Grouchybeast

I don't really care about theory, though. I want to know how I can make inf using this price-fixing I hear so much about. People keep claiming it's really easy and that market prices are high because marketeers fix them. I'm sure that eventually someone will be able to tell me how it's done in practise! I mean, there are step-by-step guides for all the other ways of making piles of inf on the market, right? Why is everyone so coy about this one? It's like it isn't really possible or something. 😞

How? I mean this literally. What is the mechanism by which a player does this for profit? Raising prices for a short time is very easy assuming that you have a lot of inf to burn, but it won't actually make a profit. I assume that since you're asserting this manipulation happens, you know how price-fixing for profit is done and can explain it. This is exactly the opposite of how it works. In the real world it is possible to price fix, because it's possible to create a cartel that controls supply. In the game, controlling supply is impossible since players can literally create it out of nothing. Just imagine what the price of diamonds would be in the real world if anyone could create them by waving a magic converter over a lump of coal, or spending ten minutes digging in their garden.

I think that Jimmy addressed this 'issue' quite clearly already:

And even flipping doesn't raise the overall price of an IO. Flippers want volume, because that's how to make inf by flipping. Flippers have to buy at above the current bottom-of-the-barrel selling price (because they want to be able to actually buy reasonable amounts of stock), and list at below the typical high selling price (because they want to be able to sell that stock again). The gap between those prices, less 10%, is the flipper's profit margin. When a flipper finds a new niche, that gap might be quite large. But the next flippers who spots the same niche will pick a slightly higher buying price (so they can buy stock) and a slightly lower listing price (so their stock will sell first). As more flippers start working the same niche, the lowest selling price creeps up, and the highest selling price creeps down. Eventually the profit margin vanishes, and the flippers leave. All flipping does is increase liquidity, and narrow the spread of prices. As you rightly say, it's a pretty negligible force in the AH, especially now in this age of converter roulette.

Inf and XP are mechanically linked, but they have substantially unrelated effects on the game. Increasing XP mostly affects the player choosing to do it. Increasing inf affects everyone who takes part in the game economy. Part of the cleverness of the free XP boost is that it helps people powerlevel and simultaneously reduces the flow of inf into the game in a 'trade' that people feel is fair. Anyway, back to the OP. Adding anything that increases the flow of inf into the game is always going to be a terrible idea for the long-term health of the economy. 'We get less inf now' isn't an unfortunate accidental side-effect of the fix, it's the whole point of the fix. Adding XP --> inf for 50+ characters would an especially bad idea, because level 50s drop stupidly large amounts of inf already.

That would be fantastic. The display glitch in the AH is stupendously annoying.

What happens if you use the empowerment table while in squid or lobster form?

And finally, attuned IO set bonuses work down to -3 levels of the lowest possible level of the set. So an attuned Thunderstrike set, which has a lowest possible level of 30, will provide its set bonuses down to level 27, but not lower.

Do you have a source for that? I looked in the various Issue release notes and I couldn't find a mention of the Abyss change. The main point being, Paragonwiki still lists The Abyss as villain only. I was thinking that if there's a linkable source for the change being pre-shutdown, it would be okay to edit the Paragonwiki Abyss page to say so, and that might help more people realise that The Abyss is now co-op. The Abyss is a cool zone, very atmospheric and I love the whole Jurassic Park thing it has going on. It would be great to see more Hami raids there.

No, that is not what causes inflation. Inflation happens because the supply of inf entering circulation increases faster than the supply of goods (salvage, IOs recipes, etc). Do you like being able to /ah and buy a Luck of the Gambler +7.5% Rech off the shelf for a few million, instead of 75 million? Then you should thank all those Ebil people who play converter roulette to pour those IOs into the market. Are they making a lot of inf? Yes, absolutely. Are they keeping down the price of desirable IOs to levels where playing the game without farming or marketeering is still extremely viable? Also emphatically yes. HC has turned marketeering into a giant machine for processing crap drops into the drops everyone wants. The devs don't need to watch prices to identify a supply shortfall, or seed the market with the right IOs, because they've found a way to get marketeers to do all that for them. It's actual genius. Anyway, I don't know what 'we' want, but we do know what the devs want, and what they don't want.

"Will poison and burn cosplayers for two million inf a minute and absolutely not one inf less!"

Surely by now the AE buildings are empty except for unemployed Spines/Fire Brutes doing /em panhandle?

Remember when at one point the PVP uniques were trading off-market for over twice the inf cap? Right now the Gladiator +3% Def IO is trading for twelve million. Twelve million. Run the Freaklympics arcs once in Ouroboros, turn the merits into converters and sell them, and you can buy the Gladiator IO with spare change left over. But no, apparently these are the kind of crazy prices that are stopping the player-on-the-street from getting a good build.

Martial Combat is fantastic. Dual Pistols/Martial Combat is the most fun I have ever had with a CoX character. I do not give two spinny kicks whether or not it's the most efficient or effective, or where either powerset falls on some hypothetical tier list. It's top tier for me.

Jimmy is clearly talking about the creation of new inf, as you can tell from his last line Even with this change farming is still far more efficient than every other method of influence gain. It isn't that Jimmy doesn't know that the market is a splendidly efficient way to accumulate inf, it's just that he understands it doesn't create inf, something he has explained multiple times already in this thread. For example, here: And also here:

Just a quick note about this point - blasters are all about damage, both ranged and melee. They have plenty of PBAoE damage powers, and there are are a lot of high damage melee powers in blaster secondaries.

I think it would be a bad idea to involve ATOs in the converter game. Buying packs from the market is in itself a significant inf sink, and some people buy a lot of them. The price of ATOs is largely controlled by margin over the pack price, and a better way to adjust the supply/price for them if the devs wanted to would be to tweak the pack purchase price. If might be nice to see a new pack type with purple recipes.

I hope you enjoy the idea of sitting in Atlas endless spamming "WTB Sup Brute's Fury Acc/Dam/End/Rech 25mm" over and over again in Trade chat until someone who has a set for sale happens to pick your name to initiate an off-AH trade.

I feel that adding sets called 'Damage Resistance Debuff' sets, that slot into Damage Resistance Debuff powers and yet have absolutely no effect on Damage Resistance Debuff has the potential to be extremely confusing, and would probably lead to a lot of bug reports.

Is there anyway to have Mastermind endurance numbers reviewed please To answer the question in the title - maybe? The best way to go about it would probably be to collect data using the combat log and compare the Damage Per End output of Masterminds AND their pets combined against the DPE other ATs. Then, if you could demonstrate that overall Masterminds are suffering by comparison, you'd have a good basis for asking for a change, and also some numbers to suggest what that change should be to bring MMs in line with other ATs.

What really needs to happen for a serious attempt to curb long-term inflation in the game is to drastically cut the amount of inf earned by high level characters, especially with 50s and 50+ content. The ratio between what a character earns per defeat at level 1 and level 50 is ridiculous, and vendoring level 50 common recipes gets 100,000 inf each. 50s pour inf into the game in a giant waterfall. More inf sinks would help, but they would have to be large enough to match the inflow.

The nice thing is that with AE-speed levelling, even the mayflies get to play CoX and have a couple of 50s before they rush off to mate and be eaten by trout.

That's unfair. I bet it could manage to do both!

I can see why devs might think that in theory it's interesting to have a badge that has a real risk of failing to get it. Unfortunately, the main risk is 'my internet went down' or 'we had a powercut', rather than anything that happens in game. So, yeah, make the missions into a little arc and add them to Ouro. Put it on a timer, maybe, so you can only run it once a month or whatever to keep a bit of the risk-of-failure flavour.

My apologies, I was mixing them up with the regular travel IOs sets.