UberGuy

Continuing attempts by the devs to mitigate the attractiveness of the AE have helped somewhat. For a while, the AE was so good, you were nuts to avoid it unless you had personal reasons for not wanting to use it. And it was really quite easy to set up missions that gave crazy good rewards.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether you're a dev or an XP seeker, a combination of changes to the MA and the introduction of the I16 difficulty settings made "normal" content more competitive. I can go in a normal mission on a high difficulty and not feel like I'm just ridiculously missing out compared to most AE farm content. Of course, skilled folks continue to find new ways to squeeze off-the-charts XP out of the AE. I have little doubt a lot of people who still seek these out, but its adoption among the wider player base is nothing like AE was in its heyday, at I14 release and for a couple of months after.

There's something important about that which ties back to what eryq points out - if our most prolific power levelers are running in the AE, they're producing a fraction of the drops they otherwise would, because it's typical for them to ignore hitting the ticket cap, which they can do easily but stay in the maps to continue gaining XP.

Fortunately, folks who farm for drops' sake and not raw XP have an easier time setting up such farms thanks to the I16 settings. I doubt any of us know the ratio of farmers to power levelers, or how many people choose what method when they have overlap in those goals, but it has to help somewhat mitigate the "bleed-off" of drop production that I suspect the AE creates.

I also agree that farmers, power levelers (when doing things that produce drops) and their ilk probably produce a big chunk of the market supply buyers enjoy. I have no objection to them doing so.

I'm not really sure what any of that has to do with claims that so many people are in WW that it's reducing drops. The idea that our prolific farmers and PLers are standing around at WW too much of the time strains credibility. Certainly none of the ones I have known do that unless they're AFK or something, in which case they weren't producing any drops anyhow.

Edit: By the way, I suspect that non-farming, non PL-ing people who prefer to play at 50 are pretty competitive suppliers, taken as a group, with people who spend a lot of time farming or PLing. They don't produce as much stuff per unit time, but I strongly suspect there are significantly more of them. Farmers and PLers aren't the only reason the supply is at 50 (or at max level). A lot of supply is generated there because it's at a point where our characters are at their most powerful, and a lot of people prefer to play there. (Which is a big part of why PL techniques are in high demand.) When I play, I usually play 50s, and while I'm not technically farming, I'm fighting a lot of stuff at once and killing it really fast. It's not as good as "real" farming, but I bet a lot more people have characters that can do what I'm doing than have the builds and/or the attention span to "really" farm. An awful lot of people find "real" farming really boring, but love rolling content at 50.

I usually end up chatting with people when I stopped off to dump heaping piles of salvage there. I often take that opportunity to go get a sandwich or make a pit stop, meaning I'm AFK there.

Could you explain what problem you believe that creates?

I think the market is a good deal healthier. I think it's a bit healthier compared to the old blue side and indescribably healthier red side. I think it's impossible to prove that this was due to the merger, because the merger came bundled with increased player populations and a new merit mechanic.

I should note that we don't know what situations Posi's "crystal ball" were focused on. One of the most basic assumptions in pre-I18 market merger discussions on the forums was that the Influence and Infamy currencies would remain separate. The actual I18 merge completely undercut that assumption by merging both the markets and the currencies. Every (rationally supported) downside prediction for merged markets had its foundation in that separation of currency. Perhaps Posi's did too.

First, let me thank you for your efforts. A lot.

Second, is there really no better way to handle this? I have tons of builds that I keep for every character for reference purposes. It doesn't make any sense to do what you're saying to those builds. This approach means that there's no way I can use the new version of Mid's to open those prior builds. I'll have to keep an old copy, and any time I happen to double click on one of those old builds, it'll load in the new Mids and fail. While I truly appreciate your efforts, that's a pretty sucky situation to face as a heavy user of the program.

It's hard to knock software that does as much as Mid's builder does when it's free, but I really wish you could do something other than offer us this work-around. I'm afraid it's not that helpful.

I have a character that had a pre-story pretty compatible with the Incarnate concept back in Issue 2. She is ageless, imbued with the power of a god or "entity" in old-school game terms. (Anubis, if you're curious.)

The basic idea was the old AD&D concept of a deity's "proxy". For those not familiar with D&D, this was a non-deity imbued with a portion of the god's power. A proxy was something reasonable to have show up at places or times at which the god needed to make a (very) strong showing but not so extreme that the god would manifest personally (which usually takes something of multiversal apocalyptic nature to bring about). Think: herald of Galactus, but extended to gods of myth and lore (and thus probably without the world-eating overtones).

Most of my characters have magical origins, and I find it easy to imagine them tapping into the powers of the gods as an extreme means of extending that power. Even if they don't become agents of the gods, they might be willing to steal power from the gods or perhaps just tap into the same power sources the gods themselves do. It seems to me the canon for the Well of the Furies leaves some good wiggle room there.

I'll wait and see, though, what explanation meshes best with the canon for my characters who don't seem to me on a progression to become (demi)gods. I have a hero who's a guy in a suit of power armor, Iron Man style. I can think of a few decent possibilities for why/how he'd become god-like in a way that holds to that concept, but I don't yet know if they'll mesh well. I don't like for my character back stories to be at right angles to the game canon, so I'll wait till I learn more to flesh that out. I could just go for the whole "we used technology to tap magical/divine power sources", but I think I can do better than that.

I don't see any of my characters becoming gods proper, though. Just very, very powerful beings.

If everyone present was of a level appropriate to Skyway itself, then yes, that could explain it. It's not just a matter of having IOs. It's also a matter of having enough attacks to sustain some sort of attack chain (not necessarily in the "formal" sense, just enough to be able to attack constantly) and enough endurance recovery to sustain them. That's a challenge sub-20.

I still think that's got to be a fairly unusual outcome for as many as 20-30 people, especially if some of them are able to buff the other people's damage, recharge, and/or end recovery.

It's important to recognize that GMs are hard to kill explicitly because they're huge bags of HP. That big bag of HP which means their regen rate, in terms of average HP/sec, is very large. Anything that significantly impacts their regen rate, therefore, is going to be disproportionately effective at helping defeat them. Since you ran into a situation where the DPS of the assembled players wasn't up to that on its own, the -regen made all the difference.

I promise you, though, that GMs are not indestructible without regen debuffs.

Every now and then a market user, usually one with deep pockets, looks at things with many thousands available and decides they don't like that. Sometimes it's a whim, sometimes it's some (strange?) desire to see the item worth selling again, but they buy it all up.

Given the generally slow salvage supply due to ToT, there may be some profit goal in play, but high-level commons are a terrible target for such schemes in general. (It may work, but for the effort they could probably make 10x as much inf working some other product.)

My bet is that a week after ToT ends there will be thousands for sale again.

In order to understand the impact on performance, context may be important. What do you mean by "performance"? What are your goals. If you are interested in things like maximum DPS or maximum rate of debuff application, then redraw may matter. If you are worried about whether your character is going to be useful to a team, redraw isn't likely to be a major factor.