UberGuy

I was exactly like this before I9. Inventions changed everything (for me).

I never said it didn't. I said what was being described was unclear. I responded to Yomo about why it was unclear. I will undoubtedly ask for clarification if I see it in the future, because even though I now understand its context in market terms, very few people speak in that context. No one I know in real life would speak of an offer to sell as "an offer" in an unqualified way. Edit: Meaning it's not safe for me to assume what someone means when saying that, because only a limited subset of people consistently use it that way.

Perhaps that's true in a market context, which would certainly be appropriate here, but in the vernacular, when you want to buy something you "make an offer".

What are "standing offers?" Are you talking about bids to buy or listings to sell? I can't see how anything we're talking about would have 2700 outstanding bids, so I assume you're talking offers to sell, but I think of a "standing offer" as an offer to buy, so I wanted to be clear.

If you don't buy them out, I doubt the rest of the market will. I expect the market to settle around your current buy price. You're setting the price floor. Only the very impatient will shoot past your new floor all the way into the depths of that bid stack 1200 deep. If you want that to happen, you're going to have to spend more and erode that stack more deeply.

This completely undercuts your original, posted complaint. Buyer Type 2 is going to perform their bulk bidding well above the price at which seller Type 1 is listing salvage, because Buyer Type 2 wants to control as much of the supply as possible. They will immediately vacuum up all the listings provided by Seller Type 1, which makes Seller Type one very happy and able to go about their business, come back and shovel even more salvage at Buyer Type 2.

Amusingly, while Buyer Type 2 is making Seller Type 1 happy, Seller Type 1 is making Buyer Type 2's life a pain, forcing them to maintain their bid stacks more and more actively as they fill up.

This is part of why people are telling you that no one sane is doing this right now with High-Level Common or Uncommon Salvage, because a huge chunk of the playerbase is churning out high-level content and producing those salvage types at record volumes. The time when it's sane to try stunts like this is when supply is low, not when it's a raging torrent like unto which we have never before seen. (For example, it made some sense to flip High-Level salvage when the AE exploits were the rage, because very few people were producing salvage drops period.)

Fair, until the Seller Type 1's overload Buyer Type 2's bid stacks, Buyer Type 2 stops sweeping up sales, and Buyer Type 1 starts winning bids on the next Seller Type 1. There are way more Seller Type 1s in play than Buyer Type 2s. If you don't believe me, go and actually watch the market transactions for a piece of common salvage, like Silver or Nevermelting Ice, for a while. Buyer Type 2 appears as a set of consistent prices ticking off close together in time.

Edit: Let me very clear, Berzerker. I act as both Seller Type 1 and Buyer Type 1. I simply don't see what you're describing. I read and post in here not because I'm a marketeer who flips stuff or engages in market shenanigans. I read and post in here because I'm an extremely active market producer and consumer. I'm probably about as close to the type of market user the devs intended as can be, with the possible exception that I am probably more aware of its inner workings than they imagined a typical user being.

It's subtle, but there is a bit of difference in "failing" that way and in the way of trials. You "failed" due to just not being able to beat down a bad guy ever with the resources at hand. You could try for as long as you wanted, but you presumably ultimately gave up because it just didn't look likely. With trials you can fail explicitly. You can run out of time, fail to meet some objective (like protecting a generator or preventing fleeing foes from escaping), etc.

Trials have always been distinct in this game from other content for having this explicit failure mode. For most of them, this has been a formality, as their time limits are usually immense compared to completion times since long before IOs, and the only one I can think of with a destructible objective has been trivially defensible for a very long time. The Sewer Trial has long stood out as something that strong teams are still reasonably likely to fail. I am a bit worried that this has something to do with the fact that it is not run very often. However, there are much better rewards for running the Incarnate trials, so I am hopeful that will overcome people's possible aversion to content they can fail.

As others have said, you can't roll randomly for purples at all. You have to buy them outright. The cost in Alignment Merits varies. I am not in game at the moment, but think they cost from 20-35 Alignment Merits, depending on which you are looking at.

Regular Rare recipes, like LotGs, Miracles, etc., cost either 1 or 2 Alignment Merits. Very roughly, the recipe will cost 1 Alignment Merit per 100 Reward Merits it would cost at a Reward Merit vendor, rounded to the nearest 100 Reward Merits.

For the record, I have no problems with PvP. I don't like PvP here post I13, and I wasn't interested in it particularly even before then (I just thought it was more fun). Before I played CoH I spent about 5 years playing highly competitive league and ladder tournaments in FPS games. So don't think I have some sort of axe to grind against the mere concept of PvP.

Strawman representation of the position. Nice people do bad things all the time, in the heat of the moment or due to lack of personal will. People can love and mean well for their family or friends and do the wrong things to or for them, because people aren't perfect. That doesn't mean they can't spend most of their time trying to be considerate of others and doing things they think others will like or at least won't hate.

More strawmen. There's a difference in doing what one considers polite and avoiding "horrible offense". This isn't about knuckle-biting fear that someone will be horrified that you did something in a video game. It's about realizing that not all other people enjoy it (particularly easy to imagine when the person doesn't like it themselves), so why run around doing it?

This isn't my own philosophy, but even though it's not how I choose to engage people (at least in this game), I do at least understand it.

This.

For me, a goal with what I think is a terrible journey is not worth pursuing. A goal with no journey is too easy. A journey with no goal becomes aimless to me, and I will stop exploring it.

So I won't engage in the journey without an appealing goal. I won't pursue an appealing goal if it's behind a journey I don't enjoy.

So the two are not separable. They have to act in concert.

The complaints the OP is referring to are from people who, for a variety of reasons, consider the goal attractive but the journey unattractive. They may not mind some journey, but they don't like the ones available for that particular goal.

A lot of long term players are here not just because they like the existing game, but also because they are looking forward to new things in the game. If a new thing is added has either an unattractive goal or an unattractive journey to the goal, those folks looking forward to new things don't get a new thing they want to do. They then give feedback that, if followed, would mutate the journey or the goal into something more like what they'd like to experience.

Yeah. By and large I am able to deal with them pretty decently on everyone I play. It gets harder if they're actually +4 combat levels, because they take longer to kill, and that can be a problem if they live long enough to sap me more than once. Most of my melees can either dodge most of their sap attacks or disable them long enough to buy the time needed to defeat them, but an unlucky miss (or lucky hit for the Sapper) is usually bad news.

There's a part of this that makes me facepalm.

Just because our avatars feel no pain and their "death" has no impact in the game world doesn't mean that there's zero investment on the part of the other player. Just because it's a video game doesn't mean no one cares what happens inside its boundaries.

Being defeated is viewed as a negative for any number of reasons, ranging from pure ego to loss of time invested (such as being defeated while collecting nukes or Shivans). People have varying degrees of tolerance for "loss" in this form. You personally either have a high tolerance for it, or assign low value to time or other resources lost. Not everyone does.

When you have people who view their own defeat negatively in this way, a player with empathy towards their fellow players will assume that those other players might feel that way and be reluctant to impose those perceived negative experiences on them.

You will get the bonuses for having three of them slotted twice.

Yes, with a caveat. You cannot have more than 5 duplicates of the same bonus. This is mildly complicated. The bonus is generally not tied to the set. For example, both Crushing Impact and Doctored Wounds give +5% Recharge bonuses for slotting 5 pieces. If you slot 3 sets of Doc Wounds to five pieces and 3 sets of CI to five pieces, you might think you could get +30% recharge (six times +5%), but you will only get +25% recharge, because you can only have 5 of the +5% recharge bonuses.

A caveat on the caveat, what actually matters is not the size and type of the bonus, but effectively its name as viewed in your powers list under "Set Bonuses". I think +5% recharge is named Moderate Recharge Bonus. This matters because some special IOs have bonuses with their own unique name, and they don't count against things with the same bonus size/type but a different name. Luck of The Gambler +Recharge IOs give a 7.5% recharge bonus that's different from the 7.5% "Large Recharge Bonus" of sets like Sting of the Manticore or Basilisk's Gaze.

That may be what happened. But here's what I think probably happened.

Rubies seem to be consistently either low supply or high demand. I rarely see more than a few hundred for sale, when there are literally over 10 thousand for sale of things like Demonic Threat Report. If you want to make sure you get one, you bid more. 10,000 inf is basically one +2 minion for a level 50. More rich and impatient 50s may bid even more. Some people see those sale prices, and they list high. But then other sellers come in and undercut them, so those high-priced listings sit there for a while. So you end up with stuff at the "top" of the market sales queue that's relatively low priced, and then a strata near the bottom that's sometimes much higher priced.

If someone buys up all the lower-priced stock, all you're left with is the higher priced stock. This doesn't require any nefarious intent. All it takes is someone taking a bulk slash and burn crafting approach to the level 45/50 crafting badges. If you go for the Travel IO badge, one of the cheaper recipes to buy at the table is Range, which requires two Rubies for each crafted IO, and takes 28 IOs to get the badge. So if someone buys up all the salvage they need to do that, they pull 54 Rubies off the market when there are only a couple of hundred for sale. Suddenly, you're down into the more expensive Rubies that have probably been being undercut for days.

Combine that with people who will throw huge amounts of inf at the market for instant gratification, and I wouldn't be surprised if that 1M inf Ruby sale was someone with a lot of inf who couldn't be bothered to figure out what a successful bid that didn't overshoot really was. It may be hard to believe, but I know players who do stuff like that. For them, spending 1M inf to have what they want right now is the whole point of having that play money.

Was there some hint in my post that made it seem that I felt otherwise?

I'm trying to understand why you felt the need to give this response.

I never used to, but now, with so many people playing 50s, I sell for less than 5 inf. My goal is not profit, but badges. I want more market slots, on everyone I play.

All my 50s at this point are close to "done" builds, thick with traditional high-price poster child IOs like LotGs, Miracles/Numinas and with purples and PvPOs thrown in to suit taste. They all individually have a bare minimum of 1B inf and 1000 Reward Merits in their inventory. I don't care if I lose a few inf occasionally by listing salvage super low. My 50s sweat inf from their pores. (Regardless, I rarely ever do lose out that way.)

All my 50s have at least 62 salvage inventory slots, though some have 83 thanks to Inventions crafting. I usually cart around something like 10-20 pieces of salvage I don't want to sell immediately.

That means when I come to the market after running a few missions, I want to dump somewhere in the vicinity of 50-70 pieces of common salvage. I want them to move, because in a few missions, I'll be back with more. I'm the CoH market equivalent of a dump truck, backing up and unloading huge stacks of stuff, sometimes on two characters simultaneously. (I have two accounts.)

Before I 19, I never felt compelled to list any common high level salvage for less than 10 inf. Now, if I list for 10 or more, it will sometimes sit there for a day or more. There are too many people listing for under 10 inf. So now I have to list for even less.

This is why I think the OP's discussion is so bizarre. It's not people conducting sweep-and-flip operations that's keeping selling prices so low. It's oversupply. It's people like me, who are supplying the market to a fault, because there is something I get for doing so.

You still aren't getting it. People buying up the supply helps sellers. You never, ever block sellers by buying all the stock. You raise prices, which attracts sales.

Buying up supply "blocks" buyers, not sellers.

I really don't understand why you think this is stopping people from selling.

To stop them from selling you need to buy all the stock and list it low, not high.

I prefer to level up solo. It teaches me whether I really enjoy what the character can do, and I always want a character that can solo viably for when I cannot or don't want to team. I don't avoid teaming (except on new characters I am leveling up), and when I do solo, I do so knowing I'm bringing characters who can single-handedly face a large fraction of the entirety of what the team will end up facing.

The problem with Malta is significant -DEF from their machine guns. At +4, they're going to hit even if you're softcapped, and it's all downhill from there.

The problem with Carnies is the -toHit from Steel Strongmen, which is hideous long before you get to +4s.

DE are a problem for the reasons they're a problem for everyone. A FA is probably going to do a lot better against them than a SD is.

I'm sure with enough running around all of them are manageable without constant faceplanting, but it really doesn't compare to how something with both easier access to the softcap and healthy DDR is going to perform. Except for the DE, of course.

Edit: it dawns on me that level shifts make things like "+4/x8" unclear. When I say +4, I mean four combat levels over me, which I can't actually fight now that I'm level shifted. By that measure Level 54s are only +3 to me. I fight +3s pretty regularly, though not at x8.

I wouldn't run my FA on +4/x8 versus any of those things. And mine's a Brute, with more HP and Fault to juggle and mez stuff with.

I would never in a million years be able to stand this. Which I think brings up an important point about things like this.

The assertion "performance difference [is] so small" depends dramatically about what baseline performance one is making that assertion relative to. For example, if one targets play on, say, settings +0 levels and a virtual team size of 1 player, then missing out on slots in powers is indeed probably not going to be highly noticable. If one plays on, say, +2/x4, then the performance difference in having something fully slotted and having it underslotted can be very noticeable. Fighting +2 and +3 foes with any alacrity requires a lot more of both DPS and DPE, both of which call for well-endowed accuracy, damage and endurance reduction. Fighting more foes than normal calls for good damage, end reduction and possibly recharge.

So if indeed you play on lower target settings than I do, then there's nothing at all wrong about what you're saying about relative performance. If you're playing on high settings though, I think I would have to disagree, on a fairly objective basis.