Grouchybeast

Yes, that's what I meant. Usually by level 50 I don't particularly *need* to be stealthy :-)

But surely part of the in-universe handwave about superhero powers is that it generally includes the unspoken extra details that make people able to use their powers without dying instantly? F'rex, Cyclops can blast stuff out of his eyes, but there's no need to start invoking special measures to make sure he doesn't vaporise his own eyelids whenever he blinks, or fry his own brain. That's assumed to come with the eye-blast package.

So once you've established that 'and their body makes FIRE!' is an in-universe rule that doesn't have to adhere to the laws of physics, then you don't need to worry about the logic of why said fire isn't then killing them, because that's usually considered to be automatically included.

That's exactly what I thought when I saw it.

Honestly, the point at which the fire started shooting of the character's body was the point at which common sense had already left the building.

Maybe you'd be happier looking at it this way: my magic-origin Fire Blaster already has 100% immunity to the fire spells she casts. Fireball a bad guy in the face at a distance of five feet? 100% immune. Stand in the middle of Rain of Fire? 100% immune. Awesome!

p.s. I would be quite sad if she had to take 80% damage from Nova.

If you played on the EU servers, I'd happily help you. I have a bunch of alts that haven't been logged in since the market merge, and were only logged on then because I wanted to take down their bids. I can't believe I'm the only one who leaves characters on the shelf for so long. I bet if you asked on your server forum you'd find someone willing to help.

The thing is, though, that there is always something making the market behave 'weirdly'. Since you started playing, there have been:

- reactivation and double XP weekends.
- a selection of AE exploits, some of them long-running, which had the usual effects (crash in the price of rare salvage and level 50 pool A recipes, hike in the price of common IOs, common and uncommon salvage and purple recipes.)
- the Halloween event.
- the release of Going Rogue, causing a heavy swing towards low-level content.
- the release of the Incarnate system, causing a heavy swing towards high-level content.
- the merge of the red and blueside markets that involved wiping the entire transaction history.
- the introduction of e-mailing of inf and items.
- Tips and side-switching.
- Alignment merits.

*All* of those had an effect on the market, some more dramatic than others, some more transitory than others. You can't pick May 2010 as a benchmark -- or rather, you can choose to, but it doesn't make any more sense than to pick Feb 2011. There is no 'normal' state of the market, which sets the prices that things 'should' be. There is only the current state of play, as defined by current conditions.

Actually, most people here are sweethearts, and not prone to roasting. :-)

If you're having trouble getting the inf you need, then worry not, because there are loads and loads of ways to make it. If you hop up to the Market and Inventions forum, you'll find guides to how to generate inf with a range of methods, one of which will hopefully be to your taste. You'll also find a lot of very friendly and helpful people who will be positively champing at the bit for a chance to answer questions and give advice.

ETA: To answer the specific question about Luck Charms/Boresights and Alchemical Silver/Scientific Theories.

Partly it genuinely is a difference in demand. As well as Acc, Luck Charms and Alchemical Silvers are both needed for Defense Buff IOs, which are slotted by a lot of characters. Boresights and Sci Theories don't have a second very popular recipe.

There's also an asymmetry in supply, with a generally higher supply of tech than arcane salvage. Low and mid arcane salvage drops from some of the less popular enemy groups (like Circle of Thorns and Banished Pantheon), that people tend to avoid when they're running radio missions or Tips.

I can do better than that, I can find an example in game: Common IO recipes. Fixed prices at the crafting bench, lower (often substantially lower) prices in WW.

To give you a data point, I spend a few days doing some market monitoring a while back. For a selection of about 20 level 50 IOs that were at the time profitable for trading, checking the market once every hour was enough to catch virtually every recipe and crafted IO sale that went through. The main problem I encountered was when all the sale prices were the same across the last five, so it became impossible to see if a new sale had occurred until a different price showed up, since we no longer get the time of sale data. That happened relatively rarely, though.

Is there a way to find out what items are linked to the inf transactions? Archie and I thought about something along those lines a while back, but if it's inf values only without the items, it seemed like it would have fairly limited utility.

Even if it's no more than 'sell for enormous piles of inf at the auction house'.

I hate speedrun LGTFs. It isn't the speed-running per se (speed run ITFs are one of my favourite things in the game,) it's that letting the hostages die makes me sad. Especially when they've just given their little speeches about how happy they are to escape the Rikti and get home, and then they get led into an ambush and abandoned...sadness.

OTOH, the good thing about the incarnate system is that at least on Defiant, for every speed run being advertised, there seemed to be someone else setting up a shard run.

February producer's letter, in the section headed About That Accessibility Thing:

For our more casual players, we have added an option for you to continue to build your way up the Incarnate Tree by collecting Incarnate Shards without doing any Incarnate Trials--you will even get Incarnate Shards when you are exemplared down.

That doesn't seem likely, as the 8th Feb WST changeover happened without a downtime.

Tuesdays are generally the days used for server patches and publishes. I guess today's is this one from the Test server, in preparation for the Animal Pack going on sale.

Hey! >.<

Also (and as I'm sure you know), the details of real-world definitions of hyper-inflation are of debatable value here, anyway. CoX is a sealed universe. Other countries aren't refusing to take our devalued Inf for their goods. Financial institutions are not pulling out all their investments. We have no national debt to service.

What really matters for the health of an MMO is 'can new players come into the game and gain access in a reasonable timeframe to shinies appropriate to the amount of effort they expend?' At the moment, I would say the answer is still yes.

I assume it's for balance. Purple set bonuses are large. Making a lot of the bonuses the same means that there are a variety of purple sets for different powers, but the number that can be used effectively on a single character is capped by the Rule of Five.

I think also that for some people, it's given a point to playing their 50s, and a point to buying purple recipes at all. Other IOs can be slotted from lower levels, but purples can only be slotted at 50, and so for the people who tend to shelve their 50s and roll a new character they're fairly pointless. Now the characters are progressing again, those people have a reason to look at purples for their builds.