Yomo Kimyata

It *should* not matter. Block trades *should* partially execute based on price whether or not the full block size is achieved. I suspect you see that because people tend to buy salvage in large blocks rather than one or two at a time. I say *should* because the algorithm used to allocate trades is not transparent. I would have expected that the first tie breaker is price (which seems to be universally followed, despite the display bug apparently demonstrating otherwise). I would have thought the second tie breaker would have been some sort of time stamp, but it isn't purely time linear. At one point I thought it batched orders based on discrete time periods when it was inputted, but I've got plenty of evidence to the contrary. To the best of my knowledge, no dev has ever opened that black box to inspection.

Ha! I'll be honest, the only reason I was buying them was because I was looking to seed the Character Items on my second account with some merits for converters...

Well, yeah. You can come at it from the direction of "hey, I got a Quickfoot lvl 50 drop! I can craft that, convert to a Celerity, and either sell or convert more for quick profit!" And then there's "hey, why don't I sell this one and buy back one at a lower price level and save oer 250k?" and then "hey, why don't I buy ten, no, fifty of them!" and so on and then you are well past farming and in the black hole of the marketing zone. Even with people five boxing it, I don't see how farming (including drops) comes even close to the rates that active marketing does. In this thread, I'm trying to come from it from the direction of "hey, I like farming. How can I goose my returns with some quick marketing?" and to see if that goosing is easy or worthwhile or not. My jury is still out on that right now.

These two thoughts are exactly why I posted this topic, and I'm endlessly fascinated with coming up with "best" strategies. But at the end of the day, the strategy just needs to be "good enough". I don't mind in the slightest when someone tells me they spent 100 merits on an ATO, or 600 on a full set, when they have 10k more merits and they don't feel like dragging and dropping 30k converters into the AH interface. This game is an embarrassment of riches, so "good enough" is probably good enough! Based on some of the feedback in this thread and in many others, I am concerned about AFK farming. I'm not sure if I'm concerned about it from an economic standpoint (inflation fears) or from a moralistic standpoint. Probably the latter. I *think* the GMs are actively trying to discourage it, but that's beyond my paygrade. My current "optimal" lvl 50 farming strategy (starting with empty inventory and running a full series of 5 #125 missions): 1. Sell all SOs at vendor. 2. Sell all common IO recipes at vendor. 3. Separate set IOs into keepers and duds. Keepers include purples, pvp, anything else that doesn't require rare salvage, any recipe that I would want to equip or easily convert). Vendor dud recipes. 4. Open up workbench and craft everything you have salvage for. Bid for salvage you are missing at buy-it-nao prices (which generally are 500k for rares, 1-2k for uncommon, 250 for common although I've never needed to buy a common yet.) 5. Vendor unused white and yellow salvage (or AH if you prefer), AH unused rare salvage. 6. Play "What Do I Do With That?" with your crafted IOs. Put them on the AH. I find that this is adding at least 5-10mm a series to a more basic strategy that would involve just putting everything on the AH at 5 inf, but I'd like to quantify that at some future point when I have more time and interest. I think that's a very conservative number, but it's within an order of magnitude. Takes me a couple of minutes at the end of the run to do this and I enjoy it. If I didn't enjoy it, and those few minutes were better spent starting the next run, then I guess that's ok too!

A few thoughts: It's an incredibly strong combo, but it's a little late in development. I understand wanting more attacks at 22, and there is nothing wrong with that, but also feel free to respec out of Contaminated Strike later. You eventually get a lot of good attacks that feel very slow. You also get two damage auras and (if you want) a PBAoE bomb in DNA Siphon. I think I'm running something like this (I can't remember if I fully upgraded or not):

I'm sure anyone with experience in making AE missions as well as anyone who was paying more attention than me can better quantify this, but I don't believe the rewards scale linearly with the x, much less with the +. Anecdotally, a bit back I ran back to back council paper missions, one at +0/x1 and one at +4/x8. I vendored everything and ended up with about 1.3mm and about 1.7mm respectively. Very small sample set, I admit. But when looking at spawn sizes, I know that x1 gets you 3 minions or a minion and a lt. I'm not sure offhand what x8 gets you, but it's sure not 24 minions.

The lesson I'm learning is that even if only the 125 wealthiest-in-terms-of-inf players responded to this survey, there is way too much inf in the system, and nothing to spend it on.

I am *hoping* that I just missed him twice. I’ll try the arc again when I have plenty of time!

It's a little bit apples to oranges, since you can farm for ten hours and get ten times your hourly rate, but marketing requires both time spent and time passed. But I think it's fair to say that yes, I can easily beat 51mm profit for 60 minutes time spent.

Even bionic boxer dogs get bionic fleas.

What is the problem you are trying to solve?

I find it interesting that the (admittedly self selective) distribution is roughly log normal. I extrapolate that there is a lot more pure inf out there than I thought or would have hoped.

I don’t see a solvable problem. I see “I want more damage procs.” nerp!

Thank you everyone! Here’s what I’ve learned so far: 1. I’m not far off with my farming numbers. People seem to report with inf from drops as well. Also (and I did figure this out on my own too) you get the same inf at 50 with or without spending turned off. 2. Some people are much faster than others! Keep it coming!

Capped at 100bn and not even close to there. Yet!

We are WELL short of a quorum for the contest. Keep them coming or else!

A friend of mine want to have words with you...

I just googled "inf piles" and I'm sorry I did.

This is all great stuff, thanks! I’m going to test run an elec/bio, then an elec/fire. I’m really not in love with shield for various reasons, and ice melee (and fire melee) are out until I get more costume skins. The elemental swords give me the heebie jeebies.

What’s the problem we are trying to solve here? My gut says that controllers are late bloomers and your T9 is your signature power. Are you asking also to nerf the pets to justify getting them so much earlier? Or do you just want full power earlier? I’m open to hearing new ideas!

Right, but the title doesn't say 9,999 merits. It says 999,999 merits.

Ok, so recently I went down the dual-boxing rabbit hole and I've been using a fire farmer to PL a few of my alts. I've never spent much time farming for inf before, so I figured I'm at the point in the pandemic that I check it out and see what the buzz is all about. First of all, I'm clearly doing it wrong. I'm running @brigg's Phantastic Phire Pharm #125 at 4/8 with my 50 spines/fire/fire brute (I really hate Spines but boy does it get the job done) with no xp. I have a door sitter in tow on regular xp/inf (no xp boosters -- I wanted to see how long it would take). Anyway, my 50 seems to be consistently pulling in about 3.4mm per mission, or 17mm for all five. That doesn't seem to jibe with some of the number I've seen bandied about in terms of inf/hour. I'm not setting any speed records, but I find it hard to believe that people are running a full circuit in 12-15 minutes? I'm wondering if I have a setting wrong. Second, I was sure that there would be more wiggle room in order for strong marketing to make some serious incremental income. But so far (only about 5 circuits so far), I'm getting a lot fewer IO recipes than I would like -- like 5-10 per run. Yes, the purples and PvPs are nice, but the yellows and the oranges are seeming like a waste of time, market-wise. They cost almost half a million to craft, and level 50 is a terrible spot to get good value. Anyone with more direct experience want to chime in? Paging @Ukase!

Maybe I'm doing the math wrong?!? 999,999 merits rounded up to 1mm merits and 5 merits/booster = 200,000 boosters @ 1mm each = 200bn inf I assume that the title of the thread was a typo?!?

Nothing. But diving boxer dogs notice a missing 198bn! That's why they should be in charge of Wall Street.