Zero to Awesome (30 day project)

I find it amazing to see eryq2 hasn't improved at all on any aspect in years. It's like he's impervious to knowledge.

I haven't said anything about "my knowledge", so the only reasonable assumption is that you think I'm refering to forum marketing advice in the quoted sentence, which would be quite stupid since I disagree with much of it, but I guess fitting from you.

No, no, when I say you're impervious to knowledge, I don't mean about the game specifically. I'm talking about life. Everything.

Day 4 (Friday 8/5/2011

Market-wise this was a very good day. I crafted five more LotG def/rech IOs and listed them, and several of them sold -- for good money, 10 to 13 million each! (Listed for 5.1 mil). Oh that's right, it's the weekend. ^_^ I knew these things would sell well given several days or a week!

Level-wise, I didn't accomplish much. I wanted to make sure that my bank mission went well so I'd get the contact afterwards, so I decided to street sweep to level 15. But I joined a Cathedral of Pain trial run by Zombie Man, and then formed a Manticore TF that went longer than planned (and one of the people I specifically formed it for DC'd just before the AV went down, and didn't get the badge/reward, grrr.)

My friend Dante Jr. (noticing I'm on a TF with another character): At this rate it's going to take AE Baby forever to hit 50.
Me: I know.

Ah well, I had a fun evening anyway. ^_^ And moneywise I'm now in position to buy and sell with few worries.

Day 5 Saturday 8/6/2011

The plan today was to earn some merits and gain a level or two. To that end, I first grabbed all of the explore badges in Cap Au Diable, then I turned my difficulty down to -1 and ran my bank heist.

The contact I got from this was Marshal Brass. I eventually completed his The Aeon Conspiracy arc, so I got 10 merits from that and also made it to level 17 by the time I was done (after a little street sweeping for those last two bubbles).

It's been so long since I've done low/mid level redside content that I was surprised by some of the unique maps that I didn't remember. The "Find Out What's Wrong with the Power Transfer System" part of the arc has an especially cool map -- essentially a Council map reskinned, but it looks cool, and the final room is unique to this mission. I took pictures!







I was going to log after hitting level 17, but instead I got a blind invite. What's this? A team redside? And it turned out to be a very fun team running in Sharkhead Isle. I think the leader was switching between two mission arcs. One involved the Midnighter's. I didn't recognize what arc it was, but it also had a cool unique map:



The team ran into trouble after this mission -- a Tsoo mission where at one point we were fighting Tsoo with multiple sorcerers at +4 to most of the team, and then after we turned it down we found a corridor with 3 groups and a patrol wandered in, so we had 4 different full groups (8 man team) and I don't know how many sorcerers, more than 8 I think, and after a couple of team wipes the sorcs were in the front of the hallway but were from different groups, and attacking them would bring all four groups down on us. Fun times!

But I got all the way to level 19 and within a bubble and a half of 20 on this team, so no worries!



Currently bidding on more LotG def/rech recipes (I crafted two more of these and have them up for sale) and also on Performance Shifter end/rech recipes, and hoping to pick up a Karma kb protection recipe cheap, and an Unbounded Leap stealth IO for what passes for cheap for these recipes at low levels. ^_^



There's a good chance I'll play some more tonight, hit 20, and work on going rogue. Not sure if I want to turn full hero yet, I do want to be able to buy a merits eventually, but right now being able to team hero-side would help a lot.

Neat project, Organica, I'm following it with quite a bit of interest.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Organica I wanted to make sure that my bank mission went well so I'd get the contact afterwards...

Thought I'd mention for anyone who isn't aware, that you don't have to succeed on a Safeguard or Mayhem mission in order to have a contact offered to you afterward -- you just have to complete it (success OR fail, either one works).

Is that true? For some reason i seem to recall not being offered a contact when I failed, but you're probably right.

One thing I forgot to mention: salvage for level 25 and lower IOs is cheaper than mid-level salvage. With the money I've already earned it was quite easy to completely IO my character with level 20 IOs. Those can probably serve me until I start buying level 30-33 set IOs.

Edit: I did manage to get to 20 and picked up speed boost. Not five minutes later I joined a team lead by my friend Dante to take down the Ghost of the Scrapyard. Eventually I managed to get five rogue tip missions in, but dredging for tips in Sharkhead Isle is one of the most tedious experiences I've ever had in the game, and I've done it on plenty of occasions. Your best bet is to take down bosses, but taking down a level 20 or higher boss when you're level 20 yourself and not a great soloer is tricky. I resorted to running back and forth from the hospital a lot so I could stock up and eat enhancements like candy. And when I was done I was nearly 21.

Also bought quite a few of the recipes I was bidding on (the level 50 ones to sell). I crafted some LotG and placed them up for sale. I have bids in on five Gift of the Ancient: Defense recipes too, those are over 3 million a piece to buy but will sell better than the other stuff I'm working at the moment.



This is the entrance to the tip mission "Curse of the Curious Mook". However I don't think I've seen it before, and I'm pretty sure that's because it's the villain version of the tip rather than the rogue version. Because I wasn't sure I dropped the mission, I didn't want to do a villain mission by accident. (It's been a long time since I did tip missions to change alignment instead of just to earn a-merits -- so I've gotten in a bad habit of clicking without even looking.)

Anyway, it's a very cool mission entrance, like desciending into a grave or something. ^_^

you should stay villain side, going hero is totally wimping out.

Yeah stay with the dark side.

You know thats what Dr. Evil would do.

/em waves to Dr. Evil.

I've actually run into several people today from the forums, who recognized my character, heh. Just dropped an Ouro portal for a character of Diesel Punk. (Which I have because of the Midnighter mission above, involved time travel I guess -- I can't actually use the portal yet, but it was useful for someone else!)



Anyway, level 21. Bribed Mortimer Kai into working with me... though from what I remember, people don't actually like that SF much. Anyway, I have a BBQ to go to tomorrow, probably won't get to play.

I think I may go rogue for the next week and try to hit 35 by Friday or Saturday if I can. After that I can go back redside with no worries, since I can always join an ITF. I might actually do several ITFs for DXP weekend if it works out that way.

That's true. (And I'm aware of that -- I have over 1300 merits on Tiffany Blackheart and over 700 on Mouse Police mostly because they're vigilantes and I can't convert them, heh). So I have to plan around that fact, because I want to earn as many merits as possible and convert them to a-merits, and I'd like to be earning a-merits via tip missions too... but I won't have time to do that if I stay rogue for very long.

(But going rogue will allow me to collect well over 100 merits just from explore badges.)

Another problem that I have to overcome is this: I want to use most of my market slots to earn money, but at some point I want to start bidding on the IOs I'll need for my build. In the past I've dumped money on a character and placed lowball bids on the IOs I'll need, confident that I don't need to be earning any money and can wait for the bids to fill. Doing both -- earning money, and buying a bunch of IOs to slot (but not paying buy it nao prices) is going to be interesting.

For the moment I'm trying to earn as much money as I can. All of my profits I've plowed back into buying recipes to sell -- ideally I'll have a lot to sell come next weekend (DXP weekend) and really clean house. But I'm not using base storage to do this, that would kind of violate the rules I think. ^_^ Though I probably should buy up the salvage I'll need and fill up my vault storage at least.

In the meantime, it didn't seem useful to keep two slots filled trying to lowball a karma kb recipe at 500,000 when I could buy one nao at 2 million, so I did that and crafted and slotted it. I still have three bids out on Unbounded Leap stealth recipes though, those are harder to come by than I remember them being. My other slots are being used to buy up recipes that I know will sell very well, which I'll say more about later.

For vault storage, I'd do something like "2 of each seriously variable midrange uncommon, 3 of each seriously variable midrange common." There are uncommons that will never cost much (worst case, you try again in the morning)- I'm thinking of Data Drives here. There are commons that will never cost much, though not many; Improvised Cybernetics is kind of the poster child here. But Inert Gas can vary between like 11K and 200K.

If you wanted to be fancy you could put in a bid of like 8 of something you knew you were going to use a lot of, very soon... but I don't do that kind of planning and I never have.

I would also say that, though you can't use BASE storage, you can use EMAIL storage. If you are doing something else with your global emails, you could reserve 10 or 20 base storage as an equivalent. The assumption is that a starting player isn't doing anything complex with gleemail.

Well things got interesting. Before I left for my BBQ today, I grabbed all the explore badges in Sharkhead, and then went to Praetoria and grabbed all the explore badges in the three above-ground zones. So that's 20 merits. In all that time I sold a couple of things but had not bought a single new recipes to craft or sell. So I got a little worried and put in bids on Efficacy Adaptor end/rech and end/acc, and bids on 3 stacks of 10 each LotG def/rech. Then I went to my BBQ.

I just checked after getting home, and I have 20 Efficacy Adaptor recipes purchased, nearly all 30 LotG purchased, nearly 20 Eradication recipes purchased, and a bunch of Performance Shifter end/rech recipes for good measure. So I have a LOT of stuff to craft now. I put up some of the Efficacy Adaptors to start with, since I could buy the salvage for those instantly and cheaply.

And I'm also sort of in charge of one of the Hero Force divisions now, so I need to pay attention to that too. ^_^ Though HF isn't the massively active SG it used to be. But maybe we can fix that.

(also AE Baby is a member of Villian Force - Rho Ruffians -- which is kind of cut off from the rest of HF because there's no VG-SG coalition chat of course. I was kind of surprised to realize there are still active players in the Rho Ruffians, I rarely check in on them. They're kind of an independent sattelite of HF. ^_^ )

Something I used to like to do when I wanted to buy IOs and make a profit at the same time is to bid on stacks of 10 regardless of the actual number of this specific IO I needed. As a result I often got multiples and could craft and resell the extras for a profit.

Day 7 (Monday 8/8/11)

Accomplishments:

Grabbed all explore badges in 3 underground Praetorian zones, 15 merits. That put me at 101 merits total.

Did my level 20 costume mission. Got tips, ran 5 of them, did my morality mission, went rogue!

Hit level 22 in Talos, then joined a team and quickly hit level 23 and 24. (Thus why I want to at least play heroside a bit -- teams are much easier to find. I figure I'll stay rogue at least through DXP weekend.)

Also grabbed explore badges in Talos Island, 5 more merits.

Broke 200 million in liquid influence. ^_^



I have a lot of recipes to craft and sell now, as you can see. I killed a bid on more Gift of the Ancient: Defense recipes, they weren't buying and I have plenty to keep me busy for now.

Still trying to pick up that stealth IO. :/

Do you feel that you're risking losing money by posting the screenshots showing EXACTLY what you're working on? If someone decided to be a jerk and start messing with your niches, it could hurt your experiment a lot, while if you didn't post them, someone just stumbling across them would be far less likely.