UberGuy

If I really thought it took that much effort to do pretty well at using the market, I'd be far more likely to think there was a problem. But I don't do most of that stuff, and, well, I'm doing pretty darn good.

What I think you need to do that sort of stuff for is to make as much money as humanly possible in as little time as possible, like if you want to outfit a character with purples and/or PvPOs from zero reserves or forward planning. I think I'm OK with that. I don't think we should worry about supporting new players who want to do that, any more than we should try to support new players who want to race to 50.

The contact is actually Tin Mage Mark II. He's a reconstructed version of the original Tin Mage.

Most everyone just calls it the "Tin Mage TF" for brevity.

It's based on more than that. They have the stats of level 30 entities. They also drop salvage appropriate to level 30 entities.

SOs don't follow the same drop level rules that recipes do. They are similar, but not the same. I don't think any of us know what rules Shards use.

But I really do think the core question should be whether that is really a problem. I'm pretty sure that's not one we players can answer firmly, but rather only give opinions on.

I don't really think it makes much sense to support a pure consumer standpoint on the market without much more radical changes to the Inf reward structure the game has had from the onset. Even with none of the inflationary forces we have seen over the past two years, you really can't be a pure consumer on the market if you aren't level 50, because of the way the reward rates grow with combat level (even discounting the I16 doubling of level 50 rewards). A level 20-something doesn't earn enough Inf/defeat to compete with even a level 45. Fixing just inflation won't change that, so is it really that worthwhile to make it possible just for 50s to be able to treat the market as a store? Does that really address the concerns of new players?

Thanks the gods, no.

The former, to an extent. The latter, not so much. I don't think the arguments against PvP nearly so much overlapped with the min/maxing and grinding side of things. The people who didn't want to do it mostly objected to what they perceived as the confrontational and unfriendly personalities of the people in PvP zones, and their perceived willingness to relentlessly "abuse" those less skilled than them.

In other words, I only see some very superficial comparisons, on either side of the debate.

Also a good picture of a Sword Broad.

I agree with the sentiment that said Adjutant should be about to be cloven in twain.

* teleports Schismatrix next to the nearest Moderator drone

When we have to battle one another to earn our Incarnate levels, I'll buy into the notion that it's PvP all over again.

There were things about the old forums that have improved for everyone under the new ones.

When was the last time the devs purged old player posts on this forum? Try doing a search on threads only and see how far they go back. The old forums had to have old threads completely purged that every few weeks, or they got slow and unstable for everyone.

There are definitely problems here, but they seem to be more intermittent. Assuming they're anything the CoH team can actually fix themselves, that intermittent nature may be why they can't find and fix the problem. If the problem is somewhere in the vBulletin software itself, I would hope they could get support for it, since it's commercial software.

One is working as designed. The other was not. Some day, they might get around to changing the design, because the design is not actually doing everything they way they wanted it to, but it's not a bug.

But the core of this issue is about why people can't get past the roadblock. Is it because they honestly and truly can't? Or is it because they need to prepare more or play differently than they have before?

I'm willing to say that the former is inherently bad, but I'm not willing to say that the latter is, even though I might not personally like it.

Trapdoor is conquerable, but he calls for teamwork or very strong solo characters. "Can't beat that way" is not the same as "can't beat", but I think too many folks don't want to change how they play. I can't buy into the notion that the devs have to design around people who can't/won't do any of the following: get a team, seek out temp powers, or build (by whatever means) for high offensive output. I'm not OK with the idea that Incarnate content has to be soloable by, say, a support Empath's raw offensive power. I am open to there being a way for the support empath to win on their own, and that's why I am not nuts about the change making it so it's impossible to pull Trappy from his clones, no matter how much it violated the thematic intent of the encounter. I think making alternate solutions to brute force is good, but in the absence of them, I don't want the main solution of raw damage to have its bar that low.

I'll toss out my answer. It hurts the people who try to use the market as a store.

Here's the interesting thing about it - even if you never get good drops (and we know some folks say they never do), Reward and Alignment merits provide a pressure valve that let you bleed money off the rich market users and put it in your pockets. In a few days time, you can earn enough of either merit type with whichever earning playstyle that is more suited to your habits to create some of the most market-expensive items there are and sell them for gobs and gobs of money. And you can keep doing this every few days, for as long as you feel you have a pressing need for gobs and gobs of money. Right now, you can use this technique to cap a character's on-hand inf in a couple of few weeks, tops.

If all you want to do is play sub-50 and/or just poke spawns, then yes, inflation hurts you. It seems self-evident to me that the market is not meant to be used so one-dimensionally. People can do whatever they want, but there's no guarantee it will be effective.

For the longest time people didn't know Dark had any -Regen at all. (Edit: once it was added. It used to not have any. Most powersets did not.) Hell, a lot of Dark Miasma players didn't realize it. But for some reason tons more people knew a Rad did. If, for some reason, you needed to spam as much -regen as meta-humanly possible, Rad was the better choice, because the base recharge time on LR is a lot lower than that on HT, but even in the old days I never saw people need much more than one, maybe two applications of either power to take down an AV. By the time we got harder AVs, Dark's capabilities were better recognized.

Also, Rad was always a good powerset, and Dark was not always a good powerset. I think it was saddled with the stigma of being a not good powerset long after that changed. It's happened to a lot of other "problem" powersets over the years.

Try it sometime. No, really, try it with common salvage. We have a good example of it happening in here with uncommon salvage, and even then it capped out around 300k, not 1M. And it took so much "effort" to sustain in the first 36 hours or so that the 30-second log-out timer was actually raised as a point of contention.

That sounds like effort to me, yes.


When something is really worth that price to enough people, yes, it absolutely is.

You know that stuff I just said about the work needed to drive up common salvage prices that high? There are times it does work, and is much less effort. There are really are times that you can flip salvage that high, even common. When is that? When supply plummets but demand remains high. Suddenly, hey, that' 1M inf for a common can become the price the market can bear without a ton of work trying to force the market to bear it. Why do people object to something's price rising to what the market can bear under these conditions? Because someone else wants it right then but isn't willing to pay that price right then? What's broken about that? Why is that such a terrible thing?

I have some mild concerns about the effect of perception of prices on new and otherwise uninformed players. But I think the way to address them is to find more ways to drain more inf out of the system faster, not to try and constrain the ways we can use the market. And honestly, I don't worry very much about it in any case. Most people I've met in game (as opposed to on these forums) figured out very quickly that what seemed like wildly unattainable prices weren't that unattainable at all.

But it's not low-hanging fruit at all. It is terribly easy to say "just do that", but a non-TF version of, say, Tin Mage's TF would have to be significantly different. Do you really think most players could solo sixteen War Walker EBs or whatever are in the Apex? Could they solo Bobcat + Neuron + two War Walkers, even EB-downgraded and reduced to level 50? TFs have a minimum team size, and so the devs can design an encounter based on the assumption that at least that many players will be there. They don't have a system that can dynamically adjust to correct for when someone on a (potentially much) smaller team attends.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, or that they can't do it now and so never should. But I do object to the claim that, hey, it's easy to describe so it should be easy to do. They need to build in a new system to do that.

All that said, I'm not sure what I think of the idea. I don't dislike the notion that TFs are meant to be harder and meant to require a team. I know people who want to be able to solo a TF like the ITF or whatever without the gyrations of getting a team to form it and then log out, but they actually want to solo an 8-man TF - they don't want it to be easier to "win", they just want it to let them start it solo.

That's one way to look at it. Certainly, anyone who is benefiting from the established order is going to be hard to convince that changing it is a good idea.

But there's another way to look at it. Some of us are here because this forum, its topics and tendencies are a perfectly natural fit for how we already viewed, played and experienced the game. Only a few of the market regulars actually prefer the market itself to the rest of the game - most of us consider it a means to an end, and view it with varying degrees of favor ranging from outright enjoyment to grudging acceptance.

I am a firm believer that long-term, persistent video games should reward invested effort. If we don't want that, we should be playing something like Pac Man, where previous activity has no bearing on past or future play actually stored in game. In MMOs, our characters progress, and the implication of time and effort invested not influencing that is that our characters may as well progress on our their own completely independent of what we do with them. You could build a game like that, but I would not enjoy it. I like knowing that I get back something proportional to what I put in. The idea that I should get the same as everyone else even if I do more is anathema to me, even in entertainment.

Seems like a good point.

I don't know. But I can't accept that there's "no reason". There's a reason, and we don't know what it is. We can only speculate or guess, but there's no such thing as "no reason", because if there was really no reason, it wouldn't have happened. We may not like the reason, we may not think the reason is good enough, but this is the real world, and we're just not going to get what we think is a good product every time.

But let's circle back. We got to talking about the Malta at all because we were discussing whether it's OK for the game to start telling us we're proto gods and then start throwing massively harder foes at us. An objection was raised because Malta don't make sense there - where have the proto-god-grade Malta have been hiding? But that's mixing two things - we're mixing story and game balance. I was talking about having fun with the Tin Mage and Apex content because its game balance is harder, and from my perspective you moved the goal posts and started us down a discussion about whether it makes any sense for the actual stuff in it to be harder from a story perspective.

I know that all comes together to make a whole, but you and I have different levels of tolerance for the composition.

Don't get me wrong. I would actually prefer what you I think you want in that regard. I really, honestly do want the game to have a credible story - as credible as a story about people who can fly and shoot lasers from their eyes can be, at least. But perhaps unlike you, the mechanics are actually more important to me. As long as they bother to paint at least a thin veneer of lore over it (and a few times they have not), I'm going to be pretty happy. As long as *I* find the challenges fun, I'll forgive them some continuity fail. Sadly, as long as enough people are like me, they will continue to pump out some continuity fail, because they'll have learned they can get away with it. But I'm OK with that.

Does she have an Unstoppable that caps her DR to some damage types, then? I've never noticed it, but that might only mean we've had enough debuffs and/or "correct" damage types.

Edit: By the way, if you're dealing damage to which the Honoree has 100% resistance, you actually don't get any damage float text. That can be hard to notice in a high-gear 8-man team, but it's how I noticed this eventually. I really start to notice it if I an playing somthing that can crit, scourge, assassin strike, or whatever. You see, you get that message ("CRITICAL") and no attendant damage numbers, which has a slap-in-the-face feel to me when I know what it means in this case.