Andreah

No, better. It's literally using [Ultimate]. https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Inspirations#Level_Shifting_Inspiration

I use [Ultimate] Fold Space to complete the tanker's pulls into the bowl so they can go get more quickly and efficiently. When it's timed right, it's a beautiful ballet of merit production, and we push closer to 2,000. I've never personally got that many, but some people have claimed so.

I made a Petless Mastermind., and leveled it to 50+tier-3's. Mistake on purpose! :O

I position my convert window such that the convert button is immediately above the enhancement in the tray I'm converting. Then I pick the enhancement up and drop it on the convert button and click in one smooth motion. It's still two mouse actions - one click, drag & drop and one follow-up click, but the total mouse movement seems more precise, faster, and easier on my fingers. I just have to be careful to not keep going after I have the target I want.

Powers in a video game need to be precisely defined and operate within the rigid mechanical context of the game. Hit points, endurance, holds, buffs and debuffs, and so forth. Powers in comics tend to be more free form, and limited only by the writers imagination, willing adherence to the setting background, and the ability of artists to draw. Edit: I'll add the game's environment is basically immutable as well. You may be super strong, but you can't lift a chair or punch through a wall unless it's been set there in advance anticipation for you.

The big and significant sources for vanguard merits are group content like the LGTF and especially, the MSR. Just last night I got 1600+ vanguard merits from one MSR. All 47 other players in the league got similar amounts, I'm sure.

I don't think I've ever seen this happen. If you can provide a case example, and document it, it's something they should fix. However, it's certainly possible to cycle through the same IO and back again while converting within a class. For example, if one's converting inside a set, there's at most six possibilities, and you're going to come back around to previous ones at least every six conversions. It doesn't 'remember' which one you started from and could easily come back to that one many times over, but if it converts from a piece to that same exact piece in one try, that's a bug.

I don't mind the RNG. It's not like there's incredible 1 in a Thousand or a million chances we're going for. It does put some possibility of frustration in the system, but it's very manageable to those who use it enough to have a high chance of encountering long unlucky streaks.

For the curious, I found a page which describes the probabilities of runs of the same outcome in what are basically dice rolls. https://www.gregegan.net/QUARANTINE/Runs/Runs.html In the OP's case, there were 14 one out of two fails in a row -- coin flips, basically. The linked page includes a calculator at the very bottom, and using it, we can see that if we were to toss a coin 1,000 times, (d=2, M=1000) then the chance of getting 14 of a specific result in a row (N=14) is about 3%. Not particularly low. I do a few thousand conversions each month, so in the course of a year, I probably do 20-30,000 of them. In this case, my chance of seeing a similarly frustrating case is likely over 50%. If there are ten or twenty other marketeers doing the same, chances are a result like this pops up every few weeks, for someone, somewhere. One of the things in the news that amuses me is how astounded people get when facially very rare events occur, without really thinking about how many different chances to get these kinds of events there actually are. When you throw the dice enough times, you get some weird stuff. And when you go looking for them, they're pretty easy to find.

The possibility it will take a long time is one of the key deterrents for many people to try doing conversions. Instead, they go to the market. (The other big ones being, they don't know how, or that they don't know it's even possible). A professional converter knows there will occasionally be a long string of fails, but presses on, secure in the knowledge that the law of large numbers is on their side, and it will all average out to a net profit.

I occasionally create fairly deep backgrounds for my characters. Usually, I try to compartment that background headcanon away from the existing game's well established canon, specifically to avoid glaring contradictions. For example, a character maybe from another city, country, or even an entirely different dimension with its own history and take on superhumans. This way, when I present my character's background to others, I can be definitive about it, and not be concerned I'll step on someone else's. In that light, what I find another player presenting their headcanon as if it were already agreed-upon and accepted game canon, I'm a bit bothered. It doesn't happen that often, but it sticks out to me. I'm sure I do this myself from time to time, but I hope I am at least somewhat aware of it and try to give a fair attempt to avoiding it. A big part of this is to know one's audience, and try to roll with it a bit, and be flexible about what happened, or its significance, or how widely it would be known -- even if, to the small tight group who participated, it literally saved the universe.

I still dislike dimension shift in team content and prefer when teammates simply don't use it. I wouldn't directly complain about it, but it's the sort of thing I'd go look for another team over if it kept up. Black hole, as is, is worse ofc. I would ask people not to use it, and I would leave if they continued. That's rarely a problem, since most team leaders will boot someone for continuing to use it after being asked to stop. I'd say that's motivation enough to do some fixing on the power. If it at least behaved more like Dimension Shift, it would be less awful. But I'd like both to get some further fixing.

I don't perma-hasten my SR's either; generally, they're good enough without it, and I use whatever slack there is in the build pursuing the character's theme.

Let's say you were only willing to allow one set you were processing to use up, say, 20 inventory spots. And any time you got 21 of them, you'd covert until you had a complete set and sell it, in addition to selling any complete sets you got along the way naturally. In this case, the average inventory would be 15.014, the maximum would be 20, and on average, you'd use 0.2427 conversions per piece. If you allowed 40 spots, it would average 29.6 inventory and use up 0.1145 conversions per unit processed. I'm not sure there's much practical value to running these minor variations, but I find it interesting abstractly to go over these kinds of what ifs.

It turns out, it would be very easy to do minimal conversions to keep the inventory down in the Test 2 scenario. If, for example, each time you got one full set to sell, you also picked out the one kind of piece you had the most of, if more than one, and converted one piece once to any other piece, whether is makes a set or not, that keeps the inventory from growing without bound. In this case, it kept the average sustained inventory over a million trials down to 28.3. The worst it ever was, in the entire run, was 196. Now, that's kind of high, but conceivable to keep that many around in the auction or in SG storage. if you reroll the two highest counts, then the average was 17.6 and the most ever in inventory was 122. Both of these alternatives use far fewer converters, less than1/6th or 1/3rd as many, respectively, than my top post Test 1 method.

This is true, however, you will always have an increasing number of leftovers, even if the percentage of leftovers decreases -- which is what my second test basically shows. At a certain point, the leftovers may be proportionately few enough to no longer worry about, of course.

Okay, I got this implemented and tested. The results were statistically identical to my original method (post correcting my logic error) and identical to doing them in either sorted order by number of duplicates.

The Holy Grail in this case would be for us to produce set pieces in proportion to the rate at which people would buy them at the price points we want. If, instead of complete sets, that was the criterion, the same simulation code modified to follow those proportions would tell us what kind of average converter usage does the trick, and then in turn, help me understand my break-even selling price.

I put some more thought into this, and can explain is better, I hope. Since we're not doing any conversions, rolling out a million pieces and selling the sets as they come up is no different than rolling a million pieces and then selling all the sets at the end. In that case, the number of sets you can sell is dictated by the piece you got the fewest of, which is related to the spread of the count that fell into all six possibilities, and the count of those is distributed approximates in a Binomial distribution with rate p=1/6, and its standard deviation is the square root of the number of trials, and this only increases as the number of trials increases. Your inventory will fill up with incomplete sets.

Well, the theory would be, that people generally buy sets in complete, or mostly complete sets. Certainly NOT TRUE for many sets with bad six-piece bonuses, or those with uniques people like, but I've had good success selling many things by keeping a single full set up for sale at a time.; and many times people buy them in complete groups.

First: while implementing a few different variations on the order of rerolling, I found a subtle logic error in my code for the first test I ran. You can be certain this is the first time I've ever made a mistake in coding that had to be found land corrected later! Especially after showing results! This error caused some of the rerolls to come back as the same item; I was only checking that successive rerolls weren't the same index that they started with, and not the index they had right before the present reroll. So, for example, I'd start with 1, get a 2, then roll again and make sure it wasn't a 1 again, when I should be checking it against 2 which is its' new value. In-set conversions don't remember and avoid the first item you started with, only the item you have right now. The second test had no rerolling at all, and I see no issues in it, so far. Then, with that fixed, I'm comparing a test 1 with rerolls in order from the piece with the most copies first and down, and also in order from the least copies (above the first unique one), and up. This isn't quite what Yomo is asking for, but I'm heading that direction in steps. ... and it turns out they're identical statistically for runs into the millions of repetitions. Edit: I also have a new best estimate for the number of conversions needed, and I will update my top post.

This was what my second test tried out, and the number you have hanging around not making full sets grows without limit, roughly in proportion the the square-root of the number of pieces you've made. One piece, at random, ends up being a bottleneck and it never catches up on it, and you build up a huge excess of the others. Only the steady slow production of sets to sell keeps it from growing in direct proportion.

One thing that immediately comes to mind, is that if you convert enough pieces, you'll be nearly assured of getting one complete set out of them. So, by carrying some inventory, you can decrease the number of conversions. What if we never converted one target set piece to another, but only sold off complete sets as they showed up, how much average inventory would we be carrying on average? This is a slightly different simulation, but not a difficult one at all. We'll start with an empty inventory, and then one by one, randomly roll new pieces into it. Each time we do so, we'll tally up how many in total we're carrying and record it. Then, we'll check to see if we have any full sets, and if so, we'll subtract them out. After doing this for a suitably long time, say, ten million new piece rolls, we'll print out the average. We can also track the maximum, or how often the inventory exceeded a certain count, and even how often inventory was empty. We find something very interesting -- the size of the inventory we carry gets very large! :O In my first test run of doing this ten million times, the average inventory was 6922 pieces, and the maximum was 14384! Well, this is sort of thing that would seem obvious in hindsight. If we're always selling off a full set whenever it appears, then there's most often (hugely most often, in fact) just one missing piece that we need to catch at random to fill out a set to sell. Think of it this way, one each new piece we roll, there's five chances out of six it will just increase inventory by one, and one chance out of six it will complete a set and let us sell six pieces out of inventory. So, on each roll, there's only a net inventory change of -1/6. This is a very modest downward pressure, and it means the inventory looks a lot like a random walk. The lesson here is if one is processing target sets to sell, some end conversions to level sets out to sell would be worthwhile, but the more inventory one is willing to carry or more sets to list for sale at once, the cheaper it is in converters.

Let's say I'm making a particular set via conversion, and I'd like to sell them as whole sets of six. Granted, there's individual parts of many sets that sell better than the rest of the set. Since we're converting into the set at random, most of the time we won't have exactly one of each of the six pieces, so we would have to do further conversions to even the set out. Let's also say we stop after getting any six parts of the set, and then start converting inside the set to even it out. How many conversions from the random grab-bag we start with do we need to do, on average, to get one of each piece? If we know this answer, then we know what the additional cost is (in converters at least, if not also time & effort) that needs to be made up in increased price or increased volume. And in addition, I like to know what my average cost of production is so that I can intelligently set my sales listing price so that I'm at least guaranteed to not lose money on a sale. Well, I'm a statistician, and my intuition tells me there ought to be a closed for solution to this. But I'm also retired and rusty, so instead of doing it right, I wrote a Monte-Carlo simulation and did it ten million times and recorded the results. The simulation for each case rolls six six-sided dice and tallies up how many of each number comes up. Then, for each number that came up more than once, it rerolls until it fills any of the potential results that didn't come up. Then it records the number of rerolls. And then it repeats that ten million times, and tracks the average number of rerolls. I'm not sharing my python code because it's embarrassingly ugly and brute force; and also because it would be great if someone else did their own completely independent test and confirmed or countered my results. Or even better, worked out the analytical closed-form result. So, what was the answer I found? It takes 7.2478 conversions on average to make a clean level set of six out of a random initial set of six. For in-set conversions, that's three converters per trial, and converters cost ~70k at present, so the overall cost of leveling a set out prior to selling is ~250k per piece. What if we process until we have twelve pieces in the target set? That's more likely to even out a bit more, so there should be fewer leveling conversions at the end, right? Yes, the total conversions for making two complete sets out of twelve random pieces would be 10.106, or ~177k per piece, which is pretty close to three converters per piece sold. Can we do better? Of course; the more random pieces you accumulate before you try to level them out to sell, the more likely you already have complete sets.

I have a character whose psionic power is to be able to influence computers to perform subtly against their programming, and even in contradiction to their hardware. And is able to sense when a system is about to cut off access or raise an alarm via precognition. It's the sort of thing one has to be very judicious with in RP or it becomes an infinity power.