Flux_Vector

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Sitting on them is smarter because the devs have announced that they intend to 'adjust' merit rewards in the future based on new datamining of average TF times. In short, nerf TF rewards in the future.

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I don't really care what adjustments they make to the Merits. I plan to play the same as always. I'm not here to nickle and dime the market/merits for the easiest reward for the least amount of work.

I play for the fun of being a super villain or super hero. Somewhere, somehow...this simple principle has become skewed or even forgotten in this quest for the uber IOs.

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My playstyle won't change either. Well, I might do even more TFs, so that I don't feel like I missed the gravy train before it left the station when they nerf the rewards.

What I do with what comes out of my playstyle is what will change, because I won't want to use the game's newest most-valuable resource - ie merits - to do something (make influence) that I'd do better in other ways. So instead of posting the results of my TF play to the market, it'll sit in my pocket until I need it for another character.

Edit - basically, I'd replace much of the inventions buying power I currently hold in influence, with buying power held in merits instead. I don't spend all my influence as soon as I make it either... all that'll be changing, to me, is what currency I'm keeping my wealth in - merits currency, instead of influence.

Like buying euros or even gold because you're worried about the value of the dollar.

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Seriously I dont think its going to be 1 merit for 5 minutes. If it is taking that long on alot of those task then you are just doing it wrong. I am looking at doing 90 minute ITFs. Thats about 10 to get what you want, which would be closer to 15 hours of game time per IO. It cant be any worse than it is now. Seriously dude I started a toon a few months back and did all the heroside tfs except the shard tfs and didnt get [censored] that was useable for that character. It was either snipes, confuses, and other various trash drops. Many of those TFs I ran multiple times. Given the total time I put into it I would say its way more 16 hours per recipe. I think the problem you are seeing is that folks wont put much time into the tfs. I think people will be more willing to put time into tfs after the changes. So that 3 hour per week could end up being 10 to 15 hours per week

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Unfortunately the devs have stated their intention to nerf rewards if the playerbase at large beats the 1 merit per 5 minutes metric by enough. So if you do better, they'll try to stop you.

Expect it in I14. I do, and I'll be behaving accordingly during I13.

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Actually TheWeaver, it gets worse.

Players who don't need anything for the moment - like, I have 4 characters with fully loaded builds who will never need another IO unless the game changes and I need/want to respec them - can just sit on their merits and not produce anything for the market.

In fact, it's smarter for me to hoard merits than it is to exchange merits for things to sell on the market. The 5-10 TFs I normally run per week are going create merits that will stay in my pocket after I13, instead of 5-10 random recipes that I post for sale because I don't need them.

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For my characters that are completed IOed, they will use their merits to obtain IOs for my other heroes/villains. Or they will use their merits to obtain IOs and then place them on the market for profit or to obtain something else entirely.

They won't be sitting on them...how silly. You are a doomsayer, nothing more.

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Sitting on them is smarter because the devs have announced that they intend to 'adjust' merit rewards in the future based on new datamining of average TF times. In short, nerf TF rewards in the future.

My future characters, if I make more characters that I want to heavily IO out, will thus want those merits from now later Merits don't go stale, or take up auction slots or need to be risked in SG storage bins (I'm not in a personal SG), unlike recipes and enhancers, their buying power is stable and they can be redeemed for more than one useful shiny. So they're a much, much better value-storage medium than anything currently available - recipes, enhancers, or influence.

I don't think most people, however powergamery, are going to fully tweak and perfectly IO out every character. I think my having 4 is a lot; additional characters I'm making and playing now are more for-fun, not to min/max. Most people I know don't try for more than one or two fully min/max'd characters.

Influence, meanwhile, is very easily farmed. Why exchange merits for influence when if influence is what I want, I can make more of it faster another way? Furthermore, I can use that large amount of influence I can create, to engage in arbitrage, which will be easier, not harder, since market supply is going to go down as 1 TF run no longer will equal one recipe. I wouldn't need to produce recipes to supply the market to profit off the market - you'd supply the market and I'd profit off you.

Actually TheWeaver, it gets worse.

Players who don't need anything for the moment - like, I have 4 characters with fully loaded builds who will never need another IO unless the game changes and I need/want to respec them - can just sit on their merits and not produce anything for the market.

In fact, it's smarter for me to hoard merits than it is to exchange merits for things to sell on the market. The 5-10 TFs I normally run per week are going create merits that will stay in my pocket after I13, instead of 5-10 random recipes that I post for sale because I don't need them.

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And people who aren't willing to pay above the arbitragers's price floor? They'll have to get it from merits, or else won't get their shinies until they change their mind.

Right, people will, when faced with absurd prices, tell the flippers to go do something biologically impossible and get what they want from merits.

I'm sure our cafeteria capitalists won't mind a little competition.

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The problem is, doing it with merits will take alot longer for most people than I think a lot of pro-merits posters really realize.

At 1 merit per minute - five times the devs' intended rate - it's over 3 hours of TF time to get a shiny. At the intended rate, it's about 16 hours of TF time. If you do one to two TFs a week like a lot of casual players do (if that... many I know do maybe 2 TFs a month), at the intended rate you're going to take 4 to 6 weeks to save enough merits for that shiny... unless you actually want to have fun on your TFs and focus on the newer ones (ITF, LGTF, etc) or are a villain, in which cases it will take 8 to 10 weeks.

So I think a lot of people will either end up paying whatever the market wants since it's easier for the casual player to get influence than it is for them to get merits, or they won't get their shinies for a very long time.

[/ QUOTE ]I think you are over stating how long its going to take. Most recipe sets will have only 2 pool c rares and possible 1 pool d rare. You just use merits on the pool c's if they are too high on the market. Since almost all of pool d's good but 2 recipes it wont be so bad to take random roll for that. So you are looking at most 500 merits per power that is using a set IO. Alot of powers will not use sets at all, some will use HOs for better slotting. Everything else you just use the market for. The thing is they wont dare raise the prices on non-purples because we have an alternative now. So basically if people want to be able to sell at all they will have to keep stuff reasonable. It wont work like this initially but after the first month or so and everyone has found out about merits things will drastically change.

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I'm talking about getting one pool C by deterministic choice. Not a full build. Not even a full power's worth of inventions. Just one pool C recipe choice.

200 merits. At 1 minute per merit that's 200 minutes (3 hours, 20 minutes). At 5 minutes per merit, that's 1,000 minutes or 16 hours, 40 minutes.

Assuming you do the intended 5 minutes per merit rate, at 3 hours of taskforce time per week it's going to take you 6 weeks (you'll have a few merits left over). To get one 200-merit recipe.

Edit - at your 500 merits per power, EvilRyu, that's 41 hours, 40 minutes of taskforce time per power at 5 minutes to the merit. In a build where you're slotting say 12 powers with inventions at 500 merits per power, it's going to take 500 hours.

At 3 hours of taskforce time per week, it'll take you 166 weeks and 5 days to get your build. That's 3 years, 2 and a half months.

Now tell me again how this is good for the casual player? Storyarc merits? Heck they could give so many merits from storyarcs as to knock a full two years off the time to completion and the casual player would still be boned here.

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And people who aren't willing to pay above the arbitragers's price floor? They'll have to get it from merits, or else won't get their shinies until they change their mind.

Right, people will, when faced with absurd prices, tell the flippers to go do something biologically impossible and get what they want from merits.

I'm sure our cafeteria capitalists won't mind a little competition.

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The problem is, doing it with merits will take alot longer for most people than I think a lot of pro-merits posters really realize.

At 1 merit per minute - five times the devs' intended rate - it's over 3 hours of TF time to get a shiny. At the intended rate, it's about 16 hours of TF time. If you do one to two TFs a week like a lot of casual players do (if that... many I know do maybe 2 TFs a month), at the intended rate you're going to take 4 to 6 weeks to save enough merits for that shiny... unless you actually want to have fun on your TFs and focus on the newer ones (ITF, LGTF, etc) or are a villain, in which cases it will take 8 to 10 weeks.

So I think a lot of people will either end up paying whatever the market wants since it's easier for the casual player to get influence than it is for them to get merits, or they won't get their shinies for a very long time.

Farmers won't be TFing for LOTGs, or if they do, it'll be because they're selling at higher prices than today, not lower ones.

Let's say you can reliably do a merit a minute TF times. An LOTG will cost 200 minutes - almost 3 and a half hours.

Let's further say you can farm 20 million inf an hour with your fire/kin or spines/fire or whatever. I can do over 10M/hour with my SS/WP brute on a generalist PvE build, solo, so I'd be surprised if actual 'chinese farmers' didn't do quite a bit better.

If you've got the choice between spending 200 minutes for an LOTG or 200 minutes just farming at 20M/hour, that LOTG had better be selling for about 75 million (don't forget you lose 10% in market fees) and it better sell fast, since as a chinese farmer your account's liable to get banned any minute. You literally can't afford to wait for things to clear through the market

I also have to note: the merit system probably won't make prices come down on anything in the long run. In the short run... possibly. In the long run, not a chance.

There will be a contraction in supply on everything in Pool C and D, resulting from a situation where 1 TF/trial run no longer directly equals 1 recipe caused by a combination of lowered rewards on short TFs and from the number of people saving up towards a deterministic choice instead of random-rolling as often as possible.

This contraction in supply will make it relatively simple for those with sufficient influence/infamy on hand to take control of the supplies that are available and set a price floor by buying up everything under price X and reposting it for price X + Y.

Lower supplies = easier arbitrage, and probably a higher profit margin (though probably also a lower overall profit due to the decrease in volume).

And people who aren't willing to pay above the arbitragers's price floor? They'll have to get it from merits, or else won't get their shinies until they change their mind.

Anyone who converts merits into inf (by buying a recipe and selling it on the market) is making a foolish choice IMO. Those merits are worth far more than influence/infamy because they're a currency that is much more restricted in supply, more insulated from loss of buying power (the devs would have to change merit vendor prices in a patch for them to go up) and are in fact more likely to rise than fall in value over time (because merit rewards are much much more likely to be lowered than raised).

Selling pool C recipes for influence looks to me like it's going to be a losing proposition, honestly. Even if you get something shiny from a random roll, you'll want to keep it because low supply situations encourage hoarding (because you can't be sure there'll be a supply of shinies tomorrow for you to buy at all if you sell your shiny today, let alone at the same price or less than you first sold it for).

In fact if you don't need any more recipes at all, you're better off just keeping the merits until you do, because that's a superior way of hoarding to buying a recipe and holding onto it - it's more flexible (you choose the recipe when you know what you need) and doesn't take up limited inventory space.

Bottom line? Inf's easier to get outside of taskforces and relies on other players wanting to sell things to you in order to actually have value... while merits are both more valuable and act to discourage people from creating things for sale in the first place.

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I don't trade in the high end market. I'm more concerned as a customer than as a seller about the supply.

The ways I make money in the market are unlikely to change at all. But now, I see myself having to grind for these darn things as supply drops into the toilet.

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This is my concern too - I'm not worried about how much money I'm making on the market, because I don't make alot of money on the market. I'm worried about being able to equip my future characters at what I consider a reasonable rate without being forced into meritfarming for it.

And in fact the people who do make money on the market, will make more money, more easily, in a lower-supply environment. It's much easier to control the prices for a small incoming supply of shinies than a large incoming supply of them.

But I'm also someone who likes doing taskforces for the group activity of working with people, and would prefer doing funner, newer, more challenging taskforces to older, grindier ones without being penalized in terms of reward.

It's ludicrous that TFs which are 4 years old and have at most 1 "boss fight" - with relatively weak and boring bosses, to boot - give as many as twice the merits compared TFs which have more, and much more strategic and challenging, boss fights.

The merit rewards system has the numbers inverted, and that's pretty much all there is to it. Positron should be giving 25 merits, and the LGTF should be giving 45. Synapse should be giving 20 and the STF and LRSF should be giving 55. The way this is set up encourages people to avoid challenges and embrace grinds.

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And a small hint about what that pricing scheme might need to be. I'm a solo mission arc player. I get into TFs sometimes, but I don't organize them. That means by design my merit earnign power is roughly 5 per hour. I can also farm with my higher level toons at about 1 million influence an hour. That tells me a merit is worth about 200,000 influence to me. I'm gonna take the merit cost of a recipe and multiply that by 200,000 influence and that is the msot I will EVER pay for a recipe ever again, because I know I can get it myself in the same amount of time or less. That's right, there is NOTHING in the game worth more that 50,000,000 anymore. At least not to me. To people that do TFs regularly, I'm sure the soft cap is quite a bit lower.

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If you can only farm 1 million an hour, you may need better farming characters

Not to single you out or say mean things about you, just that most of my level 50 characters (support builds aside) have well over 1 million/hour earning potential without farming (for example by soloing cimerora repeatable missions).

Taskforcing for the random roll would actually look better, if my earning power were less through other means. But time spent taskforcing is (mostly) mutually exclusive with time spent soloing or farming for inf.

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Lets face it, we all know that about 80% of the pool C recipes are extremely limited in demand and utility (AkA, Junk). Sure theres a handful, maybe 5 or so that are worht Multi-Millions, and a slightly larger handful that are worth form 1 to 5, but the vast, vast majority of other Pool C drops go for under a Million.

[/ QUOTE ]Funny...I just looked at Wenty's...and 32 pool C recipes go for over a million. Most of them going for multiple millions.

Granted, this is out of all of them, so you're not able to pick from all of them out of each level range...but it's more than a "small handfull" of recipes that are actually worthwhile to get.

Even the so-called "Crap of the hunter" proc is worth a million at level 20. Since you can pick the level range you pick from, your odds can be pretty good with the random roll.

Add this to the fact that prices will possibly go up for less-desired recipes...and if you listen to the DOOOM patrol, they'll skyrocket...this makes the random roll even *more* lucrative.

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First... at level 50, which is where most pool C recipes are generated, half of them aren't worth over a million each. Lower level ones, possibly, because those both A - have to be generated by lower level characters (reducing supply dramatically) and B - are more valuable because of the IO-level exemplaring rules (increasing demand). The merit system will actually put an end to point A, as 50s will be able to buy the lower-level enhancers via merits. There'll be much less of a price difference between low and high level IO prices as a result.

Second... something worth a million isn't a shiny. It's not even a 'somewhat polished.' It's nowhere near worth 100 minutes of game time. In 100 minutes of game time I could have generated many more millions of inf by farming for it. In fact that's pretty much what I do for my builds right now - running taskforces for valuable recipes on a random roll has given me such poor results that I stopped doing it. I farm for influence and buy my recipes from people who are either luckier, or dumber.

Now if crap of the hunter or sting of the manticore or lethargic repose start to be worth 15 million... we might be talking. But they won't ever be, because there's not enough demand for them. I would expect the price of level 35ish positron's blast and scirocco's dervish pool C's to go up to where LOTGs currently are, and 35ish LOTGs to go clear through the roof, by perhaps 3 weeks from release. Level 50 recipe prices will probably crash at the same time, as they're supplanted in both supply and demand by the exemping-friendlier 35ish ones.

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I'm sorry, but will you guys ever discuss the disparity? I'm hearing Dr Q is down to under an hour now.

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They will, but it won't be by helping the red side. It'll be by making the blueside market just as undersupplied and avoided as the redside one.

What's going to happen in the longer term is that the merit system will give a material advantage to those who hit the high-merit speedable TFs early and often, then the nerfs that provokes will enshrine that advantage by preventing anyone from catching up to the merit (and thus performance-improving invention) lead such people build.

Thus the people who get things nerfed for everyone, get to laugh all the way to the bank as their high-performance character continues to generate rewards at a much faster pace than anyone else... and now it's harder for anyone else to even approach them at it because they benefitted heavily from an overall higher rate of rewards in the past.

Edit - of course the people who've fully completed builds in the current environment (like me) will be even more ahead of the curve - I'm in a position to game the merit system at the maximum possible speed from day 1 onward, thus increasing my own wealth and resources much faster than the average player could hope to under the new rewards regime.

Pretty sure that the merit system's going in as is, a relative handful of people will game the system massively to their benefit, and then next issue there'll be major nerfs to most blueside TF rewards.

Then in issue 16 or 17, they'll be reworking it again because the casual players will complain that they can never get anything they want, because they have no hope of ever earning enough merits to buy it off the merit vendor and the slash in supply of pool C and D recipes on the market leaves all the influence that powergamers generate to chase pool A and B recipes, and salvage, making it so that powergamers are always outbidding casual gamers on currently low-priced items, for want of anything better to do with their cash.

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My point is and was they have decided to fix what I believe is a non problem (People speeding through TFs for rewards)

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Fixed.

Because obviously the devs did think people speeding through the TFs for rewards was a problem.

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If so, encouraging them to do it more, to more TFs, is a pretty bad way to go about solving it

Probably. But manticore's at a level where you can has fulcrum shift, so going back to a full team with "optimal loadout" of buffer/debuffer members is practical to blow through it...

It just doesn't give as many merits as positron because people already broadly cut through swathes of it by stealthing with no motivation other than getting it over with faster.

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They're going to run two different skill-based TFs in the same time it's supposed to take to run one grind-based TF and earn pretty close to the same merits?

Even comparing optimized teams for Grindforces to optimized teams for Skillforces, you're probably going to come out pretty close to the same time investment for the same rewards.

The system provides options, and doesn't force anyone to do anything. Your idea of "luring" assumes that the people who run the Skillforces are going to be willing to give up all of their powers and bonuses to exemplar down and grind out Posi or Synapse, or subject themselves to the slog through the Shadow Shard, when they could instead be running multiple different more challenging pieces of content back to back, at full power, for comparable rewards. I don't think that's a safe assumption to make about how this system is going to be played past about 3 weeks in, when people realize that boring content is still boring content, and fast content adds up rewards as fast as or faster than boring content can let them grind it out.

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The key difference is, you can solo Posi and 2 or 3 man Synapse and it'll be faster than a full team in most cases. To do a 'speed/skill' ITF, STF, or LRSF you need at least 5 or 6 skilled players with the correct builds.

The only people who'll be banging out a 30 minute ITF, 45 minute STF and 45 minute LGTF back to back to back will be people in SGs like RO who've set up teams specifically to do these things.

Everyone else will be soloing positron 2 or 3 times a day because it's alot easier and there's no lead time for setting up. Like I said, 2 padders to start.

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You're relatively punished for running the ITF, LRSF, STF, and LGTF under the new system. These are generally more difficult to successfully complete for the average team than older, longer, grindier TFs but give as little as half the rewards of them.

[/ QUOTE ]...once again, you missed my point. It's still a reward. Whether you think it's worth it, that's a different story...but it's not "no reward to speak of".

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So your point is that specifically, literally speaking as long as something gives a merit or two, it has a reward? That's semantics and completely misses, or perhaps intentionally, ignores the actual point behind the complaints against the merit system being based on median average times.

The point you are overlooking with your quibble over the definition of 'no reward at all' is that you're rewarded heavily for doing boring, 4-year-old, grindy TFs quickly, over doing recent, more interesting, and more difficult TFs at all, under the merits system.

It takes much longer to organize and perform a successful pickup STF or LRSF than it does to get 2 people to pad you in steel canyon while you start posi, then kick them and solo it, and the rewards don't reflect that at all.

I didn't make any judgement about how many merits were worth it, if you want to get your semantics messed with in return. The judgement I'm making is that the system's set up with its rewards inverted - rewarding people heavily for shortcutting through something boring as fast as possible, rather than rewarding them heavily for tackling difficult challenges in a 'normal play' manner.

Hamidon and the Silver Mantis SF are maybe the only merit values I think they actually got right.

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So now, we are punished from playing the fun TFs by receiving no reward to speak off,

[/ QUOTE ]That's only true if the only TFs you consider to be fun are Eden and Katie.

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You're relatively punished for running the ITF, LRSF, STF, and LGTF under the new system. These are generally more difficult to successfully complete for the average team than older, longer, grindier TFs but give as little as half the rewards of them.

When skilled and powerful players who today favor those TFs for challenge and enjoyment are instead lured into older grindier TFs for their vastly superior rewards, we've already been over what's going to happen.

The basic flaw here is that the merits system is designed to reward time, not meeting challenges that require skill or effort.

I almost never run "speedens." I haven't for months. I prefer the ITF and LGTF because I find them more fun (especially the multiple "boss fights"); the merit system is going to "encourage" me to run positron and synapse instead, until those are nerfed.

Indeed the fact that the devs have telepgraphed the nerf ahead of time is itself probably the biggest encouragement for me to get out there and bang out 60-90 minute posi's as often as I can once this goes live. I don't want to be one of the people left on the platform when the gravy train pulls out of the station.

It's also the first part of why I'm saying don't ever take the random roll. Merits are going to be scarce for people who don't TF alot, and they're going to become more scarce in the future as rewards are adjusted down.

The other part is that the value of most of the pool C recipes, 2/3 of which are from sets for snipes, immobilizes, disorients, slows, fears, etc etc, will never be high enough to match 1/10 the value of the 'supershinies' - numina, miracle, LOTG +recharge.

The reason for that has little to do with supply and everything to do with demand. I did a quick check over my own characters' build plans, and in my ideal end build I use an average of 4 of the 'supershinies' per character to every 1 pool C "vendor trash" recipe. Why? Because most of my characters have 0 to 3 powers that can even slot most of those sets... and many of those powers benefit more from other kinds of slotting that don't use those IOs anyway.

My most-used pool C IOs are positron's blast recipes (several characters have 3-4 targeted AOEs and there aren't other good targeted AOE sets at the moment), and scirocco's dervish for the same reason (may change with new PBAOE sets coming).

Right now if you look at the market, you practically can't give away level 50 pool C control set recipes. They sell on the market for less than vendoring price (5,000 to 10,000); even people who presumably want them aren't willing to pay as much as the level 50 inf yield of a single even-con lieutenant mob kill (6,500 inf or so), which takes all of what, 10-20 seconds?

The supply of something like that could go down to almost nothing and I still doubt the demand would raise its price up over a million or two influence; people who do want those recipes may be the ones who decide to use the random roll, since they're more likely to land on one of them.

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However, in this kind of context, it should be understood that "worth it" means in terms of whether or not it's a good strategy for obtaining game rewards. On that question, connected with random rolls, I'm not completely convinced that for my circumstances (which include, among other things, lots of alts to spread things around to and a general disinterest in extreme min-maxing), the random roll isn't a good deal--or that it might not become a good deal with merit-system-driven price changes. I'm not going to commit myself any further until I can do some real research, which I'm certainly not going to do tonight.

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This is what I'm trying to get at. The devs have quantified the optimal game reward per unit time that they want you to get, and have defined how to get it. The message they are sending is "we want you to do it this way" by setting up a system where "this way" gives you the most rewards.

They can't directly reward you with fun, but there is a demonstrable, significant correlation between 'fun' and 'points and shinies' for most MMORPG players. And they can directly reward you with points (exp/inf) and shinies (inventions).

Right now shinies are awarded randomly, and points are awarded steadily. Merits are a points-for-shinies system, and one where the devs have made explicit how many shiny-points they want you to get for your time investments at which tasks... which is in essence tantamount to their sending the message that completing the tasks that give the best merits faster than the median average time of the player base is intended as the 'most fun' way of playing.

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That's what my time is worth. Fun. And the devs didn't have a single thing to say in that.

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And I have fun doing things that have no rewards attached, like chatting with my friends, helping people learn, occasionally lolPvP, or decorating bases... your point?

The devs have decided that independent of any fun you may be having, they're going to reward certain behaviors at certain rates, and independent of any fun you may be having, they'll reduce that reward if enough people exceed their desired rate. That's not my decision, or my desire.

Don't argue with the messenger if you don't like the message.

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You're under the presumtion that everyone cares about getting the most possible merits for every second they play. That's completely and totally wrong. Merits will be a nice side benefit...but I'll play what I have fun with. I like Posi. I'll play it because it's one I can play with just my boyfriend, with very little hassle. And we'll have fun doing it.

Or...no...wait. We won't...because you don't think it's possible for us to be able to.

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No, I'm saying that the system is going to end up as unfairly skewed because of the people who have their fun by playing in the most optimal manner possible, to the detriment of the people like you who have fun in other ways. And I expect people will broadly start to find that unfairness translates into un-funness when they're the ones on the receiving end of it.

There are also degrees of fun. Just playing is fun. Both playing and getting something shiny is more fun than just playing for a lot of people. Reducing the second is going to result in a net reduction of fun, however small or large depending on the person's emphasis on having shinies.

Like a parade is fun. A parade that gets rained on isn't that fun. The merit system lets people who speed TFs rain on the parade for the people who don't.

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I will. I'll be having fun playing the same game I've been playing for the past two years. I had fun before IOs. I ran TFs before IOs. Even if they completely stripped IOs from the game, the game would still be fun.

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Good for you. I've been here for four years. I've had fun the whole time. That doesn't mean I couldn't have had more fun for some of it. I've in fact had more fun since issue 9 entirely because of inventions, and I see the merit system's probable effects on the inventions market as a mid- and long-term reduction-in-fun for me.

And I on principle don't like the stated intention of the devs to adjust merits based on median average times from datamining, which allows people who can blow through taskforces - and who in fact find it fun to do so - to rain on everyone else's fun-parade. Like yours, and even mine.

In fact, this makes taskforce speed-running a type of "PvP" that no player can avoid... not even future players who aren't even subscribed when it hits.

Humor is subjective. I'm getting a laugh out of your argument

What isn't subjective is that I'm not the one assigning a value to people's time - the devs are. And the value they've assigned to your time isn't subjective either.

5 minutes of taskforce time, or 12.5 minutes of storyarc time, are worth 1 merit. 1 merit is worth 1/20th for a random pool C drop or 1/200th of a specific pool C drop. 100 minutes of your time is worth a random pool C drop; 1000 minutes is worth a specific pool C drop.

I didn't make that up and tell you what your time was supposed to be worth, the devs did.

Sorry to break it to you, too, but your fun also doesn't seem to matter to the devs' decision on what your time is worth because they've given the most merits to what are broadly considered the least fun tasks (positron; doctor Q; long, 4-year-old multi-zone travel storyarcs with multiple delivery or hunt missions). And they've given much less merits to taskforces and storyarcs which are newer, hailed as more fun (the ITF, katie, the STF, all of the villain ones), and even more difficult to successfully accomplish (especially the LRSF and STF).

But I'm not trying to tell you what's fun, I'm trying to tell you what's the optimal use of your time under the conditions that the developers are imposing (and, though it's not relevant to this tangent, which I disagree with their imposition of).

The fact that you don't think the optimal path is fun, doesn't change the fact that it's optimal.

And I could, in fact, tell you what tasks to do and what ATs to do them with in order to "beat" the system and gain more than 1 merit per 5 minutes... but I'm not going to, because you'll just complain that that isn't fun to you either when "fun" has no bearing on mathematical optimization, and besides the more people who know how to do it, the faster it'll be nerfed, which will mean less for me in the longer term.

"Have fun" in six months when a relatively small group of people who do what I'm describing have made it nearly impossible for you to actually achieve merits at the developer-decided rate of one per five minutes.

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Bottom line? Random rolls won't ever be very worth it for me.

[/ QUOTE ]Fixed that for you.

As already demonstrated, there are several people in this thread for which they *will* be worth it. And we're not the only ones.

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Don't "fix" things for me. In fact, try not to do it for anyone. It's a disgusting form of argument that should be against the forum rules in my opinion.

Further, that you don't agree, doesn't mean I made a subjective statement. You are just wrong.

The average influence/infamy value of a pool C recipe would have to be A: at least 1/10th of the inf value of a super-shiny (LOTG, Miracle, Numina) and greater than 5 million influence/infamy in order to be 'worth' 100 minutes of active game-time.

Otherwise, saving merits is a better choice than converting them into a random drop. This is not subjective, it is fact. If you still think it's worth it "for you" to take random drops under the merits system without both of those conditions being met, then you're not a fully-informed rational actor, or you're just dumb. Sorry.

And I've already explained why those conditions will almost certainly never be met.

Snipe, sleep, teleport, fear, immobilize, knockback, disorient, defense debuff, tohit debuff, slow, tohit buff, and pet recipes will, broadly speaking, never be worth very much due to low demand. The Pool C ones might become worth listing on the market when supplies dry up, but I expect they will never sell for a significant amount of money that justifies the time investment of a 100-minute taskforce (the devs' time metric for earning 20 merits). I'd be very surprised if these recipes ever came to sell for more than 5 million, excluding some (but not all) procs.

Simply soloing for 100 minutes will result in more than 5 million influence for most level 50 characters, excluding heavily team-oriented builds, let alone doing standard farming.

The low demand for these recipes will come from three directions that are independent of the market - first that relatively few characters can slot them at all, second that the ones who do will only slot them into one or two powers each, and third that for powers that can slot them as one of several set types, the alternatives will usually be better.

Bottom line? Random rolls won't ever be very worth it because not enough people are going to want the stuff that usually comes out of the random rolls.

Regarding the idea that taking 50 random rolls will result in six "shinies," I'll refer to my own experience of not seeing a single decent drop valued over 5 million inf from the market for two consecutive months while doing at least twenty taskforces per month. And 5 million, as I just explained, is still not shiny.