crimson72

How about ignore some of the other stuff I suggested, and let's focus on higher % taxes for erroneously priced items? I'll use an example. A luck of the gambler defense/recharge 7.5% typically goes for around 6m, no? Let's just say that's the average price for that item. Now, someone shows up and posts a 12m tag on it, they have to put up 50% instead of 10%, or 6 million just to post it. Meaning nobody would realistically ever put up an item for double the going market rate. And people attempting to do this could be given some sort of notification. Also, I think information about the average price paid for a given item over a longer period than the last 5 sales of the item should be given to the player. It's a better context as to what the true average price might be. For all I know the last 5 items sold are lowball, or extraordinarily high, and I've got no info to help me know the difference.

Ok, you make a reasonable point. I'm merely offering suggestions to raise talking points about this, and there are things that can be implemented to improve this for nearly everyone. Maybe limiting the maximum number of items you can sell or buy in a day isn't a good idea for reasons that you've stated, but I think huge taxes on items that greatly exceed the average price, as well as some stricter limitations on posting and bidding (possibly higher than what I suggested) still seems sensible to me.

It seems to be commonly agreed by most reasonable people that as long as people find a way to play the game and enjoy themselves in a way that doesn't negatively impact the enjoyment of others, that's fine. But when you have people intentionally putting stuff up at wildly insane prices in hopes to over charge people who expect to pay average prices and get it relatively quickly, then I'd argue the ones doing that are negatively impacting the game of others, therefore measures should be in place to strongly penalize this.

I've had bids up for 5+ days on some items at what I assumed were reasonable prices that others paid according to the log. If there's a way to pull up a longer term log, like average price paid for a given item over the period of a year for example, I haven't figured out how to access that. I would gladly pay the yearly median price for any given item without any complaints.

Correct. This would benefit nearly everyone.

Wrong. You sell one block of 10 of them, if it's priced reasonably it should be a near insta-sell. Then feed the other 8 in there and you just sold them all in a few secs. My suggestion of doing this is in part to encourage people to put instant sell prices on stuff vs trying to price fix and over charge people looking to buy. This would make the AH better for pretty much everyone involved except for a small minority of players. Last I checked, converters were between 60-70k. The player who puts 10 converters up for 100k is going to be waiting a very long time to sell those, and in the process their 10 slots will be occupied. Limitations discourage people from doing this, and it's something that would benefit nearly everyone, because nearly everyone would benefit if you can make bids on items for reasonable prices and simply get their items right then and there.

I'll use an example: The level 40 "budget" build. This would be 100m+ now, if you used the AH to buy the stuff. There's no way any of you could put that together for anything close to 20m.

It's NOT stable. If so, then explain to me why builds that cost 20m a couple years ago are now in excess of 100m to build? I'm talking like relatively budget stuff. Not one person has offered a rational explanation for this. People fixing the market/prices is the most logical explanation.

What were you aiming for with converters to try and flip? Chances are, I have some recipes in my inventory right now that I could "convert" to a payout. I also have 60 or so converters I got normally just doing whatever (mostly AE farming)

I'll strongly consider using converters, I find a lot of recipes while farming, and last I checked on the AH converters were selling for around 60-70k a piece. I'm trying to calculate the ratio of 1 converter per merit and estimate whether it's quicker to simply get 3.5 million inf through farming vs getting 50 merits from a TF or whatever content you acquire them from. 3.5 million doesn't take very long at all to get, even on my under equipped spines/fire brute who's still a purple pill addict. I'd estimate the rate to increase by a whole lot if I was fully kitted to the point where I had max defenses and resists. Even looking at merits from the perspective of 50 being able to buy a luck of the gambler defense/recharge 7.5% for 50 merits, which typically goes for around 6m on the AH, even 6 million inf might still be quicker to obtain even with a brute who's an unoptimized purple pill addict over grinding merits. Can someone tell me how long it takes to get 50 merits using the best known methods? A quick search suggests about 45 minutes to an hour, but that could be wrong, or maybe it's better now, these were topics a few years old.

A power leveled 50 alt can still exemplar down and do task forces, etc if that ends up being a good method. So it's not like leveling to 50 misses anything other than certain story archs. I don't care so much for the stories in MMORPGs, and this is one of the reasons why I tried, and couldn't play a game like Final Fantasy 14 with the forced main story arch, it was mind numbing for me, when all I wanted to do was run dungeons/raids/etc and get loot. People don't have to like that, but that's my preferred way of playing MMORPGs. I can state for a fact that the number of games I've played for the story is 0.

Can you offer a specific example for how merit farming is more efficient than AE farming (includes selling drops/recipes and inf gained)? I've asked this before, and I've never gotten a decent response. I'm interested, if you can at least provide me with some specifics. You don't need to type a huge wall of text, just an example of why this method is more efficient/better than this other method is all I'm asking for. Because it seems to me like this is simply an alternative for people who don't like AE grinding more so than it being a better method. I'm open to trying it.

Nobody has to like people power leveling, that's their personal opinion, but absolutely nobody can deny that power leveling hasn't always been a part of CoH gameplay at every single point during the game's life. If one method was nerfed, another area/map/build became meta for whatever the new method was. This is and always has been a thing. Anyone who remembers the old game can attest to all the farm groups running portals in PI. Virtually every single team entering and exiting portals were farming groups power leveling. Pretty much every SG (the ones worth joining at least) had dedicated farm tanks who helped the group level up alts. Even lower level teams, the tanks would herd up massive swarms on the overworld, or in missions, and buffers/healers/blasters would do their roles to keep the tank alive and eliminate the packs. It was fun.

If you think CoH is a power leveling simulator now, then you haven't seen nothing. CoH was always a power leveling simulator. I still remember the time when tanks had no aggro limits, and cones/aoes would hit as many targets that were in range, and tanks could quite literally herd an entire AE meteor map worth of enemies into an ice patch and burn the whole stack down. Ask anyone who played back then, they can attest to the almighty fire/ice tank. The pwnage was so hardcore, that even factoring in double exp at current rates, the exp/hr is still overall lower than it was back then. You could also sidekick people with a level 46, so level 1s were sidekicked at 45, and while the tank was burning down massive stacks of 53s, and the sidekicks got full exp gains.

Also, queing for content has never worked once for me. That was one of the very first things I tried when I started this game looking for teams was to simply use the que, and hope that it worked like a traditional que function in MMORPGs. Turns out that nobody really uses it. It's frustrating that nobody seems to use such a convenient feature for teaming. I tried to que for dfbs many times on several low level alts, and waited in ques for an excess of 30+ minutes before dropping them. Why the community seems to insist on totally ignoring this as well as the game's traditional teaming feature (setting yourself as looking for group + a comment) is a complete mystery to me as a returning player. Back when I played on live, people would have absolutely used that que if we had it. It's an example of an actual good feature that was added since I last played that nobody seems to take advantage of.