Grouchybeast

This is just wrong, and is where your underlying assumptions are giving you unnecessary worry.

It simply does not take billions of inf to use the IO system effectively.

You can get a big bump in performance from simply frankenslotting your powers with a mix of cheap IOs, to take advantage of the fact that slotting Acc/Dam Acc/Dam from two sets is much better than slotting one Acc and one Dam SO. An Acc/Dam from one set is just as good as an Acc/Dam from another, so all you need to do is find the cheaper, less popular sets, and use those.

Then, you can move into slotting more of the cheaper sets, to start picking up some of the bonuses. You can dabble in the system, for not a lot of inf.

Some sets are in very high demand, because they're rarer sets and they provide specific bonuses that people value for certain types of builds. But usually, there are other sets in the same group that will provide perfectly decent bonuses, and are cheap as chips. E.g.:

Kinetic Combat sells for tens if millions of inf per piece, and over a hundred million in some cases. For people chasing defense, it's a highly attractive set. But...

Crushing Impact can probably be bought for less than 10 million for the whole set. And who wouldn't want a 7% Acc and a 5% recharge bonus on all their powers?

If you want to fill a build with highly sought Rare, Purple and PVP IOs, then it will cost you a lot of inf, but you will not get a proportional return in terms of increased power and survivability. In some cases, depending on the character, it might actually be counterproductive.

Your guess is completely wrong. There are many ways to get enough inf to buy a perfectly decent build without grinding anything. I'm IOing a brute out right now, using sets, and if I spend anywhere near 200 million on the build by the end, I'll be surprised. I might, afterwards, gather up a few villain merits to directly buy a couple of the very expensive IOs just to add the finishing touches, but I might not bother.

But again: if you don't want to touch the IO system, don't touch it. As people have said, it genuinely is optional. If it isn't fun for you, just ignore the whole thing and you will be absolutely *fine*. You can throw all your drop on WW for 1 inf, and never touch the crafting system at all.

To be honest, it does come over as if you're determined to hate the crafting system, no matter what. And that's fine. But maybe it would be better to hate it for reasons that actually exist, rather than just on your assumptions about the system.

If you want to spend a lot of time in it, you certainly can. But if you just want to engage with is casually, you can do that too. The system caters for people all the way from a little frankenslotting or an occasional KB IO, up to the people squeezing the last couple of percent of advantage out of their build.

It really doesn't need to be a lot of work.

The best thing about the CoX market is that it works while you're off playing the rest of the game, or not even logged into the game at all. There's no need to hang around in the market waiting for a bargain to come along -- you just place your bids and go about your business.

So, for an example...

You decide that you want to have a set of Thunderstrikes. At the end of one play session, you can go along to the market and place the recipe bids. Nowadays, every recipe has a link on it that will search for all the salvage needed, so one click get you the list of everything you need to make the recipe, too. When you log in again the next day, odds are that your bids will have filled. A trip to the base/university, and you're done.

If you approach IOing a character as something you can do gradually over time, rather than looking at it as one huge intimidating 'I need to buy 96 recipes + salvage!' lump, it's a pretty approachable task.

Honestly, if you're going to pick one place in the forums that are the least representative of the playerbase as a whole, then the Scrapper forum is a good place to look. There are a bunch of people there who *love* numbers. :-)

You could take a look at Fulmen's two guides to using the market and frankenslotting and see if they seem like the right kind of level of detail for you to start getting a handle on things. (You can also just drop in to the Market and Inventions forum and ask questions, where you will get more enthusiastic help than pretty much anywhere else.)

Finally, I would really suggest getting a copy of Mids character designer. It might look a little scary to begin with, but it provides a really easy way to start answering questions like 'what's the actual difference between slotting 1 Acc, 3 Dam, 1 EndRx, 1 Rech, and putting in a set of Thunderstrikes?' without having to do the maths yourself.

Nowadays, you can also use Titan Sentinel to export your current build from the game into Mids, for an even easier start to the process.

And often for good reasons, too, lest people jump to the conclusion that it's just because Paragon aren't doing it right. Consider that the live account database contains the credit card details and all other personal details of every player in the game. This is not information which it is good practise to make available to people who do not absolutely need to have access to it. Faking that kind of data is often a lot harder than it sounds, too.

I don't have a list, but I can tell you that I went into AE on Beta yesterday, and tested it with one of the low-level self-PL ambush farms, on a brand new Claws/Fire Brute. I went from level 2 to a bubble away from level 21 in 40 min, and didn't see any sign of MARTy kicking in at all.

I'm not sure how concerned NCSoft will be your intention to pay them $179.88 over the course of the year, rather than $143.88 up front.

Honestly, yes, it was. If the devs made sure that they never did anything that caused players to threaten to quit, they could've called it a day back in 2004.

No, but it's best not to introduce an idea if it has an obvious exploitable feature that subverts the original concept. AE was meant to allow players to tell stories. Check the top of the Hall of Fame and see how well that worked out.

You seem to be proposing Reincarnation with primarily the idea that it will be used occasionally by people to recreate a character either for pure concept purposes, or because changes in the game mean that some other AT or set is better for their concept.

What Bill is saying is that implementing powerful buffs as part of that system will mean that Reincarnation is primarily used by people who want to stack up to 12 different AT buffs, and have the PLing available to do it. Are you happy with that being the main effect of your idea?

TBH, doesn't look like too many people care all that much.

This is the part that I really don't understand about some of the complaints about Freedom.

Before Freedom, if you dropped your sub you got NOTHING. The game was gone, completely inaccessible. Now, you can pay not one cent to NCSoft, and still have access to a basic version of the game. How, in any sense at all, are you worse off now than you were before?

Anyway, regarding specific issues:

Assuming that you've been subscribed since your forum joining date of August 2010, Paragonwiki says that you will enter Freedom with 7 Reward Tokens (that's 4 per vet badge + 1 anniversary Token + 1 for having an account + 1 for applying a retail code). That will immediately put you at level 3, and 1 Token away from completing level 4.

You will therefore have access to ALL chat channels. So no worries, there.

The inf cap for level 3 is 1 billion inf, so unless you have significant funds washing around, it shouldn't be too much of an issue. You can always e-mail your inf to yourself, and then claim it on the characters you decide to unlock.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'turn your account on', but after I21 goes live there will only be one version of the game. If you're a subscriber, you'll be able to access it, and if you aren't, you won't. Then at some point, as yet unannounced, the VIP headstart will end and they will enable Free/Premium access.

I guess either no one could think up an equivalent title, or they wanted to make sure they collected up all the viewers who'd enjoyed the UK version. At least, I assume the UK version was shown over their first, and that's why they bought in the franchise. Otherwise it make even less sense.

Well, I guess it worked well enough, then.

But -- but -- but it said on the BOX I BOUGHT* that I would have to PAY A SUBSCRIPTION to play. They SAID IT RIGHT THERE ON THE BOX**!!! HOW DARE THEY CHANGE IT LIKE THIS!?!!??!!!???





* From e-bay, for £2.50 inc p&p.
** Which also said that game experience may change during on-line play, but WHATEVER.

NCSoft: We've noticed some rather 'interesting' patterns in your account usage, and we'd like to use our monitoring software to check that you aren't cheating. If that's okay with you?

Botting goldfarmer: No, 'fraid not.

NCSoft: Oh, okay, then. Sorry to bother you. Have a nice day!

I have always wondered what the hell most people though about the title of Queer As Folk when they made the US version. I don't imagine the original saying is very widespread over there.

Premium is not meant to be 'play everything for free'. Premium is meant to be 'select only the features you want to use and pay for them a la carte'. If you/the kids want a lot of those features, then a subscription is going to offer a much better deal than a la carte payments.

Actually, the OED wants two Gs for all British English usages. Single G is given as the American spelling.

Queer Street!

I'm seeing him as probably a rather tattered, down-and-out-looking guy, most likely steampunk/Victorian themed, fighting back with the new Street Justice set against the rich supervillain who ruined him. (Not that I would, in a million years, actually try to use the name in game, because my passing amusement is not more important than potentially upsetting and offending fellow players.)