Fulmens

TL/DR: I know way too much about this. . .

We're currently at about 1% wind [up from something like 0.2% three years ago]. It's not exactly a looming threat. The problem with the grid carrying solar and wind, as far as I know, is mainly that both are intermittent, nondispatchable and have low capacity factors.

INTERMITTENT: Solar tends to cycle on and off over sub-minute periods, which is a hell of a thing to try to build a system around. Wind is slightly longer-scale but mostly because the turbines are so big that smaller episodes of turbulence get eaten by rotational momentum.

NONDISPATCHABLE: You have to match power supply to demand. Baseload, peaking plants, etc. Wind blows when it feels like it, sunlight is more predictable in SOME places but, with cloud cover, can easily vary by a factor of 5 or so. In Texas they have a ton of wind that blows mostly at night and a lot of turbines using it; the price of electricity in Texas sometimes goes NEGATIVE at night as a result.

CAPACITY FACTOR: If you have a 1000 MW coal plant, you get very close to 24000 MW-hours a day. It can run at full power nearly all the time. 90%, 95%, 98% capacity factor. If you have 1000 MW of wind turbines you usually get more like 8000 MW-hours a day. (30% capacity factor, more or less.) They run at partial power, they only run when they have enough wind, and so forth. Now a peaker gas plant also runs 10-30% of the time but it runs WHEN YOU NEED IT.

The solution to all of these problems is high-efficiency low-cost energy storage. Whoever can solve this will be very rich. Deservedly so. (I know of a couple candidate technologies and I'm rooting for them.)

People say the problem is politics; that's mostly wishful thinking, because politics can be changed by votes. We're already subsidizing renewables by 30% or more and in most cases, you can't make money building renewables even when you buy your dollars for fifty cents. That's a technology that just plain costs too much to build.

(On the optimist side, the cost of solar panels went down something like 44% last year.)

That seems like a fair criterion. Especially the difference between something selling on-market for 2 billion and off-market for 2 billion and 1 is that one destroys 200,000,000 inf and the other does not.

["worth" == "almost always sells for" in this context, before we get into that side argument.]

There is good and bad news on that front: The good is, the most expensive item in game is selling for only slightly over 2 billion (2.25 is pretty standard these days)- so it's getting close to regular on-market sales. The bad is, more "almost as expensive" items are getting awfully close to 2 billion [I think only three things are over 2 billion regularly- the Glad Armor, Shield Wall, and Panacea specials- but I've been wrong before, often and in public.] There are quite a number of 1.5+Bn PVP items, and purples are getting close to a billion each in many cases.

Delightful! Thanks to all who are contributing, nonymous and otherwise.

I'm going on a business trip for a few days, so this is going on hold till Thursday.

Seriously? Zero to sustainable energy arguments in three posts? Based on one of the worst antiwind arguments ever?

Riding the wild tangent for a minute...

Current wind turbine placement (unlike the turbines built in the early 80s) avoids migration paths; current wind turbine tower shapes don't have places for birds to build their nests. I will preemptively agree that one golden eagle or California condor hitting a wind turbine is not comparable to one pigeon hitting a glass skyscraper. And people are doing research on the alleged problem with exploding bat lungs.

But we are still talking about a situation where we could increase the number of wind turbines by a factor of 100 [from 1% of our power supply to 100%...] and kill 1/6 as many birds as tall buildings do.

Arguing that wind is intermittent, has a low capacity factor, and is not well matched to demand, or that wind proponents exaggerate the number and quality of usable wind sites... those are reasonable arguments and I might end up on one side or the other depending on how it's phrased.

But BIRDS?!? 5000 birds died last year from one fireworks celebration, in one city, on one night. (see also.)

I am begging from YOU. It is very important that we keep our business relationship straight. This is serious business.

... when enough people put in 2 billion. You wanna contribute or you wanna just hang out?

Fiksed.

Last week I did a munged sale price (previous one was something like 1 million and I managed to add three digits into the middle.) That only cost me 5% of 1.5 billion!

If you have one AM I recommend looking at the [crafted] sale prices of the following:
Kin Combat, L35, Dam/Rech
Kin Combat, L35, Dam/End
Performance Shifter,L21, Chance for Endurance

The other good sellers I'm aware of are 2-merit recipes.

I like to tell people why I'm putting them on /ignore. There's only a tiny chance they'll learn from my explanation, but it makes me feel better.

I am putting you on /ignore, quickfire, because you aren't trying in any visible way to convince me of your points. You're a lazy arguer, and I've done the thing where I spend half an hour on a reasoned post to be met with 30 seconds of "Nu-uh! You're not the boss of me!" I've done it more than enough.

Sir, madam, or tentacled creature: I bid you good day.

So I've got my idea for inf burning. Basically there's a "Valley of death" for new SGs between the basic stuff [around 400K prestige] and the first big upgrade [around 1M prestige]. 600K prestige = 300M inf, or a LOT of work.

There are presumably people who don't appreciate the market [1] who have new SG's and can't get beyond the valley of death.

My idea is to pick a server, go to that server's forum, and offer a disproportionate inf matching scheme. The SG has to be under 500K prestige, though. "If you have 50 million inf, we'll match the other 250" or something. [2] If the inf holds out, I'd like to do this for every server but the big 2.

If I put in 2 billion, and three other people put in 2 billion, we can help out 32 starting SGs.

So far it's Eric Nelson and I. Anyone of you other moneybags wanna help?


[1] Can't play it, or don't want to, or don't believe in it, or whatever. Doesn't matter WHY.

[2] I feel that the SG owner has to put in SOME inf or they won't value our contribution.

Gah! Hope I didn't click on that.

*scrubs skin*

Your impressions are your impressions and as such they can't be wrong. That _is_ what the game looked like to you. BUT:

* It's painfully easy to make "enough inf for starters" with even the most basic marketing tactics. (Almost all my characters are financially independent from level 1, unless I'm really impatient. Then again I like this s***. ) In one hour of fetching and carrying, you can make enough to afford your SO's for your entire career and I can explain how to do that in 5 minutes. And that's using almost the WORST way to market there is.

* The invention system is deliberately tied to the market system and it doesn't work like other games that way. Storage is deliberately scarce, for instance, so you have to "store" stuff by selling it and buying it back when you need it. [usually at a considerable profit.] You may hate that idea, but they did it on purpose and for a reason. You cannot be a rock and an island in this game unless you use SO's.

* They do sell one-time Wentporters. If you go to Steel Canyon the university is one block over in one direction, and the Vault is a block or two in the other. They also sell a variety of craftable temp powers, including jetpacks, med packs, resurrector packs, etc.

* Supergroups frequently have vaults set up right next to their crafting tables. As in "can have both windows open at once."

* There are crafting tables in SG's, in Vanguard bases, and in almost all Supergroups; sometimes your fellow heroes will pop 'em out right in the middle of Wentworth's, although it is a huge amount of work to get Field Crafter.

* There have been at least two situations where having level 20 IO's made a really big difference in play for me.

This game is not like other games. There's no Holy Trinity. Until you hit level 50 there's no "Bind on pickup" loot. One hero can often beat up ten or twenty high-con enemies at once. Money is available very easily in ridiculous amounts (with a little knowledge.) If you judge it by "how well it works like other games" you'll hate it.

Is this info still accurate?

(The question behind the question: Is going from "starter base" to "next size up" still about 600K prestige?)

*reaches for wallet*
I can't do that right now, but I can give you a card for someone that can help...

Back when I first decided to burn 10 billion inf, back when that was a lot of inf, I kept records. At the time I was running an exchange, influence to infamy and vice versa, and so I was moving a lot of inf between servers (selling stuff to myself in Wents; ah, the old days before gleemail) and that was my #1 inf-burner. But #2 was inf-to-prestige, beating out wentfees for regular crafting and flipping.

I burn around 100-200 million inf a day in wentfees (and make around 300 million inf.) The way I think of this, and I could be wrong, is that wentfees are sort of "built in"- the quasi-equilibrium of prices includes one to two wentfees and those (almost) burn the inf you generate while you're generating these items. Doesn't burn all of it, thus the upwards spiral of prices we've seen.

Prestige burns are pure destruction. Yeah, it's inf people aren't currently using... but they might use it someday, give it to a friend, start a new alt, whatever.

IO's aren't a necessity, but you're a hell of a lot more powerful with them than without. Agreed?

Going back to the original question: Here's what I would suggest for your All SO's All The Time team members.

Defenders- rad/sonic or... naah, just rad/sonic.
Brutes, Scrappers- Something/Willpower.
Blasters: Fire/Mental [personal choice]

... that's about all I play these days.

Heh. The most I've ever had at one time is under 18 billion...

If you think of it as "renting the market slot" it makes more sense. A market slot can be used for a common IO (guessing 3/4 of a million profit turning over twice a day, for 1.5 million a day) or it can be used for, oh, certain orange recipes (20 million profit turning over about once a day.) If someone's generous enough with their crafting time and market slots to sell common IO's, a nice tip is about the least you could do.