UberGuy

It's definitely fair to say they have more TFs, and especially more TFs that get run more often. When I play a villain, the only SF that is regularly being formed in general channels for my server is probably the BSF, and the only one people I regularly team with run often is the RSF. The rest of the time I'm usually left to run the two coops.

That's a bit like saying it's OK if all villains level slower, because they're villains. Given that IO us has always been presented as an alternate progression method to gaining XP (particularly when characters can't gain XP any longer due to the level cap), it is very much like that.

It doesn't have to be exactly the same. It should be comparable. Right now, with respect to the market, it is not comparable in my opinion. Just because there are other ways it is not comparable does not justify any of them. They should all be improved if possible.

That's not a solution to the problem. That's deciding the problem will never be fixed and giving up.

The fact is that the invention system is a part of the game. If it's available, it should be available in an equitable way. Simply because it's optional does not imply that it should not have equal applicability. As soon as it does, there is the implication that if you want to make good use of the system you should choose one side over the other. That's bad.

It's often useful to make sure your foot isn't in your mouth when you speak.

There is not such thing as the right kind of currency. During CoV beta, Infamy actually had the "influence" label in the villain interfaces. It's the same thing. That might have been almost completely obvious if you'd considered that the same mobs at the same level give exactly the same inf rewards on both sides, and all fixed cost items cost exactly the same from the same kinds of stores.

Merging the market would do no such thing. I'd love to hear an explanation of how you think it would work.

Only to a point. On the one hand, it's like they've permanently debuffed your defense by the amount of their toHit buff. But there's an important difference here. In general, if they hit you again the effect on you doesn't get worse. It's typical of the debuffs which ride on mob (and player) attacks as secondary effects that the debuffs are stackable even from the same caster. So if a mob hits you and debuffs your defense, and either the same mob or another one with the same effect hits you again, your debuff gets worse.

Mobs with (just) +toHit never have this effect unless they're using something like Blinding Feint, which gives them more +toHit when they hit you. But even in that case, such powers usually have practical stacking limits that mean the mobs can only benefit from one or two buffs. Moreover, -def makes everyone able to hit you more often, while +toHit only affects those wielding it. Of course you can get foes like Nemesis that apply +toHit to everyone around them. The interesting thing about the Nemesis scenario is that DDR is of no help at all.

Malta and Longbow still debuff at 50. Rularuu eyeballs are hideous about this debuffing, but they're currently fairly easy to ignore. I learned the hard way that some of the Praetoreans debuff badly. Arachnos are hideous about it - Tarantula Mistresses will ruin your day every time, and the Crab Spider guys have a pretty decent debuff in their lash and bullet attacks.

Edit: Malta don't debuff defense heavily, but their Burst clone does do so. In large numbers it can get to be a problem.

I do think it's specious to argue that Def without DDR is useless, but I can see how people get to that hyperbolic statement.

Here's what happens. If you can survive most stuff on traditional solo settings, then adding a good chunk of defense, say 25% or more, probably lets you survive somewhere in the range of, say, 2-5x as many foes. But if those 2-5x as many foes suddenly have frequent defense debuffs, then when one hits you (and one of them will), there's a lot more of them ready to follow up with a better chance to hit you again, and then it goes downhill fast and suddenly you have -60% defense. And you're still fighting 2-5x as many guys as you can survive with no defense, which is probably a problem, since they're actually doing you 190% the average DPS they would against you with no defense.

Does that make the defense useless? You might use that word for the case where the foes actually have prolific debuffs, but even then I think it's a bit strong. But especially if you aren't near the softcap (meaning that first foe to start the debuff cascade has a good chance of landing its debuff), you have to work pretty hard to leverage the +def at all.

As opposed to all the AT and powers forums, where those take the form of "I soloed 9 giant monsters at +4/x8 in the AE version of the LSIGTF?" Because, you know, this is the only part of the forums where people wear their e-peens on their sleeve.

I have a habit of capping my inf and then some on characters after I IO them out. After all, if I'm not going to play them in some pretty high-value ways, what am I IO-ing them for? At some point I figure I should consider spending it on something, so... yeah, that tends to open up new vistas of affordability.

Tickets are not a substitute for a market, because they remain a random drop generator. At best they allow for a larger number of rolls, but you still cannot make any determination about what you will get. The exception is for uncommon and rare salvage, but other than the occasional gripe about prices, I don't see many people complaining that they can't obtain salvage. The market's main utilitarian function is to allow people getting random things to sell things they got but don't want for things they want but didn't get. Having more random rolls doesn't get rid of a need for that function unless you make the number of rolls so high that everyone just gets everything they want almost by fiat.

Merits required to buy an item outright from a Merit Vendor often take substantially longer to obtain than it takes a level 50 character to obtain the inf to buy the item outright on the market. This may not seem relevant if you aren't level 50, but it does matter, because you may be able to convince a level 50 to give you that money for something you sell... assuming a market liquid enough that 50s bother looking for your goods. Indeed, this cost for merit investment appears to have been by design - on the hero side you would have to be sort of daft to consider buying a whole build with merits. It appears that merits are intended to be a spot solution to wanting things, where you can use them to buy a few items which you deem too expensive at going market rates. This makes them a sort of "pressure valve" on upward price pressure.

If one of the root causes of an illiquid Black Market is lack of players, this has implications for teaming, which has implications for merit earning. TFs are far and away the best potential merit/time. The only current crossover TFs are the ITF and LGTF, meaning this pressure valve, already slower than buying items on the blue side, is now potentially even slower for a villain player until they hit level 35. Even then, a hero player is more likely to find a team for TFs other than the two co-op ones, meaning they may have more opportunities to earn merits per day than a villain relying on the two co-ops with hero teammates.

The implication here is that the villain player gets to choose between the Black Market and an even slower merit-based IO accumulation.

The main complaint here is that, if you play both sides of the game, and if you want the same ability to IO characters on those two sides, right now the villain version of that ability is slower and/or more expensive. You either have to accept that about the market and pretty much only seek max-level shinies, or you have to soak time into merits. When you soak time into merits, not only is that time a hero generally not have to spend, but it may actually take longer in both hours played and real calendar days to obtain the same number of merits a hero would due to greater teaming and TF-running access.

iKnowRite?

It should be noted that there's a handy mechanism in place already that would make something like this viable for everything but enhancements. Our inventory sizes in the various salvage and recipe "bags" we carry can exceed the listed maximums. During one of the early market muck-up rollbacks, I know someone who was issued around 500 Pangean Soils, despite the fact that at the time the max invention salvage inventory you could possibly have was 70. In the same rollback I was given about 50 recipes, even though I could only hold around 20.

Perhaps they should ditch the enhancement tray and add it as a tab on our inventions inventory. If they did so, then they could use it as a safe storage area to dump in things they automatically stripped out of our builds, with (apparently) no practical risk of running out of room because your inventory was already "full".

Nope.

Which probably means we're stuck with the current system.

I'd like to see the respec screens redone though. There has to be an easier way. I hate having to add two slots, hit next, add two slots, hit next, and so on. It drives me nuts.

Nope. Actual users of the exploits can be banned and/or lose characters. At least, they were in Issue 14, and possibly again now.

If by "true banned" you mean "banned forever", I'm not aware of any (and there's no particular reason I should be, so take that with a grain of salt). Some folks did get temporary bans, however. I don't know of anyone who created a farm being banned for it, though some folks had their arcs locked. But I knew people who were banned for using exploitative maps.

As easy as some mobs are for some people to farm, they aren't wildly outside whatever reward/time envelope the devs have in mind for us. The exploits in question were getting people from 1 to 50 in a matter of hours.

There have been pretty extreme exploits in dev-created maps in the past. Before the AE, I don't know of any reports of them leading to bannings. That I didn't hear of it probably doesn't mean much, but I knew people who used both, and bannings among them only came down for using the AE stuff. (Edit: There may have been some bannination for the folks who abused the Cathedral of Pain trial, which was the most extreme exploit I've ever heard of, and also possibly for a free SG prestige bug. I know the SG using the prestige bug lost their ill-gotten prestige.)

My computer zones fast, and that's still a waste of time IMO. And you've still got to go through the character creator.

Plus, it doesn't address the fact that you'd almost certainly glut the market in very short order. I'm still buying these things overnight for 25k.

It's funny ... I didn't know that, but actually saw it in like two other threads today before coming back to this one.

Thanks for the info nonetheless!

Just to be sure here ... is that an issue because you were going to slot the LotG early in your career? I ask only to make sure you know it doesn't matter when you take the power, but rather what level the LotG is. If you want the LotG while leveling up pre-40's, though, obviously that matters.

It's always possible the CAs are wrong, but they're how we noticed most of the other stuff that worked this way. Curious. I wonder what Castle's seeing.

Yeah, I was thinking the same. You could buff some of those with powers, like Power Boost, or perhaps the various Mystic Fortune buffs.

I wonder how many people have been benefiting from the Impervium Armor piece being enhanceable, though.

It'd be nice if you'd call a spade a spade, and stop treating all market forum regulars as some sort of variation on Smurphy. Nearly every time I can think of that you've given a specific example of something you claim is two-faced dealings with market information or activity, he's your example.

We aren't all the same.

There are. The reputation timer is used to suppress getting any PvPO drop from beating on the same target. It means that, by beating on one target (the typical farming scenario) you can't get more than 1 drop per 5 minutes no matter how good your luck.

"What is the Market"?