seebs

What level are these? I have a use for a couple lowish level ones...

One of the biggest problems affecting the entire player base is inflation -- it costs more inf to get stuff than it used to, making it harder to afford things without playing the market a lot. The number of alchemical silvers you earn per hour of killing things is way down -- and that hurts nearly everybody at least some. The only way to fix that is to destroy as much inf as possible.

Here's the thing: If enough inf gets burned, you can give numerically smaller prizes and they'll be worth more to the recipients.

Note that this requires a LOT more inf-burning than we can do right now, but every little bit helps. And this benefits the entire player base, even people who aren't at the events.

15 PvP I/Os seems pretty high. I'm not sure I've ever seen someone who isn't primarily a full-time PvPer do that. As to whether it's possible? Sure. Might want to have an alt or two for market slots, but there's nothing unbelievable about it.

No, even if we stipulate to that, you're still ignoring random drops and looking only at a-merits. You're ignoring reward merits (which allow you to get an a-merit every day) and AE tickets. So even if we completely avoid the market, your numbers are still off by at least a factor of two. (For that matter, they're especially far off on PvP IOs, since the recommended way to get those is PvP, not marketing or a-merits.)

This is a great place for a discussion of the actual reality of the game. It is not a great place for you to constantly move goalposts and not be able to handle careful reasoning from a stable set of premises which have been identified explicitly. You keep adding and removing premises.

But do it wrong.

First off, no, you're told that your claim is pants-on-head retarded, because it is. There is no favoritism in the market, it is not rigged.

Secondly... I think you're missing a key point. You don't have to use the market, but if you apply the "learning about your environment" skills we take for granted in kittens, puppies, and small children, you can easily use the market to hugely reduce the amount of time it takes you to get the build you want.

Since that works even in the current market, despite your implausible and totally unevidenced claims that it's "rigged", it is very relevant to the question of how long it will take people to get enhanced.

There are a couple of reasons that the off-market methods matter:

1. They tell us what the devs think should be the amount of effort it takes to get certain things.
2. They provide a "safety valve" -- a point at which you can have a guarantee of getting a specific thing.
3. When coupled with even the most naive use of the market (list everything you get that you don't need for 1 inf, bid average of last 5 bids on anything you want and leave the bid there for a week), they give you justified confidence that you can, and will, get everything you want in a reasonable amount of time.

Don't like to use the market? You're welcome to use slower methods, but if you do, don't complain that they're slower -- that is why people suggested the market. Think the market is "rigged"? Yeah, whatever, that's tinfoil hat territory. You've repeatedly demonstrated that you simply don't comprehend how the market works -- for instance, you asserted that all else being equal, bids fill in chronological order, but this is simply not true.

The market isn't rigged. It's a bit weird and opaque, and it's certainly a bit counterintuitive. But... Last night, thanks to AE farms, common salvage was again selling for ridiculous prices. I wanted some things which had last 5 bids from 50k to 100k. I put in bids on several of them at 1234 or 12345. I went on with the rest of my shopping. In about an hour, I had complete sets of suitable I/O enhancements for two level 20 characters, all level 22-23, good set bonuses, except for I think three slots on one of them. For those, I left bids up overnight. I paid 5-10% of the "going rate" for most of the salvage by the simple expedient of placing bids and waiting a few minutes.

There is nothing rigged here. It's well-documented, there are detailed guides available, and it works exactly the same for everybody.

Yes.

One of them is a statement about reality, the other is the answer to your question of "what should it be like?".

In the real world, multiple people appear to have done this for multiple alts, so it must be taking under a year for people who are really focused on it. In the hypothetical world of how the game would be designed if I were in charge, there would be new things introduced over time which improve the available options, so that those characters would still have room to progress. Oh, wait. That'd be something like the Incarnate system.

Consider what they've now announced. Imagine that you have a character that is "finished". As of Issue 19, that character will no longer be finished -- there will be better stuff available. You get that stuff. As of Issue 20, that character will again no longer be finished -- there will be better stuff available.

See a pattern?

That's the intended design -- always room for improvement.

As it happens, people who work at it now can get characters fully kitted out with whatever it is that they think they want, but they do have to be willing to seriously work at it.

Several of us have answered.

Completely? I'd say years. More importantly, I'd say keep tweaking content so there's new stuff that's better so people who "completely" purpled a few months ago are not quite up to the best stuff available.

I would want to try to make it as likely as possible that every character in the game has potential to be further improved from content now available in the game, at every time, because that's what makes MMOs keep players -- the possibility of further progression.

People don't play MMOs to finish characters, but to develop characters. Once development stops, it's no longer fun.

If I've got my names right, Steelclaw is the one who maxes out 50s and then deletes them all on a fairly regular basis.

I've been playing 4 months. I have 19 characters on one server, and I'm probably going to buy more character slots this weekend. None of those characters are over 35.

Believe me. I know about altitis. But what I enjoy about alts is having room for progression. I had a raid tank and a raid healer in another game, and they were still progressing, which meant I could keep playing them and they contributed to my fun. Without that, they would have been slots tied up with boring characters.