Fulmens

We do things which are not entirely rational. It's ok, it's a game. When the market started, I had to stop myself from buying thousands of things for 10 inf and selling them for 250 to a vendor. I knew it was stupidly small profit, but I got obsessive.

... oh, a PSA: At some point you will throw in an extra zero, or list ten mathematic proofs for the price you meant to use for a Luck of the Gambler, or otherwise lose a big chunk of money on the market due to operator error. Everyone's done it. You will get it back at some point. (Other people throw in extra zeroes too.) It's no big deal, just an expensive lesson.

Send me emails in game, to @Boltcutter , (with your forum name in the message so I know who's who) and I will either meet up with you (if we're both on and it's convenient) or email you the inf for burning.

The goal is to simplify the whole "what's your global" dance I always end up doing.

Ed: Diggis, I'll probably do it again in the fall. I show no signs of going anywhere.

So. The Crazy 88s seems to have reached a natural stopping [or slowing way down] point. We're well behind the top Freedomites and well ahead of all the Virtuvians.

What next? Start the Crazy 89s, take the #1 spot from the 88s, and destroy the SG? Relaunch on Freedom and go head-to-head with the other crazy marketeers? Support Enyalios? Push the 88s to #1 SG of all servers ever? Keep our inf for whatever hundred-million-inf pothole I20 ends up throwing at us? Wander off, bored?

I'm willing to throw ten or twenty billion at any of the above, I just can't do ALL of the above.

Something to consider is the "Res" half of it: normally "two and a half Res" is capped, but with the level 10 you get a VERY low half-res . What are you planning on doing below level 22 that you expect to be challenged by?

Nemesis + Ruularuu?

I never had the patience to get an Alarm Clock build up to level 39...

I've actually given this a lot of thought because of Midlevel Crisis: "What can I bring to the task force that everyone's going to want to see?"
1) Force field/sonic defender: I like defensive overkill. Sonic provides great damage enhancement to the entire team. Probably the best combo of foolproof protection and damage boost I know. I have an indefensible [sic] love for Force Fields- any level, any team, full protection, guaranteed.
2) Rad/Sonic defender. Similar, but with even MORE damage boost, nearly as much protection from tough targets, and the capability to enhance the team and dehance the enemies in a variety of ways. Has the "oh sh**" buttons that FF is totally lacking in.
3) Dark/Sonic defender. Has the protective overkill I so like, but occasionally suffers from enemies that resist the debuffs.
4) Sonic/Dark defender, with Maneuvers and the blasts slotted for debuff: This was kind of an experiment. It's the ultimate "+1" character. By itself it's hopelessly weak. But it makes any other buff, debuff, defense or resist set better. A _lot_ better. Useful for ANY large team.

As for what I like on my team? Any buffer that keeps the buffs up.

I have a billion or so spare inf to match. (I match 1-for-1, up to 200 million of your inf, for a total of 400 million inf -> 800K prestige.) Is there any interest? Or is there no need any more?

And if one were to demonstrate it nonstatistically, by (e.g.) making 50 billion inf buying Pool C recipes and selling Pool C enhancements, that would prove nothing. Right?

Move along, nothing to see here.

It's also possible that they've added some stuff to the game that works the servers harder for the same number of characters-in-action. That would result in more yellow and red servers. (I'd say "It's also likely" but that would suggest some sort of inside knowledge, which I do not have.)

... As you can tell, different people do things differently. Just like I said.

It'll get faster as you get used to it. The invention system is kind of a large expository lump to get through.

The advice I give to total newbs is "go with SO's, list all your salvage and recipes for 1, if they don't sell in 5 seconds pull them down and delete them."

Advantages:
1) Simple. Simple simple simple.
2) You will always have as much inf as you need for SO's. More, even.
Disadvantages:
1) You're giving people bargains, sometimes huge bargains, all the time.
2) If you ever DO decide to go for shiny happy IO's, you will be slightly behind in building up the necessary inf.
3) You lose some of the possible benefits from things like "Frankenslotting at level 30-ish" (you can get free recharge reduction, or free endurance reduction- basically more "SOs" in less slots.)

There are as many ways to IO out as there are people doing it- maybe more. I've got some characters that I never fully IO'd out, some that got new sets of IO's at 17,27, 32, and 42-ish. But I _like_ playing with the market and building IO's, so the answer for me is not the answer for you.

The simplest option is, as mentioned, sell everything for 1 and buy SO's.

Second simplest is, at level 27 or 32, reslot everything with generic IO's of level 30 or 35. Put in your orders in advance, and you can get some great bargains in a couple weeks. Generic IO's sometimes actually sell for cheaper than you can craft them yourself, and by leaving the bid up over a couple weekends it will be there when some crazy goon crafts 150 Level 35 Damages and dumps 'em all on the market at once. For this you may want to make more money faster than the "Sell for 1" approach. This will take some learning time, unfortunately. If you have a couple spare million on another character you can email it to your own global and pick it up on any character.

Third simplest is to frankenslot- this isn't, actually, all that simple but you only have to do it once per character, then you just have to plan a couple levels ahead and have the bids in place (ideally filled) when you level.

I'm trying to come up with a couple good rules to get you in and out of the market in a hurry.

1) Learn to Read The Market . This is maybe more detailed than you need, but it's clear and will teach you general principles.
2) List for less than you would expect to get, but not less than you'd be willing to actually get. If you list for 1,201,908 and someone bids 1,234,567 they'll get it. Don't complain if you think it was "Worth" 5,000,000 and the last bids were all 5 million. Don't list for less than you want to get. You'll probably get the 5 million [or some clever bird bidding 4 million] but you may get your list price. There'll be more stuff to sell.
3) The take-a-penny rule. The reason those "Take a penny, leave a penny" trays work is that nobody cares if they end up with a couple pennies more or less. For me, a penny is about 5,000 inf: any amount under 5,000 inf is too small to care about. I could sell it for 1 inf or 5000 inf and I'm equally happy; I never bid under 5000 inf because that's too small for me to worry about. If "a penny" is 500 inf for you, that's fine. Just figure out what the number is and don't worry about numbers less than that. If I'm buying something that uses a 2 million inf piece of salvage: That's 400 "pennies" for me. Paying 1 more penny to get my Improvised Cybernetic on the first try doesn't make a difference to me .
4) There's probably a couple useful miniguides in my sig. It's more homework, but you only have to do it once, ever.

I'm just back from a vacation with no internet [surprisingly interesting, real life can be] so I don't know, but for a long time, Kin Combat had two recipes worth [crafted] around 100M that went for one AM each. Lots of stuff crashed, that may have as well.

It's all about what you like, what you'll suffer through, and what you are willing to pay to avoid.

Minor note: while it is true that " the very first time you do a Morality Mission, you get a reward of the old fashioned Reward Merits", you get enough Reward Merits to turn them in for an AM.

You may be thinking "So the first time costs me 20 million inf?" That is correct. However, last I looked, you got around 75 million inf per AM, maybe more, so it's not a large investment in your future. Comparitively. If you don't have the cash to start with, you can always save those reward merits until you get and sell your first pure-AM recipe.

I used to store billions in gleemail. Friends of mine lost money, so now I store billions on an alt and have a gleemail telling me which alt. Probably obvious but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

I've got one for sale! level 10, crafted, 3 billion inf, some file marks on the serial number.

Freedom really isn't as bad as it sounds from standing in Atlas Park. Having said that, even if you have 12% more terrible players, that's an average of one extra wretch per team of 8.

Freedom's rep is based on the fact that, for seven years, you've been able to get to 50 without teaming with the same person twice. So unlike a smaller server, there's absolutely no incentive to change your behavior just because your teammates all hate you. And, just like "bad roommates come in pairs" [J. Whedon], bad teammates feed off each other.

It doesn't take a lot of leeches, loudmouths, griefers, losers, scumbags, brats and whiners to ruin a task force.

That said, some of the best players I know spend most of their time on Freedom.

/gignore - it's not just for real money spammers!

Servers: Mileage varies quite a lot.

Freedom and Virtue have as many players as all other US servers combined. Freedom has jerks, and a disproportionate number of them. If you can get to level 50 without teaming with the same person twice, there's no negative consequences for being horrible to all your teammates. On a smaller server, jerks tend to burn through the population, and either change their ways or decide Everyone Here Sucks. So Freedom has lots of good players, but you may meet a disproportionate number of leeches, griefers, noisy idiots and other stinkers. If you start in Atlas Park, clear the Broadcast channel out of your main chat tab as soon as possible.

As far as my recommendations on server, that's tough for me to do; I've been here so long that I might think "Infinity's great, Big Purple Bug is on almost all the time, and he's always fun" or "Victory has those four really fast guys that are always running task forces." I don't know what the servers look like if you're new- I guess that's what I'm saying.

Welcome to the game!

Decidedly ebil, my good... creature. Decidedly.

88 it.