UberGuy

Just about anything will be fine. Mitos don't have any special vulnerabilities or resistances that would guide your primary damage type, and I've seen IO'd out Scrappers of just about every primary take out a yellow mito solo as long as the yellow didn't get too much healing attention from its green buddies. I'd say pick something you enjoy and think works well with /Regen, and it'll do what you need it to do at a raid.

That would drive down supply of "new" enhancements. Also, people would be more likely to overwrite enhancers rather than slot them, reducing numbers of "used" ones would that make their way into the market. This would likely drive up prices on "new" ones.

This would also make hoarding in SG bases undesirable. While this would seemingly drive up supply, I do not believe it would in practice. Bases can only hold so many enhancements - once you meet that capacity, overflow must either be sold, slotted or deleted. That means that bases represent a reserve buffer, but not a long-term drain on supply (unless new bases are being created faster than old ones are filling up, something I find hard to imagine barring supporting evidence).

Finally, on a overall acceptance level, I think this would be received similarly to how people dislike having to spend a respec to unslot enhancements. People would probably view this as a net increase in the grind they need to outfit their stable of characters, because it's a sort of perverse version of "bind on use". They aren't actually bound, but "used" enhancers would be deemed undesirable.

Edit: If enhancers dropped by an actual level as displayed on the enhancement/recipe, this would quickly turn into a way to create non-50 recipes, and would actually increase the supply available at other desirable levels. I know I would spend time passing enhancers around between my two accounts to get them to the level I wanted - unless I had to slot and then unslot them... which I might still do by creating cast-away characters PL'd to 50 just to act as IO "de-levelers".

For a very long time, Heroes produced more high-level arcane salvage than high-level tech salvage, presumably because a lot of farmers focused on Behemoths. (There was also a great deal of PLing being done with Family, but I suspect that the PLers were less likely to dump their salvage on the market as a whole. For whatever reason, farmers seemed to prefer Behemoths while PLers preferred Family. Perhaps Family were easier while Behemoths offered better gains on rare salvage sales.) On the flip side, Villains produced more high-level tech salvage than arcane, because they didn't have any especially productive arcane foes on "farmable" maps. Some folks tried to work this to advantage by farming Possessed Scientists, but you were subject to luck of the draw on what powers the Scientists got, and they weren't terribly compliant crops (they attack from range and run away a lot).

Something around the I11-I12 era changed the character of this on hero side, and now high-level arcane salvage is actually significantly more rare than tech salvage, with the exception on DTRs (unless you've already gotten to them). I suspect this is a combination of new hero map options (RWZ arcs come to mind) that drop tech and a general deflection of some farmers into the AE (who probably now don't produce salvage at all unless they need it themselves).

Agreeing bigtime.

WP is a decent option as well, but lacking a self heal and a lot of foes nearby to drive your +regen up means you may have to rely on green inspirations for burst healing. If you have recently been pegged by a green mito, green inspirations may do little or even nothing.

Another decent choice is /Firey Aura. While it lacks the +HP and passive +Regen of /Regen, like /Regen its heal does not to degrade due to the heal resistance that green mitos apply. The extra burst damage from FE doesn't hurt if you're on mito beatdown duty (which is what most Scrappers are doing at any raid I've been to).

Regen is at the top of my list, though, speaking from experience taking several powersets to raids. Bottom of the list is anything relying primarily on defense or resistance. These can work if you have sufficient regen buffs (preferably external, such as Empathy/Regen Aura or Empathy/Adrenaline Boost) or if you use an EoE (not recommended for blue-side raids - look for more +Regen).

I agree completely. Once upon a time, I suspected this based on dedicated PvPers I know, but was much less sure. Then I saw the price shifts that hit certain items (but not others) when PvPOs came out, and am now much more confident of this.

Then why are there 8000-10000 of the two salvage pieces I mention?

Why does that happen with two pieces of salvage that happen to not be used in recipes very often, or by commonly popular generic IOs?

If this was true there would be an ever increasing number for sale. This is not true, except for two items I can can think of. Demonic Threat Reports and Mathematical Proofs have been on a slow, fairly monotonic rise on the hero market almost since I9 came out. Not enough things use those salvage pieces in crafting.

For anything client side, or that primarily impacts performance client side (like cruddy polygons on terrain/buildings), I agree completely.

Part of the point of my responses is that "easy" doesn't work that way, even if it could fix the problem. They can't just run out to Best Buy and replace the CoH server farm with systems with faster cores and higher SPECint. Doing that in the real world has costs.

I'm arguing against blithe insistence that the devs have to fix things because the players demand it, and come here to the forums insisting they fix it right damn now. I'm arguing against the apparent notion that all problems like this are just some switch the devs can turn off and make all better.

There may be no solution to fixing the specific problem we're talking about that's affordable based on current budget and may take so much effort as not be able to fit in their other priorities.

If they had infinite resources to fix long-standing issues while continuing to deploy new features then these sorts of demanding posts would make sense. If the change required to fix the issue was trivial, these sorts of posts would make sense. The former is clearly false and the latter seems extremely unlikely. That means these sorts of demanding posts don't make sense, and that's what I'm arguing about.

It's fine and well to tell the devs we want something fixed. *I* want the lag on that TF fixed. But to say "it's been long enough, fix it now" is pretty silly.

I doubt Gamemaster's posts are still available, as he posted that information long before we came to the new boards, and so I believe the old boards' purge would have eaten them.

However, I don't think that Gamemaster's posts showed what A_F is saying they did, except, as Werner indicated, for certain specific definitions of "price". The flipper does set the price floor for what you pay if you intend to buy a flipped good at the point in time where you are in buy competition with the flipper. This is not what I, for example, consider to be "the price" for a good, because I am willing to outlast all but the most persistent of flippers. Also, I rarely object strenuously to the price floor a flipper is setting - what I'm more often unwilling to pay is their asking price.

Basically Gamemaster layed out how you can cause a surge in prices for something that you can soak up enough of the supply on. The surge generally causes an increase in supply in response, as people who were not selling the good now start doing so. This causes the surge to be self-defeating on a time scale that's dependent on how infrequently whatever it is drops (or how many merits or average tickets it takes to create it). He outlined that the key to profitability in these schemes is knowing when to curtail your own buying and how to sell your inflated inventory in a way that doesn't collapse the price before you get rid of enough of it to profit.

I might have saved it somewhere. Edit: I guess not, and I can't find it on the forums, as suspected. That makes me sad, because it was a great write-up.

OK, let me explain this carefully.

We pay money now, and it pays for salaries, servers, software licenses, ISP hookups, etc., now.

To add more hardware, they have to pay for more (or better) servers, probably more software licenses, possibly more salaries, etc.

The Paragon Studio team / NCSoft probably aren't looking to decrease their bottom line. If they did it could even be bad for the longevity of the game (since it would increase the minimum subscription base required for the game to be considered sufficiently profitable to keep alive). That means that they either have to scrap something else, release employees elsewhere (possibly increasing time-to-deliver on some features), or increase our fees.

Asking them to add hardware while doing none of those things is asking for hardware for free.

Just to be clear, I didn't think you were being dense. What you were saying had, I think, great relevance to what A_F and I were discussing. I was just tying what we were all talking about back to the (quite a bit more irrational) logic some people have blaming marketeering for any price increases, no mater how macroscopic.

And I think you're spot-on in how some people take a more-or-less logical understanding of the 1st couple of steps and then leap to step 27, as you say.

Yeah, this one has always bothered me. I do think they did something wrong with that zone, and need to address it, unless as you suggest, they actually can't for some reason. (Still, I would think they could by modifying the zone itself, but I guess I can see why they might not want to.)

Are you serious? You're asking why they just don't throw more hardware at it?

I want to live where you do that more hardware is free.

(I regularly encounter ITF-style lag on Rikti raids. Its a function of number of players present and what powers they use. If you really want to experience ITF lag, get lots of FF or Sonic bubbles, and have someone herd Rikti with Repulsion Bubble.)

Since you are authorizing this, would you like the devs send all the unhappy players to you when we get the next 6 month gap in content while they upgrade the core engine? (I'm sure they can CC you on all the bug reports, too). How about the complaints when they up the monthly fee to absorb the extra hardware costs (ongoing, not just up-front) to deal with performance without upgrading the engine?

I'm not saying I don't want these things too, but just saying "make it happen" isn't very realistic.

But this comes down to grousing about the nature of the game, and not the behavior of its players. This is a superhero game with loot that you can buy from other players in a market.

Saying it's a "superhero game," full stop, leaves too many open ended expectations. It's a superhero game, an MMO, a game with classes and not point systems ... it has a very specific nature and other things attached to it beyond its superhero genre. People bring expectations from all over the place, and some of them are going to be wrong. Expecting to come to this restaurant and have no wait for food might be an explainable, but it's not valid.

The bolded part is critical, and at the heart of the position that anyone who can't wait some period of time is impatient, and that if they come here and complain about paying a lot without any effort to wait then they are being lazy and feeling overly entitled.

A flipper does not raise the price unless the buyer insists on paying the flipper by buying right then. Note that there is some chance that a "buy it nao" player may end up paying less for a given item than they would have otherwise since flippers usually reduce price volatility and draw down the top-end price. However, this isn't guaranteed, and in any case depends heavily on the bidding behavior of the "buy it nao-er"

The way the game slows down and your powers don't recharge is a server-side problem, and there is nothing they can do about it without

a) redesigning the core game engine
b) throwing more hardware at it
c) redesigning these missions so you cannot fight as many opponents at the same time.

The problems with these maps is unique to Cimmeroans. There have been (exploitative) AE maps with so many ambush foes on them that the game engine will not render them, and those maps do not suffer from the server-side delay the ITF maps do. This leads me to believe the problem is actually a combination of how many foes are in play and what powers they are using.

The NPC version of the Shields powerset the Cimerorans have is clearly computationally intensive compared to many. Consider that for every non-Surgeon on screen, in order to determine a Cimeroran's defense and mez protection the server must determine how many other Cimerorans are in range. (Edit: Defense and mez protection are probably calculated separately, incurring the in-range sweep twice.) Checking to see if something is nearby in this way for every active entity on map is going to chew up a lot of cycles. The game's main event loop starts to fall behind, and "game time" starts taking longer than "real time".

The reason this doesn't always happen is because playing through the map different ways causes less of the NPCs to become active at once. When Castle said the probelm was the ambushes, I do not think he meant that the AI computations for ambushes themselves was at fault, but that ambushes containing Cimerorans cause more computation to be needed for their shield powers.

This means that if you drag spawns together, you'll create the lag problem whether you have ambushes or not. Ambushes will just make the problem more severe. However, if you are careful to fight one spawn at a time and can defeat them and the responding ambushes as they appear, you will get minimal degradation.

If you have issues where your screen doesn't update as you move and turn (once the server lets you move or turn), then that's more likely to be a performance issue on your side that a better video card, lower settings, and/or possibly more RAM would help with.

My suspicion is that there is also too much data coming down from the server when these events occur, possibly updates for every entity just defeated, plus all their power effects, and possibly their visuals as well.

This suspicion is based on which of my regular TF partners suffer said DCs, and what other kinds of events hammer their performance in what ways. For example, I know someone with a rig that doesn't struggle under visual effects load, but his internet connection does struggle under high data load. He can DC during ITF map AoE kills, but everyone else just generally has to wait for the server to wake up. He observes his netgraph-reported ping spike during these events.

Another tangentially related thing I've noted over time is that CoH client side performance is extremely sensitive to memory availability and swap memory performance. CoH takes a chunk-ton of memory, and this only grows during a typical session. (While I believe there may be some honest-to-god memory leaks here, the way it only generally grows when you zone or see new characters/critters makes me suspect overaggresive caching.) If you lack enough physical RAM to hold the game, parts that are still regularly needed get pushed out to swap memory, and performance starts to degrade. Suddenly the performance of the HD your swap file is on figures dramatically into the game's performance, including things like how fragmented the swap space is. I do think the memory the game uses is a performance-related issue we can put before the devs, as I cannot possibly imagine playing the game on the minimum spec machine given its current memory use patterns.

If you end up combining things like the ITF server-side lag, the likelyhood the game may be running out of swap on mid-range (probably 32-bit) rigs, and the way it seems to soak bandwidth, the experience sounds like it could be pretty raw. My rig is good to go on everything but the overall physical RAM, as I'm still on XP (something I'll be addressing soon), but I know people with less high-end specs (including bandwidth) run into some annoyances, to say the least.