UberGuy

Yeah. That's where I'm at with them. It's not like every character has a guaranteed kill method against them, or that there's always just one in a spawn - especially the ambushes. If their debuff was not both so extreme and so long lasting, that wouldn't be as much of an issue.

What usually happens to me is that if I don't kill the Ghost immediately, then his debuff means I can't kill him, and if that happens, he gets to stand around and refresh the debuff on me, because he can recast it before it expires.

I don't think the devs hate villains. I think the orignal CoV dev team seriously believed one of (or both of) two things. (1) That villains were perhaps more powerful than heroes, possibly because the devs made all of them all (conditionally) pretty good at damage dealing. (2) That heroes had it easy, and since they were making a new, separate game with new content, they were going to address that.

I am left with a nagging feeling there's a (3) here. It feels a bit as if, just maybe, possibly unconciously, some of the arcs are written with the idea that the good guys are supposed to be really powerful, and so if you're a bad guy, you've got to face really powerful foes to prevail. Having to face an AV signature Hero at the end of so many arcs really drives this feeling home for me. The original uproar over how common that was in CoV and how much earlier it starts compared to CoH seemed to have a lot to do with the original ability to downgrade AVs to EBs when solo.

The problem with all of these, but (2) in particular, is that many players of CoV are also players of CoH, and they got to compare and contrast the two games. If they liked where CoH's overall difficulty was at, then they were prone to feel that CoV's difficulty was punitive.

Sorry, but this doesn't make any sense to me. I play this game a lot. Most days, my currently-played characters are logged out around 20 hours a day. My characters I'm not playing are usually logged out 24 hours a day, minus a few minutes to poke the markets.

I really don't see the issue. Instead of having to be logged out "for over a year", it means you have to play the game "for over 1.2 years".

If you have a problem with having to wait a year, that's one thing. But being logged out just doesn't have a significant relevance to this unless you play the game like 12 hours a day.

See, I have yellows, too. Typically, fighting these guys, I run out. That's even on a Stalker, who can pick off one Ghost early. The biggest problem is that if you do the side missions, you get big ambushes of these guys who are naturally preemptively aggroed on you, so there's no option for sneaking up on them and picking off the obnoxious ones.

Yes. I do.

Feel free to set me straight.

I'm curious. What, exactly, do you do, when they hit you with -40% toHit for 60 seconds? Do you just whiff at them? When they debuff your movement to a crawl, how do you go kill them, since most of them stay at range?

Or is the situation here that you always face them on a team, where you can have enough buffs and debuffs to overcome these issues?

I know it's not that you have characters so bad-*** that they can just brush off these effects. Not at level 20. Not even with IOs.

I don't like it when I'm level 20. It doesn't make anyone hardy. It's not like fighting mobs that debuff the crap out me when I really have no recourse for preventing it actually gives me any benefit. All it does is slow me down in that level range. Most people faced with foes that slow them down a ton just avoid that content if they can, since doing other stuff is less slow.

I'm all for looking for challenge in the game... to a point. I think SWAT PPD are well beyond that point for the capabilities of the characters that fight them at that level range.

The "SWAT" variety of PPD are insane overkill, period. They can slow the bejeezus out of you, ream your defense, make it so you can't hit squat, and debuff your DR. Oh, and just for fun, they can pop ranged "assassin snipes" on you, though those aren't that brutal ... on their own.

The SWAT PPD are foes that would be considered farily damn annoying by a lot of characters at level 50, at least solo. Why they are put in at level 20s is mostly beyond my comprehension. Someone was feeling particularly cruel, or convinced that villains were wildly overpowered in PvE.

Notably, many of those buffs are very weak, and you cannot stack them. 5% resistance to a single damage type for one hour. A defense version would probably be 2.5% Defense, non-stacking.

No. I have an exceptionally stable network connection to the game a significant majority of the time, with a very wide network pipe.

I'm not sure this is the same thing, but nearly every power in the game with a projectile will do this if you activate the power as your target dies. I have witnessed innumerable Gloom skulls, Power Blast energy-bubble-bunches, and Psi Darts and Force Bolts hung suspended in the air where released when their target died before the power finished animating.

As best I remember, the game has always done the above.

That still doesn't explain what inherent/NPC value has to do with it.

Still, to address the implausibility... as long as the aggregate production levels are basically equitable, I agree that an imbalance won't happen, or will be to small to matter in the face of other factors. I suspect that while an imbalance does exist in the current markets, other forces are probably stronger, and we wouldn't notice the effect in general, or if we did it would take a very long time to be meaningful.

Remember, you're saying an imbalance is implausible in the vacuum of our existing market separation, where it cannot possibly happen. There are no working examples of it, because there can't be. However, I don't believe that it can't happen in a merged market. The possibility that it could is going to a barrier to merged markets for the devs* unless they either (a) introduce currency exchange rates or (b) eliminate the production imbalances - which I believe GR does.

Money spent on the market generally has some trickle-down redistribution to other people that also use the same market, up to the number of transactions it takes original money to be completely obliterated by fees. In an imbalanced trade scenario, more villain money moves from the villain production economy to the hero one than moves back. That extra flow to the hero side makes market-using heroes generally richer through the trickle down. (Some also trickles back to villains, but as a population they also reinvest that in more purchases from heroes, and so on.) If that proportion of imbalance is large enough, heroes will be able to increase their bids for goods they compete on, not specifically because they are competing with villains, but because each bidder has more money and they are competing with everyone else in the market. This bid creep due to increased inf reserves reinforces the imbalanced flow; prices on the contested goods rise, so villains also bid more, and more money flows to the hero side.

It's apparent that most players make their money by either simply defeating mobs or (if they listen to anyone in here) at least selling their drops. What marketeers here do in terms of concentrating wealth created elsewhere is not representative of the playerbase as a whole. After all, one of the major reasons it works is that only a limited number of people bother to do it.

As a heavy-duty drop supplier, I can tell you with significant confidence that, taken as a category of drops, pool C/D is the third-best thing you can sell to the market to transfer other people's inf to yourself, behind PvP IOs and purples in that order. All the evidence I know of suggests that neither marketeering, PvPing nor farming are mainstream playstyles for our playerbase, which leaves pool Cs as the next most likely source of major market income in terms of accessibility to the general playerbase.

Now, it's possible that the wealth transfers of the other two market price leaders (purples and PvPOs) would swamp any pool C/D imbalance. When this all was initially discussed, purples may not have even existed, and PvPOs definitely did not.

However, if we have a scenario where most of the villain players are not getting lots of purples, lots of PvPOs, or lots of pool C/D, then they must change their behavior to increase one of those or become marketeers. Most heroes also would not be getting lots of purples or PvPOs, but more heroes probably can readily produce pool C/D random rolls. Sure, there will be an elite "upper crust" of villain players who do produce purples, PvPOs, and even Pool C/D drops. They will be immensely wealthy, as similar players are on the hero side. But there will be more extreme gap between them and more "mundane" market users compared to hero side, where that same gap hero side would be better filled by people who run content for high-volume merits.

Agreed.

* Caveat - I have to admit I seriously doubt the devs have internally given this topic this sort of debate.

But what does that have to do with the imbalanced transfer scenario in a merged market?

The actual price of the goods in question is irrelevant as long as it's not so small it's washed out by the total inf production of the two economies.

If it's an oversight, it's one of those "we just never thought about it hard" kind of oversights. They know it works a specific way, and people have complained about non-selectable randoms since IOs were introduced (even back when you got them outright instead of merits).

In short, I have no idea what the rationale is, of if there really is one.

If the vendoring of uncommon and rare recipes was a meaningful means of creating inf, I would agree. When a +0 minion produces nearly as much inf as vending an uncommon recipe, an even level LT produces more than vendoring a rare, and a vending common IO produces nearly 10x as much inf as vending a rare, I cannot possibly see the relevance of the tiny amount of inf created by people vending recipes (or salvage).

The radically immense preponderance of inf created in this game is created by the defeat of level 45+ mobs, vending of level 45+ common recipes, and completion of level 45+ missions. Everything else is like a snowball thrown into the antarctic wilderness. If, tomorrow, we lost the ability to vend uncommons, rares, and salvage at NPCs, I don't think the overall market effect would even be perceivable.

When we play this game, we generate two distinct categories of reward - currency (inf) and goods (recipes, salvage, and enhancements). The overwhelming majority of currency is created through mob defeats. Vending common recipes is a distant 2nd place. Completing missions is probably a more distant 3rd place for non farmers. Vending SO/DO/TOs is likely an outrageously distant 4th place.

Vending uncommon and common rares is almost certainly in last place taken across the playerbase. First, it's the smallest absolute reward per item vended, worse even than SOs. Second, the majority of goods are not vended, but likely sold on the market or deleted outright. (The currency generated by selling an uncommon or rare recipe is meaningless at nearly every level when compared to that generated by simply defeating foes, so it's common for ones that aren't worth selling on the market to simply be deleted.)

So, again, I just don't get why you talking about the intrinsic value of the recipes. No one I know plays the game worrying or even thinking about the NPC vendor value of uncommon or rare, recipes, or salvage. People generate gobs of currency every other way possible, then give it to one another in exchange those goods.

Let's say we have two sides, A and B. Both are equally capable of generating lots of inf by defeating mobs, etc., but side A is getting a recipe drop side B isn't but both sides want. Side B is going to send money to side A for those drops. That's going to increase the per-capita inf supply of side A. If that wealth actually spreads around it will eventually allowing side A to bid higher on that contested good. Side B will have to send more inf to side A to continue to outbid them.

Things only spread around evenly if both sides are producing the same per-capita rate of goods and the same per-capita rate of inf at roughly comparable rates.

Because it's so small, the "intrinsic" value of the drop is washed out by market sale prices of desirable goods. If there's anyone out there dumb enough to vend the this contested recipe, they're basically just reducing net supply of that good - the decrease in net inf supply is negligible.

Yes, and my example was about transferring inf around.

I think that, taken as a whole, heroes and villains are roughly equal when soloing in the hands of skilled players. I have no problem soloing any of my characters of any AT on either side. Strong farming builds definitely exist on both sides.

What's important, I think, is that any team good enough to overcome the time overhead of forming and managing the team, teaming is a superior total generation of inf/time, because of the team size bonuses. Because heroes have a larger player population and more team-centric ATs, these factors make them more likely to team than villains. Discussion of what percentage of those (more frequent) teams are actually good enough to come out ahead on inf/time is inevitably going to come down to anecdotal evidence, but I know the teams I play with definitely come out ahead. Of course, I avoid pugs like the plague.

I explained in my earlier post why the idea that merits are equal is false. Merits are equal on median. Median measurements are inherently resilient to outliers, and that was done on purpose. Broadly speaking, the more missions a piece of merit-granting content is, the more open it is to deviation from the median completion time. Hero-only content contains many, many more long arcs and TFs than villain side. This is often touted as an qualitative improvement in the villain content over old hero content, but it has this quantitative side effect on potential completion time. Moreover, if we grant that heroes are more likely to team than villains, they create more merits per unit time for this reason too, because each teammate is given the content's merit reward. They are also potentially more likely to run TFs, both because they have more options to choose from, and because they're more likely to form teams to start with.

Taken all together, at this time I believe heroes distinctly have more opportunities and to create merits which they multiply by larger team sizes. Net result, more merits per-capita, which means more pool C and D recipes per-capita.

Of course, based on what we think we know about Going Rogue, I think all of this will become a non-issue after GR's release, because those production opportunities will become available to anyone who crosses factions. It's possible that it could remain an issue if not enough villains do this, but based on what I'm reading of people's responses, that seems unlikely.