EarthWyrm

I agree that people who know a little about it seem to think it's useful. I just think they get excited over its utility in theory without seeing how it plays. I had one granted on Test while the sets were still in beta testing, and it was so completely underwhelming in practice that I've never bothered with getting one on Live, despite being able to afford it many times over.

Lots of people thinking something is useful helps make it popular and expensive. Cognitive dissonance can explain people continuing to think it's useful after getting sporadic tiny green numbers and a sub-standard version of the PS proc into their builds at the cost of over a billion inf.

On Virtue, ran it with 3 different PuG's last week. Never had a run go over 56 minutes. Really like the story progression and the send-off in the final mission - makes this among my favorites to run.

On one team, had a team member totally disappear for 2 of the final 4 AVs. Ended up being the fastest run. On another team, a character got the drop that allowed him to craft the Rare boost, and without thinking crafted and failed to slot it (due to the cooldown) prior to fighting Minx, so we had a -8 on her.

This is really not a hard TF if people listen and stay together. It's definitely one I'll do again - and not just because I still need MDWDAM on my main badger...

Would've been useful information to include the first time.

GM's have been wrong before. I was being optimistic that they had some architecture in place, but they may not.

Your join date shows as 2007. Issue 14 dropped in April 2009. Point 1 can still be true if the databases were only required to be non-unique for global names created starting with I14.

Admittedly, though, I don't see that many minds being set to rest if it's only the last 2 years where new global names couldn't be duplicated across EU/NA. That still leaves a lot of game history where cases like yours can (and clearly do) slip in.

I hope they can find a satisfactory resolution to this.

I predict that this statement will end up in at least one .sig.

So I shall quote it for extreme truthiness.

I would suggest that if the issue of a forced change to account names and global identifiers in a video game were to escalate to litigation, there would be very few "reasonable people" left in the discussion.

Implied threats of litigation are just poor form.

I do need to figure out how to update those. My laptop is really ticky about them, though. I prolly just ought to go up to the tech forum and ask for help...

I can verify that this is not correct. Neither my wife nor I engage any UM settings (everything UM tried to turn on, we turned off due to the age/specs of our systems), world graphic settings are turned way down, and the lag associated with that room is still substantial. The two people we team with most often experience the same problem.

The room contains too many objects and is not optimized at a design level for older/lower-end machines. It's flat-out too much to render, and reminds me of the "layers of Grandville" problem (which never affected even my low-end machines all that much) shoved into a room-sized box, with the lighting turned up to 11.

This. The performance issue I get in that room is the exact same subjective issue I have when entering a room in my SG base that has a ton of stacked objects that the game is trying to render all at once. Rigs with lots of memory/processing capacity won't notice. Those of us who are playing on closer to original/min specs end up with fairly noticeable performance issues.

Or they could be the ones who log in, check the market, go run some missions or a TF, and notice out the corner of their eye when something they want is bought while they're off doing other things.

You have interesting ideas about what people who make money on the market do. Those ideas are interesting because of how divorced from reality they seem to be.

"Exponentially" should be added to the list of words you ought to look up, when you're done with "supply" and "demand".

I'm having a hard time imagining this anthropomorphized market that is able to "see" anything. Consider re-wording for clarity.

The one person who puts out 200 low bids won't buy anything, though, while the 10 people who put in high bids will. I think that's kind of the opposite of having their will "subverted". I'm struggling to come up with how anything is being subverted, in fact, when consumers who were willing to pay more got to buy the product.

Have fun with the salvage experiment, btw. If I need anything out of your niche, I'm sure I'll completely have my day ruined if I need to pay above vendor price because I'm too lazy to go kill some minions or wait 10 minutes for a bid to fill. I hope you'll be happy with yourself then, young man!

QFT. Did we end up teamed, I wonder? I was standing there for some portion of the incident, and because I was trying to find a team my general solution to the problem (switch to a tab that doesn't include broadcast) didn't work.

The Broadcast back-and-forth was really unpleasant.

Not to derail, but - source, please? There's an entire set of methods within statistics dealing with power analysis (ref. Cohen 1992 "A Power Primer"), which can be used to make estimates of the number of observations required to ensure that one will find an effect if one is present. Unless you're talking about small effects (and my "anecdotal indicators" from observing the market say that we're not talking about effects that would be quantified as particularly small), combined with extremely high levels of power, I can't think of a statistic that would require 1000-2000 observations to provide a fairly high degree of confidence that any true effect would actually be identified.

That being said, I don't dabble in this stuff like I used to, and am honestly curious where these large numbers are coming from and what statistics you're basing them on.

I combined a level 52 Membrane Exposure with a level 50. Waiting to see if it failed was the most excitement I've had in the game in a long time. =)

I'm fairly certain that the above is not an optimal translation of "Bring a stealth member."

I don't know about Organica's thoughts on this, but I've gotten so spoiled by my marketeers who have Field Crafter that I have a hard time actively marketeering on anyone who doesn't. The ability to drop a workbench at my right hand while I have the CH window open and can pick up exactly what I need, craft, and put it back up? Life is just crazy-easy that way.

It takes some doing to get the portable workbench, but for me it's worth it a thousand times over.

/end threadjack

That's not a dumb question at all.

I start putting set IOs in my powers around level 20 if I'm Frankenslotting. Those eventually get over-written, generally with full sets (where "full" = 4-6 pieces). I start looking for full usable sets in my low 30s. I may replace those later on, if I can pull some out on a respec, but I've got level 50 characters who've been rocking level 30-35 Crushing Impact sets for years.

Common IOs I'll tend to over-write eventually if they're below level 30, but if they're 35+ I'll let them ride until I have a spare laying around that'll improve things. I don't prioritize doing that because the performance boost is often pretty minor.

Indeed. Playing this game makes me thankful that the Allies were able to take out the Nazis, with their evil hovering robots, genetically-engineered vampires, and dastardly werewolves.

Since your first paragraph seemed to indicate an openness to price feedback, I'll point out that if you got 1.8 billion in a private deal, you'd be getting 180,000,000 than you would if you sold for 1.8 billion on WW, since you don't have to pay a listing fee. So you're already getting more even if the buyer is paying the same price.

In which you paint an entire group (which is not, as near as I can tell, even one group, other than in the broad sense of, "Everyone who doesn't agree with me") as having a single mindset/mode of interaction, despite evidence to the contrary, followed immediately by this:
Really should earn you a gold star for forum name choice.

Worth many, many more ebil points.

It's not speed burning through content that's an issue. It's speed relative to reward. You don't have to look any further than Broadcast when an AE exploit is live to see what I mean. When players are offered a "path of less resistance," they will rush toward it like moths to a flame. It doesn't even have to be obnoxiously broken - it just has to be slightly better than what they can get by other means. Systems that over-reward for less effort trivialize the game and cause people to avoid content that has had substantial time and effort put into it, but that does not reward at the same rate.

That is what the devs have to balance against: Basic human "want it NAO!" psychology, which has the potential to undermine the integrity of the game if it's catered to.

The key question in finding the conversion numbers has to be, "At what point are the requirements for soloists strictly worse than those for the players engaging in the behavior we want to incentivize, but not so much worse as to demotivate them?" Because you can't make the soloist path better, or easier for team-oriented players to get than when using the system as designed, if any long-term goal for the game involves incarnate content getting played.

Do I think the 88-shard equivalent for a Notice is on the steep side? Yes. But I would have been completely stunned to see anything less than 50 for the key ingredient to create the rare boost.

I hope nobody makes serious decisions based on the MBTI. It's psychometric garbage. (And just for the record, it's actually based on Jung's typology, so referencing Jung rather than the MBTI doesn't really get you all that much closer to "acceptable," given the way Jung is regarded in much of the scientific literature. I believe Jung would probably consider introversion/extraversion a little archetypal, and might be hesitant to claim credit for more than the labels regardless.)

Beyond that, I don't think that all introverts are extreme enough on the trait to be affected in the way you describe. In this thread you've recognized that it's a continuum, yet you still want to treat the 25% number as representing the full effect of the design decision on the player base. You can't have it both ways. You can't have this affect 25% of all players, when you yourself admit that there are degrees of introversion - and I can guarantee that no data exist to support that 25% of human beings are incapable of functioning in a group of 8 in a computer-mediated environment.

I agree completely, and like your thoughts on incentivizing rolls at lower levels.

Unfortunately, it's no picnic for sellers in a lot of those mid-level bands. I've got items that I rolled up with my dom as she's gone from 35-40 doing nothing but tips (okay, and 2 SFs...), and most of it just sits there, even when I'm below the "last 5" prices. Most of the bids at those levels are people hoping to grab a lowball bargain.

My sense of altruism has its limits. If I can't consistently get prices that make generating those worthwhile, I won't bother. I've got things like an Oblit proc that's been sitting for over a week (I think at least 4 of the last 5 are at or above 100m at the level where I posted it, and I'm below that with my listing price), and other "desirable" items (both recipe and crafted) that just take up market slots. I had level locked a brute at 35 to do tips, but 300-400m later I found myself with market slots filled with things that are good, but that people just don't want to pay for at non-max levels.

So, to answer the question: In part, the recipes aren't there because the demand doesn't always make supplying them worthwhile. I made a reasonable profit with my brute, but the churn is just painfully slow.