Squidnunc

If I get an Aloha slot, then I want an Aloha slot as well.

An easy way to make more challenging content without much additional dev time would be to count each of these "super incarnate" characters as two slots in any mission or task force. So you could only take up to four people who'd reached this level into what's normally an 8 person task force, and it would still treat it as if 8 heroes were present. Mind you, this wouldn't be a good direction for the game -- you want to encourage grouping and interaction among players. But it would be much easier than coding whole new mechanics, enemies and scenarios.

Yep, you've got it. I'm not saying that it makes sense to evaluate things completely numerically -- people are different, have different tolerances for different activities. One person might prefer a completely mindless procedure they can do while watching TV, another might appreciate the variety that comes with random rolls like scratch-off tickets. And there are limits; there's not always an infinite quantity of the thing you want at any given time. But if a couple of robots were having this discussion, then you could say: (Buy Rare recipe-get components-craft) takes V seconds and adds W value (Buying a cheap Rare) takes X seconds (and adds zero value). In this example, V>X. (Convert Rare until it's worth selling) takes Y seconds and adds Z value So which is bigger? (W+Z)/(V+Y), which is the $$ per second of doing the whole thing, or (Z)/(X+Y), which is $$ per second of just doing the last part? [This leaves out (Buy cheap recipe-get components-craft-convert until you get a Rare), as your original "Drive up the price of Doctored Wounds and make a killing" guide described.] If LotG were selling for 25,000,000 instead of 7,000,000 then I think it would be a no-brainer. Focus exclusively on that second step; that's where the money is. But in the actual market, I don't know.

I look forward to that guide. Though you should be aware that at least on my screen with this font, the "C" and the "L" in clickiness are easy to misread as merging... Given that there are many ways to reliably make money in this game with almost no risk, it comes down to what's sustainable, what isn't going to drive you crazy with boredom, what has a decent rate of return per minute of clicking, etc. I've been experimenting lately with a very limited strategy: - Put in bids for level 41 defense sets other than Luck of the Gambler. Bid on every enhancement for about 2M, or some other number if the history guides you that way. Bid for 10 at a time. You're looking for "Red Fortune" and "Reactive Defenses". You want level 41 so there's no chance of converting into a "Serendipity" or "Gift of the Ancients" - Log out. Wait. - Log in later, grab everything you've won. - Do "out of set conversion / Defense" on each enhancement until you see dice (the Luck of the Gambler symbol) If you start with a Red Fortune or a Reactive Defenses, you have a 50/50 chance of getting either a LotG or another "loser". It's a coin flip. - (optional) Once you have a LotG, take a couple of stabs at in-set conversion to get the magic +7.5% recharge enhancement, which is the most valuable in the set. - Sell on the market. Pick a price a couple of 100K under the last few bids, so it'll roll over relatively quickly. - Take your profits, go back to step 1. So basically just trying to skim the cream in a mechanical way. I figure LotG will never go out of style unless they decide to make that recharge enhancement Unique, which would probably cause a riot. It's a pretty rare level 50, from what I've seen, that doesn't have at least one of these, and they're making new level 50 characters all the time. If enough people did this, then in theory the price of one of the "lesser" defense set enhancements and the price of a LotG enhancement would converge to within about 200K of each other. But I think there are far more people who would rather, say, play the superhero game and have fun instead of messing around with the auction house, so that'll probably never happen.

I usually leave BuildUp as my auto power, so it just goes off whenever it can. Sure, I might not be able to time things perfectly, but I figure that's outweighed by the number of times I'd forget to hit it otherwise. Am I screwing myself over by doing this? Is there a better use of the one auto power we get?

You should take solace in the fact that your 150 million influence commission will keep the lights on at Wentworth's for another month, at least. The hardworking employees there might even get a bonus. Might even help them install some better security for those raids they keep experiencing.

The original table showed cumulative odds. Please don't edit it this way, especially if you're going to leave my name on it.

Great math, but take care to note that that's 5 conversions, which for in-set means 15 converters, or 1.5 million influence.

Good points. If you know for a fact that you're holding the dog in the set, and all of the others are worth more than 300K more, then logically it's a no-brainer. Then it's just a matter of the time that it takes to learn that fact in the first place, by madly clicking around and putting in 1 bids until you get a decent history on each of the others. And of course you're right if the thing you want just isn't on the market at all, and you have to have it now, then this is the way to go. Although if you're in that case... Say that one of the members of an ATO set has no sellers and 20 bidders. Would you go to the effort to convert a couple of extra, counting on a guaranteed sale to one or more of those 20? Ultimately I suppose what it boils down to is that the CoH market, being a made up thing in a made up world with made up money, is not nearly as efficient or liquid as, say, the real world stock market. There are plenty of places where there's a price gap that an automated program could jump on and exploit until the gap didn't exist any more, which is what happens in real world markets. Here everything is still manual, so there are opportunities to pick up crumbs - sometimes very big crumbs - all over the place. If people choose to spend their time that way.

Good point. Converting within a smaller set drastically raises your odds.

I'd tend to agree. I'd even say it probably isn't worth it if you're looking for an enhancement for yourself. Since it's all about the money, you can always buy what you want (and attuned for free) rather than playing dice.

I made a post that got killed in the forum snap, so I wanted to re-post the basic idea and see if there are any answers. The basic question: If you're aiming to make money on the auction house by doing the whole enhancement conversion game, is it ever worth doing an in-set conversion? That's a conversion where you're exchanging one enhancement from a set for a different random enhancement from the set, at a cost of 3 converters. For purposes of this discussion, assume converters cost 100K, so that's 300K to take one shot at the prize. Let's take an extreme case first. Say you have a set that has 6 enhancements. There's one enhancement out of that set that's worth a lot; maybe it's a valuable proc that everybody wants. There are five enhancements that are kind of crap. You get dealt one of the crap ones -- maybe by recipe, maybe by converting from another Rare, maybe you found it stuck to the bottom of your shoe. So what has to happen to make it worthwhile for you to spend converters trying to turn lead into gold? To put some real numbers on it, say that the five crap enhancements sell for 1,000,000 each, while the nice one sells for 5,000,000. The odds of making the right conversion on your first roll are 20%. If you fail you can try again; still a 20% chance. Keep going, keep feeding coins into the slot machine. # of rolls chance of success cost of converters 1 20% 300K 2 36% 600K 3 49% 900K 4 59% 1.2M 5 67% 1.5M 6 74% 1.8M 7 79% 2.1M 8 83% 2.4M And so on, and so on. So is it worth it? Seems like a lot of tedium for not much benefit, and this is an extreme example. Most sets have much less of a gap between the low and high earners, probably because people are converting them. Is there money to be made by just buying up the cheaper items and focusing completely on doing in-set conversions? Even with the LotG set that seems unlikely. What do other people think?