Bosstone

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Anyone who thinks they're doing this because they think LS, VS, GD, etc. are overpowered really needs to reread the thread.

Short answer: they're not. But the powers are being affected in a way that they were never intended to be. Add in the AI glitch with henchmen, and this fix deals with both issues at once.

Again: they are not doing this because they think these powers are overpowered. They're doing this because those powers currently are broken. Strength has nothing to do with it.

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Opinionative, you have no idea what tha game would ahve done had ED not arrived in the form it did. Its an opinion I share though, I too think ED was best for the game.

However developers are not infaliable seers with powers to identify what is best for the game longevity, after all look what SOE did with SWG.

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Oh, I don't deny any of this. I just think it's funny that Ryu is calling on one of the periods of drama that, while painful at the time, proved to be beneficial, and using that as an analogy for why this change is so awful. It doesn't make for a very strong case.

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I agree with you. What really gets me is that 2 MMOs in the same genre are going to be on the market soon, you would think they would be extra nice to their existing customers and not piss them off with stupid changes like this.

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You'd think so, right? That means this change is probably more necessary than you think.

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I havent been this mad about changes since ED.

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And yet ED turned out to be a benefit to the game in the long run. Those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

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Only part I don't agree is with the not being able to buy anything above SO's until the 40's or 50's. Not really true. I Frankenslot the cheap sets, easily affordable just by salvage sales most of the time.

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Yeah, this is the part a friend who read this post disagreed with as well. I definitely exaggerated here, but the overall point remains the same. Thanks.

When I wrote that, I was thinking more of the high demand recipes like LotG and Numina. Those will be in lower demand because the people who save will most likely be saving for those and so they won't have as great an effect on the market.

I expect Traps and Pacing and the like to rise in price, but not astronomically. They'll probably wind up selling for 1-2 mil or so instead of the, what, <500k they go for now? Really, what I expect out of merits is that the 2/3 that folks here deride as crap will actually become worthwhile recipes to have, and a random roll won't be 2/3 chance of getting a 10k recipe and 1/3 chance of getting a 50 mil.

The notion that some recipes are inherently more valuable is bupkis. There's only supply and demand. LotGs and Numinas command the price they do because there's moderate to low supply and exceedingly high demand, while Traps and Pacing are cheap because there's high supply (all the recipes generated by people hunting for an LotG) and low demand. If Traps were as rare as purples, they'd easily be worth a couple mil or more, and if LotG 7.5% was an uncommon enemy drop, it wouldn't ever really be worth more than 10-20 mil, instead of the 60-100 mil we're seeing now.

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Thats the point mate, they are presenting you with a choice of playing your way and getting no merits or playing the way they want you to, and getting merits. Ain't it great?

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Also, you realize merits are totally optional, right? Just like IOs? If you decide you have to have IOs, you already have to play the way the devs want you to in order to get them.

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The main thrust of my point was that even if this hypothetical player never does TFs, he'll still get merits through the normal course of play.

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How? My understanding is that you get merits for completing arcs THAT YOU OWN. Whenever I'm on, I almost always play with my buddies. They play more often than I do, and eventually it gets to a point (pretty early on) where they're a higher level than me. So I take a mentor/boss and we go and have fun. So I am almost always running someone else's story arcs. Often, we run radios. Either way, I don't get merits. In nearly four years, I've run ONE STF and ten or less KHTFs. How am I going to get Merits?

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So...basically, nothing's going to change for you. What's your problem with the new system, again?

Current system:
If you run TFs/trials, you can get Pools C and D.
If you do your own story arcs, you get nothing from C and D.
If you do other people's story arcs, you get nothing from C and D.

Merit system:
If you run TFs/trials, you can get Pools C and D.
If you do your own story arcs, you can get Pools C and D.
If you do other people's story arcs, you get nothing from C and D.

The market itself isn't going to change as drastically as people fear. You should still be able to get recipes that way. Supply will be lower, but there will also be lower demand. Effectively, nothing will really change for you if you don't TF and don't do your own story arcs.

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I guess I never understand this hypothetical casual player. He is too dumb to succeed under one system but will magically get enough merits and use them to get all the right recipes in the next.

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Hey, don't look at me, go talk to the guy I was responding to who said the casual player will never get anything with the merit system. The main thrust of my point was that even if this hypothetical player never does TFs, he'll still get merits through the normal course of play. You don't have to make time for a Posi or Quaterfield to earn, and grinding out Katies certainly isn't necessary nor expected.

That's better than the current system, where the exact same player either has to earn a buttload of influence (not that easy for a new player; only after a year do I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of the market) or make time to participate in a TF, or else he gets nothing from Pool C.

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I guess what bothers me the most about the merit system is that for a casual player (i.e. someone who has limited time on any given night to play due to Real Life) will mostly go virtually unrewarded for many things that they do.

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Why...why, why, why do you people think grinding is the only way to go?

Casual player. Solos, mostly. Takes his time leveling up. Does the contacts and the story arcs because they provide a nice XP bonus at the end. Doesn't do TFs because he doesn't have the time/doesn't particularly want to group.

Under the current system, he'd get no pool C drops at all. He'd be lucky to get anything decent from regular enemy drops, and he surely wouldn't have the inf to buy anything beyond SOs until he gets into the 40s-50s.

Under the merit system, he'll steadily accumulate merits through story arcs, and will be able to trade them in relatively quickly for random recipes or save them up for better stuff in the high levels.

I really think the story arcs are getting underestimated here. All y'all can think about is how grinding is going to be hurt and somehow that affects the casual player's ability to get decent stuff. The casual player doesn't give a crap about grinding, but he will be able to accumulate merits naturally over the course of his character's career.

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Also, I wonder if anyone will even use the random roll feature. It seems like people will probably just horde their merits to spend on big ticket items.

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Don't underestimate the draw of the lottery. Yes, you might be able to mathematically prove that it's better to get the big ticket items every time, but there's a certain thrill to rolling the lottery to see what you get. I think quite a few people will happily grab 3 randoms right after Quaterfield on the off-chance they're all big tickets, even if the odds are against them.

You can call lotteries a tax on stupidity, and you might be right, but I think it'll still see a lot of use.

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second: the removing the option for a random roll at the end of the task force isn't real popular.

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Of course it's not. Being able to slam down a recipe every 30 minutes (barring the 4-hour window) is extremely popular. It's also clearly not the speed at which you're supposed to be able to get rare, good recipes. Katie (and to a lesser extent the ITF) is broken in their eyes, and this is their way of fixing it without necessarily working on the TFs themselves.

Getting merits for story arcs should hopefully offset the decrease in rate at least somewhat.

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The log in timer was put in when someone asked for it because they had difficulty with the market timer eating their stuff. It had nothing to do with day jobs, nor looks at anything day job related.

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Never said it did, only that they're already tracking logout times per character and not per account.

I would find it intensely odd if it were per account. Nearly all the discussion on the day jobs so far have been assuming that it's per character, and I'd consider it a major failing on the staff's part if they didn't clear up the distinction at any point.

Consider, though, that the character selection screen already tracks how many days it's been since you last logged in a character. If they were only concerned with the account and not the individual characters, they probably wouldn't bother with that.

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If however it is to reward real days subscription time, then adjusting the maximum time to 15 hours per day would accomplish that.

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Then they would be veteran rewards. They're not.

Really, if it capped at, say, 8 hours per day, it becomes little more than a vet badge. You went 30 days, here you go.

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So you are saying that it is proper for the developers to pretty much punish players for wanting to play their badge characters? Because that is what it comes down to.

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That is quite the self-centered view, isn't it? You're assuming this is a deliberate 'let's-screw-the-badgers' act. It's something to help out the casual players. That you decide getting these badges within half a year is the only way you can be happy isn't really their problem. It's not like you're locked out of it unless you play 24/7. It's just going to take you longer.

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That variance should be eliminated before launch. It serves no purpose.

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But it does. Just as hardcore players who spend 8 hours a day on average playing are able to access things like purple IOs and the epic badges and accolades, the day jobs and leveling pacts are geared toward the casual players who can't play nearly as often. The casual gamers can still get those accolades and purples eventually; the overachievers can still get the day jobs eventually. It's just going to take longer due to the playstyle.

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Hmmm. So I'm paying money not to play my toons? How about NCSoft not charge us for the time that we are earning these badges?

[/ QUOTE ]Do you realize that, right now, you are receiving nothing while you're offline and yet you're still paying NCSoft? Subscriptions are on a per-month basis, not per-hour-played. You don't get a refund because you had to go out of town for the week and so couldn't play your usual 4 hours a day. Right now you get nothing for that time. They're now offering something.

Why people think this is an incentive to get you to stay off your characters is beyond me. You'll still get so much more from an hour of playing than a week of not playing.

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Well, if the goal is to gain xp (and this is how the game is set up), then the smart thing to do is to play each toon for a level and move to the next.

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Dunno about you, but I play to have fun. XP isn't the be-all end-all, otherwise nobody would exemplar.

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I think I'm gonna have to drop from this argument. This whole thread has spiralled into a "lolbadgers ur lazy" argument with a few good but repeated arguments on either side and more singling-out and baiting than was necessary.

[/ QUOTE ]Fair enough. When an argument devolves into people shouting their personal preferences at each other, there's little more to be gained.

I do think it wouldn't hurt anything if the devs shortened the day job requirement such that, based on their datamining, the average player (who plays, what, 2-3 hours a night?) would reach the badge in 30 days of both online and offline time. Or 25, or whatever.

Really, this all reminds me of EVE Online. For those who don't know it, advancing is done through a time-based skill system. You pick which skill you want to work on (can only have one at a time), and it chugs away nonstop, whether you're on or offline. Lesser skills can be completed in 10 minutes to an hour, with duration increasing the higher the skill level or specialization, with some skills taking over 30 days to complete. A common practice when you have skills like that is to have the long-term skill chugging away while you're offline, but when you log into the game you switch to a shorter-term skill, usually something that will complete during your session, so you can get an immediate benefit.

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I'm just saying make badges as a result of doing stuff, not as a result of NOT doing stuff. I can't see how anyone, regardless of "hardcore badger" status, could be objecting to that.

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There are badges for getting mezzed and collecting debt, which are pretty much the antithesis of playing the game well. I don't see much difference between 'time spent in a sleep, hold, or stun', 'debt collected', and 'time spent offline'. None of these are ostensibly achievements, but they're tracked anyway.
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Seriously, I want to know: what's in it for you?

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I get a cool badge that lets me display a title.

Seriously. There's one or two of my characters that it would be neat to have 'Security Chief' on. I like getting badges for titles, mainly. I went and grabbed the exploration badge out by the floating truck in the D last Winter's Event just so I could parade around with 'Trucker' under my name.

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As odd as this may sound, I don't see why hard-core badgers should have a monopoly on how new badges are introduced into the game.

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This is true for just about any MMO mechanic. Letting the hardcore players dictate the game design based on their personal desires usually doesn't work out very well.

Edit: Unless the game itself is geared toward the hardcore. Lookin' at you, EVE.

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(Logging out for 30 days to get badges ASAP won't make me or any competitive badger happy, though. Sure, you say we don't have to... but that's not what we're telling ourselves.)

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And really, whose problem is that?

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A system based on PAYING to NOT play the game?

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I'm getting so tired of this mischaracterization.

Do you currently demand that you not be charged for the time you don't spend playing the game? I spend roughly 36 hours out of each 168 hour week playing the game; that other 132 hours is wasted. Gone. I'm sleeping, working, or doing something else. Every minute I'm not logged into City of Heroes I still have to pay for. It's $15/month whether you spend 1 hour a week or 23 hours a day on the game.

All the Day Jobs mechanic was intended to do was fill the gaps when you're not playing the game. It's a freebie that wasn't intended to alter your playstyle except for where you log out after each session. Now, that 132 hours that I'm not logged into CoH each week actually works toward something in the background.

And none of this even addresses the question of alts.

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How is this so worthy of angst?

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Because the badgers are approaching this from the perspective of "When I decide to get a badge, I devote the whole of my gametime toward earning that badge." Sort of like how if you want the badge for killing Vampyrs, rather than just accumulating them as you do Council missions, you go to Striga and run around for a couple hours killing nothing but Vampyrs. From that perspective, when a badger decides to get a day job badge, they need to do everything they can to progress toward getting it, and in this case that means logging off the character for a month.

I really do think the offline badges would be best approached without that mentality. It's something that happens in the background. When you're online, focus on getting the badges you can get through hard playtime, but the only thought you should really be putting toward the offline badges is where you log out. You'll get them eventually, and like as not you won't even notice. I'm shocked every time I see I've received a new veteran award, for example. Three months went by that fast?