On the nature of ebil and marketeering

Let me crystallize the reason I don't care about your pain: YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO PAY THAT MUCH.

Did I pay that much for the item? I did not. How much did I pay? Well, you could probably find that out by looking for a repeated number in the "last 5"- maybe in the recipe, if you're looking for a crafted item. You could bid that number, plus one inf, and probably have the item by tomorrow.

You can get a level 30 impervious skin triple, recipe, for under half a million- probably 16 THOUSAND if you want to wait- and the salvage for like a million and a half, and you can run off and craft that. Two million, you have yourself a shiny new IO. They're in stock, they're really that cheap, you can do this TODAY.

Or you can buy the crafted IO for eleven to fifteen million from me. I've sold dozens of 'em. Why do people pay more than they really have to?

I don't know. But I'm pretty sure the person to yell at isn't ME.

I already made this argument much better upthread. But thanks for your support.

Don't read much history, then, do you?

Morally ambiguous is probably an apt term. I assume you intended it pejoratively, but market acts are, truthfully, irrelevant to morality. The whole idea behind a free market is that self-interest furthers the greater good automatically.

And that's exactly what we see in the CoH market, in principle. In practice, there are instances where unscrupulous marketeers can do annoying things to the Market for short periods of time, but that's only because there isn't enough competition from other marketeers, unscrupulous or otherwise.

Even when that manipulation occurs, though, the person responsible is likely to end up losing as much as he gains from it. Sometimes, I gather that people try and fail to manipulate the market just for the sake of disproving that manipulation is effective. There simply is no controlling supply when everyone has equal capacity to produce everything.

I'll never understand some players' fascination with victimhood. Everyone is equally buyer and seller in the game's market. Everyone is equally capable of producing the goods that are ultimately sold on the market. It's not like anyone on this forum is cornering the market on food or water or clothing, or really anything anyone needs to play the game, much less live.

For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich, there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. Personally, I rarely have more than about 200 million onhand at any time. Why? Because I spend it. I spend it happily and often. What good does pixelated money do you if it's just sitting there?

And then when I'm done spending, I become a seller again, and the cycle continues.

Stability is the lifeblood of any market. It attracts participants, which drive up both supply and demand, which ensure that the market is useful both to buyers and sellers.

The only hard fact is that people who believe that there is some arbitrarily lower-than-the-market-average price to which they're entitled, or which can be described as the objective "fair price" -- are hopelessly out of their depth. Without a stable and active market, you might not have any items to buy at all. Prices are defined by what people are willing to pay. Period.

No one put a gun to your head when you hit the "Make Offer" button. No one threatened to evict your poor sainted grandmother if you didn't play ball.

Why is it that this forum's victimologists always look at the market from the (supposedly ripped-off) buyer's perspective? Why is the seller always ignored? Why is the seller's time worth less than the buyer's -- even despite the obvious fact that the buyer in question was clearly willing to pay the seller's price? To take a cue from an ingenious poster from another thread, let me ask you: What would you, oh great moral authority, charge for a Gladiator's Armor PvP +DEF IO, if you had one?

Would you look at that item as a representation of two or three months of your time (the most valuable resource), as the devs seem to think you should -- or would you take one for the team and sell it for peanuts with the understanding that your buyer is probably going to sell all of his drops for the best possible price? Or would you horde it for yourself? What's it going to be?

I'm not a regular Marketeer. I've done it in the past, but it's really not my cup of tea. I prefer to earn fictional money by beating up bad guys, with the occasional trip to the market to craft and sell what drops. But you're darn tootin' that I appreciate the Market and all that comes with it, after several years of playing this game with no economy at all -- with a very shallow system of character-advancement-through-equipment.

And after seeing what the Villain-side market was like before the merge, you're gosh-darn right that I appreciate every effort made -- whether intentionally or not -- to promote stability and activity in the market. I'm sorry you don't.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

I'm still chuckling over that bit about onion rings.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

<.<
>.>
<.<

Exactly. I was going to comment on that, but you covered it perfectly well.

Now, excuse me, as 1) I'm no marketeer and 2) I don't normally come to these forums and 3) This is besides the real point of this thread, so I apologize...

While I see zero moral implications in flipping (since flipping has been a specific focus of discussion in here)...
I do think that people (of any and all groups) tend to place too much importance on themselves.
And, I simply mean they hold that importance in the discussions of their actions, not necessarily in the performance of their actions (nor when away from the game walking down the street, for instance).

The results of the flippers are the results.
The economy and the video game world would perpetuate, with and without flux, and things would be okay... and things would be complained about.

So, actually... I'd say the greatest benefit of the flippers, specifically, are simply as a target for some people's animosity.



Thank you, flippers, for being a face of evil for people to throw their ugly frustrations towards.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

One of the most valuable lessons I learned from college was in the psych classes learning how different people's blinders and prejudices influence every single aspect of not only how they think, but also how they process incoming data. Everything is filtered, and it is distorted long before it ever gets to the logic centers. In most humans, and by most I mean upwards of 95% from what I was taught (though arguably it was a while back and the numbers may have adjusted due to more modern analysis), logic is only used to retroactively justify a decision already made.

Input comes in, decision is made, then it hits the logic centers and an argument is formed that defends the decision.

Best part are the studies that show people in highly polarized us-vs-them mindsets actually get a hit of endorphins for rejecting "them" comparable to many drugs. Was first discovered in studies on politics, how strongly democratic people get a major jolt of endorphins for rejecting actually correct information presented by republicans and how republicans get the same from rejecting truth presented by democrats. Then later studies came out expanding on the initial findings to any powerful us-vs-them mentality. This is the key underlying process behind victimhood. Define "them" and then claim "they" are victimizing you. Then sit back and rake in the natural drugs your body rewards you with for denying the truth about "them" regardless of source or presentation method.

As I've posted before this too baffles me. I simply cannot fathom why on earth people buy crafted items at huge prices when the recipe and salvage are sitting there available at a fraction of crafted price.

Last night I decided just to run with it and craft the 2 Obliteration IOs that I got from running a Hero Morality mission (the Acc/Dam/Recharge pleasingly from completing the mish, the quad in the 5 random rolls afterwards). Listed them for a reasonable price (compared to the Last 5) and hopefully when I go back tonight they'll be gone.

How much more would the 'rest of us' be paying if prices were not stable?

I'd list it for 6 inf personally. That way I'd get at least my listing fee back. And maybe a little more if anyone happened to bid more than that.

I wonder what would happen if there was a 'find the recipe and salvage to craft this IO' link on IOs, in the same way as there's a 'find salvage' link on recipes?

Because time is the ultimate commodity.

Technically it wouldn't be hard, given the filtering mechanism they use, to provide that link, along with a "Find Enhancements crafted with this recipe" link to do the reverse (jump from a recipe to it's crafted equivalent).

... I did not know that. I'm going to have to seriously mistrust the workings of my own brain now.

A good farmer can bring in 25-30 million per hour in straight inf. factor in drops, and that number can easily double, if not tripple. This allows a good farmer to generate 25 mil from defeats alone. Then, they make the other 25 mil off of people "paying more than they really had to" by selling their drops (at least the ones that don't get deleted over and over because they take up space).

On several servers, farmers off a power leveling service. I have seen prices that indicate about 5-10 million per run, per person. Fill up your team with 7 lowbies and your 25 million per hour + drops just became 60 million per hour + drops.

People who constantly run TFs can easily generate 100 merits a day. These merits can be converted directly to recipes. Defeats during TFs generate both inf and drops.

There are people who can also run A Merit missions for an A Merit every 2 days. To date, I have seen several claims that people invest approximately 30 minutes or so per A Merit. I cannot verify this, but I will accept it is fact, since I have seen people do crazy things. Running A merit missions generates lower amounts of drops at this level of speed. However, it does allow for the influx of at least 1 new "free" recipe every 2 days.

I have now provided 3 alternative methods for gaining inf in this game that go beyond regular playing. Which incidentally also generates inf and drops. None of these activities are considered "evil" and none of them attract the witch hunters that marketeers do.

If one chooses to, you may make a tidy sum by just doing the farming. 25 mil an hour (solo) in AE - never buying anything with your tickets is almost 200 mil a week if you only play for 1 hour a day. That's 800 mil a month.

Or, you can sit on your thumbs and complain about how everyone else is rich and you're poor.


I'd like to cover one more thing here, just for funsies:

We don't claim to be the good guys. We don't generally claim to be the ones saving everyone money at the market, but we are hardly the cartel people like you paint us to be.

No one has ever forced you to go to the market and spend more inf than you were willing to for any item. Ever. This is a fact, and one that is seemingly lost on the ignorant. You place a bid, you get the item - at some point. If you need it now then be prepared to pay for it. Frankly, I have yet to see any IO that individually made a build so amazingly fantastic that it required me to slot it immediately.

I wrote a considerably long guide expressly dedicated to how to save inf at the market. It is (and has been) in my sig since I wrote it a couple of months ago. Try reading it. Then try being honest with yourself and see how many of those things you actually do when you approach the market.

Marketeers are only successful because they have the single skill that people who complain about the market lack. We have patience. Patience is ALL that is required to pay what you want to pay (within reason) for anything and everything in this game. If you lack the patience to pay the price you think is fair, then I am truly sorry, but the blame lays squarely on your shoulders, not mine.


And last, but not least - for those who feel that the IOs you need to make your build functional cost way too much due to marketeers driving up the prices:

I have a 6 year old. He plays several characters. One of which is a blaster (squishiest of the squishies). He loves his blaster. He plays at +0/x1. He dies on occasion, but it doesn't bother him.

His blaster is now level 29. He picks all of the powers. He picks all of the slots. And about every 12 levels he opens his full enhancement tray and slots anything that isn't red into whatever power it happens to go in. Currently 90% of his slots are empty. Currently 90% of what is slotted is red (expired). He has chosen powers like Jump Kick and Group flight.

Basically, the kid has no idea what he's doing and he can still manage to complete radio missions and safegaurds. Those are his 2 favorite missions.

If a 6 year old who picks powers based on names, and not performance, slots powers every once in a great while and never EVER vendors anything can have fun playing CoH, why is it that people claim they simply must spend billions on their "perfectly crafted" and IO'd toons? And why is that the fault of the people who play the market?

I've been poking a fairly fascinating book I picked up off of a bargain shelf at a local Borders that talks about this in the context of corporate management and how this psychological reality interacts with efforts at feedback and reward systems for employees. It talks about recent discoveries in the science of brain function explain why some traditional and seemingly logical approaches to delivering incentive to employees frequently backfire in unexpected ways.

That's definitely interesting. I wonder how people are theorizing about what purpose that would serve leading to it as an evolutionary development.

short version is that the process above describes how. Everything that gets past the filters is accepted as true in the form that it arrives. There is no argument between nature-vs-nurture, the two are 1 and the same. Every experience (nurture) is interpreted by the inherent filter (nature) and they cannot operate independently.

The brain is essentially a piece of hardware. It accepts as true literally anything and everything it encounters just like your computer will blindly run any piece of software you put into it. Hence the risk of viruses. Just like a computer, some bits of software try to block out others, etc.

But if you hear it, your brain, at the unconscious level, believes it.

While the preceding discussion on brain function is (honestly) fascinating,
the above quote is sig-worthy


Cheers,
4

Reason can overcome internal bias in people who choose to reason it. I am a firm believer that when you do this you've either altered the filters manually. It is possible to do, I have a former student who was raised Mennonite and he now writes code for the NASDAQ, Not exactly anti-tech.

Rationalization:

• the cognitive process of making something seem consistent with or based on reason
• (psychiatry) a defense mechanism by which your true motivation is concealed by explaining your actions and feelings in a way that is not threatening