EarthWyrm

This. Alternately, once I re-logged when zoning didn't do the trick, and was able to claim.

My wife accidentally reported me as a spammer while trying to claim a LotG 7.5 I sent her.

Ingrate...

I suspect that your temporary sarcasm overload disabled your ability to tell the difference between "fixing stuff" and "redesigning an entire task force." The former has been attempted three times and improved the performance on that map. The latter - well, I doubt that Castle uses the word "massive" to mean, "really easy and gosh we should get right on that because it won't take any time at all". Especially when it's an issue that, for people even on systems like mine that pre-date the game, still doesn't make the ITF unplayable.

I'm going to have to run the CoP one of these nights.

They're weighted by usefulness (in terms of how many powers can slot them), though, not popularity. There was a thread a while back that broke down the weighting based on a ton of random rolls on test, but I'm not sure if it's still around. The weighting makes it less likely to get janky stuff like snipe sets and mezzes, and more likely to get things like melee damage sets. I don't recall (and could certainly be wrong) the "premium" recipes being weighted all that high - just higher than the stuff that has always been trash.

I've been looking for hard data since the new issue dropped, and haven't had any luck.

The question you have to answer is, "If I roll randomly twice, do the 10 recipes I get sell on average for more than I could get for one minimum level LotG/minimum level Miracle/max level Kinetic Combat triple," or whatever the single most expensive recipe you can buy and sell on the market is. That seems to make the "break-point" somewhere in the 10-15 million per recipe range. I've not averaged 10-15 million per recipe when rolling with my 50s (I just vendored a stack of 4 Scirocco procs...), so I stopped. Without knowing the precise weightings for the premium recipes, I don't know for sure that it's the right decision.

I can see the follow-up point about rolling randomly to supply alts. However, I'd also point out that if you're supplying them with level 50 recipes, for a lot of Pool C the non-premium recipes can be had for a pittance at 50. So there's still more long-term benefit in buying a single guaranteed item, selling it for a lot of inf, and then buying all the things your alts need on the cheap.

Edited to add link to rare recipe weight project thread:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=205760

For those who roll, it's because you can get 5 randoms for 1 A-merit. The LotG 7.5's and the various uniques, plus a variety of other orange recipes, cost 2 A-merits each. Others just cost 1, but you can't get more than one thing of choice with a single A-merit. Rolling randomly, you have a chance at getting multiple good things. You also have a chance at getting the kind of dreck the OP found in his tray after rolling, though. It only takes one random roll with 2 LotG 7.5's and a Miracle: +recovery to make up for a lot of trash rolls, but that's the gambler's fallacy talking. You have a LOT more trash rolls than you do rolls with even one of the truly valuable recipes, let alone multiples - but that's what people are rolling for.

No, they do not.

I'd thought it was dependent on character level. I straight-buy with my 50s because so much of Pool C has turned to vendor fodder at max level. I roll randomly with my characters in their 30s because of how true I've found Goat's "Rule of Zero" to be.

2. I KNEW there was something unpleasantly familiar about the flavor of Enriche!

And the spike could be all the GR characters getting to 50, sure. It's across all the purples (Apocs other than the triple have hit 600+m, and Hecatombs have climbed back over 300/400 per) as far as I can tell. Seeing that much change in a week, though, makes me wonder.

Plus, it's more fun to be paranoid.

Yeah, there's a weird spike going on that makes me think there might be some new MA exploit that requires plugging. Pieces of the purple immobilize set that could be bought for 30-50m last week were going 150-180m last night.

Out of curiosity, what levels are available? Since random rolls always happen at the character's level/max level of the range rolled, it matters what level your characters are that have the merits, and that would affect any potential offering price (at least from my perspective) for random rolling.

At 50, I wouldn't pay much for random rolls right now. Too many things have just turned into vendor fodder that used to at least be saleable. I'm already sitting on 11 or 12 A-merits on level 50s, waiting for a new character to need something specific.

For a short time, and at a loss.

I could walk into a movie theater and shout, "I have a bomb in my pants!" and create temporary panic, then probably get thrown in jail. This does not make me successful at shutting down the theater or appreciably altering how it functions. It just means that one person in the short term can make sacrifices to alter the situation in a way that makes a few other people cranky.

By showing them that such a situation is so short-term as to not matter.

If someone went an hour without nevermelting ice because they couldn't put up a bid and walk away for a few minutes, or couldn't go and beat up a handful of MA mobs and roll high-level magic common salvage a few times, I have no sympathy.

If you say so. If they really aren't interested in the market, why don't they just go beat some stuff up to get what they want? The market's not a store. It was never advertised as a store. It's never going to be a store. It rewards patience.

Farmers. People who generate 20-30 million inf/hour by killing stuff. Anyone who values their time more than their play money.

It's an MMO where we represent ourselves with pixelated people who spend their lives wearing spandex. I don't think marketeers exactly have the self-gratification market cornered.

This, by far, is the most bang for your buck. I've got an /ea brute sitting at 2018 HP prior to Overload, and the biggest bonuses are absolutely the ones from the accolade powers.

A six word response:

He posted screenies. Bid one higher.

A nine-word response:

You seem upset. It was essentially a joke. (Oops.)

A haiku response:

In-game marketeers
Destroy their own fake moneys.
Blame the government.

I've purchased every booster so far for all 3 household accounts. This one, I can't justify. It's the first booster none of our accounts will have.

When that happened to me once, I was able to petition for and receive a refund on the listing fees. It may depend on the GM you get, but I got my ridiculous listing fee back when they checked the logs and verified what I said.

What'd be helpful is for someone to go through and so the math on these, using the drop weighting formulas and current market values. My perception is that it's hard to average 15-25 million per recipe right now (or crafted enhancement, even before factoring in salvage costs), but I've probably got less than 100 recipes worth of random rolls total so far and recognize that my sample size is too small. Unfortunately, I never quite understood the drop weighting statistics for Pool C, so doing the analysis I recommend is beyond me, but I've had relatively few random rolls on my 50s where I felt confident that I was doing better (in terms of what I could sell the 5 randoms for) than what I could have gotten if I just saved 2 alignment merits and bought a min-level LotG 7.5 or Miracle.

I know the stack of unsellable Scirocco procs sitting on one of my characters (2 from one roll, along with 2 other damage procs...) has made me gun-shy to roll randomly with my 50s, even in the 35-39 range. With my mid-level characters, who are generating things that aren't grossly over-supplied, I'm quite content rolling randomly.

And now he's specifically asked for feedback and seems aware of the concerns. The existence of this thread would seem to indicate that he doesn't want that to happen again.

Your sarcasm is duly noted, though, and I'm sure you thought it was a constructive way to phrase your comments.

Ya follow me?

Seems to me you're putting words in people's mouths that have nothing to do with the content of what they are saying. So...

Nice straw man, though.

I think the old stuff doesn't represent the game well. I think much of it is aesthetically unpleasant. I think that the technical hurdles that would have to be overcome to give us everything and a bag of chips are outside David's control, but that updating the textures are within his (and his team's) control. I think that I'd rather have more textures and trust that if an object becomes functionally different through the addition of textures, David is aware enough of how attached people are to their characters' looks to not just blithely rubber-stamp it through to QA regardless.

C'mon, there's no need to be like that. It's pretty clear what I meant. There's an obvious psychological difference between "my character is wearing tights that reveal nothing" and "my character is naked and wearing body paint (that reveals nothing)" that might make a difference with the kind of uptight folks who seem to run organizations like the ESRB.

And you'll notice that I said "Assuming," which would tend to indicate that I would assume it wouldn't violate anything - but also that I don't put it past regulatory bodies to be random in their decision-making.

I would support this. In fact, I'd say that a lot of the "tight" legacy pieces could be ported into a menu called "body paint" and left basically as-is.

Assuming that having a bunch of painted toons running around wouldn't violate the whole "T for Teen" thing, of course.

For frankenslotting, you can start as early as you want and still increase the performance of your character beyond what you'd get with standard options. Heff's not doing a full-on final set build, it doesn't sound like.

They're worth less, but they're not worthless. It really depends on what you want to get out of them, and 22 to 32 might be a long time, depending on play style.

Sorry you logged off before I had time to finish alting last night and get to my bins. I had a 35 d/e just sitting there, and a 34 as well.