UberGuy

I know someone who's farming all weekend. He's deleting junk, vendoring commons and storing good stuff on alts. I doubt regular players are getting stuff at anything like the rates he is, and he's doing fine.

It'll be interesting when the markets start up. Demand and supply are both going to be ridiculous. I predict chaos, profiteering, joy and tears.

I've never audited his stash, but I have every reason to believe Ra's post here.

Heh, I didn't mean you. I mean I think the lockout/overload timer was probably never tested in beta, and so we're stuck with a fairly damn ugly bug live.

(I don't even know if players in beta could have stressed the beta market server enough to cause it to block us out.)

Wow, that was a bit of a testing miss, eh?

It's clear to me that you, the real person behind the keyboard, are a metahuman being. You possess the cranial density of a collapsed star. I imagine you eating food by dropping it into an event horizon. In my mind's eye, I can see a burrito warping into an accretion disk like some culinary halo, finally giving off a burst of x-rays above your head as it achieves relativistic speeds just before vanishing into the infinite abyss that is your inner being.

Then I remember that I am here to point out to you that CoH is attached at the figurative hip to THE game about being a SuperVillain.

Your notion of what that means is not canon. Your notions of what that should cause are neither wise nor reasonable. This is not a book. This is a game. No sane game makers will make a whole, standalone game with the express intention that anyone who plays it shall suffer an inherently inferior experience. You are not a gamemaker. You are not in control. You are wrong.

Most likely because it's deeply rooted in the architecture of the game server engine. If it was easy, they would probably have done it by now.

I definitely suggest to anyone storing wealth that they do so in a diversified way as you do. That means to store some as "stuff" and some as cash. I also like to store some as merits (maximum flexibility non-purp/non-PvPO) for and (to a lesser extent) tickets.

My point was just that even in such diversified wealth storage scheme, that leads to some wealth that's simply stored as cash, and so contradicts the notion that wealth stored as cash has no utility.

I totally get your take on the Black Market. Of course, at that point I stop viewing what we hoard in that situation as "wealth", because I think of wealth as something I can spend to buy something else. At that point it just becomes a hoard.

One thing I will say about hoarding cash - comments attributed to Posi at the last M&G suggest to me that there may be some extra-market way to get IOs in the works for GR (or beyond). We have no idea what that means, but if that way doesn't involve spending infamy, then its value may drop dramatically, depending on how good a supplier said hypothetical supply of IOs might be.

I had a big issue with this too, until I really thought about it at it and came to understand (I think) what's been done in the game and the philosophy the devs now have about it.

It looks like the rewards for bosses and LTs is, put simply, out of whack compared to the baseline of a minion, in terms of how much harder it is to win against such critters in isolation. In other words, if you take one minion and measure how long it takes you to defeat it, and compare that to how long it takes you to defeat a LT, the ratio of the LT's reward to the minion's is larger than the ratio of the times it took to defeat the LT to that for the minion. That effect is even stonger for bosses.

What they appear to have done is to have balanced these critters reward less in terms of such single-opponent challenge and instead based on how often they appear. After all "challenge" is a pointless metric in an MMO. Everything comes down to reward per elapsed time. The devs generally look at heavily averaged statistics. Those statistics for most of PvE seem to assume some spawn-based ratio of minions to LTs and bosses.

Whether this was an intentional design decision early on, or one the later devs have decided to accept and tune based on historical inertia, I can't guess. Whatever the case, it looks like LTs and bosses are there for their overall effect on both speed at which we mow down large groups and the reward they inject into the process. Their current values aren't tuned for what happens when we fill a mission with just one of those two ranks and defeat it rapidly. It's no longer "watered down" by minions the way they designed for, and for whatever XP/time boundaries they have in mind.

Now, none of that has anything to do with whether or not any of us agrees with the boundaries the devs set for XP/time. But assuming they have some, it makes sense that they would react to people using the lack of proportional reward for those ranked critters to exceed those boundaries. I don't like it either - it whacked the reward in a very much non-farm mission I created. But I do think I understand it.

Actually, amusingly, you're wrong. You're probably familiar with the term "kiting", which is the act of queuing an attacj and then moving rapidly past an opponent so that the attack comes into range enough to trigger. Then you sail past the foe while activating the attack. This denies the foe time it could spend using more than one melee attack on you, which usually represents a big decrease in the DPS it inflicts on you. The high-end version of this looks almost exactly like people hopping around in pre-I13 PvP. People who don't play PvE like this are probably either playing under their peak PvE potential or have characters who are radically durable - which usually means they spent a ton of money on the build. Hm, that sounds familiar.

People who do the things I described in my earlier post spend significant amounts of time figuring out what works well in PvE so they can get the best shinies for PvP. The two are not mutually exclusive. There are people who are lastingly bad at PvE. I don't really have any excuses for these people, because it's not hard to be good at PvE. Almost no one who lacks the wherewithal to be good at PvE is going to be any good at PvP, because it does take at least some skill to be good against other human beings. Anyone who has half the wit they need to be a reasonable PvP player isn't going to be so dense that they can't figure out PvE here, and frankly PvE is going to be a lot more forgiving than PvP will.

Being PL'd to 50 by other people is always a possible sign of folks who may not know what they're doing, irrespective of whether they're planning to play in PvE or PvP. Most people who coined the term "AE baby" weren't griping about PvPers, last I checked.

The people I'm talking about are the ones that pioneer new ways to game the game. I've got a possible news flash for you - some of those people are good PvPers. Why? Because the folks who most want to PvP yet not really PvE have some of the strongest motives out there for figuring out how to break the game.

I'm sure you're right. It's an awful good thing no one claimed that.

PvE players sit in farms so they can hit 50 as fast as possible too, last I checked.

Take that one up with the devs of pretty much every game ever created. I couldn't say, but it's a pervasive outlook in the MMO industry (and most progress-based games in general).

There has actually been at least one whole thread discussing that topic. I think its an untrue statement.

Liquid cash sitting around doing nothing is an investment in ability to do something at a later time without the need to convert some other storage instrument into cash. No better example of this is available than the 2B I mentioned spending on an IO. I had no intention of such an expenditure, but then the BotZ change rounded the corner. I had one character I really didn't want the full impact of that change for, and a PvP +3% defense was my best cushion in terms of build impact. 2B+ on hand let me obtain one, though it took a while, because that's actually a pretty lowball bid on that IO.

Also, so long as it is not your only method of wealth storage, cash inf is also a means of hedging against slew in the market value of other storage instruments - when particular IOs devalue, for example, the buying power of "cash" inf usually increases.

Despite regular claims by from a few regulars that cash is always a declining value, we're now in the second clear case I know of where this is untrue. Both times I am thinking of, it took more and more cash inf to buy stuff on the market, which meant you could sell stuff for more and more inf. Then, something changed - in both cases I am thinking of it was the hammer coming down on the more egregious goings on in the AE. Market prices rapidly retreated. Both times, I have been sitting on huge piles of cash earned during the price "bubble" created by the influx of cash into the game's economy. Both times I have been able to use that after the "bust" to obtain high-priced goods at comparative bargains. Had I held on to the cash value in any instrument other than a very short list of PvPOs, they would have devalued with the goods on the market.

I think you rather thoroughly missed the point. The early devs in particular made all sorts of decisions - be they interface, zone layout, game balance, or what have you - based on logic that was either fairly radically at odds with what a lot of players ended up actually wanting or just plain internally inconsistent.

The enhancement interface was just an example, specifically of one of the things that is not something the players wanted. When people found out the reasoning behind the "power 10" enhancement situation was because of concern about unwieldly lists at store vendors, "flabbergasted" is probably the kindest description I can give of the posted replies.

Perfection would imply that something could not possibly be improved upon. While you might consider a build subjectively perfect and therefore impossible to improve upon, it is provably false that a build cannot be made objectively superior for at least one of the objective functional metrics we might use to measure performance in the game. Such metrics might include: time it takes to be defeated under a given incoming damage stream, time to defeat a foe, how long it can fight non-stop, etc. An IO build may not be able to improve all such metrics simultaneously, but it is pretty much guaranteed that it can improve at least one without making any sacrifices in performance over a purely SO build.

If you do not care if you characters can be improved in any such metrics, that's fine. That is not the same thing, however, as claiming it is not possible to improve them.

Players who don't use the market and therefore don't care about it are irrelevant to the discussion. Except of course for the fact that, were it more liquid, more of them might find it useful enough to bother with.

Would you care to explain what "everything you want" entails? After all, you might want to buy nothing but level 50 bargain bin IOs, when people who don't like the BM are usually trying to buy non-near-50 rare and/or expensive IOs.

I think I've seen accidental stacked Vengeance at least twice. It's definitely a bit of an "ooh, ahh" moment.

The KB protection special IOs (all three versions) are "globals" - they act like set bonuses. This means that they stop functioning if you exemplar more than 3 levels beneath the IO level, but not just if you slot them in a power that you lose.

Here's one.

Credit to Google and the DROW supergroup, which is from my home server of Justice. I'm amused that Google led me to them.