And the mask comes off.

[CrimsonCapacitor]

But... but.. but... floating crafting table!!  :O

Make that a purchasable item in the store and I'm in.

[Codewalker]

But... but.. but... floating crafting table!!  :O

There are indications in the files that they were planning to sell the floating crafting table power from the Field Crafter badge in the microtransaction store within the next 6 months. I wonder how that would have gone over.

[Balince]

Going straight to my favorite set I've ever played spines scrapper. My original was spines/regen but I'll have to think about it. As lame as it sounds I loved hearing quills going off. My first welcome to CoH moment, in the hollows teaming with a random spines scrapper and seeing him impale, it was love at first sight lol.

[JanessaVR]

Don't remind me, some badges were not worth the grind and having to complete 5000 or so craftings was not worth it.

Actually, I thought the portable crafting table was *very* worth it.  Yes, it was a pain in the rear to finally achieve, but combined with remote market access, you could be out at the tail end of the Shadow Shards and make anything on the spot.

[Burnt Toast]

I personally loved having the crafting table and market access. Allowed me to do some crafting/marketeering in between things no matter where I was.
It wouldn't have bothered me if they offered that option to people to buy... I mean it is money being spent towards the game. The crafting table was a convenience and in no way do I consider it a pay2win item. If it would have been account wide... I would have purchased it.

There are indications in the files that they were planning to sell the floating crafting table power from the Field Crafter badge in the microtransaction store within the next 6 months. I wonder how that would have gone over.

[Sinistar]

There are indications in the files that they were planning to sell the floating crafting table power from the Field Crafter badge in the microtransaction store within the next 6 months. I wonder how that would have gone over.

The term lead balloon comes to mind....

[Arcana]

  Please , Please don't put salvage up for 1 inf.  Put it up for 200 inf for common, I think it was 400 for Uncommon, and Rares, well they weren't usually a problem.

  See if you put them up for 1 inf, people will buy them for the minimum and turn around and sell them to vendors at 200 inf per.  This makes the buyer rich, (buy low sell high) and the supply dry up faster than . . than . .  well something that dries up real fast.

  I had friends tell me how they made hundreds of thousands of inf this way.  It blew my mind and made me a little angry too, as the salvage that I needed would be either difficult to find, or priced WAY above what it should (looking at you Luck Charms).

It blows my mind also, because its several times faster to street-sweep greens than do that.  "Hundreds of thousands" of inf might sound like a lot, and if you only played low level alts and did not ever level one to high level, it could be a lot.  But as a "get rich" strategy?  To me that's a "get crazy running around" strategy.  A level 50 alt can make that kind of influence just playing the game normally and dumping the drops they get periodically on a time scale of an hour or less on average, and I'm not even talking about farming: I'm talking about a casual player that runs standard missions at standard difficulty and doesn't farm anything.

Keep in mind that if I didn't think it would sell for at least thousands of inf, I would regularly just plain throw it away to make space in my inventory for a potentially better random drop.  Across all my gameplay after Issue 9 launched (when inventions and the auction house were released) its entirely possible that I've thrown away hundreds of millions of inf of stuff collectively, simply because it was not worth the space it was taking up in my inventory.

But lets say I wanted to execute your strategy.  Part of the problem with the cheap stuff is that its cheap because no one wants it, or is only willing to spend very little on it.  Suppose I took a stack of common salvage and put it up for 200 inf.  Its likely that because no one is bidding that amount, that stack would just sit there in my auction house slots.  And sit there.  And sit there.  Eventually, very quickly in fact, I would fill all my auction house slots with common salvage that didn't sell.  Now I couldn't sell anything anymore.  I couldn't even sell any more common salvage and would have to start throwing it away.  Or my inventory fills up and then I don't get any drops any more at all.  Its a self-defeating strategy.  Auction house slots are valuable: too valuable to have a stack of common salvage stuck in it for weeks or months or forever not selling because no one ever comes along and tries to spend what you're asking for it, because lots more people are still willing to dump it for 50, 20, even 1 inf.  If it prevents you from selling even one piece of rare salvage at a good price, it ends up costing you far more than you could ever make.

And it *still* doesn't really alter the supply/demand equation by any noticeable amount.

[JanessaVR]

Please, Please don't put salvage up for 1 inf.  Put it up for 200 inf for common, I think it was 400 for Uncommon, and Rares, well they weren't usually a problem.

See if you put them up for 1 inf, people will buy them for the minimum and turn around and sell them to vendors at 200 inf per.  This makes the buyer rich, (buy low sell high) and the supply dry up faster than . . than . .  well something that dries up real fast.

I had friends tell me how they made hundreds of thousands of inf this way.  It blew my mind and made me a little angry too, as the salvage that I needed would be either difficult to find, or priced WAY above what it should (looking at you Luck Charms).

By setting the floor at vendor buying prices, the supply remains relatively stable, unless someone is actively spending inf to destroy it.

Fuegocito

LOL, I had friends who loved to do that on the market - buy low and then sell to the trainers.  It was their sure-fire INF-making scheme in the early-to-mid years of CoH, before we all had too much INF to know what to do with and could just e-mail a few million or so to any new characters to keep them well supplied.

I find it a bit amusing that you got angry at this - there's basically no way to stop people from doing it.

In my early days, I actually spent real-world money several times buying large piles of INF.  I was never caught, because I knew the people in RL and they were members of my SG.

[LaughingAlex]

  Please , Please don't put salvage up for 1 inf.  Put it up for 200 inf for common, I think it was 400 for Uncommon, and Rares, well they weren't usually a problem.

  See if you put them up for 1 inf, people will buy them for the minimum and turn around and sell them to vendors at 200 inf per.  This makes the buyer rich, (buy low sell high) and the supply dry up faster than . . than . .  well something that dries up real fast.

  I had friends tell me how they made hundreds of thousands of inf this way.  It blew my mind and made me a little angry too, as the salvage that I needed would be either difficult to find, or priced WAY above what it should (looking at you Luck Charms).

  By setting the floor at vendor buying prices, the supply remains relatively stable, unless someone is actively spending inf to destroy it.

Fuegocito

I'll say this about the city of heroes auction house.  It was a far more stable platform than what i've seen in DCUO or CO.  The prices if they were high and did start dropping, usually only dropped for legitimate reasons and it was usually gradual.  CO?  Well, often what happens is because everyone can see the prices of the items, you get what I love to call an "Underbid war", in which, due to the rather short timer of putting things up for sale(your auction would expire after only 15 days), some jerks would eventually see your prices, and put the same items up for a lower price and prevent you from selling at all.

Then some other jerk would put their own items up for cheaper and so on and on.  An item that was once say 10-20 globals could drop down to only 5 in a matter of hours.  Items in the thousands of globals or hundreds of globals were the only safe things to put up there.  It was both brutally annoying and frustrating.  This also ensured you couldn't trade at all as a silver, because of the extremely low global cap of only 250.  That may be made worst if/when they make cosmic keys bind on purchase like has happened in NWO.  It's hoped the devs of CO aren't that stupid and that PWE doesn't do that to the game, if it happens the game for sure will die.

Then course DCUO has the same problem but even worst, far, far worst.  Your auction expires in 48 hours, max, and you see some of the same under-bidding wars going on.  Only even very high priced items end up risky to sell.

Thing is city of heroes handled it smart in that, by hiding the prices people were asking for, it allowed not only for people to "negotiate" prices but it also prevented the under-bid wars we'd see.  Putting an underbid up would often cause it to instantly sell as people buying could set a price they were willing to buy, and it'd sell instantly when put up.  That'd tell people selling "maybe I should have asked for more?".  This combined with a lack of a limit and a lack of expiration date, prevented any kind of "Underbidding" wars from starting out of pressure of making sure the items sold.  Prices remained far more stable because of that.

[Kelltick]

I'll say this about the city of heroes auction house.  It was a far more stable platform than what i've seen in DCUO or CO.  The prices if they were high and did start dropping, usually only dropped for legitimate reasons and it was usually gradual.  CO?  Well, often what happens is because everyone can see the prices of the items, you get what I love to call an "Underbid war", in which, due to the rather short timer of putting things up for sale(your auction would expire after only 15 days), some jerks would eventually see your prices, and put the same items up for a lower price and prevent you from selling at all.

Then some other jerk would put their own items up for cheaper and so on and on.  An item that was once say 10-20 globals could drop down to only 5 in a matter of hours.  Items in the thousands of globals or hundreds of globals were the only safe things to put up there.  It was both brutally annoying and frustrating.  This also ensured you couldn't trade at all as a silver, because of the extremely low global cap of only 250.  That may be made worst if/when they make cosmic keys bind on purchase like has happened in NWO.  It's hoped the devs of CO aren't that stupid and that PWE doesn't do that to the game, if it happens the game for sure will die.

Then course DCUO has the same problem but even worst, far, far worst.  Your auction expires in 48 hours, max, and you see some of the same under-bidding wars going on.  Only even very high priced items end up risky to sell.

Thing is city of heroes handled it smart in that, by hiding the prices people were asking for, it allowed not only for people to "negotiate" prices but it also prevented the under-bid wars we'd see.  Putting an underbid up would often cause it to instantly sell as people buying could set a price they were willing to buy, and it'd sell instantly when put up.  That'd tell people selling "maybe I should have asked for more?".  This combined with a lack of a limit and a lack of expiration date, prevented any kind of "Underbidding" wars from starting out of pressure of making sure the items sold.  Prices remained far more stable because of that.

Don't ever play EvE Online if those small-time bidding wars bugged ya.  Selling stuff in that game is damn near a full-time endeavor just to make sure your product moves.  Almost instantaneous 0.01 undercutting, depending on which market hub you're at and what product you're trading in, not to mention the price games people would play to take advantage of certain mechanics.  For instance, there is a brief window whereupon setting a price for your goods you are locked out of changing the price again.  During this window you may have made a sale, the market is that fluid.

However, given the small size and (to some) difficulty of reading the font (example: an 8 and a 0 look very similar in the market window) people would take advantage.  A product gets posted at a price of 888.08, hoping the competitor reads it as 888.88, who then lists their product for 888.87, still more expensive than the listing of 888.08 and thus losing out on the potential sale.  And often times you're selling/managing multiple products (can't recall the cap on market orders, but I do know it is over 50 at a time) and thus have multiple products prices to manage, you can quickly lose precious minutes of potential sales, only to have the cycle repeat itself the very second after you correct the price to be the current lowest sale price.

[LaughingAlex]

Don't ever play EvE Online if those small-time bidding wars bugged ya.  Selling stuff in that game is damn near a full-time endeavor just to make sure your product moves.  Almost instantaneous 0.01 undercutting, depending on which market hub you're at and what product you're trading in.

I chose not to bother with EVE because of how I hear the very in-game economy is tied to actual money.  At the very least I am guessing it's players deciding the prices at least, rather than the company itself, as I also hear it's economy is entirely player driven including the prices of everything in it.  Unlike CO and the whole lockbox schemes.

[Kelltick]

I chose not to bother with EVE because of how I hear the very in-game economy is tied to actual money.  At the very least I am guessing it's players deciding the prices at least, rather than the company itself, as I also hear it's economy is entirely player driven including the prices of everything in it.  Unlike CO and the whole lockbox schemes.

Yes and no.  It's rather complex in how products have a price floor (I can get into it with you if you like, but that is, as I said, complex) but they do have a rough price floor.  But yes, save for some worthless NPC goods that have no bearing on player industry and thus the overall game, every product is priced by the players.

As for the real-money tie-in, that is for a product called PLEX, meaning Pilot License EXtension, or a fancy name for gametime.  You purchase the PLEX in pairs w/ real money from CCP (EvE dev) and with those 2 PLEX you are then free to use them, trade them, or sell them on the market for in-game currency - other than CCP setting the real money price for the PLEX, their value in-game is again player driven.  In a sense it's an attempt to dissuade "gold-selling" as you can legally/TOS/EULA agreeably do the same through the game itself.

[LaughingAlex]

Yes and no.  It's rather complex in how products have a price floor (I can get into it with you if you like, but that is, as I said, complex) but they do have a rough price floor.  But yes, save for some worthless NPC goods that have no bearing on player industry and thus the overall game, every product is priced by the players.

As for the real-money tie-in, that is for a product called PLEX, meaning Pilot License EXtension, or a fancy name for gametime.  You purchase the PLEX in pairs w/ real money from CCP (EvE dev) and with those 2 PLEX you are then free to use them, trade them, or sell them on the market for in-game currency - other than CCP setting the real money price for the PLEX, their value in-game is again player driven.  In a sense it's an attempt to dissuade "gold-selling" as you can legally/TOS/EULA agreeably do the same through the game itself.

I think it's alot smarter and more upfront than the lockboxes we've been seeing in CO then.  As it not only combats gold selling since you have a legitimate system in place but it ensures people are not so easy to "Scam" by the developer themselves.  The fact that everything can be earned in game means that nerfs to items cannot be tied to baiting and switching to I'd believe.  What hurts CO is the fact that, many of the lockbox items are truely lock-box only.  If it's drifter salvage, thats also lockbox only.  And cosmic keys?  Someone somewhere spent money for it, in some way or another.  Zen from Q?  Also from someone who spent money on that.

Items on the drifter store and in lockboxes cannot be earned in game.  So money is spent sooner or later on them thus when they get excessively nerfed, you end up with the outcries you see.  And the severe drop in popularity over the last two months that resulted from that.  It(CO) really is deliberately made to make money rather than be a good game.

Players scamming others is one thing but then whats happened in CO thats, well, the developers doing, whether it was intentional or not it was :S.

[Kelltick]

I think it's alot smarter and more upfront than the lockboxes we've been seeing in CO then.  As it not only combats gold selling since you have a legitimate system in place but it ensures people are not so easy to "Scam" by the developer themselves.  The fact that everything can be earned in game means that nerfs to items cannot be tied to baiting and switching to I'd believe.  What hurts CO is the fact that, many of the lockbox items are truely lock-box only.  If it's drifter salvage, thats also lockbox only.  And cosmic keys?  Someone somewhere spent money for it, in some way or another.  Zen from Q?  Also from someone who spent money on that.

Items on the drifter store and in lockboxes cannot be earned in game.  So money is spent sooner or later on them thus when they get excessively nerfed, you end up with the outcries you see.  And the severe drop in popularity over the last two months that resulted from that.  It really is deliberately made to make money rather than be a good game.

Players scamming others is one thing but then whats happened in CO thats, well, the developers doing, whether it was intentional or not it was :S.

Agree - generally speaking CCP takes a complete hands-off approach to the markets.  There are a few instances where they have changed a few things that have impacts on the market (this ties into the complex price floor I alluded to) but overall they let the market live and breath on its own accord, obvious exploits aside.  In a game where scamming other players is allowed (and some would say encouraged, but that is an arguement in semantics) the devs do keep out of the economy of the game to a surprising large extent, and don't engage in some of the cash-grab activities of other games.

While yes, you can use real money to acquire in-game currency, you still use that in-game currency to acquire products built/looted by other players.  The only cash-shop items are 100% cosmetic (as far as I know, it's been some time since I've played).  There certainly aren't any P2W items, nor lockboxes or anything similar.  So you can use real money to get "space rich" but it doesn't really offer you any advantages over other players other than having the funds available to buy the next shiny ship you want to go get blown up.

CCP is smart in that it knows it has a sizable portion of its playerbase that play the game strictly for the markets.  As a finance/economics guy myself, that was my draw to the game and kept me playing long past when I would have cut and run normally.  Hell, at one point they had their own in-house economist to help monitor things, set the "price-floor" on new ships/items they were introducing into the game, and tweak anything that needed tweaking.

[MM3squints]

So you can use real money to get "space rich" but it doesn't really offer you any advantages over other players other than having the funds available to buy the next shiny ship you want to go get blown up.

Or you can put $1,500 worth of plex onto a ship and watch it get blown up

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/12/30/eve-online-player-loses-1-500-in-a-ship-attack/

[LaughingAlex]

Agree - generally speaking CCP takes a complete hands-off approach to the markets.  There are a few instances where they have changed a few things that have impacts on the market (this ties into the complex price floor I alluded to) but overall they let the market live and breath on its own accord, obvious exploits aside.  In a game where scamming other players is allowed (and some would say encouraged, but that is an arguement in semantics) the devs do keep out of the economy of the game to a surprising large extent, and don't engage in some of the cash-grab activities of other games.

While yes, you can use real money to acquire in-game currency, you still use that in-game currency to acquire products built/looted by other players.  The only cash-shop items are 100% cosmetic (as far as I know, it's been some time since I've played).  There certainly aren't any P2W items, nor lockboxes or anything similar.  So you can use real money to get "space rich" but it doesn't really offer you any advantages over other players other than having the funds available to buy the next shiny ship you want to go get blown up.

CCP is smart in that it knows it has a sizable portion of its playerbase that play the game strictly for the markets.  As a finance/economics guy myself, that was my draw to the game and kept me playing long past when I would have cut and run normally.  Hell, at one point they had their own in-house economist to help monitor things, set the "price-floor" on new ships/items they were introducing into the game, and tweak anything that needed tweaking.

To the person who just posted before this yes I heard about that .  Still earnable in game but yeah, I also heard about a war that had cost over 300k.  But, back to the post i'm replying directly to.  I can get behind a game in which the only store-only items are purely cosmetic.  Thats what DCUO does, primarily with things like aura and some costume pieces.  DCUO instead lives on it's subscriptions as you cannot advance beyond a certain combat rating for free, even then as long as you have the dlc's you can advance now as they opened advancement up as you can earn marks of triumph/fury in game and you still have to earn your combat ratings.  That game your subscription really is paying for the game to get new content and to keep it running compared to CO which uses only money for boxes and a tiny, mini scale amount of content per year that is often bland.

Edit: Well, ok not that event specifically but the war last year I recall?  Yeah.

[Kelltick]

Or you can put $1,500 worth of plex onto a ship and watch it get blown up

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/12/30/eve-online-player-loses-1-500-in-a-ship-attack/

It never ceases to amaze me at the stupidity of people in that game.  I still get a kick out of how many people fall for the obvious ponzi schemes and flat-out "investment" scams.  A fool and his money...

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/08/12/biggest-eve-online-scam-ever-recorded-nets-over-a-trillion-isk/

[LaughingAlex]

It never ceases to amaze me at the stupidity of people in that game.  I still get a kick out of how many people fall for the obvious ponzi schemes and flat-out "investment" scams.  A fool and his money...

I'm laughing at the whole thing right now, I feel bad for the guy but yeah.  Someone even said that had the plex dropped the attacker would have gotten seven years worth of subscriptions.  Damn LOL, that would have been one hell of a payday.  I wonder though what kind of job this guy had to have done that like really LOL.  Insanity.

Edit: And yeah, stupidity.

Another Edit: Read through what you just shared.  A little despicable to be honest.  Why are the trolls of CO playing CO again when they could be playing Eve?

[Battlechimp]

In my early days, I actually spent real-world money several times buying large piles of INF.  I was never caught, because I knew the people in RL and they were members of my SG.

With, this I find it mind boggling that you paid real money to a SG mate for inf.  And not in the "why would someone pay real money for influence way". But more in the "A SG member charged you for influence!?". 

We apparently ran in very different crowds . I remember a SG mate mention in chat that he finally worked out. Build for one character, but it'd take him a while to earn enough to get all the IOs he needed.  People started piping in with "What did you need, I'll see what I got". "I have some of those crafted, I'll drop them in the bins". "I got the salvage to craft those I'll mail them to you".  He got almost all he needed from people in the SG

That is one of the biggest things I miss about CoH, that kind of community.  I have yet to join any group in another game that was willing to just help out other members, just because they could. 

[AmberOfDzu]

We apparently ran in very different crowds . I remember a SG mate mention in chat that he finally worked out. Build for one character, but it'd take him a while to earn enough to get all the IOs he needed.  People started piping in with "What did you need, I'll see what I got". "I have some of those crafted, I'll drop them in the bins". "I got the salvage to craft those I'll mail them to you".  He got almost all he needed from people in the SG

That is one of the biggest things I miss about CoH, that kind of community.  I have yet to join any group in another game that was willing to just help out other members, just because they could.

+1

I had a lot of inf on my CoH account, distributed on quite a few "mule" characters and stored in market bids that were very unlikely to fill (had to be careful with these -- people did get burned occasionally!). But what was most fun was being able to give Inf away. I used to fund costume contests, buy prestige for other people's SG's, and help out needy players with getting their enhancements. Huge amounts of Inf really weren't that useful, and that was part of the charm of CoH -- it was easy for people to show their better, more charitable, nature.