Organica

Other people are listing for less than you listed.

If you list (for example) a Kinetic Combat triple for 165 million, but there are thirty other people listing their for 160 million, you might see it consistently selling for 170 million, more than you listed it for, but you would not be getting any of the sales. Sale goes to the lowest listed item at whatever price the buyer bids it at (assuming the buyer bids higher than the lowest listed price).

Also, these two tidbids from trials last night:

(Speed lambda, leader decides as we're clearing courtyard that we're such a kickass group that we should try for the "no nades" badge. Not everyone agrees, but leader says we'll still collect the grenades and acids, just not use the grenades unless it looks like we're running low on time. Also, we don't wait to acid the doors since we want as much time as possible to take the AV down, and it'll take so long to do that we'll get the extra reward in the end anyway.)

Leader: WE'RE GOING FOR THE BADGE SO DO NOT USE ANY GRENADES!
Leader: PASS ALL GRENADES TO ME!
Leader: Those with acids, close the doors right away then come back and buff up.
Leader: PLEASE DO NOT USE ANY GRENADES!
Leader: NO NADES! I REPEAT, NO NADES!
Player1: ready.
Player2: ready.
Leader: Go!
*Maurauder has been pacified*
Player3: Oh, you moron.

~~~~~

Then I joined a BAF:

Leader: BAF LFM.
Annoying Player: How can you be looking for more if you won't add anyone?
Leader: BAF LFM.
Annoying Player: How can you be looking for more if you won't add anyone?
Leader: BAF LFM.
Annoying Player: How can you be looking for more if you won't add anyone?
*Annoying Player has joined team*
*queue comes up*
Annoying Player: Add my friend.
Leader: We're full.
*Annoying Player quits*

/em sighs.

For the last couple of days I've just been running iTrials, ITFs, and trying to make money on the market. Most notably, I used 2 villain merits to purchase a Kinetic Combat triple which sold for 170 million, exactly what I was hoping it would sell for. Other than that I'm just selling random drops and whatever I decided to buy a 10 stack of. Right now I'm trying to make money working the two Decimation triples.



As of this morning I'm near 500 million again.


In completely (well mostly) unrelated news, I chatted the other day with a person who reads these posts and recognized AE Baby. She had a very funny, rambling first-person bio, very creative, about shooting her boyfriend for clipping his toenails at the table and shooting her lawyer. Anyway it kind of reminded me of one of my own favorite bios, in general tone, not at all in detail, so I thought I'd post this:



A bio should be entertaining. ^_^

Ran 2 BAFs tonight. Did not manage a Lambda, so only 1 Empyrian Merit on the day. But I got a rare on the second run and crafted my T3 Destiny. I'm now at T3 on Judgment, Lore, and Destiny, T2 on Interface and still stuck at T1 on Alpha.

Ran 5 tip missions + morality mission for a villain merit, and also converted 50 regular merits for a villain merit. Bought a Kinetic Combat triple, crafted it, put it up for sale.

Joined a BAF and a Lambda this morning. On one I got a rare. At this point, I've run more iTrials on AE Baby than any other toon of mine, but this was only my third non-common or uncommon -- I got a Very Rare early on, and a rare I think. Anyway, I was able to craft my T3 Lore. Working on T3 Destiny now, but I need another rare to accomplish it.

I also joined a friend's ITF last night and got 9 shards. This was not enough to allow me to craft my T2, alpha, but it's a good start. One of the same friends invited me to an ITF again today, just after I'd finished the iTrials. We cleared the entire last map and I still only wound up with 4 more shards.



Stuff sold overnight, enough to push me just over 500 million (especially after a couple of other things sold during the iTrials). Knowing that Hami raids generally happen on the weekend, I wanted to get my last Enzyme bid in right away if I could, so as soon as I had the money I placed a bid for 527 million (last five included my second bid for 511 million, and 4 others that were higher 600 million on a couple I think, but one was only 525 million).

During the ITF more stuff sold:



I decided to up my Enzyme bid. To my surprise, my bid was successful less than 2 minutes later.




After that I joined some other friends on a Citadel with Shinobu Eden. By the time that was done, more stuff had sold:



So at this point my build is complete. Price: somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 billion, I think. One billion of that came from my two purple drops, but given another 7-10 days I think I could raise another billion, especially now that I can use a-merits to buy IOs for sale.

I have 47.96% smashing/lethal defense, and if anyone on the team adds to that, then I'm usually in very good shape even in a swarm of Cimemorans. One purple and I can tank a group long enough to kill them all. I have 70% global recharge, (the 140% showing includes hasten), and a lot of other nice bonuses and incarnate abilities.

I really like this character a lot. I've played fire/kin troller and kin defender, and I've played a fire/fire blaster. This seems like the best of both worlds. I can buff the team, heal, and unleash massive damage. I can turn my corruptor into a blaster, and a blaster into a god. I feel like I add a lot to any team.

Well, you can tell how much I pay attention to these things. ^_^

But I can blow stuff up real good!

Anyway, a few level shifts are needed. ^_^

Day 26 - Sat 8/27

I checked on stuff early Sat morning, and my 3rd Enzime purchase had been made.





So now my goal is to raise another 100 million or two to purchase the last Enzyme. All I need for my build at this point is 1 Enzyme and the last LotG 7.5% recharge, which I'll have by this afternoon/evening.

I ran a BAF and a Lambda this morning. I managed to open up my Lore slot, and went with the... purple storm things from the Shadow Shard, whatever they're called. I have no idea which pets are better than others, just having pets is a bonus and so far I've gone for whatever sounded cool that I hadn't tried on another character. ^_^

I also crafted my Pyronic T3, so I have 1 level shift at least on trials. I crafted T2 for Destiny Rebirth, and I broke down and used incarnate trial salvage to craft my Alpha T1, Cardiac I think.

Plus I bought some fancy boots and stuff with astral/empyrian merits.

I haven't actually posted my other outfits. Among other things, I've purchased Halloween salvage from the market for the 5th costume slot and candy canes for the halos. I placed the halo on my original costume, because AE Baby is sweet and innocent, yes?



My second costume was similar to the first but more armored:



My fifth costume is my ITF costume:



And costumes 3 and 4 are my "most skin showing" and "least skin showing" outfits, but both have become my incarnate outfits. I like having just the incarnate boots on the "less is more" outfit, and I'm kinda going all out on the other outfit:



Aside from getting that last Enzyme, I think my goal for the last few days of the month should be to get a T3 alpha, T3 Destiny, and T3 on either Lore or Interface as well. I could say that would complete my journey from level 1 to awesome, reaching the level shifts. ^_^

Day 25 - Friday 8/26

Friday was a very good day for me. And no, not because I got any more purple drops.





First of all, a lot of stuff sold. Mostly for not a lot of money, but I was getting rid of all my inventory that's in niches I don't want to be in, so I was having a fire sale, and people were buying. That's good. Even a little profit is a profit.

Second of all, I converted 50 merits and bought my third Luck of the Gambler 7.5% recharge. I only need four for my build, and afterwards I ran 5 tip missions and my alignment mission so I earned a villain merit doing that. Saturday afternoon I'll convert 50 more merits and I'll have my fourth LotG 7.5% recharge. With about 200 merits left and a few days of tips left to get more amerits and sell a couple of IOs for cash.

Third, I decided that with 1.8 billion on hand it was time to buy my Enzymes. I didn't have a lot of hope, they were going for upwards of 600, 650, even 700 million. I place a bid for two at 506 million, well below the last five, but it's the weekend so maybe Hami is being killed somewhere. I also placed bids on Performance Shifter end/rech and Reactive Armor resist/rech, two IOs that I figure will sell better for me than the other stuff I've been peddling:



Then I joined some trials -- ultimately ran 3 Lambdas and one BAF. I unlocked my Destiny and went Rebirth and slotted my T1, and crafted a T2 for Judgment Pyronic.

In the meantime more stuff sold, and to my surprise I bought one of my Enzymes:





Quite awesome! I rebid on 2 Enzymes at 511 million just in case someone saw my previous bid, and also did more crafting/listing of stuff.

I went off to run a Sister Psyche with Shinobu Eden (hit 47), and when I checked before logging off at night, I'd sold a few more things, I'd bought some recipes, and my second Enzyme had been purchased. Awesome!

Anything to speed up a Katie is a good idea... the rewards for that TF are pathetic.

Hey Freezelok. ^_^

Thanks. ^_^

Day 24





As you can see, my drought of not selling stuff is over. I even sold a couple of other Decimations that I didn't screenshot, but basically over the course of the day and evening I sold a lot of stuff. Not always for as much money as I'd like, but a sale is a sale. (And a couple were for much more than I'd listed, so it all balances out.)

Most importantly of course, was the purple. ^_^ I haven't place a bid on my Enzymes yet, but there's hope that I can afford them now, thanks to my lucky break the other day.

* Ran 2 BAFs and 1 Lamda. I don't have my last two slots open yet, but give it time. I crafted my Judgment Tier 2.

* Ran 5 tip missions, and converted 50 merits again.

* I continue to be interested by how people react to the name. One person on two of the iTrials said that he's been reading these posts and following my progress. He was on some of the earlier trials I wrote about. I told him that I'd have to be careful to not screw up with him watching. But then I said something about continually targeting people on the team, that something was wrong. Which was apparently a stupid thing to say, but I had no idea the prisoners could confuse you, all they do is run past you and never attack, and I'd never been confused like that before (aside from AE Baby I've run trials on two scrappers and a widow). Also this was right after the servers had come back up after the Hotfix, so my first thought was "something really weird it going on, does it have anything to do with why they took the servers down?"

Someone made a comment, "Oh, the irony!" Apparently because of my name and the "clueless question". Because, you know, stupid name = stupid person. (Actually, so far I haven't managed to troll too many idiots with my name -- most people tend to ignore your name unless they think it's particularly weird or cool.)

Finally I had someone tell me that they loved me and I'd won the internet, also apparently because of my name. Heh. (They may have read my bio too I suppose -- this was in the ski chalet.)

I bought some candy canes and purchased the halo aura. I'm going to get the burning halo as well.

Other than that, I joined a speed Khan on my widow. Please note:



I got the kill on four of five AVs, but the one that someone else killed, I got a purple drop -- my third of the week. And someone on my team said that they were still waiting for their first ever. I can't complain, it's been very lucky for me this week. Well, except for the raft of commons and uncommons on the itrials, I've got one rare and one very rare total so far.

Team was 2 defenders, 2 stalkers, a stone tank, and my widow, so probably not too surprising that I got a lot of kills, I was a significant part of team damage I think. We finished in 22 minutes, and that included a quick bio and snack break before the AVs.

Oh looky, I'm logged into Virtue.

I was reading Darths and Droids and El Goonish Shive, and thinking about logging into CoH.

And then... I tried to do that.

Yeah, and my build has only one relatively cheap purple but has those Hami-O Enzymes, which sell for similar prices.

Personally I start with generic IO's when leveling. They're more expensive but you can keep the cost lower by crafting yourself and bidding overnight for the salvage, and they more than pay for themselves by not going red in the middle of a mission or TF. And as others here have pointed out, if you need 3 heal IOs, buy the salvage to craft 6 and sell three of them. Money recouped, and more!

Yeah, I'd rather use my itrial salvage for those slots, but we'll see. ^_^

And yes I've noticed the slide Fulmens, but mostly on this one character. On my normal marketers I leave things up for days or weeks, so I'm normally slow to notice slides like this and sometimes they don't affect me at all. ^_^

One thing that did seem to rebound quite a bit for me were Decimations. (Or Devastations -- whichever is the level 40 one.) I'm not sure if prices on those are falling again, but I sold a bunch of one of the triples for 35 million each, that's much better than they had been selling.

Day 23



Here you see just about everything you need to know about how my day went.

1. Converted 50 merits and bought my second Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge.

2. Crafted and listed my two purple IOs. The Armageddon sold instantly for 535 million. I probably could have listed higher then, but I'm not going to complain about that. ^_^ I did list them both fairly high -- you pretty much can not go wrong listing purple IOs at the high end of the sell range, someone will pay that price soon enough.

3. I have 18 IOs for sale (17 in the picture) and NOTHING sold overnight or all day. I pulled down a bunch of the Eradication damage IOs that I had ALREADY pulled down and relisted at a "more reasonable" price. I think I just need to hand them out on the street corner or something.

The other things I have listed -- Eradication dam/rech, acc/rech, and Gift of the Ancient defense -- are selling for much higher than my list price, so it's probably only a matter of time before the ones listed even lower than mine sell out, and mine will sell. I think. Maybe.

(I crafted and listed a couple more random drops -- Doctored Wounds recharge (instant sale for something over 5 million) and a Scirocco's Dervish dam/rech I think. And a Cleaving Blow, not sure why I crafted that one.)

I purchased my Ragnarok proc, crafted and slotted it. It was more than I remember them going for but not so bad -- $75 million, buy it NAO price.

I check out Enzymes. They are going for twice as much as a month ago. I bought several of these in the Spring for 300 million, and a whole bunch in June and July for 350 million. I have at least 5 in my base that I bought at that price. But that doesn't help AE Baby, and they're currently selling for 500 to 700 million. Bleah! I need four of them too.

I ran 5 tip missions and burned down Croatoa again. 50 extra merits since it's my first time since coming back from rogue status. First time on this character at all I think.

No purple drops during my tip missions. Darn! No shards either. I've only earned 3 shards since opening up my alpha slot, and I have Judgment and Interface slotted already.

Did not run any trail today. Instead I did a Manticore with Shinobu Eden, got to 46, and then bought a Glad Armor 3% def IO from someone on the Market channel. Put that in my base. I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet, but I had the money and he wanted to sell, and I like having an extra of those lying about just in case. ^_^ My last one I used on Shinobu Eden, to try and push her smashing/lethal and energy/neg energy defense up to near-trial levels.

It makes me think of a book sale I went to this Summer. Half Price Books had a weekend book sale, all of their discounted stuff discounted even more. On Sunday the price became "everything for $1.00" and then at 2 in the afternoon "all you could fit in a shopping bag (one of their eco-friendly ones) for $20.00".

My friend and I had been by this sale on Saturday and decided to come back on Sunday. he filled a bag with movies for $20.00. He's a movie-holic, he'll watch almost anything, but there were some good deals to be had.

Anyway... the point of the story... is right at 9 AM when they opened up and everything was $1.00, there were the professional buyers right there with their little handheld scanners. They'd scan barcodes and only pause to look at something if the scanner beeped. They were only buying to resell. It's their job, their business, how they make their money.

So... if they got to a $1.00 movie that I wanted before I saw it, was their purchase somehow less moral than mine, just because they were planning to resell it on eBay or whatever? Half Price Books didn't care, they wanted people to take their junk off their hands for any price they could get. Whoever found that book or movie or dvd first and decided it was worth more than $1.00 was entitled to it. I could complain that the reseller was cheating me out of a good deal by snapping it up first, only to make money on it... but that would be silly. First come, first serve.

(Things I bought for $1.00: Stuart Little 2, Corpse Bride, Wallace & Grommet's Three Amazing Adventures, Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, Superman Returns, X-Men III the Last Stand, The Watchmen, & for music Me First and the Gimmee Gimmee's are a Drag, Velvet Revolver - Liberdad, Them Crooked Vultures, The Very Best of Sweet, The Righteous Brothers - Anthology, The Blue Aeroplanes - Swagger, and a few more. ^_^)

The IO was there for "a fair price" for only as long as the original seller wanted it to be left there.

If people had to wait longer for their stuff to sell and they made less money on it, there would be fewer people putting stuff up for sale in the first place. Which is absolutely true for IOs that don't sell well or very quickly.

As TopDoc said, people are providing the service of being a store when the offer stuff up for sale. And those that offer stuff up for sale at very low prices are more likely interested in their product moving quickly than in your getting a good deal.

Well, congrats to DevilYouKnow. ^_^ I have a lot of alts too, there are myriad ways to spend all that money.

Day 22

I think we've agreed that whatever "results" I might get from my experiment here are skewed by my used of vet rewards, by my own knowledge of the market and the game, and by the fact that I gained a lot of levels during a double exp weekend. But I'd still say that the overall point is just to show how to furnish a nice build on your own by the time you hit 50, or not much after.

Anyway, we can now add one more thing that is going to skew my results by quite a bit:




I ran 5 tip missions tonight, solo at -1/1, and got these two drops in successive missions. It's not the first time I've gotten two purple drops in one day, but certainly the first time I got two such very nice drops at practically the same time, and with so little effort. Not only would I not expect anyone else to manage that -- I doubt I could manage it given another fifty or one hundred tries.

But I'm not complaining. ^_^

What I did tonight:

1. Ran two BAFs and unlocked my Judgment slot (and slotted it with a T1).

2. Picked up some Ascension armor and two emotes, swoon and collapse. Those two are lots of fun, and I have swoon on my 2nd account and keep trying to use it on my first. Now I can.

3. Ran the five tip missions.

4. Converted 50 merits. Sold 5 IOs on the market.

5. Joined a Silver Mantis with friends.



I was frankly surprised at how many badges I have. I know I grabbed all of the explore badges that I could -- or at least, all of the ones that would lead to merits. I pretty much ignored history and other badges that didn't yield merits. And I still haven't set foot inside an AE building. But... over 500 badges? (I'm at 511 after the Silver Mantis tonight). That's kinda neat. In fact, Mouse Police on Virtue is over 1,000 but I'm not sure how many other of my characters have over 500.

Just to compare, here's my new brute on my new account. All I've done with this character is AE and marketing:



Heh.