Arcanaville
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Quote:But why would you want to.Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
It doesn't take much accuracy to lob a grenade in your general direction. You can do that without ever exposing yourself. -
Quote:I read a review of the Avengers movie written apparently by one of the six people on Earth who didn't like the movie whose basic thesis revolved around two assertions:Originally Posted by Lothic
I'm not sure I'd say JJTrek was as bad as Bay's "Transformers without the giant robots" but I would definitely agree it was at least closer to that extreme than Roddenberry's vision. Let's just say Abrams let a bit more of the "no attention span MTVism" into the mix than I really cared for. Much like the Devs often do for CoH I think Abrams over-corrected for some of the traditional stuffiness of the franchise and made something a bit too watered down and derivative. Sure it sold tickets for the one movie but that's far from proving Abrams has what it takes to lead the franchise in a meaningful direction. The second Star Wars trilogy sold a lot of tickets too but that didn't really make it "better" than the first trilogy for many, many reasons.
My main concern now is that Abrams is already playing the Kahn card. I thought he was supposed to be this masterful movie maker - is doing a "rehash" right after the obligatory "reboot" really the direction the Star Trek franchise needs to go? When is he going to be brave enough to actually give us something original and/or unexpected that makes sense? Wiping Vulcan off the galactic map was the twistiest twist Abrams could come up with so far and that was basically the jarring equivalent of permanently cutting Superman's right arm off - sure a writer could do that but it'd weirdly crossed a line that should never have been crossed.
Ultimately I'm just left with this strange sensation that I just let Abrams borrow my proverbial car (in this case my affection and understanding of the Star Trek franchise) and he took it for a joyride the same way he imagined young Kirk would have been stupid enough to have driven a car off a cliff. I suppose we'll now have to wait until the third movie to see what Abrams can -really- do with the franchise.
1. Its a shame that Joss Whedon was forced to make the movie we saw, because he lacks the skill to know any better or do any better.
2. Its doubly a shame that the ignorant masses will flock to the movie, ensuring that we'll just get more of the same.
My reaction to that review is basically this: on the one hand projecting taste as objective review is unfair, but its an argument you simply cannot win against someone convinced of their position. On the other hand, the consolation prize is that its an argument you don't have to win either.
Happening to be in the vast overwhelming majority doesn't mean you're right, any more than being in the vanishingly small minority means you're wrong. But it does mean you can relax a little and let someone else attempt to fight (what they believe to be) the good fight for a while. Which is another way of saying I don't myself have to wait or plan to wait for the third movie. -
Quote:An interesting experiment, then, would be to see what would happen if you were to create an extension of Pocket D which had market interfaces for both factions. If socializing and marketeering are as incompatible as suggested, they would tend to be unused in favor of either the current markets or the popup auctionhouse interface. On the other hand, if the primary concern is convenience over interference, they would tend to be used proportionately equal to or higher than the other interfaces relative to the amount of traffic that passes through Pocket D.Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
Pocket D was designed to be a social spot, for one thing - so was the PDP before it, though that was more a "secret club." The Atlas plaza and hill on Talos were just sort of "created" - they're either open areas where you can see the new people come in (after all, they spawn right at the bottom of the stairs,) or they've become that way because of invasions and other events. (There's really noplace similar redside, which I add to the list of flaws there.)
It's easy to socialize there.
The markets? There's several things *designed into* them that make them not "social hotspots." One is that you're going there to interact with a (very) few NPCs. Two, at least with Wentworths, it's a fairly confined area - and I can't say being enclosed helps. And three, while you're standing there - unless you're "just standing there," which I don't recall seeing anyone doing pretty much since they came out, regardless of server - you've got at *least* the market window open (which is not small.) Or the merit vendor window open, and you're browsing through that. You probably have your recipe and/or salvage window open as well. Why? You're there to do some specific business.
It's basically the difference between saying hi to someone at a bar (or park or whatnot) and getting between someone and the teller at the bank. One you'll get a response from. The other, you'll just irritate people with -and the second one's not the bar. -
Quote:Relative to the amount of influence earned via leveling they are, which is the context for that statement. The amount of influence which enters the system through leveling *could* be very large if the vast majority of characters never hit 50, except for that fact. Because so many characters under 50 are either influence neutral or actually influence negative, to a first order approximation we can probably discount influence earned through leveling even if only one in a thousand characters makes it to 50.Originally Posted by Fulmens
Arcanaville: While sub-30 characters are definitely net consumers of inf, they aren't *large* net consumers of inf.
You cannot just handwave the leveling influence component because one farmer outdoes a hundred levelers, when the ratio could be far higher than that. We just don't know. But when a single level 50 nets to a higher amount than a thousand average levelers, or even ten thousand levelers, because they are netting close to zero across level one through 49, we probably can handwave them completely away. -
Quote:Its also just a rule of thumb, but more importantly there are lots of ways for it to be obviously false, and one way is to compare across populations that really shouldn't be averaged across. "The set of all 50s" is definitely suspect, because it includes both level 50s that aren't played often after they hit the cap and level 50s that farm influence or are played enough to generate large amounts of influence. If the 80/20 rule genuinely applied everywhere, it would apply to the set of all characters ever created but its extremely likely that the bottom 80% have almost zero influence, at least relative to the scale being discussed.Originally Posted by Another_Fan
The Pareto principle is about population distribution. The 80% is a straight 80% of the population, the 20% is a straight 20% of the population.
Edit: I thought about working it in the reverse but I have no idea how large the number of trillionaires is, the data is also shakier in that direction -
I see Prezi continues to displace Powerpoint at Paragon. Although I guess its still extremely difficult to break Powerpoint's hold on the brain based on the structure of the presentation.
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Quote:Some percentage of the 50s are part of the 80%, and some are part of the 20%. It doesn't seem currently possible to know what that percentage is so it seems currently impossible to to know how large the 20% is and how much influence they have.Originally Posted by Another_Fan
The statement by the devs was 500k accounts had achieved level 50. Inf generation below 50 from direct play is very small, and the destruction is offset by a very short length of play at 50.
The absolute worst pure inf earners can make 2 million+ inf per hour solo, so for the 40 million to be invalid they would have to play less than 20 hrs at 50.
Generating inf with a single alt below 50 and few market slots is something that can be done but not something you would really want to, so I wouldn't consider the below 50 high earning noobs as a very significant percentage of the total. To the extent they are there they would just make the estimated inf larger. -
Quote:Personally I believe not enough credit is allocated to influence destruction. My best estimate is that I've created, in actual play, about two billion influence in eight years. I've destroyed many times that amount through purchases, prestige conversion, and marketeering. So I'm personally a net influence negative to the entire game. My suspicion is a high percentage of alts lower than level 30 are either break even characters or if they are supplied with influence from other alts net influence losses. I wonder out of all the players that participate in the markets, how many of them are net positive and how many are net negative influence sources across all their characters.Originally Posted by Fulmens
I'm starting to wonder if the Market isn't better at destroying inf than we have given it credit for.
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Quote:Some percentage of the 50s are part of the 80%, and some are part of the 20%. It doesn't seem currently possible to know what that percentage is so it seems currently impossible to to know how large the 20% is and how much influence they have.Originally Posted by Another_Fan
I was only using the population of 50s
edit to be precise accounts that had made it to 50
Another issue with the calculation of how much influence is earned from 1 to 50 is that a substantial amount of it is likely destroyed by the player through enhancement purchases. Before the markets existed influence was constrained until the late 30s, sometimes for some players to the low 40s. The markets didn't increase the amount of influence generated, it only allowed influence to flow between characters. If that same influence destruction occurs now at similar rates then the amount of inf earned through leveling might be insubstantial compared to the influence earned by level capped characters. -
Quote:I don't think you can get there directly, because you can't automatically call that calculation the 80% even if the 80/20 rule holds. And its unlikely to hold strongly for the specific case where there is a variable driver: there is a driver for influence generation from level 1 to level 50 that vanishes at level 50. The 80/20 rule, if it applies at all, is far more likely to apply to all influence generated at level 50, but there's no current way I can see to estimate the proportion between leveling generated influence and level capo generated influence.Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Actually the exact opposite.
Its incredibly unlikely the wealth distribution is going to be linear. If it obeys the 20/80 rule the way real world wealth distributions do
80 % of the pop = 16 trillion inf (assumes 80% have the very minimum)
20% of the pop = 64 trillion inf
So we are talking about 80 trillion as a minimum.
Now seeing as we are talking about 100,000 accounts in that 20% and we know at the top end there at least 4 trillionaires, it suggests that the size of curve is considerably larger. -
Quote:I'm curious: from your perspective, what specifically makes Pocket D more of an appropriate socialization spot than the markets, or for that matter any other random spot? Are those properties, whatever they are, transplantable to the market locations in theory, or is there something about Pocket D that makes it impossible for the markets to have the same properties?Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
When I want to 'socialise' I chat in channels. Or go to Pocket D to RP. Or to a SG base where friends are.
The market is NOT a 'social' hotspot. End of. -
Quote:One observation: since Scrappers were identified as the most popular alt at the level cap, that would imply that all other things being equal they should also be the richest archetype in terms of influence generated. If they are also the richest archetype in terms of influence held, that would imply that either influence warehousing coincidentally parallels that, or most of the influence in circulation exists on characters and not in other storage environments, or other storage environments were not counted by the devs in that calculation. With the markets at least at the moment apparently having a limited amount of influence, that makes two separate pieces of information suggest that there is a strong possibility that the number of players that actually accumulate and then keep large amounts of influence separate from generating it and holding it potentially very small compared to the playerbase as a whole. We might be talking about dozens to hundreds of players at most. Their behavior may not average out, but it also might not be very large compared to the playerbase as a whole.Originally Posted by UberGuy
It's entirely possible, though, that there is skew in what people who do that sort of thing use as the AT of their "bank" characters. Especially if such players are rarefied enough that their personal preferences don't "average out".
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Quote:That generates a lower bound limit for influence *generated* at 20 trillion. That's an inconsequential number compared to the hundreds of trillions conjectured to be in circulation, and doesn't factor in any influence destruction due to market activities. In fact, when I did that calculation myself it sounded to me to be of comparable magnitude to the estimated influence destruction likely over time from market activities: tens of trillions of inf.Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Looking at the information that was posted, we have 500,000 accounts hit 50. Getting to 50 generates roughly 40,000,000 inf. So if you use 40 million and 1 alt as the low end of the wealth distribution curve across that number its pretty easy to have that much inf in the game. If the wealth distribution obeys the 20/80 rule it does in real life it's more likely
On the generation side, all I get are estimates of tens of trillions of inf generated and tens of trillions of inf destroyed, which makes the lower figure of merit estimate tens of trillions of inf.
My guess is that farming or just plain playing at level 50 is more likely to generate more influence than leveling to produce the numbers the devs have given. But while its possible for the playerbase to generate hundreds of trillions of inf in theory, I still don't see compelling evidence that the activity required is likely to be happening. Its not unlikely either: there's just no strong evidence either way. But before I looked at the markets I believe everyone including myself assumed that if large amounts of influence existed, the markets would be one large reservoir of it. At the moment, I don't see enough bids to make that likely.
That automatically means that prior dev reporting errors aside, the assumptions players have made appear more shaky than they originally appeared to be. Its not a question of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that hundreds of trillions of inf don't exist in circulation, its a question of whether the analysis that suggested that amount is solid. I think its much more questionable without a gigantic influence reservoir in the markets. -
Quote:That's ok: I don't mind being called scary.Originally Posted by Blood Red Arachnid
This thread has devolved into harassing a player.
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Quote:Spike's "peace sign" during Buffy the Vampire Slayer's opening credits seems to suggest Whedon doesn't mind doing that when only a small percentage of the audience is going to "get" what he's doing.Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
I don't know if it's so much to "slip one past the censors," though it did fit that role, as to add some... how can I put it... archaic-ness to Loki somewhat like Thor has.
Besides, how many people (a) heard it correctly and (b) knew what it meant? -
Quote:A random super awesome being maybe, but not Thanos. Stark had Loki pegged when he told Cap that Loki needed the adoration, the worship, the attention. He was setting them up to be defeated in public so the world could see him defeat the Avengers. Loki had to lead personally: its in his nature, and its ultimately part of his actual goal.Originally Posted by CaptainFoamerang
Well I'd say a super awesome villainous being would be personally involved in retrieving the key to his plans if he were confident enough in his ability to overcome any likely resistance, but if he wanted to test those defenses first...
Thanos doesn't care about any of that. He doesn't care about attention or adoration. He basically worships death, and craves power only as a means to an end to make himself worthy of Death by having the power over life and death in the universe. And I'm certain that while Loki was on Earth Thanos wasn't at home watching cartoons. He had other things to manage, as all leaders do.
If he didn't think Earth was going to be a significant threat, he wouldn't go there just because he was confident: that's not what leaders do. Going there himself when he thought Earth was no threat is a waste of his time. -
Quote:I assume you read my post in which I tallied all the bids on all such items I could account for (plus the addendum reply to Another_Fan which shows the 51-53 bids). Do you have a specific one you believe that list omits?Originally Posted by Neuronia
Remember that there are items that can no longer be produced such as Base Salvage which have bids on them. I personally have made "accidental fortunes" logging legacy alts, placing base salvage on the market for 1 Inf then getting 50 million times a bunch. That's not even counting level 1-49 HOs or SHO bids, level 53 bids...there is a LOT of inf out there. Right now I'm purpling/PVPIOng a future level 50 Dark/EM Blaster and my liquid inf has dropped slightly below 5 billion...guess I'll have to throw a bunch of purples on the Market or sell some crafted IOs...
On the subject of whether people use the "ten bid" system or storing in one large bid: there are *lots* of items with multiples of ten (sometimes exactly ten) bids in them - usually the ones with small numbers of bids suggesting a few or as little as one bidder using it for storage. It suggests that the more common practice is to stuff with ten bids in a slot, although it does not say what the actual percentages might be.
But even if you multiply all my numbers for bids that could be used in that manner by 10, you still don't get hundreds of trillions of influence. Nine trillion could be 90, but it cannot be 400. The numbers still simply don't exist on the markets.
It seems less likely that there is more influence in global mail than the markets, certainly not an order of magnitude more. There could be in actual characters, but that requires making some very large assumptions about the amount of influence people store on individual alts. In the absence of any other calculations, would it sound like a reasonable assumption to assume that a couple hundred thousand alts had an average of a billion inf each, or alternatively millions of alts had an average of hundreds of millions of inf each?
That's what it takes to get to hundreds of trillions of inf. Tens of trillions the markets and conservative estimates of character inf can reach. Hundreds of trillions and it seems the markets cease to be particularly helpful to account for that level of inf, and the numbers for character storage seem to get very large very fast. -
Quote:The numbers are there in theory, but they require huge participation by the entire playerbase which seems unlikely. The original presumptions were that only a fraction of the playerbase could be responsible for a huge amount of influence. But if that assumption is faulty, there is no missing influence to account for. In that case, the question becomes why is it reasonable to assume, with no other evidence to support it, that hundreds of trillions of influence exist within a hundreds of thousands of alts collectively storing a huge amount of influence.Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Hmm
100,000 accounts in the game
For the sake of argument
100 mil on average in email/ account
An average of 3 alts per account
an average of 100 mill stored on each alt
There is 40 trillion right there.
Now if we assume an average of 1 scrapper/account we know the devs pegged the number at 12 trillion inf on scrappers. That gives us 120 million per scrapper and they are the most popular AT so that jibes with the 100 mil average per alt.
All you would need to get higher numbers of inf out there would be more Alts. -
Quote:It was an interesting way to do it, but I doubt many other people were doing it that way based on conversations with other marketeers.Originally Posted by Fulmens
Interesting stuff! And hard to argue. I can find a few specific places that a trillion or ten could be hiding, but nowhere to put "hundreds" of trillions.
* We have no way of telling how much is being stored in "sold but not collected" bids, but the only person I've ever heard talk about storing inf that way is ... Arcanaville.
I did count both crafted enhancements and recipes in the total. I didn't break them out because from a storage perspective they are basically identical. But there were, at the time I looked, about 5260 51-53 recipe bids and 3970 51 to 53 crafted bids.Quote:* I could boost the 51-53 numbers two ways: if the average bid were larger (I tend to do single billion or two-billion bids, and I suspect most people do two-billion-inf bids instead of ten 200-million-inf bids) that would kick it up to 9-18 trillion, and if Arcanaville had only counted recipes OR crafted and not both. (I doubt Arcanaville made that mistake, but she might have.) Even if that number goes to 30 trillion, that doesn't help us find "hundreds of trillions". -
Quote:I don't think it was a test. I think Thanos expected to win. It would be more in keeping with his core character if the smile he cracks at the end when he's told that to continue to throw himself at the humans "is to court death" implies that Earth actually became interesting to him at that moment, specifically because they have the potential to be huge agents of chaos and death under the right conditions.Originally Posted by CaptainFoamerang
I can see them waiting until the third Avengers film for the team to actually confront Thanos. It seemed to me like this first wave was merely an attempt to test Earth's defenses.
As to the awesome lines in the movie, I think the movie is full of them. Before I went to see the movie I believed that what Joss Whedon could bring to the table is not just his command of emsemble characters, but the specific way he gives them unique identities in the face of absurdity. Each of the main characters in the Avengers shows their personality most when they are playing off of the most absurd elements of the story. Stark wisecracks in the face of it, Fury stoically and sardonically challenges it. Rogers tries to do what Dr. Erskine reminds him to do in the Cap movie: continue to be himself while it happens all around him. Ruffalo tries to ignore it completely, because his way of dealing with his "condition" is to try to make sure nothing gets inside and reaches the Hulk.
And yeah, the Hulk doesn't talk too much, so his best lines are delivered with his fists: against Thor as the equivalent of "oh yeah, I remember you" and against Loki. And you know, the Loki scene reminded me of another famous Whedon scene. -
Quote:I'm not sure if we can call them logical inconsistencies when so much of the mechanics of influence circulation is guesswork. But I'm inclined to believe in the absence of an error that this indicates a much lower supply of influence than has been assumed, because one of the presumed storage areas seems incapable of holding as much influence as earlier suggested. Unless, of course, the market interfaces are off to the tune of hundreds of thousands of bids. Each trillion inf requires at least 500 to 5000 bids to store on the markets, depending on storage methodology, at a minimum. There aren't many things, as far as I can see, that even have more than 5000 bids in them capable of storing significant influence (i.e. not things like common salvage).Originally Posted by Another_Fan
I don't make the claim of knowing where it is I am just pointing out that if your statement is taken as true there are some pretty big logical inconsistencies that pop up. You would expect to see more effects from the people burning inf, a much larger deflationary effect from superpacks, hero merits converter purchases etc.
I did notice while scanning for bids the market was a little inconsistent about presenting all of a category.
If I had to guess, my guess is that influence is destroyed at a lot higher rate than presumed, to the tune of trillions, perhaps tens of trillions of inf a year more than estimated. But honestly, I didn't expect to see the potential storage value that low. I actually expected to find fifty to a hundred trillion inf on the markets that I could reasonably account for. I have to stretch to guestimate ten or fifteen trillion, which is unexpected. -
Quote:Do you consider anyone who points out your facts to be in error to be attacking you? Because if that's the case, then the answer to your question is that you posted things I disagreed with because they were inconsistent with the facts as I know them to be, and I elected to attack you by stating that I believe those facts to be in error because I'm often compelled to point that out when that happens. I have never felt the need to have more reason than that.Originally Posted by Gunstar
Why are you attacking me?
If you feel this is also an attack, then the answer to that question is that you asked a question, and I decided to answer it. -
Quote:Just as your opinion carries the same equal weight towards illegitimizing Abrams Trek.Originally Posted by Lothic
Again it's easy to pick apart differences in the various Star Trek show/movies that predated Abrams' involvement. Despite all that it is terribly easy for me to see unique differences in Abrams' vision to all that which has come before. Sorry, it just is. Just because you can make a case that Star Trek has never been a monolithic entity does NOT automatically justify or legitimatize what Abrams has done.
I'm not going out of my way to construct a case. That's just how I see it intrinsically. -
Quote:Actually, what you said was that a) ED and the GDN were obvious proof the devs don't listen to players:Originally Posted by Gunstar
HOLY THREAD DERAIL BATMAN!
How we got here I'm not sure, and I'm not really sure what we're actually discussing; ED, GDN, pissing people off, or Invention Diversification.
I made an simple comment that Invention Diversification (originally stated by Samuel Tow) would piss people off.
That is all.
Thank you.
b) ED and the GDN went farther than players suggested:Quote:Originally Posted by Gunstar
Do you remember ED and GDN?
Player input means very little when the change is already in the works or according to the "master plan".
and c) the devs didn't communicate ED and the GDN very well to the players:Quote:Originally Posted by Gunstar
From what I remember most of the ED and GDN changes suggested by players were very minimal compared to what we received.
The first statement is false: players were asking for changes comparable to the GDN and ED, and in fact there were a not insignificant number of players lauding the devs for making those changes after they were implemented.Quote:My reply wasn't that they weren't needed, I was alluding to the fact that the Devs did such a poor job at communication and pissed off the majority of the forum posters.
The second statement is mostly false: while there existed players asking for far lower changes, the players directly asking for changes of a balance-significant nature were asking for changes of the same magnitude of ED and GDN, or higher.
The third statement is half-true. The devs did not have an opportunity to communicate ED to the players because it was leaked from CoV beta while still being tested. The devs did explain the GDN changes and why they felt they were necessary. Many players hated them anyway, but that wasn't a communication problem.
The biggest communication glitch players accused the devs of perpetrating with regard to ED was not about ED itself, but about the fact that Statesman said after the GDN that "no more major balancing changes for powers was planned after the GDN." Many players took that to be a lie given their interpretation of ED as a "change to powers." I myself pointed out that this was an ambiguous statement, but not a lie: its a definite communications error, but one few players would themselves consistently avoid either. -
Quote:So where is it then? There's no such thing as a hidden bid. If the bids exist, they exist in an item I haven't seen yet, or the markets have a serious display bug in the bid counters. But I'm open to corrections. Its not hard to spot places a lot of people stuff bids to hold influence, and they only have thousands, not hundreds of thousands, of bids.Originally Posted by Another_Fan
I seriously doubt that number because if it were correct it would mean I am personally holding about 5% of all the games liquid inf and that doesn't seem likely.
Also, this is just a projection of the influence in the markets, not the game as a whole. The presumption made is often that the influence we can estimate in the hands of player characters (or the devs might be counting) could be only a tiny fraction of the total. But that doesn't seem to be the case. The amount in the hands of players could, by the devs numbers, be on the order of 50 to 100 trillion. I was just trying to discount the idea that another 300 trillion might be in the markets. I can't find anywhere for those hundreds of trillions to be.