Does the Market suck this bad? Say it ain't so!

Did no one else notice or care that every single link on the guides section of this forum is coming up "Page not found"? I don't wanna sound whiney, but... for real?

Since that's the case and I'm completely new to IO's and the market, does anybody know of any other (working) guides to making money? I'm thoroughly poor blueside (~3 mill total influ) and no moneybags on red (~20 mil). Again, not trying to sound whiney... but unless I'm completely wrong, the market system is takes a lot away from the game. Let me see if I've about got this pegged:

The whole feeling of "I just enhanced my character, now watch me go into battle and show off!" can only be achieved through hours of crunching numbers and "working" the auction house to get inf. Once you MAKE enough inf to IO your character you get to spend even more hours painstakingly deciding how to slot your IOs so as to maximize every single little set bonus you can find. You are allowed this privilege every few levels until 50, if you want maximum enhancement efficacy. Want to customize your powers so your Dominate is holds longer, but recharges more slowly than every other mind controller on the block? Too bad: All customization is squashed by the overpowering need for set bonuses.

Did I say "need"? Yes, I did. One could make the accusation that SO's are still in the game, or that generic IO's get the job done. If I'd give up on min/maxing, I could quit my nerdrage against IO's, right? Wrong. Ask any long-term MMO developer and they'll tell you straight: If you say "here's a way your numbers CAN be higher," the people hear "here's how your numbers SHOULD look." We're not talking 1 or 2 percent here, either: Maxing out set bonuses results in huge and noticeable increase in efficiency.

Buy low, sell high, work the market, make inf, assign slots perfectly, slot enhancements perfectly, maximize set bonuses, obtain super-expensive/rare enhancements like Miracle/Perf. Shift...

Good grief! I didn't spend this much time crunching numbers in WoW!! You could realize your full potential by raiding, getting the best gear, and enchanting/gemming it. If this is the world of making money and realizing your character's potential, I guess I'll be gimp the rest of my CoX career. This is just too much.

*Sniff* I can't figure out if this is a legitimate call for help or just a troll post. I was in the midst of formulating a substantial response, but then remembered all those times these just turned into pointless protestations of the casual vs power gamer perspective.

I'm not trolling at all. I'm very frustrated about this. I understand the softcore:hardcore dichotomy, I really do. For the most part, I'm okay with it.

WoW is a good comparison here. I was never one of those guys who could spend hours a week raiding for the best gear. But you know what? I was always in high-level dungeon epics due to the badge system and some casual raiding. I didn't have the most 1337 ep!c enchants/gems, but I had the money and know-how to be decent.

I have no problem with CoX having a system that caters to "hardcore" gamers that have the time to spend crunching numbers and working spreadsheets. My beef is that, if I'm hearing these forums right, the difference between soft/hardcore builds is *substantial.* Game-changing, even. It's not just "my attacks do 10% more damage than yours because I slave over the auction house." No, it's "My global recharge is 15% less. I have a +60% global acc bonus. My endurance recovers 50% faster than yours." These are SERIOUS improvements that make a softcore gamer's blaster look impotent next to the competition.

IMHO, the softcore-ers should look at the hardcore people and go, "That's pretty cool, it must have taken a lot of work." As it is now, however, I feel like a kid looking through a window at something I'll never have.

I'm not saying time invested should not yield return to the hardcore players. My point is that ALL types of gamers, casual or hardcore, should be able to feel super-heroic while playing this game, without pouring half their life into it. This game is NOT hardcore. (How many 50's do YOU have?) It's sorta crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. That's why I like it, and why I came here fleeing from the min-maxers of WoW. Looks like I may have come to the wrong place.

Seriously, if you craft and carefully sell every worthwhile recipe drop on your way up to 50, you'll easily earn loads and loads of loot. Common IOs 20+ that folks use all the time often sell for more than a quarter-million a pop crafted. I get hundreds of acc, dam, endredux, and rech recipes on a toon by the time I reach the level cap.

It takes a little extra time, storage management, and occasional patience in waiting out common salvage price spikes.

Plenty of uncommons and rares are worth crafting and selling as well, but it will require poring over the market some.

Or, once you have a small stake, you can merely purchase recipes on the market cheaply, craft, and sell IOs dearly, without ever having to "earn" them yourself by arresting critters.

Helpful, cash-earning tips repeated here weekly:
-Play a level 50 lots (purple drops, highly marketable uncommon/rare recipes, vendorable commons).
-Play a character with AoE damage, the ability to survive lots of critters at once, and solo (try -1s--your drop rate will be faster).
-Collect merits by running TFs/your own arcs/grabbing all the explore badges in a zone. Turn those merits into cash. (~1 million/merit if you save 200 for a 25 LotG +rech; perhaps even better return using that for 10 rolls in the 35-39 range.)
-Create an AE mission that helps a certain toon of yours level fast, garner lotsa tickets and convert them into bronze rolls.*

*As a test of earning rates in AE recently, running less than an hour's worth of a suitable mission (4 runs--700-800 tickets from critters, then click finishing glowy), rolling bronze tickets level 10-14, buying the salvage and crafting the good ones, a toon of mine produced well over 130 million in sales, and the tickets aren't all rolled yet. (This character is 50, and kitted out nicely already, so initial earning rates would probably be lower.)

Doing a good build hardly requires hours of number crunching. Most of the time other people are willing to do their share of the crunching here on the forums. Download Mid's, work out a build and post it on the forums, then tell us what you want the build to do and what your budget is. Most of the time you'll get responses as to if it's even possible with that kind of budget and even whole builds.

As you build more characters you become more proficient with Mid's and you learn some of the sets so building becomes faster and you'll need to worry less about how your product is going to turn out.

Getting the optimal performance requires many of the more uncommon and expensive IOs which means for most that you have to work for it. I think this is completely balanced and how it should be. Good performance on the other hand can be achieved by anyone, simply frankenslotting powers and using inexpensive sets results in a much higher performance than SOs. With the some of the unwanted IOs on the market which cost next to nothing you can easily slot powers so that they have 50% more SOs worth of enhancement value than you have the slots for, i.e. in 6 slots you can easily have 9 SOs worth of enhancement value.

This already boosts your performance because instead of the generic 3Dam/1Acc/1End/1Rech you can have 3Dam/2Acc/2End/2Rech resulting in basically 30% global Acc, Rech and End reduction. Not bad.

It pays here, as well as everywhere else, to learn stuff. If you're willing to learn some simple rules it won't take long before you've automatically also learned some of the harder stuff, too.

Yeah, I was very softcore before. I still don't consider myself hardcore, something inbetween, I'd say. I don't play that much, but I know my way around stuff. I also know how to make influence without too much work involved and have some characters with heavy IO slotting. Is it impossible? No, unless you feel entitled to it for free. Well, can you get it without work? No. Did it involve massive work as you imply? No.

The easiest way to get started:
1) While leveling, do story arcs. TFs too if you have the time. Then save your merits!
2) Sell your drops, but save whatever you think you can use yourself soon. Basically that means recipes that any of the characters you're currently leveling can use.
3) Patient bids! I can't stress this point enough. You can easily get your build for 25% less influence if you're willing to wait a few days with your bids. It's guys like Mr. Buy-It-NAO who get my my money.
4) Use your merits once you get to 50. Most recipes are worth the most at their maximum level.

Last night I was able to give my Fort a pretty nice 2.8% AOE defense by buying 9 Maelstroms to go into my ranged attacks. Initially I was just buying them to frankenslot her attacks for Acc, Dam and End Reduction. But by buying 3 sets of Acc/Dam, Dam/End and Dam/End/Recharge and then adding 3 other cheap Acc/Dam from some other cheap set I now have her at 40% Acc, 85% damage, 18% recharge and 40% End Reduction, plus nearly 3% AOE Defense (which is pretty handy for her, taking her to 38% AOE defense when Mindlink is up).



All for roughly 1 million inf and I won't have to worry about slotting those attacks again (so you could deduct the cost of replacing 48 SOs over her journey to 50 from that).*


The market is fine, even Red Side, if you go for bargins which compliment your character rather than the top end stuff.

Before ED you could have a spectacular build or a horrible build depending on how you slotted your SOs.

Before IOs you could have a good build or a horrible build depending on how you slotted your SOs.

Since IOs, now more than over half of the game's entire lifespan (May 2007-) the options are much more varied.

1. Crappy build no IOs can save because someone just picks and chooses and doesn't pay any attention.

2. Good build that can gain benefits from IOs.

3. Awesome build designed for particular IOs.

Assuming most people are in category 2 or 3 because if they are in category 1 they may as well at least use Mids to design a respec to category 2, let's continue on.

In category 2 we will assume the baseline of competent slotting of SOs. This is what my level 50s before I9 came out, a dark melee/inv scrapper and a bots/ff mastermind, fall in. I upgraded them to common IOs exactly replacing their SOs and saw only a marginal improvement because of ED.

They could handle most enemies on the old highest setting which would now be +2/x1.

Next up I have some characters who came along after I9 and are slotted for specific IOs benefits to beef them up.

They can handle more difficulty.

And finally my casually purpled warshade (I spent a year on doing it). He easily mows through more difficulty. I don't bother to crank it up more because that isn't my objective.

Comparison wise my first group bought their gear from a vendor, the second group has done a small amount of raiding and the warshade is raiding all the time.

Seems fairly comparable to WoW to me.

Hey all, thanks very much for the replies (especially the one that linked the non-broken guides!) I'm not sure if it's the abundance of trolls around here, but many of you seem a bit sensitive. I was trying to put forward my attitude of frustration (and, moreover, confusion), rather than the "gimme" attitude some of you accused me of. But... if you want to keep reading what I say through your own filter, that's fine.

It looks like there IS a middle ground between "I have no IO's because I don't have 50 hours a week to play" and "I want all my IO's for free." I didn't know that. I spent a few hours around here reading last night, and got the impression that having IO's sucked up a lot more time than many of you are portraying here. (Which I'm thankful for.) I'm not saying I want the "perfect" purpled-out build... just that it'd be nice to take advantage of set bonuses and do decent damage/control/whatever. (i.e. some global recharge on my warshade).

I'll give this a try. Maybe economics and math aren't my thing, but I seem to have a hard time grasping how some of these things could work. Can y'all help? (forgive me if some of these questions are stupid):

1) I've tried selling salvage. I have, on multiple occasions, scrolled through my full salvage list to try and find something that would sell for more than 1,000 inf. (I search it on WW and look at the history to find out if it's worth anything.) Is this the only way? Am I missing something? Should I be doing this on my 50?

2) My 50 is an ice/ice/cold blaster with SO's and a few Hamio's. (I got into WoW right before IO's came out, and have never got back into them full time). Obviously, she can AoE, but not survive lots of mobs at a time. Even though I don't like her as a toon, I don't mind playing her a bit to make some money.

3) How do I know what a "reasonable" patient bid should be?

Thanks again to all those who posted helpful tips.

What I do: Sell the big Inspirations you get from completing the Outbreak tutorial. Sell it at Wents.

Run around and mission/patrol whatever.

Sell everything, all drops, after checking the Wents/Bm price, the useless crap I sell at a regular enhancement store.

When I get a little cash, usually in Kings Row, I might check Wents for rare (orange) recipes that I can buy for 500- 1000 (or even less). There are a lot of "useless" lvl 50 rare recipes around with a large stock and no bids. Put up some very lowball bids and go mission some more. Later, come back and check and see if you bought anything. Take crap rare recipes to nearest store and sell for a decent profit.

Use TO's (as they drop) till lvl 11. 12-21st lvl I use Dual Origins from Steel. 22-35 use Single Origin enhancements. Around 35 I either buy or create and use Common IO's. I don't bother with sets until 45-50 and then usually only on melee and particularly my tanks. Globals and procs and stuff I might use on other characters, but not much.

Only once have I ever not had enough cash through normal PUG'ing to fill out my slots at any level. Bad RNG maybe or whatever.

Also, for Blasters and whatnot, if you have a 50 then get some missions of easy foes, (least amount of mez) and run them at -1 +5 and see how it goes. Go for the purples, it only takes ONE decent purp drop to set you up. bTW, do you have Hibernate? If not, then consider setting up another build or respec and take it.

What server are you on btw? Consider rolling up a Tank or Scrapper geared for farming. Hell, I'm using an Ice/Fire Tank and it works fine on anything while I slowly level my Spines Scrapper.

1.) You do not need to use the invention system to be successful in the game. We played for years before the invention system even existed just fine. You can do fine with SOs all the way until 50.

2.) The invention system takes very little time and effort to get a descent result from. Purple IOs are not really either necessary nor an entitlement. There are alot of IO sets that can be very easily purchased. You do not need to do the number crunching. Since the IO system isn't necessary to play and be successful, you don't need to worry if your build is perfectly optimal or not. Just find sets that give you more of what you feel you need more of and slot them.

3.) Playing the market takes very little time and effort. I'm probably the worst marketeer in existence and I never have less than 100 million on me. I've spent many more 100s of millions on my characters, too, most if not all of which have multiple full sets. My formula? Look up the current prices. Sell absolutely all salvage and recipes I don't plan to use in short order to the market. I list for about 10% lower than the going rate or for 10% of a recipe's build cost, whichever makes more sense. It's a HORRIBLE market strategy, but I still make millions. It takes me about 10 minutes at the end of each game session to manage, too.

Quote:

Originally Posted by eltonio This is over the top mental slavery.

My view on the builds you see on the forums:
It doesn't take any money or time to put a full set of Armageddon into Mid's.

How to make inf through play:

1) Do not play in a manner you dislike. If you don't like the L50 blaster, do not play the L50 blaster. If you don't want to spend some time learning to be an ebil marketeer, do not be an ebil marketeer. I stand by my quote in Nethergoat's sig: people throw money at you.

2) Assuming, for a moment, that you do not want to farm and you do not want to play a current 50 and you do not want to marketeer, does that put you Straight Outta Luck? It does not, surprisingly. I don't know Mission Architect farming- that is what the Goat is eating, more power to him- but if you want to accumulate merits, I know a little about that.

You get Merits for TF's (I don't remember when that came into the game- it replaces the random roll you used to get), you get them for finishing your own mission arcs, and you get them for a couple minor things (5 merits for all the location badges in a "core zone", for instance.) 20 merits = a random recipe at your level or max of set, 200-ish = a specific recipe at any level you like. Task Forces get you big handfuls of merits- often enough for two full recipes. (They also level you quite fast.)

Very roughly, you can get about a million inf per merit by rolling randoms at level 50 or by picking out specific high-value IO's (min-level Lucks of the Gambler 7.5%, or Miracle Recoveries, or whatever.) Maybe a little more at the moment, but that's my rough estimate. Rolling randoms at lower levels TENDS to make you less money.

FourSpeed: I wish they'd implement something so if someone quotes a person you've /ignored it looks something like this: