StabBot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency

You have a much stronger negative connotation of that word than I do. To me it's simply when you see something isn't working the way it was intended, and you exploit it in a way that is detrimental to other players.

Because exploit has a strong negative connotation, lemme be clear on which denotation I'm using: I don't know you. I am accusing the average marketeer of skimming money off the top of players transactions without providing meaningful value to the system. You are well aware your habits are atypical.

I already do that. The problem when supply is tight, a history of 5 is not sufficient to gauge what value they're being bought out at. You might have to wait 30 minutes to see the string of lowball bids snatch them up. If the purpose of this game is the AH metagame to you, then I'm sure that seems fine. If you log on to go fire off ridiculous powers in a silly costume at polygonal bad guys, then it's tedious and it's just a speed bump.
You acknowledge the devs set the intended rate at which you are intended to acquire those items.
therefore number one is disproven. Marketeering far exceeds the speed at which the devs intend for players to acquire items.

Personally I think the market was intended to be a system which reduces the effects of randomness by facilitating trade. Instead, whenever players trade items a third party drains a significant portion of the worth from both. Not that I expect people to care or change. I just find the assertion that the average marketeer who does nothing but markup items is adding value ridiculous.

I think listing the last 100 transactions would decimate the current interface, but if instead of showing the last 5 entries it showed the average of the last 20, the preceding 20, the 20 before that, and then so on, would be nice. I'm not sure how much of an effect it would have, but it would probably be an improvement over what we have now...

That's assuming of course that the database they're running can handle those kinds of record commands at the quantity users would send them... The AH can already be a bit slow now and that'd be a lot more data requested than we see now.

I used Nevermelting Ice as an example specifically because it used to cost less than 1k and now routinely goes for over 50k, topping out around what, 110k?

You guys talk a lot about inflation. Maybe I'm sorely mistaken, but do you believe the amount of money in the game has doubled in the past year? Quadrupled? Increased a hundredfold? I would wager that your perception of inflation is sorely inflated, but maybe I'm mistaken.

Obviously the AE issues have exacerbated things, but the notion that they've directly increased the cost of Nevermelting Ice tenfold, much less fiftyfold while providing an incredibly easy way to procure said Nevermelting Ice is a step further than I'm willing to suspend my disbelief.

I almost agree. I think that your wording has a bit of a negative connotation - that people who won't pay the prices are too poor to so. I have a billion influence sitting around (not much compared to people here's stocks, I know) and I simply don't want to pay 100k for nevermelting ice.
Flippers sometimes save the time of those who want to sell it now, and even that depends on what "it" is. A stack of white salvage? Sure, that's probably true. A Dam/Recharge Positiron? Not so much.

CoH lets you bid on items that you expect to be posted, so if the markets really did crash and no one put in the effort to sell, but demand stayed the same or at a comparable level, then I think that it would actually be much easier to sell - the irony being that prices on some items probably would be greater than they are now.
This is as subjective as the first, and it assumes that you got your money from marketeering. If you got your money from farming, then it's actually an argument that, unlike everything else so far, we don't have to get so abstractly hypothetical about. Compare the amount of influence gained per hour for a normal player and then compare it to the markup.

You end up with the same situation as selling. The common salvage becomes easier to obtain, the more valuable stuff is probably not. Marking up the price by 20 million isn't necessarily going to be a net gain for quite a few players as opposed to just letting their bid sit overnight (assuming they would be sleeping, eating, or doing something else with their time anyway).

Just because people with no other options will do something doesn't mean it's proof of the merit of the situation which drove them to it.
The solution would be complicated. Implementation of a fix would have unpredictable results. You're like anyone else who's abused any other defect in a game for their benefit. Lemme reiterate that I don't blame you for it, it makes sense to me, but the fact that a fix would be cumbersome and risky shouldn't bely the severity of the problem.
I like the disdain you have for the people whiney enough to use merit and alignment tokens. I think that this shows a critical difference in your perception of how the game should be played and how the average player plays. I'm sure you'll take that as a compliment.
When CoH starts accepting SQL commands, stores databases for me, allows user created forms, etc. then sure. Otherwise, you're being ridiculous.
Yup, and it can be improved upon. They've made improvements over time with AE, merits, and alignment merits, and hopefully they'll continue to roll them out. Have fun abusing the system for the next few years while they slowly try to fix it.

Until you understand that players don't like you because you waste their time, the forums will continue to confuse you.

No one here would care if you raised the price of nevermelting ice to 5 billion a pop if it only took half a second to raise 5 billion influence. Its probably fun to think that people are too stupid to realize time is meaningful, but I guess most of us just assumed that was so basic a concept that we wouldn't have to go over it. Kind of like not explaining what fire is when you talk about how an internal combustion engine works.

I think there's a critical difference. The cost of keeping a hundred million barrels of oil (or whatever amount it would take to affect the market) in a facility rated for hazardous material storage would be quite expensive, in fact I don't even think you could turn a profit on it.

The fact that auctions never expire, and fail to do so at no expense to the seller is probably one of the largest contributors to the current state of the market. That being said, if there were time limits on auctions I suspect there would be no market for unpopular sets or moderately popular ones at odd level ranges. Putting up an item you didn't expect to sell would be a losing prospect, assuming you lost your auction house fee each time you reposted it.

So clearly a broad rule causing all auctions to expire every 72 hours wouldn't be a good thing, but I think it's clear that the top end of the marketeering racket needs some serious review. It's a shame that logging how often an item is resold would be such a massive tax on the game's databases.

At the very least it would be helpful if instead of showing the last 5 purchases it would show the average value of the last 50 in increments of 10.

I definitely agree with a chain induction type move, and while I think it'd be really neat for it to be the set's bread and butter control move, assuming the delay between bounces wouldn't leave you too open to alpha strikes (it'd need a pretty good range).

Actually I'd be pretty stoked if the majority of the set's moves used that mechanic.

As "useful," rather than good. I'm unhappy with an ability if it doesn't scale well from the level I receive it up to level 50, even with full enhancements. That's the difference to me between a primary hold and FA. The primary hold is useful from start to finish, and the latter is useful in a window, or at least hits a peak in that window and then drops off too dramatically.

I think something simple like a decent recharge reduction attached to Freezing Arrow or some other cold-themed debuff would go a long way towards fixing the ability I probably still wouldn't take it (bear in mind I have Deceive on my /TA so I already have a second singtle-target mez debatably more powerful than the first), but I could at least appreciate its permanent utility against EBs, AVs, and Bosses before you get the second hold up or after it expires.

I apologize for derailing this conversation, but it seems like all the bases of the original topic have been covered, so I'll follow up on the Freezing Arrow thing.

First off I'm skeptical about the animation time of the ability, when was the change made? I believe I leveled up my Ill/TA character during i15 and I got very little mileage out of TA.

Second off, sorry to nitpick, but Blind also has a 1.67s activation time.

Third, regardless of what people say, I still have misgivings about redraw animations. I'd heard before they don't actually increase the time it takes for the activation to complete, but generally speaking TA doesn't feel especially responsive and Freezing Arrow is no exception.

Fourth, the duration and recharge really are quite bad. At 50 you're looking at an 18 second recharge on a 15 second hold, vs. a 9 second cooldown on an 18 second hold... The thing is when Hasten, your set bonuses, and your hold enhancements are running the amount of time it takes to just recast your primary hold is so small that I felt I was better off just casting some other ability to wait out the cooldown than firing off an Ice Arrow that's going to be overkill a second later when my primary hold comes back up.

Perhaps that's becaues as Ill/TA I can just alternate between Deceive and Blind anyway, but I still feel that really any controller is going to get more mileage out of picking up a different power than they would from Freezing Arrow.

I'd be curious about what builds actually do take FA, because I would wager that I could find a different ability swap out for it.

I don't necessarily feel that TA is underpowered when my damn Oil Slick Arrow actually works correctly, I just don't feel that Freezing Arrow is especially useful for a Controller in the long run.

People take Freezing Arrow? That ability is just awful once you have single origins on your primary hold... The animation time is agonizing, it does no damage, and it has a short duration. :/