Fulmens

Short version: what Watt said.

Longer version: You remembered the right result [only slot 3 of one thing] but not quite the right math. SO's 4 through 6 get you less, total, than slot 3 did, but they do get you SOMETHING.

The math goes by total percentage, so if you have an Acc/Dam/Rech, an Acc/Dam/End, and a Dam/End/Rech each giving 20%/20%/20% (which they would at roughly level 45) Enhancement Diversification sees that as "60% Damage, no ED applies" instead of "three Damage enhancements, apply ED."

Depends on the build. If I've got another good layer of protection (Defense or Resistance or whatever) and don't have a self-heal, I will sometimes kick in 50-100% extra, on top of Health. [Health with 1 slot is 53%-ish; health with 3 slots is 80%- ish. Adding a Numina heal + unique instead of two generic L50 heals is a large sum of money for a small benefit. Remember that 1% of Regen is 1% per four minutes, so 100% regen is like "one small green every minute."

Heck, I'd be happy with #2 OR #4 !

I tend to stay away from 10-stacks for that reason. People defend niches, people think I am in a niche and attack it, it's all combat and no capitalism. I hit and run a lot. Nobody's going to get that mad about me snagging three sales out of their fifty for the week. And if they do? I'll never know.

But that's not really constructive advice.

The ones you have for sale? Leave 'em till Tuesday morning. There's a LOT of traffic on weekends. Prices will fluctuate. The number for sale will fluctuate. Yours might sell.

As far as "run"? Kinda hard to say. If I was selling and it was "10 for sale, 16 bids" and all of a sudden it was "43 for sale, 160 bids": Someone's messing with that. I wouldn't sell everything for 1 inf and flee, but I'm sure not putting any more money into that for a while. If I had stuff that I hadn't listed yet, I probably wouldn't list it for a while.

It's very rare that I see something dry up for a long period of time- I may have seen a couple, like, Impervious Armor or something where someone will pick up a bunch of sets and then nobody will buy for a few days.

Occasionally I take a loss, but not on many IOs and not very often. Try three or four recipes each of two different things. Hopefully you'll have a "5 million cost, 11 million listing price, 15 million expected price" kind of setup. So if you sell ONE at the expected price you've pretty much covered costs on all three. Where can you find those sorts of ratios and prices? I'd look at Positron, Aegis, Doctored Wounds, Devastation, Decimation, Impervious Armor, Titanium Coating, maybe Reactive Armor... if it's a less-loved set go for the most-loved items in the set-for Devastation you'd check Acc/Dam- whereas if it's a set with one standout item you check the second-best items [for Miracle that would be Heal/Rech or Heal]: those are things people frankenslot with, giving extra demand.

Remember that a 100K recipe with a 3.5 million inf piece of salvage and 500K crafting cost is a 4.1 million inf investment(so you'd want to sell for 9 or 10 million at least), but people SELL it like it's a 100K item. You can grab those recipes in bulk any time you want. Pay 200K, pay 500K, you're not affecting YOUR profit margin significantly.

I don't know, but I'm going to point out that I saw someone's pet a couple weeks ago that gave me my new favorite phrase: "Like putting lipstick on a Venus Fly Trap." Every now and then someone still surprises me with power coloring.

Are you @JuliusSeizure in game? I may have to do this via email because I'm not on at reasonable hours at the moment, but I'm interested.

EDIT: Like it says in the sig, I'm @Boltcutter.

Fire/Ice blaster. Big damage, big vulnerability, fast play, big fun. Shiver and Ice Patch are the only things that slow down incoming damage. Get 'em before they get you.

(I recommend at least one level of Stealth. Strike first, strike last. )

... this is a very personal recommendation. What I love you may hate. Etc.

As you can tell, everyone does it differently. . .

For most characters I tend to frankenslot around either 27 or 32 [frankenslot = bunch of different sets with no particularly good "set bonuses", so you're getting the advantages of higher bonuses in each power for cheap]. Then I'll sometimes replace them with better sets in the 40-50 range, depending on how much I like the character and how much the character needs them. I have only built three or so even remotely high end characters (one was a stalker who soloed Countess Crey as an AV at level 42), so my answers may not be your answers.

There are cases where I do a temporary "IO-out" at a lower level. For instance if I've got a character who's an end hog, doesn't do enough damage, or is otherwise frustrating at level 16 or 17, I may buy a bunch of generic IO's (level 20 IO's are considerably better than DO's) and maybe even set IO's to improve performance. I did that on a dark/energy tank that I soloed a lot, and I did that on a Fire/Mental blaster because three AOEs is a dramatic amount of endurance.

Incidentally, if you're short on money there are a lot of ways to make a lot of money fast. One is to do 10 Tips [there's a 5-a-day limit] plus your Alignment mission, take your hero/villain merit, and buy one of several 1-merit recipes which sell for close to 100 million inf. Last I looked Kinetic Combat: Dam/End and Dam/Rech were in that price range. If you're willing to craft, you can often add 10-20 million inf to that. Be sure to check prices before you convert, and remember to lowball your sales price. I am an Ebil Marketeer and I approve this message, etc.

Uberguy, I admire your patience. I'm outta this thread.

The social activities that other games tend to do with guilds/supergroups, we do [these days] with global channels. So you would do something like "/chanjoin RF2009" to join the channel.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Global_channels

Most global channels that I'm on are aimed at specific servers- RF2009 is the replacement for Radio Freedom since that got full of people who no longer play the game, for instance. I think of Victory as a vibrant community, for instance, but that might just be because I know a lot of the people in those chat channels. But if I'm playing on, say, Freedom, and someone in Victory Badges says "Starting up a task force" I'll still see it and may switch over.

Freedom is highest-population, or close to it, but Freedom is also... well, it's possible to go 1 to 50 on Freedom without teaming with the same person twice. So if you're the sort of person nobody wants to team with twice, you may end up on Freedom. There don't have to be a LOT of scumsuckers on Freedom to make it an unpleasant place- 1 in 8 means "one on every full team" on average- and I know a lot of good people on Freedom. What I'm trying to say is, "Freedom may not give you your best CoH experience."

I've had a lot of good times on Freedom, Victory, and Infinity. I have nothing against the other servers. But at this point half the people you'll run into on EVERY server have known each other for five years. Hopefully we'll all be gracious hosts.

Welcome back!

I'll admit it. I'm cheap like that. 2.5% of my recipe price is a measurable amount of money. I end up paying it, because I Want It Nao, but I grumble.

When new code comes in, new weirdness is possible. (For instance, there were missions that ALWAYS gave you a Pool B Door Prize- random wasn't quite random in that case.) So I'm going with "Unlikely but possible."

To TheMightyObs:

What is your preferred "semantic term" when someone says something that's the exact opposite of right?

I'm thinking of this specifically:

Clever, clever person!

I had a friend who complained that "everything's the same." He had forty characters, none above level 10, at the time. He got whiney when it took him too long to get the reward of new levels.

I had another friend who, it looked like, was potentially going the same route. So we started the "get her a 50" plan: every Tuesday we were going to play the same characters from 8 till 10 PM, and we weren't going to play them any other days. (it mushroomed and now our novelty group with the Elvis impersonator and the jello shot waitress is a top 100 SG on Infinity, or was last time I looked.)

Sounds like part of the problem may be that he's seeing what you can do with your, level 50, tuned and heinous, character. His characters don't work like that! (I don't know if you're purpled or what, but exemplared characters have serious advantages over true new players- even if it's just Sands of Mu and modified SO's.)

Start a new character with him. Say something like "Do what you like the rest of the time, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays we're playing the Stomper Twins" [or whoever they are.] You'll be level 5 when he's level 5 and he won't feel like "maybe if I play a rad/sonic I can keep up THIS time".

It's a theory, maybe a bad theory, but it's the only one I've got.

Azuria always takes the hit. Who has the vault visible behind him?

Lot of possible next steps.

It seems illogical to me that people would buy a crafted IO for 12 or 15 or 20 million inf when I pick up the recipe for 500K and the salvage for 3.5 million. But they do it. All the time. (level 50, positron's blast and performance shifter, to mention two where I've made some money.) If you look at the top level of any melee, ranged, AOE, defense, or resistance set you'll probably find at least one of those six IO's where there's a good, profitable spread between recipe + salvage + crafting cost, and cost of crafted IO -10%. "Buy for five million, sell for ten to twenty" is good for learning, because if you get bit on your second time through the system and lose your inf you are still ahead of the game; it's also good for the long term, because you can make a few billion that way.

Four quick notes:
1) List well under the "last 5"- I have listed a lot of things for 12 million that sold for 20. Sometimes the "last 5" on those was 15 million.
2) Until you get comfortable, work in small batches. This depends on how much attention you pay, vs. how much risk you mind.
3) Niches collapse, it's the nature of the beast. Sometimes they come back quickly, sometimes they don't come back at all. If you have something that's, like, "Buy at 1 million, add 3.5 million inf of salvage, sell at 40 million" do not be surprised if one day it starts selling for 6 or 8 million. (I think that happened to Impervious Skin Res/Rech.)
4) You can move into more expensive stuff, buy for 20 + salvage + crafting, sell for 40. Buy for 300+salvage+crafting, sell for 400. It's riskier. Some people pay more attention when they're spending half a billion inf. Fortunately, some people don't.

Market merge went pretty well. Everyone got everything refunded to them (here's your market fees, here's a giant ton of stuff that was for sale and is now in storage on the market.) I didn't have anything riding on the market at the time, either.

MLC suffered from Fulmens Attention Disorder. I still generate a few, still buy a few, people log into MLC and do stuff, but it's not really "my" supergroup in any plausible sense.

The Crazy 88s is my new thing- also other people, who throw in a lot more influence- and I can serve both masters at once by generating midlevel recipes and selling them, then throwing the inf into the firepit.

One major thing was not so much the "day the markets merged" but "the day people could intuitively email their inf to themselves." (I wrote "safely" but gleemail does lose stuff sometimes.) Prices went up considerably due to that alone, I'm pretty sure. But went down due to Hero/villain merits. Purples are crazy.

Anyway. Welcome back!

A point which you may have peripherally made, but I overlooked, Rhysem:

The more stuff sells for 2 billion+, THE WORSE IT GETS. I will attempt to splain.

Let's pick two items- generating one generates 150 million inf that can be associated with it in some way. After you've sold everything else you generated along the way and burnt that inf, you have 150 million inf that gets "charged" to the account of that item. If you sell it for 1.5 billion, you destroy the 150 million that got created along with it.

The other one generates 250 million inf. If you sell it for 2.5 billion off market, you destroy NOTHING and you create 250 million inf of inflation. That 250 million goes to buying other things. Prices go up.

(The flip side of this used to be PVP recipes: No inf was created with them, so they were a pure inf-destroying measure. Now, some of them still are but the biggies are not. )

There are ways to increase your inf-to-stuff ratio: playing on higher difficulties, for instance. People aren't having to do those things, which means that we could cut a LOT out without affecting people's ability to seriously farm up inf if they wanted to.

Last time we had way more party than I expected. This time we had way less. So it goes.

The more I think about this the more I think it's near-unfixable.

There is by my estimation one to five billion inf for every person in the game. (figure 60K players, 60-300 trillion inf.) Between the five major prestige-buying SGs that I know of, we've destroyed something like a trillion inf in the last three months and prices didn't blink.

I think adding AM's burnt a trillion inf in the first week they were in the game, maybe considerably more, and prices changed- but supply went way up, too.

If you could put something in that allowed a character to get a small benefit in return for burning one to fifteen million inf a day- that might make a dent in the supply. Eventually.

Undoing the level 50 influence fix would drop prices 30%, I estimate.

Nothing else I've been able to come up with would be more than an order of 5% change. (That was upping the Wentfee to 15% on transactions over 20 million inf.) Selling to the market from ghost characters? Maybe 1%. Allowing billion-inf tokens that sell back for 900 million? Maybe 0.1%. (It would fix the problem that off-market sales don't destroy inf, though.) Doubling level 50 crafting costs and halving level 50 sellback prices? 1%.

Maybe I'm just depressive today.