Sardan

I'm quite sure the devs haven't forgotten The Coming Storm. But first and formemost they have to create the new shineys that keep the subscription money flowing. The good news is that the team is now up to over 60 people and they still have open reqs, and that'll let them tackle more tasks simultaneously than in years past. The Comicon video showed them saying that they're going back and reworking a lot of the low level content, for example. That's something that players have been asking for for 5 years. Plus while they're working on i16 and Going Rogue, they're also working on killer new end game content and a way to power up level 50s without raising the level cap. So they have a lot of irons in the fire.

They've hired new writers but it takes time for people to get up to speed and get content into the game. I'm confident we'll see The Coming Storm plot moved forward. But no, I won't take any bets on exactly when that will happen!

Technically you're right, but the types of farming you're mentioning are extremely rare compared to farming for drops, which was what PP was referring to. She's quite right that optimal farming for drops is done solo.

Supply and Demand
Unlike a store, prices are set in the CoH markets by "supply and demand". We've all heard this phrase, but what does it mean? Simply put, the more available something is, the lower its price will be and vice versa. Prices are set between willing sellers and buyers. No one can force you to buy at a price you're not willing to pay.

Example: before the Mission Architect (MA) was introduced, only rare (orange) salvage was pricey. Uncommon (yellow) salvage was cheap and generally you'd get a better price by selling it to a store than by selling it on the market. Now uncommon salvage frequently sells for 50K-100K inf. What changed? MA missions don't drop salvage, they drop tickets. Players have shown a reluctance to redeem their tickets for uncommon salvage; instead they save up for desirable recipes. People are crafting IOs just as much as ever so demand has remained constant but supply has tightened up, so salvage sells for more.

Prediction: when the Going Rogue expansion goes live, there will be at least a temporary shift away from the MA. Salvage will once again be abundant and prices will plunge.


Cyclic Demand
Demand that predictably follows a pattern is called "cyclic demand." In the real world, think of peak season hotel prices. Hotel prices are always highest in the peak season because there are more people chasing after a fixed number of hotel rooms. This pattern of higher prices during peak season is so reliable as to be predictable.

Is there cyclic demand in CoH? Sure. There are always more players on during weekends, holidays and special events such as the release of a new issue or a double XP weekend. Why should you care about cyclic demand in CoH? It'll make more sense after the next section....


Gotta Have It NOW
When most players decide they want to buy a set of IOs, they proceed to bid high enough to get the set right away. That's understandable. For them the market isn't fun. It's a necessary chore, like going grocery shopping. They want to get it over with and get back to having fun. By putting in high bids they get their stuff quickly. Experienced marketeers derisively refer to that as "get it now" pricing; they're derisive because it guarantees the buyer is paying top dollar.

There's an even worse form of "get it now": since many of the players that want to get their IOs right now don't want to be bothered with the hassle of crafting them, they'll pay a healthy premium to have someone else do the crafting. And when I say "healthy premium" I really mean "insane premium" like paying 2-3 mil for ingredients that costs 500K to purchase and craft.


The Secret Every CoH Market Billionaire Knows
Combine the concepts of cyclic demand with "get it now" pricing, and you get an interesting phenomenon. During peak demand (usually weekend evenings) there is a reliable flood of players who just want to buy their stuff ASAP and get back to playing. Prices surge. Off-peak those players are absent for the most part and prices sag.

So if you want to make a fortune playing the market or just want to avoid paying top prices, the secret is to have a bit of patience. Don't outbid peak weekend prices. Look at average prices on a Tuesday or Wednesday, put in your bids, and force yourself to wait a day or two for your bids to pan out. Buy recipes and salvage and do your own crafting instead of buying pre-crafted IOs.

The real kicker is that for every player who takes the time to read this and try it out, there will be hundreds who can't be bothered. And those will be the ones making you rich.

That pretty well sums it up. I have a lvl 50 SR scrapper so I wanted to try Shields on my brute. As Kepa said, SR is easier to get to the soft cap and is WAY more survivable due to much stronger def debuff resists and that wonderful sliding damage resistance. And let's not forget that Quickness gives you the same +Recharge as 2 purple sets or 3 LotG recharges (roughly).

On the other hand, with Shields you get a damage buff/enemy damage debuff/taunt aura with AAO and an extremely high damage PBAoE in Shield Charge. The extra damage, more than anything else, is what I believe makes it the FotM for min-maxers.

My Shields brute is currently my favorite character but I must say if things start to go bad he can go from god-mode to dead extremely fast. With SR you typically get more time to react in a debuff situation because your def won't drop as quickly and each successive hit damages you less and less as the damage resistance ramps up.

I don't know why SR isn't more popular with Brutes. Its advantages stack up very well when compared to Shields.

What we're proposing here is a practical realization that 2 years is not the same as 5 years. With each passing year where a player has never reactivated, the chances of him ever doing so diminish. I really don't see the harm in a policy that would free up all names from an account if it had been inactive a solid 5 years. Yes, there's a miniscule chance that player would be return with a crystalline memory of his reserved names and be gung-ho to subscribe for years if only those names were kept, but it's more likely he won't have any recollection and will be happy to start from scratch.

I agree with your reasoning, but I'd extend it to level 50s. If you've been inactive for an unbroken 4+ years it's simply unreasonable to continue to reserve those names.

In general I like that NCsoft retains our characters' names and possessions. I think it's quite common for people to take breaks from MMOs, then return for a while. But anyone who has been inactive for over 4 years would have to have quite the sense of entitlement to feel any outrage over losing any character names. I say the balance should be tilted in favor of current paying customers.

I'd call it a certainty rather than a pretty safe bet. The new difficulty slider settings apply to regular content. As long as the foes you're righting are the right level, they can drop purples. There's no existing code that checks your difficulty slider before rolling for a purple, and if they added that it'd make no sense and provoke justifiable outrage from the players.

Yeah, it's key to get an enemy that won't unload a big attack chain on you while you're resting. CoT Guides are good, but as their attack seemed to be awfully near 50% of my health, I was concerned that if 2 of them hit me at the same time they might kill me. A CoT Ice Thorn also has only one melee attack and it hits for a bit less damage than the Guide. When they both hit at the same time, it'd take me way down into the danger zone, but I was able to safely regen.

I believe a dev posted that they are testing a queuing system so that in the future you won't get locked out of a busy server, you'll just get put into a queue. As part of this, they tightened up the way the test server locks out so we no longer get access to the character creator (*sob!*). I'm sure they'll clean up that message eventually. Right now they must be more concerned with just getting the more important aspects working correctly.

I never thought about that. Well, as long as the default was to hide folks on teams that'd be fine too. Since the primary purpose of the Search window is to find people to team with, its current state of cluttering the list with ineligible candidates has got to be changed.

They'll never make such an announcement. And yes, it is a failure. The entire online ad market is depressed. Further, I would guess their actual click-thru rates were abysmal. Further, it's expensive as hell to have an ad sales rep selling such a niche product (the product being the in-game ad system). Even though your idea is interesting, I think it'd be an investment with horrible ROI.

Except Elec Melee is a pretty poor choice if you're building a Hero or AV killer. It's a fun set but is probably the weakest at single target damage.

QFT.

If you're on a budget, at least focus on melee defense. You can get by with so-so ranged and especially AoE defense, but you're going to spend most of your time in melee, so work on that. And the Steadfast Protection +3% unique IO is mandatory, plan on getting that.

One thing that can really help is to put your bids in way early. Like now, before you start even leveling your SD. By being patient you can get your Touch of Death, Obliteration and Gaussian sets for way less than the "buy it now" prices. And bid on recipes, not IOs.

I wouldn't look to Ice Armor being proliferated any time soon. IIRC it was going to be one of the original brute armor sets, but the inherent slows worked against generating Fury, so they yanked it.

As for me, either Spines or MA would be great. I wasn't interested in either before the customizability for them was announced, but now they both will look cool.

I can't say whether it's unchanged, better, or worse, since I'm taking a break from the AE. But my experience was definitely prior to the most recent patch.

I've been inspired by you, PK! I'm going to start ignoring politicians whose policies I find reprehensible by wearing "Vote For" t-shirts with their names on them!