Venture

Any relation to Becky the Tarantula Mistress?

I regret Sieglinde will never get to meet Becky....

2- Venture pops into WentPrime for a look. None are available at the moment. He puts in a buy order...but for how much? The last 10 went for a paltry 100k, but what if another 50 gets the same idea, or there are already other buy orders in? He puts in an order for 30 million to seal the deal. Way above what a level 30 is going to offer, well below his actual limit. He's happy.

The problem with your theory is that neither I nor anyone else is going to do that. We won't even pay 1 million. If the last 10 went for 100K then that's the ballpark we're going to play in, because we don't HAVE to go higher. We all know the market punishes sellers for trying to get high prices so there's no reason for us to pay high prices.

The real problem is that rare IO won't be on the market at all. Whoever got the drop is going to be trying to trade it for one he can use, because the one he can use isn't on the market either.

Instead, level 30s who find any rare that any 50 wants are going to be rich beyone their wildest dreams.

No. That's what would happen if we had an eBay style system.

Someone upthread speculated about the market for common items. There won't be one. That stuff is common. Before long you'll have more of it than you know what to do with. Those of you who have played Magic: the Gathering know what I'm talking about -- people opening packs and throwing 14 of the 15 cards into the nearest trashcan.

At least more people have a chance of affording something for 10k than 100k or 1 million.

No, they don't, because the level 50s can buy everything worth having without cracking a sweat.

It's very likely that Wentprime will be for n00bs like me and the 50s will have their own exclusive off-market market.

That won't happen either, because those of us with level 50s can (and will) pay millions for anything we want for our low-level alts. (Personally I don't plan to bother chasing IOs for any of my sub-50s but that's a minority opinion.) A player with a 50 can spend an hour to grab a million inf (or use one of the millions he already has), then take 100 items priced at 10K off the market. Keeping prices artificially depressed doesn't "level the playing field" between the 50s and everyone else. It just magnifies the already considerable advantage the 50s have in buying power even further.

You might be thinking that making WentPrime cross-server will create a such a large supply of items that no one will be able to "corner the market". That's true, no one will. But unifying the server economies also puts all the 50s in one place, too, which means it's a wash. Actually it isn't, it's worse than that, because the level 50 characters aren't evenly distributed across the servers. Merchandise is going to flow towards Freedom and Virtue, one of the many reasons why making WentPrime cross-server is doubleplusungood.

It's not giving them away if she posts them for an amount she's happy with, and actually gets, rather than some huge but fair price no one is willing to part with.

It is "giving them away" if you are selling your drops for amounts that do not fairly represent the amount of effort required to obtain the item in question. If the market doesn't value Invention items in that ballpark then the market isn't worth using and/or the item isn't worth trading. (There are lots of real-life examples of things that take a lot of labor to build or find but aren't worth anything, proof left as an excercise for the reader.)

The only reason to sell a drop for cash is to earn cash that can be traded for a drop you want or need. If an item takes an estimated 20 hours of play to drop, the starting price ("retail", if you will) is 20 million inf, because you can earn that much in 20 hours. (Yes, that's only counting level 50s. Anyone below 50 doesn't exist as far as the market is concerned.) If you sell that item for 100K you're practically giving it away, and you're pinning your hopes that the person selling the item you really want is just as stu^H^H^Hgenerous.

If there is some kind of reasonable limit, nearly every successful sale will net you hundreds or thousands more than your asking price.

Thousands of inf? What are you talking about? I destroy trayfuls of DOs worth thousands because it's not worth my time to go sell them. It's not even close to worth my while to use WentPrime if we're only talking about thousands, and that's including the fact that you can teleport there.

People with visions of sugar plums and low prices dancing in their heads are in for some major disappointment. Once people have been burned enough times, which won't take long, anything rare (i.e. anything worth having) is going to get bartered or sold off-market.

In your scenario above, those are the ones that would wind up at Wentworths.

Why, so you can give them away? Far better to hold on to them and trade them directly, since WentPrime punishes anyone trying to get a fair price.

The average player who never comes to the boards, doesn't read guides, tutorials, or popup boxes:

...will have learned to creep up on prices from the low end after about a week.

<QR>

If you're playing your brutes to have short fights, you're not maximizing your fury bar.

The game isn't about maximizing your fury bar. It's about maximizing your XP bar.

I have figured out what works for me, and you continuing to insist that I am somehow "wrong" when I've run 2 brutes to 50 this way, is nothing short of willfully belligerent.

You made an absolute statement. You got called on it. "Works for me" is not the same as "optimum solution".

But there are entire sets that cap out at level 30.

Which should not even exist.

They'll be good for what, a week? Then you'll have better options available. This is where someone bleats "but IOs don't degrade with level!". Well, if I have 20% IOs and going up in level now means I'm eligible for 25% ones, then yes, they just degraded. Anyone who goes out chasing sets at low level (and yes, 30 is low level) is just running two treadmills instead of one.

Low levels are transitory. Only the endgame matters.

Economically, if an economy does develop (and it won't involve WentPrime if it does), people with level 50s will dominate it. They already have large stockpiles of cash and can earn more much, much faster than lower level characters can. My back of the envelope figures suggest level 15-20 characters earn about 15-30K per hour, 20ish characters around 50-60K an hour, upper thirties 200-300K an hour and level 50s over a million an hour. (That's based on routine play, running paper/scanner missions. I'm sure there's a more efficient way to farm cash but I expect the relationships to remain the same.) Since WentPrime artificially depresses prices, lowbies have no chance at getting any of that cash away from the 50s. Worse, since the 50s are going to bypass WentPrime by barter or direct sales, none of that cash is going to bleed out of the economy. Far from being a bastion of the proletariat, WentPrime is more like something Westin Phipps would have come up with.

Frankly the consignment house system can not be setup to cater to the 50's.

Quite the reverse. The pre-50 game, as far as Inventions go, is not merely unimportant, but totally irrelevant.

I do? That's bizarre. I never have, and yet you seem so certain that I have. A wonder that you seem to know me better than I know me.

If the editorial "you" was good enough for you....

edited to add: It is, in retrospect, possible that I've been leveling brutes so much that I over-generalized based on playing an archetype that goes non-stop activating powers.

I slot Brutes for damage first, too. It makes the fights shorter so you spend less END.

The point, however, is that there is no challenge inherent in figuring out what a given character most desperately needs in the low levels after you understand the archetypes and what they are supposed to be able to do.

The point is that there obviously is a challenge in it since you're doing it wrong. :-)

That there's an "extra layer of challenge" to figuring out that you buy accuracies and end reductions first?

Must be, since you actually buy accuracy and damage first....

Player A1 puts up a Level 12 TO for 5,000,000 inf.

Player B1 puts up the same Level 12 TO for 1,000 inf.

Player A2 (trying to transfer funds) offers to buy that level 12 TO for 5,000,000 inf.

Since player B1 wants less, and is obviously trying to move his items faster, his "for sale" is processed first, so he ends up with 5,000,000 inf (minus fees).


WOW does that suck. All this is going to do is keep prices artificially low. You won't be able to sell anything for anywhere near what it's worth (which, contrary to popular opinion, can be objectively estimated in this game). Even if people are willing to pay that much no one will dare list an item for anything even close to fair asking price, because the sale will almost certainly go to someone asking less. Once players sass the dynamic (which was, like, yesterday) they'll bid up from practically nothing every time.

Since the consignment houses are cross-server (another monumentally retarded idea), all it takes is one joker out of 170,000 players willing to give away what you're trying to sell to keep prices depressed. Under this system, if I had invention items I couldn't use or keep, I'd try to barter them for items I could use, inefficient as that might be. If I couldn't, I'd destroy them before putting them up for consignment under these rules. Why should I sell things for a fraction of what they're worth?

As for using the system for inf transfer: why is this even possible? Every buy/sell order should be tagged with the player's global ID. Orders from matching IDs get blocked. Easy.

Am I the only one that made the connection of Detective Frasenbacker to the show Due South?

That was so obvious even I got it and I never watched the show.

Detective Kowaccio is probably some TV reference as well, but I'm not getting it.

He's a reference to the other two cops on Due South.

There was a long thread on the Test forum about the cop references in i8 but it's almost certainly been purged.

Now, when one looks at Penelope Yin's info, how would one know that there was any discussion involved?

Push the button? There's a Discussion link on the top of the page, just like any wiki....

Yes, Agent G is the last stop.

Notice the names of the Lost leaders in the Rescuer badge mission?

It's debt reduction, not debt immunity.

All I can say is that I haven't had one bank mob run from me since the 10/23 patch to Test that fixed the problem.

It's that it's a tier 9 power on a 'stop from fleeing' mob.

Which can't run if you attack it.

Once engaged they can't run, so all you have to do is not get defeated.

Well, no. Ice Mystral also appears as an AV for large teams so it is not just a PP. She spams status/mezz attacks and Powersink as the Lt version, kills you, then runs to getaway Mole instead of just standing there.

For starters, that doesn't sound like Ice Mistral. Shock Treatment, perhaps.

Secondly, the point is, again, mobs with teir-9 defenses are not new. People have been dealing with them for the last 2.5 years. Yes, they can be a handful but people have leared how to cope with them.

Maybe these are only supposed to be played by Scrappers and Controllers? I thought Heroic ment ANY Archetype.

I have successfully soloed Safeguards with every single hero AT. I've failed one on Live; my TA/A's second run at Steel Canyon tanked when I got hit with a massive lag spike in the bank. The second chance at the getaway truck failed because he had to fight the villain and all of the bank mobs at once.

Anyway, I took an Archery Blaster (first mistake, no Damage Mitigation/Secondary effect) got killed three times, still couldn't stop the Elite Lt. AV. However, any of my same level Scrappers would have had no real difficulty and that is what is very wrong with CoX.

Some mobs are going to be problematic for some builds. Can't be helped. That is not, in and of itself, indicative of a balance problem. How I would have tackled the problem would depend a lot on your secondary, which you have thus far failed to mention.

Also, what is an Lt level Boss doing with Powersurge?

The same thing Minion level 7th Generation Paragon Protectors are doing with old-school MoG....

Mobs with teir-9 defenses are not new.

SGMs like Mayhems are terrible with a bad team.

Fixed that for you.

try it with a team.

Why, so it will be even easier?

Since Atlas and Galaxy don't have Detectives, the Safeguard progression is off-by-one. Same for Mayhems, actually.

This is a mish for a high-dps, self-healing, efficiently-mobile protagonist (whether team or solo).

Into which of these catagories does a Trick Arrow/Arrow Defender fall?