macskull

Or just play the game, like I do, and make bank off selling your drops. Seriously, if you want something badly enough, you'll do what's required to get it. Apparently, you don't want it badly enough because here you are whining about what you "have" to do to get it.

Duh? That's the point of the market - sell drops you don't need, buy drops you do.

This thread is full of such idiocy it's laughable.

(Oh, I like your suggestion to add price caps on items, because it would make me even richer while screwing over everyone like you who thought it would be a good idea. For an example, see the +3% def PvP IO, which routinely trades off-market or 3-4 billion.)

Crits on held or slept targets.

Yes, Stalkers can crit out of hide (base 10% chance, compared to the 5% or 15% Scrappers get depending on the power, plus I believe 3% extra for each teammate within range for a max of right around 31% chance). However, part of the appeal of a Stalker is the ability to control when you crit (especially on Assassin's Strike). As far as I'm concerned, Dark Armor is the worst Stalker secondary when it comes to meshing with what the AT is designed around (quickly eliminating single targets).

At that point, everyone who's currently using nonexistent recipes will pull their bids (making sure to spread their inf out so as not to lose any to the cap) and then re-store it using sufficiently lowball bids on existing items (i.e. stacks of 10 bids at 200 million for the +3% defense PvP IO). Is it possible they'd lose that stored inf by actually purchasing items that make it to market? Not likely, as no one would actually list that item for that low, and if they did the person storing that inf would make even more inf off such a mistake. In short, you've solved nothing and have cost programmers a substantial amount of time to do so. (That's not even counting the time it would take to raise the inf cap, as 2 billion is about as high as they can make it without changing it away from a 32-bit signed integer.)

In short: lolno.

People can't flip unless there are buyers willing to pay what they're asking. If everyone refused to pay 2 million for that Pangean Soil, no one would be able to list them for that much. If people were smart about it, they'd place bids for 1.5 million, or even 1 million, and let them sit a few days. Unfortunately people are lazy or just impatient, see the last 5 bids, and assume that's what the going rate is (which is never a good idea unless those last 5 bids are spread out over a significant period of time). So, the simple truth is - if so many people actually took the time to place reasonable bids instead of blindly bidding along with the last 5 - the prices would be COMPLETELY different in our little market. And yes that means far far lower. Period.

Inf prior to the market was essentially worthless past the mid-30s, because by that point you'd have enough inf to buy SOs every 5 levels for the remainder of your leveling career. It was sometimes an issue before those levels, or if you wanted lots of Hami Os and didn't have a build capable of getting them at Hami raids (or didn't have generous friends). When the market first came out, prices were low because people didn't realize how much inf was out there. Things like purples and PvP IOs didn't exist, and costume recipes were ridiculously expensive because of how rare they were (remember when those cost 10, 20, or 50 million?). The reason prices are different now is because of how much new inf is entering the economy due to changes to the game as a whole that have been made since I9 (debt reduction, debt cap lowering, bugfix for level 50 inf earning, XP curve smoothing, etc.). If the amount of inf entering the economy never went up, prices would've stayed the same, because no one would have been able to afford to pay higher prices. Do you actually think about these things before you blindly point fingers?

Flippers can't set the prices any higher than the population is willing to bid. If they've got a monopoly on a particular item (yes, this happens sometimes) they can sometimes artificially raise prices and keep them raised for a short period of time, but in the end they always fall to what they were before the manipulation. Don't believe me? I'll take a leaf out of Smurphy's book and give you the inf to try such a scheme. Still don't believe me? Buy a Luck Charm and list it for 200 million. No one will ever buy it, because that's a price no one is willing to pay. Why are the prices on some items "high" right now? Because that is what buyers are willing to pay. It really is that simple.

Some of say "hey, look how much this sold for!" Yeah, we just got a lot of inf off a sale because someone was willing to pay our listing price (and that's assuming we listed it near the price it sold at, which often isn't even the case). Many of my "big sales" come off items that are listed at 10-20% below the going rate. It's not my fault someone wants to pay me 10-20% more than I am willing to sell for.

No, they're lazy. They're certainly not the observant ones, at any rate - if they actually took a bit of time to read up on the market, using information we freely give away, which we admit hurts our bottom line, they could make inf like we do. They don't, however. It's not our fault they don't use the resources we provide them with. If you consider someone telling you the facts as they are to be "going into massive self-defense mode," then you should probably take off your tinfoil hat and open your eyes to what's really going on.

WTF, indeed.

Basically, you're giving up your inherent for extra survivability. It'd be like a Brute giving up Fury for a bit stronger secondary.

I know, that's why I said "don't copy this build." I just posted it as a reference as to what kind of powers you should expect to take, and a (very rough) idea of how to slot them.