UberGuy

Yes. I wrote a log parser that measured my earnings rate in "round" fraction of an hour intervals, and it included parsed drops of common recipes, inserting their NPC vendor value at the moment of the drop. The metric included zero market profits.

If it matters, I believe the last time we had "earnings per hour" thread in here was before I16 roughly doubled our earnings@50. Even something like an empath built with an an intent to be able to solo as well as possible should be able to hit around 2M/hour these days.

I'm going to disagree with a minor point here, but I'm doing so in way meant to support your (edit: larger) point. Any farmer who's making 5M an hour needs to turn in their Farmer's union card. I can hit those kinds of numbers running a DM/Regen Scrapper through +2/x6 paper missions, and that includes time spent picking a new mission, going from mission to mission, etc.

To your larger point, that's one of the reasons that things like Alchemical Silver cost "a lot". People making 5+M/hour drive the rest of the economy, because they (and the people who obtain money from them on the market) take that money and outbid lower earners, because that's how you get what you want faster.

As a response to the topic, and not Fulmens directly, I'm not sure what "greed" even means in a context like this. We all want stuff. When it comes to the market, we are competing with other players to get the stuff we want. If we want stuff faster, we have to pay more for it. That is, in the most literal sense, how the system works. If you're getting some of the money you intend to use to by stuff by selling other stuff, it behooves you to get as much profit as you can when you sell stuff. That means finding the highest price you can sell stuff for (with the trade-off that setting the price too high means the item may not sell for a long time, which defeats the goal of getting money to buy stuff faster). Is that "greed"? If it is, then wanting stuff sooner is also "greedy" by extension.

My first thought in reading this was "that's pretty good". My second thought after reading this was "there is no spoon". Then I saw your avatar, and my head exploded.

You know, I did post numbers showing that you almost certainly earn more Inf and XP fighting 51s with a level shift than you do fighting 50s with a level shift. By a lot. So much more that I find it unlikely that even nonlinear effects like debuffs would make up the difference. You apply higher debuffs and mezzes to lower-level foes, but those kinds of effects would have to add up to defeating level 50s 22% faster than you could defeat level 51s, after accounting for the fact that you would do 11% more damage per attack to level 50s, and that's just to break even.

Ditto. There's something about the angular layout and the content/angles of the images that does not appeal to me. The old ones looked more somehow open and interesting to me. The new ones give me the impression I'm looking at a schematic, while the old ones looked like a splash screen.

The new ones do work better with modern graphics settings and screen sizes. They just don't appeal to me as much artistically.

This. I sell what I produce, and I buy what I need. I hunt for bargains. I have 10 50s, every one of them is steeped in things like Kinetic Combat, LotGs, and purples, where appropriate. (Every 50 has at least one set of purples, and some have as many as four sets slotted.) I bought a PvP 3% defense from another player. Every one of 10 50s has between 1.3 and 3.0 billion inf in liquid cash.

I don't farm. I don't marketeer. I am rich. I made that money by killing stuff and selling stuff. I play 50s a lot.

I didn't make it all at once. I made it over the course of months. I'm not claiming that everyone will produce inf at the rate that I can, but I know there are people who can produce it a lot faster than I do. There are people with a lot more inf or stored valuable items than me. None of those people are keeping me from earning an awful lot of inf. In fact, I'm pretty sure they help me, because I sell them stuff at awfully high prices all the time.

Which gets to the asterisk I added to the quote above. I'm not sure what "gouging" means. I charge the going rate for stuff. I price it to move, which means I list stuff below the going rate to try and score the sale, but I'm not interested in market charity - I don't price so low that I think bargain hunters will easily buy my goods. (And if there's none of something for sale, I'll go for the gusto and aim high.)

Don't get me wrong - I don't think most of us crank out a billion a day or anything like that. There's a thread asking about that specific rate (a billion a day) and pretty much all the regulars in this forum were like "newp, not me".

But most of the things* that cost hundreds of millions or billions of inf are explicitly extremely rare. Going back to the discussion about supply and demand rates, the rate of demand for purple IO pieces way outstrips supply, so even if people aren't raking in billions a day, they're willing to work towards those purples. Even if you aren't a farmer or marketeer you can crank out 10M a day playing a 50 on high settings. That kind of inf earning rate makes purples distant goals for a lot of players, but that's intentional.

*The things that aren't extremely rare but still cost 100M+ are extremely highly demanded. LotGs are a good example - they provide something most people interested in IOs see as useful and most characters can slot two to five of them. They likely get produced fairly often, but demand for what is produced is very high.

I cannot possibly stress how incorrect this statement is.

Supply is not just about how many of something can theoretically be produced. It's about the rate at which something is produced. I promise you, absolutely and unarguably, that the rate at which the playerbase is producing anything we talk about in this forum is not infinite.

When we say demand is greater than supply for a widget, we mean that the rate at which players want to use, slot or consume the widget is greater than the rate at which players are producing widgets. When that happens, a method needs to be used to prioritize who gets the next widget that's produced, because at any given time, more than one person will want it. This game uses a method of letting people sell widgets on the market, and it prioritizes the acquisition of the person who bids the most inf. You want the next widget put on the market? You get it if you bid the most of the other people asking for one when it arrives.

Do we really have to explain to you the difference in DeBeers diamonds and Alchemical Silvers? You know, the part where no one player can actually control the supply, and to absorb the supply of all the people actually producing them takes a metric crapton of real-world time? And how in that same metric crapton of time, you could probably make 100x the profit selling one large item that takes way less attention?

Do you know that DeBeers has had to lower their prices on diamonds several times because there are other suppliers that did not exist when they formed their cartel?

I certainly don't. Most of the time, I'm off soloing with them, and that's when they really get to shine. When I'm teaming, it's almost exclusively on TFs, and usually speed ones, and frankly there aren't a lot of opportunities for anyone to shine there, except perhaps the buffers and debuffers.

That's pretty much my focus, and always has been, beyond playing with people I like playing with.

I'm one of the people that spends billions of inf on IOs, and I agree with this assessment.

Edit: To be more clear, IOs make things easier. I use IOs to build characters who can solo a whole team's worth of foes higher level than themselves, because I think it's fun. I don't know why, but I do, and I don't try to analyze it a whole lot.

When one of my tricked out characters comes on a team, if that team is running against +0 foes, it's entirely possible that my character could defeat most things the team will face all by themselves. That can't help but make things easier. Bring a team of eight other characters like that, and things are really easy. Easier probably (but not necessarily) translates to faster. Faster means the same reward in less time. If you're all basically indestructible, you can throw most need for careful tactics out the window, just pile on through and speed to victory.

The thing is, IOs aren't the only way to do that - team buffs were doing it long before we had IOs. Mixing the two together often makes things even easier. Having some people on the team who lack awesome IO bonuses isn't going to make or break the team. The effect of that alone on the team's progress is probably negligible if the people at the keyboard is contributing at all. Basically, I think that team leader had something straight up deep somewhere dark and nasty, and really should relax and just play the game. This game is way too forgiving for people to play it like that, IMO.

I am almost certainly inf positive, for many of the same reasons. I play the game on high settings, including large team sizes, even when solo. Worse, I actually bring my 2nd account in the mission, meaning that, though each character is getting a split of the inf, I trigger the team size bonus, increasing my total inf/time. I typically clear most maps of all foes. I, too, increased my difficulty when I got a level shift. (My characters are designed to operate near their performance edge, so dropping the level of all my foes defeats the purpose of having my characters built that way.)

I act primarily as a producer to the market. I don't "marketeer" - I just sell what I get that I don't want and buy only what I do want. Therefore I am not a good source of large scale inf destruction. I do currently craft level 45/50 commons, which destroys some inf, but I am only doing that for badge progress, and as each level 50 character gets all the badges, I stop doing it. (I want the recipe slots.)

I also don't avail myself of any of the newer inf sinks. I don't convert Reward Merits into Alignment Merits, because I earn reward merits so fast I don't often feel the need to, despite the ostensible efficiency increase in doing so. Consider it the merit version of spending 100k on common salvage. I consider it unlikely I'll want or need to make use of any of the inf sinks in the coming incarnate system, and certainly had no need to craft Notice of the Well components using cash.

Edit: I do think it's kind of nuts to worry about deflation at the level you mention. I don't think the mechanisms to allow that to happen exist. We produce so much inf/foe at 50, with such a low probability of an item drop per foe, and so many of us are playing at 50, I just don't see it at all.

So... about 21 more months?

It's in my info (under where my avatar would be if I used one). I kind of figured it didn't need saying.

Edit: Really more to the point, I have a core of players I can normally depend on for excellent play. We aren't in a SG together, but we sort of act like one, based around a global channel instead. We spend most every evening running TFs together, and we generally try to run them as fast as possible. Even so, we almost never try to tune what people bring on the team. About the most effort we apply to that is to say things like "hmm, too much melee" or "not enough debuffs", at which point someone usually switches to whatever we're lacking. Sometimes we just say "screw it" and run it with whatever. My favorite outcome for the latter: 26 minute Apex with seven melees and one Elec/Psi Dom.