Hyperstrike

Yeah. Make me feel like a cheapskate now...

*Rassum Frassum*

No. It doesn't, because the things described are only two of a host of contributing factors.

How many defense common defense IOs does an SR scrapper need to deck themselves out?

How many runspeed?

How many Acc?

Not to mention the places where the salvage is used in various set IOs.

We can keep naming off contributing factors all day. In the end, the result is the current situation of the market. And even then, we're probably going to have missed things.

If you look at each of these things, or at least all of the things we've mentioned thus far, in a vacuum, sure it looks hokey. You have to understand big-picture here.



The problem is, you're looking at market balance in terms that don't include game basics (or common sense basics) like "There are people out there who have VAST Inf stockpiles" because they've been playing a lot longer (and possibly harder) than me."

With realities like that, the type of "balance" that you're talking about isn't even a dream.


And you have. There's no easy answers here. Just keep working at it and you too can reach a point where the inf becomes incidental. But nobody's promising it'll come quickly.

Events always make it harder. More people means more demand. Depending on their activities, this could mean more supply, but that isn't guaranteed.

It's a problem all right. But the solution, since it involves effort and some short term fiscal responsibility, isn't one lots of people want to hear.


No. Bad! WRONG! You should still have posted. It's all the people who don't post, and sit around muttering about "evil marketers" that exacerbate the problem.

I'd furiously cultivate blindness and hairy palms!


What? Too honest?



Seriously? I'd probably stop gaming again for a while.

NOT going to go to WoW.
Won't even give CO or DCUO the time of day.
Might play some more POTCO on and off, but not regularly.

There really isn't anything out there that really grabs me and makes me want to play.

Remember, CT is a melange of more than just Lovecraftian horror. So it's been tweaked.

As for how black ops work. While the devs themselves are quite creative people, they wouldn't recognize a black op if they were the target of one. Nor would most people.

Additionally, RL black ops tend to not really be the kinds of things that make for exciting reading anyhow. Yeah, the basic CONCEPT and the whole rube-goldberg "how it's put together" are stimulating, but the actual execution, if done right, tends to be really "meh".

I wouldn't say the devs have "ate it up".

Notice they're militantly NOT doing anything about ratcheting down player controls on the market. If they were going to fiddle, the market merger would have been the time to do so.

If anything, they made bulk traders MORE efficient.

Have you put in the same amount of time and development of your toon that they have? If not, why would you reasonably expect parity with them. Ask them to hunt up how many hours their toons have played.

If they don't know how, have them hunt up a citizen whose name begins with an M. Talk to them, it'll tell them that toon's total hours in-game.

Sorry about that. Unfortunately, there are idiots in every group. Even here. Mostly they're people who simply cannot properly adapt to the game where "gear" is less necessary.

Plus you have people with isues and issues worth of free costume change tokens. Someone 40+ with all 5 costume slots opened gets 5 tokens every issue, regardless of how much that toon has been played in the last couple years.



Prices were nuts after issue 9. People had been storing inf as mostly useless for 3 years by that point. Then the market happened.

It went nuts after i13 when the Merit system was introduced. Various recipe prices skyrocketed because you could no longer rely on end-of-TF drops.

It went completely bonkers after i14 when everyone went and farmed themselves silly for about 6 months.

The market is never EVER going to be "sedate". If you want sedate and boring, go do random rolls for your needs and buy SOs through the stores.


Sorry if this sounds rude. But whether YOU consider the market a mini-game or not, it IS. If you wish to avoid it, use merits, tickets and alignment merits (in addition to random drops) to outfit yourself.

You need to get out of AE though. AE is merely a fallback method of acquiring wealth. Compared to earnings in real content and your inf accumulation is decidedly stunted.


It's good that you're at least attempting to learn the ropes in the market. That'll both save and make you money in the long run.

Remember, you've only been at this a couple months. A year or so down the road, you won't even blink at prices if you absolutely HAVE to buy "RIGHT FRICKIN' NAO!"

Sure there is. Stop paying "Buy it NAO!" prices then acquire the items by alternate means and it'll stop being so profitable.

OH BOY! FRESH MEAT!

Cool! Welcome to the city! Pull up some enemies and relax!

If you got thrashed at Basketball by Michael Jordan in his prime, would you feel bad?
If you tried competing in Formula One in a Civic, would you be put out when you didn't win (or even place)?
If you went into real estate and lost a bid on a property to Donald Trump, would you feel unfairly handicapped?

Remember there are people with 7 YEARS of inf accumulation, plus a goodly number of marketing specialists here. Becoming competitive, IMMEDIATELY isn't a realistic expectation.

It's going to take time, patience, hard(ish) work, and a bit of luck in developing a couple niches where you squeak out profit. I've been here two and a half years now. And I have enough to pretty much buy anything I want. Yet there are people here who could buy and sell me several times over (though it'd be an annoying number of transactions since the inf transfers are capped).

There are ways around the high prices at WW. AE is one of them. They allow you to purchase salvage rolls and recipe rolls with tickets. You can even spec buy certain very expensive types of salvage.

At higher levels for recipes, you can purchase recipes with merits.

I had a couple of people offer to give me Influence as a gift to a new player. At first I politely refused, wanting to pay my own freight, as it were. I learned to accept those gifts.

For future reference. Sell the two TOs at the first vendor you come to for seed capital. Then go sell the large inspies on the market. You can easily bring in 6 digits of inf immediately. I've stepped out of WW with as much as half a million inf just from this alone. Once you have this level of inf, getting rich is pretty much a done deal.


This is a legitimate way of getting equipped though.

IO crafting, especially for commons, isn't really worthwhile until the mid 30's. You're better off with SOs until then.

35 actually. In the future, you're better off running regular, non-AE content and actually getting drops if you want to get wealthy. Some of the lower level salvage pieces go for obscene amounts of inf. A couple of those and you're rolling in inf.

Leveling up in PvE isn't a competition.


If you can buy most things on the market (purples and PVP IOs excepted) you're fine.

Quite a bit. Remember, you've got people sitting on billions of inf. Some people can do a bit of performance art with their high level characters and stack 42,000,000,000 (42 BILLION) into their toon via impossible bids (for L53 recipes, etc) via the market. Don't even get me started about also storing inf in e-mail.

As for paying below the "buy it NAO" price. Patience can be measured in days usually. Realistically, you can't expect to bid 1 inf for an item that's regularly going for 100K and actually have it fill before the heat death of the universe. More reasonable lowballing (50-80% of average bid) can fill in up to a week. If it doesn't fill after a week, you should probably up your bid. If you really need it now, either bump your bid or hit AE and spec buy with tickets.

Also, leveling up faster usually provides less inf overall. Usually, outside of lucky recipe drops, AE makes you less. Had a run a couple weeks back where a brand new character in AE make 100 million due to bronze rolls.

See above about suitable waiting periods and bumping bids.

Because they aren't used in as many things, therefore competition for them is less.

Also, crafting large numbers of recipes at once (usually meaning paying "Buy it NAO!" pricing because you don't want to wait) can be very expensive.

I blew 75 million inf in a one-night binge for Field Crafter back in i12. You could probably double or triple it now doing the same thing.

Luck Charms are used in more than just Acc. They're used in more things than Boresights are. They're also used in MORE DESIRABLE things than Boresights are. Hence there is greater competition for them.

No. Because they aren't just used in that single recipe.

Do a bit of digging into recipes that require Boresights. Then look at ones that require Luck Charms. There are simply more recipes (some of them VERY desirable) using Luck Charms.

Yes there are people fiddling with the market. It's there to be fiddled with.

As for the 88's, they're not PRIMARILY about messing around with the market, though that's how they obtain their wealth. They're essentially an inf-DESTRUCTION project. More inf is coming into the CoH economy than is leaving. This is one of the causes of the inflation you're seeing. These individuals are destroying inf in massive quantities to help balance out the system. Simply buying things they don't need only takes a fraction of that inf out of the system. Converting it to Prestige removes ALL of it. And more, they get to tweak the noses of the various unfriendly Prestige farmer SGs.

One other thing to ruminate on. If you came into the game, and after a month you had "everything" and billions of inf besides, would you actually be happy? Probably not. You'd be bored out of your skull. Because you wouldn't have had any notion that you'd actually EARNED it.

You're comparing yourself to people who've spent massive amounts of time and inf in the game. You're a brand new player. The game is not about "winning" by hitting some pre-defined "end". The fun is in the journey there. Tweaking them afterwards to turn them godlike is just icing on the cake. It's not necessary, nor is it mandatory.

Good. Trust me, after you've played a while and had a chance to build up some reserves, marketing becomes easier (if not cheaper).

Market griefing is a term used by people who don't understand the forces at work in the market, nor the fact that what's happening is NOT directed at them. It's people having fun playing a game in a way that IN NO WAY detracts from your ability to participate.

The more people who participate in the market minigame, the better off everyone is. Simply because competition will drive prices down. Fortunately for the marketeers, few people have the patience for this and would rather gabble about how the market is "broken" and how marketeers are "evil" and that they really want a storefront that just sells the stuff at set inf prices.

As such, marketeers make obscene profits. *Smootches Inf Horde*
My personal best (that I remember) at selling non-drop items I've either relisted or through buy-and-craft was over 20000% (twenty-thousand percent). Double XP weekends are usually so rife with profit that I get very little actual XP earning done.

Also, the profit levels I'm talking about are WELL above the point where I actually listed the items in question.

*Busts out the M2A-17* LIGHT ME!

First off, do yourself a favor. Use your alt builds.

Make your primary build Stone Armor with Rock Armor for a mule/fallback (mostly as a mule).

Get yourself softcapped to all typed (save psi), and then work on boosting your recharge and travel speed.

At that point you can simply set an attack on auto and walk away. When you come back the enemy will be dead.

Use a second build as your alt-armors build.

You can already purchase salvage through AE. You can even spec-buy.

Sell your drops. Do a bit of commons arbitrage for a bit if you're REALLY strapped for inf. Use some of your higher level unplayed alts to set long-term bids.

The money will come.

The GM ambush is entirely optional though. The missions themselves are not.

Yep. Just got DE-NIED. Got all the way through the purchase process and the damn thing says to come back later.

GRRRRRRRRR!

Don't forget about the clockwork farm...err, Synapse.

Kill All
Hunt
Kill All
Kill All
Kill All
Patrol
Kill All
Patrol
Boss Kill
Boss Kill
Hostages
Boss Kill
Multi-Boss Kill

The second half of the TF isn't too bad. But the first just defines tedium.

I'm the head of the IT department here, network architect, senior admin, etc, etc.

Oh yeah. And the owners of the company are good friends of mine. As long as I get my stuff done, am not pirating anything, and not browsing porn on company payroll, it's pretty much on.

Still, I don't normally team at work. As others have said, I don't know when I might need to go idle and it's not fair to teammates.

While all the lieutenants what? Go fish?

That looks outta whack to me. IIRC,

Most GTs were either 512 or 1GB

I know my on-board Quadro FX570 on my laptop only reports it's 512MB of RAM.

Either your drivers are corrupted (in which case uninstall them, run a driver cleaner, then reinstall from a fresh download) or your vidcard is damaged and sending the wrong info to the OS, causing it to believe there's actually almost 4GB of RAM on the card.

As Bugs would say. "Hmm! Could bee!"

Oh. I don't gnu about that.