UberGuy

As for earning the money to buy purples outright, if you don't see how you could earn it, I have to wonder what you're looking at.

Just about every day I play, I get at least one thing I can craft and sell for 5-10M inf. I typically earn 3-5M inf just from playing the game, defeating foes and stuff, over the course of a few hours of being logged in. (A lot of time is lost forming teams for TFs and stuff.)

If I solo, I can earn a bare minimum of 1M inf/hour. I am much more likely to earn 2-3M inf/hour. That's solo, but to give you an idea what a team can do for you, clearing most of the mobs on an invincible ITF with a team of 8 takes about 1 hour and earns me around 8-10M inf.

So on any given night, I can earn between 5 and 20M inf, split somewhere between 1:4 and 3:2 between direct earnings and market earnings. At that rate, it takes me between 5 and 20 days to earn 100M inf. That's with no "marketeering" - just selling what I get at what it looks like I can sell it for.

That's also not using the AE. I want a chance for purples, so I'm not in there.

We have some statistical data on purple drop rates. It's not perfect, because, among other things, foes of multiple ranks were defeated, and the chance that a minion, LT or boss will drop a purple are believe to be different (because they each have different chances to drop anything, after which we presume the game determines what you get).

If I am remembering it right, based on that analysis, we're looking at something like 3100 mobs defeated on average to generate a purple. There's a 1/TeamSize chance for you to get any drop while on a team, so you have to multiply that drop rate by your usual team size if you usually team.

Solo, I have gotten 5 purples in the last 4-5 weeks. Three of them were in the last 10 days, since I decided to spend some time each day poking the wall in Cimerora while waiting for low-ball bids on purples I want. Sadly, all the last 3 were comparatively junk: one Confuse, one Pet Damage and one Sleep. The sleep was true and utter junk - it sold for 3M inf. The other two sold for 50M apiece though. Not so wonderful when I'm buying things that sell for 175-300M (this is a villain), but I'll certainly accept it.

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Actually you can. If you go to the published arc, hit edit. Make the changes you want to and then the 2nd to last button will say Republish and save (I think that's what it says). The changes will be put into effect on the published arc.

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But that publishes the edits you've made in that editing session, which is to an in-memory copy of the published arc.

To my knowledge, there is no way to take an existing local arc and use it to overlay an already published one. This distinction matters, because as soon as you save a published arc to a local copy, even in that editing session you begin working on the off-line copy and stop working on the published copy. (It tells you this will happen.)

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The Golden Rule forbids prices from rising or falling based on supply and demand. Even if I could make enough inf selling the junk I get for more than it's worth to buy it at auction for more than it's worth, that only compounds the evil. Better to have even common salvage purchasable for a fixed and known quantity of tickets.

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If everyone followed the golden rule, and supply and demand did not affect pricing, then the distribution of goods would be based solely on a first-come, first-serve basis. While there may be categories of goods in the game for which one could argue this makes sense, for the broad in-game market it is nonsensical from the perspectives of game balance and time-invested goal setting which the devs necessarily desire.

What do I mean by that? Consider set recipes, which have tiers of rarity, and (often) the more rare the item is, the more powerful the benefits of the crafted IO or/and set it is a part of. If all the prices were equal, there would be no sense in this scheme, because an uncommon recipe would be the same cost as a purple one, despite the clear reality that the purple has far lower supply (much less likely to drop) and potentially much higher demand (everyone who could use one would love one).

Price, be it in inf on the market, merits at a vendor or tickets in the MA, is a proxy for time invested to obtain something. The various goods have different prices because of multiple interacting factors:

1) The devs set the average time to obtain powerful items higher than less powerful ones, in an effort to give inclined players something to strive towards. The price is high because it is an alternative to grinding the item out yourself - you have to grind out the price instead. As it turns out, even very high-priced items are often a steal compared to the time it could take you to earn one as a drop.
2) There are not enough of these goods for everyone who wants them. If the price is not high, you will have to wait in a very long line to get one.
3) If there is flat pricing, most people will get in the line for the best goods, hoping to score them instead of and ignore the less rare/powerful ones. With a pricing scheme based on rarity and functional value, items instead fall into strata which naturally divide people into different lines, based on their income levels. People with more modest income can still benefit from the less rare, less powerful goods, while those who have more income can buy more powerful, more rare goods.

While that may sound like some elitist environment, where only the rich and powerful deserve to be rich and powerful, what such a perspective would overlook is that anyone in this game can be rich and powerful. The only barriers to entry are typically intellectual interest and time invested. Of note is the fact that the rich in this game tend to radiate off their wealth in ways that would make a star envious. All you have to do is be a solar panel for that radiation and others will transfer that wealth to you. Indeed, you can use the stratified rewards to climb a ladder to success - each "tier" of reward helps propel you towards access to the next.

Ultimately, I find heavy appeal to moral imperatives in everyday market use to usually be specious. There is the implication or sometimes direct accusation that using the market to earn in-game wealth is wrong on the basis that it is "stealing" it from others. What that view ignores is that there are plenty of characters, especially those level 50 characters who see a lot of playtime, have so much wealth that they're happy to part with gobs of it not just to be more powerful, but literally because they have nothing else to do with it than give it away. Such level 50s are the engines that drive the market prices for nearly all goods.

Edit: that wasn't a list of two factors...

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Dominators do almost* Blaster level ranged damage and bring much more to a team.

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Blasters have much simpler overall attack chain building capability, and since they don't generally need to use mezzes that deal damage as part of that chain, they often have better endurance efficiency on those chains. Certainly they bring far less control, and that may or may not be better for a given team, but I think you badly underestimate their damage potential in the general sense.

Dominator melee damage scale is still slightly lower than a Blaster's: 0.95 to 1.0.

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Play them like a scrapper who can hide, REALLY FUN!

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This. I like my Stalkers. I have never played them as hit and run artists, even before the most recent buffs. The base damage and base HP boosts, plus unconditional critical chances, made them much more effective and, for me, a lot more fun.

You have to be able to tolerate two things.

1) You don't get a solid attack chain on most powersets before level 26. You can ameliorate this with pool powers.
2) You won't get much AoE potential unless you're Spines or Electri Melee. Sometimes you get absolutely none.

The above weren't a real problem for me, so I dig my Stalkers. I really enjoy my 50. Every now and then I get this sweet chain of crits after an AS and I just cause some poor boss to evaporate in 2-3 hits, and damn if that doesn't feel good.

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If I'm talking about economics, and you're talking about my living arrangements, my flawed character, and my various sins ... that's not actually a dialogue.

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It's not much better in other forums.

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to disagree, I thought being a Stalker was about speed, go in, step out.

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This is a really poor way to play a Stalker in PvE. In PvP, long animations aren't that great, but BS's aren't worse than existing sets - just not existing sword sets.

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Do not design your events assuming people will participate, and do not design your events with consequences if people don't participate. It doesn't matter how small those consequences are, if they're anything over purely cosmetic, don't even consider it. Don't ruin other people's game to improve your own.

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I very much agree.

If you want people to participate in an event, the event needs to be compelling; people should want to join it because it's attractive to do so. What you have described is a punitive motivation for people to join - if they do not, it gets worse. This is one of the worst possible ways to motivate your players in any multiplayer context, be it a MMO or a tabletop game with a game master.

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Guys it really shouldn't matter what support primary you take, if the damage is way too low on every blast set that isn't Sonic Blast...

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I think it's clear there's not a consensus on that matter.

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In other words, people will happily cut off their nose, just to spite their face.

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I think that is a bit uncharitable. Players will tend to engage in in-game activities that they enjoy. If they don't enjoy marketing, they won't do it. And so it should be, CoX is a leisure activity.

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It does depend on their reasoning though. Certainly we get people posting in here who hate the idea of the market on a conceptual or RP level, and so refuse to use it even while sometimes acknowledging it may be the best way to get "stuff". However, It's quite consistent that we get people posting in this section whose complaint is not so much that they hate using the market as they hate the prices on it. When you get people complaining about the cost, and then hailing merits as a wonderful solution, I am convinced these people are committing the above face marring. The reason is that price in inf and merit cost are both a proxy for the time it takes to acquire something, and merits for something frequently take longer than earning the inf on the market. In the cases where "high" price really is the complaint, merits should not be the preferred solution.

Yep. That's exactly how it works.

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Mmm that is why my Storm/Dark Defender does so poorly, her dark powers are an ACC debuff, which is ineffectual against anything higher than a LT.

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What?

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That's a bad deal all around. The players who walk away aren't contributing to the market, and they aren't benefiting from it.

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Therein is the crux of the complaint many in this forum had with the idea, even if we had no issue with the fundamental concept of letting people do what they want (avoid the market). When you create a parallel system, then by definition that removes actors from the market, because that's the point. The problem is that, if they don't want that mechanism to wholly replace the market, it has to be less efficient than the market.* The result is that that set of constraints mean that practically everyone loses compared to the original position.
[*] Avid market users see decreased sale volumes, because players are producing fewer items/time and fewer are selling what they are producing.[*] "Casual" market users (by which I mean ones with minimal market trend and/or usage information) see higher prices due to reduced supply and are apparently dissuaded from the market more[*] Players who do equip using merits do so, generally, at a greater average time to acquire each item

Of course, it's arguably an improvement for the people who refused to use the market, or were so woefully ignorant of it that they took a bath when they did use it. I would question the wisdom of giving everyone else a raw deal to "improve" things for these people, since it's an improvement only because they could not or would not use the system that worked at greater efficiency.

Unfortunately, we know that's not the only reason the devs created merits. They created them to allow more granular control of playerbase-wide median item creation rates. I very much understand why the devs would be interested in this, and merits are one of the most straightforward yet flexible means by which to implement such control. That more than anything surely guaranteed we would get them, market impacts be damned.

* In theory, you could try to strike a balance where it was just as efficient as the market so the two would be used equally. I don't see how that's practically possible for any real system where one side operates on fixed-prices like the merit creation costs for recipes while the other system is dynamic in response to supply and demand.

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ok, all I asked for was a open debate/discussion. Not some childish banter. This thread was opened simply to give everyone an opportunity to state their viewpoint on AE. Not to be insulting or to exhibit (again) childish behavior. Please keep the comments to the thread topic and leave the immaturity to yourselves.

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If you think the forum public is going to abide by your wishes, especially when you follow up your call for debate with a highly polar opinion of you're own, then you're painfully naive.

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Sigh.

OBVIOUSLY, there are powers in the set that do some mitigation. I didn't think I had to spell it out, I was under the impression that you all knew something about the subject.

Tell me exactly how a Force Field Defender's Insulation Shield increases his mitigation. Tell me how an Empath's Fortitude increases his damage.

My point remains the same, and it remains valid.

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I'm sorry, we are all going to respond to the words you say. You did not say "Insulation Shield cannot increase the Defender's mitigation". You said "Force Fields cannot...". That statement was false. If you don't want to be called out, say what you mean and don't expect readers to divine a completely different meaning from what you say.

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Force Fields cannot increase the Defender's mitigation.

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You don't do yourself any favors with stuff like this.

Given that I'm having no issues, I'm going to guess this is network/ISP-releated. Sometimes some ISPs have problems reaching the game's data-centers.

What ISPs are you guys on? If a lot of you are on the same one, and no one sharing your ISPs is working OK, that's going to make it pretty certain that's the broad issue.

Hah. Awesome /say there.

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On the salvage side, I think the most expensive tech rare was about 100K before the change; it went up to half a million or a million. I don't remember the arcane prices but I think high-end arcanes went down by half a million or a million. this context.

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Not a very important quibble, but Platinum was hovering in the 4-7M range, and Chronal Skips were 3-5M.