Run on Ceramic Armor Plate

After a little, um, coercion by Chaos Creator, I helped clear out a lot of the supply of Ceramic Armor Plate on the market for heroes. Here is the starting inventory:

ceramic-buys-01.jpg

I started buying at 51 influence, buying as many as I could before going up a little on my bid. Unfortunately, I failed to get screenshots of the pricing as I went. I meant to, but somehow didn’t get them when hitting my F12 screenshot key for Fraps to grab the image.

ceramic-buys-02.jpg

This is where I stopped. I didn’t feel a common tech salvage deserved a greater push than 10,005. When I could no longer buy at this price, I stopped. Those 17 bidding include 7 from me and another 10 that I can’t account for.

ceramic-buys-03.jpg

Not that it is full penance, but I did put a few of them back on the market when I was done. I was out of slots, or would have saved and returned more.

EDIT: Within 5 minutes, someone realized these prices were not right:

ceramic-buys-04.jpg

Market manipulation is eBil!!!

Yes, I’m posting a lot about City of Heroes/Villains lately, and not pointing out much in the way of coming games I want to play/see. I’ve not really put much time in to anything but my heroic/villainous self gamewise recently.

In the City of * forums, there is a long thread going about how market manipulation is très eBil, immoral, demoralizing, and a few other negatives I can’t quite recall just now. In that thread, I just felt a need to respond to this one wrong point that one poster made:

I think the players that many other people perceive as market villains are the ones who consistently & systematically manipulate things in order do their absolute best to make sure sell items WAY THE FRAK ABOVE anything that an impartial/unbiased 3rd party would consider a fair price.

Why do I say that is wrong? Because, well:

I purchased these Deific Weapons for deific-bids-01.jpg (for the record – I normally like to purchase them for less – 3,177,233 to be precise – but some other ebil market manipulator has been muscling in on my space, so I had to push my bidding up significantly).  After I won a stack of 10 of them, I put them back up for sale deific-listing-01.jpg (and again, this is higher than my normal 3,517,233, but since I bid 120,000 more than normal, I don’t feel bad selling for 80,000 more than normal).  At the end of one good night of sleep, I logged in to find all 10 sold: deific-sales-01.jpg.

So let’s review – I listed at a price point where after sales, I would earn 3,246,509 after the 10% market fee if someone bought for exactly what I listed.  By my math, that means I listed my items for sale at a point where I would take a 53,504 loss per item sold if someone got my exact selling price.  Yet after my full stack of 10 salvage sold, they went for an average of 3,940,000, and my final profit after market fees is 4,263,480 instead of the potential 535,040 loss I could have suffered.  I am unwilling to take credit for any market price increase beyond 3,650,000, which is what my actual minimum sales target was.  The other 290,000 is clearly due to people willing to spend that much, not my forcing prices up.

An unknown pool recipe drops for me

According to Catwhoorg’s post in the Co* forums, the Force Feedback: Knockback/Damage/Endurance Reduction recipe is of an unknown pool currently. Here is my reward message for the end of a mission I ran tonight:

feedback-drop-01.jpg

The character in question is a level 32 Dark/Kin corruptor who was exemped to level 30 while running a task force. Here is what the normal reward looks like for defeating a minion:

feedback-drop-02.jpg

This particular mission had an end-boss who we had already defeated, and the reward came when we beat the final minion, a Longbow Minigun, in the boss-room. I’m calling this a pool B drop. Comments?

The Rikti return

City of Heroes folks, remember that this week, starting Friday the 18th, is a Rikti invasion week.  No debt in invasion zones and lots of fun PUGging to kill invading aliens.

[youtube 4mYV-IbO2Ww]

If you destroy enough bombs and defeat enough rikti heavy armor and regular rikti spawns, you can get an accolade granting a substantial resistance to psychic damage for 1 minute with a 25 minute recharge.

Flipping salvage – the buy

In an attempt to update and better logically split this information, I have moved this post and made edits to it on a new GamerDemos’ page titled Flipping Salvage which you can reach by clicking the Flipping Salvage link or finding it at the top of any page on my site. Check out updates there and look for updates on market crashes and the sell process on successive pages from there.  The original post remains below.

As one of those ebil market manipulators, I figure I can share a little knowledge on what I do to earn easy influence and infamy in game. Mostly, I work in flipping rare arcane salvage. The margin on this is not nearly as great as the margin on flipping IOs or buying recipes and selling crafted IOs, but the work is easy, and you can do this with one character without ever moving around. Log in, collect salvage, list it for sale, put in more bids, log out and play your other characters.

With minimal time and effort, I turned 7 million influence on my Dark/Dark defender into well over 100 million. Then I started working with recipes and flipping crafted IOs, and have again nearly doubled my holdings, in addition to slotting more sets with a rough market value of 75 million at the time I bought and crafted things. Here are some specific examples of what I’ve done, along with some notices of the kinds of problems you can encounter with this method.

The time investment is substantially less than it will seem if you read this through, because I do a lot of checking while actively buying and selling other items.

For this example, I’m looking at Magical Conspiracy. This is a salvage item I haven’t ever used for flipping, so I’m showing you exactly how I evaluate a salvage type to see if I can flip it for profit. Before I start working a category, I make several checks. Early in the morning on the first time I checked Magical Conspiracy salvage, here’s what I saw:

magical-conspiracy_check01.jpg

Continue reading “Flipping salvage – the buy”

Dark defender respec bug?

For all the City of Heroes folks, I’ve got an odd problem here that I want to show.  I haven’t filed a bug report on it yet, but plan on it, I think.  While using a respec for my Dark/Dark defender, I selected Twilight Grasp for my first power.  After selecting all my powers, I went to the slotting screen.  To my amazement, Twilight Grasp isn’t there.  Here is the screenshot of me after selecting all my powers:

ddd_respec01.jpg

And here is the screenshot immediately after hitting next:

ddd_respec02.jpg

I didn’t even notice the missing power until I finished slotting and putting IOs in everywhere only to see I had 2 Doctored Wounds IOs left over and no healing power in which to place them.  Have any other CoH players seen this problem?

Lair reviews

I’ve not been particularly interested in the PlayStation 3 – the absurd price, the lack of interesting games, the arrogance of Sony’s executives in pushing the platform (We expect gamers will want to take a second job to afford the PS3), and the fact that I don’t really have that much time to play games much any more make it less than compelling to me. One of the games I’ve been keeping my eye on, thinking it might change my mind, is Lair. Now that it is out, how does it fair? Well, let’s start with the GameTrailers review.

[gametrailers 24533]

That’s not a very convincing review, is it? Well, I go on and check out what Tycho and Gabe have to say (and their associated news item – ” You couldn’t pay us to play Lair any more than we have already.”) then swing over for Bill’s write-up on the game (and I quote – “As a game, though, Lair has some of the worst game design I’ve ever seen. Ever.”).  I stopped looking for reviews after getting the two reliable sources I’ve used for many past gaming purchases.

This isn’t looking to be the game I’d hoped would make me want a PS.  Not that I’d have hopped out and grabbed one this week.  Still, having a few compelling games would up the interest meter for me.

Controller information updates

I have added some information on the kinetics secondary to my controller information pages.  It is less than halfway done, but I thought getting the information out early would give others a chance to view and comment on what I’m working on writing.

I’ve made minor updates to the fire controller primary information as well as the radiation emission secondary information page in the past couple of days.  Feel free to comment on the information and let me know if I’ve missed anything or need to clarify details.

Steadfast protection

Finally got my knockback resistance Steadfast Protection enhancement for my Spines/DA scrapper.  Look for vide of him farming those CoT in Founders in the near future.  I plan on burning a respec to make him a ‘porter now.  This was his planned playstyle all along, but knockback became such a problem that I used a respec last year to go Combat Jumping/Superjump/Acrobatics.  Thanks to inventions, I can now get back to his intended build.  And maybe I’ll be able to save up enough money to get the stealth invention enhancement for the ‘port set, while I’m at it.

In case you can’t tell, I’m kinda stoked about this.