Plasma

I'm still skeptical that this will continue. There is every reason to believe the vast majority of the supply will have been purchased up front. They are very pricy from a merit perspective. If super packs are a bonafide "hit", then maybe not. I know that I bought a LOT of superpacks, and even quantitatively, I didn't get enough ATOs to satisfy my altitis, and I want a set of ATOs on every character I roll usually, starting at L5.

Now, if the devs put these same ATOs in future packs, then my theory goes out the window. If not, I expect them to land in the realm of ~100m+.

I think you can't underestimate how long it will take for demand to rise as awareness of their benefits arises, and people learn tricks like doing 3+3 (3 catalyzed/3 not) for double-set bonuses (7.5% S/Ldefense from 6 slots? ok.)

I'm not a universal optimist about rising prices, since I've said the PvP IO and Purple markets are about to take a dump that will shock most people. (at least, based on prices things are selling at now)

They will probably cost quite a bit more, even. (Because the rich will get richer.)

It would be more accurate to say "everything that can still be produced will be considerably less than 1B".

Providers using automated systems are likely blocking your emails because your emails have several "mistakes" that make them look like spam.

I get my CoH email on a system that I actually run, and so I can see the full internals of why it gets flagged spam. I still get it because I completely whitelisted you but it gets MARKED as spam:

The key part is this:

And yet:

As you can see, your email system is labeling the email with a timestamp 8 hours in the future from when my system receives it. Spammers, in the quest for efficiency, tend to "copy" headers and not generate real headers for each spam copy they send. That leads to quirks with things like time, and that's what is being detected here. The majority of your spam score comes from this error.

The probable cause is this: the system on which your email software runs set it UTC/GMT, but the email system itself is being TOLD the system is running PST. This results in the time, as "perceived" by the email program, being 8 hours in the future. (The difference between PST and UTC.)

If your email program has a setting for time zone, I'd suggest you try setting it to UTC/GMT for the next mailing.

The second big problem is this:

That's easy to fix. Send a text version too. Just a "This is an HTML message. If your email client cannot read HTML email messages, you can view this at <URL>." is a pretty good substitute.

Hmm. Other project eh? A non-CoH project? I pay my $15 a month, you have to tell me what!

I think 4 of those are me dumping some on the market in anticipation of converters. They would never have even been for sale otherwise.

No. I don't know about PvPers, but in PvE land, I know a fair number of well-heeled people slot Panaceas as a preferred healing set, but outside of that, no.

Appreciate the update!

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=281919

Yeah. I still have a L40 EM/Elec brute, and a L33 EM/Nin stalker I haven't played since ET was nerfed. I'll be the first to admit ET was too good. It's still a really strong attack. It just doesn't carry the set any more like it used to.

I've only had it bug out once. I've heard that if you dismiss all pets before you leave the final interior room (ie, as you hit 500/500 rep the 2nd time) that you're safe, but that could easily just be hearsay. I've run it successfully at least a dozen times.

If I wanted to do that, I'd bid 10x stacks of Apoc triples for 100m or such. That should be safe. No one will mass-sell into bids on recipes though - you can only convert an actual crafted enhancement.

Given what TopDoc described in his other thread, I think he's likely to make over 1 Trillion influence in profits and could have executed the plan in less than 80 total hours of time invested. (Well, cashing out may take more than that, but the value will be there.)

I'd simply ask: what premium will you have to pay to get a L10 over a L50? Well, we know that right now, that premium is somewhere on the order of 200-600 million.

I'd say that:

1. PvP procs will be selling for less than 200M in the not-too-distant future
2. People will not be willing to pay an 800M premium to get a L10 version

The L50 proc works when exemplared to L7, even if the IO is L50 and you slot it into your L49 power. That means the L10 version only "matters" for leveling.

I've done some math on the "cost" of converters. Of course, each has a base cost you pay "in case", but I ran some numbers to ask "how much will converters cost, in lieu of buying something else?". Prices ranged from ~2m per converter (bought via E-Merits) to ~15m per converter (bought in pure merits). This assumes that the average purple will be worth 250m and the average LotG (or some other 2-merit HVAM item) is worth 150m. (and since I say "average purple", it also assumes that purples will be more costly than PvP IOs, which I think is true.)

So, any item that can't be created via converters will potentially still be super expensive. (L1 Hami, L53 Hami, costume code, etc) But anything you can convert to - any purple and any PvP IO, for example - is going to be substantially less than 1B. I'd guess PvP procs will run ~120-150m, purples (ALL purples) will run 200-300m, etc.

Thanks. I was playing through NWN2 storm of zehir, and it has a sort of subgame around setting up city-to-city trade that uses "Trade Bars" that you can eventually trade for gold, and so I may have been inspired by that. It does seem like a simple way around the game engine limitations.

What I'm wondering is: when you have literally more than you can imagine spending in any way, will you still think about mechanics enough to come up with the next ebil plan?

Exactly the point I was going to make. The more consistently you nail any sort of scam to the point where it isn't worth perpetrating it, the less likely anyone will commit one in the future. I just didn't bother posting this because as far as scams like this one go, both the converters in I22 or my idea about a fixed-value item vendor can easily solve this problem. If players are trying to do it, you should support it. (See: a certain other MMO making trading-card-obtained loot tradeable because they realized it was causing a lot of scamming, and they wouldn't be able to prevent it. So they enabled it to happen without risk.)

Obviously I posted a big rant before, but this is exactly my point - you do not want customers to think this. You want them to always feel safe buying from you.

If you want happy customers, you should be asking the bigger question: why isn't your customer service empowered to make customers happy?

The CS rep should have said, "Hey, this is working as intended, we'll pass the suggestion on... but I've put 3 catalysts in your email box you can claim. Thanks for being a customer."

I had my own CS nightmare recently with CoH support. Back when freedom went live I bought several $.99 accounts, since I figured having a bunch of extra premium accounts would be worthwhile. I recently decided to use them to PL some alts and xfer them to other servers, and when I logged into them for the first time (after buying them back in.. November?) I didn't have a transfer token. I put in a ticket (actually, 3 tickets, one for each account), and felt like I was getting autoresponses from a script. It took like 4 posts and a screenshot to even make my point. Eventually, they did get me the missing transfer tokens (which apparently rely on you logging onto your account each month, which is a disclaimer stated...nowhere. And sure enough, I have a friend who has been subbing as a VIP since freedom launch who hasn't logged in the whole time. Got him to log in, he had 1 token instead of 6).

The teeth-grinding experience of having someone tell you "working as intended" over something like that really makes you want to think twice about feeding the beast more money. It doesn't really matter what's "right" or intended, or whatever. What matters is that when someone is hovering over the "buy points" button, if they hesitate because they had a bad CS experience, you already failed. And we're ultimately talking about customer satisfaction which costs you nothing, because you're giving bits away.

I'll point out also, because I've done some management work in this area, that the cost of having a CS person answer 2-3 more customer replies in a thread rather than satisfying the request on the first contact with the customer not only costs you customer goodwill, it costs money. The only part of this which isn't free is the time of your CS reps. So if they spend 4 replies with a customer, there's a good chance you already wasted on payroll what you were saving by not just immediately giving the customer what they wanted. (Especially when that's something as minor as some catalysts.)

It's an "exploit" that has been well known since ~Issue 1. If you let the status quo sit for over 7 years without any comment (other than saying it wasn't intended but the game engine can't support fixing it), it's no unreasonable for players to adapt.

That said, Eclipse is hardly broken without Nucs.

I like other games That said, I'm perfectly happy with the 1x 580 performance... but the default setting by nvidia for coh now sets SLI, so you have to know to actively go force it to do single card renders, or get half the performance. (Until I found that, I was a very unhappy camper.)

No, I acquired them myself by 2-boxing hami raids. There was a bug present for quite some time where if you sidekicked a L45-46 toon to a L50, you would get a 52 or 53. They were really no big deal at the time - more valued than a 50 but only marginally so. There were people who got irritated with 45-46s even being in the zone during a raid, which means enough people were doing it that other people got irritated by it.

I expect that at least hundreds were created, really. But of course, with churn, plenty of ex-players will take their 53 HOs to the grave, as it were. I flirted with selling them a while back (I even posted here), but at only 2-3 billion per, and no real urgent need for those funds, it wasn't worth it to me to part with them. (It was right as I came back to the game after a long absence where I subscribed but almost never played; and I only had a couple billion in seed cash outside of my slotted sets. When I left, that made me ludicrously rich, but by the time I got back, it was peanuts.)