For a game which has no actual money to speak of, I seem to be getting an inordinate amount of enjoyment out of The Black Market in City of Villains over the last few weeks, and the thing is swiftly becoming a significant sub-game in it's own right, to be honest. As with much in my gaming life, this new aspect of CoV stemmed largely from personal irritation.
The economy of CoV is quite an unusual place really. Its a game where there is no gear, as such, and all The Numbers tend to automatically scale as you level. An attack power might describe itself as a doing a 'Minor' amount of 'Lethal' damage, and this may just seem like sloppy tooltip design, as it did to me at first. Then you realise that at every level, as you progress, it will always do a Minor amount of damage to a foe of your level 'White-con', making the powers you start life with useful all the way to the end. They can be improved however, to do, say, Minor + 8% of Minor, rather than just plain old Minor, and that's done with the only thing in game that resembles 'gear' in the traditional sense, the Enhancements.
Every Odd Level you don't get a new power, but instead get two Slots, which you can assign to existing powers, to a maximum of six per power and these slots take permanent socketing with these little Enhancement bubbles, each of which has the capacity to...er...enhance aspects of that power; more damage, better accuracy, longer duration on status effects, and so on.
These Enhancements drop from defeated enemies in a fairly random fashion, and while many are useful, some aren't. For example, as a melee DPS type, I have very little use for +Range ones or +Confuse Duration. The only additional status effect I cause, is -Accuracy, (which is the standard 'extra twist' delivered by Dark powers. For Ice powers, it would be +Slow instead, a speed debuff), which makes a great many other types of Enhancement no use to me; +Slow, +Hold Duration, +Knockback Distance, etc, etc. As a Teleporter, I don't have much use for ones that improve jumping or flight. Certainly, I'll pass them around to teammates who can use them, but as you only have carrying space for ten of these at a time, suddenly the conditions for a Market are met. I have a thing that I don't need, but someone else does need. Ah-ha! Trade!
The game does have a currency of sorts, earned along side experience, called 'Influence' if you're a Hero, or 'Infamy' if you're a Villain, which is conceptually meant to represent your renown as a Superperson. You gain it for fights and missions completed. You can also use it to buy Enhancements from NPC shopkeepers, or the player-based Consignment House/Black Market and that's where the fun began. I had a big bag of largely useless Enhancements after finishing up a few missions. I'd already used the ones that were useful, hiking my relative power up a few notches in some useful areas. I was soloing at the time, but felt that these extra leftovers I had ought to go to a useful home, rather than just be destroyed, via selling them to the NPC Quartermaster.
Reasonable enough, you might think, and I can be sometimes! Mind you, I'm not so reasonable that I'd want to actually give these things away, and so not having a clue what these things were actually worth, (a perpetual anxiety that often puts me off trading with actual people altogether), and anal retentive Numbers Obsessive that I am, I went to the NPC anyway, got my pen and paper out and made a list of how much he was willing to pay me for each of my items of stock. I also noted the price you'd have to pay him if you desperately needed these enhancements in a hurry.
Armed with Logic, Information and Rational Thought, I then took my haul to the Black Market and cheerfully listed them up for sale, settling on prices around half-way between the NPC buy price and the NPC sale price. I then went on my merry way. Four days later they were all still there. Not a nibble! This irritated me greatly, and most of my best MMO work is caused by me simply being too annoyed by a thing to give up, walk away from it all, and get on and play the game.
The CoX Auctions are done on a curious blind bidding system, which works like this. You put an item up for sale and as you do, you enter how much you'd like to sell it for. It takes this and sets the thing going. Then, when someone browses to the item, they see how many there are for sale, and a list, containing the last five or so prices it sold for, with date/times. Then, if you want one you put in a bid, with how much you're prepared to pay for it. If this amount exceeds the seller's hidden asking price, the sale happens and you pay the whole amount you said you were going to, to the seller. This means that the seller can end up earning a lot more than they asked for if the buyer guesses too high, or indeed, genuinely values the item that highly in the first place. Since the only fees that happen seem to be during a successful sale, and the items list indefinitely, rather than fall off after a 2, 8 or 24 hours, its quite easy, if time-consuming for the frugal buyer to 'walk' the price up in slow steps to get the best value for money.
All very fascinating, but the basic hidden nature of the prices seems to confuse a lot of folks and I suspect that many misunderstand the nature of the price histories somewhat. That list is not 'what the item is worth', in the slightest. It is merely, 'what some people managed to buy it for'. For a guide to the item's worth, you need to take it to an NPC Quartermaster; 'Magic Store', 'Mutant Store', etc.
My items were not selling however. I'd priced them on what I thought was a fair basis; more than I'd get by dumping them out to an NPC, but less than it would cost to buy them from the same NPC. I checked the amount for sale for each, and the selling history and immediately saw what the problem was. Many, many other players were also trying to sell the same items for much less than I was. Any other player wanting to buy one of these would have to wade through a great many cheaper ones than mine before mine came up on the roster as the Next Cheapest one, and to be honest I suspect the bulk of the playerbase had gotten used to the idea that these lower prices were quite 'normal' for the items in question.
Of course, the obvious answer, which indeed seems to occur to many Villains in there, is to unlist it, and put in a lower price than everyone else, so that when a buyer shows up, yours is next in line. Of course unlike most Auction House type listings, EVE Online included, you can't tell by looking what those lower prices actually are, and so most tend to err on the low side, desperate to sell. Clearly, my Sensible Pricing Policy was right out of the window, given the price histories I saw.
The less obvious answer seems to be, don't bother wasting your time and money trying to sell onto the Black Market, and instead, just take the guaranteed and known price the NPCs offer. Which is what I did. I was still annoyed though, and thought about it a bit and came up with my Sekrit Master Plan. Its not really that secret, to be honest, and I'm sure the sharper reader will have already worked it out themselves by this point.
I decided that if the market can't be relied on to get me fair prices for useful items, I'd have to personally adjust it, until it could! There then followed an hour or two of me cackling hysterically as I shuttle from Black Market to Quartermaster and back. Working through the lower-end lists of enhancements, I plinked away, placing, and more often than not, winning, stupidly low buy-bids. Once I'd got ten Enhancements, its off to the Quartermaster to sell, wholesale, and then return, rise and repeat. Seemed no shortage of silly-low selling offers to be had, and of course, each time one of those sell, that price goes in the Sale History list, further perpetuating the whole debacle.
I've now gotten into the habit of loading up 10 bargain basement super-discount Enhancements every time I pass the Black Market locations in my day to day Villainy, and without too much extra legwork on my part, managed to get enough Infamy to buy the recipes, salvage parts and pay the crafting table costs to upgrade every single one of my own in-use Enhancements to the super-charged Invention Origin Lv15 scaling Enhancements, and still have a pretty huge chunk of Villain-Money left over. This in turn does have a useful game effect, as being something of a reputedly difficult solo class, having all the best toys helps me punch somewhat above my weight and helps with the ever crucial Viability issue.
Exploit? It certainly seemed too good to be true, but I wonder if this isn't just a consequence of the CoX market as designed? Its not my fault people don't have a good understanding of the actual worth of things, or enough patience to wait for a proper price. I suspect a great many CoX players have not also played EVE Online much, as I have, and a broadly similar strategy is how I made my early millions in that game too.
And anyway, do these sellers even care? Players can only carry ten of these items on them, unequipped, at a time, ever, and they can't be banked. Maybe people just want shot of them and can't be bothered to do the legwork, as I can? Rather than delete them outright, why not just dump them on the market? Also, there are badges to be collected for selling items on the Black Market and I suspect that I am personally responsible for a great many of them being handed out over the last few days. Fair play to them, I say! Just a shame there aren't any badges for buying too!
I suspect Invention has a lot to do with it. The Enhancements come in several types, each with a greater effect. Typical values of the same enhancement statistic and level:
- Training Origin: +8.3%
- Dual Origin (e.g. Magic & Natural): +16.7%
- Single Origin (e.g. Magic only): +33.3%
- Invention Origin (Player-Crafted from Salvage): +38.6%
- Invented Set Enhancements (Rare Crafted Set Items): +21.75% in two different stats, and extra bonuses for having 2 or more of the same set installed. These two stats can overlap though, e.g. A set of three might consist of: +Acc/+Dam, +Dam/-End Cost, +Acc/-End Cost, resulting in an overall +43.5% to +Acc, +Dam AND -End Cost, if you have them all.
Only the TO, DO and SO ones can be sold to an NPC Merchant. The TO, DO and SO also have a fixed level, meaning that they become less effective as your own level outstrips them, meaning they need to be periodically upgraded or replaced, perhaps every five levels.
The IO and Set enhancements on the other hand, do scale to match your level, cannot be wholesaled off, and are entirely at the mercy of the player economy. They have no intrinsic alternative value, and really are only worth what the players think they are worth, in utility terms, although most have a fixed Infamy fee to carry out the actual crafting, so you'll want to at least make that back on the sale, along with the cost of any salvage used.
Its possible that with the addition of Invention, some patches back, the entire non-invented Enhancement market has in most player's eyes, become irrelevant, and its in the Recipies, IOs and Set Enhancements that the real economy functions, the wheeling, the dealing, the Step 3: Profit! Perhaps the only reason I'm doing so well out of it all is that I'm one of the few people who even cares about these lesser items anymore?
(Any highlevel CoX players want to chime in with typical Enhancement choices? Are SOs used at all at the top end or it is exclusively inventions and sets?)
Alas, despite being a lot more wealthy than I ought to be at this level, there doesn't seem to be a lot to actually do with this pseudo-cash. The two main Very High Price Items available seem to be the Wings & Boots - fun but functionless costume parts with a purely cosmetic value, and the Set Enhancement collections - the Premier League of overpowered twinking, such as it exists in CoX at all, another kind of vanity item, in a way, although far more useful. There are no Epic Mounts to grind for, there is no Carrier to buy. Also, the progress bar on the 'It's all about the Infamy, baby!' badge seems unaffected by my economic plunder, and presumably that badge is only to be had by actually earning Infamy, via fights and missions.
Still, at the end of the day, I do enjoy this minor marketeering mayhem, and it makes a nice alternative to beating up thugs for four hours solid. I was ever the frugal sort in online games, and do get off on the 'Oooh!' you get when you find a real bargain on a market. And of course, being able to afford to stuff myself to the gills with Invention grade Enhancements of my own is useful too. I wonder if this is merely left-over slack in the market, months old stock from players who don't even play anymore, or if these silly-low items are being replenished often and low enough for the whole thing to be sustainable, long term. Seems so, so far, but always hard to tell this kind of thing in detail.
I do worry sometimes that my depredations are in some way depriving less fortunate villains the opportunity to buy useful things they need, for affordable low prices, but then again I am supposed to be Evil after all.
(I'd be flattering myself if I thought enough people actually read this to cause any significant impact on the Black Market on my own server. Seems an awful lot of bad habits to correct overnight for my current Diabolical Caper to fall apart! If you are a Hero, all of the above probably applies equally to Wentworth's...go crazy! Together we can make the Markets work as intended!)
Incidentally, today's (and future) CoV Numbers came from here:
Fusion Fortress: Mids' Hero Designer
Which seems a handy sort of downloadable tool, allowing offline tinkering about with power and enhancement choices, and a peek at the numbers behind it all! Especially useful for working out Endurance costs and throughputs, very crucial to get right if you don't want all your toggle-shields fizzling out at an awkward moment! Mmm....numbers....