Fulmens

I can be a BUY IT NAO fool and a cunning marketer at the same time.

Wait overnight to acquire recipe for 5 million, with intention of listing crafted item for 12.1 million and expecting to get 15 million: Cunning!

Forgetting to buy uncommon salvage, which is being flipped between 5K and 100K, and buying it nao: Fool!

So yeah, we still might be able to make occasional profits off each other.

Pretty much what everyone else said.

My experience with Drain Psyche is not quite as... not quite as consistent as Storm Devil's. It comes down to playstyle- I'm generally on a fairly large team, I play blasters fast and usually my teammates play fast too. Shuffling NPC's around for optimal placement is not fast. Doesn't mean I'm right and Storm Devil is wrong; we're doing different things.

* Drain Psyche has a SMALL radius. I find it tough to get even five people with the power. (I remember five as being break-even for instantly getting end back. It's been a while.)
* Getting Build Up, Aim, Drain and Nuke in on a single spawn is sometimes challenging, if anyone else at all is shooting at them. As a workaround, I often Drain in one spawn, if I have enough end recovery going I use BU/Aim/Nuke on the NEXT spawn.

ClawsandEffect said

I might be a cursed gradualist, but the problem may be that complaints move in internet time (1 day = 1200 posts) while fixes move in coder time (1 day = 8-10 hours of work, minus 1-4 hours of meetings, with a buglist that fills three screens.) Once the coders have a clear, reproducible definition of the bug, I'm not sure how much you can do.

For reference, an exploit that I reported on 1/04/10 was fixed on or near 2/9/10 and that was probably less than 10 lines of code. I probably wasn't the first one to report it either.

Weird- I could swear that I answered this thread. Oh well, brain is overrated anyway.

Dys- I like the "let the market decide" idea a lot. The number of listings-per-day would IMO be way lower than 10,000, but I'm pretty sure you just picked that number out of a hat.

By the way, I decided to start doing my part to burn inf out of the system again. In the last week (since 2/13) I've destroyed just over a billion in Wentfees. I did considerably better than break-even (I had about 150 million of relist fees, I think I lost around 30 million flipping LoTGefense crafteds at 30-35 million each, and I made something like 500 million on my other transactions. I think.)

I also spent 300 million+ moving inf around for banking, and have burnt 1.2 billion in Prestige (half of it mine, half of it the SG owners'.)

I'm out of practice on this stuff. I could have done it a lot faster and easier, now that I remember the tricks...

OK, as has been [correctly] pointed out, there haven't been many Midlevel Crisis events planned. I've been falling down.

So this Tuesday, Feb 23rd, there will be Evil For Lunch! At noon Eastern/9 AM Pacific, and 3 Eastern/noon Pacific, I'm going to start a team and do Ouroboros missions for about an hour. If we have enough people or we think it's going to be fast enough, we might do the Cap Strike Force; otherwise, Doc Buzzsaw and maybe something else.

Depending on which one gets more participation, I'll probably pick a time and redo this regularly.

DEATH TO THE PEOPLE WHO GET IN OUR WAY!!!

It's an unfortunate effect [sorry, choir, I'm gonna preach] that people who Want It Nao will buy whatever's on the market Nao. Which is usually level 50's because that's where the play happens and the supply happens. And people who Want It Nao will pay inflated prices.

... and that's why max-level procs cost MORE than lower level ones.

... and that's why it's financially stupid to roll at any level below 50.

... and that's why there's nothing but 50's on the market.

... and so it goes.

(Note: As far as pool B's, anyway, more are produced at level 50 than at level 30-49 combined. In a moment of scientific curiosity/stupidity I tried to corner the entire supply of Mako's Dam/End once, buy new ones, sell a supply of the ones I had and generally raise the price floor. It didn't work, made me cranky, and gave me that very expensive chunk of knowledge. )

OK, I got, lessee... Goat's, Celtic Coders, Kippio, Lock0n, Tigra, Laevateinn? I have Bubblegum Bomb written down as "done" but I don't remember doing it (Hence, presumably, the writing down of notes.) Still definitely in queue: Cende and Enyalios .

I may have oversimplified because the OP said he has enough on his plate. Pool C vs Pool A, merits vs. insta-drops, massive exemplaring, Buy It Nao syndrome, all these things are stuff that doesn't need to be discussed in Inventions 102.

... Wait. I am going to discuss Buy It Nao.

If you see a piece of common salvage with 14 for sale and 2000 bids and the Last Five are 100,000 inf or more: Put a bid down for some much lower price (I like 5908, or 22908, but that's my signature) and do the Next Thing. Which may be more bids on more salvage, or may be crafting the things you CAN craft. It may be going back to beating people up.

If you have so much money that you won't miss a spare 100,000 inf, by all means buy it NAO. Otherwise, your offer to buy will probably fill in 5 minutes. Or 20 minutes. If it doesn't fill overnight, you may need to up the bid from five thousand to twenty thousand.

People who don't plan ahead and can't wait pay more than people who do plan ahead and can wait. That's the secret of the market.

I can't tell you how many times I've bid a reasonable amount on something, thrown money at the problem, forgotten to cancel my old bid and come back from crafting to find that I now have a spare Circuit Board or Steel. Bought at a reasonable price in the time it took me to go from Wents to the crafting table and back.

Back in the day (I3? I4? When did they put in the epic powers?) they specifically took the mez protection out of FoN because... get this... Scrappers complained.

My Invuln scrapper was THIRTY TIMES TOUGHER than my wife's Fire blaster and yet... scrappers complained.

People needed hittin'.

Sometimes (around once a year) I have to use a nuke as an actual emergency power- no time for Aim and Build Up even if they're recharged- and in those situations, I like to have a LITTLE accuracy. It's overly conservative, but a nuke without overkill is hardly a nuke at all. (And let us not speak of CoT Quicksand and the like.)

Fire_Minded- about your sig:

My brother-in-law is a Navy SEAL who does black ops. Please, **** with me.

... you see how stupid it sounds when someone else says it?

1) It's usually a LOT cheaper to craft your own. I don't even see the difference between buying a recipe+ingredients and buying a premade IO any more, as a difficulty thing. I just see it as five minutes work to save 2 million inf (for a typical set IO).

2) Under filtering, there's a "for sale and bidding" field. Shift that to "All" to see recipes and IO's that nobody's dealing in. That's probably it.

Example and Other Example of what I mean.

Peripheral point: Level 25 or 30 generics ARE worth it, probably. If you leave a bid up for 24 hours on a crafted item you may well catch startling bargains, although the "last 5" is full of people paying way too much. This is because of generic IO memorization which saves you 50% to 75% of the price to craft, depending on cost of recipe. So if you're just running SO's, you might consider running generic IO's - SO's that you buy once and never need to replace. Everyone's got their own plan for upgrading and IO usage, varying from "use 10's, then 20's, then 25's, then frankenslot at 30, then expensive sets starting at 40" for the most intense people to "buy generics at 25, never touch them till 50" relaxed people.

Katie_V: "Too Awesome to Use" is a good thing to consider, and one I've overlooked. I'm hoping for something that's Too Awesome To Use... much.

One of the big causes of TATU is things that have a limited number of charges that can never be renewed. Most of my characters have five Amys each because of the TATU effect. If it's just money... I'll throw 100K at the Market to get a tier 3 inspiration; I'll throw a million at the Market to get ten. If the SG has a bad day, I'll buy up dozens of insps to refill the storage bins.

One of the other things I see is that we have game-improving items that are often ignored, either through obscurity or because the game is so easy we don't need them. Ethereal Shift/pistol/bat temp powers, Shivans, rockets, base buffs. Only Shivans get much use there.

Uberguy: I don't want the prices to be "About right." I want it to be a slight financial penalty, buying merits to get rolls. I want people to complain that the price is too high (like they do about inf-for-prestige) but do it anyway (like they do about inf-for-prestige.) I don't want farming for cash for merits to be a viable replacement for doing TF's, and I don't think the Devs want that. (Farming is antisocial, while TF's are social, and building social bonds = Good Thing for a MMO.)

Changing the subject again, I just figured out why cash-for-merits is a problem. Because you can move 200 million over to a level 20 alt and get ten rolls.

Maybe some sort of diminishing return, like TFs? 1 million for the first merit, 2 million for the second merit, 3 [4?] for the third, on a 20 hour timer? (What is the current TF timer? Still 24 hours?) That way if you're "just a couple short" you can afford them, but if you want to buy ten you're looking at a considerable expense.

You probably need, about, half an SO of accuracy. Nukes are accurate.

Then enough damage to hit 95% with as much rech as you can manage. Any extra slots could go to EndRed, I guess... but they're not going to be doing much but falling down.

... you mean "try something else than farming?"

[/quote]so a Brute? what sort of powers? there are many to choose from and if I decide to stick with him to higher lvls I would hate to end up like "one of those guy" . You know the ones that did not choose wisely and should have chosen something better. I know all things work but somethings work alot better. Somethings are broken and some arent. So whats ur opinion with Brutes and power choices early on from lvl 1?[/quote]

There aren't many really gimped sets left in the game. There may be, however, some sets that are not right FOR YOU.

The classic example of that is probably the Force Field defender. Slow and unimpressive soloing, boring to play... why do I have three at high levels? Because they really only do one thing; make the entire team freakin impossible for enemies to hit*. And usually, that's enough.

*Impossibility not guaranteed.