Casual Earnings: Project Mope

okay, I've been inspired to finish off my red side 'casual player earning power' experiement.

Here's my stalker at level 30:



His rules of operation are:

- contact missions only, run solo, stealthed where possible.
- exceptions made for seasonal events.
- all drops sold on the market, enhancement drops vendored.
- outfitted entirely with generic IOs, except for GotA + Runspeeds (for thematic reasons)

He's a semi-RP character- I chose his powers to represent a 'normal guy' with a sword. Happily, along came power customization, which let me turn off his Willpower effects, and now he really looks like a normal guy with a sword. He won't be taking a travel power- created him before Ninja Run, all his pre-30 leveling was done with sprint, swift & hurdle. Took Ninja Run, of course, which is SO FUN in Sharkhead.

I'll try and post an update every 10 levels or so, noting any 'big ticket' drops he gets.

/edit
oh, he's got this far using the default mission settings.
I may bump it up at some point if it starts to be a slog, but for now I'll leave it be.

Interesting. I might suggest a big-team player (other people's missions, larger teams/fewer drops, some TF's but probably very few merits) but I sorta did that. Doing "all TFs" and rolling at 30 and 33 got me about 300 million, I think.

That was a nice bio.

TY!

About five seconds after I took that screen I got a "cool toon dude!" tell from someone in Pocket D.

He's definitely one of those characters where the original concept shaped everything that followed after. The idea had been bumping around my noggin for a while so when I decided to check out the stalker buffs it was a natural.

He sort of took on a life of his own- when the time came to pick a travel power, none of them 'worked' for him & I decided to just beef up his running as much as I could (which was much more feasible red side than it would've been blue side!). Also, he ended up getting around zones as much as possible without touching the ground- leaping from roof to roof. Ninja Run has been a great boon with this.

If you're focusing on earning power I wouldn't stealth missions. Defeats add inf and drops that are too valuable to pass up.

One thing I always notice when I team is I earn nowhere near as much as when I solo, though the XP is much quicker on teams (generally).

WARNING: I bold names.

not a genuine update, just a comment on salvage prices-

I ran a PvP mission and a couple of newspapers (working toward a chat with my new broker in St Martial), got some salvage I didn't expect much from and then CLEANED UP with it. Got over 200k for a Carnival mask and over 100k for a couple of other uncommons.

All told, close to a million inf without getting a single 'good' drop.

Hooray for MA, earning big $$$$ for the little guy who just wants to run missions and sell his junk!

I'm convinced that with any use of the Market to sell your drops it's actually very difficult to be "poor" unless you try.

Oh, and I've always held that XP debt was actually GOOD for the pocketbook. How can earning at the normal rate and gaining enhancement slots at a slower rate NOT translate to having more Inf per level on the way to L50? So whichever Casual Gamer who dies a lot in missions will actually benefit more.

I suppose it would, if Debt hadn't been nerfed to the point of being pretty much unnoticable, wiped out by the end of a single mission, assuming that Patrol XP doesn't nullify it on contact.
But in that vein, we now have the ability to turn off XP, so there's really no reason for anyone to run around unable to fill thier enhancement slots with functional enhancements of some kind.

This thread jumped the shark when someone said 'True Casual Player.'

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Update time!

So, my severely restricted playing time has made this more of a slog than anticipated. The upside is that posting every level instead of every 5 or so should give us a more fine grained view of 'casual' earning power.


here's Mope at level 31:



Levelling was accomplished via contact missions where possible with newspapers and mayhems mixed in when I needed to open up new contacts.
No teaming at all this level, all solo runs, stealthed where possible.

The only "big" drop he got was a Gaussian recipe- listed it for 500k, sold it for 5 million. He made a heck of a lot just selling salvage drops- the market was nuts, especially for uncommons. Notable rare salvage was a couple of Mu Vestments. Enhancements & worthless/generic recipes were vendored to whoever was closest.

Hmmm, I seem to play all my toons by the rules that you've set for this character and have never even come close to that number.

So are you crafting your recipe drops and selling them or are you just putting the uncrafted recipes up on the BM? Because quite honestly, none of my toons since i9 have ever reached over 3 mil by lvl 30 without some extremely lucky drop (or more) coming my way... just sayin'.

haven't crafted anything so far, doing nothing but selling drops.

with salvage prices as bugnuts crazy as they are right now, I don't see how you can avoid making fat piles of loot.

He's had two "good" recipe drops in his career, a -KB that sold for ~10 million and that Gaussian that went for 5.

revision-

actually, early on I think I did craft some generics, using the criteria that he would only craft recipes he got as drops using salvage he also got as drops. If he only needed one more piece and it wasn't expensive, I'd buy it on the market.

But that wasn't a tremendous moneymaker, as you can imagine.

Well that's very interesting. I guess I just have horrible luck at the BM, because I always try to generate as much infamy as possible for everything posted for sale... maybe I'm just doing it wrong.