Personally, I value them to be about 75 mil each. This assumes that you can purchase a recipe every 2 A-Merits for an expected value of 150 mil. This translates into 150 mil / 2 = 75 mil.
At 75 mil sustainable, it would take 40 A-Merits to obtain the 3 billion you'd need for the money to buy a GA proc.
Fulmens probably has the exact worth of an A-Merit laying around somewhere, though be forewarned, it most likely has to do with complicated maths and I'm sure it factors in the flexibility of a triple-jointed squirrel in the equation.
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If 75 mil is the value, then saving A-merits for a GA proc is best. Now, marketeering is another way to purchase a GA proc...but spending 3 B inf is a hard proposition for most people on a single item.|
Originally Posted by Misaligned
At 75 mil sustainable, it would take 40 A-Merits to obtain the 3 billion you'd need for the money to buy a GA proc.
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Until I see some data, I think conventional wisdom (i.e. random roll and sell) is wrong on this one.
"Oh dear. Maths."
-J.K. Rowling, when someone mentioned that the scoring system for Quidditch makes no sense.
The first thing about the market is, nothing stays the same price for very long. The second thing is, if you calculate an equivalent value two different ways you get two wildly different answers. Inefficient marketplace, lots of profit to be made.
I've been considering a random roll to be worth about 20 million since before Going Rogue, which makes an A-merit worth about 100 million. But that was pretty much based on a 200-million-inf LoTG 7.5% (and supported by various high-priced Kin Combats and Impervium Armors and whatnot.) The price has gone down somewhat- 75 million sounds reasonable.
In vague "what it SHOULD cost" terms, an A-merit is twice the rolls for the R-merits (plus a 20 million fee) which means 40 million per A-merit (or 8 million per random roll). Given infinite time and a rational marketplace, that's what an A-merit would be worth, about 40 million. We have neither of those, obviously, so I think we can call that a lower end.
At some point the value of an "Average random" would [again, rationally] be expected to be 1/5 * 1/30 the value of a PVP +3% Defense, which would imply [for a 3 billion inf Defense] an average random of 20 million per roll, or 100 million per A-merit.
There's obviously an inconvenience factor- many people will get 10 or less A-merits and give up- so the PVP will be disproportionately more valuable.
... 75 million per A-merit is an entirely plausible price. I don't know if the 3-billion price for the PVP 3% Def is stable, though.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
Based on my limited experience with converting A-merits into recipe rolls to sell I'd say that any estimate that pegs the "typical value" of an A-merit between 50 to 100 million INF would be acceptably realistic.
Obviously there's nothing out there to guarantee that value one way or the other. But let's just say for the time being they are worth "far more" than 5 million INF and "far less" than 500 million INF. Give or take a few million... 
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I don't see the price dropping...well, at all, without a large increase in supply and large decrease in demand. Neither of those two are likely to be satiated, so we can expect prices to stay very high.|
Originally Posted by Fulmens
I don't know if the 3-billion price for the PVP 3% Def is stable, though.
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Per your earlier points, there will likely always be some value bounding: that is, an absolute low point and high point. The average value can be expressed as a weighted average of those two points; the weights will change, of course, to reflect the interaction between buyers and suppliers (aka the market).
30 HVmerits for the +def pvp unique IO.
2,000,000,000/30 = 66666667 inf
I guess an HV merit is worth a lot to me.
Be well, people of CoH.
For me 1 a-merit is = 50 merits + 20 million inf or 100 merits (5 random rolls)
On average I would say 1 a-merit is worth 50 million to me.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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It's always about 666 with you... =P
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Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
30 HVmerits for the +def pvp unique IO.
2,000,000,000/30 = 66666667 inf I guess an HV merit is worth a lot to me. |
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
(Buys A merits from SwellGuy, sells them to BillZBubba)
What?! I still make a little money.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a *real* useful invention. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...t-sarcasm.html
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If they were transferrable I'd sell them on the market in a heartbeat.
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Originally Posted by Yomo_Kimyata
(Buys A merits from SwellGuy, sells them to BillZBubba)
What?! I still make a little money. |
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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If they were transferable, I'd already have both of the pvp IOs I need for I-19 and I'd be selling the farkers on the market until I was inf capped on some arbitrary number of characters.|
Originally Posted by SwellGuy
If they were transferrable I'd sell them on the market in a heartbeat.
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I like the word arbitrary. It makes me happy.
Be well, people of CoH.
I'd say A-Merits have no value, aside from to yourself, as there is no way to transfer them?
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I don't like it when it is used in front of "decision". |
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
If they were transferable, I'd already have both of the pvp IOs I need for I-19 and I'd be selling the farkers on the market until I was inf capped on some arbitrary number of characters.
I like the word arbitrary. It makes me happy. |
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
From a very small sample size, rolling 4 A-merits in the 20s, I've produced 125 million+ per A-merit, after subtracting crafting, salvage, market, and A-merit entry fees.
My rolls in the 40s (taken at 35-39) have certainly been less remunerative (also a very small sample).
Worth more at 20? What would be the best level to stay at for A merit purposes?
A game is not supposed to be some kind of... place where people enjoy themselves!
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Originally Posted by Carnal
I don't see the price dropping...well, at all, without a large increase in supply and large decrease in demand. Neither of those two are likely to be satiated, so we can expect prices to stay very high.
Per your earlier points, there will likely always be some value bounding: that is, an absolute low point and high point. The average value can be expressed as a weighted average of those two points; the weights will change, of course, to reflect the interaction between buyers and suppliers (aka the market). |
Absolute low: 50k (or less depending on level) for straight vendor trash. If all you ever do is roll and vendor, this is your lower bound.
Absolute high: Assuming you are the luckiest person on Earth, you could potentially roll 5 x (insert expensive proc) on every roll. This *should* average out to about 175 mil per recipe (after costs) which would give you an upper limit of about 875 mil per merit.
Obviously, you're going to fall somewhere in between those. But there are your low and high end bounds.
Looking quickly at the rare recipe roll weighting project (using the 30-34 range due to volume and popularity) being done by others with much more patience than myself (found here) I would place your actual value much closer to the low end than the high end.
The apparent weighting seems to favor recipes that sell for about 10 mil on average with a few bigger fish in the mix. The weighting also implies that some real garbage has a much higher chance of dropping than some of the better stuff.
All in all, you're going to eventually find that random rolls will become less and less profitable at 50. It is extremely easy for most people to crank out an A-Merit and roll with it. This leads to an excess of the "weighted" recipes filling the market. While leveling to 50, you may or may not find good "parking spots" for your character to roll on. I have a level locked 35. The stuff there sells well, but not nearly as fast as the level 50 stuff moves.
If I had to revise my earlier answer, I would say that on average, the recipes you randomly roll are going to be worth roughly 10 mil each and the purchased (for 2 merits) can be cherry picked to generate the 75 mil per merit I listed before.
As for the 3% procs staying at 3 billion... well, that's something we'll see, won't we?
Personally, I feel they'll come back down to roughly 2.5 where they were right before the merger. There is no real explanation for them to be up to 3 bil at this time other than a perceived shortage. The influx of them doesn't appear to have died down dramatically, so I think they'll start to come down over the next couple of months.**At 2.5 billion, you still need 34 A Merits (at 75 mil each) to get one through sales. In order to "break even" 30 merits @ 75 mil, you need to have the price come down to 2.25 billion
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Originally Posted by ChaosExMachina
Worth more at 20? What would be the best level to stay at for A merit purposes?
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I would expect somewhere between 30-35 would give best results. But... then again, that can change over a weekend.
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There is the option of placing a bid and waiting...and waiting...and waiting...|
Originally Posted by Misaligned
**At 2.5 billion, you still need 34 A Merits (at 75 mil each) to get one through sales. In order to "break even" 30 merits @ 75 mil, you need to have the price come down to 2.25 billion
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However, you should eventually get one for 2 bill (I got one in a month like that, pre-merger).
Anyway, I concur with your average value of 75 mil = 1 AM.
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Market dilettante though I am, I don't think Fulmen's quote can be over-emphasized. Averaging per-merit worth based on the Gladiator's unique seems little misleading. Or, if you prefer, a little too optimistic.|
Originally Posted by Fulmens
There's obviously an inconvenience factor- many people will get 10 or less A-merits and give up- so the PVP will be disproportionately more valuable.
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If you went all out with one character, diligently running Alignment missions and Task Forces (or story arcs) every single day and taking the once-daily R-Merit to A-Merit conversion, then unless my math is off, the fastest you could earn the GA proc is about 20 days.
20 days doesn't sound terrible, given that we're talking about the rarest of the rarest enhancements in the game, but it's a pretty grueling 20-day grind in what is otherwise a fairly casual game environment. And after all of that, either you end up with one IO to use yourself, or you have to arrange an off-market trade with someone who might not be trustworthy in order to get full price for it.
With less effort, I can run two or three mid-level characters through their daily Alignment missions (which seem to be shorter and easier at lower levels), gain a lot of highly marketable recipes on piecemeal random rolls or 2-merit purchases, and level up in the process if I so desire.
Because I'm not saving up for anything in particular, it doesn't really matter which characters I choose to run on a given day (as long as they're over SO-level), and failing to log in for a day or two doesn't interfere with any established plan. Hell, it doesn't even really matter if I suddenly lose interest in (or flat-out delete) one of the characters in question. I may end up with a slightly lower per-merit value per character with that approach, but by the calendar I'm getting very close to the same reward in far smaller chunks of time.
Long story short: There's something to be said for liquidity. The less flexible, longer-term option should be more profitable over time, when you really think about -- but even then, it isn't necessarily better.
For what little it's worth, I'll probably save up for one Gladiator's Armor unique for my Tanker just to say I did it, but it ain't likely to happen in less than 100+ days. The single-minded grind required to go much faster than that just sounds too much like work.
YMMV.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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No, but you can transfer the goods obtained with them, thus they do have value, even if it's not fixed.
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Originally Posted by Haetron
I'd say A-Merits have no value, aside from to yourself, as there is no way to transfer them?
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@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."
"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."
I did a fairly extensive run of "buying merits" (Back when there were only r-merits) and it went pretty well. I bought a few a-merits as well. So you can approximate marketing with them.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
A quick check suggests that on Oct 6, the most valuable direct A-merit purchases--crafted--are Unbounded Leap stealth, lvl 10 at 100 million/Amerit, followed by
Steadfast Res/Def lvl 10 (save on crafting!), at 80 million/Amerit
Miracles look like they fluctuate as high as 100 mio/per, but mostly offer the standard big three's 75 million per. (Level 20 Miracle's salvage a bahgain!)
Caveats: I didn't check recipe prices and forgot to check Regenerative Tissue proc lvl 10.
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The Uleap stealth looks like a bubble about to burst, most people slot them in sprint and will cotton on that the celerity one is currently cheaper so the prices will equalise. The set starts at 15, so if you got a level 10 one you'll sell it for a fortune.|
Originally Posted by Reptlbrain
A quick check suggests that on Oct 6, the most valuable direct A-merit purchases--crafted--are Unbounded Leap stealth, lvl 10 at 100 million/Amerit, followed by
Steadfast Res/Def lvl 10 (save on crafting!), at 80 million/Amerit Miracles look like they fluctuate as high as 100 mio/per, but mostly offer the standard big three's 75 million per. (Level 20 Miracle's salvage a bahgain!) Caveats: I didn't check recipe prices and forgot to check Regenerative Tissue proc lvl 10. |
Regen tissue 10 regen is about 85M, Kinetic combat 35 dam/end about 80.
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
Hi there! Watch as I eat my words!
Now understand that this is not empirical. Nor is this how things will "actually be". This is however taking the best data that is available and applying some basic math to it.
I was curious about how the weighting affected a random roll. So... I went and gathered that data from the wiki. Then I went to the market and got an approximate price for each and every IO listed. In order to do this, I had to make some assumptions:
- The person random rolling is level 50
- The person doing the rolling is going to craft all of the recipes they get
- The person rolling will sell their crafted IO for approximately what the market shows currently
- Reward merits and A merits use the same pool to roll from and use the same weighting (this may turn out to be bugger all false - if it does, I'm sorry)
One last assumption was made: Prices fluctuate. However, they never all go down or all go up at the same time. When one comes down a bit, another goes up a bit. This allows us to make the assumption that the weighted value of a roll will remain fairly constant.
I managed to plow through the 10-14 rolls (not exactly looking forward to the rest of the rolls *sigh* very time consuming) and after applying the weighting, I came up with the following number:
Approximately: 24,800,000
This is the *average* value of the crafted IO you will get from a random roll in this range. This can then be extrapolated to show that a random roll from an A Merit will yield 5 crafted IOs with a gross value of approximately 124,000,000.
This is significantly more than the 75 million I originally stated. Hence, why I am here eating my words.
I will be extrapolating the prices across all of the rolling ranges (that have data) and posting what "appears" to be your "best bet" when rolling your A Merits.
For right now, I would assume that the 10-14 and 15-19 will be the highest average number with an overall smaller pool to draw from and a higher premium paid for sets that cap at lower levels. But that's just a guess for now.
Howdy ebil marketeers,
The conventional notion on the boards, with regards to obtaining the Glad Armor 3% defense proc, has been to:
1) Earn A-merits;
2) Exchange A-merits for random rolls or 1 merit recipes;
3) Craft, sell, profit;
4) Buy GA proc
The underlying assumption is that 30 A-Merits > 3 B inf (or the prevailing market cost for the GA proc). For that expression to be true, each A-merit must be valued at over 100 M inf...
Now, here is my challenge: is that assumption valid? After salvage costs and the listing and selling fees, does each A-Merit consistently yield over 100 M inf?
I have turned an A-merit into 150 M inf from a single recipe exchange, but that result was not sustainable. Random rolls can produce alot of vendor trash, so I'd expect the estimated value to be lower than 100 M inf.
I have no empirical data to support my claim, but I'd venture that under certain conditions, the random roll/craft/profit method would be a better way to obtain a Glad Armor proc (i.e. lvl 40 locked character performing rolls).
On the whole however, I believe that exchanging 30 A-Merits for the Glad Armor proc is the optimal approach. The question boils down to this: what is the "true" value of an A-Merit?