What is obscenely rich?

Im curious about this. When i get home, ill glance at the toons and see if i can give a number according to current WW prices. I have 3 accounts, but 2 of them have several purpled out toons with all the recov procs, lotg 7.5's and such. Id say, combined, i have in the 10's of billions tied up in toons and prolly 5-6 billion in cash on across 3 inf. holding toons.

I'm stealing this from Chris Rock, but I'm rich and Smurphy is wealthy.

He could probably convert his inf. into prestige and have the most prestige of any SG/VG on any server.

As far as I'm concerned if a character has a complete build and 1 billion plus, they've got obscene wealth.

Of course for some people the money is simply a way of keeping score, and not a means to an end. In that situation it can't even be considered money. Simply just ... stuff.

Obscene wealth is defined differently for each individual.

To me, I'll be obscenely rich when I can afford to outfit my alts with TopDoc's High End Builds.


Of course that's two-fold. I'll need to be filthy rich to get one and then using it will make me obscenely rich.

Man. I live in a parallel universe compared to all you people. I never got very hardcore into the Market...

I consider people with several hundred million to be very rich. The most money I've ever had at one time on one character was 380 million, and that's because I respeced a crafted purple IO that I'd found a long time ago and sold it for 275 mil. I honestly couldn't imagine having a billion.

I only have a few characters I bother getting IOs for at all... most of my characters still get SOs. The ones that do bother with IOs at all just get common sets, rare sets for my best people, and occasionally a couple of the very cheapest ultra-rares if they need a sleep or confuse set...

And I've been playing since I2. /em shrug

For me it's slotting out a loldp blaster for pvp on a server that doesn't have any pvp, just because.

(That's not really rich, but meant I'm dual building random pve toons for pvp just because I have nothing else to use the inf on now)

Don't act brand new now, Fulmens.

You know you were crème de la crème if you were able to get away from Dual Origins.

I have... 20 mil.

Guess I should just give up on ever seeing a (non-generic) IO that doesn't drop for me.

I should do a recheck on how much it would cost to re-IO out my original 6 million inf man, if I take out the spectacular exception. . .

. . .at the time I didn't have the near-million in my budget to get a Steadfast KB protection IO, so I settled for a Steadfast Res/Def at 40K plus crafting and salvage cost.

My main brute has 4 full purple I/O sets, LOTG, Some other juicy stuff crammed on. In truth, the build could be better. Now if I could afford to buy all the best enhancers I need to experiment with 2 other builds, (the alt and a changeup on the primary) buy all the Respec recipes I need to make it happen blindly off the market, and maybe a bill left over as change to play/give in game. That to me would be filthy rich. For one character. I assume we are talking just one avatar and not like the whole account?

I'd say whole account, now that you can transfer stuff around easily via email.

In my opinion I would say 500 billion would be obscenely rich.

About 40-50 bil here, which I'd say falls somewhere short of "obscenely" but may qualify as "absurdly." Especially since I tend to retire my toons at 50 and thus have no use for purples.

One thing I've noticed, though, is that the limitations of the Market (especially as population declines) prevent massive wealth from *feeling* as empowering as I imagine it would in RL. I put this down to at least two factors:

1) Buy It Now, which would be the most natural expression of profligacy, is far FAR more of a price multiplier than it is in any RL context that I'm aware of. In RL, paying full price at the most convenient outlet (instead of waiting for a sale or comparison shopping) feels pleasingly self-indulgent because you get your new toy instantly at a premium of perhaps 10%-100%. In CoX, depending on the item, you may be looking at more like a 100%-1000% premium over the patient/skilled marketeer's price.

1.5) Plus, when you Buy It Now you're essentially taking the role of the "suckers" who've funded your career as a marketeer. So chances are you'll just feel stupid, rather than lavish.

2) While the very top-tier items and 50 recipes will generally always have availability at SOME price, in the mid-game there are many useful items (e.g. parts of Thunderstrike near your level when you're in the 30s or 40s) which often have zero availability at any given time. So no amount of wealth can get you instant gratification. I think this kind of situation is very rare in RL. (The only examples I can think of offhand are "collector" domains (art, comics, antiques) where the ratio of available items to population size is astronomically smaller than anything in CoX.) If even my untold billions can't get me a full set of non-unique kit for a mid-30s toon without my having to log out and wait, I just don't feel like much of a plutocrat.

On the other hand, there's one thing that DOES feel like a truly impressive show of wealth, and that's giving it away. Nothing in the game produces dropped jaws as reliably as handing out 10+ million to each of your teammates on a PUG, or to anyone who happens to be in-zone when you broadcast your offer. It's not just the gratitude; it's that combined with the knowledge that this really IS pocket change to you, that you could make it back in less time than it took to give it away. THAT feels like ludicrous wealth.

(I'd also say there's an earlier and more important breakpoint: the point where you never need to "stop and sell," since any but the rarest of drops is just trivial compared to your market earnings. This is probably equivalent to something like US$100-200k income, where the prices of everyday consumer goods like meals and clothing become insignificant. In-game at least, I found that this was by far the biggest QoL gain from wealth.)

Has anyone else had this experience of feeling that mega-wealth doesn't feel as qualitatively different as one might have expected? Any other ideas as to why this might be so?