Grouchybeast

Some people have very, very broad definitions of 'market manipulation', and sometimes they seem to include literally everything that makes a profit on the market. Like, I don't go into the corner shop in my village and accuse them of market manipulation because they bought tins of baked beans from the wholesalers and are now selling them to me at a profit. (And for more than I could get them at the supermarket, too, just because it's easier for me to walk a couple of minutes to the village shop than it to drive to the supermarket! The nerve of it!) I know I could cook my own baked beans, but it's just so much easier to buy them, even though it would be cheaper. And probably tastier. Molasses and salt pork are hard to find here, anyway. ...I think this analogy has lost its way a bit, sorry. I list it all so the cheapest it can sell is vendor price + listing fee, but then at the same time I'm too lazy to converter roulette PVP recipe drops, because I'm both inf wise AND inf foolish. As they used to says on the old Market forums, this game literally rains inf, you only need to hold out a bucket and catch some. And we can thank the HC market changes for the fact that we all need MUCH smaller buckets than we did on live. p.s. Devs, I love you all, please fix the last 5 display bugs.

I don't understand what the problem is that you're trying to solve, here. People make a lot of LotG+rech because they know it's a popular IO with high turnover. People bid for a lot of LotG+rech because they're used in a lot of builds. There's a huge supply of LotG available at very reasonable Buy It Now prices for anyone who wants them. The players are generating the supply by their own efforts without the devs having to spend any time at all watching or balancing the market. Everything is working as intended, and much, much better than it did on live. If supply gets too high and prices fall too far, then people doing converter roulette will just switch to making another IO instead. Again, WAI. ETA: Actually, I think you might be confusing bucketing with seeding. Bucketing is when items will be automatically converted from one to another by the AH, e.g. a listed level 35 Thunderstrike Acc/Dam will be used to fill a bid for an Attuned Thunderstrike Acc/Dam (if the bid and offer prices are right). Seeding is when the devs put a supply of an item onto the AH, e.g. salvage or Winter Packs. (And I don't know if the AH can autobuy items. That isn't a function that it has active at the moment, anyway.) I do that, too, with super low-ball bids on big ticket items. I saves me from losing a bunch of inf when using the market, and occasionally I /ah on a character and get a lovely surprise. (I've always worked on the principle that I'd rather come back to the game after a break and discover I've overpaid for some LotG I can actually use, than find out level 53 SOs have become a thing!)

The incarnate system is stupidly complicated, but as an easy fix for that particular problem they could just cut the thread cost for sidegrading components. (TBH, for anything other than Very Rare I just pick whatever I have least of, because the sidegrade costs are small enough anyway that I don't care.) I don't really like the idea of adding Incarnate components to the market, because that removes one of the biggest incentives to run iTrials.

You can do it without the temps, but it's a PITA. Especially since HC unlocks task forces for teams of any size, I agree it would be really nice to have more flexibility on which ATs can access which temps.

My Synapse proposal is to cut out missions 3-11 and then do whatever text surgery is necessary to join the rest together. That gets rid of four kill alls, two patrols, two talkies and a defeat boss. It leaves six missions, one of which is a talkie, including the nice unique maps and the optional Babbage encounter.

How many customers does Manny need? There are two giant Rikti ships queuing to fill up!

No, that's not how it works. IO bucketing only applies to the same specific IOs. They aren't even interchangeable within the same set. A level 20 Basilisk's Gaze Accuracy/Endurance Reduction/Recharge IO can become a level 30 Basilisk's Gaze Accuracy/Endurance Reduction/Recharge via an AH sale, or an attuned Basilisk's Gaze Accuracy/Endurance Reduction/Recharge. It can't become a Devastation Acc/Dam/Rech, or even a Basilisk's Gaze Accuracy/Hold. The bug doesn't actually affect the sales themselves (as has also been tested and demonstrated), only the last five display. I assume if the actual sales were affected, then the devs would have given the bug much higher priority.

Level 50s already have a lot of options for making inf. One of the nice things about the current combination of IO bucketing and lower crafting costs for lower level recipes is that it makes crafting drops much more profitable for sub-50 character, which encourages the flow of inf from 50s down to lower level characters.

The evidence for the bug is literally in the thread that you didn't read. You can go into the game and repeatably prove that two specific listings are showing exactly the same sales. Basilisk's Gaze Accuracy/Endurance Reduction/Recharge is showing the same last five sale as Devastation Acc/Dam/Rech. If you make a purchase in one of them, it will show up in the other, something that people in that thread demonstrated. There are three other pairs that have been nailed down exactly listed in that thread, plus more suspected affected listings.

Ouro portals can now be used by level 1 characters, so that's probably not the reason.

We duoed it with a Corr and a Brute, and it took a loooooooooooooong time to take him down. I'd completely forgotten about the temp powers until after we'd done it and I happened to look at the TF on the wiki, so we didn't use any of them! ETA: Fortunately we had incarnate pets. I think without those we would've been completely screwed.

You can always make a game more accessible by removing complexity, at the expense of making the game less for fun the people who enjoyed the complexity. I like crafting, so it would make the game worse for me personally, On the other hand, buckting recipes and salvage, and bucketing attuned IOs with unattuned has already vastly simplified the whole system. I'm not sure if removing recipes would be that much of a change, now. It could be worth considering, although probably out of the scope of this thread.

The side of the equation that never gets mentioned here is that players sell things as well as buy them. And over the playing lifetime of a character they will have far more recipes drop than they will need to slot IOs. The combination of level bucketing and converters have raised the value of cheap-to-craft yellows and also made the drops of lower level characters more valuable generally (rares are far more likely to be profitable to craft for a low level character than a high level one). Characters can be genuinely self-funding through their own drops far more easily on HC than on live, even without considering the previous outliers like PVP uniques.

No, unfortunately you need to replace the specific sound files in the CoH folders. @Solarverse's thread here has a few mods for Sonic, and instructions on how to deploy them. ETA: This is my DP/MC Blaster, Gun Sue, as screenshotted by my duo partner. Thermal shields coloured to match!

Sonic is a deservedly popular Defender secondary because their -res debuff values are so good. As long as you throw in a blast every few seconds, then you're not only doing damage yourself but you're buffing your teammates' damage by 20%, too. It's just a great team buff across the board. But honestly, you could equally well just take whatever secondary you fancy for thematic reasons. A trio of anything in CoX is going to be robust enough to trade some mix/maxing for theme. The sonic sounds are pretty annoying, but you can mod them.

I recently duoed a DP/Martial blaster with a Thermal/Sonic defender, and it was a fantastic combo that made my blaster feel absolutely godly. Shields, heals when I inevitably managed to blap myself into trouble despite the shields, no mez to worry about, debuffs turning EBs into jelly, and a permanent 50% damage buff to top it all off. A+++, would rampage wildly across the map again.

I don't even do this. I just look at recipes as they drop, compare them to the crafted IO, and if it's profitable I craft them and sell them. If there's high demand for the IO, and I can buy the recipe cheaply enough to be profitable, I might put in some bids for the recipes and salvage and craft more for as long as the niche exists. I'm very old-school, I'm afraid.

I propose this as an extremely rare variant of the rikti monkey buff from Mystic Fortune. Click and *boom*, suddenly you're the Kraken. Downside: Could be awkward in cave maps.

I mean, HC aren't idiots so if anyone actually tried it I'm pretty sure they'd get short shrift. It just amused me.

This comment just made me realize that, hypothetically, someone could write and publish a story about a character who has the name they want, and then alert HC to the copyright violation.

That's correct, yes.

I think it would be a really good idea to have a big warning on the Merit purchase screen that the items for sale can almost always be bought cheaper on the AH. However, at the moment Merits are doing an important job, which is they are providing an absolute backstop on AH prices. Nothing that can be bought on the AH can ever cost more than 1,000,000 x Merit cost, because Merits can be bought for 1,000,000 inf. It's a completely automated system that requires no dev monitoring or input. It also means that if prices ever rise that high, a new inf sink also automatically kicks in. Like a lot of the system around the HC AH, it's very elegant and means that the players automatically act as a force to increase supply and lower prices, which is pretty brilliant. If you think that the absolute cap on AH prices should be lower than 100 million, that's a different thing and fair enough. But trying to match Merits costs to AH prices in an active, ongoing way would take up dev time, potentially a lot of dev time. My only objection in principle to making packs buyable with Merits is that at the moment, buying packs is a pure inf sink, which is good for the economy.

I don't think that power customisation was ever said to be impossible because of any limitations of the engine. It was deemed to be prohibitively expensive in terms of hours of work needed to make the changes, until someone developed a way to semi-automate the process.

While I agree that a market tutorial would be a great idea, I think the UI bugs in the AH have much, much more impact for new players than for experienced marketeers. When I go to the AH and try to price a drop, and all the prices displays are blank, I know that I need to place a dummy bid and use that to call up the info. To a new player, it's just broken. The answer to that isn't 'here a tutorial that explains the arcane rituals we use to work around the buggy interface', it's to fix the interface. If I look at the listing for a Snipe or an Immobilise IO, and see that it's trading for 20,000,000 inf, I think, hmm, looks like the #@$&ing last-five bug is here, too, and I treat with extreme caution. A new player thinks they've hit the jackpot, crafts, and wastes more than the real selling price on the listing fee. The buggy interface is the number 1 thing that is going to screw new players in the AH. Honestly, until it's fixed I don't think we SHOULD be encouraging new players to use it.

Please fix the last sold display bug. PLEASE FIX THE LAST SOLD DISPLAY BUG. PLEASE FIX THE LAST SOLD DISPLAY BUG. I might be back later with more thoughts, but until then, PLEASE FIX THE LAST SOLD DISPLAY BUG! >insert flashing, sparkling, rotating marqueed version of request here<