UberGuy

It is absolutely not #1.

I don't think we've ever had redname confirmation, but I know I've never worried about that, because it was clear enough to me how it worked.

Now, I have a vague interest in things like "does it choose what to drop before it decides who gets it" or "how do drop pool mapping to critter types actually work", but most of that is either purely academic or only mildly interesting.

I have unquestionably received ambrosia for things I did not defeat. I cannot say for certain if I have ever received ambrosia for things that I did not damage, but I assume that you only need a teammate to damage them, since this is common behavior for other drop types.

As far as I have ever determined, you are correct in general. There are some caveats.

First, the same critter can drop recipes from different pools - an IO recipe and a costume recipe, for example. Each pool appears to have its own check to see if it's dropped, and one for who it will be dispersed to. This means defeating something could give one person the IO and another the costume, if it dropped both. I don't know if we know what pool "Boss pool C" drops are in; if they are not part of pool A, then it may be possible for a boss to drop both at the same time. I've never heard of it, but if it were possible it would also be quite low probability, and there aren't that many places where we can mow down a lot of bosses who can drop recipes.

There are certain foes who definitely drop things in a "per player" way for certain drop tables. As For example, Devouring Earth Monsters (like those in the Hive and Abyss) can drop an inspiration on anyone who damaged them. Rikti who appear at RWZ ship raids will "drop" Vanguard merits on anyone who damaged them. (We don't often think of them that way, but Vanguard Merits and AE tickets are drops too.) I haven't tested it specifically, but I'm pretty certain that Hamidon's Mitochondria can drop salvage on multiple people, as there are only 54 of them for a whole raid, but 40-odd people will get around 10 salvage per raid, and that's including the fact that not everyone attacks all the mitos.

I'll sell you one off-market for 3B.

Players of this game have to decide how to split their time between the two sides, and for a variety of reasons, most people seem to prefer playing heroes to villains, so that means most of the on-line population is on the hero side.

Something to understand about CoH and CoV, is that the game is heavily instanced. People don't do much "outdoors" in the game, except for a few interfaces that are in the open zones (such as the in-game markets). On low population servers, this can make the game seem empty. Also, there are tools for hiding from searches that quite a few people use. Obviously, those who are looking for teammates don't do so, but people who usually play with their friends or supergroup will sometimes hide from searches, which makes the game seem less populated as well.

If you decide to play, check out the server sub-forums for servers you are interested in trying out, and ask around for the servers' active supergroups and also their global channels.

Global channels are a way that people on any server can chat, similar to a chat room. Most servers have a few global channels for looking teaming, badge hunting, task forces, raids, and general chatter. These are often good places to find teams, though certain channels might tend to present special-purpose teams, depending on the channels reason for being.

Hope you have a good stay.

It never really struck me like that. I think it's more likely that they spent a lot of time on the invention system itself, and possibly the market back-end, and either didn't have as much time to sink into the interface design, didn't have the in-game tools to make a better interface, or both. There's a lot of information to present in the market interface, and if they had a limited set of GUI widgets with which to present it (and limited time to create new ones from scratch), I could definitely see us ending up with what we got.

The new interface has some pretty clear visual relationship to the AE's GUIs, which makes me suspect they are trying to leverage new/better interface widgits created for use with the AE. If so, I think it's good that they're going back and trying to revamp the old interface with better tools. I'm just sad/worried by how much those who worked on it didn't seem to grasp how people who do use the market frequently go about doing so. Granted, there are a lot of different use cases to cover, but the early pas seemed to miss most of them.

On the upside, it's gotten some pretty good bake time in beta, and has improved significantly over the initial pass. I think I'll be reasonably satisfied with it by the time it goes live, though I really prefer the way the live "More Info" button works to what they've done in the new interface.

No one in these forums is known for doing any of those things. What people here belittle other posters for is the combination of decrying other players for making it "too hard" for them to use the market along with illustrated ignorance of how to use the market, plus a refusal to listen to anyone who tries to help.

I've got no problem with people who don't understand the market. There are several things about CoH's "economy" that aren't intuitive.

I've got no problem with people who think stuff is too expensive, particularly if they don't understand the market.

I've got a problem with people who come in here proclaiming regular market users as somehow denying them access to inventions, usually accompanied with pretty direct insults when folks here try to explain how (a) that's not usually the case at all and (b) what they need to know to use the market successfully.

Players in the Tanker forum don't like it when posters wander in there proclaiming that the Tanker AT sucks while showing that they know little about how the AT works, and then telling anyone who tries to explain the AT that they're just fanbois who would say anything to stand up for their favorite AT. It's one thing to not want to play a Tanker, or think it has issues. It's another to tell everyone else who likes it that they're wrong and suck.

The analogy definitely isn't perfect, but we get our version of that in here plenty often. Oh, and then we're lambasted for defending the status quo when we flame such people.

But we'll be clueless or whatever, because the insults do not hurt our feelings one bit.

It's also not normal play for another reason - it requires a kill rate fast enough to supply inspirations that quickly. That's not achievable on a wide array of builds, primarily being reserved for those with excellent AoE powers.

Most of my characters can't generate inspiration drops at those rates, because a lot of them are more single-target-focused than AoE. That means I have to set my difficultly based on the assumption that I won't have the right inspirations on hand. When I do get them then I certainly speed up, of course.

Something to note on this advice, though.... it's possible those tickets could be better spent on recipes. It's...really cheap in ticket terms to roll a bunch of bronze rolls. If you do much of this, you'll end up with heaping piles of total junk to delete or sell to some nearby NPC. But getting one decent rare can blow away the money you'd save spending 560 tickets on a piece of rare salvage.

How good an idea it is to churn through bronze rolls looking for a decent profit depends a lot on the market. There have been times since the AE came out that it was clearly better to spend tickets on rolls and just buy salvage with profits, and times where it's not so clear. I consider now a "not so clear" time.

Without really addressing your suggestions themselves, you have to recognize that there's a subtle difference in the interface and the current functioning of the market. Giving us more or different information is a change in how the market will work, as well as an interface change. I realize you understand this - it's why your asking for some of these things. However, my guess is that the devs may be reluctant to meaningfully change how the market interface drives the market's behavior, on several levels. One level is that they clearly intended the market to be its own mini-game, and the limited information it provides partially facilitates that, even though it potentially turns off some users.

What they've done on test is reorder the currently available information. For better or worse, they are explicitly trying to improve the graphical interface itself, not how the market behaves.

When the new things come along that Positron has mentioned to try and address market issues circa GR, my expectation is that they will be things that tinker with supply or demand outside the formal market, and not explicit changes in the market, per se. I'm guessing that simply because that's how everything else they've done has worked - merits, tickets, drop rates, etc.

That's in open beta now, so anyone can go see what that entails.

Edit: My feeling is that it's passable now, but what they originally had as the new interface was worse than the one now on live. Part of that was it being incomplete. Part of it was it genuinely not being engineered very well with respect to how those of us who use the market regularly actually use it.

...Which does very little for my faith in changes to the actual fundamentals of the market economy itself.

3B in 6 weeks for most of us means a couple of things.

1) really good lucky drops that sold for a truckload of cash
2) leveraging serious market know-how, usually some variation flipping. (I include buying recipes and selling crafted for way more than the cost of salvage in this category.)

Note that (2) tends to accelerate the more inf you have to invest, so (1) plus (2) creates what can seem unbelievable earning rates.

To give you an example, I've played the same character pretty extensively for about 4 months now. In that time, I went from 18-50 (the character sat at 18 for a long time), got a purple and two respec recipes, completely IO'd out the build, and ended up with 2.2B inf. Then I threw 2B of that inf at the market for a PvP IO, and have earned back 850M. This was with no flipping, but with a fairly intensive play schedule, ranging from 2-4 hours a day most weekdays, and more like 2-6 on weekends.

Early on I buy IOs strategically, so that I get good bang for my buck as I level up. This includes things like making sure I have ED maxed attributes on powers' primary functions along with strong endurance reduction, plus accuracy and recharge where appropriate. Then I use merits or very careful bidding to go for big-impact goods like Miracles, Numinas, etc. I also go for some of the moderate cost, big improvement goods, like Performance Shifter procs, Kismet +toHit uniuqe, and the low-level KB protection IOs.

My goals are usually to build strong soloers. I team pretty often, but when I solo I like to push the envelope. How much you earn per hour played is a function of how much you team, and how many people you team with. Because I do solo a lot, I get to keep all those goodies. Because I build strong soloers, I can take on more than a typical share of foes, usually running at +2 set for x4-x6, with bosses enabled and AVs disabled for most purposes.

The goal when I play solo is to be challenged, but not so much that I have to retreat often. Having to fall back means I am moving through my foes slower. The sweet spot is to put things just shy of getting killed without having to run away to keep from getting killed. If having something slow down how fast you kill foes means you end up losing, you're probably doing it right (unless that happens too often!) Of course, there are builds that ... really can't be killed by most foes, and for them the sweet spot is whatever nets them the best XP or inf/time, or the best defeats/time if the focus is drops. My feeling is that +2 is the sweet spot on XP/inf per time, and +0 or +1 is probably the best for drops/time. At level 50, you get more drops/time at -2, but you also get non-50 uncommon/rare drops, and the sale prices on those is a lot lower.

When I team, it's to play TFs. I probably play 2-3 TFs per day I play. That's a good 40-60 merits a day. I spend a bit (but not a lot) of time figuring out how to best convert those into cash, assuming I am interest in doing so. (I usually am interested in doing so.) Sometimes I just random roll. Sometimes I buy explicit recipes with the intention to craft and sell them.

So I play a lot at 50, solo a lot at pretty high (but not farming-level) efficiency, team primarily to earn merits, and sell most anything I can't use targeted to sell within 1-3 days at something like 90%-100% of the highest regularly occurring sale price for the item.

Something else to bear in mind is that how fast people like me or more hardcore marketeers convert playtime into money is actually a function of how expensive things are. The more stuff costs, the faster we make money on the market. Lately, hero-side prices have crashed on quite a few high-end goods, and my refill rate on the character I described above took a hit as a result.

Accuracy itself doesn't scale down, ever. What happens is that your baseline chance to hit a mob goes down if it is either higher level than you, has defense, or both. StrykerX posted the base chance schedule up above.

What happens is complicated, but a relatively simplified version, with no defense looks like this.

ChancetoHit = (1+(slottedAcc+globalAcc))(powerInherentAcc)(BaseH itChance)

Most but not all powers have a 1.0 inherent accuracy. (Examples of ones that have more than 1.0 are Katana, Broadsword and Martial Arts attacks. Examples of powers with less than 1.0 are most AoE mezzes.)

So if you have 60% accuracy slotted, plus 30% global accuracy bonus, and a power with 1.0 inherent accuracy, and you're attacking a +2 foe with no defense, your hit chance is...

ChanceToHit = (1+(0.6+0.3))(1.0)(0.56) = 1.064

Now, there are min/max boundaries on the math in two places. First, BaseHitChance ± any defense/toHit can't be below 5% or greater than 95%. Second, the whole quantity "ChanceToHit" can't be below 5% or greater than 95%.

Since 1.064 is 106.4% and is over 95%, the result there is clamped to 95%.

Now, if your foe has defense buffs, that's subtracted from BaseHitChance. If you have toHit buffs, that's added to BaseHitChance. Remember that debuffs are negative buffs, and the math still works for defense debuffs on the target and toHit debuffs on you. (But remember that debuffs can be resisted.)

Lots more detail on ParagonWiki here.

Here's the problem. Playing CoH or CoV is an either or situation. Most of our players are not technically locked into one side or the other - if they stay on one side, it's because they prefer it.

Making more CoV content isn't going to get someone to migrate over from CoH if...

• all their friends play hero side
• they don't like the idea of playing a villain
• CoV is harder on their low-end system
• they dislike the visual style of CoV (often run down and dirty)
• they dislike playing villains who are usually treated like enforcer thugs instead of people with grand plans to rule the world
• they dislike playing villains who so often appear to be cogs in a different villain's organization
• they dislike how the Rogue Isles seem overrun by losers and underachievers, including many positions of power or influence

In other words, the oft-cited problems people have CoV are fairly systemic; they involve things like the design of the zones (both technical and aesthetic), the over-arching story line, and indeed the very notion of playing a bad guy. Upping merit rewards is not likely to sway many of these people at all. They'll just stay on hero side where things work better for them.

This has a lot to do with why those of us who suggest merged markets do so - addressing the kinds of problems identified in that bullet list seems like it would take a pretty hard-core redesign of CoV, and that just doesn't seem likely. Merging the markets lets the people stay on the sides they like while presumably addressing the issue of market liquidity and inventory diversity for villains.

It's not a perfect solution - the perfect solution is to get more people to play CoV. The problem is that there's no indication we could actually achieve that solution. And if we did achieve it without actually adding a lot of completely new players to the system, we would achieve it at a cost to the hero side of the game and thus the hero market.

Now if only that worked on NPC placate. It drives me nuts when Bane Spider Scouts placate me then can't hit me.

Yeah, capping inf doing what they were doing became pretty common. And during that, they and anyone they were PLing received zero salvage or recipes, while slamming into the map ticket cap fast enough to cause whiplash. I don't know how much inf they were producing per run, though we can probably figure it out - it was around 60 Giant Montsers per map. I am certain most of them were probably not cashing in their tickets; anyone who was would fill up on Bronze or Silver roles too fast to bother marketing them effectively. The most likely cash-in was gold rolls, since that was the highest "compression ratio" of tickets into potentially useful recipes. But it sounds like most people were cycling the missions as fast as they could, which I bet means tons and tons of tickets just evaporated.

Result, ratio of inf to stuff went sky high, and prices went there with it.

That depends entirely on how many monitors you have. >.>

(Actually, I only play with one monitor, I just use a piece of shareware I've been using for like 10 years to force the respec window to stay on the top of the game when it has focus. I'm still on XP, and that probably won't work in Windows 7 without the game being in windowed mode.)

It may have been brokenly good before, but I think it's woeful now.

The powerset spends too much of its time in animation. Other powersets can achieve better AoE damage, or better single-target damage with sufficient recharge (which is available from far more than IOs - try playing with someone who can give you +recharge).

But there's a part of this outside the DPS statistics. Even if you assume the DPS stats are adequate, the problem is that, to sustain them, you spend a lot of time in animations. Time spent in animations is time you can't spend doing anything else. You can't move, or adjust movement if you're already in flight while attacking. You can't heal. You can't taunt a foe off to the side. If your teammates ream out your current target, your stuck completing the animation on your nice, long attack, even if it deals you self-damage at the end.

With sets that require more, smaller, faster attacks to achieve their DPS, you have the option on every attack to interrupt your chain in order to do something else you need to do other than damage. The inability to do that with EM is a pretty significant downside, IMO. The fact that it's DPS doesn't scale with +recharge like other powersets do is just part of what makes its new format so unattractive. This game isn't hard by default, but if you want to try to make it harder by cranking up your foe settings or trying to run through things fast, being able to react becomes increasingly important, especially if your Tanker primary or Stalker/Brute secondary is click-centric. One long animating attack is manageable, but bumping the set to two really hammers the set's all-around effectiveness.

I normally vendor L50 Doctored Wounds because it's not worth my time to sell it on the market. Crafted pieces have been going for 2M or so, though I haven't looked at them in the last week or so.

Now if we're talking about ones far from L50, I wouldn't know. While I don't restrict myself to level 50 IOs, I haven't messed with Doc Wounds outside of 50s.