Yomo Kimyata

Hmm, I'd watch this sooner rather than later. It's a neat idea (like when someone edited Julie and Julia to keep only the Julia Child parts), but unless they have direct permission this might be taken down from YouTube at some point. Maybe not, I'm no lawyer, but I sometimes rescue them from the Devouring Earth.

Cool! Also, you might be interested in this guide I wrote a while back. This was before low level SOs were freely available, so in a lot of cases SOs really are best for lvl 25 and under. But I hope you find it useful:

Right, but if you slotted that instead with lvl 13 SOs (1x accuracy, 1x end reduction, 3x damage), you would have comparable accuracy, roughly twice as much damage. And at a fraction of the cost.

I've made it up to Master Midnight, Miss T is 26 (just picked up Adrenal Booster -- I'll respec to Poison Trap another time), and maybe I'm not levelling quickly enough. I don't like to look ahead, but I think I only have two arcs left in First Ward, so I doubt I'll be 29 by the end of Vanessa Vavavoom. I've finally got a few complains about content in the First Ward. I'm sure lots of this is unfamiliarity with the content, but they are complains nonetheless. The final mission in Blind Melon's arc is needlessly tedious. It's teneedlious. I get that redside has lots more ambushes than blueside, but goldside seems to be taking this to an extreme. Five waves for four accompanying NPCs, AND it's an enemy you have to kill twice. Teneedlious. A less solid complaint is that in the missions that you have a companion, often that companion is needlessly overpowered. It's overneepowlied. Sometimes I feel like a doorsitter in an AE mission. Just kidding, how in the world would I know how THAT feels? HA HA HA! I think I overpriced some of my goods last time. Thanks to circumstances, I often forget what day of the week it is and I've generally noticed that IOs tend to hit a low point in value Wednesday/Thursday. I'm not sure if that's a lack of demand before the weekend, or if it's a bunch of marketers pushing supply into the market in front of the weekend. Probably a bit of both. I've put in some bids for a bunch of things that I think I can turn around quickly, but we'll see how quickly those bids fill. It's also time to go through my recipe inventory again. Look out for those orange recipes which don't need rares (yay!) and for those yellow recipes that do (boo!). Rare salvage has gotten very pricy of late, and I ain't paying no fifty cents for no Coke. This time around I crafted 14 yellow recipes, and hey, there's a Gladiator's Net (PvP) and a Impervious Skin (easily transformed to a Steadfast Protection). Guess I'm paying fifty cents each for two Cokes. Now when I talk about "stupid market tricks," I'm not actually saying that they are, in fact, stupid. I'm just saying in many cases it's not someone looking to make a profit, but it's more often someone just trying to poke the market with a stick and see what happens. Something like that is going on in both uncommon (yellow) and rare (orange) salvage right now. In yellow-land, there is a consistent heavy buyer at 1,001, and there is often a heavy seller at 1,002 -- possibly the same person. Why? Who knows. If it is one person, they are losing about 100 inf per trade round trip, but keep in mind that really isn't a lot of money. Perhaps someone is trying to get the Power Seller badge on all of their alts? Who knows. Rares are a bit more enigmatic. Prices have been going up up up over the two weeks I've been writing this, and there are deep buyers, like thousands deep. There doesn't seem to be a profit to be made here, since buying at 500k means you need to sell at 555k+ in order to break even after the fees. So maybe it's just someone feeling their oats. Regardless, I've got a stash of rares for just such an occasion. Not specific rares, just thousands of Alien Blood Samples I've been holding onto just in case someone wanted to try and push rares back up towards the seeded ceiling of 1mm. Yeah, I'm going to eat the transaction fees and the bid-offer spread, but in case prices get pushed north of 600-700k I'll be ready. Needless to say, Miss T doesn't have such a stash, so she's just going to have to buy things where she can. EDIT: Ok, here's an example of what I mean by weird and wacky goings-ons. So I ended up buying a bunch more rares, then ended up selling the extras. I bought all of these at exactly 500,000 (and the brainstorms I bought at 20,002): So yeah, somehow people ended up paying OVER A MILLION on average for these rares. I mean, yes, they are Yomo-owned and Yomo-approved, but that means that people bid well over the seeded price for some of these. And the rich get richer. This is a real headscratcher! I think I'm at the point where I can't think of a particular topic for discussion for each post anymore, so I'm going to open this up for requests. There are only three topics that I will not fully divulge at this point in time -- everything else is fair game as far as I'm concerned. One is my exact pricing strategy, both for buying and selling. I feel that it's kind of my competitive advantage, so I'll be happy to give generalizations but not what I do exactly. The second and the third will remain shrouded in secrecy for the time being, which undoubtedly means that they will be the first two things people ask about. So ask away. See you on the other side, Ray.

I think you are missing the forest for the trees here. At level 10, if you slot the three Shield Breaker accuracy IOs you get +20.4% accuracy plus the 11% bonus across all powers. Or you can slot one lvl 13 accuracy SO and get +38.3% accuracy on that power. "Optimizing" a specific attribute isn't that useful unless you take into account your slotting opportunity costs. And although a few % of defense is always helpful, it is marginal. Two suggestions: if you pick up a defense-slottable power like Combat Jumping from the Leaping pool or Hover from the Flight pool, at level 7 you can slot the Kismet +Accuracy (which is actually To-Hit and thus even better!) to help with accuracy issues. If you go into the Fighting Pool, you can pick either Kick or Boxing and then at level 14 you can choose Tough. At level 15 you can add a slot to Tough. There are two unique Resist Damage IOs (Steadfast Protection and Gladiator's Armor) that will give you an overall defense bonus of 3% EACH. That 6% at level 15 at the cost of two slots is MUCH more effective and cheaper both in terms of inf cost and in terms of slotting.

I give away a lot of things to other people, so it would be a slight PITA if the default was my own name. I think that accommodating both your play style and my play style is probably best accomplished by leaving the default To: as blank, as it currently is.

Imma making a broadsword/regen brute for Praetoria. He's gonna rock!

In my experience, at that level you are far better off investing in accuracy than in defense. Dead ghouls don't fight back.

800 merits will get you 8 purple recipes of your choice, and each of those will cost you about 2mm to craft. People may tell you that's a dumb way to go about it, but there's nothing wrong with it. It may not be the most cost effective way, but it's the quickest and the most certain. Another option is to trade in those merits at a merit vendor for various goods that you can trade directly on the /AH. Converters are tried and true, and 100 merits gets you 300 converters, which you can sell in 30 blocks of 10. Let's say you offer them at 70,000 and sell them there. That's 21,000,000 inf before the AH takes its vig, so 18.9mm after taxes. That's enough to directly buy an already crafted purple with probably a little bit left over. There are lots of other things you can trade in merits for as well, some may net you a little more, some a little less. A third option is to convert all the merits to converters and use those converters yourself to change less valuable items into more valuable items. They are really magical, and converting is a great way to make lots and lots of inf. There are a bunch of guides available. Good luck and happy hunting!

Are you looking to exchange them for inf, or are you looking to get items you need, or other?

If it makes you feel any better, they are definitely the best procs out there. Those five in particular.

The Terrigen Miss just finished Noble Savage's and Katie Douglas' arcs and, yeah, now we're talking! I had been considering moving up to +3/x1 but nerp, I'm sticking at +2! The Possessed and Apparitions, especially the bosses, are no jokes, and I'm really enjoying it. I just dinged 24, and am experimenting a bit with Experimentation. At 24, I wrestled between adding Corrosive Vial or Adrenal Booster and went with the former. It's still new to me, but combined with Weaken and Envenom, it really helps with tough bosses. I'll try AB at some point, and there will certainly be at least one more respec in my future. I may have made a mistake in picking up Kick and Tough already. I think I could use Maneuvers and Tactics from Leadership a lot more. Also, since I mostly play melee characters, I've still relatively new to the mechanics of snipes, at least the whole fast-snipe-with-slow-snipe-damage. Right now I've got Toxic Dart, X-Ray Beam, and Proton Volley 5-slotted with Decimation; Electron Haze 3-slotted with Vigilant Assault and two procs; Irradiation 4-slotted with 3 procs and an accuracy SO. Don't sweat using respecs or unslotters -- I got 2 of the former and dozens of the latter from my Hero Pack experiment. Speaking of which, I streamlined my process a bit to hurry it up. I had sold 30 of the 51 ATOs at my price by today. My planned system had been to take down the remaining 21 ATOs (costing 5% of the posting fee), convert once by ATO (costing 1 converter) and repost at my original price. Instead, I reposted at a discount price, just to move past this chapter, since we're moving closer to our goal of 1bn and since I'm starting to run out of relevant lessons. One thing that was interesting was that the unsold ATOs weren't all the ones you would expect (less frequently played ATs, crappy sets) but included some really popular items. This brings me to the madness of crowds and overreacting. Sometimes, suppliers of goods lose sight of the forest for the trees and overproduce popular items by changing unpopular items into popular items. But unpopular doesn't necessarily mean no demand. So in my ATO example, I had unsold brute ATOs and sold Kheldian ATOs, all at the same price. Another example is in Luck of the Gamblers: Normally, the most popular ones are the proc, the Def, and the Def/End and the other three tend to lag in flow and/or price. Well, not very long ago the supply of the D/E/R dropped pretty low, presumably because people were not putting them on the market and were instead converting them to the top three. So when I noticed that, I saved myself some converters and started selling them directly. I am a big fan of putting together systems for making inf. My favorite systems are what I like to call "sustainable factories" -- I like to identify items that are in high or at least consistent demand, and to create them by using other materials that I can replenish in short order. And I like to do this in blocks that I can sell to real end user demand on a daily basis. A theoretical factory would be putting in bids on lvl 41 Red Fortune recipes, crafting them to IOs, converting until you get a LotG, converting the crappy LotG IOs to the good ones, putting them up for sale, and putting more bids in on the recipes. Assuming no market pvp (lol), this is sustainable so long as you are able to buy more recipes as fast as you are able to or want to make and sell LotG IOs. Some of my factories lag in supply and I have to wait to replenish. Some of my factories lag in demand, so I have to be careful not to choke the market with too much supply. And my favorite, of course, are those Goldilocks factories where I steal everything from the bears and then have them killed am able to spit out product as fast as I want to. Don't get me wrong, rare roulette is great! It's a wonderful way to put out as much product as you feel like making and it's good bank. But having a good system (and periodically rechecking your assumptions and changing things if necessary) is potentially much more profitable and definitely faster. I'm in the process of getting rid of all the inventory I accumulated (the Kinetic Crash and Paralytic recipes which I will craft and crack), and I'm currently in the beta stage of our newest factory. I suspect it will be limited by true end demand, but it's looking promising. I think I need to get through a weekend with its normally increased demand before I can make a real judgment on its value. Currently at about 650mm in straight cash inf homey, and have 65 items for sale. Stay frosty.

For me, a couple of different reasons: 1. Like @Ukasesaid, it's a good way to get a character started from scratch. 2. It's good practice, and it (hopefully) helps to keep the mind sharp. I could use some help there, for sure. 3. I think it's fun. Sometimes. In real life there are tons of financial strategies that are super low risk and super low margin that aren't worth the effort until you leverage it up 100x. And those are the strategies that make bank. Well, until they go pear shaped.

Just now someone was bidding 50,000 and I sold about 150 into that bid.

I'm down with that!

Today, I'd like to discuss market pvp (lol). I really only think of two types of market pvp (lol): large buyers competing against other buyers, and large sellers competing against other sellers. Compared to Live, there is blessedly comparatively much less of this on HC. But it exists, and there really isn't anything to be done about it. If you are buying something in bulk (like rare salvage), it helps to periodically check the last five history to see if your bid is still the best one. Sometimes, someone sees a bunch of trades at (for example) 475,000 and so put in mass bids at 475,001. It's annoying, but all you can really do is to outbid them, or wait until their bids get filled. If you are selling something in bulk, and you haven't made any sales in a while, check to see if someone is under-offering you. that's harder to see because trade histories print at the bid, and you don't really know where the offer is. There is, of course, a foolproof way to see what the highest outstanding bid (HOB) and the lowest outstanding offer (LOO) is, but you may not like it. First of all, you bid creep on an item until you buy one. In theory, you would increase your bid by 1 inf each time until you bought one, but that's hideously impractical. I normally start at a low number then increase bids by 100k until I buy it. Keep in mind that people also like round numbers or repeating numbers or numbers that are easy to type. So by bid creeping you can find the approximate (or exact) ceiling. There's no guarantee that the next one is at the same level, but it's a decent guess. Then, in order to find the floor, all you need to do is what I tell people never to do: sell the item at 1 inf and see where the trade occurs. Again, no guarantee that there are more bids at that level. But you may be asking, what about the market pvp (lol) between buyers and sellers? I don't really consider that pvp, because it's getting two parties together for (hopefully) mutual gain. But that said, there are some tricks and traps, some dirty, some not-so-dirty that people will use. I'm not going to detail them there, but it's handy to remember that buyers always want you to sell things for cheaper, and sellers always want you to buy things more expensively. Also, I want to talk about what I call "stupid market tricks" after the bit from David Letterman many years ago. There is a lot of inf out there, and there are a lot of items out there. Not every trade has to make economic sense, and sometimes people will do things just for the lulz. Also keep in mind that the devs hold the keys to the Fed and can change anything they want at any time with no warning. So don't count on things staying the same forever. Now that I've gotten that ray of sunshine out of the way, let's look at our latest project: Hero Packs! There have been tons of threads about these and about Winter Packs, so I'm going to ask you to read there for greater detail. But I had some spare inf lying around and wanted to demonstrate a real time strategy. This morning I bought a total of 40 packs (20 Hero and Villain, 20 the other one) at 9,999,999 and 10mm each respectively. I always check to see if someone is selling at less than the seeded price, and sure enough, I saved myself 20 inf in total. I opened them all and tracked what I got: 51 ATOs 48 insprations 460 Brainstorms 450 merits 54 converters 59 unslotters 8 boosters 3 catalysts and a bunch of temp powers, a respec or two. Now all these items go into an account-wide grab bag named Character Items that is on your email tab. Character Items is a magical place, and you can take items off of it on any one of your characters at any time, even in an instance like a mission (where you normally can't access the AH). My Character Items is a big mess, but for the sake of clarity I made sure to claim every item that came from these 40 packs with the exception of the inspirations. I have so many freaking inspirations on my Character Items that I just ignore them at this point. Then I created a system. Systems are very good for making inf. Step 1: put every ATO, regardless of type, on the market at the same price. That price was not 1 inf. That price was also not 10mm. That's all I'm giving you for now. Step 2: (this is where we are now) wait a day. Some sold instantly, more trickled in over time. Step 3: pull every unsold ATO, convert it once by category: ATO, and put it back on the market at the previous price. Step 4: wait a day. and repeat steps 3 and 4 if necessary. This means I'm listing brute ATOs at the same price as dominator ATOs, but who knows, I may get some people who are building dominators! Everything else, I'm keeping for now, except brainstorms, which I'm converting and selling as rare salvage. Ever since the first post when I talked about buying 20 brainstorms, I've been keeping an eye on them. Remember that you can convert 20x brainstorm to one random rare salvage, so if the going price is low enough, there is a pure arbitrage opportunity. And yes, as we've been watching rare salvage prices move higher (IMO stupid market tricks), brainstorms have remained low enough that I could buy 20, convert, sell the rare, and make over 100k profit. I've been engaging in market pvp (lol) for a week and a half now before I got tired of it and just put in a bunch of bids just over 20k. It has been quite profitable. Miss T finished her first arc and I really enjoyed it. First Ward is visually interesting, stories are engaging, it's dope stuff! She's now at level 22, and I'm doing a reassessment of slotting. Now is the time where I'm going to be swapping out SOs for IOs for the most part. I'm also regressing to a tactic I used to use in Live: put in a bid for 10x on something I want, slot one, sell the other nine. Working well. I'm sitting on about 100mm in cash inf and the rest is invested in a few other things, including possibly our new niche. The anticipation is terrible! I hope it lasts. In a while, crocodile.

I didn't read it that way at all. My initial reading, which I now think was wrong, was that they adjusted supply and demand by artificially using dev tools. On second look and after the OPs edit, it just looks like they thought that the HOs in question were too cheap, so they bought them all and put in a bunch of "fake" bids in order to try and fool people into believing there was actual demand. And then their bids got hit because there was no actual demand. Standard market manipulation, which we really can't stop, but I would have expected better from a GM. It's not like marketers have the best reputation to begin with, but a GM bragging about trying to trick people doesn't really help people trust the marketplace system. Let me put it this way: I expect cops to run red lights while stopping/preventing crime, but I don't expect them to run red lights off duty to get to the donut shop faster.

I've not done extensive research on this, but I think the Rebirth server (i.e., not Homecoming) is the closest to "old school" CoH right now.

The only PvP sniper recipes are Experienced Marksmen. You can ONLY convert these to other PvP sets (or convert in set, of course). I'm guessing you used different sniper recipes? No problem! There are (in my opinion) too many sniper recipes and the only one that's any good is Sting of the Manticore. Ask yourself, "What Do I Do with That?". My answer is (for uncommons), convert by rarity: uncommon until you get a different set from sniper, then convert by category: whatever that set is until you get a rare, then play rare roulette.

I've gotten great use out of my Staff/Bio stalker. I haven't run a 4/8 ITF yet, admittedly. But staff gets you two AoEs and automatic form of the Body and all of bio's goodness to help with the damage. It is not, however, a charge in and aggro two or three groups at once kind of build. I believe you have a like/hate relationship with bio, and my builds tend to sacrifice tankiness for offense.

I hear you and as a fellow human, I sympathize. It's tough to make silly mistakes. As a player, this reinforces that this is not a market driven economy and that any fiction of a free market can disappear in an instant at the whim of a GM. I don't have words right now to describe how I feel about this. EDIT: I think I just realized that you acted as an individual player, and did not use any programming reserved for developers. If that is the case, then this is just stupid market tricks.

So Miss T decided to run Penelope Yin's arc and I found it, sadly, unimpressive. But I figured that I'm a completer and since I'll be moving on to greener (grayer?) pastures in First Ward soon, I might as well. I've now run all the arcs for the Resistance: Warden storyline (except Dark Watcher, which I outlevelled) and overall, two thumbs up. It's s good story, and it's a story I'm new to, so great! I will certainly run the other three storylines (I've already made a Loyalist who is hooked on Rikti fan "fiction" named Boy.Fan, Battle Axe/Bio Armor scrapper, modelled in part on Comic Store Guy). My main complaint so far is that although the play is nicely difficult, there is very little challenge in the way of end bosses. I like my story arcs with lots of Elite Bosses, and maybe I'm spoiled, but 1 1/2 EBs in that entire storyline is too light for my tastes. To each their own. I also took some time to do some exploring and to pick up all the exploration badges in all six zones. There are some really nice vistas (visit above ground during the day though!) and I like the color scheme. It's not as dismal and hard on the eyes as redside, and not as saturated bright as a lot of blueside. I also read all the plaques for Headjuiced; well, look, maybe I didn't read every single little tiny syllable, no. But basically I read them, yeah. How'd you do on your homework assignment on Basilisk's Gaze? Personally, I would buy Paralytic recipes in the level 10-19 range. Convert them once by category: hold and you either have a BG or a Neuronic Shutdown. The NS proc sells well, and you can play rare roulette with the other pieces. Sadly, over the past two days I'm really not seeing a ton of interest in BG, despite the low supply. I've been flipping or buying and converting in set for small profits, but this is not the new niche I was looking for. Sometimes though, it really takes off, so it's useful to keep that in the back of your head. I've also been flipping some Perf Shift procs, buying around 2mm and selling 3-4mm. Not ridiculous money, but good flow. I've still got a bunch of Paralytic and Kinetic Crashes I should get rid of. All my spare marketing slots are going into bids on something I'll tell you about next time. The real project occurred when I was thinking ahead about my snipe power and how I wanted to slot that eventually. So I go looking at the snipe PvP recipes and was astounded, ASTOUNDED at how cheap they were. Don't people know that PvP IOs are all topologically equivalent?!? So I put in bids of 10x for each recipe in the set and within two days bought 60 of them. I guess a lot of people get a PvP drop and think, "Wow, great drop, I can sell this right now for 3+mm!". But I think, "Wow, great drop, I can craft this and convert it and make 8-10mm!" There's so much juice in PvPs as some of you know very very well. So I crafted them all and converted until I got something I wanted: all the Panaceas, some of the Shield Wall, some, but not all of the procs. And rather than set individual prices on each of them, I picked my price and listed them all at that price. Some insta-sold, which always makes me stop and wonder if I'm really selling things too cheaply. That reminds me of some of the fundamentals of the marketplace that I wanted to discuss. Now it is clear that every transaction has a buyer and a seller. But did you also ever thing about that every transaction has a passive counterparty and an active counterparty? By that I mean that every trade occurs when someone enters a new bid or a new offer in the system, and that bid is high enough (or the offer low enough) that it will cross with an existing order in the queue. That existing order was the passive counterparty -- they put in their order to buy or sell and were willing to wait for transaction. The new order was the active counterparty, and they either bid higher or offered lower than anyone previously in the system, which means that they paid up a little in order to instantly transact. This may not seem the least bit interesting, but it demonstrates how the passive counterparties will tend to get better prices because they have given up time in the form of how quickly their trade occurs; in exchange they get a slightly better price. There is nothing wrong with being the active counterparty or the passive counterparty, and both are necessary for trades to occur. Ok, thus endeth the boring part. Miss T is now at level 21 and we are very excited about the next part of her journey. Both for exploring a new zone, with new stories and new enemies, and for the wonders of soon dinging 22, which opens up a whole raft of new slotting choices. I'm gonna have to think on that. Most of my PvP IOs have sold, and I'm sitting on over 600mm in inf that is just burning a hole in my pocket. Can you guess what comes next? See you later, alligator.

As I've gotten better at the game over the (literally) years, I realize that it is beatable, but it takes a bit of luck and a lot of micromanagement. Even now on Immortal, it usually takes me a few tries to get a victory. The key is preventing a runaway rival. And for me, embracing war early and often really slows the AI down.

It's 2021. I really thought we'd have hover cars by now.

So Miss T has finally dinged 20 after finishing Helix's and Aaron Walker's arcs, and they were great! Why? GHOULS! Fat Bottomed Ghouls, the Ghoul from Ipanema, Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls! Every arc needs more Ghouls! I'm very much enjoying running all these arcs for the first time slowly, but I can't imagine running them more than once each. Nowadays, I like redside missions, and I vastly prefer the other content (like TFs or radios) either redside or blueside. And I'd really like to see more elite bosses. I still have some missions from Calvin Scott, and I can run the Penelope Yin arc, so I'm going to wrestle between doing those or moving on to First Ward. And oh, I learned something today. PRAETORIANS GET UNIQUE TITLES! WHY DID I NOT KNOW THIS!!! Every once of my Praetorians will be known as Sweetcheek from here on out. Well, only the Resistance. Once you gain interest in the AH, it really helps to keep an eye on things and try to take advantage if flows change. And then you have to ask yourself if things have really changed, or if someone is just screwing around. Example: when selling all the Performance Shifters I've made recently, I noticed that a lot of the procs were selling at 2mm. That seems low, very low. So I put in a bid for one just over 2mm and bought it. And I put in a bid for 10 there and bought 10 there. And put them up for sale and sold them for 4-5mm each. Generally, they trade somewhere in between, but if you see a buying opportunity, take it, you notorious flipper you. I also ended up buying 10 Endurance Mod/Recharge recipes at 5 inf each from my price-finding bid, so I figured that I really needed to craft those and convert some of them in set for the sake of diversification. Speaking of diversification, I noticed something with the purples I crafted and converted. I ended up with about 25-30 of them and converted all to one of the damage types as detailed in last issue. Soon, everything sold at my price except for the Apocalypses. Normally, I don't look at my purple sales on a daily basis, and I would let it sit for a few more days. But no, I need those market slots! So I convert them to a non-Apocalypse damage type and relist. Moving quickly. One thing I hoped to get out of this documentation was to try and start up a new market niche for kicks, and the first step is to learn more about potential candidates. Basilisk's Gaze is a very useful low-level rare with good set bonuses, but it ranges in price a fair amount based on supply. Run your own analysis on this, and ask yourself if you were to make BGs, how would you go about it and which ones in the set would you target to sell? I also started a new project for the next lesson that took some working capital but I guess I'd be up to about 400mm in profits right now if I weren't invested. A great way to make consistent bank, no matter how often you play a given alt, is to put in a bid for 10x a yellow recipe that doesn't require rare salvage as the last thing you do before logging off. First thing you do when next logging on is collect them and put in bids on your salvage. Play and you should have bought your salvage by the end of your game session. Collect salvage, craft, play some rare roulette, and post your items. Put in a bid for 10x yellow recipe. Repeat ad infinitum. May the odds always be in MY favor.