Nethergoat

CoV could definitely do more with the storylines of some factions to 'spruce them up' a bit.

But what I wanted were explicitly heroic enemies.
Aside from Longbow, all we get is the PPD guys in Mayhem missions.

Luddites and Scrapyarders both bore me- they're basically normal people, and they're visually generic. There isn't much of a sense of accomplishment in beating them down.

Scrapyarders could be interesting with one change- they 'reach out' to Paragon city for help, and a couple of actual heroes infiltrate the Rogue Isles to help them out.

Not a bad idea for an an MA arc, if anybody wants it.

Wuff!

GRATZ to the lucky winner, hopefully the unlucky loser is so rich they won't really care...

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Well...this thread certainly turned left at Albuquerque. I really didn't intend, or WANT, this thread to turn into a market vs anti-market discussion.

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Alas, it was guaranteed by your topic.

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My whole idea with this apparently-forgotten guide is to have OBJECTIVE, VERIFIABLE statements that cannot be argued.

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We have plenty already.
That doesn't stop people from arguing them.

Your plan is frankly doomed to failure, as are all Utopian daydreams.
Anti-market zealots are not amenable to reason.
The ones who are have already followed our advice and become one with The Financial Borg.

Don't let that stop you from doing it- I've posted any number of dryly factual threads over the years that were meant to sway the uninitiated.
The process itself has value.

But temper your expectations regarding the outcome.

I was gonna say "when in doubt, roll up a brute" but it sounds like you're over 'em.

The Goat is a fire/dark corrupter and I had a blast with him all the way to 50, most of it solo.

Also, if you haven't tried a stalker since the buffs give one a chance. I've been having a ton of fun with my ninja blade/willpower guy.
I've deleted probably ten stalkers since the launch of CoV, but this one is a blast.

QR

CoV learned many valuable lessons from CoH.

The problems it has are more conceptual than technical.
The 'look' of the game is pretty boring. yeah, it's visually busier than CoH, but the zones are all basically carbon copies of each other.

Oh, this one is really long and has some jungle.
Oh, this one has a big pyarmid in the middle.
But basically they all hew to the same visual style, one I call Garbage Can Gothic.

It doesn't have any natural meeting places- I've harped on this since day one. CoH has Atlas, CoV has nothing. And before the inevitable 'atlas sux thank god CoV doesn't have one', meeting places are good for a sense of community. If I'm playing heroes and want to check out some costumes and read some bios and see some goofy broadcast chat, I heat for Atlas.
In CoV, I'm out of luck. The Cap market usually has a small group around it, but nothing to get excited over.

The other major issue is the whole "villains fighting villains 24/7" vibe. In CoH, you're mostly fighting bad guys. In CoV, you fight one 'good' faction, and the rest of the time you're beating up fellow villains.

I appreciate the structural improvements they made over CoH, but it is a huge failure at diversity. The visuals and the enemies are limited to a narrow band that doesn't hold up very well to repeated viewings.

As redundant, lame and annoying as a lot of the hero side stuff is, it still delivers a much more varied gaming experience, visually and experientially.

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After a large of numbers of posts regarding certain actions of the devs does anyone think

1. They give a !@#$ what any of us think?

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They presumably care about the bottom line.
They must figure that alienating goal and performance motivated gamers will somehow result in a net gain in the future.

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2. Care that people have and will stop playing this game because of their actions?

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See #1.

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3. Care that they will lose more people to their soon to be rivals... champions online?

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CO is going to stink on ice.
It would be great if it was a good game, since it would serve to keep them from power tripping so hard, but it isn't a good game, and wishing can't make it so.

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I really don't get the big deal about kill-count badges or "farmability" factors. seriously, who cares? why is this an issue? whose game is this breaking?

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the whole pogrom reeks of ex post facto rationalization by Posi.

"Oh, I never wanted MA to be a farmer's paradise!"
"Then why did you design it to be a famer's paradise?"
"BAH I'M TAKING OUT ALL THE BADGES, see, see how I don't want it to be for farmers!"

It's like watching a teenager throw away all their comic books to prove they aren't a nerd, while ignoring the wall-to-wall covering of Anime posters.

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Right, so they saw they saw the market as a minigame timesink, rather than an essential adjunct to IOs that means you stand a sensible chance of completing sets without the chat channels being full of nothing but "anybody got a crushing impact acc/dam".

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It's both.
Markets fulfill many design goals, which is why they're nearly ubiquitous in the genre.

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Many people view the market as a way of getting the IOs they need and the salvage to craft them not as a game in itself. What the devs viewed it as is a guess, presenting your view as fact is ridiculous.

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Players will see what they see.
Devs look at design considerations.
From their point of view, the purpose of the market is obvious.

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My opinion - differs from yours, but equally valid -

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Opinions have zero intrinsic worth. They're only as valid as their underlying reasoning.
I have a strong feeling that in this case my opinion will be substantially stronger and more virile than yours...let's see if I guess right.

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certainly neither is fact - They added merits to try to persuade people to stop farming the same missions (standard farms or papers) and do some content. They wanted people to do more TFs, and I think they succeeded in that aim.

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Wrong.
Or rather, that is far from the fundamental reason for their creation.
They don't care what you play or how you play it, they care about one thing- keeping you on the treadmill (to steal an idea from SwellGuy).

The two main functions of merits in the game are alternative supply chain and creating a direct link between time and reward.

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They added tickets because using the standard reward structure would have been even more ridiculously exploitable than what's there atm, and if there were no rewards, MA would barely be used anywhere other than Virtue.

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Again, tickets are an alternative method of supply, nothing more.
They were designed to create more of "the good stuff" in the form of desirable recipes and rare salvage. This serves the dual purpose of boosting red-side supply (now all those level 50 farmers can supply the lower levels too, wheee!) and serving as a draw to MA ("hey, if I run MA missions I don't have to 'waste' any drops on junk like common salvage or generic recipes! Wheeee!")

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I really dont understand HOW a person can make it to 30, let alone 50 without being insanely rich just from dumping their junk on the market rather than vendoring it, along with being smart enough to buy recipes and salvage rather than completed IOs

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Or put in lowball bids on crafted generics- remember kids, badgers are our friends!
I regularly get generics for less than their crafting cost, often MUCH less.

Stalker, played "casually", level 30, 30+ million just from selling his drops.

Unless you want to 'purple your warshade' the game provides more than enough $$$ for your needs, no farming or marketeering necessary.

And if you do want to purple your warshade, well, it's unreasonable to expect that won't take extra effort.

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Fair enough. After a second look, I can see that you make some sufficiently backed statements until you said this:

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That they added merits and tickets at all to appease the crybabies and entitlement cases is a travesty...

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If this is factual, then what proof is there of it?

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Point A: They had to do something to address the discrepancy between Wentworth's and the Black Market.

Point B: They absolutely refuse the simplest, most obvious solution- merge the markets.

Point C: Merits/Tickets give them an 'out' when villain players ask why they're expected to pay more and wait longer for 'the good stuff' than their hero counterparts- "well, you can just grind merits/tickets". Purples aren't an issue since they only drop ~50, the only market strata where the BM supply is reasonable.

This may fall short of my standard of concrete fact, but it is IMHO the most reasonable explanation of why they would spend a lot of time and energy building an alternative supply chain when they already had a perfectly viable one in place.

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SOs (5 million?) 130
Cheapo frankenslotted (10 million?) 140 (2x cost, 8% better)
Cheapish set build (50 million?) 192? (10x cost, 48% better)
Cost no object (2 billion?) 244 (400x cost, 88% better)

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Those numbers sound about right to me Wer.

So, going by that my experimental stalker, who has 32 million inf at level 30 having done zero marketeering, just sellign drops and crafting commons from recipes and salvage that dropped for him, is already over halfway to being able to slot himself out with pretty good sets.

As usual, I don't see the rationale behind the poor-criers.
expensive stuff is expensive, sure, but literally everything else in the game is freely available to players who do nothing but sell their drops.

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Gonna say this in the nicest way possible...I aint got time to sway YOUR opinion and argue wit you all day about a video game bruh. Defeatist attitude? Never that.

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To paraphrase,
"I look at the expensive stuff and despair"
is pretty defeatist.

You can get whatever you want in this game without extreme effort.
No "hours" at Wentworth's necessary, no farming necessary.

A few minutes per log in + knowledge freely available on this forum = wealth.

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But its disheartening to know I gotta run around all day back and forth and hope and pray the prices have changed. I'd rather be playing the game since my time is limited.

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the most efficient way I've found to earn inf and get deals on the market is put in bids and walk away.

I rarely spend more than a few minutes per login 'at' the market.
It is uniquely suited to earn inf for me while I'm playing 'the real game'.

This is the secret so many market-phobes will not or cannot grasp.

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I never said YOU stand around all day did I Goat?

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I know a lot of people who are drowning in game-wealth.
None of them spend "hours" at the market.

You are working with a stereotype of a marketeer that doesn't conform to reality.

I mean, I'm sure some people do park themselves at the market and micromanage their various schemes, and I'm sure it's profitable.

But that isn't how most of us do it.
A few minutes a day to make bids and list sales, that's all it takes.

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... I'm the opposite. I don't slot super IO's and I could afford them, because I'm like "I get 25% better than SO's from slotting the cheap stuff, I should spend fifty times as much to get 50% better by slotting the expensive stuff? " [Actual numbers are not right. I'm starting to think that I may have to learn how the high end builds work before I can talk intelligently on the topic.]

I think there is a missing thought process in there. If SO's are an '87 Taurus, and the billion-inf build is some sort of Ferrari, people don't realize that there's a nice option that is a lot closer in cost to the Taurus and a lot closer in performance to the Lamborghini.

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I'm not really performance oriented myself- I've made a couple of UberBuilds (not to be confused with UberGuy) just to see how the system works, see how much they actually cost, see what the performance difference is....curiosity, basically.

But the majority of my characters roll with generic IOs & frankenslotting.

Being efficient with IOs takes attention to detail, and I'm not really interested in that part of the game.

I can say that if you're satisfied with "good" sets like Positron's Blast and the like, they're entirely affordable by level 50 for anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention while selling their drops.

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I'm not the guy that stands in Wentworth's for hours at a time, no thats not me.

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Huh, neither am I.

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I see those outrageous prices and think to myself "wow, so the only way to afford this is if I stand here all day and mess with this market, or farm.

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This inaccurate, defeatist attitude is your undoing.

Enjoy life without teh shiny!

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Wow, I can't even begin to tell you where you are off track, Goat.

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Every statement I made is entirely factual.
Except maybe the one about veering off into the desert.

But please, try to debunk them. It's been a slow week.

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I was one of those bunches of people.

I was one of those bunches of people several times.

I am predicting it right and left.

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predicting the obvious isn't much to hang your hat on.

(since you seem to have missed it the first time)

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How many of you are guilty of posting under the influence?

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Not here.

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maybe you should be?

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the dense thickets of stupidity are difficult enough to navigate sober, I'd prefer not to risk them under the influence....

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1. Most people are here to be the superhero or the supervillain.

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Then it's their tough luck they chose to play super-being in an MMO format, because economies are an integral component of the genre.

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Having to deal with the market ends the fun and starts the work.

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Nonsense.
You can become quite rich doing nothing but selling drops. No special knowlege or skill required, simply hit the market instead of the vendor.
Voila, wealth!

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Faced with having to stop punching face and start plugging numbers into a boring interface, many players end up feeling frustrated with the very paradigm of the market.

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Oh well.
It's an MMO first and foremost.
If you aren't willing to submit to the structure of the game type, that isn't the game's fault.

The problem with CoH isn't that it has a market, it's that it took them 9 issues to ship one.

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2. A better system could have been implemented. Just look at how you can buy rare salvage with Tickets. That's how the whole system should work instead of a market.

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That fails at the main gameplay goal of the market- minigame timesink.

That they added merits and tickets at all to appease the crybabies and entitlement cases is a travesty, but an understandable one given their refusal to redress factional market discrepancies in the only logical way.

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You're rewarded for playing the game instead of playing the market.

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Bad news Sunshine, the market is the game.
So is PvP.
So is MA.
So is base building.
etc etc etc.

Take your litmus tests for determining 'real' gamers somewhere else, that bunk doesn't fly around here.


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The market encourages distrust of other players.

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Now you're just freewheeling off road through the desert.

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They always suspect they're being taken advantage of when dealing with the market (and sometimes they're right).

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How so, when THEY determine the price they pay?
Or are they somehow griefing themselves, in your bizarre alternate world?

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How many of you are guilty of posting under the influence?

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Not here.

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See, exactly. It's easy to drive up prices – just keep buying and deleting. Making a profit on it is a much harder proposition.

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You can make a profit on a lot of stuff in the short term.
Although you're not really raising anything except the price floor- you have zero impact on the 'market price', or what people are willing to pay.
But it isn't sustainable over time.

My experiment on Ancient Bones is a case in point. Over the course of a few days I "raised" the price floor and made a tidy profit, but people follow profits and before long the market was flooded with supply, much more supply than I could deal with.
I abandoned the niche, and a few days later everything was back to 'normal', meaning extreme swings in supply and price.

You can do it, but not over time.
Smurph's standing offer will remain standing for eternity.

this forum software needs to die in a fire so they HAVE to migrate to the new platform.

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Graphical update = Power customization.

Mark your calenders so you can look back to this post when you see I am right.

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or you can look back further, to the announcement thread where a bunch of other people (myself included) called power customization.

predicting the obvious isn't much to hang your hat on.

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Wasn't sure where else to post this...will Going Rogue have a graphical overhaul similar to what CoV had at launch?

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Seems likely.
It's something they've expressed a desire for and a paid expansion is a great opportunity to roll out big advances.

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Then do what I do, yeah, me, the ebil rich marketeer. I BUY DOs. Are you serious? You take the time and effort to craft level 20 IOs that will be outclassed in just a few levels? There's your problem right there.

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Or do what I do, buy those DOs for dirt cheap on the market (I get mine for under 10k, usually WAY under).

Badgers are our friends!

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Myth : Everyone can play the market and, starting from nothing, make hundreds of millions in a few weeks. New marketeers don't hurt old marketeers.

Fact : Only a tiny part of the playerbase plays the market, which is why there's room for new marketeers without a noticeable difference in market income for old marketeers. If absolutely everyone would start playing the market, profit margins would shrink. The smartest, patient folks might still be able to make a profit, but not everyone. The market doesn't create influence, it destroys it. As it is, it's only redistributing the influence among the playerbase.

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There's plenty of room in the market for everyone who cares to use it.
However many converts we make, it won't be enough to dry up every niche.


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Myth : Marketeers want to help people. Marketeers know how to help people.

Fact : Using a condescending tone is never a good way to get people to listen to you.

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Nobody who's ever come into this forum with an open mind has been abused by the regulars, and we've made a lot of players a ton of inf over the years.

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Myth : There is one right way to consider the market, everything else is wrong.

Fact : In any economic system, there's different point of views, none of them being exactly right and none of them being exactly wrong. Economics use maths, but it's first and foremost a social science, and no social science has only one correct answer.

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The only people around here I've seen trying to impose a 'one true way' approach to the market are the anti-capitalist zealots.


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Myth : Popularity implies veracity. If most marketeers agree on a point of view about the market, it's the correct point of view. If most marketeers agree on a claim being a fact, it's a fact.

Fact : The validity of a claim is irrelevant of its popularity.

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At last, you make a little sense.


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Myth: If you say stuff against the market or the marketeers, you're a stupid idiot who doesn't understand the market, doesn't understand math and speaks from emotion.

Fact : I make money from the market, and I like doing it. I like the market. I happen to disagree with the point of view of some other folks who also like the market. That's about it.

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The vast majority of anti-market zealots are ignorant yayhoos that bring nothing to the table but simmering anger heated by their burning sense of entitlement.

If you're an exception to the rule, GRATZ!