Arcanaville

I don't think I buy that theory completely, except perhaps in extreme situations (like someone living billions of years), and maybe not even then. First of all, people who live past a hundred years have seen basically everything they've known die too, and they don't always go crazy. Second, even if you're immortal that doesn't mean you have superhuman memory or brains. Do people who are a hundred years old pine over all those two-year olds they knew and are gone now? No, because they've probably forgotten them.

Our puny monkey brains evolved at a time when they only needed to function for a couple of decades. Making it past thirty was bonus time. And yet, even when they manage to last three or four times longer than the warranty, they can still function more or less reasonably, and relatively sanely.

Sure: if you could live a billion years, some things start to get interestingly problematic. But I think human brains are good enough even to handle lives like Methos from Highlander, who lived for about 5000 years.

The neural networks that contain memory and learning in the brain probably work like most neural networks do, which is a lot like holograms work. You can't "overload" a brain any more than you can overload a beach with writing in the sand. At some point, you fill the beach with writing everywhere, and start overwriting things. And like holographic storage, you don't delete one memory and write another in its place, you write both memories into something that can only store one of them at high fidelity, and both end up stored at lower fidelity. Sort of like compressing your older JPEGs at higher and higher compression ratios to make room for the new ones, so your older memories don't go away but they get steadily less detailed and more pixelated. Eventually they degrade to the point where all of the information in them is gone.

Reminder everyone:

Woman:



Man:



The differences are subtle, but try not to confuse the two. Because that leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate:



... leads to suffering.

I'm just answering your question: the numbers themselves were discussed before when the issue first came up; this is a summary of that.

I know that testing long ago proved it was definitely not first-in first-out. The fact that your tests showed a repeating order suggests someone made a goof again and is either attempting to write their own random number generator, or is incorrectly seeding the one they are using so it generates the same pseudo-random sequence every time. Its happened before.

Good heavens. I nearly dribbled my chardonnay onto the carpet of my Gulfstream just now.

The crucial difference is not that level 50s earn more or play differently. The crucial difference is that at every level you earn more but have more opportunities to spend more in gear (i.e. enhancements). Earning goes up, and costs go up, because gear expires. Except at level 50, technically at level 47. Once you reach level 47, your gear can't expire anymore and there's not much to spend inf on besides pursuing high-order inventions. Unless you turn XP off, as a practical matter there is really a limit to the amount of influence you can earn at every level (because if you earn more, you're guaranteed to level) and there is a limit to the amount of inf you can reasonably spend on that level (before you've bought everything you can use). Its that rule that breaks at level 50 (47). Except for things like special inventions, your costs drop to zero while your earning capacity becomes unlimited. This eventually causes inflation at the top.

The theory that drops and influence are earned in sync so they should balance out doesn't happen because separate from mechanical issues (for example you can fill all your slots and stop earning drops easier than you can cap out your influence) not all drops are equally valued. Eventually, some are singled out for special pursuit by the playerbase, and their collective influence gets concentrated into attempting to acquire them (things like special procs and purples, for example). The other items which might have actual value to the players gets relatively ignored by comparison. You end up with a form of auction frenzy where some things sell for less than their actual worth to the players and some things sell for astronomically high values. This isn't true market inflation as such, but its all but indistinguishable from it.

Actually, what War Witch said was that it was thinking about all of the issues related to Going Rogue - presumably faction switching and grey alignments in particular - that led to them reexamining the question of market segmentation. Consider all of the tiny little corner cases that had to be dealt with when co-op zones were introduced: how teaming worked, who could trade with who, etc. Now multiply that by ten.

She also said that Going Rogue created the opportunity to merge the markets, which implies this is something they have been thinking about for more than just Going Rogue, but Going Rogue itself gave them both the impetus and the resources to tackle the situation.

I don't think its fair, as some have (not saying you are specifically), to suggest that this is just the devs taking the easy way out. I think its more a case of many factors combining simultaneously to cause them to take action.

But as I said, the only evidence you have for such corruption at the moment are the devs statements about the change to game mechanics, which are not in-game canon. So when you say such activity could not possibly stay hidden, my reply is "what activity?"

The devs haven't actually stated that materials physically transport themselves between factions, except in the grey area case of characters taking their possessions across alignments with them when they switch sides. Until it happens in-game, by your rules what little they've said is not officially canon anyway. So what activity is supposed to be "obvious?"

YES! We've delayed Going Rogue, Captain!


I have the best crew in all of Star Fleet.

Its not just you, but its false all the same.

1. No one was doing "tanker damage" with shield charge. Everyone was originally doing Pet damage, which is essentially the same as doing 1.0 modifier damage (the same modifier that blaster melee attacks use). Technically speaking, Scrappers were doing slightly less than their modifier would imply (which is 1.125) while everyone else was doing more than their modifiers would imply (Tankers: 0.8; Brutes 0.75).

2. Castle is pointing out that the power was originally designed and intended to do its maximum damage within a radius of three feet of the target, and less damage throughout its radius of twenty feet. In other words:

Scrappers 3' scale 2.7, 20' scale 1.9125

Scrappers were intended to do Scale 2.7 damage within three feet of the center of the AoE, and Scale 1.9125 damage within twenty feet of the center of the AoE (the power's full radius).

Where do these numbers come from?

2.4 at the center, 1.7 everywhere else when scaled up 1.125 for scrappers is 2.4*1.125 = 2.7; 1.7*1.125 = 1.1925.

They could also shift to 48-bit or 64-bit integers. But I'm guessing if they changed it they would change it to 64-bit floating point (which would normally have 53 bits of precision, allowing precise values up to about 8 million billion inf).

Fine. If you are going to be literal, and not accept anything but what the game concretely presents, then until you can prove in-game that anything changes hands between the blue market and the red one, you shouldn't have any problem. As of right now, none of your characters can possibly have any idea anything is wrong with the markets. They shouldn't be able to read War Witch's postings.

The devs say INF isn't money, but you don't care what they say: you only care about what your characters see. Well: its highly unlikely your characters will ever find proof that materials are being smuggled between the markets, because the devs haven't and aren't likely to implement such activities in the game. It will happen basically by trans-cosmic magic: items will disappear from Paragon City and duplicates will appear in the Rogue Isles in equal numbers, with no way to ultimately trace how that happens because that doesn't happen within their universe.

Unless your characters manage to somehow escape the Matrix. So what's the problem? Until the devs make an in-game canon declaration that Wentworths is corrupt, acting as if it is because of anything discussed here would be violating your own rule about canon.

I was not familiar with credit default swaps prior to the economic detonation, but I was familiar with most of the derivative instruments they were ultimately layered on. I always assumed there was a safeguard against their doing what it was obvious they were doing, even though I should know better by now. In the risk analysis industry of which I am a technical participant, I've often described it as the "round to zero" error. Basically, 10% risk is a problem. 0.0000001% risk times 100,000,000 is still 10% risk, but that's also 0.00% risk times 10.00^8 which is zero. No problem.

People have been doing that for as long as risk analysis has existed. What's different today is that most risk analysts who make that mistake either dodge a bullet, or take a bullet for the error. But we can't make any single group of people take a 65 trillion dollar bullet, mores the pity.

The problem here is that the two markets are actually extremely abstract conceptualizations. They present a single simplified interface to perform a lot of very conceptually different things. For example, you can "buy and sell" things that aren't tangible, and cannot, within the in-game canon, possibly be bought and sold. Inspirations, for example, are not "potions" in the in-game fiction. They are literally inspirations to higher performance. Inspirations changing hands at all is a very thinly engineered fiction of players ultimately exchanging some of their "influence" or "infamy" for some intangible benefit that will manifest itself as a sudden "author-induced" burst of performance for the fictional character. They are meta-entities that don't actually have *any* physicality within the in-game world. They cannot possibly be literally bought or sold, because they don't exist in the in-game world. They are really placeholders for the players not the characters.

Some enhancements are described as physical items, some are not. But its unclear and ill-defined what the players are even supposed to do with the ones that are physical. I don't myself presume that I'm carrying them all around with me. I presume they are somehow "used" to improve my character's performance. But things like Training Enhancements and Natural SOs are generally described as literal training. "Buying" them from a store or the markets represents the conceptual activity of exchanging inf for training. And its not even necessarily "an exchange ." It could be seen as a post-hoc decision that all along while you were earning that "inf" you were really expending time training yourself as you went along. In other words, rather than "earning inf" you were really "practicing to get better" and the use of inf to buy those enhancements is a retroactive decision.

All of these things are not consistent with a "market" that allows you to "buy" and "sell" them. *Some* things are, but the markets have to conceptually encompass all of them, and the only way to presume that is to presume that the markets themselves are a convenient fiction. We treat them like markets you buy and sell from, but that is a game mechanical dodge to prevent having to represent far more complex trading and training mechanics.

This means just because the only straight-forward way to conceptualize cross-faction execution is by a literal underground railroad of goods and services flowing between the two factional domains, doesn't mean that is the actual concept being represented. The markets are far too abstract for that to be definable. Now, if you *choose* to conceptualize them that way, and as a result role play that concept by opting out of them, that was always dealers choice. Some people probably don't even like the notion of "buying" *anything* from *anyone* that isn't an actual thing and clashes with their concepts of what the items actually are. But this is not mandated by the devs' actions, even if it appears to be an apparently logical conclusion. The axioms of that conclusion are far too shaky for that line of thought to be objective.

Real economies are complex things. True story: back in early 2007 I was traveling in Europe and happened to notice a peculiarity: all over England I was seeing banks with signs in their windows advertising their interest rates, much like here. Except there, average interest rates on deposits was around 5%. Here, it was about 1%. And those were not introductory rates either.

When I got back I asked around to try to figure out how that kind of potential arbitrage opportunity could exist and could possibly be sustainable. Especially since it couldn't be an isolated phenomenon: it had to reflect a fundamental discontinuity between the US economy and the European (or at least British) economy. What I was basically told, by the smarter people, was that it wasn't sustainable, but they had no idea what would "collapse" the situation.

Of course, now we know.

Trading volume on the red side tends to be so low relative to liquidity on the blue side for most items that I'm not sure your hero characters would even be able to notice the difference in the long run. Its the red side characters that are much more likely to notice, although I'm sure there will be some exceptions to that general rule.

I believe you should assume that unless the devs explicitly state otherwise, things you currently cannot trade at all will not become tradeable after the merge. The only limit explicitly being removed is the restriction that many things that are tradeable or giftable in general are not tradeable or giftable across factions.

Except where that might be problematic or exploitable, the devs appear to be saying if you can give it away now, you will be able to give it away to anyone regardless of faction. If you cannot trade it at all now, that's not changing because of the merge.

After the change, there won't be an "either market" anymore. There will be only one market, just in different locations:

War Witch:
(emphasis hers)

This has to be the first time in six years I've seen four people answer the same question four different ways at exactly same time. You'd think this was something interesting like NCSoft announcing Desdemona figurines shipping with Gamestop preorders.

They logically have to. War Witch from the announcement:
Avatea from the FAQ:
If you can claim influence and infamy from global email regardless of alignment, and you're only going to have one blank on your character sheet to represent "INF" that implies currency autoconverts as it passes from player to player, because there is only one basket to hold it in.


Its probably safe to assume that, barring some change in intent on the part of the devs, that Influence and Infamy are essentially being unified mechanically. Conceptually, they'll remain different things, but they will be one to one interchangable, and everyone will have a single basket of INF (War Witch says as much in her second post in the thread when discussing the conceptual backstory for the change).

According to the FAQ essentially yes. Influence, Infamy, and Information will autoconvert from one to the other as you change sides, and presumably as you buy and sell things in the unified market. They'll still be called different things, but they'll operate as if they were the same thing.

There are some corner cases the devs have to be careful about, like making sure there's no way for a hero to acquire the villain market teleporter and use it to teleport themselves across factional lines to a villain market, things like that. The devs may not want to be more specific until they've completely finalized the implementation. "Some restrictions apply" probably means "broken or exploitable stuff may need to be restricted."

Which checks and balances do you think occur at all that the Phantom Army bypasses? I'm personally unaware of any specific design rule that the PA violates that any other controller set is required to follow, unless you think one of the rules that other controller sets are required to follow is "is not allowed to have the phantom army."

Moreover, Illusion breaks this rule three times. The Spectral Terror is indestructible. Phantasm decoys are also indestructible and draw aggro (they taunt).


A lot of people assume that the PA was made indestructible purely by accident, or without forethought into what it meant for them to be indestructible But I do not believe that to be true. They are looked upon - and have been used as - "indestructible tanks" but that's not the whole story of what the PA is. The PA is really an entity that takes a lot of control away from the controller and gives it to an uncontrolled entity. Its a keeper of Illusion control power.

Indestructible pets are certainly better than destructible ones. Replace the Phantasm with an indestructible version, and of course it gets better. But the PA is not a replacement for a destructible pet. Its a replacement for powers. Controller powers are not "destructible." Certainly, the controller can die, but that's also true for the Illusion Controller. When the PA is cast, its designed to do two things: attack things for damage, and draw some aggro from some of the NPC attackers.

*Both* things are replacements for powers Illusion control doesn't have. It only has two attacks (Blind and Spectral Wounds) and only two explicit control powers (Blind and Flash - although you could also count deceive). The rest of the hard and soft control a controller would normally have is split up into the Spectral Terror (also indestructible) and the PA. The PA "controls" by drawing aggro, and it serves a similar function: hard mez turns damage off. The PA sends damage > /dev/null: the damage goes into a bottomless pit.

Is it "fair" that the PA can just sit there and take an unlimited amount of damage? Well, if you compare that to a tank, it seems like not. But when you compare it to a mez which is what it actually replaces, you're comparing *taking* an unlimited amount of damage with *turning off* an unlimited amount of damage. And in both cases there is an actual limit: mez eventually expires, and so does the PA.

Its important to remember what the PA and the Spectral Terror are. They are not "extra" indestructible pets that Illusion got for free. They are actually thieves: they hijack powers the Illusion controller should have gotten and take them over, granting the benefit that the Illusion controller doesn't have to cast them or burn endurance on them, but dealing the penalty that the controller has no control over how they are used. They are both indestructible because in a very real sense the intent is to simply hijack the control of the powers from the Illusion controller, not to give those powers to pets the Illusion controller has to baby-sit.

Given how Illusion is designed, it would actually be broken if either the PA or the Spectral Terror could be killed. If they were killable, both pets would have to be either significantly stronger or recharge significantly faster (moreso for the PA than the ST). And particularly in the case of the PA, where the aggro drawing is replacing a hard mez. Mez cannot be broken by damage. If the PA can be, it would be weaker than the mez it was intended to substitute for.

If the Phantom Army was a mastermind pet, it would be problematic. As it is, they make poor tankers because you can only really use them as alpha strike tankers when you first cast them. After that, they quickly become scatter-brained and also follow behind you rather than lead in front of you. They are explicitly part of the "chaotic control" design of Illusion, which has very few hard controls (Blind and Flash are pretty much it) and few actual attacks (Blind and Spectral Wounds are pretty much it). The Phantom Army was explicitly intended to be part of the control of the set, and part of the damage of the set.

They are unkillable, but then again Earthquake is unkillable. Volcanic Gasses is unkillable. Bonfire is unkillable.

Illusion just happens to have a reputation for excelling in interesting corner cases, such as AV fights where the PA can be focused on a single dangerous target. Try using it on an AV that has or spawns minion support, or moves around a lot, and things go pear-shaped rapidly. But actually, in "normal" missions Illusion's chaos counter-balances its strengths to a sufficient degree to make the set interesting to play, but not overpowered. In fact, its performance is only average outside of singular hard targets.


Incidentally, in my opinion the best "unkillable" controller pet in existence today isn't the PA: its Carrion Creepers.