On the nature of ebil and marketeering

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/worth

How exactly is this proven? Please show me the dev publication that says
"thou shalt only obtain X items per hour". What the devs have set is the
rate at which items drop ---> for mob kills.

Much earlier in this thread I asked a question which nobody answered. I'll
re-iterate it here.

How, exactly, is *any* transaction on the market fundamentally different
than a simple trade in Atlas Park using broadcast and the in-game trade
screen?

You state that the market intent is to facilitate (ie. make easier and more
effective) trade. I agree.

So, back to my Atlas Park question - If I talk to enough folks and trade for
enough items, your position is that is contrary to the dev's intent, and a
GM should come and punish me because I got too much stuff too quickly?

Really???

And since nobody answered that earlier question, I will...

The ONLY difference is that I can interact with more players (across all
servers and factions) more quickly and effectively than I could by simply
shouting out in broadcast, and for that service, there will be a 10% fee
on each transaction I make... That IS facilitating the trade you say is
the market's designed purpose.

I find your accusations from a position of complete ignorance, ridiculous.


Regards,
4

And the rate at which you can get a-merits and reward merits. Which I think is there to provide a floor for how quickly you can acquire items -- even if you can't team, even if you can't talk to strangers, you can run tip missions and you can get at least one a-merit every two days on each character. If you can run an occasional TF, you can get a lot more than one a-merit every two days on each character. And that provides a sort of minimal guarantee of access. Want a LotG +recharge? Four days, tops. There is no reason to obtain it through any mechanism that will take you more than a couple of hours, max, on each of four days of play. That works even if you've got a gimped build that can only run missions at -1/x1.

The thing is, if devs wanted everyone to be for sure able to get more stuff than they can currently get off the market, the a-merit and reward merit vendors would have lower prices, or you could get more a-merits, or something like that. Since they haven't changed that, they're happy with where the floor is. Since they haven't done any of the many obvious things they could do to constrain marketeers, they are apparently happy with the near lack of a ceiling, too.

You called SwellGuy?

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Please keep direct quotes in context. I was presented with several things to attempt to disprove. Within the scope of the post to which I replied, I succeeded. Reread the post if you like.

I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but I think that the answer to it might be helpful. The difference is that when trading in Atlas Park you have to spam the starting zone for many players with trade chat, which makes it very difficult for them to get help, and even if it weren't a starting zone, there's still a pretty limited number of people who can communicate simultaneously before it all turns into static.

Next, it has a much more convenient inventory management feature, and it allows you to bid on rare items without tracking down the individual player who found them. Also you can sell your own rare items for which a seller might be hard to find, especially if they're useful for a limited number of builds. Also even if it's possible to sell, a seller might not be paying a reasonable price at the time.

Furthermore, the record of previous sales and the centralized location regulates prices, with or without speculators. Whether the natural regulation of said prices is sufficient is, of course, what we've all been talking about.



I could go on and on. The reason why I would type all of that out is because many people here have taken the angle of "well if it's not working how the devs want, why don't they just change it?"

The AH has far more benefits in its current state than it does drawbacks. It could get way worse and still be way better than trading in Atlas Park. If you wanted to reduce the number of people skimming tens of billions off the top of all these transactions, it would take a very insightful and likely complicated series of changes.

I get the feeling that you guys haven't played many other competitive online games... The smallest of changes tend to have massive ripple effects. I view adding merits and alignment merits as a massive changes, so clearly, right or wrong, I view devs' efforts at manipulating the market as much more dramatic than you guys do, and thus infer a different intent.

No. I'm saying it would be absolutely impossible for you affect the market in a way remotely comparable to the impact a marketeer who has 40 auctions running simultaneously has. A single player who who filled up their WW bid slots across multiple characters could easily affect more people than a dozen people spamming in Atlas Park, even ignoring that auctions are cross-server actions.

Furthermore, I don't think you would even get more money spamming in Atlas than you would running TFs and alignment missions.

People have said multiple times in this thread that the AE issues are exploits. The only benefit AE had over playing 'normally' is that you could get rewards maybe 10x as fast with AE. I would honestly say that I think I could make a hundred times more on WW than I could spamming in Atlas. The difference in magnitude is tremendous, and that's not a bad thing. I'm just saying that the "only difference" you mention is a pretty f'ing huge difference.

That's a bit harsh. I think a fair amount of people just play this game very casually, and the idea of bidding on an item and then checking back several days later is way more effort than they want to put into the part of this game most removed from its theme (superheroes/villains fighting stuff).

I'm about to log on to check on 30 auctions. I'll probably have make 60 million or so, so while I don't benefit nearly as much as people in this thread, it's not that I don't understand the concepts of it. I just think it's a ridiculous trend in these online games that the way to in-game prosperity is so far removed from actual gameplay.

I never thought I'd miss bind on pickup items.

it's funny 'cause it's true.

I don't know how much harder I can quote the dictionary. I'm ignoring you.

The devs can do no wrong, right fanboy? Also, look up strawman. I haven't used one. There's an ad hominem attack for you though.

The fact that you can still rake in phat l3w7z despite your overwhelming factual handicaps will stand as a stinging rebuke to future generations of market incompetents.

Honestly, I don't think it will help those who are unwilling. However, I do think it will flatten the learning curve required to understand the information which increases the number of people capable of being ebil (note this is in regard to the suggestion seebs had a few pages back regarding adding time based historical data not the suggestion to show exact bid data).

You've been ignoring the truth for this entire thread, why stop now.

Fanboy? Is that the best you can do?

Just to reinforce this... (This reply is not directed at Obitus.)

One of my older characters had been sitting near the inf cap for a while. I had been creeping back up on it from whatever time I last spent several hundred million inf on her for. I was earning inf just playing the game, mostly on defeats. I hadn't played this character in a while, so I wasn't approaching the cap very fast in terms of calendar time, but then a few weeks ago I started playing her a lot again. I was running missions on moderately high difficulty, selling my commons to NPCs, crafting uncommon recipes worth 5-10M apiece those and all my common and uncommon salvage on the market.

On November 16, 2010 I hit the inf cap. I went to the market and stored 250M inf in a bid at 6:39 PM. Right now, that character has 1,883,053,440 inf, meaning that in 7 days of play I have earned 133.1M inf. That's net - I've probably spent around 30M inf outfitting the character with new sets after a respec.

The character in question is a DM/Regen - hardly a good farmer. This character hasn't been in the AE in months, so none of this is from primate wrangling. I haven't sold any of the purple drops I've gotten, since I have a use for them all. I haven't spent the 90 Reward Merits I've earned.

Surely I must be punished for my exploits.

Just imagine what I could be doing if I was running a more AoE-centric character, and/or one at the soft-cap. Just imagine if I was selling everything now with the expectation that prices on many things will fall if I19 closes extant exploits (extraordinarily likely).

I do not weep for the salvage that costs 100k, not just because I can afford it without blinking, but because, despite that I still place patient bids. Because I keep a stash of salvage in my bins and vaults, and use that when I don't want to pay prices. 1M inf for a Nevermelting Ice? Use one of mine, put out a bid for ... 5,001. Go play for a while. Probably buy it. Didn't buy it? That's OK, I probably got one as a drop. Put that in storage to replace the one I spent. Still didn't get one? Oh, well, I'll check on that tomorrow. Oh, I need that market slot to sell something for 10M inf? Yeah, why was I worried again?

If you don't personally have characters that can do this, you need to understand that other people do, and they will happily sneeze out what you may consider stupidly high amounts of inf for things that you don't want to wait for. If you and they are both out there, they get dibs, not just in terms of buying a bid over you, but in setting the trend for the price sellers will list things at.

Well I don't know him personally and I've only ever ready that one line of his, so I didn't have much to work with.

The strawman in question is appeal to the unprovable "casual player" and their implied inability to compete with hard-core marketeers. It's an easy target, and which you certainly invoked in your reference to casual folk not wanting to reference the existing history.

You may have made limited reference to it, but folks in these parts are sensitive to its use, as it is frequently found hanging from the lance tips of many a windmill-tilting poster in these parts.

He also used the well-worn 'mouth breather'.

I think there's a saying about the person in an argument who resorts to calling names.
I forget it at the moment.

Fair enough. That being said though, it seems like 90% of the players who make the effort to actually post on the forums of these games are not casual players, so I do think there's a pretty major case of confirmation bias here and all the similar forums, as was mentioned earlier.

Have you ever tried to explain to a friend you wanted to get started on the game what it would take to get a character geared out?

Casual play is what I told mine.

I s'pose you're going to tell I am wrong

No, I actually almost went back and deleted that line. To get decently enhanced you're right. The ability to get LotGs pretty easily off of merits is a pretty major equalizer.