Andreah

We would still need a way to filter out groups that are dead -- lots of tags, lots of members, none of them play anymore.

I think it would be really neat if the in-game supergroup listings could have a single, clickable HC-forums or FBSA websitelink. They would have to be carefully limited to ONLY legit pages in those two domains ofc.

The new definition of prestige would, IMO, actually be useful, since it's a calculated measure of recent SG multicharacter activity, not some earned, farmed, or purchased score.

Or perhaps a travel power with a pop-up tray for sit and stand poses, and slow and fast speeds.

The animal form travel powers (coyote & panther?) are very cool. I'd like to see them expanded to other animals we already have the models for (e.g., from the beast mastery -- wolves and lions). Further, and this is probably the hard part, I'd like them to have basic pose emotes for standing or sitting still, and also a walk mode for when the walk power is enabled.

I too feel that Prismatic Aethers will continue to drop, since they're used for one-time purchases per character and only a limited number of people really care that much for NPC and variant looks. Perhaps they need a conversion route to something else that would be a long term consumable?

A 2% rate of occurrence event is going to be very streaky -- you'll have long runs of none, get one, then another really long run of none, then get two in short order, and then more long runs of none, etc. It will only average out over hundreds and hundreds of mission completions.

I concur. RNG's in common use haven't been that bad since the 1980's. When operated correctly most good modern PRNG's are indistinguishable from truly random hardware RNG's to any statistical test a lay person could devise, and it's difficult to find problems in them even The source code to CoH is out there -- I'd like to see one of the folks who're concerned about the generator in the game to look up which it uses for combat/drops and see if there's known deficiencies in it.

Is Chaos United a roleplay SG? They have a few roleplayers in them, but I've never considered this to be their theme. To my understanding, they mainly sponsor PvE events, like the MSR. And my suggestion in this thread isn't limited to roleplayers -- but to anyone who would want to find a supergroup via an in-game search. Right now, it is true, no one does this now. I believe this is because it doesn't work, not because people don't look. I don't think a forums or discord function would work well either. A great many players, possible even a majority, never come back to the forums after they make their account. Similarly to various discords -- if a player is not already using discord and prone to ask for links to join them, they're fairly out of luck.

I'd like to see a fix to the bug where on larger monitors half or more of the screen is a dead zone for placing objects.

It would be for passive advertising; for an SG to join, to interact with in some way, or etc. To me this is a low hanging fruit opportunity. Prestige is there in the UI and is used for absolutely nothing. Some server-side coding would be needed to do the checks for online concurrency, accumulate and store the data, and then to load it into the SG-member and SG-total prestige data fields. There could easily be data visibility or persistence deal breakers in the existing design, but I don't let my lack of detailed knowledge stop me from proposing things. Adding tags would almost surely require a lot more work overall and especially more client-side, but would add a lot more utility, too.

I think you're highlighting edge cases. Look at my examples in my last post. Those four people would have to coordinate their legal multi-boxing to be done simultaneously. There's no incentive for doing that, other than to game this one system for which there would be no mechanical benefit. However, an SG which is actively being multiplayer, playing content or activities or RP or whatever, together, will naturally do that at the same times and gain these higher point totals. Even a larger SG whose actual players tended not to play at the same times would not score so well as a smaller SG who actually did play at the same times. I'll grant that multi-boxing could be staged in a way to appear to this scoring system to be an active supergroup. That it's not perfect doesn't mean it wouldn't be good enough, or at least better that what we have now -- nothing.

The number of members in the SG is already in the registrar's listing, but this is the number of characters, not accounts, and certainly not players. But, my system only accumulates prestige if more than one character are on at the same time. Yes, multiboxing can count, but legal multiboxing in the same SG can't compete numerically with an active roster of real players playing together. A solo player being on line, even for long periods on multiple characters in series, does not score any points in my system. It only accumulates points when multiple characters in the same SG are on at the same time. And it scores each additional character much higher than the last. One character online for a minute -- 0 points to the SG. Two characters online in the same minute -- 2 points to the SG. Three characters for the same minute -- 6 points. Four -- 12 points, a full SG team of eight -- 56 points. My old RP SG (before it went inactive) would get 20 characters online for multi-hour events. 20 characters -- 380 points per minute. It ads up fast. With the "squared" option I mentioned, it would be even more dramatic; one player on three accounts multiboxing characters in their single solo SG would gain 12 points per minute, or about a half million for a month playing 24/7. A sg that could get twenty characters on for a two-hour event once a week would get about 3.7 million per month. And, if there are tags for filtering the lists, a person could just de-select the "Solo" tagged SG's, and only see the sorted list of the non-solo SG's by their computer last 30 day activity levels. Then the solo-multibox SG's would not even show on that list. The important features (to me) are that the points drop off the 30-day window so that inactive groups who used to be very active don't stay on the ranking, and that the points do nothing mechanical so there is no positive incentive to deliberately try to game it.

This was what I had in mind.

This was why I suggested repurposing "Prestige" for a calculated activity level from the last 30-days. I think the system I outlined for doing this would work pretty well. True. And in a minimal sense, calculating activity by integrating the square (or cube) of the player count above one over the minutes in the last month and inserting it into the existing prestige field would serve this purpose without requiring any UI changes. One would not even need to rename "Prestige" -- just indicate in patch notes it now represents a measure of activity over the last 30 days.

I've found several interesting supergroups by their descriptions (which do show in the in-game SG listings) but they're often completely inactive or even defunct. And the number of members rarely tells a story by itself. Further, tags alone won't show that a supergroup is active. Even the old prestige system didn't do that, but I think changing it as I suggested would show that and be useful in that regard. I am in favor of tags -- currently you have to search for supergroups by keywords in their names or descriptions (I think it returns groups that hit the search terms by either by default) having actual tags would be an improvement. Maybe just adding how long it's been since any member of a SG (or perhaps any of them with invite permissions) has been online would minimally improve things. If I found a cool sounding SG in the listings, but none of them have been on in 800 days, that would be a hint.

Right up front, I am NOT proposing Prestige be used to buy base items or anything like that, nor am I proposing it be earned in the old "Live" way where you went into supergroup mode to earn it from defeating enemy mobs. I was looking through the supergroup registry the other day, and clicked on the "Top 100" supergroups button. Some groups I knew about came up, but it didn't seem to be more than a happenstance collection of groups, since they all had zero prestige. Then I thought, what if there was a way to use the prestige system to guesstimate supergroup "activity" so that at least a viewer could see the most recently active groups? What I would do for this is: once a minute, for any player logged onto the game, check how many other characters in their supergroup were logged in, and grant them one point for each. I would total these point earned on each day for the character behind the scenes, and keep the last thirty days of them in an array, and each day, push the oldest one off the back end and add current days' earned points on the front end. The total of these last thirty days of points would be the character's current prestige, and I would record it in their individual supergroup entry as they earned it. The total of all the prestige by the individual characters in the supergroup would be the total prestige of the group. Supergroups would get prestige only when more than one of their members were online at the same time. The idea is it would favor groups whose members were online and at least potentially could be playing together at the same time. Solo supergroups where a single player keeps all their alts wouldn't get this prestige, but then again, they're solo. Supergroups where a single player multi-boxed multiple accounts would gain some, but likely not a lot compared to a large multiplayer supergroup. So if you were online and one other member of your group was online for a simultaneous minute, you would each gain one point of prestige. If six players were online for an hour, they would each gain 60 mins x 5 other players = 120 points -- the group as a whole would gain 120 points each x 6 players = 720 points. Large groups that tend to play together would stand out in rankings, and only if they sustained activity for at least 30 days. If we wanted to emphasize activity of groups that had events and many more people on at the same time, we could count the square of the number of other players on. I'll grant this isn't a big or very important change to the game -- mechanically nothing changes except that those searching the roster for supergroups to join, to look up descriptions of, or to interact with for whatever other reasons would be able to get a sense of which groups were active. It could be paired with other modest changes to supergroups, such as adding roster tags such as "RP", "PVP", "Event", "Social", "Solo", etc., and then allowing search by tags and sorting by prestige/activity. One might even allow searching for supergroups elsewhere than the group registrar, such as at the community kiosks, or via a slash command.

For extra credit you can run a Chi-Squared significance test on your set of drops following the theoretical distribution. :D

Maybe you've seen this before, and maybe not. This lays out the mathematical probability of drops from all three kinds of superpacks.

I'm not sure I can add a lot to this, but I'll give it a shot. CoH is pretty loose on forcing roles on players; unlike, say, a classic trinity-MMO. For example, someone may be playing a tanker, but be a DPS build. Does every team need a tank? Probably not. They may even be on a tanker, playing a tanky/aggro build, but like using it to do DPS. The role they're playing is often "This is fun for me to play", and I may not like it, but they are not wrong and I keep my advice to myself unless asked. If the team is having difficulty with how a handful of random people playing the way they individually want to play, then maybe the difficulty could be turned down, or worst case, they could find other people to team with. Now, for me, on many pugs, on my tankers which are built pretty tanky and for aggro and also for mobility, I herd. I see my job to be to herd as much on the team as fast as possible as the team can manage without too many deaths. I find this fun. Most people seem to like this when they are on the team with me, but on rare occasion I've also had people complain, in which case I'll slow the pace down. I've had other tanks complain, for that matter, though that's rare. Some folks expect/desire a plodding, one group at a time, don't let anyone take even a tiny bit of damage, clean up the spawn, and then move to the next group style; and they're not wrong, even I don't enjoy that. I'd rather be with the high speed cataclysm-in-motion. I do sometimes feel judge-y about how other people are playing, but it's an emotional response and I try to have enough self awareness to temper it with reason.

I only have 29 alts on just one server, the only one I play on. But ... a friend of mine (a streamer) has ~460 alts.

There is some very good detailed information about Taunt/Threat in this forums thread:

Now, a collection of ten, twenty or even fifty people could do this much more easily. Of course ... assuming several of them didn't blindside the others along the way. But no, no one would ever do such a terrible thing. No one!

Even though it would break the rules, I hope they used a macro to do that. Eugh, it's worse, you can only hold 20 stacks on a character at a time anyhow. Think of all the character slots needed just to store it all off the AH. Or just storing it in auction slots, and rotating between slots of bids to buy, stored slots, and slot offers to sell. Yuck; all those stacks would take 60-odd characters (or more if they don't all have maximum auction slots) to post for sale anyway. All this work for ... common salvage? Eww.

I see them selling at 70K still. I'm going to unload a few I stocked from last year. This doesn't make money in any significant way, it's just amusement.