UberGuy

Good luck with those. In my experience, players of all "income strata" consider that sort of structure to be an unfair penalty applied to them, almost no matter how you spin it. Consider what happened with SG "rent" costs, which had this structure. Under the original system, your "rent" was based on how much prestige you had. (It was effectively a "prestige tax", not rent, since it had nothing to do with your actual SG base.)

I think it's much more likely to be given positive reception to offer them things to buy that they want (but presumably but don't have) than to charge them tax/rent on things they already have.

That doesn't make sense to me. The reason it doesn't make sense is simple. If it's that expensive, I think people won't use it. Remember, you're willing to run out and intentionally destroy billions of inf on a lark. Most players I've met aren't willing to destroy 100k inf without a damn good reason.

I see a lot of cases of people where people are terribly irrational about inf-based prices. Consider the folks we have post in here who use merits to outfit their characters, despite the inefficiencies of doing so for most goods compared to converting those merits to cash and then buying the goods with inf. Even people converting tickets to random common salvage to save spending 50k or 100k strikes me as an inefficient use of those (especially since you usually have to roll several times to get what you actually want).

There's also the consideration I mentioned earlier that purples and PvPOs, (the things that really have the bigtime price rises that's got us talking about this) can only be bought with inf. If I want purples and they take cash to buy, I will not spend my cash on things I don't use very often. (And I'm extremely likely to be suffer from TATU on the things I do buy.)

I think what I'm saying is that if we want people to spend inf across the broad base of players, we have to give them things with low psychological barriers to purchase, but make those purchaes things they find attractive enough to buy often. I believe lots of frequent burn will remove more inf from the system more reliably than a few epic chunks.

It should help, probably weighted towards pool C/D stuff, since I am guessing most merits that get spent go into random rolls. Of course speed runs through TFs probably help drive the inflation of purples, but in an interesting way. Speed TF runs (which tend to minimize mob defeats), actually increase the ratio of merits produced per purple produced. I can't even begin to speculate how that ratio works out in practice, but if they're major production forces, it creates an interesting triangle between fast merit producers, purple farmers, and PL/inf farmers. (I only distinguish purple farmers from PL/inf farmers because some purple farmers will bother to run missions at -1 difficulty to speed drop rates.)

Based on what experience with sonic/storms with 44% defense?

If the "duh" is in regards to what PvPers want to do, that's kind of silly to say, given my statement of "by definition".

If the "duh" is in regards to the need to use the market to get PvP goods, that's not a "duh" factor. It's that way because it happens to be that way, not because it has to be that way.

It's not as if the devs haven't spent significant amounts of time working on it. Not only in the past, but presumably currently - Castle has said enough to make it clear they're still working on things. The problem is that their results have been, IMO, disastrous, and served only to shrink the very playerbase that would have most used their changes.

If the ROI was perceived to be so small, I have to wonder why devs made any changes at all?

Based on their comments I expect them to keep making PvP changes when priorities allow until the game shuts down. I don't have a lot of faith in what they will do, but as pointless as giving them our feedback proved in the past, they're guaranteed to not take it into account if they don't get it now.

Surely you jest. There's many a thread around here that has my teethmarks on it. I don't let go that easily.

So we should just tell them all to go away and stop asking for things? If having even a high proportion of god-awful suggestions was the criteria for that, the whole of the forums should be shut down, erased with an EMP and smelted for scrap metal.

Shoot down bad ideas for being bad, and concede when good ideas are good, even if you don't think they'd ever happen. There's no need to play "no-man" for the devs, especially on things we don't know their positions on. I used to poo-poo lots of ideas on the basis of the devs seemingly never having time to make changes or fix things. Then they staffed up like mad and starting doing things we thought they'd never do. Like I said, I don't necessarily trust them to do a good job fixing PvP, but I don't think we're safe in assuming they aren't going to try (for better or worse).

I avoided getting caught by this by probably about two weeks. I had a build planned with PP slotted with Numi and Miracle uniques, and had just gotten the power, and was trying to figure out when to respec to move the IOs (which I already had slotted elsewhere) into PP. Had I already respecced into that build and then immediately lost a reason to have done so, I think I'd have been fairly annoyed.

Of course, the change also saved me having angst wondering what I'd do to deal with exemplaring below level 39 and thus losing the benfit of both uniques.

(I'll eventually lose the extra benefit of slotting Regen Tissue uniques into Heal-slotted Health on a whole bunch of characters, but I'm not sure I'll really notice.)

Right now, a merit is probably worth around 750k-1M inf, based on what you'd get selling some of the more costly things you can spend merits on, then dividing by the merit cost to fabricate a recipe for one outright.

That means right now, 1M for a random rare salvage or 20M for a random recipe roll is probably about right, possibly a little high. The interesting part is that, if the scheme works and drives money supply down, that'll drive prices down, which will make the money roll high, meaning (savvy) people would go back to spending merits on random rolls because they're worth less. It'd probably work out, but I suspect it'd actually oscillate around instead of really stabilizing. Of course, in our market it's rare for anything to have stable prices/exchange rates for long anyway, so no one would probably notice.

One thing I can say is that the fact that we have categories of good that can only be bought with inf (like purples) means that, if I want those goods, I either save up money to get them and/or convert other psuedo-currencies into inf. I always look at spending merits directly (to save money) or spending money when that's cheaper so that I can convert merits into money to come out ahead. I would still do that under any regime where inf was the only way to buy purples (or PvPOs).

It does.

Oh. That reminds me. Teaming is actually an inflationary force. 8-man teams don't generate more recipes per kill, but they generate 2.5x a much total inf per kill as a solo player. (That's then divided among all 8 team members.) That increases the ratio of inf in the system to recipes (and salvage) in the system. Obviously everyone doesn't play on 8-man teams, but it's probably safe to bet that a large fraction of the players aren't soloing.

Over-level mobs do basically the same thing. They have the same chance per-mob of dropping something, but they each drop more inf than an even-level version.

Playing in the AE after your tickets are capped does something similar. You create money, but stop gaining even the potential to create additional recipes as a result.

Basically, anything that can create meaningful inf but can't drop recipes helps drive prices up. Anything that increases inf rewards without increasing drop probabilities proportionally helps drive prices up.

No, that's actually not what's being asked for, so I don't actually think you understand. You've overlooked the core point of Empire's original direction.

The market is a PvE-centric contraption. In order to be successful at it, you have to either use it fairly aggressively or you have to play PvE quite a lot.

Dedicated PvPers, are, by definition, here to PvP. Time spent fiddling with the market (despite arguing being a mild form of PvP) and definitely time spent PvEing aren't on their agenda. However, to be competitive, they must do one of these things.

Your comments that if they want to PvP in a more competitive way they should seek out a game with better PvP is a non-starter. The point of their complaints is that they'd like to PvP here, and are looking for improvements to the system that allow them to do this without having to spend time in PvE. It does not imply that they demand zero time investment at all, but simply zero (or minimal) time investment in PvE.

The solutions I described have nothing to do with breaking or correcting the market that exists today. Instead they strive a separation of PvE and PvP concerns (something our devs have struggled with from the very beginning).

I understand and sympathize with sentiments given here. Your position on this matter seems to me to purely argumentative for its own sake. And believe me, coming from me, I think that's saying something.

I don't think you understand. What the PvPers in here are talking about is a "sure thing" in the loss column.

In competitive play, and against a team that realizes you have a weakness to KD (by trying their powers on you), you will lose unless they are incompetent.

It's a little like competing in the Grand Prix with a Prius you got off of a used car lot.

If you're just talking about wandering into a zone and messing around with whoever you find there, then sure, lacking KB might work or might not, and maybe you find that challenge interesting. Competitive folks won't find that interesting - when they find that gap in their build, they'll try to address it. They'll also try to exploit it in other people's builds every time.

I'm not saying they should, but this is breaking down into the fact that hard-core PvPers often have little interest in booking the PvE time required to obtain top-end gear. This isn't a challenge unique to CoH by any means.

My answer to basically every complaint about the market is "be patient" and "play the (PvE) game". I know that both of those are badly incompatible with the mindset of those whose interest is primarily competitive PvP. If they have to go through days, weeks or months of PvE interaction to get a top flight character, that's time they spend potentially unable to be effective in ladder and league PvP environments.

If you're presented with that requirement, and there are other games where you can become much more engaged in PvP essentially immediately, what's the motivation to PvP here?

I do think a time investment makes sense. I also think that time investment should be in PvP, and not enforced to be in PvE, if they really want to maintain a hard core PvP community (which is usually the nucleus of the larger PvP community in most games.) There are several potential solutions to this.

One is to break the hell out of the game via PL tricks. Hard-core PvPers loved the I14 AE wave for the opportunity it gave them to create new PvP-ready level 50s and the scads of money they made doing it.

Another approach, taken in games like Guild Wars, is to give you the option to create "PvP only" characters who can basically buy all the basic PvE gear in the character screen, but who can't ever play PvE or get that gear out of the arenas.

Yet another approach is to make PvP only gear which only drops in PvP. I'm not talking PvPOs here. PvPOs are, frankly, damn sweet gear on levels approaching purples. There's a decent consensus around that this was a mistake, and making them pretty sweet in PvE too only complicated matters.

Finally, specifically to our game, I think there's probably a problem with KB mechanics in PvP. If you're hard-core at all, you must have a certain (very high) level of KB protection, as other posters have been saying. When people have distilled high-end min/maxed victory conditions down to that kind of binary line that then dictates something everyone puts in their build, I think that's probably indicative of something that wasn't thought through to its proper logical consequence. (Notably, people were talking about KB/KU spikes when I13 was on test, but I think how player feedback went with that release's PvP changes is somewhat legendary at this point.)

Yeah, but there have been a few things I know we told them about that they still didn't "know" about until they read what people were doing here on the forums, or saw it in game.

Yeah, that's my guess too. It was somewhere on their priority list, and an increase in people taking advantage of it got them to bump it up. After all, I'm thinking this was super easy to fix. They just needed to flag the boosts as unenhanceable and unaffected by buffs.

I think this would be problematic. If they want to do something like this, then they need to flatten the whole scale from 1-50, or at least 20-50, so that the dynamic range of reward rates isn't so large. 50s earn nothing but money - making them earn less money than, say, 49s, is going to be distasteful at best, and lead to degenerate gaming of the system (such as freezing characters at 49 to farm inf with) at worst.

I wouldn't jump to that conclusion at all. This wasn't really widely exploited until quite recently, when Physical Perfection was introduced. I think that's why it's been left alone until now.

You could easily make use of this with Regen Tissues in powers like Health, but it was really Phys. Perfection that made the practice what I'd consider fairly common knowledge.

Also, the devs themselves may not have picked up on this until it started popping up on the forums more, which again started with the introduction Phys. Perfection.

Finally, duration something goes before being changed really isn't clearly indicative of anything. Look at Energy Melee.

It should be noted that these drops currently account for roughly 1/6 of all raw created inf by level 50s. Prior to the recent change in I16, this was more like 1/3.

It's worth noting that they just changed this. The 2.0 used to be 1.0. It was a bug that had existed since the game went live. Frankly, I could not believe they set about fixing it. No one knew it was a bug that it worked that way. They could have left it like that forever and we'd never have known.

I don't understand why people keep suggesting this. This does nothing to curb the rate at which inf is created vs. the rate at which is destroyed, which is what causes ongoing price inflation. It creates a blip in the current supply, but does not reduce the rate more will be created to replace it.

That's the main, popular one currently. It's not somewhere most people would slot one of the relevant IOs, but you could also achieve this in a power like Drain Psyche.

I know what he's talking about. We're talking about both a bug and the AE. No one who's responded to you here is anti-farming, or anti-AE, or anti-farming in the AE. You're making this way more complicated than you need to,

Mkay.

Dark Melee on its own compares favorably with some primaries for how much damage mitigation and HP recovery it gives you. That's why people often use it.

Now, it's quite true that one of its strong benefits is its -toHit (and/or its Fear), and those only work against a single target. One of the reasons to mix it with a defense set is not the -toHit, but the self heal. This is why my suggestion was for a defense set with the Fighting pool, softcapped with additional IOs. DM is there for the self-heal.

Remember, "impossible to kill" is a very broad statement, and I interpreted it as being good both in a pile of foes and faced with one big foe. DM isn't especially top-rated at killing a pile of foes, but it's going to help a soft-capped character with good L/S resists and good DDR be very hard to kill as long as it can land its heal on the enemy.

I'm sorry, are you saying that because you think it's wildly boring that people aren't doing it?

That because AE already got nerfed once, it can't be being abused now?

That relatively rampant fast minting of new 50s is having no affect on inflation of currency supply and demand for (and thus price of) PvPOs?

Edit:

So whenever you see someone tell you about something you don't know how to do, you assume they're lying? You understand that there are bugs in the game, right? Do you think anyone claiming people can get from 1-50 in a few hours is saying they do it using normal play?

He's telling the truth.