UberGuy

Also, let's not forget a very important thing here - for what I expect are a significant majority of players, having more wealth is a means to an end - that wealth is used to obtain more power for their characters. Even people who hoard wealth typically do so for "rainy day" purposes, to ensure they have ready access to new market items when they become available.

So for many people, "greed" for wealth is about "greed" for power.

With that out of the way, you're completely missing the point of what I'm saying and why I'm replying. You aren't offending me at all, and I am not complaining that you somehow painted me with an overly broad brush.

One of the core complaints I'm taking from your posts is that the markets are driven by greed, and that this is at the core of the price escalation. Greedy people want more money/goods, so they intentionally and explicitly do things that inflate the prices of market goods.

My whole and only point is that, by virtue of my own example to the contrary, I'm proof that this is not clearly at the root cause of price escalation. I'm using that to question that whole tone in your replies - that one of the founding problems with the market is this one of "marketeer" greed. Does it exist and contribute? I think it does, and if that's all you're saying, then I think you're right, and I'm mistakenly arguing over nothing. If you really do think it's at the core of the "problems" with the market, then no, I disagree.

I know without a doubt that I do things that help raise market prices implicitly, even if I do so in a small way. Biggest, simplest example? I continue to pay more and more to have things like purples. I help empower other people to ask us to pay more for rare goods, because I go ahead and pay more when they do so. I think lots of other people are like me. I think that is why prices keep going up. The "greedy" people are just along for the ride, paddling the boat faster down the whitewater cascade of inf we're all rushing down.

You're correct. Scrappers, Tankers and Brutes do all share a 0.5 ranged damage scale, but Stalkers have a 0.6.

(In practice I guess this is moot, since nothing in these AT uses these scales any more, except as what I presume are bugs. For example, Scrapper Darkness Mastery cones are using the ranged damage scale, which makes them both pathetic and inconsistent with other epic cones not only in other Scrapper epics, but in use by other melee AT epics as well.)

It also does a fair bit more damage. That gets diluted a bit when you start comparing Blaster ranged and Stalker melee damage scales and considering that some blasters have Aim and Build Up (and Stalker Build Up is only +80% damage), but the difference is still considerable. I think most Blasters would be much happier with their snipes if they pumped out 700+ points of damage. And that damage number doesn't include the Stalker using Build Up. With that, it's more like 1090 damage.

The Stalker ranged damage scale is 0.5. (I know this is shared with Scrappers, and I think it's true for Brutes and Tankers as well, but have not checked recently.) This is in contrast to their current melee damage modifier of 1.0.

According to Red Tomax, snipes should be using the melee damage modifier. It should be possible to confirm this with the in-game "real numbers" info for the powers. I can confirm from my own experience that the blasts (like Dark Blast from Stalker/Soul Mastery) do produce damage that's consistent with the Dark Blast damage scale (1.0) times the Stalker AT's melee damage scale. This was a change some time back. All stalker ranged attacks used to use their ranged damage scale. It was atrocious, and it changed. I thought snipes were specifically excluded from the change and left using the ranged damage scale, but Red Tomax disagrees.

If that's correct, Moonbeam, a scale 2.3 attack should deal 127.9 base damage at level 50. Enhanced too +100% and performing a critical, it would do four times that, or 511.6 points of damage. Contrast that with Assassin's Strike, which would deal 778.56 damage fully enhanced.

I also disagree with this. I have been selling things that cost 200-300M for months, and I would say there's at least a 5:1 ratio of sales where I sell at a "round" price (well above what I listed at) to times where someone buys close to my actual list price.

What, really, do you mean when you say people bid creep? When I am buying something that costs 300M inf, sure, I usually bid creep, but I do it in 10M inf increments. My experience as a seller is that not many people do even this. If they did, I wouldn't make sales at 200M, 250M, 300M, etc. nearly as often as I do in practice.

I do not see them what I consider that much in game, and even when characters have them, I do not see them used much at all. In general, I believe that the likelihood of a character having and regularly using a snipe is inversely proportional to how experienced or knowledgeable of game mechanics the owning player is, and whether or not they prefer to build characters based on concept or performance. Clearly, if your character concept calls for a sniper power, other considerations can go out the window.

I have Dark Blast characters with Moonbeam, but I have that power not because I think it's that effective that often, but because it's a good set bonus mule and because there is no power I want that's more unconditionally useful. I used to rely on Moonbeam more for single-target damage, because Dark Blast has a dearth of single-target blasts. However, thanks primarily to Inventions benefits, I can now spam my two single-target blasts much faster than before, and better afford to use my cones even when attacking a single target.

Heh. I'm not sure if you're agreeing with what I was saying or not. But either way, what I said had too many "too"s.

And "nerf something because I don't think it's fair" isn't?

Again, you didn't have to. Your tack in the conversation makes it easy to infer you mean most people. After all, if you didn't, why would any of this matter?

I'm not sure what the confusion is. I tried to make it clear that I went from selling them for 250M almost all the time and 300M sometimes to selling them for 150M almost all the time and 200M sometimes. 250M to 150M is down.

You're might be talking about the best price you can buy them at, but I'm talking about the best price I could consistently sell them at, crafted.

OK, now it makes more sense. You care about this because you want to flip. I don't. I either want to sell what I have, or buy one. Yes, in both cases, I do care about the things you mention, but I would not generally want to buy what I want to sell, nor would I want to sell something I got as a drop for 1 inf to find the price the way you did.

So to me, there's not much value in that knowledge, because the opportunity price of obtaining it is generally too high.

The point is that I'm proof that you can't claim everyone is doing that. I'm not offended, I'm trying to point out that you're making claims you can't possibly back up. Do we know some people use the market like that? Sure - a lot of them post here. But the tone of your entire line of thinking in this thread is that basically everyone is some sort of amoral shiester. I think that's a claim based on a feeling of victimization because you don't like how difficult it is to obtain some things than any clear evidence that it's actually the case.

I gave that information in pretty explicit detail in my post.

I agree that it's very likely they lack that detailed economic background, but I think more to the point, they don't actually care or feel that's critical.

It may not be fruitless in the sense that you can pull off figuring out who it is, but I'm not seeing the benefit of knowing the vast, vast majority of the time. I mean, sure, it might help sometimes, but to me it feels like the mini-game equivalent of bid creeping for uncommon L50 salvage.

You are correct. Actually I just messed up that sentence entirely. I'll go fix0r it.

Like it or not, this is a core aspect of the game. When it comes to leveling up and, honestly, most regular content, I'm a pretty hard-core soloer. I do, however, attend lots of TFs.

While I have some sympathy for it, saying you don't like to or can't go on TFs in this game is tantamount to saying "I don't like to or can't really play this game," at least in a way that will produce IOs. TF's are basically this game's core reward mechanic with respect to IOs. A-Merits put a serious dent in that, as indicated by the price drops I mentioned, but if you're hard-core about running them, you can earn more Reward Merit equivalence in a day than you can Alignment Merits (barring buying them). I don't claim many people are that hard-core, but I'm just pointing out a reason I consider Reward Merits still the prime reward mechanism.

If you both can't/won't TF and you don't want to use the market, even just to sell A-Merit bought LotGs or Miracles or BotZ or something, well, I'm sorry, but you've cut out too many of the key paths to success. I don't think the devs should be beholden to "fix" the economy to account for people who can't or won't do those things, because I think people that cant' or won't do either are a small minority.

Genuine curiosity here: what recipes aren't?

There's a message in here. I think the devs never intended anyone to do that. Merits are a pressure valve only for the most expensive items. Spending them any other way is wasteful. If you can spend 2 A-Merits or 200 R-Merits on something that costs 150M on the market, why would you spend 125 R-Merits or 1 A-Merit on something that costs 25M? The devs expected people to mix and match.

The devs expect people to use the market. Just as I believe Task Forces are the main IO-generating reward path (now heavily supplemented by A-Merits), I believe that the market is the main path to IO acquisition by design. When most stuff is generated by random drops, you need a market to transfer that stuff from those who got it but didn't want to to those who didn't get it but want it. It's totally fair to talk about whether people like using the market, or whether the market could be more friendly or efficient, but it's not reasonable to talk about removing some sort of market from the equation without deeply revamping the reward system in CoH - and again, that reward system is meant to be a time sink.

I know the guy you're talking about. As in, I know him personally.

He doesn't really play CoH any more. Not in PvE. He occasionally goes on a TF, and lately he has been leveling up a new Scrapper. Mostly, though, because PvE doesn't excite him, PvP was screwed, and because he's pretty busy in Real Life, he uses it as a fancy 3D IRC client. He is AFK a lot of the time. He logs in and out at the market and leaves characters standing there all the time because he's not really playing, but when he does play, he likes to be richly IO'd, so he does do stuff on the market.

He's just not a good example, because he's not playing like most people at all.

That is hyperbole, because it suggests that everything on the market has done that. It hasn't. Some things became much less expensive, and some things became a lot more expensive, but the market as a whole has not clearly inflated to that degree.

What's a prime example? LotG +Recharge globals. For a while before we got Alignment Merits, and while lots of people were AE farming the most recent major exploit, crafted level 25 LotGs were selling consistently for 250M inf, and I sold a couple for 300M. Now I've been lucky if I can sell one for 200M inf, and that's during double XP weekend. Most of the time they're more like 150M inf. That's 60% what I used to be able to sell it for, and if I try to price it at the old value, it won't move.

Purples got more expensive because, in part, the price on things like LotGs, Miracles and other "Pool C" stuff dropped due to increased supply, but the supply of purples didn't change much. A-Merits are accessible by more of the player base than large numbers of Reward Merits, so they tended to create a bulk supply increase, but because the A-Merit rate on purples is so high, that hasn't happened for them. It's cheaper to buy them with money on the market.

I do, at least when the build calls for it. (I don't blindly add purples, but I do like lots of +recharge on most builds.) Like you, I don't flip or especially marketeer. Unlike you, I don't farm to speak of, but I do produce a lot of merits (mostly Reward, but also Alignment), and I use them to buy high-priced items, either to use or to sell for money which I use to buy purples.

What's low moral value about the way I use WW, exactly? I don't use it to "screw" anyone. I don't flip. I don't vacuum away supply to cause price surges. (I don't consider those screwing people, really, but I am inferring that you do.) Yet I have heavily purpled characters and about 10 billion in liquid. (I didn't add it up, but I have 1-2B across 7 50s and a few more 500M characters in the 30s.) What morals did I discard if I did that just playing the game? If I did that, why can't you?

Yeah, I missed that and was going off of info from the beta.