Yomo Kimyata

Whoops, wrote the wrong gender. Like I said, and like @The_Warpactacknowledged, that was my opinion. I'm not in charge, and I'm not going to tell you what to do. I just said that I found it unacceptable.

IMO IMO: 1. Racist and offensive in name and bio. Unacceptable. 2. Derogatory term for female genitalia in name. Offensive. Unacceptable. 3. If I lost my home to a wildfire, I'd probably be offended by a character whose name and bio were like that. But I wouldn't pre-emptively nuke it until I got a complaint. But I wouldn't expect to keep it. It's in poor taste. I don't think I have many if any offensive characters. I don't get enough pleasure out of potentially hurting other people to justify it. EDIT: I do have a Water/Bio sentinel named B R B Bio.

I have very little experience with fire melee or ice melee for the same reason -- I don't like elemental swords. So I can't tell you why ice melee suddenly needs a boost in order to keep it within a standard deviation of performance to an "average" set. Make your case!

Whoo boy. I've been working a lot on a similar topic, so I'm going to opine a bit. There is intent, and there is interpretation, and a functioning adult needs to take both into account. One does not dominate over the other: you can't say, "It's your fault that you're offended since I didn't intend to offend you" and you can't say "It's your fault you offended me because you said something innocuous that I chose to interpret as offensive." But you should take both into account. If you want to make something or do something and you think that you're getting away with something, then you are probably being a jerk. Don't do that. If you make something or do something and someone points out you are offending them, then you need to ask yourself if you are doing something offensive or if someone is being *really* sensitive. Listen and learn. If a dev changes your name or your costume, shrug your shoulders and move on to another alt and ask yourself why. Basically, don't try to be a jerk. If you realize you're "accidentally" being a jerk, you need to do some soul searching. But, yeah, fart and poop jokes are always funny.

Just put him in paper/radio missions!

Just the winter packs and only during the winter event. Two years running.

Actually, I really did mean converters. I started with 30 for the ~10 expected merits per pack, then rounded up to 50 because it seemed about right.

I apologize, I am not sure why I meant @Faultlinebut somehow ended up with @Lunchmoney. I'm sure there is a Freudian reference in there somewhere.

yup, that's easier! thanks!

I'd look for an expected value of a Winter Pack given certain sales prices for the components, e.g., WOs are worth X(set), merits are worth Y, etc. Run a simulation 10,000 or so times and come up with an E(WP), then vary the assumptions for scenario analysis. I could probably cobble something together relatively quickly in VBA (I'm not exactly an expert programmer), but it's perilously close to work-like activity, and I'm really only idly curious. I highly doubt that I'm going to go all in on Winter Packs this year.

In theory, with this info from @Lunchmoney, someone* could put together a monte carlo simulator for fun and profit. * not it.

Exactly. I figure that an "ideal" winter pack would be 1.2 WOs and 50 converters. Avoid that whole "Build Snow Beast" nonsense.

I set my noob traps before the event and adjusted bids thereafter. I figure I've created about a thousand synthetic Winter Packs by now. I can't wait until the event ends, then it's full on Market PvP!

Keep in mind that building S/L defense/resist is probably easiest and cheapest in terms of builds. Also, if you are planning to team at all, most support characters would be most likely to give you S/L help, so if you plan on being team oriented you can cheat a little and focus instead on other types. IMO.

I'm still deciding what I want to do with respect to Winter Packs. One day in, and almost 40k packs have been sold (and a small number relisted), which is more than a pack per active account according to March 2020 numbers. @Ukase's other thread is giving a good sample of what one should expect from bulk purchases. My first observation is that there are a lot of potential merits out there, which nowadays translates to a lot of converters, etc.. I've lowered my bid prices as I said above, but we'll see it I end up buying there. My second observation is that WO prices seem to have quickly stabilized to around 8mm, more or less. Like it or not, the lion's share of the value in a Winter Pack are the WOs. Personally, I don't use them very often and when I do it's Avalanche. Some people have posted about how it may not be worth their time to invest in Winter Packs and profit in a few months when they can make inf right away, and they have a point, but it's like marketing before and after you go farming -- why not do both? I am not, however, convinced that there will be unbridled demand for WOs in six months, and I still have my Character Items inventory chock full of all kinds of things that I can pull out and use anytime I want to, even mid-mission. That's a valid reason in and of itself to open a few hundred packs -- to have a ready inventory of things like unslotters and catalysts that all your characters can access without having to email it to yourself. Yesterday, I bought 100 packs for the pure reason that I wanted to try and clean out any remaining high bids in the WOs (and I was far from the first mover there) and I made a nice profit on the WOs alone. But I think I'll wait until towards the end of the Winter Event before deciding to invest in more packs in bulk.

I dropped my buy-it-soon(tm) bids for converters. There is a veritable glut of merits.

I am soothed by that knowledge, thank you.

In my experience, mercs are the shortest kid in the class. I can't speak for the personal attacks, since I rarely take them on MMs, but the pets are pretty lackluster. Something that would help a lot (but would keep them at the bottom of the pack) would be change Serum into a mule power for IO sets, like Necro and Thugs have.

I think the most profit you can make is to buy the packs now, then unpack them when the event is over and try to sell the contents for 30-35mm, net. Reselling the packs post-event is also good, and assuming that you price appropriately and make sales at 25mm, you'll get 22.5mm net for a lot less effort. Last year, I really expected a huge race to the bottom. It was so obvious how a 60% sale on significant size was profitable that I assumed *everyone* would do the same thing. I was actually looking forward to seeing what happened to Winter Packs in the aftermarket. But nope, day after the event ended, people started paying 25mm again and it felt like I was the only one with any supply. So I held onto them and gradually liquidated. This year, I think people are smarter and there is an order of magnitude or two more of disposable inf, so I'm hoping we see a different type of post-event equilibrium.

Ok, for posterity's sake as of right now there are 9,983,800 for sale. 1 December 2020 1:45PM EST.

Dammit, now I have to buy all of them and relist.

@Ukaseby any chance did you track the number for sale before the event started?

I like doing the Frostfire mission and positioning myself next to an ice column when destroying the first key. If you set it up right it blows you back into the column then up to the top of the column where you hover for a few seconds before coming back down.

Sorry, had to correct that! NEVER FORGET THE VIG! If they go on sale, I don't see how I can't buy a bunch of them. At some tipping point, it's possible that so many people will buy them that demand for WOs will be overfilled tenfold. I mean, I have over 100 alts, most of which are completely tricked out (although most under 50) and I might have a total of 100 individual WOs among them at the absolute most.

Since the last time I saw this thread, I've moved on to a new RP project on Excelsior. A supergroup called The DEFCON 5. Five females who formed an elite team to protect the POTUS and the nuclear football, but the team disbanded for unexplained reasons. Starting as heroes but will switch over via alignment missions at level 20. DC5 Fade Out: (Blue) Ice Melee/Rad Armor Stalker DC4 Double Take: (Green) Illusion/Rad Controller DC3 Round House: (Yellow) Martial Arts/Ice Armor Brute DC2 Fast Pace: (Red) Fire Blast/Radiation Corruptor DC1 Cocked Pistol: (White) Storm/Dual Pistol Defender