FourSpeed

Hmmmmm.... Sorry you had trouble with this one...

I wasn't in any of the Betas (GR or I19), so last night was the first time I'd
ever seen the mission.

I ran it 3X solo with a Brute, an E3 Blaster, and a NB/Nin Stalker.

Nobody had any trouble with it at all <shrug>

In fact, in the entire arc, only the Blaster died, and that was on the very
last mission (EB - Minos), and even that was mostly a case of Bad Luck timing.


Given that 2 of those 3 AT's are "squishies", I guess, I'm not seeing any
general problem for soloing these. At worst, some luck & heal insps (and
maybe a Shivan) should get you through them next time...


Regards,
4


PS> Watching Ruludak go poof was one of the cooler graphic episodes in the game (imho)

That would be handy -- I was thinking about whipping something up in Perl,
but there's not much point to re-inventing the wheel if you've got something
that already works that you would be willing to share.


Regards,
4

rofl Yeah, I'm harsh that way....

4

.... and here we go ...

Flippers do not set prices - welcome to this fallacy.

If the flipper is actually going to sell the flippable items he has to be the
lowest lister... that is simply how it works -- High Bid gets Low List when
Bid >= List. If he's not the low guy - he doesn't sell his stuff... Simple as that.

By very definition, he's not listing at the highest price.

Further, you can see in the last 5 what he was bidding at when he got his
bargain buys... Bid 1 over that, and *you* get the buy, not him...

There's no magic or manipulation, just simple common sense and patience.


Regards,
4

Depending on how you actually meant this, it may be a bit misleading.

If you are saying that this is yet another mistaken perception on the
part of the sellers/observers, then I agree. It is yet another fallacy that
leads the uninformed towards undeservedly blaming the flipper.

If you honestly believe flippers are truly "taking advantage" in these cases,
then I think that statement is categorically wrong.

In the latter case there are two clear factors that make it wrong.

1> This is the slam dunk one - the listing price is a defacto contract to sell.
By that, I mean the seller voluntarily selected that value as the minimum
acceptable price for the item, regardless of its real value, and if
that price is met, he is, in fact, obligated to sell.

If I put an ad in the newspaper offering to sell my car for $1000, and
someone comes up and pays me $1000 for it, it would be laughable for
me to turn around and claim that guy took advantage of me, even if
the car is actually worth more than that.

2> This one is more subtle. In the game, the lowest list sells first, so there
is some incentive to list as low as you can stand to, in order to both sell
first, and sell to the highest bid out there. That is definitely by dev intent
considering Castle's various comments on "Market PvP".

However, if the seller is listing for less than they would willingly be satisfied
with, the motivator for that action is the same "greed" the flipper is being
accused of. Again, they voluntarily chose a low listing price to quickly snag
the high bid, before the next guy does ... Greed - pure and simple, or if
you want to be less brutally honest, I'd settle for impatience, but either
way it's pretty difficult to claim in that scenario that the seller was taken
advantage of.


Regards,
4

In general I agree - we are usually on the same side in most of the discussions.

I disagree that I "lashed out" at you. I did outright call the plan ineffective
and impractical, and I was sarcastically derisive about the advice to play
like your 6 year old. That's a pretty thin stretch for "lashing out".

Basically, I feel that you are missing the entire point of the thread.

First, the thread is NOT about what any given player finds "fun" because
by and large, it isn't quantifiable. It IS about a measurable, minimum,
standard of performance for toons (SOs and Common IOs). It is about providing
quantifiable data on what cost expectation is for that performance, along
with (if I put it in a guide), simple marketing techniques to reach that level
of performance *without* counting on pure, blind luck, or potentially
needing to play below that performance level awhile because the "right
drop" hasn't occurred yet.

I played in the early days when stores weren't even marked on your map,
and you could only get certain SOs from them in any case, and what dropped
often wasn't usable or desired for the stage your character was at.

Maybe it's better these days, but it wasn't much fun then, and I would
not advocate it now either.

I can understand that your youngster is fine with that, which is great
actually, but I'm willing to also bet that the average player would not be
as thrilled about it.

Furthermore, there is no reason they should have to be either.

Sure, maybe you can slot absolutely nothing and be ok with it. Of course,
there are lot's of things you "can" do - PL in AE, RMT for inf, Level Pact or
get into an S/VG. All of those things could get you what you want, but
those aren't the point of what I'm looking at in this thread.

That is what I wrote in the very first line of the thread, and it's what I'm
interested in discussing.

I felt that your suggestion completely missed out on the thread's purpose.

Moving on to your general commentary...

Unfortunately, there has been a serious outbreak of Galactic Stupiditis (tm)
lately (imho), as evidenced in more than 1000 posts in a couple threads
that should have been locked after the first page or two.

To be sure, having to contend with that level of pure ignorance has frazzled
more than a few tempers, mine included, and some of that frustration
probably bled into a few other posts along the way, like this one.

So, in the interest of the spirit of the Holiday Season, I'll offer an apology
for coming across too harshly in rejecting your suggestion, and I hope you'll
endeavor to simply see that it just doesn't fit in with the issue I'm trying to
address in the thread.

Now that's just crazy talk (I'm kidding)

I'd be ecstatic if I could teach them that...

I'm afraid I'm likelier to have to settle for trying to teach them that they'll
need 10M-20M in a timely manner if they want to use SOs or common IOs
while leveling their toon. If they want better shinies than that, they'll have
much more consistent, and reliable success getting there if they develop
some simple marketeering skills sooner rather than later, instead of swallowing
verbatim the self-limiting foolishness that the market is nothing more than
a trap, controlled by a cabal of soul-sucking evil manipulators...

Yeah - I'm not betting any money on how successful that guide would be
at changing silly perception. That's why I'm mulling it in here first...


Regards,
4

As mentioned, flipping is the purchase of one or more items at price X
followed by the immediate re-listing of those same items at higher price Y.

It is "bad" purely due to mis-perception caused by three mistaken premises.

1> It is often confused with cornering which is a specialty sub-case of
flipping, with an entirely different purpose and methodology intended to
take over and control the supply of an item, rather than simply profit on
the item's current volatility.

2> Players mistakenly think flipping raises Price (period). In fact, it only
raises Floor Price (by recycling the bargain items), but it actually reduces
Ceiling Price and squeezes the entire range towards Normal Price over time,
at which point flipping ceases to be profitable for that item.

3> Given a visible rise in Floor Price, it's an easy, and intuitive leap (albeit
mistaken) to assume the flipper is also the cause of the current Ceiling Price.
In actuality, it is the fact that there already IS a distinct gap between
Floor and Ceiling prices that attracted the flipper in the first place.

So, instead of seeing what it really does, which is stabilize prices and
supply over time, it is often mistakenly perceived as a hostile price
manipulation.


Regards,
4

It raises another interesting question (to me) in the context of minimum cost
picture.

I think it's clear that once you hit L50, you're pretty much set if you put
some additional playtime into the toon at that level. That was also true
in the "Old Days" once you got over the L32-L37 "hump".

The question it raises for me (and any potential guide I'd write) is, can you
acquire sufficient funds, during the levelling process (ie. pre-L50) to move
up to decent Frankenslotting (ie. that 50M-200M range) without having
any marketting savvy or strategy?

Prior to A-Merits, or very good luck with drops, or external help, I'd be
inclined to say "probably not".

We looked at L50 earning potential several times, and UberGuy's toon adds
another anecdotal piece to support that, but I'm not sure anyone has put
much analysis into the results for mid-range characters using the simple
"play the game, sell your drops at the market" approach.

I'm getting curious what the L25-L35 hourly income potential looks like.


Regards,
4

It's not the item that matters. It's the perceived value of the item in relation
to any implemented cap for it...

So, with the current data cap of 2B, do a lot of folks trade, say, damage IOs
off the market? Probably not... There's no real reason to (except for ducking
the 10% fee, which, at that price, isn't very much).

On the other hand, the 3% Glad Armor's perceived value is well above that cap, and
consequently it is traded off-market quite often.

So, if you were going to implement caps by category, ie. salvage, PvPIOs,
purples, what have you, the effect would be the same - based on the ratio
of perceived value of the item to its category cap.

If the cap is really low -- say 5-10K for common salvage, you'd get a different
problem - most folks would probably just delete it - the time involved to
list on the market isn't worth the amount you'd get from the sale.

You can already see this by looking at TOs/DOs/SOs on the market today
(none of these are plentiful, or good sellers on the market).

In short, capping the market, any way you slice it, won't provide the benefit
that most "casual players" hope it would.


lol - that's a perfect example of how polarised and heated the topic gets
when you get people that clearly don't understand it, but adamantly insist
the way they think it works is fact, and are equally certain that the people
who actually do utilize the technique every day, are wrong (or evil, malicious
liars, depending on the level of vehemence expressed).

For the sake of this thread, I'll leave it alone, since flipping has no actual
relevance to the topic at hand here...


Regards,
4

nbd. Basically, I'm just trying to (loosely) quantify your earnings/hour.

Prior research in our Forum has shown a lower limit around 1M/hr and anywhere
from 10-25M/hr or so (iirc) as an upper limit for an L50's base earning potential.

So, I'll throw together a really loose estimate from what I see here (just
for unscientific giggles ) to see how/where it fits on that curve.

Looking over your logs, and making some simple assumptions, here's what
I come up with...

Approximate time from your logs: ~24.5 hours.

Assuming you were active when those drops occurred, and probably some
time both before and after the drops, I basically added a (PFA - Plucked
From Air ) fudge factor of 1 hour when the session was 3 or higher, and
1/2 hr when it was less than that, totalling about 7 hours.

So, I'll count total time at 31.5 hours. Since I didn't add a lot of extra
time there for chitter chatter and whatnot, I'll further assume 90% of that
was actual combat time given that all we can see here are the drop times.

So, for total combat playtime, I get a figure of 28.35 hours.

You posted sales of: ~152 M
You posted combat earnings of: 128M
You posted kills at: 8302

So, Kills/Minute is ~4.88 on a DM/Regen, which seems pretty reasonable
and combat earnings are ~4.5M per hour.

Again, that looks pretty reasonable and right in the same range as previous
research has been.

Even without the drop sales, it seems pretty clear that a couple weeks of
standard play under similar conditions should get the basic player enough
funds to decently Frankenslot (assuming ~200M cost to do that).

So, the gist of it for me comes down to covering the market skills needed
for that first 10-20M in a timely way (to slot the minimum goodies at the
levels you first need them), and then carrying those skills forward to
the point where you can earn the billions needed for the premium stuff.

In between those two points, standard L50 play should cover decent IOs
and Frankenslotted sets.

Once again, interesting information, thanks for providing it.


Regards,
4

While it does seem easier these days, I think the 1B watermark is still a good
milestone to celebrate.

You're still not too likely to get that amount through drops, and/or blind
luck (for the most part), so it demonstrates some amount of marketeering
effort and knowledge, and imho those are both Good Things.


Gratz,
4

That could be a semi-handy feature having a direct tie-in from the market
to a standard vendor.

I'd also like a feature to access the market from my S/VG base as well.

Here's hoping...


Regards,
4

fix'd.


@UberGuy:

Excellent - I truly appreciate seeing some hard numbers from actual play.

Given what you posted, I'm assuming this is on an L50 toon (you got purple
drops after all).

I, like Obitus, would love to know the relative number of hours this entailed,
and also how well (loosely speaking), the toon is built, slotted and enhanced.

In any case, it is definitely strong supporting evidence for income amounts that
can be consistently made on high level characters.

That should be very encouraging news for folks that fall into the cash-strapped
category my cost analysis was covering - clearly, once they get past the
minimum cost builds, and play at high level awhile, they should be rolling in
enough dough to start working towards enhancement upgrades for their
characters.

Nice Work - I appreciate you sharing those results here.


Regards,
4

Just as mentioned earlier about "laypeople" not understanding what
market caps will really do, the function of "flippers" is even less well
understood.

Given how polarized and heated trying to explain that gets, I'm not
going to bother.

I will say, categorically, that flippers in our market are a price stabilizing
mechanism. While that may seem unintuitive to most, they actually
provide a service (reducing price volatility, and stabilizing supply), and
they're compensated for their patient efforts by impatient sellers and
impatient buyers - believe it, or don't.

That's not to say they're not looking out for #1, the same as everyone
else is, but it IS saying that how they work is actually helpful to the
market as a whole.


Regards,
4