UberGuy

The RP connotations of merits are even more bizarre. What actually provides them? Are they like XP or more like badges, which once had the connotation of being awarded by city hall and/or Statesman? Who are the Merit Vendors, who can convert merits into a wide assortment of things both abstract and concrete?

The whole Merit Vendor thing actually bugged me a lot when merits came out. There's no explanation for them or what they do. It's not like I'm deeply immersed in the game, but really obvious lack of effort to provide an in-game explanation for something like that really bugs me. If they had been some sort of crafting station I think it would have bugged me less.

I don't think it's very useful thing for them to do. Its utility would evaporate with time. 1 year after everyone starts using the new "wazoos" as a unit of currency, all the players will become inured to earning 0.05 wazoos for level 10 mobs, and will think "Gee, I'm never going to be able to afford that LotG for 500,000 wazoos."

It sounds like throw-away effort to me.


Heh.

You know, I was suspicious of that possibility, given the new patches and all. I fled to Ouro as soon as we were done. Then I fled in general because I was late meeting friends for dinner.

Did it eat your reward like in the past?

As is so often the case in these discussions, we're never really going to be able to figure that out unless a dev graces us with data-mined answers, because except in that statistical sense, there really is no such thing as the average team. We could take our standing joke of "mythical casual gamer" and just as easily plug in "mythical average gamer", and get a lot of the same confusion. Without data to back it up, we're all imagining our own interpretations of what's average.

The "average" pug might have issues, just because they may have a lot of new players. The "average" SG team is going to be all over the map in performance, but will probably tend towards consistency within the same SG. The average public global channel team will probably be rather pug-like. The average private global channel team is likely to be a lot more polished. But who knows what proportions those categories exist in, and what their internal variance is? I sure don't.

A good team is going to blow away the best farmer on raw kill speed. The main differentiator then becomes mobs per map, because good teams running normal content clear maps fast then have to move to a new one, while the farmer gets all of them to themselves. You also have stuff like contact delivery or zone kill missions, or stuff like looking for the last glowie behind a pillar somewhere, which are things the farmers never worry about. In all, I find that sort of thing makes it unclear to me which really pulls ahead.

Of course, if the answer isn't glaringly obvious, I wonder how important knowing it really is.

Come on, you have to know that's not what I meant. I'm talking about obtaining purples too, and even said so in my post. Farming is not the only way to obtain purples. It's one way. There is no "best" way, because what works best depends a lot on what each of us do and do not enjoy. I enjoy playing 50s solo and running TFs with veteran teams. I don't farm in any serious way. You want to know what my best farmers are? A Dark/Dark Defender and an Ice/Dark Corruptor. Woo, look out, I'm a machine! And yet I've heavily IO'd eight level 50s, and fully purpled five of those.

The single aspect I'm talking about you drilling down into is the difference in choosing to farm and choosing to team, or choosing a solo capable character and choosing one meant to buff or debuff while relying on others to deal the damage.

You're characterizing the teaming or team-centric option as a non-starter because of purples, but that's bogus on at least two levels. 1) Not everyone cares about purples. 2) Even if they do care about purples, they can still get them through team play.

I am saying this as a separate complaint from your ideas on buffing team drops, which I am largely neutral on. My complaint is with your hyperbole. You're defending your idea with exaggerated claims of the disparity and its affect on people's play choices. Anyone who decides they must not team because they want purples is foolish, ignorant or both.

That's kind of ridiculous. Of course it's a choice. You're acting like soloing is the only way to get purples. It's not. In fact, I've gotten most of my purples funded by the most fundamentally team-oriented content in the game - Task Forces.

Above and beyond that, not everyone is in this game for the shinies. I've met any number of players in the game who play it because it's fun, because they enjoy using their powers, watching the animations and seeing stuff go boom. They enjoy chatting with people in an MMO. They don't need IOs of any sort to do any of those things. And, you know what? If they want a lot of the same benefits as IOs without having to spend the time to buy them, they just get on a team with a few buffers around and go to town.

You're drilling down into this one aspect of the game and casting it as though it's this immense, gameplay bending flaw. I might agree isn't as good as it could be, but I simply don't accept that it makes teamplay versus solo "not a choice". It may make it a more attractive choice for some people, but not for everyone, and it's not the only choice in any case.

I've seen both happen. Not terribly often; it usually takes a lot of action for that to happen. What's not clear to me is what factors affect it. Server load? Client load? The size of my network pipe? I couldn't say.

LOL. I was amused by all four, but wtf! ↑

If our devs increased drop rates for teams, I have a pretty good feeling they would, indeed, base it on data mining.

However, I have very little faith that the XP/inf modifiers we have now were based on any hard data.

The game was very different at the time the devs implemented them. People in general didn't have the grasp of force multipliers we have today. Only the most obvious power functions had known well values, and even then a lot was misunderstood. We had no ED, but we had no inventions, obviously. Far fewer people had level-capped characters. It was a world of different playstyles because it was pre-ED, pre-GDN, and even pre-I4 buffs.

Back then, I rather suspect the idea that teaming hurt XP rates may have held more validity. Most teams just didn't know how to have the synergies they do today. So players complained, and the devs listened on this particular point.

Maybe the change was based on something besides player feedback, but I am not sure how much XP data mining capability the devs had that early on. In any case, I think the numbers we got are a bit too "round" to suggest they were the derived from any calculations on team size vs. speed. I think the devs were mostly just very eager to promote teaming. My feeling is that the devs used to do a lot of balance by throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck. If so, I think they may have done a decent job of that in this particular case. I certainly wouldn't recommend the same technique for balancing drops. (Throwing ideas at the wall, I mean.)

This is correct. They only drop from things of boss rank or higher.

No, I guess when I think about it clearly I can't think of a way that you can.

See, I told you it was a dumb question.

But what I'm saying is, the game is what it is. It's not some other game. (By the way, CoH is far from unique among MMOs in having "support" characters who blow chunks at gaining XP or other rewards on their own.) And in this game, being better at combat reaps you better rewards / time because fighting is what we do. I just don't see the return on investment in trying to end-run around that just for purples, or any other "drop-style" reward.

Edit: I'm talking about solo play there, not teamed. I'm not defending (or strongly attacking) the way drops work on teams.

Ditto. (I need to level mine, not yours. )

All the things you mention there hold true for that bubble Defender for much more fundamental rewards, like XP. For better or worse, this game revolves around a very central theme - defeating things in combat. We have extremely limited ways to interact with the game outside of attacking things. Any time one builds a character that can't fight well on their own they become reliant on allies for basically everything. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but it's pretty fundamental, and since combat is about all we have, the devs have little choice to attach rewards (of all types) to combat ability. Building a buffer with little offensive capability is a give/take choice we all have to make. It can be fun to buff your allies, but in doing so, you may end up needing them heavily.

If there's any part of this I'm not nuts about, it's that it may not always be clear that a given powerset choice is better or worse than others in this regard. For example, while the Defender AT description is pretty conservative about its soloing ability, if you choose a Rad/ or Dark/, you can potentially solo really well. If you choose a FF/ or Emp/? Not really the same. A new player really has no way to know that. I'm not sure it's terribly important to try and address that, but it does feel ... unfortunate.

I don't understand. Are you disputing how /hide interacts with /sea ?

Of what value in the debate is a completely unprovable percentage of hidden players?