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It's an awesome and maybe slightly above and beyond the scope of the Homecoming team, but I thought I'd throw it out there that the island of Mu is already in City of Heroes.

I have an unfinished DA stalker. My feeling is I prefer having a character with flaws that I need to solve myself rather than having the devs solve those problems for me.

I think a redo of the contacts menu is in order, especially find contacts, where you can be guided towards other contacts, TFs and trials based on the things you've already done. Something more like a log. It would include which Ouro arcs to consider playing to fill plot holes. (Slight side-suggestion, if the menu could also include looking clues and souvenirs relevant to that contact, rather than keeping clues in a separate menu where they don't always make much sense.) At the moment it just really wants to send us to First Ward.

I'm not sure all contacts should be available to level 50s, outside of Ouro (my argument was going to be chronology, but I know CoH stopped caring about levels-as-sequential while ago). But definitely would love if arcs that have started don't become a rewardless chore if you outlevel them. Also, while I'm here, raise the cap on praetorian contacts! 🙂

Yeah, the ice effects are intense. They need to chill out.

Ever noticed how ArchVileTerror and GM_Arcanum have never been photographed together? Just saying.

Communists, maybe?

You're buying (in theory) from the lowest item auctioned. As long as there's a supply below the seeded value, none of that would get touched. I've seen some discrepancies that make me question if this works quite like this, but that's the concept.

Vectored knockback could give Gale the chance to knock-towards. If you can use your own character as a positional anchor, crowd control with Gale would be amazing. Coupled with Hurricane, a stormy character could control the positions of groups of enemies like nobody's business.

Actually, Jimmy kinda did say this on page 1 (clunky phone makes quoting things hard), that it levels the playing field across everyone. Characters who have 'peaked' aren't exacerbating inflation by doubling their inf, and those players won't be commanding the market as much as they might have done.

Been playing today and yesterday. Certainly seeing lower prices across the board for crafted IOs - though I reckon that isolation is a factor here. Recipes maybe higher, but I don't know the trends outside my normal picks well enough to judge. Still very low relative to crafted IOs. The big exception is uncommon salvage, but that's been misbehaving for a while now. I'm starting to surrender to the possibility that uncommon salvage just goes for 50k now.

You'll have 1000 character slots, you'll be pleased to know, plenty of room to experiment. And yeah, there are a few support based archetypes (Defenders, Controllers and Corruptors) and Tanky archetypes (Tankers and Brutes). They most obviously fill those roles, but you'd be amazed how much any character can skirt into other roles.

It's good of you to be watching out for the integrity of the community - I mean that sincerely. But I don't believe anything has really warranted locking the thread. It's a topic where people will butt heads, but really that's fine. The game is so broad and malleable that there are a range of opinions on the ways they can be approached, which everyone is entitled to express within reason. At least we're not talking about knockback. Largely, folks have tried to be helpful here, giving real information about the change and advice on how to maximise income through other methods (though it's hard to afford the patience. I snapped in my last post. Sorry not sorry). And finally, people do need to vent. And that's fine. The change is good for the long term health of the game, but will upset people in the short term. A lot of folk have come around to at least an understanding of the change, though nobody expects anyone else to like the fact that their playstyles have been altered, and that's ok. I think it's good to hear the experiences and perceptions of people since the change, like Crysis has posted. That's useful information and you can see people corrolating it with their own.

How do they not apply? Explain. You've repeatedly given incorrect definitions of very simple economic concepts, you really don't have a leg to stand on calling other people's assertions pseudo.

Prices and inflation aren't the same thing, though they are linked. Like a balloon is inflated by the amount of air inside it, the economy is inflated by the amount of currency inside it. The market only moves that influence around, it doesn't generate any more and has zero contribution to inflation. If 100% of players got their income through market manipulation, there would be 0 inflation. In fact, the economy would deflate because of market taxes. I believe you may have misread the intent Jimmy put forward. Lowering the inflation rate - which was the goal - is a different thing to lowering prices - which would be nice, but probably won't happen. Influence is still entering the game economy faster than it's leaving, so inflation is still there, but the rate of it has been decreased.

When did anyone say they would go down because of the change? The change aims to affect the rate inflation would cause disparity between players to increase and prices to rise. It's very unlikely we'll actually see prices straight up drop because of this.

Not sure why, but your post appeared late for me. I think there's definitely still room to balance rewards and what effects may happen when exemplaring. I doubt we've seen the end of changes in how players are rewarded. To keep with the analogy, your husband's benefits are coming from an existing pot of money, whereas influence earned in-game materialises out of nowhere, which is a significant distinction economically. Too much influence generated this way leads to inflation. I doubt we'd see influence bonuses be readded since the whole point of the change was to curb inflation. We players don't have access to the data to know whether a 25% bonus would or would not be harmful, however. Don't forget that we still have merits as another form of reward, so player-beneficial changes may occur there. Since merits can't be traded, they help to keep a lid on how high prices can go.

If that happens, then it's hard to call it a niche anymore. And that much competition and supply would start to see the price go down - or at least stay level. Which is why the accessibility of converters is a good thing (assuming low prices are considered good), since that can and more or less does happen. Without them, supply of desirable items will dwindle while demand stays the same, driving prices up.

I feel as though you're overestimating how much influence people can actually have on the market, particularly sellers. A seller can only follow the market, it would be a mistake to try to manipulate prices to be higher, especially on homecoming where everyone has very easy access to desirable IOs. plus keeping in mind we can only see previous purchase prices, we can't see what anything is being sold for. The 'niches' are bulk purchases, not sales, usually trash uncommon IO recipes (How many uncommon teleport IOs do you think people need for their builds?). Generally speaking, marketeers converting and selling this way put their bids up for below the purchases on the last 5 sales. There's no point in going higher. The people actually taking the time to study the trends and manipulate the market by buying an item at a low cost and selling it at higher, I could probably count on one hand. Heck, I think I could name them both. I wouldn't want to be doing that myself. With all that in mind, it's demand - buyers - that controls the market way more than sellers. The following hypothetical behaviour will raise prices: I have many alts at lvl 1, I powerlevel them all every day over a month, and I outfit them all with the most desirable IOs by making high bids to ensure that I get them asap without waiting, using new inf generated from farming. I also vendor all my drops, so I'm not adding to the market supply. If a lot of people behave that way, competing with each other for those higher bids, the prices will go up. It doesn't even matter if the actual supply is at a lower cost if people are outbidding the last five sales in order to get their products asap, and obviously sellers will follow those heightening bids. The more influence people with that behaviour can generate, the larger the rift between farmers' income and other content players' income becomes. The inflated influence is in the circulation of a certain subsect of players. That's where we got to on live.

I got permarest IRL.

Yeah, that ATO is totally replaceable for me. I've heard people loving it, especially when they can fire off a few at once, but since none of my Doms are fire type characters I just can't bring myself to use it. Do ATOs count in the cottage rule?

Even then, it's like just one guy.

From the way you describe this, I feel as though you're missing the out-of-set > by type conversion. It will allow you to convert between any enhancement of the same type, like ranged damage or defense. You can convert between uncommon and rare IOs this way, for the price of 2 converters. Once you've got a rare this way, you can switch back to converting by rarity and just keep converting to get an enhancement with value. Depending on where you personally draw the line of a valuable IO (about 2.5 mil for me), it shouldn't take many conversions.

I really like the ideas here. Your proposal is a set I'd enjoy.