Canine

Unfortunately, there isn't an infinite supply. There's a *theoretically* infinite supply, given an infinite number of players and an infinite length of time, but we don't have that. We have a finite number of players who each play for a finite amount of time, and individual playstyle choices have an impact on the amount and type of resources being placed on the market.

Someone who is always on a full team is (in my experience) going to get fewer drops than a scrapper running solo, due to the way drops are spread throughout a team, and the fact that a team of 8 doesn't generally kill mobs 8 times as fast as a solo toon can (travel time between spawns, higher prevalence of bosses which can take longer to drop etc. etc.)

Of those players getting the drops, some may just vendor all the salvage, some may play the auctions heavily, some may not care one jot.

Players gaining merits may save them up to buy the one really shiny thing that they want, rather than burning them on random rolls and listing the rolls that they didn't want.

I could go on, but functionally in game there isn't an infinite supply of anything.

There *are* ways to get the money to afford anything you want, but they require patience and time. My two mains (Hero and villain) have each acquired a huge pile of inf, from nothing more than 5 minutes a day of visiting the auctions. And I'm not doing anything complex like flipping, or trying to make a profit from selling high value named IO's. I'm just slowly raking in influence/infamy from people with less patience, but more desire to spend excess inf. <shrug> it works for me.

Yes they were all drops.

As to how long? When did I9 come out again? 1st of May 2007, so about 3 years worth of playtime, a lot of which was levelling new alts when I got an idea I liked, as far as level 50 playtime, that's far harder to figure out.

Bear in mind that the Katana/Regen with the most purples also has the Leader badge, so has enough playtime on him (about 1600 hours last I looked) to have gotten 500 million inf through mob defeats and mission completion bonuses. Do that, mostly via level 45-50 flashbacks, and you should get a fair few purples, too.

Personally, I don't in general like purples, not enough of the set bonuses I like in there, but they're a good source of reasonably negotiable ready cash. I cashed one in about a year ago to buy a Numina Regen/Recovery for the toon I was levelling at the time. It paid for the recipe, salvage and crafting costs, and all those combined were still cheaper than the 'buy it nao!' prices for crafted IO's at the level I was looking for.

I'm not sure I totally agree that the requests were for Base recipe storage so that SG's could share recipes. What I've read into a lot of the requests are 'I want to make a one account SG so I can store lots of shiny things and not have my trays clogged up'

But then again, maybe I'm cynical <checks .sig> oh right, I knew there was something...

Also, regardless of the intent behind hoarding recipes away from the auctions, the end result is the same. Supply to the auctions declines (I'm talking about drops being hoarded, not recipes purchased off the auctions going into storage, since storing purchased recipes is functionally the same as crafting them, the recipe itself goes out of circulation.).

Heh, I never claimed I had a particularly intelligent approach to the things I store

It was more an observation that sprung from me wondering 'Just how much crap DO I have spread around my alts?'.

If one player (i.e. me) can accumulate that much stuff without really trying, what quantity of resources would be removed from circulation and the auctions if the much requested and much denied base recipe storage was to be introduced?

As to the max level vs mid level question, to me, a lot of the mid level supply crunch could be alleviated by allowing recipe rolls (among other things) to arrive not at your security level (50) but at the level you pick on the slider at the top of the window.

As to how exploitable/abused that sort of tweak would be, I'm not sure, but I'm not so sure it would be a particularly bad thing. Then again, I'm not a game designer.

This may lessen your confusion. (or it may not, depending on your natural level of confusion.)

It's now 'music'.

If you want to hear it, turn your in game music on.

Not personally, but a friend of mine's got the input delay issue.

It's on a older PC, ATI card, single core AMD CPU, Win XP, disabled the appropriate service etc. etc.

We use TS, and after I17 we thought the TS server was playing up, serious breakup/stuttering, but only when the game's running fullscreen. I *think* that if he alt-tabs out to the teamspeak window, TS works fine, but as soon as he Alt-Tab's to CoH, TS is effectively useless, as he can't hear anything I say and vice versa. Oh, and this is with none of the ultra mode shinies turned on, the slider set to 'Minimum'. Oh, and he uses a mouse button as the TS 'Push to talk' button, not the keyboard.

It looks like the game's grabbing it's fair share and more of CPU time, leaving nothing else for TS (and maybe not enough for the OS to process keyboard calls in a timely manner?). I wonder if the priority of the client's been maxed out or taken a notch higher than it used to be?

I've noticed no issues on my machine, but as I had to get a new PC late last year and I'm running an Nvidia card, that's not really news.

I'm in the EU. It appears you're in Cleveland, so make sure you're not trying to point yourself at the EU servers, as my shortcut would do. You need to make sure you just add -compatiblecursors 1 to the end of whatever the shortcut for your updater is.

If you can get into the game, and flying blind manage to get the options window up, then you can enable compatible cursors from within the game in the Graphics Options tab too.

Why do you think I stopped doing my attempts at updates? Knowing that there's something in the works from the Art crew is more than a little of a disincentive

I'm patient, I can wait.

Yes, the curse of the invisible cursors has returned once more after being briefly vanquished during beta (for me, at least).

You need to add '-compatiblecursors 1' (without the quotes) To your shortcut.

Right click the shortcut on your desktop to the updater.

In the Target text box, it should say something like Just add -compatiblecursors 1 to the end of it, so in my case it now looks like:

If you can't do it from in the game, do it from <dramatic chord>

The Support Websites!

Support Centre for our English European players
Support Centre for our North American players
Plateforme d'assistance pour les francophones
Support-Center für deutschsprachige Spieler

<fireworks, smoke machines, lasers, theme music>

(links nicked from Avatea's /sig)

(Apologies if this comes across as too facetious, it's late, and I'm tired )

Also, regarding the greyed out buttons, for most players it seems to be caused by running into the 'you've done too many auction transactions too fast' buffers. Once they're greyed out, they don't ungrey themselves after a short while as they should. Quit to the Desktop and log back in and they should be available again. It has to be to the Desktop and not just to the login screen. Go slow on the auctions and avoid the buffers of doom and the buttons should stay a nice bright blue.

If that doesn't fix it for you as it did for me, then you're going to have to bite the bullet and get in touch with support via the website.

I was specifically responding to the hyperbole that everything in I17 is broken.

I was also remembering and reminding people that previous issues have come out in a less than perfect state. Issue 7, which I referred to is the one that's stuck in my mind as it had a huge number of bugs that made the game so frustrating that it was all but unplayable for the villains I had at the time. The bugs got fixed eventually.

Now, some people are having serious issues, I'm not denying that, but there are other people who are having far fewer, and less serious issues, if any.

Leaping around crying DOOM because Issue 17 isn't perfect and completely bug free isn't necessarily the most productive way of bringing bugs, glitches and errors to the attention of the developers.

Also, the bugs won't get fixed instantly, there's a turnaround time on patches (QR making sure it doesn't make the servers melt down into a small puddle of Seville Orange Marmalade, for example), and tracking down and fixing the bugs in the code base takes a certain amount of time.

If you can get in game and hit a problem, submit a /bug report. I have myself for one or two issues I've come across in I17 and if it's serious, submit a /petition, too. I've had a good positive response so far from the GM's regarding the petition I submitted.

If you can't get in game, or for whatever reason can't submit a report from in game, then submit a ticket to support via support websites :

Support Centre for our English European players
Support Centre for our North American players
Plateforme d'assistance pour les francophones
Support-Center für deutschsprachige Spieler

(links yanked from Avatea's .sig)

Then unfortunately, a most rare and precious commodity is required. Patience.

Something that was mentioned on the EU Pocket D Bash on Wednesday was that there are apparently a lot of employees of Paragon Studios who don't want a redname.

A stance which sounds eminently sensible to me, given the gibbering levels of insanity which can tend to happen on these boards.

Wait, what?

...

......

<takes breath>

....

Nope, I can't think of anything non-inflammatory to say to that.

<shakes head and exits, remembering the bugs in I7, kids these days, sheesh.>

And yes, it DID devolve into a discussion about tea at one point. Don't ask me how or why.

Well, that's me up to 5.25 years in the game, wonder how many more I'll get in

Happy Older Game Day.

Same here, on multiple toons.

/bug'd /petition'd.

Just going to have to wait until it's sorted

You know, sometimes I get the feeling I'm talking to myself...

The thing is though. Black cars aren't 'reflective black metal', they're reflective black plastic, because what you're seeing is a reflection off the paint, not the metal.

I'm not sure if there *is* a shiny black metallic element, as the majority of metallic elements are described as 'silvery' or 'silvery grey'. Copper's a little bit of an oddity in that regard, along with Gold.