UberGuy

rofl

Edit: What the hell? The forums forcibly lower case that?

During CB, a number of people were complaining about reduced AE tickets. I did no testing of that, but I wonder if (assuming it's true, it was quite anecdotal) if it could be related to what we're seeing. That might have some credence if Vanguard Merits are really being reduced.

No. Nor is there any indication that "we" are.

Pretty much every day, I sell something for 5M inf. It would take me ~56 such sales (after market fees) to earn one purple at those prices. Fortunately, I also defeat lots of level 50 mobs, play TFs for merits (and random rolls or outright purchases of some things), craft IOs and sell salvage, so that 4.5M inf probably comes with 2-5M other inf in income, bare minimum. And of course sometimes what I get is worth more than 10M inf, or sometimes I get two. Some days I get none, but I find that's the exception.

And sometimes what I get is actually a purple. Or a respec. Or a LotG proc. And I can sell those kinds of things pretty directly for a purple here and there.

(Who buys respec recipes anyway? I have respecs coming out of my ears on most characters, and we generally get a one-off every issue. I consider dropped respecs an excuse to make a killing on the market.)

In general, I earn something like 50-100M inf a week playing this game, depending on what side I'm on (hero or villain), and how many hours I have available to play. (I have a 9-5 job and a house to take care of.) And here's the kicker... I'm not a "marketeer". I'm not a hardcore farmer. I just play the game.

No. I'm one of a few trying to educate them that the above quoted statement is ignorant. It's false. It assumes that the market is like a grocery store, where you go only to buy, and does not consider that you can use it to sell things. Selling things earns you money. It can earn you lots of money if you spend a little time to understand how people bid when they try to purchase things, and how much things are really selling for. Those numbers on the market interface, number for sale, number bidding, and the last 5 sale prices and dates - they aren't a complete picture by any means, but they tell you a lot. You can learn a great deal from them if you pay attention to them over a few days on a given item or a few weeks just buying and selling different things.

I wouldn't touch those damn sites with a 10 foot pole. Why anyone would give them money for something they can do themselves escapes me.

Then you're doing it wrong. My guess, just because it's the most common way people "do it wrong" is that you're using the market for buying only. If that's true, then don't do that.

Hyperbole. The price of purples has nothing to do with being able to IO toons, because all IOs are not purples. If people stop playing because they can't purple their 50s, then they've missed the point. Purples are alternative progress for level 50 characters. They aren't something that's supposed to land in your lap when you ding 50. The devs expect you to work for them, and to take a while to get them. That's why they're ultra rare.

Sorry if this seems abrasive. We get asked this a lot, and it's really frustrating.

Supply of purples is down because a lot of playtime got moved to the AE where no purples can drop, Demand is up because there are a lot of 50s out there thanks to the hardcore PLing the early AE made possible. (It's still possible, it's just not as widespread.) Finally, a lot of players are immensely wealthy, because it's easy to achieve if you just play a level 50 a lot. Low supply, high demand and lots of disposable income = the price is high.

Expect I16 to do a lot for supply, but not quite as much for demand and available wealth.

Definitely not. But when they're that far off of predicted values, that's a pretty strong hint that it's not supposed to work like that.

I am very relieved to see that there's no intentional change, not just because I don't want it to change (!) but because this allows us to focus testing on the test server and trying to identify conditions that may lead to the difference(s).

I'm looking forward to outdoor, non-instanced results.

Previous response to applying the Golden Rule to any game market.

I never completed the mission I was testing with, so I am certain I never got any variation on mish complete recipes.

It may be related to the difficulty settings somehow, but they don't actually seem to affect it. Drop rates on a team equivalence of 1 and 6 were comparable.

We were told explicitly that it's not supposed to matter. Neither mob level nor virtual team size is supposed to affect it, according to pohsyb in the Test server beta channel.

Whether it actually does is of course something different. In my testing, it does not appear to. You get roughly the same drop rates with a virtual size or one or six.

I have posted a direct request for more info on this in the Current Issues thread. I had already PM'd Niviene during closed beta, and she responded saying she was passing it on, but I never got anything back.

Frankly, the lack of feedback on this topic has me quite angry. This is one of the most slogging, boring and time-consuming things any of us could have spent closed beta working on, and it would be vastly less time consuming just knowing if it's supposed to be different or not, because not knowing means we should be gathering data from live.

I don't suppose anyone has data comparing the ParagonWiki mob drop probabilities with actual farming rates from live?

* Looks for TopDoc...

None of the above specifically except for the most extreme PLers. The early PLing in the AE was so off the charts that I think it got its own specific reaction, even though AE mechanics were the enabler for it.

Beyond that, I don't think the dev's motive for change was aligned against any one playstyle like that. I believe their motive was to remove anything that detracts from the AE as a place to create and play what I'll call "meaningful content". By "meaningful content" I mean arcs that are an earnest effort to create story-driven entertainment for other people.*

Farming a map chock full of the same mobs over and over, whether for inf, tickets, XP or even badges - all of that appears to be fall under an umbrella of playstyles that detract from that purity of the dev vision for the AE. The devs have taken steps to curb those kind of playstyles from the AE to an extent that they have not applied to other parts of the game. Not only that, but that there are some pretty strong indications that they don't intend to apply those curbs outside the AE, or at least not to the same extremes.

A great example is the change to the AE badges, which you can now practically get all for walking into the digitizing beam. They stated clearly that they didn't want people badge farming in the AE, so they removed any reason to. Meanwhile, other potential, non-AE badge tweaks don't appear to have anything like that scale of change in store. Another example would be the farmer-enabling I16 difficulty settings changes. The devs are clearly aware of how this will be used, going so far as to comment here on the boards how they knew that specific posters known for love of farming would love the change. That suggests they don't oppose farming directly - just farming in the AE.

I think that a lot of folks on the forums didn't recognize this intentional double standard. That's lead some of them to miss the mark in predicting just how far the devs would take some of the AE changes, because they made predictions based whether the devs would do certain things game-wide. But they aren't doing them game wide - the AE gets its own set of rules. Thus I believe the devs are willing to apply extremes to it that they actually won't apply to the rest of the game. Whether that's good or bad depends a lot on which kind of playstyles you like.

* I emphasize the notion that AE arcs are supposed to be "for other people" than just the authors. I don't buy into the frequent claim that the AE is supposed to exist primarily as a tool for authors. I find the people who claim that act as if the AE should exist for the authors, without regard for whether anyone else gets to appreciate their work. I don't accept that the devs would have invested nearly two issues of development on a tool that had such a one-way function. I believe they did intend it to be a creative tool, but primarily for content that would then be enjoyed by other players.

This is so off-base it's really pretty ridiculous.

Yes, you can build Blasters which aren't very AoE oriented, but an actually AoE oriented Blaster isn't even on the same planet as a VEAT for AoE firepower. I speak this from a position of experience with both.

Yes, on their own a VEAT's mitigation can be vastly higher than most Blasters', and (as noted many times in this thread) there's not a simple inverse relationship between damage potential and mitigation on any AT with self-mitigation tools. But to claim that a VEAT can access more AoE firepower than "most Blasters" is simply inaccurate.

This assumes, of course, that everything in the AE remains status quo. Given how blatantly obvious the boss farming is, I'm not sure that's likely.

I expect more purple supply.

Was this WW or the BM? WW has been incredibly ********* the last few days. I don't know if today's server reboot/maintenance helped any.

Edit: Haha, I'm impressed that word was in the filter. Let's see... heiny-tastic.

Sounds like more of a conspiracy hobbyist to me.

This is not a client issue. There's a general awareness of this problem, at least on Justice*. It's only started around Thursday or Friday last week. WW (not the Black Market) is incredibly poorly responding. It says it takes things or gives them to you, then later rejects them. (If you have the market messages in your chat tabs, the giveaway is that there's no message for what you just did.) Every now and then, it does the action after a delay, but most of the time it simply fails to actually happen, which is incredibly frustrating.

I hope that this morning's maintenance does something to it.


* The markets are cross server, but it's possible this problem is limited to one server based on however the shards connect to the market server.

I find that many prices are "sticky". Sometimes it's because someone is propping it up, but many times there isn't sale history that supports that. There are some items that people just seem to pay the price for because that's what "everyone else is paying".

I find that usually, something eventually comes along and breaks the price loose. Sometimes its an event that disrupts supply or demand. Sometimes its someone dumping multiples of something at a low price. Sometimes a dislodged price actually ends up settling at a higher price (though this is usually because of a persistent increase in demand, such as a popular new powerset that calls for a certain set or IO type).

As they say, it seems the only constant is change.