Heraclea

If that was the intent, AE broke that too. The high level characters that run AE make Luck Charms the same way they make any other piece of common salvage they might need and not have on hand.

On the other hand, before the advent of AE I saw the price of Luck Charms at the AH, and concluded: if I ever get one, I'm keeping it. If I get more than one I'm saving it. And the base was expanded to include 12 salvage racks. Since AE, the hoard is more about convenience than necessity.

It would help if you posted a Mids' build. This is mine.

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.601
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Yansan: Level 50 Magic Tanker
Primary Power Set: Shield Defense
Secondary Power Set: Electrical Melee
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Fighting

Hero Profile:
Level 1: Deflection -- GftotA-Def/EndRdx:40(A), GftotA-Def/EndRdx/Rchg:40(3), GftotA-Def:40(15), GftotA-Def/Rchg:40(27)
Level 1: Charged Brawl -- KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg:35(A), KntkC'bat-Knock%:35(3), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx:35(13), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:35(15), Acc-I:50(46), Dmg-I:50(46)
Level 2: True Grit -- Mrcl-Rcvry+:40(A), Mrcl-Heal:40(5), Heal-I:50(5), S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+:30(9), Aegis-Psi/Status:50(36), Heal-I:50(50)
Level 4: Jacobs Ladder -- M'Strk-Acc/Dmg:50(A), M'Strk-Dmg/EndRdx:50(9), M'Strk-Dmg/Rchg:50(11), M'Strk-Acc/EndRdx:50(11), M'Strk-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx:50(13), M'Strk-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:50(37)
Level 6: Active Defense -- RechRdx-I:50(A), RechRdx-I:50(7), RechRdx-I:50(7)
Level 8: Against All Odds -- EndRdx-I:50(A), EndRdx-I:50(36), Taunt-I:50(36)
Level 10: Combat Jumping -- Zephyr-Travel:50(A), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx:50(37)
Level 12: Hurdle -- Jump-I:50(A)
Level 14: Super Jump -- Zephyr-Travel:50(A), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx:50(37)
Level 16: Thunder Strike -- M'Strk-Acc/Dmg:50(A), M'Strk-Dmg/EndRdx:50(17), M'Strk-Dmg/Rchg:50(17), M'Strk-Acc/EndRdx:50(27), M'Strk-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx:50(43), M'Strk-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:50(43)
Level 18: Health -- Numna-Regen/Rcvry+:50(A), Numna-Heal:50(19), Heal-I:50(19), Heal-I:50(40)
Level 20: Stamina -- P'Shift-End%:50(A), P'Shift-EndMod:50(21), EndMod-I:50(21), EndMod-I:50(34)
Level 22: Battle Agility -- GftotA-Def/EndRdx:40(A), GftotA-Def:40(23), GftotA-Def/Rchg:40(23), GftotA-Def/EndRdx/Rchg:40(43)
Level 24: Build Up -- AdjTgt-Rchg:50(A), AdjTgt-ToHit/EndRdx:50(25), AdjTgt-ToHit/Rchg:50(25), AdjTgt-ToHit/EndRdx/Rchg:50(42), AdjTgt-EndRdx/Rchg:50(42)
Level 26: Taunt -- Mocking-Taunt:50(A), Mocking-Taunt/Rchg:50(42), Mocking-Taunt/Rchg/Rng:50(50), Mocking-Taunt/Rng:50(50)
Level 28: Shield Charge -- M'Strk-Acc/Dmg:50(A), M'Strk-Dmg/EndRdx:50(29), M'Strk-Dmg/Rchg:50(29), M'Strk-Acc/EndRdx:50(33), M'Strk-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:50(33), M'Strk-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx:50(33)
Level 30: Chain Induction -- Mako-Acc/Dmg:50(A), Mako-Dmg/EndRdx:50(31), Mako-Dmg/Rchg:50(31), Mako-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg:50(31), Mako-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:50(34), Mako-Dam%:50(34)
Level 32: One with the Shield -- ResDam-I:50(A)
Level 35: Phalanx Fighting -- LkGmblr-Rchg+:50(A)
Level 38: Lightning Rod -- M'Strk-Acc/Dmg:50(A), M'Strk-Dmg/EndRdx:50(39), M'Strk-Dmg/Rchg:50(39), M'Strk-Acc/EndRdx:50(39), M'Strk-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx:50(40), M'Strk-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg:50(40)
Level 41: Boxing -- Acc-I:50(A)
Level 44: Tough -- RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx:40(A), RctvArm-ResDam/Rchg:40(45), RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg:40(45), RctvArm-ResDam:40(45), RctvArm-EndRdx:40(46)
Level 47: Weave -- GftotA-Def/EndRdx:40(A), GftotA-Def/Rchg:40(48), GftotA-Def/EndRdx/Rchg:40(48), GftotA-Def:40(48)
Level 49: Grant Cover -- LkGmblr-Rchg+:50(A)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Gauntlet
------------
Set Bonus Totals:

• 5% DamageBuff(Smashing)
• 5% DamageBuff(Lethal)
• 5% DamageBuff(Fire)
• 5% DamageBuff(Cold)
• 5% DamageBuff(Energy)
• 5% DamageBuff(Negative)
• 5% DamageBuff(Toxic)
• 5% DamageBuff(Psionic)
• 14.3% Defense(Smashing)
• 14.3% Defense(Lethal)
• 7.38% Defense(Fire)
• 7.38% Defense(Cold)
• 9.25% Defense(Energy)
• 9.25% Defense(Negative)
• 3% Defense(Psionic)
• 14.3% Defense(Melee)
• 13.6% Defense(Ranged)
• 11.8% Defense(AoE)
• 7.2% Max End
• 20% Enhancement(RechargeTime)
• 9% Enhancement(Accuracy)
• 5% FlySpeed
• 56.2 HP (3%) HitPoints
• 5% JumpHeight
• 5% JumpSpeed
• MezResist(Held) 6.05%
• MezResist(Immobilize) 7.15%
• MezResist(Sleep) 6.6%
• MezResist(Stun) 6.6%
• 8.5% (0.14 End/sec) Recovery
• 12% (0.94 HP/sec) Regeneration
• 11.3% Resistance(Fire)
• 3.78% Resistance(Cold)
• 1.26% Resistance(Energy)
• 1.26% Resistance(Negative)
• 3% Resistance(Psionic)
• 5% RunSpeed

No argument here. But there will always be people who aren't going to do it. They're going to assume that sets that cap at level 20 are meant for them to own, and learn to their astonishment that they cannot hope to achieve this without a twinker or a stroke of extraordinary luck. And therefore the market and its participants are going to face a predictable, somewhat constant, level of frustration and anger. This may flare up from time to time as a result of conditions.

If that were the intent, I'm not sure this is working as intended. Being asked for help with inf transfers is still a regular phenomenon.

Mine too. After going around killing a couple mobs to earn enough inf for a modest deposit, my first action on a new character is almost always to sell the large inspirations from the tutorial. The proceeds of that is usually enough for a few high priority DOs when I get to that level; I don't even bother purchasing TOs.

And, most of my new characters are well twinked by level 7, using level 10 and 15 IOs. The IOs are made by crafting badgers; the salvage, from MA tickets rolled for the right range. Since these are permanent until I choose to upgrade them, I typically use a mixture of IOs and DO/SOs well into the thirties.

This is made possible by having a SG and VG I essentially control; running a fair amount of MA; and having crafting badge characters. Not every new character is born into the game world with these advantages, though.

I always forget that irony doesn't always carry well. Yes, his "great discovery" was rather flawed in method, and the end result was rather trivial.

All I've been trying to say here is that the complaints about market prices represent a theme and a perspective that recurs fairly often in history. People who approach it for the first time are likely to be shocked and dismayed.

I take it as a given that:

• normative inf earnings are defined by the inf dropped by defeating mobs,
• normative prices for enhancements are the ones established by the in-game stores, and
• normative performance is the performance of the enhancements sold by in-game stores.

Those are the comparable goods, comparable prices, and comparable income streams that are going to be familiar to a newcomer to the market.

I also take it as a given that while set inventions do enable superior performance, the advantages they confer are not overwhelming. This is my understanding of the devs' intent.

It may be difficult for you, as it's become more difficult for me, to put yourself in the shoes of a player who is used to those things who confronts the market and its prices for the first time. I doubt that a large percentage of the inf paid by people who pay 100 million prices for Kinetic Combat Pool C&Ds was actually earned by the payor's own drops from defeating mobs.

But, that's the main source of inf that the newcomer is going to be familiar with. He's going to translate the prices he sees into labor: how long will it take for me to work up 100 million inf from mob drops? Quite a while, even at level 50. This is indeed a daunting task.

Confronted with this scenario, discouragement, anger, and looking for scapegoats are actions for which there is ample historical precedent. Even assuming that it's immature or irrational, history suggests its still going to happen. Nothing you're going to say is going to completely eliminate the problem. Name-calling back probably won't help either, nor will boasts about how easily you made a pile of inf.

I am not sure whether such a majority exists or not. But my recollection is that the original post, as the title makes manifest, was an expression of incredulity at the appearance elsewhere of a proposal aimed at forcing prices down by curbing the ability to stockpile inf past the cap. I was simply trying to provide some historical perspective, and point out that these proposals are always going to be out there.

And I do agree with at least part of that proposal. Yes, market prices are too high. People confronting them for the first time as a would be buyer are going to be dismayed, and this reaction should be expected and ought not to surprise anybody. I don't think that introducing uncertainty in allowing people to retain their huge inf stockpiles would have anything but perverse effects, at least in the short term. It would, of course, stomp on the minigame of those people who stockpiled inf. It would motivate them to toss their stockpile back into circulation, which would make the problem worse rather than better, at least in the short term.

Market prices are too high, IMO, because there's too much inf in the system and as a result it's too dilute compared to the supply of recipes and salvage. Some way needs to be devised of making high level characters and their players want to shed inf in a way that removes it from the system, and at least over time bring market prices to be more directly comparable to the fixed, normative prices charged by the in game stores.

I'm not sure it has either.

On the other hand, at least in my case, the behaviour of the market is enough to inspire avoidance strategies and counter-strategies. I don't find this hard because I have the advantage of leading older supergroups with fully built bases but not a lot of remaining traffic. Other people without this advantage may find the market more discouraging. I can't tell in their cases, but I do know that this tends to make me avoid starting characters off my home server. These consequences may not be desireable from the dev's perspective either.

For better or for worse, the game is also a community. Your neighbors are watching you, and will not hesitate to express displeasure when their norms are broken. It does not matter that the norms go beyond the formal laws enforced by terms of service and GMs, and forbid what the formal rules would allow. This was that PvP griefing professor's great discovery. I think it's unreasonable to expect that the community will not develop similar norms about proper and improper use of the market. Telling people that they must not seems a vain endeavour.

Again, historically, prices of anything have a customary and traditional dimension. People will continue to judge prices as fair or unfair based on what things have cost in the past, and what they cost relative to comparable goods. They will not stop doing this because you tell them not to. They will not stop doing this because you tell them they don't really need whatever's priced at the price they look askance on. They will not stop doing this because you tell them that their expectations are economically naive and ignore supply and demand. And their jealousy, or their outrage at seeing the community's norms broken, can be a potent and violent force.

And, as Arcanaville said, the "currencies" or reward systems are in some fashion proxies for time spent pursuing them in game. This is why I prefer not to hold inf. If I want a Numina regen/recovery button on a character, I know for sure that I can earn one by completing four Positron TFs. Then, if I run enough AE missions, I will have the salvage needed to make it.

I might also be able to earn enough inf to buy one on the AH during a similar stint. I mght be able to make enough inf to buy it by random rolling those merits and selling the recipes instead. This introduces elements of chance and price fluctuation: uncertainties I choose to avoid. There is too much inf chasing too few goods, and as such inf strikes me as a poor store of value.

Yes, set IOs are luxury goods. The game is a luxury good. When people are moved to outrage over the prices of staples, they may riot. When they believe that luxury goods are unfairly overpriced, they'll choose to spend their money - or rather, their time - elsewhere. Given the fact that this is an online game that competes against similar entertainments, this last decision is disaster enough even if it doesn't quite have the moral drama of a bread riot.

I'm not really claiming that moral concepts of a just price ought to be applied here. My "appeal" to these ideas is more by way of an explanation: you're dealing with a phenomenon that reasserts itself throughout history. Merely waving people off with the notion that "IOs aren't a necessity, and in fact the game isn't a necessity" isn't going to be convincing. It's likely going to make them madder. We all know that qu'ils mangent des brioches is a path to the guillotine.

It is, of course, ridiculous to compare Kinetic Combats to food and shelter. But all they're going to see is a price tag they doubt they'll ever be able to pay. And on the internet, slight grievances are magnified.

But one more relevant question is: are prices so out of hand that some players abandon the game because they see the rewards as something they'll never be able to achieve? This is what soured me on another game: there was a raiding path to advancement, a PvP path to advancement, and both were so difficult, so time consuming, and so fraught with potential conflict with my fellow players that I gave up trying.

This is what some people fail to grasp.

Apart from the laws of supply and demand, any system of exchange in a human community acquires a traditional and moral dimension - a moral economy with corresponding obligations and expectations, such as a just price. In this sort of moral reasoning, it isn't right to charge more for gas just because the refinery caught fire. You can't charge more for building materials in the aftermath of an earthquake. The cost to produce existing stocks didn't rise; to charge more just because of high demand or low supply violates people's traditional norms and expectations about what prices ought to be. Those norms carry the force of custom, and sometimes of law.

You can argue "supply and demand" until you're blue in the face. You can claim that the ideas of moral economy and just price just don't work in the "real world". But that kind of thinking just comes across as an apologia for greed and injustice if you start from this framework.

People confronting the markets here for the first time come with expectations shaped by the things that inf can purchase in game. The costliest things that can be bought at fixed prices with inf are level 50 Damage and Heal enhancements: each cost 60,000 inf a piece. Technically, SG prestige can be bought at a rate of 2000 prestige per million inf, but even that makes one prestige point worth 500 inf. An awaken costs a whopping 150 inf; all the rest are 50.

This is what the newcomer to the market knows. They compare set IO prices on price versus performance one and one. It's not at all surprising that people greet market prices with no small shock and dismay. And I think it is rather unwise, or at least uncouth, to belittle this perception: that is where at least some of the "hate" comes from.

FWIW, my badging and AE oriented characters routinely use common ticket rolls. It's a fairly efficient way to make progress towards your common IO crafting badges and memorize a lot of recipes to make them still more efficient at this. The resulting IOs are first passed off to my levelling characters; or if none need them, sold at the market for a technical loss (i.e. the salvage and recipe would have cost more.) I will buy recipes to do this on the market, but not for much above sale to vendor prices. The alternative is to just buy them up front from the table, and that's often the path of least resistance.

I am more or less resigned to the fact that the most desirable recipes I want are not going to be obtainable via the sort of inf any one of my characters are bound to be carrying.

My own workaround is to

• designate a banker character to sell unwanted drops and accumulate inf,
• stockpile salvage and AE tickets so that any valuable but unwanted recipes (this includes most purples, BTW) can be crafted and sold by the banker,
• pool and craft desirable recipe drops, and hold some enhancements in anticipation of future needs, and
• resign myself to purchasing the costliest recipes needed by a character directly with merits, which are always going to be easier to accumulate than hundreds of millions in inf on any single character.

FWIW, I've thrown away merits on random rolls. The results suggest that saving them is a better option.

I have personal caps on the amount of inf I am willing to pay for recipes, enhancements, or salvage. AE tickets remain a reasonably efficient workaround for obtaining invention salvage, especially at the middle tiers.

Paying market prices means acquiescence in the current price levels, and I am unwilling to do that. The market currently works in such a way that it makes avoidance strategies attractive. I think it takes a rather blinkered view of things to avoid the conclusion that nothing is wrong with it. But that's obvious enough.

The real problem is the declining value of inf versus other in game currencies. This tends to make inf a poor store of value.

Think of merits as a currency backed by gold. No matter what the market is doing, 250 merits will always buy you a Numina's Convalescence Regen/Recovery recipe. Merits, however, are an untransferrable currency. Recipes are transferrable, and crafted enhancements are even more so through a supergroup.

AE tickets are a currency backed by silver. No matter what the market is doing, you can always buy rare and uncommon invention salvage of any level and any type for a fixed price using them. Salvage is readily transferred from one character to another through a supergroup.

Unfortunately, inf is a currency backed by moldy french fries. Its value peg is SOs: 60,000 inf will always buy you a level 50 Heal or Damage SO.

But, SOs have very little market value on the in game market. There are very few SOs or DOs available for purchase on the market. Even theoretically scarce level 53 SOs typically sell for less than vendor value there. People don't bother selling SOs on the market because there is no return for the bother there. My high level SO drops are typically passed through a supergroup so that the inf earned by vendoring them can be passed to lowbie characters so they can buy DOs and early SOs. By the time they get close to level 32 they usually have replaced most of them with generic IOs anyways.

Mechanically, the primary bottleneck is the lack of a common recipe bin to add to a supergroup base. This creates an incentive to create massive salvage stockpiles so that worthwhile recipe drops can hopefully be crafted at will to pass on IO enhancements to those characters that can use them.

One influence sink that would help would be a personal item recipe sharing bin for SG bases. This should be craftable as a personal item, the same way teleporters are. And it should cost a daunting amount of inf: a hundred million would not be unreasonable. Once crafted and placed, SG members could pass recipes the same way they pass crafted IOs now.

This part is, quite simply, true.

But this part is not. This is what Mission Architect tickets are for now.

If you are playing the markets as a minigame to obtain influence, rather than simply using it to trade what you don't need for what you do, you are speculating. Speculation will always be morally problematic.

Set them to aggressive: then give them custom power sets. Take away all their damage attacks, then give them the buffs and debuffs you want them to have. The AI will make them use them because they have nothing else.

See what I mean about Statesman, though?

Nothing to apologize for there. We're here because we like playing tankers, and want to make your tanker experience all it can be.

He was 3 slotting it for accuracy; I was recommending 2 slotting it for accuracy, which is pretty much standard for me for anything at generic IO levels.