PvP IO and Purple drop

Then there is no hope for you. Market manipulation exists, you denying it does not make it non-existent. Period.

You can't spend Reward Merits at all to get a purple or PvPO, and spending Alignment Merits on a Stealth IO will cost you 1/10 or less than a purple or PvPO. Moreover, you can only obtain certain, generally unpopular purples and PvPOs for 100M or less. My assertion stands.

That is a bit misleading, as only certain (low) levels of run speed stealth have gone for that much.
Level 15, 100m+
16, 17, 18 ~33m ave
19 33-150m
22, 20m
28, 5-12m with a 30/40
29, last sale 11m
31, alternating 20m and 5-6m
in the 40's, a bunch of 555 sales, and a level 50 buy it now price of 22ish.

leaping level 50s? 100k.
Below lvl 20, should be able to obtain for 20m or less.
Slot it in sprint or a vet run.

I can't spend Rands either. Unless you are arguing that its easier to earn merits and purchase directly, than it is to generate inf by any activity and buy from the market your assertion falls flat.

This may be entirely true. It is also possible the people I know who brag about market manipulation maybe aren't always as successful as they claim. I am aware of what they do and I know they've been working on this a very long time, but I only know what they claim and I can observe.

I am not going to devalue anything you posted here as you are at least open to the possibility that it happens. That makes us at least in the same ballpark.

baddog "Market manipulation exists"

macskull "it's not possible"

uberguy "So is nothing on the market ever manipulated? I know better. Is manipulation ongoing and rampant? I don't believe it's likely at all."

This more or less summarizes the points of view, and I doubt anything is going to change this, so let's leave it there.

So all of the run speed IOs are more expensive than about 25% of the pvp ios ?

Buying PvP or Purple IOs with hero villain merits is the absolute worst way to obtain them.

Buying stealth IOs directly with merits is meerly a poor way of doing it.

The best way of gaining either in terms of time efficiency is earning inf and buying them.

Please compare apples to apples.

Edit: Asuming 30 minutes for 5 tips 36 minutes for 5 tips+alignment and dual boxing = 11 hours for a purple, 15+ hours for pvp io vs Several random purples/hr for a good farmer or 5 hrs/pvp io using MacSkulls wrong number of 1/60 kills

When people talk about the price of PvPOs in the abstract, do you assume they're talking about the ones that very few people slot?

You wandering into a conversation days after it petered out and applying arbitrary limitations on how people play the game is meaningless on many layers.

Earning an arbitrary level Stealth IO is easier than earning a desirable PvPIO or desirable purple IO in every possible way one can try to obtain them. Desirable here is defined by the items that have high demand compared to their supply. That's what my statement meant in context.

From what I have seen in this thread it has been about nothing but arbitrary limitations on how people play the game.

Really ? How many people are slotting gladiators armor uniques ?

just stop. you have a bad habbit of taking something and twisting it so that it fits your idea of what is going on. kinda like saist and some others. so just stop.

Don't be dense - I'm not denying that manipulation exists, but I am saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, for reasons that have been shown several times in this thread. I've even offered you my inf to prove me wrong, but you haven't taken me up on the offer. Why's that?

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."

Seemingly a lot less that the number of people slotting Stealth IOs. It's almost as if Stealth IOs are easier to obtain...

<3 Macskull

And just what is that ? I pointed you can easily expect to over 100 mil for stealth IOs but you can get PvP IOs and Purple IOs in the low millions.

We have one guy who is digging out special case pricing, and making unjustified assumptions about the drop rates for the IOs. We have another who sets up takes the worst way imaginable to get these things and goes see it will take you forever to get these things but you can get stealth IOs really quickly.

As to the desirability ? To who ? I find the purple sleep and confuses very desirable, the Ragnarok chance of is also very nice. My controllers, blasters, and defenders slot them all very effectively. The PvP hold set is also good, and the javelin volley quad and triples are also very very good for rounding out the abysmal targeted AoE sets.

When people talk about purples and how they are expensive and hard to find, do you think they're talking about Coercive Persuasion? Sure, there are characters for whom players slot that set, and if a character both has a sleep and benefits strongly from high recharge, it can be a very smart thing to slot. But because some people slot it does not mean that it's the exemplar of what people think of when they talk about purples in general, especially in the context of being hard to obtain.

Try putting together a list of recent sale prices for PvPOs by piece. Then feel free to discuss whether any of the pieces that cost anything like 20M are representative of what folks on the forums are referring to when they use a vernacular reference to PvPOs. We don't have to be pathological and restrict the discussion to the +3% defense unique - there are plenty of other PvPOs well over 20M. I'll help you out. The 20M examples are to the collective set of PVPOs what Coercive Persuasion is to purples. In fact, some of them probably aren't even looked on as favorably.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that you're that detached from the vernacular of the game, which leads me to conclude that you're arguing this point for the sake of argument. Then again, you argued some pretty outre angles regarding highly optimized builds in another thread, so maybe you really are badly disconnected from what people are doing and saying.

Take that the other way, On the characters I have that use Sleep and confuse sets, I doubt I would gain very much benefit at all from slotting a gladiators unique or even a full panacea set.

As to what the folks on the forum say, well I just got done reading a thread asking for regen to be buffed when it is being buffed. In another thread, I spent 20+ posts trying to explain why using base recharge numbers doesn't produce meaningful results, so I can only go by what is actually said. Of course, all you had to say was you meant the most expensive PvP and Purple IOs. In that case a fair comparison would have been the most expensive items you can buy with some form of merit.

Would that thread you are referring to be the one where you argued, that inherent fitness pool was a negligible change ?

Except that's not what I said. You seem very keen to devolve everything to the edge cases and try to frame the argument as if all references must refer to those edges. Try comparing the average or median prices of purples to the same calculation for non-purple rares. Then try the same for PvPOs to non-purple rares. If all PvPOs were 20M except for the Panacea and Glad Armor uniques, then it wouldn't be common to call PvPOs expensive. There's more to it than that.

Flipping that same thinking around, I don't actually think it's fair to say that Stealth IOs can be represented as costing 100M+. Level 15 Celerity Stealth IOs specifically might cost that much, but anyone looking for a Stealth IO not only can look to other levels, but can look to a completely different set that performs 100% identically for a fraction of that price.

Then, one needs to consider that when a pool A/C/D Rare recipe gets a really high price (let's call that 100M+) a player has the option of avoiding that direct market cost in the form of merits (of one kind of another) to create them outright. You and I very likely consider earning 100M no problem, and would both consider using merits that way inefficient. Yet we both know though that there are players who would either find it easier or perhaps just personally more enjoyable to spend two to four days pumping out some sort of merit to buy a level 15 directly. But if they want to do that with a purple, or heaven help them, a PvPO, they better hunker down.

So including all the optional ways to create a recipe outright, and looking at median or average market prices in order to make statements about whole categories of IO, if I were going to speak about either PvPOs or purples and ask whether they were harder to obtain as a category than Stealth IOs as a category, I would absolutely say yes. And I further extend that to all the pool C/D Rares as a category.

I'm referring to that thread, but that's not what I argued. I argued that the change was a more dramatic change for characters that didn't have Fitness (particularly including the low end of the game where fitness is not presently an option) than gaining three powers (but no extra slots) was for most previously optimized builds at the high end. I frequently stated that I agreed that there was a shift in power at the top end, but I argued that it was not as large as some were suggesting, because they were combining what they could do with three extra powers with room for improvement that was already present in their build, then calling that that whole improvement the change introduced by inherent Fitness.

Its an interesting kind of edge case when in the case of PVP IOs most are not that expensive, and in the case purples you have pieces from 3 sets that are horrendously expensive, 2 set that are relatively inexpensive, and 4 sets that gyrate between the price levels.

Actually what you said, was that having 3 extra power picks was not a big thing thing for a "Min/Maxed build", that the ability to free up extra slots or pick powers that could be beneficial with minimal slotting would not be transformative or a major improvement.

The simple rebuttal is all the builds people have done for I19 with marked increased levels of performance. I am particularly enjoying the Shield Defense builds that now have one with shield.

Ah, yes, your favorite arguing tactic: qualitative.

Would you care to make it quantitative and provide either the median or average prices? Use whichever you think best supports your position.

And I reiterated that again above. Swift, Hurdle and Stamina and Health at level 10 with no cost to other power or pool picks? Transformative. Three powers when you're already heavily min/maxed? Not typically transformative, with specific exception made (repeatedly) for builds with high defense who can add even a little more, because of how defense stacking mechanics work.

And as I pointed out, not one build actually produced included only changes relating to the new powers. They all included additional improvements that were already available, then tried to say that the three extra powers made the entire delta possible.

Were they defense capped before? If not, why didn't they already have it? If they are defense capped, how often do they require a big chunk of resistance that they want to be careful to only activate when they can manage the crash? How is obtaining this power transformative?

I already have. But, I do appreciate your attempt at insinuation to bolster your failed argument.

I think that is more the path you have gone down.



One with the shield is +resistance, + recovery, and + HP on a softcapped build .If you can say ,being able to layer those on top of positional defense capping, isnt transformatve its pretty clear you are defining transformative in a way no one else does, or just redefining it so no matter what the change is it doesn't qualify.