price limits

uh huh.... And I can shove knitting needles into my eye sockets. But would I WANT to?

WOW that's ugly!

I think it's even worse than a character I made for a vet reward whine thread a long time ago who used every vet costume piece available to me at the time.

GRATZ!

Maybe after you met that character in game.

Chiming in to the 'my approach' sub-thread:

I mostly solo these days- babies generate random AFK's like nobodies' business. I still manage to rack up a decent # of hours over the course of a month, but I can never count on more than a few minutes of consecutive gameplay.

My gameplay is like my marketeering- mostly concept driven. I get an idea and pursue it as long as it maintains my interest.
"I wonder how much inf you could make playing inefficiently and selling drops?" Voila, a concept stalker is born.
"I wonder if the 'old' content is as terrible as I remember it being? And how does it compare to the newer stuff?" 19 levels of arch/elec blaster later, and the answers are "yes" and "horribly".

To get all the way to 50 a character needs to engage me completely- I have to like the concept and story (even though I don't 'do' RP I absolutely require the character to fit snugly into the game world) and their powers have to engage me on a visceral level.

I skip around a lot between alts.
Lately I'm rotating between my level 40 ar/dev (motivation: can a l337 SuperBuild(tm) restore him to some meaningful fraction of his pre-ED efficiency?), my level 19 arch/elec (motivation: compare and contrast 'real' content across level ranges), my level 30 ninja/willpower stalker (motivation: how much inf can you make stealthing missions, killing a minimum of enemies and just selling drops?) and my level 29 mace/inv brute (motivation: a control for the stalker- I'm playing him with my usual mix of drop selling and market gaming).

With IOs, it depends on the character. The majority are slotted with generic IOs + a few key IOs (-kb, procs, etc). I have two UberBuilds, my level 44 fire/ice blasting DA farmer (all set bonuses keyed to DA, perma-oro'ed and parked in Moth Cemetary) and my level 50 fire/rad controller, who I log in when I feel like some high level farming or to PL friends on his zombie map. My ar/dev is well frankenslotted- I have a l337 build waiting for him to hit 50, but was able to frankenslot him for pocket change while building up wealth for his eventual buying spree. And the Goat, as my namesake, obviously requires a grotesquely, ostentatiously expensive UberBuild even though he's mostly retired these days. I got a leg up by picking up a couple of PvP sets to slot before the prices went bugnuts- he's probably over a billion right now, although they only cost maybe 150 million at the time. =P

But mostly, I'm fine with generics. I enjoy playing characters more than planning them out.

She means flipping, or crafting-and-flipping. Remember the experience she said she had: her character that did nothing but buy recipes & salvage, assemble them, and re-list the crafted Enhancement for far higher than the parts cost earned five times as much money in the same time period as one who ran missions & TFs and marketed all drops as-is.

Remember what I said back on page 1 about the darwinian view, and people who say that if you don't have them, you don't deserve them?

sadly, I can see this coming too. I'm slowly working my 2-account posi run down aiming for an hour. 132 merits across 2 characters is probably too good of a payout for what is currently about 2 and half hours and will get faster.

I don't think the devs anticipted just how many people would avoid the market, even to their own detriment, when given the option to bypass it. Many people HATE the market for whatever reason.

I've stated several times that drop rates are too low. Specifically, I would like to see teams get a modifier for drops based on team size. nothing like "8-man team gets 8x the drops" mind you, but the XP modifier I suggested using gives an 8-man team 250% of the XP per kill, then splits that 8 ways. I don't think that's unreasonable. i have other ideas that ARE unreasonable, but those are pipe dreams, not something I would suggest seriously.

Of course, they should just realize this when the game up until I9 allowed everyone to get SO's at a store for a fixed price. Maybe someone should go and inform each person individually of these things that they "should realize" without any outside source. Say, the people who don't read the forums? (IIRC, more than 90% of the playerbase does not come here.)

Well it was a bit sarcastic actually but they don't listen to folks like you, me, Smurph, and Catwhoorg about market concerns during closed betas because what we have to say about how the majority of the general public will use the features doesn't fit in with their vision of how they designed it to be used so they listen to the folks that pat them on the back and test it the way they intended it to be used instead of the folks that purposely try to break it so that the weak spots can be seen.

I fully expect merits to receiving a solid nerfing in the next issue because they overlooked the speed that setting for -1 mobs will allow.

I always thought merit rewards for story arc content was too low all ready especially since only the arc holder gets any when you are doing it outside of Oro, so I like the changes there, but I think merits will be decreasing again in I17 or GR though a better solution IMO would be to force all TFs (including team run Oro arcs) to spawn at the appropriate level. The technology exists to do this. I checked an AE mission that was designed to spawn at a particular level and it spawns at that level whether you select -1 mobs ot not.

Darwin has no place at the table of a voluntary pastime. The game gives you everything you need. Luxuries exist on a different plane.

And my philosophy is "if you aren't willing to make an effort, you don't deserve them".

Why exactly do you feel the market should change to accommodate players that will never accept it?



In the real world ignorance of the law does not excuse criminal behavior.
In the game world failure to use available resources does not excuse ignorance.

Ohhhh yeah that's a great idea Goat! After all look how well it worked for PvP when they tried that in I13!

/sarcasm

Edit - sorry have a bad cold today which is the reason I'm grumpy and throwing out all the sarcastic comments. I don't want the Goat to construe that as a sarcastic comment directed his way but rather as a sarcastic comment directed the devs way and at those players that feel that changing something that's unappealing for a minority of folks that really messes it up for the majority of folks is a "good thing"

Are you absolutely certain that you're using "minority" and "majority" correctly? I don't think there's any way to be certain that people who just skip the market entirely aren't the majority. I highly doubt that "market forum regulars" is the majority of the playerbase though, and I DO remember seeing a poll a while back, where quite a few people who posted described the market not as something they do because they enjoy it, but rather as a necessary but not especially fun part of character development.

Certain within a few percentage points with out a doubt.

That's based on conversations held across all of the very busy global channels I'm on and watching the market itself.

Take a look at the any of the mid demand range recipes (and many of the high range recipes). They all have last 5s from today or yesterday.

Watch how fast salvage ticks over in the market by buying and selling stacks of it. When I was crafting commons in earnest I'd easily go through 2000 pieces of salvage a day and all those commons would sell by the following morning.

Gather some data, compare it to subscribership. I think that you'll see that far more than 75% of the player bases uses the market at least to some degree.

The players that avoid it completely are probably somewhere in the 2% range which is where I'd guess that the players that spend most of their time exclusively in the market are also at.

I am a bit weary of this 90%/10% stat. I don't think it has been a stated as a fact for years yet it gets trotted out constantly as a means of attacking the forum so I present the following:

IF it is true that only 10% use the forums means that only 10% read the forums and only 10% know anything about the game, then people who post this factoid as a means of making a point make no point because they are arguing about people who have an opinion that is a complete unknown. Those 90% non-forum people may well agree with the poster or they may all disagree but since it is a complete unknown any premises based upon them is completely irrelevant.

Furthermore, in the current game and web environment, a person is being intentionally ignorant if they do not seek out information on a game on its official forums and should be given all the consideration that people living in the undeveloped Amazon jungle should have on how the next web search engine ought to work.

Ironically, I recently watched a special about an Amazonian tribe which is involved in legal disputes trying to protect their ancestral lands from loggers. These are guys who have a lot of villagers who trot around with bare chests, painted bodies and bone piercings on their faces, and yet their tribe owns a laptop with a satellite connection so they can do legal research on the web...from the jungle.

That's awesome!

So I guess there's really no excuse for people who won't research the game on the web.

Go go Amazonians!