Andreah

Imo, the salvage bottleneck to crafting, if there is one at all, is still rares. Here's a thought experiment. If salvage could ONLY be bought from the market at the seemed prices of 10,000/100,000/1,000,000 would it greatly change the end prices of the converter production? I think somewhat, sure, but not hugely. The majority of the production costs would still be in converters.

Would putting it in the auction clear the boosts off it?

I'd be curious to see what the yellow salvage price would have to be at to make running AE farms for tickets more efficient than for regular drops.

That's not what it is. That's a low-bidder buying them up to relist somewhat higher (a flipper), OR perhaps a low-bidder buying them up to convert to another kind of purple that is in greater demand and has a higher price. Marketeers use these odd prices as a signature or point of randomness to maximize the chance they'll be high enough to snatch up an offered sale when buying, and low enough to be below everyone else trying to do the same when selling, while avoiding the round numbers, because smart listers post just above those for many similar reasons. If a player wants to move an enhancement to an alt, they can just use their shared base storage or use the in-game email to mail it.

BDO's crafting system was ... well, I'd use the word Horrible, but it doesn't convey the incredible frustrations and sense of loss it gave me. Maybe Terrible, or Horrendous, I dunno, I'm at a loss for it. There was some complexity, but it boiled down to a lot of preparatory gathering, pre-processing effort and time investment into one very low chance to succeed, which would very nearly ruin your gear on failure, and make you feel like you completely wasted the last week of your life. And make you feel envious to the point of hatred of people who worked just as hard and smartly as you did, but who just happened to roll luckier. And there were some people who liked it, I guess.

What ratio would you suggest? 20:1, which would be the no-loss inverse of the Emp->Thread conversion? Or should it be 25:1, 30:1, or even 40: or 50:1?

I'd like there to be a button that would export my entire character list from the displayed server to a CSV file with all the basics. Level, vet level, Inf, xp to level, debt, patrol xp, badge count, reward merits, emps/astrals/threads, incarnate tiers, etc. I also feel like I've suggested this before, but I can't find it if so.

That is wild.

If I could sell the ~1,000 free tailor sessions that I have, I would. Well, most of them, anyways. :)

I tried SSB once back on Live and I was so confused and hated the #@!$% thing so much it's got to be the very last thing I'd run ever. You go enjoy the SSB; I'll just buy the OWF off the market. :D

With either a little luck or some volume, a player can make a million or so off each pack by selling those contents which can be sold, or used by you instead of buying them from the auction. But it's a lot of UI clicking and claiming from emails which can be fussy, and then posting to the auction and pricing for selling. The packs also drop things that are useful but can't be sold. Things like "Experienced" ,"Windfall", and etc. temp powers, amplifiers, free tailor sessions and free respecs. If you open a lot of packs your email claim will be jammed with them. If those have value to you, that helps.

I've considered suggesting the HC Devs do a merit price rebalance, but it's a more complex problem and fraught with potential adverse downstream impacts. It would also need to be done with an eye on the value of AE Tickets, superpack drop rates and prices, and the metas of converter roulette. If we rebalanced prices, I can't think of anyone winning other than the large scale marketeers. Except Catalysts. Those are a trap for casual player and ought to be reduced in price or removed from the merit store. Or, alternatively, unbucket the attuned and leveled IO Set enhancements. Now that would make catalysts valuable again, and player who're using catalysts to attune their set pieces wouldn't be wasting their merits and influence any more. Catalyst prices on the auction would float up a little closer to their equivalent merit value, and they wouldn't wreck the downstream economy the way messing with converters would. But this isn't going to happen, and I'm okay with that. We just need to continue educating the non-marketeers and casuals on how to best use their Merits.

I would say Merit prices for most things are generally too high, but not greatly too high for some things. For example, buying a LotG global recharge recipe will cost 50 Merits. Those are worth 10 Million Inf, and an already crafter LotG global recharge enhancement can be had off the Auction for 8 Million. The recipe costs 10 million plus two rares worth about another million and some odds and ends plus crafting fee. It's more expensive, but not hugely so. And this also puts a soft cap on the price anyone can reasonably charge for this enhancement on the auction. A casual player would do better to convert their merits to Inf and then buy it, and save a couple million. There are other rares which are not remotely worth 50 merits' equivalent of 10 Million on the auction. And uncommon recipes sell for 20 Merits, which is still 4 Million. A lot of uncommons enhancements can be had for a fraction of that. It's a matter of whether you feel you need to spend wisely in the range of millions or not. For wealthy players, probably not. But I think most all casual players should consider their options carefully. It can add up a a big savings in Influence or time to get a build slotted out. It's possible Boosters and Converters sell too low. If their Merit prices were raised, the 50 and 100 Merit recipes might be better placed in terms of cost, but this would generally drive prices of everything downstream from converters on the auction up. Finally, Catalysts are priced wildly too high in terms of Merits. They're just not as useful as they were on Live, and spending 20 Merits on them, the equivalent of 4 Million inf, is downright criminal when they can be had for 1.5 Million on the auction. They would be more sanely priced at 10 Merits.

100 Merits can buy 20 Enhancement Booster (or 300 Converters) which sell for ~1.5 million each, which nets you ~27 Million inf after market fees. Sometimes they move faster if you list lower and settle for ~20 Million after fees. Anything you can buy in the neighborhood of this price is a fair deal. (300 converters would sell for around 20 Million after fees, but it's more clicking and stack management). If a player is spending merits on anything that's substantially lower cost in the auction than this ~200K per merit, they could get a better deal. This isn't an issue for those of us with huge piles of Inf and other wealth, but I try to steer more casual players to this route so they can get a lot more for their hard earned merits.

There are three kinds of Superpacks, Hero and Villains, Rogues and Vigilantes, and Winter Packs. They are bought from the Auction under Salvage->Special. The first two cost 10 Million Inf each, and the Winter packs cost (nominally) 25 Million each. Sometimes players resell winter packs for less. Each pack is opened and flips five cards on your screen to show you. Each card reveals a drop which could be one of many things, including ATO's. The full lists are in the wiki. https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Super_Pack https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Super_Pack/Heroes_and_Villains https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Super_Pack/Rogues_and_Vigilantes https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Super_Pack/Lords_of_Winter

Sometimes you can get very good deals on them. But also, if you're willing to plan ahead a day or two, you can bid modestly and get the ones you want in the 5-8 million range. The recently worsened state of pack opening and emails claiming probably reduces supply. Also, one could buy any five Superpacks, and expect to get 6 ATO's from them, and then a few dozens of converters should get the complete set desired. And bonus stuff to use or sell.

I think the merit costs of a number of things could be adjusted to not be quite so far off the market equivalent values of the merits and the things you could buy directly with them. Some of them are wildly bad deals. Others, pretty fair. I think the losers in this are the more casual folks who don't stop to work out the ratios.

1.5 Emp merits converts to 30 Threads converts to 1 Ultimate which is worth ~1.5 Million 1 Emp converts to 10 reward merits which can get would be worth ~2.0 to 2.7 Million based on buying two boosters which each sell at ~1.3-1.5 million, or 30 converters which sell at ~70-90k each. I don't consider them "Free" since you could sell them for the influence, which represents an opportunity cost. But if you're going to play anyway, then certainly they feel free. :) I would never use Emps to make Ultimates or other super inspirations however. You can use the normal threads that drop if you can't or don't need to use them for incarnate crafting.

That's impressive building! Crippled by all this and still softcapped.

Influence ... is ... for ... Hoarding!!

Good luck trying. Monopolies are basically impossible to create. Unless you break the Code of Conduct and use botting/automation, there's nothing person A can do sufficiently more efficiently than every one else to make a monopoly work. And there's simply no way to stop other people from producing goods and prevent them from undermining a temporary monopoly. Go ahead and try to buy up all the LotG globals recharges, they'll make more. There's nothing wrong with flipping stuff. It provides a useful market service, increasing the prices sellers get when they want to sell, and lowering prices buyers have to pay when they want to buy. It's sort of a "bottom feeder" approach to marketing -- you have to live just barely outside the 10% market fee buy/sell split on your chose flip items, and you'll have to constantly watch it and adjust your buy and sell prices, and constantly be ready to respond to market-pvp and eat big losses on inventory. If the flippers prices don't look right to you, don't pay them. Better yet, turn the tables on them, and do a little market-pvp. Flippers have a lot of the same problems as the monopolist -- just not quite so bad. It makes them vulnerable. Again, good luck. If you want to corner the market on a particular item and drive the price way up, that's hard -- as hard as being a long term flipper but worse, since you can't just live inside the buy/sell margin, you have to push the sell price up, and that just invites other people to undercut you. I've never heard of anyone causing a long term change in the price of an item. Go ahead and try, prove me wrong. Further on inflation, people working the market actively reduce inflation. Inflation is caused by too much money in the hands of buyers for the amount of goods that are out there. Not only, that, but and increasing amount of money in circulation. People who create influence from drops and vendoring items are causing inflation. People who stash the best items away permanently for their own later use cause inflation. People who pay market fees, even flippers who cause it to be paid twice, remove influence from circulation. Marketeers who stash money away permanently to have as a measure of their accomplishment remove money from circulation. Finally, the market is totally optional. There's nothing you can't get on your own without ever needing to buy it from another player via the market. If the way the market works disturbs a player, maybe the market isn't for that player. There are other game systems that are. Get your items from vendors, from random drops, from Merits, by doing converters, and so on. No one needs the market -- it's a game system, fundamentally designed to entertain some of us. Edit: One more group of players who decrease inflation in a big way: Superpack Openers. The money they spend on Superpacks in the Auction doesn't go to any player; it goes entirely out of the game. Then, the superpacks drop all sorts of items they can sell. Decreased money supply and Increase supply of goods -- that's a perfect storm of reducing prices. Imagine you want to buy a Winter-O, and hardly no one's buying winterpacks because they're too hard to open. Prices would go up very high as we all scramble to bid high enough to get the few that do get to the market.

The game is different things to different people. And this is intentional -- a wide-audience MMO doesn't have just one way to play it. It deliberately seeks to provide game systems that appeal to a large and diverse player base. In this case, there are quite a few people for whom the aim of playing CoH is to become very wealthy in influence, assets, enhancements, expensive builds, and so forth.

I've been thinking about this a while; not in detail though, just theme-wise. Some streamers have been doing a "Iron Man/Woman" challenge. Could you do something like that with a pools build? If so, which build would be your best choice? What if you could put IO set pieces in pool powers, but only SO's/Commons in primary and secondaries? What if you could not place slots in primaries/secondaries if there was a pool power that could be slotted instead?

I had a look at the level 50 accuracy common recipe. It sells at the vendor for 113,650. It can be bought from the invention worktable for 454,600 (exactly four times the vendor price. If you memorize the recipe, the worktable cost is halved to 227,300.) It's being bought on the Auction for 87,011. That's probably the low-ball mass-buyer/crafter price. If you post them for "1" you'll likely get a price like this. Is that relative loss worth skipping the vendor? I think so. Other common recipes have much lower auction sell points. Recharge reduction was around 30k. There's probably good potential competition in there for beginning marketeers to bid to buy to vendor or craft.

Flipping, I believe, came out of real estate, and it was the practice of buying a property and immediately relisting it to resell at a slightly higher price, with little or no improvement to the property. There's another meaning also out of real estate, and that is when one buys a property, puts in some property improvement, and then relists for sale. In the latter case, someone with some understanding of the housing needs in the area has used their knowledge and available capital to improve a property - I think we can all agree that's a positive. In the first case, I think there is a real service which is done here as well. The flipper came in and bought a property earlier for the seller than they otherwise would have sold it at. And then, carried that inventory until a willing buyer arrived, and then sold it to them at a price lower than they otherwise would have paid. Everyone wins. If people believe that a flipper is someone who buys a controlling share of the inventory of something and then only sells it at a much higher price, well, we can't stop them, but that's not flipping. That's cornering. I don't think anyone can corner any significant market in CoH Homecoming without losing influence. Unless the person uses bots or other automation, the tools just aren't there to do this on any significant scale. If there was a class of players who act to increase market prices *at all* I would say it is the farmer/hoarders -- those who do a lot of gameplay or farming, and then vendor the trivial drops and hoard their useful drops for themselves, especially if they build up a large and increasing stock they'll likely never use. They're adding influence to the economy and not correspondingly increasing the supply of goods. In the context of the recent rise in uncommon salvage prices, it could well be conjectured that once many people saw the price rise, they stopped selling as much of it to save for their own use, making the price rise accelerate, and then possibly even causing more people to hoard it. Like toilet paper in 2020. I play a fair amount. I hardly ever vendor anything, and I don't save anything. I put it all on the market. And I don't spend most of the influence I get, I sock it away for my self-actualization "Marketeer Score" Add goods, remove money, decrease prices.