Prismatic Aether and locked costume items

[Luminara]

14 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

you want to be playing wow, not city of heroes. They are set up exactly like you want. the devs should change the name to city of heroes HM. COH has NEVER been a game about gatekeeping the lesser players to the cheap seats. This is all about changing to City of Hardcore.

 

An optional currency used to purchase purely cosmetic NPC costumes was added as a payoff for playing Hard Mode content, and you equate that with gatekeeping and pushing less skilled players away?
 

You tried to microwave your head to fry the government tracking chip, didn't you.

[ivanhedgehog]

22 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

An optional currency used to purchase purely cosmetic NPC costumes was added as a payoff for playing Hard Mode content, and you equate that with gatekeeping and pushing less skilled players away?
 

You tried to microwave your head to fry the government tracking chip, didn't you.

people have been requesting this for years. Shifting 8 BILLION inf with every TF complete is not "cosmetic". If the economy is so damn important to nerf other playstyles, why does this get a pass? Oh, its the devs preferred play style. got it.

[Grouchybeast]

3 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

COH has NEVER been a game about gatekeeping the lesser players to the cheap seats.

 

I think I must have been playing a different live server version of City of Heroes.  In the one I played, the Gladiator's Armour PVP IO was changing hands off-market for over the inf cap, and some of the individual purple IOs were touching a billion inf.  A single build could be multiples of the inf cap.  Describing Prisms, something that's only been in the game for 10 days and is already dropping steeply in price, as 'gatekeeping the lesser players to the cheap seats' is absolutely ridiculous.

Edited September 3, 2022 by Grouchybeast

[Veracor]

I am just chiming in to say that I appreciate the impact that the new Prismatics have had on the economy.  For a player putting in the time and effort to run hardmode content, it's nice to finally have the option to sell the rewards to gain an amount of influence that is comparable to AFK farming.  This equivalency won't last without the constant addition of new things to buy with the Prismatics, but as it stands now it is in a balanced and enjoyable place.

 

Making the Prismatics a purely vanity thing (buy the few things you want to use / buy all the things for no reason) is a good call in my opinion, because it leans more toward player demand rather than being a badge checklist, and allows it to also be used for future content rewards.  I'm sure aspiring economists (and future content designers) are watching and recording the influx of a new item/currency appearing on the market with great interest.  Me, I'm personally interested in how long the price equivalency lasts for.

 

1 hour ago, ivanhedgehog said:

people have been requesting this for years. Shifting 8 BILLION inf with every TF complete is not "cosmetic". If the economy is so damn important to nerf other playstyles, why does this get a pass? Oh, its the devs preferred play style. got it.

 

I don't know where you're getting your numbers from but this is very incorrect.  With the time it takes for a team to both form up and run a 4-star ITF/ASF, accounting for the extra Reward Merits, a typical player is going to average around 150-250m influence per hour if they choose to sell the Prismatics.  This is on par with the standard AFK farming setups, with a player on a speedrun potentially making more than 250m/hr.

 

Prismatics were only expensive on the first day because of a select few people who had stockpiled influence to purposely make crazy bids.  They had their own reasons for this and they can speak to it if they so wish.

[lemming]

2 hours ago, Shadeknight said:

No longer a thing on Everlasting, not sure about other shards.

The concern over market price is entirely in the player's hands, and as far as the Best Shard goes? It's now no longer AS ludicrous as it was.

Auction House works cross shard

Just checked and numbers changed barely between Reunion, Everlasting, and Excelsior.  23-24m, 234-240 for sale, and ~6900 bidding

Edited September 3, 2022 by lemming
gah, forgot info

[ivanhedgehog]

52 minutes ago, Grouchybeast said:

 

I think I must have been playing a different liver servers version of City of Heroes.  In the one I played, the Gladiator's Armour PVP IO was changing hands off-market for over the inf cap, and some of the individual purple IOs were touching a billion inf.  A single build could be multiples of the inf cap.  Describing Prisms, something that's only been in the game for 10 days and is already dropping steeply in price, as 'gatekeeping the lesser players to the cheap seats' is absolutely ridiculous.

240 million as becoming more affordable? for 1 characters costume? how many billions have the hm players set aside so far? this isnt an inf drain.

[ivanhedgehog]

22 minutes ago, Veracor said:

I am just chiming in to say that I appreciate the impact that the new Prismatics have had on the economy.  For a player putting in the time and effort to run hardmode content, it's nice to finally have the option to sell the rewards to gain an amount of influence that is comparable to AFK farming.  This equivalency won't last without the constant addition of new things to buy with the Prismatics, but as it stands now it is in a balanced and enjoyable place.

 

Making the Prismatics a purely vanity thing (buy the few things you want to use / buy all the things for no reason) is a good call in my opinion, because it leans more toward player demand rather than being a badge checklist, and allows it to also be used for future content rewards.  I'm sure aspiring economists (and future content designers) are watching and recording the influx of a new item/currency appearing on the market with great interest.  Me, I'm personally interested in how long the price equivalency lasts for.

 

 

I don't know where you're getting your numbers from but this is very incorrect.  With the time it takes for a team to both form up and run a 4-star ITF/ASF, accounting for the extra Reward Merits, a typical player is going to average around 150-250m influence per hour if they choose to sell the Prismatics.  This is on par with the standard AFK farming setups, with a player on a speedrun potentially making more than 250m/hr.

 

Prismatics were only expensive on the first day because of a select few people who had stockpiled influence to purposely make crazy bids.  They had their own reasons for this and they can speak to it if they so wish.

your math is a hair off. 1 prismatic = 24 million 30 prismatic = 720 million. for a hour and a half effort. I dont know where you farm, but no farmer is getting more than a tiny fraction of that. add in all the other rewards they get, they are pushing a billion per run, with no rng. 8 players getting that every hour and a half to 2 hours. please name the server where prismatics go for 3 or 4 million each.

[Veracor]

47 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

your math is a hair off. 1 prismatic = 24 million 30 prismatic = 720 million. for a hour and a half effort. I dont know where you farm, but no farmer is getting more than a tiny fraction of that. add in all the other rewards they get, they are pushing a billion per run, with no rng. 8 players getting that every hour and a half to 2 hours. please name the server where prismatics go for 3 or 4 million each.

 

Well first off, you only get 20 Prismatics for a 4-star run, and Homecoming's market has always been cross-shard.

 

Secondly, the times for a 4-star run range between 90 minutes (organized team geared for it) to 240 minutes (pugs trying it the first time), and this isn't accounting for the time it takes to get the team together.  A typical runner is going to get 20 Prismatics for 120-180 minutes of effort.  This falls into the 150-250m/hr range I gave, even if the Reward Merits are converted and sold.

 

Thirdly, you are conflating the influence gain of a single AE farmer to the profit that 8 players are making from a 4-star run.  This is giving you numbers that are 8 times higher than they should be on top of Prismatics only being 20 per player.  You should be comparing 8 players choosing to AE farm to 8 players' profit from the task force, or a single AE farmer to what a single player makes from the task force.

Edited September 3, 2022 by Veracor

[Frostbiter]

5 hours ago, El D said:

 

If they don't spur you to do Hard Mode content - or spend the Influence on them - then that means you can readily live without them. Which is precisely the other half of what the PAP/Hologram Costumes are designed to serve as, given that they're basically just 'extremely visible bonus badges.' There are no numerical advantages, no 'If I don't get these, my character isn't as good as they could be' like with the Incarnate system. The PAP stuff isn't the innate goal of the Hard Mode content like those powers are for iTrials, they're just an extra goodie bag folks can earn. Some players certainly will run HM content solely because they want the PAP/costumes, but that's a personal choice at that point - their own determination of 'Do I want this purely optional extra enough for it to become my primary motivation.'

 

Also, as @arcane and others have said, you can still buy them for Influence and skip Hard Mode altogether. Yes, they're expensive, but if they were cheap that'd just undermining what status they had as 'extra investment bonus' from the HM content to begin with. 'You pay more for the convenience' has been Rule #1 in the Auction House from the get-go (well, Rule #2. Rule #1 is 'Always double-check for extra zeros when making a purchase').

 

I've already said they don't interest me and that I don't intend to chase after this new shiny.

[Frostbiter]

7 hours ago, arcane said:

Continuing to ignore their availability on the market is just dishonest at this point in the thread.

 

Not commenting about something is not the same as ignoring it and it doesn't make me dishonest. That's a poor and antagonistic attitude to take. Since you brought INF up though, I'm not sitting on billions and billions of it. It's a means to an end and not a goal of mine. I spend exactly zero minutes in the AE or anywhere else chasing it. I still manage to make builds that perform as good or better than anything else I see out there. I play this game the way I play it and that's entirely solo, other than when I volunteer to help someone finish a task when it comes up in the Help channel. I'm fine with how I play and also fine not chasing after something I don't need just because it is there.

[Frostbiter]

2 minutes ago, Krimson said:

Remember, the REAL benefit of farming is not the fastest gains. The benefit is being able to get these gains without having to rely on anyone. I'm not locked in for 2-4 hours. I can go at any pace I want, and I never die. Seriously no comparison. 

 

It's not the slowest method by a far margin though. I just naturally level my characters and run content I want to run with them. I still manage to accumulate inf but truth be told if I scraped up all the INF I had I'd be sitting on about 35 million right now. I don't hold it and it's never been any earth-shaking amount because I've never needed any kind of earth-shaking amount. There are other avenues to getting what you want just by earning merits, drops, and inf from doing whatever content you want. 

 

PS Giant Monster Hunting Jinx! 😛

[ivanhedgehog]

1 hour ago, Veracor said:

 

Well first off, you only get 20 Prismatics for a 4-star run, and Homecoming's market has always been cross-shard.

 

Secondly, the times for a 4-star run range between 90 minutes (organized team geared for it) to 240 minutes (pugs trying it the first time), and this isn't accounting for the time it takes to get the team together.  A typical runner is going to get 20 Prismatics for 120-180 minutes of effort.  This falls into the 150-250m/hr range I gave, even if the Reward Merits are converted and sold.

 

Thirdly, you are conflating the influence gain of a single AE farmer to the profit that 8 players are making from a 4-star run.  This is giving you numbers that are 8 times higher than they should be on top of Prismatics only being 20 per player.  You should be comparing 8 players choosing to AE farm to 8 players' profit from the task force, or a single AE farmer to what a single player makes from the task force.

Dr.Aeon TF is 30. at 24 million(just checked everlasting. they go for 24.1 million each) each member of the team gets 30. Im not conflating anything. 30 prismatics times 24 million is 720 million. at least in the math I learned. EVERY runner that does the complete TF will get 30. I dont know how you farm 720 million in less than 2 hours, I have never managed anything even remotely close to that. and that is every one that completes it, not one outlier farmer. With the multiple "bugs" that they have found to reduce farming, its even less likely to happen. 1 player farming vs 1 player on an ATF getting 720 million + any other inf/recipe/merit drops they get. Not in the same ballpark.

Edited September 3, 2022 by ivanhedgehog

[Luminara]

1 hour ago, ivanhedgehog said:

this isnt an inf drain.

 

10% market fees say what?

 

720,000,000 * 0.9 = 648,000,000

Oh, look, a wild 72,000,000 inf* sink just appeared!  Quick, someone take a picture!

 

And the inf* being spent for those stacks of prismatics, that's not being created out of thin air either.  That's pre-existing inf* that people have had sitting in storage, tucked away in bids on non-existent items in the market.  The inf* they're throwing at the AH now is just changing hands.  The people with less inf* get more, inflation has a lower chance of taking hold since so much inf* is being destroyed, win-win for everyone.

 

Or are you really going to try to argue that people are emergency farming billions of inf* in a few hours to buy stacks of prismatics?  I hope not, because no-one's going to buy that bullshit, even if they're willing to pay early adopter prices for prismatics, especially after you pointed out that they can't farm that much, that quickly.

 

Kind of shot yourself in the foot there, didn't you.

[Veracor]

16 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

Dr.Aeon TF is 30.

 

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/37186-patch-notes-for-august-23rd-2022-issue-27-page-4/

 

21 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

30 prismatics times 24 million is 720 million.

 

20 times 24 million is 480 million, then divided by anywhere between 2.0 to 3.0 for the time per hour.  When you make a claim of 8 billion for every task force completion, yeah no.

 

31 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

I dont know how you farm 720 million in less than 2 hours, I have never managed anything even remotely close to that. and that is every one that completes it, not one outlier farmer.

 

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/37390-page-4-fire-farming-microguide-maps-builds/ as an example.  This applies to every player that chooses to AE farm instead of running the task force, which is why you need to compare 1:1 to 8:8.

 

I'm going to go run content, enjoy the thread folks.

[golstat2003]

10 hours ago, Shadeknight said:

No longer a thing on Everlasting, not sure about other shards.

The concern over market price is entirely in the player's hands, and as far as the Best Shard goes? It's now no longer AS ludicrous as it was.
 

 

 

The market is cross-shard.

[Loc]

18 hours ago, Veracor said:

 

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/37186-patch-notes-for-august-23rd-2022-issue-27-page-4/

 

20 times 24 million is 480 million, then divided by anywhere between 2.0 to 3.0 for the time per hour.  When you make a claim of 8 billion for every task force completion, yeah no.

 

 

It's 30. I run a 4star ASF at least once a day. Let me quote you from the post  you linked:

 

Quote

Dr. Aeon Strike Force

Advanced Difficulty

• There is now an added 10 Prismatic Aether Particle reward with its own 18-hour cooldown for defeating the full Hero 1+Vanguard leader master bonus battle in the 4-Star difficulty mode.

 

That makes 30 in total if you add the reward of completion into the equation.

 

I'm also curious why every reward in the game has to be easily accessible to everyone in the game. No other multiplayer game works like that; not even literal pay to win games. What's wrong with having some rewards that are easier to get for people who wanna put in the effort? Besides, not having these rewards has been tried. Remember oldskool LRSF? The only time I see anyone run that is for the reward of the badge. Relentless ASF stopped being ran for anything other than the combat dummy a month or so after its release and even those runs were rare.

 

The reality is that this new salvage is getting everyone to play the HM content more because they have an incentive to do so. There are exceptions to this but that's a minority. And maybe after everyone got their baby mode it'll die off too. I'm actually in the other camp and want these to be account-bound and not given out so easily but I understand that's going really far the other way and appreciate the balancing the devs did.

 

I also think the criticism in this topic has been somewhat dishonest in how gated these prisms are to the general player base. Yes, A 4-star hardmode will only be completed by solid teams and casual pugteams are more than likely to fail or spend 3h on it.  But a 1 or a 2 star still give okay rewards and are a lot more accessible.

 

Also I haven't seen the mention of trial rewards once; 1-3 salvage per character per day for each trial. You also have the reward for weeklies; 1-2 salvage per character per day for each weekly. Both of these are significantly better than the 2% drop chance for every mission completion and can be done by virtually every level 50 player. Obviously the rewards aren't as good as HM but see my previous paragraphs or the posts of many people who already responded before me for that.

Edited September 4, 2022 by Loc

[Veracor]

57 minutes ago, Loc said:

It's 30. I run a 4star ASF at least once a day. Let me quote you from the post  you linked:

 

Oh wow, all the 4-star ASFs I've joined since the patch have skipped the Vanguard fight because we all had the MDC already.  That would bring the profit, for an average player, to a bit higher than AE farming for doing 4-star ASF+Vanguard fight.

 

Thanks for pointing this out, even with Ctrl+F on the patch notes I glossed over it.  Guess I'll ask next time everyone's on if we want to do ASF instead of ITF!  (But chances are we'll end up running ITF anyways because it's new)

[ivanhedgehog]

1 hour ago, Loc said:

 

It's 30. I run a 4star ASF at least once a day. Let me quote you from the post  you linked:

 

 

That makes 30 in total if you add the reward of completion into the equation.

 

I'm also curious why every reward in the game has to be easily accessible to everyone in the game. No other multiplayer game works like that; not even literal pay to win games. What's wrong with having some rewards that are easier to get for people who wanna put in the effort? Besides, not having these rewards has been tried. Remember oldskool LRSF? The only time I see anyone run that is for the reward of the badge. Relentless ASF stopped being ran for anything other than the combat dummy a month or so after its release and even those runs were rare.

 

The reality is that this new salvage is getting everyone to play the HM content more because they have an incentive to do so. There are exceptions to this but that's a minority. And maybe after everyone got their baby mode it'll die off too. I'm actually in the other camp and want these to be account-bound and not given out so easily but I understand that's going really far the other way and appreciate the balancing the devs did.

 

I also think the criticism in this topic has been somewhat dishonest in how gated these prisms are to the general player base. Yes, A 4-star hardmode will only be completed by solid teams and casual pugteams are more than likely to fail or spend 3h on it.  But a 1 or a 2 star still give okay rewards and are a lot more accessible.

 

Also I haven't seen the mention of trial rewards once; 1-3 salvage per character per day for each trial. You also have the reward for weeklies; 1-2 salvage per character per day for each weekly. Both of these are significantly better than the 2% drop chance for every mission completion and can be done by virtually every player. If you don't really play level 50ies or play solo the weekly still got you covered. Obviously the rewards aren't as good as HM but see my previous paragraphs or the posts of many people who already responded before me for that.

I did moonfire TF wst last night and got no prismatics. bug? who knows?

[Loc]

48 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

I did moonfire TF wst last night and got no prismatics. bug? who knows?

 

I made a little mistake in my post. You have to be 50+ for the weeklies sorry. It's tied to the notice of the well reward

[Burk]

3 hours ago, Loc said:

It's 30. I run a 4star ASF at least once a day. Let me quote you from the post  you linked:

 

That makes 30 in total if you add the reward of completion into the equation.

 

To be fair, 4-star + special fight is different from 4-star by itself. Not every team that can do 4-star can do the special fight.

[ivanhedgehog]

3 hours ago, Loc said:

 

I made a little mistake in my post. You have to be 50+ for the weeklies sorry. It's tied to the notice of the well reward

well then its a good thing that you dont use costumes till 50. That is a glaring mistake. we have to run on 50's to get the good reward? Looks like running tfs is not a good way to level anymore.

[lemming]

4 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

well then its a good thing that you dont use costumes till 50. That is a glaring mistake. we have to run on 50's to get the good reward? Looks like running tfs is not a good way to level anymore.

It's great way to level, just not for getting Prismatics.  (Note, several people have suggested that Aethers should be given to non-50s as well)

[ivanhedgehog]

4 hours ago, Krimson said:

Just wait for the new car smell to wear off and regular runs will be back. 

The wst wasnt a lvl 50 tf. synapse and moonfire, neither are ever gonna be hm. but you have to be level 50 to get the reward that they said anyone could get? by running the wst. evidently not.

[ivanhedgehog]

19 minutes ago, lemming said:

It's great way to level, just not for getting Prismatics.  (Note, several people have suggested that Aethers should be given to non-50s as well)

Its looking like we should pl to 50 and go back and do the tfs later. Back to AE to level.

[lemming]

41 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

Its looking like we should pl to 50 and go back and do the tfs later. Back to AE to level.

Why? You don't get Aethers via AE runs either.   I assume the reasoning is that under 50s don't get Notice of the Wells either.  You still get a huge XP bonus and maybe they'll add the Aethers to the reward.