UberGuy

You can try to lump them together all you want. I'll happily point out that doing so is moronic.

We had a piece of software. It did certain things. It now does those things using more keystrokes, more mouse motions. It's very basic for people who have a working software interface to be dissatisfied with changes to that interface that reduce their operational efficiency. This happens with all sorts of software, from loan origination applications to word processing to incident management. Those are applications where people get a certain level of productivity per time, and reducing that productivity potentially reduces their reward. Now that's a real world scenario where you're talking money. But in this game, the market and playtime itself is also something that has a measurable return on time spent. The market changes reduce that. Of course the most prolific and productive users of the market don't like that.

You can try to dress that as some sort of entitlement to suit your own arguments all you want. It's painfully obvious that it's a twisting of the reality of the situation to pretty much everyone else.

Very specific, quantitative descriptions have been given of how it now takes longer to perform the same activities. That is a degradation in performance. It unquestionably came with some benefits, but when those benefits did not apply to the users now degraded they are experienced as a pure degradation.

For example, I never had problems opening the old interface. There were people who did, and now they have a working interface. That's awesome, but it doesn't change the fact that the new interface is slower to use than the old one. Both I and the people who could never use the interface before would benefit (further) from the new interface being further improved to reduce the increased need for scrolling and clicking .

Being able to bid on a 10 stack of enhancements or inspirations is nice, but of far less regular utility to me than being able to see what I'm doing as I bid on salvage and sell IOs without having to constantly twiddle my scroll bars. The old market didn't need a window divider, but the new one does, and it moves to the bottom of the window every 3rd time or so I revisit the market. That's not an improvement.

I didn't address the breakdown, so while this point is true, I don't see the relevance.

Which has nothing to do with the price of tea in china. Again, you're lumping together people who don't like either the idea of the market or the current status quo between the "haves" and "have nots" with people who either like the market or at least don't mind it as a means to an end, but who dislike the changes to the new interface.

What an incredibly self-serving argument. How convenient for you it is to lump people who don't like crafting or playing "City of Day Traders" with people who actually like doing those things but are unhappy because there's a new interface for doing so that has new issues.

People in the former category don't want to play because they somehow feel they have to use the market but often claim they can't (and don't want advice on how to). People in the latter category know how to use the market and consider doing so a big part of their play, and are depressed because it's been degraded.

I'm not sure if you need to wake up and smell the coffee, or if someone shouldn't just pour some on you.

Here are a few rules I can think of that might catch you unawares.

• You can't have benefit from more than 5 of the same bonus. I'll come back to this, because "same bonus" is somewhat complicated.
• Keep an eye out for unique IOs. These are IOs that you can slot only once, anywhere on your character. Something like Mid's designer, linked above, will catch attempts to slot more than one of the same unique IO and disallow it.
• "Stealth" IOs that you can slot in travel powers are unique as a category. You can only slot one stealth IO, even though there are several distinct ones from different sets.
• Take note of what sets your powers can take and compare them to the set type for an IO before you buy something. For example, attack sets are broken into Ranged (Single-Target), Melee (Single-Target), Melee (AoE) and Ranged (AoE) categories. Sometimes it's surprising what sets a power can (or can't) take.

On the whole "same bonus" thing, the rule of thumb is that the "same bonus" is the same numerical bonus for the same attribute. So "+10% Regeneration" is different from both "+10% Accuracy" (I made that one up) and "+12% Regeneration". You can benefit from up to five "+10% Regeneration" and up to five "+12% Regeneration".

It's important to recognize that this doesn't relate (directly) to how many of a particular set you slot. Pretty obviously, slotting more than five copies of the same set would put you over the limit for at least some of its bonuses (depending on how many pieces you slotted in each power), but you can go over the limit sooner if different sets you have slotted both give you the same bonus. For example, both "Luck of the Gambler" and "Scirocco's Dervish" grant "+10% Regeneration".

Finally, the real rule isn't based on number and attribute, but on something else that you can see represented in your own character's info window, on the powers tab under the "Set Bonuses" heading. Each of these bonuses has a name. For example, "+10% Regeneration" is shown as "Large Regeneration Bonus". For each bonus of this type you have in effect, this name will appear once in the list. (Sadly, this makes the list fairly hard to read, especially since there's no clear ordering.) Why is this important? Because some things with the same numerical bonus have different names in this list, and you're allowed to have up to five of each, within the limits of your ability to actually slot that many appropriate sets. For example, there are "+7.5% Recharge Time" ("Huge Recharge Time") bonuses available in a couple of sets, and this is also the same bonus size and attribute granted by the Luck of the Gambler:Recharge IO. However, LotGs appear in your set bonus list with a distinct name: "Luck of the Gambler: Recharge Time Bonus", and so they don't count against the limit of 5 with "Huge Recharge Time" bonuses.

Mac covered most of this, but it's because:

• Defense counts against foes that weren't caught by your debuffs.
• Defense counts at its full strength against foes of all ranks and levels, whereas toHit debuffs are reduced in effectiveness against higher level and higher rank foes, and are massively reduced against things like AVs.

Well, be careful about the "no leeway" part. Certainly there's no leeway in that power, since six-slotting it uses up all the slots by definition. But you can make up for some of that in other places. For example, accuracy and recharge bonuses from other sets or special IOs can pick up the slack fairly well. Sets like Obliteration and even purples tend to be low on endurance reduction, which you can sort of make up for in +recovery. Neither are what I'd consider introductory IO use, though.

I do wonder what the point of that is, though. It's really saying "hey, don't do this till you're at the top end of the range, or get someone who is to start it for you". It just seems kind of needless.

I have, in six years of play, almost never had lack of endurance be what kept my Defenders from saving a team in a bad spot.

OT, I like the new Vigilance as far as it goes. I already soloed my Defenders a lot, making it basically pure gravy for me. I promptly soloed my first GM with my Dark/Psi right after this bonus went live. Do I think it makes the rest of Vigilance better or more worthwhile for teaming Defenders? Not in the least. But I'll still take it.

It amuses me that you're so scrapper-locked on this campaign of yours that you see it everywhere, even when it's wildly inapplicable.

Most of the complaints here are by people who do like the market. What we don't like is the loss of efficiency or functionality in the new interface to the market. Complaining about the things in the new interface that are inferior to the old one has nothing to do with "just not liking the market".

I'm quite used to the new market now. It takes more screwing around than the old one did to both enact multiple trades and to determine what's going on when a lot of slots are in play both buying and selling. It's also still buggy in new and sometimes expensive ways. The latter needs to be fixed and the former shouldn't be expected to make anyone happy.

No, I agreed with other posters that they're an option.

Actually, +0/x1 is the baseline setting. I misread the setting as +1/x1. So you haven't actually increased your difficulty. (The default, +0/x0 is functionally identical to +0/x1, and really seems to be more of a misleading labeling than anything.)

It doesn't. While I concur that Night Widows can be quite challenging, I never had that much of a problem with them, and I soloed quite a few villains through them before we even had IOs. I don't know what to tell you. Inspirations are expected to be used in the game.

I'm not sure how this is part of the issue if the bosses can be defeated solo. Even a -1 sidekick is more help than no one at all, and if they can be defeated with no help at all (and they can), then that shouldn't be the problem.

In order to find what's going on in each category, I have to click on each tab, and then, depending on what's in each category, I may have to scroll down within that category. That's significantly slower than simply grabbing the scroll bar and panning the list left.

Also, when you picked a place to "work" in the horizontal list, it didn't move. Because you could view your entire slot list, including slots that were not in use, you could "buffer" the list against what the current vertical lists do. The current lists in each category stop showing slots after the ones in use, no matter how many more you have. That means that adding and removing items constantly shifts the bottom of the list, but the scroll bar doesn't keep the end slot in view. So as you work the list, you have to constantly keep scrolling down to keep the last slot in view, especially if you click on it (which you have to do to list it).

Far more interface manipulation all around for the same functional activities.

Oh, hell no. I mean, I understand they're trying to be helpful, and some folks will consider that better than being out a ton of cash, but wow would that suck.

Did you get a prompt first warning about the listing fee?

That's no guarantee, unfortunately. When it did it to me with the LotG, it was the only transaction I had executed.

They aren't required. You're choosing to play with optional difficulty increase. IOs make it easier to manage that difficulty increase. If you don't want to use IOs, and you don't want challenges as hard as what you faced in the OP, then don't increase your difficulty.

The old market interface used to do this as well. Usually it affected everyone on at least a given server and one whole "side". (If WW was doing it, the BM wasn't necessarily). Usually this was an indication that something was wrong with some aspect of the market server backing that interface, or at least the game server's connection to it. Weekly maintenance usually fixed it, for example.

However, the new interface does it a lot more regularly to a lot more people, and the problem doesn't go away when they restart the game. It's affecting a lot of people.

That's what I'm thinking of. You can actually modify previously compiled apps that don't have that option set, and I actually did that with a couple of graphics apps on my 32-bit system. I didn't, however, do that to CoH. (The launcher would just love that, I'm sure.)

What I can offer, TV, is an anecdote in the opposite direction.

For the longest time I ran CoH on an XP (x86) rig containing an ASUS mobo with NVidia video and 4GB of ram (2.5-3 GB available depending on my vid card - I went through a couple).

I do strange things like watch the real and virtual memory use of my applications. Before I16, CoH used to use around 500-750MB of real and virtual memory (1.0-1.5GB total) on load, and then relatively quickly rise to around 1GB of each (about 2.0GB total) as soon as I did anything non-trivial, and then it would slowly rise from there. In particular, every time I zoned (at least for the 1st time in a given zone) or met a large crowd of characters, my memory usage would increase. As far as I could tell, it would never go down. If it topped around 3GB of combined real and virtual memory it would crash. (This isn't totally unexpected, since 32-bit Windows limits processes to 3GB of addressable RAM.)

In I16, it felt like both my baseline and my rate of memory consumption increased. My game rarely reached the peak and crashed unless I did something like attended multiple zone raids in a row, but what looked like a "3GB crash" did happen to me several times in I16 - probably more in that than issue than had ever happened to me in all the issues before.

Since I17, what I find is that my initial memory use is higher - I load the game and the game image is pretty much at ~1.0GB each real and virtual memory use immediately, but I don't really seem to add much over time, or if I am, the rate is much lower, making it harder to notice.

Vengeance is a handy tool, but it's not required. There are quite a few ways to make a team pretty much invulnerable to all but the most unfortunate of circumstances. +Def isn't exactly hard to come by - bubbles, cold domination, traps and VEATs all provide it in large doses. I don't think adding non-Vengeance +def to a team really should count as requiring a specific team composition. But even without +def, other buffs are can be terribly helpful. +res is extremely useful for taking the edge off of blows from AVs and the like. (When something hits you through +def, and it will, eventually, having some DR underneath it can mean the difference in a failed MO run and not.) While +def and +res are pretty unconditionally helpful (barring hitting caps), buffs like stealth, +speed/recharge and +recovery are also helpful to a wide array of characters, and can often help them keep themselves (and their teammates) alive better.

Mixing any level of the above benefits with IOs is obviously going to be bonus, again at least up to the caps.

And let's not forget inspirations. I'm one of those players who sits on his inspirations a lot, just because I like seeing what I can do without them. But for something like a MO or even a speed run, I have no fear of popping them like candy.

Armed with high +def, high +res, or a mix of +def, +res and/or +regen, a good player is going to be pretty hard to kill. Note that by "good player" I don't mean they have to be some veteran wonder-gods. They do need to have good situational awareness, with the kind of awareness they need depending on their AT and powersets. Buffers, for example, often well serve the team by having a close eye on their buff expiry. (Knowing who actually needs your buffs helps keep this sane - constantly Clear Minding the melee ATs when they aren't facing something like Ghost Widow is just a going to frustrate the buffer.) Melees need to pay attention to their own aggro levels and health in relation to how much punishment they can take.

Certainly, such skills probably come easiest to veteran players, but I've met new players with excellent situational awareness. It's got a lot to do with focus and mindset - actually knowing the game inside and out is just bonus.

Do I think the odds of meeting such players in a Pug are very good? No, I don't. But I do think there are quite a few good players around. The trick is figuring out who they are and finding a way to get play time with them.

Edit: I have seen people commit AT/powerset/level "bigotry" for even non-MO runs. The people I have seen doing so the most are folks I consider to actually be sub-par players (at best), and I consider most of the resulting "bigotry" to be done in ignorance. Interestingly these same people often have a much higher opinion of their own game knowledge or skill than I think is warranted, and seem to feel greatly justified in their extreme selectivity, because they feel they know that's the right way to succeed.

There are many reasons for this. I post this a lot; I should copy/paste it somewhere for easy reference.

• IOs used optimally allow any given character to inflate the rate at which they earn rewards. IOs allow characters to fight more foes at once without suffering defeat, fight higher level foes without suffering defeat or end exhaustion. They allow us to cycle powers faster at lower total cost of activation. In other words, they potentially allow us to fight more, higher-value targets and do so for longer than otherwise possible. All these things increase reward rate.
• We got both XP "smoothing" and patrol XP at the same time. This makes it easier for more people to get to 50 in less time. Assuming some fixed percentage of people will spend play time on 50s once they get one, this means we are accumulating people who play 50s faster than before. 50s earn more inf than anyone else.
• XP "smoothing" came with at least one undocumented feature - it made over-level mobs worth more XP and inf than they had been previously. Higher-level characters are more likely to fight over-level mobs, and earn more inf per mob when they do so.
• I16 allows us to make our ordinary missions into mini-farms, and allows "real" farmers to run bigger farms without padding players. This solved a "problem" that many IO'd characters faced - the inability to fight enough and/or high enough level foes at once to actually fight at their limits of performance. Combined with the very first bullet, this allows characters to optimize their earnings rate, almost certainly at a point much higher than ever before.
• I16 was followed by a patch witch effectively doubled inf earning rates for level 50s.

These are all factors which are accessible to players who aren't doing anything that I think should be considered terribly aberrant, unless one considers spending a large percentage of play time on level 50 characters to be aberrant.

On top of this, numerous changes have variously reduced market supply of at least certain goods. When Merits were first appeared they were supposed to decrease global supply of pool C/D, but various (real) exploits and poorly tuned TF/arc rewards actually spammed them out a lot faster than intended. As this has been addressed, supply rates have almost certainly trended down, though global merit rates have been adjusted up once so far.

Before the AE, the best PL techniques produced level 50 recipes including purples, but now the AE is (still) one of the best XP time opportunities, and it produces no purples and likely produces far less total C/D drops even if people spend their tickets wisely. (Many people interested primarily in PLs simply let their tickets cap, and also spend them on gold rolls, both of which tend to produce dramatically less stuff per player per time compared to regular mobs.) It's pretty hard to say what this has done to pool A supply per inf generated given I16's mini-farm changes probably increased supply.

None of these factors include the fact that probably hundreds of billions of inf have been injected into both game economies by various AE exploits since I14. I've been aware of a number of those exploits as they developed, and watching the market track their rise and fall is mildly fascinating - price trends seem to track the popularity of them quite tightly. And of course, those exploits also created a huge burst of new level 50s, all of whom wanted good stuff but who produced virtually none.

So we've got at least certain pools of drops with decreased drop rates with peak inf rates way up. We've probably got more 50s, fighting more stuff more effectively while earning more per kill than ever before. Combine that with the fact that I think the market tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of a small population of heavily engaged market users, who then toss it around to buy the most desirable shinies and I think it's no surprise that the prices have been on an upward spiral.

As is usually the case, the answer is relative.

If you can make 100M/week without really trying, then yeah, it gets to that point pretty fast.