Grouchybeast

I guess you could do that by starting squishy ATs off with negative defense values.

Hero Slayer on redside unlocks Lord Schweinzer in Port Oakes, while Villain Disruptor on blueside unlocks Agent Hassell in Steel Canyon. You can take as many safegaurds and mayhems as you like from them. The sole restriction is that you can only get missions that are your level or lower.

I've always though, since AE was in beta, that it should have had no rewards, or at most extremely nominal ones. People usually reply that if that was the case, then no one would use it, but I don't think that's true. If people wouldn't do something in CoX without direct rewards from the game, then there would be no roleplaying, which is patently not the case. It could have worked. People want to tell stories, and other people want to read them. There are giant fanfic archives out there with millions of works in them that demonstrates that very clearly. An AE with no rewards was the only way that it had any hope of being what it was apparently supposed to be: a way for people to create stories for others to experience. It's great for farmers to have a place to farm, but I think AE could have been something really innovative, and that part of it was lost between the unusable search system and the original devs basically abandoning the system when it didn't do what they wanted. I think it's a shame.

There's now a way to run mayhems/safeguards via contacts unlocked with badges. without doing the papers/radios, so it would be possible to farm them really quickly.

The slow creeping increase of prices is literally due to inflation, the issue that this change was specifically designed to address. The market does not and cannot cause inflation, because the market is a net INF SINK, not an INF GENERATOR. Providing a fixed price store for items (which is what seeding the market at volume does) definitely caps prices. For basic supplies like salvage it's pretty much costless, too, in terms of impact on the rest of the game. However, with purples and PVP IOs you would open a whole different can of worms which is the question: how easily should people be able to obtain items? Should there be any items that are rare and give players a sense of achievement to pursue? If you want to have rare items AND a store, do you seed the market with only small numbers of those items, which encourages botting, off-market sales and real world money trading? How do you set the price? Providing a fixed price store (seeding the market at volume) without addressing inflation leads to either a) the items that are seeded eventually becoming trivially easy to obtain or b) the seeding price having to be continually adjusted upwards to keep pace with inflation. Much better to try to address the inflation at source. And let's be realistic: running farms is not going to stop over what is relatively speaking a trivial change. As someone said earlier in the thread: it isn't like you weren't going to run the map again anyway. Farming is still vastly more lucrative than running any other content. What if farmers run *more* farms to get the same inf, and recipe supply increases and prices fall? Only time will tell.

Please no more currencies! One of the worst things on live was the addition of more and more different currencies interacting in confusing ways, as the devs desperately tried to control the economy. Merits for completing mayhems and safeguards sounds better, but highly farmable. Maybe one merit per run? One per five runs?

Actually, is it a potentially game-breaking ask. As I understand it, individual items stored in racks actually become base items as far as the game is concerned. So greatly increasing the number of items per rack would likely have unfortunate consequences for the stability of bases. The current limit on base items is only 20,000, which I assume includes a safety margin for the existing base storage limit of ~1800 items.

And that only drops from Hellions.

This seems like the kind of idea that, like AE itself, could end up having massive unintended consequences for the game's economy, especially on the supply side. I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad idea, not at all, but I think would need a lot of consideration.

Jimmy already answered your question, so I just wanted to say, welcome home!

Increases in purple prices have nothing to do with converter rolling, which is what I was talking about Purples, are in their own category. Although, actually, now you mention it, purples recipes are a great example of how good converters are for IO prices, because we know what happened on live when converters were introduced into an economy that had already suffered from enormous levels of inflation (caused by too much inf existing). Before converters there were 'trash' purples that sold for the low tens of millions at best and there were the smaller number of 'good' purples that everyone wanted, like Ragnarok, that sold for the high hundreds of millions. I think some were just about breaking a billion? Anyway, after converters the price of the trash purples rose, and the price of the desirable purples dropped significantly. That meant that every single purple recipe that dropped could be sold for good inf -- even if you didn't want to bother converting it, it was a better price than before -- and it was cheaper to buy the purples you actually wanted. Or look at PVP uniques on live for another example. They went from costing more than the inf cap to being buyable on the market again. Converters are good for everyone. Luckily, the devs seem to understand this very clearly.

I assumed he mean this Jack:

I'm all for options. (And even moreso if it was added in as a mission option in Ouro, and there were a set of badges for using it. Mmm...badges.)

This was an amazing power. Put it up for sale at the P2W Vendor for 10,000,000 and sink some inf.

A. How many IOs does it take to outfit a character? B. How many recipes will drop for a character over their played lifetime? If A>B then the normalization of prices to lower the high end and raise the 'trash' is bad for the character. If B>A then the normalization of prices to lower the high end and raise the 'trash' is good for the character. Everyone who plays the game benefits from converter rolling, except possibly people who decide to PL their character to 50 by doorsitting in AE, then want to outfit it immediately with a build designed around Uncommon recipes and then never play it again. And frankly, that seems like a rather niche playstyle around which to design the game economy.

The characters are per shard (Reunion, Excelsior, etc). Are you sure you didn't log into a different shard by mistake?

That is not the sort of positive, can-do attitude we expect from CoX players! *grabs bat and heads for Atlas Park*

Waves frantically! I don't know if anyone is already looking at this, but before giving the AH a full rewrite, it would be awesome if it would be possible to fix the long-standing bug that is screwing up the last five price display. There is a thread about it here, with several examples of cross-wired last five prices. This is a bug that causes real issues for people using the market, especially people who don't know about the bug who can ended up overpaying, or frustrated that their low bids don't fill. It would be amazingly awesome if we could get at least an update on dev thinking about the priority of this bug, and whether it's being looked at. And thanks for all you guys' hard work on the game.

Do you ever sell anything on the market, or do you only ever buy from it?

They look like vendor trash, in that the recipes themselves are worth very little. However, you can actually make a million or so from a lot of them when the recipe is low enough level that the crafting costs are negligible. It's small potatoes compared to doing most things on the market, but it's certainly enough to self-fund a character as they level, and the only secret market knowledge required for the hypothetical 'average player' is to look up the price of the crafted enhancement versus the ingredients.

And this works brilliantly. On live the majority of set recipes that dropped at low level were vendor trash. On HC the majority of set recipes that drop at low level will turn a profit if crafted. It took me a little while to get used to the change when I started playing, but once I understood it, the simplicity and cleverness of the idea behind it impressed me a lot.

Jimmy already answered this: I'd add that Farming is not Farming, regardless. For example, turning reward merits into converters and selling them on the market is a process that actively removes inf from the game, and this therefor the exact opposite of the issue addressed by the new change to exemplared XP.

I don't think, here or on the old forums, I've ever seen anyone complain that they were losing money on their drops because prices have fallen. I'm not sure why, but people only ever seem to see how much inf they have to spend, not how much they can make. I guess it makes some sense if you doorsit your character to 50 in AE on double XP and then emerge blinking into the light of Atlas Park and try to buy a full high-end build. But for any non-PL levelling experience, high yellow prices are a good thing!

I don't think that it would be wise to make changes based on purely hypothetical outcomes. You could just as easily argue that because farmers will need to make more map runs to get the same inf, more recipes will come onto the market and therefor prices will crash. The only way to know if this change will increase prices, decrease them or have substantially zero effect is to wait and see.

I have to vote no to any change that stops me watching I AM...NICTUS!!! for the thousandth time. I'm not even joking. That's the best part of the ITF.