Max_zero

Originally Posted by Local_Man

AV's aren't the only hard targets. Deceive alone can take several bosses out of a fight before it begins, because it works without drawing aggro. Given enough time, Deceive can wipe out entire spawns without drawing any aggro. On several occasions, I have been on a team that wiped out in a particular room (while I survived). While waiting for the team to come back from the hospital, I was able to wipe out the troublesome room solo, using only Deceive, Blind and SW -- mostly Deceive. Sure, we didn't earn XP for those foes who were defeated by Confused foes, but that was better than another team wipe.

I'm the first to agree that PA is a big part of Illusion's strength. But my Illusionists can handle spawns without PA and without taking any damage. If you don't use Seeds on a Plant controller, you can expect to take a lot of damage because you don't have any control that fully mitigates damage and is available continually. And a Mez has a good chance to faceplant you.

As for an AV? Yeah, the Illusionist will need PA. But at least he can do it. That is a pretty limited special case . . . but a Plant Controller can't take down AVs solo, even with Seeds unless you have some major IO slotting -- and even then. I've never tried on my Plant controllers because I'm fairly certain what the result would be. Maybe others have done it, but not without some significant IO slotting.

Originally Posted by Bittovan_Odduck

(In response to previous message)

I have to say that there have been a couple things that have irked me for almost 6 years now... and every time I encounter them I go "How freakin' long is it going to take them to fix/improve this?".

I can now say that all but one of those items have been fixed. (The last one is the inability to hit ANY key - even Alt-Tab or the Windows key - while logging out)

Thank you devs, for not only providing a great (free!) update, but also for listing and fixing some of those persistent QoL issues for us.

Hugs and happy Alpha-Striking to all!

Originally Posted by Local_Man

OK, are we going to turn this into a "which set is better" argument? The sets are different, with a different focus. Illusion is far better than Plant for single tough targets, but isn't nearly as good at AoE and large groups. Plant is good for mowing down larger low level groups, but isn't very good at handling Bosses and single tough targets.

Illusion doesn't NEED AoE Containment . . . its damage is single-target focused, and it gets almost all of the Containment it needs from Blind. As for Spectral Terror, an AoE fear power is great when you are taking down foes one-by-one with Blind-SW-Blast-SW. The group is all cowering while I pick out single targets to take out quickly with my attack chain. Using an AoE attack is often counter-productive unless they are all focused on PA.

So, I can handle groups without PA in complete safety by using Deceive to take out bosses, Spectral Terror to handle the group and then take them down one-by-one. It is moderately fast because the single target damage is significant if you learn how to leverage the Illusory Damage.

Comparably, Plant takes a while to take out foes, but it does damage to a bunch at a time. My Illusion controllers can take out single foes much faster than my Plant controllers. Plant takes out groups almost as fast as it can take out single foes. But if you try to do it without Seeds, you can expect to take a lot of damage while Roots+Creepers do their DoT.

If you want to compare maxed out characters, I prefer my Perma-PA Ill/Rad to any other character in the game . . . but not for farming.
He can handle missions faster than any of my other characters because he can stealth, distract, confuse and do great single target damage. He was quick to complete the Incarnate arc. He handles Tip missions faster than any other character I have, and handles missions easily that are trouble for other characters.

I'm certainly not suggesting that Plant is a bad set at all. It is a matter of personal taste. I prefer to complete missions quickly rather than mow down large numbers of foes. If I want a "mower," I usually pull out my Fire/Rad but Plant can certainly do it well.

Originally Posted by Local_Man

Illusion has other tricks. Spectral Terror is a perma-AoE control even before any slotting. Deceive lets you take down a group of foes without ever alerting them that you are there. And back before the pet AI was broken, Phanty's Decoy could fill in for PA at times.

Yes, Plant control has other tricks. But it seems to rely very heavily upon Seeds+Roots -- I found myself often having to wait until they recharged to take on the next group. I didn't have to do that with Illusion.

Originally Posted by Griff Mender

Im not really seeing any situation where Recharge isn't the right answer for this question. As far as I can tell there isnt a single controller who wouldnt benefit from recharge far more than other bonuses in the alpha slot. I know im taking it for my Ill/rad for sure.

Originally Posted by Obitus

Strawman? Your entire premise rests on the presumption that low-ball listings would exist in appreciable quantities regardless of flippers. Otherwise, why argue that flippers raise prices by raising the absolute (and usually laughably small) floor on prices?

What everyone else is saying is that the average is what matters most, because it does.

You acknowledged that flippers lower inflation here. By implication, if nothing else. In any case, it'd be pretty absurd of you to deny that flippers lower inflation, when you spent so much time arguing that flippers don't crate items or inf, adding an extra set of transaction fees instead.

Originally Posted by Lohenien

When the low end and the cost of crafting are too close - sellers can't profit and therefor are less likely to craft the IO and sell it. They may sell the recipe or they may delete it.

Originally Posted by UberGuy

They make their inf on the difference in the price ceiling and the price floor, not on the price median/average/whatever increasing.

When the gap between the ceiling and the floor shrinks too much, the flipper leaves. When all the flippers leave, the price gap starts wandering wider again, and eventually the flipper(s) come back.



But it does not follow that this raises the average price. It only follows that it raises the floor and eventually lowers the ceiling (for reasons I explained earlier).

Originally Posted by Lohenien

You are still failing to understand the 3 price points of goods. Floor, ceiling and actual value.

The floor is not the actual value and you are not entitled to it.

Think of it like this : Buy More normally sells new shiny tv for 799$, but black friday is tomorrow. Buy More puts new shiny tv on sale for 499$. For a limited time you can get the 800$ item for 500$. 500 is the floor while 800 is the ceiling. Once the new tv is not so new any more, the price normalizes to 600$ - the long term value of the TV.

What you are arguing is that new shiny tv should always be on sale at 500$.

Originally Posted by Lohenien

No it doesnt. Why ? Because the cost of the IO itself is close to 2 million or as high as 3 million when rare salvage is not dipped in price.

In order to sell at a profit it needs to sell above the cost to make it. Some people do not sell above the cost to make it - they are selling too low.

When a flipper raises the floor price it makes the IO more attractive to sellers who would simply delete or vendor the recipes instead of crafting them.

Without flippers, the low prices would drive sellers away and you would have to wait longer and longer for IOs.

As people have said, as I have said, if you don't want to pay normal prices for IOs then you need to compete with flippers and bid slightly more on the low end. This is how market pvp works.

The market is not a store with set prices, get over it. Good luck trying to convince wholesalers to sell to you instead of Wal-Mart when you insist on paying less than WM does.

Originally Posted by Obitus

Flippers can make bids in stacks of ten, whereas the person who's buying for himself or selling for himself using drop-acquired items will have to buy/sell them piecemeal.

Flippers (or hardcore marketeers) if you prefer, are also more likely to use alts in a coordinated manner. Again, you're essentially advocating for the casual player, but you're ignoring one of the casual player's most compelling needs -- the need to free up inventory space.

You're saying that in a magical world without flippers, we'd all have an endless supply of goods listed at hilariously low prices. That we could depend on the low end. That isn't a justified assumption -- or at least you haven't justified it yet. Eventually, people would stop selling these items at ridiculously low prices if they couldn't sell them reliably fast.

Eventually, they might decide not to bother with selling on the market at all.

You've acknowledged that Flippers lower inflation. You have acknowledged that you think flippers are a neutral influence on the market otherwise (which is in contrast with your previous contentions). So what is your argument again? You seem to switch up at whim.

Originally Posted by UberGuy

I just don't feel you've shown at all that there are costs in play here. The only "cost" I've seen is the one to the bargain hunter who is hoping to pay a price below the average (or whatever collapse method) price.

I'm one of those bargain hunters. I'm not a flipper. I sell what I get as drops aiming for high prices and I try to buy at low-ball prices. I'm one of the people that flipping impacts, arguably negatively, and I have no issue with them doing it. Why? Because I'm competing with them for those bids, and if they out-bid me, they win. What they do with the spoils is up to them.

Originally Posted by Lohenien

Argued Point : Flippers raise prices.
Truth: All items sold on the market have 3 price points : floor, ceiling, and normal values.

When someone argues that flippers raise prices, what they usually refer to is : flippers raise the floor. This is true.

When someone argues that flippers raise prices, what they usually mean is: ' I feel entitled to low prices' .

Why this point is argument fail: When a flipper buys low and sells higher, they sell below the ceiling price. In this way, flippers lower the price range between the floor and the ceiling.

An example : Performance Shifter end/acc sells at 10-15 million. Flipper comes in and buys up a bunch of them at 2 million. Flipper lists the IOs at 5.5 million and most of the stock sells at 6 -7 million over the next 2 days.

This argument says : The flipper ripped off people by stealing all the 2 million or lower costed IOs and is being so corrupt as to charge 5.5 million for them! GASP!!!

How this argument is fail : The flipper has normalized the cost on the high end of the price range and brought it down to 6-7 million instead of 10 -15 million. People selling below the 4-8 million range are selling too low, while people selling above it are selling too high. The actual value of the IO is between 4-8 million as shown from long term supply and demand, but the people who use this argument fail to recognize this actual value and instead assume they are entitled to the 2 million or lower price.

Originally Posted by Obitus

You raise participation by creating an environment where people can sell things quickly. Again, inventory is valuable. Your insistence that it isn't because people should spend endless time emailing items back and forth among a half-dozen alts is hilarious.

And again, you reveal your ignorance of the Market's mechanics. The seller would have received no sale or a lower price if the flipper weren't there. Why? Because the highest bid is paired with the lowest asking price. Thus, if the Flipper bought the item, then by definition he had the highest outstanding bid at the time.

No, in order to be a strawman, my argument would have to rely on the claim that you are anyone's advocate. It doesn't. What it does rely on is simple and irrefutable arithmetic. You claimed earlier that the only people who feel an inventory crunch were flippers -- the implication being that people who play the game normally have endless space.

Which is false on its face. Period.

You're saying that driving down the profit margin isn't creating a downward pressure on prices? They are equivalent forces. Remember, we're talking about multiple flippers competing with each other here.

You just don't see it because you think sharing market slots among an army of alts is a reasonable or common occurrence. So perhaps you don't care that you have 14 Regenerative Tissues that won't move now because you listed them at the max possible price and the market has since moved lower. I guess you can afford to wait if you have a legion of alts running on the market. Eventually, inflation might take care of you.

Everyone else? Not so much. That goes for people playing normally; that goes for marketeers who are trying to maximize their profit over time. You have to list things at a low enough price that they'll sell in a realistic span of time.

Originally Posted by UberGuy

No worries. I don't expect real-time communications on the forums.



They are, but again that doesn't imply that they're raising the overall price trend. The 30M inf purchase doesn't exist in a vacuum. There have to be other, higher prices in play or the flipper wouldn't even be in the picture. What the flipper did was potentially buy that IO from a bargain hunter. Those people have to pay a higher market price or wait longer. If the bargain hunter was bidding 29M, they now have to pay 3% more. If the bargain hunter was bidding 20M, they may have been in for a long wait anyway, whether or not a flipper came along.



Understood, but it does matter from a larger argument perspective. What happens to individual sales is not compelling when discussing what market activity does to price trends. The overall trend of all sales have to be considered, and that includes other actors than the bargain hunter and the flipper. As I've mentioned, a flipper will set their sale price based on other existing sale prices - in our example of buying at 30M and selling at 50M, a flipper wouldn't pick a price of 50M unless people were already making sales at 55M or so. (Honestly, an experienced flipper would never choose a round number like that. They would look for sales at 55M and list for 53.51 or something. But the point stands that a flipper is going to set a sale price beneath existing sales history or longer trend maxima.)



The primary claim I've see and that I accept as reasonable is that it flipping promotes market throughput at more stable prices. In my opinion, the market's greatest practical utility is as a pseudo-storage device. What I mean by that is if I get some rare drop X that I don't need right now, I want to be able to sell it on the market right now to get money for something I do want and have some confidence that, if I want to buy X again later, I will find one for sale in a reasonable period of time. Having consistent sales activity helps guarantee that. It doesn't give me any guarantees about the price I'll find, but at least it suggests there will be activity and also suggests a locally consistent price trend.

Originally Posted by Obitus

More self-conflicted gibberish. You keep saying, Max, that flppers don't add anything. They don't create items; they don't add to the money supply. What they do, and you've said it yourself about a hundred million times, is to add an extra transaction to the equation.

An extra transaction creates an extra set of market fees, thus lowering the money supply. Again, self-evident. Again, ignored by a guy who's read too many Wikipedia articles on economics out of context and doesn't understand the game environment we're discussing.

Originally Posted by Obitus

Market stability encourages participation. Participation raises supply and demand. In CoH's case specifically, flippers make sellers' lives easier by freeing up inventory slots, which incentivizes sellers to participate, which raises supply.

LOL. It's easy to run half a dozen toons at the AH? And you're the one claiming to advocate for the non-hardcore marketeer?

As noted earlier, ad nauseam, I have 57 salvage slots, 26 recipe slots, 10 enhancements slots and 18 market slots on my Tanker. Running about three missions maxes out my inventory space. In Max_Zero's world, though, apparently 57 + 26 + 10 isn't greater than 18. Arithmetic isn't your strong suit, is it?

If I want to get back into the action, I have to move that inventory. I don't spend the next hour emailing things back and forth and writing down which character has what. The idea that you're somehow describing typical or desirable behavior is asinine.

Why do you suppose people running AE farms take rare salvage with their tickets when white salvage would earn them a better return per ticket (thus driving white salvage prices through the roof)? Because it isn't worth their time to spend hours trying to sell inventory for every full load of tickets.

You claim to be an authority on economics, and yet you don't understand the benefit of stability.

You know how more flippers drives prices down? Because the market sees more and more items being moved at lower-than-high-end price, which means that sellers at the high end of the spectrum (like you, with your LOL-seventy-million Regenerative Tissues) are encouraged to relist at a lower price. Thus, a stable average is reached. The more flippers there are, the faster you reach that point, until all the flippers leave because their profit margin is too small, and then the cycle begins anew.

You havent established that stability doesn't increase participation. Your problem is that it does. Posting graphs that rely on a flawed premise only earns you ridicule.

Originally Posted by SwellGuy

So you've made up your mind and you won't let the facts get in your way? Check.

Thanks for letting me know you have no serious intention of trying to get information.

Those are long running fallacies people have been spouting for 3 1/2 years since the markets and inventions were added to the game.

Until you and people like you get that IOs are luxury items in the game and that prior to the markets people couldn't afford even SOs until their 30s without sugar daddies you will continue to bang your head into the wall of reality.

I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish here but education is clearly not one of your goals.

Originally Posted by SwellGuy

This is a game.

When people see something is worth selling they sell it. So flippers raise the floor selling price so people like me will sell it. If it is too low I just vendor or delete it.

Keep in mind if you seriously have any real interest in discussing this and not making some statement that there are two ways to consider supply in the game. There is the supply generated by drops and there is the supply for sale on the market.

So rather than assuming you know more than everyone else here perhaps you may want to open your mind and read. You are arguing nothing that we haven't seen for 3 1/2 years.

Consider how most people play the game and then come to use the market. What you see as market problems caused by manipulation are actually caused by how players use the market as a store to buy things now and not use it with patient bidding.

The second fallacy most people then fall into when they get that is "well it's a game so I shouldn't have to work for these things". The devs disagree. If they didn't there would not be rare drops in the game. They also state repeatedly the game is designed around SOs which is what people don't have to work for. IOs are a luxury item in the game.

The third fallacy most people then fall into is in the mistaken belief that because they don't make influence as quickly as many other that those others are either farmers, flippers or inf buyers.

And it goes on. Rather than learning most people simply decide it cannot be done or it cannot be done "fairly".

I spent a year playing the game to purple my warshade combining drops with selling drops smartly with buying what I lacked smartly. I then spent 3 days just buying it now for my controller to purple out. So I know how to do it and I know how it is done and you are just wrong.

Originally Posted by UberGuy

And there's no guarantee there would be anything there to buy, period, because someone may have bought it before you.

You seem to be mixing statistical and instantaneous views of the process. For example, bouncing between discussion of price floors, ceilings and averages/medians to discussions of what happens with single sales.

Originally Posted by SwellGuy

Nope. Not unless someone buys it.

And who forces someone to buy the flipper's 50 Million IO rather than someone else's 30 million IO? This isn't art work. Each level 30 LotG 7.5% IO is equal to every other level 30 LotG 7.5% IO so it doesn't matter if one sells for 30 M and then 50 M if I can buy one for myself at 30 M.

And do you realize your claim would mean flippers could make any item in the market go up to 2 billion in price because you never consider any other factors?

The gap is going to be there with or without the flippers in action because it was already there before the flipper saw the opportunity and went to work.

Originally Posted by SwellGuy

No they don't.

They cannot make people pay more than people want to pay.

Perhaps you need to stop with theory and look at how the market works.

Lowest lister is sold to highest bidder.

This means at some time a flipper had to be the highest bidder and then later they have to be the lowest lister or they will buy nothing and sell nothing.

Flippers find items where the gap between the lowest and highest price make a profit margin for them. They did not create either of those extremes.

All they do is take items from impatient sellers and sell them to impatient buyers.