CoyoteShaman

While it is both a cool idea for RP purposes and a very good idea for the economy (although the gravitation upwards would be worse for the economy so that part would have to be considered), as are all things that are actually good for the economy in the long run, this would require a huge amount of "political will" and would alienate those players who don't understand the applicability of supply and demand to monetary policy (read: 99% of the adult population of the world). I'm afraid this would be untenable.

Robin

Dead on, Alpha! Exactly!

Yikes! Are you suggesting the devs get into the RTM, or whatever it's called, business of selling influence for real-word money? Please NO! That completely turns the market into the rich man's world. People with more real-world money wind up driving up the prices of everything so poorer folk can't get anything.

I'm made to think of the old truism: Give an inch and they'll take a mile.

There are multiple currency sets in this game on purpose. They interact in specific ways and are balanced very carefully. In the case of salvage I'd say they're balanced very poorly (the whole idea of supply and demand seems to have escaped the notice of the devs when defining rarity) but those imbalances that do exist are a large part of why people think there are problems. The problems aren't with the currency, they're with the goods.

Keep in mind that all currencies also follow the laws of supply and demand. If you increase the quantity of merits (by making them easier to get) you decrease the value per merit. That's called inflation and it can be seen in the market for "common" salvage.

Robin

I had identical septuplet mutant sisters on one server. Most of my villains are related or are apprentices of my first 50 villain (or are undead/demons raised/summoned by her). All of my heroes all belong to the same, private SG. I think it's ridiculous to assume they don't know each other or wouldn't help each other out if they were rich enough to do so.

I think SGs should have banks where people could store inf for other SG mates to borrow or whatever. It's silly that they can have enh banks but not inf banks.

And yes, I know the devs don't want that, or have said they don't want that in the past. Don't care. Still silly. Still hope they change their minds.

On the other hand, I do agree that an email inf transfer system doesn't make thematic sense. Maybe they should implement a Western Union (tm).

ED is bad enough as it is. I'd pay good money to get the whole ED thing to go away altogether. I'm certainly not going to ask them to make more of it.

If you want to diversify your build, go for it. What you're suggesting isn't an ability or a choice because you already can do that. What you're suggesting is that the devs force your desire on every other player. That's most certainly not a good thing. Players need more choices for play-style and character builds, not less.

I'm sorry if this sounds vehement or personal. It's not directed at you, but at ED. ED is the only decision/"feature" implemented by the devs since I started playing that I've actually gotten angry about. There have been a couple that I haven't liked, but only ED has actually made me mad.

Robin

You may be guessing but it's a damn likely guess. I know if I was on the team that's exactly how my conversations would go.

Does anyone know why there isn't something (anything) at level 40 for costuming like there is at 20 and 30? Is it just that they haven't thought of anything good to put in there?

Robin

They made new animations for flight and I've never once seen them being used. I know people use them, but I've never seen it. That tells me they're not used very often. They exist solely for people who have flight (a subset of players) who don't just want to get there faster but want to get there in a way they think looks good (a smaller subset of players). Yet those animations were made. How many are there? I have no idea. But if being a non-utilitarian animation desired by a small subset of players is a reason for not building them, then I'm pretty confused as to how the flight emotes ever came into being.

As to the use of a self-debuff for implementation, I'd have to say I have no opinion on that. Sounds like it could work, but I don't know if there's not an easier way that just hasn't been put in the game. The emotes alone could include x/y movement, for all I know, and therefore you wouldn't need a debuff.

As to the need for turning: there's no turning in the run or sprint animation. You just turn. You don't lean into the turn, you don't flex your hips or shoulders to adjust for the turn, you don't move your arms towards the angle of incidence, you just turn your facing. It's the same when you are standing still and you turn. There is a different animation for strafing and running backwards, but not for turns. I count four animations: move forward, move backward, strafe left, strafe right. It's possible that strafe left backwards and strafe right backwards would also have to be included, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure any of the strafing animations would be needed at first anyway. Those could be added if it was found that more people were using them.

I like the idea of having walking as an option. We can freakin' swim in a 2-D environment, but we can't meander??? Come on already.

Robin

Any change to vigilance will, I expect, achieve one of two results:

1) players will still think it's not good enough because they will still feel the AT is "underperforming" or is "underrepresented".
2) players will realize the fact that the AT is "underperforming" or is "underrepresented" has nothing to do with the inherent but instead to do with the relationship between the defender and his/her role.

In the first case, they'll come up with something else eventually and the process will repeat itself until the second case is finally achieved. At that point they'll start actually looking at why the defender is not making the showing they could.

The "why" of it, in my opinion, is this:

The defender serves two roles, the first being mitigation/multiplication and the second being damage. They have one power set for each role. Their primary power set is the best for their primary role, their secondary power set is paltry for their secondary role. In the defender's secondary role they can't (and shouldn't be able to) compete at all with those ATs that have damage as their primary role. The problem that needs to be addressed lies in their primary role. The controller has two power sets devoted to mitigation/multiplication. All control primary effects are mitigation (whether that's their main purpose or not, their primary effect does cause mitigation) and a number of the secondary effects either cause more mitigation or multiplication. And then they get a slightly reduced mimic of the defender primaries as their secondaries. When taken as a whole, the controller makes a much, much better mitigation/mulitplication specialist than the defender. Therefore the defender is relatively very weak in their secondary role and relatively slightly weak in their primary role. Other than a desire for a specific theme, why would people ever play a defender?

There are two possible ways to fix this that I've been able to see:

1) change the relationship between the AT and its primary role.
2) change the secondary role entirely.

Short of getting rid of the primary competition for mitigation/multiplication (i.e. controllers), there's no way to make defenders the singular, undeniable rulers of that role while still maintaining any semblance of power balance. Since getting rid of controllers would be even worse, IMO, than mangling defender balance, I would think option two would be the way to go.

While considering changes to the secondary role of the AT, one should keep in mind that the reason for needing this change is that the AT is in competition with two others. None of the other ATs really compete on two fronts like that. Whatever their new secondary role is it should not repeat that mistake by making them compete with another AT for that secondary role, or at the very least their secondary role should not compete with another AT's primary role.

That's my addition to the "food for thought" element of this thread.

Robin

Keeping in mind that I am a free-market anarchist, I do not believe in IP. If you can't touch it or feel it, it isn't property. Regardless, I do believe in courtesy. Whoever made mids did a ton of work (which I have never used, by the way) which s/he made available to the public at no cost and doesn't wish his creativity to be put into the hands of others and so be it.

That doesn't mean an open source CoX builder wouldn't be a reasonable project. The project team could even use feature concepts from Mids or from Mids users. Building it from scratch wouldn't be nearly as easy as adapting the current model, but it would be easier as open source and that way it would be much more likely to be kept up to date.

I would recommend .net, mono and objective C for portability and the selfish reason that getting an iPhone version is high on my list of pie-in-the-sky desires. I've never started an open source project, however, so I wouldn't be able to take point on that. I would be happy to participate, though.

Robin

As a software engineer specializing in data integration I can definitely say that the coding of the interface is the least of the problem here. Acquiring accurate and up-to-date source data from a proprietary organization and getting that data to integrate with a third-party system is the real trick.

That's not to say the interface is simple. I'm just saying it's the tip of the iceberg. It's a twenty-ton tip, but the tip nonetheless.

What we need is a web-based tool. They're easier to publish, update and maintain and much easier to access for the customer and that way it would be cross-platform; one application usable by both PCs and Macs. If someone could point me to where I could find the source data, I could build something. A web application wouldn't have some of the bells and whistles that a forms app would have, but it would much more dynamic. If the source data where available through a web service (WSDL w/ SOAP) it could even be self-updating.

I seriously doubt the real-numbers are available through a web service, however, and I won't have the time to go get them. If someone else wanted to make those numbers available, I'd be happy to grab them.

Robin