EarthWyrm

As long as I don't have a taunt or debuff aura engaged, I can stand next to random mobs in Atlas all day on my 50 and have them not do a thing.

Look, I don't mean to be pedantic...

No. Scratch that. I do. Baseball cards produced in 1868 (advertising pieces given away for free) had absolutely no relation to modern baseball cards beyond the obvious picturing of baseball players. When baseball cards were advertising freebies the psychology of modern "chase" collectibles did not apply at all. The pseudo-modern era of baseball cards that began with the sales of packs that were nothing but cards and a stick of gum doesn't even approximate the same psychology as what's being leveraged in modern cards (post around 1986, give or take) or that's being discussed here.

Not that I agree with the position that seems to contend that PS has somehow become immoral or unethical for the apparent business decision to leverage the psychology of the "chase" rare (my initial knee-jerk reactions in other threads notwithstanding...). I just think that if you want to date the parallel in sport card collecting, you really can't go any further back than the mid-1980s and have a leg to stand on.

/end threadjack

p.s. The answer to the original question is, "It depends in large part on how much enhancement converters cost."

I've decided that I'm going to stop being bothered by this. It's vaguely annoying, since the set bonuses exemplaring is something I'd like to have happen with the IOs I have without buying them at low levels, but there's so much variability in builds that I suspect I can still put together something that's effective at low levels without investing in the Market-Os. But then, I've been trying to optimize builds within the pre-PM parameters for a while, and find it fun. That being said...

I did buy one set that I haven't slotted yet, and may buy another at some point soon, because I have one character I want to have as tricked-out as I can get him, since I do a lot of TFs with him (when he's not sitting in freaking First Ward twiddling away at day job badges...). But I can already exemp him to around 30 without altering his survivability much at all, so it's really not that pressing.

If people get their jollies buying this stuff, so be it. I don't begrudge them the convenience of "buy it and forget it" IOs just because I'm too cheap to do the same.

Please note that this is not a great way to encourage people to try helping you.

If it is in the power listing for one character but not others, that would be a bug, and something you should submit a petition regarding.

A question and a comment.

Question: Aren't the MW games all rated M, other than the DS version of the first one?

Comment: I see a difference in reaction to the depiction of people stabbing things that are attacking them and people summoning a "pet" to strap a bomb to.

I've seen extreme reactions over less, is all I'm saying, and I wouldn't be surprised if PS were being forced to take this into account.

I became dubious about that possibility when I read this:

The first time somebody blows up a dog, or a dog-like creature, with Detonator, I fully anticipate Paragon Studios will get exactly the kind of publicity they don't want - from PETA. Not because it's a "real" anything (duh...) but because things that make harming animals into entertainment don't go over well with a lot of folks.

Anything that even remotely resembles a domesticated animal being set to explode opens up something I seriously doubt the PS crew wants to deal with. Exploding wild animals? Don't think it would matter to the folks who would complain.
This. My wife, who had been wanting the GS, laughed and shook her head when I told her the price. She then proceeded to go play Facebook games instead of logging into City.

If I might offer what I hope is a constructive suggestion, have you considered the Grant Invisibility temp power that's craftable using a base empowerment station? Mobs that can't see your squishy are unlikely to kill you before you can finish loading, and I find it to be vanishingly rare for groups to spawn close enough to an entrance to spot a character with any meaningful kind of +stealth.

I think there are also some mez resistance buffs, but they are, if memory serves, one type of mez resistance at a time. I'm pretty sure there's a +perception one as well, to help you with stealthed enemies.

I like how you moved the goalposts there. I'm sure you can keep coming up with solutions all day, but I'd prefer ones that don't devolve into name-calling.

Here's mine: I think that, if you want the IOs to be attractive enough to purchase, having them level up with you is fine. Let them "grow". Just take away the exemplaring function. That goes away and I have no problem with selling any of the things that aren't purple/PvP. They still have the "slot it and forget it" functionality, but don't suddenly emulate an ability that was heretofore restricted to the very rarest of IOs.

Lisa, I like your posts, but I find this one baffling. The reason Fire Farms got whacked with the nerf bat wasn't because the story-focused AE users complained, it was because the rewards they offered were out of line with the effort involved in them.

If you really want to draw a parallel to this, I guess you could, but it's again a case of minimal effort (plonk down some $$) giving a better reward than you get from playing the game as designed, and I don't know that you want to make the case that less effort ought to lead to better rewards. IMO, that doesn't create a sustainable game.

I think there were overriding game balance reasons for the changes made, which may have made the authors happy but which were, at best, incidental to the happiness of that portion of the playerbase.

I'm curious why you seem to want to insult broad groups of players. That doesn't seem like you.

As far as it goes, I don't know that I have a particular problem with the selling of crafted IOs on the market, provided the price-point remains high enough that it won't obviate the in-game market. Like Adeon, though, I'm bothered by the precedent of selling strictly better versions of these sets. People keep saying, "Well, as long as there are no purples, I'm fine with it..."

Thing is, the types of bonuses offered by the purple sets are very limited. The ginormous +recharge bonus is nice, but purples don't generally grant non-psi defense bonuses (the exception being the 6th slot in the confuse set). Being able to keep your +def set bonuses down to 27 or 22 (respectively) means that these sets grant something purple sets cannot. They are better than the standard versions of these sets, and in terms of set bonuses granted, arguably better than the purple sets people seem fine with painting as "off-limits".

In a lot of cases, the performance difference between level 33-35 set pieces and level 50 set pieces is fairly minor, so I'm generally not compelled to upgrade everything. I have plenty of level 50 characters who have several sets whose pieces are oddly dispersed through the 30s and low 40s. When I do bother to upgrade, the earning power of a level 50 and the relatively large number of recipes available of almost all the standard sets at level 50 makes the inf cost manageable, to me. The time cost to swap everything out is less trivial, though if I were in the habit of doing so regularly I'd probably buy the two extra enhancement trays.

That's assuming you'd be swapping out the lower-level pieces for higher-level, of course, and not just over-writing them. I like recycling those on future alts whenever I can.

There's positive punishment (the introduction of an aversive stimulus as a result of behavior, with the intent of reducing that behavior) and negative punishment (the removal of a desirable stimulus following completion of a behavior, with the intent of reducing that behavior). People generally only think of the first as "punishment," but modification of outcomes to reduce the likelihood of behavior is, from a behaviorist perspective, all punishment.

That being said, I'm still not totally convinced that this qualifies as negative punishment, since it's not removing rewards because you completed the trial. It's removing rewards that were previously associated with completing the trial, which is a separate issue and something I think behaviorists would have to go babbling about "higher-order reinforcers" and "higher-order punishers" to explain.

I care less about the changes to reward structures, and more about the changes to communication with the players. There's a reason the Ustream chat summaries spend so much time joking about tangents and so little time conveying new information, and we get lamentably little in the way of "Why?" information as lots of the changes we're seeing come through. People left to their own devices will make all sorts of attributions for why decisions have been made, and not all of those attributions will be reasonable or rational.

I can testify that it's not needed there. I've had it on my SS/EA, and dropped it in favor of IO slotting and the FF+rech proc in Footstomp.

Of course, I also like having an unnecessary "real" travel power (Super Jump) that could be dropped for Hasten. At some point, it becomes a flavor thing, but to me, /EA plays just fine without Hasten to buff it.

Reading comprehension FTL. That's Graystar yammering about farming AE for bronze rolls and making 200m an hour selling them. It's "market pvp" about as much as generating a Miracle: +Recovery an hour and selling it on the market is. A notable difference is that Graystar is actually introducing substantial new liquid inf into the system because what he's doing involves a level 50 at max earning rate, and ISN'T just moving wealth from one player to another by providing a low-level commodity at a higher rate than was dev-intended.

You could rightly argue whether or not making 200m/hr is exploit-scale wealth generation, but "kill stuff, roll bronze, sell on market," is not functionally different from "kill stuff, buy Miracle, sell on market."

You asked for something in the same timeframe, you got it. If you want to pretend you didn't, that's okay. If you want to claim you didn't understand it, that's also okay. I often don't understand Graystar.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=275713

Easy enough to fix. Just force us to do 20 tip and 2 alignment missions per character every time a new SSA is released...

I certainly hope this kind of ham-handed "fix" isn't what we can expect going forward under the "Freedom" model, but given what I've seen since open beta started for I21, I'm starting to lose faith in the team.

Anyone who had "under 50" on the "How many posts will it take for this thread to meet its quota of illogic?" line can see the teller to collect. Thanks for playing!

Or it could be an example of the classic "third variable problem" common in correlational research, where a relationship exists between two variables due to a factor they both have in common - here, a tendency toward slightly obsessive behavior tied to external performance metrics. I'll be using this article as an example of the third variable problem from now on when I teach correlational statistics.

The problem with conclusions based on the article is that it assumes "gamers" are a singular entity. Clearly, we aren't. People who play games for relaxation and socialization will not have the same level of success with fitness routines as people who play games in a more competitive (even internally competitive) min-max fashion based on the logic presented. Personality factors therefore become moderating variables in the equation.

tl;dr version: For certain types of gamers, this will be perfect. For others, not so much.

I see what you did there.

I spend more time out of Granite than in it on my stoners, and don't have survivability problems. Other than occasionally soaking alphas or holding AV aggro, I don't find Granite to be a requirement for survival, and on teams with incarnate-scale buff capability it's often more impediment than aid. I do love watching stoners with Granite on run in and try to tank psi AVs, though.

That all being said, building for set bonuses is the way to go. I don't bother with the +RunSpeed much, just because teleportation is such a flexible travel power, but my main stoner is one of only two characters that I've bothered getting the max # of purple recharge bonuses on.

I wouldn't shed any tears at a customizable version of Granite armor, either. Being forced to look like the runt of the DE litter is annoying.

I'm used to not having access to all the cool NPC pieces - kind of a "learned helplessness" thing. So I didn't feel bad not buying the CoT pack when I saw it lacked the glowing belt buckle I see every time I run the SSA.

Yes, that's right, Marketing. The difference between me spending $5 to get the points to buy the pack and me not spending $5 to get the points was one costume piece.

And nope - not upset about it. Just another consumer, voting with his wallet.

Edited to add: No. I would not spend $5 for that piece. But I'd have bought the set if all the "cool bits" were included.

Yeah, this happened to me on some characters (but not others) sometime after the issue went live. I felt dumb when someone explained to me that it was just a matter of the options having become un-checked - but to be fair, I'd never opened the options window on my map before, so didn't even know it was possible to turn all that stuff off.

It would have been nice if Support had ever so much as acknowledged the bug report I sent, and told me what was wrong and that I had complete control over fixing it.

Sorry you don't like it.

I doubt I'll ever be a first-day purchaser of a powerset. I lack the "gotta have it now" piece of my brain, and would prefer to wait and read reviews and figure out if it sounds like something that fits with my playstyle.

You pays yer money, you takes yer chances.

A low-level villain like Frosty getting "redeemed" is way less reality-bending than the proliferation of "heroes" who farmed the Freedom Phalanx in the LRSF for all those years.

The alignment system allows and encourages that kind of transformation and character development. I don't actually have a problem with either Frostfire or PC hero-villain sideswaps.

I'm of the school of thought that a well-built /EA (which yours qualifies as) gets hit little enough to not benefit as much from the resists. If you can get your negative up to the soft-cap as well, all the better.

You do that if you go to 5 Red Fortunes in ED, though. As to Oblit's bonuses, the 3% damage is okay (if not always that noticeable on a Brute), but the Accuracy is not as needed when you've got the massive +To Hit from Rage. Eradication, on the other hand, for 3 slots gives you 3.125% en/neg defense (and Neg is your non-psi weakness, yes?), and for 4 slots gives you +2.25% more HP. I just get tichy if my big AoE damage power only has 18% end reduction in it to go with the FF proc. That can put a real hurting on your blue bar if you're not basically auto-firing energy drain.

In Incarnate content, slotting it for more defense is useful IMO. If you aren't ever planning on doing incarnate content, you could probably harvest some slots from the power.

It's a good panic button power, and one of my favorite Tier 9s in the game, since the crash can be managed with Energy Drain after some practice. I don't use it much, but when I need it I'm glad I have it.

I slot mine with 3 Numina's, but that's because after defense and recharge I built for +HP and +regen. Now we're getting into playstyle choices, though, so to answer your question: Yes, I think it's worth having, even if you just use it to mule a LotG global.

I've not only read the posts in this thread, I've been involved in discussions about these mechanics since the beta forums went Open.

But since you're so intent on being pleasant and posting enormous bandwidth-hogging screenshots, I'll just bow out and let you do your thing.