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Posts
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Quote:Actually, he screwed it up worse than that. With the TV that sells regularly for $600, and is on sale on Black Friday for $400, the flipper buys a bunch at $400, then sells them for something less than $600. The only way he could sell as high as $600 would be if those TVs were completely unavailable from retailers.In the real world people can't flip in large quantities, the flippers are corporations instead of single people. The wholesalers sell to them and not to single people.
You missed the point, however, that the floor is like a discount price and is not something that is always available.
So. If the retailers have no more TVs, the flipper is providing availability of something which was otherwise unavailable. (You might argue they would have been available without the flipper, but it's not likely -- the $400 TVs would have sold out regardless, so what really happens is some people trying to snipe the Black Friday deal didn't succeed, but the flipper has genuinely created availability for people willing to pay $600.)
If the retailers do have TVs, the flipper is selling TVs for less than $600, and people are getting a better deal. Not as good a deal as the Black Friday deal, but they don't have to spend an hour looking for a parking spot. -
Max_zero, a suggestion:
Instead of a long post full of blatant errors, misrepresentations, and failure to comprehend, try a short post which makes a coherent point and supports it with any kind of evidence whatsoever. That would do a lot better for advancing your cause. -
Quote:Imagine, if you will, the instruction "don't waste endurance on those stupid powers, just heal."Presumably if he's kicking people he's the team leader so whatever he says is fine.
If you don't like it, leave.
However I presume you are trying to find something wrong in whatever his instructions are.
While the team leader is certainly allowed to run a team by whatever rules, it's sometimes nice to distinguish between "rules I personally don't enjoy" and "rules which are provably stupid." -
I figured, since the power was a to-hit debuff that didn't generate aggro, other debuffs would be covered by the no-aggro thing.
Apparently, in fact, that particular /dev blaster is now on hold until I19. -
So, I cleverly put a chance for recharge slow proc in my smoke grenade.
Which now aggroes enemies.
Whoops.
Am I right to blame the proc? -
Quote:I don't know enough about the engine to say. I don't have any idea whether we're talking massive and fundamental problems, or a few unintended effects that would need to be nerfed.So, you really think it would be easy and cheap to find all the potential problems that self targetting could introduce?
I can say that it's been no big deal in other games, but they have different engines. I would guess that in a hypothetical CoH 2, they'd probably fix it from day 1, though. -
Huh! I heard someone saying once that they'd successfully done it. Never tried.
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Quote:No, but!Have you ever tried to explain to a friend you wanted to get started on the game what it would take to get a character geared out?
I'm a newbie myself. Only been playing about four months. So I asked a friend who's been playing for 6 years.
His advice:
"1. Punch dudes
2. Sell everything that drops on the market for 1 inf.
3. Get SOs.
Now you are balanced against the entire game at defaul difficulty.
Better than that will require more effort, but is also 100% optional."
As he observes, expanding on point #3:
"Get SOs. They were perfectly good for the first couple of years I played the game, and the game has not been made harder. And they're way, way, easier to obtain now than they were then."
Now, to be fair, I don't actually do this. I sort of enjoy marketeering, and I love IOs, so I spend time and effort on salvage and crafting. So here I am, 4 months into playing the game, and all my characters either have a ton of IOs, or a bunch of empty slots because I ran out of market slots for buying stuff. I have around 2B inf lying around. I'm not even trying very hard; 80% of what I do is just buy something I want, notice that the enhancement is more expensive than the recipe, and bid up, craft, and sell a stack of them.
But seriously. This game is not hard and you can have plenty of fun without even touching the market. If you want awesome phat lewts, you gotta put some time and effort in one way or another, but seriously, the devs have worked miracles making it easier and easier to do this. -
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Which of these would you rather be?
1. A good healer.
2. An effective team participant whose contributions include, but are not limited to, healing.
If you want to be the first, you have picked the wrong game! People who "just heal" are not a good contribution to most teams. I mean, they may be better than nothing, but they are nothing like as useful as, say, people who contribute in a variety of ways.
If you want to be a pure healer, and you're dead set on doing it in CoH, pick a Defender, and take one of the sets with a couple of heals, and resign yourself to using about three of your twenty-four power picks.
If you want to be a powerful and effective character who can heal among other things, then you can do fine with any of defender, controller, corruptor, or mastermind. Of these, defender and corruptor will typically be the best at the buff/debuff sets, but controllers and masterminds are also useful.
Basically, if you want the kind of "Wow, I'm Helping" feeling that you would get in WoW from playing, say, a pretty much pure healer, then you probably want one of the classes with some healing options, but you will find that the most helpful things to do are very often nothing to do with healing. Instead, focus on preventing damage:
* Defense shields (for allies) and to-hit/recharge debuffs (for enemies) mean fewer successful attacks on your teammates.
* Mezzes on enemies mean fewer attacks on your teammates.
* Mez resistance and protection for your allies mean your allies are out of the fight less.
* Resistance shields (for allies) and damage debuffs (for enemies) mean that successful attacks on your allies do less damage.
* The counterparts to all of the above mean your allies can kill enemies faster, also meaning fewer successful attacks.
In Another MMO, I used to play "healers". You know what one of the most valuable things I did was? Watch for interruptible enemy spells, and interrupt them. Quick pop quiz: What is a more effective heal?
1. Preventing an enemy spell which, if it hits, will do 29,000 points of damage to your tank, using a fraction of a percent of your available mana.
2. Waiting until after that spell lands, then healing 17,000 points of damage with your big expensive slow heal, using about 10% of your available mana.
CoH has similar mechanics going. If you can prevent attacks from being made in the first place, you are going to have much greater efficiency. If you have -regen debuffs you can land on enemies, that can effectively do more damage than pretty much any single attack, or even any couple of attacks. I once helped a group defeat a Giant Monster. How? I came in and dropped a single buff/debuff power -- "poison gas trap". What's it do? Eliminates enemy regeneration. They'd been fighting the boss monster in question for about three minutes when I came in, and he was at about 98% health. They got him to zero within about a minute once he stopped healing.
If you learn to do this well, you will be awesome, and if the game you came from had mechanics at all similar to the ones from World of Internet Dragons, you will probably find that buff/debuff sets complete the experience and make it much better. -
Empirically, this is untrue. I say this because I have already successfully teamed with people on this toon, and I went out of my way to be Very Helpful (porting in new spawns while people were coming out of elevators, knocking things around, etcetera), and we had a blast. And yes, I know they had fun. I advertised for people I could "help" with all my lovely grav/storm powers, on a character named Helpy McHelperson. I got people who wanted to do this, and we had an incredible time. Possibly the slowest alignment tip I've ever run, but it was fun, and we spent the time chattering and making jokes while we watched robots run across the room to try to knock things back even further.
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Quote:And the rate at which you can get a-merits and reward merits. Which I think is there to provide a floor for how quickly you can acquire items -- even if you can't team, even if you can't talk to strangers, you can run tip missions and you can get at least one a-merit every two days on each character. If you can run an occasional TF, you can get a lot more than one a-merit every two days on each character. And that provides a sort of minimal guarantee of access. Want a LotG +recharge? Four days, tops. There is no reason to obtain it through any mechanism that will take you more than a couple of hours, max, on each of four days of play. That works even if you've got a gimped build that can only run missions at -1/x1.How exactly is this proven? Please show me the dev publication that says
"thou shalt only obtain X items per hour". What the devs have set is the
rate at which items drop ---> for mob kills.
The thing is, if devs wanted everyone to be for sure able to get more stuff than they can currently get off the market, the a-merit and reward merit vendors would have lower prices, or you could get more a-merits, or something like that. Since they haven't changed that, they're happy with where the floor is. Since they haven't done any of the many obvious things they could do to constrain marketeers, they are apparently happy with the near lack of a ceiling, too. -
Quote:Okay, let's look at those two claims:You have a much stronger negative connotation of that word than I do. To me it's simply when you see something isn't working the way it was intended, and you exploit it in a way that is detrimental to other players.
1. Isn't working the way it was intended: You have not supported this claim. Given the number of things the developers have done to tweak recipe acquisition, it seems clear that they are definitely looking at the process by which players acquire enhancements, and do not think the market part of it is broken. Thus, it is working the way it was intended.
2. A way that is detrimental to other characters: You have not supported this claim. Since the key thing you've pointed at (common salvage costs) is clearly massively affected by AE exploits, and is not something that marketeers would bother with, since the amounts of money involved aren't big enough to make a significant profit, it seems pretty unlikely that marketeers are having a significant effect.
Quote:I don't know you. I am accusing the average marketeer of skimming money off the top of players transactions without providing meaningful value to the system.
Quote:I already do that. The problem when supply is tight, a history of 5 is not sufficient to gauge what value they're being bought out at. You might have to wait 30 minutes to see the string of lowball bids snatch them up. If the purpose of this game is the AH metagame to you, then I'm sure that seems fine. If you log on to go fire off ridiculous powers in a silly costume at polygonal bad guys, then it's tedious and it's just a speed bump.
Quote:You acknowledge the devs set the intended rate at which you are intended to acquire those items.
therefore number one is disproven. Marketeering far exceeds the speed at which the devs intend for players to acquire items.
Quote:Personally I think the market was intended to be a system which reduces the effects of randomness by facilitating trade.
Quote:Instead, whenever players trade items a third party drains a significant portion of the worth from both.
Quote:I just find the assertion that the average marketeer who does nothing but markup items is adding value ridiculous.
In the real world, market makers make markets more efficient, and everyone else in the market benefits. This may be counter-intuitive; it is nonetheless true. -
Distinguish between "farmers" in the sense of "people trying to run a map which plays to their strengths" and "farmers" in the sense of "people trying to get massively disproportionate rewards". A fire tanker going up against things that do nearly all of their damage as fire is playing to strengths; a group of people going up against things that give 20x as much XP as anything else of comparable difficulty are trying to get disproportionate rewards. Both are perhaps "farming", but the latter are the ones who are saying "looking for AE farm".
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I sort of like the patrol XP idea.
Here's my suggestion, mostly unconsidered:
* Dev's Choice arcs can give normal rewards, meaning 100% parity with comparable non-AE content; random drops, inf, full XP, and so on.
* Other arcs give little to no inf, but give tickets, and give partial XP.
* Possibly, have some kind of flag other than "dev's choice" that allows devs/GMs to mark a specific arc (until next time it's published) as a legitimate arc which gives real XP, but still only gives tickets instead of regular drops.
I do sort of like the "patrol XP" equivalent -- you can use it to accelerate levelling, but not as a complete replacement. However, this breaks an existing loading screen tip, which says you can level 1-50 in AE.
... But doesn't, I note, claim you can do it in 6 hours.
I think the basic issue right now is that a buggy AE mission can clearly and massively out-reward standard content. Note that non-buggy missions can also be better for players -- people have built things like custom maps which are designed to be cakewalks for fire/ tankers and /fire brutes, for instance. But I'm not sure that's really an exploit, because you can cherry-pick opponents in the rest of the game, too. -
Quote:Then don't. Bid what you do want to pay and wait.I almost agree. I think that your wording has a bit of a negative connotation - that people who won't pay the prices are too poor to so. I have a billion influence sitting around (not much compared to people here's stocks, I know) and I simply don't want to pay 100k for nevermelting ice.
Imagine, if you will, that you're willing to pay 10k, but not 100k, but some allegedly-evil guy is buying all the ice there is for 9k, and listing it at 100k.
Fine. Bid 9,001, and your bid fills before his. Problem solved. The only way the alleged "flipper" can make it impossible for you to buy under 100k is if that's his bidding price. And if he's bidding what the stuff sells for, he's losing money, so there's no problem with people who are trying to make money on the market screwing you.
Quote:Flippers sometimes save the time of those who want to sell it now, and even that depends on what "it" is. A stack of white salvage? Sure, that's probably true. A Dam/Recharge Positiron? Not so much.
Quote:The solution would be complicated. Implementation of a fix would have unpredictable results. You're like anyone else who's abused any other defect in a game for their benefit. Lemme reiterate that I don't blame you for it, it makes sense to me, but the fact that a fix would be cumbersome and risky shouldn't bely the severity of the problem.
You haven't shown that there is a defect.
You haven't shown that what the marketeers do is "abuse".
You haven't shown that what the marketeers do is even a minor contributor to the state of affairs you dislike.
You have not ruled out the following possibilities:
1. The market is doing what the developers want.
2. The market is doing something that follows naturally from AE exploits.
The second is my pick, just because previous AE exploits have produced exactly the same pattern of unaffordable common salvage, and there's a clear mechanism for it -- lots of people who suddenly have 10x as much inf as they used to, and 0x as much salvage as they used to, and who are generating nothing but rare salvage.
Quote:I like the disdain you have for the people whiney enough to use merit and alignment tokens. I think that this shows a critical difference in your perception of how the game should be played and how the average player plays. I'm sure you'll take that as a compliment.
Merits and a-merits are a solution the devs provided to the alleged problems with the market. The reality is, some players have whined, not merely complained, about the market. Some of those complaints were loud, some of them were well-founded, and heck, some were probably both. The developers responded by changing things so that people who ran a lot of TFs or alignment tip missions could get exactly the recipes they wanted instead of relying on random drops plus marketeering.
Now, here's the key thing: The developers set the rate at which you can earn recipes through those mechanisms. What that tells us is that, by definition, the rate at which you can get things through those mechanisms is the rate the devs intend you to be able to get things. If you do not think you can earn things fast enough by those mechanisms, your problem is not with other players, but with the devs.
Quote:Yup, and it can be improved upon. They've made improvements over time with AE, merits, and alignment merits, and hopefully they'll continue to roll them out. Have fun abusing the system for the next few years while they slowly try to fix it.
And yet, you haven't shown that any of the behaviors marketeers engage in are actually "abuse". To do that, you have to find some kind of evidence or support for the theory that the ability to do these things is unintended, or they're using them wrong.
Furthermore: The grand total of my "flipping" was that once I sold a bunch of brass for 250k and bought a bunch for 500 inf on a lowbie toon. It took weeks. It was not especially rewarding. The reason I have two billion inf lying around now is that I craft recipes. Constantly. Across 20 toons. I am selling people things that save them time. Lots of time.
And you're accusing me of "abusing" the system. I'm doing exactly what people say we ought to be doing -- making money exclusively and only by adding value. Heck, sometimes I lose money by adding value, because I craft every recipe I get except temporary powers. I get a level 25 intangibility recipe, which will cost 300k in AE-inflated common salvage to make, and sell for 30 inf? I craft it anyway. I am providing the supply of pre-crafted enhancements that people who are rich and in a hurry want.
And here I am, burning my time and auction slots to make things easier for people -- and since I only buy recipes at substantially under the usual going rate, people who want to craft a recipe themselves can nearly always buy one just by bidding a reasonable amount for it -- and you're calling me names and accusing me of "abusing" the system.
What is your problem here? Why is it so important to you to condemn actions that you've made it quite clear you don't understand? Why is it so hard for you to admit the blatant, clear, reality that AE farming exploits inflate common salvage by orders of magnitude, every single time they happen? It's not as if there's any lack of evidence tying AE farms to common salvage prices. It's not as if the mechanism is secret. You can go ahead and ask people on AE farms how they're making money, and they'll tell you -- they're getting rares and selling them for 1M a pop, because that's a ton faster than trying to get hundreds of common salvage and sell them.
Seriously: Calling people "abusers" is not okay. That is not how adult society works among civilized people. If you wanna go around namecalling whenever you don't like something, try junior high or something. Here, how about you stick to factual claims that you're willing to back with evidence, and leave the namecalling out? -
Quote:I honestly don't know.My question at this point is: Do you want suggestions on a AT/powerset to take to 50 from scratch? Or are you interested in which of your existing toons you could take to 50?
Quote:Taking an existing toon to 50 is gonna be a bit easier because you know most of their strengths and faults. What do you have sitting in your character selection?
spiness/wp scrapper (20)
dark/dark tanker (32)
nrg/dev blaster (27)
fire/kin troller (22)
ds/dark mm (32)
dp/dev blaster (27)
elec/elec tanker (16)
ws (18)
traps/sonic def (28)
arch/ta corr (20)
bots/traps mm (35)
SoA (21)
pb (12)
km/nin stalker (22)
widow (13)
wm/sd brute (12)
elec/elec dom (14)
elec/rad troller (19)
fire/ice blaster (28)
ill/rad troller (20)
grav/storm troller (29)
plant/storm troller (21)
plant/thorn dom (12)
Hmm. Thinking it through a bit... They're all fun at least some of the time. The defenders tend to be more fun on teams, but sort of tedious to try to solo on. Same for the tankers -- fun on teams, too slow solo. The blasters tend to be a bit fragile solo, although the nrg/dev does okay just because knockback is decent mitigation and /dev has some nice mitigation tools. MMs are decent solo, and also okay on teams, but sometimes a bit frustrating to manage. Haven't gotten the hang of dominator yet, though it does look like it'd be fun once I got it.
And yes, concept is important. These are the characters where I liked the concept enough to keep playing them -- I've deleted probably another ten or twenty at levels anywhere from 5 to the early 20s because they Did Not Work Out. And that's purely a matter of concept; I have never found a combination in this game that wasn't playable mechanically. -
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Quote:If more than one says something other than "wat?" or "lol" or emits a random racial or sexual slur, you have found an unusually good team.Tell you what....
Get on a monkey farm...ask people what they do with their tickets. If more than one says "Common Salvage" then clearly you are correct....
... Okay, I'm exaggerating very slightly. -
Quote:So it's gone from immeasurably small to immeasurably small?I used Nevermelting Ice as an example specifically because it used to cost less than 1k and now routinely goes for over 50k, topping out around what, 110k?
Neverselling Ice is only useful to high-level characters -- who are generating inf so fast that this difference is statistically lost in the noise. All that has to happen to make something like this happen is an AE exploit resulting in a lot of rich players who are not generating any common salvage, but who are making it into the 40s and 50s quickly and then want a bunch of IOs.
Demand goes up, supply doesn't, that's gonna create a big shift in prices.
Quote:You guys talk a lot about inflation. Maybe I'm sorely mistaken, but do you believe the amount of money in the game has doubled in the past year? Quadrupled? Increased a hundredfold? I would wager that your perception of inflation is sorely inflated, but maybe I'm mistaken.
Quote:Obviously the AE issues have exacerbated things, but the notion that they've directly increased the cost of Nevermelting Ice tenfold, much less fiftyfold while providing an incredibly easy way to procure said Nevermelting Ice is a step further than I'm willing to suspend my disbelief.
So, first off, you're making a grave mistake if you think that the people doing the AE farming are, for the most part, capable of the kind of reasoning involved in figuring out how to most efficiently use their tickets to save money.
There's another issue. See, it turns out, it's still not worth the hassle.
So I have this toon, who has ~7k tickets. I am well aware that the best use of tickets in terms of inf/ticket is random rolls of common arcane salvage, 25-40. Do you think I actually rolled on salvage I wanted? Oh, of course I did! Once. I filled up an inventory with things most of which were useless to me, making my shortage of WW slots even worse, and out of the 30 salvage rolls, I got I think five things I might have wanted. It took several minutes, I had to run up to AE and back, and the net result is that I got salvage which I could have bought immediately for 100k, or very quickly for 5k.
So while I was trying to roll arcane salvage in the hopes of getting luck charms (I got one of the four I needed), I also left lowball bids of 1,234 inf on stacks of things that were running for 50-100k.
Guess what! I got the items I placed lowball bids on faster than I got the items I tried to roll for.
In short, while in theory rolling on common salvage is a great way to save money, in practice, it's not worth the time it would take to save enough money to matter. In a fraction of the time I'd spend rolling on salvage to use up 7k tickets, I could have done a handful of silver rolls and gotten stuff that would market for enough to buy me all the common salvage that character will buy in the next ten levels. -
Quote:I wasn't thinking of something much longer. I'd rather see:Contrarian that I am, I like the history the way it is now.
Given the space limitations of our current system MOAR INFORMATION in the shape of a longer history wouldn't necessarily have the salutary effect people think it would.
Last 5 sales took: N minutes/hours/days
24-hour high: X
24-hour low: Y
1-week high: Z
1-week low: W
Last sale: M
This is only one more piece of information, but it's a lot more informative.
So for alchemical silver, you might see:
Last 5 sales took: 2 minutes
24-hour high: 340,000
24-hour low: 60,000
1-week high: 1,200,000
1-week low: 40,000
Last sale: 111,111
and for Kismet +6% accuracy (recipe) [16], you might see:
Last 5 sales took: 9 days
24-hour high: N/A
24-hour low: N/A
1-week high: 3,456,789
1-week low: 1,501,501
Last sale: 1,501,501
That gives you a MUCH better picture, I think. But it's not a huge amount of information.
Just changing it from "last 5" to "last 500", for instance, would be catastrophic for casual players, although I might get some benefit from it. Most people, though, would no longer have any clue how to interact with the information.
What they should do is go to a Lua-based user interface, allowing us to write addons and mods (I hear rumors some other game might have done this), so we can write a Market Helper addon that lets newbies get useful information about the market without having to think too hard. -
I tend to favor recharge. 4-piece basilisk's gaze, of course. PGT's regen debuff is autohit, the hold isn't. Caltrops like recharge, and they're one of the powers where it may be reasonable to put in a damage proc -- although it only checks every 10 seconds, it checks on initial drop, so if you're dropping caltrops on stuff, you get a boost to damage from it. I think I have part of a gaussian's set in my seeker drones.
Acid mortar, the resist debuff proc is nice, and apart from that, recharge, some accuracy, and defense debuff seem nice.
I try to aim for having PGT, SD, and AM all under one minute recharge. Depending on team, that can be enough to get you all three on every spawn (this is on the Super Efficient "herding" strategy used by a particularly famous tanker on Virtue), or to get you at least one on most spawns as long as you're willing to drop seeker drones on the next spawn over or possibly the spawn after that (this is with some people I know who are just steamrolling). -
Quote:No. Now, there is a cognitive bias here, which is that people who know how the market works are likely using it actively, and people are unlikely to believe themselves to be doing evil, so they have a bias against recognizing such harms, at least in theory.Have there been any cases of people who know how the market works claiming that it's full of people who're harming the game's economy?
In practice, though, I think there's enough special cases (e.g., I don't think anyone, even Chaos_Creator, disputes that random salvage disruption is, well, disruptive) that we can reasonably rule that out as a primary explanatory mechanism. -
One of the issues I face is that I can't team all the time. I get oversocialed very easily, and then I can't really be on a group with people. I'm usually good for about one TF in a day, maybe two if I'm having a really mellow day.
Of course, that does add up pretty fast. -
Quote:This is a recentish change, the intent all along was that 120-second procs would be 120 seconds in a click, and on only when the toggle was on in a toggle. Recently, they implemented it correctly.OK I just found out through slotting it, that Kismet: +6% Acc is useless to me slotted in invisibility because even though it says it grants a bonus for 120 seconds it doesn't, it shuts off as soon as I un-toggle the power, and can actually attack something.
Quote:I currently have a Karma: +KB resist in Grant Invis, and it gives me just enough resistance for my rad/MM blaster, If I move it to invisibility, will it not give me the +KB resistance when Im not invisible?