Purple Futures

Just get a durable (or toon that can easily handle mobs of 0x8) toon to 50 and run thru missions or farms and kill over and over or make a toon and get it all the way to lev 1 and sit it in WW and start searching for deals. Buy low/sell high stuff. I'd rather go kill stuff.

Some say it's luck to get purples. I disagree. Its bound to happen, you just gotta go hunt them. Theyre not gonna fall in your lap. lol.

Well that's what I started doing. But then it became clear that its possibly better to buy the market leader instead, because you get more for your merits.

Prices will drop. That's my guess.

I don't follow that. If purples become rarer, there will be less demand for Rare Salvage. Granted the people buying purples will need to be rich, and will be able to pay top dollar for Rare Salvage. But I'd guess that most Rare Salvage is used to craft Rare Recipes rather than purples. With most other prices dropping, I don't think Rare Salvage will hold up. And if it does then farmers desperate for decent returns on their tickets will knock it down.

All of you Salvage flippers, when you come here to complain about your niche collapsing, I'll just say I TOLD YOU SO! As to level locked lowbies farming, prepare to see a lot more of that.

The damage oriented sets are getting there. I've seen a couple billion Inf transactions for them, while 700 to 800 Million is the norm for a few. Granted the mez sets will probably never get that high because they aren't used by farmers as much.

Prices are already at the point where most Uncommon recipes are vendor junk, hardly worth your time to list on the Market. For the few that are expensive, like Steadfast: Res/Def, I expect the price will drop a bit. But it really depends on how expensive it is. I got /auctionhouse when it came out, so I haven't had to listen to RMT spammers at the Market. But last I knew you could get a billion Inf for under $10. That's enough to buy 50 of the expensive Uncommon Recipes at 20 million Inf each. That sets the bar REALLY low. The Devs won't be able to compete with that unless they offer Uncommons for 25 cents or less. At that price, people may use Paragon Points for the expensive ones, but they're probably not going to spend nearly $24 to completely outfit a level 50 character. Like all of the other Merits in the game, I expect Paragon Points will mainly be used to purchase just the most expensive Uncommons.

If the Devs want to undercut the RMTers, they could offer Uncommons for as low as 10 cents each across the board. At that price I can see people spending about $10 to completely outfit their characters. At that price, the expensive Uncommon market will collapse.

Well, I have a number of 50s, including an Incarnate Fire/Fire Tanker who goes through most normal mobs with very little effort. I was wondering if there are certain specific things you have to do in AE, certain maps you run or that you choose to run them in a certain way.

I manage to make a few million here and there by crafting and reselling, but I look at the prices on things in the market now and can't help feeling like I'm playing with pocket change, and I'd really like to know what to do to start making the real money.

It's inflation, isn't it? Farmers make huge amounts of money, and outbid everybody else, and drive the prices up. And then ordinary people feel like they have to start farming too just to buy the stuff they want that farmers have caused to be priced well out of reach otherwise.

I sure hope the developers can do something about that.

No offense correct me if I'm wrong here;

1. You've found the City Forums
2. You've found the market forum
3. You appear to be able to read threads
4. What's stopping you from reading all the guides we've written to making money?

Somewhat, but only on certain items. Prices on the market are a function of two things: the amount of inf available (demand) and the supply of items.

The thing is people soloing (which most farmers do) actually generates more items for every inf than people playing on teams. When a team kills an enemy the total amount of inf added to the economy is greater than when a solo player kills the same enemy. However the drops the enemy provides are generally the same in both situations (there are a few exceptions from Avs and Monsters but those are a small quantity). This is actually largely what TopDoc was getting into in his original post. The iTrials result in very large groups killing a relatively small number of high level foes (the +4s in the trials give more inf than +0s but have the same drop chance for loot). Even with the inf scaling accross a league it still means that more inf is being generated per drop than on a standard 8 man team

Now the AE does skew this somewhat. Solo players still generate more drops per inf than teams in AE but the drops in question are ticket drops which skews the output somewhat. This is largely why the prices of rare salvage and pool A recipes have dropped relative to their pre-AE prices but items that aren't available with tickets (or are available but are considered to expensive) have not dropped.

I buy them. I have the inf so if it's useful for a build I am happy to shell out for them.

Ah, the "placing items for sale at low prices hurt marketeers" line. Well I hate to break it to you but the opposite is true, marketeers LOVE people who list things well below the going rate. We make our profits on the fact that people are listing items below the stable market price. When you list a piece of rare salvage at 500K what do you think happens to it? The answer is that a marketeer buys it (probably for a bit over 1 million) and re-lists it for closer to the going rate (probably somewhere around 1.7-1.8 million).

If you really want to screw marketeers list your salvage for about 1.6-1.7 million (maybe a bit lower if it's a less valuable one like Hamidon Goo). That way it's to expensive to make it profitable for them to flip it but since you don't have to worry about making a profit you can undercut his prices and steal a sale. Listing them for 500K is just giving marketeers more profit, for which we thank you.

Look for an AE mission that says it's a Fire Farm. The mobs all do Fire damage, which you should resist at 90%. If you pop some lucks before and during, you'll hardly be hit. That means you can REALLY crank up the difficulty, like to +4/x8. They usually have multiple ambushes triggered off defeating bosses or destroying objects. You end up with a huge number of mobs around you. The mobs may rez so you can defeat them twice. Eat lots of red Inspirations and you'll be damage capped. Look around the guide section for macros to combine Inspirations and it'll be easy.

Volume or high end items. Buy 10 Aegis: End/Res recipes plus the salvage to craft them for 12M each, sell for 30M each, that's 150M profit on a stack of 10. Or buy a really expensive purple for 500M, sell it for 700M, that's 130M profit. The first is fairly safe but it's some work. The second is very risky and you need to have 500M to risk, but it's faster. Then again, you may spend more time tracking the market prices so you know which purple to use. And you don't want to have a whole lot invested in any single thing in case some little bit of i21 info causes a panic. The floor would drop out of the purple market if the devs said that you could buy purples for $1 each.

They have already added several different currencies that people can earn to buy purples or other rare Enhancements. But honestly, there will ALWAYS be a purple problem. Some people farm, others play a lot, others play efficiently. They EARN their purple, either directly or by earning enough Inf to buy them on the Market. The more casual players don't play enough to get many purple drops, and don't earn enough Inf playing so they can buy purples on the Market, so they don't deserve them. The real problem is that casual players have unreasonable expectations. The new currencies are an attempt to correct those expectations.

No actually I'm at the high end, even for Marketeers. I buy purples when I want them, and have hundreds on my characters already.

So do i, but i'll never say someone doesn't "deserve" purples or anything else in this game that they pay the same amount per month that i do. Just because i can play 20-30 hours a week don't mean others can.

For it to take MONTHS to get 1 purple as an alternative to farming is ridiculous for regular gamers that like to play on teams (which also hurt their purple chances) and run missions and may not like to sit at WW and run back and forth crafting and all that crap to earn some inf. There needs to be some realistic options for EVERYONE, not just the ones that wanna stockpile of inf just to post pics in here for the "look at me im rich" crowd.

Because ultra-rare means everyone gets one?
Or...? What?

They are just as rare for me as they are for someone that may have LIFE situations that doesn't allow them to play as much as i do. But that doesn't mean that they don't "deserve" them. Well, to me it don't.

Deserve's got nothing to do with it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpDkYZWeeVg

Rare means that very few people will have them.
Ultra rare means that very, very few people will have them. Everyone gets a chance. It's not the dev's job to balance the game around everyone's various personal life.

Not recipes, apparently, but pre-crafted IOs. Not that it will really make much difference for uncommons anyway.

Seriously?!

That is the worst news I have heard all day! I loathe the idea of things like that being for sale for real money, regardless of the power of the items in question.

I agree. I hope this F2P doesn't start a whole era of real money involment for in game items. If so, i'll delete fast. My monthly fee is all im paying for, for a game. I dont buy slots, respecs, and i wont buy enh's either. F2P doesn't sound too F. LOL.

It strikes me more as a la carte plus an available free trial

That scale with your level. Kinda interested in how that'll work out personally. I'd like if they removed the level component from inventions in general. Would be a mess with regards to influence sinks though.

Well, it would probably require crafting on a level 10 (or as low as you can) so that the cost would be smaller. Or just cap the costs at level 30, and refund 250M to everyone who has the portable workbench unlocked.

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.

As much as I would love to see that I would be kind of pissed though especially after going for field crafter. Thats alot of inf to blow at once. Personally I do not see this F2P thing working out well at all. It just turns CoH into farmville or some other F2P game like say dungeon runners. I am mainly worried about the level of spam we will be getting especially since they have said absolutely nothing about what they are going to do to prevent it. Right now its not really worth their time to do it due to you only being limited on trials to lvl 14 or so but once trials can go to 50 that means they will be spamming every where more hardcore than before.

If you didn't turn a profit obtaining Field Crafter, you're Doing It Wrong (R)(tm).

The communication restrictions placed on free accounts seem to have those precise concerns in mind.

Or you just don't care. I only turned a profit because I'm greeeeeedy.