Yomo Kimyata

That *does* sound like something I would do.

*cough cough tickets too*

Accumulating, stealing lollipops from babes. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

TOs (like DOs, SOs, and common IOs (and HOs) ) aren't fungible or bucketed, so the level does matter.

And now over 80% of the bids have been filled, but there are still plenty more! If only there were some way to create training-os for cheap. If only there were some way... (The "Take One" request has been removed at this point. Feel free to clean me out.)

Now I'm not saying you should do something about the aliens, and I'm not saying you shouldn't. But I *am* saying that there is a market for their blood...

It seems to me that the people who blame "market manipulation" for why they are not successful enough in Homecoming are very similar to those who used to blame witches for their crop failures. Both were superstitious and made up scapegoats to account for their own shortcomings, and both were crappy farmers.

Kneading, manipulation, all the same thing.

I'm not a social RPer, and I 100% support this for exactly that reason. I can't stand when I run to Pocket D to level or whatever and I get a barrage of cringey softcore dialogue in my window. Keep that radius as short as possible, please!

Clearly, *CLEARLY*, the Z in Bill Z Bubba stands for Znoob.

I'm sure that using the AH interface puts a big strain on computing resources. Has anything changed from your end as far as your computing demands? Are you running with more apps open than usual? I don't recall ever having the game crash on me while using the market. It's probably happened, but not frequently enough for me to notice that it was while I was using the market.

I make well less than 10% of my ill-gotten gains from making markets, and I will stop "flipping" the instant noobs stop selling me things to flip.

I think of farming as pretty much playing regular content, to an extent. Over time, people faced with any repeatable task will tend to move towards the most efficient way to complete that task because economics, aka the allocation of scarce resources, works. I'm ok with that. I run Heather Townsend arcs when I want incarnate components. I skip cave missions when I'm running scanner missions. Sometimes farming, as some could define it, pushes the boundaries in my opinion. Example: AFK farming. For me, this is mainly an aesthetic, or possibly a moral objection. It's like when a little kid pokes his fingers at his little sister and says, "I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!" Technically correct, but it doesn't sit well with me. So then I have to look and see if my objection has any merit in terms of "Is this hurting other people?" Inflation is one possible concern. Marketing is clearly deflationary; farming may or may not be inflationary. My observations over the past two years have seen mostly deflationary pressure; your observations may differ. Getting annoyed by broadcast spam could be another possible concern, but I can move past that. There may be other concerns. But for the most part, I really don't think farmers are hurting me personally. Now, if we are going to come back to the farmers v. marketers (or "cowmen" as I used to call it!) argument, well, I don't know what else to say. It's kind of like when tourists visit NYC and have dinner at the Olive Garden in Times Square and brag about it on social media. I mean, sure, if you're happy with it, good on you! But you should know that there are so many better and/or cheaper alternatives out there.

Thank you for that:

Disbalanced.

A deity at that!

Well, if this were a much bigger universe with many more active players (and more active traders), I would personally want a volume indicator, as well as a bid-offer spread. But I doubt the former is even possible based on my understanding of the programming, and the latter would obviate the purpose of the blind bidding system. So I'm pretty content as things are. It takes a little thought to figure out what the bids and offers really look like, and I'm totally fine with a little thought being rewarded.

I read that as "gnushy", which totally should be a word. I have no idea what it would mean, but I like the way it looks and sounds.

Well, to be honest, I don't see a lot of value added by an index. I get that you want an overall "health of the economy" gauge, but there are issues with a price index with a blind auction system. Namely, what happens when you take the snapshot of rare salvage and you have 4 prints of 406,067 and one print of 10,000,000? Yes, the 10mm print is probably a fat finger trade, or someone wanting to give away funds, but it certainly doesn't represent the trading value of an alien blood sample. Similarly, I would read the 406,067 prints as the highest outstanding bid, meaning that it is the low end. And without big macro events (Winter Event, new issue released) the only fundamental changes would be from an ebb or flow of player activity or from an outlier player or two doing arbitrary things in the market. I would hate for someone to say "OMG, Trap of the Hunter procs are worth 9mm now!!!" just because I decided to clear out a backlog of inventory for my own inscrutable reasons. But if someone wants to do this, have at it! I'd be happy to opine on items for inclusion.

@DougGraves, you should do an analysis like this for the Family. There is a HUGE discrepancy between the two boss types. Consiglieres have gravity powers which are really effective with knockback and immobilize if you don't have enough mez protection. They can be a real pain in the butt. And then there are the sad-sack Underbosses, with no gravity powers at all. They're never gonna knock you up. They're never gonna hold you down. They're never gonna propel a forklit and invert you.

Some numbers: 2bn -- approximately the total inf amount of bids still outstanding 500 -- the total number of possible places I hid it 29.8% -- the probability that there were two or more bids on the same item 76 -- the number of TOs my distracting bids snared at the price of 1 inf 15 -- just a number, I think 8 -- the number of days it took me to set up this tournament a lot less than 8 -- the number of days it took me to accumulate 5.55bn inf

I'm a little ashamed to admit I just sold a Miracle proc for 10mm and I was offended because the glitched display *clearly* has the lowest trade occurring over 13mm.

Remember: there are two basic ways to accumulate inf in this game. 1. Inflationary methods. Killing mobs, finishing missions, selling items to *vendors*. These all generate inf from nothing, and increases the pool of inf in the system. Basically, these are all fundamental parts of playing the game. Farming as we know it is merely an extension of this, playing the game in a way to maximize creating inf in as fast and as easy a method as possible. If only inf was created and nothing was sold on the AH, then there would be an increasing amount of inf and a limited amount of goods. We would expect prices on goods to increase, which would help some and hurt others. Generally, inflation is not considered to be a good thing and I'll let you do your own research on that or take a Macro 101 class. 2. Deflationary methods. Getting drops/merits/whatever, maybe transforming them, and selling them on the AH. Everything you sell is (in theory) bought by another player. No one is creating inf -- you are merely moving it around from one person to another. Since every transaction on the AH erases 10% of the value of the transaction in inf terms, inf gets deleted from the system, and it is deflationary. If you could only get inf from trades on the AH, there would be a shrinking amount of inf to be spent on goods. Since inf would be the rare commodity, we would expect prices to decrease as each inf gets increasing buying power. Deflation is also not considered to be a good thing, although generally preferred to inflation. In fact, running missions or farming, involves both of these methods. You get inf and some of your drops (common IO recipes, maybe salvage) you vendor. That's inflationary. You get recipes, craft them (deflationary, since crafting fees are a sink), sell them and 10% of the price gets deleted. That's deflationary. So, is farming/running missions quickly and optimally against easy enemies good or bad for the economy? In theory, there is a multiplier of 10x, where an influx of 10mm in the system would be offset by aggregate trading of 100mm worth of goods. (You buy something on the AH for 10mm, the recipient buys something worth 9mm, they spend 8.1mm on something else, etc.). So if running farming missions produce 10mm of raw inf, and provides 100mm worth of goods, it should be neutral. I believe that the devs were worried enough about that multiplier to remove some farming exploits and slow down the process some. Now, in reality that multiplier is probably a lot less than 10x for a number of reasons. A big one I can think of is that I am out there taking away all your inf and hoarding it, essentially taking it out of circulation. That's partly because I'm greedy; partly to help the economy; partly because there isn't anything for me to spend it on that would not disrupt the system and thereby negatively affect someone else's playing experience. But what I have witnessed is more of a glut of supply -- probably not because there is too much inf and not enough goods being created, but because there are flat out not as many players making as many alts as they used to. tl;dr I'm fine with farmers at this point in time. Also, they are not within an order of magnitude of earning potential in terms of inf accumulated per active minute spent as marketing.

Honestly, they are not as bad as Antimatter’s robots. At least you generally get Vahz at low levels. But at high levels you get vast numbers of Scrub Bots, debuffing your defense with ranged energy attacks when your defenses are capped to melee and smashing. And no, I don’t want no Scrubs. A Scrub is a bot that can’t get no love from me.

Something I tend to forget -- don't choose double xp until you have enough inf to pay listing fees. You used to be able to sell the TOs you got in Outbreak/Breakout to the vendors, but they replaced TOs with that other thing that you can only delete, not sell. Even one defeat at regular XP will give you enough inf to list your inspirations at the minimum. Then, of course, Goldside tutorial gives you 50 inf for some reason, so you can ignore my advice there. Keep up the good work!