UberGuy

There are many ways that having a smaller player base affects the supply of goods on the market. I think that not all of them are obvious. Simply because the mechanical actions of using the market are identical does not mean that the use patterns of differently-sized populations are the same.

The first, probably most intuitive difference is that price is likely to be higher, because lower per-capita supply and simialr per-capita demand suggests a higher equilibrium price. What may not be immediately obvious that lower population implies lower per-capita supply. After all, many people assume for simplicity that supply should be simply directly proportional to player population. However, I think that's an overly simplistic model that doesn't hold true.

I believe that there the hero side's higher population gives it the folloing non-proportional benefits for per-capita market supply of and demand for IOs.

• A larger proportion of players who team because teaming is both easier and more obviousy beneficial to more hero ATs. This increases the per-capity supply of merits and thus pool C/D recipes.
• A larger proportion of players who sell drops without being serious consumers. This is linked to the bullet above - team players have less forces driving them to seek IOs, because teams provide many of the same benefits, and teaming is considered easier and less onerous than IOing by many "casual" players. This effect decreases per-capita market demand.
• A larger pool of players getting drops, increasing the sampling across levels, meaning more non-capped recipes are generated and listed, creating more bargain opportunities for those willing to shop across levels.

I think one of the biggest effects come from the fact that there are non-linear behaviors introduced by the "prisoner's dillema" of market use. An active market can be treated as a sort of storage medium - if you sell something to an active market, you can have some confidence you can get it (or something else you value similarly) back later at a similar price. If this confidence is lacking, then we enter a negative feedback loop, because fewer people will use it, which helps ensure it does not function as well as a "storage" medium. (You may put things in and never get them back, or only at a higher price.) In a smaller population of market users, this confidence is harder to create and maintain. This decreases supply relative to the population, but not demand.

To try and clarify, the functional utility of a player-based market where drops are (primarily) random is intrinsically linked to the number of people using that market. We want better utility by virtue of a larger (merged) user base.

I presented this as a response to an existing false dichotomy. You presented the dichotomy that people are either vain or they don't want purples. If anything, what I presented was reductio ad absurdum, showing that the dichotomy you originally presented is preposterous when taken to its logical extreme - that any pursuit of power in an MMO is driven by vanity.

Would you bother to grace us with some of them? Besides, of course, the pursuit of greater power.

So you don't ever covet getting your next power? Never wish for more slots in a power you just got? You never prefer SOs to DOs or training enhancements? You don't ever pine for more accuracy or better endurance management?

Which says nothing about their worth. It speaks only about their worth to you. You, personally, do not value the benefits they provide. That does not mean they do not provide them. It also does not mean that others might not value those benefits, possibly greatly.

Allow me to introduce you to my little friends, the difficulty contact and the hazard zones/areas. Those folks crowded behind them are not the Verizon network but the Giant Monsters and AVs in the game.

Just because you can find sufficient challenge at low difficulty settings or attacking "team content" with the aid of a team doesn't mean that it's not also challenging to play at higher settings or to tackle things designed for a (large) team solo (or with a small one).

Oh, it's so amusing now that you opened this post with an appeal to false dichotomy. Seriously, as if there's no middle ground between our baseline and infinite endurance... Oh, and it's impossible to get to where you never miss - 5% minimum chance and all that.

Are you really so unfamiliar with the game that you think that missing as little as possibly or being able to go for a really long time without running out of endurance means there's no challenge? Seriously? Minimizing those factors doesn't mean you'll win in any given situation - especially if we rise to the kinds of challenges I mentioned above. It's going to make you more likely to survive in extreme conditions.

Perhaps more importantly, you're really discounting that different people think different things are fun. Is missing fun? Is running out of endurance? How about waiting around longer for powers to recharge? They aren't fun to me. I'd rather be right in there, smashing or blasting or whatever my character does. It's the thrill of the fight that I savor, not the downtime enforced by spending all my power or ready actions, then waiting for them to come back. Sure, there's some satisfaction from planning out a fight based on limited resources, but that's not what I find most fun about the game, so I limit how much I have to deal with it and focus on what I think is fun - the fighting.

Wait, the difficulty "slider" doesn't work with content? Weird, I thought that's how you used it - you turned it on and then ran missions.

Beyond that, though, seriously, this is yet another false dichotomy. There's nothing that says you can't enjoy having really powerful characters and do content at the same time. Do you know I solo most of my characters through the game still because I like having full contact bars? And yet I build characters with purple sets at 50. I've been playing this game since its release and I've seen and done seriously just about everything it offers in terms of content. Content is easy to consume. Then what do you do? Why, you keep running it over and over...wait, how is that really different from the thing you said would get boring, being the same level forever? Here's a hint... for most players it's not that different. Even running it again on a different character isn't that different. So we look for new ways to approach it - such as at higher difficulties or when solo instead of on a team. Or perhaps a lot faster than normal when it's known to be slow.

If one runs around proclaiming it, you might be right - they might be being vain. Not everyone does that. Not everyone who ever mentions that they play that way is being vain - sometimes it's necessary to explain that you play that way when putting context around conversation - like, oh, why someone might actually value purple IOs.

Funny, I never knew spending time in Mid's planner was part of my "real life". I never realized before now that when I thought about how to optimize a character, I was still thinking about having to pay bills, care for my lawn, my projects at work, or how screwed I'd be if I lost my job due to the economic downturn. Who knew that spending time crunching numbers could never be escapist on its own! You have opened my eyes! ... OK, not really.

What's funny is that people aren't in here impugning your idea of fun. You're on a soapbox proclaiming how inconceivable it is that other people could find things fun that you do not. You're coming about as close as possible to trying to say they're actually wrong to enjoy these things as you can without saying it in those words.

Take the blinders off. Accept that other people might enjoy things you don't, and that they don't have to be vain for that to be true. The game has the room for that. Keep in mind that the devs actually empowered these playstyles - they gave us difficulty settings that let us solo large team content, or AVs without a team. They acknowledged that people enjoy doing these things. Maybe its time that you did too.

Let me ask you something. Why do people want level 50 characters? Is it vanity? Or is it because we enjoy the heights of power a 50 can have?

If you have any particular objection to the particular number 50, feel free to insert some other plateau. 41 for epic pools. 32/38 for your "tier-9" power. 31 for the three slots per level. 22 for the ability to slot SO-level enhancers. 20 for access to Stamina.

People play this game, and indeed many MMOs, for the ability to feel a sense of progress and increasing power. Unlike many other MMOs, in CoH we can actually become significantly more powerful than our environment as we level, even though our foes also become more powerful and disruptive along the way. This is one of the attractions of this game for many of its players. For people who enjoy this about the game, IOs in general provide added enjoyment benefits. Purples simply provide very specific benefits in very large magnitutes.

If they can benefit from their benefits, purple sets can provide significant performance benefits for the right builds. One of the most obvious is if you have powers that benefit from high recharge, or perhaps fast activating attacks that get high DPS benefit from the purple damage procs, or even endurance-hungry builds that can use high +recovery bonuses found in several sets.

Is building so that these benefits make your character more powerful about vanity? Or is that good, escapist fun?

Honestly, if really think that it's vanity, I feel sorry for you.

So long as one market is decidedly inferior to the other as an actual tool, I will continue to consider this opinion wrongheaded. Which is "better" is not simply a matter of opinion. One is qualitatively inferior as a utility. The "flavor" is a matter of opinion. The functionality is not.

Which is almost exactly what I remember you saying before.

While this is correct, you misunderstood the reasoning behind my wording. Only green-con or better foes ever drop anything. A level 47 minion is the crossover between the minimum foe con that can drop a recipe for a level 50 character and the minimum level of foe that can drop a level 50 recipes. Naturally, since none of us is ever over level 50, that means they can drop for everyone, as you point out, but I wasn't trying to say they only drop for level 50s.

This has no impact on purples. Level 47+ mobs will drop purples for a level 50 character.

That's the breaks. This market is not different than, say, the stock market in that regard. Queue a rehash of past arguments over whether its "fair" that people get heads-up information in beta.

No one who has outstanding bids, outstanding hoards, or outstanding whatever before such a change needs any special consideration, no matter how much potential inf they may lose as a result. Every action taken on the market that costs money up front is an investment, and just like real-world investment (but with far less serious consequences) you can lose money on a poor investment.

These situations happen today, and they happen without any of the upheaval of a market merge. Apocalypse: Chance for Negative Damage has increased in price 400% in the last 4 weeks. Prices on some goods fell in price as much as 10-fold after AE came out, then increased to double or triple their pre-AE values. Now many of them have fallen again. Many recipes that used to be highly valued by the "must have the best" crowd have been co-opted by PvPOs, causing the old favorites' prices to plummet.

Inf is the same way. Inf gained massive purchasing power on both sides during the initial AE ticket craze, then fell massively when the ticket caps were lowered but PLing stayed viable. It rose with I16's release and the easy access of farming to the masses, but now it's falling again because inf supply has doubled for level 50s.

No matter which way the currency valuation is a "win", it is a temporary situation. Once you start buying and selling into the merged market, from then on you have equitable selling power for the same goods and therefore equitable earning power. I have over 10B inf on my villains, and about 4B on my heroes. I do not think a point of infamy has as much buying power as a point of influence. Despite this I still want a merged market, despite losing buying power on that hoard, because I don't care about the buying power of my hoard - I care about my future earning power.

The point is that change is inevitable, and we shouldn't need to worry about people who don't diversify and put all their eggs in one basket. When their basket tips over we'll know two things: they didn't plan wisely (perhaps through no fault of their own) and they can make their money back in short order if they really want to.

No, a Master of is admittedly different. Now, granted, the folks I run with typically run a Master run a bit faster than that (the few times we've run it), but time's not really a primary consideration for any Mo* run.

Lets not even start in on "random PUG Mo*" TFs.

See, that doesn't fit my definition of a random PUG. A random PUG is, to me, a bunch of people who find each other by LFT and little else. Sure, almost by definition, some random PUGs will actually be quite good - random shouldn't imply "always sub-par".

But as soon as you have a leader is selectively filtering the characters on the team with an eye to their capabilities, I don't really consider it a PUG any more. Now, I'd be willing to concede that, in literal terms, it can still be a leader just finding "pick up" players and making a team from that, but I certainly am confident saying it's no longer a random PUG.

Yeah, I don't ever like to "speed" through a TF I've never done before, and I don't even like to take others along on speed runs if they've never done it before. And that's not because I somehow consider them dead weight - I just think it's a poor way to experience new content.

But after all this time I can only guess how many times I've run the mainstream, popular TFs in this game. I have to have run several of them many hundreds of times each. At this point, beating our best time has become an entertainment goal all of its own.

It may also depend on bandwidth, but it definitely depends on computer performance.

• An older machine with the same amount of RAM on the same network is significantly slower accessing the market.
• The same machine running other high-CPU activities in the background is significantly slower accessing the market.
• The same machine using enough memory to force the game to swap is significantly slower accessing the market.
• The same machine running a 2nd instance of the game, the 2nd instance is much slower accessing the market. Notably on my system the 2nd instance started does not get the same hardware acceleration from my video drivers and has lower framerate when in the foreground.

By "significantly" I mean by as much as 20x slower in my limited testing. Obviously I expect the actual value to be heavily dependant on what you're actually doing in the background or how much swapping is involved.

Edit: my network pipe is fairly ridiculous, and I still see the above. To the extent that when I16 was in beta, people were reporting huge lag in TF mode which I never saw. This turned out to be due to massive spray of network info when in TF mode choking out some people's connections, and I never even noticed it.

Sufficient +Def is extremely useful, because they still have to hit you. I have been on many ITFs with +defense running in the 70s and higher thanks to defense buffs from multiple allies. Now, nothing over 45 actually reduces the mobs' chance to strike you, but everything over that still provides buffer room against their debuffs.

The one place +def does not help much is with the Sunless Mire nictus in play in the last mission, because it is either auto-hit or extremely high base toHit. I don't think particularly special support tactics are needed to deal with it, however. Something like Regen Aura, -Dam effects, or +DR effects can all usually carry teams I am on past that particular nictus effect, since it's the first one Romulus "consumes" to res. That means you can even get past it with orange inspirations, assuming your team isn't having problems killing Romulus to begin with.

Oh, I agree completely. I just think it's generally well-accepted that, unless a regen is keeping themselves near the defense cap with the help of lucks or benefiting from various teammate buffs, an extra 10 HP/sec probably isn't really going to cut the mustard when a pile of stuff is flailing at you, where being able to pop MoG earlier might. I think most of us tend to focus on maximizing solo, non-inspiration-based survivability. Of course neither of those assumptions apply to everyone.

This also all depends on what you're fighting. My DM/Regen would sneer at most even-level x1 spawns, but I am usually actually playing on +2/x4, which she generally can not just sneer at. (I'm working on it, though. )

I say this as someone who does what you do. I like knowing I have kind of dumb amounts of regen, and I am aware I am slightly sub-optimizing other capabilities here and there to get a couple of slots in FH and maybe even Health.

For me, anything over an hour is basically a failure.

I was responding to a general statement comparing PUG AE farms (in general) to PUG ITFs (in general). I'm not going to bother with more explicit wording when context should make what I'm talking about perfectly clear to anyone paying attention at all. Applying your criteria to the original comment makes it equally false, and thus my response.

I think we all knew they wouldn't stay low even if they went down, because of the change, right on I16's heels, doubling the earning power of 50s.

Edit: We didn't know it in advance, of course, because no one knew that change was coming. I just mean that once that change was announced, it seemed pretty obvious that the price of everything would be going up. Except some of the PvPOs, whose price can't go up more because of the 2B inf cap. >.>

The points about the price elasticity of demand are certainly valid, too.