UberGuy

I don't disagree. I think, though, that your expectation to be able to do that (purple your characters when they hit 50) is not at all what the devs have in mind. I believe that there is lots of evidence that they expect purples to be something players pursue once they are 50, or at least very near to 50. What's that evidence? They only drop from level 47+ critters. Unique of all IOs, they can only be slotted at exactly level 50. Finally, they are very rare in the sense that they take a long time on average to produce. (Ignore randomness for a moment - even using Alignment Merits would take 40-50 days to produce one purple.)

So, yes, if you want to land at 50 and then immediately purple out a character, them maybe you need to farm or marketeer. I just don't think that's something the Devs are likely to review any time soon, because I think that, essentially, that's working as intended.

I'm not farming for rewards. I'm badging with a side of playing a character that I'm digging having made more kick-butt than before. This is a hero gone rogue for the sake of badges. I need Mayhem mission arsons for the badge. If I wanted to I could farm a single Mayhem instance for the arson badge, but kicking the butts of lots of bad guys on a high difficulty setting is a hell of a lot more fun to me than loading up a lowbie and farming their Mayhem for side missions. So I'm running paper missions and then running a Mayhem. Before this I was running tip missions to go from Villain to Rogue and I'll soon need to go from Rogue to Hero.

That's the whole point you're missing. I'm just playing the game, and taking what comes my way, and it's plenty good to make billions of inf. You seem so embedded in the farming mindset that you can imagine that anyone would play on high difficulty settings or run repetitive combat for any other reason than high rewards. I do it because I think it's fun, and if I didn't I probably would have stopped playing this game three years ago.

It would be dumb to do what I'm doing if I wanted to farm. I don't. I want to kick stuff's butts. Shockingly, I've shown that kicking stuff's butt in a way that a farmer would scoff at [The defense enters the player eryq2 as exhibit "A"!] is still enough to earn a staggering amount of inf in a couple of months.

What does that have to do with the point? Why are you bringing up what you can do with farming when your whole position is about what you can't do without farming? What you can do in a farm is completely irrelevant to that except to set a baseline for what time frame you think is reasonable for earning, say, 20B inf. All that matters is what someone not running something like a BM farm can achieve. Stop talking about what you can do in a farm - it has no bearing on the discussion.

There is a difference in being a liar and being wrong. You made a claim, and I believe that claim has been thoroughly disproven unless you want to contest the 20B inf target number as adequate. That doesn't mean you were trying to deceive anyone, but it might mean, for example, that your claim was not backed up by suitable facts. I tried to provide those facts, and I believe they support my position and not yours.

Your response to that, so far, has been to try and redefine my activities as being the same as yours. Hopefully clearly, I don't think is remotely reasonable to redefine what I'm doing that way, and moreover, I think you have repeatedly undercut that position by pointing out how inefficient I am being about my alleged "farming door maps".

I think I see. I just read it as though you were correcting what I had said, but I think I get what you were saying now.

Possible. He was involved in a pretty involved market discussion (in the Test Server forum of all places) and when presented with some detailed information that was contrary to his position, he moderated his viewpoint to something more middle-ground. That doesn't seem to be going on here, though.

Edit:
For many but certainly not all players, the change to make Fitness inherent is a nice band-aid for this. I know it lets some things I dropped off the bottom of my power pick priority list fit back on my characters, though perhaps with limited slotting.

That's correct. You never lose slots for exemplaring.

Think about the respec process, if you've ever done one. When it comes to placing slots, think about how it handles them in the 30s. When you're leveling up you place slots two or three at a time, and there are levels in the 30s where you get three slots two levels in a row. When you respec, these cases are handled as bundles of six slots in one shot, not two successive cases of three slots apiece.

Instead, this is what the exemplar scaling rules for enhancements are supposed to simulate. Multifunction enhancers like IOs and HOs are extremely friendly for this sort of thing - back when all we had were SOs it was potentially very painful. You might three-slot damage, but usually only had one slot of some things like accuracy, recharge or end reduction. Having that one enhancer get shrunk significantly could be really painful. Now with IOs and the like it's common to have much more enhancement even of those "lesser" attributes, so while everything is still scaled down, we can often have larger values to start with.

If that were truly strictly the only thing changing, they probably could do that. I think what's happening a lot of times is that there's rarely such an isolated change rolled out. I suspect that things may get pushed in the patch pipeline that include changes that do require the server and client to change in lockstep.

Now it's entirely possible that there are things about critter changes that really do require them to update both sides at once. Someone who had looked at the game files might be able to tell us more about unconfirmed reports that critter powers have info in the client files, for example. But whether info like that truly needs to be in step with the server still probably wouldn't be clear without dev comment.

Do you really think banning people will stop unbanned people from using exploits? I think that's outrageously naive. The only way that would work is to ban people until all that's left is those with the moral fiber to never use an exploit. Oh, there will be people it stops from exploiting out of fear, but I don't think you're going to keep those people in such an environment. If they would like to exploit but don't solely out of fear of punishment, I think they're going to look for what they see as greener pastures, consciously or not.

Truly mass punishment for something like this is stupid. Even last time around, what they did was not mass bans. Probably a very small fraction of the total player base was punished, just a large enough portion that a lot of people knew someone who was punished. I can promise you that not everyone who used those exploits was punished - only folks who really, really pushed it. (Oh, and some folks who, it seems, got incorrectly caught in the dragnet.)

Lesson shown large last time around, relying purely on automation to identify exploiters cannot be fully trusted - people had characters deleted who were untrained level 50s due to non-PL level pacts. So you have to choose between reviewing all the hits your automation identifies as potential exploiters or risk punishing people who truly did nothing wrong. There are on the rough order of a hundred thousand active accounts for this game. If even just 1% of people used the exploit, that's a thousand accounts that need to be reviewed once automation identifies them. Do they have the staff man-hours to do that, even if it's CSR-type folks who do it? How long would it take given existing workload? Is it worth it? If not, do you risk punishing "good" players, or do you scrap the idea of punishment altogether? Or do you instead try to write a very narrow filter that identifies only the most intense exploiters so it's easier to hand-check them? This lets you set the image that you're doing something, but it's undercut because potentially lots of less intense exploiters go unpunished (and talk about that fact).

Either way, mass punishment of stuff like this is simply impractical. It's a dream world. The main correct response is to correct the defect and move on. The main issue with this one was a matter of timing. Things like this come up all the time in lots of games, but their impact is determined largely by how long they're left in the wild. Events conspired that this one became widely known at a time when the devs could not react in a timely fashion. Stuff happens.

Yeah, we get it. You pine for the days of old Regen. That was fifteen issues ago. Time to move on.

(Old MoG was crap. I pee on that, not the new one.)

That's correct for set bonuses, and special, non-proc IOs like the LotG global recharge and the KB protection IOs (which behave like set bonuses). You can lose the power and you retain the bonus(es).

It's something I whipped up in Python. I'm happy to share it, but the initial version was targeted to a very narrow purpose. I've modified it to make it a bit more generally useful, mainly meaning it accepts command-line arguments to let one tell it what logs to parse and put some boundaries around what data to accept.

I should finish it up tomorrow, and I can host it for anyone who wants it to download and mess around with. It will need a Python 3.0 interpreter. (3.1 would probably work, but I haven't tried it.) I am fond of the ActiveState free install. Edit: Hm, they don't offer 3.0 any more. I guess I should upgrade anyway.

By your definition, anyone running any combat content in the game is farming. If you're going to define farming like that, then here's how I can restate your argument.

"The only way to outfit a character with purples is to use RMT or play the game."

If you think that's asinine, I do too, but I'll point out that it's your redefinition of farming that makes it so.

That's the point. I don't have to get on a farm map. I'm not farming. I'm playing a character I enjoy playing anyway, playing stuff that's readily available to play, but that is not farming in any traditional sense.

More importantly, I showed that I did this with quite reasonable downtime. I didn't give quotes based on extrapolation from only my peak earning rates, but rather based on whole days. Then I showed just how much I spend playing (or not) on each day, so people could judge for themselves whether or not I am playing an unusually large amount.

Yeah, woo, boy. Let's call what I was doing "farming" when it included going after PPD kill badges at -1 level, then still running a bank mission at +2/x1 every 5 papers and completing an arson for the badge. Let's point out that it included a Synapse TF, a RWZ raid, a Hamidon raid. Yeah, all that was included in the metrics I posted, but I was "farming".

Your entire position is "you have to farm" and then you poke holes in my "farming" methods. Hint: my methods were inefficient because I was not farming.

Shield also benefits Scrappers more because their damage levels come from a higher base, where Brutes have a low base and are brought up near Scrapper levels from large Fury contributions. Adding AOO's bonuses add up to a larger net for the Scrapper. (I haven't checked, but AOO should also be a larger buff per foe, as the Brute AT modifier for self damage buffs is 80% of that of Scrappers.

When IOs were first created, that was one of many alternate suggestions to the current binary cutoff.

Have you ever watched reality television? Imagine if AE sessions were televised.

I think there needs to be XP in the AE because to do otherwise makes it the demesne of a tiny fraction of the game base who are interested in artistic pursuits for their own sake. I do not believe that's enough people to justify continued dev investment in the tool. Hell, I have doubts that the number of people who use it for XP justify that, but the relative frequency of exploits found there must certainly prop that stat up.

First of all, the thread like that I remember wasn't purples. Also, the guy doing that (purples or not) is not "many of the marketeers".

To answer the actual question you couched behind hyperbolic accusations, AE exploits increase the actual money supply in game relative to the amount of goods they create. People PL-ing in the AE don't create the same proportion of drops per inf created that they do in other content. Even if they take their tickets and roll up a nice distribution of bronze, gold, silver and salvage drops (which no one does) they stay in the map long after they hit the ticket cap, so they produce disproportionately more inf than tickets, and thus more than drops.

Even if this did nothing at all to market supply of goods, it would make the sale prices of market goods creep up, because there would be more money in the system chasing the same number of goods - inflation in a much more economically correct sense than the usual MMO use of the word ("prices on X went up!") But on top of that it actually reduces supply rates of certain goods. Very few people in these farms are using their tickets to create random common salvage. None of them are producing any purples. So now more money is chasing fewer goods.

When someone buys up all of something the market, that only creates a market supply drought as long as that person can keep up the purchasing. It doesn't change the actual rate of supply in the game for an entire category of items, like purples or common salvage.

Whether or not this is actually a problem depends on your perspective. High prices mean higher profits per sale, so if you actually use the market to sell stuff you can typically "keep up with the Joneses". It seems a lot of people despise high(er) prices on their face, irrespective of whether they represent an actual decrease in buying power. Others insist on viewing the market as a store, where only the sale prices of goods matter.