Where's my Super Pack: Lords of Winter Sale?

[UltraAlt]

33 minutes ago, lemming said:

The value of the contents do seem to be about 25m, though that's if you can buy enough to account for the RNG screwing with you.    And yes, having them drop to 10m or 15m means those with plenty of spare inf could profit even more.  The devs are trying to keep things a bit more stable though sometimes it seems like a precariously balanced pile of rocks.

 

There were people buying hundreds of winter packs last year at the discount price.

I think that is why they aren't on sale any more.

 

Who would have done such a thing?!

 

[Shizuoka]

On 12/25/2022 at 11:00 PM, Snarky said:

This is a lot of smoke and mirrors and infospeak from someone with....1 post...

 

It is also desperately trying to obfuscate the fact that it is a giant exploit for enriching those already rich.

So when something doesn't fit your preconceived notion you instead just try to discredit the person that brings it to your attention. 

Your contention is that no discount for winter packs is good. (That's your opinion, I accept that.)

Your sub-point that it only made the rich richer, and that all the rich are bad... is what I'm contesting. Along with your sub-point that you are good because you profit off of using converters instead to increase the market supply of uncommon and rare IOs instead of winter IOs. 

The funniest thing to me is I reduced the numbers in my example to make them easier to grasp. The real numbers... In the last event I hosted in September I gave away 6b in prizes to the participants without any assistance from the GMs. 

But keep on only seeing the world through the most narrow of lenses and refuse to learn from other viewpoints. (And this is why I don't post on these forums haha)

[Snarky]

6 hours ago, Shizuoka said:

Your sub-point that it only made the rich richer, and that all the rich are bad... is what I'm contesting. 

Maybe you do not try to obfuscate.  Maybe you are even more long winded than me.

 

Out of your post this is the only sentence that pertains to the subject.

 

I never said the rich are bad.  I am saying that feeding money to a small minority of the playerbase further destabilizes the market and economy.  So, that is bad.  m'kay?

[lemming]

To support what Snarky points out.

A small funds player probably buys a few packs and uses them.  Maybe they sell some for a profit, but it's a minor blip.

 

At 10m a pop, you could conceivably double your inf.    The more funds you have liquid going into the sale, the more profit you're making and concentrating the wealth.

 

I assume that when you put a bid in for 25m on them during the year, the first ones sold are those put in by players since the game is putting them up for 25m.

 

At this point it's a interesting thought experiment.

[Greycat]

Eh. Personally I think there should be one pack granted per account - not character, account - at the start of the event as a "Hey, look, these exist, and now you can see inside!" thing, and drop as an *extremely* rare drop doing winter stuff.

 

But, eh. Don't honestly care one way or another.

[Snarky]

13 minutes ago, Greycat said:

Eh. Personally I think there should be one pack granted per account - not character, account - at the start of the event as a "Hey, look, these exist, and now you can see inside!" thing, and drop as an *extremely* rare drop doing winter stuff.

 

But, eh. Don't honestly care one way or another.

I like this concept.  And i want the sale to be available to people who do not play much or go cash hunting much.  So I thought “How about being able to buy 6 per account.   
 

Then it struck me that the farmers will just sit and make new accounts until the wee hours of the morning

[Monty Haull]

On 12/26/2022 at 11:32 AM, Snarky said:

I found the key to making 2 billion infinite.  (2 billion is liquid....this part costs)  Set up a base with hundreds and hundreds of I/os.  Winter, ATO, Heals, Resists, Defenses, End Mods, ranged, mele, a bank for each type.  sometimes two banks.  Then when you make an alt pull from there.  Use the cash to buy whatever did not have in base.  If alt works great!  If it doesnt....shatter and store.

 

Have you been "Snarking" into my base(s)?

[Nyghtmaire]

Serious question after reading this thread (as well as the various market related threads here in General): it seems that the view is that there is no good time to buy a Winter Pack without the sale. Is this accurate? I don’t see the costs of various Winter IOs 25m+ yet.
 

Is the consensus that Winter Packs are not useful for marketeering at this time at the current price? Rather, only valuable to the individual player for an IO and some assorted ephemera AND a more general antagonism to marketing.

[Snarky]

4 minutes ago, Nyghtmaire said:

Serious question after reading this thread (as well as the various market related threads here in General): it seems that the view is that there is no good time to buy a Winter Pack without the sale. Is this accurate? I don’t see the costs of various Winter IOs 25m+ yet.
 

Is the consensus that Winter Packs are not useful for marketeering at this time at the current price? Rather, only valuable to the individual player for an IO and some assorted ephemera AND a more general antagonism to marketing.

winters sell for 17+ on market.  a winter pack (when bought in bulk) has slighty more than 1 winter per pack on average.  then there is a bumch of extra stuff which is nice to have and/or sell.  some of which is accessible through email in new hard mode content.  serious good cheats.

[Yomo Kimyata]

3 hours ago, Nyghtmaire said:

Serious question after reading this thread (as well as the various market related threads here in General): it seems that the view is that there is no good time to buy a Winter Pack without the sale. Is this accurate? I don’t see the costs of various Winter IOs 25m+ yet.
 

Is the consensus that Winter Packs are not useful for marketeering at this time at the current price? Rather, only valuable to the individual player for an IO and some assorted ephemera AND a more general antagonism to marketing.

 

I ran two test cases last year around this time and gave some details in this thread here:  

 

 

I think the upshot is that you should expect to get 1.2 ATO/WO per pack, and that for the most part selling those generally convers the cost of the pack and everything else in the pack is profit, but there's not a ton of profit there.  Interestingly enough, when Winter Packs were on sale (either at 10mm or 15mm), the prices of the WOs in the aftermarket tended to move down to about 60-80% of the cost of the pack.  

 

My completely unproven theory is that if they raised the price of Hero packs to 25mm, the prices of ATOs would move into the 20mm range, which I frankly think is a pretty good place for them.

[Snarky]

5 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

I ran two test cases last year around this time and gave some details in this thread here:  

 

 

I think the upshot is that you should expect to get 1.2 ATO/WO per pack, and that for the most part selling those generally convers the cost of the pack and everything else in the pack is profit, but there's not a ton of profit there.  Interestingly enough, when Winter Packs were on sale (either at 10mm or 15mm), the prices of the WOs in the aftermarket tended to move down to about 60-80% of the cost of the pack.  

 

My completely unproven theory is that if they raised the price of Hero packs to 25mm, the prices of ATOs would move into the 20mm range, which I frankly think is a pretty good place for them.

Please do not advocate raising the Hero pack prices.  As has been covered in this thread extensively there are quite a few players who have no interest in spending days or weeks making influence.  To them the current price of Winters and even Hero packs are a big investment.  I personally believe everyone should be able to afford good I/O builds in this game if they want them.  I find most of the market borderline griefing. 

[Ukase]

9 hours ago, Nyghtmaire said:

Serious question after reading this thread (as well as the various market related threads here in General): it seems that the view is that there is no good time to buy a Winter Pack without the sale. Is this accurate? I don’t see the costs of various Winter IOs 25m+ yet.
 

Is the consensus that Winter Packs are not useful for marketeering at this time at the current price? Rather, only valuable to the individual player for an IO and some assorted ephemera AND a more general antagonism to marketing.

Just the thoughts of someone who's made stockpiles of influence, most of it being through the sale of Winter-Os and PvP IOs: 

Buying one winter pack isn't likely a path to big stacks of inf. And that statement requires elaboration. 

First - last year, a LOT of packs were bought when they were on sale. Probably over 100K of them. I know I still have 1500 of them, plus or minus a few hundred that have yet to be opened. There's a ton of those Winter-Os in various peoples character emails. Large supply tends to suppress the price due to competition. 

Second - the rng is a fickle mistress. You might spend your last 25m on a winter pack and get crap. You can see in some of the older marketing forum posts where you get items you can't really monetize - like a tailor token or a snow beast. The snow beast is fine for lower level stuff, but it's not sturdy and will die fairly quickly at higher levels. You can't trade it or sell it, so it won't help you. So, if you are going to try and make profit - you need to be able to afford at least 10, I'd say. Or more, just to be safe. 

Even so, sales will be slow. A lot of those bids are genuinely bottom feeding bids. Like 1M for a superior avalanche. Every now and then, someone posts one for sale for like 1 inf and gets suckered into taking 1M instead of the 30M they were secretly hoping for. The good news is, if you're level 50, inf is easy to make. But it kind of sucks to get tailor tokens in the packs. 

The only way I've been able to make over 25M on one pack is when I get two of the winter-Os in a pack. But, since the average is 1.3 enhancements per pack, there is profit to be made, if you buy enough packs. 

[UltraAlt]

9 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

My completely unproven theory is that if they raised the price of Hero packs to 25mm, the prices of ATOs would move into the 20mm range, which I frankly think is a pretty good place for them.

 

So you think 100 merits are worth 25 million?

[lemming]

3 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

 

So you think 100 merits are worth 25 million?

100 merits made into converters winds up as a value about 19.5m (based on 65k per) though from my own mass openings, you get 1.2 WO, so it's more like 120 merits worth and 23.4m worth of WO.   And quite a lot of extra stuff (including merits)

 

So maybe, over a large sample size.

 

I think one of the reasons more packs aren't used is because it's a pain to get them unpacked and sorted.  Then again, I suspect they were designed as rare items instead of the mass amounts that get bought at a time.

[Snarky]

After a few erm contentious pages of explaining why I am anti “sale” (i will not re explain it, read it if you want)

 

Hold onto your heads….

 

I am pro reducing the price on Winter packs to 10-15 million PERMANENTLY and likewise reducing Hero/Villain packs to 5-7 PERMANENTLY 

[Monty Haull]

15 hours ago, Snarky said:

After a few erm contentious pages of explaining why I am anti “sale” (i will not re explain it, read it if you want)

 

Hold onto your heads….

 

I am pro reducing the price on Winter packs to 10-15 million PERMANENTLY and likewise reducing Hero/Villain packs to 5-7 PERMANENTLY 

I tend to agree that the reduction of WIO and ATO would help.  This would have a larger impact on other items on the market.  I would think that most items values would decrease as well.

 

I really would like to know what the stats are with player finances.  How much inf does the average account have?  

 

In my ventures as Monty I get the sense that the average player is pretty broke.  That could be due to several factors like alt-itus or not knowing all the game mechanics.  

[Nyghtmaire]

On 12/30/2022 at 5:37 AM, Snarky said:

I personally believe everyone should be able to afford good I/O builds in this game if they want them.  I find most of the market borderline griefing. 

No argument with the first sentence. As to the second, I still remember the crazy AH on live. Here is soooooo much better that every character gets an IO build of some sort. It might not be a purpled out warshade of a build, but it’s very doable with a day of playing at 50 to get something far more efficient and powerful than was available on Live. 

[Glacier Peak]

What I don't understand is that the population of Homecoming across all servers have declined since the three and a half year high back in 2019, yet the prices of everything are pretty well the same. Back in 2019, converters ran for about 90,000 on high, 80,000 on low. It's basically the same right now. 

[Troo]

On 12/25/2022 at 10:38 AM, nihilii said:

It breaks the risk/reward formula in a way almost unlike anything else in game.

 

It really is/was this simple.

 

 

When it became abused at a significant enough scale, it was ended.

I'm surprised to see no mention of any issues that arose from opening many packs at a pace that had a system impact.

[UltraAlt]

On 12/30/2022 at 1:36 PM, lemming said:

100 merits made into converters winds up as a value about 19.5m (based on 65k per) though from my own mass openings, you get 1.2 WO, so it's more like 120 merits worth and 23.4m worth of WO.   And quite a lot of extra stuff (including merits)

 

What is a WO? I don't know what that term means.

 

On 12/30/2022 at 1:36 PM, lemming said:

I think one of the reasons more packs aren't used is because it's a pain to get them unpacked and sorted.

 

Uh. I can't get them out of the game to manually sort them.

 

My email must be set up wrong or I hacked it or something, because it sorts the opened pack items for me.

(PRO-TIP : Email>Character times> click on the little bar across the top "subject". It lists the items in alphabetical order. Click on it again, and it lists them in reverse alphabetical order)

 

On 12/30/2022 at 1:36 PM, lemming said:

Then again, I suspect they were designed as rare items instead of the mass amounts that get bought at a time.

 

They were being sold for real world dollars before the sunset.

"Super Packs were sold in quantities of 1, 12 or 24 uses each on the Paragon Market." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Heroes

If you could buy them with real world dollars in lots of 24, it wasn't designed to be rare ... it was designed to be a money grab.

The same can be said about influence back then. NCSoft didn't sell influence in the Pargaon Market place as far as I know, but you couldn't go more than 15-60 seconds in most zones without some goldfarmer spamming that they would sell you X milion influence for Y dollars. And you better believe they were making the influence they were selling by farming in the AE.

 

[Snarky]

5 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:

 

What is a WO? I don't know what that term means.

 

 

 

pretty sure WO in this context means Winter Origin.  the 1.2 per was the clue for me.

[lemming]

3 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

 

What is a WO? I don't know what that term means.

Winter Origin

 

3 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

My email must be set up wrong or I hacked it or something, because it sorts the opened pack items for me.

(PRO-TIP : Email>Character times> click on the little bar across the top "subject". It lists the items in alphabetical order. Click on it again, and it lists them in reverse alphabetical order)

Oh hey! Never tried that, thanks!  Of course, looks like once you do that, you'll have it in either those orders, but since it's either that or leaving it in the order they came in, I'll pick alpha order.

 

 

3 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

They were being sold for real world dollars before the sunset.

"Super Packs were sold in quantities of 1, 12 or 24 uses each on the Paragon Market." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Heroes

If you could buy them with real world dollars in lots of 24, it wasn't designed to be rare ... it was designed to be a money grab.

The same can be said about influence back then. NCSoft didn't sell influence in the Pargaon Market place as far as I know, but you couldn't go more than 15-60 seconds in most zones without some goldfarmer spamming that they would sell you X milion influence for Y dollars. And you better believe they were making the influence they were selling by farming in the AE.

Oh right.  I think you got a few packs from other things as well, maybe it was in the veteran stuff. First one's free, etc...

[BitCook]

On 12/25/2022 at 12:16 AM, Snarky said:

So here is the interesting part. (*throws brick right over your head). Do not let this go over your head!  If the Devs put these (winter oacks, or any packs) on sale for a couple weeks the “have nots” get a little discount on stuff they want for a while.  The “haves” get a warchest of influence making ammunition to last all year long.  (*picks up three bricks) Now, there is only one problem with a few “the haves” raking in vaults of influence.  They “the haves” use this to further manipulate and skew the market in their favor.  Basically making the “have nots” fund their takeover of the in game cash machine. 

 

When did making INF become hard?

Anyone who wants to be a have can do a quick search on the forums and figure out how to make inf.  It's really not that hard.  If you put ANY effort into it, you can make a billion a week with fairly minimal time commitments.  That's not even trying to "play" the market.  Just buy things, make them, sell them at market price.  No shennanigans.  No trying to influence price.

The second part, is that people having boat loads of inf has VERY little impact on anyone's ability to play the game.

The market is really set by the conversion of merits to inf.  That's the cap and it will never really change all that much.  So things have a natural limit to them that regardless on Mr. Moneybags desire, will pretty  much stay constant.  People may change the price on a thing for a day, but rarely more than that.

With that said, I don't care if Winter Packs go on sale or not.  As I said, you can make more inf than  you will ever need for a character in a week or two of simple buy and sell things.  I don't market that much, just enough to outfit the character I am playing on, then I stop.  If you don't want to buy things, get merits, buy things.  Really, stuff is not that hard to get.  Play the game in the way you enjoy and move on.  Don't worry about what other people have or don't have.

[Snarky]

25 minutes ago, BitCook said:

 

When did making INF become hard?
 

For a greedy organized little vampire like me it is not. 

 

If you read through this thread you will see a significant portion of people who log into the game to PLAY the game.  With their friends, to relax.  Not to work.  The people in this thread posting that they do not want to meta game just to be able to have fun....they represent a voting block of real players who FEEL that way.  That is completely valid.  It is a game.  It is fun.  it is free.  we do it to enjoy life.  Well, i also get to kidnap Paragon citizens to give to Dr Vahzilok.  Work can be fun.

 

Basically there does need to be a balance to remain true to game theory.  But the Winter pack sales, and the subsequent abuse (over enthusiastic and smart use?) of such has lopsided that a bit.

 

I offered up a solution.  Lowering Winter packs to 10 Mil permanent, and Hero packs to 5-7.  Of course the current Dev staff follow my wisdom diligently.  look for that in the next patch....

[BitCook]

Of course the counter argument to this is that you can play and have fun with SOs too 🙂  For which you don't need to do really anything other than play.

But, again, I don't really care, lower the prices, leave them alone, it doesn't really matter.  Making inf is trivial and doesn't take away time from game play really.