peterpeter

Inventions are the new HO. I think most people would rather slot a fistful of purples than HO's.

Everything I can think of boils down to:

1. Get influence
2. Delete it.

I don't see any leverage at all. We don't have any equivalent of the real world credit market to multiply the money supply.

A lot of inf is created each day. The more of it you can get (by flipping, crafting, begging, etc) the more of it you can destroy.

I suppose you could try to convince people to PvP. That doesn't generate inf, and increasing the supply of pvp IO recipes would destroy inf through market fees and crafting fees. If you somehow convinced half the player base to start spending half their game time on PvP, there could be some dramatic deflation.

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Can we have a proliferation update before then? Claws for brutes plz.

[/ QUOTE ]Dark Miasma for Controllers plox!

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Thermal/fire for defenders!

As for I16, I hope that they've been working on it for a year now and that it will be ready for beta by the end of the summer. Given that my hopes have, historically, been unrealistically optimistic, I'm afraid that I16 is more likely to be a spring 2010 thing.

I like all of these ideas. My favorite is a PBAoE power that costs 100k influence to use, which shows you throwing money in all directions, which causes a confuse effect on any enemies in radius, and grants influence to any nearby allies.

If you're still low level after running all those, you can search for "peterpeter" or "nadir". I don't have the arc numbers handy, but I have three missions up. Most people seem to like them.

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peterpeter wrote:

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Plan A: Charge into the pack of bad guys and start swinging. That works 90% of the time, I'd say.
Plan B: Single-target pull until the group is weak enough for plan A.
Plan C: Herd/Gather an entire group to a safe distance away from other nearby mobs, then go to plan A.

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So Plan A is your Plan B for Plans B and C?

--NT

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Well put.

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I very much remember those statements in the past.

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A lot of it has to do with different definitions of the word flipping.

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Last time I checked everything Performance Shifter +End was going for several million.

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Last time I checked was about a year ago, and they were in the 25-30 million range. And I don't mean for just the last 5 sales. They stayed in that range consistently for the weeks that I was paying attention.

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Herding every mob is lame and boring.

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I have a different registration date. Same year, though. Does that count?

Here's how I usually play:

Plan A: Charge into the pack of bad guys and start swinging. That works 90% of the time, I'd say.
Plan B: Single-target pull until the group is weak enough for plan A.
Plan C: Herd/Gather an entire group to a safe distance away from other nearby mobs, then go to plan A.

In practice, I always start with plan A. If it doesn't work, then I've probably weakened the mob enough so that plan A will work the next time. If it doesn't, then I've almost certainly weakened the mob enough so that plan A will work the next time. If it doesn't, then I must have weakened the mob enough by now that plan A will finally work. If it doesn't...

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For a while there was trading in between my buy and sell points, but it usually dried up and went back into my control.

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I always used to claim that this sort of manipulation couldn't be maintained, and this piece quoted above is the reason why. All of the trading should have shifted to be within his price points and stayed there until he got tired of buying things and not selling them. That's what my econ 101 professor told me would happen. That's what logic and common sense tell me should happen. That's certainly what I do whenever I find myself facing that situation in the market. What I have learned in the past couple of years though is that, in this game, for our particular market, there simply is not enough competition to break this kind of manipulation quickly and consistently.

Part of it is the low volume. Part of it is the low stakes. People just don't care. I mean, they care enough to come in here and excoriate everyone, but they don't care enough to price their items appropriately and buy patiently. Most markets really are self-regulating. Ours isn't, not as long as the overwhelming majority of people insist on selling low and buying high (because they're in a hurry, or they want to be generous, or whatever).

EDIT: I keep doing the same thing. I read an interesting OP, respond thoughtfully, and then later check the rest of the thread and discover that it has gone so far astray that my post is completely out of place. Sigh. That's what I get for spending too much time in real life and not enough on the forums.

I'm sorry I didn't notice this thread earlier. I can't read it all now, but I'll toss in my two cents: most of the "myths" about the market are taken as articles of faith by the people who believe them, and nothing will ever "bust" those myths as far as they are concerned.

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peterpeter - are you the creator of Doctor Nadir who is working with Hellions to make napalm?

I love that mission. I'll have to check for the others.

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Thank you, yes. I have three up there. I keep meaning to make more. People seem to enjoy them.

As for the unique missions, I think that during beta they were all considered map length 0. I guess that was changed, but I don't know how.

According to Pohsyb in beta, it's the sum of the lengths of the maps, plus a little extra if you have a defeat all. It's an imperfect metric, but it's not a bad ballpark.

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That isn't a problem with the market, which is limited by other mechanics, both in-game and out. That is a reward rate problem, entirely in the hands of the developers.

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Yes! So few people understand that.

I remember being terribly poor until the mid-30's. After that, the money rolled in faster than I could spend it. It always seemed to me that the devs didn't do the math before setting the prices of high level SO's and the influence drop rate and the amount of xp needed to level.

One thing I have always loved about this game is that nothing decays as a function of time, especially time logged out. In SWG, it was easy to reach a point where you needed to log in a minimum of X hours/week just to maintain your stuff. You couldn't make any progress unless you played X+1 hours/week. And since your maintenance costs went up as you made progress... It was the worst possible system for a casual player.

In CoH, you can just make more and more and more inf. Sooner or later you're bound to hit the inf cap. I love that. As long as there isn't any ongoing inflation, you can buy anything eventually.

"Eventually" is the key word, of course. You're right that many people don't want to wait that long, however long that turns out to be. And there's nothing wrong with that. Loot speed is a lot like leveling speed. I think we can all agree that if it takes more than 150 years to reach level 2, that's too slow. On the other hand, most people would agree that hitting level 50 in under 30 seconds is probably not best for the long term survival of the game. It's a question of balance, keeping in mind that every single person will have a different opinion about where the sweet spot is.

I think the main reason why the market can be so profitable is because so few people do it. The lack of competition is what makes the profits so large. I'm not sure how the devs could address that, even if they wanted to.

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It is an investment. And not a very expensive one, as I recall. When I was doing it, it was something like "buy at 511, sell at 100" until all bids for Improvised Cybernetics were filled, repeat with Spirit Thorns and Regenerating Flesh, come back later and do it again. That gets you a couple of slots (one at 250, one at 1000 according to the wiki) for about half a million inf.

Pricing has changed, the "low cost high turnover" items have undoubtedly changed, and it may be less practical now in general.

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I have an unhealthy aversion to selling things at a loss. I did basically the same thing, but I bought at 50 and sold at 100. It did slow me down a little, but not as much as you might think. I was mostly doing circuit boards or computer viruses, but you may need to pick something different now. High turnover is the key. There are some things where the demand is just terrible.

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Oh, it's on the protector server hero side.

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FYI, the MA stuff is on its own server. Everyone can see the same missions no matter what server they are playing on, even in the EU. For that matter, heroes can see and play villain missions and vice versa.

One thing to keep in mind is the fact that the 60 day rule is gone. If you have something that might not sell for weeks or even months, you could craft it and hand it off to an alt, using supergroup storage. The alt can list the item and then you can just forget about it for months. If you ever get around to playing that alt again, you might be pleasantly surprised to find a few million extra info waiting for you at the market.

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Because, if they do hit the reward cap, whatever that may be set to, it really hurts them more than it hurts someone who plays a smaller amount of time.

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Yes. That sounds like a problem to me.

A daily reward cap would hurt farmers, but it would also hurt people who just play the game a lot, and it would especially hurt the people who really like the MA and who use it a lot. People have already created characters and formed teams dedicated to leveling up only in the MA. Why should they be punished?

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Ahhh...that makes a lot of sense. I keep forgetting that the market wasn't in the game initially. Putting it in later will definitely influence (no pun intended) people's views of the whole thing.

I mean, every other MMO I've ever played has markets/AHs and I never see this level of derision for people who play the markets. But I guess it would make sense if this were the case.

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Also, a lot of people feel that a marketplace is inappropriate for the genre. They say that they don't want to play "City of Stockbrokers". It annoys them that playing in a way that they don't enjoy gives rewards, or that people who are playing "the wrong way" by being greedy and selfish in a superhero game are getting extra rewards.

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Does anyone remember when the Devs said that there would never be more than one issue without Proliferation at a time?

[/ QUOTE ]No?

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Me neither.

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I plan one taking a Scrapper redside when Going Rogue goes live. I really don't play blueside, at all really.

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I plan on taking a brute blueside when Going Rogue goes live. I really don't play redside, at all really.

I played brutes during Cov beta and enjoyed them, but I just don't like playing CoV.

Does anything happen when you've found them all? (No, I didn't click on the link. I've never gotten past halfway on my own, but I will one of these days!)

When they say "quiet" I think they meant that powers would be suppressed, not noises. If you want actual auditory quiet, then, yeah, I'd suggest turning the volume down.

I don't think a daily cap is a good idea. Different people play different amounts of time each day. Why should they get the same rewards? If one person only manages to log on for an hour, they might hit the cap. Another person could be logged on for two or three hours, hit the cap after the first hour, and then what? You would punish them for continuing to use the AE, regardless of whether or not they were using it appropriately?

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I have not seen one person ask for the ranged attack to be removed, have you?



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Um, did you read the OP?