Rhysem

And by "still be able to hold aggro" read "rip AV aggro off tanks who aren't continually taunting."

This has been a problem for me in a few TFs I've run. Sometimes you have to turn it off so the AV quits looking at you funny. The flip side of that, of course, was ghost widow blowing her heal on me... and missing. Gogogadgetsoftcap. That was nice.

OP: You weren't real specific about the concept, but I'd plug both Kat/SD and BS/SD from the scrapper area if they'd fit. Parry is nice when leveling because you can hit that softcap to melee/lethal earlier. Shield is kinda a late bloomer.

One flipside: if you want to be a tank, AAO's aggro aura is amazing.

There is no game with an auction house I've played that I've ever found prices threatening. Its just more opportunity for me to find a niche.

From an absolute magnitude, I'd say you folks just talked about inflation, inflation, inflation though. I mean, the numbers on bids are a lot bigger. It may not represent more time invested, but...

I'm not seeing what's dropped in cost, but I'm comparing prices now to what I remember from two years ago when I was playing the market to kit out my BS/SD scrapper, and I'll admit that requires trusting my memory, which I generally try to avoid.

But I remember nummies and miracles going for more like 40 and 60 mil each, not triple that. I remember purples being under 6-fig, not half way through. A bunch of stuff is about the same -- crushings and makos seem about where I remember they were (I was working them back then). Orange salvage strikes me as about the same, 2-4m per piece with wide variation.

You'll fill plus some in an hour solo. So that's what, ~20 recipes if you have some unlocks. That's still 20%. That's not insubstantial. If you're not just mass-farming, you might get more recipes::inf on mish completions.

[QUOTE]"once you get rid of the inf floating around" is a heck of a disclaimer, I realize./QUOTE]

Especially when the last few years prices have overall risen? At least, I don't remember purples costing 6 figures before going rogue.

Truth! Unfortunately any increase in drop rates also increases the trash recipes (there's some in every pool) that get vendored. You've got to now further boost market transaction speed to have that 10% fee > inf intake.

I would hope we could all at least agree there's more inf floating around in game now than there was, for example, three years ago. The 10% fee isn't big enough to counteract all the inf sources.

This "take more money" makes absolutely no sense. How does an increase in transaction rate take more money than exists in the economy? It isn't like what you paid for an IO left the economy -- it just went to a different player. Yes, there is a 10% fee skimmed off the top, so if we double the speed of sales at the market we're now taking out money from the economy at a faster rate. Yet as long as that "money out" rate due to fees is less than the "money in" inf rate incoming from killing mobs and vendoring trash recipe/salvage, inflation is going to continue, and the market is going to continue to be expensive.

"prices drop" doesn't mean people selling at the new price aren't still getting inf to spend on something else.

Great! I got part of my +rech build cheap. Now I have more money left and need the FF +rech proc, a couple of 5pc crushing impacts, and some purples. I've got more cash to spend on them. What happened to prices? Average across the market: did they fall? (answer: probably not.) LotG might have dropped. The rest just probably rose because suddenly I have more of my budget available to allocate to them.

Of course I ignored your examples. You focused on a tiny little slice of the market in each and said, "oh my god look the prices of pool C dropped" and ignored that the rest of the market probably rose just a little to compensate. Given the size of the rest of the market relative to pool C and in particular that of the big winners in C, four of them are uniques (stealths, miracle, nummies) it's likely that without access to the full transaction log we probably couldn't even measure any increase in the rest of the market. It'd get lost in the noise of individual sale fluctuations.

In terms of the OP's (seeming) goal of "reduce prices at the market" altering the relative supply of things (which is all that all of your examples are) on the market fails. It reduces some prices and increases others, but it does NOTHING to reduce the inf oversupply in the game. And that's what really drives prices (up) at the market. Not buyers. Not sellers. Not supply. The total amount of inf in game (or, I suppose, MAXINT) is the only thing that puts a price cap on the market.

Boosting the supply of recipes will reduce the amount of time you probably need to invest to get what you want. Which might actually be the OP's real goal: easy mode. But it won't reduce prices at the market overall. It might alter what's costly, but the whole thing is still going to be $$$,$$$,$$$ expensive.

Yes, if you assume we all list more and burn the inf we get into prestige for our SGs, prices will drop. If we don't burn the inf to prestige, where are we all going to spend that inf, other than the market? Green pills @50 a pop? I don't think that's going to cut it. Sitting as a number on my characters ID? Doesn't help me kill mobs better. I'm going to spend what I get on buying new stuff that makes me more effective.

I don't understand why the only thing you focus on is "more will get listed and prices will drop!" Sure, in a very short term, that's possible. Happens on a daily basis when people quit for the night and go list their junk on the AH. I don't see those listing spurts lowering prices on the AH in general over time.

I'm not claiming that changes to drop rates wouldn't be a market shock and prices wouldn't dance around. I'm claiming that with a given (larger than yesteryear) amount of inf in the game, that people are still going to spend it (or try to), and thus the market will remain inflated compared to the old prices. You might change what exactly is pricey at the moment, particularly if you vary the drop ratios between what is 'uber' and just 'decent', but you won't change the general truth that the market/economy as a whole has cost inflation going on.

In order for supply to increase, those who participate in the market must list more. If I list more, then I get more inf, even were it at a lower price. If I get more inf, I want to spend it on shiny things. Maybe a second build. Or third. Or purples. Or even set IOs on an alt I hadn't bothered with them on yet. If I spend it on shiny things, I've raised demand for said things (set IOs in the general sense).

Like I said, I'm not convinced that prices should drop. The econ101 supply and demand curves thing makes a lot of assumptions about the size of the market and an individual's effect on it that just aren't true in a MMO. Like, for instance, it ignores that to increase supply enriches at a much higher rate than the factory wage model, the same people who are demanding.


Also: if things dropped a bit easier, you might get some of the "its too expensive" whiners hooked in because they have 4/5ths of a set they want and actually totter over to the market to buy the last piece.

Welcome to 2008? I've known since at least then (probably before) that if you want to farm for inventions you do it as solo as possible. At worst you do it with a group of close friends, because I'm nearly as happy one of them got a purple as if I got it.

At one point I had an observation that I'd seen enough to believe was probably true, but hadn't done any statistics on: the lowest level on the team gets VASTLY more recipe drops than the highest level. So if you did those farms with lowbies getting phat XP... they were also getting all your phat drops.


In other news: the reason prices are going up is there aren't enough money sinks in game. Inf in > inf out = Inf total rising = prices rise.

Who knew?

Too bad it is close to impossible to fix. Slap on huge market fees to sink the money and you'll just kill the market. Remember the original hammie-O days where it was a barter-only economy? I do. It sucked. Hardcore. I still could trade my way to riches by smart bartering 2-for-3s, but still.

I'm not even clear that you could lower recipe costs by increasing the drop rate of recipes. The problem is the amount of inf in the game, not the rarity of the recipes. If you made recipes more available, you'd get more people looking at IOing their builds out which will counteract any temporary price drop you'd see from it being more common. Also you'd just waste more time deleting the vast majority of recipes (ie: useless ones) while trying to play.

Put another way: in order for higher recipe drop rates to lower prices, they'd need to suck inf from the system in the form of auction fees. Otherwise the market will probably be 'faster' -- you'll see a lot more things trading hands -- but not strictly cheaper. That will help suck inf from the system, so it might work, but it'd have to be pulling inf out at the relatively low AH fees faster than inf enters the system from killing baddies.

You know, we could have our cake and eat it too. See the epic ATs or now DP's "pick this power and get N more". Have the "shield" powers grant two sub-powers. One is your standard, run of the mill shields like now. The other is the end-hog, large-range, sight-limited PBAoE buff. Done! Pick which you want to use!

There's some slotting concerns there (you can now slot more +def or +res sets in the two powers). On the flip side if you wanted both you'd have to spend extra slots. I don't see that being a total showstopper. They'd have to make sure they two buffs (ST/AoE) didn't stack from the same caster, but that shouldn't be *that* hard. If it happens to clear up how buffs do and don't stack (the double-stack zoning, the don't-vengeance-till-the-last-is-down-or-it-is-wasted) to something a bit more consistent... that'd also be a nice QoL improvement.