Quasadu

I'll be running my first Apex Task Force this weekend, but this will also be the first time I've actually done it.

I've read all of the Paragon Wiki page but there is a lot of +++ Missing Information +++

I've looked through the Player Guides here but didn't find anything yet.

I've seen a few threads with some good advice, but I thought I would post a thread to ask specifically:

What advice or tips do you have for a first time leader/team on this TF?

And if there is a good guide somewhere that I've missed, let me know.

Thanks!

Father Xmas and Local Man already summed up my feelings but I will just add - it is not the software itself that the OP should be questioning. The software itself is not inherently illegal, nor should it be. It is the use of that software to obtain or distribute materials illegally that is the problem.

The bulk of my stuff is done on two characters - one does pretty standard buy & craft stuff. The other collects rare drops that I email to it while playing other toons. When they pile up she crafts them and sells them, or puts them in storage if I want to keep them.

I mostly only do that with rares though. On every other character I have, I will craft worthwhile drops, or just list the recipes and salvage I get. I don't think of that so much as marketeering though. I guess technically it is, but it's just a natural part of playing the game as far as I'm concerned.

Then I have a whole ton of alts that are able to get assigned to do odd jobs when I come up with some wacky idea. Right now they're mostly doing seasonal work.

As some of you have, for the past six or seven months, I have been buying Candy Cane salvage off the market in large quantities. Over the past two weeks, I have sold all of my Candy Canes. I have also been actively flipping Candy Canes in the market, and I also bought a few to convert into level 10 Winter's Gift: Slow Resist recipes.

I promised to post the final results for some friends on LJ, so I thought I would share it here as well. Here is my uncensored spreadsheet which I used to track profits throughout this venture:

Candy Cane Trade (Google Docs)

Some quick notes:

Total profits: 3,841,061,507
Note that this figure includes over 300 million spent to buy and craft 43 level 10 Winter's Gift: Slow Resist enhancements. There will be further profit on those sometime down the road (probably after another six months but who knows) when the market rebounds from the glut of them currently available.

Methods
The methods were pretty simple. I knew I wanted to track exact figures, so I started out with one character with a very deliberate amount of cash: Rockem Shockem started this project with exactly 500 million Infamy. She was responsible for all the buying in the off-season.

My buy price varied, of course, but generally had a low of 45,000 and a high of 100,000. Those are not exact figures, of course. There was definitely competition and I know several other were working on the same plan as I was. Sometimes the going price got and stayed over 150,000 and I usually would leave it alone at that point and let it come back down. I stopped buying when I ran out of my initial investment of 500 million. I could certainly have gleemailed myself another half billion and kept buying, but I was worried about how quickly I would be able to move that much stock (I shouldn't have worried).

I tried to distribute the canes roughly evenly among several rarely played alts (all listed on the spreadsheet by name). I used my second account to do that, by the way. No way could I email it all. Even using base storage would have been problematic since they aren't all in the same SG. If I do this again, I will likely use Justice or Pinnacle, since I have a one-person SG one each of those. (This was done on Infinity, btw.)

My list price varied. I put up my first batch of canes around the 450,000 mark (all numbers are approximate - I don't want to give away all my secrets) the night before the event went live. Those sold out rather well so I got greedy and upped my list price to 900,000. Those did not sell at all for 12 hours - there were too many other folks out there with stockpiles - so I had to eat some listing fees and go back to a more reasonable price.

Throughout the event my prices went up and down - higher during the day and especially on the weekend, but you can see that my average sale price worked out to about 375,000 per cane.

My active flippers had a much more rigid pricing. I was buying around 100,000 and selling around 300,000. Those went up and down but stayed pretty close to those numbers.

At the very end of the event (this morning) I sold off the last of my remaining stock - price went back up to 500,000 per cane, so I got a little last minute bonus for holding out a little.

Lessons Learned
I had a lot of fun doing this. It was fun to track, and fun to see the large quantities of inf rolling in in a short amount of time.

However, as a financial strategy, I have to say that stockpiling was almost not worth the effort. On my main marketeer, I make roughly 500 million a week, depending on my motivation and the market (and I know many of you make quite a bit more). Sure, I pulled in over 3 billion in a two week period, but that took several months of cane-collecting. The competition to sell drove my prices way down below where I was really aiming for. I have a feeling that it will be even tougher next year since canes were easier than ever to create this time around (and I'm probably making it harder by posting this and spreading the idea).

The active flipping, on the other hand, was very profitable. As you can see, that almost hit a billion in the two week period, which is more in line with what I make in my usual niches. It took some effort over that two weeks, but I didn't have to do anything to prep for it - just started flipping when the event began.

Conclusion
There wasn't really any greater goal to this project than "make tons of easy money" and that certainly happened. But I wanted to share with you folks since I feel like it turned into an interesting experiment in the market and I learned some things I didn't expect.


PS: As to what I'm going to do with this money? Well I already dumped half a billion of it into one of my solo SG bases, and I will probably do the same for the other one. The rest will probably go to purple recipes as I still have a lot of Issue 19 respecs to take care of.

In addition to the explanations the above commenters have provided, I just want to add that asking for changes based on the fact that it inconveniences you when you want to leave this game and go play something else is not the most persuasive argument ever.

It seems to me that what bases really need is a complete overhaul of the base designer from the ground up to make it more user-friendly, stable, and feature rich.

The problem with that, is that base building is by design only used by part of the player base - namely those members of the SG that have permissions to do so. Therefore the amount of time and effort that such an overhaul needs is not warranted by the number of players it would appeal to.

The solutions suggested so far have been (1) people could create their own SG and their own bases, and (2) personal apartments could be added in addition to (and possibly linked to) SG bases.

The problem with (1) is that it encourages isolation rather than community building. That's bad, so that's out.

(2) sounds good and doesn't really present any problems except this: most (if not all) of the time, only one person is going to see your personal apartment. Screenshots and possible visits aside, it's not going to be the community-wide shared form of player created content that warrants a lot of development work for its own sake.

It seems to me that the one thing that could provide a bit of development priority to this would be to find a way to make the hypothetical new Base Builder tool compatible with the Mission Architect. Add spawn points and other necessary mission features to the base maps that can be activated when the maps are used in active missions.

This way, the base builder is also a mission map builder and, in my opinion, adds a whole new layer of depth to MA.

I know that a base builder overhaul and fully customizable MA maps have both been asked for, and it makes sense to me to bundle those suggestions into one tool (and I'm sure someone else has probably suggested that too). I think that might give the Devs the justification to put the resources into it.

I don't store inf on gleemail or the market because I don't trust those systems enough to not lose it, and I don't trust myself enough to remember how much I had stored there. I agree with the commenter above me who said that storage alts are probably the main form of storage out there. Even if you can only store 2 billion (liquid) on an alt, just one server you don't use for playing gives you enough alts to bank up to 24 billion. And you don't even have to level the alts past level 1.

But ultimately I don't think there's any way we can realy make any kind of reasonable guess at how much is out there. There are just too many unknowns and people often do weird things that don't always make sense.

To add tot he list of awesome regular content, The Civic Squad mission. Sure it's been eclipsed by some stuff that's come out since then, but it's pretty awesome.

Viridian's arc also comes to mind (especially the Council mission) but I think that qualifies as gated - even though it's not a TF - since Viridian is such a pain to unlock.

I hate capes. Damn you Dumpleberry.