seebs

How did you DO that?

I was on a fire/dark corruptor, someone asked me whether I was a healer. I said that I was more focused on burning people to a crisp, they wrote back "oh, ty, but i need a healer".

No you bloody don't, not in the mid-teens for levels. Of the ways in which my fire/dark corruptor contributes to teams, "healing" is a distant third or fourth.

Yeah. Was thinking the +recovery and -kb would be very pleasant to have, and I could have them for multiple hours for a tiny fraction of the cost of an IO, to say nothing of slots.

Looks like my base-building is about to get More Fun.

Woah. Those look seriously awesome to my untrained eye. Cheap components, hour-long buffs that would make a lot of content way easier.

I haven't seen these at all. There was a reference to "base salvage" earlier, are these dependent on stuff we can't get anymore? Or is it just regular salvage?

I may have had bad luck. I didn't do much AE, as I recall. I didn't know about ANY of the tools for increasing wealth. I didn't know how to craft, and I didn't get many recipes. So I just teamed with people through stuff like Frostfire, some various radio missions, and so on... and I remember that, when I made 22, I could only get SOs because someone sent me some money to help me out. I think it may be relevant that I probably got 90% of my experience on 8-person teams, though, which give a LOT more XP per drop than other ways of levelling.

This was hero side, back in July or so. I just happened not to get particularly lucky in drops, and never ended up with any decent recipes.

Since markets are completely merged these days, I don't see how server affects marketeering.

I've really loved my bots/traps MM. Started a bit wussy prior to upgrade robot and/or the second henchman, but later gets to be utterly amazing.

Hmm. You have a point -- pre-50, inf from drops is so trivial that it probably can be ignored, in general.

When I started out, though, I had a very hard time coming up with money; I couldn't even buy SOs at 22, because I didn't have nearly enough money. Despite selling stuff on the market -- by trying to guess what to list it at, without really knowing anything about how it worked.

I think things improve a lot later in the 20s, though. Now I'm curious, though -- I haven't got a real handle on what things look like before that. I levelled mostly teaming at first, and that seems to produce more XP per drop, thus, less wealth at any given level.

I am looking at mostly what you have when you make 50... Can you afford to buy IOs? Over time, with inflation, the market's sustainable prices can be affordable by people who have been 50 for a while, without being affordable to people who just made 50 -- because so many people have been 50 for a while.

Basically, as prices inflate, the time after you make 50 it'll take you to achieve a given level of build will increase. That has little effect on active marketeers, whose income is utterly dominated by market sales, and thus scales smoothly with inflation. It has a lot of effect on people who barely use the market.

We all pretty much grant that you can't reasonably expect to have a full yellow/orange IO build the day you make 50 unless you've been marketeering. So it'll take time of adventuring at 50 to fill that in. The amount of time, it seems to me, changes with inflation, because your "punching dudes" money is significant.

And yes, people IO themselves without 50s... by playing the market more actively.

I guess, by "marketeer", I mean "make any effort at all to make good choices about purchase or sale prices when interacting with the market". In short, anything more elaborate than "list everything you don't immediately plan to use at 1 inf, buy by picking the average of last 5 prices and waiting".

It seems to me that, if inflation continues on the path it's on now, there will likely come a time when a level 50 who's done that won't be able to get cheap frankenslotted IOs from money they've made, because inflation has somewhat disproportionate effects on different kinds of value.

The thing is... Yes, the amount you get from selling drops goes up. But that doesn't mean that your total wealth goes up as fast.

Say that at point A, you can afford X. Now, we double all market prices. Can you still afford X? Maybe, maybe not. Your total wealth has not doubled. The portion of it which came from market sales has doubled, but the portion which came from punching dudes has NOT doubled.

So say you make 10M punching dudes, and 10M selling stuff on the market, and want to buy something which costs 20M. You can. Now say you make 10M punching dudes, and 20M selling stuff, and want to buy something which costs 40M. You can't.

I don't agree with the contention, from earlier on, that the market is particularly siphoning money away from poorer people. In fact, if you view yourself as too poor to buy from the market, inflation in the market purely benefits you -- you can sell stuff, you get more inf for it, and you're not spending it on anything that is subject to price increases. On the other hand, you have nothing you can do with that money.

I really do feel that, at this point, the marketing thing is a sort of flaw in the game's design. Sure, I love it. I love that I can spend enough inf to have a really nice personal SG base for my solo villain without even blinking. But I know too many people who are a bit overwhelmed by it, who just find it too much work and not enough fun, but who would really like to be able to get decent I/O builds together.

And I honestly believe that if you simply removed the inflationary tendency of the market, that wouldn't be such a problem. If you removed 90% of all inf from the game, and provided enough inf sinks to keep inf-per-toon at levels closer to the resulting level, I think a lot of players would find it much easier to get IOs, because the inf they get from punching dudes would be statistically relevant in a way that it isn't now. I'm not saying this would be a good fix, or a practical one, but I think a lot of players would find the market more usable if all the prices dropped a zero.

Usually, if someone tells me I'm "misinterpreting" them, it means that their statements were intended to be understood in some other way -- possibly a less literal or "exact" one. Now, I might resent the implication that I'm doing it on purpose, when I did my level best to understand what they meant, but I will usually concede that they must in fact have meant something else.

I was a new player recently. Feel free to search up my thread where, in my low 20s, I was complaining about how impossible it looked to be to craft enhancements, because salvage was too expensive.

So, the marketeers responded exactly like a tight-knit exclusive clique: They told me everything they could about how to use the market more effectively, how to pay lower prices, and how I could make more money if I wanted to. Wait, no, that's now how an exclusive clique would react.

Here's the thing: If everyone started using the market more intelligently, I'd have less inf. Lots less. But that's fine by me. I don't care. When I see people complaining about prices I usually offer to get them a stack of whatever they're having trouble with. I am not trying to preserve the status quo as such; I just know enough about economics to state, confidently, that the "problems" reported are not problems with the existence of marketeers, but with a combination of influences on the market (no pun intended).

If the devs came out Tuesday with a patch that added more useful price history, and some gigantic inf sinks, and so on... I'd be so happy. I'd be happy because the market would be more approachable for newbies, so they'd be happier. I'd love to see that happen.

But in the mean time, the problem is not that the alleged "flippers" are driving prices up.

You know what I did today? I decided to buy market slots. That is to say, I decided to anti-flip. I bought dozens of stacks of salvage and listed it all for 1 inf. I assure you, I paid more than 1 inf for it. There were periods of an hour or two today during which, at EVERY single moment, I had at least one stack of rubies up, priced at 1 inf.

I got prices as high as 111,111 for those rubies.

So here I am, with a few stacks of bids at 123, and a few stacks of items up for sale for 1. Any time someone lists something cheaply, it sells instantly for 123 inf. Most of the time, the last transactions include at least one at 123.

People are typing in SIX DIGIT NUMBERS in response.

That is the "problem" -- high level characters have too much money to care. They have that money because the game gives out immense amounts of inf and has very few decent inf sinks.

Specifically:

When an account is permabanned for spamming, remove it from all ignore lists.

Right now, if I ignore-as-spammer a bunch of spammers, eventually I have to go through clearing out my ignore list, and risk unignoring an actual player who is not a spammer but merely stunningly stupid or rude.

But wait! These accounts keep getting banned (or I'd already have them on ignore). Once they're banned, having them on ignore does nothing. So why not just remove them from our ignore lists when you ban them?

I really don't think marketeering, in general, is taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich. It's taking money from the impatient and giving it to the patient -- and lowering prices in the process.

And yes, it really is lowering prices. It has to. There is less money to be used to buy stuff as a result. Take away all the marketeering, and there's more inf available for the same amount of stuff or maybe even less stuff.

OOoh! That is a really good idea -- shame I can't mez-protect myself. I spend WAY too much time held. I may need a big stack of break frees some day. The mace mastery stuff might be viable. I sorta want death rays and such, but I am pretty happy with the fire/dark build in terms of looking Very Evil. (It's all green and purple. It looks a fair bit like an angry affliction warlock.)

If farming tickets didn't generate inf, then the more you sold the salvage for, the lower prices on everything would be. (By some very, very, very, small amount.)

Me, I marketeer a fair bit. I've got, oh, say about four billion inf lying around. That means that, at a bare minimum, I've destroyed at least 400M inf. But wait! I've got a lot of stuff that's gone through three or four cycles.

Say I buy something for 20M, craft stuff, and sell it for 100M, of which I get 90M. 10M gone, I have 90. Now I spend that on two things at 45M, sell them for 150M each, and I get 270M. Now I've destroyed 40M, and I've got 270. Now I spend that on three things at about 90M each, and sell them for 110M each because I mistimed the market. I end up with 297M, I've destroyed another 33M, for 73M. Keep on going, and by the time I get to 4 billion, I've destroyed a billion or more. Which is more than all my characters put together have ever earned in drops. So I'm helping!

Fire/dark it is.

Next up: GIZMOS! Timi was, in a previous incarnation, an engineer, constantly fiddling about with goggles (found some tolerable ones in the costume editor, though I'd prefer ones which glow), devices, bombs, and so on.

What are some things I can craft (temp powers, etc.) or acquire (epic power pools, someday) which involve visible gadgetry? Fancy-looking science stuff preferred. It really, really, doesn't matter what it does; neither whether what it does is of any use, nor whether it makes any sense for her to do it. Gadgetry is an end in and of itself.

I think it was better in the original Klingon.

So, back when I played Some Other Game, I played a warlock named Timi. Timi was a blast to play, and I want to try to recreate her here. In the hypothetical other game, which I am not talking about, she specialized in life-draining abilities and the like.

I'm pretty committed to /dark because OMG FLUFFY! He's no Belnuz but he'll do.

But primary?

fire/ -- flavor of the month for some time combined with /dark, obviously powerful, but I'm not totally sure it fits thematically.
dark/ -- meshes okay with /dark, but I already have a dark/dark defender, so maybe a bit much overlap.
ice/ -- nice control, I'm told
rad/ -- apparently also pretty usable

I'm pretty comfortable ruling out dp/, ar/, arch/, and elec/. Open to suggestions for other stuff, though.

Character, if it matters: Timi is a more ridiculously over-the-top villain than most of CoV. She will try to bribe people by offering to kill their family members in front of their very eyes "relatively quickly". Not exactly a very serious character, but sorta creepy in practice.