UberGuy

I think this is a really important thing to highlight, because I am positive a lot of people either aren't aware of it, or it doesn't really penetrate their consciousness.

For almost any in-demand item, there is usually a lower crust of items for sale at prices much higher than the usual "going rate". When you see supply on something drop and then prices shoot up, that's not always because some profiteer ran in and jacked up the price by selling his wares at 10x (or more) than the long-standing price.

Instead, what happens a lot of the time is that those 10x or whatever list prices were sitting just there for sale, but untouched because it was constantly being undercut by lower sale prices. When supply of the cheap stuff dries up, someone with more inf than patience showed up and raised their bid until they bought one or more of the high-priced items.

Now that this is in the history, some new people dropping in supply probably do raise their sale prices to reflect those "legacy" item sales, and we get a price spike.

Sure, sometimes it really is someone taking advantage of the supply shortage. And sometimes, that might even be why someone left "overpriced" stock for sale for a long time. But I think it's more common for active marketeers to want to keep their slots churning along, rather than tie them up with items that may not move for a long time. (Edit: Particularly with salvage.)

When a theory syncs well with a lot of observable events, that lends a lot more credence to the theory that claims to explain the same phenomena, but doesn't sync with observable events or is only valid if you exclude some the same observations. It also helps when theories have had a lot of discussion. Theories about CoH market manipulation is have had a lot of discussion and even experimentation. There's certainly been a lot of static in the discussions, but we have still filtered out some pretty applicable knowledge, too. It's not that new theories are always wrong, though some people act that way. It's that new theories have an uphill battle to show why they're better than the existing ones - they need to present a good case in order to displace the current thinking, exactly because the current thinking has usually been put through a lot of paces.

In your original posts on the topic, you said things that suggest you really aren't necessarily that familiar with how the in-game market really behaves. It's unfortunately pretty common for folks like that to come along and make sweeping declarations about what is going on about the market. How likely is it that someone who illustrates fundamental lack of understanding about something is presenting a valid theory about what's going on?

It doesn't help that it's common for people making what seem (to market regulars) like outrageous claims seem all too often hell-bent on the perspective that skilled market users are all some horrible people who act purely as leeches on the community of otherwise innocent CoH players. They lace their "theories" with denigrating references at best and outright insults at worst. That's a sore spot with a lot of us, and it doubtless makes us lash out worse than we should against people who just have seemingly poor theories. That's what I did with you.

I want to be clear - I don't think you did the things I'm talking about above, at least not in the same sense we frequently see. Based on your original posts, I handled you pretty dismissively and you challenged me to provide some backing for it. I took that seriously and posted a lot of information. You seemed to me to really consider the things I said, and you modified your position, even if just slightly, to account for it, and that really reset the tone of our conversation.

For what it's worth, none of that's is what was going on in my conversation with Another_Fan. Don't get me wrong, he's a frequent voice of dissent in the Market forum about how more manipulation goes on than the regulars want to admit. But while he and I are usually on opposite sides of that argument, you might notice that nowhere in that huge conversation did that topic actually come up between us.

So those toHit vs. foe level tables that often get referred to in toHit/defense mechanics discussions are really giving the result of a calculation.

+0: -0%
+1: -10%
+2: -19%
+3: -27%

and so on.

Maybe not necessarily useful, but definitely interesting.

Well, I'm not sure if I'm answering the question you asked, but only "% chance" and "for 120s" IOs are "procs" in the traditional sense. I think most people would not categorize "for 120s" IOs as procs at all, but mechanically they are identical to procs with a 100% "chance" of triggering when you activate your power.

Things like KB IOs and LotGs are not in any way tied to the slotted power's activation, thus the sense in which they are not procs. Slotting them is like gaining an auto power. You keep it unless you exemplar to low to have it, which in this case is the slotted IO's level -4 or lower.

I wouldn't prefer one, but I would not say I would never do one.

Honestly, I buy the argument that if they truly know what they're doing, have decent support or at least a tray full of insps, they'll be fine. I've just seen it work too many times to not believe it.

Riskier than going with a tougher tank? Sure. Serious risk of failure if you know and trust the player? Not in my experience. In my experience the unknown player with the "right" build was actually a worse risk.

Actually, I didn't even look. I figured you were around long enough to remember at least some of that stuff. The long-winded background was only intended to paint the big picture (and maybe be interesting info to newer readers), not specifically to educate you personally.

Probably true, and I didn't really think of that. I will say that other than being poorly advertised in game, I think global channels are a much more effective way to get people together.

Maybe. I'm not sure there's much mileage in dropping the mission complete bonus. It's only about a +2 boss's worth of XP. (Edit: I can't remember, does your level setting for mission difficulty still affect this?) If you play on low settings and don't kill everything, it's probably going to be a decent percentage of your mission XP. If you play on high settings and tend to defeat everything, it's a drop in the bucket anyway.

I really can't see them doubling debt in missions. They could halve it outdoors, but that seems kind of meaningless, given that there are so many other reasons to run missions.

Whew. That's a good thing!

If you say, so, Fan. At no point in this have I tried to change my message. I've gone round and round trying to say it in new ways, and apparently you think my message changed along the way. I honestly don't know how or why you think that I did change it with as many posts as I've dedicated to trying to circle back to the original point, but even I can keep it up so long. I don't even know if television-grade CSIs could find this dead horse, we've beaten it so long.

Revel in your self-declared victory. There was nothing to be won in any case.

They're become window dressing. They give a sense of immersion on their own, with no other players needed.

I have a certain nostalgia for it too, but I recognize that there are real problems with it in this game.

This game gives its greatest rewards for defeating foes. It's combat-centric, and always has been, and I believe that's because at its core from day one, what our devs originally released was a cool, mid-scale team PvE combat simulator with a bad-*** costume editor. That set the pace and the expectations for everything that followed.

Not long after release people figured out how to build and slot enhancers such they could take on multiple over-level foes. Back then, the only place you could get lots of over-level foes was outdoors. "Street sweeping" was a direct outgrowth of this.

This was a serious challenge for the devs in the days before difficulty settings. They were creating instanced content that large swaths of the player base were not playing because the best reward was not in those instances. So they started doing things to attract people back into the instances. Larger mission end rewards, 1/2 debt in missions, and even the original reputation "sliders" (Heroic, Unyielding, etc.) were enticements to get players back in missions. That tradition has continued all the way through I16's difficulty settings (which helped move people back out of the AE after that became the most recent "street sweeping").

So they keep using carrots to funnel reward-interested players into mission instances. Combine that with travel powers and you've got a game world full of players traveling at 50+ MPH to get from mission door to mission door. They're going to blow past all that stuff, and that's what happens a ton of the time for an awful lot of players. I have only very rarely met players who were interested in moseying through zones. Even though I've met people who had characters with no travel power for concept reasons, they still tried to get from mission to mission as fast as they could given that restriction, at least in the days after street sweeping was no longer vogue.

Remember, the devs (I think Statesman told us) that they originally envisioned us fighting our way from mission to mission. How they could possibly have envisioned that while giving us travel powers like Fly, SJ and SS, I don't know, and nothing about how they placed missions relative to one another or laid out mobs in zones really seems to line up with that expectation. That said it's probably not the most extreme prediction error our original devs had for how people would play the game they built.

Ultimately, addressing this at this point would probably require a serious rejiggering of both the mission and reward systems, which doesn't seem that worthwhile to me for the benefit of bringing back that nostalgic outdoor teaming activity.

It's not like I want them to get rid of the zones completely, because they do provide a sense of depth, even if they have no players in them at all. It would be a deeper sense of death if there were players out and about in it, but the game is currently set up to make people want to be in missions. I think it makes complete sense for the devs to give players the ability to get into those missions more quickly as a QoL improvement.

I suspect part of the point is that the screaming about manipulation is often about common salvage.

Aren't you an English teacher or something?

I ask because I have no idea how you can post those words, have them mean what I think they mean, and be serious. I really don't.

Send that to Noble Savage. I bet his team could slip that in.

It'd have a wicked twist to it if they put it in a booster pack, though.

By the way, I almost typo'd his name as "Noble Salvage". Who wants a new character name?