"But, What will it Cost, Man?"

Procs are pretty decent at lower levels, and of course, everything sells better at multiples of 5.

Level 25 IOs sell to people who made 22 and are considering skipping SOs in favor of IOs. Level 30 sell to people who bought SOs at 22 and wanted to get all the use out of them they could. The other levels, not so great.

So I buy a lot of off-level stuff, but it takes a while.

I'm working on a quick and dirty parser that will give me my earnings info in a format I can plug into excel to create some quick bar charts of total earnings vs time interval. I'm taking a break for dinner and some errands, but I should have something graphical in the morning. I'll have info for today also. Today would screw up the whole-day rate predictions, because I was in game like eight hours or something crazy like that, but hopefully we can get some more specific info at a per-hour-played level from my graphs.

@Misaligned - Alright, I'm going to try to address this a bit. Please bear with me.

Quote:

In general we have usually come down on the same side of many arguments. Frankly, I'm a bit baffled why you seemed to lash out at me in both of my posts.

In general I agree - we are usually on the same side in most of the discussions.

I disagree that I "lashed out" at you. I did outright call the plan ineffective
and impractical, and I was sarcastically derisive about the advice to play
like your 6 year old. That's a pretty thin stretch for "lashing out".

Basically, I feel that you are missing the entire point of the thread.

First, the thread is NOT about what any given player finds "fun" because
by and large, it isn't quantifiable. It IS about a measurable, minimum,
standard of performance for toons (SOs and Common IOs). It is about providing
quantifiable data on what cost expectation is for that performance, along
with (if I put it in a guide), simple marketing techniques to reach that level
of performance *without* counting on pure, blind luck, or potentially
needing to play below that performance level awhile because the "right
drop" hasn't occurred yet.

I played in the early days when stores weren't even marked on your map,
and you could only get certain SOs from them in any case, and what dropped
often wasn't usable or desired for the stage your character was at.

Maybe it's better these days, but it wasn't much fun then, and I would
not advocate it now either.

I can understand that your youngster is fine with that, which is great
actually, but I'm willing to also bet that the average player would not be
as thrilled about it.

Furthermore, there is no reason they should have to be either.

Sure, maybe you can slot absolutely nothing and be ok with it. Of course,
there are lot's of things you "can" do - PL in AE, RMT for inf, Level Pact or
get into an S/VG. All of those things could get you what you want, but
those aren't the point of what I'm looking at in this thread.

Quote:

I was mulling around an idea for a guide that looks at the minimum cost picture for equipping a toon with a low-end SO build.

That is what I wrote in the very first line of the thread, and it's what I'm
interested in discussing.

I felt that your suggestion completely missed out on the thread's purpose.

Moving on to your general commentary...

Quote:

I used to really enjoy the market forum as the people here were always polite and helpful. Even when people didn't agree, they still managed to have civilized conversations about issues and many people gleaned a lot of good information. However, over the past 6 weeks or so, this forum has turned ugly.

Unfortunately, there has been a serious outbreak of Galactic Stupiditis (tm)
lately (imho), as evidenced in more than 1000 posts in a couple threads
that should have been locked after the first page or two.

To be sure, having to contend with that level of pure ignorance has frazzled
more than a few tempers, mine included, and some of that frustration
probably bled into a few other posts along the way, like this one.

So, in the interest of the spirit of the Holiday Season, I'll offer an apology
for coming across too harshly in rejecting your suggestion, and I hope you'll
endeavor to simply see that it just doesn't fit in with the issue I'm trying to
address in the thread.

Quote:

You want to teach people something, teach them patience.

Now that's just crazy talk (I'm kidding)

I'd be ecstatic if I could teach them that...

I'm afraid I'm likelier to have to settle for trying to teach them that they'll
need 10M-20M in a timely manner if they want to use SOs or common IOs
while leveling their toon. If they want better shinies than that, they'll have
much more consistent, and reliable success getting there if they develop
some simple marketeering skills sooner rather than later, instead of swallowing
verbatim the self-limiting foolishness that the market is nothing more than
a trap, controlled by a cabal of soul-sucking evil manipulators...

Yeah - I'm not betting any money on how successful that guide would be
at changing silly perception. That's why I'm mulling it in here first...


Regards,
4

OK, here we go.

I divvied up my rewards into 15 minute intervals. Here are charts of each day from the 17th through the 26th, omitting parts of the day where I received little or no reward.

The units of the Y-axis are in Inf, and each bar is one 15-minute interval. Intervals with no data mean I earned no Inf in that window. Generally speaking, I probably wasn't logged in 15 minutes before or after a given set of data. To turn a given bar into Inf/hour, multiply by four.

Edit: The blue portion of each interval bar is Inf earned through defeats, or other similar "raw" Inf rewards. The red portion of each bar is Inf value in common IO recipes received as drops in that interval.

So, a few comments.

You may notice right off that I don't have a graph for 11/21. I did play that day, but there was only about 1 hour of combat, and the graph isn't very interesting. It looks about like a one hour chunk out of most of the other graphs, so I omitted it.

Next, you can see that I tend to have some nice cyclic activity in my rewards. I hit a stride of 1.2M to 1.4M "raw" Inf per interval, then tail off. That usually means I went to the market to craft and sell stuff, which usually leads to me getting distracted by chat, forums, etc. The length of those "strides" varies, and I'm thinking that's probably just down to real life distractions - phone calls, bio breaks, snack runs, etc.

In the second half or so of the 11/22 data I was working on the "Defeat 1000 Paragon Police" badge, running a mayhem mission on -1/x6. Annoyingly, that's actually still dangerous because Kheldian PPD debuff the snot out of your defense, so it was crummy rewards and I had to do it sort of slowly.

11/23 deserves special mention. When I first graphed this, I threw all the days on one chart, and the bars at the start of 11/23 data stood out very clearly as much taller than all the others. I thought my parser had done something wrong until I looked at the logs. That was a RWZ Rikti ship raid. I should mention it was a fantastic raid - I earned over 800 Vanguard Merits. Justice usually has good RWZ raids, but that one was something else.

Also, there's something interesting in here. I respec'd on the 21st, and while there's nothing in the graphs that can hint at it, I can tell you there's a significant survivability difference in my character before and after that respec. By the 22nd, I turned my solo team size up from x4 to x5. Generally, I feel like I don't have to work as hard to survive. Yet the graphs show that my peak earnings didn't really improve. It thought about that for a little bit, and my conclusion is that while my reward/time isn't superior, my reward/effort is, because I'm not working as hard to stay alive even in the face of more foes. That probably means my earnings could be higher if I "screwed around" less.

Misaligned,

I think things, in general, will improve once I19 releases.

The delays in the release of the Incarnate system are polluting the atmosphere, I think.

Good Stuff UberGuy,

Just to clarify a little bit, these data are a more detailed breakdown of your
earlier data from your DM/Regen, correct?

So we're still talking about an L50 character running at ~4.5M inf / hour?

Interestingly, on the 22nd, where you were running vs PPD you were still above
a sustained 1M / hour, once again lending some supporting evidence for
that amount as a reasonable lower limit.

And, yeah, a good RWZ Rikti raid or two can be quite lucrative - I've been
in a few on Guardian recently, and ~3M+ and 500+ VGuard merits are pretty
standard for about 30-40 minutes of effort. ...and they're fun, besides...

Again, thanks for putting these charts together.


Regards,
4

great stuff Uber, thanks for taking the effort to pretty it all up for us!

So, just to test out my theory about being able to push harder, I ran five paper missions today, treating them as "defeat all". Except for one spot, I didn't stop playing missions to sell recipes or salvage. I was much more aggressive, simply running into spawns and hoping for the best, rather than more deliberately pulling them around corners for large Soul Drain + Shadow Mauls. I did die once, running into a spawn of +3 Council and pulling them right into a spawn of +2s. I didn't see that I ran right up to a +3 Galaxy Archnon. "Why hello, mister 'my Tough+Resilience does nothing to reduce your attack damage.' Yes, it's a very nice day."

I ran from mission to mission as fast as was reasonable, stopping at the Quartermaster to sell commons if it was on the way. By the middle of the 5th mission, I filled up on salvage.

The game cursed me a bit with lots of Circle of Thorns missions. Death Mages can slow me down a lot, because my build has no direct way to deal with their toHit debuff. Instead, I rely on my +defense powers to get in close and slather them in debuffs. The toHit debuff in their version of Chill of the Night can miss, so if I do this right and am lucky, they won't debuff me (much). I wasn't lucky much today.

Despite this, I clearly did improve. Over the course of the time I stayed in combat I did a better job of sustaining an average closer to 6M (raw) inf/hour with .

Other things of note: I got two more Crushing Impacts, and I sold a crafted Sirocco's Dervish Acc/Dam for 18M(!).

I am going to go back and tweak the parser to include inf from common IOs as though they were an inf reward equal to their store value at the time of the drop message. I can spit out the graphs in a way that shows the updated totals in the same number of bars, just putting the recipe values on top of the defeat values in a different color. I'll update the posts in-line. I may not do that today. Edit: It wasn't very hard, so now done around 3 CST.

As an aside, I maxed out my WW/BM sales count badges today, the "old fashioned" way - just selling salvage and other stuff.

So anyway, circling way back to the original point, I'm well on track to earning multiple billions of inf per month on a richly outfitted but in many ways fairly inefficient character. The charts showing how my defeats-only earnings vary over my logged in time show that I am on track even once we account for my "real" hourly earnings and drop rates, not just heavily filtered, combat-only rates such as those taken by Herostats only while in combat.

So I call baloney on the notion that people have to farm or resort to RMT to create richly outfitted characters in relatively short timeframes. People who do those things may be outright dumb, or they might just not know any better, but they definitely have other options. If they're just too impatient, that's their problem.

To add another anecdotal data point, I ran my L27 Stalker today with
my friend's L27 Controller through some blue-side radio missions and tips
at standard difficulty.

Noting influence and clock time, I came up with a combat earnings rate for
him of ~42K / hour...

I didn't run HeroStats, or UberGuy's parser, so I don't have any pretty
graphs to show (which reminds me - what are you using as your
parser UberGuy, and is it something you c/would be willing to share?)

Anyway, while the run was pretty representative of that toon's usual
playstyle and pace, I'd be curious to hear from some other folks running
mid-level toons.

Also, given that previous experiments have shown earnings of 100K or so,
from L1-L10 (10K / hr, although that also includes sales), I'd guess that
~50K / hr for pure combat inf might not be too unusual in the mid range.
It would be great to see more data before concluding anything however.

On an amusing note, with salvage prices as crazy as they are right now
with the AE exploit, he actually pulled down 1.8M by dumping it on the
market for 11 each. I don't think we can count that as representative
given current circumstances, but it was a nice little score for him.


Regards,
4

ouch...that's gonna leave a mark.

I think it's good to have some sense of the rate of income you'd expect for just ordinary playing of the game without specifically aiming for money.

eryq2, what might help would be if you posted comparable numbers for efficient farming. Then, players who want money could look at yours, and UG's, and decide whether they think "efficient farming" is worth it to them. If they enjoy regular play more, and it's only a bit less inf, they might do it by preference anyway. If they really want money, and it's a substantial increase in earnings, they might prefer to farm for a bit to get the money.

I'll post it in its own thread this evening. I want to give info about its capabilities, limits and assumptions, and writing that up while I'm on work calls all day just isn't going to be good, either for work or the post.

eryq2, I think you're missing UG's point.

He's not talking about farming in order to get rewards, but the rewards that come if you play the game because you enjoy playing the game. So of course it's not anywhere near as efficient a an activity chosen based on the rewards it provides.

If I decide to spend the afternoon running missions with a friend because we like hanging out together, we'll get a lot less XP than I would on an 8-person team, in all probability, but I'll have fun. So if I point out that you can in fact level on a duo without 8-man teams, pointing out that 8-man teams are a better way to gain levels is missing the point.

One of the questions people have is whether you need to explicitly seek out ways to farm inf, or whether you get enough "just playing". So UG's giving some solid numbers for what you get "just playing", rather than specifically farming something for the sake of farming it.