UberGuy

This, pretty much. You can get other stuff with merits, and you can find things that cap out below 50 at their respective caps, since level 50 people random roll them using merits and tickets. So things like Touch of Death and Miracle exist at level 40.

Below those caps, supply is low and bids fill very slowly. The same thing is true on heroside, but the effect for villains is more pronounced due to the smaller player population.

My opinion is that the smaller population effect is actually stronger than just the ratio of the population sizes. I don't think, for example, that a 1/3-sized red population creates a 1/3rd speed market experience. I think it's stronger than that, because of psychological feedback factors. I suspect that people perceive the market as slower, and use it less. The villain market seems likely to be heavily influencted by a small percentage of power-users who wield more influence over its transactions. The same is true on the blue side, but on villains I suspect this body of players is a smaller percentage of the villain market users and that it exerts more influence than its hero equivalent.

Really? Hmm. What I am remembering is you and I having a long debate in here some time back, and I thought this was what it was about. Sorry about misattributing it to you. Now I really wonder who the heck that was.

Why does that call for rebalancing the game? It's not like soloing AVs is actually useful. It's just neat to be able to do. Your MM is good at it because you have massive -regen debuffs, which are one of the most powerful tools available for soloing a large hard target.

Balance does not suggest that every build, AT or character be as good at every task as every other.

I won't claim that Stalkers have an outstanding place in the key set of roles people look for a character to fill in this game, but that's not a problem unique to Stalkers. They're essentially what was originally a PvP-centric AT tweaked to be viable in PvE. They're intended to be played because they're functional and different than the alternatives. If they don't do what you want to achieve in the game, it's OK if you don't play them.

That's the same thing. They long ago had the DNS for ParagonWiki moved to the Titan site. (They recently had some issues with the DNS expiring, but they got it straightened out in short order.)

Yep. The pages linked above are copies as best as could be recovered of the Paragon Times articles, which (if I understand correctly) were not brought over to these forums. I remember seeing them, and (as Dev sourced) they were canon information at the time they were published.

Yes, but you're drawing a conclusion for which there is no direct evidence. You can't say with certainty that IOs are intended to be rewards primarily for 50s, because...

• They can be functionally obtained earlier, by non-50 charcters
• The market provides a way for lower-level characters to feed off of the raw inf generating power of 50s, which they can then use to buy expensive goods. This function of the market was explicitly intended. (We were told this in I9 beta.)
• No dev has ever said that IOs in general are intended for 50s specifically. The closest thing ever said was that IOs did provide a way for 50s to continue progressing their power. This statement was issued at a time when existing 50s would have had no IOs, only SOs and HOs.

While there's no proof either way, I think there's a significant burden of persuasion required to propose a change that is predicated on restriction of IOs from a segment of the population for which they are currently available.

Edit: There's not a lot of support in my mind given by your Basilisk's gaze example. Good sets exist in many level ranges, but any given large set bonus may only be found in a given level range. Some things pretty universally have their best options in the 40-50 range, some things do not. If your example were valid, there would be uniform cases where low-level enhancements gave very good bonuses, while high-level ones gave poor bonuses but excellent enhancement. Instead, this is not uniformly the case. Moreover, it's not uniform in the sense that "good bonuses" depend dramatically upon build goals, which depend on the nature of the AT/powerset combinations of the character buying the IOs. For any given type of bonus, what's "best" is often clumped in a few sets scattered across different level ranges.

Purples are essentially explicitly intended to be that way. There's no clear indication that IOs in general are intended to be exclusively for "post-50" advancement. Otherwise, they wouldn't exist at earlier levels.

Yeah, that is what happened there. Late night/early morning responses result in fact fuzzification.

What version of the Black Market do you use? The one I use, every single cool item is virtually always far more expensive in terms of units of currency than it's equivalent at Wentworths. Worse, unless it's a level 50 or other level-capped version, it's usually not available - especially if it's a TF/Trial drop.

My villains are vastly more wealthy in terms of units of currency than my heroes.

I have never bought into the theory that villains in a merged market would be poor. Nothing in any of my personal experience supports it, and I switch what side I'm playing regularly. Villains would be selling into the same market as heroes. Selling stuff, not "traditional" marketeering is how I have made over 12B inf across both sides (about 2/3 of it on villains). Level 50s on both sides have the same per mob reward rates. I've never been convinced that Heroes have the market cornered on better level 50 farm builds, and after GR, that will be irrelevant.

I do buy into the argument that Milady's Knight has brought up in the past that the merger will have an affect on the purchasing power of existing hoarded inf. Unlike MK, however, I am unconcerned with that, and consider it an acceptable collateral effect for the long-term benefits of a shared market. Recent market situations are great examples of why I don't care. Because the AE PLing phase lasted beyond the most broadly exploited farming phase, mob drop recipes and salvage decreased in supply and rose in price, sometimes dramatically. The purchasing power of my inf fell, but my ability to get more on the market rose. Now, with I16, aggregate drop rates have increased again, and supply has risen. The purchasing power of my inf has risen, sometimes dramatically. However, the devs have effectively doubled the raw inf creation rate of every level 50 character in existence. In the middle to long term, that could as much as halve the purchasing power of all my hoarded inf. I am unconcerned. I will continue to create new inf and concentrate the inf others create by selling on the markets they use.

After all that, I am quite confident a market merger would not phase me.

I think I came in on the middle and didn't understand that the discussion was about starting them in Praetoria.

I am not sure what I think of that. There's no really clear RP reason you couldn't have a Kheldian on Praetorean Earth (on either side), so it kind of sucks if RP considerations would keep the epics out of there.

A reasonable-ish long-term consolation prize would be if Praetoria got it's own epic ATs.

If that's how it works, I think that blows.

Being able to go visit the other side, and just stand around until you're invited to a team would be pretty ******* useless.

This is dumb.

SoAs are rogue Arachnos soldiers. They buck the trend, do their own thing, and kick their boss' butt around if they do the right story arcs.

There's no reason one couldn't decide to throw that out the window and go hero.

I prefer villain-side content, don't have any issue with merit rewards there, am not bothered by the environment depicted there, and have no major performance issues.

However, I know I am not typical in most of those regards.

More importantly, more people want the larger teams that blue side offers. It's the same phenomena that causes people to want to play on Freedom.

I don't really personally care about most of that. I don't even team that much outside of TFs. But I'm not going to like it that much if TF teams get even harder to obtain, or if the supply of goods on the BM gets even slower. It's already not very impressive except at level 50 or other level caps (due to merit/ticket rolls).

Yes, more endurance makes +recovery more effective in exactly the same way that more HP makes +regen more effective. Your blue bar fills up in a fixed timeframe based on your recovery level. If you make the blue bar represent more total endurance, that means you're recovering more absolute endurance per second.

Whether it's noticeable is a kind of hard to quantify - it depends a lot on your end burn rate. I find that getting around 120 endurance from the combination of accolades and set bonuses to be quite noticeable in combination with the recovery uniques and a few additional +recovery bonuses. (Note that slotting a few purple sets can add up to around as much bonus recovery as a Numina's unique, or more.)

More endurance does not increase the effectiveness of the Performance Shifter proc. When it gives you endurance, it always gives you 20 endurance, no matter what size your full endurance bar is.

I really wanted them to do that back when Castle was looking at how to improve them. I'm pretty damn happy with the improvements, but I still wish they'd have done that.

I do have a pretty serious concern about the market aspect. A lot of people have been posting about how they will move their villains out of the Rogue Isles and never look back. They like their villain characters/ATs/powersets, but dislike any of a short laundry list of things about actually playing on the villain side.

If these posts are actually indicative of a large movement, that's going to suck a lot of players out of the villain system My concern is that this is going to take the already relatively anemic villain market and drain even more activity out of it. The markets need a good critical mass of players to remain useful.

What are you going to do if this sort of thing drains away that critical mass?

When you buy Coffee in real life, do you validate that it wasn't grown in ways that exploit local people or their resources?

Does your hero eschew the Mission Architect, because it's front man is Dr. Aeon, a known associate of Lord Recluse, in partnership with Crey, who's security forces attack you on sight?

Simply put, your heroes can buy this stuff with blissful ignorance. All they know is that it's in consignment. They don't know who listed it, or from where (or indeed from what parallel universe).

Functionally, this is a merged market with less convenience and more opportunity to get rich for those willing to bother with making transfers into an industry.

So sure, I'm all for it too, in the way that RagManX wants price caps.