Yomo Kimyata

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.

Huh, I learned something new! I didn't read your P2W guide, since it is a QoL service that I mostly don't use. I enjoy the leveling process, and frankly, it mostly makes an easy game too easy for me. YMMV. Oh, but I do buy the crafting table on every alt!

Great guide! There are all kinds of variations, but this is a good, easy-to-follow system. Personally, my "ditch-digger" technique uses lvl 30s recipes that don't automatically convert within category to rare. This is purely to capture the Karma/Steadfast Protection/probably a few others opportunities. So I convert by common one or more times, then convert by category when I get to one I want. Also, I don't pay nearly as much for components as you do. Saving 25-50k+ on one craft isn't a lot of money, but when you do it thousands of times it adds up. This is a good guide to inform people about how to produce valuable resources easily. How they monetize it is another issue. As AboveTheChemist notes, selling is more of an art than a science. And there is a big difference between selling it dear or selling it now. One of my maxims is BUYING IS EASY; SELLING IS HARD.

Technically, since you have to have a listing fee, you have to kill SOMETHING. Unless there is another way I'm unaware of. Get the all the badges in Atlas Park and you’ll get 5 merits. Go to the merit vender and buy 15 enh convs and hit the AH. Boom 1.2-1.5 million inf. Without hitting a thing. But you need some inf for the posting fee. You simply cannot sell anything on the AH without 1 inf.

Technically, since you have to have a listing fee, you have to kill SOMETHING. Unless there is another way I'm unaware of.

This. To the point that I’m replacing the non attuned ones

Going off memory, but I think it is a 1.5PPM proc, so it would work like any other PPM proc. Based on recharge of the power and the type of power it is, there is a probability of proc that can be calculated, and that probability is applied to every target it hits. If you have a power in mind, I can give you an idea of the probability. So it has a chance to provide +end to the mobs it hits? Or to you? Or something else?

I should know this, but I don't. If you put the Performance Shifter proc into an offensive power, what does it do when it activates?

JusticeBowler, I promise you that you haven't missed out on something. I understand that lots of people choose to NOT be in the market, but there is no reason to not be making money if you want to. A lot of it is practice, and doing it over and over again. It's really, really hard to make 5mm profit on a conversion trade, but it's really easy to make 500k profit on ten trades. I suggest you try it again, but keep your sights modest. Get 10 recipes, 100 converters (you probably won't need that many). Call it a 15mm investment. Roll those ten until you get something you can sell in the market for over 1mm. You might end up with 10 Miracle procs and sell for 50mm before fees. Chances are you'll end up with some less savory items, but chances are very good you will end up with well over 20mm before fees. As you do it more and more, you will learn tips and niches, and it will get easier and easier. I guarantee* it. * not an actual guarantee

Frankly, there is no real reason that anything in the LotG complex should be trading for significantly less than 2mm short of the highest selling component. That goes for any set. Edit: I just broke one of my cardinal rules: NEVER FORGET THE VIG. Replace “2mm” with “2mm plus fees”.