Bosstone

The consequence of respeccing power sets on a whim is that you can't play at peak performance unless you're willing to go to extreme lengths to obtain and store a ton of IOs and use a ton of unslotters.

If you're an SOed build, not a big deal. Sell off your SOs during respec and buy new ones. But if you've tuned your build for high performance using set IOs, that relies highly on powers within the sets. Broadsword does not have access to the same slotting as Fiery Melee or as Titan Weapons. The IOs that work well for Traps are useless for Pain or Empathy.

I don't know how healthy powerset respeccing is for the game or whether it's even possible at all, but someone really interested in FOTM is going to have a bear of a time keeping up with the IO needs. It'd best be used for someone who's either not terribly invested in their character anyway or for someone who thinks changing their character is worth the hassle.

Wee-ee-eell, more like "Pay to be as awesome as I could be in-game, just faster." For IOs that are both attainable in-game and on the market, it's purely a time versus money equation.

It's when you can surpass in-game performance only by spending money that it becomes Pay to Win. Funnily enough, the only things that really let you do that are the team insps and dual insps that nobody wants. Technically the ATIOs, I suppose, but they don't appear to be any more impressive than purple sets.

This is a big part of it. I can see Tankers exhibiting weird behavior by allowing the AI to attack a squishy just so the Tanker can unload. Everyone likes to do more damage, even if their role is ostensibly being the wall.

I did miss that part. Probably so then.

This reminds me of something that maybe has already been addressed.

How would redside get to DA?

Folks are already ticked off about the gambling/addictive aspect of this as it is. Throwing badgers into the mix is just asking for trouble.

This point was brought up ad nauseam in the original brawl over a solo Incarnate path. Team play gets more stuff (XP, recipes, shards, threads) faster than solo. That's how it works, that's how it has always worked even before Incarnates were in the picture.

Right, as in "coming out of Hide." A bit ambiguously phrased, that.

Pretty simple, really.

Simplified example:
You have three players. One can afford to pay only $5 a month. One can afford to pay $15 a month. One can afford, and wants, to pay $50 a month.

With a basic $15/mo subscription, you get only $30 a month. One player can't play at all, one's in the sweet spot, and one has no available options to spend more than $15.

With a hybrid pricing model, you get $70 a month. All three players can play and can buy as much as they can afford/want to pay.

Before you mention tiered subscriptions, expand those 3 players to 150,000, all of whom not only have different amounts of money they have available to spend on the game, but also have different priorities and different things they want out of the game. At that point you're not looking at tiers, you're looking at continuous lines. It makes far more sense to offer everything a la carte and let folks pick and choose. A tiered subscription is always going to lock someone out on the low end and prevent making even more money from people on the high end.

What Paragon is doing now is figuring out what they can offer that will draw in the most people possible paying the most money possible. If a particular segment of customers only pays $5/mo because that's the cost of all the stuff they want on the market at a given time, maybe Paragon can introduce more stuff that will get them interested and paying $10/mo instead.

Because then you can stack a Windfall on top of that and get even more. Remember, Windfalls also increase your chance for drops. I have pretty reliably gotten 1.5x more shards than usual when using a Windfall, and on a steamroll ITF that means a lot of shards. It also works with recipes, but unfortunately the chance for a purple is so low I could run 3 ITFs and not see one even with a Windfall.

It's not as if there's a cap on how much inf, XP, or prestige you can earn in a given amount of time. No matter how much XP I'm earning on a steamroll team, a +25% bonus just gets me that much more.

While I agree that the market could be better and does need to present itself better, that may be one of the goals here. In buying a pack for the IO or costume piece, you get a little collection of consumables you've heretofore been reluctant to buy. You didn't ask for them, but here they are anyway, and maybe you discover that, hey, they're actually useful.

I mean, heck. I bought a pack of Windfalls because I got a few in my vet rewards kit. I don't buy consumables in F2P games all that much either, but I figured, hey, they're here and they're free, I might as well use them. In doing so I found them to be modestly useful, so now I have a stack sitting in email for whenever I go on a Roman killing spree. I imagine the idea behind the packs is at least partially the same.

No argument there.

Great post, and I agree to a large extent, but the one guy I personally know who's had trouble with RMT (on another game, not City) has Alzheimer's. He has a hard time understanding that folks can and will screw you over, and despite everyone's best efforts to get the concept of "Buying Money Is Bad" through to him, he'll still occasionally pop up on forums and go "So I bought some gold..."

It's frustrating, but it's tough to full-on blame the guy, you know? It's mostly just sad.

The reason I mentioned +2/x8 was because it was on a level 33, not a 50. By 32 you've got the majority of your important powers, but all those slots you pick up in the last 20 levels make a major difference in effectiveness. I don't see any reason my Bots/Traps won't be able to run +4/x8 with SOs once he hits 50 and has all his slots filled out.

I can attest to this. It's tricky, but possible, and maybe not with every group. I've taken out spawns of +2/x8 Freakshow with my Bots/Traps MM at level 33 SKed up to 49 (the Freakshow were 51), and I did it quickly enough that the tank I was SKed to didn't have time to catch up to me before the spawn went down. The MM is almost all SOs aside from one Achilles' Heel proc and a couple sets in his personal attacks.

Freakshow are pretty easy though, aside from the Super Stunners. The MM can still get chewed up by other groups if I'm not careful.

Sorry for coming back to this kind of late, but to steal from Men in Black: A person may not like grind. People do.

I agree presentation matters a lot, though. I've played games where I've been bored out of my skull and watching my XP bar with an eagle eye, just desperate to get to the next level for that fun thing. I've also played games where I can spend hours having a total blast and my XP bar has just flown on by without me looking once at it. Hell, sometimes those have been the same game.

He didn't say anything about the quote in the original post you nitpicked. He italicized his own writing.