Shinobu

I think you got confused halfway through your post and started saying scrapper instead of stalker.

If people drive the prices of rare IOs down so much that it makes no sense to craft a rare recipe, then I guess that's what will happen. It won't be the end of the world. Note that the price of rare salvage is half what it was a few weeks ago, so the costs of crafting your rare recipe are dropping, too. Also, uncommon crafting costs and the costs of converters set a baseline for how much you can sell the end product for and still make a profit. If the prices drop too low, people will stop trying to eek out a profit by converting. Or people will start buying the cheap IOs and flipping them for a higher price. If enough people stop supplying the market, prices will rise again. Either way, it should auto correct. The only problem I see is that your rare recipe maybe isn't worth having, but your uncommon recipe is more valuable. /shrug.

I do know people would do this not just for a few hours, but for days or weeks at a time. Pick your salvage (we'll just say Luck Charms again), and first you bid-creep until you've bought out the entire stock up to a certain point. In some cases, people would buy up ALL the stock, just because they could. (And sometimes a different marketeer would have placed 10 of a common salvage for sale at nearly 2 billion influence per piece, just because they could do that and it would prevent people from buying everything. And in one case that I remember, the buy still bought everything just to prove their point. It was all posted on the market forums, heh.) Anyway let's say you think all Luck Charms should sell for 75,000 influence. Once you've cleared the market of Luck Charms selling for less than that, you can place thousands of bids across multiple characters at 74,000 influence, and list all of the Luck Charms you've bought at 75,000 influence. You will now automatically buy anything listed at 74,000 influence, and force everyone to pay at least 74,001 influence to buy a Luck Charm. And you can keep doing this for as long as you can afford to, and for as long as you have time to keep checking on your bids to make sure they don't all fill. But people would figure out what you were doing and flood the market with salvage from their bases, so in the long run it didn't seem very sustainable to me. I never did it, and it mostly seemed like a mini-game that didn't really result in huge profits or anything, just people screwing with the market because they could. Pretty much impossible to do with the way our market is set up here, since you'd have to buy out ALL common salvage including the millions that were seeded by the GMs (and which they could just reseed if you did somehow buy them all).

You know I see this bought up a lot and I seriously question how often it actually happened. Quite a bit, based on the stories from Marketeers on the forums and what I observed. But also people tended to conflate the issue because it annoyed them that one time, so it always sounded like an even bigger issue than it probably was.

The thrust of this whole thread is really this: in the old days you could be excited when you got a rare recipe, because you could probably craft it and sell it for a profit. The new reality is: there's a good chance your rare recipe will sell for a loss if you craft it to sell it. But you can still craft it to use, and certain recipes are still worth crafting to sell, and if you use converters yourself then getting common recipes is actually better than getting that rare recipe. Also, getting a PvP recipe or a Purple recipe is still a very good thing. You just need to adjust your perspective on what is a good thing to get as a random drop. ^_^

I've been playing this game since the week it launched, and I agree. :o

I think that polemic, that the most recipes are generated by players playing at level 50, was kind of skewed at the start here on Homecoming, because everyone was playing low levels to begin with. I noticed that early on, something like a Steadfast Protection IO that you'd expect to be in short supply actually wasn't. That's changing week by week as more people get to level 50. The longer Homecoming is around, the more level 50 recipes you'll see on the market, and the fewer lower level recipes (my prediction anyway).

When I first got to Homecoming, people had been at it for a week or two. The market was active. I found it easy to bootstrap myself from two pieces of rare salvage, to a couple of IOs to sell, to several IOs and I was in business. I made over a billion in a week. And I was all self-congratulatory, and aren't I smart, and now I'll tell other people how to do it. Selling on the market those first couple of weeks was EZ mode. IOs were going for 5 million a piece. Popular ones were going for 10 million, 15 million. Then the market got crowded. Lots of people tried the same tricks I used. Prices on many IOs dropped below 2 million. This is a good thing overall, more people can afford nice builds, but you have to work harder to make money. In my head, I knew the answer was to sell in volume, but in practice I didn't do it. I would craft maybe 10 IOs per market character and list them, and then wait maybe 2 days to craft more. I'd completely forgotten what selling in volume looked like. And my friends were all, have you conquered the market yet? And I was like, not quite but I'm working on it. But really, I wasn't. Over several weeks I've maintained about a billion influence total. I had between 500 and 600 million on my main / first character, and the 2-3 others I was working on would have maybe 100 to 200 million on them at any given time. On my electric/shield scrapper I was running a Council Earth farm, and I'd craft any recipes that dropped, but I'd keep the purples and you only maybe get a few recipes a run so I was making maybe 20 million a day at best. Not to say this was bad -- I was making money, and in a week or so I was approaching 200 million influence. But compared to a billion that first week? I was barely moving the needle. Not to say that most players wouldn't be trilled to have a billion influence lying around -- but my goal is to be able to buy Winter Packs by the fistful without even thinking about the cost. Is that too much to ask? Is that so wrong? (/em adjusts monacle) Enter my fire farmer. I'd intended to build one eventually, but I finally started the project Monday. Once I hit 30 and got relatively well IO'd (those Winter IOs will have to wait, never mind the Purple IOs for when I hit 50), I was able to self-PL using an AE fire farm map set to +2/8 (later turned to +3/8). I watched a video about how you can turn off experience at 50 and earn up to 8 million influence per map on this farm. Sounds good -- except! AE tickets are where the real money is at, if you're willing to craft and convert. I already knew this, so I set for AE rewards, and before I was level 40 I was at the 9999 ticket cap. I was forced -- forced! -- to spend them. I bought recipes, bronze roll, level 30-34. Everyone has their own favorite setting but that one is mine. I got a lot of recipes for a few thousand tickets. Admittedly, it takes a lot of time to craft and convert so many disparate recipes, and it takes experience to know what might sell, but such a wide mix of recipes forces you to look at IOs that you might not have considered selling. Some of those lower-level IOs are in short supply and go for 3 to 5 million influence, instead of the 1 to 2 million that many level 50 IOs sell for. I crafted so many recipes that I filled my inventory with crafted IOs. 70 IOs! And then I remembered: Oh yeah -- THIS is what marketing in volume looks like! I made 100 million in short order, even with buying all of my converters from the auction house. By this morning I had over 150 million and about 170 converters to use on over 50 crafted IOs in my inventory, so I tossed a bunch more onto the market and should easily have 200 or 250 million by this evening. And the question is, why haven't I been doing this on all of my market toons? (Aside from, it takes a lot of time and effort, of course.) So that's my market advice for the day. Volume. Don't craft 10 recipes and call it good. Craft 50 or 100. If you farm, run an AE ticket farm and roll as many recipes as you can hold. Craft everything that doesn't require rare salvage -- and maybe some of those, if it's the right kind of recipe. List a lot of stuff, make more money. ^_^

As an aside, I explained to a friend last night how LFG teleport for a full team works if everyone's in the same zone, and she immediately decided that a good use of this would be to assemble a team and then surprise teleport them to Doctor Quaterfield. Not, mind you, because the team would enjoy this, but.... Er... back on topic, I've never used Team Teleport, or encountered someone who used it, and I didn't realize it wasn't like Assemble the Team. And now that I know, I'm wondering why this power exists in it current form....

You get a level shift +1 for a Tier 3 or Tier 4 Alpha power (slotted). This applies to all content where you'd normally be level 50, and affects how the enemies con to you and how easy it is for you to hit them/how difficult it is for them to hit you. You also get two levels shifts (+1 each) for a Tier 3 or 4 Lore and Destiny power (slotted). These only apply in incarnate trials, including the two incarnate TFs in RWZ.

Yes, good idea, although you might not be able to do the entire zone arc starting at level 11. The Hollows: levels 5-15. David Wincott / Flux / Julius the Troll / Talshak the Mystic Steel Canyon: Laura Lockheart and Graham Easton, levels 15-24. (one-off arcs) Faultline: levels 15-24. Jim Temblor / Penelope Yin / Doc Delilah / Agent G Talos Island: Roy Cooling and Field Agent Keith Nance levels 20-29 (one-off arcs) Striga Isle: levels 20-29. Stephanie Peebles / Long Jack / Tobias Hanson / Lars Hanson Croatoa: levels 25-34. Gordon Bower / Skipper LeGrange / Kelly Nemmers / Buck Salinger

You want to head to Faultline. There’s a series of story arcs there that follow each other and are all contained in one zone. There’s really nothing like that in Skyway or Steel Canyon, but Striga Isle and Croatoa are designed that way once you get into the 20’s. Since you might be too low level for Faultline just yet, there are the two independent contacts in Steel Canyon you could do. They don’t introduce you to other contacts in a story arc, but each has a self-contained story arc that you could do that will help you get closer to Faultline level. I think one is Laura Lockhart? I forget the Tsoo guy’s name though.

I like Martial Arts the way it is. It's not flashy but the moves all work together well, one attack flows into the next. Katana and Broad Sword and some of the others, yeah they could use some love.

All common salvage goes int one pool/bucket. All uncommon salvage goes into one pool/bucket. All rare salvage goes into one pool/bucket. All recipes of a given type (say, Positron Blast Accuracy/Damage) go into one pool regardless of level. All IOs go into a similar bucket by type, so there's a bucket for all Positron Blast Accuracy/Damage IOs. Note that this also includes attuned versions, you can buy an attuned version of any IO from the same bucket as a regular version. These changes were made on the SCORE server partly to benefit a smaller pool of players, and partly to prevent the sort of scarcity issues that one saw even on the live servers, where people might manipulate the market for Luck Charms, making them unavailable unless you paid hundreds of thousands of influence per piece, or where recipes at certain lower or mid levels weren't available at all because few people played at those levels. (There was a market forum - led group called Midlevel Crisis, whose entire goal was to supply the market with recipes in the low to mid levels because there often weren't any available). I like these changes and hope they remain for the Homecoming servers. It means that if you have 3 of a given recipe available, it doesn't matter if they are available at level 13, 17, and 27, I can buy them at the highest level the recipe exists, or conversely I could buy them at level 10 if it's something like a Miracle +recovery where there's no particular benefit to it being a higher level, and I can slot it on my low level characters as soon as possible. It also means there are fewer "junk" recipes, because your level 39 Positron's Blast is still useful for a level 50 character.

I hate respecing. Doesn't mean I don't wind up doing it, but in theory a build shows me where I want to go and how to get there, and when I get there, if I did it right, I won't have to respec. I don't worry about a "leveling" build. Getting to 50 is trivially easy, I don't have time to mess around with a build that I'll only use for the few days or weeks that it takes me to hit 50. I do agree that a lot of people post their dream builds for characters that they'll never actually play to 50 or, if they get there, never actually come up with all the IOs they need for that build. But I'm not like that. I make sure to implement my build once I hit 50. It's been a bit harder since we're all starting over here, but so far I have two level 50 characters fully IO'd, and I'm working on three more in their 40's.

I think it was Luna, I don't think she's gone but the anniversary badges are only available (including for purchase for older ones) during May.

That all depends on the rare. It's always been quite worthwhile to craft certain rares. Mind you, all you really need is to be able to craft for less than you sell. If you can craft for less than a million influence and sell for more than a million, you'll make a slim profit. Not as great a profit as someone who crafted for maybe less than a hundred thousand, but still, worth the effort to craft that rare recipe you already have, especially for anyone who doesn't want to mess around with converters. :D Still and all... I've been working on a new fire farmer, self-PLing at +2/8, up to level 42 now, and I hit my cap on AE tickets, so I bought a bunch of random junk recipes and then crafted and converted them all, and I made 100 million influence by morning. That still seems pretty magical, like I'm making money from nothing. I didn't borrow any money to do it, so I had to sell one IO to finance the next couple, and buy converters to convert more, but I still wound up well off in less than 24 hours, and with over 7,000 AE tickets still to spend.

I'm going to say ice melee/FA brute. Not because you can't fire farm on any type of /FA brute, burn is where most of your damage comes from after all. But on an ice melee/FA brute, burn is nearly all of your damage, because your primary contributes so little to the equation. Again, all /FA brutes are viable farmers so it's just a matter of degrees of effectiveness, but I've played every type of /FA brute possible (there are 22 primaries) and Ice Melee is by far the most annoying primary to work with on a farmer.

I always bind sprint and ninja run to the first and second numberpad keys so that I can turn them on and off at will. Later, when I get fly (or some other travel power) I'll replace the sprint one: /bind numpad1 "powexecname sprint" /bind numpad2 "powexecname ninja run" /bind numpad1 "powexecname mystic flight" Click on powers on your power tray -> combat attributes and then right-click on any stats/attributes that you'd like to always know and select the monitor option. My go-tos are current hit points, defensive stats (usually smashing defense, fire defense, energy defense, unless it's a character that favors positional defense like a /shield scrapper), maybe some resistance stats, recharge, damage bonus, influence. Whatever, now you have a window you can place anywhere that shows those stats. When you get to level 35 you can go to Night Ward, where you'll appear in a hedge maze around a mansion. Go inside the mansion, you'll get an explore badge that instantly grants you access to Midnighter's / Cimerora. (You can do this before 35, but Cimerora is level 35 to access.) When someone wants you to join a task force, in particular an ITF, tell them you'll be there in a second. Don't join a team yet. Open you your LFG tab, find the contact for that task force, and then click the button next to him and also click the button to LOCK THE TEAM (lock the event for your group). Then click queue, and you'll instantly teleport to the contact. (Obviously, this only works for task forces and trials that have an in-world contact). So if you want to join an ITF and don't have the badge, you can get it inside a minute and teleport directly to Imperious.

Always bear in mind that you can slot an ATO set or the Winter O Frozen Blast set, so long as money is no object those are options too. Catalyzing your Positron's Blast will only turn them into attuned versions. Attuned IOs are useful if you're not level 50 yet since they level up with you, and they're nice if you plan to exemplar some of the time as they exempt down with you (purple and pvp IOs will do the same sort of thing). However rather than catalyzing your slotted set, you could just buy attuned versions of them and swap them out with unslotters. Much cheaper. Also if you're level 50 you might want to boost your level 50 IOs to 50+5 for some extra oomph. You can't do that with attuned IOs. Just another consideration.

So love means tying up your family in the basement? /em puts on "Masochism Tango".

I think the market is cross-server? I haven't actually checked that, I just assumed it was.

I don't think the number of bids is weird. Them selling for less than you had bid, that's weird. Why would 800 people be bidding on Gravitational Anchors? Well, it's probably not 800 people, but much closer to one guy putting in hundreds of lowball bids, and maybe a couple of other people like you placing bids. I mean, if I want to buy Gravitation Anchor recipes, it costs me 1 million to place 10 bids at 100,000 a piece, and I can toss up a few hundred bids on one character in just a minute, and only be outlaying a few million influence to do it. Much cheaper if I'm bidding 100 or 111 influence. Also, if I do this on several characters it can look like there's a great demand for the item in question, which can maybe convince people to drop it at 1 influence thinking they're bound to get the highest bid out there -- which might just be my 111 influence bid, or my 100,000 influence bid, whatever lowball bid I've placed, assuming nobody else has a higher bid. When I see stuff going for lowball bids, with lots of bids out, that's what I think is going on. Never assume a lot of bids means a lot of people bidding, especially on something that might not be overwhelmingly popular otherwise. Gravitation Anchor is one of the less popular purple sets. Craft it, convert it into a damage set, and you can make good money.

Pro Tip: One of the things that the SCORE team changed, thanks to many many MANY requests from players, is that you can NOT accidentally vendor a purple recipe. Try it -- you can't sell them to the NPC vendors at all, they don't show up as an option to sell. It was pretty much determined that NO ONE would EVER want to sell one of those at vendor prices. Now, accidentally selling other recipes that you meant to keep, you're on your own there....

My understanding is it's one VM per Rikti kill that your team did any damage to (couldn't say for sure if it's "any damage at all" or "a certain amount/percentage of damage", but I believe it's any at all). People with AoEs on your team help a lot. Having an active player with Water Blast or Fire Blast? Priceless. HOWEVER... If you're too far away from the rest of the team, you don't get credit. So yeah, herding is a thankless job.