iBot

What @Andreah said. I would add that you can list a level 30 IO and it can sell for any valid level of that same IO. This applies to both the recipe and the crafted version for generic and set IOs. This is why you see players state to buy lower level recipes in guides because the crafting cost is lower and the item will sell on the AH for the higher price. Granted this is all about the same named IO. So a damage IO will never become an accuracy IO. But a level 10 damage IO can become a level 50 damage IO. Side note: the other reason to buy the lower level recipe is to craft and convert. Again this has to do with keeping the crafting cost down and because of the bucketing that occurs on the AH. And yes ties do exist but it is generally a better chance if you choose a non-human variant above or below the desired golden price if you want the transaction to occur NOW. Patience can allow you to play the margins and there are lots of players that make inf by just doing that. There are players that focus on just sniping low asks by placing odd bids such as 66,632 for a enh converter or 321,998 for rare salvage just to absorb those items when someone dumps a bunch for 1 inf or some such oddness.

A few of things if OP is still wondering: 1. I don't believe you can buy or sell to yourself. I'm not 100% certain if that is account wide or just on the same alt. But I'm sure others have that exact answer. 2. Certain items are bucketed on the AH. Meaning that what looks like a single item to the user is really just a collection of a bunch of them. Just because you put an item up on the AH doesn't mean it sold as that widget. This mostly occurs with salvage but can affect IOs as well. 3. If you want to buy NOW you've got to at least bid above the minimum ask price. Otherwise you'll need to wait until someone lists one under your bid and no one else is higher than you. Small numbers are easiest. If you want an item for 10 but all of them are listed at 15 you'll never get one until someone lists it for 9. That is unless someone else bids say 12. 4. Opposite is true of sell NOW. If you list an item for say 15 but all the bids are 10 you'll not sell that item until someone bids more than that 15. Beyond that there is also a display bug that has been alive since the before times. This causes the AH to display the incorrect figures for an item. Sometimes reloading the list can correct for it and other times not. Best practice is just to use prior knowledge and/or price creep until you hit the golden value for whatever you are trying to do.

I never have been nor ever will be anywhere near the class of some here. I just don't have the motivation. I think I have liquid probably 1 bil across all 30ish of my toons and a stack of purples sitting in my main because for some reason at some point I was obsessed with collecting purple recipe drops. Not buying. Not crafting. Just keeping what dropped for some reason. Now that my in game time has taken a nose dive I'll probably never really get back into the groove unless major updates come in terms of both legal status and game content. But for what it is worth it has certainly been enjoyable to get to play around in a fictional economic system that isn't always being upset by whims of the devs.

And would you believe there are still people that ask "Why do I need to learn this?!?? When will I ever need statistical analysis??" 🤪 As for the profit/click should be a straight forward multiplication using the average converters. But the real question that needs asking is "How much beer did this take?"

I suppose with some macro programming wizardry I could automate the clicking. The hard part is getting the macro to stop when a certain enh is obtained. It is also probably another reason why I don't do it all that often except when trying to get an ATO I want from one of the packs. First world problems I know... 🤪

Personally it isn't the number of converters it is the number of clicks. I'd like to amend my previous post to say that I'd be OK if they'd just add a button that says "Convert until I get XYZ enh or run out of converters." That would solve the problem for me and require no changes other than a quick calculation to decide under the hood what the average number of converters should be to come up with a particular enh. And I believe some even here on these forums have down a good chunk of that work. 👍

Personally, I'd rather they ditch the RNG of conversions and just give us another tier or 3 that just cost more converters but give more targeted options. You can already spend 100 merits to get almost any recipe so maybe tie it into that value. Then just say for 50 converters you get to choose the in set conversion you want. Or hell even throw in the salvage required for the actual item if you had crafted it from a recipe on top of the converters. I don't know, if going to go that far may as well include the cost of the crafting inf as well. But really any system that gives that level of control is just a bypass for crafting so <shrug>. I suppose the ultimate question is "why is the converter system in place?" Is it so that players can change unwanted recipes into desired ones to use? Is it so that players can change unwanted recipes into desired ones to sell? A mix of the two? Either way I think easier conversions would have an unforeseen detrimental affect on the market as a whole so I would be careful what you wish for here.

Balance is what players call for but rarely what they actually want because 10 out of 10 times players have no idea what balance means other than "that player can do something I cannot so therefore something should be changed to make us equal." And there in lies the alligator in this swamp. There is no way to balance a game system that is designed to allow a wide range of solutions so that both sides come out equal. Forgive me for being a bit simplistic here but go with this logic exercise and see how this shakes out. Some are arguing for balance in terms of damage. OK fine. Answer this: should a tank do equal damage as a defender? Defenders do more damage. That is not balanced. Some answer: yeah but they have different roles. Really? You sure? Both help to keep teammates alive during each encounter. The method is different but the outcome is the same. The design goal that turns the balance argument into a swamp is that each powerset is meant to have a different path to success. Any discussion about balance has to take that into account. It is certainly acceptable to argue that the rules of the game should be applied equally but again that is a tough pill to take. Answer this: why do some ATs not have mez protection? Is it fair that a scrapper (high damage) can prevent a hold but a blaster (high damage) cannot? The entire point is that the powersets and ATs are meant to have pros and cons. You cannot load up on one without taking into account the other. And I don't care which you choose. Most players focus only on the pros because they typically argue for the changes that benefit their preferred style over all else. But there are a lot of others that would say that isn't balanced. So which is it? City of "everyone the same" or City of "multiple solutions"? Can't do both. I concede that there are broken powers and power/slotting interactions that are probably unintended consequences and those should certainly be addressed. But that should be done only to pull those powers more in line with everything else. Course that requires determining what the base line value for that power is and that is another whole discussion.

I'd have to dive back into the patch notes but wasn't there a pass over procs a while back to at least make them more consistent in their application? As for a balance pass, I'd much rather see them take what is currently working nicely and just expand upon it. It would be nice to not have just ONE option for certain types of procs in terms of the power that you can slot that particular widget into. I'm ok with uniques I'd just like to be able to get that same unique in a for that can go into say def debuff instead of just defense. I like the concept behind "power proliferation" now we need more "slot" or "enhancement" proliferation. And for the goodness and sanity of this chaotic universe would someone please make a few blaster sets (or alter a couple existing ones) to actually increase <gasp> RANGE. Call me crazy but I actually believe that being able to snipe a mob from halfway across the map is a good thing!

Ah hadn't thought of the ATOs for unslotters. That makes sense. I just sell them straight and figured the AH would take care of it for those that want them superior. Funny too cause I tend to buy the non-superior versions myself and then make them superior when the time comes since they can be slotted at level 10. Course that was before I realized that it was better to just get them from the hero/villain packs at 10 for 100 mil.

I've bounced between unslotters, converters, and catalysts several times. And when I do I often stop to try to think about the why of some of those bids. Then I remember, "Oh right... humans." and I go back to what I was doing. Converters I understand because you need a LOT when RNGesus just isn't cooperating. So solid supply/demand dynamic in play there. Catalysts I scratch my head at because they can be scored easier ways than the AH but whatever shut up and give me my 1.5 mil (or whatever it is they sell for I forget now). Unslotters I have no idea. I think I've used exactly 1 the entire time I've been back in game and that was just to see what it did exactly. My build is either planned out meaning I never need to remove something or if I do I just respec that one time at 50 to remove all the IOs and put in the sets I want if I didn't do that already as I was leveling anyway.

Because you asked 🙂 We've slowed a bit as of late as in not quite as many of us log in daily. But there are always people in the global channel we use and a few that do use the voice chat we've set up in discord. Give it a look. Even if you don't want to join the SG you are still welcome in our chat channel for when you are looking for teammates.

The example I gave was just a general thought in the direction I think it could have taken. I've not sat down and fully thought out all the permutations of such a system so I'm sure there are plenty of places where careful thought would have to be given to make sure that the required slotting is something that is actually useful rather than gimping a power for no reason other than to gain +5 rech or whatever the bonus. My only point really was that the IO system as implemented was a miss in terms of making it a continuation of the existing origin system rather than a wholesale replacement that then needs a content polish pass since it completely unbalanced the original content.

My thought with the origin enh vs. invention enh was just that I would have thought that the devs would have used the origin enh as a step to craft the invention version. Meaning in order to craft say a level 30 damage IO I need the crafting salvage + recipe + a level 30 origin SO. So the transition to IOs in a build would be a natural progression at the time meaning I could at some point replace the out dated origin enh with the new invention version to gain some benefit such as the IO version never expires etc. As for sets I think that was yet another blunder on their part. Sets should have followed the same crafting idea that they are an extension to the common IOs rather than a replacement. An example would be you get a specific set of bonuses if you slot into a power 1 acc IO, 2 dam IO, 2 rech IO, and 1 end redux IO you get the "set" bonus of +Y% to your to-hit. Same could be done with other combinations. This gives a much broader range to builds and doesn't require the complete respec of the character. The reason I don't fully agree with the thought that the devs needed an effective inf sink is that the inf problem was there from day one. This then requires the thought that they were severely short sighted (though not the first time devs have fallen into this trap) about what their economy would look like. Printing money in a game is always a problem since it is created out of thin air as we play. By the time they tried to do it the damage was already catastrophic. The invention system, prestige system, and incarnate systems were all attempts to change that and each of them failed miserably because the underling problem was never addressed. HC has done a better job of this but it is still a system with big holes.

From a game design perspective I've always wondered why the TO->DO->SO system was abandoned for the IO system. I've wondered why the original devs did not find some way to incorporate that original enh system into the new invention system. Maybe too much conflicting code or other hard coded obstacles but I've always thought that was the mistake. That would have made the transition cleaner and kept those origin enh relevant rather than a straight replacement. PvP was always a horrible implementation. I remember when it was first introduced and there were major design flaws given that they tried to take a system that was created to make us unstoppable and then nerf it to hell so we could be stopped. Add to that then forcing us to have PvE builds and PvP builds and the added headache of being unable to easily switch between those two completely different goals was just too much. I remember being excited to have a chance to face off in the new zones or on a base raid but that quickly turned sour when I realized that my awesome mob killing sniper was less than a paper tiger in PvP. Prestige was again another head scratching idea. It should have been left on the cutting room floor. First off, the only groups that could really do it were going to be the large member groups. Second, with the horrible PvP base raids were never going to fly. Who would want to spend all that time and effort to build something that could be wrecked on any given day if something happened and the scheduled defense couldn't materialize. Then compound the problem with forcing players to choose between funding themselves or funding the SG. I think quite a few friendships ended over that argument. Personally, I think the difficulty and rebalance questions are different animals. Don't get me wrong I used to enjoy insanely difficult games. You know, Dark Souls, Ninja Gaidan, Contra, etc. Not any more. So what I'd want out of CoX is different. Challenge sure but that is difficult to achieve when one of the main tenants of the game is "ANY group of ATs can make this work." No holy trinity. No "we MUST have a debuffer for this or it will fail." That is tricky at best and impossible otherwise to balance content around. It is what leads to the feeling of "my XYZ character feel useless on this". So far, I like the newer difficulty idea that HC seems to be headed for and I'm certainly willing to wait and see how this progresses. Hopefully, it will turn out better than some of the systems in the past.

My experience has been that the size or wealth of the company makes little difference. I think a lot of times the original design is done by someone that is drafted into the project who is not remotely a data specialist rather than someone that has the training and experience to do it properly. It is down hill from there. And the type of industry really doesn't matter. I've seen tech companies that were tech companies from day one have inventory or accounting systems that are complete disasters to the point where they have four or five different identifiers for the same object just because no one could figure out the original numbering system so the invented a new one and tried to tack in on. So you end up with lookup tables for lookup tables that reference another unrelated lookup table because that is where the original manufacturer part number is. And if you dig deep enough the original document they used was an excel spreadsheet. 🤪

A big part of programming is knowing when to use a system and when not to. I think the trap a lot of people fall into is trying to make everything fit into whatever new shiny they just learned. Databases are like everything else. A well designed one can be a thing of beauty to watch chew over massive amounts of data without a single glitch. Poorly designed, or better put poorly implemented ones are a nightmare. Again, I've never seen this code, but my gut says they tried to implement this thing as a game loop system not realizing the amount of data required to model the stock exchange. That is essentially what the AH is... a model of NASDAQ. And even on a much smaller scale that gets out of hand very quickly. I'm willing to bet good inf that the original devs had enough time to put a rough system into place and then could not spare time to clean up the mess which led to quick patch "fixes" which only made the implementation even more fragmented and devolved into pure spaghetti puree.

Our SG has done this as well with the ITF. It is a lot of fun and gives an excuse to try different ATs/power sets when coming up with new alts. We've also done costumed themed ones as well just for fun. I think my fav out of all of them was definitely the all fire farmer meaning no changing the build that was used in normal AE fire farms. While no single one of us could really handle the alpha all that well when we were bunched together stuff just melted away. Even the annoying MoG from the cyclops was nothing. I think the entire kill most run took about 30 minutes. Good times.

Because I do whenever someone asks 🙂

I run on Excelsior though my in game time recently has been limited from RL. Yeah I forget exactly how long the comics ran for and I'm not sure why I am missing one but I remember digging all that stuff out when I first heard HC was back. I even still have my special edition box set of City of Villains along with my original game guide to City of Heroes. You know for back when the internet was still basically AOL and Yahoo!... hehe 🤪

If memory servers I think I have all but one of the issued comics.

I could be wrong but I thought there is a Null Gull setting that allows you to auto reject drop gifts. I do this once in a while if I run a TF that offers an enhancement option for reward and it rolls something that I don't want. I just drop it on a teammate before they all scatter. No idea if anyone ever noticed since I've not gotten a tell about it after but still funny to think of them scratching their head trying to figure out how they got 2 of the specials. When HC first came back I would sometimes run through Atlas and drop random lvl 53 SOs on players but I've not done that since those first few months. Seems as if most now have plenty of inf and the extra SO is just an inconvenience since they have to run to a vendor to sell it. To randomly drop a bunch of stuff on someone else is a bit off putting especially with the crafting table open since the only reason you'd have that open is to craft a bunch of stuff yourself. If nothing else at least ask first before just spamming the inventory.

Sure depends on the actual goal here. I read the OP as they wanted the IO to slot for themselves not to flip onto the AH. Hence the idea of buying it directly. I hadn't considered buying the lower level set recipe, crafting, then catalyst. I grant that depending on the going market rate this might be cheaper than a buy now price. Generally for me that is too much effort. I'd rather use 100 merits to get 300 converters to get roughly 20 mil inf and then just buy whatever I want. On average probably about the same number of clicks as crafting and converting but for some reason my primal brain prefers the sure thing over the anticipated gamble. Which is probably why I don't play the lottery 🙃

There are certain set levels that only overlap in very specific IOs. I don't remember the exact ones but I seem to remember level 31ish being magic for a few of them. Generally though as a rule you cannot efficiently target a specific IO from any other IO of the same category. What I would suggest is if you are trying to get the IO for yourself to slot then simply sell all those converters you are using and buy directly from the AH the attuned IO you want. Way better IMHO. If the one you want isn't for sale or very low number then buy a different one in the same set and use the "In Set" option in the convert menu to get to the one you want. Works well with ATOs too since there are certain ones for whatever reason always seem to be in short supply while others have plenty listed.

Well I managed to go through a few batches of 10 over the weekend. Opened them all and sold all the enh. So far I've managed an OK profit without considering any of the other goodies yet since I'm kinda saving those to fund the next few alts once I figure out what the heck I want to run next. Thinking this is a better strategy for me rather than waiting to sell them back at 24.5 mil later.