PvP IO and Purple drop

This is delicious. Uberguy didn't use the qualifier "all" in the quote in your first response to this thread, either, but that was essentially what your counterpoint nit was picking at in your original post in this thread. But when your own statements are under the microscope, your defense is "If I didn't use a qualifier, you can't pin one arbitrarily to any statement I make!"

Which is exactly why I put him on ignore, and made my ZZ Top splitting hairs comment.

My English professor called that Word-O-Mancy.

You should ask him for a refund.

Fan: It's obviously they are doing to you what they were doing to me. You aren't allowed to have a dissenting OPINION with or without facts, unless you are part of the club. They will gladly take an opinion and turn it into a debate over minutia and try to turn you into a clown in the process. This has morphed into a meaningless debate over whether or not you said or meant "all" in a sentence.

It's no wonder the majority of people who come to the boards won't post. It's obvious their opinions will be clobbered immediately with a handful of regulars spouting fiction as fact. If that doesn't work then come the insults and sarcasm followed closely by bulldozing the conversation off topic into a debate over something that has little to do with the original post.

Everyone here needs to put their big boy underpants on and realize however "right" you think you are does not mean you are. And that is regardless of how many people agree with you. You aren't omniscient. Unless you can produce undeniable FACTS, your opinion is THEORY or OPINION and therefore it is no better than anyone else.

Being this is a public forum for all players, and not your own personal website, you can either accept the fact that people will not always agree with you or you can go post somewhere else like a Republican or Democratic website where everyone thinks exactly the same. People are allowed to post opinions that don't agree with a so-called "peer-review" of forum regulars. You don't have to like other people's opinion nor agree with them but you do have to accept them and without sarcasm and insults.

Using insults and sarcasm in an attempt to stop a challenging opinion or make a clown out of a poster for his opposing opinion to the "peer-review" is not only childish, but that's how things get out of hand like the majority of this thread. And putting people on ignore because they won't agree with you is no different then putting fingers in your ears and humming to yourself..... that's what toddlers do.

Until some of you realize this and practice it, we can only assume you boys want to play it like a school yard, then so be it. But for as long as dissenting opinions are attacked, you'll only find people who won't agree with you even if/when you are right.

If you'd be so kind as to look back at Fan's posts, you'll notice he does a pretty good job of twisting his first major assertion (regarding Stealth IO prices) in order to evade the arguments brought up by myself and others. Even after hard evidence was posted he still juked and dodged said evidence by clearly stating his post was the equivalent of "When I said I got a hair cut, I only meant one or two."

Besides, the reason I put him on ignore wasn't because I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and sing a capella about other stuff until he stopped talking. I put him on ignore because he's doing what politicians do best. Really, that wasn't meant to be a personal jab at him; what he did with his argument is pretty common to see done in D.C. His method of evading our posts consisted of warping his first statement any time someone decided to take it in the context he allowed it to be in. Here, have a look.

Anyone who has a basic understanding of sentence structure and present tense will most likely infer that _Fan was himself inferring all Stealth IO's were up beyond 100 million inf. He continuously said "where did I say they all were expensive?" and immediately made it clear that no matter what we said or showed him, he wouldn't A) alter his original post to coincide with his arguments, B) acknowledge the fact that his initial statement was wrong and could be proven wrong, and C) take the fact that he could be proven wrong with any grain of salt. When it was clearly pointed out to him that he was in fact wrong, rather than admitting it and understand that his argument may or may not be extremely misleading, _Fan decided to play armadillo and wrap himself up in a shell of semantics.

The "big boy" thing (as you call it) for _Fan to do would be to admit that his Stealth IO statement could have been better worded, go back and change it, and then resume his stance that certain Stealth IO's being more expensive than certain PvP IO's is outrageous. Instead he just made snide comments in his defense and overall made himself look like the one who stuck his fingers in his ears. He's on my ignore list because, personally, I can't stand that sort of thing and I'd rather not pull myself into the abyss of flinging personal insults in a thread that quite honestly could have turned out far better than it has. I will admit that I got snarky, but had I not put _Fan on the iggy-list I'd have said far worse things and probably brought Mod12 down on my head like the fist of a furious deity.

There. Ignore explained, situation explained, take it for what you will.

When a theory syncs well with a lot of observable events, that lends a lot more credence to the theory that claims to explain the same phenomena, but doesn't sync with observable events or is only valid if you exclude some the same observations. It also helps when theories have had a lot of discussion. Theories about CoH market manipulation is have had a lot of discussion and even experimentation. There's certainly been a lot of static in the discussions, but we have still filtered out some pretty applicable knowledge, too. It's not that new theories are always wrong, though some people act that way. It's that new theories have an uphill battle to show why they're better than the existing ones - they need to present a good case in order to displace the current thinking, exactly because the current thinking has usually been put through a lot of paces.

In your original posts on the topic, you said things that suggest you really aren't necessarily that familiar with how the in-game market really behaves. It's unfortunately pretty common for folks like that to come along and make sweeping declarations about what is going on about the market. How likely is it that someone who illustrates fundamental lack of understanding about something is presenting a valid theory about what's going on?

It doesn't help that it's common for people making what seem (to market regulars) like outrageous claims seem all too often hell-bent on the perspective that skilled market users are all some horrible people who act purely as leeches on the community of otherwise innocent CoH players. They lace their "theories" with denigrating references at best and outright insults at worst. That's a sore spot with a lot of us, and it doubtless makes us lash out worse than we should against people who just have seemingly poor theories. That's what I did with you.

I want to be clear - I don't think you did the things I'm talking about above, at least not in the same sense we frequently see. Based on your original posts, I handled you pretty dismissively and you challenged me to provide some backing for it. I took that seriously and posted a lot of information. You seemed to me to really consider the things I said, and you modified your position, even if just slightly, to account for it, and that really reset the tone of our conversation.

For what it's worth, none of that's is what was going on in my conversation with Another_Fan. Don't get me wrong, he's a frequent voice of dissent in the Market forum about how more manipulation goes on than the regulars want to admit. But while he and I are usually on opposite sides of that argument, you might notice that nowhere in that huge conversation did that topic actually come up between us.

On a text only forum, I am being ignored by someone who can't read.

Welcome to life, and the Human condition.

I actually hit View Post to see what you posted.

Clarify something for me: Why are you using arguments against yourself to bolster your own statements?

EDIT: Even moreso, why are you using an argument that doesn't even pertain to your statement? UberGuy used that post against rsclark, not you. UberGuy is right when he said the IO's are easier to obtain. You, however, made a different claim. Where is the disconnect happening?

Do you have yourself on ignore ? Or just not listen to yourself, after all if people that evade arguments by warping statements upset you so much, you must have real difficulty with your own posts.

Yes yes, I see the quotes I made, I understand you're trying to talk down to me.

You still haven't answered my question. UberGuy was not responding to you in that post you quoted. He was responding to rsclark, well before you made your claim. You posted this:


You were responding to the post UberGuy made in the first place. Now what you said is grammatically misleading and can easily be misconstrued.

Read this carefully, and I'm not saying that to be rude: UberGuy said that Stealth IO's are easier to snag than PvP recipes. You, however, said the exact opposite thing and then used his argument to show that yours is correct. I'm really at a loss for how you're working this out in your head.

Really, all I want from you is a detailed post of why exactly your claim on Stealth IO's is proven to be right by UberGuy's post, a post you refuted the very next post after he made it.

If you don't answer my question and simply reply to this with a bunch of free-floating quotes and a snide comment about my attitude you'll just be on ignore again. The only point in this thread where I went against claims I myself made was when I made a snarky comment to you about personal attacks. Other than that I have stood my ground on my opinion and have (unsuccessfully) tried to get you to make sense of the things you're posting.

The market forum has one of the worst cases of confirmation bias anyone is ever likely to see. Its extreme in the way it filters theories, and and interprets facts. I still laugh at when Smurphy on the Chriffer account was saying that the market would function more efficiently and be less volatile if we had open an open outcry system instead of a double blind system. It was even more hilarious when market regulars told him he didn't know what he was talking about and should go read the market forums.

And to be accurate, I did mention up thread that the market was now for all intents and purposes irrelevant. Between tickets, merits, and the new hero villain merits just about anyone can completely evade the market and equip their character in good time.

Just going by the results of their actions, it looks to me, like the developers didn't buy the arguments the marketeers were making anymore than anyone else did. I am just ecstatic that they actually merged the markets despite all the arguments people on the market forum for it. I mean really when you have people over and over come up with schemes of the order "Make people take random rolls so they have to sell things cheaply when they don't want to, and we can buy them cheap", even if they say something that is correct you are likely to turn a jaundiced eye towards them.

If someone walks into a bar and says, "liquor isn't even remotely as expensive as wine", is this correct or incorrect ?

Someone at the bar says, "Glen Fiddich is going for $150/bottle, Muscatel for $4.95 a gallon", correct or incorrect ?

First Guy Says "Aha, Glenn Fiddich is only $10/glass, you're wrong", correct or incorrect.

Well first, I don't drink, so I wouldn't know. :P

Second, I think there's just been a giant communication failure here or something because I still don't understand how you orchestrated your posts, so, I'm excusing myself from that subject.

I'd like to see some breakdown of that. I use all these tools, and I would currently never try to outfit myself using any of the non-market tools as my general source of gear based on my perception of the time it takes me to obtain specific goods. I would use all those tools to produce goods either that I could sell on the market in order to buy what I really want, or sometime to produce strategically chosen items for which xMerits or tickets are the more cost-effective options.

My experience is not that the market is the only way to outfit one's self, but I certainly find it is the significantly more efficient one in general. This includes the fact that I typically produce stuff via drops, tickets, Merits, etc. and sell them. (Whether I produce random goods or not depends on the source.) I haven't tackled meaningful "marketeering" (flipping, etc.) in over a year, and I am working on the assumption that "marketeering" is more profitable per unit time spent logged in that fighting, especially since I really don't engage in classic farming.

So I guess I should start by asking what you mean by "good time".

Well why don't you start. Then I can tell you, you're wrong, and we can turn the meaning of the word good into a popularity contest.