Adeon Hawkwood

Ok, then the thing is why? What benefit does this provide to the player base? People who are happy to team with anyone can easily do so (either through the queue or by joining a preformed league advertising in a public channel). So what benefit is obtained by potentially adding them to teams that do not want them (as happened here)? The only result I can see is to upset people and cause complaints.

You mentioned the Hive, I'll point out that the ability to form an instanced Hamidon Raid is a feature that has been requested multiple times in the past.

People like to be able to control who they team with, some due to elitism, others because they want to test something under controlled conditions (or run small groups to minimize lag), some people simply want a known group for RP reasons or because it's a group they are comfortable chatting with. Supporting these desires doesn't hurt the people who are fine with a random team and in fact helps them since if they joined such a team and got kicked they'd lose their place in the queue.

I'll also add that I find the "no private leagues unless it's a full size league" idea to be very irritating. If the devs don't want private leagues why allow them for 16/24 man leagues? If that is the direction they want then they should limit the maximum size group you can queue with so that all league sizes are equal.

Pretty much and in real life it's the reason so many lottery winners end up bankrupt. Of course in CoH if that happens it's pretty easy to make more.

Oh definitely. A lot of the really high priced recipes (purples and the more popular PvPIOs) are really bad value for money. Of course if you can afford them...

EDIT: Also congrats on being officially ebil.

If you don't want to worry about participation based rewards there's plenty of content to do.

The issue is, if a group of people can form a group (whether a single team or a league) that meets the minimum requirements for the trial why should they be forced to take additional people? Supposing you were planning to run a 3-man Positron TF with your friends but when you started it you got two extra people randomly added to the TF (and one of them had the star), how would you feel about that?

I complained about this in the sneak peek forums and I'll continue to complain about it. Not allowing people to form teams the way they want is just poor design. The fact that the system makes an exception for full leagues is just adding insult to injury.

If the queue was set so that Leagues could not queue (only single teams or even individuals) then it would still be annoying but at least it would be equally annoying to everyone.

The queue should be a tool for easily finding a league if you want one or adding members to an existing league. It should not be used to force people onto leagues where thy may not be welcome.

A wonderful suggestion. You can run a private Lambda if you have 15 friends but if you only have 7, well hopefully the queue is empty.

Yes, it's WAI, but that doesn't make it a good idea, frankly I'm amazed that it took this long to start seeing complaints about it I guess the popularity of forming full 24 man teams and the general unpopularity of queuing solo kept it to a minimum so far. No other part of the game requires you to take random people onto your team and I see no logical reason for the devs to have changed it in the trials.

Hmmm... that I haven't tested. My guess is that it won't work but I don't know for sure. I think I've seen people added to locked teams when the league reached maximum team count but I can't remember for sure.

Nope, it's not an option.

Short answer is they didn't. What they basically did was reverse a change they made in the last patch which made the lag even worse. So the alg should be back to the level it was prior to the last patch.

I disagree. While I don't particularly condone kicking people who are simply the victims of a poorly designed system why should the team leader have been forced to take additional people on his team? At no other point in the game are you forced to add people to your team simply because the game decides you have to take them.

Good point. I saw the lack of armor and figured they were Barbs but I guess they're just using a homebrew armor system.

I don't see it as a matter of how many calendar days to get the reward but if a person wants to get an E-Merit can they? For example I rarely run more than 3 trials in the same day (and even 3 is a busy day for me) so if there were three trials in the game I would get the maximum E-Merits I could on a single character by running all of them. Since I'd probably be done after three anyway the actual mechanics would not impact me.

The solution you're suggesting is beneficial for someone who only plays once or twice a week but runs a LOT of trials in that time (currently 7 a day if they play on two days). As the number of trials increases the number of trials per day they would need to cap the merit system also increases which decreases the value of this change substantially.

I guess the question is how many trials per day do you think the "weekend only player" is actually running?

But... don't they need D12s to roll their hitpoints?

You're misunderstanding my point. Yes, changing to a 24 hour cooldown would be stupid, but I'm not proposing that. The idea behind a 24 hour reset system is that the flag resets at a specific point during the day (normally midnight).

So you can run it at 11:59pm and again at 12:01am the next day but if you do you can't run it again until 12:01am the day after that. The advantage is that those who cannot get on at the same time every day are not penalized. Suppose a player has a playtime that alternates between 8am-10am or 8pm-10pm. Under the current 20hour cooldown system he can only do it every other day since his 8pm-10pm time one day will block out his 8am-10pm time the next day. A 24hour system fixes that by saying that he can run it once at any time between 12:01am and 11:59pm on the same day but, unlike the current system, his time on the previous day does not affect the available time range the next day.

From an implementation point of view I would think that this should be doable by changing the expiry time of the reward flag (although Standard Code Rant applies). Presumably the current system sets a reward flag that is keyed to expire at current time + 18 hours. The proposal is to set it to expire at 12:01am the next day.

If you're talking about purchasing you can can place a buy order for a stack of up to 10 enhancements but you can only sell them singly (the same is true for inspirations).

Salvage and recipes on the other hand can be both purchased and sold in stacks of 10.

To buy a stack of an item simply replace the 1 to the right of the purchase price with the number you want (up to 10). To sell a stack simply move them to the market interface and when it asks how many to move drag the slider to the right.

Good point, I forgot to include this in my original post but if my profit per slot is 5.6 million per day then in order to justify tying up a slot buying an item my savings has to also be greater than 5.6 million per day that it takes to buy. Otherwise I'd be better off paying the buy it now price and using the slot to sell something.

I do cheat a bit here since for big ticket purchases (such as purples) I'll generally use one of my non-marketeering characters since I can more easily wait a week or two if I'm not using the slot anyway.

Yes, the little stuff does add up but as the old saying goes "Time is Money".

Time in CoH is not simply a measure of playing time but Market Slot Time. Maximizing profits for a player is not about maximizing the profit on every individual item sold but instead maximizing the profit per time of every market slot used.

I'll give you an example. I mostly trade in mid-range rare IOs. There are a whole bunch of different ones with similar buy/sell prices and I tend to rotate amongst them. I operate on a 24 hour schedule, I price my IOs to sell within 24 hours and my buy orders are similarly priced. In general, my costs per IO are:
Recipe: 4.5 million (placed overnight in a stack of 10)
Rare Salvage: 1.7 million (placed overnight in a stack of 10)
Other Salvage: 2500
Crafting Cost: 490400

I sell them for, on average, 15 million each. In a 24 hour period each IO I sell is "consuming" 1.2 market slots (1 for selling it and 0.2 for it's share of the recipe/salvage purchase slots). Including the 10% market fee my total profit is therefore 6.8 million or 5.67 million per slot per day.

So given that I consider 5.67 million per slot per day to be the baseline profit I need for something to be worth selling. If something is less profitable than that I either sell it immediately for whatever is being offered or vendor it.

Now, the other aspect of this is personal time. I have Field Crafter on all of my marketeers so I could easily mass produce common IOs if I wanted to but the profit is so low that I don't bother. It would take about 10 minutes to craft a set of 18 common IOs, mail them to an alt, switch to said alt and list them on the market and for what? Maybe 5 million if I'm lucky. Similarly I do not actively marketeer on all of my characters since doing so would eat to heavily into my playtime. I have three main characters that I marketeer on but most of the others I don't. On the non-marketeers I am more likely to drop stuff at the market as convenient but even there I aim for a fast turn around, if it hasn't sold by the next time I play that character then I priced it wrong.

It will not. The limitation on market slots is a deliberate one. It limits the ability to players to do pie in the sky bids just in case and, combined with relatively limited storage, encourages fast turn around on bids. This helps keep the market ticking over at a fast pace.

I agree with this, not just for E-Merits but for all 20 hour keepouts (TF rewards, tips, Grai-Matter, A-Merits etc.). A 20 hour cooldown works well enough for most people but a once-per-24-hours cycle that resets at the same time everyday would be nice for people with more variable schedules.

It's something that other MMOs do with their Daily Quests and I think it makes a lot of sense.

It depends on how impatient you are.

I'm working on Incarnates for 3 characters, between them I've got T4 Alpha on all and a total of 1 x Tier 2 ability, 10 x Tier 3 abilities and 1 x Tier 4 Ability, I've also got enough Very Rare components to make another 5 Tier 4 abilities once I get sufficient common components to make more T3s.

My total Influence spent was less than 25 million and that was solely impatience on my part (I spent a bit on iXP because I was impatient and wanted to unlock a couple of slots immediately instead of waiting until I ran another trial the next day, since trial XP is free and I was planning to run more trials the next day this was a complete waste of inf/threads).

At no point in the process was I ever tempted to spend the hundreds of millions influence necessary to manufacture rare or very rare components. Not because I cannot afford it (I can) but because I don't have sufficient uncommons and threads to do so even if I wanted to. I've gotten a decent number of Very Rare components through drops (about 10% of my drops so far) and by spreading out my Trial runs on different days to ensure I always get an Empyrean Merit I have plenty of them to turn into the extra rares that I need (and my thanks to the many people who put up with me compulsively changing characters between Trials). As such the bottleneck for me has always been common components (the uncommon to common downgrade helped a lot there).

The point I'm trying to make is that while there is an option to spend inf to progress in the Incarnate system it is not required and my experience is that it's not even a particularly useful method of advancement.

I would take any numbers from the Kotaku article with a grain of salt. The XP/Inf numbers need to be multiplied by at least 1000 to have any sort of accuracy.

Similarly the 60:40 split does not seem to play out in game, I would guess it's closer to 80:20.

Interesting, did you have people just stop using Destiny, Lore and Judgement or did you ask them to unslot Interface as well?