seebs
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Quote:Something interesting:Originally Posted by Obitus
Heh, yeah, which leads us back to the beginning: Inventory/market space is valuable.
* All the marketeers agree that inventory/market space is valuable.
* Some people, who are not marketeers, claim that it is not.
Which is to say:
* People who are effectively making money on the market think that space is valuable.
* Other people disagree, and complain that they are in some way unable to make money as efficiently as they'd need to in order to buy stuff in the markets.
I hypothesize that this is one of those rare cases in which correlation does suggest the existence of some sort of causal relationship. I propose the theory:
People who understand how the market works well enough to use it effectively recognize the value of inventory/market space, and people who do not recognize that value are unlikely to be able to make as much money on the market as people who do. -
Quote:Wow. That's amazing.Originally Posted by Obitus
As (IIRC) Fourspeed very elegantly pointed out, Stab's problem appears to be inflation. He's complaining that you can exploit the system by fitting a bajillion alts with non-expiring bids/listings, wait several days/weeks/months, and profit hugely even if your initial estimate was absurd at the time.
I am going to go exploit the system, now! I have a five dollar coin, which is actual gold, and currently has a market value of several hundred dollars. Clearly, it is an EXPLOIT and reasonably considered HAX that my great-grandmother saved this.
Every marketeer I've seen comment has been an enthusiastic proponent of better transaction history.Quote:Or at least, that seems to be his main point of contention. I happen to support the idea of a more thorough transaction history, and frankly I haven't seen one marketeer oppose that idea. If I missed one, then my bad, but there's certainly no monolithic opposition on that one point.
Yes. So of course, rather than blaming the dozens of people farming AE exploits to generate tens of millions of inf, he blames the people who are most actively trying to specifically DESTROY inf to counter inflation. Brilliant!Quote:Regardless, it is inflation that drives up prices massively over time. No one flipper can do that, because he has to have the lowest available listing to sell anything. No group of flippers can do it either, because competition among flippers drives high-end prices down. So Stab has all of this misplaced anger stemming from the combo of unlimited list/bid time and the inflation that occurs in any online game where the minting of money is only limited by the collective population's time.
And if he doesn't, sure, eventually he can make a profit.Quote:That's why I asked the question in my last post, which I doubt he'll answer. People really don't seem to understand that flippers can't just wave a magic want and inflate prices up to some arbitrarily profitable point. The market has built-in protections against that, protections that will make any such would-be flipper lose his shirt (as Max_Zero will do soon on his Regenerative Tissues, if he needs to free up those market slots in the next two months or so).
But that profit is peanuts compared to what I can make by pricing things to sell and making smaller, but consistent, profits on all my market slots all the time. -
Quote:Agreed.Originally Posted by StabBot
So clearly a broad rule causing all auctions to expire every 72 hours wouldn't be a good thing
Why do you think it is a "racket", and what kind of "review" is needed?Quote:but I think it's clear that the top end of the marketeering racket needs some serious review.
When I think something is "clear", I usually like to marshal up some arguments and evidence for it. If I am unable to do so, I take this to mean that it's not actually clear. -
Quote:If there were some way in which Nethergoat wasted their time, that would make sense.Originally Posted by StabBot
Until you understand that players don't like you because you waste their time, the forums will continue to confuse you.
In fact, we all understand that people who don't understand even basic economics dislike the marketeers because they don't understand what the marketeers do, and fear what they don't understand.
All your ranting about this ignores the fact that the primary thing marketeers do is save people time. Do you know why I have 300 million loose inf accumulated over twenty minutes of effort on my tanker? Because I saved people time. They could have bought those Obliteration recipes just as cheaply as I could, bought the salvage just as cheaply as I did, and crafted their own enhancements. But that would take time. So they paid me 20M a pop or so to do the work for them, and list finished products so they didn't have to deal with figuring out how many salvage slots they needed open, bidding on stuff, running to a crafting table, and so on.
And here's the great thing: I'm not just saving them time by spending the same amount of time myself. No, I'm saving them time by spending less time.
Time to buy one recipe, all the salvage, and run to a crafting table: Five minutes.
Time to buy 5 recipes, all the salvage, and run to a crafting table: Five minutes and three seconds.
Thanks to me, the total player time spent on those five enhancements is now six minutes instead of twenty-five minutes. And I got paid for helping. -
I have a spreadsheet showing which characters have open WW slots and recipe slots.
Oh, and according to my spreadsheet, my total across all characters is just over 2B, though I haven't got anyone with over about 300M. -
Quote:I vendor temp powers unless they look fun -- I always list power analyzers, for instance, because they contribute to the chances that someone will post useful hard data for something I'm curious about.Originally Posted by Obitus
For recipes, I check the market and craft the (usually) one or two worth selling -- and I list them at like 30% below the ballpark average of the last five. The rest get vendored, because recipes just don't move very fast, generally (and jeebus, can we get Temp power drops moved to a lower priority pretty please?). On the whole, it works out pretty well. I usually have about 5-8 market slots tied up at any given time with crafted enhancements. Salvage usually sells immediately or if not, it sells while I'm running the next batch of missions. Any salvage that doesn't sell by the next time I run to the market gets pulled and relisted at 1 inf.
For enhancements, I craft everything. I don't care whether it's worth money. It's not worth my time to think about that, it turns out! If I just craft everything without checking, I usually make a fair bit of money over salvage costs, and anything that doesn't look like it'll sell quickly otherwise, I list at 1 inf. Sometimes I get 1 inf for it. Usually I get at least a good fraction of salvage costs. But I figure, someone out there wanted that enhancement for some reason, and now they got it. -
A lot of the attacks on "flipping" are based on extremely selective observations. Now, this may not be dishonest; humans are well known to have consistent problems with certain kinds of thinking. The most relevant, I think, is the availability heuristic; people tend to think that something is more likely if they can recall examples of it. For instance, many people will heavily overestimate the frequency of kidnapping, and underestimate the frequency of ****, because kidnappings are often national news. Since you can think of several kidnapped kids, it seems like kidnappings must be frequent.
Imagine, if you will, that alchemical silver had a mechanically-enforced price cap of 5k, but that it were also impossible to vendor them or to trade them any way but the market, so EVERY alchemical silver generated must be placed on the market, where it would sell for 5k or less.
The steady state of the market would be that there would be no alchemical silver for sale. You could bid 5k, and then you would maybe eventually get one -- but since everyone else is bidding 5k, and the market is not a FIFO system, you don't necessarily know whether it'll be today or next week.
As you increase the price cap, you increase the chances that a bid close to the cap will genuinely get priority over other bids, because some people won't be willing to bid the cap. This allows you to choose whether to spend more and get it sooner, or spend less and get it later.
Take away the cap entirely, and you end up with a market where you are virtually guaranteed to be able to get an alchemical silver RIGHT NOW if you are willing to pay substantially over the going rate, and also quite likely to be able to get it for a fair bit under the going rate if you are willing to wait. (I haven't gotten any for under about 50k in quite a while, though...)
In this market, what do "flippers" actually do? If they're trying to make a reasonable amount of money, they must do the following:
1. Their bid price has to be high enough that it is likely to be the highest bid at least occasionally.
2. Their listing price has to be low enough that it is likely to be the lowest listing at least occasionally.
3. The gap between bid and the amount they actually get paid has to be enough to justify the effort.
Now, there's a quirk here. There are two strategies, both of which work:
Strategy A: Maximize profit. You bid low enough that you don't get many, but your cost basis is low. You list high enough that you only sell during peak shortages, but your price is high. You get a larger profit per transaction, but fewer transactions.
Strategy B: Maximize flow. Your bid and listing prices are closer to the middle, so you have less profit per item, but you get many more transactions.
Of course, the real win is:
Strategy C: Maximize profit * flow. Figure out how much the prices affect your transaction rate, and head for the midpoint where the number of transactions times the profit per transaction is highest.
In fact, there turns out to be an interesting side-effect. Because you get the amount bid, rather than your listing price, it is quite common that strategy B *is* strategy C, because profit per item is not (list)-(cost), but (sale)-(cost).
I recently sold a few alchemical silvers. If I listed at 1inf, I sold them immediately for something in the 60-70k range. If I listed at 71k, I sold them after about ten minutes... for 111k. That 40k is enough to make for a fair amount of profit. Since I know that 70k produces an occasional purchase, I could do okay buying alchemical silvers for 70k, and listing them for 77k or so. I'd make a lot of money on a fairly high rate of flow.
Now, it's easy to assert that this "raises the price". I'm not sure, however, that it is actually true that it raises the prices people pay. Take my bids out, and people will quite likely pay 111k to the people who were listing at 70k, or even at 1inf. They are not paying the listing fee, they're paying a guess based on recent sales. If, as has been asserted, I'm neither increasing nor decreasing supply, then I'm not going to be affecting supply or demand noticably, so I shouldn't be having any effect on prices. (Except that destroying inf lowers all prices marginally.)
However, think back to the price caps analysis. What I'm doing is moving things from one category to another -- I'm moving a few things from the "low prices, sold out" category to the "high prices, still available" category. And that, it turns out, provides a useful function. I'm guaranteeing listers a reasonable price -- as long as my 70k bids are up, no one will be getting 10k because there were no outstanding bids but long-forgotten lowball bids. I'm also guaranteeing buyers a reasonable price -- as long as my 111k listings are up, no one has to pay 200k because there were no outstanding listings but long-forgotten highball listings.
Consider the implications of StabBot's story about forgetting about the alt for a long time. Non-flippers who are not planning to play a character can quite easily leave stuff up at ludicrous prices for a long time, and some day, that will be the lowest price on the market. When you complain about a flipper "raising" the price from 70k to 110k, you're missing the point; the flipper is actually lowering the price from 250k to 110k. -
Quote:Exactly. One of the reasons I have such an alt problem is that if I do five or six missions on a single character, I am likely out of market slots until I spend a while crafting and such, and even then, I'm pretty much done for the day because I have toOriginally Posted by Obitus
Thanks for playing, StabBot. You did an excellent job reinforcing the opposing side's arguments, just as you predicted. The players who would be most inclined to whine about inflated prices are precisely the kinds of players who don't want to spend four days selling stuff every time their inventory fills from the natural pace of running missions. Like me, believe it or not.
log out and play someone else while I wait for sales.
If there were active flippers in all niches, I would be able to play that character a lot more, because I could just list everything and get some kind of livable price for it instantly. -
Quote:The fact is that when you put your assertions in as parenthetical assumptions, it's a cheap rhetorical device to try to bypass the reader's sanity-checks of assertions made by presenting them as premises, and shows that your argument is weak.Originally Posted by Max_zero
That fact is if everyone flipped (rent seeking)
This stupid argument was already totally rebutted by the grocery store analogy: If everyone ran a grocery store instead of farming, there would be no food. What you've missed is that there's another equally true statement: If everyone farmed instead of running a grocery store, life would suck for nearly everybody. We tried it. We couldn't maintain a written language or any kind of medical treatment or anything else, because it was so inefficient.
The fact is that if you could prove that flipping was "rent seeking", you would be able to present it as an assertion, rather than trying to sneak it in as a premise. The fact is that since you don't, a rational reader is fully justified in assuming that you cannot prove it, and that you know that you cannot prove it, and that you are specifically trying to trick people by playing rhetorical games instead of arguing for your point.
People don't engage in that kind of sleight-of-hand by accident. It's a thing you have to do on purpose -- you have to specifically decide that instead of presenting a claim, you're going to try to sneak it in. The only way you could not be doing it dishonestly is if you are genuinely incapable of comprehending that it's an assertion -- say, if it were a bit of heavily-committed dogma that is such a foundational assumption of your culture that you can't perceive it as a proposition. However, it's hard to imagine that such a thing could apply to a claim about video game economics.
But we can say this, and say it confidently: Either you are arguing in bad faith, with specific intent to use dishonest tactics to try to trick people into accepting a conclusion that you are fully aware is unsupportable by evidence or argumentation, or you are incapable of comprehending the issue, and thus cannot have contributions of value to make.
I am reminded of a friend who quipped, about the 2000 Presidential campaign, "this will be a tough choice, because we have a choice between a liar and an idiot." It took people a while to realize that they couldn't tell which one was which. It took them a little longer to realize that it didn't matter. -
Quote:And yet, no one's provided even a shred of evidence that "flipping" is a kind of "rent seeking". The key is the lack of anything even remotely analagous to monopolizing, regulating, or abusing law to create a new market.Originally Posted by Max_zero
That's why rent seeking is considered bad by every single economist.
... Also, I have trouble believing that it's considered bad by "every single economist". Have you ever MET an economist? If you ask two economists a question, you get on average three answers. There is almost certainly at least one economist who believes that the complete extinction of the human species would be a net positive. For you to claim that something is "considered bad by every single economist" is like claiming that a particular style of noise production is "considered bad by every single musician", only not as plausible.
Why don't you say something believable, like "every single economist thinks cats are better than dogs"? -
Quote:Well, hang on.Originally Posted by Intrinsic
A couple of months ago, I could have pointed to even more examples in common and uncommon salvage. This does not look like a market that is constrained by inventory.
Why could you have pointed to more examples a couple of months ago, but you can point to fewer examples now?
Sounds to me like some parts of the market are constrained by inventory. Certainly, I know I am -- I regularly end up with characters that have no free WW slots. And as a result, I vendor some salvage I might otherwise sell. Being a bit of a market-watcher, I can sort of favor selling stuff that's worth something, but that doesn't necessarily work for people who don't watch the market so much.
While there are certainly some examples of things where inventory constraints are not significant, there are others where it looks as though they might be. For instance, many mid-level recipes. If there happens not to be a bidder right now, listing a mid-level recipe is usually a guaranteed loss of a slot for a week or two. Same for many mid-level enhancements. And then, when I want to go buy stuff, there's none listed because people didn't have the slots to list them.
Basically, common salvage is just that -- common. There's not usually much of an issue with inventory constraints on it. Sometimes there might be. However, there are a lot more recipes than kinds of salvage, and on recipes, inventory constraints become an issue. -
Okay, we have a preliminary result, which is that no one is curious enough to do the test.
I am really curious about this, and I would love to get solid data, but apparently the forums consensus is sufficiently unambiguous that no one sees the question as interesting. Any suggestions as to how I could get people who could test this? Alternative methodology that would be more convenient? -
Quote:I suspect, though, that conservation of market slots turns out to serve a similarOriginally Posted by Intrinsic
Grocery stores (and other retailers) add value via transportation and distribution. That's an aspect of the real-world economy that is not present in CoH.
function.
Yes, but turnover is amazing.Quote:BTW, the profit margin for retail grocery is very slim.
I don't object to it at all. I am in general in favor of more information. I'd like the market to show 24-hour and 1-week highs and lows for items, too.Quote:As for showing the bid/sell prices, I am in favor of it.
However, it seems to me that the problem here is not that flippers are somehow making the market inefficient, it's that the market starts out insanely inefficient and flippers make a lot of money narrowing the range a bit. -
Quote:Congratulations, you've committed yet another logical fallacy!Originally Posted by Chuckles07
From the Wikipedia entry listed above
Rent seeking generally implies the extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity...
All together now:
A implies B does not mean that B implies A.
Even though "rent seeking" may imply "extraction of uncompensated value", that does not mean that all "extraction of uncompensated value" is "rent seeking". Furthermore, you have yet to show that there is genuinely uncompensated value involved. I find that, when I have stuff to sell, flippers improve the rates I get for it and how quickly I get those rates, and when I have stuff to buy, flippers increase my assurance that I can get it and tend to stabilize the prices I have to pay.
Some guy who does nothing but buy alchemical silver for 20k and list it for 100k is guaranteeing me that, as long as he's able to keep his stock up, I will never have to pay more than 100k to get alchemical silver. In his absence, I might get it for 30k and I might get it for 200k. On the whole, I'd rather have him around. Similarly, he guarantees that I always get at least 20k if I want to sell mine, without having to wait for bids, while without him, I might get 100k and I might get 1111. Again, I'm happier with him around. -
Quote:That is the smartest way to list -- I have better uses for market slots and salvage inventory than saving up for stacks.Originally Posted by Chuckles07
Hint, try listing smarter.
And again, try looking at every single market in the entire world ever. This is not a new question. You are not the first person to wonder about it. We have been studying this for about as long as we've had written language.Quote:Well I don't, does my experience trump yours? Hence why I was asking for some external evidence.
Yes, it is.Quote:And this is where I stumble,
Ahh, but they don't have to produce things. It is sufficient if they keep things from being destroyed. And since there's a lot of items that you get paid more to vendor than to list, items do get destroyed. A lot.Quote:I'm not seeing the flipper produce anything, so I'm not seeing them increase supply.
Steady bidding on items meaning you can sell them instantly makes it more desireable to list them, and less desireable to vendor them, which increases the number of generated items which go on to become part of the market.
And yes, this experiment has been tried, and it works out exactly like that. We've even tried it in this very game. Not as much of an issue post-merger, but in the unmerged markets, it was seriously problematic to try to get some items red side, because there weren't any for sale, so prices fluctuated madly. Add one flipper, and a week or two later there's a steady supply at a reasonable price.
Imagine that there is a flipper listing item X for 100k inf.Quote:I see that they reduce the number of things that sell for less then the equilibrium, but I'm not seeing where they can help reduce pricing back down to equilibrium, say on double xp weekends.
What this means is, if you list for over 100k inf, you never sell. If you want to sell... You have to list for under 100k inf. And that means that the next person to come in picks a new number, maybe 90k. And then next one picks another lower number.
It works. It's not fast, but it works that way in this market, same as in every other market ever.
What makes you so sure that's irrational? I just levelled, I have two minutes, I want to put an enhancement in a slot and get back to my TF. A million inf lets me craft something right now. Waiting for a bid to fill does not. Since "a million inf" is a fraction of what I'll get just punching dudes in the next twenty minutes, what do I care? It's too little money to notice.Quote:Some of that simply has to do with there only being a last 5 listing.
I'm assuming irrational actors in the economy, hence the Iron selling for a million inf every so often.
In general, if you start by assuming that people who have different priorities from you are "irrational", your analysis of any market is doomed to failure. -
Quote:Uh-oh, you're about to commit the fallacy of equivocation.Originally Posted by Chuckles07
Isn't that manipulating the market?
When people talk about "rent seeking" as "manipulating the market", they mean specifically causing the market to behave in an irrational way from which the manipulator benefits. However, when we talk about actions which affect markets, while they can be called "manipulating" in the broader English sense of "manipulating" a thing as "having some effect on it", they are not "manipulating" in that narrower sense.
Market makers do not in general "manipulate" the market in the sense of controlling outcomes to their benefit; they do, however, take actions which have effects on the market which other participants generally regard as beneficial. For instance, allowing purchasers to buy for lower prices, and sellers to sell for higher prices, than they otherwise would.
Wholesalers are not in business because everyone else is stupid and gullible and being manipulated by them. Wholesalers are in business because they are able to provide an improved marketplace for both buyers and sellers. -
Quote:Do you have any proof that they don't? I'm suggesting that an economy is working like every single economy we've ever studied or reported on or heard of. You're suggesting that it is magically unique.Originally Posted by Chuckles07
Do you have proof that flippers are increasing the number of listings?
And why should I, or anyone else, care how things "seem" to you, in the absence of any kind of evidence or support?Quote:It seems to me they are simply buying something and raising the price, keeping the number of listings the same.
Anyway, do you know the word "stack"? Do you know what it means to speak of a "stack" of items, in an MMO?
If I list the items I acquire while out punching dudes, I will list them in "stacks" of from 1 to 4 items, typically. If, on the other hand, I buy and sell a specific item in quantity, I list them in "stacks" of 10. Which of these keeps more items listed per slot in use? (Hint: Try comparing "1 to 4" with "10".)
Yes. I have 20 characters and I have to search around at some length to find open slots.Quote:Is there evidence that people don't have enough slots to sell everything they want to?
Congratulations, you've now conceded the point that these people are increasing supply, but then you say "not that that's a good thing".Quote:If anything, the people who list things for absurdly large sums that don't sell are increasing supply, not that that's a good thing.
But wait! What we all want is lower prices. Prices are formed by the interaction of supply and demand. Supply lowers prices, demand raises them. More supply lowers prices. That is, in fact, a good thing.
Consistency is in and of itself a desirable thing. Why do people buy insurance? Because a slightly higher price that you can be confident of and build plans around is a better deal than a slightly lower price on average that could be wildly higher or lower. When selling, the same thing applies, only you'll accept a lower price in exchange for consistency, usually.Quote:Why is selling for a more stable price of any value to the seller?
Why not simplify this question to "why do some people prefer not to gamble?", since that's the question you're really asking. -
Okay, newbie question... I basically stopped using SOs at all once I found out about IOs. So I have only a vague comprehension of them.
When people say that a level 25 IO (32%) "underperforms" SOs, what are they comparing with? Even-level SOs (level 25 at 25)? Three levels higher? Two levels lower? -
Quote:At least one person has called it that. It doesn't seem to me to be accurate.Originally Posted by Max_zero
Flipping either crafted or non crafted IOs and re listing them at a higher price with no improvement to the IOs is called a 'rent seeking' profit.
It's not at all obvious that "manipulating" is profitable, compared to other forms of participation.Quote:It is generally considered a bad sign when it is more profitable to manipulate the market rather then increase the size of the market.
In particular, with recipes and salvage, flippers are clearly improving market stability by increasing the number of bids/listings available, because they are putting whole stacks in each WW slot. With crafted enhancements, bids can still be on stacks, but listings can't, which creates some asymmetry, but it still increases availability.
You equate "flipping" and "manipulation", but since you do it with a parenthetical rather than an explicit statement that you think they're the same, it'd be easy for someone to think that you were trying to hide the weak premise, rather than putting it out as an assertion in and of itself. However, it's very definitely an assertion, and it's a contested one.Quote:If everyone flipped the market (manipulation) rather then farmed (increase the size of the market) then eventually the market would collapse.
Consider, if you will, the grocery store. If everyone ran grocery stores, and no one farmed (literally), we would of course have no food. Does this tell us that grocery stores are "manipulating", because they do nothing but buy goods and resell them? I don't think it does. It seems to me that grocery stores add a kind of value, even though they don't necessarily do ANYTHING to modify the goods they sell. (I know some repackage things, or have a deli, but we can ignore that and focus on what they do to forklift-loads of Kraft Mac&Cheese.)
When I have a bunch of junk in my salvage inventory and don't really care about it, I tend to list it all for 1 inf. If flippers are buying it, great! They're ensuring that there's a steady supply of bids on that salvage, so I get my market slots back immediately. Instead of waiting for the next person to come along, I get an instant sale. The only time that sale goes to a flipper is when the flipper was bidding more than anyone else was when I listed. So every time I sell to a flipper, I come out ahead of where I would have been without the flipper. If I sell to a non-flipper, I'm probably getting a more stable price anyway, because the flippers have nudged that item's price towards a stable center point.
So I think you've got a major assumption here that's been carefully presented as an assumed premise, when really, it looks like a thesis statement you ought to be presenting and supporting in its own right. -
Quote:Well, it inflates because of the huge rate of inf creation, but apart from that, usually yes.Originally Posted by Chyll
Rise and fall, sure but ultimately, as it is random, it should stay stable, right?
Changes in relative supply do chance prices, mind. -
Quote:Hmm. I think what I'm probably looking at, roughly, is something that's got a decent survivability/AoE mix -- won't spend too much time faceplanting, can do enough damage to be not-boring solo. For instance, my (dark/dark) tanker's pretty good, at 32 he can pretty consistently run at +0/x5 and win, but it takes forever to kill stuff. I've heard good things about scrappers, but never gotten far with one, and about brutes, but mine's stuck at level 12 being unable to keep a blue bar under any circumstances. MM is really fun, but tends to involve more micromanagement than I sometimes want.Originally Posted by Nethergoat
I didn't have anyone at 50 until a few years back for much the same reason (well, and also it was much slower going back in the day which encouraged my alt-itis).
But if you *want* a 50 for whatever reason, just pick one character and stick with it. As long as you don't actively hate playing them, you'll get there.
If you're looking for efficiency, soloists who can crank out the AoEs are great. My 50s are my kat/regen scrapper, fire/ice blaster, axe/fire tank and fire/dark corrupter. My scrapper was one of my oldest characters or he'd probably have been an AoE powerhouse too. -
I have a really hard time with "most enjoy". It seems to vary pretty quickly over time. Problem is, this game is too well balanced; each character tends to be good at something, so I end up enjoying playing them more... then I play someone else and that's fun...
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Hmm. I have a ds/dark MM at 32, blue side. I could work on that. I forget why she's been 32 so long. Might be stamina-related, or coulda just been full inventory of recipes that I had to sell off.
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I most like playing whatever I'm on, until I've played a couple of hours, then it feels sorta old...
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So, I've been playing about 4 months, and I keep thinking I want to see some of the higher-level content, but I have serious altitis.
I seek advice: What's a good first character to try to get to 50? Either something that will really bloom post-30, or something that'll be easy to level, or... I dunno. What should I try to finish levelling, and why? (I'd list my characters, but really, would adding one more change things? No.)