Andreah

I started composing a post for this thread, but it depresses me. The sorts of things that would fall to the depths to meet the standard are so rare I don't think there's value in my scrounging through them. Further, I don't want to indirectly disparage anyone's playstyle or build choices like this, even in partial jest. I'd rather talk about the best things people could do.

it's pretty bad right now. I'm holding off opening more packs and am just glad I can claim small numbers of things from email at all.

As an aside, I'm usually amused when people claim they post things for sale at 1 or 5 Inf intending to help "the little guy" or "average player". The little guy doesn't have hundreds of standing bids to buy all manner of things across the market ready to snipe those posts up. The average player doesn't bid 100 inf for things and let those sit for days and weeks until they get a hit. The one who helps the average player is the one who makes sure the market doesn't run out of items priced at reasonable levels, and that bids are out there at fair amounts, so when the average player is ready to buy, then yes, they can get that LotG or whatever for the usual going price set by long term supply and demand, and not the "Omg the only one left is at 20 million!" level; and average player can list their salvage or recipe at 1 and still get a fair bit of inf for it.

No one's using Brainstorms in mass to make uncommon salvage. 1 Brainstorm makes 1 common salvage. What's that, 100 inf per brainstorm? 5 Brainstorms get you 1 uncommon salvage. Call it 3,000 Inf per brainstorm. (uncommon salvage going for 15k right now.) 20 brainstorms get you 1 rare salvage. That's 25,000 Inf per brainstorm. That's 8 times better than for uncommons. Brainstorms themselves sell on the market for 22K and up. You could just sell them direct. Don't use brainstorms to make uncommon salvage, that's a losing game.

I think the difference would have to be between quitting out of the blue sky, vs quitting after telling people "This is awful, we need to quit and reform." In regards to the OP's original problem, I'd suggest to the rest of the team, possibly starting with a private tell to the team leader, that we should quit, and reform without the problem brute/tanker. I personally would not just drop out without a word or in a one-player ragequit. If I think something is going badly wrong, I'm likely not the only one.

This is a good idea; I may use it in my tanks, even if my wording will be a bit different. I herd, and I herd aggressively. I don't want controllers or anyone following me when I zip off to herd -- they'll either mess it up or die trying. I'll bring the herds back to where folks are fighting, usually where the most AoE vfx are clustered. I also don't deliberately try to wipe the team. I'll slow down or even only anchor for single groups if the team is having trouble. I watch the team health bars constantly and adjust accordingly. If someone's in trouble it's my duty to get the aggro off them if I can, and that takes absolute priority over herding. Fortunately, I build my tanks for battlespace mobility. I also carry supplies to rez and heal people -- if I get someone killed, that's on me and I need to make it right. My job, as I see it, is to pace things as fast as we can reliably clear groups without defeats. We should feel challenged, if that's even possible, but not overwhelmed. And it's also my responsibility to respect my fellow players' desires and to be a good follower if I'm not leading. It's not about me, it's about us.

We will also get hoarders trying to buy up yellow salvage because that's what they do whenever prices rise for any reason -- jump on and hoard before it's too late.

We're probably now also seeing The Streisand Effect, too.

At vet level 3 I don't believe you would have had a lot of incarnate abilities to slot, or even most of the slots unlocked. I have characters I haven't played in many months and I've never lost anything other than a temp power. Check your character to see how many incarnate components, emps, astrals, shards, and threads you have. Check the front page of your incarnate powers screen and see how many of the slots are actually unlocked.

Not only that, but you can BUY reward merits for 1 Million inf, each. 100 reward merits buy a Winter-O. If Winter-O's are ever selling for more than 100 Million + market fee, I'll mass produce them.

This. You learn to be efficient at it, too.

I pause from eating popcorn while reading this. First, I doubt there's market manipulation going on. I'm a fairly large scale marketeer, and I've tried just about everything, both on Live and on Homecoming. My opinion is that market manipulation at this magnitude and for this length of time would have to be done by a large team, or using quite a few bots, and would lose a lot of money. If they were succeeding, these hypothetical schemes could not be kept secret, or unnoticed by the devs, for long. Second, to claim it is a "fact" that this is happening and it's punishable, then evidence should be collected and given to the devs. Otherwise, this is not 'fact', it's opinion, and at best "possible", not even "likely". From what I see, this are reasonable price change stemming from general market conditions. There's no reason to believe the price of salvage should be constant, long term. IMO, we should see a long term secular rise in salvage prices because a larger proportion of Homecoming's player base knows they're useful and bids for them off the market. Certainly I've done my best on my server in chat to explain to folks how to use the invention system, how to bid smartly on the market, and how to use converters to produce things they need. I have seen other prices continue to change as well. Boosters have been rising, because they're useful to more of the existing players who pimping their end game builds, and catalysts have been slowly falling because more people realize those are bad choices to use on anything but ATOs. We tell people this in help chat frequently. It adds up to a collectively more market savvy community. Third, regarding flipping. It's a legit market activity. Flippers don't force people to sell game things, and flippers don't force anyone to buy them. If players don't like the prices flippers operate at, they should figure out their bid/sell points and squeeze them out -- it's not hard to do. Flippers exist because most people don't care enough to bother keeping the margins thin. And flippers actually perform useful services -- they even out sell and buy prices and they drain more influence out of the game economy. Finally, the entire auction system is optional. If some players don't like it, they should stop using it. There's nothing there we can't get for ourselves from content rewards and currencies. If we feel that's too expensive; well then, we're complaining the market isn't delivering us as fantastically good a deal as it used to. But if we still use the market, then we must, at some level, realize we're still getting a very good deal out of it. Back to my popcorn.

I've occasionally had difficulties claiming items from email and also opening superpacks for at least two years. It might be a little worse lately so far as I can tell, but it's not new in the last few months. And this has been on Everlasting, not Excelsior.

I have two accounts. My main account with all my serious characters including my marketeers; and a second account which I solely use to keep emails containing Inf.

I think the real money is in the market. It would not be so if everyone were to work it, of course. I make about 2.5 to 3 Billion per week using fifteen marketing alts each taking about 30 minutes of my time per week. That's about 5 or 6 million per minute. A more dedicated marketeer could probably double that with more lucrative niches or more efficient production lines. I like to watch help, and sometimes general chat while I market. An AFK farmer could do better if you only count their hands-on-keyboard time, I'm sure.

I would be hunting for salvage in one, and going over recipes in the other.

What I really want to do is open more than one auction window at a time. Even if they share all the same market slots.

You also pay a 10% market fee. So that's only 11k profit each. Flipping can be profitable, but once it's evident someone is flipping, another flipper usually moves in to flip inside their margin. And those who're listing converters for sale might start listing them a little higher, too. The purchase volume would drop, and those listings would cut into sales, too. Most of the commodities flippers would be interested in end up having margins that are pretty tight -- probably no more than the market fee itself. I doubt this happens much on converters since they're so cheap. The flipper is only making 100k on a stack taking up a market slot, and on a per click-basis, it's low profit. The problem with relatively low value commodities in our auction is it's hard to scale up to larger amounts. And if you try to go for a lot of stacks simultaneously, you'll be risking the non-refunded 5% market listing fee if the market responds to your flipping activities by changing prevailing listing/buying levels. Your other alternative to is constantly be bidding and listing in small amounts trying to stay on top of the fluctuating market. There are probably already casual flippers working these markets; but doing so only in small amounts or sporadically to try to stay under the radar. I think a person would do better flipping rare salvage. For a short time, and then the market pvp would drive you out of it. Which is probably what would happen with converters, too. I encourage folks to give the idea a run and see what volume can sustained over, say, a week or two. It can be a lot of fun. It might even make some money.

Most teams running at +4/x8 can handle having one character be really low and/or poorly kitted out. I've been on a few that turned out to be severely challenged, and sometimes I'm up to digging into my resources (like claiming team insps from email in quantity) to help carry it through, and sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I'll drop with a thank you but I need to go. On a TF it's a more difficult decision because we can't replace dropped teammates. I think in the OP's case I would have stayed and seen it through to the end, and then one-starred a few folks. Next time I join a TF, if they're on it, I'll drop before they start. Sometimes I wonder how often when a TF that was recruiting and filled suddenly needs one more before they can go if this is what's up. :D I think the worst case of this I've encountered was joining a bait-and-switch quick Tinpex where the leader unexpectedly had set players debuffed/enemies buffed/etc settings as we started and when we figured this out he refused to make adjustments. I and most of the team dropped. He called us out for being bad players in global chat afterwards -- that did not go well for him. If you like a really hard fight, great, but let people know you're setting that up when you recruit. Similarly, if a leader is running a TF and wants the team to carry a lowbie/ungeared buddy along at +4, that's fine -- I might even join to help! But tell me so up front, and there may be other people who aren't in a mood or ready to help like that. They deserve to know before they're trapped by our own societal standards of behavior. I suppose we do have minimal societal standards, but also, those aren't automatic in new people - we have to teach folks what expectations are and convince them they're reasonable. I try to check people out for levels and powersets and so forth when we start just out of curiosity. I suppose I ought to politely bring up the difficulty level more often when we're forming up based on what I see, but I don't like to be seen as a complainer. However, if it's not going to work at +4, we need to see that quickly and let people know. Even half way into the first mission "We're not going to do this at +4, we need to drop the TF, reform the team, and restart at a lower difficulty." If someone were to say that in the first mission of a TF going badly, I'd be happy to agree. I'd rather do 1/4 of it over than do the whole thing at 1/4 speed.

I fairly consistently get this problem. I can cause email claim to stall most of the time doing these steps. 1. Open up my email window and the auction house at the same time. Assume I have, say, unslotters to claim from email, and an item of any kind in my auction house storage panel. 2. Claim a few unslotters from email. 3. Retrieve an item from auction storage. 4. Claim another unslotter from email. On step 4., there will at least always be a noticeable delay in the unslotter being delivered. And fairly often it will not deliver for many seconds or even minutes. Any subsequent attempts to claim items from email will produce an error messages that the claim failed, another item claim is still pending.

I listed a bunch I had hanging around for sale at a much lower level. I doubt it's enough to move the needle on the market supply, but hey, doing my part!

What might help is a way to send an in-game email or /tell to the senior leader of a supergroup. Short of that, doing searches for the group name in the forums or asking around might be the best recourse.

You can figure it out if you are willing to work through the tedium. Here's the first seven numbers: As you can see, on Everlasting, the codes 1, 2, and 6 are not currently in use. Just try some random alpha and the code with /enterbasefrompasscode, and see what you get as an error. I suppose it's possible you might guess some's entry code doing this, but I kind of doubt it.

This is likely true, without changes to the code which does this. I imagine it would be possible at some level of effort, for that code to be altered to create and maintain a list of all base numbers in use, and when a new number is required, use the lowest one which is currently not in use. This may sound simple, but I'm also sure it's not. That list would have to be managed, updated when an SG loses its last member (another place in old code that would need to be worked on, with all the accompanying risk), stored in a database structure somewhere, and maintained through restarts, backups, and reloads, and so on.

I have no practical on-topic advice, but I'd just like to plug my concept for the Kinetics/Time Manipulation "Defruptor" archetype. That is all.