Fulmens

... which results in higher buy prices and lower sell prices. Nonflippers win.

Three cheers for the flippers!

Hip hip... hooray!
Hip hip... hooray!
Hip hip... hooray!

... the last time I tried to buy up the low priced supply was when Going Rogue went live. I spent about 3 billion on crafted IO's. I managed to sell them for a little over 2 billion, minus the 10% Wentfee. So I got half my money back. Go me.

Last week Celerity:Stealths were 50 million crafted. This week they're like 20 million. I have a few that are listed at 40,100,908 that aren't selling. Why? Someone listed lower than me, and people started paying that price. (I may be wrong about the specific combo of prices and IO and time. I got burnt a couple times lately- L40 Miracle Heal/Rech and L50 Celerity:Stealth are two where I had to mark down my prices- so I might be mixing up a couple events.)

Prices spike up when there's a big event (like Going Rogue, or a new issue, or double XP, or whatever) and then gradually come down. It's consistent. It's predictable. Like King Canute, we cannot command the tide. It's just too large.

Some of what you're seeing is caused by the evolution of the game. The change in steadfast prices was caused by people discovering they could softcap on Super Reflexes, and how GOOD the softcap was, and taking [for instance] Tough to put a Steadfast in. That was a matter of build evolution. I picked up a Steadfast Res/Def when I did the original 6,000,000 inf man back in, like, July 2007. Because it was 60K including crafting costs and I couldn't afford the Steadfast -KB I wanted.

The change in Reactive Armor was caused [probably; I haven't been following it] by the "typed/ranged" changes. (For those following at home: Used to be you'd get ONE typed defense, and no "half spillover". Thunderstrikes gave you 2.5% Energy at the 3-slot and no Neg or Ranged; you got 2.5% ranged with 6 and no En/Neg.) Reactives become much more useful when you get some amount of Ranged, Melee, AOE, as well as En/Neg, Smash/Lethal, and Fire/Cold- especially when you can stack that with [e.g.] 3.75% Range/En/Neg from Thunderstrikes or 4.11% F/C/AOE from Aegis. So the softcap became far more accessible to far more builds. And Reactive Armor helps pretty much any kind of Defense you're working on, at least a little bit.

There may have been other changes that boosted Reactive Armor, for instance the introduction of BoTZ (getting people used to softcapped Defense) and its nerfing (causing people to go elsewhere for the Defense they lost.)

Some of it may have been "general inflation": respecs are going for 180M last weekend instead of... what did they used to be? Like 45M at one point?

I'm certain some of it is also "inflation of expectations"- if you expect to spend a couple million per slot no matter what, you pay more (and more casually) than if you expected to spend half a million per slot on the normal stuff. When the invention system started, spending 300 million inf on a build was a number so big people couldn't fit it in their brain. Now people spend 300 million inf on one slot.

Gedankenexperiment: We have no inf, just a giant swap meet. If you want thing X, you have to either beat it out of a critter or find someone willing to swap you for it.

If you beat a "thing X" out of a critter once in the past, you either swapped it for something, or you kept it . If you swapped it for something you can swap it back IF THE PRICE IS FAIRLY CONSTANT. If you have a sword and one day you can swap it for a bar of gold, and the next day you can swap it for a single gold coin, there's not much guarantee you can swap a sword and get it back.

Sword Flippers make the price of swords fairly constant.

(If you never had a thing X, there is no guarantee that you'll be able to get one. Normally that's an argument I use on purples. )

I would also say there's a considerable difference between the price you're PREPARED to pay and the price you're ABLE to pay. Lamborghini performance doesn't often come for Honda prices; in this case I'd say that Honda performance doesn't often come for Yugo prices, but the principle is the same.

First: There are at least as many reasons to do this as there are people doing this.

Second: Inf means something. Inf means "I can buy [thing x]. " People put other meaning on inf, like people put other meanings on real money, but inf always means "I have this much purchasing power." If we can reduce the total amount of inf in the game by a meaningful amount, that means your pile of inf has gotten proportionately larger and you have more purchasing power at Wentworth's.

... Forget it. You're right. We're buying your cake and we're putting our feet in it. It's the only reasonable explanation.

Alchemical Silver is pretty much always expensive, running between 55K and 100K.
Improvised Cybernetics are so cheap you can't give them away.

Let's look at what they are used in, especially the generics. Improvised Cybernetics is used in Resist Damage, which maybe 20% of characters slot. Alchemical Silver is used in Defense, which maybe 25% of characters slot, and... umm... Accuracy.

Do you have a character, generic'd or SO'd out, with less than 6 Accuracies slotted?

Can't imagine why there'd be a high price on THAT.

... if you'd said "There aren't enough drains in that pool" I might be willing to agree with that.

I pretty much destroy around 60M influence per day in Went-fees in the ordinary course of my marketeering. Now that we can convert reward merits to AM's at 20 million inf per AM created, I'm good for another 20M every two or three days depending on when I get time to run a TF, and another 10M or so from selling those recipes. Call it 10M a day from that.

There are drains. You could say there aren't enough drains, that's a fair point, and not enough people using them, but there are drains.

I see Sonic as a secondary buffer, as mentioned above. If you have someone else workin' it on the team, that's generally 50% of what didn't get stopped by the other guy[s].

Sonic's great with Rad, Dark, FF, Cold, another Sonic, you name it. By itself? pretty meh.

This is just to say


I have spent
the prestige
that was in
the SG kitty

and which
you were probably
saving to crush RP'ers

Forgive me
It was delicious
It was so money
and so cold.

... actually, as far as prestige, I'm virtually certain that the ranking is based on total, not available.

Thanks for doing this!