Andreah

If this were a second, account wide, stash of such things, it could work. But if it were just a consolidation into a single account wide aggregation, this would be an absolute disaster. The OP may not realize this, but the upper limits on these per character are not very high, and many of us would lose tremendous amounts of all the currency types. The limit on Influence alone is only 2 Billion, and this an extremely difficult thing to change, if not flat out impossible. Anyone with more than 2 Billion inf collectively on the characters on their account would instantly overflow, and lose all the excess unless there were some way to gather it and hold it aside. This adds additional coding complications on top, and as I see it, it's just not practical for the value. Similar issues exist for recipes, salvage, and so on. Many of us use extra characters as spare storage, and until that's solved, I'd oppose this strenuously.

Don't forget Amplifiers -- great to use on higher-level alts that need those last few levels, but they're (relatively) expensive to buy from P2W by then. Or the Experienced temp powers, which also help speed up getting Veteran levels for Emps and Threads.

The features of the auction in CoH are pretty limited compared to real world markets, and the terminology isn't always a good match. I mean, what I wouldn't give to be able to short-sell Winterpacks in November. 😄

I never plan to have to be lucky to get a profit. I work out the averages, and then I count on the law of large numbers for doing what looks right on average in great volume. I'm going to make a profit doing X ten thousand times over or I'm not going to do X at all. When ever you do a conversion, there are only so many things an IO can convert into. Some of those take you closer to what you want to end with, and some don't. For making, say, LoTG's from a certain start, count the number of equally likely outcomes at each step and then ratio the number that yield a success vs a failure. (Or you can have done it enough times and recorded your data well enough to be confident you have a good estimate of the expected number of trials before success) This probability of success is your Bernoulli sequence rate parameter, and you can use that to determine the average number of conversion attempts needed to achieve success .. 1/p, where p is the probability of success. (In the stat literature, Bernoulli sequences are often termed as runs of successes before a failure, so we're backwards of that -- number of failures before a success. ) From this you can estimate your average production cost, and then from that, the cost of the starting input, the cost of the converters, and the market fee you'll need to pay, work out the minimum listing price you can list at for a profit, and compare that to the typical selling prices on the market. Your strategy to choose a price to list at to sell fast may not be at the minimum profitable price, of course, especially in a high volume and competitive market like LotG's, and that's another topic entirely. 🙂 Maybe that's worth a quick discussion anyway. If you have one LotG to sell, you could list it pretty close to the median sell price, and get it to sell overnight, or worst case, a few days. But if you're making 100 of them every day, you need them to sell fast, and you can't list them all that high -- most will still be there tomorrow, and you'll run out of market slots after you make the next batch of 100. You'd need to list them low, so of the, I don't know, ~200 (?) LotG's that sell every day, half of them are yours so you don't build up a big inventory backlog. But the problem with listing 100 LotG's every day at the same price, well below market to achieve volume, is a predator on the market (*humms innocently*) might deliberately put in a series singleton bids to try to figure out who's listing low for volume, and snipe most of them away, only to relist on alts with extra, otherwise unused, auction slots. Or worse, list their 100's of LotG's 1 Inf below yours. Ideally, you want to do this to them -- list your goods 1 inf below where they're trying to sell, and have low enough production costs you can make a profit even if that's the price you sell at. Or at least -Know- that you can, while they're not sure because they didn't do the arithmetic. How do you defend yourself from all this? Watch for patterns in the prices you sell at. List at several price points. Don't get obsessed with number patterns (don't always buy at 5,123,456 or at 10,111,111) Keep your production costs low and your pockets deep, so you can ride out price wars. Be diversified, so you can let go of any one market niche for days or weeks at a time. Have several broad strategies for marketeering -- flipping/arbitrage, crafting, converting, super-packing, and switch between them when it seems appropriate.

I deliberately didn't use the "Flipping" term, because from where I've been, this is buying, fixing up, and reselling for a profit, generally in a rising market. So, if one buys, for example, IO's in certain sets, and then converts them more valuable ones in the same set, or into rarer sets, or uniques, this would be flipping in that sense. To me, buying something only to immediately relist it higher for a profit is speculation (time-arbitrage) -- buying in today's market where prices are relatively low, with the intent of selling in tomorrow's market where prices are relatively high. I'm more likely to call this time-arbitrage, because it's working with the spread over time of the typical seller's impatience to unload, even at a lower price, and the typical buyer's impatience to acquire the asset, even at a higher price. A time-arbitrageur is trading their willingness to hold onto an asset for a while for a cut of the spread, less a second round of market fees.

Are any of you "Pure Marketeers"? A pure marketeer, as I define it here, would be a money-making strategy which did not act as value-added processing, but only as an arbitrage. Buy low, resell high. Not buying inputs, creating a more valuable product, and then selling it. A pure marketeer might also farm, craft recipes, and do conversions, but only on things they acquired via missions and play, not buying purely for that reason. There's probably a better term for it. Back on live, I was what I would consider a pure marketeer, and did pretty well with it. I bought and resold recipes, salvage, purple IOs, and a few other things. I never stockpiled them for later use, only to buffer my sales. Iirc, I could generally get a 30 or 40% margin on things, and there was pretty good volume. I think margins here on HC tend to be slimmer, which is a sign of a more efficient (less inefficient?) market. This may be due to a higher density of knowledgeable players, or just the bucketing of the market at work -- fewer narrow niches dominated by the stochastics. The big advantage I saw was it did not require a lot of in-game activity; once you knew your markets and had things set up, it was a high profit/time and profit/mouse-click activity, So, again, do any of you do this, and how well does it work for you?

I had a news radio station SG back on live on Virtue, but there were only a couple of us in it -- it was "WSPDR World News" or something sort-of like that. If I'd had more a mind for recruiting and leading, it frequently got inquiries. So the idea of having a group like that has a draw. You might also try going to the SG Adminstrator in City Hall and doing a search over group names for the usual suspect "News", "Newspaper", "Reporter", "Radio", etc. If you want to see a SG along a certain theme, and don't find one, then there might be draw to creating one yourself or looking for people who have the same interest to band together to get it going.

I understand where you're coming from, but in a more strict accounting sense, they're worth what you could sell them for, which is pretty consistently 1.8M each. (2M less market fee) When I do analysis of my marketing schemes, I value everything, no matter how cheaply I buy it, at the price I could reasonably expect to sell it at, less fees. Let's say some kind benefactor was gifting me rare salvage, and I was using those to craft recipes to feed up-conversion marketing, I'd still estimate my profit margins counting those at 450k. Because if I can't sell what I'm making for more than the sum of the parts, it's not a real profit.

Right; the point is what you can do with it, the market valuation is what you could reasonably liquidate it for. 🙂

According to Bopper's calculations: You should average 9.7146 reward merits per pack for both of them.

I agree with the disagreement. 😄 It's certainly possible spend a billion on a build, but it's not the same as the value of the build. When i talk to people who're doing builds and who are concerned it's going to cost "600 Million" or more, I try to ask them how they are coming up with that number, and often it's because they're expecting to overpay hugely for IOs. The market will let you overspend on things incredibly. We even have threads for this. But even without putting in accidental extra zeros, most players have a poor strategy for how to get good value off the market. Or worse, they know how but don't seem to care. I'd say spending and extra thirty seconds to bid-creep and save a million is worth the same time farming. Maybe by quite a margin! And there are even better ways to get good deals. I would venture a guess that most Billion Inf Builds might reasonably only liquidate for half that. However, we have multiple builds. And it would not be difficult to have a billion in value in three carefully tuned builds, but I think this is very uncommon.

I would not count boosted IO's as being more valuable than any others. Boosting your IO's is pure consumption and has no resale value. It does cost quite a bit more to do, but it isn't a store of wealth, since the boosted attribute can't be traded, and is stripped if you try.

I think a lot of people would be interested. I sometimes forget to use most of my incarnate powers in regular missions anyhow. Why not get a chance at a reward merit for it?

Aha! Well, you can also immediately convert one Empyrean Merit to ten Reward Merits, and that's the basis I generally use. Astrals, go through the extra step of going 5 Astrals to an Empyrean first. I think on the market, going to threads to buy Super/Ultimate inspirations is both a poorer deal and lower volume. 1 Emp -> 20 threads -> 2/3 an Ultimate worth ~750K or 2 regular Super Inspirations worth ~1M vs. 1 Emp -> 10 reward Merits -> 30 Converters worth ~2M

Almost all assets. Total wealth; including anything that could be sold and those pegged to current market price, but excluding anything that cannot be sold.

I'd recommend https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Alignment instead, as it's a fork off the old dead paragonwiki archive, and is kept more up-to-date for Homecoming.

It could be a lot worse.

It does add up fast. I keep track of mine -- at least stuff that's not slotted into builds. I've figured we had a Trillionaire or two out there in net worth; it's not impossible, just difficult. In the two years HC has been up, if a player has been accumulating 10 Billion a week for 100 weeks, that does it. As Yomo has noted before, keeping that rate up is very hard purely from market operations; but if someone is also farming consistently, then I think it's very doable. I think it can be done, approximately, using mark-to-market, but one has to settle on a method for reading the market price for things that aren't in one's usual market basket. I pick something like the lowest sale price I see on the list that isn't an obvious low-ball snipe, minus 20%. I feel I could get this price fairly easily for most things, and only wait a few days to do it for most items. I also don't keep big stockpiles of rarely-used items unless I'm actively buying/using/selling them. So I might have a few thousand converters or such laying about, but I know what those will go for, and how fast they'll go, too. But I don't have a collection of Panacea Uniques, for instance. The thing with mark-to-market is we know we can't get the market price if we had to liquidate instantly, but it's okay. Today's real world super-billionaires don't have billions of dollars laying about, and they could not get billions of dollars on short notice -- their assets are typically in stocks of companies whose prices would fall dramatically if they tried to sell them quickly. You're a billionaire only until you try to cash in, and then suddenly, you're not. I think Yomo had this in mind in the other, more recent, thread asking for people to rate the range their on-hand actual inf holdings were in. If it's asset wealth, it's not as real as liquid wealth. What counts as each to me? These lists are not exhaustive, mainly what comes to mind on short notice. Liquid: Actual Inf on alts Inf in emails to myself (instantly claimable) Inf in market buy bids (instantly cancelable without fee) Semi-Liquid Assets: Reward + Hero/Villain/Emp merits (reliably convertible to inf in short notice via selling converters, boosters, etc) High market volume assets such as Special and Rare salvage and some Enhancements (LoTG's come to mind) Not Liquid Assets: Pretty much everything else, including purples, SATOs, Hami-O's, slotted enhancements These don't count at all: Account-bound items such as Incarnate salvage

1. Call these 500 million each for a rough total of 60B 2. 650,000 at 200k each would be 130B 3. 1200 x 3 x ~12.5M each would be 45 B 4. 120 x 100M + ~3 x 10B = 42B A conservative grand total would be around 280B or so. Considering the imponderables and uncertainties, it could be anywhere in the range of 250-350B Most of this is mark-to-market asset wealth, and it would be very hard to turn it into Influence in a short period.

I'd like to be able to email stacks of ten of some items; specifically any items which currently will go into the Auction as a stack of ten, such as recipes or invention and special salvage.

It happens to everyone, sooner or later. But getting into the habit of double- or even triple-checking before hitting the button will help make them more rare. Measure once, cut twice; measure twice, cut once.

I'm under 100b. Mainly because I give a lot away, and secondarily because I take long multi-month breaks from playing. For those who play consistently and keep it all, it's easy to make a billion a week; only a little harder to make 3-4 billion per week (I'm in this range when I'm playing), and a solid effort would be a billion a day. So the wealthy range from HC's being up for 100 weeks now ought to be somewhere from 100b to 700b.

I started this thread a few days ago to propose a related QoL suggestion for the Convert Window.

You can have the best of both worlds -- Server transfers are free and easy. Transfer to a busy server, do some trials and stuff, transfer back. (be careful to keep your names though)

Base Empowerment Buffs are nice, but a bit of a hassle to get, since getting several of them requires a collection of salvage. I don't want them to last longer (descriptions say 60 minutes, and the hcwiki claims they last 90minutes) and I certainly don't want them to stack in the ordinary sense of being more powerful, but I think they would be more useful if their durations could stack for up to several hours; or even as much as eight hours (like the P2W Amplifiers do). According to the hcwiki, they don't properly persist through being rezzed after defeat; we could simply that and just drop them entirely on defeat. If these buffs were more frequently used, it would create additional demand for common and uncommon salvage, as well.