UberGuy

Seriously, and I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but surely you can't be this dense.

This was not the thesis to which I replied, and over which I offered to bet you real world money.

You stated, I quote:

Emphasis mine.

You did not say "AFK farming for those is pretty much a non issue in terms of generating enough supply to trend their price lower," and thus specifically adhere to the OPs thesis. I did not adhere to the overarching thesis of this thread in declaring you mistaken. I claimed that you were mistaken in claiming that the AFK-farmed supply could not "ever impact the market" (for PvPOs).

What seems most likely to me is that the supply of AFK-farmed PvPOs is damping an otherwise rampant price increase created by multiple forces.

• Reduced supply caused by the change to match the Rep timer
• Increased demand as more players became aware of the PvP sets' benefits and "standard" builds using them emerged
• Increased per-capita wealth created by, among other things, the rough doubling of the rate at which 50s earn inf in I16.

In other words, the price is increasing, making them a "golden egg" for people who produce them, but that does not make inconsistent the claim that the farming is keeping the price increases lower than they otherwise would be.

Unless the people I know in game are all lying to me (not some abstract "grapevine" you allude to, but first hand reports by people I play and/or chat with almost daily), I personally know enough farmers to have, at one point, accounted for around 10% of total daily transaction rates for PvPOs. That was before the vogue techniques became more widely known. It's not hard math to come up with that estimate - one needs only look at what people were reporting as drops or sales, then actually peer at the market for those goods for a couple of days, and compare how many drops were reported (or how many sales were reported) to the rate of sales for PvPOs shown in the market history.

We know there are more people doing it nowdays. It's common sense to conclude that the percentage of total transaction volume provided by these additional AFK farmers has only increased as a result, as there is no indication that more people have been PvPing, and AFK farming is, by all appearances the most widely known farming method. It's inconceivable to most of us here that this much of total supply cannot "ever impact the market".

Now you can freely claim that my online acquaintances are lying, that I'm lying about what they said, or that I'm too incompetent to watch the market and successfully gauge the ratios I mention. I'll just point out that most market behavior information posted on this forum is anecdotal except for the average price analysis people used to do. Given that, why you'd decide this one claim is bogus is beyond me, other than a dogged refusal to accept you might have been mistaken in the specific assertion you made, quoted above.

Edit: It occurs to me you might claim that those of us debating this with you should have inferred your quote to mean "AFK farming for those is pretty much a non issue in terms of generating enough supply to trend their price lower" because that is the topic in the OP. If so, I recommend you reconsider your communication techniques. It is never wise when reading any given post to assume that it is meant as anything other than a direct response to the post it replies to; threadjacks and sidebars are the norm on these boards and every one I have ever frequented.

I'll be spitting fire if they replicate in effect what they have achieved with the AE. I consider the community utilization of the AE awesomely out of line with the resources allocated to its creation (effectively one and a half issue releases). A lot of the same could be said for PvP, though I think they were wise to try and create it and flubbed the implementation(s) badly. So in my opinion those are examples of things they should not do. Anything that gets as much effort as either of those examples damn well be made as desirable as possible to as many people as possible. If they want to target a subset of players, spending a whole issue on it is not what I want to see happen.

I think that they should adhere to that as much as possible. It's really simple common sense, IMO. If most people don't use bleeding edge builds, and most people want new content, you shouldn't facilitate a long dry spells where most people get content they won't use. Bear in mind that them doing exactly this has created long stretches in this game where I didn't get content I wanted - for what felt like ages the devs added new content in the 20-35 level range and not 40+. I didn't like it, but I had to admit it made sense to me.

It can be, if it's not something enough of the community at large will make use of. Look at Hamidon. It's not hard once you figure out a method that works, and despite having a formula for it, a lot of people refuse to be bothered with it because it takes the commitment of having 35+ other people around. Or the commitment of spending the up front time to figure it out initially. Then there's the people who never get to 45+, the people who's computers can't handle it, etc., etc.

If you have something that only a small part of the community uses, is it a good thing to work on? There's no right answer, of course. I think there's value in making things that "work" for different bits of the community, because "the community" doesn't have some monolithic preferences block. Hami was set up once and left alone for a long while, then changed once and left alone another long while, etc. He's not soaking up a lot of dev time.

Given how they refer to this new thing ("End Game") I'm not assuming we're talking about one raid or TF here, but rather several things which may or may not be directly related to one another. Having various different TFs or raids with different commitment requirements that appeal to different parts of the community is a good approach, IMO, because it spreads the creative and development effort around. But if they're setting aside a focused dev sub-team just to develop something that uniformly appeals only to the hard-core ? That's a lot riskier.

Eh, I think the latter point is overboard. Of course the players who like the status quo don't want new ways for the AI to overcome them. To equate that with a desire on the part of players to actively stifle innovative mob design isn't really accurate. That's a symptom; the desire we see is a general desire to limit the ways the mobs can win, not to stifle innovation specifically.

Sure, we see this sort of thing in fiction. In fiction, the characters have a weapon players lack - an author who already knows how they will get out of the situation (assuming the author doesn't intend to kill them off). They can come out of the situation in a storybook in ways that we cannot - they can parlay, sneak out a window, be saved by their (off-team) friends ... all things that have no representation in the necessarily limited simulation we have here.

If the powers we have in this game were designed quite differently perhaps this would sound less annoying. Right now, singular powers are often singularly key to survival, and having them abruptly, effectively randomly disappear, with no real means to restore them even for a few seconds, sounds immensely irritating. Of course I despise tactics that rely on "denial" of other players in pretty much any game. I hate the unavoidable status effects that now exist in D&D 4e (you now generally must suffer through anything that hits you until at least the end of your next turn) and I always hated Blue/Black denial decks in Magic: The Gathering (such decks either took your cards away or blocked your attempts to play them).

I want to lose because I didn't play well enough or my foe outclassed me, not because I was prevented from playing.

(Yes, that means I also intensely dislike mezzes in this game, but the change from Disciplines to Break Frees means we can at least get back in the game as long as we have one on hand, so I'm mollified.)

All said power would do would be to ensure I never played against Malta again by any choice under my power. There is nothing in this game I have ever despised more than things that take my powers away from me. My powers are why I play the game, and being stripped of them is crap. It's why I despised anything in PvE that dropped toggles. (I hated it in PvP too, but I kind of got the reasons they came up with it.)

I consider 5 minutes an unusually long fight with a +3 boss, and there's usually some chance the boss could actually kill me, or at least run away. This is 5 minutes flailing on something that doesn't move, doesn't fight back... hell, it doesn't even have snappy lines.

And as mentioned, 5 minutes is doing good.

It's boring.

At best, without a major overhaul of the game's design (and hey, it's possible, they've basically created a dedicated dev team for it), I forsee this as mowing down mobs more slowly.

I mean, think about it. All they can really do here without revamping mob AI in a really huge way is do something like throw a bunch of debuffs at us and buff the mobs. This might make us more careful or cautious, which means we won't fight as fast or as many foes, and/or we might die more often.

Is that "content" either? I'm not so sure. It might make us think a little harder in combat, but again, unless they're really reworking some very fundamental things, it's not going to be that complex. My bar might be set too low, but I'm expecting buffed mobs, possibly more varied mobs, and stuff that tries to debuff the tar out of us.

Current rough estimates I've seen from the people doing the farming are on the order of a 1:100 chance for a drop, subject to the 5 minute suppression. People actively PvPing on Freedom concur with your assessment - actual PvP play provides less drops because the kill rate is meaningfully lower than one kill per 5 minutes. Sure, the kill rate may spike above that, but it's not sustained.

I did. You chose to spend most of your energy flailing around at the words I used.

Perhaps English isn't your primary language? Are you possibly unfamiliar with the concept of this particular idiom? From my post that started all this ridiculous internet posturing on your part:

"I'd". "I would". Why "would"? Why, because I don't think there's a way for us to sign off on such a bet. But if there was, I would make the bet with you. And yes, then we'd have to get proof in order to determine who won the bet. But if we were offered a view of the stats, and I had a way to exchange the money, I would make the bet with you.

Do you now have a better grasp of the colloquial use of that phrase in this context? It's meant to emphasize that I believe this to be true to an extent that I would put something valuable on the line on the basis of the belief.

Sure, if you want to completely discard any anecdotal evidence then knock yourself out. I don't actually care if you believe me. I'm arguing with you primarily because of your childish retorts which have included mild attacks on my character, not because I care if you actually have correct knowledge. I don't know why you're so insistent on not even considering other people's anecdotes thought provoking, but my strong suspicion is that you got your dander up because I said you were wrong.

How about a reminder that you haven't even backed up your assertions that AFK farming is not a major source of market supply (a notion you introduced into the thread)? You're all on me like white on rice, but you haven't said one thing to defend your position. Are you possibly in politics?

I'm sorry, if this is the core of the problem you're describing ... play with smarter people, or possibly try to educate them.

Most of this game, especially on the default settings, is easy enough that it may not matter much who you bring to do a job. Hell, sometimes it doesn't even matter if you have someone to do a job like "protect" a team. Bringing more protection or more damage means that your team can fight with more abandon and thus possibly progress faster. More XP/time, more drops/time, less time per merit earned, what have you. That's all the focus on "who does it better" gets you.

But here's the thing - beyond a point, it doesn't actually matter who's providing extra buffs, because at some point you either reach mathematical caps and floors in the game mechanics. Does it really matter if someone on the team can mez all the foes if they can't hit anyone on the team? Do you really need anyone with tanking capability if the whole team is mez protected and at their regen rate cap? Does anyone care that a Mind Controller might be able to out DPS a /Psi Defender when there are Spines/Dark Scrappers and Fire/Mental Blasters on the team?

Between the operating extremes of "it's easy, nothing matters" and "we're gods, nothing matters", there's things like small teams taking on possibly more than they "ought" to be, perhaps because they want the challenge. In these cases AT can matter. If you lack other mitigation and want someone to tank, a Scrapper may not be able to pull it off, because they aren't as hard to kill as a Tanker. If you have plenty of mitigation but a Tanker is your main source of damage, you may progress noticeably slower, because a Scrapper or Blaster can really deal a lot more damage in general. These are the situations where people may want to choose what they bring based on comparing ATs to what's needed.

Bucko, I might remind you that you're the one who chose to actually respond to that particular part of my post. You didn't respond to my point, but rather to the thing I used to emphasize how strong I thought the point was. Worse, you then claimed without any supporting statements that my method of emphasis was an indicator of fallacy on my part.

I think I smell herring with a hint of rose, served on a bed of ad homenim.

Oh, wow. The old "prove it" on an internet forum. Yeah, you know, I'm soooo going to be able to prove to you that what I describe is fact, let alone provide hard market data. So lets try something else, something I'd bet isn't going to work. I might even bet you real world money.

I'll give qualitative evidence and appeal to common sense.

On my home server alone, I know people who have been reporting getting 3-5 of the things a day. I chat in various channels with about 6 people who farm them, about 2 of whom do it pretty much every day. I know about 5 other people who do it on and off. I know two people who have used this to fully outfit at least one character with all the PvPOs they wanted - multiple sets.

There are additional people I don't know doing it. You can wander into PvP zones and find their setups not even especially hidden.

And that's just on one server.

Finally, I use the market and see the transaction rates for the things. I see how many are for sale and how often sales are made, and I can compare that to what the people I know are producing.

Is it proof? No one can offer you proof on a forum. You'd have to see it yourself or have reason to believe the people I know when they say they get drops or make sales. Nonetheless I am telling you it's what's going on. If for some godforsaken reason you want to focus instead about my betting money you were mistaken, it's no skin off my nose.

OK, lets ignore the other ways to actually create influence for a moment.

First, there are likely more players with level 50 characters now. It's not just that more time has passed and more people got something to 50. It's also that it's actually easier to get to 50 now because the XP/foe was increased in several key areas and Patrol XP was added. And lets not forget how immensely the devs underestimated what people would do with the AE (and are doing again currently).

Level 50s make more inf per defeat than anyone else.

There are more reasons to play at 50 now. Ouroboros means you can play a lot of content even if you initially raced past it on your way to 50. There are level 50 TFs, now, at least of couple of which remain quite popular. Fighting against L47+ mobs is the only way to get purples. Level 50 characters are as powerful as they can get innately, so many people like playing there.

These factors combine to create another reason to play at 50 - if you want IOs, the supply is concentrated near 50 or whatever the level max is for a given set. The people playing at 50 for the reasons above are generating merit rolls, ticket rolls and random drops at or near level 50. Since the supply is there, it's easiest to get IOs there, so many people wait till near 50 to get IOs.

Then there's IOs themselves. Our characters can be harder to kill, act faster, move faster, fight longer, and hit harder than ever before. As a character makes money and gets drops, they bootstrap themselves to higher and higher levels of performance. The more they get the faster or safer they can defeat more foes.

And then the devs let us fill our missions with foes without padders. Now, those of us with characters that can kill more stuff faster can get as much of it as they want all the time.

And finally, the devs just recently approximately doubled how much inf a level 50 gets per foe defeated.

Add all that up, and the rate at which money is entering the economy has accelerated. Note that defeating more mobs/time also increases common recipes dropped/time, and selling those to NPCs (not the market) is also a considerable source of created inf. However, since the reward doubling for level 50s, that is a smaller part of the pie now (roughly 1/6 of raw inf creation power, where it was roughly 1/3 pre-I16).

Did you invent this little gem? If not, what's it based on? Does it make you feel big to suggest mysteriously that completely orthogonal concepts to the matter at hand reveal what people actually know about the matter at hand?

I'm saying I'd bet you real world money because I am absolutely and completely certain that you could not be more wrong. If there was some way for us to actually seal the deal on such a bet and exchange money in the end, it would be guaranteed money for me.

If you think that <edit>AFK</edit>farming for PvPIOs is inefficient then you either do not know how to do it and/or play on a server where very few other people know how to do it.

I had to peruse the thread seeing if anyone had listed BaB's powers.

Let's not forget his Hand Clap that deals scale 1.42 damage ... the same as Footstomp.

His Total Focus deals its damage and mag 4 stun in a 17' AoE.

His Hurl hits in a 15' radius AoE.

None of his AoE attacks have a target cap.

He has two attack sets - Energy Melee and Super Strength (with the big-hitters from both).

Like most signature NPCs, his "godmode" doesn't have a crash.

The DR cap for AVs is 100%.

Do you know how many things have been discussed, even loudly demanded by vocal parts of the player base and simply never changed? How many campaigns have fallen on deaf ears? That really excellent mathematical analysis of player perceived problems has failed to sway the devs about certain issues? Just because something is both talked about on the forums and gets changed doesn't mean that talking about it on the forums gets things changed.

Yes, presenting a good case can get the devs to think about things. I'm pretty sure it has in the past. But you need to have a way, way better thesis than you have so far, or you're going to be just more noise that they won't listen to.

(By the way, want an example of something that the devs changed irrespective of player feedback? Blaster defiance was modified because the devs saw Blasters lagging other ATs on rate of progression. The devs didn't look at it because players complained that Blasters were broken (even though lots of players did voice that complaint), but rather because of that finding.)

I said that as part of a two-part statement. Some Stalkers have no problems placating in dense combat. You made a very broad claim about how useless Placate/AS is, and what I said was meant to address that it's not a universal problem.

If you're going to sit here and claim you have to be soft capped for defense to help you placate successfully, you're showing a wild ignorance of practical play, which doesn't make it feel like you're in a good position to be arguing for change. I've play with non-capped Defense on a non-Defense-based Stalker. I dropped Air Superiority once I got +25% defense and I didn't really miss it.

You asked for feedback, you got it, and now you're going to argue about it. The claim that being able to AS is the "Stalker's premier power" just shows that you're insisting on trying to make the AT play how you want rather than how it really does. You're claiming there's a problem here, but all I see is that it doesn't work the way you want, not that it doesn't work at all.

The second part of my two part statement was that Stalkers do more damage without AS now. They are not dependent on it for dealing enough damage to be (a) strong soloers and (b) worthwhile damage contributors on teams. AS is slow damage. Even before the recent AT changes you dealt about as much damage as AS in the same span of time by using a solid attack chain. (You possibly dealt more damage if you were one of the few that had some AoE damage). Now you deal even more damage with that attack chain, and even more on a team.

A Stalker's job is to deal damage. AS is a single tool for that in the Stalker's toolbox, not their primary approach to dealing damage. It's a signature tool for Stalkers, certainly, but that doesn't mean we need it to be our primary way of getting things done. It's designed to be a surgical obliteration tool you use early in a fight or on the edges, not in the middle of the fray. Use it that way and you'll be a lot more satisfied with it.

Months of posts on the forums about what was wrong with Stalkers defy this assertion. That those complaints largely went silent with increases to the AT's damage testify further. (The other complaint was that they were too squishy, and they also got more base HP out of the changes.)

You admit in the opening words of your OP that you're not very experienced with the Stalker AT. Try playing it with a more open mind, and stop trying to make AS the center of how you play. The AT's design is now more of a slightly more fragile, stealthy variant on a Scrapper with a very potent single-power control power which you can use to manage one opponent at a time. If you happen to be in a safe position, with good defense, or alone with that target (or you are approaching under initial hidden status) then you can also use AS to mangle that one foe. Otherwise you need to set it aside and just use your normal attacks to beat stuff down.

For better or worse, most people would complain bitterly if foes this challenging were more common. The game has 6 years of history with foes people can take down by facerolling on the keyboard. People who've stuck around for that often like it and fight to keep it mostly the same.

I am expecting some brutality from the new end game content, though. We'll have to see.