Grouchybeast

I'd love that, too. Also, if they used the yellow-conning system for Crey in non-hazard zones blueside.

And maybe the drones could be set not to shoot at yellow-conning NPCs. I worry about how anyone in Arachnos gets to work, what with being droned every time they venture near the transport system.

And, actually, there are people out there who do just that.

It always interests me when a fictional setting spontaneously generates responses and arguments that you can find in regard to real world events. To me it's a sign that the writers are hitting a pretty good note with how they're presenting Praetoria.

The last existing vet badge is for 87 months. For a new player to get it under the old system, they would have to subscribe continuously until the end of 2018.

The old vet system was a nice idea in its time, but it's now broken. Whatever the amount of effort going into maintaining it, it's being focused on an ever-shrinking pool of players -- the number of people continuously subscribed since the game's launch can never increase. Even without Freedom, it was in need of some kind of overhaul.

So...now you can drop your 'sub' to $2 a month, instead of $15, and enjoy your IOs all you like. You can play, with IOs, every day for a whole year for less than the price of two month's subscription at current rates.

Why is that going to push you away? How is it worse than what you have now, which is $15 a month or no game at all?

Try making this assumption instead:

The devs primary goal is still to have subscribers, and provide an excellent game for them which will keep them subscribing. They also hope that those subscribers will drop a little extra cash in the store from time to time, as used to happen with Booster packs.

As a second best, if people won't or can't sub, then the devs will be happy to take their money on an a la carte basis. In order to encourage this, a wide variety of different parts of the game system have been parcelled out (some ATs, IO, AE, the AH, Praetoria) in the hope that one of them will be something that the player feels is so important to their game experience that they have to buy it.

It is not the intention of the devs to encourage a lot of people to play for free. They can if they want to, but the *goal* is to have everyone either subscribed, or picking up items from the store to enhance their Premium play experience.

From the devs point of view, it's a *good* thing that you have found something that you don't want to play without.

If you absolutely can't afford $2 a month...well, that's a shame. You'll either have to play without IOs, or not play at all -- which is one more option that you'd have pre-Freedom. But the devs are not in the business of giving everyone the game they want for free. Thank goodness. If you want examples of what happens to businesses with lots of customers and no way of getting revenue from them, you'll find plenty back in the dotcom boom.

However, the title is itself a quotation from Life, the Universe and Everything, about the problems of immortality:

'In the end, it was Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you know you've taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.'


Aaaanyway.

I, like Dr Harmony, start slotting my IO sets in the 30s, as I like to go for IOs around 33-35, for exemping purposes. So I'm usually getting a nice bump in effectiveness as I get the better values and set bonuses coming on-line. Plus, my Enhancement screen looks prettier, which is very pleasing.

I don't think you're considering the full possibilities for entertainment and abuse offered by any kind of floating store price linked to the market.

F'rex, look at what Ragman managed to do to the price of KB IOs in this thread. Now imagine what people with very large amounts of inf could do to the flow of IOs into the game with a system that allowed them to drive down a store price arbitrarily low simply by manipulating the market price.

If you're going to assume rational market use, you have to remember that one of the rationales is going to be 'for the lolz'.

Yes.

Next time you're waiting for a TF or a Trial to start, check out the info for the characters around you. I've seen plenty of people out there playing with no set bonuses at all. The forums, especially the AT forums, tend to give a rather skewed idea of how characters are built.

Don't get me wrong, set bonuses can be awesome. But in TF and Trials particularly they're still generally overwhelmed by the buffs and debuffs being flung around.

Servers are fine, but the launcher seems to be being screwy for some people at the moment.

If you can't get the launcher to run:

1. Look for a window that's appeared behind other windows on your desk top -- alt-Tab through, or minimize one window at a time until you can find the darn thing.

2. If that doesn't work, see if you can find a launcher process running in Task Manager, kill it, and try again.

If neither of those work, have a look in the Technical part of the forums. Various people have solved their launcher problems in various ways, and one of them might work for you.

The complete collection is a better deal that the upgrade option was, anyway, as it includes a month of time.

Not according to the EULA.

From the quick look I managed to take before the servers swan-dived into oblivion, that seems about right. Some of the junky stuff looks like it sells for a few million every few months, so I shall probably throw it all over to an alt I don't like and list it as a public service.

I have exactly the same problem. Every time I launch the game now I have to start minimising windows and playing hunt-the-dialogue-box behind them.

Good!

The way the Freedom system works is by having a wide range of different things locked behind Premium tiers. Ideally, (from the pov of the devs), everyone should think that at least one of those is something they can't play the game without. Something for which they can be persuaded to part with money.

The devs don't want people to decide that playing for free is good enough. Really, of course, they want everyone to decide to take out a sub. But failing that, they'll be good with people playing on Premium but throwing $2 a month their way to use IOs, or paying for AH access, or AE access, or Signature arcs, or whatever.

Premium ought to feel incomplete, and incomplete in important ways that matter to players. That's its design.

The most common figure I've seen quoted is 1:100. That would line up very nicely with my recent rep farming, where I had four recipes by the time I got the 400 rep badge. That would be just a little over 400 kills, as it took me a few days.

I can't tell you if it's generally changed, but it's definitely not the case with Rebirth. I got Empath on my blaster with it.