Yomo Kimyata

A lot has changed since Live. 1. Every piece of salvage of the same rarity (i.e., white or yellow or orange) is considered fungible. That means that in the AH they are all considered equivalent. So when people sell white salvage into the AH it goes into a big pool. Then if you buy, for example, a luck charm because you need that specifically for a recipe, it comes out of that big pool. So there are no expensive rares and cheap rares; they are all the same at this point. This keeps people from manipulating the market on, for example, luck charms. 2. The developers seeded the market for salvage. They offered 10mm each of white, yellow, and orange salvage at 10,000; 100,000; and 1mm inf each respectively. Those are those really big numbers in the "for sale". That put an effective cap on prices, and for almost all of trading history, prices have been significantly lower than those caps. Going to your question: why is rare salvage so expensive when there are so many sellers and so few buyers? The answer is that the sellers are mostly the devs at 1mm a pop. There are sellers like you and me who are offering at lower prices, but that's harder to see when you have that nearly 10mm number staring you in the face. As to whether or not rares are too expensive, every day we see people who want to buy them complaining they are too expensive and people who want to sell them complaining that they are too cheap. At this point anything between 5,000 and 1,000,000 is "about right".

I just recently started a Merc/Time MM named Billy Pilgrim. If the Vonnegut estate doesn’t like it, I’ll be happy to change the name.

Sounds dead on (assuming a 6-piece set). A fair RNG would have a mean of 5 conversions (15 converters) and a median of 3 conversions (9). Out of curiosity, what was the longest non-conversion streak you had?

I’d say a few hundred enhancements.

Just started a new character. Here’s how I got him to 100mm by lvl 19: 1. out of Outbreak sold the large inspirations for seed money. 2. Traded yellow salvage (bot under 500, sold over 1000) for the first few mm. 3. Put in lowball bids for attuned pet damage IOs and converters around 85k. Logged off for the night. 4. Next log in converted IOs, sold them. 5. Put in bids on various attuned Preventative Medicine. I will need a full set eventually. The set is in good demand, some pieces more than others. Logged off. 6. Sold off the IOs I didn’t need for over 100% profit. Put in more bids. Invested in more converters and converted more of the pet damage IOs that I bought. Invested 10mm in portable workbench. Put in bids on lvl 21 uncommon Stun recipes. ( Stun because they looked untouched, lvl 21 because I’m testing that level range.). Logged off. 7. Crafted stun recipes. Convert by uncommon until I get an interesting category or one that will convert to rare by category. Then rare roulette. three days by the calendar. Well under an hour of active time. Over 100mm in cash and probably the same in pending sales. This was a real half-assed effort; one can do a LOT better than this.

The only things that stand between anyone and a billion inf are: a little bit of knowledge (which is pretty much freely given in this forum); a little bit of patience; maybe scale.

Bring back SG rankings and allow inf to be burnt for prestige again. Leave all SG maintenance costs at zero. Win win.

I’ve seen a few purples trade at 30mm, which seems like a soft cap. Spend 100 merits on a purple recipe, 2mm on salvage and crafting. Versus spend 100 merits on converters, sell them for 23-27mm after taxes.

I appreciate this! I don’t play TW much but I’m all in on Bio. It’s nice to read a detailed analysis with your thought processes. i seem to differ with consensus on DNA Siphon and Genetic Contamination. To me, the former is just too good a vehicle for damage profs to be used just as a safety button. I currently six slot it with Perf Shifter A/R/End mod, the accurate healing damage proc, Eradication damage proc, Obliteration damage proc, the purple damage proc, and the pvp -res proc. I think the % is at or close to 90%, so it’s good for a few hundred points of pbaoe damage and a res and regen debuff. For GC, the damage doesn’t feel worth enhancing, you can put the purple set in a bunch of other powers, and the -dam is unenhanceable. So if I take it, I’ll generally one slot it for endurance reduction. Maybe a proc. great work!

Recently I’ve been putting together 2nd and 3rd builds for my 50s, and started thinking again about how something like this would work. I’m currently on something like: 1. Buyer emails Provider seed capital and a shopping list. Call it 999,999,999 since that’s the max. 2. Provider purchases/creates/pulls from storage the goods. 3. Provider emails items to Buyer 4. Buyer emails remaining fee to Provider for services rendered. Call it 1-4bn. There are two trust points since there are no binding contracts: Buyer trusts Provider won’t run away with the seed capital; Provider trusts Buyer won’t stiff him on fees. I’d imagine time frame could be a short as three days but 1-2weeks seems more likely. Just spitballing.

OP's experiences are so diametrically opposed to mine that I wonder if we are logging onto the same program. If OP cares, I can try to give some tips if these are problems that he/she is looking to solve for personal play -- feel free to send me PM.

Well, you aren’t really faking bids; you are just putting them in at a low enough level that you are willing to buy them there, and it’s unlikely your bid will get hit. I put in 5 inf bids everyday when I’m trying to price something out. Lots of the time I eventually end up buying something at 5. Capping the number of bids for an item? I don’t see how that solves a problem that does or does not exist. Allowing “fake supply” would involve changing the AH to allow short selling, and I think there are a whole host of problems there. Right now you can’t sell something you don’t have. On the plus side, I think the only thing you cannot replicate with merits (or converters) are hammi os. If you really want something else that has no supply, you can make it. It may be more expensive than you wish, or take more time or converters than you like, but it’s freely available in infinite numbers.

This brings me to another of my trading aphorisms: YOU CAN FAKE DEMAND, BUT YOU CAN'T FAKE SUPPLY.

I assume you mean the non-proc? You can probably convert all of them to the proc, sell them, and make a reasonable profit.

100 reward merits gets you your choice of ATO. Super packs are more cost effective (since 100 merits can also get you a Winter-O, which sells for twice an ATO) but you don't know what you'll get.

Staff/bio or bio/staff.

At this point, I rarely spend merits at all and I tend to use them for unslotters or catalysts or boosters. Everything generally is cheaper in terms of inf on the AH.

I’m having a hard time reconciling supply with demand. Let’s look at just two items: Winter packs and a generic Winter o. you could buy infinite winter packs at 10mm, and you can now buy infinite at 25mm. Anecdotally, people who have posted in this forum bought over 10,000 of these packs during the sale. I think the total number was much much higher. Lets’s look at three options and three time frames: 1. Sell your winter pack; 2. Open packs and sell the basics (for me that’s enhancements and winter os, converted sometimes); 3. Open packs and sell everything, including merits; a. During winter event; b. Soon(tm) after winter event; c. Later(tm), but before next winter event. 1a is off the table, but I have been doing 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b like crazy. And based on my observations of winter o flow, I’m really concerned that there is a shit ton of pent up supply. I’m estimating that under a thousand winter os trade per day, and I’m buying a goodly portion of the ones getting dumped on the market. Just curious what you see and think.

I have to think the horse is pretty much out of the barn on almost all of this. I haven't seen much evidence of changes in market activity based on posts in this forum, so either we are not getting new readers or our ebil activity is swamped by the inertia of non-forum users.

For LOTG, the "easiest" way is to buy level 41 recipes for Reactive Defenses or Red Fortune, craft, convert. Or you can buy them precrafted and convert. You can also move down the chain and add lvl 31 Gift of the Ancients or Serendipity, but your conversion odds drop a lot so you will be burning more converters.

Nerf time travel!

Nerf [XYZ] needs a boost threads!

Attuned IOS pick a random level within the range they are available and you can’t see what that level is. So a failed conversion occurs when you try to convert, but there is nothing at that random level to convert to.

I cannot guarantee this 100%, but I feel very confident that I have converted by rarity and gotten the same category but in a different set, e.g., converting a Smashing Haymaker by common, getting a Focused Smite.

I don't know how the RNG does the rarity thing. One logical way would be to look at every rare set that this *could* be converted to, choose one, then assign which enhancement in the set it is. Another logical way would be to look at every rare enhancement that this could be converted to and choose one. If it's the former, then you might have a (for example, making this up entirely) 1 in 45 chance of getting a winter's gift, but if it's the latter you would have a lesser chance (since winter's gift only has three enhancements in the set). There may also be observer bias. I tend to notice when I get things that are worthless to me, like winter's gift or snipes, but don't pay as much attention if it's something middling, like a melee damage.