Important System Improvements in Going Rogue

This whole post has me a tad confused. How are you defining "markets"? The hero and villain markets? The market for each individual item that is capable of being listed?? Also, isn't liquidity somewhat base on a random number generator to create drops, so to a certain extent the liquidity of really rare items is a bit random. Not sure what your "obvious" stated problem is or what your "obvious" solution is.

Meh, maybe, maybe not. For the vast majority of stuff, I really do not look so much at the last 5 bids as I do at the number available and the number bidding for a given item. The last 5 items can often include somebody that needed it "RIGHTNOW" and overpaid to get it. It is not a fairness issue so much as a patience issue for most people. They simply cannot wait long enough to see if their bid is successful, so they get frustrated and go away in a huff hating the market.

What is a "hassle cost"? I really have no idea what you are trying to get at here. What is your definition of a "low value item" and why does the system encourage players to spend large amounts of time dealing with items of little value???

Perhaps because they are not problems...somebody go get the Goat. I am sure he would be better able to address this.

Yes to the first sentence. Waving away the second sentence like it didnt happen at all.

Any RP reason against this is full of equally obvious holes. Your RP is not greater than anyone elses RP.

Maybe not your problems but it works for me...

Don't think we aren't grateful for that. The mental image of you squeeing is enough to drive a person to self castration.

Eh, you're probably right. I can't say I stuck it out.

d

Oh hey, I didn't know that! Very cool.

Artificially inflated demand maybe. Common salvage going for over 1k just isn't natural. My brother and me amused ourselves a long while back with inflating the red side alchemical silver prices, just to see if we could. We just bought everything available on the market under 20k (was well over a thousend of them at the time) and started putting some of it back up for 50k, later increasing to 100k. Worked like a charm. We maintained this for a week or 2. Once we stopped it all collapsed back to 10k-25k a piece in a day. Still rediculously expensive imo.
Seeing the wonkey price history red side Alchemical Silvers a lot of people have been doing this. Currently it sells for 250-5000inf or something.

Or what about 50-100k prices on luck charms while there are thousands in supply? (No idea if this is still the case, haven't bothered with heroside salvage in a while).

I buy just about all my common salvage for 250 inf, 10k being the absolute limit for some extreme cases. It's just a matter of patience (a few minutes to a day at max). I can afford alot more, but I just find it rediculous to do so, when all the prices are inflated artificially.

Edit: Yey, inf transfers and insp trading across sides!

Yes, he's using the term market in the rather technical sense. I.e., each item is a market.

Each screen with its own bid and ask screen is a separate market. For example, a level 10 set IO recipe has its own bid and ask screen which must be accessed separately, and into which data must be entered separately, from the level 11 version of the same set IO recipe, and so on.

Even if you looked only at IO recipes and IO enhancements, and ignored the presence of salvage markets and every other kind of market, there would still close to 38,000 markets (I did the math). When you consider all the markets together (Hami-Os, salvage, regular enhancements, etc), the number of markets may nearly or even actually exceed the number of subscribers to the game, depending on the figure you arrive at for subscriber totals.

There is no hope of having anything approximating good daily trading volume in more than a minor fraction of all the markets in existence, given the current ratio of players to markets. A market merger doesn't change this basic fact. And, if this key underlying cause of poor liquidity had been addressed earlier, then the markets would have already been functioning far better than they currently do, even if no other steps had been taken.

Crossing over fully has the advantage of being able to solo the other side's content. Regular (non TF) contacts will not speak to you or offer their missions.

With 12 basic character slots per server and up to 21 market slots on each character, a single player can contribute to a great many "markets" at any time, so I don't see what the trouble is, or what the "obvious solution" might be.

This is only REALLY a problem if real retail considerations were present... storage, shipping, personnel and genuine scarcity of natural resources, to name a few.

Given that this is computer code, none of that matters; there's no warehouse somewhere in California filled to the brim with chunks of brass. The devs threw out a ton of different kinds of possible loot to meet every possible desire or need. It's not all going to move. Honestly, who cares?

We don't have a choice; if we want to use MA we have to do it through AE. The vast majority of players I've spoken with not only ignore the stupid backstory (really, I have no idea why anyone at PS thought that was a good idea) but treat MA stories as if they were "real" and not holodeck shennanigans.

Thanks to reward merits, I do have a choice as to how to get stuff.

I know. I won't. I'll get what I want with merits; my drops will be thrown out, vendored or shipped to characters on the same side that can use them.

The number of items lost by MAGI in the game's storyline is one.

Those are the only areas portrayed in the game. Canon fiction on the game's site gave a (stated) incomplete list of other cities attacked.

Defeated enemies "fade out" so that players can write in their fates, except when specified.

Now you're just being pedantic.

In the City universe, it would be. If someone wanted to know something about you badly enough, they'd be able to.

Doesn't work. The defenders have to be everywhere all the time; the attackers can be anywhere at any time.

Even if you assume that they cancel out, that just gets you back to a real-world equivalent situation, which the corrupt Wentworth's still loses. Fraud requires that you commit more frauds to cover up the initial fraud, which then require more frauds...it's unsustainable.

And if it were somehow logically necessary for there to be a merged WMD market you might have a point here, but it isn't even remotely necessary so you don't.

I guarantee you that if Lockheed Martin was caught selling missiles to the Taliban the penalties would not be limited to some managers getting fired and the company fined. I also guarantee you that the first time any corporation is caught shipping Enriched Plutonium to terrorists will be their last.

The Freedom Phalanx has never been very keen on due process, and they're supposed to be the exemplar heroes. There is no shortage of supers who would simply torch Went's and sort out the bodies later. (What do you think Malta would do to Wentworth's if they found out Went's was supplying supervillains?) Also, again, if you come up with solid evidence that someone is shipping plutonium to terrorists, no one is going to particularly care about how you got it. I'm sure that even moreso in the City universe than in ours, "national security" is still the root password to the Constitution.

Things like plutonium and alien technology are not just flat-screen TVs and iPods that can fall off a truck if the right people are paid off.

At the end of the Crey storyline, the Countess is in jail and the company is circling the drain. Yes, I'm ignoring what Manticore (the former dev) said, on the grounds that a) it's not in game and b) if it was, it would be the final notification that superheroes in Paragon City need to quit, relocate or turn vigilante and start killing suspects. For that reason I double-dog dare the developers to actually implement a storyline post "The Evil Countess Crey" that actually says she beat the rap and it's back to business as usual. Good luck explaining how that happens without the PC being involunatarily flipped to at least vigilante, since proving your innocence in said arc requires proving the Countess' guilt.

This argument is basically "the whole storyline is crap so who cares". Well, I do.

No, they're not. They're great big buildings in four parts of the city where superhumans go to sell and buy things that make them more powerful. The idea that they're some kind of abstraction does not pass the smell test. If the market wasn't supposed to be concrete then it shouldn't have been implemented in this fashion.

Actually, inspirations are not defined. They are whatever you think of them as.

I'm very confused by this definition of market.

What you're saying is that in order for the market to function properly, we have to have tens of thousands of each item for sale and bidding at any one time.

I haven't done the math, but it seems to me that's impossible even at WoW's subscription rates - unless you're proposing that the devs should reduce the amount of marketable goods.

Furthermore, isn't the blue-side market general considered to work well?

It's nice of you to think of us, Marcian. Thank you! I am confident we will have no trouble at all with whatever may eventually come to light. It's true we do enjoy our harmless RP, but we certainly can't expect everyone to take our perspective as canon, nor are we inflexible about the future. In fact, I imagine this sort of speculation about our personal morality will make for very entertaining dialogue in game. We're looking forward to the fun and profit!

Infiltrate and take over to gain control over more supers.

You know, business as usual.

It's even likely that it has already happened.

Ya I know, which pretty clearly indicates that the rogue/vig status is the most useful as it has the least restrictions and the most content accessible.

They talked about rewards for staying loyal, it makes me wonder what they are to make up for losing access to an entire game world now that all the other negatives of being between states and crossing over fully have been eliminated.

This is a great change and I applaud War Witch (or whoever pulled the trigger on it). It just seemed like they were using some of the inconveniences to transitioning as actual content during the process. By removing it it sort of seems like they will need to shore up the difference with solid "loyalty" rewards. Which may or may not be in place already.

It's not logically necessary - it was necessary for the game mechanics they're introducing in GR, and to improve the market's performance for villain-side players.

I'm not really trying to convince you to use the markets, but I'm just curious... if War Witch had got on and said, "Hey folks, even though the markets are merged mechanically for player convenience, our lore is that they are still separate - all bids are anonymous, so you can pretend the extra bids are coming from other NPC characters on your same side." Would you have a problem with it? In other words, can there ever be something that's mechanically true, but that you ignore for the purposes of RP?

So I note that you have no problem rewriting the game's canon when you need to, which is a good and healthy approach. So why the sudden hangup?

Except APPARENTLY THEY ARE, given that I can get these things by beating up a random Freakshow.

At the end of the one in Heroes, you mean, which was written before City of Villains and all ITS Crey storylines appeared. She and Crey are a persistent evil that can never be truly defeated, which is why they keep showing up in new zones and getting new storylines. Are you not familiar with the serial nature of superhero comics, or how villains are never truly vanquished once and for all? Just tell me you've heard of Lex Luthor, who has been openly responsible for crimes against humanity and was also the President.

At this point, honestly, it's like you're being deliberately obtuse.

1) No it isn't. My argument is "a shared universe written by a lot of people over a long span of time is going to have a ton of contradictions, so why act like that's not the case when you can just ignore what you want?" If you equate "contradictions" with "crap," well, we're at the root of the problem here.

2) You didn't actually address my point. The game is FULL of fallacies (not to mention a high level of moral ambiguity, intentional and otherwise). Why is this one the end of the world?

God, I'd love to see the regulatory body that oversees a store that freely sells enriched plutonium, devastating computer viruses and manifested shards of the fabric of reality to anyone who has enough money. I can't IMAGINE how there might be some corruption in an institution like that!

Okay, so you consider sources outside the game canon unless they conflict with your view of how the ingame world should be (the partial list of cities attacked by the Rikti is, btw, found in the same posts of "former dev" Manticore as the Countess Crey stuff). Also, great big buildings in the gameworld that are required to interact with a system cannot be safely ignored, unless they're the only way of interacting with said system, in which case it's totally okay.

Glad we got that sorted out.

aaahahahaha big ups, Gale.