What happened to the Market???

Hey, I take a bit of a break from CoH for around 4 or 5 months. I come back and take a look at WW to see how some of my sells and bids are doing. I find that purple recipes have gone up like 200% in some cases. WTF happened?
North

this has been an ongoing thing since just after the AE was released. nothing new to see.

Hyperinflation.

So the best way to build up my IO sets now is......?
TF's to get merits?
AE missions?

A lot of things changed. For starters, the amount of inf earned per drop was fixed, which means that 50's earn more inf simply playing the game. I'll also ask one question: Red or Blue? Redside has some severe market shortages going on, which is making prices soar even higher than Blueside on some items.

On top of that, the period of quick 50's meant people potentially could go 1-50 in 3 hours. That's a tremendous amount of inf generated in a very short period of time. Multiply that by a large sample of the population doing this, and inflation starts running rampant.

I assume that when the two of these combined, you had a pretty hefty hit on inflation. On the bright side, lots of things are selling more than they used to, which means it is also easier to make inf.

The most profitable method of earning inf continues to be the market, whether it's by flipping recipes, crafting, or simply using the market to sell your drops and listing them intelligently.

Using AE for tickets can be profitable, providing the recipes aren't saturated, which has happened to quite a few recipes (so there's some things cheaper than they used to be)

Running TF's daily tends to generate a nice amount of merits, which can be used to roll on randoms or specific recipes. However, for the time needed, it does not compare to AE ticket generation (though you might find soloing AE at x/8 difficulty gets monotonous after a while).

So, no purple drops on AE missions, or ticket rolls, correct?
Just run vanilla lvl 50 missions and hope for one. (Don't have much
time these days to run on TF's).

Personally, I'm of the opinion that they were undervalued to begin with. Now, at least, they're at where they probably should have been all along. And they're still affordable, depending on how much you want them.*

*This is the rule of thumb for ANY kind of loot: It's affordable, depending on how much you want it.

Sorry, I mostly play blue side. Khan TF?
Cheers

Play or do Market.

You can make a good toon by just doing missions. I'd suggest buying recipes and crafting, as that can save you some cash, but look first. Sometimes a crafted recipe will sell for less than the recipe and salvage used to make it.

You can also earn some fairly decent cash by taking advantage of the Buy-it-Nao crowd by doing that same crafting.

If you want to purple something out, you will pay. Pay pay pay.

Any good Dev choice missions to tear through with a Lvl 50 ILL Rad??

The question nobody's asked so far is "What kind of builds, on what kind of budgets?" You can tear through content pretty well on a 100-million-inf build, and you can make a hundred million in a week on the market.*

A lot of people only look at very high end builds, because it's just as easy in Mid's to pick a Hecatomb as a Crushing Impact. And if you want a very high end build, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. But ask yourself what you're doing and why, before you do it.

* People who put the time and effort in have made 2 BILLION in a week on the market. I'm not that good and I don't work that hard.

Edited: The question nobody had asked, when I started typing. Damn you, Sailboat!

That's a miscommunication.

In an AE mission that drops tickets you have no chance of getting a purple. Dev's Choice gives you the "regular drops plz" option, which gives you normal chances of getting a purple. Which is better than none, I think.

As for "normal missions" vs. dev's choice vs. other things: It's about one drop per 1500 enemies per person on team, by TopDoc's math. Normal radio missions don't give you as many enemies as carefully chosen missions where you're trying to swamp yourself in baddies (looping through the Council Earth mission over and over, set to +0/x8, for instance).

If you're running the Imperious Task Force, your team is required to beat something like 400 badguys just to complete the thing, and when I've done it we usually hit around a thousand, I think. So that's a very good chance of a purple for SOMEONE on the team, and you're getting other stuff on the way.

I know that dev's choice are supposed to give "normal rewards" but I recall a discussion during beta where some thought that purples had not been added to the normal rewards available in AE, even when running a Dev's Choice.

I have never received a purple in AE, nor have I ever heard of anyone getting one. Not to say that means it's impossible, but has ANYONE gotten a purple in AE?

Not sure if its true or not, but I've heard that ouro mishs have a higher drop rate than regular mishs, meaning you have a better chance of getting a purp from them. A friend of mine runs ouro mishs all day and gets a nice amount of purple drops and tons of merits. That might be a option to look at if the higher drop rate rumor I heard was true. Not only will you have a better chance of getting purps, you'll also get merits in the process.

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