UberGuy

I'm intimately familiar with the differences, and aware the game is in C. But lets take your example. It seems you were making inf from nothing using the market interface. Do you know they made that possible while changing the market interface? Or were they changing something else that interacted with the market interface to make that bug possible? We'll probably never know.

The point is they could break the game in any of a hundred ways making any change. It would be ridiculous to be afraid of asking for specific changes because those changes might introduce bugs, because any change might cause a bug.

This.

Plus, waiting to get field crafter means you spend all that time you could have had it without it. People who craft tons of stuff want field crafter for its convenience during that time, not to wait and get it at the rate it takes to sell items like common IOs at their maximum prices. Those are items with maximum prices a lot of marketeers consider piddly for the time they tie up slots.

I don't want to say such caution is misplaced, but it has to apply for every change. While I know it's not likely, they could have caused the problem you're describing making some costume change. They have broken really strange things working on stuff that seems to us to be totally unrelated.

Yeah, I'm not big on earning interest. A bank as a place to store inf alone I'd be fine with.

I don't agree with this at all. There was some of that, certainly, but I feel it misses what appeared to me to be the most vocal and most virulent of opposition to the merger - those who wholeheartedly maintained that merging the market unequivocally violated their RP worldview. There simply was no justification for a merger that these folks would accept, no matter how well framed. To them, the concept of a merger was itself anathema.

In my opinion, the people who were dissatisfied with the RP explanations provided were often voices of moderation. They at least accepted that a merger could be explained to their satisfaction, even if they did not get the satisfaction they would have liked to have seen.

Edit: There were also a couple of people who seemed to have trouble separating the game fiction of playing a villain from real-world consequences, and actively (and seemingly fully seriously) wanted anyone who played a villain to suffer an explicitly inferior gaming experience as punishment for playing a villain. Merging the markets would implicitly improve the experience of market-using villains, and was thus unacceptable under this view.

Well, the tiny minority part is what I mean about them probably not considering it worth doing. The ensuing outrage part is sort of what I meant about them not thinking about it, at least objectively.

I think we know they'll do things that cause moral outrage, at least from what are probably vocal minorities. They just have to think there's a good enough reason to do it. After all, they merged the markets, something that cause quite possibly the purest (in the sense of not being rooted in game balance) of moral outrages I think I've ever seen. What'd it take? From what we were told, it was the realization that maintaining separate markets was becoming a burden on their development time that they could spend on other things.

I'm not really sure. I mean, think about the stuff they'd have to do for that. They'd need a new (but simple) structure of some kind in the DB to represent accounts, and something would have to be stored either in our characters or our global account to link them to the bank accounts they had, and (probably most labor intensive) the bank would need some sort of graphical interface. Given how the devs like to do this stuff, they'd also probably create a building or indoor office for us to interact with it (though they IMO could certainly re-use the market or Vault Reserve for that).

I'm not saying the bank is a bad idea at all. I just have a hard time imagining it's actually easier than what we're imagining would be needed to change our inf from a 32-bit to a 64-bit number.

What seems likely to me to be the easiest-to-implement suggestion for working around the existing cap was the inf token idea. Of course I'm not sure what's involved in the creation of new "special" salvage items, but they seem to do it pretty regularly these days, so I'm guessing it's relatively simple. Having a merchant where you could buy and cash in the tokens/salvage for (say) 1B is probably simple - it seems to me like it'd just be a standard merchant interface where they had this one item for purchase and sale at (presumably) the same price.

Shocking, since a Controller doesn't as easily get soft-capped defense to three positions.

Hey, look, this guy can almost act like a twelve-year-old.

FWIW, my forum and global name is my handle from FPS games of days gone by, and it's intended to be a joke. I guess I should be used to people assuming dumb stuff on the internet.

Wait, I though being awesome at video games didn't matter. I'm so confused.

By the way, thanks for the opportunity to report you for posting that last bit. Doing so may be petty, but I'm going to enjoy it.

Uhh. You do realize they buffed the hell out of most of the pools when they gave them a 5th power, right? I haven't seen people griping about PPPs since then. There are way better powers than the Mu Guardian nowadays.

I think, to your point, worrying measured sustained DPS outside of the situations you're talking about is kind of meaningless anyway. We use AVs and pylons and such to measure our sustained DPS because they're the only things that generally last long enough for us to sustain an attack chain long enough to bother measuring what we were sustaining. Since that means we have to sustain those attack chains, well, they have to be endurance sustainable. So that's pretty much always what we'll end up measuring.

I'm sure there are some middle ground conditions, maybe fighting some Elite Bosses or something, where we might win a fight faster using a higher DPS chain that's not actually sustainable for longer term fights. But I'm not sure it's worth the effort to develop and document, even for the numbers freaks we foster in this forum.

Not that I recall.

Thanks for the really pointless "advice."

Maybe people like to play a Controller with amazing defense.

In I9 beta, they did. And for a while, people ran around utterly destroying things with procs in powers like Rain of Fire, Ice Storm, and Burn.

I never slot level 50s of these. It's always more valuable to me to be able to exemplar down as far as possible and retain the +recharge bonus.

Have you looked at the difference in enhancement% on a level 50 versus a level 25? Even for defense, where small % changes can be a big deal near the softcap, once you actually calculate the difference in total enhancement (remember, people don't typically just slot the Global in meaningful +def powers) times the base defense of a power, I have found the difference in a level 25 versus a level 50 to almost always be ignorable.

FYI, the lower ones have typically, though not always, been more expensive for a very, very long time.

Just to be clear, I'm not just talking about really min/maxed ticket farming. I'm talking about any form of dedicated ticket farming, where you play the same mission with the same foes over and over. (To answer your question, in the better farms those foes usually are tailored in some fashion to be weak to your strengths, but it doesn't have to be anything spectacular. It being spectacular just probably makes you able to take on more foes and thus earn more tickets faster.)

In my experience, there are only so many people willing to run farms for hours at a time on a regular basis. I'd say probably 1/3 to 1/2 the people I know well in game have farmed the AE at some point, but probably only like 1/10 or fewer of them do it with any regularity. The rest get bored and want to do other stuff.

That may happen with AMerits too. Even though you can't quite "farm" them in the same sense, you do still have to repeat the same content a lot. We're getting more in I19, though, so that may help sustain it.

Two A-merits is ten random rolls.

I'd like to see some breakdown of that. I use all these tools, and I would currently never try to outfit myself using any of the non-market tools as my general source of gear based on my perception of the time it takes me to obtain specific goods. I would use all those tools to produce goods either that I could sell on the market in order to buy what I really want, or sometime to produce strategically chosen items for which xMerits or tickets are the more cost-effective options.

My experience is not that the market is the only way to outfit one's self, but I certainly find it is the significantly more efficient one in general. This includes the fact that I typically produce stuff via drops, tickets, Merits, etc. and sell them. (Whether I produce random goods or not depends on the source.) I haven't tackled meaningful "marketeering" (flipping, etc.) in over a year, and I am working on the assumption that "marketeering" is more profitable per unit time spent logged in that fighting, especially since I really don't engage in classic farming.

So I guess I should start by asking what you mean by "good time".