macskull

I would advertise this in the market subforum, since with global email you don't necessarily need to be on the same server:

* Someone on Freedom wants your enhancement
* Roll a lowbie (or use an existing character) and email the enhancement to yourself, claim it on that character
* Trade with the person who is buying your enhancement
* Email the inf back to your Justice character

EDIT: As someone pointed out, this might not work because + and ++ Hamis may not email properly. Haven't checked myself, as I don't have any lying around.

As Aerik puts it, price caps are a bad idea. To see a real in-game example of this, check out a few of the PvP IOs which routinely go for 2 billion (the real price cap) on the market. Notice how lots of people are buying them off the market for 3-4 billion since they know they'll get them a lot faster than hoping their bid comes in before the 300 other people who are waiting to get one off the market. What this means is that the actual value of the item is between 3 and 4 billion, but it can't be listed on the market for that amount so people who want to get a fair market value for their item seek buyers off the market, and vice versa. Let's pretend the value of a Miracle +Recovery is 200 million right now, and suddenly a price cap of 100 million is instituted. People will know that IO is worth more off the market so they will not even bother to list it in the first place - in other words there will be a supply shortage and you'll be lucky to get one on the market for that 100 million. In fact you'll probably end up paying more to someone off-market than you'd have been paying had there not been a price cap in place.

Don't forget that higher prices only suck if you buy more than you sell. Just remember that that purple which sells for 500 million means you will make 500 million if you get one and sell it.

The current prices have little to do with hoarding (as there is not a finite amount of items since they're basically generated out of thin air) and everything to do with the increased earning power of level 50s, the change to the leveling curve/debt reduction/patrol XP, and the Mission Architect system. In reality, people who hoard IOs are doing exactly the same thing as the people who are IOing their characters (since they are removing things from the market and keeping them off) - by that sort of logic anyone who is IOing a character is hoarding and therefore to blame for the market situation.

I suggest everyone thinking that price caps are a good idea take a look at Aerik's link.

Yeah, I remember that experiment (I helped run it, actually). I was exaggerating for the sake of making a point - it will be random, yes but you don't know how long you'll be waiting. At least two examples from this thread (two weeks and won a bid, and seven weeks and didn't win) plus one example from a friend in-game (four weeks and didn't win) show that it's random but if you want a guarantee of obtaining that item in a reasonable timeframe you're better off just finding it off the market.

Added Flea, sorry!

The inf cap is 2 billion because that's the closest nice even number to 2,147,483,647 (the highest number that can be represented by a 32-bit signed integer). If the devs wanted to raise the cap beyond that (presumably they don't) they'd either need to switch to a 64-bit integer which would require substantial rewrites to chunks of the game code, or they'd need to do some goofing around with the way numbers are stored, which is difficult and error-prone.

If you're storing more than 2 billion inf in bids on the market (I know I've got a lot floating around out there), email it to yourself or make lowbies to hand it off to. The two things you probably don't want to do are 1) leave it on the market and 2) purchase items to put in storage to resell later to recover your inf. Number 1 is bad because we don't know what will happen to any inf over 2 billion, and number 2 is bad because we really don't know what will happen to item prices post-merger. It's probably safe to say that prices blueside will be generally higher, but not by much, though redside prices may be substantially lower. If you're willing to take that gamble, you might invest in some IOs blueside and then resell them later, but that's kind of like playing the stock market and you could get burned.

What about all the people that have bids out on non-existent items to store inf? Gonna have to start rolling some lowbies to hold the cash until the merger happens...

I don't think that will happen in the forseeable future, because the only items which routinely trade off-market for above the inf cap are two or three extremely desireable items which only drop off of PvP kills, which means they're substantially rarer than even purples.

Zombie's example was relevant and correct, even if the numbers were a bit off. Price caps cause nothing but problems, both in the real world and in this game. For example, let's say you want to buy a shiny new Gladiator's Armor: +3% defense IO. You check the market and see that the last 5 have all sold for 2 billion, but you're not worried because you have 2 billion. Now you look at the bidding/selling and see there are 500 bidders but none for sale and the last one to sell was three days ago. Now you realize that if you bid your 2 billion, you'll essentially be the 501st person in line, which means you will be waiting literal months, perhaps years (I'm not exaggerating) unless you get lucky.

Alternatively, you could find someone who is selling off the market and offer them the same 2 billion inf, which they will turn down because Player B over there is offering them 4 billion. What's the moral of this story? Price caps cause a real black market because sellers are unable to get a fair price for their goods the "normal" way. You may argue that 4 billion isn't a fair price, but that just means it isn't a fair price in your eyes, because if it wasn't really a fair price, people wouldn't be able to ask 4 billion and still get it. For an example of this, try listing a piece of common salvage (any piece) for 1 billion inf and see how long it sits there before someone buys it.

Much of the market "lag" experience came from the market UI having to query the market server for each and every keystroke. The autocomplete option with the new market UI at least somewhat eliminates that problem (though network connection speed and computer hardware may be at least partially at fault). As far as I'm aware, the client doesn't load specific information about an item until you tell it to, it just lists items - since there is no separate hero and villain version of each item, you'll be loading the same amount of stuff (the exception being side-specific items like the Black Market/WW teleporters).

These are improvements that could (and should) be made on top of a merger, but aren't a substitute for one. Before we knew anything about GR, I'd say that making IOs level-independent would go a long way in helping the redside market, but in light of the ability to switch sides a merged market means people will no longer feel pressure to move to blueside simply because the market is better. There's been quite a bit of that sort of sentiment since side-switching was announced and a market merger was ruled out, but now we know that won't be the case.

I see what you did there.

Re: prices, the history wipe (and cancellation of any bids and sales) will take care of some of the initial pricing confusion because it's kind of like adding a whole bunch of new items to the market (purples in I11, new sets in I13, PvP IOs in I14), except in this case people will have some idea as to what those items were worth before the price wipe. However, people redside might not put the same value on an enhancement as a blueside player would, so prices will probably reach an equilibrium somewhere in between - i.e. heroes will pay more than they do now, and villains will pay less. However, with only one pool of supply and one pool of demand (as opposed to two of each) the market may well be more stable which means less price fluctuation. (For those of you that dislike flippers or market manipulators, this should make you happy-ish because it means those sorts of things will be slightly harder to do.)

My only concern right now is what I'm going to have to do with my "inf holding" bids on nonexistent items.

WTF are you smoking? Travel suppression from being attacked lasts two seconds, regardless of what power causes it (the exceptions being toggle debuffs and debuff patches).

Realistically, you won't be hitting a target from more than 100-ish feet away with most attacks unless you sacrifice slotting for range, build for lots of +range bonuses, or are an /EM Blaster. Unless you web someone on the ground first, you'll be well within range of someone with webnades at that distance. The only way you're going to reliably kill someone on a flier is to ground them first and stay out of range of their attacks, but that assumes you are only going after one target and in zones that almost never happens.

The issue with this strategy is that it requires you to have Teleport to negate TP Foe, which isn't the case in 90% of PvP builds.

FYI, that's not, and it's not.

On topic: I don't PuG MO runs simply because I'd rather I know the people I'm running with, and because more often than not our MO runs take only a little bit longer than our regular runs (the last MoLGTF I was on took about 35 minutes, which is only about 10 minutes longer than our "normal" runs). I don't at all mind the MO badges simply because they provide some modicum of challenge to the majority of the playerbase.

If you ever get things working right, let me know. If Beef is willing to allow mirrors, I can work with him to host files on my own web server, as my webhost allows unlimited disk space and bandwidth.

Dark Pit is a good power, but its long-ish recharge kind of hurts it. It's got an acc penalty, but then again so do all AoE stuns. I think it would be improved by reducing the recharge time from 60 to 45 seconds (same as Thunder Clap) and increasing the radius from 20 to 25 feet. The issue with Dark Pit is that Dark Blast already has incredible amounts of utility for a blast set, which is why I think it's highly unlikely that the set as a whole will be ported to Blasters as-is.