Bad_Influence

...And to be fair, I also remember a time when Crap of the Hunter [as some loveable wag dubbed it] seemed to be falling like rain! Just about every time I did a TF, a CotH was what dropped as final reward, as if the set bonuses it bestowed were the awesomest things ever. This was a long time ago, as in over a year. And it did get QUITE old.

I don't see CoTH much these days, thankfully. It has been replaced by several successors, most recently the new FotM: temp power recipes. Woot. Or... not.

Perhaps they are not equally likely to happen, but that seems to be the gist of what is said every time someone brings this sort of thing up.

forumite 1: Why am I getting so many Crap of the Hunters?! Sick of it.

forumite 2: All recipies are random. You are only *imagining* you are getting a metric crapton of Crap.

When the word "random" is used, unless qualifiers are used it looks to the reader like "randomly equal chance to happen." Randomly equal chance to happen is quite clearly NOT what we see in the game, related to either salvage or recipes. But I think a lot of people don't like admitting that.

Sorry, I have never claimed they were not random. I do think it is set up to be a lot less random than people think it is; and this goes for many other recipe pools as well, and these things are at least partially mandated by what AT you are playing at the time. If all things within a given pool had an equal chance to drop, my tank would probably see way fewer Confuse sets than he does. Meanwhile my Mind Dom gets Taunt recipes all over the place. Hmmmm...! Or not.

My contention is that a few sets of purple IOs are weighed to drop with extreme frequency; and within those sets, two or three recipies are almost always what drops. I want to say that one of them is Fortunata Hypnosis acc/rech? Something like that. I think I have four of that one recipe spread amongst my people.

This causes me to think "less random." I am not saying they are "not random." Just "less random."

No, what I meant by that was actually "everybody in the game whom I know and team with on a regular basis" - not a huge sample size, but fairly good sized. Don't put words in my mouth, thanks. I will return the favor.

So what's your story? No doubt Shield Walls and Hecatombs are falling like rain over your way? Its the Internet, and any wild claim will do.

Perhaps a sample size of two isnt all that many, I will grant you that. I therefore turn to the market, consisting of tens of thousands of players, where things such as Fortunata Hypnosises and Unbreakable Constraints are selling for considerably less than many more desireable sets. Now why might that be? Perhaps we shall never know, but my guess is because these sets really do fall like rain for a considerable number of people. If its frequent, its cheap. Seems logical enough a conclusion to me.

If certain things are "weighted to drop more" than that is a lot less random than many would like us to believe.

The essence of "random drops" is that each thing in the given class has an equal chance to drop. This has been the opposite of what I've observed to be happening.

I would not use a roulette wheel as an example. The house is going to do everything they can to throw a spoke in the wheel of winning players, which is not exactly what they want you to think is going on.... on second thought, that's exactly what seems to be going on with "random drops."

If you are in a PvP zone and a purple drops for you, is it going to be a Shield Wall or is it gonna be a Fortunata? I know which one I'd place my bet on.

First, as someone else mentioned, I am aware that temp powers drop from a seperate pool than purples. My point was that it seems that both myself and well... just about everyone, are spammed with temp powers in lieu of more useful recipes. And it seems to be 90% Plasmatic Tasers. Color me underwhelmed.

Now as to the quote on this post, I would agree IF I WERE THE ONLY ONE THIS HAPPENS TO. I'm not; everyone I know gets 7-8 out of 10 purple drops as, one of the same 2-3 Fortunatas OR one of the same 2-3 Unbreakable Constraints. That's not random, folks.

If I go to the market to try and sell that Fortunata, surprise, surprise: that recipe is selling for chump change. This makes me think that me and my pals are perhaps not the only ones seeing those same damn three Fortunata Hypnosises. Mere random chance? Maybe.

But I doubt it.

RANDOM would be our having the same chance of getting a Ragnarok as we do of getting a Fortunata Hypnosis. Not seeing that happening, sorry.

Now I have three characters who can use Fortunata, so its always good to see a Fortunata, honest - but for the love of all that is holy, lets see some ACTUAL RANDOMNESS in supposedly "random" drops.

They DO force us to take Sprint and Brawl; I'd much rather have something more useful in those two slots, especially Brawl which is perhaps the most useless thing ever. Just sayin'.

I will take that even furher and state that I should be able to walk into any store, anywheres and say "I'll have this, this, this, this and that," and all those items should be absolutely free for me.

Howver I am confining my remarks to reality, and the reality is that the best costume stuff is mostly bought these days. This economic model is going nowhere. Money is being made off of these booster packs, and wishing them away will acheive nothing.

And I greatly prefer to pay rather than unlock stuff like the Rulaaru weapons.

I will wish good luck to those of you chanting "but everything should be free!" Maybe it should be, but it isnt GOING to be.

I would probably pay MORE than $10 to just unlock the Rulaaru weapons, which are the grindiest things to get blueside that I can think of, off the top of my head.

I will not pay for emotes only, even if I love the emotes, as I do with the new stances. Luckily those were free.

Remember back in the day, when new costume parts took 99 forevers and yeah.... 99 forevers? We saw new costume stuff ONCE IN A BLUE MOON. And not much of it.

NOw that we pay for it, we get it MUCH FASTER. I can live with that. What I think should stop is the further fracturing of packs: I want packs like Valkykie and Magic, where we get a metric crapton of useable parts, emotes, and maybe even a temp power or two, so our money bought us a lot of things to piece out all over the place. Fun.

Packs like Mutant, which lacked chestpieces and belts, and packs like the Basketball emote pack, which is what I call it [facepalm] are a rung or two down from that and should cease ASAP. Value for money: this is what the people want.

p.s. I like the Snow aura, especially the Eyes one. I have Body and Eyes on my cold-themed Archery blaster and I think it adds nicely to her look. NOW MAKE WITH FIREFLIES FOR WOMEN, ALREADY Seriously awesome.

YOU don't think. Judging from the amount of requests we see for dynamic respecs, I think your thought might be wrong.

We have been told "ABSOLUTELY AT NO TIME, EVER, NEVER!" on the following issues:

*transferring loot to ourselves
*power customization
*switching factions
*merged markets
*and I think server transfers

...and all of those came to pass, so pardon me if I take your caveat with a grain of salt. On second thought, I'll just move the Tank to a new server and wait.

If we cant get through mission #1 of the ITF without 15 deaths, this is very very ominous. If the team is fun, that's one thing. If the team is un-fun, this is a problem compounding the fact that we will probably have slogged through the rest of the TF for no real reward at the end.

And compounded yet again by people realizing this, then saying "OMG a storm is brewing over my house, I might DC at any moment" and within 5 minutes *bink* they vanish... without quitting first, so we can fight their spawns without their help.

So, the AV fight might go well. But with a team like that, odds are stacked against.

They have reversed themselves on "Forget it, never ever going to happen EVER" stuff so often, that I now have zero belief left for such fiats.

Dynamic respecs are very wanted by many players, allowing them would be wise.

Can't say as I want rain in the game, due to my small experience with it in That Other Superhero Game; it lagged my machine to no end. However snow, even if only in the Chalet, would be fun. I notiece that if you're standing around by the contacts in there, flakes will occasionally mist over you. Awesome.

New for Christmas: please - in the name of all that is holy - something to do where we don't end up looking at Snaptooth.

New for Halloween: a rework of the banner event where its possible to complete with only a few cooperating teams. This even needs some serious love and some serious looking-at.

The new part of last year's event was troubling to me. The problem is, to take down all four banners AND! and then, what..... about two minute time frame after the banners are killed, to hunt down and defeat a Giant Monster, is just not reasonable in my book. I think the two minute part is the real killer: out of a 15-minute time frame the banners take so long to defeat that after everyone does that, there's just no time left to defeat the GM.

This works well on highly-populated servers, where you can muster many people to get everything done in time. On lower-pop servers you got a problem.

As a result after the first few days these events were largely ignored, at least on Guardian blueside they were. Oddly enough I saw a higher completion rate redside.

Back to trick or treating

Sometimes while standing over the body of a particularly difficult boss, my people will say something long the lines of, "....And STAY DEAD" in Local. They do this both solo and on teams

I'm looking forward to being able to do stuff like add Epic pools to people who cannot have them now. I am fine with the choices we have now; an extra three picks to work with will be wonderful.

I'd really rather see new powersets for the ATs, than new pools. But that is just me.

That would be some extraordinarily good news, if they did.

Don't really see how, since its not as if costume slots are a thing that needs to be created from scratch. They've been here since what, issue 2 or whatever? Any time needed to allow us access to more than five slots would probably be minimal.

If you don't want to use extra costume slots, then don't. Those of us who do want to use them will be in no way affecting your gameplay.

As far as costumes being an influence-sink, bwahahahaha. Many purples are selling for 200 million these days; I'd say we have more than enough inf. sinks in the game now, and costumes don't even rate compared to the truly high-end stuff.

More costume slots please.

I have it too, but never slot anything anyways until DOs.

When I hit 22 I respec, sell back all my DOs and buy SOs. Cheaper that way.