Andreah

It's interesting. Maybe one of the more technically knowledgeable people will confirm or not, but I think mezz magnitudes of some different kinds stack. E.g., someone hits an immob on a boss/eb/av, and it's not quite enough to affect them. Then, another person puts a KD on them, that ordinarily wouldn't affect them either, but then it seems to do so.

I have a kinetic defender with Repel. I have it slotted for KB->KD, and a resulting 110% chance for knock magnitude -22. It works wonderfully, even at the highest difficulties. You won't bounce AV's or EB's with it, but just about everything else. Bouncing them costs endurance, so some end reduction and yourself slotted for end recovery are important. It seems to generate a lot of aggro, and if you're stunned, held, slept, etc., it will drop and need to be restarted.

I tried a variety of control options for Combat Teleport, and settled on Ctrl-Lclick as the best option for me. I use shift-click for normal Teleport, so moving to ctrl for the combat variant feels fairly natural. I also used powexec_location target to set Combat Teleport to take me to my selected target whenever I press both Lshift and Lctrl together. It would be neat to have a single button teleport to cursor without needing a click, but there are still pretty good options if one doesn't mind a click.

The current "Sell Now" price is currently as I type this 1.6M -- that's the price flippers are paying to impatient people. They relist them at ten percent (or more) higher, and then within a few hours or a day, they resell at 2M or as high as 5M, which I saw yesterday afternoon at peak for a while. Impatient people buy too, and pay a premium. For anything you intend to sell instantly, you're not going to get a very good deal. Being patient and pricing a little bit above the flipper's price and letting them sit overnight usually pays off well.

Short answer, go to a merits kiosk, convert them into Boosters, Converters, or Unslotters; whichever strikes your fancy. List them for 1 inf on the auction, and they'll sell instantly, and won't be too bad a deal. Don't convert them to catalysts -- those don't pay well enough. Don't convert them to recipes -- that's too much work.

Converters are 3/merit, and sell for about 70,000 each on the /ah currently. That's 210K per merit, before auction fees. Catalysts are 1/20-merits, and sell for about 2,000,000 each on the /ah. That's 100K per merit, also before fees. Unslotters are 2/merit, and sell for about 120,000 each on the /ah. That's 240K per merit. Boosters are 1/5-merits, and sell for about 1,200,000 each. That's also 240K per merit. Prices change a lot, so look and see where they are before committing a lot of merits. Selling at a good price also depends on your ability to effectively set your asking price smartly, and how patient you are. Your mileage will vary on using merits to buy enhancement recipes, but the rule of thumb is not the value of the final thing you make, but what the substitution cost would have been if you bought the recipe using inf off the auction instead.

I think most players can tell, situationally, whether things happening are IC or OOC. When not, it's easy to ask: "((Hey, are you all in character?))". And if someone coomes up to a group I'm in when we're messing around OOC'ly, I might drop a "We're OOC here : )" with the smiley into local chat. If after that they insist on being in-character, okaay, whatever floats, but it does seem to be pointless to RP into OOC stuff.

If a person chooses to play a thoroughly unpleasant character, one should not be surprised if others don't want to interact. No matter how technically correct, true to the characterization, or cleverly played, that kind of character is going to have limited appeal, especially to those who don't know the player OOC'ly very well, or at all. And I could see and understand if some of those people who don't want to interact just go straight for the global ignore, to cut their losses, so to speak.

I'm a tactical pricer, and yet I have to admit, sometimes I want to list for 1 just to skip the trouble.

I logged in to check and saw that. LOL, 50k? O.o 22.5k should be the break-even with rare salvage currently going at 500k. It's moments like this when I wonder if someone is messing around and having a good time at a loss, or if they know something we don't. 😮

... I may have been market-PvP'ing with you over those 😃 But I quit too, it was fun, but not a lot of profit/effort. In another game, I recall doing that kind of dance with the intent of driving my competitor up to bidding high enough to beat me, that I could suddenly dump my inventory into their lap at a profit.

I read the (edited) OP as a standard thing a player working the market would do, not as a GM effort. The person saw an item that had no current bids to buy, and that had last sold at a very low price. Imagine this is some useful unique thing, and the history says they're going for a few thousand each, and there's hundreds and hundreds for sale, and no one is bidding for them right now. Could be a stats blip, sure .. but if it's not -- OMG what a deal!! Time to work the magic. You do a few trials bids and buys, and convince yourself it's not a market stats blip. So you buy up every one that's listed real low like that, and you -know- they'll sell for millions. So you need to get that history cleared. You put in bids for a bunch in the modest million just to prime the pump as it were. You set it up and then log for a while, very pleased with yourself! Muahaha! The cackles and mustache twirling are epic! And then you forget. Log in days later, you've bought a mess of these things at your pump-priming price, and omg, the going price dropped back down before you could strike and sell your stash. Buy high sell low ... wait, that's wrong. Your monocle falls to the floor as you realize the scale of your mistake! Fortunately, the story is entertaining and self-deprecatingly funny, so you write it up and post it in the forums for others to enjoy. --- Edit: Why does anyone bother with stuff that sells at 1K? Or even 10K? Even at 10K, and flipping 200 stacks of ten, that's not really a lot of profit for the effort.

It's like a school of shark-AV's, all ready to frenzy feed if you make a mistake.

... you could repost them for sale at 1. 😄

Perhaps your keyboard was fluttery and just by barely touching the key, it did key repeat 22212 before the last two zeros. I've made mistakes in the AH myself; I lost 700 million once when I hurried when I shouldn't have. I doubt whoever got the windfall is watching these forums. And if they are, given human nature, they would probably silently keep it. All I can say is to repeat the carpenter's creed: "Measure once, cut twice. Measure twice, cut once."

Also, IIRC you can only have two patrol experience boosters' worth of patrol XP at a time, so don't use more than two until you see the patrol XP burn down a ways.

As long as someone is bidding more, those low bids will never fill. The market has a lot of low bids and a lot of very high asks that will never fill on many items. The AH has some issues (bugs) where it might not report stats correctly for an item, and I believe it's possible it might hiccup and fill a bid out of order, but withstanding those, if someone were to bid for thousands of rare salvage at, say, 300k, and keep those bids refreshed frequently, then no one would ever sell a rare salvage and get less than 300k for it, not have it not sell instantly at that price. And if that person consistently relisted them at 333.334K (the first increment over exactly the market fee), then no one who wanted to buy a rare salvage would pay more than that. All the purchase bids lower than 300k would fail to fill, and all the sell bids over 333.334k would fail as well. The person doing this would become the "Market Maker", and control rare salvage at that price point. People could buy higher that the market maker, but not resell at a profit. If the market maker has sufficient inventory and liquidity, they can outlast anyone who tries to challenge them. This is hard when there's a fixed amount of rare salvage you can store. It would require using some alts and shifting inventory around a lot using shared base storage. The problem is, unless that price point was very carefully chosen, monitored, and occasionally adjusted, their inventory that backs it would get unbalanced (too many bought at 300 and not enough sold at 333; or too few bought at 300 and too many sold at 333) and they either get flooded with goods they can't sell or run out and can't maintain their sell position. Getting on this horse is not difficult -- try it some time! The ride can be a lot of fun ... but getting off without breaking something is tricky. Staying on topic, sort of, one could do this to an ATO as well, and deliberate push the price up. But this is really not practical. There's too much supply, and with converters your low bid price would end up tied to the price of the cheapest ATO set plus the price of a few conversions.

I recall a few weeks back, or maybe a month or two, (time flies), someone in /general was complaining they'd listed rare salvage at 1, and it was bought at some silly low price -- less than 100k iirc. Chat was kind of mean, you know how that goes, people said the person would take "1" for it, so be happy they got more than 1? Rare salvage sells pretty consistently between 350k and 450k, depending on whether winterpacks are on sale. (I think brainstorms from pack drops are a big part of rare supply). So I thought, does it hurt me at all to put in a mess of bids at, say, 200k for rares, and keep those refreshed? I can relist for 222k, get my money back, and ensure someone listing for 1 doesn't get burned hugely. Heck, one could probably put those in at 300k, and still set a bottom for the market.

Everything that I get in normal content I list back at 1. In my case, I want it to sell fast. Secondarily, people who want to buy and use or resell benefit and I'm happy with that, too. When I'm doing market arbitrage, upselling items I've crafted or converted, or selling drops from packs I've paid for is when I'm careful about the prices I list at.

Being rich from marketeering lets me help people and I enjoy that. I get the inf from people who are impatient, who're unwilling to risk pack opening RNG, or who don't care enough to bid incrementally and get good value for the auction-house spending. I give away large amounts of inf to friends, sg-mates, and even to strangers in /help or /general frequently. Just today I sent a tidy little sum to a player I never met before who seemed to need it from banter in /z chat. For a lot of people, especially new players, it's hard to get inf for those enhancements or for the very helpful items in P2W. I help them out, and I enjoy being able to do that without skipping a beat in my own play -- a few million is nothing to me, but everything to the right recipient. I can also pass money to people running costume contests when I think the theme is one I like. Those I like especially, because they help build community. Some of it I keep for myself; I can make and gear those new alts when I want to, with no hesitation. And more is for purpose of score, because it's a game, and nothing says you're winning quite like being a trillionaire. Not that I am. >.> Yet.

If one is listing ATO's, and some are not selling for at least Bopper's 5.84Million, one can use one or more converters on each one to convert the to ones that do. So long as the sale price increase on the converted ATO exceeds the value of the converter used, then it's worthwhile. Just do the out-of-set conversion for one converter to make another randomly chosen ATO.

Thank you, Bopper. That confirms in detail what I had seen in bulk bottom-line averages selling drops from many, many packs. Free tailor sessions, for some players, will be a pretty big value. If you open enough packs consistently, they would never pay a tailor fee again. Windfalls are quantfiable after the fact, too. Write down your inf; run an hour of content with a Windfall active, sell everything, and check your inf. 1/3 of the difference would be on account of the windfall -- it's a 50% bonus to virtually all drops, and when you get 150% instead of 100%, then 1/3 of the 150% is the value. All the little bits and bops inspiration drops are not easy to quantify. But if one were patient one could sell them and total it up, but the tedium, ouch. Experienced powers either speed on even faster to level cap, which gains on increased inf drops at cap for the leveling time saves. Or they increase the rate of gaining veteran levels, and the Emps/Threads those drop. That's harder to set a inf value to.

I use those, and I'm always fully amplified while I'm running missions. The defense, offense, and survival amplifiers together are probably about the same in total as being a level higher. Then, you also get "Windfall" temp powers which for an hour greatly increase drops from content. I don't use them always, but I use them often. For example, an ITF being run with your character amplified, running Experience, and also Windfall is hugely fun and even more rewarding that normal. There are also temp powers you can claim to rez yourself and teammates, and you'll have all the Team-Dual inspirations ready to claim from email to boost the whole team when you're in a tight spot. Some of this stuff defies a straightforward inf valuation, but is clearly very useful and beneficial to gameplay.

Well then, I will answer you directly. I have bought thousands of super packs, and will buy thousands more. I make approximate a 20% margin selling the pack drops. The packs drop a lot of valuable items in addition the ATO's. They drop Brain storms, which one can easily convert to rare salvage and sell, enhancement boosters, catalysts, converters, and unslotters one can sell; reward merits which can be used to exchange for items to sell, special inspirations which can be sold (but generally not worth the effort), and a lot of temporary powers which have value even if they cannot be directly sold. The most valuable of these, imo, are the three amplifiers and the Windfall power; those in concert improve the rate of drops from content or farming which has a substantial value. It would be easy for an inexperienced person to lose money on packs by not pricing their sales on the Auction wisely. Once one understands how the auction works and how to price ATO's especially, then it's not difficult to make consistent profit. In addition, one can use the converters that drop from the packs to change the less demanded and lower priced ATO's into better ones to sell, and increase profitability. That's not necessary, but improves results.

Just like back on live, there is a lot of "Dead" Inf. Inf that lies on characters who are no longer played by inactive players. Inf that is being kept for purposes of bragging rights or "Score", Inf that's being saved for non-specific future uses, and so on. Between that and the fixed price seeding of superpacks, I don't see there ever being an inflation problem. The excess inf-supply will funnel into dead inf before it can create a general rise in prices. Finally, I would turn the OP's question around for more insight: Given that ATO's sell for less than 10 Million inf each, why does anyone buy superpacks? 😄