Andreah

But that's just number of slots -- that's not in itself very interesting if they're empty. It matters what you put in them! There are LOT more combinations of that than I care to think about.

Let's look at Scrappers for a start. Scrappers can choose from 21 primary powersets and 14 secondary. 21 x 14 = 294 combinations of those, except for the specific combinations that are disallowed, such as (katana, staff fighting, titan weapons, claws, dual blades) which can't be combined with shield defense. That's five combinations we subtract out, for a total of 289 combinations. Correct me if I've missed any forbidden scrapper combos. Then, scrappers can choose up to 4 out of 12 power pools, and then one out of 10 ancillary/patron pools. For power pools, we have to account for possibly choosing 0 of these (one way to do that), 1 of these (12 ways to choose one), 2 of these (66 ways), 3 of them (220 ways), or 4 of them (495 ways) for a total of 794 unique ways to choose from power pools. For ancillary/patron pools, there's 1 way to choose none of them, and 11 ways to choose one of them, for a total of 12. The total number of unique scrapper powerset choices is the product of these totals, or 289 x 794 x 12 = 2,753,592. After that, there's many, many numbers of ways to powers from each set. As an aside, the way to figure out how many unique ways there are to choose K things out of a set of N choices is called "N choose K", or C(n,k) which is equal to n! / ( k! (n-k)! ), where x! is the factorial function, which is where all the whole integers from 1 up to x are multiplied together. Counting the unique ways one could choose powers is much harder to work out, and I suspect, vastly higher yet.

Are you familiar with how WW2 went in the game's history? Pearl Harbor wasn't the only attack on December 7th. There was also an attack on Paragon City the same day (by German supervillains -- the Storm Corps, iirc). If it were me, I'd tie back to that. However, the further you go back, the safer you are. Pearl harbor probably won't upset anyone. But you never know, a player may be here whose grandfather or great-grandfather who survived PH recently died. You never know. If it's just a passing mention, that safer as well. If one ties the character up in the event in great detail and significance, that's probably less safe. We have plenty of game-lore catastrophes to link our stories too already, and the realms of our imaginations are wide.

In my head-canon of the game, everything about City of Heroes' non-super history post WW2 was different. Subtly at first, and the more so as the decades come to the current day. All the US Presidents were different, the wars and conflicts different, the issues that divide or unite everyone in real-world are different there, popular culture is different, and so on. I die a little inside every time someone ties their character to real world movies, fiction, star trek, star wars, lotr, famous real-world entertainers, famous politicians, and so on. No desert storm, no dot-com crash, and no 9/11. Just leave these things out. However cool an idea might seem to be to use them, it'll go no where good.

If you must go, go on a high note -- Mission Succeeded! We'll miss you.

Regarding converters and boosters, look at the ratio between their going prices. Nominally, it should be 15:1. Converters also get a bit of a premium because they're more click per merit to redeem, but it's usually within 10% or so. If clicking/mouse-actions are not a consideration for you, you'll make more money from converters if they sell for more that 1/15 the price of a booster. And if boosters are selling for more than 15x the price of a converter, sell those instead.

Kin is my KM ITF Choice of Choices. With Fold Space. And a tray full of [Ultimates]. ^_^ I don't care what it costs, it makes it fun!

Also, there is an "Upgrade" button in the lower left corner of the enhancement management screen. Press it often. It's a fair deal and much easier. It instantly updates all your slotted SO's to your current level, and only changes the fair difference in price from what you last had slotted to what they would cost at your current level.

I use https://www.nomic.ai/gpt4all with either Llama3 8B Instruct (overall the best small model I've found) or Nous Hermes 2 Mistral DPO (when I need a fully uncensored model for writing projects which include violence). Both are decently good models with high performance on a normal desktop. I use the GPT4All local files facility, and scraped the CoH Homecoming wiki for zone and enemy group info, and included the CoH bible PDF's as well.

I currently use LLM Chat-AI's quite a lot in my writing. Yet, almost nothing I post as RP for my characters has been written by AI. To me, it is presently a tool, not a replacement. Mine is a multi-shot process, starting from the abstract and general, making me think about foundations. I iterate with it to provide a general framework to assemble my creation in. It holds parts together, set boundaries, provides material, points out issues. It brainstorms with me as my partner, but I remain fully in control. I feed it background materials, and it mulls them over, identifying inconsistencies or narrative opportunities. It tests me, by request. It asks what my purpose is with each part, helping me trim excesses; it ponders the holes, and asks whey they are empty. It suggests alternatives, and accepts my revisions without question or ego. AI is a fine servant.

I did my own experiment overnight; all the boosters I listed under 900k sold overnight, for about 900 or 950K. This isn't right or wrong, it's just where supply and demand have the current price at. Go forth, make profits.

You can portray a legitimate, proactive, Villain, either Red or Blue. Use AE. Consider it an Evil Plot Generator. Make a copy of your character as the AV in it, and set the completion conditions such that your character meets an end, being defeated or escaping, as fits your mood. Otherwise, the story system in the game requires a contact who initiates and guides pre-canned stories; imo there aren't really enough mechanical 'sandbox' features to the game to let us be villainously proactive.

Part of the pressure for deflation, is, imo, the increasing breadth of player knowledge about how to use game's features to get what they need.

Here's an experiment you can do to see what the demand curve looks like. Post one booster for sale at each price point between 800k and 1,000k, say, in increments of 10k. See which sell immediately, see which sell over night, see which take a week, and see which don't sell at all. You can learn a lot by bidding to buy in a price spread like that, too.

There is long-term, relatively slow, deflation in the CoH player economy. I remember when Boosters routinely sold for 1.2+ million each. Selling them over 1 mill now is uncommon, at best. If you dare to list them at 1 million or more, it may be a long wait.

We should have more empathy for a dedicated and loyal employee who's fired for what is really no fault of his own.

A player has to deliberately not use any of the many means to rise to such a challenge. So, okay, you get slapped down, hard, by an AV you tried to face-roll like a melee, even though you are a defender. Instead of, after going to the hospital, or getting any of the many tough tank-like summons, or loading up on high end inspirations, or getting various accolade or START temp powers that would help, or even just changing your tactics to use your strengths against the enemy instead of parading your weakness in his face, or even GASP! turning the difficulty down a bit or getting someone to help, you go to the forums... I mean what?

Task forces are group content. They always have been, and still are. No one has to fight a TF AV/EB solo. NO ONE. We can choose to, as an option, and the game allows this, because enough people were capable of it. Clearly not the OP. OP... please stop trying -- I don't think you're up to the task.

Well, at least now the entertainment value of the thread meets min spec!

Here we are. Basically five pages three months ago on exactly the same topic by the same OP. Is there something new to be said that wasn't covered before?

This thread reads like Deja Vu to me -- I'm pretty sure we've had very nearly exactly this discussion before in just the last couple of months.

I doubt we could afford our volunteers if we paid for them. Even at 5000 people paying $15 a month, that's only 75,000 a month in revenue, and a lot would go to overhead. Say 50K left, that's just a couple of highly skilled developers. That's not enough, and the rest would be put off by it. It's better they do it for the love of the game and community as a hobby. And for most of them, the return they get this way is more valuable to them than the pay might be. Further, none of them feel trapped in a job they can't leave because they have bills to pay.

Kins are easy to play, potent on teams, always welcome, and appreciated.

I'm curious as to what the in-lore explanation for the Labyrinth is. It's suggestive to me of a connection via mythology of the well of the furies and etc.