Rodion

It's all the Fire/Kins, I'd wager.

While it's true that you can make more on the market than you can by playing the game or farming, the market would not function if people did not play the game or farm.

Without any recipes to buy or sell, marketers would have nothing to do. The only real function marketers serve is to "rent out" their slots, essentially using them to store items that other players listed at prices lower than their actual worth, often because they lack slots. Otherwise marketers mostly cause inflation.

Similarly, the only players who have enough inf to pay the prices that marketers charge are those who farm or actually play the game. The market itself is a less-than-zero sum game (because there are transaction charges). If everyone in the game just plays the market, and no one brings influence or items from outside into the market, the market dies very quickly.

So, it's very misleading to say "Market > Farming." The market cannot exist without playing/farming, but playing/farming can exist without the market (especially now with AE tickets giving you a much better chance at getting useful drops/salvage).

To answer the OP's real question: the best way to earn a lot of influence if you like actually like playing the game (and not just standing around in Wentworth's fiddling with market slots):

• Join a supergroup with a base and get all your characters into it. You may want to have a SG with just you in it so that you don't have to worry about other players stealing your stuff. But if you have some friends you can trust, it's best to be in an SG with other players so you can help each other out.
• You can use enhancement storage tables in the base to transfer enhancements between characters (which is why all your characters need to be in the same SG). This is why we don't really need in-game email transfer of items.
• You can use storage racks to transfer salvage between characters (most useful for transferring rares for use in crafting).
• Get a character to level 50.
• Get there quickly by running at high difficulty levels. This is probably easiest by playing on big teams and fighting +2 to +4 mobs. That way you don't have to worry about trying to run solo against big spawns. But don't run too high: if you're dying all the time, you're wasting time and influence, so don't jack up the difficulty too high.
• Once you reach level 47 run solo at +0/x2 or +0/x4, or +0/x8: the largest spawn size you can run without trouble. This will maximize your chance of getting a purple drop (which you can start getting at 47).
• Sell your good drops (purple recipes, high-demand uncommons and rares) on the market for decent prices. Don't list things at 1 influence, list them for their actual value.
• If you run out of market slots, craft high-demand recipes and make IOs that you can store in your base. Your other characters can use them, or you can sell them later, or you can have other characters use their market slots to sell them.
• You usually don't need to transfer influence between two characters on the same account. Instead, craft an IO with the rich character, put the IO in a storage table, get it with the poor character, and have that character sell it on the market.

No, actually what this says is that stars are meaningless. As you have found, many five-star arcs are just farms, because farmers run them a lot and they find them useful.

Because of this, I pretty much ignore five-star arcs because they are often completely worthless. Four-star arcs are more likely to be decent, well-written stories. This is because in a real story artistic choices have to be made, and not everyone is going to like those choices.

Five stars are used by farmers to make it easier for them to find their farms. Five stars are used by people who like stories to mark arcs that touch their hearts. Five stars are used by game designers (and apparently the devs) to mark arcs that use the mechanics of the MA to make complex arcs that stretch the boundaries of the system.

These uses are pretty much exclusive -- farmers hate stories because of the incessant walls of text, they hate complex mechanics because they just slow down getting tickets. Story lovers hate farms because of the lack of content, game designers hate them because they're BORING.

And the average player wants a moderate combination of all these things: a decent story, fast and easy tickets and XP, and interesting but not ridiculously time-wasting mechanics.

Which means that any arc that is highly valued in one of the above dimensions will be highly devalued by other segments of the audience. Which means no arc is going to be universally liked, and will almost certainly garner as many 1 and 2 star ratings as it does five-star ratings. Unless it's one of those rare arcs that is a happy medium of all of them.

The only real way to address this problem is to have multi-dimensional ratings. Instead of one star rating, we'd need to have five or six: plot, mechanics, "playability" (a code word for farmability), coolness of concept, characterization, soloability, etc.

The interface for doing this is already partially there. When you give a star rating at the end it displays the same categories that authors can select when they wrote the story. This appears to do nothing now, but it should be modified to allow you indicate a number of stars for each of these categories, in addition to the overall star rating.

Then when you search for stories and select categories, the results will be ordered based on the star ratings of the categories you selected.

Here's how the rating system works now: let's say I'm an avid soloer. I find a canon-related arc that has a great story line, but had way too many tough EBs in it. I would have rated it a 5 for the story, but only gave it a 3 because it was too damned hard and got me killed too often, unreasonably so. (To be fair, let's stipulate that the author marked the arc as team-oriented, but I stubbornly ignored that and plowed through it anyway.)

With the above proposal, I could rank it a 5 for canon-related story, and 1 for soloability, and give it an overall rating of 3.

Another player would rank it 5 for canon-related, and 5 for team-oriented, and 5 overall, selecting no rating for solo-friendly.

When you search with canon-related as the category, the results would be ordered by the score in canon-related. The ratings for the other categories would be displayed, and if I'm playing on a big team and see this has a poor rating for soloability, I won't care. If you select multiple categories it would rank the arcs based on an average of the selected ratings.

The downfall of this (and any) rating system is the conscientiousness of the raters. On the plus side, the lack of a rating in these categories would indicate no opinion and not zero -- so your arc wouldn't be torpedoed by someone who quickly one-starred you in anger, as long as other people give you fives for having a good canon-oriented story.

This system would probably give better results because only people who have an opinion would bother to rate a category.

I've seen this too, for a variety of villain groups. My guess is that it's a rarely occurring bug, probably another one of those "uninitialized variables" that causes the same spawn to be reused over and over instead of rerolling the encounter for each spawn location.

A bug like this is very hard to track down because if you have a mission full of the same LT/minion spawns you'll never notice anything out of the ordinary. So it could be happening all the time but no one realizes it.

I've just confirmed that you have to be level 7 to be able to spend the 540 tickets on rare salvage. I got to 7 and bought the salvage, and remembered the final wrinkle: you have to have at least 100,000 influence to post a bid for 2 million. So I just sold a candy cane for 56K and put the Pangean Soil I got up for 1.1 million, which sold for 1.8 million, netting around 1.6 million. Not quite two million, but close enough to prove feasibility if you're really motivated.

So, if you get all your ducks in a row, find the right AE mission and find some quick way to drum up 100K so you can post the salvage, you can easily make 2 million in hour or two the "honest" way, though 30 minutes might be pushing it.

By the same token, it's possible to make 10+ million with that same 540 tickets if you happen to get a -KB recipe with a bronze roll.

But your point is very well taken: with just a little investment in time, any low-level character can now get as much influence as they can possibly use in a matter of an hour or two.

You're right. They aren't rolls for salvage -- you just buy the rare salvage you want outright -- but the ticket vendor wouldn't sell me rare salvage at level 5.

Starting from scratch, without doing the tutorial, I just now got 590 tickets in about 55 minutes from doing some randomly selected arcs, which got me from level 1 to level 5. The time included going to level twice. I cheated and used vet attacks, which really do speed things up. I also had a false start with an arc that SKed me to level 12, in which none of my attacks did any damage at all. And I also had a couple of missions where I had to waste time searching for glowies and another one with hostages on a big open outdoor map.

Unfortunately, when it came time to buy rare salvage it wasn't on offer from the ticket vendor. Nor were any recipes. My guess is that when I hit level 7 I'll be able to buy recipes at my level, plus any kind of salvage.

If you pick the right arc, you can probably make it to level 7 in AE and get 540+ tickets within an hour. Half an hour? Probably tough, but possible if you write a custom arc ahead of time that's made for doing this.

I've used tickets to get rare salvage for my level 11 characters, which I then sold for millions. It didn't take much more than half an hour to do it, but they weren't level 1 to start off.

Thanks. I searched the web but Google didn't find that because the information is in a JPG image and not text.

I eventually found Ghost of Scrapyard standing on the container ship next to the black market. A friend got a stone brute and with the help of a couple of Shivans she and my Fire/Dark corruptor took him out in about ten minutes. And I got my accolade!

I found Fire/Dark to be very good all around on teams and solo. I would guess that Sonic/Dark would be as good or better. Fire/Rad and Sonic/Rad would also be good, though I haven't played them.

I have a Rad/Kin and had an experience similar to your ice/kin, though I would have thought it would be easier to solo given the hold and slows.

I'm not seeing this. I'm getting a ton of recipes (it's embarrassing -- I've gotten like 10 purples since I16, including one today), and I'm not really playing all that much.

It's possible that there is a bug with the drop rates at higher levels. I suggest you do 10 runs at +0/x8, then +2/x8, then +4/x8 with chat logs turned on. Run your logs through the stats analyzer and get back to us.

The devs gave you six free character transfers a week for the holidays. You can do your own server merger!

This was my reaction. Ouroboros does exactly what the OP wanted: the ability to run content after outleveling it.

The OP is missing another slant on this: the new difficulty options give you four extra levels to complete arcs.

The one thing that's missing now is the ability to run the mission from your actual contact at the lower level. I have many characters that have open arcs that are 10 or 20 levels old. As it is now, I go through these missions swatting EBs like flies in order to close the arc out. It seems like such a waste of time, since I get no XP or inf.

I seem to recall the devs talking about dealing with this problem, but if they implemented it I can't find the option.

There should be be an option to autoexemp those arcs at the appropriate level. Instead of going through Frostfire at level 37, I would be exemped to 15 if this option is set.

You used to be able to do this by finding someone of the appropriate level and exemping to them. Now everyone will be autosked to the mission holder's level. Again, unless I'm missing something...

I've seen this over and over. When a team with a decent TA breaks up everyone says "AWESOME team! We rule!" What they don't realize is how much the TA had to do with it.

The real problem with TA is that it has so many different debuffs and you have to get them all out there to make that difference: one debuffs damage resistance, another debuffs defense and damage resistance, another slows, another debuffs enemy damage, another debuffs to-hit, another does knockdown and damage (which often requires a second roll to ignite).

When you add up the activation times for all those powers, it takes 10 or more seconds to get all of them out there. Except for EMP Arrow, no single power in TA is obviously dominant; but taken all together, they shut down an enemy, leaving them unable to move, hit, damage, or defend themselves, while burning in flaming oil.

Perhaps the best way to buff TA would be to combine debuffs from some of the powers into fewer powers (Poison Gas and Acid Arrow are the obvious ones), and then add some kind of new utility power. The other alternative would be to speed up the animations for all the debuffs, but some of them are already only 1.16 sec.

That's the best thing to do: try them both out. However, SS doesn't get its best powers till level 18 (Rage) and level 32 (Foot Stomp). Until you get those, you haven't experienced the true fun of SS.

Really, either of them will be fine. They just have different strengths and weaknesses.

SS has two advantages: Rage and Foot Stomp. Rage has a 20% base to-hit buff and and 80% damage buff (but does have an annoying crash). Foot Stomp does knockdown around you, and provides a great deal of mitigation against damage because the mobs are wasting time standing up instead of attacking you.

SS has disadvantages too: smashing damage is the most resisted damage type in the game. That means that you'll do less effective damage against certain mobs.

Fire does more base damage, and does damage over time, but doesn't have any powers with mitigating effects like knockdown that Foot Stomp has. If you're taking too much damage the only thing you can do is use an inspiration, run or kill them. Over time Foot Stomp prevents quite a lot of damage. Hand Clap, which is usually scorned, is an excellent mitigator when you use it in a small enclosed room.

Fire is less resisted than smashing damage, but since Rage is up most of the time SS probably does more damage on the whole than Fire.

WP has no self-heal, while Inv has Dull Pain which heals and increases your hit points. WP gets Quick Recovery early on, so you won't have as many endurance issues that other powersets have.

There is no "best" overall powerset. They're intended to be balanced overall, with some being better for certain purposes than others. For example, Energy isn't very good for AoE, but has very strong single-target attacks. Even the sets generally perceived to be weak (/Energy Aura) can be made pretty strong by power selections (Tough, Weave) and by choosing the right IO sets.

You can pretty much do what you want with any kind of brute, but some powersets will be more vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks and will play better under certain circumstances. For example, Invulnerability has no native defenses for Psi attacks, while WP has excellent protection against Psi. On the other hand, WP is very vulnerable to ranged energy attacks that debuff defense (such as radiation). An Electric Armor brute can easily cap energy resistance, so they laugh at the same defense-debuffing ranged energy attacks that slaughter WP brutes.

Certain powersets necessitate certain kinds of tactics. You will find fun the kind of brute that uses the tactics you find fun. For example, Invulnerability derives a great deal of its defense from Invincibility, which increases with the addition of more and more mobs in your immediate vicinity. If you stand alone in the middle of the room, you will be much easier to hit than if you're in the middle of a big crowd. Willpower uses a similar mechanic, but instead of getting defense from proximity to enemies, you get Regeneration (and you debuff their to-hit).

This makes a difference when fighting mobs that prefer ranged attacks. An Electric Armor brute can let them take pot shots at a distance and it doesn't really make any difference (in terms of taking damage). But as an Inv brute you have to "herd" the ranged attackers into a compact group and then plunk yourself in the middle of them to maximize your defense.

So, if you despise herding and being in a big crowd, you won't like Inv or WP brutes. If you prefer to blast away at range, you might want to try a corruptor or dominator.

Most brutes (and tankers and scrappers) herd anyway to maximize the effectiveness of AoEs and damage auras, but for Inv and WP you have to compact the groups out of necessity.

Names in this game aren't really unique -- the system doesn't decorate them with disambiguating characters, we do. If I want the name Darkfaith I can get some version of it -- Dark.Faith, Dark-Faith, -Darkfaith, xx Darkfaith xx, Darkfaith2, Darkfa1th, etc.

Is it really any better to force players resort to adding junk letters to the name to make them syntactically unique, than to just have the system find some way of doing it?

I would never personally accept a name like "xx Darkfaith xx", but I would take "Dark-Faith" if "Darkfaith" was already in use. But nothing will stop some guy after me from taking "xx Darkfaith xx", and then there's this guy out there with an immersion-breaking copy of MY NAME!

So, it's disingenuous to say that such a system would be unacceptably bad, because we already have a system that's equally terrible, which produces exactly the same kind of garbage names that you want to avoid. True, you don't have to give them to your characters, but other people give them to their characters all the time and you have to use them if only to put them on ignore .

Instead of complaining about how the system won't let you bid enough on the things that no one is producing, how about you go out and produce those things? You can bid the sun, the stars and the moon, but if no one is producing them there won't be any to be had.

On the technical side: there is probably a limitation in the database that prevents bids greater than 2,147,483,647. If the price is stored as a signed two's-complement 32-bit integer, 2,147,483,647 (2 to the 31st power minus 1) is the largest possible integer that can be stored. It's not some arbitrary cap, it's a limitation of the numeric format. They may be limiting it to two billion to avoid the really silly looking value above.

If the price is stored an unsigned integer that maximum possible value would be twice that, or slightly more than four billion.

The only way the limitation can be removed is to store the data in a bigger field, which has to be some quad-size integer (64 bits) or some other format used to store very large amounts of money.

But it's more complicated than that, because everywhere throughout the code where influence is referenced, changes have to be made to ensure that the new data type is properly handled. That probably means hundreds of changes in the client, on the server, and on the market server. Most programming languages don't have intrinsic data types that manipulate such large numbers (you want to avoid floating point values because of roundoff errors -- you should use some kind of integer value when manipulating money and similar things because people just don't like their money disappearing just because you multiplied or divided).

In short, removing this limitation would probably be a large, time-consuming, costly and potentially error-prone task.

Anyway, if the lure of two-billion a pop PvP recipes isn't enticing people to find them, it seems unlikely that four or six billion would be any more motivating.