Is influence really that hard to come by?

Okay, whatever. You can do that for 20-25 million at the low end. That should be easily attainable by anyone.


(shrug) Maybe they're not there for the money?

Ummm, most sgs I know of since issue 9 HAVEN'T given out inf.

Also you don't need Set IOs. We are talking about making inf. Not about what you buy with it.

No, people are saying that they understand the process well enough to judge that anyone can achieve basic competence with minimal to moderate effort. Certainly it's easier for some than others. But, if all you need is a basic IO build, it's easy enough that ANYONE can do it.

It's easy for everyone who can process simple mathematics. I'll tell you exactly what's you need to be able to do;

First, let's set some values. We have Recipe price (includes crafting cost) which is A from now on. We also have Salvage costs which shall be B and the crafted Enhancement price which shall be C. We'll probably want a profit margin of at least 500k on the recipe (consider sets like Crushing Impact, nothing spectacularly pricey).

What the market user has to be able to do is this: 0.9 * (C - [A + B]) > 500,000. Very simple mathematics because there won't even be any variables because all the information needed is available in the market.

If the player is too lazy or doesn't care enough to spend 5 minutes looking through the market to find Recipe/Enhancement combinations that could work for a scheme like this they're lazy and deserve no sympathy. Simply, it's being poor by choice.

And there really is no drawing the "aptitudes" card. All you need to do is find three numbers from the market window (which anyone can do), insert them into a formula given to you and stuff it into a calculator or computer. And that's it. Not being able to do that is lazyness.

Or even just 'craft and sell your drops'. By doing exactly that, starting a brand new toon on a brand new server, by lvl 43 I have a toon with set IOs and 200 million inf in the bank. And I still have about a dozen of the shiniest IOs in a rack saved for later use.

Oh, no, wait, I lied. I also got a handful of crafting badges and sold common IOs. As that's a big marketeer secret that is in no way suggested to every single person who has ever asked about how to make inf, I guess that puts me in amongst the l33t.

I believe instead the conversation has been reduced to you refusing to admit that certain levels of wit and intellect are within the reach of the majority of people with at least a middle-school education in the United States. Which, honestly, isn't saying that much in the industrialized world, which is the only place we should expect to find people able to spend US$15 a month to play a video game.

It's not about it being easy for me. It's about me acknowledging that I haven't done anything special at all.

What's more arrogant: to assume one has done something anyone else could do if they were interested in doing it, or to assume one has done something others actually lack the facilities to achieve?

And there you go you can do it, so everyone can.

Now in your case its interesting to see what doesn't qualify as not anything special at all. You have stated you make most of your inf by running speed tfs and selling the proceeds into the market. The vast majority of people are not able to do this and by definition never will be.

Which brings us to this

The poor are poor because they want to be ?

Not exactly, but pretty much. They're not poor because they want to be poor, they're poor because they choose to be poor.

I know there aren't many of us (might only be me) supplying level 10 stuff red side. On the plus side I am making a nice amount and leveling up a lot of lowbie alts.

Maybe it depends on the server. On Defiant it's pretty common to get speed TF runs advertised in the global channel -- in fact, sometimes the assumption is that any TFs looking for members will be speed runs, and the people who want a 'normal' TF are wary about joining without checking first.

You really have a depressingly low opinion of the players in CoH. TBH, speed-running TFs is even less like rocket surgery than using the market.

In the context of CoH, yes.

EXACTLY.
There is no "I lost my job.", "I had a long-term illness.", "My car was stolen." There are no external factors to make someone poor.

What's being discussed here are the aptitudes needed to make money on the market. I have 10s of billions of inf. Is someone who does not earn money on that scale actually lacking in aptitude? Or are they just not quite so monomaniacal as I am? I rather suspect the latter.

I actually don't apply many of my aptitudes to the market, because I am not much of a marketeer. I am a supplier, because I apply my aptitudes to game mechanics and to seeking out like-minded players. I am a power gamer, and I use that and some basic market knowledge to make sure that the rewards I earn as a power gamer net me as much wealth as they can. I actually don't need to know that much about the market, other than to pay attention to the little numbers in the windows when I come and drop my goods off. It's the ability to interpret those little numbers I'm talking about, not how often someone comes with a cartload of self-earned goods to convert into cash.

The poor are poor because they either (a) have not discovered that there are easy ways to not be poor or (b) are not sufficiently interested in any of the ways they have discovered to actually pursue them. Option (b) can be said to be being poor because they want (edit: I do prefer choose) to be.

On this I think we may have to define terms. I am pretty certain that Uber's and my definition of speed tfs is at least similar

Posi 1:20 or less 1 player dual boxing.
Manticore/Numina 45 minutes or less
Synapse/sister p 1:30 - 1:45

I have seen people say the ITF is doable in 26 minutes that is really very impressive I have an idea on a strategy for doing it that fast but it would involve having 4 very good duos or maybe a portable dead guy and a bunch of above average players.

Many people will advertise they are putting up a speed run but haven't even put together the team or strategy to do the tf reasonably quickly. (My personal experience)

Anyway the minute most people are running speed tfs and are doing so often enough for it to be an income source, you can expect the rewards of those tfs to get nerfed. Which is why I say by definition most people will never be able to be part of speed crowd for earnings.


My first character was an at and powerset combination that would perform near the bottom of the 1 hour challenge in terms of earnings. Originally when I started marketing I created an alt to do it I found it necessary. If I wanted to buy IOs for my main at reasonable rates, I would need to bid for the recipe and 1 or 2 pieces of salvage that were expensive, this ties up 3 slots for what can be quite a long time. That isn't so much the case anymore tickets/merits have gone a long way to fixing the problems of the market. It is still the case that you have to be willing to break the 4th wall and treat the game not as a superhero rpg, but more as and mish mash of shooter/superhero game/trading game to do well.

I've been on more than one sub 30 minute ITF (on Defiant) which included a couple of PuG players speed-running for the first time. Sub 40 min is *easily* doable even with a few people new to speed-running on the team. All it requires is a balanced team, an experienced leader who can give clear directions, and players who are willing to follow them.

This game seriously is just not that difficult to play. Not in the market, and not when doing TFs. It just isn't.

My real world politics and my in-game "politics" are loosely correlated at best. It wouldn't surprise me if that's true of many or most players, and in both directions. A die hard capitalist might prefer a game where you don't have to use a market to get goods, and where most people have similar equipment, such as a first person shooter or this game before I9. A die hard socialist might prefer cutting loose in the game, slicing and dicing their way through the game economy, secure in the knowledge that IT'S JUST A GAME. I don't kill "villains", "heroes" or "other players" in the real world either.

Now I'll disagree with these. I have met too many poeple who just don't understand how the market works. I meet people who have no idea the lowest sale goes to the highest buy price. Most I've met seem to assume it's just first-in first-out to the highest bidder over your listed price.

I try to explain why I can list for 5 and it sells for 10,000 but the one they listed for 300 will never move, and they say I'm the crazy one.

Really, except for selling drops every attempt I've made to follow the advice given on this forum has resulted in me losing a crapload of money. Even the simple, "Buy two sell one" advice has given me two bankrupt characters with a big list of non-selling IOs clogging their auction slots, one of them has 9 items posted for less than half the crafting and materials price unsold for over 4 months. I guess that advice only works if you buy things other people want. =)

Selling my drops I do ok. Trying to use the market to generate wealth has been a disaster. And I meet people who are worse at it than I am. Quite a lot of them.

The average player is really not good at math. Or common sense. Or being patient. All of these are required for earning wealth in the game. Especially that common sense one.

You may not think you're doing anything special, but the ability to bid low and wait IS special. Most of the players can't do that.

The ability to look through the market and understand the information is provides IS EXTREMELY special. I think that you have no idea how many people don't have a clue how the last 5 sold window works.

Please look at the number of threads by people who can't even find a group on Freedom and Virtue. A not insignificant portion of the playerbase thinks spamming "level 23 <insertshortformofAT> lfg" is the only way to get a group. I know people in active supergroups with populated friends lists can get a task force whenever they want. But try cobbling together a pug at off hours not using anyone you know. Now imagine you don't know any other way to get into one. How many will you do? And speed runs in a pug? Is that even an option? Yes a few pug members, but it still requires that experienced leader you mentioned. The average player can't be that person and probably doesn't know one either.

I can only do Pug TFs because if everyone on my friends list and all the members of all my supergroups were on at the same time, the three of us don't have many options. =) I've been on more ITFs than anything else, but I've never managed to find a group that can pull one off in under an hour. And I've been on 4 or 5 failures. Villain side I have never yet been on a successful respec at any level. More than 10 failures though.

That's perfectly understandable. It's not very obvious. I won't even lay that one down to apathy, because a lot of times, you have no reason to assume you don't know how it works.

OK, I think anyone who actively dismisses info like that in game is a dummy. They may not actually dumb in the intellect sense, but they're dumb in the unwise sense. At the least they should ask for some backup on that, which you could easily provide them. I can get them not just believing anything, but they should at least consider the possibility of what you're telling them. I've met people like this in game myself, but not terribly often. I don't like them.

Seeming to lack common sense is one of those things that it's very hard to tell whether someone actually is a moron, or if they don't care. In my experience, a lot of people just don't care.

Again, not being good at math doesn't mean they can't be good at math. I can easily mean they hate math and don't want to be good at it. I know tons of people like this in game and out.

No, most of the players don't do it. That's not the same thing as they can't. Sure, in the end, from my perspective, there's no functional difference. But if they cared, I think far, far more people are capable of it, and just don't care enough to bother.

This. Seriously. A game economy where everyone has roughly the same ability to earn rewards that can be converted into in-game lucre versus a real world economy with all of the variables it entails has apples and oranges overtones. The game economy will follow some the same principles as real world economies (e.g. supply and demand), but I doubt a drought in the Midwest is going to impact the price of Thorn Tree Vines the same way that drought would impact the price of soybeans. That being the case, attempting to read someone’s real world politics into their behavior in a game market is essentially a sophist exercise. At best.

I had no idea anything being discussed here sounded anything like any political party platform.

Am I to conclude you think that the Republican party thinks everyone is lazy yet secretly capable of more, while (by inference) the Democrats think everyone is an ignoramus?

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

If you are playing only in the off-hours, then you are by definition not in the majority of players. There are definitely people who are always going to have trouble getting into TFs. People who play very odd hours will find it harder, and there's people who for work/family reasons just can't devote a sufficiently large chunk of time. I'm not saying that every single player in the game can get into a speed TFs at will, I'm just disagreeing with the stance that it's impossible for anything other than a tiny minority.

I have about four people on my global friends list, my SG is me and my other half -- who is now busy playing Dragon Age: Origins :-( -- and I play on Defiant, which has been supposedly dead for the whole 18 months I've been in the game.

This is how I became a l33t speed runner: I joined speed TFs recruiting on the Defiant global channel. I demonstrated the ability to follow directions. I got invited to more speed TFs. The end.

Maybe it's a server thing, but it usually seems pretty easy to get into a TF on Defiant, using the main global channel, even outside of core hours. (Or maybe we're all just nuts. I was on one Quarterfield TF that started at one-thirty in the morning.) Union likewise has plenty of TF's recruiting. Maybe the US servers don't have such active global channels? I honestly don't know, as I'm a Euro-only player.