Prestige starvation

Why is the game so extremely stingy with prestige? It's given out with an eyedropper after kills, and the inspiration-to-prestige exchange rate is nothing short of thievery. I realize that too much influence, injected into the game, ruins the virtual economy. But I don't see how more prestige would hurt. Is there something I'm missing? Thanks, all.

Getting the base started is the hardest thing about forming an SG. Once you actually get things for your base and it's up and running, you almost don't even need prestige at all because the rent is practically non-existent nowadays.

I have not put any new bases together in a while, but I'd like to think that it still takes at least some decent work to get one going. The key is getting some friends to make some alts for you and schedule some events to build prestige for the group together.

Put a 50 in the SG. My 50 corr alone racked up 1 mil prez just running lv 50 papers and SFs. I suggest a 50 brute also and the run tv liberate mission or Sis Arlia's missions in Cim.
(You can do AE at lvl 50 also, if you want tix instead of recipe drops.)
If you prefer to play the market, convert your profit into prez.
It's possible to get a decent base for 800k prez.

Minor correction: I meant "influence-to-prestige," not "inspiration-to-prestige."

Thanks, all, for the suggestions. Actually, when I asked if I was missing something, I was wondering if anyone knew what damage would be done to the game economy if they doubled, or even tripled, the prestige drops.

I do run SGs for my toons alone, but it's not antisocial. I've tried being part of someone else's SG, and I eventually felt like I was working for him - like my toons became his when they joined, and I ran them for him to benefit his SG.

When I posted the original message, I almost closed it with "Let the flaming begin." Thanks again for being so helpful.

It's a fair question that we hear variations on in the base forums quite a bit.

I personally don't have a good answer for ya.
Best I can do is offer a handy guide to building small bases.
There are several options in it that try give the best bang for your buck.

The first thing lots of folks do is get the "first 15" prestige bonus by loading their base with alts.
The next quickest way to earn prestige is to run with a lvl 50 in SG mode. The ratio is still peanuts, but at least at that level it's bigger peanuts.
The marketeers are running a project now, building a "top ranked" base by purchasing their prestige. It has been quite successful (you go, 88's!). The only hang-up is earning certain badges to unlock some of the cool base shineys.

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What would probably work better would be to just lower the inf/prestige exchange rate. This would have some people that previously would not have purchased prestige consider it.

Not like the game has any major inf sinks as it is.

On the other hand, I feel like it's not that bad. I joined a once-a-week group of hardcore characters, which means they are deleted after one defeat. This had two effects on our prestige: first, we stayed mostly low-level, frequently re-making "dead" characters, and second, few people joined us. So it was just a few of us, low-to-mid-levels, once a week. And in a surprisingly short time we had a large base with every teleport pad. I don't recall how short a time, but it came as a surprise to me when all the telepads went in.

I never run out of SGmode all u have to do is grind for a bit and recruit. 3 others and I have the largest plot decked out and have no issuss with presige

I just pulled up a level 47 character to check, and they have 280K prestige. Let's say 300 K by level 50.

If the devs planned for a typical SG to have 20 people in it, half of which go 1 to 50 in SG mode over a couple of months, that's 3 million prestige, which is plenty to build a base with. [originally they were expecting SG's to have 50 people in them, if I recall. They found out that most people don't build SG's that large and cut base costs appropriately.]

Point being: If you want to do something that normally takes 8 or 10 people a few months, and there's only one of you, you're going to have to do unusual things. If you were trying to solo an ITF, and you complained that it was too hard, people would suggest that the problem doesn't lie with the ITF.

So what unusual things can you do? Well, you can hunt bosses [If I recall, they give disproportionate prestige.] You can do TF's [maybe, or maybe not,disproportionate prestige- but you're doing a lot of missions and beating up a lot of guys. Volume, volume, volume.] I think there's a large XP/inf/prestige bonus for completing story arcs; you could look into Ouroboros.

And then there's buying it. I know what you're thinking: "that's a heck of a lot of influence!" And if you want a million prestige, that is in fact 500 million influence. How do you get that?

Well, there are roughly three ways:
1) Market
2) Farm
3) Play relatively normally, leaning slightly towards things that make you more inf.

Farming is not my thing- I don't have any useful advice on it.
Marketing, well, I can go on at considerable length on the topic. What I do is buy a recipe plus ingredients for 3 million and sell the crafted IO for 8 to 15 million. You can do that 60 or 70 times and make 500 million.
Playing "normally": You can do a Statesman's Task Force [if you're level 45-50] and get a Synthetic Hami-O, which sells for between 100 thousand and 100 million. You can do ten tip missions and a morality mission and get an Alignment Merit, which turns into five random recipes, which turns into around 50 million inf depending on the recipes. [your first time, you get 50 reward merits which costs money to turn into an AM, but after that it's straight AM's.] You can do ouro arcs, you can do task forces, and get Reward Merits which you can (with a starting investment) turn into Alignment Merits.

Almost the only thing that won't make you merits is doing newspaper/radio missions.

If you have any questions on any of the above moneymaking methods ["how do I get 3 million inf?" or whatever] just ask.

What I'd like to see:

Currently we have controls to turn XP earning on and off.
We have controls for choosing Inf or XP when exemped.
We have controls for turning Prestige earning on and off.

Why not have a control for choosing between normal Inf/Prestige earning and Half-Inf/Double-Prestige (or maybe 1.5x Prestige)?

Frankly, the amount of inf earned by mashing face is a joke compared to what I earn from drops and marketing. If I'm LAZY, I earn between 3 and 6 times as much just logging out for the night as I do during play. And this is on a level 50. For lower-level toons, by the time most of them hit level 12, they have between 10 and 100 million stowed and are sporting a complete set of DOs. By the time they hit 22, their Inf reserves are even higher and they're sporting a complete set of SOs or have kit-bashed a nice useful frankenslot IO setup.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Until 25, there is no conversion rate, as I recall. Until then younstill get full inf in SG mode.