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Well a combination of that and recent AE exploits which also tend to throw the market out of whack.
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Originally Posted by Sharker_Quint
I have a really good idea that most, if not all, of the market peeps will agree with. Since we now have 3 builds, and a lot of 50's running around doing incarnate things, why don't we let it die off a bit and see what happens. It seems to me that this is just like the spike that happend when the second build came out.
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Why must "use the market" be devolved to "use the market like Forest Gump would?" Even if we do that, surely you know that there are people who post here who do market like that and have billions?|
Originally Posted by seebs
I guess, by "marketeer", I mean "make any effort at all to make good choices about purchase or sale prices when interacting with the market". In short, anything more elaborate than "list everything you don't immediately plan to use at 1 inf, buy by picking the average of last 5 prices and waiting".
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It seems to me that, if inflation continues on the path it's on now, there will likely come a time when a level 50 who's done that won't be able to get cheap frankenslotted IOs from money they've made, because inflation has somewhat disproportionate effects on different kinds of value. The thing is... Yes, the amount you get from selling drops goes up. But that doesn't mean that your total wealth goes up as fast. |
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Say that at point A, you can afford X. Now, we double all market prices. Can you still afford X? Maybe, maybe not. Your total wealth has not doubled. The portion of it which came from market sales has doubled, but the portion which came from punching dudes has NOT doubled. So say you make 10M punching dudes, and 10M selling stuff on the market, and want to buy something which costs 20M. You can. Now say you make 10M punching dudes, and 20M selling stuff, and want to buy something which costs 40M. You can't. |
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| I really do feel that, at this point, the marketing thing is a sort of flaw in the game's design. Sure, I love it. I love that I can spend enough inf to have a really nice personal SG base for my solo villain without even blinking. But I know too many people who are a bit overwhelmed by it, who just find it too much work and not enough fun, but who would really like to be able to get decent I/O builds together. |
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| And I honestly believe that if you simply removed the inflationary tendency of the market, that wouldn't be such a problem. If you removed 90% of all inf from the game, and provided enough inf sinks to keep inf-per-toon at levels closer to the resulting level, I think a lot of players would find it much easier to get IOs, because the inf they get from punching dudes would be statistically relevant in a way that it isn't now. I'm not saying this would be a good fix, or a practical one, but I think a lot of players would find the market more usable if all the prices dropped a zero. |
Why do I think that? Market price is, very loosely, a proxy for time. The price of an item should relate to the product of how long it would take you to produce the item yourself times much inf/hour you can "produce" the old-fashioned way, conflated in some fashion with how badly you want the item. A level 50 can potentially produce 10s of millions of inf per hour. Let's pick on an LotG - that could take a multiple calendar for some people to produce by other methods. By that measure alone, it probably should cost hundreds of millions of inf. Let's say in four days elapsed time, our player might be able to earn 10M inf an hour for 2.5 hours played a day, so earn 100M inf. So if it takes them four days to earn an LotG, and they have 100M right now and want an LotG right now, it makes sense to pay that much. So for that person, an LotG might be "worth" 100M inf.
Now let's consider that it might take me twenty days to produce a purple (probably way more if we didn't have Alignment Merits). In 20 days I could produce five LotGs, and sell each of them for 100M inf to people like my example player. By that measure, such a purple should probably cost 500M inf! That's a lot of money - 1/4 of our carrying cap.
The thing is, today's prices are not that outrageous when you consider our actual earning rates. There's a ton of variation in earning rates based on what you're playing, who you're playing with (if anyone), what you're fighting, but the simple fact is that level 50s can produce gobs and gobs of money. Reduce that, and prices go down, but so do the rates of earning you seem to think should be a stronger component of our earning power.
The only think I think makes some sense to do if the concern is for new players is to flatten the earning curve, so that what a level 10 earns from a defeat or a mission completion is not such a meaningless fraction of what a 50 earns. That isn't a new suggestion, and I can't lay any claim to it. I don't think it's important to do, but it would have more of the effect you're talking about.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
I am looking at mostly what you have when you make 50... Can you afford to buy IOs? Over time, with inflation, the market's sustainable prices can be affordable by people who have been 50 for a while, without being affordable to people who just made 50 -- because so many people have been 50 for a while.
Basically, as prices inflate, the time after you make 50 it'll take you to achieve a given level of build will increase. That has little effect on active marketeers, whose income is utterly dominated by market sales, and thus scales smoothly with inflation. It has a lot of effect on people who barely use the market.
We all pretty much grant that you can't reasonably expect to have a full yellow/orange IO build the day you make 50 unless you've been marketeering. So it'll take time of adventuring at 50 to fill that in. The amount of time, it seems to me, changes with inflation, because your "punching dudes" money is significant.
And yes, people IO themselves without 50s... by playing the market more actively.
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The market redistributes the wealth of 50's across the spectrum of all players.|
Originally Posted by seebs
I am looking at mostly what you have when you make 50... Can you afford to buy IOs? Over time, with inflation, the market's sustainable prices can be affordable by people who have been 50 for a while, without being affordable to people who just made 50 -- because so many people have been 50 for a while.
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So, provided you've taken the absolutely minimal step of selling your drops on the market instead of vendoring them or whatever en route to 50 you will arrive with a tidy bankroll.
Again, my non-optimized RP concept stalker has 60m in the mid 30s from behaving more or less exactly as per your requirements for minimal market involvement.
He stealths everything he can, kills absolutely as few enemies as he can and only recently bumped up his mission difficulty from the default.
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| Basically, as prices inflate, the time after you make 50 it'll take you to achieve a given level of build will increase. That has little effect on active marketeers, whose income is utterly dominated by market sales, and thus scales smoothly with inflation. It has a lot of effect on people who barely use the market. |
EVERYONE.
Farmers don't get rich from defeats, they get rich SELLING DROPS.
I genuinely do not understand the point you're trying to make here, or rather the point is so divorced from my market reality you might as well be speaking some weird moon language.
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| And yes, people IO themselves without 50s... by playing the market more actively. |
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
We also come back to the fact that SO builds are perfectly good.
My rad/rad has his alpha incarnate slotted, and ran Apex last night, on a build from about I9.He has a couple of IOs slotted here and there, but is basically an SO build with a few HO (endrec/tohit debuff especially in RI).
No inherent stamina, no significant IO investment. Still one of the 'goto' guys in my stable for late game stuff.
All his inf at 50, and his drops get put into liquidity for other characters to use if they need to.
@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617
Hmm. You have a point -- pre-50, inf from drops is so trivial that it probably can be ignored, in general.
When I started out, though, I had a very hard time coming up with money; I couldn't even buy SOs at 22, because I didn't have nearly enough money. Despite selling stuff on the market -- by trying to guess what to list it at, without really knowing anything about how it worked.
I think things improve a lot later in the 20s, though. Now I'm curious, though -- I haven't got a real handle on what things look like before that. I levelled mostly teaming at first, and that seems to produce more XP per drop, thus, less wealth at any given level.
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Your English is so good no one could tell it wasn't your first language. That's one reason they were all being so hard on you.|
Originally Posted by Bright Shadow
Finally! Someone got what I'm talking about! English isn't my first language, but I'm not -that- bad!
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| Right now, the gap between the amount of money and effort needed to buy IOs and fully buff out a character is realistically higher than the amount of money and effort needed to simply use SOs on that character. And that's fine. |
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The "issue" and "problem" that I'm trying to point out is that this gap is getting wider and wider and wider at the same rate as that of the inflation. If you think this means "We should give everyone candies!", then I'm sorry, you're misinterpreting me. What I -am- trying to say is that if this gap continues to get wider and wider as it is doing now, then at some point in future, it will be too much to handle for most players. The main point being having the option of solely being a consumer in the market right now, and slowly, this option is being taken away. If you want to get rich, you wouldn't be able to rely on the PvE game alone. You would HAVE to dig into the market. That's what I mean by "affecting new players". Edit: Going back to the example I added above, now I've spent some big chunk of money on a large stack of Scientific Theory. To recover from this loss through only the game, I'd have to farm day and night! But instead I do 10 Tip missions, and sell a highly-valued IO on the market, and I not only recover from that loss, but I also make hundreds of millions in profit. This makes my pocket bigger, and so next time, again, I'm more inclined and encouraged to be lazy, because I have a very much disposable sum of cash! |
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| Yes, the game is a step up from the SOs, and they're not necessary for you to be awesome in City of Heroes. Yes, not everyone should be able to get buffed out characters in a flash. But how costly this "step up" should be? Do we want IOs to be exclusive to the elite of the elite? Is that a reasonable cost for a "step up"? Do you guys believe that everyone should be forced to utilize the market as efficiently as all the more experienced players just because they want to buff out a single character with IOs? |
1) Standard enhancements (TOs, DOs, SOs) (pre I9)
2) Common IOs
3) Frankenslotting junk IOs
4) Uncommon Sets (Thunderstrikes, Crushing Impact, Doctored Wounds)
5) Rare Sets
6) Purple, PvP IOs, and Hamidon Enhancement
With the exception of 2 these all follow a pretty standard progression. From 1 through 3 it's not expensive, if you use the market, to get a huge increase in performance. At step 4 it's a balancing act of cost vs performance increase over the previous level. 5 and 6 it turns around it's only a very marginal increase in performance for a very high cost. Only serious gamers tend to be interested in steps 4 and higher. That means a time investment.
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If you think the answer to all those questions is a big 'yes', then go right ahead. I could be wrong. Maybe none of that will happens. And if it does happen, maybe it's for the better and I'm just being concerned about nothing. But that's just what I'm concerned about, and I'm trying to raise an observation for the more experienced players to see, and maybe think about it. I am NOT trying to argue or prove a point! xD |
One more thing to consider:
Have you thought about what it would be like to try to use inventions WITHOUT the market? It would be nearly impossible to do much like it was back in the preI9 days of trying to Hami out your toon. You had to raid to get the Hamis, you had to raid to trade the Hamis, and woe to you if you were on a low pop server that didn't raid.
The same would happen without the market especially before glee mail. You would only be able to trade on your home server. Low pop servers would be at a huge disadvantage here. You would only be able to trade if someone was on line to trade. You would have to advertise here for trades and set up times to meet. Well that is assuming that this forum even existed without the market. To advertise a trade you would have to zone and broadcast, zone and broadcast. The mere prospect of IOing without the market sends shivers of dread up my spine. Only the elite that played all the time would have even a small chance of completing a build without the ability to easily transfer goods from player to player through the market interface.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
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I do it completely passively. I put up bids with the amount I'm willing to pay and wait. I don't level just one character at a time, so I can leave a mid-level alt for days or weeks while I go do other stuff.
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Originally Posted by seebs
And yes, people IO themselves without 50s... by playing the market more actively.
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My postings to this forum are not to be used as data in any research study without my express written consent.
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I would think normally this should not happen any more. The only way I can see this happening was pre-merger and pre-AE playing a villain and not getting any good drops because villainside paid about 5% of what hero side did for common arcane salvage.|
Originally Posted by seebs
When I started out, though, I had a very hard time coming up with money; I couldn't even buy SOs at 22, because I didn't have nearly enough money. Despite selling stuff on the market -- by trying to guess what to list it at, without really knowing anything about how it worked.
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But even there I found memorizing level 20 or level 35 endurance recipes would allow me outrageous profits selling common End Mods.
At level 22 a non-kheldian had 37 slots to fill now 41 with inherent fitness.
Not having bought SOs in an eternity my recollection is they were 30k-50k each so using the max 50k on 40 slots a player only needs 2 million to SO at 22.
So right now any character can earn 540 AE tickets pretty easily without any shenanigans and get a Deific Weapon or other highly valuable rare and get 2-4 million. Or they can at level 20 run their hero/villain tips and get 2 h/v merits and grab a high value recipe and get even more.
But if someone gets to 22 now and cannot afford their SOs it isn't because there aren't a few easy ways to get there without having to do any more than buy the right recipe or salvage with tickets and merits. I don't find that an unreasonable hurdle at all.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
This was hero side, back in July or so. I just happened not to get particularly lucky in drops, and never ended up with any decent recipes.
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I think now with PvP recipes it's seven groups. After enough time spent in this game, I learned and then relearned what it took to get to the next level of enhancements, moving from common IO's and junk IO sets, to uncommons, to rares, and now purples and Hami-O's. Those PvP IO's are in a group amongst their own in rarity, scarcity, and price on the market. Or in the case PvP IO's... off the market.
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Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
There are 6 pretty clear cut levels of enhancement:
1) Standard enhancements (TOs, DOs, SOs) (pre I9) 2) Common IOs 3) Frankenslotting junk IOs 4) Uncommon Sets (Thunderstrikes, Crushing Impact, Doctored Wounds) 5) Rare Sets 6) Purple, PvP IOs, and Hamidon Enhancements |
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Should never happen, play 1-10 in AE doing story focussed stuff, no need to farm, bronze roll your tickets at 10, odds are you'll see a -KB or res/def, and if not there are plenty of things that will sell for 1M or so.|
Originally Posted by seebs
This was hero side, back in July or so. I just happened not to get particularly lucky in drops, and never ended up with any decent recipes.
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Otherwise, buy up stacks of useless level 50 rare recipes (snipes other than SotM for example), for 1,000 each and vendor them for 10,000 each, that can make you 90K/stack. Do that a dozen times you got a million. Nobody should have any trouble affording SOs.
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
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You must have had an EPIC run of bad luck.|
Originally Posted by seebs
When I started out, though, I had a very hard time coming up with money; I couldn't even buy SOs at 22, because I didn't have nearly enough money. Despite selling stuff on the market -- by trying to guess what to list it at, without really knowing anything about how it worked.
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I tracked lowbie earnings in a thread a few years back to illustrate the discrepancy between the thriving hero market and the wizened villain market and AFAIR at level 15 my hero had 400k or so and my villiain had ~200k. Common salvage sales generated nearly all of those earnings, as at that time uncommons were universally vendor trash.
Although I will admit I haven't actually 'kitted out' with SOs at 22 since the day I9 launched...and the only time I did it before I9 launched was when one of my buddies gifted me a few million. Back in the day most of us limped along with an uneasy melange of trainings, DOs and a few key SOs (usually acc) in various stages of decomposition until earning power caught up with expenses in the late 30's-early 40's (and that was being totally poverty conscious, selling stuff at the right store, riding enhancements until they went red, using intentional debt to boost earning power, etc).
Maybe it does take some luck with drops to fully equip at level 22.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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As for the OP's post, I've no comment - there's nothing there imho worth bothering with...|
Originally Posted by seebs
When I started out, though, I had a very hard time coming up with money; I couldn't even buy SOs at 22, because I didn't have nearly enough money. Despite selling stuff on the market -- by trying to guess what to list it at, without really knowing anything about how it worked.
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As for your comment seebs, it's < 1.5M from scratch to equip a character
with traditional TO/DO/SOs including the L25s (bought at L22), and 18M
total to L50, per my "What's it Cost" thread (now idling on page 3 these days).
I'll add what I've always said regarding inflation - there is NONE in this
segment - in fact, buying power is at an all time high. The prices for
traditional shinies have not changed by a single inf since I-1 in 2004 while
income has risen by orders of magnitude during that same timeframe.
I have a hard time feeling at all sympathetic for a player that can't make
1.5M by L22... Seriously, a handful of vendored recipes or AE tickets gets
this handled in an hour or less.
One decent drop gets the 18M handled as well...
If that is too difficult for a player to figure out, and further, they're too
impatient, lazy, or proud to ask a simple question, or read a guide, TFB.
As folks know, I considered writing a guide based on that "Cost" post, but
in the end, I simply can't see a need for it that other guides haven't made
easy already.
Incompetent players should not constitute a dev problem.
Now, where there IS inflation is premium IO's.
Medium sets up and disappeared for awhile, and that *was* due to dev
changes - some of which have been mitigated in recent releases.
High-end sets are expensive, but also volatile for the most part. There are
bargains on these to be had every day (I know this, because I flip some on
most days).
Still, as I mentioned, merits mitigate the bulk of it, and even simple marketing
skills covers the rest. Additionally, supply in several areas is making a nice
comeback with all the L50's working the Incarnate Trail.
The only actual "problem" I'm seeing is with whiny, self-indulgent players
whose sense of entitlement far exceeds their intelligence and effort level.
That's *my* rant... (not at you, mind you, but at the players who feel the
game or market is busted because they can't be bothered to get off their
duff, and buy a clue first, and then shinies later)...
Regards,
4
I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is definitely better.
Light is faster than sound - that's why some people look smart until they speak.
For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich,
there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. - Obitus.
Ummm, am I wrong, but don't the prices for commons for IOs remain the same at the University tables?
Cause if I'm right then there is ANOTHER level between pvp, purples, LOTG, and set IOs vs SOs.
And that is COMMONS!
A COMMON IO build (which is sure as hell NOT difficult to get) is BETTER than an SO build.
Just thought I'd point that out because people keep forgetting that COMMONs are available at the university table. And also my memory might be wrong, but having them at the tables in the universities was something that I9 beta testers specifically asked that the devs keep.
So no, a full IO build DOES NOT vary in price with the market. And yes I know someone's going to come in and say "but what about the salvage?" Run a mission or two and you have the drops that you can sell to buy the salvage you want.
Now if one is talking about SetIOs that is a different level of effort as it should be.
Bottom line is that the level of build you are able to create (as listed above by others) is directly related to the effort you need to put into it. As others have alluded THAT is by design.
Blazara Aura LVL 50 Fire/Psi Dom (with 125% recharge)
Flameboxer Aura LVL 50 SS/Fire Brute
Ice 'Em Aura LVL 50 Ice Tank
Darq Widow Fortune LVL 50 Fortunata (200% rech/Night Widow 192.5% rech)--thanks issue 19!
I may have had bad luck. I didn't do much AE, as I recall. I didn't know about ANY of the tools for increasing wealth. I didn't know how to craft, and I didn't get many recipes. So I just teamed with people through stuff like Frostfire, some various radio missions, and so on... and I remember that, when I made 22, I could only get SOs because someone sent me some money to help me out. I think it may be relevant that I probably got 90% of my experience on 8-person teams, though, which give a LOT more XP per drop than other ways of levelling.
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I apologise in advance, this is going to sound incredibly picky.|
Originally Posted by FourSpeed
I'll add what I've always said regarding inflation - there is NONE in this
segment - in fact, buying power is at an all time high. The prices for traditional shinies have not changed by a single inf since I-1 in 2004 while income has risen by orders of magnitude during that same timeframe. |
Prices for standard enhancements (TO/DO/SO) have actually fallen since Issue 1.
When I started, in Issue 3, the Origin Stores only carried the 'Power Ten' (which was a stupid idea, but lets not go there), and if you wanted anything exotic like, oh, maybe an End Mod for Stamina, you had to have a contact from who you could buy it. At the inflated contact rate (another stupid idea, I've busted my gut helping these guys out and they're ripping me off?!?). Until you got to Brickstown or Founders and unlocked the appropriate origin stores there, then you were stuck with Power ten stores/contacts, so far as I recall.
I remember buying stuff for a friend because he hadn't done the magic contact in that level range and so couldn't buy a couple of different flavours of SO, I think I used Lars in Striga, so that indicates it was somewhere in the late 20's/very early 30's.
Now that all types of enhancement are available from stores, you don't have to pay the contact's extortion and so it ends up as being slightly cheaper over a toons career than it used to be. (I seem to remember there being some mention a while ago about equalising prices, so contacts may not be gouging you as much as they used to, but it's been a long while since I bought an enhancement from a contact; a longstanding habit held over from when I realised how much contacts were charging over the odds
)Like I said at the beginning, picky
Warning:
The above post may contain Cynicism, sarcasm and/or pessimism. If you object to the quantities contained, then tough.
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big teams definitely kill your drops.|
Originally Posted by seebs
I may have had bad luck. I didn't do much AE, as I recall. I didn't know about ANY of the tools for increasing wealth. I didn't know how to craft, and I didn't get many recipes. So I just teamed with people through stuff like Frostfire, some various radio missions, and so on... and I remember that, when I made 22, I could only get SOs because someone sent me some money to help me out. I think it may be relevant that I probably got 90% of my experience on 8-person teams, though, which give a LOT more XP per drop than other ways of levelling.
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Also, leveling is quite a bit faster in general than it was back in the day, which 'shortens the runway' so to speak. Between patrol xp, xp smoothing and meaningless debt, you're going to arrive at 22 quite a bit faster than the historical average.
I can see those two factors plus some bad luck keeping you from kitting out at 22.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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Originally Posted by Aura_Familia
So no, a full IO build DOES NOT vary in price with the market. And yes I know someone's going to come in and say "but what about the salvage?" Run a mission or two and you have the drops that you can sell to buy the salvage you want. Now if one is talking about SetIOs that is a different level of effort as it should be. Bottom line is that the level of build you are able to create (as listed above by others) is directly related to the effort you need to put into it. As others have alluded THAT is by design. |
I don't fault newcomers for not intuiting all the options available to them when it comes to equipping characters, but if they certainly deserve some flack if they persist in complaining after said options have been pointed out.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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Nothing wrong with being picky, when it does bring something relevant to the table like that.|
Originally Posted by Canine
Like I said at the beginning, picky
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SO prices have indeed gone down for the non-power 10.
@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617
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Agreed.
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Originally Posted by Nethergoat
I don't fault newcomers for not intuiting all the options available to them when it comes to equipping characters, but if they certainly deserve some flack if they persist in complaining after said options have been pointed out.
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Blazara Aura LVL 50 Fire/Psi Dom (with 125% recharge)
Flameboxer Aura LVL 50 SS/Fire Brute
Ice 'Em Aura LVL 50 Ice Tank
Darq Widow Fortune LVL 50 Fortunata (200% rech/Night Widow 192.5% rech)--thanks issue 19!
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone