Mind Forever Burning

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When you battle the boss as it loses health i was trying to make more guys appear to help the boss....but i was not allowed to do this....
I also wasnt allowed to put an ambush after the boss was defeated.

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That's odd, I've done exactly that in some of my missions and it worked fine. What I meant by the issue I outlined was that you couldn't have an ambush and something else trigger off the same event.

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I have had the other problems...like the emote problem...to give an example i set the main boss and her minions around her to be basically be asleep(at least thats what i was going for)...they where on the floor in unconcius emote mode.....
The effect when you play is that the minions are all in the unconscious emote but the main boss sits there their with the typical beat hand into fist pose.

[/ QUOTE ]

That one's already listed.

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I dont think you mentioned this.....but there is a problem with ambushes in general...

If you create a custom group of one character and set the ambush up....multiple copies of that character will show up...not just one.....
This is no big problem with low level guys for the ambush....
But i did this with a single elite boss....
Set to the lowest level...and 6 of them show up to attack a single player on the heroic mission difficulty.....
Yah another great bug...


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That's actually working as intended. What you want - to have a named boss spawn as an ambush, captive guard, or battle group - is not currently supported by the Mission Architect. Hopefully we'll get it at some point in the future.

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I haven't had the oomph to test much lately. Are we still getting errors that don't show up in the real-time checker but prevent you from playing the arcs anyway? I'd mark that inconsistancy in the interface as a glitch in itself, apt to confuse and frustrate people.

[/ QUOTE ]

Last time I was on test, yes it still does that. Kind of annoying to not know what's causing it to be broken.

[/ QUOTE ]

Do you have any more specific information than this?

OP updated to here

OK, I got that one (though I'm not entirely sure I described it correctly).

Also added some that people gave me in-game on global chat.

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Did they ever fix Ninjitsu?

[/ QUOTE ]

Nope, as far as I know it's still broken - good catch. OP updated.

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Many valid animations for captives and allies are not listed in the animation selection menu. Such animations can be added manually via editing the mission in a text editor, but the animation will be dropped again the next time the mission is edited and saved through the MA interface.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sometimes the select list for animations doesn't seem to be consistent, either, and you can lose an animation that you had selected on the next time you enter into the MA interface.

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Are you sure this isn't due to new patches? I haven't run into that one except when a new patch came down.

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Bosses in a "defeat boss" objective will not perform assigned emotes, and instead continuously do the "bring it on, watch me punch my palm" thing.

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Added, thanks.

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[ QUOTE ][*] Masterminds can no longer give inspirations to their henchmen.

[/ QUOTE ]

This one's fixed.

[/ QUOTE ]

OK, updated OP. Thanks.

As we approach the eve of issue 14 going live, there are still some bugs/gotchas that as far as I know were never addressed. I'd like to collect them in one thread. (The last "Known Issues" post in the Feedback forum contains issues that were fixed in subsequent patches, plus there were omissions.)

This list is intended to summarize issues introduced in I14, i.e. no long-standing bugs listed here, please. I'd also like us to refrain from listing missing features (such as the many missing maps, or missing Traps and Poison powersets) or features whose design we disagree with.

Here are the issues I know about:
<ul type="square">[*] Binds that open chat on a specific channel insert the bind's keystroke into the chat context. For example, if you use 'q' to activate team chat, a 'q' is inserted at the front of your comments to the team (when you use that bind).
[*] Critters using Ninjitsu as a secondary get large damage buffs on every attack. Presumably this buff is supposed to simulate criticals and therefore was intended only to buff the first strike out of Hide, but currently it affects every attack the critter makes.
[*] Critter AI is still problematic, particularly for allies with melee attacks. Critters tend to stand just outside their optimal melee range and cycle their one slightly longer-range attack, such as Dark Melee cycling on Soul Drain.
[*] Ally ambushes do not work properly. The ambush group will mostly stay rooted to the spawn location, while one critter from the group will properly run to the trigger location.
[*] MA Souvenirs are awarded on a per-installation basis, meaning they appear for every character on an account once awarded to any character on that account, and even appear for characters on other accounts if they happen to share the same install location.
[*] Cyclical dependencies among triggered details are not correctly detected; the validator will sometimes reject perfectly valid missions. There is a workaround in that you can edit the mission in a text editor and re-order the mission details so that triggered details always appear after the detail that triggers them, and then the validator doesn't get confused.
[*] The real-time mission validator seems to have inconsistencies with the validator run prior to testing, as occasionally a mission will be unplayable even though the validator shows no errors. More information on this problem would be welcome, but possible causes include text field overflow and "invisible" level range errors.
[*] Many valid animations for captives and allies are not listed in the animation selection menu. Such animations can be added manually via editing the mission in a text editor, but the animation will be dropped again the next time the mission is edited and saved through the MA interface.
[*] Bosses in boss details will not perform assigned emotes, and instead will always do the "punch fist into palm" emote.
[*] If you trigger one detail off another detail, you cannot also trigger an ambush off that second detail (I'm a little hazy on this one, maybe someone can clarify/correct it).
[*] There are some level spawning oddities that are surely not intentional.
- The Family faction listed as existing from levels 5 to 40 don't spawn between 29 and 39 if the mission holder is a hero.
- The Lost/Rikti transition isn't handled correctly for missions around 29; level 29 Rikti appear instead of desired Lost.
- Including the Banished Pantheon (40-54) "RandomMinion" option in a custom group doesn't work; they become 20-29 range, and during the mission they won't spawn, instead replaced by whatever else is available.
[*] Lots of missing faction and level range errors (too numerous to list here; see this post for a full list).
[*] Exiting an MA mission with a click effect active up will cause the power's effects to drop prematurely. In the case of Domination, the Domination bar will still be full, but the Domination power will not automatically recharge.
[*] Choosing "Random" for an escort detail will choose a random member of the guard faction rather than a random member of the escort's faction or NPC group.
[*] Editing things (be it story arcs or custom critters) in the Mission Architect may make your cape or cape-like costume pieces (e.g. trenchcoat bottoms) disappear on your screen. They will still be visible on other people's screens.
[*] Faces in the custom critter editor have their scale sliders reset every time you open them up to make changes, even if it's just changes to powersets.[/list]
Edited to add list tags.

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Actually, if you could point me towards the nature of those resources, I'd appreciate it, as I pulled 90% of what I wrote out of my posterior.

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There's lots of general resources for writers, but of course now that I look many of them talk about the process of getting writing published in addition to (or sometimes rather than) the process of writing something good in the first place.

I learned most of what I know starting with a great book called "The Art and Craft of Novel Writing", whose principles IMHO apply equally well to any kind of fiction. (It has mediocre ratings on Amazon I think primarily because it doesn't talk about the publishing process at all.) Here's a good summary of the guidelines for fiction writing: http://www.writersdigest.com/article...vel-blueprint/ - the whole writer's digest site has lots of good information.

I'm sure there's more out there, particularly if you want to focus on genre writing like detective/thriller plots.

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Oh. Avatar. Gads. Really, does it really hurt hitting three more keys?

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He's just trying to threadjack. Don't let his low post count fool you, he's an expert in these matters.

Regarding the OP: Nicely done. Honestly I think you should turn this into a guide - all it needs is some more formatting (to guide the eye) and maybe some references to online fiction writing resources (of which there are many). If everyone followed your advice the quality improvement would be dramatic**.

** Edit: pun intended

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Although several arcs have successfully integrated the AE as a part of their story, and I admire them for that.

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I thought about starting a thread along the lines of "Premises consistent with the AE backstory that let you do basically anything you want".

I've held off mostly because I had the feeling that an open discussion might irritate people who came up with those ideas independently and wanted to finish their personal creations before revealing their methods. In a way it's like PvP tactics; letting people explore and find their own solutions is often a good part of the fun, and I didn't want to create what might basically amount to a "spoiler" thread.

At some point I plan to make an arc that is truly villainous - where the character running the missions is committing evil for evil's sake. While it's true that comic book villainy often involves such lofty goals that it's impossible to fit into a shared world that doesn't change after success, real evil doesn't have to have such visible effects to be brutally effective.

I fully expect a good proportion of villain players will hate it.

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14 per arc, 14 total. It has to do with how many character definitions can fit into your 100K arc file limit.

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Let's say I want 4 different looking minions with the same powers just alternating costumes; is there a way to make this take up less filesize just by specifying different costumes, rather than creating 4 unique minions. Or would each minion need to be created and listed in the file seperately (and need a unique name?), even if everything else is the same?

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Currently, each custom critter specifies everything about itself in the mission file; they don't share blocks of information with any of their brethren.

In your specific example, it actually wouldn't help much to share powers but change costumes, because costume information is by far the bulk of the information stored about a critter. Each costume segment is named and colored individually.

The case where sharing information would help a ton is if critters could share costume data, and you wanted a team with the same costumes but different powersets (like the CoT Possessed Scientists). You could potentially get a whole faction defined in the mission file using the same amount of space that's currently taken by two critters.

For "tips and tricks":

Q: How do I change the color, size, and attributes (bold/italic) of text in my missions?

A: In many contexts you can do this using an HTML-like markup supported in the MA Editor. For example, &lt;i&gt; &lt;/i&gt; puts text in italics. The markup is not exactly like HTML, and it doesn't work in all contexts - text that ends up in the chat window, for example, is colorized by the chat window rules and can't be overridden.

You can right-click on text in the MA Editor and choose markup to apply, as well - this is a shortcut that merely inserts the correct markup into your text block, which you can then edit if desired (for example, to specify colors not in the default list).

Note that markup does take up space in the mission file size - see the note about newlines expanding to &lt;br&gt; above.

One more:

Q: I created a custom critter as an ally, but when we fight, it doesn't seem to use all the powers at its disposal. Sometimes it just seems to sit there staring at the enemy.

A: This is a known issue, that seems to affect melee powersets in particular. We suspect it is related to the old Animated Stone bug/behavior of never quite closing to melee and simply cycling Hurl. Try changing up powersets and playtesting to find something that works.

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How do I set dialogue for non-patrol mobs?

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There's no way to do that at this time. We started a wish list for "MA 2.0" at some point, and I seem to recall that adding additional dialog trigger points was in there; maybe someone should revive that thread...

Arcanaville, I think another question people are going to ask (particularly after running your Scrapper Challenge) is: How do I spawn an ambush of all lieutenants, or all bosses?

Answer: You need to create a group whose only members are of the rank you want (all lieutenants, or all bosses), then set that group as the ambush group. When it spawns, it will be all of that rank. Be warned: that group will be hard, especially if it consists of custom critters - the normal spawn mix rules will be voided. (I'm not sure anyone knows what the spawn rules are for this case.) [Also, Arcanaville, do you have confirmation that this isn't a bug? I hope it's intended, but if we don't know, people who design maps based on that trick could be disappointed later.]

And a related question: How do I create an ambush with a named/custom boss (or EB, or AV)?

Answer: Currently, you can't. Many people suggested this be added.

[ QUOTE ]
No, you read it partially correctly. It used to matter. Unless they've broken it again recently, they fixed it.

There's simply no hard evidence that the SK gets the loot, currently or ever. Keep and some other folks were doing real, careful testing to check for patterns and never found evidence of that. Without that kind of investigation, I file reports to the contrary up with the "they nerfed accuracy!" claims we get every patch.

[/ QUOTE ]

In fact, the testing I was doing that uncovered the RNG bug was precisely that test: to see whether SKs got more or less loot. Long before I had enough measurements to make any kind of judgement on that, the fixed-pattern problem surfaced.

And yes, that bug got squashed. If anyone sees it again let pohsyb know. Basically, someone had written their own RNG algorithm instead of using rand() - why, we'll never know. Maybe some intern was doing their CS homework at the office.

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Apparently there were some issues with drop codes before I12 which caused sidekicks/lackeys to get more drops than their mentors but no redname ever confirmed that.

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Huh? I was watching pretty closely for this issue to become anything more than rumor, and as far as I knew it never did. Or did you mean the broken-map problem? That wasn't a blanket "sk gets more" issue, but a problem where RNG patterns for certain determinations were fixed for certain maps. The parameters depended on player actions, and while you could set up a configuration where the SK got more, you could also do the reverse.

Re: Markets and economy:

Project Burn Rate - taking a new character from 0 inf to 1 billion inf in under 30 days. More a journal than a guide.

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Can someone reach 1B in 50 hours on-line?

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I think you'd really be pushing it to try this with a new character. If you were starting with a level 50, then maybe, but a new character has to level somewhat to earn transaction slots and inventory space - otherwise there's just not enough wiggle room.

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one thing i would like to suggest is to improve the storage capacity of the storage base one could create alts on that server as place holders thereby increasing your starting prestige, each toon u have join the sg boost that prestige.

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I probably should have mentioned in the writeup that I had a set of rules to follow, which I outlined in the original thread:

- No inf transfers
- No stealing from SG storage
- No multi-boxing

That last precluded me from using the "new member" prestige to improve the base, unless I wanted to invite strangers.

I'm PMing Ex to ask that this thread be moved to Guides.

IV. Outfitting Strategy

I intended to be stingy with my slotting - very, very stingy. Accordingly, I was prepared to buy DOs/SOs if that was necessary.

As it turns out, it mostly wasn't necessary. I used drops until 12, then started buying spare common IOs off the market, as well as Yin-Os or low-level SOs if available. That tided me over until 17, when I outfitted with all level 20 IOs, then with 25s when more slots opened.

In the early 30s I frankenslotted... and man, what a difference that made. Frankenslotting is a little harder than it used to be, I guess, but it's still one of the biggest performance boosts you can buy for the money. In fact, with a little scrounging I was able to bring the cost in to under what common IOs would cost.

With the exception of some cheap (2x 3-set) Titanium Coatings and (1x 5-set) Doctored Wounds, frankenslotting lasted me until level 50. I didn't even bother slotting my epics since they were really just placeholders for purples.

V. Leveling Strategy

I soloed Burn Rate up to Positron TF level, then soloed one Posi. That was enough Positron for me, so the next step was to get up to Dark Astoria levels and burn zombies.

I only did that for about a level and a half. I didn't find it to be terribly lucrative, probably because that was the middle of the Double XP glut; plus, I didn't have a build that gave me Acrobatics, so the storm shamans were really annoying. As soon as I could get into Croatoa I ran the arcs there.

As I mentioned before, my original strategy was to park in the low 30s and milk random Pool C rolls. But by the end of Double XP I was level 34, at which point I was in striking distance to the ITF... and once I got there, pretty nearly all the TFs I was running were giving me XP. As I neared 1B inf I was close enough to 50 that I thought I might as well go for it. One level of bridging, two ITFs and a Justin Augustine got me my last four levels.

VI. Conclusion

This was a fun project, if time consuming. At the end of it I had a brand new level 50, with nearly enough for a full purple build (as of this writing, I have four 5-sets of purples, and can possibly earn enough through saved merits for the 5th, if I'm careful) and a few high-end QoLs like a Kismet +ToHit and a Slow Resist.

I should mention that I topped out at 137 hours of play on this character by the end of the project. That's a lot of time logged; I don't pretend this is something a casual player could do by any means. However, I think a reasonably casual player could reach 1B inf in many fewer hours of play if they didn't care too much about calendar time. It's also worth noting that even though I ran quite a few TFs with no XP involved, and spent a lot of time at the market, I still reached 50 in many fewer hours than it used to take, pre-i9 (and pre-level smoothing, pre-patrol XP, etc).

The game may not have gotten easier, exactly, but it sure has gotten faster.

- KeepDistance

III. Merit Strategy

At the outset, I had intended to park Burn Rate at some optimal random-roll level (like 33) and spend merits on random Pool Cs. However, this plan didn't work out so well in practice, for several reasons:

- I overshot the optimal rolling level (33) by the end of Double XP. I was running whatever TF was offered, and a lot of times that meant being in the level range of the TF (and I didn't quite have the chutzpah to turn off XP altogether). Plus, by the mid-30s the ITF had begun to whisper its siren's song in my ear.

- I was very tight on slots. 10 different 5M recipes was worth vastly less to me than one 50M recipe, and there was no way to predict what the distribution would be.

- As it turns out, random rolls are not the best inf/merit anyway.

My first discovery was the Steadfast -KB, which sells at level 30 for 30M inf, about 400k/merit at 75 merits. However, I felt really bad taking advantage of this, because lower level ones sell for considerably less... and have less utility due to exemplaring rules. I only sold one before my conscience got the better of me.

Its brethren, however, the Res/+Def IO, sells for 50M or so at level 30, again about 400k/merit at 125 merits. Over the course of the project Burn Rate bought, crafted and sold three of them with merits and one with inf.

Prior to that I did take a few random rolls, and lucked out on one with a Miracle unique. It may say something about my thinking that I decided to get out of that game while the getting was good.

Merits were earned from a variety of TFs. I earned the Task Force Commander accolade more or less naturally over the course of the project. I did one run of Positron solo with the aid of several nice folks from Triumph Watch who were willing to pad, but other than that all were fully manned teams. The ITF was popular, but I also ran two Shadow Shard TFs, a first in my long CoH history. (Their detractors are right: they are overly long and tedious. The final fight in the Augustine TF, though, is actually pretty great.)

Here is the final tally of merits. The unspent merits were earned in the final push to 50 - if I'd needed them for the 1B count I would have just bought more Res/+Defs.

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>Merit earnings
Cost Type Result Inf(M) Inf/Merit(M)
30 D Roll Sovereign 0.01 0.0003
30 D Roll Aegis 1 0.03
20 Roll Miracle 50 2.5
20 Roll Vend 0.01 0.0005
20 Roll Vend 0.01 0.0005
75 Pool A - U KB prot 30 0.4
125 Pool A - U Res/Def 45 0.36
125 Pool A - U Res/Def 50 0.4
125 Pool A - U Res/Def 55 0.44
239 Unused
Total:
809 231.03 0.405 (of 570 spent)
</pre><hr />

If I had needed to spend the last few merits, I doubtless would have bought another two res/+def IOs for approximately another 100M. That makes merits about 1/4-1/3 the total earnings for the project depending on whether you count the unspent ones in the tally. Inf per merit was 405k overall - almost exactly what I was getting from Steadfast Protections, which means the random roll was only slightly better than average for me even given my Big 3 score.

II. Market Strategy

Prior to the challenge, it had been quite a while since I did active marketeering. Over the past year I'd only done one serious effort, which was to invest in Steadfast Res/+Def IOs redside just before Issue 12 was released (which brought several new ATs and builds that specialized in defense). However, I have explored the market pretty extensively, so I was firmly grounded in the principles.

I knew that in order to win this challenge I was going to have to make a pretty high income every day. That meant that some of the more lucrative patient plays weren't going to be successful - they turn over too infrequently to be counted on. I had to move fast, and that meant constantly moving in where opportunities opened and getting out immediately when they closed. There were a few close calls when I thought I was going to be stuck with a few duds, or forced to sell items to recover liquidity, but overall I did pretty well (but see IIe. The Strange Case of the Devastation Quad for an exception).

IIa. Phase 1: Scrounge and Prepare (0-1M)

I had several strategies to hit the ground running right out of the tutorial. First, you can sell one of your large insps, buy two of the other, and combine them into a large purple, which sells for a lot. Second, you can buy and vendor underpriced common IO recipes. Third, you can do the same for enhancements.

I did end up combining to get a big purple, but I didn't really need to. I street-hunted Hellions exclusively from the start, and as soon as I could do so, I took on level 4s. The first few drops turned out to be pretty lucky ones. My first luck charm sale was really what made my kitty.

Meanwhile, I was scouring the market looking for my next opportunity. I was especially interested in mid-level common tech salvage, because while it's usually very inexpensive, I remembered some spikes from the Winter Event (presumably because people were farming for candy canes and not earning much tech at all).

Bingo: the very first evening, I was able to flip a 1k Inert Gas for 25k. That's a pretty significant mark-up. Probably there were other like-minded folks building inventory, because prices bounced around quite a bit between Wednesday night, when I started, and Friday morning, when Double XP began.

I flipped quite a bit of Inert Gas, Iron, and Circuit Boards as I continued to sell Hellion droppings. I also attempted to combine large insps into purples, but quickly realized how slot intensive that is; I only did that when the salvage flipping margins were low, and only if I could get in and out of the insp sale quickly.

At level 10 I created my own SG, the Mighty Marketeers, and started a base. Good thing, too; I was going to need it.

IIb. Phase 2: Double XP Weekend (1-100M)

On Friday, when Double XP started, I was level 14 and had 5.6M inf. I thought I had prepared myself pretty well: I had room for 30 pieces of salvage, and 12 market slots.

Boy was I wrong.

I knew that Double XP would be a frenzy of leveling followed by a shortage of goods. What I didn't realize was how much of a glut Double XP produces while it's already underway. I guess this makes sense: people are incented to fight constantly while the event lasts, so they throw their goods on the market to get rid of it. By mid-day Saturday I was furiously building salvage racks in my base, having filled both my personal inventory and my vault space with Runes, Inert Gas, Circuit Boards, Iron, Stabilized Mutant Genomes, and more, all going for less than 1k, all virtually guaranteed to sell later for much more than that.

There were large periods of time where I was completely locked, with all inventory and all market slots full with salvage. I couldn't cancel some of my offerings even when I knew they wouldn't sell - there was no place to put them. I was loathe to delete because I knew there would be shortages later. My solution was to earn a little more prestige to buy more racks.

I wasn't fast enough. I only got my third salvage rack on Sunday, by which point the glut was slowing down. Too late, I realized I could have sold my invention table to buy more racks; I was so focused on how to juggle salvage that that simple solution went right by me. I estimate I could have earned another 20-30M over the weekend just by selling that table and keeping 3-4 more salvage racks in the base.

Even so, I finished out the weekend at 15.5M inf, and another 20M in built-up salvage to sell when the shortage hit.

And hit it did. Monday and Tuesday, right on schedule, all the salvage I built up over the weekend sold, some of it for stupidly high prices. I tiered my offerings so I could tell where the high water marks were, and even the Inert Gas I listed for 100k+1 had sold by Wednesday morning. By the day before my net worth had hit 100M, and I was already moving into the next phase.

IIc. Phase 3: Heavy Lifting (100-200M)

As I sold off my Double XP holdings I was looking for the next opportunity. Surprisingly, the rare arcane salvage market - which I looked at back when nearly every piece sold in the millions, and found too stiff - turned out to be a rich vein to mine. Once the prices reach the 1.5-2M mark, there's a lot of "middle play" where people sell their drops relatively high and buy them relatively low; but in the mid-hundred thousands, where Mu Vestments, Soul Trapped Gems, Enchanted Imperviums, and Magical Conspiracies now reside, people are a lot less careful.

I set up several standing rotations through all these items, buying most for around 350-400k and reselling them for 500k. Magical Conspiracies I got for a little over 100k and resold for 200k, which is a bigger margin but slightly lower per-slot net. I turned over a ton of all these items over the middle range of the project, even towards the end; at about 1M per slot turnover, and multiple turnovers per day if I checked both morning, nightly session start, and nightly session end, I was making maybe 10-20M off these things.

Stability of these items varied. Several times prices got higher than I was comfortable with and I moved to other items. I could still afford to turn them over, for sure, but I worried that the price increase was temporary and I'd be left with a lot of overpriced wares. Mu Vestments rose so high (800k-1M) that I eventually decided I didn't understand their equilibrium pricing and I left that market entirely.

But rare salvage wasn't going to get me to the 1B mark. At 20M/day I'd need 50 days of fairly intense marketeering to make it. So even as I sold off the last of my Double XP holdings I was already looking to move on.

IId. Phase 4: High End Play (200-1000M)

This phase of the project was where most of my time was spent, and it was also the most interesting. I played around a little bit with flipping midlevel recipes, especially Pool Cs, since in theory they are now below their equilibrium pricing given changes in supply.

But that didn't really pan out. In order to support my goals, I needed items that turn over quickly, and midlevel Pool Cs didn't really fit the bill. Theoretically there might be some suitable recipes at their level cap, such as Touch of Death at 40 or Entropic Chaos at 35, but I didn't find enough margin for the turnover rate.

So I returned to one of my old stomping grounds, rare Pool As. At level 50, there is quite a bit of activity on these items - they drop from farms, and people seek them to complete their characters, often willing to pay top inf for them, especially crafted. Also, people seem pretty willing to part with them on the cheap, perhaps because they didn't have to do anything special to get them.

The last time I used that strategy, which I think was in the i10 time frame, the best bet was to craft something that required tech salvage; people seemed willing to pay high markups on them without actually doing the math on what they cost to craft. This time around, it didn't really seem to matter what the craft ingredients were, I suppose because tech and arcane have evened out quite a bit since i10.

Another difference this time was that it was trivially easy to identify Pool As: just check their merit cost. 125 for a non-unique means rare Pool A.

The items I crafted for sale included:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Aegis End/Res
Luck of the Gambler Def/End
Devastation Acc/Dam/End/Rech
Scirocco's Dervish Acc/Dam
Positron's Blast Acc/Dam
Performance Shifter End/Rech
</pre><hr />

Each of these, depending on market conditions, would net 5-10M per item sold, and sold 5-10 per day. If I could have captured every one of those sales I could have made 100M per day. But that wasn't really possible; every one of those niches was already occupied, and if I tried to capture all the sales, competing crafters would have reacted by lowering their prices, or increasing their bids, to crowd me out.

So instead of sitting in one place, I moved around constantly. I'd slip one or two of each type into the mix and then get out before the competition could get too antsy. I constantly monitored the recipe and crafted prices and dove in wherever momentary opportunities arose. I priced things at 80% + 1 inf of the going crafted rate so that I'd be first to sell, while reducing the risk of being flipped, and if possible I tried to time things so that the east coast morning crowd would see my items first.

Even so, competitors reacted. Sometimes they would buy recipes at higher and higher prices; in those cases I generally got out at the risk of building too much stock. Sometimes they would craft and sell at a loss to close the gap; in one of those cases I countered by lowballing the crafteds and flipping them.

In one case, everything went south.

But before I get to that - the Strange Case of the Devastation Quad - I should mention that towards the very end I flipped or crafted a few purples as well. The market there was surprisingly little different than the crafted rare Pool A recipe, as far as the profit rates go; the net profit per item could be higher - in one case, I sold a crafted Absolute Amazement for 40M that I had bought for 18M - but trades, particularly profitable ones, are much less frequent. These are the items that the true patient player would probably want to trade in, since you could probably go a week without checking the market and still make pretty good use of your slots.

And now, on to the most fascinating part of the story.

IIe. The Strange Case of the Devastation Quad

When I first started trading in Devastation Acc/Dam/End/Rech, recipes were going for 3-6M and crafted items were going for 9-10M. Since the salvage costs 3-4M and it's another 500k to craft, this is a healthy but not outrageous profit - 3.5M if you lowball everything and sell high, down to just about nothing if you catch it wrong both sides.

Devastation was one of the items where I first noticed competitors were twitchy: if I put up too large a batch, suddenly craft-at-a-loss items started appearing. I flipped the first two that came on the market, then moved on as the profit margin started to close. Every few days I checked back on the item and saw pretty much what I expected: prices would return to their original equilibrium, I'd compete for a bit and they'd close.

Until the weekend after double XP. Then something enormously strange happened, which I'm still somewhat at a loss to explain.

There are some things you learn to look for in the rare Pool A crafting business: how many recipes are selling, how many enhancements, and which filled bids are clearly from lowball bids (i.e., your competition). Starting the Saturday after Double XP, I started to see all the sales come in as lowball bids. Very few people were buying recipes for themselves, it seemed. But looking at the crafted enhancement sale rate, it didn't seem like they were buying crafted enhancements either.

Predictably, prices on both started to fall. Thinking this was just a temporary anomaly, I quickly stepped in to what I thought was the recipe price floor, thinking that if the crafted market had dried up I could simply sell back the recipes when things returned to normal. My bids were so low I was pretty confident that if worst came to worst I could sell back to the crafting crowd at 3M and come out slightly ahead.

But before I knew it, I had 20 of the things, and still more lowball bids were getting filled. I crafted a bunch and put them in storage, but I just couldn't figure out what was going on. The number of lowball bids getting filled was astonishing. Prices fell beneath my 2M "floor" to 1.5M, 1M, 500k.

Where were these recipes going? They had to have been building up in crafters' inventory - there weren't nearly enough sales to "outsiders" to soak up the excess, as far as I could tell.

I started to unload. I sold the enhancements in dribs and drabs, but it was slow going. I tried to price the recipes at a reasonable flipping profit, but they didn't move; in fact, recipe stocks shot through the roof, up to 65+ at one point (when I started, it was 8-12, typically, with another 8-12 crafted for sale at any given time). Devastation quads accounted for "40M" of the holdings I still had when I dinged 50. Eventually, I sold most of it at cost, with a few above and a few below as prices moved around.

The Devastation market is still weirdly skewed. Recipe prices have returned to the 2-3M range, which seems about right given their usefulness and rarity, but take a look at the crafted prices! (The 9M sale is mine.)

I still have one left, actually. I might keep it for sentimental value.