UberGuy

In a global channel I hang out in, I once brought up how crazy I thought people were who paid like 2-5x what it costs to craft something for the crafted item. A couple of the regulars spoke up immediately and were like "I'm one of those people." These are/were competent players and seemingly competent people in general, but they readily described themselves as having more money than patience. These weren't all people swimming in pools of gold a-la Scrooge McDuck, either - several were the kind of player who strips older characters to move IOs around. They knew they could get more mileage out of more careful spending, but couldn't be bothered to do it.

I want less time spent in the streets. I dislike any hunt X mission, and would be absolutely mortified if they added "hunt <specific critter X>" missions as was suggested early in this thread. I prefer instanced missions in pretty much every way.

I do not enjoy street sweeping, because spawn sizes and levels are not controllable the way mission settings are. Once upon a time, the reason I swept the streets was because we couldn't find consistently large spawns or over-level critters in our missions - street sweeping was the only place some of us could seriously challenge our characters. That's long since changed, and now missions are far better at offering controlled difficulty than street sweeping ever was.

More zone events of various sorts are fine with me, and I don't consider them at all similar to street sweeping. Such events are typically something you can join or not, and tend not to relate to your progress through any arc or mission. (I would consider any mission or arc requiring you to participate in a zone event anathema.)

There is a difference in the assertion that "there are people who manipulate the market" and the assertion that "nearly everyone who uses the market casually is the victim of manipulation most of the time". The latter is the form of the claim that so many market doomsayers make, and that's the kind of claim which ensures that I don't think much of the poster's knowledge of the market.

I'm quite happy to try and respond politely to such posters why I don't buy into that viewpoint, and for people I think are new around here, I'm happy to do so without any personal attacks. I'm also happy to say that I and various others around here (many posting in this thread) have managed to convince some such posters that the market isn't some teeming cesspool of Inf exploitation. But some posters come here more interested in pontificating about their views than learning something new, and those posters we rarely convince of different viewpoints. It's when they start making negative judgements about the character of people who disagree with them that any effort on my part at patience with them quickly ends.

Based on my own observations of the market across a large number of items generally (obtained primarily because I tend to be a net seller of goods), I find the price fluctuations of most goods at any given time to lack the fingerprints of manipulation over the longer term. Because of that, I don't accept that most goods are being manipulated most of the time.

When I see signs that someone is manipulating the price of goods upwards, my usual response is to start selling that good. Once upon a time this was not so easy as it is now, but nowadays there are several good ways to produce a specific good. I just make a point of stockpiling fungible goods like merits and converters and using them to spot produce things that are hot sellers. Then I can use the cash earned to buy other things I want later, or even the same item later when the price drops.

I don't always know with certainty that what I'm seeing is intentional manipulation, but there are certainly things that make me suspect it.

Because I do pay attention for things like this, I an fairly sure that at any given time, there are a few things being actively manipulated, and those things are not always the most rare/expensive things on the market. But I also know that skilled manipulation takes devotion, and the amount of devotion required increases with the rate of supply for the thing being manipulated. Players with the kind of devotion needed to persist in manipulation of decently supplied items for more than a few days appear to be rare. Not do the things I take to be manipulation usually die off in such time frames, there are other indicators of how little patience most players have to spend on such activities - if patient players were more common we wouldn't be selling even very expensive things for 2x-10x the list price so often.

I know full well that people who use or care about the market less than I do are more likely to be "caught" by schemes that drive prices up. But I don't consider it likely in general that they are being caught by such schemes all the time across all the things they are likely to want to buy, and so I reject the notion that such "exploitation" is the norm. It happens, but that's not the same thing.

Indeed, I don't believe the amount of salvage listed for 1 inf is particularly indicative of anyone being taken advantage of. I list my high-level common and uncommon salvage for that (basically), because that stuff is massively oversupplied. The only reason I list the stuff at all is because it gives me badges that increase my market slot count, and if I list it for much more, it won't sell.

Heh, I considered that it might be something like that.

In such a case, one wouldn't want to slot any KB enhancement in the power. Hypothetically, of course.

I'm guessing they have some new tech whereby either this special IO completely overrides any KB features the power already has (making slotted KB basically do nothing), sets a max KB magnitude ceiling for the power, or something to that effect.

No one is likely to be able to answer how it works for sure until it's closer to live, or probably even afterwards. Things like Mids and RedTomax's site eventually get the powers details on these things somehow, but without something like that, or a redname explaining it to us, all we can do for now is guess.

I was talking about IOs, not HOs. As far as I know, they have similar but different rules. Last I saw, IOs lost plusses when traded. I haven't tried it in a while, though since it costs a consumable resource (Boosters) if the experiment works the way I think it will.

I've got someone with boosted stuff in their tray. I could copy them to test/beta and check it there.

There's a screenshot of one of the pieces in the summer event preview thread, and that piece says it's unique. It's not the proc, but the piece shown does look like very much like an ATE set, where each piece is unique. If the Acc/Dam/End piece is unique, I'll be very surprised if the proc isn't.

I suppose now we know what explosive the Trolls used to collapse Eastgate.

They can be traded, but if you trade them, the "plusses" are stripped off.

I'm not just trying to have fun, but I do find this amusing.

What you did, was not faint praise of the Hollows.

You praised the other content, full stop. There was no praise of the Hollows at all. You cannot "damn with faint praise" something you do not praise.

That's not how you do it. Really.

And again, if you're saying now that you were trying to "damn with faint praise" the content in Atlas, Steel and Talos by saying it's better than the Hollows, your OP was completely unclear on that. Nothing in it anywhere suggested that you were doing that. If you really want, I can give you a breakdown of why no one sensible would conclude that was the goal of your OP, and thus why they would have inferred that any "damning" was meant to be aimed at the Hollows. Which it was... just not via faint praise.

I personally find it far more likely that you just don't want to admit you used that idiom wrongly/strangely than that you're actually confused by this, though. But I'm cynical like that.

Yes.

So he is. That's what happens when you post while working, though.