UberGuy

It's generally extremely difficult to crack these sorts of authentications.

Imagine that you are issued a mechanical device something like this that constantly rotates its own wheels. Back wherever you want to log in, they also have a device that rotates its wheels in step with the one you were given. It doesn't have the same symbols on its wheels, but it knows how to derive what your wheels should look like for any given position of its own wheels.

Whenever you log in, you first use your ID and password to say who you are. Then, you type in the symbols on your wheels. Since the remote system knows who you are, and how to translate its wheel symbols into what yours should read, it can use this to determine if that's really you logging in. If you got the ID and password right, but the wheel symbols wrong, it can reject your login.

To break this sort of thing requires either access to your symbol device or some very detailed knowledge of the home system's symbol wheel machine. If the login transaction is poorly encrypted, it's potentially possible for attackers to garner this information by observing a sufficient number of tapped logins. How hard this is depends on how many wheels and symbols are involved, and how different each user's symbol devices are from the master and from each other.

Of course, there aren't really any gears involved; that was just for ease of illustration. But systems like this use digital versions of the same ideas. The devices are intended to produce what appear to be very random number sequences (a geared device would actually be very bad at this) as their passwords. Of course the sequences aren't random at all, because the fob and the home system need to know what they are. But the more random they appear, the harder it is to determine the sequences involved.

OK, it's apparent you aren't going to share details, but are you doing something we could consider remotely normal? Are you doing something like fighting foes that give huge reward compared to how easy they are to kill? (Bearing in mind that this is all sort of slippery, since even the metric of fighting +2 bosses in a never ending stream would probably be considering that we're not allowed to do that, and not at full reward when we could even approximate it.)

No. I have to use that level of security to access my work remotely. (I work for a bank.) I am reasonably careful with my passwords. I don't need this level of security in something I do as a hobby or for entertainment.

...

Then that comment seems wildly tangential to the point I was making that you responded to, that the Sewer Trial is almost certainly unsoloable because of its timer. What's the relevance of pointing out some timers that actually makes it easier to solo some trials?

As an aside, I don't think anyone would think of "on a timer" in the sense you seem to have meant it when comparing, say, the Sewer and Respec Trials.

I'll take effective high-level play over better low-level play any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Blaster Rad Blast isn't significantly worse at low levels than a lot of attack sets, it's just not as comfortable as it would have been with Defender-style versions of its little blasts.

As someone who played the set on Test during beta, and someone who played a Rad/Rad Defender in the past, I much prefer the Blaster version. Sure, you can't make NB into a proc monster. I'm OK with that, because I don't think a power's value should revolve around whether you can do something like that with it. At mid-to-high levels, even at Blaster damage scales, NB felt anemic. I didn't care if I could spam it faster, I cared that I felt like I had to spam it to kill things. Now I don't, and that makes me happy.

I too think 3s recharge would have been a nice compromise, but the devs apparently didn't agree. That's a shame, but I still think what we got was an improvement.

My estimate of a lot of play time is based on my own, which is probably 3 hours a day average on weekdays, and probably 6 hours both days on weekends. I'm a single guy with RL friends in game plus an in-game community of players I enjoy hanging with, so I find the time pretty easy to justify even if it's just to hang with buds.

Of course, I have tons of downtime where I don't try hard to earn money (or XP). But by playing what I feel is a fair bit, I do get more hard-core earning time in than someone with the same casual-to-hardcore time ratio who spends less time in game.

I assume that most people who feel an influence pinch either:

• Don't play a large number of hours / week.
• Don't play much of the time they do play on level 50 characters
• Don't make much use of the market as a "marketeer"
• Don't at least sell your drops intelligently

In general I think people who want IOs should be willing to do one of these things.

However, I do think that not all of these work as well as they once did. In particular, it feels like it used to be more viable to play a lot and/or at least sell your drops, even if you weren't at a max level threshold.

Right now, the collapse of price distributions to max level recipes means it's not as easy to make (what I consider) large amounts of cash selling broad level range of random recipe drops. It's no longer as attractive a strategy to spend merits (especially random rolls) when on a non-50. 50s are far and away the biggest raw currency generators. The combination of those things means that 50s are both creating and earning the most money and that money may not be being distributed as effectively to low-level characters as it once was.

Of course, right now it's easier to get to 50 than it's ever been. However, that doesn't really come into play for people who, for whatever reason, don't like playing to 50 (or perhaps more accurately, vastly prefer playing sub-30 or so).