Yomo Kimyata

Cutting prices on Winter Packs will do more to keep inf in the hands of the already wealthy. How about giving away 1-5 packs to each account instead? of course, I’d prefer neither happens, but I’m ebil like that.

A healthier winter gift would be to grant 1-5 free Winter Packs to every account.

Normally, I thirst for the tears of those who meant to lowball but accidentally did the opposite. OP, in my opinion, was trying to pay a fair price for a Posi Blast -- that's what I pay when I need one soon(tm). @AngryJesusMan, check out my giveaway (in my sig, on the clicky). I'm happy to more than make you whole on your loss.

In my opinion, the devs should absolutely not put Winter Packs on sale for 10mm this year or any year going forward. In my opinion, the devs absolutely will put Winter Packs on sale for 10mm this year and every year going forward. My argument for the former is too much supply in the hands of too few. I was blindsided (by my own blindness) when the packs went on sale last year. That was where I had put my excess inf bids because I didn't trust that the devs wouldn't introduce lvl 53 Hami-Os (*duh Duh DUH*) and I figured that If I bought something at a 60% discount I could probably figure out a way to make inf out of it. I accidentally bought *thousands* of them. So I started paring down my exposure, and guess what? I made a $#@$-ton of inf off of them, starting from day one. The "markets" seem to have set rough values for ATOs and Winter-Os at 80% of the cost of the pack, which jibes well with my rough observation that I tend to get about 1.2 IOs per pack in bulk. It's the "other stuff" that determines your profit. Winter-O packs give way too much "other stuff". Despite the fact that prices on the other stuff has dropped a lot, even if prices remained at 10mm forever, smart money would buy the Winter Packs because they (anecdotally I admit, but it's very clear to me) provide more "other stuff" than ATOs. This keeps the rich richer, in my opinion, and I don't see that as a particularly healthy thing for the game. The rich in this simplified game are absurdly rich. It seems to me that the only thing stopping ridiculous market shenanigans is good will. And that will hurt the casual gamer. HC seems to bend over backwards for the casual gamer, and yet I think that putting Winter Packs on sale will hurt the casual gamer in the AH in both the short and the long term. But they will put them on sale, because for every ebil marketer who buys a few thousand packs, there will be one dewy-eyed "newbie" who will moan how unfair it is that they can't buy a single pack at discounted prices. My two inf.

I was visiting family in Hawaii, and one night I was reading in bed. As I reached over to turn off the light I caught a scurrying movement on my chest out of the corner of my eye. Knew instantly what it was, and leapt out of bed to grab the nearest shoe. The 8-inch centipede ran under the bed and I couldn't find it after looking for about ten minutes. Slept in the other room on a couch with a shoe in my hand. I hate those bastards.

Thanks for posting this! Homecoming is the land of milk and honey, and there is no reason that every single person shouldn't be swimming in inf. By describing different methods, you really demonstrate how people can find their own groove. Well done!

I have 90% resistance to toxic.

This was from last week when I was selling a bunch of converters:

I'm pretty happy with Blonde Fury.

I've got the same feeling.

Given that procs work approximately the same in the future as they do today, I don't think anything that can run in proc-heavy mode needs a lot of work. I include AR in this. It's not a great set, but it's not ridiculously awful. I could see juicing up the damage a little bit, and changing the radius on Ignite to something like that of Caltrops or Burn. I feel like Broadsword could use some help as well. Originally the king of burst damage, it's been left in the dust by War Mace and Battle Axe. I'm not sure what a good fix would be. Giving Headsplitter a wider cone would really be nice. Sonic Resonance is in desperate need of a makeover.

PART III: Profit Now it’s just making sausage. Here’s what I did by IO set: Adrenal Adjustment: Convert once by category to get a rare Energy Manipulator. Rare roulette from there. Annoyance: Convert once by category to get a rare Triumphant Insult, then rare roulette. Discouraging Words: Convert once by category to get a rare Deflated Ego, then rare roulette. Encouraged Accuracy: Convert once by category to get a rare Rectified Reticle, then sell as is. Essence of Curare: Convert by category until rare Hold set. If Basilisk’s Gaze, reroll in set if it is the proc and sell as is otherwise. If Neuronic Shutdown proc, sell. Any other rare Hold, play rare roulette. Exploited Vulnerability: Convert once by category to get Achilles’ Heel, then convert in set to the proc. Harmonized Healing: Convert by category until rare Healing set. If Miracle, reroll in set until the proc. If Regenerative Tissue proc, sell as is; rare roulette with any other Regenerative Tissue. Sell any Preventative Medicine as is. Jaunt: Convert once by category to TimeSpace Manipulation, then rare roulette. Karma: Sell as is. Paralytic: See Essence of Curare. Quickfoot: Convert once to Celerity. If Stealth, sell, otherwise rare roulette. Reactive Armor: Sell as is. Serendipity: Sell as is. Soaring/Springfoot: Convert once to rare, then rare roulette. Steadfast Protection: Convert to Res/Def, then sell. Triage: See Harmonized Healing. Volley of Velocity: Convert once to Explosive Strike and sell. I am not going to get into specifics, but I ended up selling a not-insignificant portion of these IOs to myself. I can’t really consider it self-dealing, since I paid the same prices I would (and do) ay to anyone else. However, I did have the advantage on several items to know that I already had a minimum bid out there. So, how did I do? Well, I used a total of 7,672 converters (1,000 used in Part I, and I forgot to break down the split between Parts II and III) and sold the remainder at a net price at or above where I bought them. So initial investment was 712,665,000 and net inf at the end was 2,444,985,675 for a net profit of 1,732,320,675. At first, I was disappointed, since it was short of my shortcut estimate of 2mm profit per IO, then I realized that since I was also the end buyer on a large portion of these, I certainly could have hit my bogey if I had offered at higher prices rather than hitting my own lowball bid. Also, since those repurchases are all being remade into higher priced items, Team Yomo is definitely making out like a bandit here. I hope some of you found this interesting. If anyone cares, here is the spreadsheet in Excel form. Happy hunting! Cleaving Blow.xlsx

I was today years old when I learned that some people put videogames on their CV.

Based on what I've seen of the new sets and of suggestions in that forum, a new FF would have: 1. Self-heal, preferably in the form of a band-aid arrow. 2. Damage aura 3. Endurance regeneration tools 4. Ability to be slotted with KB procs 5. Toxic damage This is tongue-in-cheek, to be clear!

Emergency? I'm not sure why a rebalance would be an emergency? Is there a threat of mass exodus unless Assault Rifle is buffed? It may just be me, but that one word implies a quick fix and I'd hate to see a cobbled-together buff for anything. I'm far more on the side of emergency nerfs, but again, that may just be me. There are some sets that could benefit from careful, reasoned buffs though, and I'll work on my opinions later today.

Part II: The Winnowing So we’ve taken a look at the random number generator, and I for one can’t take anything conclusive out of it. Part of me was hoping to see that we would see statistically significant evidence that there *is* a systemic bias built into the conversion-by-rarity machine, but it’s not there. So now that I’ve wasted all this time and effort on this, let’s try to make some inf! This is the Market forum, after all. It’s all fun and games to have 14 Adrenal Adjustment EM/R, but that’s not going to put my characters through school, so I needed to start figuring out how to monetize them and other IOs. My next set was to transform every one of the uncommon IOs into something that is either saleable, or is easily transformable into something that is saleable. In my case, that meant rolling and re-rolling each IO until I got one of the following sets: Adrenal Adjustment; Annoyance; Discouraging Words; Encourage Accuracy; Essence of Curare; Exploited Vulnerability; Harmonized Healing; Jaunt; Karma; Paralytic; Quickfoot; Reactive Armor; Serendipity; Soaring; Springfoot; Steadfast Protection; Triage; and Volley of Velocity. These 18 sets (out of the 44 unique uncommon sets available at level 20) are valuable to me for one of several reasons: they are valuable in and of themselves; they can be easily changed into something valuable; they can be automatically be converted into a rare through one conversion-by-category; or they can easily (not automatically though) be converted into a rare through a few conversions-by-rarity and are in a lucrative category. Here are the results within a 2-standard deviation band: And here are the results within a 3-standard deviation band: I did all these conversions in one sitting, and keep in mind that each category already had some entries from Part I (also one sitting). In theory, by rerolling until I got something that fit my criteria, it should still be an randomly distributed allocation. If you roll a die a thousand times and reroll every time you get a 5 or a 6, you should get a random distribution from 1 to 4 that should be roughly even. EDIT: I need to point out that the second distribution is really comprised of two different distributions: one of which (in theory) has a 1/43 chance for any given set, and one of which has a 1/18 chance for any given set. I really should account for that at some point. The distributions by individual IO, like in Part I, appear to be less randomly distributed than I would expect by chance. Like @Andreahsaid, I should run a chi-squared test, but then I would have to remember how to do that and also lament how my data set is too small. Distributions by set seem to be more feasible. Coming soon: Part III: Profit!

I'll try to give Samuel Clemens some of those lies he's looking for.

You are totally right, I believe. A chi-squared test would be the proper way to test if *all* the results are simultaneously uniform and significant, i.e. every non-Crushing Impact IO comes up 1/191 of the the time, or that every non-Crushing Impact set comes up 1/43 of the time. I didn't use a chi-squared test because, as you say it needs a bigger data set, but more importantly, I had forgotten about it entirely until you mentioned it. I'll be honest, my statistics are like my Joes: sloppy. What I was trying to do in a real short-cut was to look at *each* individual IO or set *separately* and run a z-test (I should be able to use a z-test rather than a t-test since p*n and (1-p)*n are both over 5 and therefore normally distributed). By putting up 95% and 99% bands around the speculated population proportion of 1/191 or 1/43, a result that falls in that band will pass a significance test. That won't prove that one possibility is right or wrong, but it gives me enough information to make a ham-handed guess. But, again, I'm a sloppy sloppy statistician and I would be pleased as punch if anyone wanted the data to do it up right! I'll be sharing the spreadsheet at the end. I've been very busy the past week or two, but hopefully Part II comes later today.

I want to be clear that my attitude then was why are the developers using the reality tv model? Like I said, high horse. I have zero issues with AE or PvP. Given a choice I will play "real" content over AE, but sometimes you just want to smash thousands of minions in a riskless manner, and AE is great for that. There are probably some great stories too, but if I read the text once then it's old content to me. A niche aspect of AE that I use on another server is that AE tickets are the best way to get specific salvage and sometimes recipes if the AH on that server is, um, sparse.

My opinion re: content: Let's be honest. Complaining about doing the Hollows arc for the umpteenth time is structurally identical to complaining about running ITFs for the umpteenth time is structurally identical to complaining about running incarnate material for the umpteenth time. You would not still be playing this game if you didn't find repetitive behavior of *some* type enjoyable. Personally, I don't pay much attention to people who want to PL in order to skip the terrible content they have done a thousand times and then run a thousand ITFs. To each their own. This game is kind of like a really simple "choose your own story" book, and if you want to choose one aspect of it over and over again, that's cool. And if someone else wants to choose a different aspect of it over and over again, that is also cool. But even with brand new content, how many times are you going to be able to run it and keep it fresh? Twice maybe? Back in the day, I was unhappy with the introduction of both the AE and PvP. Personally, I thought it was sloppy and it was a way to get players to pay the developers in order to create the players' own new content. It's the same reason I quickly hated the tv show Lost, which had a great concept, but wrote its weekly scripts based on audience feedback rather than coming from the mind and pen of a dedicated story teller. I was a little bit on a high horse about stuff like this back then, to be honest. Nowadays, since this game is free (outside of occasional donations which are voluntary), I don't expect the devs to continuously surprise and delight me, and I take my enjoyment from the static version that is currently in play. Any other changes are just gravy. Two more of my inf.

I would agree with you if we had a deeper population, or if HC hadn't given us so many gifts/tools with the AH. Now with almost 200 slots per character (and 1,000 characters per server), it is just way too simple for people to abuse the system and make life difficult for others. In my mind, the slight inconvenience in selling or buying 10 at a time versus 100 or 1000 or 1000000 at a time is worth it as a governor in order to slow things down a bit and help prevent bad actors from manipulating the AH. My two inf.

1. It is clear to me that population on HC has dropped over the past year. I could provide some numbers, but they are mostly anecdotal. 2. This server, or its predecessor, survived for *7* years with very little change and with a static population. I'd love to hear more about that from someone who was there. 3. I adore this game on many levels, but there is no way I'm going to be playing it ten years from now. Shoot, I quit the game before it went off subscription model. So what? Enjoy the game where and while you can enjoy it. It's not going to disappear. However, just like groups of young people in a big city (think Friends, sorry but it's probably most understandable), things are going to change. People move to the 'burbs, get married, have kids, do other things. You have no way of making any current player or new players stick around to do the things you want them to do when you want to do them. So just enjoy the ride while it lasts! I've likened managing HC to managing a series of dinner parties. I'm glad to be invited, and I'll bring my specialty dishes when asked, but sooner of later, *unless new participants come in*, the dinner parties are eventually going to be less frequent and probably will eventually stop. That's ok.

Part I: The Uncommoning (cont.) So, I tracked the results, then I looked at the frequency compared to what I think “normal” would look like in terms of statistics. Here’s the data (WARNING: STATISTICS): 2-standard deviations (explains ~95% of outcomes) 3-standard deviations (explains ~99% of outcomes) So what did I learn? First of all, the “uncommon rares” I mentioned before never came up. The odds of that happening by chance are pretty close to zero, so I feel confident in saying that you cannot get an uncommon rare by converting an uncommon by rarity. This makes sense, because then you could convert an uncommon by rarity, get a uncommon rare, then convert that by rarity to get another rare. Second, I’m leaning towards the second scenario I listed in my first post, i.e., the RNG selects a set first, then selects an IO within the set. In the 2-SD spoiler above, the spreadsheet shows what the actual percentage was and what an expected band would be above and below. I did this for both the “Select by IO” scenario and the “Select by Set” scenario. We can see there are 18 outliers in the former scenario, but only one in the second (Serendipity!). We would expect some outliers, but 18/191 is well over the 5% error rate we should expect. The 3-SD spoiler has two outliers for the “Select by IO” scenario and none for the “Select by Set) scenario. Exciting stuff, huh? Wait until you see what I did for Part II!

Now, despite having used the conversion process many times, I realized that I still had a few fundamental questions as to how the process works with respect to conversion by rarity. Now, I don’t think it is critical to know *exactly* how the process works if we can pretty easily get a more-than-working knowledge of how the process works. A young child can learn to catch a thrown ball without knowing calculus. But I wanted to think about the assumptions I have made, and maybe test those assumptions, because at the end of the day I’m just another curious ape. I’ve wondered for some time how the conversion-by-rarity selects what the available pool is, and how it assigns probability of outcome. I’ve come up with a number of possible scenarios (I’m sure there are more, so please add any you come up with!) as to how the process works. (Of course, all this speculation would go away if someone delves into the code, but let’s indulge my idle curiosity): Determine all IOs that are available and randomly transform the IO to one from the available pool. Example: Starting with a level 20 Cleaving Blow IO. There are, I believe, 195 total unique uncommon* IOs available at level 20. This process would transform to one of 191 (not a Cleaving Blow) possible IOs. So, roll the dice, and BAM you get a Befuddling Aura: Confuse/Recharge. The probability could be evenly weighted, or could have some other distribution. If evenly weighted, we would expect each IO to come up about as often as any other. *There are 27 “uncommon rares” which are IOs from rare sets that are listed as uncommon in the AH. Usually, but not always, these don’t require rare salvage. And they are not considered uncommon. More on these later. Determine all sets that are available, then choose a set randomly. Then choose within the set randomly. Example: again, starting with a level 20 Cleaving Blow. There are, I believe, 44 unique common sets at level 20. So, this process would choose 1 of 43 other sets randomly (again, could be evenly weighted, or some other distribution), and then choose within that set randomly (this would almost certainly be evenly weighted). So, roll the dice and BAM you get Befuddling Aura. Roll the dice again and BAM you get Confuse/Recharge. If evenly weighted, we would expect to see all sets have roughly the same number of choices. For sets with three members, we would expect to see each member come up more often than for sets with six members. Determine all categories that are available, and choose a category. If there is more than one set in that category, then choose a set. Then choose a member of the set. Example: Roll the dice and get Confuse. Roll again and get Befuddling Aura. Roll again and get Confuse/Recharge. Other. So what did I do? PART I: The Uncommoning I bought 500 level 20 Cleaving Blow A/D and 500 level 20 Cleaving Blow D/E recipes on the AH, crafted them and put them in base storage. I bought 10,000 converters under my standard budgeting rule of 10 converters per IO. Then for the first part of the three part project, I converted each IO by uncommon rarity once and tracked the results. Why Cleaving Blow? I’d prefer to all start from the same IO, just in case it affects the RNG, but buying all within the same set should be almost as good. I went with Cleaving Blow since the recipe goes from 10-50 and therefore should drop a fair amount. I chose A/D and D/E because, well, the other two required rare salvage. Why 1,000? It’s a nice round number, but it’s also right on the cusp of being statistically significant. If I could hold 2,000 IOs in my base, I might have done that, but even 1,000 items noticeably slows down processing speed in bases. Plus, it took me longer than I liked to even accumulate 1,000 (I’d like to specifically thank the person who started ramping up bids on Cleaving Blow recipes right when I was on my last 100…) Why level 20? Two economic reasons: 1. Lower is better because of crafting costs; 2. Level 20 has enough set variety (but not as much as level 30 or 31) to get good stats, but I should still be able to sell the end results in a timely fashion. How long did it take? I’d say about a week or two to accumulate the recipes. Once everything was in the bins, it took me an hour to convert all IOs and track them, following the adage that it takes five times as long to document something as it takes to actually do it. How much did it cost? 712,671,000 inf, which was almost all invested in converters. So what happened? STAY TUNED!

I'm not sure that is conclusive, or at least I'm not convinced that it is hitting another object in the CoH AH database. For example, I've occasionally tried to find the object that replicates the Miracle+ when it is bugging, and I've not been successful. And I *think* I've looked at every item in the AH. Maybe there is bleed through to another task that the AH server hosted in Canada is performing?