Yomo Kimyata

I’ve got one to about lvl 12 that’s gone pure solo so far. I’ve already gone up to +1/x3 and bosses solo. Bosses are the only thing I bother using the Poison DeBuffs for, since damage is strong for this level.

The way I see it, this game, as is, was enough for people to keep playing it in secret with a base of a few thousand people for, what, 7-8 years? I admit I do still treat it like it could go away tomorrow, but if it does, I’m not sure if it would be due to not enough population. if populations DID drop drastically from the current level, and I was not able to occasionally team or get pleasure from the AH, I might drop my playing time.

I think fungibility, as much as anything else, contributes to this. No individual baskets for salvage, recipes, set IOs! Converters are a very close second, and may take first if I really think about it.

I agree with the second part, but my observation is that crafted IOs, with the exception of things like LOTG proc and Miracle proc, are lower to significantly lower.

Don't forget the sales fee as well as the posting fee. Together they sum to 10% of your sales price. So if it costs you 3mm to make it and you sell it for 4mm, you pay 400k total in fees and your profit is only 600k. Which makes your point on posting fees even more salient!

Yeah, on Live I would do this all the time. But I didn't stick with Live until sunset so I was wondering if the original devs ever allowed solo TFs or if this is purely a Homecoming thing.

Well, it's August 1. How do you feel prices have changed over the last month or so, if at all, and where do you see them going by, say, the day after Labor Day (September 3)?

Huh, I bought about ten thousand of them this weekend too. I'd love to say that I lifted a lot of really expensive offers, but all my bids were in the 85k-95k , so I probably have you to thank for much of that. There are definitely better sellers than buyers, and I think there will be so long as it's one of the best ways to monetize merits. Like I've said early and often, converters are a really strange commodity, where people are dying to sell them to make inf, and people are dying to buy them to make even more inf.

That seems to be conventional wisdom, but I’d take it with a grain of salt. If you were able to sell 300 converters at 100k a pop, you’d net 27mm which should buy you any winter o you want more or less, and leave you change in most cases. You might find it difficult to sell at that level though. Most trades seem to be in the 90-95 k range, which nets you less. Maybe enough to buy your winter o, maybe not. if I needed winter os and I had the merits, I would probably buy them directly with merits rather than buy converters, sell them for inf, and buy the winter o with the proceeds. I don’t think the cost savings would be significant versus the convenience of doing it in one step. UNLESS you feel that you are particularly good at buying and selling things in the AH.

Here’s the thing. There are a few ways to get converters, and different people are going to have a competitive advantage in earning one over the other. Unless I am missing something, there are four methods of gaining converters: 1. Random drop from mob kill 2. Convert merits at 3 converters/ merit 3. Buy it in the AH. We’ve been using 100k as the benchmark. 4. Random drop from Hero/Villain/Winter pack. (if I’m missing things, PLEASE point it out to me. I’m not too proud to learn something.) Focusing on 2 and 3. Some people will find it easier/faster to gain 100 merits, and some people will find it easier/faster to gain 30mm inf. For me and my constraints, the inf route is faster and more consistent with my play style.

My 85k bids fill every couple of days, but most of the time I'm like you in the 90-95 range with exactly the same time urgency.

Huh, I didn’t realize that about attuned. I guess I assumed that the system would convert it into ANYTHING in the range. Thanks for figuring that out and sharing it with us!

I’m assuming cyvert and Myrmidon are talking about using merits to buy “free” converters. Feel free to play however you want, but if your goal is to accumulate inf, those converters are not, in fact free. There is an opportunity cost, which we are shortcut valuing in this post at 100k per converter. Or one merit per in-set roll. You could choose to convert your merits to converters and sell them. Or you could choose to convert your merits to converters and use them to convert. Or do what I do and sit on your merits since I convert everything to Inf anyway. (I don’t monetize my merits as of this time. I don’t need to.) If if you choose to value converters you get from merits as free, but you value converters you buy in the AH as worth 100k, you are going to make some economically unsound decisions. But this is a game, and you can play as you want!

Sounds about right. You could probably buy 14 at that level pretty quickly and you could probably sell at that level overnight. Of course, you would have to post at less than 5mm.

If you are playing rare roulette, keep in mind there are plenty of crafted rares you can buy cheaply on the AH to use as an initial seed. You can't necessarily produce 50 of them at a time, as you can with crafting and converting common recipes, but in many cases you can get them for a song and cheaper than it would cost to craft one.

I'm not a user of the packs myself. I'm a fan of other people using them -- it takes inf out of the system and it replaces it with tradeable goods, both of which fit my notions of "what is good for the economy." As an investment scheme though, I will say that one thing it has going for it is scale. I agree with your ROI estimates, but investing 100mm in craft is, what, a few hundred IOs? That's a lot of clicking and dragging and time spent. And what if you wanted to invest 1bn in crafting? A few thousand IOs is a lot of work. If, IF, someone felt they had a reasonable chance to make a decent return after fees, it scales up to size. Investing 1bn in H&V might get you between 100-150 ATOs, which is manageable. But I'd target 50% after fees and I don't think it's anywhere near that.

With respect to Squidnunc's specific example, you can set up a rule-based strategy. Let's say you own one of the crap pieces and you can sell it for 1mm right now to net 900,000. You say to yourself, well, how about I convert it once and sell whatever I end up with. So you have an 80% chance of ending up with a crap piece that will net you 900,000, and a 20% chance of ending up with a good piece that will net you 4,500,000. Either way, you are out 300,000 in conversion fees. So, you will end up with either 600,000 or 4,200,000 but on average your expected return is 1,320,000. That is better than your initial case of 900,000, so over the long run, on average that is a good investment. However, 80% of the time you will be worse off than if you just sold the crap piece in the first place. So you have higher reward (my expected return is 1,320,000 rather than 900,000) but higher risk (4 out of 5 times, I'm going to lose money). If you did this a million times, with a million IOs, you would expect the distribution to work out in your favor. But if you did this ten times, you could easily lose money every single time. That's risk. In general, a higher expected return goes hand in hand with the higher risk that you will actually lose money You can extend this to say, I'll convert up to two times and sell whatever I get, or five times, or fifty times. I'll leave that up to you to calculate. What you should not do, however, is say I'll convert until I get the good piece, by hell or high water. Your potential losses are infinite, since you could keep rolling that 80% until the sun goes dim, or you run out of converters or inf or patience. This, of course, applies to Squidnunc's really simple model. Making that decision for something like an IO is much much much more complicated. Look at Steadfast Protection Res/End: last 5: 3mm, 4mm, 5mm, 5mm, 4mm Steadfast Protection Res/Def: last 5: 6mm, 6mm, 6mm, 6mm, 6mm Steadfast Protection Knockback: last 5: 4mm, 4mm, 4mm, 4mm, 4mm That's what the market says as of right now. Let's say I own the Res/End. Should I sell it or convert it? At what price do I post it and at what level do I expect it to sell, and when do I expect it to sell? You should ask yourself that question for each piece. And those are big questions and not easy questions. Let's make a really big jump and assume I can absolutely sell the Res/End at 3mm, the Res/Def at 6mm, and the Knockback at 4mm. That nets me 2.7mm, 5.4mm and 3.6mm respectively. If I don't convert, I get 2.7mm. If I do spend 300k to convert, and sell whatever I get, I will get 5.1mm half the time and 3.3mm half the time for an average of 4.2mm. With expected profit of 1.5mm, That looks like a good trade to me. And if I could buy the Res/End at less than 3.3mm, I would at least break even every time. But what if I can sell the Res/End at 5mm, netting 4.5mm? I'd be losing money! Or what if I can't absolutely sell whatever I convert it to at 6mm or 4mm? Or any of a thousand other questions. Not to mention that 1.5mm is equivalent to farming your 50 for about 30 seconds or whatever the influence rate is. And this is probably as easy as it's going to get. In real life, for real money, there would be computers modelling this out. But I'm not going to do the math for every situation, and neither should you. I look at the math of the broad picture, make some gut decisions, and follow a set of rules that may adapt over time. So it depends. But I always convert the Steadfast Protection Res/End.

It also really helps if you have an idea of how it has tended to trade over the last few weeks. One of my rules is KNOW WHAT YOU TRADE AND TRADE WHAT YOU KNOW. If the last 5 are all 2mm and it's a LOTG proc, you don't want to be listing at 1.5mm. And if it's a Scirocco's Dervish triple, you don't want to be listing at 2.5mm.

I usually price to sell it soon(tm). If all previous sales are at 2mm, I really don't have enough information. But I would probably post between 1mm and 2mm and hope to sell it before the end of my gaming session. I'm sorry I can't be more specific than that, but it really feels like an art rather than a science. If last 5 were 2mm, 2mm, 2.6mm, 3mm, 3mm, and I knew nothing else about the item? I'd probably post between 2mm and 2.75mm. Things to look at are: how many are for sale; are all last 5 trades from today; is this an item I personally find useful; etc., etc.

Short answer: it depends. Long answer: iiiiiiiiiiiiiiittttttttttttt dddddddddddeeeeeeeepppppppppeeeeeeennnnnnnnddddddddssssssss.

I don’t see this as a problem that needs a solution, but alternatively, if rare salvage prices were to drop, it would be economical to craft rates directly again. The only reason I’ve bought rare salvage in the past two months is to craft purples. I’m having a hard time justifying the demand side of the equation. I’d short the market if I could.

I had a fun concept and started a new alt. I read how Poison is unliked, and I don’t know if I’ve read word one in Mind Control. If you were going to take Mind/Poison to 50 and beyond, what would you focus on?

Short answer: convenience and desire and the lack thereof. If you NEED inf, there are many, many ways to go about it. The simplest way being play your high level characters. Some people prefer farming, etc. Some people just don't care to learn about it, or don't like using the AH. And in the marketplace, the convenience of buying (or selling) it now rather than crafting something else and converting and attuning is worth a lot to some people.

I’m not a merit hunter by nature, but being able to solo a TF is a game changer. Was that ever enabled in Live or is this just a Homecoming thing?

This is kind of my long-term goal. I can't make people play their alts to 50 rather than PLing them, but I can help make it easy for them to (as you stated) deck themselves out with sets of Entropic Chaos at lvl 17. Basilisk's Gaze is extremely useful, and in my opinion way underpriced, but lots of people seem to skip right past that on their way to incarnates. I doubt I'm losing money on any of the stuff I'm supplying, but I'm definitely not maximizing my margins by putting a lot of sub-50 material into the AH.