UberGuy

Yes, because we know they will let it break all those things, right? The complexity of those issues surely couldn't have anything to do with why we weren't granted the rare and very rare Alpha Slots already, or why there was a signed-NDA closed beta for I20 that started during I19's closed beta, right?

Which looks almost nothing like what they have done here.

Doing the Apex or Tin Mage TFs without your Alpha slot is lunacy. It's so, so much easier to run every other level 50 TF out there, plus normal level 50 content drops shards. I haven't even seen a Cathedral of Pain form in weeks, and yet I've had enough Shards to craft my uncommon salvage, craft the one from Cathedral of Pain, and have 10-50 shards left over on all my 50s from doing all the other level 50 content I've done. Where's the indication that they're going to start making us have the slots to run the content that unlocks it? So far, if you don't have the slot you're nuts for even trying the content, because the alternatives are that much easier.

Why must "use the market" be devolved to "use the market like Forest Gump would?" Even if we do that, surely you know that there are people who post here who do market like that and have billions?

I don't accept that this is meaningful. I know it's not, because that's how a low-level marketeer IOs themselves. If you never get to 50, your earnings from punching stuff is so small that it's irrelevant, and people still IO themselves.

Again, this assumes that the portion that came from punching dudes was significant to start with. My experience with the market tells me that there's no reason to assume that.

I do think the inflation in the system adds a psych factor that (and I don't mean the lack of money sinks, I mean the honest-to-God things that have been increasing the amount of inf/day the player base creates from scratch). However, I don't think that anything would change that for those people other than to not have a market, period.

I think the only way to achieve that is via money sinks so intense as to cause rebellion on their own. I'm talking something like the way base prestige used to work, which was basically a tax (your prestige due used to be a function of how much prestige you had, even if you tied it up in your base) or vastly larger market fees.

Why do I think that? Market price is, very loosely, a proxy for time. The price of an item should relate to the product of how long it would take you to produce the item yourself times much inf/hour you can "produce" the old-fashioned way, conflated in some fashion with how badly you want the item. A level 50 can potentially produce 10s of millions of inf per hour. Let's pick on an LotG - that could take a multiple calendar for some people to produce by other methods. By that measure alone, it probably should cost hundreds of millions of inf. Let's say in four days elapsed time, our player might be able to earn 10M inf an hour for 2.5 hours played a day, so earn 100M inf. So if it takes them four days to earn an LotG, and they have 100M right now and want an LotG right now, it makes sense to pay that much. So for that person, an LotG might be "worth" 100M inf.

Now let's consider that it might take me twenty days to produce a purple (probably way more if we didn't have Alignment Merits). In 20 days I could produce five LotGs, and sell each of them for 100M inf to people like my example player. By that measure, such a purple should probably cost 500M inf! That's a lot of money - 1/4 of our carrying cap.

The thing is, today's prices are not that outrageous when you consider our actual earning rates. There's a ton of variation in earning rates based on what you're playing, who you're playing with (if anyone), what you're fighting, but the simple fact is that level 50s can produce gobs and gobs of money. Reduce that, and prices go down, but so do the rates of earning you seem to think should be a stronger component of our earning power.

The only think I think makes some sense to do if the concern is for new players is to flatten the earning curve, so that what a level 10 earns from a defeat or a mission completion is not such a meaningless fraction of what a 50 earns. That isn't a new suggestion, and I can't lay any claim to it. I don't think it's important to do, but it would have more of the effect you're talking about.

Fair enough. I tend to assume that people will use inspirations before reporting that something is too hard. We've had several people in these various threads reporting that they did use inspirations and still couldn't defeat him.

Hm. I think what happens is that if you aren't near him when he bifurcates, you don't get the message. I think that would be /bug worthy if you're near him but don't get it just because he's in the "wrong" place.

Heck, it might be /bug worthy that there's no message even if it's based on being near him. It sort of depends on what they are thinking about why we get the message. I think of the message as sort of beyond the fourth wall, because it conveys information I don't think our characters could readily perceive. That makes me think it's meant to tell the player to do something we wouldn't otherwise know when/what to do, which then makes me think we should really see it wherever our character (or Trapdoor) is at.

Heh.

I'm excited about the Incarnate stuff to come, and am aware they may spread it out over that many issues, but if that's all they release for 10 issues, it better rock everyone's socks into the 5th dimension or I think we all have something to be unhappy about.

It's not for only the best players. Trapdoor doesn't require the best players. He requires any one of the following.

• A character that's got some strong DPS (which to me means a reasonably slotted Scrapper, Blaster, Brute, or Stalker). If you have one of these and it can't DPS him, you may not be one of the best players.
• A character that's got -regen or mezzes.
• The ability to find and obtain temp powers from one of at least three different sources we've frequently discussed.
• A team.

If you want to solo him with your Defender, you may need to be a better player. If you aren't that fancy, get team. Why are we blowing the requirements for this out of proportion?

Trying to keep the discussion focused on the OP's topic, are we really going to assume that there's an endemic situation where our players can't deal with info overload on TFs, based on a couple of reports of it? Should we assume that they can't figure out how to build a team for TF filled with level 54 critters? People who are "better players" are completing these TFs with the "better player" team composition equivalents of PuGs. Is it so inconceivable that the people who aren't "better players" could figure out "hey, we should grab a bubbler and a Rad" or something like that? If they can't figure that out, how low are we willing to take the bar, here?

But when have we realistically seen that happen? How long has it persisted?

I can think of one time something like that has happened. It was relatively recently, and it has since receded. A-Merits lowered the price of all pool A/B/C/D recipes, but did nothing to the price of purples or PvPOs. It became noticeably more time consuming to sell drops or merit-bought goods and use the income to buy purples.

But we're talking about purples and PvPOs in that example. I've never seen that happen to stuff that is available at the regular Merit Vendors, because I think the small dynamic range on Reward Merit prices for everything they can buy helped damp it. Possibly more importantly, prices on high-end pool A/B/C/D recipes have all risen again, and are actually at some of the highest levels I've ever seen them outside of ongoing exploits. (Unless, of course, I've missed the popularization of a new exploit. I've been attributing it to a big increase in the number of people playing 50s.)

I just don't see the inter-pool prices doing things like that. If LotGs become 10x more valuable, it's likely that Crushing Impacts do too, or at least something proportionally close.

I don't know for sure what the devs really thought, but I believe they probably always intended us to use the market to obtain "decent" IO builds. I think the whole system is predicated around it. No one is expected to really get all the things they might want as drops, so people who get A and want B have a place they can "trade" A away and get B instead. But since A and B may not be of equal value, someone may have to trade let's say 20 A's to get one B. We actually trade in currency so that, among other things, we don't have to find someone who wants 20 A's all at once. We can sell an A to 20 different people and save up the results to buy one B.

The notion that the inf we get selling 20 A's and the Inf we get defeating foes need to be equivalent is not clear to me. I think there are some advantages of simplicity to having it work that way, which gets back to making things easier on new players, but I am not at all sure it's important it be that way.

I see no issue with that. Hell, a lot of players probably don't know about the options they have. I don't think we've really touched on that all in these discussions about the Incarnate content (there are three threads on it in in this forum section alone) - most of it has been centered on people who know about the alternatives, but cannot or will not use them. Giving people an in-game way to know about some of the useful, powerful combat tools seems reasonable, though I think it it might be a bit hard to convey some of them "in character".