Yomo Kimyata

In order to make a 20% profit per trade, you need to buy at 375k and sell at 500k (for example). You're not buying at 375k. You talked about putting in floors. I know where the floors are in rare salvage, and I know that barring a major sell fest, your friends aren't going to be buying at 375k. Now selling at 500k? It happens every day, but the only way you are going to get that sale is if you are offering something well below 400k. And then you take the chance that someone like me decides to pay 405k for a thousand or two. There's no way you (or me) is going to get off a 20% profit on 1,000 units in a day. No, it's not a good beginner's market. You can probably make a lot more inf on the yellow salvage market. Either bidding below vendor value or even bidding above and selling a few hundred units in an hour. That's a good way to learn about layered caps and floors, imo.

I have to disagree with you here. The rare salvage market isn’t a good place to learn marketing. Thanks to fungibility it’s a real liquid market with good real supply and demand, but in my opinion it’s not lucrative enough. Buying at 380 and selling at 420 is a net loser, and that’s no way to learn. You can make inf on it, sure, but there are so many easier ways to get your feet wet. IMO

Also, I've found that it's a lot easier to take markets where they want to go rather than make them go where I want them to. I've probably got 10-20k of yellow and orange salvage in storage on various characters. I almost never pay buy-it-nao prices for salvage, but I do not abide with putting in bids that don't get filled by the end of my session. So if they haven't, I'll throw a few hundred/thousand into the market, lay down some buy-back bids, and move on. Maybe I make a profit, maybe not. But I cannot stand putting in a block of 50-200 bids on rare salvage and not getting filled relatively soon.

The problem with painting the tape (changing the last 5) is that it only works so long as you constantly keep painting the tape. And in order to keep trade prints either artificially high or artificially low, you need to keep selling things too cheaply or buying them too expensively which means you are losing inf with the deception. Of course, sometimes the display bug does it for you.

Radiologist: "Good news! Your x-rays show ..." Yomo: "Die!" Radiologist: "Ack, ..." Research Assistant: "Hey Professor, we need more time on the supercomputer and ..." Yomo: "Die!" Research Assistant: "Ack, ..."

There are LOADS of them. I’ve been meaning to make a master list of guides on the Guide or the Market forum, so I’ll get on that.

In my opinion, there are two major factors preventing long-term successful market manipulation in HC: 1. You can't fake demand. At the end of the day, if you want to buy 10,000 LotG 7.5%, you either have to use them, sell them, give them away, or delete them. I see plenty of people try to drive a market up by bidding out existing supply, but then they neglect to leave protective bids. And if those bids are too high, I'm going to hit them. My extremely unscientific observations say that there are about 100-200 new lvl 50s being equipped each day. For me, that expresses the limit of how many of something I should expect to sell. 2. You can't stop supply. Especially with converters. Now, if you don't care about making a profit and you just want to cause chaos, well, there's nothing we can do about it except take the opposite side until you get bored or run out of inf.

Hmm, I haven't seen this at all. I'm buying all I need at 1,000 and selling all I need at 1,000 and I'm not waiting more than a few minutes?

So, I've been leveling my Dark/Atomic blaster in Praetoria/First Ward/Night Ward, and I've been playing her organically, meaning that I'm adding slots and powers where I need/want them rather than focusing on an end build. My initial look at this from a lvl 50 would be as a mostly melee based character, but as of now (at 27) she's been mostly a ranged character. In fact, she plays a lot like a controller, with Positron Cell and Abyssal Gaze as controls while "arresting" with other powers. My thought process on powers: Primary: Gloom or Dark Blast. I dislike DoT, especially ranged DoT. I end up overkilling constantly. But I cannot reconcile choosing Dark Blast over Gloom on how I see the numbers. Tenebrous Tentacles. I can't do it. I just can't Everything else I take. Secondary: Atomic is too good on paper. I can't bring myself to skip any of them. I'm trying to work out a few issues: Do I slot my holds for hold or damage or procs? Right now I'm leaning on 2- or 4- slotting them with Basilisk Gaze for the ranged D. Beta Decay seems too good not to 4 slot. I'd love to 4-slot Metabolic Acceleration as well. I really have no idea how to slot Life Drain. It seems of much higher use as a defensive power than an offensive one. Then I'm just screwing around with slot allocation. Am I better off 3 slotting 2 defense powers or 4 slotting one and 2 slotting another. So far, it's been a blast though. Here's my current thought process on my future build:

This is a very valid point. You can spend ten minutes a day marketing for six days and make a *lot* more than farming for 60 minutes straight. But can you make more farming for 10 hours straight than you can for marketing 10 hours straight? Personally, I'd still be on the side of marketing, but there certainly is a component where you have to wait for "someone else" to supply you with component pieces and to buy your end product. I think I addressed this in my 24-hour challenge thread a while back.

Every time I "arrest" Archon Roget I yell, "Throw the book at him!" Sometimes, someone else on the team says "You mean tome!" and I know I've found one of my people.

I made a suggestion about this a few weeks ago, specifically in terms of Longbow enemies. Crickets. The Current debuff animation is for all intents and purposes invisible .

"Steal Data from Neuron's Labs" I will skip this one every time from here on out.

Just on a hunch... I picked up Nuclear Power Plant on Everlasting. I guess I have to make: Plant/Radiation controller? Plant/Radioactive dominator?? Radiation/Plant blaster???

I like it and usually start it around lvl 12. It's a heckuva lot easier than the redside equivalent of Darrin Wade.

To be fair, even in the real world the nomenclature isn't really accurate. But having "risk arbitrage" as your stated strategy makes it a lot easier to raise capital than calling it "merger speculation." And in theory, you could. Find a counter-party who owns a lot of winter packs and enter into a contract with them where you borrow the packs from them and promise to replace the packs plus a profit a month later. The problem, of course, if finding that counter-party (and enforcing the contract).

Opening lots of any kind of pack is a bit of a godsend for altoholics because everything gets jammed into Character Items, which you can then access at any time on any character on that account, even in an instance. Some things it is great for: Unslotters -- you will never run out of these, ever. So if you need one or two, just grab them and don't bother with the AH. Catalysts -- you don't need these at all until you ding 50, then you need a bunch of them, then you earn one a day forever. Again, save yourself the effort of buying a block of 20. Boosters -- just like catalysts, only probably less necessary. Inspirations -- I find these next to useless AH-wise, but if you are soloing an AV on your level 15 controller, you can keep drawing down on these during a mission. Respecs -- again, you will never run out. Respec early, respec often. Revival Temp power -- the equivalent of emailing yourself a wakie. and merits, glorious merits. I also just used a bunch of these to get all the anniversary badges on a character, but I mostly use them if I need converters on an alt and don't want to wait for my target price (which is dropping daily) to fill. I try to keep a reserve of about 10k handy

I kid, I kid. I wouldn't call it arbitrage, as that is defined as riskless and instantaneous (our old friend brainstorm ideas sometimes fit that bill). I'd probably call it market-making, or speculation. I'd say it's 1-5% of my business, and really only stuff that can't be converted. For all intents and purposes, I buy converters in bulk at 50-70k and do the equivalent of selling them for a million each...

This sounds perilously close to what the kids nowadays call "flipping," which is the scourge of Primal Earth, ad makes Ms. Liberty cry...

Also, although I agree it is technically possible that someone has amassed one trillion in influence and spent it all on their characters, I still highly doubt that it has actually happened on HC. I would be over the moon if someone proved me wrong, but really the only way to prove it is to liquidate everything and since we are all crazy rich anyway that wouldn't (in my opinion) be worth the effort. Once you have enough inf to do whatever you want, it's kind of irrelevant whether you can do that ten times over, or a thousand times over. IMO.

I considered doing something similar, and still may if there is demand. But I have a different pricing model. You give me a build and 1bn, I buy you everything you need and either email you or meet you in game and transfer everything and return the excess. Then I get paid my fee, which I'm trying to figure out if it should be 500mm or 1bn. My rationale is that sending 100 emails in and of itself takes up so much more effort than I want that I'd charge a fee for the effort. I also think that people would try to game the system and send you a build with 9 lvl 53 cytos (I have one).

I’m gonna guess that’s because they aren’t doing the mission for the challenge and just want to go back to farming Council minions for incarnate rewards.

I believe that any build can solo an EB.

This is my understanding as well, and I love me some Res Debuff. It doesn't stack at all, even if two or more players trigger the proc on the same mob. It merely resets the duration.