March 31 patch and its effects on the marketplace

[Troo]

An email wipe alone would have a major impact on the biggest hoarders.

A market wipe I guess would have more far reaching impacts. I'm not positive, but I may have significant amounts in bids that would have no where to refund since the characters are capped already.

Edited April 1, 2020 by Troo

[DR_Mechano]

47 minutes ago, Digirium said:

Not so much any more. With the farming nerf, more farmers will cotton on to cutting out the middle-man i.e. buying the winter super packs themselves, converting them and adding a catalyst. There will be less incentive to flip winter enhancements like this as they won't sell. They won't have as much to throw at inflated cost enhancements as before.

 

Nerf farms = nerf marketeers.

Wait people didn't do that already? I mean that's exactly what I did because apart from the rare chance when you got none, you'd likely get 1 or 2 winter IOs per pack and farming you'd get the catalysts flowing so I just used to send them to my alts. Especially when you get a twofer it saves you like 20-30 million inf and all the rest of the stuff went into the farmer (merits etc.)

Edited March 31, 2020 by DR_Mechano

[Yomo Kimyata]

1 hour ago, Troo said:

An email wipe alone would have a major impact on the biggest hoarders.

A market I guess would have more far reaching impacts. I'm not positive, but I may have significant amounts in bids that would have no where to go since the characters are infamy capped already.

I really wouldn't mind a wipe.  It would be simple to make it all back.  The mythological "average player" would be devastated, however.

[Sovera]

Call me optimistic or dumb, but I don't think anything will change. Half of infinity is still infinity and people were printing inf by the billions, all that money won't just disappear.

 

Since I salvage my gear from one alt to the next I reached a point where I had one character fully slotted with the most expensive stuff, plus about a billion in raw inf, plus at least half of that in IOs floating in my base. That's when I stopped salvaging all IOs from one alt to the other and started allowing two or three of my favorites to remain slotted. I still have close to 400 million in raw inf, a bunch of random IOs in my base, and I never set foot in a farm or played the market.

 

Too much free printable currency is just bad, y'know. Prices skyrocket. Someone with 500 million who wants an IO that costs 20 million will not blink at buying it for 25 mill instead of trying to get the recipe and craft, or set a bid and a wait. Why, when they have free printed money and more coming in? And the next guy who comes in will have no problem in throwing 30 mill.

 

I sometimes notice this when I put something for sale at 7 mill and someone buys it for 10 mill. Do you think the one who bought it went at it trying to buy for five mill, then six mill, then seven mill?

 

This is fine until a new player tries to wedge themselves in to buy their stuff and they are competing with whales who have no prob in completely outbidding them.

[Bopper]

I think the sky is on fire and the world will end. I kind of course. The market economy in Homecoming is so much better than it ever was on Live, and my guess is the impact here will be minimal, and may even improve. I am more concerned with lower drop rates impacting the market economy than I do exploits of the 2xp system.

[Coyotedancer]

Honestly, I'm with Solvera... I doubt it'll actually change much of anything long-term.

 

Enough of us who farm actually do seem to enjoy it enough to just keep doing it, so supply shouldn't take all that much of a hit.

[Yomo Kimyata]

14 minutes ago, Coyotedancer said:

Honestly, I'm with Solvera... I doubt it'll actually change much of anything long-term.

 

Enough of us who farm actually do seem to enjoy it enough to just keep doing it, so supply shouldn't take all that much of a hit.

I agree with both of you.  Farmers gonna farm, marketers gonna market, meriters gonna merit.

 

I love in the other thread though how so many farmer-based inf makers are saying, "Well, since I have less money to spend, I'm going to raise prices."  It's stagflation!!!

 

It's been 12 hours and a literal gold mine in the AH from my experience.  Maybe because I'm about ten times more active than I have been since last summer.

[Coyotedancer]

Yeah... I don't get the doom-and-gloom bit. The exploit itself needed to be closed and while losing the XP-for-INF bonus is a little irksome, it's just not *THAT* huge a deal in the grand scheme of things. 

 

If they go ahead with the custom mob damage recalculation though, THAT may cause a bit more of a ripple. It's going to make the farm missions a lot rougher for all but a few very specific builds... And that may be enough to slow some of us down, at least for however long it takes to re-spec or re-equip our farming characters to deal with that situation. (A not-quite-soft-capped/proc-monster/traded-some-security-for-speed farm build like my guy's is apt to really feel that 2x damage from the higher-ranked mobs. I'll have to scrap some of Harry's extra damage to pick up another 3% DEF. Boo! Monoculture builds are boring. XP)

 

 

Edited April 1, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[Ukase]

An email wipe would piss me off for sure. Mainly because that's where I stash half my inf. My characters each carry 1B, and I have my emails with 900M each. 

I would have them carry more, but if I did, I couldn't retrieve them with my characters. I don't trust the HC devs to not have a crazy sale and saddle me with a zillion winter packs or hero packs, and honestly, it's neat and tidy in the emails. It's convenient. 

It is something I would consider rage quitting over. I know it's easy to make, and I know I have more than I will likely ever need - but when the devs seeded the market with salvage, they lost something with me. I can't trust them, because I'll have no idea what they'll do with regards to the market. Worst case, I can take the micro's out of the 30 some odd characters that have them but I'm not really playing anymore. I should do that anyway. Doesn't really make sense to have 500-800m worth of IOs just sitting in a character I'll probably never play again. At this point, they just hold inf. 

As far as this nerfing of inf while exemped...*yawn*.  Who cares? I doubt anyone who plays the market or even has a farmer cares two bits about this. I think it hurt the beginning player who needs more inf to kit out their non-farmer more than anyone else. 

Now - those who have not are going to be left with a couple of choices: make a farmer and / or learn the market. Or continue on and struggle a bit. Life goes on. 

Fortunately, I'm at a place where I don't have to do anything. I tallied up my inf and while I'm not close to 100 Billion yet, I'll probably be there in a couple of weeks if I would put in the effort - which I won't. I've been actually having fun playing the game with a "delete the toon if it gets defeated" theme, jacking up the diff every 10 levels. So far, at level 43, and have only had a couple of close calls. 

[Gremlin]

12 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

How about an AH server/email wipe?  

Ooh! That'd be fun.

[macskull]

6 hours ago, Gremlin said:

Ooh! That'd be fun.

I don't see what an email or AH wipe would accomplish other than piss off a lot of people. There seem to be hoarding concerns which I legit don't understand because it's not like any resource in this game is finite - you generate inf, salvage, recipes, enhancements, etc from thin air just by playing the game so keeping a whole bunch of inf or super packs or recipes in email isn't a big deal. A thought exercise here is to look at what happened back on the live servers when the hero and villain markets were merged. Transaction history was wiped and prices ended up stabilizing around where they were on the hero market within short order (minus some exceptions which were biased redside like pet IO sets).

[Yomo Kimyata]

I’m not asking for a wipe!  But it certainly would shake up the AH!

[Gremlin]

I was just joking. I wasn't serious about messing things about just for the heck of it.

 

As you point out, @macskull, it'd be hard to do anything that'd make any real difference. I don't think hoarding is a problem. The only thing I can think of that could be a problem is inflation. It seems like the devs are keeping on eye on it so I don't expect any serious problems.

[Murcielago]

On 3/31/2020 at 4:35 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:

How about an AH server/email wipe?  

How about a game wipe?

[Coyotedancer]

5 hours ago, Murcielago said:

How about a game wipe?

 

I'd cry.

 

I plow all of my farming and marketeering profits back into my characters' builds.

Losing the gang would be a huge loss of both time *and* resource investment.

 

Also... I'm one of those nutty roleplayers. I'm kind-of attached to them all as characters. I'd miss them. 😞  

[Obus Form]

After all is said and done, markets seemed to have settled thusly:

 

Things that have not lowered in price

1) Capital salvage (salvage used to do things) such as Converters, Enhancement Boosters, Catalysts

2) Salvage salvage (rare, uncommon, common)

3) Recipes

4) Though they sell slower, people still buy Catalyzed Winter and Catalyzed ATOs at insane high prices because ?

 

 

Things that have lowered in price

1) Very Rare lowered about 2-3 million

2) IOs in general lowered about 2-3 million

 

 

Odd things

1) Someone flooded the PVP IO market lol

2) Sticky prices on recipes but not on the IOs themselves

 

Anyone else notice this?

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

42 minutes ago, Obus Form said:

 

 

Things that have lowered in price

 

2) IOs in general lowered about 2-3 million

 

 

 

 

Could you say more about this?  I'm not seeing that at all.  

[Obus Form]

27 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Could you say more about this?  I'm not seeing that at all.  

Winter IOs, especially the Targeted AOE ones are selling at 20-21 million.

Some Purple IOs did drop in price to 20-21 million, but seem to have risen back to 24-25 million (someone even bought at 28 million even though supply is over 50)

 

As of this morning, I think some of the prices have risen back to normal.  Or it may just be left over buying from night time when supply is lower.

[Obus Form]

33 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Could you say more about this?  I'm not seeing that at all.  

I guess we're saying, the market has not been adversely affected at all by the farming nerf?

[Yomo Kimyata]

22 minutes ago, Obus Form said:

Winter IOs, especially the Targeted AOE ones are selling at 20-21 million.

Some Purple IOs did drop in price to 20-21 million, but seem to have risen back to 24-25 million (someone even bought at 28 million even though supply is over 50)

 

As of this morning, I think some of the prices have risen back to normal.  Or it may just be left over buying from night time when supply is lower.

No, I see that purples and winters are lower.  It was the comment that IOs in general have dropped that I'm not seeing.  There was definitely a push up right after the patch "in general" for the invention IOs I was looking at, not a push down.

[Yomo Kimyata]

20 minutes ago, Obus Form said:

I guess we're saying, the market has not been adversely affected at all by the farming nerf?

Nerp

[Obitus]

On 3/31/2020 at 1:28 PM, Gremlin said:

Have you tried it to see how much difference it makes? Someone in chat was saying that it only reduced their inf by about 25%.

I only got interested in farming about two weeks ago, mostly as a build-optimization exercise (trying different builds to see how close I could come to the inf/minute record).  Maybe I jinxed everyone, because the nerf came down right after I started paying attention.

 

Anyway, prior to the nerf I was getting ~51 million per arc (5 missions), using @brigg's Comic Con Fire Farm (#2915).  That was with the exemp + patrol experience "exploit."  After the nerf, I'm getting a consistent 27.6 million for the same arc. 

 

The exact amount of the nerf will vary a little depending on the mix of minions to lieuts to bosses you kill over a given farming session, but half seems like a fair estimate.  (The patrol XP exploit buffed INF gains by roughly 30%, so this latest patch nerfed even non "exploit" INF generation by ~30%, or 1 - (27.6 / (51 / 1.3)) = 0.2964.)  More detailed numbers follow below the spoiler:

 

Spoiler

Post-patch INF-per-kill numbers:

 

Boss - 64,081 INF
Lieut - 20,048 INF
Minion - 5,438 INF

 

This is in contrast to the numbers posted in the Farm Fresh Builds thread, which follow:

"Level     Minion     LT      Boss     
50     10,251     29,048     89,713
49     14,523     37,592     115,346"

 

So the new numbers represent a nerf of the following proportions:

 

I. Relative to "normal" level 50 content with XP turned off, pre-patch:
    Boss: -28.5%
    Lieut: -30.9%
    Minion: -46.9%

 

II. Relative to the "exploit" Influence earned by flogging level 49 maps with Patrol XP:
    Boss: -44.4%
    Lieut: -46.6%
    Minion: -62.5%

 

But of course even those numbers don't quite tell the whole story, because farmers also get drops.  Most of those drops  aren't worth the effort to sell, IMO, but you do occasionally get valuable PvP recipes and/or a purple, along with some rare salvage.  I'd guess, purely based on my gut feeling, that drops are worth an average of ~10 million over and above the 27.6 million INF I earn from kills, over the course of a single 5-mission arc, which takes a little less than 25 minutes for top-end farm builds.

 

The bottom line is that farming will still be quite viable as a money maker, but speaking as someone who always made his money on the market, I can understand why people would be discouraged.  The gains from marketeering can be much more impressive, certainly on a INF-per-time-played basis, though marketeering can also be tedious in a way that farming probably isn't, to most people.

 

As for the net effect on the market, it's really hard to say.  In principle, though, I'm glad that the HC devs are working proactively to counter inflation.

Edited April 6, 2020 by Obitus

[Gremlin]

3 minutes ago, Obitus said:

Anyway, prior to the nerf I was getting ~51 million per arc (5 missions), using @brigg's Comic Con Fire Farm (#2915).  That was with the exemp + patrol experience "exploit."  After the nerf, I'm getting a consistent 27.6 million for the same arc. 

That's very helpful. Thanks very much. 

[Yomo Kimyata]

I will say, I am extremely pleased with what's happening in the End Mod complex, especially with Performance Shifters.  Other than the Heal proc, the new IOs are (rightfully in my opinion) pretty much considered to be junk.

[tidge]

After the recent patch, I went back to some older toons and decided to try out alternate builds. This was a little like respecing, but without getting to reuse IOs. These were level 50s, but neither had that much Inf (between 150M and 250M on each)... my characters basically invest in newer ones, so what wealth I have is usually in new characters... anywho, I used the market to get most of the build for each of them. It took roughly three days to get the Inf and the pieces I wanted. I didn't notice any particular trends, except what you might think based on an influx of new characters and the new EndMod sets. The only real standout trends (from the perspective of a player who stop seriously marketing 6 months ago):

 

1) The Performance Shifter proc and EndMod looked like they were selling higher than pre-patch. No doubt partially due to decreased converter roulette odds and partial due to lots of new empty Stamina slots. I was able to get into a few of the new sets w/ procs before the market was flooded (as with so many other procs).

2) A couple sets were in relatively short supply: Gaussian's ToHit set and the Mocking Beratement Taunt sets. Prices weren't terrible, but supply was low.

3) Melee Damage sets were doing better than I remember. I used to convert past these almost all the time, but the market wasn't terrible to me. I'm sensitive to the number of conversions in order to preserve margins.

4) Healing and Resistance sets were a good place to sell, but Healing had started to deflate near the end of my efforts.

5) The LotG set was more 'lopsided' than I remembered, with 2 of the 6 pieces going for much less than the others. Some Ebil-wiggle room existed at times.

 

On the high end (Purple, PVP, Winter, ATO) I didn't notice much difference, except that I had no trouble getting what I needed at the cost I could afford to spend (or convert from). I did dump some SG-crafted PVP IOs that were below lvl 50, converting where necessary. I did buy a few recipes because the price was much better than the crafted piece. I didn't see many bargains to be had in the recipe side, but I didn't look too deeply. (Your Ebil niches are safe from me!) I never buy Superior ATOs unless the market prices are inverted (which wasn't the case where I looked).