Jack_NoMind

Someone should make a boilerplate response for this.

I think eliminating the ability of trial accounts to send mail is probably reasonable. It would have far less of an impact on legitimate ones than eliminating their ability to send tells did.

As I understand it, this is a technical challenge above and beyond any balancing issues.

I agree the merit multiplier should be increased, but because Oro missions can be soloed so easily, I think it should be less than 1.0.

Edit: Note: We didn't use to get really anything for completing these, unless there was a badge or something. So while I do support the suggestion, I'd like to remind the OP and other supporters to be grateful for what we have if this is a low priority rebalancing.

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This is my first time hearing about it too. And I've never heard of someones account getting hacked because of viruses or keyloggers, come to think of it never heard of a game account being hacked except on those browser games.

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Peoples' accounts rarely get hacked in the hacker-novel-esque sort of way, but keyloggers and phishing are common enough means of lifting someone's password and compromising their account.

It's overall not a very profitable crime -- far less so than, say, stealing their credit card number -- so account stealing is usually limited to people who do it in revenge for something. And most of those cases use the far more accessible method of social hacking. So, it happens, but... it's not high on the cybercrime watch list.

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I wouldn't mind account transfers if there weren't ANY hackers on the interwebs.

What happens if you get your account stolen and someone figures out your master password, then starts yoinking characters off your account because THEY don't have a level 50 blaster on Triumph?

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Then you've just had your account stolen. I don't think I understand how that's different than someone stealing your account and then changing the password and email address. If it was "stolen" because you told someone your password, then tough luck. If it was stolen through a security fault on NCSoft's end, then they owe you your characters back and compensation for time/damages.

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Why make it against the rules if they are not going to enforce the rules?

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Because in this case they are enforcing the rule: It violates the EULA to sell, therefore, they are not responsible for any loss, damages, or inconveniences that are caused. They are not actively policing the rule, which is a bit different.

Think about it like a warranty or a product guarantee. Under ordinary circumstances, a warranty covers damages/losses from something that goes wrong; if your computer fan shorts out and fries your motherboard, the warranty covers your product and the damage it caused to your system. However, many warranties list exceptions -- for instance, if you overclocked your processor or manually altered your fan.

If NCSoft's character transfer feature fails and you lose a character, they're responsible, because it's their service... unless you're in violation of their policy. And that's why it has to work that way.

There are a whole slew of traffic laws which work basically the same way, btw -- nearly everyone breaks them, many people unknowingly, and the cops don't as a rule care because it would be a waste of effort (not to mention generally dickish) to prosecute them. Ever looked into the laws about jaywalking in your local city? However, in situations where people are violating the law in a way which endangers or threatens to endanger others, police can use these laws to enable them to stop that action.

Or, hell. For a closer-to-home example, take a look at the forum posting policy. The mod team could flag just about every post in S&I, but they don't, because it would be exhausting and dickish to do. But when there's a complaint or an actual issue, they can point to the rules post as justification for locking or deleting a post.

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Why let the people keep the vet rewards on a character and not the badges?

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The vet rewards are part of the character -- powers, costume, et cetera -- in a way the badges are not. I personally wouldn't care if the badges were retained, but that seems to be a larger infringement of their existing policy on veteran rewards.

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Stupid ideas should be allowed to die and when people bring them up again they should be subjected to electric shocks to teach them the error of thier ways.

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Electroshock is a stupid idea. It's been shown clinically. You brought it up again; I'll let you take care of getting the car battery and alligator clamps. Since you will be referencing it every time you shock yourself, this will unfortunately (for you) be an infinitely recursive process. =/

I was a bit early for this post, and made my comment over here. ;p

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Also Epic AT's could be transferred to accounts where the player never earned the right to play one.

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Why? I mean, that seems like a simple enough problem to solve.

Anyway, I'm going to go with my socialist-libertarian party line here:

I don't care if people sell characters and I don't think the developers should either. They should announce the behavior as unsupported, against the EULA, and that any and all consequence (including litigation) undertaken as a result of any character transfer (involving money or otherwise) is entirely the player's responsibility. And that if NCSoft is involved in any private litigation as a result of a character sale (for instance, being asked to appear in court), the player initiating this action is responsible for covering their costs unless it would be illegal to enforce that collection. Then they should spend basically zero effort policing transfers, although the EULA allows them to freeze any accounts who are flagrantly and documentably violating policy.

Veterans' rewards that have been claimed on a character (including, if I understand correctly, all vet costume parts) should remain granted for that character, but new ones should not be available; badges should be forced to refresh as soon as the transfer is complete or on the first login (whichever is more technically feasible). The big advantage to Vet Rewards isn't that you have one character with Sands of Mu and Assemble the Team and boxing gloves, but that any and all characters, including new characters you make, has those things.

Yeah, sure, it would require some technical work. Everything requires some technical work, so, whatever. But it would open up new revenue for them and let we who would like to use this legitimately -- transferring characters between our own accounts or as gifts to friends/family members/sg mates or the like -- do so.

And we would never have to hear about it on Suggestions again.

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After a positive roll occurs a 1-41 lottery roll comes up to see what kind of recipe it is.

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I think that's just approximiation of the percentile values used (there's no entry there for purples, which have a drop rate less than their total number out of all rares).

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Followed by a weighted roll on the appropriate table (common, uncommon, rare) to see what the actual recipe is.

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I don't think there's any weight on that roll, only on Merit and Ticket reward rolls.

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The 'average' income from vendoring recipes at level 50 is about 1650
(my current spreadshett is lacking the exact weighting of the common drops I learnt a few weeks ago)

This exceeds the inf earned by defeating an even con minion out of SG mode. In SG mode obviously the difference is even greater.

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I'm not sure I can productively interpret that (at least without working up a spreadsheet of my own that figures out the drop rate of Common IOs vs the drop rate of uncommon/rare IOs vs the number of minions, lts, and bosses on an 8-size Unyielding or Invincible team), but thanks for the information!

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But given the idea of dropping the influence gain to 0 they're only adding to the supply of recipes and salvage. Sure they'll make boatloads of money off the items they sell, but it won't add new money to the system.

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No, that was part of my point -- they will! Boatloads of it. Vendor, by which I mean in-game "Store" entites, generate new money when you sell something to them. And the most common fate for a L50 Common IO recipe is vendoring for a juicy 100K+. So you figure on your standard solo farming run, people already come close to filling up on 30 recipes, with about 2/3rds of that being Common IOs. That's 2 mil entering the system per 20-30 minute run. So I don't think it's really doing even what you want in the first place.

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The biggest problem -I- can see is getting the point across to the farmers that kicking themselves into this mode of gaining is a good idea. So many will see the 0 inf part and immediately back away screaming and moaning over how unfair it is to give up one reward for another.

Which, to anyone who has ever done game balance, is pretty much mandatory...

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Yeah, but when you sell something like this, you want the "thing you get" to be shiny and big, and the "thing you give up" to be small and insignificant. (Get these AMAZING NEW KNIVES! They cut through onions, tomatoes, meat, bone, EVEN SOLID BRICK! for only three easy payments of 39.99!) This comes across more like "GET ZERO INFLUENCE! For getting a statistically insignificant increase to your drop rates that will, as a game-wide effect, slightly increase the commonality of purple recipes on the market -- which is pretty much the only thing you're really farming for, since most people want Pool C recipes anyway."

I don't think you can offer anything that is balanced and shiny that would convince the mass of people to give up a proven method -- what they're doing now -- and try out this new thing. And I think that of those who do try it, many of them will simply go back to what they were doing before, because it either is (depending on the drop rate increase) or seems (because even on a run where you get crap, you get a couple million influence for kills) more profitable.

And I don't really think it's necessary. You didn't comment on the stabilizing effects of merit buys; what do you think of that?

There wasn't a Discussion thread, so I made my own. =P

Now, when you say "innovation"...

City of Heroes isn't the first game to try something like this. It's the most successful MMO to do it, and has chosen an excellent implementation. But user-created content for multiplayer online games has had other go 'rounds... Ryzom, for instance, which while never as successful, was the first MMO I'm aware of to pull it off. And of course plenty of other games have permitted users to create their own maps and scripts over the years -- ranging from Furcadia (which, while having no game rules of its own, comes out pretty far ahead in terms of its scripting system and the extensive degree to which it allows players to re-create any game element, including tiles and avatars) to Neverwinter Nights (both versions of which have had Persistent-type online servers) to straight up FPSes to, heck, TinyMUD. Now of course I'm kind of going down and away on a list in terms of relevance to CoX's MA project, what with starting out with another MMO and enduing up on MU*s... but this is a long tradition. And it saddens me to see so little of that acknowledged, both within the game and in the press surrounding it.

I always feel so ignored when I try to talk reasonable-like. =P

Ah... I'm pretty sure I don't think this would do you're trying to accomplish here.

Either by 10% you mean a 1.10 multiplier on current drop rates, in which case people are going to generally ignore this option and continue doing as they're doing, or you mean a current rate + 10% (so 5% would become 15%), in which case you're vastly accelerating the amount of influence entering the system, as about half the influence that comes out of most farming runs is the result of selling common IO recipes to vendors. If the former, the drop rate on purples wouldn't increase enough to be worthwhile (the .01% or whatever it is now would become one-one thousandth of a percent higher); if the latter, it would increase a thousandfold.

People farm because it's profitable. It gets them a lot of inf which they can then use to purchase the precise goods they desire. Saying, "hey! You should do this less profitable thing because it's more responsible!" will have exactly as much impact on the farming 'community' as it does on Wall Street.

Besides, we already have a much better method of price control in the game -- merits. That will gradually force market prices for items to conform to a rarity scale corresponding to merit costs, with adjustments for very high or very low demand. And since even the most expensive recipes (shy of purples and pvps) and salvage are now obtainable by all players with a relative minimum of effort, the fact that there *is* inflation is largely irrelevant -- they are just as able to acquire and sell those items as anyone else (eg, 65 million for one LotG +7.5% recharge, which costs 240 merits or about 8 runs of Signature task forces. No matter how much you can sell it for, it will continue to cost about 8 TFs of time investment). SOs, which are what the game is still balanced around, are still on a fixed price scale and will be afaik forever. It's not unreasonable for the developers to expect players to learn about IOs, merits, and the market at essentially the same time, precluding concerns about inexperienced players being thrust into a world of "must-have" gear they can't afford.

I see what you're trying to do, but some annoyances you just have to learn to live with in MMOs. They are, after all, a form of social interaction.

Not on players.

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The other eight powers in Fiery Aura.

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Ahh, yes, those eight powers Blasters don't get. Powers like Rise of the Pheonix, Burn, Blazing Aura, Consume, and a damage booster.

Oh, right.
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Fail.

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So, as long as we're not calling the three powers they don't share "eight" with a straight face: the issue here is not risk versus reward. Fire Blasters routinely kill entire spawns without entering melee range or even being subject to return attacks. Would adding this set disrupt parity? No, not unless HE were unchanged from its support-AT form. The "arguments" suggesting it would are uncritical reactionism; go call adding Darkest Night to Brutes a game-breaker, and see how far you get.

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Weapon Mastery starts with the following:

A low damage...


You're suggesting:
A solid damaging...


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Let's get some numbers there, shall we?

@50

Caltrops base cast deals 2.78 per second at an endurance cost of 9.75, with a duration and recharge of 45s, with a -80% movespeed effect and -jump and -fly. Assuming slotting for damage and recharge, that works out to 5.41 dam/sec with a cycle time of 23 seconds. Since it can then be double stacked with roughly 95% uptime, we'll look at it as though it were so: 10.8 dam/sec, -96% movespeed, and an endurance cost per second of uptime of 0.43. It is an auto-hit power.

Assuming Hot Feet were slotted for damage and endurance cost, it would deal 27.1 base damage per cycle time (2s) at an accuracy of 75%. This works out to an average damage per second of 10.16. It has a 70% movespeed debuff, -jump and -fly, and costs 0.53 (enhanced) endurance per second.

The powers are very similar. Using SOs (which are what are assumed for this), Hot Feet is in all ways worse than Caltrops. Including damage. Please be a bit more thorough before offering comparisons you have not examined.

Those are the only two powers which lend themselves to comparison; I'm not sure what you hope to gain by comparing the other initial powers of the pools. You might as well try and compare the first three powers from Energy Mastery and Darkness Mastery and conclude that one or the other of those two is imbalanced because it isn't an exact duplicate of the other. If you want to compare secondary effects, the first power from Darkness Mastery is a cone KB with a higher magnitude and shorter recharge time than the cone KB that's the T3 in Energy Mastery! And it comes with an additional tohit debuff! What could the developers have been thinking?!

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due to the risk involved.

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A Fire/Fire/Fire blaster will have 30% S/L resistance from their APP shield. A Fire/Fire/Fire scrapper will have 35% S/L resistance from their set shields. What exactly is it that amplifies the Blaster's risk -- that additional 5% resistance the Scrapper gets? Or the does the fact that the Blaster can attack from range some how make it seem 'riskier'?

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Mmhmm.. archery and assault rifle... but the weapons aren't the only thing v merits are good for. They have an entire costume set involved and temp powers...

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And I don't want to take any of that away. Purely an additional option. So! You'll five-star the topic now?

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Why prestige? What good does that do for those of us who don't use bases?

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None whatsoever, and it might not even show up as an option for people not in SGs. You can also buy customizable weapon options with v. merits, which I imagine isn't helping most Defenders, Corruptors, Dominators or Controllers very much. Not everything benefits everyone.

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The game needs more influence and infamy sinks, not Vanguard Merit sinks.

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I've spent several million inf on Prestige for my small SG. And I've spent quite a few hours of my time farming for more inf and prestige for it. It's painfully boring and I'm not very efficient, but I don't want to invite people I don't know into the group. Of the people I do know, many are active with their own existing SGs. So while they may 'donate' an alt or two, as I have to some of theirs, the benefit isn't to my rate of prestige gain.

While I'm not that great of a farmer, however, I'm pretty good at participating in and even leading TFs and raids. I'd like the opportunity to spend some of the credit I earn doing things like that on prestige. It seems both thematically logical and reasonably balanced.

It's quite possible to generate a pretty large stack of, say, Vanguard Merits -- far beyond what you might want to use. Which got me thinking... Vanguard's a big organization, right? They could probably do a little endorsement and pay off big for a Super Group. Why not allow Vanguard merits to be exchanged for Prestige?

Right now we have Merits, Vanguard Merits, MA tickets, and Bounty. Of those, I think Vanguard Merits and Bounty would definitely be appropriate for additional 'prestige buy' choices, tied as they are to in-game organizations. The other two may not be as much, although I would certainly not object to their implementation.

As far as cost scaling goes, I think V.Merits should work on a base 1:8 scale for prestige -- so the buy option might be something like, "250 V. Merits for 2000 Prestige." Bounty's a little bit easier to come by, so perhaps a 1:1 scale on that (although if so, I'd like to see buyout options starting around 500 or 1000 -- because while easier to come by, it isn't persistent).

You're, uh, a touch late.

Very unlikely to occur graphically, extremely unbalancing, yet very well thought out. *So* close to a hat trick.

Some of those have Stealth.

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I think the custom farm mishes are sad and are more damaging than realized. If you can create a cutom mish designed to level your characters and to reap maximum amounts of Xp/inf/Tix then how much would you still populate the real game?

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Just imagine if you could live in a world that was brighter and more colorful than the real world! A world where you didn't have to deal with petty annoyances like having a job -- a world where everything was easier than normal. A world where you were stronger, faster, perhaps even seemed smarter than you are in the real world. A world where you were practically... super-powered? And the only times you had to venture back into the real world were when there was something you needed from it.

Yes, friends. Beware of Mission Architect -- as it will destroy your grasp on reality!

I'd prefer a numerically-weighted "free mode" build option. Or the ability to edit the attack list in the .storyarc file. Or even just the ability to select "extreme" and disable one or more of the powers, other than the ones available on Easy. (I don't know if difficulty level adjusts rewards, but you could just scale to Easy automatically if this is done.)

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(No other APPs in the game start out like this and if the player has Burn and Blazing Aura from /Fire? LOL)

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Except, you know, Weapon Mastery. Which has a placeable ranged -slow -fly damage dealing debuff that can double stack.

You know what else would be great? A PBAoE stun effect that combos with Blazing Aura. It's like a slow, except all they can do is stagger around, not attacking!

Oh, wait. That's what /Dark Armor gets out of the box.

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Yes, my AT has some of the best damage in the game and criticals to double that awesome damage, but now I can Debuff you on top of it all!

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Yep. Just like Broadsword, Katana, Claws, Spines, Dark Melee, Dual Blades, Dark Armor, Shield Defense, Willpower, Dark Mastery, Body Mastery, and Weapon Mastery... all of which have debuff effects.

Man, what's with the lack of extrapolation that goes on here? Pay attention to the game the way it's played. C'mon, it's not that hard. Sure, it requires a little bit of reading and a little bit of math, but I promise you, you can do it with just a tiny bit of effort.

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I think it's funny when people ask for hot feet, like they've never tried to melee with it on.

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It comes from using Burn. I think primarily a /Fiery Aura would want Hot Feet, because the additional Afraid is a small price to pay for the Slow. And I don't feel bad at all for wanting //Fire Mastery to combo with Fire/Fire. Spines/ and /DAs could also get some use out of it, and possibly some of the higher-taunt secondaries like /SD, /Invuln, or a /WP with a dam proc in the aura.

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Farming is here to stay so people need to accept that fact and move on.

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Yeah, sure, okay; I farm so I can do expensive things I want to do. I farm Prestige all the time for my tiny SG. And lemme tell you, that is slow going. The only place it's worthwhile at all to do on a team is Monster Island (zone or sub-zone), and hardly anyone wants to go there unless there's a Hami run coming soon.

But I'm OK with farming requiring a little bit of hunting around, thought, and creativeness to do. So I'm happy with developers and community support closing down the more obvious routes. I feel like the stigma attached to farming is in large part due to the sort of people who advertise themselves as farmers... and anything that frustrates the sorts I'm thinking of gets a gold star in my book.