Andreah

Often what might superficially look like another marketeer trying to muscle in by "price+1" is just some ordinary player trying to get a few at a good price, and those can be waited out easily enough.

I've noticed what looks like more "one-upping" going on recently, too.

I've been trying a bunch of variations on these, trying to get one key to select a nearby ally and then perform Rejuvenating Circuit, Insulating Circuit, Empowering Circuit, and finally, Energizing Circuit. I just can't get it to work right unless it's on five separate keys without loading bind files, even though it was almost trivial to get Speed Boost and Increase Density on one of my kins. I even tried the simple case of just two of the circuit powers. In the best case, it selects the nearby ally, fires the first power in the series, and leaves that first power queued up a second time. Subsequent presses of the key will only ever fire the first power, even though it appears the bindload for the second power has succeeded. I suspect that these circuit powers are attack powers, even though they target allies, and attack powers seem to have some (many?) safeguards built into the macro/bind system to prevent just this kind of one-key-does-it-all approach. Speed boost and Increase Density must not be in that protected class, and as pure buffs, don't get that kind of treatment. Can anyone confirm this? In the mean time, I've put each of my four circuit powers on separate keys. It's no big issue, but I wish there was clearer, more complete, original documentation for the bind system.

One of my marketeers works in the salvage market. Higher volume, but lower margins.

There's never money to do it right, and never time to do it over.

To be honest, in the last few years I've started to really like unstructured and triple-store databases. Databases have never been the core focus of my work experience; which is likely true of many developers. All the more reason not to try to homebrew them. And I think that applies to many other things we might want to use. These subsystems are things people put careers in to, not a couple of nights hopped up on jolt cola.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you write your own subsystem in-house instead of getting a cots or even open source version to use. Those both can be a hassle, but they're worth it in the long run. Partly you're not reinventing the wheel, and partly you get a wheel that's reasonably round. As I understand it from previous threads, the auction uses an in-house coded heap or binary tree of some sort to implement the bids (and offers on the other side) as a priority queue. This is potentially fast at getting the absolute highest priority (in this case, priority is price) element, but not satisfy it the way of, say, a properly formed SQL query where it would have been easily restricted to the highest bid price from a user other than the offeror; and so you get this particular bug. I'm sure it's fixable even in the current code. But exactly where, and how, to do it? That now requires very specialized understanding of this code. And after the changes, one need to perform rigorous testing on it, and that's complicated because it's detailed, possibly very complex and poorly documented low level code you're fooling with instead of a simple SQL query string, where you know the database will retrieve the results if the query is properly formed, and knowledge of query syntax is common as dirt and queries are easy to inspect and test.

And if the game were to go a complete redesign of this magnitude, we'd go deeper into the attack calculations than just trying to band-aid hard caps on folks. I'm a fan of conjectural design changes as a means for understanding the game better and also for forums entertainment, but as a matter of practice, I'm against almost all of them because even if they would narrowly address the problem they're aimed at, they usually would break vastly more things. It's like medicine, "First, do no harm."

I assumed it was that you couldn't sell if your own bid for an item is the highest outstanding bid. It does the query, find the highest bid, sees that it is yours, and since you can't sell to yourself, it doesn't go through. Then it stops looking. So even if there are bids, it wont' find them. However, it could be as Yomo described too. A little experimentation could clear it up I would think.

Enemy_gm ??? Nice. I agree the enemy ranks would be very useful, but maybe too useful!

I'd really like to be able to select the nearest actual player, even if they're not my teammate. These slash commands use these keywords (from the unofficial wiki): I'd like to exclude all pets, not just my pets, so a keyword like "notpet" would be great. While we're at it (if we're at it), being able to limit players to "leaguemate" as well as "teammate" would be nice.

In general, having more ways to customize and work with our friends lists would be good. I'd also like to be able to add a reason to an entry on my list why why they are there. Sometimes I forget why I put someone there, and the notes system doesn't do it for me. I want to see the reason right there in the list. Finally, while we're wishing for stuff, I'd like to be able to set a sunset on people I add to my ignore list. Seven days, a month, a year, forever? Maybe that could at least show the date when I added them to it. I'd also like to show some degree of friendships. We have the stars system, maybe a few free-form ratings like that. Stars, Hearts, Clubs, and Spades. Someone might have four stars because they're great leading groups, but I give them no hearts because they really aren't a friend of mine, and I give them three clubs because their builds are fairly impressive. Then I'd be able to choose which of the four ratings I see displayed on the hud. But this is really just dreaming, because it's not that important for the degree of effort I suppose it would take. And then, it's amazing how many active players don't even know you can add notes to people and set stars already.

It would be very uncommon, but sometimes it's not just one apple, but the whole tub.

I've had a truly horrendous time trying to learn how to base edit. Perhaps this is part of my problem --I run at non-scaled 4K resolution. If just using the left hand half of the screen is the answer, I would be delighted.

I want to be able to put Supergroups on my friends list. And my ignore list. And I want to be able to /friend people to my Supergroup.

I believe that. The number of new characters and new builds being made for them will trend downward. But the development teams mixing things up and causing us to rethink our builds keeps demand up. And there are a few players who will make new alts forever. Maybe we should have a chance of a slotted enhancement being destroyed when we're defeated? (For the record, I say NO. )

I agree. I'd put quite a lot of thought into the dynamics of the HC marketplace, and concluded there really weren't many. In the real world, price changes occur because the classical supply and demand curves change when the fundamentals of how commodities are produced and why they are consumed change, or when new potential substitute products emerge. In CoH terms, if drop rate of a thing that was in demand, or that was a precursor (via converters, etc.) of a thing that was in demand were to change, we'd see that as a sustained change in supply of an item, and that would cause a price change. Or, if a new build meta were to emerge that made use of a previously trash IO, that could increase the price of that item. But both would be mitigated by the relative ease of converting one IO to another. The new ID-Sync-O's are a change, and a big one, but we don't see utter tumult in the others of Hami-O class IOs, because they don't displace those other items, but complement them. This was a big change, bigger than what any one player could make happen, and didn't cause market chaos. The seasonal Winterpack sale event disturbs supply of Winter-Os, (and the other items that drop) and I saw prices changes, but not huge, and not permanent, and I think not particularly troublesome for anyone. And that was truly huge in scale, especially since it was hinted it could be the last sale. If a player who was producing lots of, say LotG+7.5% IO's suddenly stopped playing, we'd see a disturbance, but it would quickly be taken up by others. And vice-versa, if a new player suddenly moved into a market niche in a big way, that would at most just crowd out one or two others. Margins in a lot of these areas aren't large, and it's easy to find others. And as best I can tell, we don't have any markets that have single suppliers working them. The primary input commodities, salvage, recipes, and etc., have either market limiting buffers (the soft price ceilings on seeded salvage, for example), or fungible sources apart from random drops, such as merit purchases. Finally, there's no real way to innovate on productivity -- I can't come up with a way to craft a recipe with less salvage than you, or a way to craft ten at a time, etc. Any such method would be an illegal exploit. It's basically a stable system, and I like that. It has subtle ups and downs and plenty of internal complexity, but these are limited and available for everyone or anyone to study and make use of.

I don't use any tools. I mix and match sets with a general goal or two in mind. I'll look at builds in the forums to see what sorts of goals people have pursued for various AT/powers combinations, but I don't follow them closely. And my builds do fine.

Your efforts were noticed. :D

I know right!! This is the single biggest reason we don't see a lot of crazy market shenanigans.

I hadn't though of it this direction, but it could go quite a ways. However, someone else buying low and reselling high might detect this and go to town on it. I suppose it's conceivable one might "reset" the going price down a bit. This may be very unlikely, as it depends on the elasticity of supply and demand for these.

You build a new, parallel auction house -- /ah2. Then start up /ah2 and you do a soft retirement on the old auction house. No new adding items to store, no new postings of items to sell. You can buy things that are already there, cancel orders you've posted, and pull things out, but not put things in. Maybe you warn folks it's going to be deleted in a year; maybe you just keep it forever.

Can confirm. A lot of it I encountered was due to unexpected success -- you plan for a throw-away tool or short life system, but end up keeping it for a decade or more. And there's sunk-cost logic all along the way. It's easy to fall into that trap. And there's incremental funding. On a project I was on, we had short-term results based funding, and at best we could only use a small amount of it to do short term bug fixes and add critical new capabilities required for the current work. Additional work was not only not in the budget, it was contractually not allowed. Rinse/repeat twenty times, and you have a truly amazing mess. And at no point along the way could you have done it differently, even in hindsight.

Try a Gravity/Kinetics or Gravity/Time controller, both are very fun, powerful, thematic, and different than a meleer.

I agree, and despite all that, if the player writes some decent background fiction explaining this, I could be okay with it.