Andreah

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.

Is the candy cane market already crashing?

Let's see.... 10,000,000 rare seeded at 1,000,000 each ... nope not enough inf. ... but all the yellow salvage? Hrm...

No, but you can bid for them. :D

Now imagine Iron Will were sold flor thirty threads each as a surprise in the next patch!

I've been on break from CoH since just before the recent issue and am considering coming back with a new Inv/SS tanker, and these discussions are very interesting.

Can you post a screenshot of exactly what you posted them for sale for and exactly the prices they sold for? At this point, we all have so much confidence the math always does jive that the alternative explanation, that you misread (or charitably, didn't provide exact numbers) the values is vastly more likely. Example: Item 1 is posted for 10,000,000. Poster pays 5% up front, or 500,000. It sells for 10,000,000. The poster pays the balance of the 10% final sales fee of 1,000,000, which is 500,000, when they collect the sale. Item 2 is also posted for 10,000,000, and 500,000 is also paid up front to list it. It sells for 15,500,000. The total fee due from the sale is 1,550,000, of which the poster already paid 500,000; and the balance of 1,050,000 is paid when collecting the sales.

I used to go through a lot too, but I've temporarily stopped using/buying them. So that's possibly a small factor on the demand side of the equation as well.

There is so much more to the game being massively multiplayer than being on a team that I don't know where to begin. Being on a team is a trivial part of it being multiplayer. Encouraged, yes. Expected, absolutely not.

I recall there was a very good game design reason why both Fold Space and Wormhole could not be made to teleport anything higher than they can already. I don't remember the details, but it convinced me to stop asking for it. Past that, I too have a Gravity/Kinetics controller who also uses Fold Space, and I have seen no difference in Wormhole and Fold Space Teleport ability. There are nuances that might make it seem so in testing, such as Fold Space being tried first and applying its teleport immunity to those mobs.

Much as I appreciated the original Devs' attempts to do world-building that made sense, they had a tendency to try to build railroad-track justifications for everything. I had this problem with AE too. They'd built the system to be nothing more than a simulation, a temporary pretendy-world inside our persistent pretend-world, when what most roleplayers, the ones who I suppose would care the most about this, rarely ever use it like that. Within our individual and small group "head-canons", our AE missions actually happen. Similarly with the powers our characters gain via the incarnate system. Perhaps some follow the railroad tracks, but most veer off it, following their own individual creative muses.

I think all inspirations work that way, you can bid for them and get purchases in stacks of ten, but you can't keep them in your inventory except in singletons, and when you post them into the auction, it has to be one at a time and they don't autostack. Edit: This is also how enhancements work. If a thing stacks in your inventory, you can move stacks to the auction. If it doesn't naturally stack, you can still bid for them in stacks, but they unstack when claimed and won't autostack when put back in.

A lot of the things that get listed for 1 are bought by someone else who then vendors it. Vendoring promotes inflation (in some small way) by reducing supply of goods (some of which have no economic utility anyway) by destroying the items vendored and creating inf out of nothing in their places. I think this ^ is true, but also not a big deal for most things. The only drops I think might be a significant point would be common invention recipes. Supply of common and uncommon salvage aren't a problem -- if there was even more it would just drive the market prices further down towards or below the vendor value. Invention set recipes, I hope most of these get sold on the market and converted into items people find useful to slot and listed for resale. We need more Player D's, always. More supply + more competition -> lower prices for everyone.

A support Fort would work great -- when you build them do you double up on the leaderships?

I'm not usually the top damager when I'm tanking. I don't build my tankers focusing on dps at all. If I did, I would probably agree with you. For example, if I were running radios with a high dps brute/etc, I wouldn't be the one herding. That role would naturally fall to someone else. I've seen sentinels do it quite well, too. I often run radios on a Kin/ defender. I admit I have sometimes used one of those characters to herd, but it's not something I routinely do expecting to survive. :D While it's technically possible, with some effort and the right build, it's not a wise use of the character. So of course, any player's best role on PI Radios may vary depending on their build regardless of their AT. My point is that having a skilled herder on your team can be a big plus, and tankers can be very good at it.

I think a few more people may try PI Radios, but the Farms will still far outperform them in terms of payout and leveling speed.

There are a few radio maps where this could be an issue, and especially with pets that may not be well controlled by their player.