Kitsune Knight

You're paranoid. That's really how to sum it up. You're basically trying to say 'there's the good players that use the market as little as possible, and the EBIL MARKETEREREERERSSSSSSS THAT RUIN OUR LIVES!!!!!!'. The problem is, the things you're claiming they're doing to screw you over can be easier explained by natural causes (by actions of the so-called 'good players'!)... and the marketers have already told you, those things would be massively time consuming and also not close to as profitable as most anything else.

Stop actively trying to ruin other peoples funs by trying to destroy the market. You're ultimately doing what you're claiming to be actively fighting against.

This is what I was thinking of as the third stage of the project. First, just get something that works for the basic case. Then, add in support for damage-enhancing powers (Build Up, Follow Up, Power Siphon, Placate, Fiery Embrace, etc). Third stage, create a database from scratch (unless someone could rip Mids' database into a non-crazily-obscured format) of the powers, with a nice and friendly GUI.

My current implementation has a lot of room for enhancements (split over multiple threads, optimize the recursive function/the path DPS calculator, use some sort of heuristics, stop it from executing the same path multiple times, etc), I'm hoping I can get it to support a reasonably large number of powers, with a reasonably long chain (say, 6 powers, at least 10 long) without taking all night.

Response time (lower is better for gaming), contrast ratio, black level, brightness, and TN vs IPS are the other 'measures' I can think of off the top of my head.

Although, in all honestly, what I'd just do is find one in my price range with good reviews that meet my minimum desired resolution (screen size, unfortunately, seems to now be tied to resolution...). Currently, I just play on my laptop, which has a 1368x768 monitor as well, which is quite adequate

The output is fairly confusing, though:

• The output starts counting powers at 1, instead of 0 like the array used to enter them.
• The output is also in reverse order, you'd execute them in right-to-left order

It's also currently limited to 9 powers (if you have a 10th, it'll screw with the in64 I use to store each path). None of these things would be too hard to fix, though. At this point I'd want to make it work before making it pretty.

Also, 14-deep trees take long enough that the golang website will kill it before it gets that far (it'll print out to 12, though).

Does that 2.85m factor in things such as the generic NC time cards used to play CoX? I'd not be surprised if that made up a large chunk of the difference (although, I would be surprised if it made up all the difference).

You can check in game on either side (I'm wanting to say 5-10, but unfortunately ParagonWiki doesn't list how much for purples, while it does for everything else...). Just an fyi: It costs 50 merits and 20 million inf to buy a single A-Merit, plus there's a time limit of... 20 hours per use of the A-merit vendor on either side (so if you bought an a-merit, you'd have to wait 20 hours to use it or buy another!).

Edit: Also, you can not do random rolls for purples, you buy a specific purple for a specific amount

The total number of possible combinations is so large that two costumes being identical is pretty much zero. But, it is possible (as is that I run around street sweeping 50s and get a purple drop every single kill), however unlikely. It's possible the Devs have infrastructure in place to check, but more likely than not there'd have no way to really known. Likely nothing would happen once people noticed... likely it'd just become an in-joke, with maybe some in-world reference. If the person, for some reason, got really upset, I could see them tweaking it slightly... but that seems like an unlikely situation (so first 1 in a billion, and then low odds even then!).

Yeah, characters like that were why I went with 'most'. Any AT with a damage set (what'd that be, pretty much anything not a Controller or Mastermind? Although some Defenders just don't like their attacks for some reason...) should be able to form a real attack chain (at least once they get high enough, obviously at level 5 pretty much no one would have one).

A level 50 Scrapper that's regularly using Nem Staff/Blackwand in their attack chain (as a melee attack) probably has serious issues (or a very exotic build). Shadow Maul could situationally be worth it (due to the AoE nature, for a set heavily lacking in AoE... like EM/ Stalkers).

This so much. I just came back a few weeks ago, having left not too long after the market merger (around when GR launched... or was the merger earlier than I remembered? either way...), the first thing I noticed with the current market is the massive amount of items listed. Before, especially on redside, it wasn't unusual for there to be zero common salvage for sell! And let me tell you, there was definitely a lot of demand. The same items that were crap back then are still crap now (like Kinetic Weapon)... but back then, I'd barely be motivated to list it because there were maybe a couple hundred for sell... Now there's, what, 15,000? The market has only gotten better for the buyers... and also somehow better for the sellers (not quite sure how that could be possible, but it definitely is, either side of the coin you're on at any given time).

More often than not, when you see a very common piece going for such a massive price, that means someone made a horrible typo, and not that that is the going rate.

The market is really much simpler than people assume... and far easier to use than the market in other MMOs I've played (double blind auction > see all listings)

Oh, definitely agreed. Although I've never played Diablo, I loved both Warcraft (2 & 3, both when they were new), as well as Starcraft (both 1 and 2). They have a reputation for hits in a market where 100,000 sells would be a tiny playerbase (unlike in MMOs where that was a good number, pre-WoW). They leveraged an existing playerbase that was far larger than probably the whole of the MMO market at the time, exposing a massive number of new players to the field (I would be surprised if they were the primary reason any MMO currently has more than 1 million subscribers).

125k subscribers is a very good amount, and is fairly close to the peak player base numbers.

Some of the others are free to play (LOTRO) or are fairly new (thus, lots of people first trying it out), or have a major playing behind them (WoW broke all records before it was released, that'll tell you something about the Warcraft brand).

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I've actually spent a while doing this, back before the market merger and the ability to email inf. I made quite a few million inf, and got several toons well off to afford basic SOs/some IOs in the early levels... But mind you, I could have made far more money a crap ton of other ways, including but not limited to flipping, crafting, playing on a 50 and transferring it over, dancing under atlas and waiting until I found myself in a CC by mistake and won.

The amount of money to be had from vendor salvage is actually less than what I was getting, because I was selling common IOs (that went for 35 to 160x the return of common/uncommon salvage)- and the amount of money I made was tiny... very tiny. I had to invest a lot of time in buying and vendoring, resulting in a joke of a inf/minute value.


This was the early days of the market. Eventually I realized how much more profitable it was to craft the same common IOs and post them on the market. It took a bit longer to get the first return, but the profit was obscenely higher, something that vendoring junk would never catch up to (I probably made no more than 10 million vendoring junk over quite a few months spread over a dozen+ characters... in one month, on one character, I made closer to 150 million inf from crafting recipes I bought on the market...).

Damn, you're totally correct. I didn't even to look at my code to be sure

I'll edit these two posts when I paste a corrected version.

Edit: New version @ http://pastebin.com/2P1hMgz6

Hilariously enough, I listed some crappy common salvage on the market for 1 inf (5 items, i think), and there were 48 bidding (and like 10k+ selling)... and they didn't sell. I listed and sold several other items after that. Sometimes the market can make you crazy

(I wanna bid zero inf for something! )

I generally move a salvage stack to the AH to see the current going price/bidders. Unless I'm low on space, it's easier & quicker for me to just list for 1 inf (so it'll move as fast as possible, and maybe help get me a badge... I've no idea what characters even have that one, admittedly), than pulling it off and then going over to the vendor and selling it. Plus, at most it's a few thousand difference... and while that'll add up over time, it won't add up to much.

I don't particularly understand being willing to list for 5 inf, but not 1 inf. Worst case scenario, you lose 4 inf. Alternatively, you'll be that much more likely if someone REALLY screws up and bids 2,000,000,000 inf for it. Plus, listing for 1 will move it slightly faster as well (which I care more about for the low value junk than 5k inf).


Although I enjoy a good head 'aslpoding (just look at my signature ), my usage of 'gameplay' is probably throwing you off. 'Mechanics' would probably be a much better way to put it... MMOs generally have much more primitive mechanics (such as what you do, or what your goal is, etc... think the difference between Praetorian content and i0 Paragon content) than other games (likewise, for games with both single player and multiplayer, the multiplayer mechanics are usually at least slightly watered down).

What makes up for that simplicity is the multi part of the second M in MMO. Other people result in the game having a social aspect (whether that's global channels, your team, or tells), which simply make the game more enjoyable. Back when one of my good friends still played CoH, if we were on different factions I'd be much more willing to solo, since we'd still talk in IMs while I fought through the missions.

So really, gameplay would be the wrong word to use, since the social aspect is a fundamental part of a MMO's gameplay. But, I've tried other MMOs, and I end up flat out not liking their mechanics (I much prefer CoX's power system over the fantasy MMOs skill system's generic attack skill lvl 3), as well as their community (whether it's because they make 4chan look mature and civilized, or because there isn't one!).

I was also thinking about these, and for the method I was thinking about, the Follow Up situation would be fairly easy to deal with... it'd add some extra complexity, you'd add a few exta fields to power struct (base damage, damage buff amount, how much it buffs the following damage, and how long), and slightly tweak the function that rates each chain to take those things into account.

The Siphon Life situation is a bit harder, since it's extra benefit isn't damage related. Some sort of value-based judgement would have to be made wrt that... could just artificially inflate the damage like you suggested, or just assume you don't need to be using it constantly, and only as needed. Of course, that still leaves ones like Divine Avalanche, DB combos, the whole mess that'd be KM, and several others (Assassin's Strike + Placate? ugh!).

... TIME FOR FUN!

In practice, that's probably by far the best thing to do... but where's the fun in that?

I'm, more so, interested in this as an initial step in a much larger endeavor- a project that'd actually be able to take a character with a specific build and then throw them into various situations, and produce various results based off of it- i.e. what'd be the lower bound of a Scrapper with a specific build being able to solo a Rikti Pylon, or on average, how averaging over X number of simulations, what are the chances, as well as average completion time, of an arbitrary character soloing an 8-man group of lvl 54 Rikti. Such a program would need to have a very thorough understanding of your character, the in-game's AI, the mobs powers/resistance/etc, and the fundamentals of the game's mechanics.


Wouldn't be insanely useful, but it'd be fun to tinker with... it could even spawn a whole meta-game of it's own, such as who could design the most ridiculous build to do some random challenge (or, even, who could build the WORST character!).