Fulmens

If we know when you tend to be on, that's a help in getting invited.

It's safeguarding against people being UNABLE to buy at a lower price. Or at least against the first few people being unable to buy at a lower price.

There were about 8K under 275 inf and 16K over that point.

We seem to have run out of 500's around 11K, although it's hard to tell.

Edit: I bailed when we broke the 10K mark. Not bad considering it started in the 23,000s.

Edit 2: I did leave a few up at a near-reasonable price in case we crashed supply and caused some sort of spike.

True.

"O NOES WE HAVE TO RUN AT +1 DIFF OR WE'LL RUN OUT OF INF".

Edit: I got carried away with rhetoric. Sorry. I do think we have a comfortable number of Enyalios-level people; back when I had a currency exchange before gleemail, I met at least two people who don't have a board presence that I know of, but wanted to move 10 billion inf or more from side to side. I wouldn't be surprised if we had 500 people playing the game who each have 50 billion inf, and another 50 who have 500 billion inf or more. Those are high numbers but not implausible ones.

/Edit

I don't think we have 1000 trillion inf. But it would be very easy to exceed 100 trillion inf.

How many badgers do we have with Leader? How many of them don't spend much time marketing? How many of them got Leader a long time back, then kept going with all the Mo* task forces, all the switching sides and running all THOSE TFs, all the new content? Those people are monumentally inf-positive.

How many people go out there on 2XP and grind because they see the market as a store and they want to make lots of inf?

How many people ran multiple MMs up to the 2-billion inf cap when the level 1 GM exploit was around?

How many people found the bug I did, and didn't report it, where you could buy a stack of ten crafted IO's for free, and the system just invented the inf? [I only saw it happen once before I accidentally did it, but that doesn't mean anything.]

There was 3 trillion inf in the game in I9. How much more have we generated since then?

You might be misinterpreting some of my statements- I actually was talking about liquid inf. Enyalios has both items for sale and bids up, so to zeroth order half the value of her money machine is inf and the other half is items.

Your idea about stored inf going down may be true. My first reaction was "i hasn't decreased, because prices have gone UP". However, I'm not sure that's true, because people have all of a sudden gotten the ability to gleemail their wealth around, so they can easily put together much larger bids. And destroy much larger amounts of inf at the same time.

Kali-like, I can pull out another hand: the large number of level 50's playing on large TF teams changes the ratio of shinies to inf gained, considerably. 8 person teams generate about 1/3 the number of drops as 8 people playing separately [assuming all are at +nx1] and generate 2.5 times the inf. And of course level 50's generate much larger amounts of inf than anyone else.

I would have difficulty with the idea that delta i is negative for all, or even most, people playing this game.

I did a little musing on it a year ago - I found some actual farming numbers from TopDoc at the end of the thread. That was mid-to-late 2009 and things have changed in the last 18 months. AM's for one thing.

1. I'm strongly inf-negative. I've introduced MAYBE a billion or two inf into the game. I've personally and directly destroyed ... well I was at something like 65 billion when I lost count.
2. An old and obsolete inf-destroyer is "using the market to transfer inf between servers." This is still necessary when moving inf from EU servers to US ones, but that's a tiny fraction of the transfers that were happening before gleemail. Second-order effects which don't quite fit on the list: Generating PVP recipes by PVP'ing is "inf destruction" in that you generate no inf but do generate recipes that sell for millions [or billions in three cases], and filling up on recipes or salvage and randomly deleting the crap is "inf destruction" in that you're not selling those to vendors.

3. I got a number for delta-i of around 5% of "personal wealth change" for TopDoc's farming. Now that's an old number, and TopDoc is a very efficient farmer, and there have been a number of changes in the system since then [AM's, for instance] but I still think delta-i is severely positive generally.

For i as a total, I took some blatant guesses and so did other people. I now consider that 100 trillion may NOT be a high number, actually. I'd guess between 10 trillion and 1000 trillion.

I guessed once that in the first week of AM's, at least a trillion inf disappeared into AM conversion fees. The system didn't even blink. PsychotiX and Wing Protectors between them have destroyed around a trillion inf by turning it into Prestige.

4. There's a lot of inf stored. I've known a couple people who refused to pay ridiculous prices, while still selling things for ridiculous prices, and ended up with ridiculous amounts of money that they were too cheap to spend. [... other than me, I mean. ] There are people with fifty characters with a hundred million on each that have no idea they're billionaires five times over. There are people out there with expensive marketing machines- It takes tens of billions for Enyalios to keep all her investment schemes working.

5. I don't think "people will be starving" - I think prices will be lower. If market prices drop by half, the amount of inf leaving the system goes down by roughly half. [TO/DO/SO's from 1 to 50 is on the order of the market fee on a single Kinetic Combat D/E/R. The market destroys WAY more than anything else.] Some people may run out of inf, and either complain or learn to make money or both. But I don't think we're going to see the market get so tight that, for instance, 50-million-inf IO's will have prices within 20% for crafted and raw, or weekly high and low prices within 20% of each other.

Good Grief: It sounds like you might be rolling 45-50.

If you roll in the 35-39 zone with a level 50 character, you will still get max-level stuff but you will get sets that cap at 35 or 40. Like, for instance, Kinetic Combat Dam/End/Rech [150 million each, crafted, last I saw] or Miracle: +Recovery.

If you roll in 25-29, which I have only done a couple of times, you lose access to some trendy sets and a lot of level 50 stuff that's in huge oversupply; in return you get some nice stuff that caps at 30/35/40, and a lot of terrible stuff that has no demand.

Either way you can get some miserable sludge; back when I was buying midlevel rolls [I paid in advance, people rolled and gave me whatever they got] I remember someone rolling, I think, 16 stinkers in a row.

Crayhal- you left out the cheap ranged sets I use. Ruin and Maelstrom's Fury. [... which was in the game before Maelstrom was, wasn't it? Huh.]

Best ways to find teams:

Global channels [RF2009 being one I know of on Freedom]
Global Friends [If you run into someone more than once, and/or they're good and you get along, /friend that character and send a /gfriend request. If they don't accept, it may or may not be about you. Assume it's not about you; you don't know either way, and you might as well choose to be happy. ]

Second best ways to find teams:
Join a large SG, or one with a considerable coalition, or one with friendly people that you've gotten into good teams with.
Form teams.

Worst way to find teams:
Broadcast. (If you do broadcast, go to the train station and cycle through every damn zone repeating it. )

OK, let's talk about how to "Form teams".
If there's a global channel with anyone on it, say something like "Manticore LFM, 6 spaces open" or whatever you have. You may get people, you may not. Especially on freedom, when the Manticore fills TELL THE CHANNEL, because a lot of times these teams fill fast.

/search
Choose level you're interested in finding, and if you're fussy choose archetypes.
* Names in grey are ON teams. Don't invite them. That's a roosterhead move.
* Names in blue are not in missions, not on teams. Read the search request; it probably says things like "not looking" or "do not invite" or "do not blind invite." The latter is just a little fussy. But a lot of people are. If you find someone who's set to "Looking for Team" or "Looking for TF" that's an extra bonus.
* Names in yellow are on missions.
* Names in purple are leaders of teams that have room. They can be touchy about being asked to invite you.
* Names in other colors... I can't keep track.

Once you HAVE people spotted, type something like this:
/t $target, Setting up Manticore TF, takes about 1.5 hours, exemplars to 35. Interested?

Click the person in the search window, and send.
Click the next appropriate person, hit "enter-uparrow-enter" to open your chatbox, reselect the last message, and send. It will go to the new $target.

If someone sends a tell back saying "Not right now" or whatever, EVEN IF THEY WERE KINDA RUDE, send a reply like "Sorry to bother you. Good hunting." Most of them will say something like "No problem!" But to some of them, you WERE bothering them. In their head. Doesn't have to make sense to you, but some people don't like the multiplayer part of MMO's.

Eventually, between sending tells to the people you can find and broadcasting in Atlas, Galaxy, Steel, Kings, Skyway, three RWZs, Talos, Indy, and Founders, you will have a team.

Chances are that 6 of your 7 teammates will be uninspiring. You may have a teammate or two that is actually someone you'd like to see again. SO FREAKIN' FRIEND THEM.

To the peanut gallery: Have I left out any steps?

... uh, we didn't hire anyone for our base design.

*hides crayon-on-napkin building sketch*

TRAVEL POWERS:

Super Speed has a couple of significant advantages. It has built in Stealth (in the original beta, superspeeders were getting capped on the way past guys they barely even saw) and it's very fast. Stealth, by the way, doesn't usually stack- but it stacks with Superspeed Stealth just fine. So you can stand on the toes of most badguys in the game and they'll never know you're there. I always say "Every travel power has advantages and disadvantages, so pick the one that works for you." Superspeed has a lot of steering involved, a lot of getting caught up on bus stops and inadvertently zooming off cliffs. (Talos Island, I'm looking at you.) But it is fast. It FEELS fast. (It feels great.) And if that's the superpower you love, go with it. I have a friend who kept a subscription to the game for a few months and didn't play normally. He loved flying THAT MUCH. He'd log in and just buzz bridges, do hammerheads, cruise the skies.

Super Jump, Super Speed, etc. are indeed siginficantly faster than Sprint. It's been a while since I checked it, but I think Sprint is around 25 MPH and Superspeed is around 65.

HASTEN: It is great for a large number of builds, but not as great as you think. For the first few levels in this game, you will indeed not have enough powers. You'll be sitting there waiting for Brawl to come back, wishing you had Hasten. But these powers have both recharge time and activation time- people refer to DPA, or "damage per activation"- so once you have four or five attacks you will always have SOMETHING ready to go. At that point it's just the difference between higher DPA and lower DPA attacks. And most of the higher DPA attacks aren't THAT much better. So you're replacing maybe half your attack chain with attacks that are maybe 50% better; and Hasten itself is not up all the time, unless you've gone crazy with a ten billion inf build that is optimized till the angels flinch.

(You don't need a ten billion inf build that is optimized till the angels flinch. You can do fine with basic enhancements, or a cheaply optimized build once you start getting the basics of the game down.)

Where Hasten helps is with powers that are on long recharges- a 45-second power will become a 30-second power, a 3-minute power becomes a 2-minute power. [I'm trying to keep the math out of this post- if you like the math , let me know and I'll never shut up.]

I'm pretty sure there are two different jetpacks available - the vendor will sell you a Sky Raider type if you have a classic and vice versa- so you can have a backup-pack.

It's not repeatable (on the same character) but I got enough zone exploration accolades on my level 2 to get 50 RMs, thus an Alignment Merit. (OK, 11 RMs were from vet badges.) Which I could have used for ... a wing recipe. At level 7 I rolled 5 randoms for 150 or 200 million inf worth of stuff. I went zone by zone in increasing order of level and I didn't die till Independence port.

You'll get really good at jetpacking from badge to badge in a leisurely manner.

I'm going to touch on the 100 million inf thing.

FIRST: As mentioned, you can use SO's and still "point and shoot" just fine. However, you can use inventions to "point and shoot" better. (Although there's no zillion-inf invention-based build that will give you as much benefit as a buffing teammate who's awake.)

SECOND:

There are a bunch of mini-guides in my sig.

THIRD:

... well, looks like the Grim Heaper's pretty much covered all my basic advice. I will add that you can put low bids up at Wentworth's and walk away- the bids will wait for you. There are roughly four "time periods" for buying something. Buy It Now, Wait Five Minutes, Wait Overnight, and Wait Till Tuesday. Buy It Now (or BUY IT NAO as the marketeers say) is considerably more expensive than Wait Five Minutes, and always more expensive than Wait Overnight. Some people don't believe in letting a bid sit on Wentworth's. Those people are frequently poor and angry about prices.

For a very, very long time level 50 was the place to roll for max inf. I'm not 100% sure that's true anymore because the huge supply may have finally blunted the demand. What you'll see if you level lock at 30, or 32, or 35 is that occasional recipes will do very, very well; for most of the rest you'd be better off rolling with a level 50.

Also, if you're looking at an old guide, please note that you don't need to spend power selections on Fitness any more. Does that open your build up any?

Did PsychotiX... umm... just disband?

And another 2, 2.5 billion on the fire. #88 no longer!