Is influence really that hard to come by?

I would not at all be surprised if 20% of the playerbase produced 80% of the max-level stuff on the market right now.

This reminds me of something.

Recently, I've been seeing a lot of complaining on the forums about the price of particular IOs, and how this is a huge balance issue, and how the devs need to fix the markets, and how the individuals in question speak for a giant mass of people who are 'too poor' to afford any IOs they really want. This was met, in my mind, by a simple little truism that was trotted out once by a famous general, who spoke of how people operate; he noted that people were either ambitious/lazy, or smart/stupid.

To my eye, there's an awful lot of lazy/stupid going around right now, and the notion that there are two fundamental axes on which people can be predicted struck me as an interesting thing to analyse. Upon a bit of reflection, I felt it was true, really. Let's take this little cross-section to task here:

Ambitious and Stupid
You keep a Luck Charm because you heard it improves your drops. You prefer to be sidekicked, because you hear that gives you better drops. You hit arcane mobs en masse, pick your way through hellions and skulls, before moving on to other mobs like them that offer those tasty arcane drops you desire. You know that you want millions of inf, to buy those expensive enhancement sets you want like Crushing Impact and Thunderstrike, and you do it with the full knowledge that you're good at playing the market. You run to your friends and tell them that luck charms are going for 30,000 inf and buy level 50 recipes to sell to the vendor for a tidy profit.

You're a good guy. You're not as informed as you think, but you don't tend to remain that way. That ambition - that desire to work the system - will in time alter itself. You'll laugh about the Luck Charms in time, seriously, and boggle that you ever had the time to waste carting recipes to the vendor. You are, in the sense of the market, the vulture that picks clean the dying and the straggling: Helping people get badges, helping clear out cruft and crap, and making a small, if not insignificant, profit while you were at it.

The best part about this stage is that it's rarely endemic. You will change, over time, into one of these other three categories. The path you take from here is determined by which rules out: Your stupidity, or your ambition. If you're very ambitious, you'll eventually start reading guides and putting the work in. You will, eventually, turn up as Ambitious and Smart. Alternatively, there are two other paths you can follow...

Ambitious and Smart
You want it all. You want it, and you know how to get it. Other people have posted how-to on the forums, have put together guides, and you've read them. You don't do anything that can be seen as wasting money; you tough out the period before SOs by using TOs and DOs as they drop, and never let a single drop of influence through your fingers. You pick your enemy groups based on how they drop salvage, picking those delicious foes with stunted pools. You farm missions endlessly rather than complete the content, because it's wasted infamy/hour. You maintain a high ZPM (and know what that means). You watch the market like a hawk and maintain stock options based on the latest rumours out of the devs' mouths. You hoover up information, seive it out and spend so much time on the market you can quote prices on the sub-30 knockback sets off the top of your head (I know I can, har har).

For all the time you spend belting away at the game, you're just making this enormous pile of money and you're not actually doing anything with it. Any new content that comes out goes right over your head because, hey, you're just going to farm behemoths anyway. You have four characters totally purpled out, farm endlessly, play the market, and do nothing else, because that's all that fun for you; the acquisition of money and the eventual squandering of that same money.

I'm tempted to call you an idiot, but the thing is, you're being goal-oriented. You want to watch a little number ping upward, which is pretty silly of me to criticize, since that's entirely what levelling up means, and I've done that enough times with my zany altitis and vicious character-pruning.

However, this guy, this guy, the ambitious and smart marketeer? He is your best pal on the market. He's the guy who has so much money to spare that he will happily splurge on buying a tech common for a million. He's the guy who buys lowbie globals and procs for ludicrous sums to finance his own lowbies, because he can afford it. The irony that this guy is sluicing money out of the economy just to sluice it back in should not be lost on any of you. What else are they going to do with the money? It's not like the ambitious and smart roll around naked in giant piles of inf.

Lazy and Stupid
You can't buy a miracle global for 500,000 inf, and you think this is somehow the dev's fault. You think that Acrobatics getting nerfed was a trick by the devs so they could laugh at you as you failed to buy knockback enhancements for your characters who didn't need them. You're poor, and so you think the solution is to ***** about it on the forums. You see all the people who have money as evil, and believe that flipping, or abitrage, or willy wonka, or whatever the current buzz term is, is the exploit that currently harbours all failings of the market. You're convinced the pool C table is skewed, since you never get anything but Craps of the Hunter. You can't have what you want, so you complain. You put up salvage for 1 inf, then ***** and bellyache when it doesn't sell for as much as you wanted it to sell for.

You are, not to put too fine a point on it, an idiot.

The Lazy and Stupid are those people who own a unique kind of sense of entitlement. They believe that, for some reason, the market is both utterly impenetrable, and that there is no way to make money on it, and that the market is a massive money sink, in which every single thing you could buy goes for literally millions of inf. Were I making this up, I would rib more on this metaphorical person, making him more cartoonish and ridiculous, but the sad fact is, I am quoting from real arguments.

These people think of the behaviours of other marketeers in moral terms, or they proscribe, clearly, some kind of other sub-incentive to justify their lack of involvement. Some people will claim it's immoral to make lots of money on the market, as if influence bought food and paid for rent checks. Some will claim it's only possible to do this by investing vast slabs of time and effort, and that they have better things to do than spend the required amount of time to both understand the market, and to then make money using it. These people are the inevitable outcome of introducing anything to a population: The people who don't get it, don't wanna get it, and won't try to get it.

There is nothing you can do for these people, in my experience. I have tried to teach, tried to offer aid, even offered direct financial start-up, without strings attached, and every time, the money just falls down a giant invisible hole of I Don't Know What I'm Doing But Don't You Dare Tell Me How To Do It. The thing is, the Lazy and Stupid are the grist for the mill. For the most part, these are the people who get 'hurt' by flippers, who buy things above the lowest and sell them below the highest - ie, price normalisers. By 'hurt', we mean 'treated exactly as they deserve'.

The good news is, the tears of the Lazy and Stupid? They're delicious.

Lazy and Smart
And we save the best till last. You do small fiddling schemes to keep yourself in money. You don't fret about how much inf you have, you just make sure you have enough to do what you wanted. You know how to get money when you want it, and don't bother with it when you don't. Acquiring money en masse is more like a game of pinball, trying to see how quickly you can manage it. You maintain a high ZPM, but more because it makes you giggle. When one scheme stops being fun, you stop doing it. You read guides and consider options, but don't bother with widescale manipulation because, well, all it would do is give you more money you don't need. Your characters are comfortably outfitted, your needs met, and whenever you want to try anything really cute, you know you can do it.

The Lazy and Smart are the laconic, laid back types. Speaking as one, I started with a character, a level 32 Super Strength/Fire brute, on the infamously poor redside. He was made before IOs, and had to be reinvigorated after a long server change and pause. In order to outfit this character, he sat down and planned. After my initial plan, I went to the black market in Sharkhead, and logged him in for one minute ever day. If I did not get everything I wanted done done in that minute, it did not get done. That was my rule.

Within a week, this character had 4 sets of Crushing Impact, and 9 million inf in change.

This is just one little anecdote. This was not a major scheme, not some dread robber baronage. I didn't grind or farm or finagle. I didn't cheat or extort or rort or fuss. I simply did something that milked money out of the market at a reasonable but not extortionate margin: Because I couldn't be bothered going for that wider margin. I just needed enough to get by, not enough to buy the moon.

Why don't I try to buy the moon? Why not keep the scheme going? Why not continue crafting, flipping, managing funds, anticipating trends or spreading vicious rumours about upcoming nerfs to sack the market out on a commodity that I can then capitalise on?

... It's too much effort.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

I guess I fall into the "lazy and smart" category. I really despise farming, and I only ever bother doing it if I decide to roll an alt whose sets are just too painful before SOs (hello Shields, SR).

Other than that, I just check the market every few days on the 1-3 characters I'm using to make money at the time. My new characters make money almost solely by leveling with story arcs and the occasional TF. I just do whatever I don't consider a chore and it serves me more than enough in the influence department.

Just think tho, if everyone was "lazy and smart", there'd be nothing for sell to just log into WW for.

Now on the flip side, i think the smart ones are the ones like me. I farm and just sell my drops to the ones lazy enuff to pay for them. I don't/won't pay 300mil for anything in game and have several purp'd toons on multiple accounts.

You know what I miss from the old boards? I miss my ignore list. I'm learning the same lessons over and over.