Andreah

100 Merits can buy 20 Enhancement Booster (or 300 Converters) which sell for ~1.5 million each, which nets you ~27 Million inf after market fees. Sometimes they move faster if you list lower and settle for ~20 Million after fees. Anything you can buy in the neighborhood of this price is a fair deal. (300 converters would sell for around 20 Million after fees, but it's more clicking and stack management). If a player is spending merits on anything that's substantially lower cost in the auction than this ~200K per merit, they could get a better deal. This isn't an issue for those of us with huge piles of Inf and other wealth, but I try to steer more casual players to this route so they can get a lot more for their hard earned merits.

There are three kinds of Superpacks, Hero and Villains, Rogues and Vigilantes, and Winter Packs. They are bought from the Auction under Salvage->Special. The first two cost 10 Million Inf each, and the Winter packs cost (nominally) 25 Million each. Sometimes players resell winter packs for less. Each pack is opened and flips five cards on your screen to show you. Each card reveals a drop which could be one of many things, including ATO's. The full lists are in the wiki. https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Super_Pack https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Super_Pack/Heroes_and_Villains https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Super_Pack/Rogues_and_Vigilantes https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Super_Pack/Lords_of_Winter

Sometimes you can get very good deals on them. But also, if you're willing to plan ahead a day or two, you can bid modestly and get the ones you want in the 5-8 million range. The recently worsened state of pack opening and emails claiming probably reduces supply. Also, one could buy any five Superpacks, and expect to get 6 ATO's from them, and then a few dozens of converters should get the complete set desired. And bonus stuff to use or sell.

I think the merit costs of a number of things could be adjusted to not be quite so far off the market equivalent values of the merits and the things you could buy directly with them. Some of them are wildly bad deals. Others, pretty fair. I think the losers in this are the more casual folks who don't stop to work out the ratios.

1.5 Emp merits converts to 30 Threads converts to 1 Ultimate which is worth ~1.5 Million 1 Emp converts to 10 reward merits which can get would be worth ~2.0 to 2.7 Million based on buying two boosters which each sell at ~1.3-1.5 million, or 30 converters which sell at ~70-90k each. I don't consider them "Free" since you could sell them for the influence, which represents an opportunity cost. But if you're going to play anyway, then certainly they feel free. :) I would never use Emps to make Ultimates or other super inspirations however. You can use the normal threads that drop if you can't or don't need to use them for incarnate crafting.

That's impressive building! Crippled by all this and still softcapped.

Influence ... is ... for ... Hoarding!!

Good luck trying. Monopolies are basically impossible to create. Unless you break the Code of Conduct and use botting/automation, there's nothing person A can do sufficiently more efficiently than every one else to make a monopoly work. And there's simply no way to stop other people from producing goods and prevent them from undermining a temporary monopoly. Go ahead and try to buy up all the LotG globals recharges, they'll make more. There's nothing wrong with flipping stuff. It provides a useful market service, increasing the prices sellers get when they want to sell, and lowering prices buyers have to pay when they want to buy. It's sort of a "bottom feeder" approach to marketing -- you have to live just barely outside the 10% market fee buy/sell split on your chose flip items, and you'll have to constantly watch it and adjust your buy and sell prices, and constantly be ready to respond to market-pvp and eat big losses on inventory. If the flippers prices don't look right to you, don't pay them. Better yet, turn the tables on them, and do a little market-pvp. Flippers have a lot of the same problems as the monopolist -- just not quite so bad. It makes them vulnerable. Again, good luck. If you want to corner the market on a particular item and drive the price way up, that's hard -- as hard as being a long term flipper but worse, since you can't just live inside the buy/sell margin, you have to push the sell price up, and that just invites other people to undercut you. I've never heard of anyone causing a long term change in the price of an item. Go ahead and try, prove me wrong. Further on inflation, people working the market actively reduce inflation. Inflation is caused by too much money in the hands of buyers for the amount of goods that are out there. Not only, that, but and increasing amount of money in circulation. People who create influence from drops and vendoring items are causing inflation. People who stash the best items away permanently for their own later use cause inflation. People who pay market fees, even flippers who cause it to be paid twice, remove influence from circulation. Marketeers who stash money away permanently to have as a measure of their accomplishment remove money from circulation. Finally, the market is totally optional. There's nothing you can't get on your own without ever needing to buy it from another player via the market. If the way the market works disturbs a player, maybe the market isn't for that player. There are other game systems that are. Get your items from vendors, from random drops, from Merits, by doing converters, and so on. No one needs the market -- it's a game system, fundamentally designed to entertain some of us. Edit: One more group of players who decrease inflation in a big way: Superpack Openers. The money they spend on Superpacks in the Auction doesn't go to any player; it goes entirely out of the game. Then, the superpacks drop all sorts of items they can sell. Decreased money supply and Increase supply of goods -- that's a perfect storm of reducing prices. Imagine you want to buy a Winter-O, and hardly no one's buying winterpacks because they're too hard to open. Prices would go up very high as we all scramble to bid high enough to get the few that do get to the market.

The game is different things to different people. And this is intentional -- a wide-audience MMO doesn't have just one way to play it. It deliberately seeks to provide game systems that appeal to a large and diverse player base. In this case, there are quite a few people for whom the aim of playing CoH is to become very wealthy in influence, assets, enhancements, expensive builds, and so forth.

I've been thinking about this a while; not in detail though, just theme-wise. Some streamers have been doing a "Iron Man/Woman" challenge. Could you do something like that with a pools build? If so, which build would be your best choice? What if you could put IO set pieces in pool powers, but only SO's/Commons in primary and secondaries? What if you could not place slots in primaries/secondaries if there was a pool power that could be slotted instead?

I had a look at the level 50 accuracy common recipe. It sells at the vendor for 113,650. It can be bought from the invention worktable for 454,600 (exactly four times the vendor price. If you memorize the recipe, the worktable cost is halved to 227,300.) It's being bought on the Auction for 87,011. That's probably the low-ball mass-buyer/crafter price. If you post them for "1" you'll likely get a price like this. Is that relative loss worth skipping the vendor? I think so. Other common recipes have much lower auction sell points. Recharge reduction was around 30k. There's probably good potential competition in there for beginning marketeers to bid to buy to vendor or craft.

Flipping, I believe, came out of real estate, and it was the practice of buying a property and immediately relisting it to resell at a slightly higher price, with little or no improvement to the property. There's another meaning also out of real estate, and that is when one buys a property, puts in some property improvement, and then relists for sale. In the latter case, someone with some understanding of the housing needs in the area has used their knowledge and available capital to improve a property - I think we can all agree that's a positive. In the first case, I think there is a real service which is done here as well. The flipper came in and bought a property earlier for the seller than they otherwise would have sold it at. And then, carried that inventory until a willing buyer arrived, and then sold it to them at a price lower than they otherwise would have paid. Everyone wins. If people believe that a flipper is someone who buys a controlling share of the inventory of something and then only sells it at a much higher price, well, we can't stop them, but that's not flipping. That's cornering. I don't think anyone can corner any significant market in CoH Homecoming without losing influence. Unless the person uses bots or other automation, the tools just aren't there to do this on any significant scale. If there was a class of players who act to increase market prices *at all* I would say it is the farmer/hoarders -- those who do a lot of gameplay or farming, and then vendor the trivial drops and hoard their useful drops for themselves, especially if they build up a large and increasing stock they'll likely never use. They're adding influence to the economy and not correspondingly increasing the supply of goods. In the context of the recent rise in uncommon salvage prices, it could well be conjectured that once many people saw the price rise, they stopped selling as much of it to save for their own use, making the price rise accelerate, and then possibly even causing more people to hoard it. Like toilet paper in 2020. I play a fair amount. I hardly ever vendor anything, and I don't save anything. I put it all on the market. And I don't spend most of the influence I get, I sock it away for my self-actualization "Marketeer Score" Add goods, remove money, decrease prices.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. There absolutely was a problem before May. I've run into it all the time going back two years. It's been worse since May, but it is not a new problem. And it was a big problem before May if you happened to be operating at a certain scale and speed. It has all the same symptoms, same sensitivities, same peculiarities -- they just occur more easily, and more commonly. I hope they continue to look into this issue, and the possibility the queue barriers are causing this behavior seems very promising to me. And, if that turns out to be true, it may affect other parts of the game as well; even if we haven't noticed them as yet.

I think there's a lot of cool ways to make origin meaningful in game mechanics and design. I like a lot of them, but I don't want any in the game. I might like the game afterwards, but too many people I play with would not. If there are proposals to make more non-mechanical impacts from origin, those I could be on board for. Especially if they're specific and particular, not general. For example, imagine if every power had different animations flavored for natural, tech, magic, science, etc., and even generic; and you could choose freely between them power by power, costume by costume.

My old company (I am retired now) was a large aerospace company, and our IT provided gaming laptops to engineers and developers as a standard higher tiers, although they were called engineering and developer workstations.

If a player is hit with the -Def once, it's more likely to land the next time, and then even more likely the time after that. Even characters high above the defense softcap can have this effect happen. The only way to reduce this is to have high Defense Debuff Resistance (DDR) and/or a margin over and above the softcap. I'm sure many people in the forums know this, ofc -- it even has a name "Cascading Defense Failure". Once this has happened, all the other nasty effects are going to pile up; the movement slows, the recharge reductions, and the Mino diseased's.

Let's say you have a variety of supplies, extra costumes, a temp power weapon or two, and so forth. How do you assume and RP that you character carries these things? Do you try to set your costume up to represent this; e.g., with a tactical belt, harness, quiver, backpack, etc.? Do you allow for it in emoting, but not attempt to represent it on your costume? Or do you just hand-wave it away as not particularly important to your RP?

Was this happening while you were fighting the nictus, cysts, and dwarfs?

Teleport, with slots, patience, and learning; along with a skid-load of the right binds, is hands down the best travel power for me -- I love it. And I also hate it. I even stopped taking hover to match with it. If there was one small change I would want, it would be to have Combat Teleport not cancel the hover from Teleport.

I haven't used much SJ since the travel power change. I've liked it in the past, but don't have a lot of experiences with it since then. I'd like those who like it a lot currently and those who don't like the changes to lay out their reasoning for why they now feel it's good/bad.

I wonder, now and then, how much the current email system claim problem has to do with the various reported pricing issues on the market. It wouldn't directly affect something like, say, yellow salvage prices, but it would affect ATO's and Winter-O's. Also boosters and such to a lessor degree. What about the indirect effects? I'm not sure. Hmm.

I'd want all sorts of visual improvements, but I'd also want them to maintain the sort of cartoon-ish feeling we have as the game stands. I think a lot could be done and still retain that. I'd probably have my fantasy visual effect team start with a thorough texture/clipping/draping pass on all the costume parts and costume rendering. Then I'd have the team go over the animations and make all sorts of state transitional animations and extra emotes and stuff. Make it smooth and seamless and proportionate. Then I'd go over the streets and architecture, just to clean up the goofy stuff. Keep the basic styles and such, but add more varieties and reduce the copy/pasta. Finally, I'd have them go over the mission maps and make them feel a bit more realistic in layout, and less like mazes. And can we have destructible interiors in offices and banks and so on? My fantasy team says yes! Then we'd be ready to go after my real goal -- merging CoH with a city simulation game, but that's out of scope for this thread. :D

I would put in a second rotation, and call it Weekly Strike Arcs, or such, and rotate through arcs at all levels, both red and blue. In any given week, you would have the WST and the WSA, and they would be on cycles of different lengths, too. Of course you'd have to allow these to be done through Ouroboros, but IMO, doing an arc at native level with a team leader who has the contact ought to give an even better reward. Maybe double merits for Ouro, and triple for native contact at level.

This; for ages. It's how the "whales" on Live could play. It's significant, but not game breaking. One specific case outside of the Magisterium where they are very useful is if you are a Fold Spacer or Shadow Slipper in the Rikti War Zone Mothership Raid. These powers grab up a bunch of mobs from around you and teleport them to your location. But ordinarily, even for a level 50+1 character, they can't teleport level 54 Bosses or EB's. If you use an Ultimate inspiration beforehand, however, they do. These inspirations last three minutes and do not stack with themselves; only one can be active at a time. Since they're worth 1-2 Million each on the market, that's pricey, but it can dramatically increase the vanguard merits earned by the entire league over the course of a 30-minute raid by increasing the rate that mobs move down into the bowl where players' powers are concentrated most. But it's costing the one doing so ~10,000 Inf/Second. :D

I'm getting failures to load using either address right now.