2 billion per enhancer

Nice try, mister shill for the marketeer robber barons. Everyone knows you guys sit around wearing your monocles and top hats, sipping tea made from the tears shed from Blue_Centurion and eating biscuits made from PvP IOs just because you can.

I'm onto you! Power to the people!

ahem since it is in open beta I feel free to share my answer on that...

Level 50 stuff is going to hit the fan in the market once I19 hits live.

By that I mean the current gap between the least desirable and most desirable is about to explode at level 50. The incarnate crazed folks (like me) are going to be playing at level 50 like there's no tomorrow at very high difficulties meaning more drops and more inf.

Let them eat merits.

I know, but I've intentionally avoided most of the info related to I19. I haven't even touched Test Server...

Also many builds getting revamped so there'll be a lot of traffic in WW.

I disagree with the "no right" part, and the "they stop being a casual player" part.

Casual vs. Hardcore is an attitude, not a measure of how skillful the player is in game.

How did SwellGuy imply that casual = no skill? As you say, Casual versus Hardcore is more about attitude than anything else. Purples are not required for any sort of standard game play. The things they are important for are things that require a significant investment of time. The moment someone decides to set themselves a goal such as soloing AVs/GMs, soloing Pylons or the RWZ Challenge they are no longer a casual player.

It will be glorious.

While this is true, I think it makes no sense to speak of a "casual" player who expects to get the best stuff in the game. You can play baseball casually, but you can't play baseball casually and expect to win the World Series.

Purples and PvP IOs are exceptional rewards, and to get a lot of them, you have to do an exceptional amount of something. If you think you are entitled to them, either you're not a casual player, or you've got an unreasonable sense of entitlement. MHO.

I don't think you understood what I meant at all.

No one has any right to any drop in the game. And no one has any right to someone else's drops listed on the market or offered for trade/sale.

And the Casual vs Hardcore is exactly why I wrote what I wrote. When somone looks seriously at getting the ultra rare loot they aren't casual any more no matter how they want to twist the meaning of the word.

I think you explained it better than I did.

Huh? I like lowbie strikeforces, lvls 20-30. For that, I can make a 20-50 mil build and not die through the strikeforce. I enjoy the game very much even without it. I can even buy them if I really wanted to. But really, I don't need 2 bill IOs.

Please don't assume that you speak for everyone. Your post should read: (no corrections done for spelling etc...)
By greifer I mean someone trying to mak the game worse for Blue_Centurion.

If the griefer is making it worse for you, then don't buy from the griefer. It is possible to post what you want to buy in the forums and wait for someone to sell it to you at the price that you are willing to pay. Both of you do the trade in game, thus bypassing the market.

If people want to pay/sell more for something, they will find ways to do it even with caps. There is no reason to cap prices since salvage and recipes are available via AE, merit and alignment vendors.

I'd rather that the devs work on the Incarnate system and more content than trying to add caps on the market.

Allow me to prove you WRONG.

I recently received a L37 Panacea Proc. This is not a real auction, but as an example, I'll open bidding at One (1) Inf. Please tell me what you all would pay for this proc, as if it were a real auction, and please be honest and bid what your character actually has on hand/liquid and what you would actually pay. The faux bidding will commence immediately and stop on Saturday, 11/13 Midnight, and the final bid at that time will be the one I accept as real. If at all possible, for the last bidder before 12:00:01 AM Sunday, please post some sort of proof that you have that liquid amount available (like showing any open unfilled bids holding enough cash on the auction house as a screenshot.)

What will this prove? I'll let another person who knows about this stuff explain what it proves (briefly, please).

well just to explain my bid on this.

I believe as a PvP proc it works like a LotG plus a purple in that it is always on and always works as long as I have the power.

With Issue 19's new inherent fitness this means by slotting it into Health it will benefit me forever and always.

It would cost me 35 a-merits which would take me at least 70 days or 35 days plus 700 million influence.

So given all that I would happily bid a (likely losing) bid of 1.5B (I'd be keeping the .5B in reserve to get some other stuff and craft it)

I agree with what you say, and I did not intend to imply that SwellGuy implied that casual = no skill.

What I'm talking about isn't regarding any sense of entitlement. A casual player that plays this (or any game) for fun still has the chance to get one of these drops and potentially use it.

I understand what you're saying, but the statements that I responded to seemed to state that those casual players who have the luck to get these random drops don't deserve it and should give them up.

Also, deciding to seek out IO recipes and improve your character doesn't remove your casual attitude, at least in my eyes.

One was a post about bread in the Soviet Union. The other was about Cuba. The thread isn't that long. Surely you can find them.

OK, before we discuss the actual suggestion, that's not a "price cap". A "price cap" is where you declare by fiat that no one is allowed to sell a good over a given price. What you're describing is nothing like that. It's simple competition. Sellers on the market would be competing with a fixed price store.

Now, let's actually talk about the suggestion about introducing a fixed price store. Guess what? They exist! There are two - the Reward Merit, Alignment Merit and (in a more limited way) AE Ticket vendors all offer fixed-price goods.

But of course, those aren't exactly what you suggested, are they? You want a fixed price store (essentially) that' lets people buy things with inf. Have you given any thought to why the devs might not do that? Lets consider a couple of possibilities.

• Inf is comparatively easy to create. Top-end farmers have reported rates as high as around 30M inf/hour, and that's not counting any serious, wildly unintended rewards exploits, like when Masterminds were mowing down mass spawns of Archvillains with their pets.
• Inf is transferable. As a result, you you can pool it from other characters. As a result of that, you can buy inf from other people.

Inf is the easiest basic reward we can acquire in this game outside of XP and prestige - not shocking, since the reward mechanisms for the three are tightly coupled. Allowing people to use inf to directly create new items would enable the playerbase to wildly proliferate those items. I hate to break this to you, but the devs want it to take a while to get things.

You know what other thing is really easy to create? AE tickets. Sure, there are some additional restrictions around them that Inf doesn't share. For example, you can't trade them. Notice anything else you can't do with them? You can't buy the good stuff outright using them. Except for rare salvage, you can only get random invention components. That's more evidence that the devs don't want us to be able to use easily obtainable materials to produce specific goods.

Why wouldn't the devs want us to do that? Why only allow us to buy explicit drops with Reward and Alignment Merits? The implication is because they're more limited. Reward Merits, at least in theory, are supposed to be obtainable at certain rates. If a given piece of content has a median completion time to complete, it will produce Y Reward Merits. The ratio of Y/X is supposed to be fixed for all content of the same category. Alignment Merits have a firmly fixed reward rate - 1 merit per two days, or 3 merits per two days if you additionally burn 40M inf and 100 Reward Merits.

The devs place an extremely high time premium on our being able to obtain specific rewards. Inf is too easy. They want it to take us longer to obtain stuff on average, so all the store-like mechanisms use alternative currencies that are much better-controlled proxies for elapsed time.

No, you're being flamed and called ignorant because you won't even consider the possibility that you're wrong about what's going on. Is there market manipulation? Sure as hell there is. It is not happening where you claim it is. Honestly, if all you had claimed was that there was manipulation, I might not even have posted in this thread. Instead, you claimed very specifically that the most expensive items are being manipulated, and there's just too much evidence to support that specific claim being wrong. Evidence like the fact that people pay more than 2B inf outside the market interface. Evidence like the fact that the price/AMerit ratio of an LotG:Recharge suggests that a GA:3% should cost around 2.6B inf.

And even if you were right, the devs wouldn't give us an inf-based store for this stuff, because letting this stuff be hard to get is in their best interests.

Hmmm...now that would be an epic screenshot. Mass deletion of 2B+ PvP IOs while sipping tea and eating crumpets with the Monocle and Top Hat crowd.

fix'd

Angel Red
"We're heroes. Fighting injustice is the thing we do." ~Rebel Scum

That's exactly correct. They have the chance. Those chances are determined by probabilities, and for the items in question, those probabilities are low. Some people who really want those items stop playing casually, and do things to increase the number of random checks per unit time that they get to see if they get a good item.

The argument being made is not that casual players are to be denied those same chances. What's being argued is that they have no special right to the same chance at access as someone who plays more and/or plays more aggressively to increase their cumulative chance at the same reward.

I am confident that no one meant that at all.

A "casual" attitude towards the game is incompatible with the notion of meaningfully using ultra-rare IOs in a build. The whole point of these things is that, used in careful combination, they make your characters wildly more powerful. Seeking out ways to make your character wildly more powerful is not a "casual" mindset, broadly speaking. A casual player can adopt this mindset, but the more involved in it they become, the less and less they can be considered "casual" players.

I've been out of the forum a few days, so I missed this when it first went around. But let me just say here that I completely agree with the capra hircus of the shadow realm. Please, try to convince the devs to implement price caps. I, for one, feel that even 250M may be too much. Perhaps lower it to 200M, or possibly even 100M.

RagManX

I still think a price cap of 0 inf would be better because I want everything right now and for free.

Whew! After the invokation failed so many times, I was starting to worry about you. I even stood in front of a mirror and said 'Price caps, price caps, price caps', and still nothing.

Did you find them? Seriously, I want to know. Did you read them? No, really. Read them. The Cuba one, the poster was like, this is not a good example because... And Guess What? Was not a good example. I am not going to explain why. You either read it and grok, or whatever. As far as the Soviet post, again, someone is not reading my posts.

The suggestion i am making for fixing the market (and improving the fun and game play enjoyment of the Devs customer base) is to have a Buy It Now feature for recipes, every recipe, Caping at say 250 mil for Purps, and 500 mil for PvP. these prices are suggested, and the Devs will prob pick a diff figure. The point is Griefers will not be able to charge 2 bill (or 3 bill) for enhancers. AND it means both those examples have no merit as counter arguments.

Some of you have serious counter arguments, some have modified my original solution to the current paradigm that i suggest. Some of you are seriously making arguments that are not worthy of responding to. You can usually tell these because they are filled with insults, little information, and a sense of self righteousness worthy of W when he invaded 2 countries and drove the American deficit into "only China will buy" territory.

Dude, they already picked a figure. They picked 20 a-merits for a purple, and 35 a-merits for a PVP IO, and they only did it one issue ago, when some PVP IOs had been selling at 2 billion+ for months.

As you have already pointed out, they are the ones with the access to the numbers for supply, demand and sales. Why are your numbers better than theirs? Why are they suddenly going to change their minds about appropriate supply levels now, when they didn't with I18?

It seems the Devs are already moving to this line of thinking then. If their customers are unhappy because it takes forever to finish a toon, AND market manipulators take advantage of the system give people an out.

I bet you two things 1) If I had made the argument for selling purps for merits before the Devs instituted the A Merits i would have gotten flamed the same, or worse. 2) The Devs, in the future, make more moves to please their consumer base, so that (OMG, this is SHOCKING) people can have multiple purp'd out 50s after a couple years. (maybe even 5 or 6, eeek, even if it is not needed to play, oooooh)

I will not bet this, but it is my sincere hope. A) Farmers get nerfed to oblivion B) Market manipulators get "managed" to such an extent they might as well be working in cubicles for the Devs.

Do you think I found and read them, given that I referenced them by description? Both examples of why a "price cap" is a terrible idea. Yes, the Soviet one is a better example.

Yes, I read your posts. I understand that you changed or explained your idea, and that it is not actually a "price cap".

You see, that's why, in my last post, I didn't spend much time talking about why "price caps" are a terrible idea. Instead I talked about your idea of a fixed price store based on inf, and why that's an idea we will never see come to pass for rare and powerful items without radical restructuring of how we earn and transfer inf.

And none of that addresses the fundamental failure on your part to answer any of the posts that reasonably explain why PVP +3% defense IOs cost 2B inf (or more) without imagining manipulation and griefing.

Yeah, I got it. If you actually read the other parts of my post, you would know that.

Hint: keep stuff like that out of your posts. Real-world politics are explicitly disallowed by the forum rules.