Hart

That's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that there's nothing you can do as a level 50 that you can't do as a level 49. There're purples, but they aren't an activity. None of the content specifically requires a level 50 player; the bulk of the content can be accessed at 30, and practically everything can be accessed at 45.

So yes, it's a somewhat open-ended game, you can continue to play it at 50. That's not the same thing as having an endgame, which would be a piece of the game that's limited to players who have achieved the max level and which provides some form of character advancement that isn't based on increasing your level. Even the CoX equivalent of 'raids' is just a string of normal missions that you have to complete in sequence, with minor exceptions like the last mission of LRSF.

There's nothing to do at 50 that feels 'epic' or puts the 'super' in superhero. It's the same stuff you've been doing for 49 levels with a different group of enemies.

The ability to automatically exemp down to the level of whatever group will take you and retain a fraction of your powers while getting commensurate rewards for a level 50 character. It was possible before, with the sidekick system - but now it's easy and mandatory.

I think the problem is that the i16 change polarized the community. The hardcore players are still playing and willing to pay through the nose for purples. Marketeers are still willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill for purples to sell to the highest bidder. However, I think a lot of farmers either quit playing or quit farming. i16 gutted AE farming, which was fun, and the dev created farms are miserable grindfest on a handful of maps. AE farming didn't produce purples, but I think farmers from the old days got spoiled by the greater entertainment factor in the AE farms.

You've also got fewer players benefiting from farming, since padders are no longer needed. Hardcore farmers that can do it all themselves are unlikely to make bad market decisions, such as selling purple recipes that their alts can use. I suspect that a disproportionate number of the purples up for sale came from padders.

I generally deal with those missions by abandoning them and running 'defeat boss and minions' or 'steal item' papers for 3 days. YMMV.

That'd kinda random. I'm apparently your evil twin. I've each of the above exactly the opposite way - even down to 'did Hess, but not Hannon'. My main hero has TFC, though I haven't played her in years.

My thing I've never done? Played for longer than 6 months without getting a character I put my heart and soul into nerfed into a mewling pile of charred flesh and smoking spandex.

I'd love to do that.

On men, they'd be wasted.

We usually play together. Love 'er to death.

Er.. afraid all of that except Going Rogue is already played out for me, for a given definition of 'played out'. I've got 2 characters that can do practically anything except solo LRSF and zero interest in badges.

Please note that I'm not complaining about the difficulty of the game - it's trivially easy. Even soloing an empathy defender is trivially easy. Set difficulty to heroic, solo paper missions that are defeat boss or steal item, repeat ad nauseum.

I rolled Fire/FF, not Fire/Kin. I rolled Dark/Elec specifically because I was trying to combine the two worst sets - Elec sucks for dealing damage, and back then Fear made things run away.

In short, by using wierd power combinations in wierd ways I was able to create a character just as effective as your prototypical fire/fire or ss/invuln tanker. The difference is that my secondary wasn't full of passive/toggle powers and a my primary couldn't be described as '9 ways to punch someone'.

I had to figure out what to do, which required some creativity, and sometimes my creativity payed off big and resulted in a unique character. The sort of character other players would look at and wonder 'what the heck possessed this guy's player to choose those powers?' only to have them standing in awe 5 minutes later as I did things they thought were impossible.

You know, the kind of character that makes you actually feel like you're superior instead of just another schmuck in spandex? Root word of 'super', ringing any bells? It's the loss of that feeling of superiority that I hate.

I got that feeling back, briefly, in i15. I created a really great farming map and ran people through it constantly. I was good enough at leading farms to get people to quit PUG farms to come fill in my team, and it felt great.

No, I don't like playing the game without a "team now" button. I lead Or Die Trying, a VG devoted to doing things that are unreasonably hard. Our tagline for mission completion was 'Another failed suicide attempt!'. I assure you, loosing has no meaning for me except as a reason to try again; but wasting hours of my life looking for a group is totally different from wasting hours of my life dying in a pile so the dark/ can HT us for another rush on States.

You're just jealous because you can't afford the banging attachment.

Rule #2 makes sense, but weekly is a bit much to ask for in CoX. I'd suggest something more like 30-45 days or you're accidentally excluding folks who play dozens of characters on multiple servers. That may not be a bad thing if you're looking for prestige though, and kicking folks after 7 days will keep your roster looking 'clean' - but it'll also keep your roster looking small.

At the risk of skewing my reputation toward elitist jerk, this won't be readily apparent until you've had a few months of experience leading the group. People's attention spans vary, but I don't know anyone who plays only a single character in this game, so you need to be flexible.


It's hard to fail within the first month. You've still got the drive and ambition to go for the gold, and lots of low hanging fruit to give you a tangible feeling of achievement that you can use to rally your team.

It's harder to succeed for a whole year. Whether you'll still be playing the game, let alone running the guild, is practically a matter of chance when that much time passes in the real world and impacts your ability to maintain a presence in the game world.

Most supergroups are ultimately cults of personality, so if you take an extended vacation, you can expect to have to rebuild from the ground up unless you've got good secondary leadership that can fill your role while you're out. That mainly means socially in CoX, as in organizing events and resolving disputes between members.

20 is a very good start all things considered, but a month from now half of them will have quit or been kicked due to that 7 day rule, so never stop recruiting if you're going for the top of the prestige charts. Also, note that the prestige charts are a very, very poor indicator of success in anything beyond grinding prestige.

That's all well and good. You became aware of potential pitfalls. That's a contribution, even if you choose not to take the advice presented.

Easy solution here is to coalition with a VG that already has all the porters.

Er.. my social circle is the general population. I'm deeply uncomfortable with intimate interpersonal interaction online. I'm actively disinterested in your real name, state of residence, and how your wife and kids are doing; I'm just here to play a game. I want hang out with interesting characters, but I don't want to know anything about other players.

To complicate things, I play for 3-6 months and then quit for 6-18 months. It's cyclical. Even if I wanted to maintain a social schedule, I've got other games I like playing and new stuff is coming out constantly. So I've been around since Beta, but only have a 15 month vet badge.

I'm not talking about my specific old friends coming back and playing; I'm talking about the overall upswing in total server population that makes it easier to find someone that's willing to group with you.

I'm on the globals, much to the chagrin of many I'm sure. I literally can't buy my way into a team. (for 5m, not chump change)

I'm sure it works fine for a lot of people, but I reliably get this result with multiple characters since i16. I'm left to assume that either channels work vastly better for bluesiders or I've irritated a lot of people, ironically, by complaining about how hard it is to get a group >.>

...

That would require me to do a lot of work that I think the LFG system should do for me. I'm sure it helps if you're willing to put forth the effort - but I really just don't care that much about individuals. I'm more interested in whether there's a group out there looking for me than who is in that group.

Er.. just to clarify, this isn't intended as a 'I can't get a team' whine - I'm more constructive than that and already posted something similar earlier.

This is more of a.. well, it just makes me sad to see the game live up to its full potential for a few bright days and then fall back to the usual doldrums. You couldn't fix it by doubling the xp permanently because that would destroy the draw, and I don't claim to have a solution - I'm just curious whether other people feel the same way about it.

A synthesis of both, really. I'm not completely market-averse, but I do hate feeling like the rewards I earn by playing the game so insignificant in comparison to the vast sums of inf I make with my 10 minutes a day at the market.

I was trying emphasize that people aren't upset that you can make some money on the market. That's the specific purpose of a market - buying and selling, and noone sells unless they make some profit.

I've played a lot of MMOs, and this is the only one I've seen vehement complaints about the market in. It's also the only one I'm aware of where you can get fabulously wealthy within a month without actually having to play the game if you know what you're doing.

Yes, it's possible. But as you say, it's substantially more difficult and time consuming. Some players (and I would argue that I could use 'many players' here) also find that it's not fun, or at least much less fun than playing the game.

Aim is a skill. Reaction time is a skill. Tactics and strategy are skills.

Marketing is great patience and grade school mathematics. It could be argued that some marketers are more 'skilled' than others, but I'd say that this use of the word in this context is synonymous with 'knowledgeable' or 'experienced'.

What's the difference? I can provide a simple set of instructions that anyone can follow in order to emulate my marketing strategy, and simply by following the instructions from A to B they can get the same results.

That's not necessarily the case when it comes to playing my character; they may not have the reaction time, ability to tab through targets quickly, situational awareness, or understanding of wierd facts about the game like 'carnies have a PBAOE drain end on death' that aren't clearly spelled out.

Granted, easy mode is easy and good teams make everything easy. Solo on Relentless and tell me there's no skill involved and I'll show you someone who's in denial.

A couple hours of active play does require some commitment. A couple days, weeks, or months of waiting for a bid to fill is a whole 'nother level and type of commitment.

Oh no, I was tired of the game before AE.

I was tired of the game when changes caused pets not to be able to be summoned in multiples and my Dark/Elec defender went from soloing AVs to being beaten up by +2 minions. I was tired of the game when ED changed my Fire/FF Controller from a defensive deity to a joke. I was sick and tired of the game when CoV came out promising base raids and items of power. I brought my entire 30 man guild over from Guild Wars, only to have the entire PVP concept be nothing but hype and thus destroy my guild.

My desire to play this game is cyclical. I play for a while, inevitably get nerfed into oblivion or otherwise mindscrewed by the devs, and quit for a year or two. I came back 3 months ago and was enjoying myself; now I'm not.

The main reason is that during the height of the AE craze I was able to find or form a team in Cap au D within 15 minutes every time, and I got spoiled by not having to wait hours for an invite. Now I've literally gone 6 - 8 hour stretches LFG on a 50 Rad/Kin corrupter, a 50 Crab, and a 47 SS/Stone brute. I've formed my own teams, only to end up with half a dozen players with a pulse and an internet connection and one guy who knows what he's doing. I rolled a Sonic/Thermal, got to 40 doing something I hate (watching the green bars and praying the idiot's in range) and decided that I don't want to play a game that I have to adapt to when I could instead be playing a game that will adapt to me.

Like a codependent ex, I'll be back eventually, after I forget how this game keeps making promises and breaking my Hart(s). Also, I'm stuck with the account for 7 months. I may as well make a bunch of money so I don't have to worry about learning the market again the next time I return.

My understanding has always been that the perceived problem isn't that people can make money playing the market.

The problem I've seen complaints about is that people can make vastly, vastly more money playing the market than spending their time doing anything else - including grinding for money!

This means that people who are good at the playing the market, as opposed to people who are good at playing the game, are able to afford the most expensive items in the game readily. People who play the game, but are unwilling to play the market, struggle to complete a simple set IO build.

The issue is that they require two totally different sets of skills and levels of commitment. The game requires skill and no commitment; the market requires commitment and no skill. Marketing is also an inherently competitive endeavor, and anything competitive seems to rub CoX players the wrong way.

Thanks so much! That's exactly the kind of advice I'm looking for. My marketing experience has been with stuff that I can bid for a rec, craft, and sell within a day, so this perspective should help a lot.

Looking specifically for procs makes sense as well, and gives me an idea of other areas I can expand into.

In short, yes.

I don't have consistent hours of play. I work a 40-50 hour job and run a home business that can take all my spare time one week and nothing for the next month.

I tried joining a couple superteams on my server, I tried joining the 'global LFG' channels on my server, etc. - nothing works and I'm sick of wasting my time trying.

I appreciate the sentiment, but this isn't the problem I'm trying to solve. I don't need a group to have fun playing Rock Band. I get a group instantly when I play Team Fortress 2 and near-instantly when I play WoW. I've got other options and I'm using them.

What I'm trying to figure out is how I can make decent money in CoX with the least in-game time.