UberGuy
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Posts
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Quote:Of course it would never occur to some folks that there are other folks who don't find any of this tedious or toiling. No, surely that couldn't be it. And of course it's fair to be indignant against something that one both perceives as a toiling tedium and as highly rewarding in terms of character progression. Surely it makes no sense that MMO developers might actually intend for something to take time to achieve, and that any game's set point for time/attention required to achieve time-consuming goals will be subjectively perceived on a player-by-player basis.Originally Posted by Another_Fan
LOL that will go like water off a duck. If the concept were comprehensible to the people on this forum they would ignore you for saying it lest their brains have Goedelian meltdowns.
What were we all thinking? -
Quote:It's a common practice. It does work, and it works just fine when you can sell a lot of the drops for north of 500M influence, with a couple selling off market over the price cap. Getting 1-3 a day is good stuff at those prices.Originally Posted by DirtyDan
Short of maybe a large group effort, I just don't see how you could efficiently farm PVP recepies (and isn't efficiency what "farming" is all about). Two accounts alone wouldn't really do it, since there is a 5 minute limit on drops per character (i.e. with 2 accounts you could get at most 2 chances per 5 minutes, one per character, of a drop).
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Quote:Why is this a bad thing? He's level 30. He's new to the game. Why does he need a softcapped build? Why are you suggesting he should rush into that? Just because existing vets already have things like it?Originally Posted by Minotaur
It's not really relevant to me any more unless I want to build something silly (7BN dominator build or similar) or want things like the 2BN+ PvP IO. I'm marketeering much more gently these days and making only maybe 100M a day.
Where it hit home to me was somebody who'd been playing the game a couple of weeks who just joined our SG a week or so ago. He's an experienced MMO player, and pretty competent already on his 47 fire/shield scrapper, but clearly what he doesn't have is in game cash. He had reached level 30 ish before he joined us, and had no clue how to make cash. He then had a subsequent avoidable disaster where he spent most of his cash saving costume designs in Icon not realising this cost inf
I put together something softcapped and not totally excessive in terms of what it used, the only thing in it that would cost 40M+ would be the oblit quad, but he's a million miles away from being able to afford things like the touch of deaths and the other oblits. Too many things that even for a year or two after I9 were available for relative peanuts are costing 5-10M each for the recipe.
There are multiple ways to earn such rare equipment in this game. I do agree that not all of them are team friendly, and I don't necessarily agree with the degree that this is so. That said, I think you're making a mountain (or at least a much taller hill) out of a molehill with this particular example, because I just don't see the issue it's supposed to illustrate as representing a real problem.
By the way:No they won't. They just won't have as much inf as fast as the people that do "play accountant" (not really a fair characterization of the effort involved, by the way).Quote:Some people came to the game to kill things rather than play accountant, and also to play in teams, they will really suffer for inf. -
Quote:That's some strange speed runners.Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison
You forgot to add "Spend an hour spamming 'Speed ITF LF KIN and damage' in every thinkable channel."
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Quote:Even on the market forum, very few people have claimed to use the market to earn inf for the sake of having it. Just about everyone earns inf for the sake of buying stuff they want.Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
On the flip side, there is no reason at all to be obsessed with earning inf beyond what you need to outfit the characters you have. When the servers shut down (as they eventually will), all that effort you went to in order to be the guy with the most stuff will have been completely wasted, as the stuff will no longer exist.
That said, the very concept of "buying stuff you want" gets into some complicated territory on motivation. This game is stateful, as all MMOs are. There's a past that covers how you got to your current state, and there's a tomorrow that includes your unachieved goals. If you plan to earn your spending needs in advance, then by definition you will be storing wealth ahead of that spending. If you are doing that well enough in advance, you recognize that your stored wealth is subject to valuation changes due to changes in the market, and so you might store more wealth, in case it devalues. Finally, you might decide to save wealth for "rainy day" spending. For example, when the Blessing of the Zephyr change landed, I was able to turn right around and buy a PvP 3% Defense unique to enable a respec that retained most of my +Defense, because I had contingency wealth on hand.
So there are actually "play the game" motivations for earning a lot of wealth in game. I know for me, having a lot of wealth empowers a playstyle I really enjoy. Like you, I think, my goal is to log in and beat stuff up. At the same time, I do get a kick out of making a good profit or feeling like I got something for a bargain. For me, the combination is win-win.
I'm not. I'm taking advantage of people's impatience to get the stuff I want, so I can beat even more stuff up faster.Quote:So, in short, I guess what I'm saying is: Stop complaining that stuff is too expensive, and stop taking advantage of peoples' impatience to make stacks of money you don't need. -
Quote:The number of bids on an item is not "demand" in the economic sense, any more than the number of items for sale is the "supply".Originally Posted by DarkCurrent
I'm going to weigh in on this point because I disagree with this concept that supply and demand is driving up costs.
Supply and demand in economic terms are measures of rates. Supply is the rate at which item appear on the market, and demand are the rate at which people want to remove things from the market.
People who do that what you're describing are commonly referred to as "flippers". The point of flipping a good is to can relist an item on the market at a higher than they paid for it. In other words, they put the item back, meaning that they have a pretty much null impact on both demand and supply.
The game's market prices are volatile around the theoretical supply/demand equilibrium point, because, among other things (and unlike the real world producers) people won't lose their shirts underpricing something they want to sell. Flippers set the floor on that price volatility.
The price at which you can sell something is not unlimited. Even if I have a PvP +3% defense IO, if I ask for 50B inf for it today (off market, obviously), buyers are going to think...
a) Screw that, other people will sell me one for way less AND
b) Screw that, I could outfit like 5 other characters in what's otherwise the most expensive enhancements imaginable for the price of that one piece
Sure, some insane-o "buy it nao!@" type might come along and pay me that, but how long am I willing to wait on that gamble? If I want to reliably earn money, I won't try to sell my item for tons more than everyone else*.
So there's always a price floor set by other bidders (including flippers, who set a sustained floor) and a price ceiling set by the aggregate buyer's market.
The theoretical supply & demand curve intersection should be somewhere between those to price brackets.
A flipper does increase the lowest price at which a savvy buyer might be able to get an item. They don't increase the supply/demand equilibrium price.
* You can usually safely raise your sale price if there are a lot of people bidding on something, none for sale, and an active sale history. This is an indicator that the historic prices are below the equilibrium price, and could probably be raised. -
Quote:No, you're not alone. However, I would not say you're in the best of company in terms of people who:Originally Posted by Killer_Krock
Are there any plans, any possible solutions to the spinning out of control in game economy? Am I alone in thinking the markets and economy in the game need a fix?
a) Really understand the existing market's behavior
b) Really understand how factors outside the market itself influence market prices. Examples: I16 Difficulty slider changes
c) Understand some basic but realistic economic models. For example, introducing price caps (below the inf cap) are regularly suggested as a way to address what are perceived as undesirably high prices, while real-world price caps on non-monopoly/oligarchy markets is not generally considered wise practice. (For example, it's not considered wise to cap the sale price automobiles).
For a user of the market, such changes are generally a wash. If the prices of goods are increasing, then profits from sales are increasing as well. It is possible for different categories of goods to diverge - if the price of purples rose but the price of rares did not, it would be increasingly harder to earn purples by selling other mob, mission and merit drops. We have seen this happen when the early AE exploits drove supply activities away from purple production an inflated both inf and rare recipe supplies. However, other than that, it's my experience that rares and purples track rather well overall. It's how I've funded most of my own purple purchases.Quote:Maybe it is just my perception, but the price on items some of us want goes up and up like a rocket putting some things out of reach, seemingly forever.
You also seem to be in the company of other posters who frequently suggest those two activities as the only reasonable solution to the problem. But they aren't - I've never bought RMT services and I certainly don't play 10 hours a day, and I have something like 20B in on hand with heavily IO'd characters.Quote:My veteran characters have several hundred million influence and infamy, and seem dirt poor. I can't play 10 hours a day to get the influ and merits I would need to build the character I would like, and I do not wish to be part of the problem, by purchasing influ from the web sites that sell "in game money" for real money.
Alternatives to "classic" farming or RMT include (in no particular order):
- Spending 10-30 minutes a day using the market to earn inf. Prices on the CoH markets are often highly volatile. If you buy something at a low price you can often sell back again at price high enough to make a tidy profit. A slight variation on this is to buy recipes and sell the crafted enhancement, since there are often quite large price differences involved. (As a correlary to this, generally you should by recipes for your own use, not crafted IOs. Always check the price of both.)
- Play frequently at 50. This has several beneficial effects. One is that you earn more inf/defeat at 50 than at any other level. Another is that level 50 recipes are often sell at the highest prices (sometimes even when that doesn't make a lot of sense). You're also probably a pretty strong character at level 50.
- Earn merits and use them to produce saleable goods. Leveling a character from 1-50 can earn you around 1000 merits on either side of the game, if you do all your story arcs. (In practice you'll likely earn less because you'll normally outlevel some content, especially if you team.) Most servers have global channels where people advertise forming TFs - see if you can find some regulars to run with. Obviously, "speed" runs give the best merit/time, but even if you prefer not to do those you should be able to fine one TF a night lasting no more than an hour or so and worth 20+ merits. Merits can be spent on random rolls, or you can try to see what sells for a lot of money on the market and save up merits to create one outright and then sell it.
That's not going to happen unless the devs keep giving us ways to earn ever more inf/hour by defeating stuff. Even though the market does serve to concentrate wealth up from people doing small potatoes stuff to people slinging around the big-ticket items, all that wealth comes from people playing the game and defeating stuff. There's a limit to the rate at which the system is pumping stuff out, and that limits the peak rates at which the market at large can spread around wealth. Everyone can't make enough to drive prices as high as you're fearing, because the money isn't being created fast enough for that.Quote:It appears to me the inevitable outcome is that one day I will log in, and everything in the market will cost the max (2 billion?).
There are multiple reasons prices have been on a long rise, but many of them have been changes in the rate at which we create inf. For example.
- XP "smoothing" let people get to 50 faster
- XP "smoothing" also made over-level mobs worth more reward than they were before (and under-level mobs worth less). High-level characters commonly fight over-level foes
- Increased adoption of IOs made characters able to fight longer while dealing more damage than in the past
- I16 difficulty settings allowed more players to find the sweet spot for what their characters could prevail against - previously most of us were fighting underneath our reward earning potential
- A patch after I16 literally doubled the average per-defeat inf reward for mobs defeated by level 50s - who were already earning the most per defeat
Don't assume all is lost. I promise you, it's not. I'm not saying that because I have an agenda here - I'm saying it because I'm not doing anything really that special, and I'm setting pretty. I mean it when I say that if I can pull it off the way I play, other people can too. -
For someone who so regularly trumpets how right you are, you sure are wrong a lot.Quote:Originally Posted by je_saist
The developers have indicated that they few some of the prices on the markets to be broken, and that trading items off the market for more than the personal influence influence limit is an abuse of the system.
He never said anything about an abuse. He said something is broken. That could be the current inf cap being too low relative to earning power, individual and/or collective earning potential being too high relative to the cap, supply and demand being so divergent that prices exceed the cap, etc.Quote:Originally Posted by CastleInflation is rampant. Things going for more than the market cap is obviously a problem, considering the market cap is supposed to be the individual wealth cap. Obviously, something is quite horribly broken there.
While it's possible it was a reference to abuse, there absolutely nothing clearly stating that. Nor are Castle's forum musings on matters outside of powers balance guaranteed to be the formal position of the devs as a whole. (I would, however, accept it as true if he outright told us something was the overall dev position.)
If you want to be sure I am not removing the quote from its proper context, the original post can be found here.
Generally agreed by you, so far as I can tell.Quote:The developers are aware of the disparity between the hardcore player and the casual player. This disparity is generally agreed to be one of the reasons the incarnate system has been delayed from it's preview.
Suggested by you, so far as I can tell.Quote:It has been suggested that the developers want the incarnate system to balance out Invention Origin Enhancements as options to making characters more powerful. The Incarnate system, when fully unveiled, may answer the needs of casual players looking to keep up with tricked-out IO builds. -
Maybe the proc is suppressing the Stealth IO when it goes off?
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Quote:I've only done this I think twice, and both times it wasn't a massive fraction of my wealth, and thinking about it like this definitely made it sting less.Originally Posted by Murphland
But I walked away thinking that someone out there got a nice treat.
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Yes.
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They never had a working attack. Their description said they buffed teammates, but they never did. They did banzai up into melee range against foes, which was pretty damn annoying if you were playing a ranged character. After a couple of false starts, the devs got them to basically ignore opponents so that they hover near you no matter what else is going on.
I'm not sure what threat multiplier they have, but if it's higher than your character and you haven't damaged a particular foe, that foe will prefer to attack the pet than you. I've always assumed that's what's going on, but have never tried to verify it. High threat modifiers are common on pets. -
Quote:There are degrees. There are examples of reasonably smart regular/long-standing posters on these forums who claim they don't earn any appreciable money on the market. Primarily, they don't spend their merits and they don't bother crafting things before they sell them. Within those bounds, claim to pretty much sell everything they get unless it's obviously total junk.Originally Posted by Roderick
If that's true (and I'm sure it is), then the smart market users must have more money than they could ever use, because I am firmly in the latter category, and regularly have more money than I need or want to spend.
I'm guessing you use the market more wisely than that. -
A lot of people think a lot of things make sense that are really terrible ideas. This is one of them. These players think that the "price people can charge" is a fully independent variable, and so they believe you can control that one variable and it will fix their inability to buy stuff.
Anyone who understands that the sale prices are not a fully independent variable understands that this will not do what said players think it will.
Sadly, if experience is any gauge (and I mean life experience, not just forum experience), an awful lot of these people will never let go of these misconceptions. They will cling to them with the fervor of religious or political views - possibly because they are convolving their lack of understanding of the broader system with personal leanings that designate what they think is going on as "bad" or "wrong".
Reducing the price people pays for stuff is meaningless unless there is a corresponding reduction in how much money people can earn. While it's true that radically capping sale prices would equally cripple market earnings per sale, level 50 characters can still create vast piles of inf for themselves. When disposable income is much greater than prices, you end up with shortages.
The only meaningful and useful way to reduce absolute prices on the market is to reduce how much money characters earn in play. But if that reduction is normalized across all characters (say, everyone earns 1/10 what they do now) that might have well just have been a purely cosmetic change in the long term. Why? Because someone who earns 10x as much as you before still earns 10x as much as you now.
The only meaningful way to reduce wealth gaps takes at least two pretty significant changes. One is to normalize how much inf/hour characters can create/earn in play. For example, they could make level 50s earn 2x as much as a level 10 instead of the ~100x they do currently. Of course, that's just per-mob earnings for a mob of the same rank and level difference. It does nothing to address the fact that a level 10 character can be seriously challenged by 3 +1 minions while a level 50 might wade into 12 +3s - and might defeat them faster. Addressing that would require a pretty severe global nerfing that seems unlikely to deliver benefit worth the resultant backlash.
Of course they would also have to reduce the ability to use the market to make a profit. After all, someone who spends time using the market today is likely collecting a lot more money than someone who doesn't use it. Someone who uses it wisely is probably making more money than someone who uses it without much consideration, even if they use it a lot. Making smart and/or frequent market use not earn a lot of money seems counter productive to having a market - doing that in a way that doesn't dissuade people from using the market seems likely to be a significant challenge.
I am not of the opinion that anything really needs to change. That said, I think that having smaller absolute numbers would probably reduce sticker shock that comes of people equating inf with real currency (as in Dollars, Euros, etc.); I suspect that 50M inf resonates with $50M on some level. I also think that having a smaller earning range between levels would probably reduce the relative sticker shock that arises between a lowbie and a near-50 just based on raw per-reward magnitudes. I think are both probably water under the bridge long ago, however - they could be addressed, but I'm not sure there's really that much value in doing so. -
Quote:The match time limit makes that inefficient. Especially if you want, say, to run a farm overnight while you sleep.Originally Posted by SwellGuy
Wouldn't be easier to afk farm in the arena in Pocket D?
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By the way...
Quote:Yeah, I'm, totally sure all the people in here disagreeing with you are the ones with the reading comprehension issue. Especially since one of them wrote the thread you're quoting.Originally Posted by mauk2
Read for comprehension, please.
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Quote:All Brute damage in that post is not better than all Scrapper damage in that post.Originally Posted by mauk2
In that thread, ALL brute damage is better than scrapper damage, by an average of three percent, IF you drop gloom out of the picture. Read the first post!
Averaged across all Brutes and all Scrappers represented in that thread, Brutes were 3% higher. That does not imply that all Brutes do more damage than all Scrappers.
You should avoid telling people that when you don't know how to apply it to yourself.Quote:Read for comprehension, please.
No one is debating that. Some people are disagreeing with it. Personally, I don't care.Quote:Brutes do comparable (or even quite a lot better) damage than scrappers, while ALSO having a crap-ton more hitpoints AND much higher resistance caps than scrappers do.
The fact is that Brutes and Scrappers achieve peak solo damage levels that differ by an amount that's negligable compared to the range of performance across powersets and builds within the two ATs.
For the same reasons that Blasters are vastly more fragile than Scrappers for the comparable peak damage they do, especially considering that all Blasters are not strong at AoE damage. For the same reasons that Controllers are "good enough" at buffs and debuffs compared to Defenders, have strong control on top of it, and often completely non-trivial damage, especially in the late game. Because the devs declared it to be that way. There is not a simple, clear proportional relationship between damage dealing potential and survival or other benefits, like force multipliers. The devs wanted villains to have a "Scranker" class, and they created one. Could they fix it now? Sure. To what end? To satisfy a bunch of cranked up min/maxers who've figured out that a Brute can be the best of both worlds? How much bad blood would they create doing it? They always have to consider the cost compared to the reward.Quote:If they have more life, and can get better defenses, why don't they do WORSE damage than scrappers do?
Yeah, sure, if everyone stops playing Scrappers, I guess they'll have to step in and take action. I won't be holding my breath waiting for their hand to be forced. -
Well, in a way that's a bad example, though I know why you used it. It's hard to get sympathy for someone who's at the defense softcap. DR and DEF cap examples like that were brought up in the prior discussion to explain why it was fine for Stalkers to hit this cap.
The issue with that logic, of course, is that Dull Pain's survival benefit, as core as it is to Regen's operation, is miles away from the benefit seen by running against the Defense or DR (soft) caps. It also has a radically different stacking mechanism. -
Quote:This post leaves me wondering if you've ever actually run a TF with more than one 50 on the team.Originally Posted by Pheonyx
You have to remember this: Posi said that this Alpha Slot thing wasn't exemplaring... which means in a team of 8 50's who all had this Alpha Slot, guess how many got the benefits from this Alpha Slot?
If you said 8, then you need to read up on "Super Sidekicking"... because your answer is WRONG!!!
The SSK system auto bumps everyone to 1 level below the Team Leader... but it also auto-exemplars to 1 level below the Team Leader; that means the other 7 50's on that team are auto-exemplared to 49 (thus not Level 50 to take advantage of this Alpha Slot). The only true 50 on that team of 8 is the Team Leader in the eyes of the programming... which is the problem.
The next time you do, click on the 50s who aren't the leader and look at their info. Or even better, take a 50 of your own on a TF that you don't lead and look at your own level. -
Quote:God help us, I hope they don't base it on those.Originally Posted by Golden Girl
I think the new tech of the Halloween Banners and the Winter Lord's realm may have been test runs for possible Incarnate zone events - especially the Winter Lord one.
Winter Lord might be OK, people did participate in that, but the Banner event is an unmitigated disaster. It's hell (pun intended) to get a decent zone effort going for them about 4 days after the Halloween event starts, and I have never seen anyone even try it out of season.
Add in that people would have to go get level 50s if they weren't already on one to get credit? Bigtime fail unless it was significantly modified from what we see today. -
Quote:Do you really understand how ignorant your logic looks?Originally Posted by mauk2
People post numbers in that thread. Then they post better, or worse, numbers, and the only difference was....what? Their fingers were tired?
Little more than hearsay. I'm sorry if that disturbs you.
You cherry picked the numbers. Sure, there's an attack chain that tops the Scrapper equivalent. That's one combination. The declaration "Brute Damage > Scrapper Damage" based on that one data point is disingenuous at best. It does not hold across all powerset comparisons. It does not prove unambiguously that all Brutes deal more damage than all Scrappers.
If you want to declare affirmatively that the build you chose is higher DPS than the other builds listed, then that's fine. No one can argue with that. Unfortunately for you, that's not how you're using the data. And that's why pretty much everyone is telling you you're wrong.
It's also why it's very unlikely that much will change. -
Quote:Actually, I'm not convinced that would be that good except as a soloing set. On teams, I think it would be very challenging, especially if the Brute actually tried to tank.Originally Posted by GavinRuneblade
Imagine porting /regen to brutes unchanged with their hit points. Scrappers have good sets, not all of them are primaries.
With support it'd be hideous, though. -
Quote:You missed the point by about 5 light years. Because they hit the cap, they cannot have the proportionally larger amount of HP the power could give them previously. They should have both the base HP increase and the full proportional bonus of Dull Pain, because that's what they got before, and other Def and/or DR based sets get the full proportional benefit of all their powers, just as they did before.Originally Posted by BrandX
What? So they're capped HP all the time, instead of keeping DP on auto like others do.
Instead, they use Dull Pain as a self heal when needed (admittedly like others do).
Running around stuck at the cap means that Dull Pain provides less proportional survival benefit than it did previously. Before your base survival was S, and with Dull Pain it was C x S. Now it's C' x S', where C' is larger than C and S' is smaller than S. Other powersets that do not include large +HP in their survival tools just got C' x S, for whatever S was in their powerset.
Again, you massively missed the point. If you have absolutely zero other sources of +HP, a Stalker can only benefit from about 40% of the potential benefit of slotted Dull Pain. The rest of the benefit is lost above the AT HP cap.Quote:And really, not all Regen Stalkers are HP capped, as not all Regen Stalkers are optimized with set bonuses or all the +HP accolades.
In contrast, a Scrapper using Dull pain can benefit from the full slotted effect of the power and still have room for another ~20% bonus HP on top of it. (Tankers and Brutes both get Dull Pain in non-Regen powersets, and are even further from their caps.) -
Quote:No, Castle chimed in on a thread about it at the time. They know it's like that and, at the time, were perfectly happy with it.Originally Posted by Jabbrwock
I don't even play Stalkers and I find that silly. You'd think that would be a (relatively) trivial fix to make. Is there a case to be made that allowing Stalkers to benefit from max HP buffs proportionally as much as most other AT's would make them overpowered? Or are we just looking at a consequence of overworked devs putting a problem that is not massively game-breaking on a back burner for a while so they can develop and test other, more important updates?
It particularly annoys me on Regen, because Dull Pain slams into the cap with minimal heal slotting. DP is a meaningful part of Regen's non-"oh crap" survival toolkit, and the nearby cap truncates the lion's share of that benefit.
A lot of people chimed in that a cap is a cap, and Stalkers were better off anyhow because of the HP buff, both of which are really non-starters in the argument, IMO. Other Stalker powersets with +Def and +DR benefit in an exactly proportional way from increased base HP, but Dull Pain in particular got its proportional benefit reduced.
Ultimately the best defense of this that was raised was that there was no clear need for Regen Stalkers to have to have the fully Dull Pain benefit in order to be viable, so no change was likely to be forthcoming. -
Quote:Yeah, we all know what happened with that big Controller/Defender disparity.Originally Posted by Tongz
There've been some good points made here, but from where I'm sitting it looks like the general public leans towards following the fad... and the fads follow the numbers.
Oh, wait...