Fulmens

Perwira: I would consider that high knowledge is effort one time; high effort is effort EVERY time.

Taking two imaginary examples: Player A crafts generics on two different characters, making ten million a day with three "cycles" each. That's around fifteen minutes a cycle, 45 min total, so about 13 million inf per hour of work.

Player B spends twenty minutes a day finding and crafting high end recipes, making 50 million a day. So about 150 million inf per hour of work.

Player B may have spent twenty hours learning the market... once. Those general rules result in ten times the inf per hour compared to player A.

I am a lot like Player A (I don't know WHY I still craft generics... like knitting, it's not exactly cost-effective, but I still sell about 40 a day) and also like Player B (I don't have numbers, but I'd guess it works out to 50 or 100 mil an hour.)

Hart: I may have chosen poorly when I said the goal was "Wealth." "Profit", perhaps, because there are a lot of people here who make a hundred million, spend it on their build, rinse and repeat. When you walk into Wentworth's, you have some goal, whether it be profit, acquiring something at a reasonable price, or buying something NAO.

It's hard to say that Smurphy, or TopDoc, or Mind4EverBurning are not "power gamers". At the same time, they approach the crippled artificial economy from a standpoint of considerable self-interest.

In other news: Is "performance artist" a large enough niche to make its presence known? things like "buying every luck charm and relisting for 1", or "buying out a common salvage and deleting all of it", or "trying to burn 10 billion in Wentfees" or even "trying to simulate a Casual Marketer"... these don't quite fit into any of the above categories.

So you don't want to do 10 Strike Forces yourself... and you don't want to pay someone else to do 10 Strike Forces. That's a problem.

I looked at the levels available, and the dates sold and, you're right. They suck and there aren't any out there. All the "1 to 10 million" sales seem to be from before double-XP, sometimes months before... but you could put 10-million-inf bids on level 19-22 and 25, and get most of that inf back.

Dystrophy: I had fun with my /traps corr and the nerf didn't touch me. I like having a SR blaster, it turns out. I would agree that it's not a high-power set, but whining six months after the fact when there was a bug and procs were triggering, roughly, ten times as much as they should? That's weak.

Ownator, when you said

When you load the market and it does the crazy populating on the right, there's a lot of network traffic. Probably because the default is "bidding items" instead of "All". If you can try to load the market and quickly click on something like "Salvage" you might get better results. If you can manage that the first time you log on, then it will go to that default every time you click on a Went-person until you shut the game off;even if you log onto another character, you still get the same Wents defaults (I get caught by this, sometimes, when I can't figure out why it's not showing any Ruins and I'm looking at level 50-50.)

I have an issue with this categorization, but I'm having trouble putting it into words.

It feels, reading it, like... like everyone has consciously chosen the lifestyle they're most comfortable with. Or something. Perhaps it's that the groups are classified in such a way that you can't tell if there are missing groups or overlaps.

Maybe if you used two axes... Knowledge and Goals? Knowledge and Hunger for Wealth? something like that.

A vendorer would have fairly high Hunger for Wealth, or "obtain wealth" as a Goal, or whatever that axis ends up being, but probably low Knowledge (Because they're never going to make a lot of inf at a couple thousand per item.) On the other hand, I vendor to grab the first 100K or so on any new character.

I think there are a few different types that fall into "Frantic casual" and "lazy casual". They're low-knowledge according to your definition, but their goals may be different. Frantic casuals have learned enough to make money outside the market, and enough to know that they want TEH SHINIES, but are missing specific bits of market understanding. Lazy casuals... it seems like you're assuming that lazy casuals know "What things are worth" and sell below that. I'm sorry that I'm not being more clear here.

Badgers are a classic example of high-knowledge but with different goals than almost any other market user.


Maybe there should be a third axis- effort?

1.Vendorers. Low knowledge, high effort, goals: wealth.
2. Flippers. High knowledge [probably], fairly high effort, goals:wealth.
3. Farmers for cash: Unknown knowledge, high effort, goals: wealth
4. Farmers for XP: Unknown knowledge, high effort, goals: XP.
5. Lazy-Casual. Low knowledge, low effort, goals: Beat badguys up.
6 Frantic-Casual. Low knowledge, potentially high effort (?), goals: improve build to beat badguys up. (goals are definitely NOT wealth.)
7. Crafters. High-enough knowledge, low effort [IMO], goals: wealth.
8. Badgers. Very high knowledge, high effort, goals: badges.
9. Non-users. Low knowledge, zero effort, goals: beat badguys up.

I don't really like this classification scheme; hopefully it will spark a better idea from someone else.

I have it correct? You started with 6 million and now you between 66M (guaranteed) and 100M (estimated)?

Nice. Or perhaps I should say...

ebil.

"Considered weird" might be an exaggeration... I know lots of people with only five or six characters.

I will note that you can't slot Swift with Blessing of the Zeppelin.

STF, the part where you do the V-side respec"

Sonic/Rad corruptor?

The usual rule is that "top level of the set has many times the supply at many times the price."

You can figure out where the "drop from boss" peak is (villainside, probably whatever level the badguys are in the Cap Strikeforce)- look through all the levels and see where the most recent "last 5" are- and put bids on those levels.

But really, there's a tiny supply so even a small demand produces really high prices in a hurry.

I'm going to say something different than "build your own team" because... well, it's good advice but you've heard it.

Join your server's global channels. Some SG's and coalitions are helpful for teamforming and such, although not a lot are. Things like "Infinity Badges" -although that gets you a lot of task forces, not so much anything else- and "Cozmic's Playground" (on Pinnacle) tend to be where PUG's are formed.

Once you DO get on a PUG, if you find a good player thereon, friend or gfriend them. Last time you were in this game, you probably had a social network that you'd slowly built and that you took for granted. This time, your social network is probably gone and you're flailing around, having forgotten how to do what you used to do.

Is The Hollows still a good place for bad PuGs ? Cause usually even a bad PuG has one good player on it.

To the OP:

I'm a 5-year-player as well. I understand that the game doesn't seem new TO ME because it isn't new TO ME.

I helped two people figure out how to get wings on their character this week... they don't know hellions from scallions, and everything is new to them. Why should they be deprived of figuring out Dr. Vazhilok's fiendish plan because I know how the story ends?

It is true that we don't know much about what your goal is, where you're coming from, etc.

One very specific thing that I noticed was Adrenaline Boost is loaded up with close to 95% Endurance Modification.

Adrenaline Boost with ONE EndMod gets over 1000% - that is, a full end bar in 6 seconds* , or "entirely cancels out the penalty for nuking." I would suggest, in SO terms, that you try one EndMod and two Heal.

* you don't actually get end back that fast, because there's a cap. The point is, you're far past any actual need. Nobody can burn Endurance as fast as unslotted AB recovers it.

I flipped common salvage for a year and a half, making less than a million a month. Why, when I can make more than that buying a yellow recipe at level 50, crafting and selling? Because that was ten of each type of salvage out there at a slightly-above-market price, buffering against short-term wild swings of the type that, earlier this week, led people to spend a million inf per Spell Ink v-side.

I'm in it for the art, all right.

Funny how "staying out of reach" is a panzie [sic] move, but "Coming in with three times the mitigation" isn't.

... no, I don't PVP.

I remember PowerFist soloing damn near every AV on an MA/SR scrapper in about 2005. It sort of goes in waves, I think.

The Man puts us down, and we claw back.

I think the answer is, "Heroes were less balanced at the start than villains were at THEIR start". So the best Heroes were a lot better than most villains, which were a lot better than the worst heroes, and people just didn't play the worst heroes.

There's been a lot of rebalancing, but (for instance) Invulnerability tanks started out with the capability of capping resist and defense to all types except Psi and "untyped" (what toxic started out at) while Ice could cap defense [except for the alpha, where they had mediocre defense to one type and nothing to anything else.]

Or Dark Armor before stacking armor, where they had (as someone put it) the choice between being beaten to death, or being stunned and beaten to death.

When City of Villains came out, there were still some pretty bad imbalances. You could get an Energy Brute going and do Assassin Strike level damage in three different places in your attack chain, at a second or two activation time each, while Stalkers were waiting eight seconds with no combat and spending four seconds in activation to do that level of damage once.

But if you took the best Heroes and the best Villains you came out with better Heroes.

Also City of Villains has traditionally had tougher opponents. From Arachnos and their "we have SOMETHING you're allergic to" approach, to Longbow and the stacking def debuff/res debuff combo, to getting Carnies from level 30+ instead of 40+ ... they wanted to fix the problem of characters steamrolling trivial content. And they did.

The problem was that City of Villains and City of Heroes were never all that separate, so you had "City of hard knocks" on one side and "city of creampuffs" on the other, and most people go with the easy option.

Purely in the interests of science: If you were level pacted with someone who was ALSO PL'ing on a different team... is there any way to leverage that into more XP/sec? I can't think of one.

As far as the "40 to 44 in 4 hours": if you're not at the BOTTOM of 40, it would be easier. The 40-50 game, playing relatively normally, goes by on fast hard-hitting teams at around 1 level per hour.

The "40-50 takes as long as 1-40" was true when they first added the 40-50 game, but when they tweaked levelling speeds that was one of the spots they sped way up.

... unless you meant "Because you're no longer getting yoinked along by a team that's +5 to you."

How advanced a tutorial are you looking for?

I wrote sort of a "medium" guide back when the system was new. . .

Will trade for level 54 cone range SO.

New-to-me data!

I don't know if there have been significant changes since march in player behavior, and TopDoc is one of the top 1% most efficient farmers I imagine, but here's what I get out of the first post, if I'm reading it right (new boards = munged data format):

Cash and common IO recipes: 73 million + 29 million = 102 million.
Regular recipes, purple recipes and salvage ("Extra inf"): 384,174 million.

Fees on selling "Extra inf" at Wents: 38.4 million.
Inf introduced into system = 102 -38 = 64 million inf per (approximately) 486 million.

So 1 inf "new money" per 8 inf in the pocket of the farmer.

If we use my "flipping term" then we burn an extra 38 million and that 64 million becomes 26 million.

And we have a 5% expansion of the money supply, or 50 million inf per billion inf generated.

If we assume the same ratios without purples, we would get 102 million new inf, 142 million sold at Wents (+ 142 million flipped) and we'd get 102 -14.2 -14.2 = 74 million new inf per 244 million in the pocket of the farmer, or roughly 1 in 3.

Interesting.

Frankenslotting: See my sig. I think it starts around post #23.

ED has been covered- sort of. You want 95% for the main thing (like damage), or 56% for defense or damage resistance. That is three SO's. You can be sloppy and think of each part of a multi-part IO (like Acc/Dam or Def/End/Rech) as "half an SO" and you'll be good enough. A little over, in fact. Three "dual" parts is just about two SO's- so three Acc/Dam is about the same as slotting two Acc, two Dam.

Two Accuracy is plenty, but two Damage is cheating yourself out of a chunk of the damage you COULD be doing. You're doing around 170% instead of around 195%. To see how much damage you could be doing, take a small red and fight normally; that's "you with full damage slotting." It may mean you save one attack per minion, or you may not notice it at all.