Super Group not scaling with members

[RogerWilco]

At the moment we have accepted defeat by the game.

 

We have split our Super Group into multiple, one per global account basically.

 

I think that it defeats the point of a Super Group and none of us like it.

 

But as we were getting higher level toons, and the variety of salvage and enhancements gets higher and higher, the situation just becomes just too limiting.

I remember it was a problem for us on live as well, but then we only had 2 really active players, not 4-5.

 

Instead of being together in one Super Group, we are now all in separate ones in a Coalition. But it's not the same.

[CrudeVileTerror]

I went and did it again . . . 

[Twisted Toon]

Forgot to log onto your Mastermind ATO guy again?

[Heraclea]

I enjoy base building, so when I started running out of space at my main TB super group I created a second.  Different concept, and this one allows for male characters as well.  Then I allied the two.

[Ironblade]

On 11/10/2020 at 9:26 AM, RogerWilco said:

But as we were getting higher level toons, and the variety of salvage and enhancements gets higher and higher, the situation just becomes just too limiting.

I remember it was a problem for us on live as well, but then we only had 2 really active players, not 4-5.

Back on live, we didn't see a problem with the system even with 25-30 active players.  The limiting factor back then was that we could only have 150 characters in the SG so I limited how many characters one person could have in the main SG and we had two alt SG's.

 

I think that, for the most part, storing salvage in the base is a waste of space.  When I'm crafting enhancements I just have the auction house window open and buy whatever salvage I need at the time.  We currently have four salvage racks - one for common, one for uncommon, one for event salvage and one that is EMPTY and used for transfers between characters.

[Oubliette_Red]

The thing regarding the limitation on invention salvage is that it applies to base items, one of the reasons lighting flickers every time you remove/add items to storage, it's updating the base items listing. And base items also have a limitation, or at least it used to, something like 20k items as the more items that have to be loaded every time you enter your base the longer the load times and bigger impact it has on your system.

 

I still keep White/Yellow invention salvage in storage, but I do limit the quantity to 5-10 per piece. I recommend going through your storage and cleaning regularly, drops stacks in the AH on the cheap.

 

[RogerWilco]

On 11/16/2020 at 5:47 AM, Ironblade said:

Back on live, we didn't see a problem with the system even with 25-30 active players.  The limiting factor back then was that we could only have 150 characters in the SG so I limited how many characters one person could have in the main SG and we had two alt SG's.

 

I think that, for the most part, storing salvage in the base is a waste of space.  When I'm crafting enhancements I just have the auction house window open and buy whatever salvage I need at the time.  We currently have four salvage racks - one for common, one for uncommon, one for event salvage and one that is EMPTY and used for transfers between characters.

Being in the base and crafting stuff, is one of the main reasons to have a base, at least for me?

We also really like it that we have multiple players running around doing things in the base. It makes it feel much more alive.

And it makes it easy to pass things between players and help each other out. We often have crafting sessions together for an hour or two.

 

I don't think your strategy would work for me, but maybe I am wrong. I'll explain my thinking and the current way I work, as do most of my friends. Maybe you have some advice?

 

I think your strategy might work once you have plenty of money in the game, and/or a good way to make money. We were lucky to get some generous donation shortly after we started playing, so we have some liquidity to start trading and get some basics sorted. Maybe I should focus on getting a character to 50? Maybe I should build a character specifically to grind money in EA missions? I don't know. I only got to level 49 on live, and my highest character currently is level 32.

 

I find that if I do need salvage, it might either not be for sale on the AH at that very moment at all, or not at a price that I can make a profit selling the things I am trying to craft. I craft invention enhancements trying to get everything memorized in my main crafting toon, and to kit out my various characters. And I craft to sell on the AH, to get money. I have been able to buy a few Attuned enhancements, but things get expensive quickly.

 

We are mainly playing missions together, as there are a lot of stories and most of them are good. Most of the people I've played with have never played the game before, and I had only played about one year on live.

 

We use the base storage not just for salvage, but also for enhancements. Single Origin enhancements are often useful on alts, or will be in a few levels. My main crafting toon often crafts whatever invention recipe she can still learn from towards a memorization badge, and then stores the crafted enhancements until an alt can use them. All recipes that I have not yet memorized get sent to my main crafting toon for this purpose.

 

My crafting toon often runs around with an inventory full of recipes, waiting for either an alt to have the right salvage drop, or for a bid on the AH to be filled. I can put things in the email, but that's a pain for 70+ recipes.

On 11/16/2020 at 4:49 PM, Oubliette_Red said:

The thing regarding the limitation on invention salvage is that it applies to base items, one of the reasons lighting flickers every time you remove/add items to storage, it's updating the base items listing. And base items also have a limitation, or at least it used to, something like 20k items as the more items that have to be loaded every time you enter your base the longer the load times and bigger impact it has on your system.

 

I still keep White/Yellow invention salvage in storage, but I do limit the quantity to 5-10 per piece. I recommend going through your storage and cleaning regularly, drops stacks in the AH on the cheap.

 

Yes, I know it is because of current limitations in the code.

We hope to contribute at some point to solving it, as we have several coders in our group.

I've gotten to the point that I can compile the Ourodev code, haven't got it fully running yet, some of the links and readme's seem to be out of date.

 

Thanks for the replies!

Edited November 17, 2020 by RogerWilco

[RogerWilco]

On 11/16/2020 at 5:12 AM, Heraclea said:

I enjoy base building, so when I started running out of space at my main TB super group I created a second.  Different concept, and this one allows for male characters as well.  Then I allied the two.

Coalitions do not solve the storage issue, as you can't grant coalition members access to your storage.

 

Me and my friends think that with the current game code, the easiest solution might be to add permissions to have coalition members access storage.

 

And I think you can't have multiple SGs in a coalition on a single Global, unless you get some help from other players at least?

As both of thee SG leaders need to be online to make the coalition.

I think that mechanic can be tweaked to prevent an explosion of SGs and people hoarding things.

 

I understand that you want to limit how much people can store, as it would otherwise damage the game economy. But for a SG to make sense, it should scale with the number of Globals in the SG, even though it currently cannot because of the limits on the implementation/database.

[LiquidBandage]

2 hours ago, RogerWilco said:

At the moment we have accepted defeat by the game.

 

We often have crafting sessions together for an hour or two.

 

I don't think your strategy would work for me, but maybe I am wrong. I'll explain my thinking and the current way I work, as do most of my friends. Maybe you have some advice?

 

I think your strategy might work once you have plenty of money in the game, and/or a good way to make money. We were lucky to get some generous donation shortly after we started playing, so we have some liquidity to start trading and get some basics sorted. Maybe I should focus on getting a character to 50? Maybe I should build a character specifically to grind money in EA missions? I don't know. I only got to level 49 on live, and my highest character currently is level 32.

 

I find that if I do need salvage, it might either not be for sale on the AH at that very moment at all, or not at a price that I can make a profit selling the things I am trying to craft. I craft invention enhancements trying to get everything memorized in my main crafting toon, and to kit out my various characters. And I craft to sell on the AH, to get money. I have been able to buy a few Attuned enhancements, but things get expensive quickly.

 

<snip>

 

We use the base storage not just for salvage, but also for enhancements. Single Origin enhancements are often useful on alts, or will be in a few levels. My main crafting toon often crafts whatever invention recipe she can still learn from towards a memorization badge, and then stores the crafted enhancements until an alt can use them. All recipes that I have not yet memorized get sent to my main crafting toon for this purpose.

 

My crafting toon often runs around with an inventory full of recipes, waiting for either an alt to have the right salvage drop, or for a bid on the AH to be filled. I can put things in the email, but that's a pain for 70+ recipes.

You are hoarding & holding onto too much stuff that is essentially not precious to you. 

Get your crafting character to 50. Focus first on kitting out that character with level 50 IOs (level 50 IO recipe drops from playing the game). You will earn the influence needed to craft them and a good portion of the common salvage needed to make them just by playing the game. If you bog yourself down by having a dozen alts all trying to level at the same time and all trying to craft/enhance at the same time you will forever be stuck in the mire of not having what you need. 

 

Take a look at what most characters need slotted in powers (not what you want, I mean what you NEED). You need to hit your targets, so you need Accuracy. You need to cut back on endurance usage (especially for toggles), so you need Endurance Reduction. You need your damaging powers to pack a punch, so you need Damage. You want to cycle your powers as often as possible, so you need Recharge. Universally all characters need those four enhancements regardless of powersets or build strategy. So focus in on memorizing those recipes first if possible. It will be useful to all of your characters. 

 

Adopt a hand-me-down philosophy with IOs that you craft, especially the Accuracy/Damage/EndReduction/Recharge ones. It really helped me to only focus in on three levels of enhancements to make it easy to store them. IOs are functional from the time you slot them all the way up to 50 and they scale down when you are exemplared. The level 25 IOs are roughly equivalent to level 25 Single Origin enhancements, so that is one of the levels I target. A character pretty much rounds out into what it is going to become in the mid 30s, plus you tend to get big powers at 32/35/38. So the second level I focus on is 35 IOs. Then the level 50 IOs are the third level I focus on. I only store IOs that are level 25, 35 or 50. All of the other IOs I craft for the purposes of memorizing a recipe I either send to a character that I KNOW will use them right now or I sell them on the AH (that gets you more inf to buy salavage/recipes that you need). To complete the thought, have your characters respec (you get a free one every ten levels)  at level 32 and dump all of your level 25 IOs into storage and equip the level 35 IOs. Then when that character gets to 47, respec again, dump those 35 IOs in storage and equip level 50 IOs. That way nothing is wasted and you can effectively reuse level 25 & 35 IOs on multiple characters.

 

Look at my post on the first page of this thread. Adopt some sense of sorting and categorizing for your salvage storage and be mindful of how much you are storing. You don't need 30 of each and every salvage, that is just wasteful. Once you restrict your crafting to a few level ranges, you will see which types of salvage are more commonly used and therefore useful to you. You will see the pattern emerge and can then adjust priorities on what you need to store for rainy day crafting. 

 

Do NOT store Single Origin enhancements. That is just wasting storage space that you are woefully short on at the moment. Sell them to get the influence you need to buy salvage or recipes to get them memorized. 

 

Another thing I see SGs doing is trying to store a handful of every possible IO for every possible level and you end up with five level 20 Confuse IOs, three level 30 Stun IOs, two level 40 Defense Debuff IOs, etc. All that crap is just taking up space that NO ONE WILL EVER USE. Don't hold onto that junk, it is not precious, sell it on the AH if you can or just delete them outright. Save your sanity and declutter your storage.  

 

When I was training up my first crafter I too stored as many recipes on non-crafting alts to be used at a later date. This is a useful tactic and I suggest that you go this route. But once you get your crafter fully memorized for whatever pattern, sell the excess patterns on the Auction House. Freeing up space for new drops is important, especially rarer recipes. Also, look into getting your characters to 40+ and running the Market Crash task force. You are rewarded with a purple recipe the first time you complete it (make sure you have enough free recipe space). 

 

Don't get sucked into thinking you need to have your character maximized at all moments of your leveling career. Do the best with what you can craft. Realize that a level 25 IO is just as effective as a Single Origin enh but with the added benefit that it never outlives its usefulness. Sure, at level 27 you could upgrade to level 30 IOs, but then you'd have to spend to craft them and only see a marginal increase in effectiveness. Save your resources for the other breakpoints and for level 50 IOs when it really counts. Once you get all of your characters running on IOs, you can focus in on sets or buying ATOs or whatever. 

 

I have never needed to grind AE missions. You have a group of friends, play the game. Invest in powers that make the group collectively more effective. Raise your difficulty level incrementally to see what the group can handle (+1 or +2 or x8). The enemy groups you face can impact how the group succeeds too, so if you see trouble, back the difficulty down a notch. Be willing to risk failure from time to time and you will enjoy the game more. Bring your friends together instead of fracturing them apart over this storage malaise. It is clearly a Nemesis plot that has wormed its way into your psyche. Liberate yourself. Declutter. Bring your friends together. Have fun. 

[Ironblade]

20 hours ago, RogerWilco said:

I find that if I do need salvage, it might either not be for sale on the AH at that very moment at all, or not at a price that I can make a profit selling the things I am trying to craft.

All salvage items are guaranteed to be available at all times.  The market has a ton (millions, I think) of salvage seeded by the devs at a specific price for each rarity level.  However, the salvage is normally available well below that price.

 

As for being available at a price where you can make a profit, I have never tried crafting IO's to make money.  When working on the crafting badges, I try to break even but that's not the priority for me.

 

Frankly, unless the base storage were enormous, if I'm doing any significant amount of crafting it's inevitable that I'll run out of SOMETHING.  Therefore, when I do serious crafting, I always do it out in a zone (I like the Vanguard base in the Rikti War Zone) so I can stand at an invention workbench with the auction house window open and buy whatever I need.  If I need to put something in my base, the portal is like 30 feet away.

 

 

20 hours ago, RogerWilco said:

We use the base storage not just for salvage, but also for enhancements. Single Origin enhancements are often useful on alts, or will be in a few levels.

Never ever store SO's.  They are basically garbage.  It's simply not worth storing them.  When I get SO's as drops, I vendor them.  When I get a character into the mid 30's and convert them from SO's to IO's, I just drop the IO's in and destroy the SO's.

 

 

20 hours ago, RogerWilco said:

My crafting toon often runs around with an inventory full of recipes, waiting for either an alt to have the right salvage drop, or for a bid on the AH to be filled. I can put things in the email, but that's a pain for 70+ recipes.

Too much of a pain, in my opinion.  My badgers crafts for the badges and I only put into storage the items that are likely to be useful, like the 'big five' - accuracy, damage, recharge, endurance modification, endurance reduction.  Anything else, I just dump in on the market unless I know I will need it - like if I'm leveling up a character with Super Jump and want a level 50 IO waiting and ready.

 

 

19 hours ago, RogerWilco said:

And I think you can't have multiple SGs in a coalition on a single Global, unless you get some help from other players at least?

As both of thee SG leaders need to be online to make the coalition.

There are ways around that.

1) You don't need to be the main leader to form a coalition.  Just the other day, one of my officers (2nd highest rank) formed a coalition between our SG and another, because I have it set to allow that.

2) Make a second account.  This is useful for *SO* many things.  I have two accounts.  Back when the game was live, I had three paid accounts.

 

 

19 hours ago, RogerWilco said:

I understand that you want to limit how much people can store, as it would otherwise damage the game economy. But for a SG to make sense, it should scale with the number of Globals in the SG, even though it currently cannot because of the limits on the implementation/database.

Firstly, I don't think that's the reason they limit the storage.  Once the storage is filled, it has no impact on the economy.  It's not a constant drain.  It's a static quantity.  I'm pretty sure it has to do with the amount of data the game client and/or server has to handle.  Similar to not being able to open the auction house in your base, which is entirely due to technical reasons.

 

Secondly, I just don't see that it needs to scale.  Back on live, I ran an SG with over 30 active players having over 100 active characters in the SG and storage never seemed like a problem.  It just sounds like you're trying to use base storage in a way that no one ever considered because 'Who would want to?'.

[Ironblade]

20 hours ago, RogerWilco said:

I think your strategy might work once you have plenty of money in the game, and/or a good way to make money. We were lucky to get some generous donation shortly after we started playing, so we have some liquidity to start trading and get some basics sorted. Maybe I should focus on getting a character to 50? Maybe I should build a character specifically to grind money in EA missions? I don't know. I only got to level 49 on live, and my highest character currently is level 32.

I guess.....  It's hard for me to address this because money has never been a problem for me.  Someone in another thread pointed out that the most efficient use of merits is to use them to generate inf and then buy the purples or ATO's that you need.  My position is why add that extra step.  I recently had to pause playing Ironblade because he hit the cap on reward merits (10,000).  So he took a break for a few days until I identified a character that needed a purple set.

 

Back on live, I maintained a spreadsheet of the money each character had.  This was not so that I could get money when I needed it.  It was so that I could tell which characters had room to hold more since each character could only hold 2 billion inf.  By the time the game shut down, I had 56 billion inf.

 

I think there's a big difference in how we play.  It sounds like you have a number of characters but none are 50 yet.  I normally have just a handful of characters 'in process' and don't make new ones until the old ones get to 50 *AND* get at least some incarnate powers.  Ironblade, for example, has 10 incarnate powers at tier 4.  Yes, I know there are only 6 incarnate slots - he has five different Destiny powers at T4.  On the other hand, someone who is constantly making new alts is going to either have to work at generating funds or be perpetually poor.

 

Get your favorite character to 50 and you can't help but end up swimming in cash and merits.  Back on live, I worked the market and also farmed PvP recipes.  I'm not doing either of those things on Homecoming because most stuff is so much cheaper.

 

[Ironblade]

17 hours ago, LiquidBandage said:

Adopt a hand-me-down philosophy with IOs that you craft, especially the Accuracy/Damage/EndReduction/Recharge ones. It really helped me to only focus in on three levels of enhancements to make it easy to store them. IOs are functional from the time you slot them all the way up to 50 and they scale down when you are exemplared. The level 25 IOs are roughly equivalent to level 25 Single Origin enhancements, so that is one of the levels I target. A character pretty much rounds out into what it is going to become in the mid 30s, plus you tend to get big powers at 32/35/38. So the second level I focus on is 35 IOs. Then the level 50 IOs are the third level I focus on. I only store IOs that are level 25, 35 or 50. All of the other IOs I craft for the purposes of memorizing a recipe I either send to a character that I KNOW will use them right now or I sell them on the AH (that gets you more inf to buy salavage/recipes that you need). To complete the thought, have your characters respec (you get a free one every ten levels)  at level 32 and dump all of your level 25 IOs into storage and equip the level 35 IOs. Then when that character gets to 47, respec again, dump those 35 IOs in storage and equip level 50 IOs. That way nothing is wasted and you can effectively reuse level 25 & 35 IOs on multiple characters.

This.  Except I only respec once, at most.  Most of my characters never respec.

 

I use SO's until around level 32 and then plan out my build at level 50.  Since I exemp a lot for low level content, most of my IO sets are level 35 and never get replaced.  I craft all the IO's I will need and let them sit in the enhancement trays until I can slot them.  For a power I won't get until level 41, I might slot level 40-44 IO's.  I'm giving up some performance at level 50, but I get to keep a lot of my non-purple set bonuses down into the mid levels.  Also, I can't be bothered with multiple respecs on every character.

 

For a power where I know I will be slotting a purple set, I will use either mid level (35) IO's or just SO's until I can slot the purples.

 

 

[Coyotedancer]

On 11/15/2020 at 8:12 PM, Heraclea said:

I enjoy base building, so when I started running out of space at my main TB super group I created a second.  Different concept, and this one allows for male characters as well.  Then I allied the two.

 

That was my solution, too. When I needed more storage space, I split my one big, generalist SG full o' magi into four more specialized ones and coalitioned them together.

The second base is about half done now. I'll build the other two when and if I need them. 

 

 

Edited November 19, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[Umagon 23]

Recently I did the crafter badge to completion to earn the workbench (and memorize the recipes). i kept almost all the enhancements i had to make for the SG to enjoy on their alts. it was INSANE how much I made and how much of the bases storage capacity this took up. 

 

On 9/22/2020 at 3:08 PM, Apparition said:

Unfortunately, it’s been said quite a few times that increasing storage capacity in SG bases is not possible.  Paragon Studios apparently tried and bases blew up spectacularly.

I know that this is the real reason but i have a serious question for the staff on this. if we can't have a storage box that stores things like a cute mmo container. could we not have a 'vendor' who 'buys' them from you (for zero) and then "sells" from that stock?  shouldn't it be easy to 'keep stock' of what number of each thing a vendor has sold to it? it seems like a normal mmo sort of activity.

 

the same with salvage. SG's should be able to heap up simple white salvage to the sky in a vendor-like situation. I know having 44 storage boxes each holding 100 items may break the base, but...vendors should work right?

[Heraclea]

10 minutes ago, Umagon 23 said:

Recently I did the crafter badge to completion to earn the workbench (and memorize the recipes). i kept almost all the enhancements i had to make for the SG to enjoy on their alts. it was INSANE how much I made and how much of the bases storage capacity this took up. 

 

I know that this is the real reason but i have a serious question for the staff on this. if we can't have a storage box that stores things like a cute mmo container. could we not have a 'vendor' who 'buys' them from you (for zero) and then "sells" from that stock?  shouldn't it be easy to 'keep stock' of what number of each thing a vendor has sold to it? it seems like a normal mmo sort of activity.

 

the same with salvage. SG's should be able to heap up simple white salvage to the sky in a vendor-like situation. I know having 44 storage boxes each holding 100 items may break the base, but...vendors should work right?

That would pose a similar issue.  My understanding is that base storage is a subset of base building, which is one reason why you sometimes get a brief mapserver error when you add or remove things. 

You do at least have the vault.  I only wish that the vault could store recipes as well as salvage.  I use the vault to store lowbie white and yellow salvage for each of my characters, since that stuff has abiding uses when the comparable level 45-50 stuff does not.