Proctology

[Neogumbercules]

I decided to target highly sought after procs, converters be damned in huge bulk so I filled my tray with defense IOs and converted them all to LOTG 7.5. Sometimes I got lucky and rolled a proc on the first conversion, sometimes it took ten rolls. Overall I estimate that I made around 150-200 million profit. 

 

That said, it was a huge waste of converters and a ton of clicking. It slowed me down a lot and my refusal to spend profits on converters means I was farming more than I enjoyed to buy them.

 

Overall while it was lucrative, it's not really for me. I think I'll try to stick to more volume, lower cost, less clicking just going for random rares and targeting the commonly valuable sets. 

[Yomo Kimyata]

The ebil is strong with this one.

 

Out of curiosity, why the aversion to buying converters?  They are so ridiculously cheap and plentiful.

[Neogumbercules]

I don't know. It's an irrational position. I just feel like I'm spending my "marketing money" on something that just gets burned. I know it doesn't make much sense. Plus farming does break up the monotony of standing around staring at menus.

 

It was definitely a huge waste of converters to make 70 LOTG procs, even though I did make money. I'm lazy and always bid 75k for buy it now pricing. 

 

But if I farm too much it gets boring. These days I can just about tolerate a single full run of 125.

[Myrmidon]

I seems to me that you would prefer my method, which is a little bit of everything. Some Merit gathering, some converter flipping, some smashing bad guys. And a whole lot of playing the game with fully geared characters instead of staring at large influence numbers.😁

[Ukase]

For a time, I was playing my primary account, and having a second account afk-farm. Then I thought, hey, we're allowed to have a third account...why not? 

At night, I'd have 3 fire brutes doing afk-farming. It's just the asteroid map, so really, there wasn't much to do on my primary account. Craft and convert 4 - 6 recipes. (give or take). But, what I'd do is bring the 2nd account out, reset, put it back in, same with the third, then take care of the primary account. 
Put the primary account back in, then go to the second account, and whilst farming, bring out the work bench, craft and convert while the mobs burn around me. When done, sell, reset, the work on the third account, reset the primary account. 

Craft convert on the third account. Sell, reset. Bring out the primary, and craft/convert the 2-3 recipes it might have gotten, then log it off and play with the primary account doing actual stuff like tfs and what-not. 

In between missions, I'd reset - not craft or convert until the salvage was close to full. 


Clearly, this isn't for everyone. After a while, I just felt like I had more than enough inf and stopped using my primary account. Then, I ended up parking my badge character into a damage farm (both dishing out and taking it - took about 2-3 weeks) and played on the third account. After a time, the only reason I was playing the 2nd one at all was to farm threads for the super inspirations. Nothing quite like soloing an AV by grabbing super lucks, rages and ultimates at level 15. 

It got to be more work than fun, basically. So now, with my well over a hundred billion, I stopped farming altogether. I've been giving away about 1 billion a week here and there. And, the inf still keeps coming in from drops that I craft and convert. Certainly not the same pace, but who cares? I'm set at least for the next 100 alts. 

[Sir Myshkin]

On 7/18/2020 at 2:23 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:

Out of curiosity, why the aversion to buying converters?  They are so ridiculously cheap and plentiful.

 

I did the math at one point on what it took to buy converters directly and flip accordingly. I should say less that I "did the math" and more of a "I was doing this without consideration for a long time and finally sat down at some point and asked myself how much Influence I was flushing." Short end of it was that for every 10 5mill+ valued IO I sold, I was loosing one or two of those straight up to conversions. Looking at a small set of 1 in 10 (5 out of 45 Mill potential), doesn't seem terrible, until that is exponentially compounded by stacks of 10 at a time, 60+ stacks, daily (for a while, this was a bit back now). Within a month I had "given away" over a billion influence to converters. The true number is honestly probably even greater than that knowing I was buying them in sets of 1,000 (76-100m) every few days.

 

Was around that same time I came to the determination that having a "Marketer" wasn't really worth individualizing one character's role towards and started making sure I targeted each Phalanx Task Force as I leveled a character (especially on double-up weeks), and cash in the merits for converters and use that supply to start looping drops and key market items to generate influence within the contained character.

[Lines]

On 7/18/2020 at 8:23 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:

Out of curiosity, why the aversion to buying converters?  They are so ridiculously cheap and plentiful.

I don't like to either, for a couple of reasons.

 

Mainly, I round up in my head that 10 converters = 1mil inf (it's more like 750-800k right now). That means that as well as the 50k-or-so crafting fee and AH tax, I need to end up with an IO of 2mil within 10 conversions to be worthwhile at 1 mil a pop. That's getting harder to do right now with prices going down.

 

I also quite like the cleanness of keeping my merits > converters separate to my inf > IO sets. 

 

Yesterday I misclicked, paying no attention, and spent all my merits on catalysts instead of converters. I haven't stopped crying yet.

[Yomo Kimyata]

7 hours ago, Sir Myshkin said:

 

Short end of it was that for every 10 5mill+ valued IO I sold, I was loosing one or two of those straight up to conversions. Looking at a small set of 1 in 10 (5 out of 45 Mill potential), doesn't seem terrible, until that is exponentially compounded by stacks of 10 at a time, 60+ stacks, daily (for a while, this was a bit back now). Within a month I had "given away" over a billion influence to converters. The true number is honestly probably even greater than that knowing I was buying them in sets of 1,000 (76-100m) every few days.

 

 

 

4 hours ago, Lines said:

 

 

Mainly, I round up in my head that 10 converters = 1mil inf (it's more like 750-800k right now). That means that as well as the 50k-or-so crafting fee and AH tax, I need to end up with an IO of 2mil within 10 conversions to be worthwhile at 1 mil a pop. That's getting harder to do right now with prices going down.

 

I also quite like the cleanness of keeping my merits > converters separate to my inf > IO sets. 

 

 

I seem to have four distinct mental values of converters in my head at all times.  From lowest to highest, first is where I can buy them in bulk on the AH, which is on the low end of 60-80k a piece.  Next is the mental accounting of 100k per converter when I'm trying to decide if it's worth converting within a set to get a particular piece, or within a category to get a particular set.  That's just a rule of thumb left over from when converters were worth that, and it's a nice round number.  Next is the merit value of 333,333, which is simply the cost of buying a merit with cash and converting to converters.  That feels like a pretty good of thumb as well for "what is the value added of a converter," albeit on the low side.  Finally, there is what I think the real value in inf is of the converter, which ranges in my head from 500k on up.

 

I can rarely bring myself to buy converters with merits, simply because I feel that I'm always better off using the merits for something else, even though I never do.  Like I said, i have the hoarding disease.

[Sir Myshkin]

12 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Next is the merit value of 333,333

I had started typing out the thought of this before, and ended up not because I felt I was going overboard on my reasoning, but since you brought it up:

 

If 10 Merits becomes 30 Converters, and I sell those for enough of a price to take home 75,000 a piece, I have an effective per-merit value of 225,000. Lets take that consideration the other direction and not sell the converter, but use them instead on a random drop set IO I just crafted (from salvage I already had on-hand, minimize investment ratio). The starter IO is... lets say an UC, we want to move out of that option so we convert out for 2 in the category to get a rare (typically). Hypothetically lets say that I just jackpot struck on a solid 2 mill minimum piece and sell it with that profit margin, that makes my converter value 1,000,000 per Converter, which makes my Merit value 1 to 3mill, making my stack of 10 worth 30mill.

 

Of course that doesn't always play out so brilliantly, which means I'm more likely looking at something like 2 to convert out, and 1-3 attempts are Rare bouncing into a minimum 2mill payout. That translates my per-Converter cost ratio to 400,000, and turns my per-Merit to 1.2 million. I'm still way ahead of the curve. The question from here is "how many converters can I burn before my potential payout of 2,000,000 becomes cost deficient to having just sold the converts?"

 

At the current market value of 75,000* I'd have to burn 27 converters to fall below the value of having just sold them out-right. As it stands currently Converters and Boosters are seen as the two prominent "best" methods of burning Merits into raw Influence, but that only applies in a "don't want to do any work for it" path. Even the simplest case of light converting can get into a useful and meaningful profit that exceeds even a 1 to 333,333 value. This doesn't even account for the potential of landing into an IO worth 4mill+ and what that becomes (at a minimum if I used all 30 to get it, my Merit value is 400,000).

 

Like I said, using Merits saved me BILLIONS of Influence.

 

*Not accounting for any fees or adjustments to compensate fees, looking for the simplistic math here. Also, lets hope I didn't smudge a decimal somewhere!

[tidge]

I'll add my practices/thoughts on the issue of "buy converters or use merits to make converters?"

 

TL;DR: As long as I'm not losing inf, I'm not stressed.

 

I will typically buy converters, at low 70K each. On average, I spend far less than 10 converters (2 to get to rare, leaving 8-more to jump around) but I stop when I hit 2MInf piece. Hitting the higher value pieces improves profits. Only rarely will I convert within a set (3 converters): Usually this is because I ended up in a set with unbalanced values among pieces.

 

Note that I'm not currently working specific niches such that specific sets are purchased to specifically get into a specific set, nor am I using packs (ATOs, Winters) as a source of income. My market activities are pretty much (better than steady state) to fund Alts. When I was building the fortune I started by converting merits to converters, as the Inf was used for purchasing recipes and paying fees (crafting, listing).

 

I typically spend my Merits on Boosters (and sometimes Catalysts, if I'm being lazy or otherwise I'm in a hurry). There have been a few instances where I've made the (market) sin of buying recipes because the market was in an odd space (and I didn't have anything to play converter roulette with). I didn't even spend merits on anniversary badges!

[ShardWarrior]

Just wanted to say the choice of thread title is quite hilarious! 😁

[Ukase]

On 7/21/2020 at 10:53 AM, Yomo Kimyata said:

I can rarely bring myself to buy converters with merits, simply because I feel that I'm always better off using the merits for something else, even though I never do.  Like I said, i have the hoarding disease.

What else would you spend them on? Just keep them forever? I know you're not going to buy recipes, given the value converters offer which give a greater return. 

That's all I spend my merits on, is converters. Now, if my farm character is out of merits, and I can't be bothered to trade them between alts & accounts, then I'll buy them. But otherwise, use the merits. That seems to be the best value to me. 

[Bionic_Flea]

I generally buy my converters with merits, EXCEPT for a few dedicated fire armor brutes that generally don't stray too far out of AE unless it's to get an accolade.  Since they don't have many merits but lots of cash, I just buy the converters to avoid having to switch characters or log the second account.

 

Buying converters for converting is my main use for merits, although I will occasionally get catalysts or boosters just to finish a character NAO!

 

I generally subscribe to the Myrmidon and Myshkin style of playing a character all over the place and selling their drops, after conversion if needed, as they level up.  Once they get far enough along the incarnate path that I consider them "finished" and I move on to my next project, I may assign them to buy and sell a certain thing and then visit with them every few months to collect, craft, convert, sell, and set up new patient buys.

 

On 7/21/2020 at 11:53 AM, Yomo Kimyata said:

I can rarely bring myself to buy converters with merits, simply because I feel that I'm always better off using the merits for something else, even though I never do.  Like I said, i have the hoarding disease.

That's just not procto-logical!

[Yomo Kimyata]

4 hours ago, Ukase said:

What else would you spend them on? Just keep them forever? I know you're not going to buy recipes, given the value converters offer which give a greater return. 
 

 

6 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

 

That's just not procto-logical!

I know, I know.  Like I said, I have the hoarding disease. 

 

My problem is that I go through converters like Meisterbrau goes through a frat boy.  I was just doing some work on one of my cowman alts.  She's lvl 27 and has about 300 merits from various sources.  I could take her to a merit vendor (I could tell you where at least one is on each red and blue side.  I'm sure there are more but I'd have to look it up.) and cash those in for 900 converters.  That would last me 1-5 sessions, and there is no way I'd be willing or able to get those merits back in that period of time.  So I just put in lowball bids that no one would possibly hit and BAM I now own 900 converters.  That feels a lot easier, and suddenly my 300 merits feels like a rounding error in the grand scheme of inf accumulation.

 

I HAVE started to pare down my merit collection.  Like I said in another thread, I think that if you can net 20mm after fees (so 22.222mm in sales price) for 100 merits, you're doing ok.  If I see an opportunity to do that with as few clicks as possible, I'm on it like a frat boy on Meisterbrau.  But there are a lot of merits sitting in my Character Items, and frankly liquidating them all seems like a far bigger task than I'm willing to take on at this point in time.

[Bionic_Flea]

I just wanted to say procto-logical.  Carry on.  😁

[Saikochoro]

The way I do it is to buy converters with merits if I have them. Otherwise I buy them from the market. 
 

Then I convert yellow level 31 recipes. I stop converting when I get something that sells for 2m or more. This doesn’t really take a lot of converters because healing, range, melee, resist, endurance mod, defense, and even travel have options that fit that criteria. 
 

The only time I convert a lot is to turn a defense IO into LOTG defense, defense endurance, or 7.5 rech or a reactive defenses scaling resistance IO. Other than that I don’t chase IOs. 
 

Works out pretty well for me. 

[Sir Myshkin]

14 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

I know, I know.  Like I said, I have the hoarding disease.

 

Also, I too just wanted to say procto-logical.