How difficult would be to make AH account wide?

[MsSmart]

All

 

    All of us, at one time have issues storing stuff in our personal super group base, when so many of our alts are in different super groups, and thus passing materials in large volumes would be highly impractical between alts in different SGs, and mailing dozens of materials one at a time by email is at best tedious and very boring.

 

    So it occurs to me, could it be possible for AH to be kept up at the account level rather than the alt level? This would ease the moving of stuff across characters incredibly more practical, and other alts could buy stuff for the intended to use alt as well.

 

    But not being a programmer, how difficult would be to do this?

 

    Any ideas or suggestions?

 

Sue

 

    

[Greycat]

Given the auction house slots for each character change depending on level (and, as I recall, badges,) probably not particularly easy or ideal.

[TheZag]

Would making more alts increase this global storage or are you thinking the 200ish AH slots a single character can earn account wide?

 

And all of us isnt me,  i dont have a personal supergroup and have never used base storage.

 

I bet the marketeers would love to have thousands of AH slots on a single character.  They do provide a service but AH slots keep them throttled back somewhat so there is room for others to compete.

 

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, MsSmart said:

All

 

    All of us, at one time have issues storing stuff in our personal super group base, when so many of our alts are in different super groups, and thus passing materials in large volumes would be highly impractical between alts in different SGs, and mailing dozens of materials one at a time by email is at best tedious and very boring.

 

    So it occurs to me, could it be possible for AH to be kept up at the account level rather than the alt level? This would ease the moving of stuff across characters incredibly more practical, and other alts could buy stuff for the intended to use alt as well.

 

    But not being a programmer, how difficult would be to do this?

 

    Any ideas or suggestions?

 

Sue

 

    

"All" is a really big assumption. I have multiple SG bases made and all but 2 have their own base storage. And pretty much none of the storage in those bases gets used. So no, I've never had the problem you are describing. My solution to your listed problem would be to instead allow stacks of up to 10 to be e-mailed.

[lemming]

1 hour ago, TheZag said:

Would making more alts increase this global storage or are you thinking the 200ish AH slots a single character can earn account wide?

 

And all of us isnt me,  i dont have a personal supergroup and have never used base storage.

 

I bet the marketeers would love to have thousands of AH slots on a single character.  They do provide a service but AH slots keep them throttled back somewhat so there is room for others to compete.

One of my characters is the designated Generic IO makers, got the badges, memorized the items, etc...

Holds a decent selection of common salvage in AH, so maybe 150 slots taken up?   It's annoying as heck to scroll thru.  Even though I've hit the 200 slot limit a few times, I'd hate it to be expanded.   The interface would need work first.  (At least able to sort)

 

Areas that need QoL adjustments in terms of UI: Email, AH, Respec, storage

Storage is a strange beast.  I'd like to see the number of storage units bumped up a little, and a bit more of a quantity.

 

Not holding my breath, since if it was easy, someone would have done it by now. 😛  (UI design is never easy, I'm a server dev...)

[plainguy]

I have 52 characters all in one SG. I use another account to add them. 
I have a Purple IO guy just to hold Purple IOs and other unique IOs. 
My 2nd account holds all the converters and things that are tradeable along with high end salvage along with the money. Why? Because several times I am so tired after the build that I forget to move stuff over and then the next time around I am relogging into a bunch of characters to find out where I put those Hero Merits.  So now I make sure I transfer stuff back and I keep things like Hero Merits on the first character on the first page. 

I am maxed out on storage. 

I put other unique IOs in mail. Mail is almost maxed.
I use a mouse capture macro to do repetitive actions, like transferring Merits one at a time via mail.  Just saves me from clicking repeatedly 40 times for example. 
Conversely when I am recovering them from the mail as well. 

When I get to 50 it literally take me 6 hours between looking at all the toons to make sure I am not missing anything before buying and sorting stuff out on how I am going to pay for this specific build.  It usually takes me 2 days of playing to finish a build.

I use the 2nd account to run out of the base to buy salvage that is missing while the character I am building up stays at the invention table. This way I can just see what I need for IOs or I can forget  and have to go back and forth.

I do not play the Auction house game, I shouldn't be required to.  City of Hero's, not City of Auction's. 
I don't care what the Devs do. But I would appreciate a way to stream line this whole character building process at the end.. 
I also have mids up with the build and toggle to that at times to see what I need. 

I said this before and I will say it again..
Anything you can send in the mail should be visible account wide.. 
There is no cheating with this, there is no unfair advantage, it does not make the game easier to level, There is no power creep.
It is just a simple quality of life issue..

Just anything in the direction of streamlining end game character building would be helpful.


 

[Galactron]

On 11/18/2022 at 1:34 AM, plainguy said:

I have 52 characters all in one SG. I use another account to add them.

 

There is a command to add your own alts.  /altinvite [character name] will add the named toon to the SG you are in.

[Six-Six]

Or

instead of instigating a sweeping change that will affect ALL of us, why not a small behavioural change that only affects you and leaves the rest of us as we are? Just sell what a specific alt doesn't need and buy what it does. You'll end up breaking even in terms of inf, but you'll have a much cleaner inventory.

Or

Instead of the AH, why not enable the email to send more than one attachment at a time?

[Zect]

I just transfer inf.

 

That's the point of inf, after all: a medium of exchange.

 

I don't store drops. I only store inf. I sell everything on every char, from salvage to recipes, and delete what's not worth selling. When a character accumulates a significant amount of inf, the money gets mailed to myself in email or one of my holding accounts.

 

When I need stuff, I claim money from email or one of the holding accounts mails cash over. Then I buy everything off the market. If there's a price spike, or I don't want to wait, I claim merits or converters from character items and make it myself.

 

That said, thank you for this suggestion. Reading about the myriad ways people wreck their inf/hr and make themselves poorer, by wasting hours and days moving minute amounts of goods, fiddling with storing items in the AH or SG bases, was a great laugh, especially the dude who used a macro to transfer merits 1 at a time. Most people understandably don't want to play City of Marketing. After all, they would rather play City of Low-Wage Amazon.com Warehouse Workers instead.

[lemming]

6 hours ago, Zect said:

I don't store drops. I only store inf. I sell everything on every char, from salvage to recipes, and delete what's not worth selling. When a character accumulates a significant amount of inf, the money gets mailed to myself in email or one of my holding accounts.

Honestly, this works well for most purposes.

 

I find it easier often to craft stuff, but that's because of the inventory I have built up to craft from.  There's a happy medium in there somewhere that is different for each player.

[Grouchybeast]

12 hours ago, Zect said:

I don't store drops. I only store inf. I sell everything on every char, from salvage to recipes, and delete what's not worth selling. When a character accumulates a significant amount of inf, the money gets mailed to myself in email or one of my holding accounts.

 

This is what I do, too.  I like to slot my builds as I level, so I usually slot attuned IOs anyway.  The only time I'm crafting drops is when I'm selling them, so I just use a crafting table in the RWZ, with the AH window open to buy salvage.

 

(I rebuilt my old base from live, including the salvage storage racks, so I now have a row of racks full of salvage neatly sorted by level that I literally never even open and are now just nostalgic decoration.  (My precious Alchemical Silver!)  I should probably do something about those.)

[srmalloy]

On 11/17/2022 at 8:35 AM, MsSmart said:

But not being a programmer, how difficult would be to do this?

Change the AH so that each account pointed to a single 200-slot-max auction list? I don't think it would be that difficult. Combining all the AH slots for each character in an account to be accessible by any character in the account, though, would be much more complex. Consider what happens when you delete a character; which AH slots disappear, and if you have more slots occupied than would be left when the deleted character's allocation is removed, which occupied slots would have their contents lost? All told, the programming effort would, in my opinion, outweigh the benefits.

[plainguy]

21 hours ago, srmalloy said:

Change the AH so that each account pointed to a single 200-slot-max auction list? I don't think it would be that difficult. Combining all the AH slots for each character in an account to be accessible by any character in the account, though, would be much more complex. Consider what happens when you delete a character; which AH slots disappear, and if you have more slots occupied than would be left when the deleted character's allocation is removed, which occupied slots would have their contents lost? All told, the programming effort would, in my opinion, outweigh the benefits.

What if they created a super computer in the SG base. Just like you can spend 10 million for a IO invention table.
This is similar.

Placing this Super Computer gives you access to all the inventory on your characters on YOUR account.. 

Maybe the Super Computer could have access to the SG base Storage as well with a tic box in the SG settings.. 

This way if you have a solo SG base you can access everything between the SG and account. 

 

Edited November 28, 2022 by plainguy

[TheZag]

I dont think all of your characters are loaded all the time.  Yes they exist on the server but they arent active when they arent logged in.  The server would take a dump if it had to load hundreds of characters for people to fiddle with account wide inventory.  Remember the email problems on excel a few months ago?  Take that and multiply it by everyones alts on the server.

 

[srmalloy]

12 hours ago, plainguy said:

What if they created a super computer in the SG base. Just like you can spend 10 million for a IO invention table.
This is similar.

This has been explained before as why you don't have access to the AH in your base or inside missions. To have the AH available, the entire AH database has to be loaded. In regular zones, it's loaded once, and everyone in the zone references the same database. In your base, every base would have to have its own copy of the AH database; it would require a complete rewrite of the way the AH system worked with the rest of the game to make it possible to have AH access inside bases without turning an entire server into a slideshow.

[plainguy]

On 11/29/2022 at 6:43 AM, srmalloy said:

This has been explained before as why you don't have access to the AH in your base or inside missions. To have the AH available, the entire AH database has to be loaded. In regular zones, it's loaded once, and everyone in the zone references the same database. In your base, every base would have to have its own copy of the AH database; it would require a complete rewrite of the way the AH system worked with the rest of the game to make it possible to have AH access inside bases without turning an entire server into a slideshow.

No

Not Access to AH.. 

Access to other characters inventory within your own account or those allowing access within the supergroup. 

[plainguy]

On 11/28/2022 at 8:48 PM, TheZag said:

I dont think all of your characters are loaded all the time.  Yes they exist on the server but they arent active when they arent logged in.  The server would take a dump if it had to load hundreds of characters for people to fiddle with account wide inventory.  Remember the email problems on excel a few months ago?  Take that and multiply it by everyones alts on the server.

 

I have to disagree in the sense that the AH exist and it much more massive in keeping record of all the transactions across all the servers. 

Each IO, salvage is a unique identifier. Your just adding up the total IDs on an account. 
Just like they can see how many characters are created around Primary and Secondary builds I am sure they have tools to review other items like Influence, Infamy and Merits. 

 

[lemming]

16 hours ago, plainguy said:

I have to disagree in the sense that the AH exist and it much more massive in keeping record of all the transactions across all the servers. 

Each IO, salvage is a unique identifier. Your just adding up the total IDs on an account. 
Just like they can see how many characters are created around Primary and Secondary builds I am sure they have tools to review other items like Influence, Infamy and Merits.

Have you seen how often they've updated those statistics?

 

You're not accounting for the coding weirdness that is CoX.   There are a lot of items out there that are keyed off the character name, but not as much on account.  Makes stuff more messy and probably has lovecraftian effects on the dev's sanity when they have to deal with it.

[plainguy]

On 12/4/2022 at 12:53 PM, lemming said:

Have you seen how often they've updated those statistics?

 

You're not accounting for the coding weirdness that is CoX.   There are a lot of items out there that are keyed off the character name, but not as much on account.  Makes stuff more messy and probably has lovecraftian effects on the dev's sanity when they have to deal with it.

Not going to arm chair the coding.

The game works.. I personally never had any crazy issue I can account for playing the game. 
It worked back then with thousands of players.
It works now..
They created new power sets.
They modified power within Masterminds which I keep hearing is difficult to work with because the powers and pets are baked in. But suffice to say they made changes.
They added salvage to the game. 
They added NPC to collect this salvage.
They created new story arches. Yes I recall seeing the post on how they were testing and things they learned along the way. The crazy shaped legs on NPC and such.. 

I just think it is reaching when people speaking on behalf of other people, which includes the devs. Pretty much strawman. 

 

[golstat2003]

 Anything is possible within reason. If the devs see that something is too difficult or needs an engine re-write they usually won't do it.

 

So all though it can be possible level of coding difficulty is a factor.

 

A few of the devs explained this in a recent thread. But only they would know that difficulty if and when they look into.

 

With that said anything that makes account management easier would be a plus.

[lemming]

1 hour ago, plainguy said:

I just think it is reaching when people speaking on behalf of other people, which includes the devs. Pretty much strawman.

There was a thread about areas that are annoying for the devs to code, from the devs.  I'm not just making up stuff.

[biostem]

I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all solution, here.  If implemented, it would likely impose a single character limit across all your characters, thereby costing you many AH slots.  I think a better option would be to utilize the email system, just with a cleaner interface, to allow you to store items for your own use...

[UltraAlt]

On 11/17/2022 at 11:35 AM, MsSmart said:

Any ideas or suggestions?

 

Think about what you are asking for from a marketing point of view?

 

Where's @Yomo Kimyata post on this!?

 

You could make a mule that moves from sg to sg.

Joins one sg, loads up with stuff, quits the sg, gets invited to another sg, move to that sg, and dump off the goods.

 

 

Edited December 7, 2022 by UltraAlt

[Yomo Kimyata]

10 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

 

 

Where's @Yomo Kimyata post on this!?

 

 

Oh, you don't want to see that, because it's cranky.  Maybe I'll monologue another time.

 

But, as a way to demonstrate we do already have the tools available to clean up our own playpens, here's this guide again.  I know, I know, you (generic you, not anyone in particular) don't want to do this.  Great, but it does work, and you are certainly allowed to opt out of using this method or others that will clean up your inventory.

 

 

[Bionic_Flea]

Most of my alts are all in one SG.  But occasionally someone comes up with a theme that interests me and I join the SG to be in on the fun and level up.  I also had 2 SGs when live, one blue one red.

 

On those rare occasions when the need to grab stuff from another SG happened to me, I either used e-mail or grabbed an alt from a second account to pull the shopping list out of storage and then drop them on the character from the other SG.