What happened to the Market?

it's slightly disturbing when I find myself agreeing with Eryq.
But MA farming is vastly, VASTLY more efficient than traditional methods.

Any person who denies that farming happens, or that farming has an impact on the market, or that traditional farming is more efficient a way to make money than AE farming, is incorrect.

However, each of those suppositions is of its own scale, and one should keep it in perspective.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Continuing attempts by the devs to mitigate the attractiveness of the AE have helped somewhat. For a while, the AE was so good, you were nuts to avoid it unless you had personal reasons for not wanting to use it. And it was really quite easy to set up missions that gave crazy good rewards.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether you're a dev or an XP seeker, a combination of changes to the MA and the introduction of the I16 difficulty settings made "normal" content more competitive. I can go in a normal mission on a high difficulty and not feel like I'm just ridiculously missing out compared to most AE farm content. Of course, skilled folks continue to find new ways to squeeze off-the-charts XP out of the AE. I have little doubt a lot of people who still seek these out, but its adoption among the wider player base is nothing like AE was in its heyday, at I14 release and for a couple of months after.

There's something important about that which ties back to what eryq points out - if our most prolific power levelers are running in the AE, they're producing a fraction of the drops they otherwise would, because it's typical for them to ignore hitting the ticket cap, which they can do easily but stay in the maps to continue gaining XP.

Fortunately, folks who farm for drops' sake and not raw XP have an easier time setting up such farms thanks to the I16 settings. I doubt any of us know the ratio of farmers to power levelers, or how many people choose what method when they have overlap in those goals, but it has to help somewhat mitigate the "bleed-off" of drop production that I suspect the AE creates.

I also agree that farmers, power levelers (when doing things that produce drops) and their ilk probably produce a big chunk of the market supply buyers enjoy. I have no objection to them doing so.

I'm not really sure what any of that has to do with claims that so many people are in WW that it's reducing drops. The idea that our prolific farmers and PLers are standing around at WW too much of the time strains credibility. Certainly none of the ones I have known do that unless they're AFK or something, in which case they weren't producing any drops anyhow.

Edit: By the way, I suspect that non-farming, non PL-ing people who prefer to play at 50 are pretty competitive suppliers, taken as a group, with people who spend a lot of time farming or PLing. They don't produce as much stuff per unit time, but I strongly suspect there are significantly more of them. Farmers and PLers aren't the only reason the supply is at 50 (or at max level). A lot of supply is generated there because it's at a point where our characters are at their most powerful, and a lot of people prefer to play there. (Which is a big part of why PL techniques are in high demand.) When I play, I usually play 50s, and while I'm not technically farming, I'm fighting a lot of stuff at once and killing it really fast. It's not as good as "real" farming, but I bet a lot more people have characters that can do what I'm doing than have the builds and/or the attention span to "really" farm. An awful lot of people find "real" farming really boring, but love rolling content at 50.