Yomo Kimyata

Dusting this off for the end of 2020. Come get your holiday cheer! Tell your friends! Tell your enemies!

My general rules when looking at brute versus tanker are: 1. What powers do I want first? Do I want the T9 power at lvl 32 or do I want it at lvl 38?; 2. Do I want to use ancillary pool powers early or late? I'm generally going to want the T8 and T9 offense powers for tanks at lvl 35 and lvl 38, so if I want those ancillary powers early I'll go brute rather than tanker.

Part VI: Closing thoughts and opinions - I think the AH should be for player-to-player transactions, not for dumping for fixed prices what people consider to be their trash. There are vendors almost everywhere, and they are happy to take your salvage, enhancements, recipes. As such, I'm going to revise my suggestion that the fixed price items from the P2W should be moved to the AH. Instead, I'm going to suggest that the devs create a command similar to /AH where you can access a vendor or the P2W vendor (or even the merit vendor) from any non-instanced location. Also, I'm going to suggest that somehow you make it possible to sell IOs to a vendor for a pittance if you *really* want to -- this would need some sort of bullet-proof "are you really sure* protection, because someone somewhere is going to sell a purple by accident and we will never hear the end of it. - I don't really see how adding more information on trading history really adds value to either a buyer or a seller. The trading log only records what the last buy price was -- this may have little relationship to where current bids or offers are. I really enjoy the uncertainty of knowing exactly where things are bid or offered, and frankly it's not very difficult to find out exactly where things are bid or offered. I reiterate, however, that the time stamp would be really useful. - I don't want HC to become the equivalent of going onto Test and insta-leveling and insta-equipping your character for free. That's a philosophical opinion of mine, and your opinion may differ. - I don't think you need to revolve the system around the "top hat and monocle crowd", but you do need to take them into account. There are a very large number of net consumers, and a small number of net suppliers. The suppliers may be few in number, but they do have an outsized impact on the player driven market. - There needs to be incentive to keep up both demand and supply for long-term vitality of the player-driven market. One way to keep demand high is to encourage new players to join and (more importantly) encourage current players to create and equip new alts. One way to keep supply high is to create a large scale influence sink so people will want to continue to make a profit. - I think that concerns about market manipulation are mostly (entirely?) unfounded, and trust me, I'm champing at the bit hoping someone tries to drive prices up significantly because I will make a lot of inf out of it. There are a lot of safeguards, some of which haven't even been mentioned yet. Not all caps are hard caps. Market PvP LOL is not prevalent, but I'd love to get some going! - I don't think it is a good idea to have devs set prices on items in general, and I always find it interesting to hear people say something is too expensive. That generally means they just don't have enough influence for it right now. I just ran two near-identical clear-all council paper missions at level 50, one at +0/x1 and one at +4/x8, and vendored every drop including IO recipes. They netted 701,930 and 1,911,878 inf respectively, and would be worth a few mm more if the yellow and orange recipes were crafted and converted. It might be difficult to self-fund a single character as it levels, but I find it unconvincing that prices as they stand right now are so high that making a million inf a mission on a 50 isn't enough to buy whatever you want in a relatively brisk fashion. You may not agree, and that's cool. Not everyone has a 50, but there is nothing prohibiting anyone from having one. - There are no gates. I hear you that people think it is not helpful to say anyone can do it, but there really are no gates other than education and effort. As @gameboy1234 demonstrated, you can make about 2-3mm in profit per IO once you figure things out. If you want to do 1 IO in a week or 1000 in a day, it's up to you and your tolerance for tedium. - There needs to be more education, and better distribution of that education, in order for the benefits of using the player-driven markets to be used by anyone with the need or desire. There are a lot of well-written guides on these forums (some of which were even written by me!), and everyone I know in the "top hat and monocle" clan is extremely open and friendly in sharing their knowledge. That said, if you don't know those guides are there, or you don't read them, or you don't understand them, or if you are just plain not on the forums, then they aren't helping you. In game resources would help a LOT. Happy hunting to all! May your fingers never get fat and accidentally bid too much for converters! Yomo

Some thoughts: -- there are very few skippable powers in either set. For Bio I *might* skip Genetic Contamination; for Staff I would skip Merc Blow, Taunt, and *maybe* Sky Splitter (I just don't like it). -- I play Bio very offensively, so get some defensive help by putting a LotG def/rech in Guarded Spin, and look for melee defense bonuses elsewhere. -- Staff has three powers that take the Force Feedback +rech. Try to find a way to work them in and you can cut back your slotting for Hasten or even drop it. -- For Ablative Carapace I usually 6-slot Preventative Medicine and for Parasitic Aura I usually 5- slot Panacea (and put in a 6th slot if I can fit it for the Taunt +proc). -- I treat DNA Siphon as a PBAoE nuke rather than a heal.

I only have a few broadsword characters, but they are very special to me. The broadsword/bio brute is working out *very* well.

Anyone could easily put in 1,000 bids at 5 inf each, or offer 1,000 items at 100mm each (although they would eat the posting fee). That doesn't have any effect on the transaction level.

Bio is great with everything, but I get extra oomph out of something that adds a little melee defense, like broadsword or staff fighting.

I very much appreciate your comments. I certainly didn't expect very many of my suggestions to be popular... One thing I'd like to ask, on a side bar, is about market manipulation. I see very little of it, but I'm wondering if you are seeing things I don't, or just if we have different definitions for it. For example, I would consider buying all of something, then relisting it 50% higher as market manipulation. Something like Red Fortune recipe prices being "higher than they should be for what they do" doesn't count as market manipulation, as they are almost certainly being converted to LotG for a profit. In that case, their value as ingredients trumps their usefulness as a set. The reason I ask this is that I feel that it's a real bugaboo to a lot of people, myself included, but I don't see very much of it, and when it does show up, supply and/or demand comes into play to rectify it rather quickly. I'm just checking to see if my assumption is correct that this is fear of manipulation talking rather than actual observation of manipulation.

That's a really good point, one I hadn't thought of.

Part V: Yomo's Outrageous and Abominable Opinions and Suggestions Right now, the HC economy is in kind of a sweet spot. Despite the massive inf accumulation in the system, inflation has not reared its ugly head. In fact, prices have dropped because (IMO) there is a lot less aggregate demand than there was a year ago, and more people are wise to converters and other convenience plays. Prices are kept in a relatively tight band for most items, either through seeding or fungibility or statistical arbitrage. We don't need to make things cheaper -- they are basically as cheap as they can get while still giving marketers the incentive to create the items that people don't want to make for themselves. In a perfect economy, everyone would be both a buyer and a seller, and everyone would have the knowledge base to be able to use the AH and converters (and would have the option to opt out of any of that, knowing full well that they will be worse off if they do). But for now, I think that there is just way too much of everything. That is certainly colored by the fact that I personally have way too much of everything. That said, here are some of the items on my ridiculous wish list: A. Drastically reduce the number of transaction slots per character. I generally max out at 200, and you can have 55 right out of Outbreak. That's just too much. People can, and will, use that for hoarding storage and/or market manipulation. I could literally take an hour or less, make 10 new characters and put 5500 bids on any given item at twice the market price. Yes, my bids would eventually fill, but until they do I'm blocking everyone else who wants to buy it. What used to take dozens of concerted marketers dozens of characters each to do (e.g., luck charms on Live), one person could do in an afternoon. Cut the multiplier of slots by half, or ideally 5-fold. B. Lock converters by account. Converters are magic, but they are not providing equal benefits for everyone. They have become a de facto exchange medium for merits (which are also too abundant), but every converter you sell means giving up 3-10x that value in usage benefits. The power sellers can, and do, buy up hundreds of thousands of these, use them, and sell goods back to end users at markups. Let's give everyone the incentive to use their converters for themselves. Stop making the rich richer. Do it for yourself. C. Unlock merits by account. Make these bad boys tradeable on the open market. Once you make merits convertible to inf directly, you get rid of the converter middle man. This is a little bit in opposition to Suggestion B above, but some people are going to want to liquidate their merits directly. This will still make the rich richer, since we will buy merits and exchange them to converters anyway. But at least there is a bit of a speed bump/governor there to slow things down a little. D. Take Hero Packs and Winter Packs seedings off the AH and make them very rare drops. People have bought over 100,000 Winter Packs since the 2020 Winter event started. There is no incentive to use merits to buy ATOs or WOs. I'd like to change that, because I'd like to see a more diverse set of options other than "converters". E. Change the merit/converter exchange rate. As mentioned, on Live it was 10:1 plus a conversion fee. On HC it is 1:3 with no fee. I appreciate converters more than you know, but I would start by making it 1:1 and working from there. F. Big honking influence sinks. This is the only one that I don't expect to be received with boos and hisses. Some people (I'm one of them) just have too much inf, more than we need, more than we can possibly every need, and we are making more inf literally faster than we can give it away. Take away the incentive to blow it on market shenanigans. I know @Jimmyhas stated that they feel that low level influence sinks may be more effective than high level ones. But you could probably take a good trillion inf out of the system overnight if you had something scalable. I'm going to come back to my trillion inf idea: Bring back prestige for SGs, but make it so that its *only* purpose is SG ranking (continue with no base upkeep fees). Then if @Ukaseand I want to have a contest, we can and it has no impact on anyone else. G. More macroeconomic events. I'm a market junkie, I admit, and my favorite thing is when something fundamentally changes either permanently or temporarily to shake up the markets. Adding new IOs, the Winter Event, etc. I'd love to see more of these. But I'd also like to see more random things pop into the system every now and then. Change drop rates. Change conversion ratios. Do it randomly or announce it is in effect for a limited time. The economy in HC is interesting but simple, and if I were a college student, there is a great thesis on how classic economic theories do or do not apply in this environment. H. Lift some price caps. It's not that I want to drive prices up, but I'd like to see more volatility in the price band. It would be fun! Certainly more fun than playing backgammon, yuck! I want to reiterate the two tenets I mentioned in an earlier post: We need to keep demand alive and we need to keep supply alive. For the former, we need to encourage new players, new alts. For the latter we need to keep suppliers interested enough to keep making stuff in the middle of the night like the shoemaker's elves.

Part IV: The Realistic* Suggestions * I understand nothing is simple, but these are QoL fixes that, in my completely uneducated opinion, would be easier and less controversial to implement that some others on my wish list. A. Port all fixed price items for sale at the P2W vendor to the fixed price section of the AH. /AH is a heck of a lot easier than traveling to a P2W vendor, especially since I only know offhand where three of them are located. I'd suggest moving them completely, but as previously noted, you can have a P2W in your base, but no AH. Pros: more convenience for players to access influence sinks. Win win. B. Add time stamp to the date stamp in trade history. It would be very useful to know if the last trade was 20 hours ago or two minutes ago. It would also alert people if someone was "painting the tape" with respect to previous trades. C. Change "Make Offer" button to "Make Bid". This is a semantic quibble of mine, but in any market in the world (except the US real estate market) the word "offer" means an order to sell. It is confusing and contradictory to click a button that says "Make Offer" in order to make a bid. I'm tilting at windmills here, but what better place to do it than in this thread! D. Remove fixed price seedings (for salvage, for example) and offer the items for sale at a fixed price in the fixed price section. As it stands, the devs just put 10mm items up for offer, and that masks the real dynamics of the trading mechanism. If the purpose is to have a ceiling, make that specific and infinite. People could choose whether to buy an item outright from the fixed price section, or could bid in the free market section. E. Allow stacking of enhancements for sale. You can currently put in a bid for 10x of any enhancement with a single market slot, but if you want to sell them you have to sell each one individually, using 10 market slots. I assume this is a programming constraint, but I'd really like to see that change if it is possible. F. Make moving recipes and salvage to the AH easier. Right now, if you double click on an enhancement in your tray with the AH open, it automatically moves it to the interface. But for salvage and recipes you need to open the relevant window and then click and drag them 10 at a time to the AH interface. I would love it if you could open the salvage or recipe window and when the AH is open, just double click on the stack to move it 10 at a time to the AH. G. Create an in-game tutorial. I have nothing new to add to the excellent suggestions we have already seen on this topic.

True dat, but you *can* sell to yourself from one character to another, and you *can* very easily sell a given item on one character and buy it back on the same character and make a profit.

I'm going out on a really short limb and saying that was intentional. A level 49 recipe costs less than half that of a 50 to craft. But there is a limited window where a farmer can get level 49 recipe drops, but an unlimited window to get level 50s. But the point is relatively moot since recipes are fungible. Vendor your lvl 50 for 5k or try to sell it on the AH, and buy it back on the AH at a lower level. Mischief managed.

I want to address this right away for two reasons. First, just like we have seen that there is a real need to provide an (optional) tutorial on the basics of how to use converters and the AH, there is also a real need to provide clearer or simpler guides on the forums. There are a lot out there already, but there is nothing saying READ THIS for people who have zero interest or zero aptitude. Second, I want to address what I think is a real misconception in your above quote. There is no gate -- not in terms of time, not in terms of knowledge, not in terms of scale. And spending a few minutes, literally spending three minutes at the beginning or the end of every few sessions, can provide tens of millions of inf so long as one is willing to actually try it. I'm not saying this as "Learn to Market, lol" or by trying to downplay or upplay the mechanics of the marketplace. And I speak from experience that you can make "ultimate" builds without using the market AT ALL, but that's like saying you can get from San Francisco to Honolulu without flying AT ALL. My two inf. Apologies again for getting off topic!

I got a little off topic, since the point of this thread is to talk about the system, not the lack of the system. There are some really good suggestions about making the process more user friendly that I'm totally going to steal later.

As long as your friend knew that it was his choice to have nothing to do with the market, no one can keep him from finding an entertainment experience that he prefers instead. I mean, I like playing chess, but I aesthetically don't like how knights move. Sure, I *could* play chess without using my knights. I know that's suboptimal, and I'm going to lose a lot. I might even do ok. But I'm not going to insist my opponent gets rid of their knights too just because I don't like them. I'm probably better off just playing a different game. But not backgammon. That's the WORST!

Found another one!

Part III: The Philosophy of Homecoming's PDM What makes the marketplace/economy in Homecoming different from that of Live or even, *gasp*, that of the other CoH servers out there? Let's look at a few things (my memory of Live is hazy, so forgive me, but I'm making the assumption that Rebirth is a decent proxy): a. Fungibility/bucketing. On HC, a level 20 recipe/enhancement is the same as a level 50 recipe/enhancement for the same item, in the eyes of the AH. Well, not in all cases, but let's keep it simple. Every IO that is available at a specific level is also available as an attuned. Every piece of invention salvage is considered fungible with every other piece of the same rarity. These changes are *HUGE* and frankly, quite brilliant. I'm not sure what the intent was, but the outcome is extremely demand-friendly. Sellers can no longer manipulate the market to the extent it was done on live. b. Seeded items. Invention salvage is seeded at prices that are intended to be above the market clearing level, but are not onerous. Hero/Vigilante/Winter packs are available, also at prices that are less than the current value of the component pieces. Also extremely demand-friendly. c. Converters. I left Live before these came on the scene, but I'm assuming again that Rebirth's policy is similar to that of Live. So Homecoming did not invent converters, but they made them extraordinarily abundant. In HC, 10 merits gets you 30 converters. In Live/Rebirth, 10 merits gets you 1 converter, and you need to pay a fee for the conversion. Don't get me wrong, I *LOVE* converters. If I could engage in statistical arbitrage in real life as simply and cheaply as I can on HC, I would be an extremely wealthy person. But I do think they are ridiculously abundant, and that will be a topic for another time. d. AH slots. I'm not sure what the limit was on Live, but I'm sure it was less than the 55 I get on a level 2 fresh out of training, and a LOT less than the up to 200 I have on most of my more developed character. e. Various QoL issues that continue to make things easier. PvP recipe drops in regular play, conversion of inf to merits, etc. These all make life extremely easy for the demand side. As was said earlier in this thread, if you don't want to use the AH at all, you don't have to. I have made "billion inf" builds based purely on drops that were converted. You *can* do this, but it is orders of magnitudes times easier to use the AH. Why did HC make these choices? It wasn't for you or me. This was a secret server with a relatively fixed population, and they wanted stuff and they wanted it easy and they wanted it now. When they went public, they kept that philosophy, which I summarize and simplify as "Everything you want, quickly, easily and cheaply". That's from the demand side, of course.

Thanks to VT's post, I now see a little about what @Faultlineis thinking, so I'm going to call an audible. Part II: The Philosophy of Player-Driven Markets* * These are my opinions. Your opinions may differ. If so, please state your opinions. What makes a PDM? In the case of COH, I'd say there are a few defining characteristics: 1. Players create the demand for some/most/all items. Sure, you can sell some things to the vendors (and in some cases that's your best economic move), but the lion's share of the demand is going to be driven by players wanting items. 2. Players create the supply of some/most/all items. This is a little less cut-and-dried than Point 1, but again, the lion's share of the supply in the system is created by players, for players. 3. There is a clear and logical system for facilitating trades between players. There may be more characteristics, but those are the three fundamental ones that come to mind. Now, we ask ourselves what are the motivations that will encourage players to utilize the AH, which embodies Point 3? The motivation for Point 1 is clear: people want stuff. It improves their characters, it gives them something to RP with, etc. The motivation for Point 2 is a little more complex. I'd say the main reason that players want to supply items for others is the profit motive. A secondary reason that I care about more than I should is to provide order and liquidity to the system. But it's mainly going to be about profit. So what keeps the system running? Continuous demand for new items (which can come from new players, from creating new alts, even from market shenanigans, but a fully built 50 HAS NO SIGNIFICANT DEMAND) and the profit motive to incentivize players to continue to supply new items. I believe that both of these conditions are necessary to keep the AH alive and useful over any given time frame. I'll come back to those two tenets later.

I've been looking forward to this topic for quite some time, and I think that I'll have a lot to say. So much so that I'm going to put it forth in several posts over the next week by category. Some of it will talk about UI, since apparently I missed the thread where that topic was addressed. Part I: The Bugs This is imperative to me, and I'm surprised that it's not more important to the developers. Given that this is a player-driven market, anything that discourages people from using it is a big no-no, and some of these bugs range from annoying to game-breakers. No one will use an economic system that they have no faith in. On no real evidence, I *suspect* that having a dedicated server just for the AH might help with these bugs, but that's based on the assumption that there isn't currently a dedicated server, and that there was a dedicated server on Live. A. Missing history display. When you pull up an item to bid on in the top half of the AH, sometimes/most times the price history does not display. A work-around, of course, is putting in a dummy bid for a low amount, then when your bid appears in the lower half of the AH, refresh the history and you then get a display. Now you can go back to the top half and make your bid based on this information. I think we can all agree that this work-around is clunky, and those who are unaccustomed to doing it can easily get frustrated. B. History display not updating. I notice this a lot when I move from one character to another -- when I open up the AH it defaults to the last item I was looking at on my previous character, and the prices have not updated since my last character looked at them. It's generally a few minutes, but that can mean a lot with a market like salvage. There are other examples of the price history not updating as well, but this is the most easily documented one for me. I'm not asking for a rolling update, but maybe a refresh button in the bid section would be nice. C. The false history bug. This is the 800-lb gorilla and the one that really bugs most people. This is when an item displays a past history that is completely erroneous, and either only shows a false history or vacillates between a true history and a false history. Miracle proc is probably the most notorious example, but there are numerous other examples. Sometimes the bug is temporary; for some items the bug appears to be permanent. Common wisdom is that the false history is bleed-through from another item, and that may be the case for some items. However, I believe that in some cases the price history is completely unrelated to any other item in the AH. I'm basing this on having searched every item in the AH database to find the item that is bleeding through to Miracles, and I've been unsuccessful. This is not game-breaking, but it can be exploited, and it certainly erodes confidence in the AH system. If I had to pick Yomo's Number One Homecoming Priority(tm), this would have to be it. D. The locked market bug. I've submitted tickets about this and been told it's working as intended. I've posted on the Bug forum and got no dev response. This bug ranges from confusing to extremely exploitative, and is a far bigger deal than the devs seem to realize. I will be happy to discuss this via email or phone with any dev, but I do not want to broadcast the details of this bug here. Coming soon, Part II: The Simple* Fixes *Nothing is simple.

Hmm, I hear you, but what makes you think that if you sent someone an email and they didn't reply then it means that it's an out-of-use account? If someone sent me a message, I might reply or I might ignore it depending on my mood at the time. Most of the time I would view that inquiry like a bot calling me on my cell phone to ask me about my vehicle's extended warranty...

I think that the procedure announced in May 2019 sounds fair, and I'd support it if/when it is implemented. What makes anyone think the specific name that they want will be freed up in a purge, anyway? As far as I know, the only info you have is that the name is already taken, not who owns it or how long it has been since they used it. Am I mistaken?

How about a mode where you opt in to maxxing your character at 49?

Click the link in my sig to see how to get another 20mm from me.

My only presence on Reunion is hardcore, non-AH using, but I can 100% assure you that the AH on all Canadian servers is the same. I'll check Reunion later tonight, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to add it to the 100%. EDIT: confirmed that Reunion AH is the same as the others.