Crafting without the market or limited use

I'm guessing any crafted enhancement could be broken down into its base components minus inf necessary to create them... but then again I think it would be necessary to add some sort of component degradation to avoid excessive reuse of same components over and over.

I'm not in favour of this idea, I think the crafting/auction systems are enough of a grind and pain in the behind as is, no need to increase complexity further.

developers are against allowing the de-crafting of crafted IO's.

Currently the enhancement system is the only real in-game monetary sunken cost device, other-wise known as a money-sink.

The use of the enhancement system as a money-sink drives several of the design factors of the game. For example, players can only unslot and remove 10 enhancements at a time during a power respecification. Personal storage of crafted enhancements is limited through super-group bases, auction house slots, and personal email. The developers have declined to develop personal enhancement storage beyond the already limited instances.

Unless there is an abrupt about-face from the entire development team, this design position is unlikely to change, even if using a time-scale that's based on geological movements.


There is also the issue that what you want, ways to avoid interacting with the market, are already implemented in the game in several different format's.

Uncommon and Rare salvages can be purchased directly through the Architecture Entertainment system using AE Tickets. Common salvage can be awarded randomly using AE tickets. AE Tickets can also be used to purchase some types of enhancements.

Regular merits can also be used to purchase salvage, recipes, and enhancements.

Hero and Villain merits can be used to purchase salvage, recipes, Purple Recipes, and PvP recipes.

Ouroborus can be leveraged to fight specific enemies for specific salvage drops. Hamidon Raids can be run for Hamidon Enhancements.

So, if you don't want to participate in the market, there's multiple ways in which you can empower your character without ever touching a Wentworths or a Black Market station.

Some players already argue, and in some ways I agree with them, that there are already too many alternative ways to advance a character in City of Heroes. Technically, yes, Regular Merits can be converted into Hero / Villain merits by leveraging a massive influence sink... but for the most part the rewards systems are largely separate.

So while it is possible that the developers might consider yet another method allowing players to bypass utilizing the market for rewards, it is not exactly plausible. The impression has been given that players who don't want to participate in the market should go ahead and do what most players in the game do anyways: leverage the existing content and rewards systems.

As others have mentioned, it's trivial to get any salvage you want for a small investment in time by using AE tickets.

Currently you can get the rarest of rare recipe over the span of four days and 22 missions, spending perhaps as little as two or three hours of real time if you turn the difficulty down to -1/x1.

The only thing you can't get on demand off-market with relatively little effort is uncommon recipes. Currently you need to use reward merits to buy uncommons directly from the vendor, and getting reward merits is actually more time-consuming than getting hero merits, though it's easy enough to run Ouroboros arcs at -1/x1.

I'd like to see an option to buy a full set of an uncommon recipe for two A-merits. For example, for 2 A-merits you could get all three Steadfast Protection recipes at the desired level.

I don't what your talking about with the 22 missions in 2 to 3 hours. I have numerous 50s of assorted builds at my disposal. I just find it very unlikely to complete 22 missions in 2 to 3 hours even stealth running. BUT I am willing to try it out if your willing to explain a bit more.

I would like to see a way where I could use my unwanted IOs and salvage to get stuff I would like without having to deal with the market or the randomness of the AE system. The market is too easily manipulated. Further you need to plan a build weeks in advance or be consumed by the buy it now syndrome. I would be willing to turn in 10 kinetic weapons and get 1 other salvage in return. Or turn in 5 Thunderstrike assorted IOs for 1 Thunderstrike Acc / Dam I am missing and need from the set.

Basically convert several items into 1 item I can use. That is the crux of the idea.

I'm just going to address those 2 comments.

I do my fair share of reading, but without a doubt don't read it all and miss stuff. You tend to speak from first hand knowledge. I wouldn't mind seeing where the dev said, mentioned or hinted they are against de-crafting IOs.

I would imagine they where against the market merge at one time also. And I recall you stating something along the lines that the devs would never do that as well. I think its poster mac( something) that has your comment as his signature.

As for the merit system, sadly that systems clashes with the grouping system in this game. So either I need to solo a story arc to get my merits or they need to fix it so a group could get merits for doing missions. I recall them saying that they were aware of the merit system not being useful in a group situation and were looking into it. So I think that also goes against what you think the devs are thinking as well.

Sure.

The first thing is to turn down the difficulty to -1/x1/No Bosses. Then give priority to the tip missions that your character finds easy to do. This will vary by character. For example, my Mind/Electric Dom has a terrible time with Nemesis because they have some sort of resistance to Confuse, though Crey and Council are trivial to deal with. My tankers generally steamroll Nemesis like they aren't there at all.

Because there are only like 10 different tip missions for each set of levels, you'll quickly learn the gimmicks for each of them. Some can be completed in a few minutes, while others take longer. That's why you do the easy ones first. You want to put off the time-consuming ones as long as possible. You'll eventually have to do some of them, but you may luck out and avoid the long ones. When you do the morality mission all your tips will be tossed out and you'll be able to pick up new ones.

Then, if all you really care about is getting A-merits, run with the characters that can do the missions the fastest. You can always global email the items you buy to other characters.

Considering that most well-built level 50 brutes and tankers can easily solo most missions at +0/x8/Bosses, running that same brute at -1/x1/No bosses should be trivial. The only problem will be missions that have escorts or weird mechanics that cause you to run around looking for a chained spawn (of which there are quite a few).

Personally, I get bored doing things this way, so I usually run at higher difficulty. I'd rather take my time and have fun, rather than always racing against the clock. But I'll occasionally resort to doing it the fast and easy way; it's always nice to know how the limits can be pushed.

On my dom I usually run tips at +1/x2/no bosses, and most of them take between 10 and 15 minutes. A level 50 brute or scrapper running at the lowest difficulty should be able to crank through most of the tip missions in 5-8 minutes, or 2-3 hours for 22 missions.

Edit: I just did two Hero tip missions with a Fire/Ice tanker at -1/x1/no bosses (You're a cruel one Mr. Phipps -- free three hostages, click a glowie, defeat a boss; and the rescue of Sister Jocasta -- rescue hostage from a boss, escort her out). The first took 4 minutes, the second took 7. The most time-consuming part of those missions was getting to them: one was in IP, the other was in Crey's Folly. The mission teleporter, the WW teleporter, the Ouro teleporter and a base with all teleporters can make things go much faster.

first off, this statement is completely false. you have no clue what you are talkign about.

second, there are things called TF/sf/trials in this game that are perfectly fine for getting merits on a team. infact, the whole team gets them. i think it works that way in ouro also. also, what DrMike said.

link to this please.

lastly, the invention system is an INFLUENCE SINK. it is working as intended.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com//showthread.php?t=239155
Your right I don't, but it seems they do. I think you can do your own searching in that forums for other similar threads.


Average players are not doing Trials, Strike Forces or Task Force missions every day. The average player is doing regular story arch and radio missions. Unfortunately I can get an invite to a team in which the Team Leader is running his story arch and has already started and has done the 1st or 2nd mission already. So though I am gaining the regular Inf and Exp. after running the story arch missions only the TL ends up getting the merits for the arch. Even if I have the contact but just never picked up the mission from him.

I am doing the TIP missions pretty much as to what was mentioned already. I thought it was something else others might have been talking about. Regardless the above reply still holds true.

i really don't see that as market manipulation. all they are doing is buying things from the market. they are not relisting them at a higher cost. and if they are getting them that cheap then that means everybody else is bidding less then that. see it as you will, but there are various other means of getting what you want without having to use the markets. and your idea is not one of them that i would ever want to see implemented.

You mean all the ones that explain what is going on, and how to make mountains of inf.? Yeah, they're not hard to find, being as a lot of them are stickied.

Seriously, I think you're misunderstanding that thread.

Then why has common low level salvage jumped back up to 25k-100k?

The word "flippers" comes to my mind.

I'm misunderstanding the thread ? I am pretty sure the title makes it clear.. Do you know what a black hat is ?

They clearly talk about buying up IOs and selling them at a MUCH higher price.. They discuss about buying up 1 IO out of a set and then reselling them for a much higher price.. They also discuss about just deleting the IOs.

Here is the deal. I play 2x a week. for about 4 hours a day.. Over 5 years I picked up maybe 5 or 6 purple IOs.

When someone is selling Obliteration IO for 50 million.. To a player like me it might as well be 1 billion.. I just tried my chance to get a Obliteration IO from rolling silver rolls which gives me a 50% chance to get a rare from table A and rolls from table B.. Since both tables had Obliteration IOs I gave it a shot.. I tried to roll for lower levels since it was slightly cheaper. After spending 6000 tickets I didn't get a single Obliteration.. I did get a crap load of turtle something from the slow set. 6K worth of tickets is about a months worth of work.. Pretty much all down the tubes.

I can not afford persay to waste my time playing wall street game when I want to play city of heroes.. I do sell some stuff, but again I do not have 10 hours in a day to research what the latest and greatest IO is going to be. Or what electric characters IOs I should buy out and flip for a much higher price..

TF give you 25 Merits, I might be able IF I am lucky ( and that is a BIG IF ) do 2 a game session. The reality is I might get in 1 a session. So that is 50 Merits a week. If I was lucky enough to get into 1 TF per session It would cost me 1 MONTH to be able to pick up a LOTG recharge. Just ONE LOTG. I'm not even talking about purple sets here.. Forget about Purple sets for this discussion..

The real reality is I don't get into a TF every night I play. Unless maybe if I hang out with my Kin every night. But as many I want to play other toons also. Those other toons don't get invited as much as my Kin persay. So I might, which as of this writing I don't, but I might get 200 merits a month if I put mind to trying to accomplish something. Again do you think that is right or fair ? Hey I understand you, you have much more time to play then me. So you can do all these things. I don't straight and simple.

But when I do run missions I do get salvage. I can afford 1 million to 2 million a week to buy some salvage.

Why can't a average player get the chance to have some decent stuff as well. Why is it required I need to go to the market to buy IOs.

TIP system. Okay Every 10 missions I get a Hero / Villain Merit. Which I can use every 20 hours. First off I have done these missions as mentioned on -1 +1 setting. Let me just say even at that setting these missions do not take minutes as described. Especially ones like the one where you need to do the 3 escorts out of the mission. So again I am compelled to do 5 hero / villain merit missions when several of my toons in attempt to farm some tickets for the following week when I can turn some in.

I know all this stuff seem trivial when you have all the time in the world to spend. But many don't.. Why can't I use the items that drop for me in the normal course of game and convert them to what I want. At least now I am not pegged to running 5 hero / villain missions on my toons then trying to get a TF/SF. Selling the IOs I don't need. Figure out if I can make more selling them crafted or uncrafted. Move stuff around from toon to toon.

You know those Orange con Pacing of the turtles, I don't need them. And they sell for garbage. So for the amount of time I spent on the obtaining those tickets I feel cheated. I feel like I'm a hamster on wheel with no reward at the end. And its a bit disheartening and a bit of BS for spending 6k in tickets and getting nothing out of it that I can use on any toon. Or sell for any real value so I can buy something I can use.

Now if I could break them down into some sort of salvage to make another IO or build up my supplies towards making that IO I might need. Then at least I feel I have gotten something out of them. At least they went towards something I can use or eventually use. But as of now I got junk for a lack of a better word.

I mean really think about it.
By the time I log in and square my stuff away and what not. I'm already down 30 to 40 minutes. I'm down to 3 hours and change. Unlike what one poster said about doing 5 missions in 10 minutes. Another 20 to 40 minutes later for the TIP missions. I'm down to 3 hours or less. Again that is just one toon. If I get lucky and get on a TF / SF thats another hour. Even if I am hanging around Cim or RSF waiting for a speed run or just doing it normally time is going to wasted. Again this is assuming I am running on a 50. If I am doing something on a lower level toon much of this can be kissed good bye.

The simple thing your missing is you have to either run AE missions or Do TF / SF every game session. Why should I have to do either or both or any. Why can't I obtain what I want through normal game play of running radio missions or doing the many, many story arcs the game has to offer.

What your saying is the AE system and TIP are part of the normal game play. They are absolutely not, they are additions, but not part of the regular game play. Otherwise it wouldn't matter if you were doing a hero or vigilante mission for the TIPS, but it does. You can't be screwed by doing a radio mission or story arc mission. AE missions are in a building in certain zones. You don't leave the building. IF that is what this game is about then might as well get rid of the zones and have you just log into that building after creating your toon. So again AE is not standard game play.

Story arcs a flawed as I mentioned. If you help a player do 8 out of 9 missions for a story arc you get ZERO credit.. Even if you have the contact or could get the contact. You would have to do all 9 missions all over again.

End result normal game play for a average player is useless. You get random drops during missions, you get random drops for AE system and the Merit system in one shape or form has limitations placed on it. Understandably why, but nonetheless Limitations are there.

Again a to a Billionaire a million is not a lot. I think that is the way many of you guys are thinking about this. Hey dude, every night when you get on do this and this and leave the weekend to doing this and this. Well if I could get on every night then maybe it would be good.

I could understand if someone feared that a player might flood the market with IOs and lessen the value of a IO, thus preventing you from making billions. Then just tag the IOs created by players as not trade able or sell able.

But did you actually read the contents of the thread? The title is one thing, but what's behind it is what matters in the end.

Tell me something... If you buy a recipe, what does it matter what you do it with after that? If you put it in a character's build, it is no longer in circulation. If you delete it, it is no longer in circulation. If you put it for sale and someone buys it, it was put there at a fair price.

I play about as much as you do and have got about as many purples.

Random rolls are random. Besides, getting 6k tickets takes me about an hour. Maybe less. I haven't really played AE much, but I'd guess it takes me about 10mins to clear a mission for 1.5k tickets. If you play 8 hours a week (2x 4h), you're saying it takes you 32 hours to get those tickets (I assume work = wasting your playtime, that's how I see it anyway). If you're not spending all the playtime in a given month for those tickets, they are not a "month's worth of work".

I'd also say that the "last 5" prices at the market often represent the "buy it NAO" price. You can easily get the items for less than half of that if you're patient. If you're not, well, then it's your own fault.

You have no time for the markets, but you have time for farming/collecting tickets? That's quite funny, because marketing is far more efficient. Besides, it doesn't take "10 hours a day" to research the markets. Exaggerating to get your point across (which is, I don't like markets) isn't really a good way to go about reinforcing your argument. I spend 10-20 minutes a day at the market at the beginning of each play session. This has enabled me to completely IO out multiple characters (many have 5x LotG +rech or purples) and have multiple billions of influence on hand.

I used to farm, then I discovered the markets and abandoned farming. While marketing may be boring (I don't find it boring nor fun), at least the boredom doesn't last as long as with farming.

I've always thought it's a waste of time to use merits to buy specific items. It's much better to roll them, sell the drops and use influence to buy that stuff. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes unlucky, but I have the feeling that on average it's more profitable than buying the items you want to. On the other hand, I can see the appeal for goal orientated people to know exactly how far they are from getting their LotG.

I think it's completely fair. People who put more time into the game get better rewards, straight and simple. I haven't been able to do many TFs (I've done maybe 2 or 3 in the past month) recently because of my finals, but somehow I've managed to buy 3 LotG +rechs and other rare stuff to enhance my alts.

Putting some effort into understanding the markets goes a long way. You don't need to know economics (never studied or had interest in it). I just do it because it lets me do what I want (make super characters) while avoiding boredom (farming). Overall enhances my game experience because the pros outweigh the cons by far.

8 hours of play gets you around 1-2 million? Whoah. Play your 50s a bit more and you'll see a lot more influence. Even the "worst" 50 can earn a baseline of 1mil/hour with the best of the best getting as much as 30mil/hour from drops only (at vendor prices). Playing a 50 for one hour should easily get you a few million. 500k from defeats and 500k-few mil from recipes, common lvl 50 recipes sell for around 100k each at vendors. Then if you get lucky and score a rare you'll easily get a few million in the market.

Not required. It's just a whole lot faster to trade your unwanted stuff for someone else's unwanted stuff. You can play the game and eventually you'll get all the items you need, but it'll most probably take much longer than using that time to earn the influence to buy them from other players. I don't know how you define "average player", but we play about as much (I play around 1h a day), and I can afford just about anything on the market.

Which is why you need to learn to know which tips to avoid and which ones to pick. When you learn to know the tips, you can cherrypick those that suit you best.

But you can do just that. You convert your unwanted drops into stuff you want by selling the drops on the market and then buying what you want. If the stuff you want is more expensive than the stuff you get, you're just unlucky and we can't do much about that. Also it takes a whole 10 seconds to figure out if you can make more selling them crafted or uncrafted, just search for the item at the correct level and see if the difference in price is more than about 3mil.

Bold added by me for emphasis. Sell the stuff and build up influence to buy what you want. The markets already work almost exactly like the system you want to implement.


I don't know what you're doing, but I don't do TFs even every week. Most of my characters level up by doing story arcs and saving up the merits for level 50. At level 50 I roll them and can often afford the whole build with the money from the rolls. I often also do some low level marketing while leveling up and get a few hundred mil doing that.

AE and Tips are just a good way to get rares for those who won't bother to put in some effort to learn a more efficient way. If you don't want to learn that easier way, it's not someone else's fault that you can't make as much money as they can.

This is something that annoys me, too, but the easiest way to go around it is to also start the missions yourself when you start helping someone with the contact. If they have already done the first mission, but don't want to help you complete it so that both of you will get rewards, they're obviously not worth the help.

You don't need to do stuff every night to get influence from the markets. Just read some of the guides and you'll learn. Then again, if you choose not to learn the lack of influence evidently doesn't bother you that much.

That's not at all one of my worries. What I fear is that the system many players already find complex will become even harder to understand if you add "disenchanting" to it. I think if this was implemented, the "junk" would disappear. Every rare would now be a possible component to a more valuable rare: most pieces would just be valued relative to how many of them are needed to craft the most expensive thing. You know, if you needed 5 Pacing of the Turtles to craft a LotG and the LotG cost 100mil, you'd have the Pacings go for 10-20mil a piece because of that and people would start complaining again.

Sorry if this comes across snarky.

I would like to be able to break apart crafted junk IOs (Oh, the unsellable garbage my former SGmates put in the bins!) into components that were either usable or sellable.
I wouldn't care if they broke into the same components or random, lesser ones from that which they were built.
I'd just like to get the salvage out of them (or even random, lesser-tier salvage). If I got the same recipe out it would just get vendored.

I disagree with your reasoning as to WHY you wish to avoid the Market, but that's another thing.

Agreed, as long as they were "Salvageable" for something. . .

So you beat Smurphy's Challenge?

Impressive!
What was your strategy?


Or wait, are you just talking out of your hat?
=(

from a gameplay standpoint a 'disenchanting' mechanism would create a market for all that absolute garbage people *have* to make to get badges. It's like vendor mules who nibble off the garbage salvage at the bottom of the food chain.