Market griefing - enough already

First, welcome to the game, we're glad you're here.
Second, the following is my opinion (generally) and is not sugarcoated in any way(I don't waste my time with it)

We (The Crazy 88s) do not believe that the market is the game. We believe that the market is a trivially simple mini-game the devs gave us that allows us to rake in inf with barely any effort. You may have heard about us in passing but you seem to have the wrong idea about what we're doing.
The Crazy 88s exist for two reasons:

1. To buy our way to the #1 prestige on Virtue(and crush a certain other sg in the process)
2. To remove from the game all the inf we spent buying prestige thus combating inflation.

We want your 'dollar' to go further.

You should check out the market forum, we make no secret of our methods to wealth. Not only that but there is a thread where one of us will buy you your SOs from 1-50. Just ask us.

Regarding a million influence being a fortune, or not;
Back in issue 9 when the market and inventions came out You could get an entire build fully purpled for under 2 billion. Now you can pay that for a single purple damage set. This is inflation.

If you have any questions about the market, why I do what I do or anything else feel free to hit me up @Chaos Creator or come talk to us by typing (without quotes) "/chanjoin theMarket"

Thank you! Hope we cross paths at some point. Let me please take a moment to state that my previous post, and what follows, deal with issues as I see them. It's not an accurate reflection of my opinion of the game as a whole. That is very positive. Please don't let this conversation make you all think I'm a whiner that wants everything handed to her. Nothing could be further from the truth. I just want a little more level playing field.

Hon, SOs are better than IOs until level 40. It's not about competing. It's about playing the game rather than running around in AE. AE is all well and good. I've played some pretty neat stories there. It's not the content I'm after, though. SOs make me stronger than IOs for a good while...but IOs give badges (I'm a badge nut) and they don't wear out, so if I level a couple times in a Task Force, I still have something. SOs can go red...which is a bad thing halfway through a task force or team session.

Normal enhancements aren't worth the price of admission. You can go broke in no time getting those things. Tried that. Cost is high, and they need replacing every three levels to remain at near top effectiveness. IOs get replaced evey FIVE levels...and they still work past that if you aren't ready to replace them yet. Normal enhancements go red...and MUST be replaced.

As to the devs (in the past) thinking we shouldn't be able to afford SOs at 22, well, mission accomplished. The trouble is, the days of the "brutal time sinks" are over. That ship has sailed. The buying public won't stand for it anymore. My friends, if any of you remember EverQuest, you'll understand what brutal is by comparison.

People want fun, not strife, in their recreational activities. I offer as evidence World of Warcraft. 37 jam packed servers generating hundreds of millions of dollars annually...and that game is easy. I'm tired of it, though...which is why I left.

Look at the changes made here! I mean DANG! The present game has no real comparison to the one released six years ago.

When I started in May, Freedom and Virtue were low population servers. Why? People had QUIT! They'd gotten tired of the same old same old. When Going Rogue went live, POW! They all came back. I made many new friends who'd been out for a year or two and I knew more about the game than they did! What a shock to me that was! All because of the changes.

Why should I be able to compete with a veteran? Come on, hon. I have to play the same content they do...often in the same teams with them. Ok...they go charging off mowing down everything in sight, while I cower in the back (or get clobbered) because I have nothing in my slots...or TOs or IOs while they have SETS in their level 26 alt of the moment?

I've been kicked from PuGs before because I wasn't "uber" enough. Fortunately I'm making a network of good friends...helpful, patient and just as interested in fun as I am without the need to prove anyone's self-worth by playing a video game.

I also fully agree with your point about needing Influence sinks. People running around with 3-4 BILLION Influence couldn't care less about paying 8 or 9 million to outfit a level 27 Alt in shiney new IOs. For a player like me...that hurts. A lot.

This argument makes a lot of sense. I confess I hadn't though much about this. It still doesn't explain the wonky market prices completely though. It wasn't "that" bad before Christmas. I don't really know the point when the market went nuts, but I do remembr griping about the cost of Alchemical Silver when it was 50k per item. Boy...was I in for a surprise later.

It's not about making money. It's about wanting to play the game. I do NOT consider the market a "mini-game" as some seem to. I want to go bop bad guys in the snot-box, not stare at a dialog box for hours on end.

I understand how to make money using AE. I made much of the wealth I have running a farm, buying rares, and selling them for 3-4-5 million per. Then I was advised by a friend to take advantage of the situation by using 8 tickets for a chance at those Alchemical Silvers I covet.

There's a 1 in 6 chance for you to get a specific salvage item. That's pretty good odds. I didn't sell the extra silvers I got though. I saved them for my endless stream of Alts. I'm a certified alt-o-holic.

I "am" learning. I just wish there was a better way.

I'm just judging by what I read in "this" thread, hon. I need to explore more...learn the ropes.

I have noticed this game has it's share of what I call "monkey children". I have also noticed a rather LARGE and (from past experience - been doing MMOs since 1997) disproportionate number of genuinely nice, helpful and fun folks to play with.

This is a GOOD game...with a GOOD overall community. It's been, for all it's strengths and weaknesses, a much better experience that World of Warcraft. That's why I let my account there lapse.

I doubt I'll be back.

Thanks for the responses...and for not flaming me.

Happy gaming!

You should seriously reply to my PM.

Now I'm curious what about buying something with thousands for sale and no bids? If I buy those to delete is that griefing?

Actually, this isn't true. IOs begin to match SOs around level 25. And level 30 IOs are better than some +level SOs. Generally, on my characters, I begin making IOs around level 30 when I find them, slotting SOs in whatever slots are left.

I do understand that SOs can go red, which can be problematic. However, you can buy new ones in the middle of a TF. It's not like people don't understand that having you well slotted is better than having you with effectively no slots in your powers. I do understand, though, that IOs never going red does make them very useful. Still, my only point is that they aren't needed, but they are useful. (And I certainly understand the badging aspect of it, but you can get those badges even when your character is level 50 and making more influence than he could possibly spend).

SOs do NOT need replaced every three levels. They need to be replaced every five levels. Buying level 25 SOs at level 22 gives you until level 27 before they are about to expire, meaning that you can then buy level 30 SOs at that time. I get that you want to be "near top effectiveness," but the percentage decrease isn't all that much that you should be able to notice one or two more levels of decrease.

Idiot players are idiot players. Can't do much to fix that. I'm glad that you've found better people though.

My point wasn't that you shouldn't be able to charge in, but that they are going to have years worth of stuff accumulated. Might they be able to do things that are a bit harder than you? Sure. Can you complete any content that you attempt? Yes, though it may have to be on lower settings.

Let me just say here that I am not rolling in dough in this game. My altitis and low amount of playtime lead me to not generating a lot of influence. I do generally struggle to afford everything that I want in this game, despite being an almost 7-year veteran. Still, I understand that people with 20 hours of playtime a week are likely going to be able to afford more stuff than my 3 hours will allow me. That's not something I hold against them, even if it makes me comparatively weaker. I will probably never get a character to the point that I can solo +4/+8 missions. That doesn't mean the system is broken, though. I can still play the game the way I want to.

Then don't. I am able to make enough money to SO out characters in the lower levels just by selling every salvage drop I get in the level 4-20 range. I don't stare at a dialogue box. I spend 5 minutes just dumping everything onto the market for 5 influence. And at various points, I've come out with more money than I'd need to SO out that character for life. Like I said, I only get around 3 hours a week of playtime. I'm not going to spend that at the market. Doesn't mean I can't make money off of it. I want to get back out and play the game, too.

OH BOY! FRESH MEAT!

Cool! Welcome to the city! Pull up some enemies and relax!

If you got thrashed at Basketball by Michael Jordan in his prime, would you feel bad?
If you tried competing in Formula One in a Civic, would you be put out when you didn't win (or even place)?
If you went into real estate and lost a bid on a property to Donald Trump, would you feel unfairly handicapped?

Remember there are people with 7 YEARS of inf accumulation, plus a goodly number of marketing specialists here. Becoming competitive, IMMEDIATELY isn't a realistic expectation.

It's going to take time, patience, hard(ish) work, and a bit of luck in developing a couple niches where you squeak out profit. I've been here two and a half years now. And I have enough to pretty much buy anything I want. Yet there are people here who could buy and sell me several times over (though it'd be an annoying number of transactions since the inf transfers are capped).

There are ways around the high prices at WW. AE is one of them. They allow you to purchase salvage rolls and recipe rolls with tickets. You can even spec buy certain very expensive types of salvage.

At higher levels for recipes, you can purchase recipes with merits.

I had a couple of people offer to give me Influence as a gift to a new player. At first I politely refused, wanting to pay my own freight, as it were. I learned to accept those gifts.

For future reference. Sell the two TOs at the first vendor you come to for seed capital. Then go sell the large inspies on the market. You can easily bring in 6 digits of inf immediately. I've stepped out of WW with as much as half a million inf just from this alone. Once you have this level of inf, getting rich is pretty much a done deal.


This is a legitimate way of getting equipped though.

IO crafting, especially for commons, isn't really worthwhile until the mid 30's. You're better off with SOs until then.

35 actually. In the future, you're better off running regular, non-AE content and actually getting drops if you want to get wealthy. Some of the lower level salvage pieces go for obscene amounts of inf. A couple of those and you're rolling in inf.

Leveling up in PvE isn't a competition.


If you can buy most things on the market (purples and PVP IOs excepted) you're fine.

Quite a bit. Remember, you've got people sitting on billions of inf. Some people can do a bit of performance art with their high level characters and stack 42,000,000,000 (42 BILLION) into their toon via impossible bids (for L53 recipes, etc) via the market. Don't even get me started about also storing inf in e-mail.

As for paying below the "buy it NAO" price. Patience can be measured in days usually. Realistically, you can't expect to bid 1 inf for an item that's regularly going for 100K and actually have it fill before the heat death of the universe. More reasonable lowballing (50-80% of average bid) can fill in up to a week. If it doesn't fill after a week, you should probably up your bid. If you really need it now, either bump your bid or hit AE and spec buy with tickets.

Also, leveling up faster usually provides less inf overall. Usually, outside of lucky recipe drops, AE makes you less. Had a run a couple weeks back where a brand new character in AE make 100 million due to bronze rolls.

See above about suitable waiting periods and bumping bids.

Because they aren't used in as many things, therefore competition for them is less.

Also, crafting large numbers of recipes at once (usually meaning paying "Buy it NAO!" pricing because you don't want to wait) can be very expensive.

I blew 75 million inf in a one-night binge for Field Crafter back in i12. You could probably double or triple it now doing the same thing.

Luck Charms are used in more than just Acc. They're used in more things than Boresights are. They're also used in MORE DESIRABLE things than Boresights are. Hence there is greater competition for them.

No. Because they aren't just used in that single recipe.

Do a bit of digging into recipes that require Boresights. Then look at ones that require Luck Charms. There are simply more recipes (some of them VERY desirable) using Luck Charms.

Yes there are people fiddling with the market. It's there to be fiddled with.

As for the 88's, they're not PRIMARILY about messing around with the market, though that's how they obtain their wealth. They're essentially an inf-DESTRUCTION project. More inf is coming into the CoH economy than is leaving. This is one of the causes of the inflation you're seeing. These individuals are destroying inf in massive quantities to help balance out the system. Simply buying things they don't need only takes a fraction of that inf out of the system. Converting it to Prestige removes ALL of it. And more, they get to tweak the noses of the various unfriendly Prestige farmer SGs.

One other thing to ruminate on. If you came into the game, and after a month you had "everything" and billions of inf besides, would you actually be happy? Probably not. You'd be bored out of your skull. Because you wouldn't have had any notion that you'd actually EARNED it.

You're comparing yourself to people who've spent massive amounts of time and inf in the game. You're a brand new player. The game is not about "winning" by hitting some pre-defined "end". The fun is in the journey there. Tweaking them afterwards to turn them godlike is just icing on the cake. It's not necessary, nor is it mandatory.

Good. Trust me, after you've played a while and had a chance to build up some reserves, marketing becomes easier (if not cheaper).

Market griefing is a term used by people who don't understand the forces at work in the market, nor the fact that what's happening is NOT directed at them. It's people having fun playing a game in a way that IN NO WAY detracts from your ability to participate.

The more people who participate in the market minigame, the better off everyone is. Simply because competition will drive prices down. Fortunately for the marketeers, few people have the patience for this and would rather gabble about how the market is "broken" and how marketeers are "evil" and that they really want a storefront that just sells the stuff at set inf prices.

As such, marketeers make obscene profits. *Smootches Inf Horde*
My personal best (that I remember) at selling non-drop items I've either relisted or through buy-and-craft was over 20000% (twenty-thousand percent). Double XP weekends are usually so rife with profit that I get very little actual XP earning done.

Also, the profit levels I'm talking about are WELL above the point where I actually listed the items in question.

*Busts out the M2A-17* LIGHT ME!

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Sure there is. Stop paying "Buy it NAO!" prices then acquire the items by alternate means and it'll stop being so profitable.

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Not Aett, but all I can say is - "then play it." (And IOs catch up and surpass SOs earlier than that, by the way.)

I have level 50s, now working on Incarnate content, that did so on SO builds (or SO with a small sprinkling of IOs, like a KB resist IO.)

SOs, really, are fine - if you don't mind the replacement cost. Given the money coming in from elsewhere, I tend not to mind. (No, not typically rich. I dump salvage and old recipes I'm not going to use.)

Why are you replacing IOs every five levels?

Um... ok. Think that's the first time I've heard them described that way ever...

*points to reg date*

Registration date doesn't normally mean anything here, but I point mine out for a reason. The forum reg date is about a week after I started playing, and I've stayed with the game since. 250+ alts, two accounts, etc.

And, again - I run on SOs. Or common IOs. Know what? Nobody can tell the difference without looking at the info screen.

Don't let idiots like that shape how you think you "have to" play. Instead, click their name, add player note, one-star them and don't team with them again. Once THEY pay your $15/month, they can tell you how to play. Really, especially on a team - it's not that big a deal.

Personally, I'd rather play with someone who knows what they're doing (or is willing to learn and work with the team) and is on SOs than someone with a 'purpled out' build and clueless/bossy/otherwise irritating.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Exactly right. Buy up maybe 1k worth of random common arcane salvage from 26-40 and sell it for 1 inf on the market. You will be able to finance your toon much better than buying your SOs on AE.

Have you put in the same amount of time and development of your toon that they have? If not, why would you reasonably expect parity with them. Ask them to hunt up how many hours their toons have played.

If they don't know how, have them hunt up a citizen whose name begins with an M. Talk to them, it'll tell them that toon's total hours in-game.

Sorry about that. Unfortunately, there are idiots in every group. Even here. Mostly they're people who simply cannot properly adapt to the game where "gear" is less necessary.

Plus you have people with isues and issues worth of free costume change tokens. Someone 40+ with all 5 costume slots opened gets 5 tokens every issue, regardless of how much that toon has been played in the last couple years.



Prices were nuts after issue 9. People had been storing inf as mostly useless for 3 years by that point. Then the market happened.

It went nuts after i13 when the Merit system was introduced. Various recipe prices skyrocketed because you could no longer rely on end-of-TF drops.

It went completely bonkers after i14 when everyone went and farmed themselves silly for about 6 months.

The market is never EVER going to be "sedate". If you want sedate and boring, go do random rolls for your needs and buy SOs through the stores.


Sorry if this sounds rude. But whether YOU consider the market a mini-game or not, it IS. If you wish to avoid it, use merits, tickets and alignment merits (in addition to random drops) to outfit yourself.

You need to get out of AE though. AE is merely a fallback method of acquiring wealth. Compared to earnings in real content and your inf accumulation is decidedly stunted.


It's good that you're at least attempting to learn the ropes in the market. That'll both save and make you money in the long run.

Remember, you've only been at this a couple months. A year or so down the road, you won't even blink at prices if you absolutely HAVE to buy "RIGHT FRICKIN' NAO!"

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I agree with this.

This is what bugs me about why the vet reward program became crap. Because all the cry babies thought it was unfair that their 3 months in game wasn't rewarded like the 7 YEAR person. Boo hoo.

This whole game generation of "gimme for nothing" is tiresome. It is sad the devs ate it up.

The reason for the difference in supply is due to the way that salvage drops work. Each piece of salvage is classified as either Tech or Arcane and there are equal numbers of each type. Enemy groups can drop either Tech salvage only, Arcane salvage only or an even mix of the two.

So in theory all salvage of the same rarity and tier should be supplied in relatively even quantities but in practice player preferences come into play. For various reasons the enemy groups that drop Tech salvage or both types tend to be easier than the groups that drop arcane salvage. For example in the mid level Freakshow are much more popular than Circle of Thorns. As such Arcane salvage is frequently more expensive than the equivalent level tech salvage.

Interestingly prior to the market merge the opposite was true on redside for Tier 1 salvage. The Mercy Island arcs featured the Snakes who dropped arcane salvage so Luck Charms tended to be cheaper redside than blue.

Additionally while all salvage items are used in multiple recipes, not all enhancement types are equally valuable. To use the alchemical salvage and scientific theory you noted.

Alchemical Silvers are used int he following common recipes:
Accuracy
Confuse
Defense Buff
Intangibility
Run Speed

Scientific Theories are used in:
Accuracy
Flight Speed
Jumping
Range
To Hit Buff

If you look at the rates that different enhancement types sell at (something I have done quite a bit while working on Field Crafter) you will see that Defense Buff and Run Speed enhancements are very popular while Flight Speed, Jumping and To Hit Buff enhancements are a lot less popular (Confuse, Intangibility and Range are all pretty much worthless in terms of sell price). So while both items are used in 5 common recipes the demand for Alchemical Silvers is actually quite a bit higher than Scientific Theories.

So the reason for the difference in price is that Alchemical Silvers have a lower supply and higher demand than Scientific Theories. I hope that clears things up a bit for you.

I wouldn't say the devs have "ate it up".

Notice they're militantly NOT doing anything about ratcheting down player controls on the market. If they were going to fiddle, the market merger would have been the time to do so.

If anything, they made bulk traders MORE efficient.

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Well, I was referring to the argument of "not fair" about the vet rewards.

The market is the market. Just like in real life. People get what they get and should get over it if they don't. imo

Actually 100 times doesn't really surprise me at all. Supply and demand curves are not linear, doubling the demand for something while holding supply steady tends to result in the price more than doubling. Add in the fact that the shortage of alchemical silvers/luck charms is almost certainly depressing the price of scientific theories/boresights and a huge difference becomes unsurprising.

To a first degree approximation scientific theories and boresight are only used in Accuracy enhancements. The percentage of them used in other recipe types is low enough to be lost in the noise (particularly for Scientific Theories since Super Jump is probably the least popular travel and Flight doesn't really need slotting after the last buff). Therefore as long as the number available is greater than the number of alchemical silvers/boresights destined to be used to craft accuracy enhancements the price will be heavily supressed down to vendor trash levels.

Yes it does, actually.

"50 to 100 times more" doesn't mean much at these low values. There really isn't any difference between 1 inf and 100 inf in this game. If something can be purchased reliably for 100 inf, its counterpart selling for 10,000 inf isn't actually significantly more expensive. 1,000 to 100,000 isn't really that big a leap either to many people, with as much inf floating around as we have.

Just to make myself clear, I'm not saying that continues at higher values. 100,000 to 10,000,000 is absolutely a huge difference. Like the comment above mine says, it's not linear.

Also it's not math proofs, it's scientific theories. Math proofs are the high level salvage. I think in general you will find Sci Theory to sell for more than math proofs.

The mid level stuff, which is where AlSil and Sci Theory sit, are generally more expensive than low or high level stuff.

No. It doesn't, because the things described are only two of a host of contributing factors.

How many defense common defense IOs does an SR scrapper need to deck themselves out?

How many runspeed?

How many Acc?

Not to mention the places where the salvage is used in various set IOs.

We can keep naming off contributing factors all day. In the end, the result is the current situation of the market. And even then, we're probably going to have missed things.

If you look at each of these things, or at least all of the things we've mentioned thus far, in a vacuum, sure it looks hokey. You have to understand big-picture here.



The problem is, you're looking at market balance in terms that don't include game basics (or common sense basics) like "There are people out there who have VAST Inf stockpiles" because they've been playing a lot longer (and possibly harder) than me."

With realities like that, the type of "balance" that you're talking about isn't even a dream.


And you have. There's no easy answers here. Just keep working at it and you too can reach a point where the inf becomes incidental. But nobody's promising it'll come quickly.

Events always make it harder. More people means more demand. Depending on their activities, this could mean more supply, but that isn't guaranteed.

It's a problem all right. But the solution, since it involves effort and some short term fiscal responsibility, isn't one lots of people want to hear.


No. Bad! WRONG! You should still have posted. It's all the people who don't post, and sit around muttering about "evil marketers" that exacerbate the problem.

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Based on Korilynn's voice, she's a good ol' southern gal, and 'hon' is for just about everybody.

Just think of it as a term of endearment.

THIS!

Also if you'd have replied to me I'd have set you up for a dozen toons worth of SOs.. was all set to send you the 200m I just made from a single sale...

The thing is, though, that there is always something making the market behave 'weirdly'. Since you started playing, there have been:

- reactivation and double XP weekends.
- a selection of AE exploits, some of them long-running, which had the usual effects (crash in the price of rare salvage and level 50 pool A recipes, hike in the price of common IOs, common and uncommon salvage and purple recipes.)
- the Halloween event.
- the release of Going Rogue, causing a heavy swing towards low-level content.
- the release of the Incarnate system, causing a heavy swing towards high-level content.
- the merge of the red and blueside markets that involved wiping the entire transaction history.
- the introduction of e-mailing of inf and items.
- Tips and side-switching.
- Alignment merits.

*All* of those had an effect on the market, some more dramatic than others, some more transitory than others. You can't pick May 2010 as a benchmark -- or rather, you can choose to, but it doesn't make any more sense than to pick Feb 2011. There is no 'normal' state of the market, which sets the prices that things 'should' be. There is only the current state of play, as defined by current conditions.

Yeah. Make me feel like a cheapskate now...

*Rassum Frassum*

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Don't forget about the free transfers. People transferring older alts from other servers for free, and breathing new life and new IOs into them.