Buying Reward Merits

Honestly I still fail to see how allowing exploiters to trade tickets for merit rewards would allow an AE exploiter to gain greater rewards than they can already get by just trading in the tickets.

Oh holy craps, if I could buy merits..... *SALIVATE*

When you get exactly what you want, it tends to cost more.

PvP and Purple IOs cost even more so.

I'd say with the current system the 5000 tickets equals 1 Reward Merit is likely the most likely outcome for such a system being added.

Figure there are farmers who can zip through the content and be racking them up if it was much lower.

The point is that the exploiters can find exploits FASTER than the devs do. All it would take would be one exploit and there would be MASSIVE farming of AE merits and (with your RIDICULOUSLY wanted low conversion rate) mass Reward Merit farming. NOT. A. GOOD. IDEA.

My ss/fire brute would be parked in the AE permanently if they could allow you AE to Merit conversion.

And that is by simply running random AE missions, no farms at all.

/unsigned, unless:

1. personal ticket AE storage increased to 99,999.
2. 1 Reward Merit=9,999 AE tickets.

I think it's safe to say the devs will NEVER do any of these things.

Also since it takes 11 missions/50 Reward Merits+20 mil fin to get 1 A merit, anything less than 5000 per Reward Merits is ridiculously favoring AE over any other content. Not going to happen.

EDIT: I personally think a Reward merit should cost 9,999 AE tickets.

Fixed my typo in my first post above.

Sure the exploiters can find exploits faster than the devs can fix them, and sure these exploits would then lead to reward merits. Sure you can farm tickets in large quantities and then convert them to merits.

My question is: What would you buy with those merits?

Lets say the devs implemented a 200 tickets = 1 merit conversion. You get on your brute and farm up some ridiculous number of tickets, for the sake of an argument lets say 100,000. You then go and convert those tickets to 500 merits. Now what do you spend those 500 merits on?

You're not buying rare salvage, the merit price for that is 20 merits (or 4000 tickets) for a random piece when you could get a specific piece for 540 tickets

You're not doing rare recipe rolls, those also cost 20 merits (or 4000 tickets) but if you spend the tickets on directly in the 30-34 or 35-39 ranges (generally considered the "best" option) they cost only 3700 tickets (which equates to two additional rolls).

You're not converting them to A-Merits, those are on a 20 hour gate.

You could be direct buying two LotG 7.5%s (and one random roll) but is that really a better option than 27 random rolls? The market forum would say no.

So, if people did start farming tickets for the express purpose of converting them to merits what would they buy with the merits that is more valuable than what they can currently buy with tickets?

Every argument I've seen against this has focused on the Time to Merits ratio but at the end of the day what really matters is the Time to Reward ratio. As far as I can see at a 200:1 conversion ratio a tickets to merit conversion option does not decrease Time to Reward below what is already available with tickets, it simply opens up options.

That's because the original intent for AE is not for farming. AE is being exploited to farm, and allowing a tix->merit exchange is just another exploit to farm.
There's a facebook game out there that allows you to farm and is free with no monthly sub fee. It seems like a waste to pay $15/month just to farm.
So I vote no to tix->merit exchange.

ok.... NO. what part of that word do you not understand? there is absolutely no reason to mix merits in with tickets at all. merits have nothing to do with AE and should stay that way. and your silly little conversion rate would never fly. stop fighting a losing battle.

Very nice reasoning you have there.

AE Tickets shouldn't be able to buy Merit Rewards because AE Tickets shouldn't be able to buy Merit Rewards.

Why would anyone bother with making random rolls with AE tickets if they can trade them in for merits and buy exactly what they want. Having to make random rolls is the consequence of running AE missions. Changing that defeats the purpose of making the rolls random in the first place.

If we want the ability to pick and choose our rewards then we have to do the regular content. Just like if we want to pull every enhancement from a build we have to use multiple respecs.

Why? Because that's the way the devs want the system to work.

Yeah... you're completely missing the point. I'm not arguing about whether or not merits should be purchasable with tickets, frankly I don't care one way or the other. However pretty much everyone who has argued against it has put forth the argument that an exchange rate of 200:1 is completely and utterly unreasonable and I'm simply asking for them to demonstrate why.

Based on the rewards currently available for both merits and tickets the 200:1 ratio is pretty accurate and if I was deciding which to farm I would use that in my calculations (we'll ignore for the moment the fact that I don't find farming particularly interesting in the first place).

If you want to posit that with the current reward structure 200 tickets has less buying power than 1 merit you're welcome to do so but please demonstrate a situation where that applies.

The general consensus amongst people who follow the market is that random rolls produce more inf over time than direct buys.

And you'll notice they haven't rallied round and come here posting their support for the OP's idea.

I fail to see what point you're trying to make here. In fact I would say the fact that a person prefers random rolls would generally make them indifferent to the OPs idea since it wouldn't change how they personally interacted with either merits or tickets. Unless the devs had a complete loss of sanity and set the Ticket to merit ratio low enough that you could get more random rolls by converting tickets to merits than you can using tickets directly adding a ticket to merit exchange doesn't change random rolls at all.

Yep I read them all. The basic argument seems to be:
"200:1 is ridiculous because it would mean an average of 2.5 merits a minute which is higher than the developers intended" (using 1500 tickets in 3 minutes, I've seen a few different values posted so I'm picking one semi randomly, it doesn't matter to much)

My counter-argument is:
1. The general consensus I've seen amongst marketeers is that when converting merits to inf random rolls are best
2. At 1500 tickets in 3 minutes you can already get a random roll in 7.4 minutes which is equivalent to 2.7 merits a minute anyway (given that 30-34 and 35-39 are more popular rolls than 45-50)
3. Therefore under the current reward structure adding a 200:1 conversion rate would not actually change the time to reward from farming the AE since it would be more profitable to take the tickets and do gold rolls instead of converting them to merits.

If I've misunderstood people's core argument or there's a counter-counter argument I've missed please, feel free to enlighten me.

It's far more likely that the devs would simply remove AE tickets altogether before they'd allow people to trade in tickets for merits.

If people could trade in tickets for merits only someone totally unfamiliar to the game would waste tickets on random rolls hoping to get a lucky score, when he could swap them for merits and choose the items selling for the highest price on the market each and every time.

Fix'd that for ya Adeon.

Nope, read my other posts, I frankly don't care one way or the other. I spend both tickets and merits on random rolls so a conversion wouldn't impact me at all. My argument has simply been that if an exchange was implemented 200:1 would be a sensible exchange rate. Please don't put words in my mouth.

Sure, totally irrelevant to the point I'm making though

That's actually rather insulting. Swing by the market forum sometime and ask there. Most people opt for random rolls since on average you come out ahead compared to direct buying. You get about 12 times as many recipes doing random rolls compared to direct buys. Direct buys are a good choice if you want to avoid risk but you don't get as much over a pro-longed period.

there is no sensible exchange rate. people would find the fastest way to get tickets to exchange them. in other words, exploit the system. there is already a way to get around the cap for tickets on a mission. this would be heavily abussed if it was implemented. there are already more then enough ways to get merits. there really is no need to add another.

Yes, I realize that people would find ways to maximize ticket gain, they already do after all. My question is:
How would they spend the merits that would be more profitable than the current options for tickets?

Adeon did you notice the silly emote? I was teasing you. We just disagree on this subject.