Question for one-person Supergroups

Hello all,

I have a question for people who have Supergroups (SGs) that only (or mostly) consist of one person (them).

How do you get your characters into your SG?

What I used to do: Pay for two accounts. Open up each account in two separate windows. Have one character recruit/promote the other character.

And this worked fine. But I was finding that I was only mainly using the "more Veteran" account... because of all the Veteran goodies that the other account didn't have. And why pay for an account JUST to recruit.

When the F2P came into play, I got excited because now I could have an account be FREE and us it to recruit... until I learned that F2P accounts CANNOT be in SGs.

So, I'm wondering. I can I pay a one-time fee to have the F2P account join SGs? This would solve my problem.

Or

Do you have other suggestions? Yes, I know I could ask perfect strangers to join my SG just to recruit my character, but I hate bothering people with that request and/or I don't want them to have access to my salvage racks, etc.

Thanks for any suggestions.

if the 2nd account is at least premium then they can be invited to join an sg and invite other toons to the sg if you have the permissions set

the only thing premium accounts cannot do regarding sg's is anything involving the super group registrar (paying rent, creating an sg)

What I used to do is ask for kind people in Atlas to help me.

Now I (as you suggest) use a second account. I have a Tier 2 Premium account which means it can join Supergroups so I use that. So to answer your question, yes you can have a free account which can join an SG. If your second account was created by using a retail code before Freedom then it should be at least Tier 2. If not purchasing 400 Paragon Points will upgrade it to T2.

Necrotech_Master and Adeon Hawkwood,

Thank you very much for taking time to respond. That's good news about Tier 2, as my second account has been around since '05 I believe.

Again, I appreciate your help!

Great! Thanks very much, Gavin.

Sorry for the inconvenience this causes but our devs seem to be dead set against making it easy for us to create solo SG's. I think it was in a September maybe October Ustream that they were asked about letting us use emails to send SG invites and the devs said that if they did add that feature we would not be allowed to send SG invites to our own characters. Only other accounts.

Honestly, it might just be a desire to limit the number of SG bases that they have to store . Other than that I'm not sure.

Given the various changes to the game over the years SGs are less important than they were. Global channels provide a more convenient method of server-wide teaming. The addition of new methods of travel and a decrease in the amount of travel needed have lessened the value of SG Teleporters. Finally the Paragon Market and Global Email have lessened the need for SG bases as a means of storing and transferring salvage and enhancements.

I would agree. I almost never use my SG that my friends invited me to anymore. I don't need the TPs and storage can be attained in other ways. I have started forming my own solo SGs so that I have a "bat cave" in a way.

I wonder what they have against creating individual "lairs" and then letting also letting you join a SG for teaming and group outings and such.

Not surprisingly, I'm probably in the minority.

I still use my salvage racks, teleporters, and invention stations. Not because I'm "loyal" to any cause, but just most likely because I'm ignorant to more effective ways to travel around!

I use my solo SG's storage and crafting table all the time, and the porters as often as any other travel method. My reasoning is, I went through the trouble of getting the beacons, might as well use 'em.

I think part of their reasoning for not making solo SGs easier is that they want it to be strictly a group activity, and one person is not a group.

And it could be because opening an SG base is the same as opening an instanced mission. So if they make it easy for every character on every server to have their own base, that could increase the lag people see while in missions. *shrugs* But that's just me trying to make sense of it, not something I actually heard.

I think that if they're going to be making any major changes to supergroups, part of those changes should be to give base instances their own server. That would reduce interference with mission instances, and allow them to load a permanent auction house database onto the server, so people can use /auctionhouse in their base as well.

Storage, travel, crafting and EMPOWERMENTS & OURO.... yes, I use my bases quite a bit for all of those things.

As to whether the devs intend for bases to be a group feature or not, I'd say they built it in such a manner as to allow for both groups and singles.

However, we do now have a bit of a conundrum: Devs have implemented several features in the game that make it much easier for the single player to manage without joining a SG.... expanded travel, expanded storage, faster xp, easy salvage through AE/WW, easy recipes with AMerits... There is very little enticement for a single player to join a SG when they can build their own solo base for the basic amenities.

Also... Even though the Devs have focused so much energy into making sure the iTrials are group activities, these massive group trials give no benefit to a SG... they are packed with single player rewards. There is only one trial geared for SG's specifically, and it is such a pain in the tukus that it is not run very frequently at all.

So... if Devs intended SG's to be a primary group feature, they have undermined it terribly over the last several issues.
Personally, I think the Devs have recognized that bases and SG's have become something other than their original design, and are trying to figure out how to fit them back in to the scheme of things.

.

The trick is to not confuse the two types of non-VIp accounts.

"Free" accounts cannot join SGs - however this game defines "Free" as an account that has spent no cash (either on sub or paragon points) at all.

"Premium" accounts can, as the minimum rank for a premium in the rewards system includes SG access. A premium account has slent money on the game in the past.

I can verify that if you ever purchased a retail code for that second account it will be at least Tier 2 which will give it access to SG's. Whether or not that char can invite is up to how the rank permissions are set.

That doesn't sound right because the side by side comparison clearly states Super Groups are not available to free accounts, only Premium and VIP.

http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/about_...cho.php#tabs-4

Hopefully we can get an official response and find out if what you are reporting is working as intended.

ive even tried to invite poeple unknowingly on the free accounts and it gives me an error message stating that they were not eligible to join because they must be at least reward tier 2 or higher