Yomo Kimyata

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?

I Lost My Daddy!

True, the window for that is closing, assuming that they put them on sale again.

You forgot Bort.

Honestly, I don't care if the only thing it does is summon a fart monkey. I six-slot it with Achilles proc, Annihilation proc, Touch of Lady Grey proc, Bombardment proc, Positrons blast proc and an A/D. That's a great attack in and of itself. Anything else is gravy as far as I'm concerned.

I'm sorry, I haven't read this entire thread, nor have I gone on Test to try it out. I just had a question about Acid Arrow, which seems to be getting a lot of hate. Correct me if I'm wrong, Sandy, but isn't it still a complete monster as a proc vehicle?

I ain’t got time to aim.

By the way, with the next patch you can merge them up to level 53. And the whole ++ nonsense is going away.

Huh! Interesting puzzle, and my initial back-of-the-envelope thoughts aren't particularly constructive, but I'll share them anyway. That's a lot of merits, and you want to convert them to inf in a quick and economic fashion. I think that either converters or Winter-Os would be the way to go, but either way you would be throwing up so much supply that you could easily single-handedly tank the market. That would be 2,500 Winter-Os, and assuming you could sell each one for 20mm and net 18mm after taxes, that would get you 45bn. That's over 80 of each one though (including Entomb) and although I think you could probably sell them off over a month or more, you'd have to do it bit by bit because if you just put them all in the AH at once you'd have a very hard time getting your price. OR That would be 750,000 converters, and assuming you could sell each one for 70k, you'd net out 47.25bn. That's a LOT of converters. I have to imagine I am one of, if not the, heaviest user of converters on HC and my purchases on marketing days are usually 1-10k converters, and I pay a fair amount less than that. I'm doubtful you could sell more than 10-20k a day at 70k inf. I'll keep thinking about it, but I'm not overly optimistic you would be able to liquidate all those by year end. I hope you can prove me wrong!!!

Code is not my strength unless it's really simple, but I would also appreciate it if someone would take a look!

So you are the xxx,099 bidder! And don't say I didn't warn you, in your own thread!

To @Troo's titular question, yes, Sleep is better than Knockback. My case: In solo play, Sleep plays the role of a cheap, quick-recharging, long-lasting hold. Sleep a mob, defeat them one-by-one where they stand. It's very easy to slot it so that it recharges well before the effect wears off. Yes, you are restricted to using single-target attacks, but you can do so in near perfect safety. Knockback is loads of fun, and buys you breathing room, but spreads your targets that you are going to need to track down and defeat sooner or later anyway. In team play, (and I agree that many/most/all cc effects slow down team defeat speed), sleep is pretty harmless. It does serve as a short-term immobilize (until they are woken), and if done too soon negatively impacts AoE attacks. But otherwise, it has little effect other than temporarily slowing return fire. Knockback, on the other hand, can really cheese some people off.

Only partially tongue-in-cheek, but I'd be happy to trade you any regular ATO you want straight up for any Superior ATO you are trying to get rid of. And I'll meet you in-game.

For solo play I'd say: Defeated > Confused > Held > Slept > Stunned > Feared (with To Hit Debuff) > Feared (w/o THD) > Knocked Up > Immobilized > Slowed. Knocked Back is situational. For teamed play I'd say: Defeated > About to be Defeated.