Gremlin

To put it slightly differently, if you exceed a hard cap value then the game engine cuts the number down to the cap before doing any calculations. The combat attributes will show the capped value and mark it in blue. With a soft cap, the value is fed into the calculations without modification. It's just that higher values don't help for some other reason. IIRC the combat attributes window doesn't mark soft caps in any way. The recharge and mez resistance mechanics display drastically diminishing returns. https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Soft_Cap gives these as examples of a soft cap but I don't recall hearing a player call them that.

Yes please. Anything that makes it impossible for me to trash an expensive IO by accident would be great. Of the two options, I'd prefer an Undo feature to a confirmation dialog because I tend to disable or auto-click confirmation dialogs if I see them too often. It would be nice if the current confirmation dialog told you which IO you are about to destroy.

I wouldn't leave a TF or Trial for something like that because I feel that by joining I've made a commitment to stay to the end. But I'm definitely unwilling to join an 8 player ITF for exactly this reason. On the other hand, the power creep means that I can solo and duo stuff that I wouldn't have dreamt of trying before incarnates. I quite enjoyed a 2 player ITF.

I'm not a fan of account bound items. I don't really mind Reward Merits because I convert them into inf but I find the others rather annoying. I'm much happier buying what I need and selling what I don't. @Dz131 you mentioned that your intention is to add something for us to keep working towards once we've hit 50. I'm in two minds about that. On the one hand, I like to have goals of some kind. Levelling and creating a build is an obvious goal. On the other hand I get a sense of completion from finishing a toon. I don't really want to lose that. If you can come up with some additional goal or achievement that doesn't impact my build then I'll be happy to see them. (e.g. badges)

Just out of curiosity, why do you want to move small numbers of merits on a regular basis? I guess turning the merits into inf and moving the inf wouldn't help. (I'm not criticising in any way. I'm just curious to know how different people play the game.)

It would be even better if we could just move as many as items as we like. I suspect that your suggestion would be much easier to implement though.

It's got to be a big plus that CoH makes it so easy to create a character. There are lots of archetypes and power sets to choose from and all the ones I've tried have worked out fine. Likewise, I've no talent for the visual arts but I can easily create a costume that looks reasonable. So I've managed to create characters to that feel unique, work well and look decent. Even if a character isn't awesome to start with I can always tinker with the powers and change the costume. That's pretty cool.

There's definitely margin in making superiors but I suspect the volume might be too low to make it worth the bother. The only data I have about this is that I sold about 10 Brute superiors a day for around 18 mm each. I did this for about 3 days. Most superiors sell a no more than a handful of each IO a day. I noticed that Brute ATOs are often in short supply. Maybe some people find it easier to buy superiors at that point.

I did a bit of testing with a salvage rack and this seems to be correct. If I added them all in alphabetical order then the re-list problem didn't happen. If I added them in a random order it did. Interestingly, I couldn't get the relist to happen unless I left the base and then came back again.

I didn't know about those commands. Thanks. FWIW the most time consuming parts of the process were claiming the drops (about 12 seconds per pack) and converting ATOs. (About 13 seconds per pack.)

Processing a single batch of 60 packs took 45 to 80 minutes depending on how much converting I did. The experiment to sell 600 packs took place over 5 days. I didn't measure how much time I spent doing that because I spent a lot of time keeping records and wrangling spreadsheets. If I'd skipped those bits it would have taken 2.5 hours a day. (12.5 hours in total.)

True and I totally agree with this policy. Unfortunately, it makes it very easy for people to claim that exploits exist without proving it in any way.

I got interested in packs because of all the discussion about inflation. Super Packs are inf sinks so opening packs is doubly virtuous. You provide people with ATOs and fight inflation at the same time! So how did I do? 1.99 bn profit in 5 days (3.3 mm profit per pack) 6.8 bn inf removed from the game Or to put it differently; I neutralised 113 farmer hours and got rich in the process. (P.S. I really want to punch some Nazis now.)

I reckon that the break even point for ATOs is about 5.5 mm each. The current average price is around 7.5 mm.

As I've already mentioned I've been experimenting with the Hero and Villain and Rogues and Vigilantes Super Packs. I wanted to know the following:- Is it worth opening Packs? Is it worth converting ATOs? Is it worth catalysing ATOs? How many packs will the ATO market bear? TLDR Answers: Yes Maybe Yes More than I can be bothered to open To answer these questions, I opened packs in batches of 60 and then sold all the contents. If I needed to convert IOs I got the converters from the packs or used merits to buy converters. All remaining merits were turned into Boosters and sold. For catalysts, I first of all used the ones from the packs and then bought more with inf if required. All Brain Storms were converted to rare salvage. In all cases, I listed everything at "Sell It Soon" prices. i.e. I intended to get the highest price that would sell in 24 hours. I ran the first 3 batches with 3 different strategies. Here are the results:- A) Mid week. Sell all contents without converting or catalysing anything. This generated a profit of 2.8 mm per pack. It took 45 seconds to open and list the pack contents yielding 3.6 mm inf per minute of effort. B) Early week. Catalyse all 10 Brute ATOs that dropped. Convert all low value ATOs to more desirable ones. This generated 3.8 mm inf per pack but it took 80 seconds per pack to process. The result was 2.9 mm inf per minute. I think I was a bit slow processing these packs so the yield per minute could be higher with practice. C) Weekend. Similar to A) except that I catalysed all the Brute ATOs that were converted from other ATOs. This meant I sold 21 superior ATOs instead of 10. This was the clear winner. It yielded 6.0 mm inf per pack and 4.7 mm inf per minute of effort. I'm not sure the market for superior Brute ATOs would be big enough to do this on a large scale. So now I was left wondering how big the ATO market is. I decided to focus on the most active parts of the market; Blaster and Brute ATOs. For this, rather epic, experiment I opened 300 Hero packs and 300 Rogue packs. I converted all ATOs to Blaster and Brute ATOs and sold them. I didn't catalyse anything. I started with Hero packs and then moved on to Rogue packs. I didn't track my time because I felt that was already covered. The result was that I sold just under 200 ATOs a day. I'm pretty sure that less than half the ATOs that sold during that time were mine. I wouldn't be too surprised if it was 20% or less. My sales were mainly limited by other vendors that undercut me. On some occasions I just ran out of stock. So the answers to my questions are:- Yep. It's definitely worth opening Super Packs at current prices. It's worth converting ATOs if you want to maximise profit per pack. It's not if you want to maximise inf per minute. It's definitely worth creating and selling Superior Brute ATOs. The Brute and Blaster markets are selling at least 10 of each IO per day. It's probably 50+. I don't know about Superiors.

I also looked at how likely you are to get 0, 1 or 2 ATOs in a single pack. (You never more than 2.) I suspect that the Hero figures are actually more representative of both types of pack. This is because the Rogue figures looked almost identical until I opened the last batch of 60. Packs containing x ATOs Chance of receiving x ATOs Heroes Rogues Heroes Rogues Packs 240 300 0 ATOs 34 56 14% 19% 1 ATO 123 137 51% 46% 2 ATOs 83 107 35% 36%

I've been messing around with Super Packs over the last week. I opened 480 Hero packs and 300 Rogue packs. I thought I'd chuck my data in here. I combined the numbers from @Troyusrexto mine for the Rogue packs. I didn't do that for the Hero packs because he didn't list the actual number of drops just the averages. I also added in the number of inspirations but they're not very valuable. Not surprisingly, my figures are very similar. FWIW I opened packs in groups of 60. The number of ATOs in each group varied by +- 10% but most other items were much more unpredictable. So much so, that I strongly suspect that 500 packs is not enough to pin down drop rates to 2 decimal places. In fact, I suspect that the two types of packs may well have identical drop rates. Total Drops Average Drops Per Super Pack Heroes Rogues Heroes Rogues Packs 480 453 1 1 Unslotter 648 755 1.35 1.67 Catalyst 75 70 0.16 0.15 Converter 809 692 1.69 1.53 Booster 89 93 0.19 0.21 ATOs 586 534 1.22 1.18 Rewards X25 201 191 0.42 0.42 Brain Storm X20 469 463 0.98 1.02 Inspirations 452 310 0.94 1.03

I was opening a lot of Super Packs last week so I was watching the prices of converters, boosters and other things you can make from merits. They were all a little lower than usual. Red salvage was also on the low-side. In general, the peak prices last week were the same as routine prices from a few weeks ago. I've no idea what's been happening with IO prices.

The game I replay the most is Civ IV. There are several different ways to win and I've enjoyed all of them. I also play a lot of Total War Games. Technically they're different games but in practice they're more like mods to the same game. I particularly enjoyed TW: Three Kingdoms. Far Cry is an old favourite. I've played that several times which is very unusual for me. I rarely play FPS games more than once.

My wallet is too big to fit in the council map. 🙂 But to answer the question: I normally set fire to them ... ... then punch them ... then hit them with a flaming sword ... and then set fire to them a bit more. Sometime they're already dead before I get to the last bit. That's always disappointing.

Thanks for posting that. I love it when people provide detailed information about something.

That's why the council maps are so brilliant. If you don't want to punch Nazis when you start the map you certainly will by the time you get to the end.

If this change has managed to squash inflation then I'd expect doubling the player base to have no effect on prices. It would double the turnover of every item though. I think this would make the prices slightly more stable. I'm not sure what would happen if we're still experiencing inflation. I'd guess it wouldn't matter. As @Yomo Kimyatasaid, we'd have twice as many people trying to buy twice as much stuff so it should even out.

Sometimes it seems like this thread exists purely to torture @SwitchFade.

Ah sorry. I missed that.