Obitus

The Performance Shifter proc is worth 0.2 EPS over time (20% chance of 10 end every 10 seconds -- 0.2 * 10 / 10). It can be worth slightly more than that if you have more than 100 max end, but it's never going to get beyond that ballpark.

(120 max end would yield 0.2 * (0.1 * 120) / 10 = 0.24 EPS. That's about as high as you're realistically going to get your max endurance pool.)

Anyway, by my calcs, in order for the 33% Cardiac Alpha boost to outpace enhanced Physical Perfection and the extra Performance Shifter proc, you'd have to use an unmodified ~5.6 EPS with attacks, utility, and toggle powers. On a Dark Armor Tanker, that should be trivially easy to do. Remember, the prior estimate was extremely conservative on purpose. I wouldn't get too caught up on this-or-that detail; Energy Mastery's a loser once we introduce Cardiac into the equation.

Yes, especially on the AoE holds. Then again, you can throw an extra slot at the problem with the Basilisk's set.

Exemplaring is an added benefit. Personally, I always try to aim for level 30 IOs to hedge against exemplaring. I'm not really interested in exemping much below that level beyond the very rare trip for a low-level badge or whatever. The only problem is that the mid-level supply of IOs tends to be spotty, but that's sort of offset by the general trend that higher level IOs go for higher prices, even despite that they're often less useful (because of exemping).

Heh, well at the margins the benefits of DEF are pretty easy to figure out. At 45% DEF, you have 90% mitigation. At 44.93% DEF, you take 0.007 / 0.05 = 0.14, or 14% more damage over time. That's a pretty significant practical consideration, even though the number looks small.

But yeah, the Scrapper boys and gals are pretty hardcore. Sometimes I think they get a little too caught up in their self-sufficiency metrics -- even to their own builds' detriment, on occasion* -- but I'll always have a warm place in my heart for that forum, cause it's where I started lo these many years ago.

(* I say they get a little too caught up sometimes because self-sufficiency -- without using temps or inspirations -- is basically impossible to achieve through the full range of the game's content, even at a given level. Every build has weaknesses, no matter how well-planned, no matter how expensive. So it's a little misleading to claim that the ability to solo a Rikti Pylon with no temps/inspirations is deathlessly important when the same build can be popping candy like a madman against Rularuu or Paragon PD or Malta or whatever. Infinite endurance sustainability is likewise somewhat arbitrary and impractical a standard, because most of the game only requires relatively short bursts of activity followed by relatively short breaks as you run between targets and whatnot. Some of the weaknesses their builds retain could, in other words, possibly be shored up a little better if they weren't married to kicking the crap out of the stress-test du jour. Still, all of their testing through the years has proven invaluable to players of every AT.)

Will do. Me too

I think you're onto something there. Honestly, after having messed around with various Tanker/Brute/Scrapper builds since the game's inception, if anything I'm of a mind now that Brutes are the odd man out, not Tankers.

Scrappers comfortably exceed even full-Fury Brute damage (especially now that full Fury is 75%) with any set other than Super Strength, given equivalent investment. Super Strength works great on a Brute, but Tankers are better suited to take advantage of double-stacking Rage -- which puts them very close to single-Rage, Fury-enhanced Brutes:

Brute: 0.75 AT damage mod * (1.95 enhancements + 1.5 Fury + 0.8 Rage) = 3.185 damage.

Tanker: 0.8 AT damage mod * (1.95 + 1.6 double Rage) = 2.84 damage

3.185 / 2.84 = ~1.12, or a 12% advantage. Granted, the Tanker gets more crashes, but even if we average crashes out over time, we end up with the Brute sitting at 3.185 * (120 / 130) = 2.94, and the Tanker sitting at 2.84 * (55/65) = 2.40, which is a 22.5% advantage for the Brute ...

Which is almost exactly what Bruising gives Tankers.

So you're left with a significant but certainly not insurmountable disadvantage with respect to AoE damage and in teams where there's more than one Tanker -- but your single-target damage is essentially equivalent in all other scenarios, and your survivability ranges from marginally higher with heavy buff support, to several times higher with no buff support.

We're also assuming the Brute is at full fury full-time, which isn't necessarily a fair assumption. What's somewhat amusing to me is that in any realistic situation that would invite a side-by-side comparison of Brute versus Tanker -- the Tanker will diminish the Brute's ability to maintain Fury simply by his very presence. (Because he cuts into the Brute's aggro.)

Some may say that I'm being unfair here, that I've glossed over several details -- like the Tanker's need to use a generally sub-par attack to set up Bruising whereas the Brute doesn't even need to take his first-tier attack. Yes, clearly, damage comparisons are much more complex in practice than the back-of-the-napkin calcs I've used here. A Tanker does have a slight DPS disadvantage from having to work Jab in, all else being equal, and a Tanker isn't handed extra recharge to double-stack Rage on a silver platter.

But a Tanker does have more opportunities to fit recharge bonuses into his build if we assume that both builds are going for some arbitrary and equivalent standard of IO-boosted survivability -- say soft-capped S/L DEF on a Willpower or INV character. That makes double-stacking Rage easier for the Tanker, who also has more incentive to stack it because the second Rage represents a higher proportional gain for him (the Brute only nets something like 10% extra DPS out of the second Rage if you account for the extra crashes).

By the same token, the Tanker has more recharge to fuel his attack chain. So if he loses by having to fit Jab into the equation, he also gains by having attacks like KO Blow up more often. YMMV, but I'm willing to call that a wash. In fact, even if we assume that the Tanker only goes for single Rage (which is reasonable, given that the crashes are annoying), the Tanker can make up some of his offensive shortfall through extra (relative to the Brute) recharge and damage procs in his attack chain.

The bottom line is that Brutes are generalists. They're desirable because of their flexibility. Notice I'm not going so far as to say that Brutes are useless. But for standalone capability in the age of IOs, the extreme choices (in this case, Tanker and Scrapper) tend to be better from a pure min/max perspective because IOs allow you to shore up weaknesses and build on strengths. A by-design middle-of-the-road Archetype can be similarly improved, but at the end of the day it's still middle of the road.

Any accusation that can be leveraged at an over-specialized AT with respect to team attractiveness can also be leveraged at an over-generalized AT. For my money, the latter has more to worry about -- to the extent that any AT really needs to worry about type-A team leaders passing them over in what is generally a very easy game.

Yeah, and now that A-Merits are around, it's even sillier how easy it is to make influence. If you simply run tip missions every day on one character, then you basically make ~37.5 million every day (based on an LoTG priced at 150,000,000 on the market). That's before we account for influence for kills/objectives. That's before we account for valuable drops.

If we assume that the character in question is higher level, then we can safely bump that number up to 40 million or so just from kills (no drops). That means that in 50 days anyone playing about an hour a day and not playing the market at all can make two billion influence.

You can probably cut that number by a third or even a half once you throw drops into the equation. For what little it's worth, I find that I get at least 10 million or so from drops for every short play session, probably closer to 15 or 20 if you average in the occasional lucky strike. The game basically throws money at you, at this point. People complain that high-end recipes are absurdly expensive -- and it's true that they're a lot more expensive than they used to be -- but the corollary is that you have much more earning power now than you did before.

Yes, the blind bidding system is explicitly designed to benefit the buyer. All else being equal, the blind bidding system and the market's preference for the lowest listing price leverage downward pressure on prices across the board.

The reason that prices don't go down in practice is a combination of an ever-growing money supply and the impatience of buyers preventing widespread and patient bid creeping (because it's a game, and therefore the only truly valuable currency is the players' free time). If we were playing with real money, you can be assured that more people would carefully escalate bids.

I'd support turning the last five into a last ten or a last twenty, assuming the UI can be easily modified to support it. Much more than that, and like you, I'd begin to worry that the extra information would tip the balance too much in favor of sellers.

Your English is excellent. I wouldn't have known you were working in a second language if you hadn't mentioned it.

I know what it's like to have build wanderlust. I call it "Power-gamer's Paralysis," and it haunts me all the time when I play this game. There are just so many wildly disparate build options available, and it's hard not to get caught up in the but-that-other-build-is-better-at-X mood, especially when you're talking about spending so much in-game money on each build.

The computer I'm using right now doesn't have Mid's installed, so I can't see your build, but the two quotes above are worthy of response.

Melee builds are not the best-suited for AV soloing. You can do some amazing things with certain high-end melee builds -- and at least with Scrappers and Brutes, you'll have amazing solo performance through most other encounters too -- but you're never going to find a melee build that can solo every AV.

Some AVs have too much self healing. Some AVs have high resistance to your damage type (and if you're playing a melee type with Smashing/Lethal attacks, then you're more likely to encounter resistance). Some AVs have buffs/debuffs that trivialize your defenses.

It's easy to get the wrong impression from reading the Brute/Scrapper forum, because those Archetypes are probably the best generalized soloists, which means that they attract a lot of min/max players. Those players like to make characters that are as self-sufficient as possible. Those players create insane challenges to test their builds' self-sufficiency, and a lot of those challenges are very impressive, but those challenges also tend to be rather narrow in scope.

For instance, a high-end Invulnerability Scrapper/Brute with sufficient DPS can easily solo a Rikti Pylon without temps or inspirations, but if you throw that same Scrapper/Brute up against a large spawn of Paragon PD, and all of a sudden the hail of energy-based DEF debuffs has that same character popping Inspirations like candy.

The truth is that the game's content is very well varied at the high end. Every build has weaknesses, no matter how well planned, no matter how expensive. Even Tankers can look downright squishy against the right (or the wrong) opposition.

Anyway, I'm rambling. The point is that if what you want is to solo the widest range of AVs in the game, then your best bet is probably a Sonic/Cold or Sonic/Rad Defender with soft-capped Ranged DEF, or a /Cold controller (preferably Illusion/Cold).

If you're intent on using a melee character, and specifically a Claws character, then I'd recommend switching to a Scrapper. Higher consistent damage is worth the trade-off of lower HP and a lower team-buffed resistance cap.

MA/Regen is my oldest character. You're going to be disappointed at the high end. MA's damage is pretty good, but it's at the low end of Scrapper performance. Regen doesn't see the same survivability increases from IO investment that other secondaries do.

You almost have to pair Regen with a sword primary (for the extra melee defense offered by Parry/Divine Avalanche) for your survivability to compare with other secondaries.

Best of luck.

Thing is, you only need four pieces of Basilisk. So you don't need both the triple and the quadruple. If all you're interested in (or if what you're primarily interested in) are the set bonuses, then you don't even necessarily need either of those two enhancements. (Heck, if we're assuming equal slot investment, then you could slot four Basilisk for the set bonuses and then use a fifth slot on a different, cheaper set's IO to flesh out the enhancement values.)

I don't have access to the market right now, but if the rest of the pieces are in the 5-20 million range, then buying Basilisk's could be much, much cheaper than even you estimate, when compared with the Gladiator hold set.

You're absolutely right that the matter depends on what you're building for. Perma-Dom builds can, in my view, sacrifice a bit here and there when it comes to enhancing the duration of their controls (especially the heavily situational AoE hold powers). Almost everything else is secondary to the need to make Domination permanent.

Personally, I will always favor +DEF builds as long as the IO system remains in its current form. But if you're going for +damage, then the Gladiator set is good, great even. And don't get me wrong; I appreciate the information you've offered on the subject. It frankly never occurred to me even to check the prices for that IO set.

Good food for thought.

I'm not off-the-top-of-my-head familiar with Physical Perfection's exact stats, but I know that it's not that much +regen and recovery. I think it's something like +15/15%.

In any case, it's not as strong as Stamina for recovery, and not as strong as Health for +regen. If (between toggles and attacks and utility powers like Dark Regen) you're using let's say 5 End per second unmodified, and if we assume that all of your powers go from 40% end reduction to 73%, then:

Your initial end use per second (without the slot) is 5 / 1.4 = 3.5 EPS.

With the Cardiac bonus, your end use per second drops to 5 / 1.73 = 2.89 EPS.

That's a savings of 0.61 EPS, and that's a fairly conservative estimate, given that a DA Tanker who's going all out to attack and heal can use probably much more end than that to begin with.

Now let's say that Physical Perfection is +15% recovery. Base recovery is 1.667 EPS (100 endurance / 60 seconds). But most people at the high end of the game have more than 100 endurance, so base recovery actually tends to give you more than that. For the sake of argument, let's say you have 115 endurance, which is pretty high. Your base recovery goes up by 15%, from 1.667 to 1.92 EPS.

ED-capped Physical Perfection would therefore give you 1.92 * (0.15 * 1.95) = 0.5616 EPS.

So yeah, using every concession I can think of for Physical Perfection, the Cardiac boost comes out ahead. It will only get better when we get access to Rare and Very Rare boosts, too. It's safe to say that even the Common Cardiac Boost is at least as good and probably miles better than Physical Perfection for a build like yours.

As far as your RES numbers go, you'll probably get about 5% more S/L from the Uncommon boost. It all depends on how many (and how powerful) S/L RES powers you have to enhance, and how well slotted they are for resistance.

Seems we're making some small measure of progress here. Or Max is just willing to say whatever's expedient at the time.

How many, though? At what point do we dismiss low-ball listings as outliers? At what point does most of the inventory-strapped game population abandon the market if even their low-ball bids don't sell quickly enough for them to keep bashing bad guy's heads in?

LOL, does the word inflation mean anything to you? Apparently not, because you don't seem to understand the difference between a singular item that costs more in the short term, and an increase in the money supply.

Flippers by definition (by your definition, in fact) lower the money supply. Thus, they lower inflation. This isn't up for debate. It's factually accurate, and based on your very own premise that flippers don't create anything.

Yes, the blind bidding system encourages a downward pressure on prices as the equilibrium is reached and as traffic increases. If there are several dozen items for sale and the price is consistently the same, then sellers are encouraged to list for lower so that their items will get preference.

Flippers wouldn't hang out in an environment where items are always going for the same price, it's true. But they are the largest singular force to drive prices towards that same-price equilibrium, and because we have only five transactions to look at, at any given time sellers very well could see the sort of price consistency that I showed in example #2 even if there are flippers present.

But for inflation -- and assuming patient buyers, a steady increase in participation, and a starting price near equilibrium -- the blind bidding system by itself would encourage a gradual decrease in prices. Simply because most people are inventory-strapped and want to move items.

But inflation is a big deal. So's impatience in an environment where the only true currency is free time.

Strawman? Your entire premise rests on the presumption that low-ball listings would exist in appreciable quantities regardless of flippers. Otherwise, why argue that flippers raise prices by raising the absolute (and usually laughably small) floor on prices?

What everyone else is saying is that the average is what matters most, because it does.

You acknowledged that flippers lower inflation here. By implication, if nothing else. In any case, it'd be pretty absurd of you to deny that flippers lower inflation, when you spent so much time arguing that flippers don't crate items or inf, adding an extra set of transaction fees instead.

Think about the Last-Five transaction history.

For example, let's pretend we have a Regenerative Tissue IO. Let's say the transaction history looks something like this:

• 100,000 on 11/24/10
• 70,000,000 on 11/24/10
• 35,000,000 on 11/24/10
• 69,204,020 on 11/24/10
• 72,000,000 on 11/24/10

Now, pretend you're not the expert you are on the market -- just a guy with a shiny IO you want to sell. Or, heck, pretend you're you. What would you list the item at with those conditions?

In contrast, let's pretend that instead the transaction history looks something like this:

• 35,000,000
• 35,000,000
• 35,000,000
• 35,000,000
• 35,000,000

Now what would you do?

As you point out, what Max doesn't understand is that the bargain lister and the bargain seller aren't so important that they should overwhelm all other considerations. How consistent the price appears to be at the time of listing does have an effect on what people do for their listings. Someone who might have been inclined under example #1 to list more towards the high end will instead list more towards the low end in example #2, because under example #2 they have virtually no expectation of selling their item any time soon.

So, fine, let's assume for teh sake of argument that Max is right about the pre-existing high-end prices. Let's say the flipper doesn't influence those listings to be taken down and lowered. But every potential subsequent high-end listing is lowered if the prices are seen to be stable at a lower number.

All of this is particularly true for the expensive items, which people put a lot more thought into listing and buying.

Flippers can make bids in stacks of ten, whereas the person who's buying for himself or selling for himself using drop-acquired items will have to buy/sell them piecemeal.

Flippers (or hardcore marketeers) if you prefer, are also more likely to use alts in a coordinated manner. Again, you're essentially advocating for the casual player, but you're ignoring one of the casual player's most compelling needs -- the need to free up inventory space.

You're saying that in a magical world without flippers, we'd all have an endless supply of goods listed at hilariously low prices. That we could depend on the low end. That isn't a justified assumption -- or at least you haven't justified it yet. Eventually, people would stop selling these items at ridiculously low prices if they couldn't sell them reliably fast.

Eventually, they might decide not to bother with selling on the market at all.

You've acknowledged that Flippers lower inflation. You have acknowledged that you think flippers are a neutral influence on the market otherwise (which is in contrast with your previous contentions). So what is your argument again? You seem to switch up at whim.

You raise participation by creating an environment where people can sell things quickly. Again, inventory is valuable. Your insistence that it isn't because people should spend endless time emailing items back and forth among a half-dozen alts is hilarious.

And again, you reveal your ignorance of the Market's mechanics. The seller would have received no sale or a lower price if the flipper weren't there. Why? Because the highest bid is paired with the lowest asking price. Thus, if the Flipper bought the item, then by definition he had the highest outstanding bid at the time.

No, in order to be a strawman, my argument would have to rely on the claim that you are anyone's advocate. It doesn't. What it does rely on is simple and irrefutable arithmetic. You claimed earlier that the only people who feel an inventory crunch were flippers -- the implication being that people who play the game normally have endless space.

Which is false on its face. Period.

You're saying that driving down the profit margin isn't creating a downward pressure on prices? They are equivalent forces. Remember, we're talking about multiple flippers competing with each other here.

You just don't see it because you think sharing market slots among an army of alts is a reasonable or common occurrence. So perhaps you don't care that you have 14 Regenerative Tissues that won't move now because you listed them at the max possible price and the market has since moved lower. I guess you can afford to wait if you have a legion of alts running on the market. Eventually, inflation might take care of you.

Everyone else? Not so much. That goes for people playing normally; that goes for marketeers who are trying to maximize their profit over time. You have to list things at a low enough price that they'll sell in a realistic span of time.

More self-conflicted gibberish. You keep saying, Max, that flppers don't add anything. They don't create items; they don't add to the money supply. What they do, and you've said it yourself about a hundred million times, is to add an extra transaction to the equation.

An extra transaction creates an extra set of market fees, thus lowering the money supply. Again, self-evident. Again, ignored by a guy who's read too many Wikipedia articles on economics out of context and doesn't understand the game environment we're discussing.

Market stability encourages participation. Participation raises supply and demand. In CoH's case specifically, flippers make sellers' lives easier by freeing up inventory slots, which incentivizes sellers to participate, which raises supply.

LOL. It's easy to run half a dozen toons at the AH? And you're the one claiming to advocate for the non-hardcore marketeer?

As noted earlier, ad nauseam, I have 57 salvage slots, 26 recipe slots, 10 enhancements slots and 18 market slots on my Tanker. Running about three missions maxes out my inventory space. In Max_Zero's world, though, apparently 57 + 26 + 10 isn't greater than 18. Arithmetic isn't your strong suit, is it?

If I want to get back into the action, I have to move that inventory. I don't spend the next hour emailing things back and forth and writing down which character has what. The idea that you're somehow describing typical or desirable behavior is asinine.

Why do you suppose people running AE farms take rare salvage with their tickets when white salvage would earn them a better return per ticket (thus driving white salvage prices through the roof)? Because it isn't worth their time to spend hours trying to sell inventory for every full load of tickets.

You claim to be an authority on economics, and yet you don't understand the benefit of stability.

You know how more flippers drives prices down? Because the market sees more and more items being moved at lower-than-high-end price, which means that sellers at the high end of the spectrum (like you, with your LOL-seventy-million Regenerative Tissues) are encouraged to relist at a lower price. Thus, a stable average is reached. The more flippers there are, the faster you reach that point, until all the flippers leave because their profit margin is too small, and then the cycle begins anew.

You havent established that stability doesn't increase participation. Your problem is that it does. Posting graphs that rely on a flawed premise only earns you ridicule.

His definition doesn't even fit.

Max procedes from the flawed premise that flippers do not (cannot, in his mind) increase either supply or demand. We know that increased movement of inventory is an incentive to sellers in the CoH economy, because players are severely inventory limited -- which means that supply is increased. We know that increased supply is an incentive to buyers to participate in the market, which means that demand is increased.

We also know that flippers cannot arbitrarily raise prices. In order to make a profit, the flipper must be able to buy low, but he also must be able to keep his asking prices low -- because the CoH market does not (contrary to Max's apparent assumption) sell your goods unless you have the lowest asking price. The highest bid is matched to the lowest listing in CoH.

That's why he's stuck with 14 Regenerative Tissues that he's not gonna sell anytime soon. And that's why, if he needs those market slots soonish, he's going to lose 49 million influence in listing fees. The dude doesn't know what he's doing.

Flippers benefit the market by increasing stability -- raising supply when demand is high, and raising demand when supply is high. In game terms, they make life easier for sellers who are inventory-limited, and make life easier for buyers who want items now. (Buyers are also inventory-limited, which is just one of many reasons that the impatient-bidding-prices we sometimes see on the market are not proof of irrational forces in the market.)

There is no magic button that any marketeer can push to raise prices. They cannot raise prices across the board, because -- as Max so helpfully points out -- they don't actually generate influence. They lower the inflating supply of influence through listing fees, in fact -- which is why StabBot's theory that flipping is the cause for the steady, across-the-board rise in prices cannot be taken seriously.

More flippers means more competition to list for the lowest asking price, which drives prices down. That is self-evident fact. Because you continue to ignore how the game's mechanics work, you cannot make an effective argument.

Further, and finally, the pre-merge Red-side market wasn't bereft of marketeers because they wanted a quick buck. It was bereft of participants because it wasn't active enough (a vicious cycle), which meant that you often couldn't buy the things that you wanted in a timely fashion, at any price.

See, having things to buy is sorta the point of making lots of money.

Yes, and happily, that means you can sell stuff to them of your own.

Jeez. You'd think the game forced people to commit to Buyer or Seller at character creation. The two are inter-related and mutually dependent.

And again you ignore that it is in the so-called casual players interest to move inventory as fast as possible, because the natural pace of drops from playing the game is so high.

That's why AE exploits drive up the supply of rare salvage and drive down the supply of low salvage. It ain't because people don't know that low salvage would make them more money in theory; it's because when you're interested in beating up bad guys as quickly as possible, you don't want to deal with a gazillion low-value items every few minutes. They're basically burning tickets, on purpose, to manage their inventory space.

It is the anti-casual who insists that you can use alts to leave quadrillion listings up forever. I've been playing this game since launch. I enjoy the market not because I like to marketeer (I don't); I enjoy the market (and appreciate flippers) because I like to have an easy place to sell and items available to buy. Because, let me tell you, this game was much less interesting when there was no economy and no long-term build goals.

Period. Exclamation point. This is not a difficult concept. It's also the fundamental issue that anti-marketeers will not -- cannot -- address.

No offense, but I can't help noticing that you didn't answer the question. You just hand-waved all external forces on the bald assumption that a massive AE leveling exploit wouldn't have as much effect as flipping would to inflate prices. AE leveling exploits spike the supply of rare salvage at the expense of non-rare salvage, because it's easier to spend that many tickets on bigger-ticket items, which is because -- you guessed it -- inventory/market storage is valuable.

Why do you suppose purples are now hovering in the 400 million range? Do you really think that that's because of Flippers? It couldn't be that people aren't playing regular content right now -- and thus are disqualifying themselves from those drops -- could it?

Yeah, inflation has had a huge effect over time. You gotta understand that inflation in an environment like this one (even ignoring the occasional, massive mechanical change to the rewards schemes that move the playerbase) snowballs like population growth. The more inf you have, the more people are IOing their builds to the nines to farm stuff (which was always a popular activity, even dating back to Issue 1), the more influence people produce per unit time. The enhanced difficulty slider also represented a massive boost to population's farming capacity.

But hey, let's hand-wave all of the above. Let me ask you again -- how exactly does Nethergoat force prices up so high and sustain it? Do you understand how bids are filled?

Nevermind. Nethergoat answered the question admirably. I suggest you read his little scenario to understand why outright manipulation on a large scale doesn't work -- or at least doesn't work to the manipulator's benefit when all is said and done.

Heh, yeah, or even playing the game normally and selling what's valuable when it drops -- which leads us back to the beginning: Inventory/market space is valuable.

As (IIRC) Fourspeed very elegantly pointed out, Stab's problem appears to be inflation. He's complaining that you can exploit the system by fitting a bajillion alts with non-expiring bids/listings, wait several days/weeks/months, and profit hugely even if your initial estimate was absurd at the time.

Or at least, that seems to be his main point of contention. I happen to support the idea of a more thorough transaction history, and frankly I haven't seen one marketeer oppose that idea. If I missed one, then my bad, but there's certainly no monolithic opposition on that one point.

Regardless, it is inflation that drives up prices massively over time. No one flipper can do that, because he has to have the lowest available listing to sell anything. No group of flippers can do it either, because competition among flippers drives high-end prices down. So Stab has all of this misplaced anger stemming from the combo of unlimited list/bid time and the inflation that occurs in any online game where the minting of money is only limited by the collective population's time.

That's why I asked the question in my last post, which I doubt he'll answer. People really don't seem to understand that flippers can't just wave a magic want and inflate prices up to some arbitrarily profitable point. The market has built-in protections against that, protections that will make any such would-be flipper lose his shirt (as Max_Zero will do soon on his Regenerative Tissues, if he needs to free up those market slots in the next two months or so).

Of course you are! Your controller has a monopoly on all the purples that are deathlessly important to every casual player's performance!

Capitalists -- burning's not just for witches anymore!

• "First off, a hundred reasons that you save time for players who are trying to sell and buy things on the market."
  
  
• "In conclusion, you're wasting people's time."

Your debate style is highly unorthodox, but I must admit, it's an interesting change of pace! Do you have a newsletter? I'd love to subscribe.

Riddle me this, how would he raise the price of Nevermelting Ice? Assuming he could, would he be able to reliably sell it for that price?