Grouchybeast

I don't think Paragon or NCSoft see much of a difference, there. If they did, the rewards tree wouldn't directly equate sub months with Paragon Points bought.

According to the Paragonwiki, Tier 9 VIP rewards only remain unlocked for VIP subscribers. Maybe that's changed since the wiki page was written, but I don't remember anyone announcing that.

This is why I haven't bought any PPM procs yet, and I won't be buying them until I see the final fix in place. It was obvious from the start that they hadn't been thought through very well, since the devs were making statements about the mechanics that didn't at all match up with actual in-game performance. I think they could well turn out to be a bit of a mare to get right.

Purple sets keep their bonuses no matter how far down you exemplar. That's one of the best things about them. (PVP sets are the same, but the bonuses are generally less useful.)

I'm intrigued to know how you would work out a morally appropriate price for luxury items in an MMO.



p.s. I don't know about Vin Diesel, but Nick Carter definitely plays WOW.

There are actually ten different items, and you can only buy each one only once. You can put them in your basket again, but you'll get an error at the checkout.

I assume it's because the market can manage to cope with items you can buy any number of, and items you can only buy once, but isn't able to handle limiting an account to buying ten of one type of item.

If only.

Eventually, odds are the older Tier 9 VIP costume set will start showing up in the store, simply because if they don't, the rotation for VIP sets will become unworkably large. Then they'll be able to make money on direct sales.


Being. Able. To. Cherry. Pick. Rewards. Defeats. The. Entire. Purpose. Of. Having. A. Reward. Tree.

However many time you repeat yourself, that isn't going to become any less true. Nor is it going to become any less true that the devs recently had the chance to completely revamp the loyalty system, and chose to stick with a reward tree. That's where your suggestion falls down -- it undermines the system the devs have just implemented.

Allowing people to cherry pick rewards from a tired reward system fundamentally undercuts the entire purpose of having a tiered reward system in the first place. Tiered rewards systems work by having desirable items spread all across the reward tree, to act as an incentive to customers at all levels on the tree.

Paragon is not going to let people start hopping all over the tiers taking what they want, because otherwise they wouldn't have stuck with the tired reward system for Freedom. Clearly, they like the reward tree structure. They have already revamped the system to set up a new one they feel is appropriately gated by time/money.

The zombie ninja pirates are in my AE arc. Sadly, it's still lacking the robot Nazis.

But sets can only be bought when they're one of the two sets currently available. The question becomes, how often do sets rotate back in, and how many sets will there be in total? How often is a new set added?

At the moment, the seems to be a new set coming in every 4 months. So, if there were only 6 different VIP costume sets, and after that no new ones were ever made, they'd only rotate in every 2 years and long-term vets would never get anything new. With a dozen sets, it would be four years between each one appearing in the line-up.

If every costume set is split up into three parts, then I don't think it's practicable to introduce a new set more often than once every three months. At three months rather than four, it would still take three years to work through a 12 set rotation.

As long as they keep making new T9 costume sets, I don't think it would be a problem for them to go into the store eventually and be taken out of the T9 rotation. Otherwise either a) the time for old costumes to rotate back into the system would become crazy long or b) the frequency with which they introduce new T9 costumes would have to drop way down.

Right now, we're getting something new every time a T9 costume set shows up, because they're all new. But two or three years down the line, either we're back to the old Vet Reward problem, where new players had almost no chance of getting the items on the distant horizon, or we're in a situation where long-term vets very rarely have anything new show up for them.

Rather hilariously, that's almost entirely due to farmers moving out of AE.

I finally got tired of watching the stupid orb floating around doing nothing and used it to make a Tier 4 Core, instead.

I have to admit, Tielekku showing up and them immediately getting nommed by Mot was one of my favourite bits of the arc. Everyone had been saying "Tielekku will save us!" and then she finally shows up and NOM. So, no, looks like the big bad Goddess was a stack of failcakes, I guess I'm going to have to save the world after all because I'm JUST THAT AWESOME {buffs nails on jacket}.

A tiered reward system has tiers, and to get rewards people have to progress through the tiers. That's the whole point of it -- to reward (or, provide an additional incentive for) financial dedication to the game, whether it's by subscribing or by buying Paragon Points.

The old Vet Rewards has reached the point where adding more to the top of it made the items unreachably far away for new players -- having to sub for seven years is not a prospect that makes an award system attractive. So the revamped system has already flattened the tree considerably, and stopped the problem recurring by capping the tree with a row of consumable items and account items that rotate in and out. Now a brand new subscriber will know that they will fill up to tier 8 in slightly under three years even if they never buy a Paragon Point, and the top is never going to get further away than that.

However, it still has the fundamental structure and properties of a tiered reward system.

There are attractive features all the way up the tier, and there are attractive things at the top of it. There's no point putting access to all the good stuff at the bottom for new subscribers, or all the good stuff at the top for only long-term vets. Every step of the way, there needs to be something attractive to subscribers, including in the repeatable tiers, otherwise the system isn't doing its job. You note that the tier nine costumes will be rotating back in, so that as more people reach tier nine they'll also have something to anticipate.

It's no more unfair to not be able to pick up a tier nine costume piece when you're on tier one than it is to not be able to pick up /auctionhouse or Assemble the Team. Or rather that 'unfairness' is a fundamental property of a tiered reward system. Allowing people to cherry-pick what they want from higher tiers goes against the whole concept and function, and is very unlikely to happen.

Sir Humphrey Appleby is alive and well and working for The Syndicate.

Matt Miller interview with Ten Ton Hammer:

Ten Ton Hammer: Moving on to the power sets then, some of those will be available for all players, but some will be unlocked through subscription or direct purchase only. How did you decide which of the power sets made the most sense to include on either side of that split?

Positron: It really is a matter of how much time and money we put into the set. Like the ones where we kind of went a little bit overboard on, in terms of animations and effects and tech to make the set work at all, those are going to be the premium sets that everyone is going to need to buy.

But things like Time Manipulation that we had the tech for, and we didn’t need new tech, and the effects weren’t crazy, the animations weren’t crazy, but the end result is awesome. You’ll be able to manipulate time on your enemies and friends – so those are going to be for VIP players, but a free player can purchase those as well.

Like everyone else, you could read the terms here, here or on the NcSoft site here. I'm not sure how they could've made them any clearer.

SB has the whacking great Recovery buff, which is equivalent to a global end reduction.

It definitely does that. It looks exactly how I imagined a video game wolf would look using a sword -- i.e. like something struggling ineptly to use a tool that was in no way designed for it. A human arm has seven degrees of freedom, and that's what makes a sword dangerous. All the wolf can really do with the sword is thrash it from side to side like it's worrying it, and that's *with* the sword somehow magically being able to switch sides in its mouth in order to complete a swing. Even to make one simple movement, the animators had to cheat. It looks clumsy and silly.

If you want to persuade people that animals could look tolerable in-game using a sword by holding it in their mouths, that's a terrible video for it. There has to be something better out there. At least, I hope so, for the sake of your argument.

If the internet is good at one thing, it's finding people who are passionate about something :-)