just a market rant

First off, do you have any idea how impossible it is to concieve of every possible exploit there could be in the AE? You can not blame the devs. But if that is what you want to do, I hope you enjoy your vacation you may be taking.

Second, you do realize that instant gratification is what leads to rants like this right? Stop with the IWANTITNAO attitude and place some bids. Since you only play 2-3 times a week, it gives you plenty of time for those bids to fill.

Well I don't blame the devs for every exploit cause like you said it's impossible to catch them all, but I do blame them for giving people what free access to print influence like they were at a printing press. So yes it's their fault for even letting influence be awarded in AE.

I did place some bids at reasonable prices(fingers crossed) lets hope they go through in a timely manner. It was just a shocker to check out the market after a few months to find prices on something as simple as umcommons quadruple in price.

Like a I said earlier it seems like the proverbial wheel barrel of money is needed for anything these days.

Here's an idea, run AE missions to get tickets to roll. Keep what you want/need and sell the rest for profit. Or, run regular missions, keep what you need/want and sell the rest for profit. Or, roll an A-merit a day to get 5 recipes, keep what you want/need and sell the rest for profit. I don't see a problem here.

I gots me some moneys don't get me wrong and I do do those things and even pvp and get lucky drops some times from there and I do get what your saying.

I just needed to vent a little and bring up the problem on influence and AE. And there is a problem I hope you can at least see that.
take influence out and hyperinflation will slow down(but not stop I know)

Removing infl from AE will not matter. What we need are more infl sinks that people will actually use. Blaming the AE for problems that have exsisted since before the AE doesn't solve anything. Of course the inflation of prices for certain things started right before i19 came out. When everyone was getting their 50's ready to do the incarnate stuff. It is a temporary spike in the market that will subside after a while.

Yes it will very much matter. When people can influence cap themselfes in a few short hours cause of AE it is deffinatly a problem. Maybe you don't see the correlation but I gurantee you it's there and I'm not the only one to notice. Nothing was near the prices they were before AE everything has went up.

Don't let the join date fool you i've been playing since i12. The AE is a major factor in hyperinflation, not the only one but deffinatly a major one.

Some folks have sigs turned off.

Unless you can prove that people are making 2 bil in a few hours running just AE missions, you do not have a leg to stand on. It seems that whenever people have a problem with not geting what they want in the market the first place besides flippers they blame is the AE. I suggest you get off of the entitlement train and learn that you can not have everything you want for putting in little effort and expecting maximum rewards.

And honestly, how long you have been around has nothing to do with it. If it makes you feel better, I started playing right after i9 came out.

How many times do I have to repeat myself
Remember the MM pets not exing down ya people were capping their influence in just a few short hours. It may not be happening right now but it's a piece of the long AE exploit pie that has caused the mess this game calls a market.

Maybe take off your rose colored glasses AE is a big problem when it comes to the market, that's fact not opinion. Stuff has quadrupled, quintupled and gone even higher since the AE. Exploits have allowed people to print influence from the thing since it's inception.

No entitlement train here maybe comprehend what your reading and then reply, I don't expect max rewards just uncommons. Uncommons I'm talking about not purples not pvpIOs not even rares, Uncommons. The market in this game blows and maybe a thread like this will do something, I can hope anyway.

Again, proof or it didn't happen. You seem to forget that you are up against every other 50 in the game right now for IO's. Of course fixing the bug that wasn't allowing 50's to earn double the infl when exempt could have nothing to do with this either, could it? But, you will fail to see this and just keep blaming AE. Yes a bunch of infl was made during the exploits, but not nearly as much as had already exsisted in the game before the AE.

And seriously, the devs are not going to fix the market. And just like everyone before you who thought this way, you will come to your senses at some point and realize this.

In the time it takes for most market haters to find the right forum, type their rant, and hit enter, they could have read any of the stickied guides at the top, placed bids and no longer had a problem.

Well all those things are healthy for the market. Marketeering exists because there is profit to be had. Flipping exists because the market haters would rather complain than learn to list things for more than 1 inf, salvage/recipe farming makes goods available to be sold. Without that prices would be higher yet.

There are no poor in this game, there are merely impatient uneducated people. If the farmers can print their own money so can anyone. The people that complain are the ones that think they should be able to purple out their warshades in a month. I will agree that there aren't enough influence sinks in the game. That comes up frequently and several excellent ideas have been proposed here, none have yet been implemented.

This is part of the misconception. If corn costs $1.00 an ear and the government decides to print enough money to quadruple the money supply the price of corn will quadruple. It's much the same thing here. It still takes the same amount of effort to produce shineys. It's really a net sum 0. The only difference is the price tag. People who are net buyers will complain, people who are net sellers will be happy. I don't listen to the complainers because they are net buyers, they and others like them cause the very problem they complain about. They need to get off their whiny entitled duffs and increase the supply instead of draining it.

This is backwards as most of these "fixes" are the root causes of the inflation. The introduction of reward merits reduced the supply of pool C recipes by roughly 60%. This was partly "fixed" later by the weighting of the pool but overall net supply was still about 33% lower than it was at the start of I9.

AE tickets are part of the problem too since they can skew supply. Skewing supply leads to imbalances that cause low buyer confidence and increased prices. AE tickets were put into place by the devs to try to give faster earning options for those people who don't like the market. If you just need a single piece of rare salvage and it takes you an average of 1 hour to get a rare salvage as a normal drop your chances of getting what you want is 1 in 6 but in the AE an hour's worth of tickets can get you 6 of the exact same rare. The difference is that you earned no recipes, common, or uncommon salvage. You spent all your tickets on the rares. That again is an imbalance that causes short (and potentially long) term imbalances.

Fixing the market first requires that the devs believe it to be a problem. Up until the introduction of A merits nothing the devs did (with the exception of costume drops) increased supply. Most of the things they did decreased supply, in some cases dramatically. A-merits should be a massive influence sink. The timer they put on cashing in R merits for A merits puts an artificial set of brakes on the process. You are right that "fixing" the market requires the effort of everyone who uses it. The very people that complain are the ones that are causing the problem, because they don't understand how to use the market, or they don't want to learn. They just want to be entitled and get what they want when they want it without putting forth the effort it takes. They have someone else power level their characters and then expect to be able to power level their inventions. The devs have brakes on the IOing process for a reason.

This is true and it's the way it should be. Experienced players get veterans rewards that the newbies don't. Determined people in the real world work harder to better themselves and do it faster than those who choose not to work and sit on welfare. A newbie purpling out their warshade in a month is equivalent to a new high school graduate thinking that he should be able to jump right into a CEO spot in a major corporation so that he can have a Lamborghini in a month. That's not the way that things work.

And if people could do that right now, it'd be a big problem. But even you admit that they can't. You can go on arguing fringe-cases if you like, but at least have the decency to not treat the most extreme exploits as somehow normative.

The fact that AE can be exploited, has been exploited, and will be exploited again is not a reason to gut rewards from it (and I say this as someone who uses it very infrequently). It's a reason to respond more quickly to the issues when they arise than was the case with the monkey farms, which unfortunately had a fix that somehow got tied in with the patch that launched an issue and couldn't be pushed live faster than it was.

Here's the problem. In the last month or so, people have gotten all of the following:

a) a third build (equals more demand if the third build is to be slotted)
b) multiple freespecs (equals more demand if new powers are slotted or old ones are re-slotted)
c) a reason, in the incarnate system, to play 50s who generate twice as much inf as they used to rather than lowbies who put less inf into the system (equals more liquid inf to spend at a time when demand is already higher for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to those above)

That's what we have right now, and all of those things can contribute to price spikes. To blame "inflation" on the AE is to ignore many of the variables that contribute to the overall system that the AE and the market are but two pieces of.

Monkeys were discovered after marketing decreed absolutely no patches until i19.

An addendum to this, since people are playing level 50s, the supply of things like the Alchemical Silver and Scientific Theory that the OP mentioned is going to drop. We've had a unusual alignment of events which has hit the mid-level items pretty hard lately. First, with GR, everyone started new characters. Then the Monkey farm hit and a lot of these new characters just raced by the mid-levels. Now everyone is running level 50s and looking for shards. Supplies of level 50 common salvage had dropped to extremely low levels before I19 because of lack of high level play and various market games that were being played. Now all the high level salvage that was at one point below 100 items available (spirit thorns, nevermelting ice, ceramic armor plates for example) is back up in the thousands, even over 10k items in some cases.

I once asked how the economy got started and where all the money came from. Folks have been stockpiling inf from way before AE came. Someone even mentioned one case of folks saving up in anticipation for their bases but when bases came out, refused to convert inf to prestige because the exchange rate was too expensive.
There's money out there, and a lot of longtime players can afford to pay 500+ mill for stuff.

I could afford to do that, but (this is the important bit) I choose not to. All of my characters can already be ridiculously powerful with a smart combination of uncommons and lower tier rares. Purples are just icing on the cake, they add flavour to the build, but aren't what makes the cake so great.

Wheel barrel? Wheel barrel? Are you trying to say wheelbarrow? Wow.

Sorry, but I don't see where you are coming from in any of these statements. New players may complain about not being able to afford anything on the market, but that is simply because they're new. By the same token, they can complain about not being able to solo an AV, too, but that does not mean there is a problem. Rather than complain, they can educate themselves. Every single aspect of the game requires some level of knowledge to succeed. They can either discover it on their own or they can come to the forums and learn. If they refuse to do either, then they're not frustrated because they're new, they're frustrated because they feel entitled.

Not-so-determined players do not exist in this context. It may have meant something a few years ago, when you needed to either farm or do marketeering to afford many of the good items available, but, the introduction of reward merits, AE tickets, and hero merits have made it easy to become rich while playing the game as a super-hero and not as a commodities broker.

I'm a prime example. I've no interest in farming so I don't. I've no interest in spending my time on the market flipping anything, or hunting down niches, or what have you. I use the market for two things: buying salvage and recipes for my use, and selling (usually) crafted IOs I've gotten as drops/random rolls that have some worth to them.

This alone has let me afford to keep my characters outfitted in set IOs. I can't afford purples or PvP sets, and some procs (then again, there are few I even want, I sell most procs the RNG grants me). Other than that, the only set pieces any character I have lacks are those nobody has listed. I've not had to pass up a set or an IO due to price since merits were introduced.

I should also mention that not only do I start outfitting with sets at level 7 (and upgrade the sets every 10 levels), but I also craft every drop I get. If it doesn't sell for several million more than it costs to craft, I stick it in my alts only SG bin. So I'm spending like a drunken sailor.

Many times I feel like I'm getting ripped off when I buy something. Then I look and notice that my 20-something level character who typically had 1 million or less 2 years ago now typically has 1 or 2 hundred million.

The game gives me the tools to play this game for what I play it for, to be a super-hero, and still make loads of money with no effort required. Some small amount of knowledge, mainly not paying "buy it nao" prices on relatively expensive items, is required.

Bottom line, if people complain because they are unwilling to use the tools that don't require you to do anything but play the game, too bad. I could complain that I can't beat a boss with brawl. Should I be taken seriously for doing so? People can complain about not being able to afford purples and PvP IO's without being willing to play the market game. I could complain that my gimped character who only took concept-based powers can't solo an EB. Should I be taken seriously for doing so?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight This is true and it's the way it should be. Experienced players get veterans rewards that the newbies don't. Determined people in the real world work harder to better themselves and do it faster than those who choose not to work and sit on welfare. A newbie purpling out their warshade in a month is equivalent to a new high school graduate thinking that he should be able to jump right into a CEO spot in a major corporation so that he can have a Lamborghini in a month. That's not the way that things work.

That, I think, is exactly where we disagree. To me, a game shouldn't be a direct representation of the real world. We come here to relax, have fun, and have a good time. To me, a game should enable me (and everyone else) to have loads of fun. High rewards, low cost, low risk. Being a Game Design student, that's how I look at games. And what I say is, why SHOULDN'T that new player feel powerful with minimal effort? Why SHOULDN'T you be epic with minimal cost? It's all in a virtual world and a video game.

However, as I've said many times, I'm a realist. And my vision of this game can never be true because not everyone shares that vision, and for that reason, the market rewards the players in an unbalanced fashion. And it will continue to do so until everyone begins using it properly and the developers introduce various smart, and creative solutions to fix it. I think the introduction of Hero/Villain Merits was a step in the right direction. Now even that new player can access the rewards. It's just a matter of time and patience. Sadly, for some (me included), that cost is still unrealistically high (a month of doing Tip missions and buying Hero/Villain Merits for a SINGLE purple IO?! Yes, I do realize it's more efficient to buy some big recipes, sell them, and use that cash to buy the purple. But still. I'm putting myself in place of a new player.).