Prismatic Aether Particles

[Yomo Kimyata]

1 hour ago, Ukase said:

 

 

I know someone gambled big, buying 10K of them. No idea why. But if they go up to even 10M, that's still a 2M profit per, after fees. IF they go up. 

 

If your buddy spent 70bn to try to make 20bn of profit on this eventually, I wish them luck, but I'm most definitely betting against it.

[lemming]

9 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

If your buddy spent 70bn to try to make 20bn of profit on this eventually, I wish them luck, but I'm most definitely betting against it.

That would be my guess.  I think the boom price was from them being new and people going for the associated badges more than the costumes themselves.  I suppose there maybe some people going for all the costumes.

[Ukase]

19 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

If your buddy spent 70bn to try to make 20bn of profit on this eventually, I wish them luck, but I'm most definitely betting against it.

From what I heard - second hand, he spent over 400 Billion. I was shocked to hear they had that much. I know there's got to be about a couple of dozen folks who are richer than Yomo and myself, but they keep things quiet. I have no first hand data, but I was told that when the game first opened by HC, there was some morality mission exploit that a number of folks used to gather in a large number of reward merits in fairly short order. Sadly, I only hear about these things well after things are fixed. It'd be nice to get in on the ground floor of an exploit like that so I could get bug hunter without spending hours on brainstorm. 

Then again, could be whomever told me was getting their information also second hand, and when that happens, well, next thing you know, the sky is falling and my name is Henny Penny. 

[Ironblade]

On 10/1/2022 at 2:21 PM, Ukase said:

Like I said, anecdotal with perception bias, but I'd suggest giving your alts a week's rest and see what happens - if they mean that much to you.

I think it's just RNG.  I have an army of alts and they will often sit around for 2, 3 or more weeks before getting played and I have not observed this at all.

 

Having said that, I actually don't care at this point.  My one badger earned enough to get all the badges and has about 25 extra at this point so I'll just keep buying costumes.

[Glacier Peak]

On 10/2/2022 at 9:35 AM, Ukase said:

From what I heard - second hand, he spent over 400 Billion. I was shocked to hear they had that much. I know there's got to be about a couple of dozen folks who are richer than Yomo and myself, but they keep things quiet. I have no first hand data, but I was told that when the game first opened by HC, there was some morality mission exploit that a number of folks used to gather in a large number of reward merits in fairly short order. Sadly, I only hear about these things well after things are fixed. It'd be nice to get in on the ground floor of an exploit like that so I could get bug hunter without spending hours on brainstorm. 

Side note - if you want Bug Hunter, you can earn it by regularly testing and providing feedback to the beta server changes for new pages. Then again, it doesn't count towards the players overall total, similar to Flames of Prometheus. 

 

Edit: Just saw the last sentence in the first paragraph of your post about not wanting to earn the badge. No worries!

Edited October 4, 2022 by Glacier Peak

[Ukase]

1 hour ago, Glacier Peak said:

Side note - if you want Bug Hunter, you can earn it by regularly testing and providing feedback to the beta server changes for new pages. Then again, it doesn't count towards the players overall total, similar to Flames of Prometheus. 

 

Edit: Just saw the last sentence in the first paragraph of your post about not wanting to earn the badge. No worries!

Oh, I want to earn it - but I want to earn it by finding a bug on the live servers, not Brainstorm. 

[High_Beam]

21 hours ago, Ukase said:

Oh, I want to earn it - but I want to earn it by finding a bug on the live servers, not Brainstorm. 

Which is always better than finding a bug in your dinner.

[Ukase]

13 minutes ago, High_Beam said:

Which is always better than finding a bug in your dinner.

My mother used to say, "It's protein. It's good for you." 

Should have seen the look on her face when I got her a cricket protein bar. 

[Zhym]

On 10/1/2022 at 6:21 PM, Ukase said:

But - here's a question: 
PAPs are selling for 7M now. I have to wonder, how much will the price go up when they intro the rest of the costumes? (My understanding is we've only seen the first tier; two additional tiers are to follow - but I haven't read that specifically, I just skimmed some things, heard some things, so nothing scientific about that, just conjecture. 

 

I know someone gambled big, buying 10K of them. No idea why. But if they go up to even 10M, that's still a 2M profit per, after fees. IF they go up. 

 

That's not looking like a great gamble right now.  With the new ToT badges giving out 2 Aether each, there's been an influx.  The last price I saw was about 3.1 million, and that's before everyone's had a chance to get the new ToT badges on all their alts. 

 

IMO, the initial price of about 20M each was inflated due to (1) extremely low supply (at the time Page 4 dropped, no supply) and (2) high demand from badgers who needed 150 Aether each to get the new badges.  Both situations were temporary.  But there's also an argument that prices are going to be artificially low for the next month, since (1) supply is increasing from the ToT badges, and (2) demand is low because (a) most badgers have their Page 4 badges by now, and (b) temporary costumes are plentiful, so why pay for a permanent one right now?

 

What will happen after that?  My guess is that the price will dip back up in November after a big drop this month but stay fairly low.  As the game goes on, the supply of Aether will increase.  The big question is whether there will be enough interest in the things Aether can buy to use all the supply.  Aside from the badge factor, I'm guessing there won't be.  And if the pricing ends up what was used in beta—1,000 Aether for the mini-me costume, for example—that might actually be so high that most people won't even bother trying to save up that much.  So, personally, I see increasing supply and decreasing demand.  I personally wouldn't bet on it increasing in value. 

 

That's just my guess, of course.

 

Edited October 5, 2022 by Zhym

[Skoochy]

4 hours ago, Zhym said:

 

That's not looking like a great gamble right now.  With the new ToT badges giving out 2 Aether each, there's been an influx.  The last price I saw was about 3.1 million, and that's before everyone's had a chance to get the new ToT badges on all their alts.

For all we know the devs will add new badges with aether rewards to every event moving forward. I'm expect price to reach 1 million or less if this happens.

[Zhym]

32 minutes ago, Skoochy said:

For all we know the devs will add new badges with aether rewards to every event moving forward. I'm expect price to reach 1 million or less if this happens.

That would actually be about the right price, IMO—if not still a little overpriced.

 

Because the only thing Aether can be used for at the moment is to buy permanent versions of Halloween costumes, we can actually do a really primitive comparison:

• It takes four pieces of Halloween salvage to buy an NPC costume that lasts for 14 days.  At the moment, Halloween salvage is going for 30k-100k.  We're in the Halloween event, so salvage is probably cheaper now than it would be in, say, May.  So let's use the high end of that range: 100k at that value, the price of a 14-day costume is about 400k.  For about 10M, you can have that costume all year.  
• It takes 10 Aether to buy a permanent costume.  Aether looks like it's currently around 3M.  So that's 30M inf to buy a permanent costume right now. 

Spending 30M to dress up like an NPC seems insane to me (so you can imagine what I thought of spending 200M to do it when Aether was at 20M—not that I didn't do it for the badges), but at 3M for Aether the cost of a permanent costume isn't ridiculous if you plan to wear that costume full time for three years.  I'd maybe peg the "reasonable" price of a permanent costume at 5M-10M inf, which would put Aether at about 500K-1M value. 

 

Of course, all that assumes that the only thing you can buy with Aether is costumes, and that people care about how much costumes cost.  I suspect that if the costumes had been rolled out in Page 4 at a cost of 200M each...well, we might have thought harder about it.  (On the other hand, we had a way to get the equivalent of 600M inf from one 4-star Aeon run, so wealth was rushing into the economy as fast as it was getting spent.  Possibly faster.)

 

Edited October 6, 2022 by Zhym

[Faultline]

On 10/1/2022 at 3:21 PM, Ukase said:

Each one of those got a very rare after their "rest" from the last page. 

Like I said, anecdotal with perception bias, but I'd suggest giving your alts a week's rest and see what happens - if they mean that much to you. 

 

There's no "rest" time coded on the mission drop; it's a straight addition to the same reward that triggers Pool B recipes, with no streakbreaker or lockout tokens.

[Ironblade]

On 10/5/2022 at 2:55 PM, Zhym said:

IMO, the initial price of about 20M each was inflated due to (1) extremely low supply (at the time Page 4 dropped, no supply) and (2) high demand from badgers who needed 150 Aether each to get the new badges.

You left out a zero.  On the first day, they were going for 200M.  I kept all of mine because I do badges.  My girlfriend sold 4 for a total of 800 million. 😲

[Ruin Mage]

I initially made somewhere close to 10bil selling mine on the first week.

But not anymore.

[Ironblade]

On 10/8/2022 at 6:03 AM, Shadeknight said:

I initially made somewhere close to 10bil selling mine on the first week.

I really have to wonder who was buying.  You would think that anyone with that kind of inf to toss around would understand how the market works and *KNOW* that the Aether price was going to nosedive within a week or two.

[Glacier Peak]

29 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

I really have to wonder who was buying.  You would think that anyone with that kind of inf to toss around would understand how the market works and *KNOW* that the Aether price was going to nosedive within a week or two.

Maybe they said "fuggit," and dropped all that inf because they were going to be taking a leave of absence or retiring from the game. Your assumption on the likelihood that individual knew how the market worked is sound though. 

[Ukase]

On 10/9/2022 at 9:00 PM, Ironblade said:

I really have to wonder who was buying.  You would think that anyone with that kind of inf to toss around would understand how the market works and *KNOW* that the Aether price was going to nosedive within a week or two.

Yeah, but I have to continually remind myself, it's not real money. So, when you have a number of badgers like I do, there is some motivation to just get them complete so you can do something else. At the time, I had no idea that PAPs were going to be part of ToT EB defeat badge awards, even though I was on Brainstorm multiple times to figure out a better farm build. No indication that anything like that was going to happen - at least nothing that hit my on my head to get my attention. 
 

[QuiJon]

I mean ultimately i have only one character that i really badge on. So outside of eventually getting the badges for that toon i have little to no interest in the things these salvage will buy me. I ignore most of the hallow costumes as well when i get those every year i dont see how this is any different.

 

However even on that one toon i can wait. So if i can make a good bank on them right now, i am totally putting them on the market and i will worry about getting the badges at a later point. 

[High_Beam]

Most of the new costumes shown from the current test server are . . . meh and the Bratz-Bobblehead thing . . . YUCK.  So I will continue to sell my Aether until they make the costumes alter to fit your gender and scale to height which will cause me to have to spend berdillions on Aether 🙂

[ScrewlooseCohh]

Is everyone getting the 10 PAs per character for the new ToT badges on all their characters or is it only me?

 

I'm over 30 characters for the 10 PAs and not sure how many Enhancement Catalysts I've got by cycling my level 50-'s through the ToT scrum each day and AEing the critters.

[lemming]

4 hours ago, ScrewlooseCohh said:

Is everyone getting the 10 PAs per character for the new ToT badges on all their characters or is it only me?

 

I'm over 30 characters for the 10 PAs and not sure how many Enhancement Catalysts I've got by cycling my level 50-'s through the ToT scrum each day and AEing the critters.

So far, 79 of my alts of which 34 have all the other Halloween badges.  ~31 to go.   But yea, the AOE chars tend to get those 5 badges quick

 

[tidge]

11 hours ago, ScrewlooseCohh said:

Is everyone getting the 10 PAs per character for the new ToT badges on all their characters or is it only me?

 

I'm over 30 characters for the 10 PAs and not sure how many Enhancement Catalysts I've got by cycling my level 50-'s through the ToT scrum each day and AEing the critters.

 

I definitely did it with all my level 50s, I'm trying to decide if I want to do it with any of my slow-walk characters.

 

The only other Prsimatic-related thing I've done was taken some of the level 50s through the Shadow Shard TFs solo to get an additional 2 for a couple of hours of play (each). I needed a calm break from door knocking and button mashing.

 

[kelika2]

seed for 10m each as an inf sink when

[Ironblade]

On 10/18/2022 at 7:02 AM, tidge said:

I definitely did it with all my level 50s, I'm trying to decide if I want to do it with any of my slow-walk characters.

I thought about this and concluded that, if I really want those extra Aether, I could just turn off XP so they won't level during the ToT carnage.

[lemming]

Finished getting the 10 Aether for 109 characters, only two that haven't are Praetorians.  That's enough for my badger, and the couple mini modes I want on a couple chars