2 billion per enhancer

1) People have made this suggestion before. It has been met with limited resistance. You were not flamed specifically because you suggested a fixed price store. You were flamed because

1. You initially suggested something else completely, only later either better explaining or, in my opinion, completely changing what you were suggesting
2. You suggested probably the most unlikely target out of all possible things on the market for anyone to manipulate was as expensive as it is only because it is being manipulated
3. You repeatedly referred to anyone on the other side of the argument using an insulting tone. You were insulted directly by some posters who disagreed with you, not all of them, but you descended to and remain at the level of leveling blanket insults at everyone who disagrees with you

2) We've only had a market for a couple of years. I have 7 purpled 50s, and I nether manipulate the market nor farm. Shocking, eh? Edit: Know how I did a lot of it? Probably around 2/5ths was selling drops and raw cash I created myself. The rest was arbitrage between the fixed price stores and the market. I bought stuff off the fixed price stores, sold it for inf, used the inf to buy purples.

Based on your position, begging for farmers to be nerfed is probably dumb. They increase supply. Yes, they also increase currency in circulation, but they keep the bread lines at the actual price cap shorter.

I think that's a pipe dream. The devs know what people do in the market. There are things they could do to reduce market volatility which would also serve in some ways to reduce manipulation. They would not be unhealthy things for the devs to do. Honestly, I don't think the devs care, because they know you don't need any of this stuff. They know it's just nice to have. They aren't losing sleep because someone made it hard for you to buy virtual caviar when you have access to infinite supply of virtual tuna fish.

/em applause

So Blue_Centurion, if you had a Shield Wall: Teleportation Protection, +Res(All) IO, how much would you sell it for if you can set any price you want?
Just to let you know, these sell for 2.5 to 3 bill off market.

And will these recipes come from players or will the game generate them?

Actually, I have specifically thanked many individuals on the opposite side of this argument from me, and at least once radically altered my position due to the sense they made. I believe that I have slightly altered my position a couple times more based on the logic and common sense that I have heard from some individuals that disagreed with me.

I have taken a few philosophy classes in college, and had some lively debates. I have a couple years college level mathematics under my belt. I have debated detailed and hard to understand concepts previous to this post. Most of you do not care about this, and I am sure this will be fodder for at least one more line of juvenile insults. Am i blanket insulting again? Hmmm. Probably according to the above referenced post.

Here is a suggestion. Try to stay on topic. (Topic equals Market is broken cause I/Os cost too much) So either add some reasonable postulates explaining why the market needs to be changed, and how it can be changed, and why the Devs should do this.... OR..... Explain why the market is perfect just the way it is, AND why the Devs would harm the game by making things a little easier for new players wanting a great toon.

Side note: Insulting me, my reading skills, my heritage, my brainpower, or any other creative reference to anything not in the above Pro or Anti Market change is really not helpful, and does a disservice to everyone on the board. The disservice? It makes this post really long and boring. Please keep the posts centered on the argument. Kiddy time is over.

Ok, here's my question to you:

When the Devs implemented Alignment merits they were effectively saying "we believe a purple/PvPIO should be worth between 10 and 15 times a top-end rare recipe". Given that and the fact that the markets seem to be tending towards supporting that exchange rate (at least for the desirable PvPIOs, less so for purples) why do you believe that (using your previous example) a Purple/PvPIO is only worth about 3.5 times a rare recipe (using your suggestion of selling them for 500 million and current market prices on high end rares)?

And to answer your questions:
The Devs have set the relative rates that they believe are fair. The market is currently offering better rates than that on at least some items which suggests that there aren't any problems with the market itself. While I personally wouldn't object to the devs opening up the supply of high end gear I recognize the reasons they don't (which other people enumerated earlier in this thread) and consider them valid from the point of view of the devs (or at least from the POV of NCSoft which is, after all, in it to make money).

i think you seriously need to stfu and read and learn what is being given to you. you do realize that any more then 5 of any named bonus gets you nothing, right? and alot of the bonuses i think you are using would equal more then the rule of 5 will allow. why don't you post your build and let us disect it? maybe we can come up with a cheaper way to do what you want without you having to look at getting one of those "outrageously" priced io's.

new players will actually learn how to use what is in front of them rather then ***** and whine about things like yourself. you DO NOT need the things you are looking to get to achieve what it is you are trying to do.

side note: why don't you also take your own advice from your side note. stop aith the arguing, read what is in front of you and learn.

We are not going to deal with the real world economy here. This is a game system economy meant to increase the enjoyment of average gamers. Yes, I keep using the word average, I know I do high level content, please refrain from pointing it out.

As far as why the amounts here are wrong, 2 Billion + per enhancer in this game economy is stupid, IMO. It tells the average gamer they will never get it. Or, under the new system, spend about 2 + months constant effort to get that one I/O, then still need 5 more of the set. For ONE enhancement set, still needing 8-10 more sets for the character to be finished. A little discouraging? A LOT discouraging. Discouraging is bad for a video game. Period. It is stupid to discourage paying customers, therefore, the price is stupid. The Devs need to look at classic conle games like Armored Core, which had diminishing returns for unlockable content, took a long time to master/complte (not YEARS) and was total fun. Why would not finishing a character end the game? 36 slots per server........

True story:

For the first time in well over a year, I recently decided I wanted to purple out 1, maybe 2, of my characters - a stalker and maybe . Now understand, I already have most of the actual IOs I want, although they are spread across many characters. I also have enough influence and infamy to buy pretty quickly the remaining IOs I would need for my stalker. But rather than pooling funds from my richest characters and finding all the purples I stored in various SG bases and market slots, I figured I'd just make the stalker earn the infamy to get what he's after, and get help from a corruptor I have who is holding a few billion in inventory and liquid funds.

At some point, I crafted a recipe I'd gotten running a mission. I don't know how it happened, but I crafted it to sell when I thought it was going for tens of millions if inf, but when I put it on the market and saw the history on it, it was only 3M, 3M, 5M, 3M, 2.7M. That amount is not worth tying up a slot on this character, because I can make far more per day per slot than 3-5M. So I listed it for 1337 (I'm just hardcore like that).

I didn't play the character the day after I listed that IO, but the day after that, I logged in and the IO had sold for 4.5M. I only asked for a little more than 1000 infamy, but someone forced me to take roughly 4,498,000 infamy more than I wanted.

The moral of this very long and dull anecdote is that sometimes, just maybe every once in a great while, the seller is not actually the person who determines the price of the IO. And from that, we can conclude that sometimes, just maybe every once in a while, some people pay 500,000,000 or 1,600,000,000 or even more just because to them they believe that IO is worth that much and would rather get it ASAP so they just go ahead and bid more than what they think everyone else is bidding so they'll get the next available.

But I do still like your idea of market caps. Please contact Positron and see if you can convince him that this is one of the best ideas put forward in the market. He doesn't seem to listen to my requests to implement price caps.

RagManX

This, right here, should tell you that the devs don't want you getting these items, in quantity, without significant effort. Yet, you persist in thinking that they will fundamentally alter the market so you can get whatever you want whenever you want, cheating other players out of fair prices for their rare goods. Do you have cognition problems in other areas of your life?

Okay, but that makes it pretty hard to talk about economy, because you're depriving us of the last couple thousand years of research.

If it's an inconsistency, it means you're wrong. If you're not, maybe instead of telling us not to point it out, you could help us understand why that's not a massive inconsistency.

You've told us that, but not previously told us how you define "stupid".

Does it? I never got that impression; I just thought they were expensive. It also means I might get that much money from drops sometime if I'm lucky.

Several errors here.

First, you're ignoring random drops completely. But random drops happen. During the two months I spend trying to buy a particular I/O, I'm getting many others. Some of them might be the ones I want; others might be things I can sell for high prices, and then the system is helping me.

Secondly... Characters are, in general, not supposed to be finished. That's not the point of an MMO. In an MMO, if there is nothing left to work towards, the game sucks and people quit.

The entire point is to never be "finished", to never have everything you want, and to always have something to look forward to.

So if you are talking about a character being "finished", you are not talking about an MMO.

If you move the goalposts back to "well-enough equipped to handle the hard content", it'll set you back a couple million inf for SOs. If you move them out again to "well-enough equipped to solo stuff that used to require teams", you might spend a billion or two total, but you probably wouldn't have any purples or PvP IOs.

Discouraging would be, but this isn't discouraging. The discouragement comes, not from a flaw in the price of IOs, but from some gamers mistakenly thinking the goal is to get all purpled out.

A good design would let most people get powerful enough to be happy, and leave room for improvement for almost everyone.

That's what we have now.

No, because the price does not, in general, discourage paying customers.

If you could get everything you wanted, you'd be done and you'd stop playing. If there's more to get, you can have fun progressing, and you keep playing. Current prices are having the desired effect; you have more to reach for.

Okay, I said the Devs need to set their own "Buy It Now" recipe prices on te market to forestall market Griefing. My suggested rates are 250 mil for Purps, 500 mil for PvPs. This is to basically give a tool to the Devs to geek Farmers and Market Manipulators and empower the average gamer I believe the Devs should be targteing to increase game attractiveness. Wouldnt it be nice to have a very active game with lotsa newbs getting 50s and having lotsa Purps? YES. Especially if they did it through normal content.

Total win!

You mean 2 months of 20 minutes per play session. That's all the longer it takes to do your tips.

Why do you post so much mis-information?
Why is it that you don't see how ill-informed you are?
Why don't you see that your lack of understanding leads you to reach the wrong conclusions?
Ummm you don't know how many PVP IO sets there are do you?
You also have no idea how incredibly few builds could possibly use all of the PvP IO sets in any meaningful way.
You ignorance of the market and builds makes you suggestions worthless. As a rule of thumb, one should learn how things work before you try to change them.
It has been pointed out over and over and over, it doesn't take years to "finish" a toon here.

Or your buyer had a typo moment. Or the market interface geeked him and he was trying to buy something else. Lets look for serious patterns and discuss those, not anomalies.

Where would these recipes and enhancements come from? Players? Or from the game?
As has been pointed out previously, the Market is much more powerful than any player. The market manipulates players, not the other way around.
There need to be things that are hard to do and hard to get or interest dies.

If the devs did this, it would suggest that they were utterly, totally, wrong in their pricing of A-merits. Like, that they had not even considered what they wanted when they picked those numbers.

And I would not be much interested in the ghost town of people who AE farm to 50, get all their purples, and never play that character again because there's nothing left to do. I like the game now, where people can still have reason to play and improve a character years after starting, and progress means something.

Actually, based on the prior buying prices, the person who bought that IO must've wanted it NOW, so they paid over the last sale price. It's not uncommon to do. I've done it once or twice out of impatience.

I do the 5 tip missions very regularly. It usually takes me about an hour, slightly more. Am I also doing this wrong? You can get a tip in 1 minute, load door and finish mish in 3 minutes (getting next tip in mish), get to/load door/finish mish/unload in 5 min, also getting tip for next, repeat 3 more times for twenty minutes total? WOW You are soooooooooo cool. I wanna learn to be just like you.

Anybody else do 5 tips + 5 tip missions in twenty minutes every night, then blast out the Morality, let me guess, in 4 minutes more?

Yes, let's.

I have sold well over ten, probably fifteen to twenty, level 30 Impeded Swiftness: Chance for Smashing Damage procs in the last week or three.

Most of them, I have listed for 12,345,678 inf.

Most of them have sold for 20-25 million. Even after one clever person tried bidding 15, the next couple sold for over 20 again.

A month or so back, I mistakenly bid 5k each on a bunch of to-hit debuff level 50 common IOs, instead of the recipe thereof. I listed them on the market for 7k so I'd get my money back. The average sale price was over 200k, with at least one for 400k.

This was during a period of two or three weeks during which, at EVERY time, there was at least one up for sale for 7k. There were sales that didn't go to me, too, so some people listed things at under 7k.

That's the "serious pattern". That is the reality of the market -- buying prices are quite often much, much, higher than what people list for. This is not an anomaly or an isolated occurrence, but the usual, normal, daily pattern of selling.

I wrote a program to calculate, from amount paid to the market in fees, the listing prices of my sales. I would guess that roughly half the time, the amount I get paid is more than 20% higher than the listing fee, sometimes well more than 50% higher, and occasionally solidly over twice the listing fee. That, my friend, is the serious pattern.

Which does not excuse the things you did which I already enumerated.

Since you didn't compare anyone to criminals or political figures you clearly disapprove of, no, I don't see any insults.

Everything I've posted has either been about those topics, or about your posts on those topics. I happen to have added information about the broader game. Like it or not, the market does not exist in a balance vacuum, and we can't ignore factors outside of the market that influence how the devs handle the in-game supply of goods.