New efforts!

[chuckv3]

I'm worried about how i'm going to afford stuff, I made serious dough off selling purples, one sale could fund an entire character's set ;_;

My plan is to level up a fire/fire tanker first, even though it isn't my preferred character, because I can solo farm with that in order to get a bankroll and some juicy drops. I'm assuming we'll all start broke with an empty market, so we'll probably all have to do a little farming (or grinding) just to get the shelves filled in the marketplace. But fear not. It's temporary

From a technical point of view, "the market" was the contents of a database, almost certainly not part of the server software. It would have a database connection client pointed at the market tables in some remote database. I'm basing this on the fact that market contents were visible across all servers. I'm hoping that whoever is tasked with getting this running doesn't have to reverse-engineer the database schema based on the queries being sent. Pee-yew! It's doable, but MAN would it be a drag. It's also very likely that player accounts and such were also in a database and not somewhere on the game servers. There's not any clear indication of what exactly they have a disk image of, but I hope it's 1 or more game servers AND any database server(s). Otherwise we can expect some hefty delays even after the ink dries on the deal (because of all that database reverse-engineering that will have to be done).

[AmberOfDzu]

Be tough for them to be as high just because there won't be that much circulating influence at the beginning. could easily be just as cost prohibitive though.

Agreed.

Imagine that first would-be hyper-farmer. Where's does this person get their IO's? The farming build they remember requires sets and sets. So they start out sort of inefficient. Okay, they get inf and drops. Who buys the drops? Everyone else is inf-poor. They get one of the super-IO's, and remembering the high prices in 2012's CoH, they post it for 2Bill, who can buy it? No one. It sits there, they get impatient. Relist at 1Bill. No buyers. Relist at 100Mill, no buyers. And so on. I don't know where it would stop. How long will it take to get the total amount of Inf in circulation up to support high prices? I don't know.

People won't even be able to farm at the same Inf-rate as before -- that was based on selling many of the recipe drops to other players at market prices. That market won't be there to start, and those old 29012 prices were supported by years of accumulated Inf from a large player-base. At a clean restart, the only sources of inf will be from vendor sales, and being realistic, there won't be the same number of players as before to support the elite farmers and marketeers.

[FloatingFatMan]

It won't really be that different to when we first got Wentworths.  The market worked OK then, it will work OK when we get it all back.

[LaughingAlex]

I already have some builds in mind for soloing for purple recipies, on single origin enhancements.  Issue 23 or 24 it will not matter, only the powerset combos in question to me truely will.

[AmberOfDzu]

It's also possible that the early farmers won't "sell" their IO finds at all; but rather barter them back and forth off-market.

[FloatingFatMan]

You're all assuming there will even BE farmers.  This is an old game. Most of the folks that will be playing are hardcore fans who'll be wanting enjoy the game again, not farm crap.

Maybe a few months after relaunch, THEN you can worry about it, until then though... Let's just get the game back first!

[LaughingAlex]

You're all assuming there will even BE farmers.  This is an old game. Most of the folks that will be playing are hardcore fans who'll be wanting enjoy the game again, not farm crap.

Maybe a few months after relaunch, THEN you can worry about it, until then though... Let's just get the game back first!

I agree with you there.  WE won't know how popular city of heroes will be on relaunch.  I think it will become very popular, just cause it's got the gameplay and of course the ambitions I see here to bring it to UE4, something that was never done for it's rival nor will ever be done with it's rival.  Which would be a step towards new content.  That again, it's rival doesn't get currently.

But it's in-game economy will be admittedly in shambles, initially, for a few months before we really see anything happen.  Because without level 50s, influence is going to be very, very limited.  Level 50s playing generate the most influence by many times over so that'll be the big deal.

[MM3squints]

It's also possible that the early farmers won't "sell" their IO finds at all; but rather barter them back and forth off-market.

I think the challenges for farmers (not the "Welcome my broken Engrish I sell Gold type", but the people who farm in game for IOs, prestige, etc) will see how much of the market they can corner.

[Arcana]

The argument I remember was really two-fold:
1) why does PFF "heal" itself so slowly, especially after being broken? This was a real concern as Regen got better at healing the more damage you took, PFF was the reverse of this.
And, 2) why take PFF that needs constant care and the use of a couple of OTHER powers to help maintain it when I can just grab Defiance/Regen/whatev and pretty much just run with only that one power choice and be (reasonably) fine?

To me, these were the real reasons PFF is overlooked and hated by many.

I should point out that in beta, PFF was the strongest defensive passive even with those issues, when block worked with it.  With block, PFF recovered slowly but was so large it was hard to take anything more than bleed-through damage, unless you tried to tank the planet Jupiter or something.

The reason not to take Defiance was that in beta, and through release, it sucked.  They eventually buffed it a few months after release I think in the next round of balancing which made it a lot better, but until the second round, it was basically PFF > Invuln ~ Regen > Defiance in beta, and Invuln ~ Regen > Defiance >>> PFF at release, as far as I recall.

[Arcana]

I'd probably take that approach with any highly virtualized workload, whether it's heterogeneous (cloud) or not. Cheap, generic, easily replaceable (and by extension disposable) processing hosts is one of the big selling points of things like vSphere Enterprise's vMotion / DRS.

The last thing you want is severe performance degradation as your failure mode; better to migrate everything off. I've run into a similar situation where a particular host had hardware issues that caused all the network ports to negotiate down to 100MBps. Needless to say we migrated everything off ASAP and took it down for maintenance. The problem is that most monitoring tools only check if a given link is up or down, not that it's running at the speed it's supposed to be.

A lot of legacy workloads don't work well that way.  If you're running fully virtualized legacy servers, you can get into all sorts of problems with affinity (restarting one part of a server farm and not the rest in an out of sequence order), or systems that take forever to restart and need to have scheduled windows of downtime (think: monolithic SQLserver).

Also, you can't vMotion off of a server where all the ethernet trunks are dead.  You can DRS restart of course, but that's where the above problems come in.  Also, a DRS restart is functionally equivalent to an unplanned powercycle: some apps don't like that or don't recover well from that, and require humans to help the process.  So doing an unplanned DRS in the middle of the night could bring the system down completely until human intervention intercedes.  If you still have access to storage, it could be better for a human to gracefully shutdown the system and then restart it on a good node.

Apps designed by cloud-minded people don't have these problems (unless the people are idiots).  But more "Enterprise" based applications often do.

Mindset can create interesting problems.  For example, most POS (point of sale, not the other kind of POS) vendors still have the mindset that retail customers are cheap bastards that will spend the absolute minimum on network infrastructure (often true) and thus presume absolutely flat, simple networks will be the environment they will deploy in.  So I ran into a vendor that made a system for a client that made the presumption that their systems and the POS system would always be a) on ethernet and b) in the same broadcast domain.  So they actually made up their own ethernet datagrams to send pseudo-broadcasts between the systems that were impossible to route and most firewalls didn't even recognize.  Which made it difficult to get those from the POS server to where the systems were, which was firewalled off of the POS server for PCI security reasons.

Why do this horrible thing?  "Because it always worked before" was the only answer I could ever get.  That doesn't really explain why you'd take the trouble to reinvent the wheel as a pentagon, but it happens all the time.

[Arcana]

You're all assuming there will even BE farmers.  This is an old game. Most of the folks that will be playing are hardcore fans who'll be wanting enjoy the game again, not farm crap.

Maybe a few months after relaunch, THEN you can worry about it, until then though... Let's just get the game back first!

Hypothetically, hard core players might explicitly farm things to rebuild their own builds, even if they had no specific profit motive.

Of course, farming is inefficient, and tends to generate a lot more stuff than you need, so you'd then have players with a lot of stuff and nothing to do with it except sell it or give it away, or both.

[Ironwolf]

I had a few tricks I used to make a bunch of cash that weren't directly market tied. I used to sell everything except recipes and stuff worth more than a million for a simple 100 inf each.

I will likely get back into the swing and start doing it again! AE farming is always a great place to start as well.

[LaughingAlex]

I had a few tricks I used to make a bunch of cash that weren't directly market tied. I used to sell everything except recipes and stuff worth more than a million for a simple 100 inf each.

I will likely get back into the swing and start doing it again! AE farming is always a great place to start as well.

I actually hated AE farming due to the influence inflation it always caused.  I mean purple recipes shot up to 250-500 million influence a piece, it was such that the only way to get purple recipes was to be able to farm purple recipes, which had to be done outside of AE since you could not get purples in AE.

[AmberOfDzu]

I actually hated AE farming due to the influence inflation it always caused.  I mean purple recipes shot up to 250-500 million influence a piece, it was such that the only way to get purple recipes was to be able to farm purple recipes, which had to be done outside of AE since you could not get purples in AE.

It was possible to make an incredible amount of Inf through marketeering -- buying low, reselling high. Mainly because the price data from the market was difficult for people who didn't "study it" to use. IIRC, we could see the prices for the last few sales, but had no idea what the offers and competing bids were. I suspect the market will act very differently with a new player-base's different make-up.

I think it's fair to say that CoH had too few Inf-sinks to have much of a balanced economy. There were a bunch of us just trying to drain the excess off and convert it into dead-money or supergroup prestige, and imo we never perceptibly dented it.

[brothermutant]

I think my farmin toon will be Fire/SS tank or brute. I think I remember getting a decent spines/fire or claws/fire scrapper that could pull it off but it was touch and go for awhile during the leveling process. Had a few other ideas for farming toons, but fire/SS was always great at killin stuff. Will use that to make some monies for my various toons I want for NOT Farming.

[Noyjitat]

You're all assuming there will even BE farmers.  This is an old game. Most of the folks that will be playing are hardcore fans who'll be wanting enjoy the game again, not farm crap.

It's bad to assume that people that farmed were not hardcore fans.

I had 3 paid accounts, badge characters, lead incarnate trials and tfs and when I wasn't teaming I was farming and I know many people that fall into the same category as me.
Some days all you do is farm while others you do alot of teaming.

Let people do what's fun for them, let's not get off to a bad start bashing those of us that liked farming.

[Sinistar]

It's bad to assume that people that farmed were not hardcore fans.

I had 3 paid accounts, badge characters, lead incarnate trials and tfs and when I wasn't teaming I was farming and I know many people that fall into the same category as me.
Some days all you do is farm while others you do alot of teaming.

Let people do what's fun for them, let's not get off to a bad start bashing those of us that liked farming.

Well put. I was hardcore, and I teamed or farmed

[Angel Phoenix77]

Well put. I was hardcore, and I teamed or farmed

I understand this point, while myself I would be called a completeionist meaning I want t finish everything. Before I got my pvp recipe that I sold for 2.25 bil I was living character to character, I will admit this was before knowing to sell to vendors or specific vendors or the market.
My play style was solo, duo, or trio. However, I did my fair share of teaming I always did not like to quit a great team that was having fun and running over enemies like they were not there. While myself did not like farming I understood people wanting to.

[Aggelakis]

You're all assuming there will even BE farmers.  This is an old game. Most of the folks that will be playing are hardcore fans who'll be wanting enjoy the game again, not farm crap.

Maybe a few months after relaunch, THEN you can worry about it, until then though... Let's just get the game back first!

You're assuming hardcore fans aren't farmers.

[Joshex]

You're assuming hardcore fans aren't farmers.

I farm, I love farming. ever since I started as a blaster I dreamed of farming then finally made a really good tank and got my wish and just spent hours demolishing bodies at +4 x8 and inviting random people on the team.