Lakanna

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See, in theory, we all want it. How does one quantify who wants it more? Theoretically we all want it equally badly. How does the system allocate this scarce resource (scarce because it was intentionally designed to be scarce -- they wanted something to be rare)? I submit that "first come, first served" is unfair, and "random drops" is unsatisfying -- you're unlikely to ever get the one you want. "Willing to pay" is fair-ER, and a decent measure of differing levels of desire.

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So the people willing and able to pay get the nice stuff. If you can't afford them, or think prices are simply too high, well, that's your own fault, and you don't get to play with the great options that other, more deserving, players can get.

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Everyone is on a semi-level playing field to earn cash -- it doesn't have to take a lot of logged-in playing time, and although people who were here first have a leg up, it's been shown a new person can make a billion in a month from scratch. What vet badge are you on?

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42. marketeering is the only way to earn that kind of cash in short order. Playing the game "normally"- missions, occasional TFs, teaming with friends - will cut into your earning potential by a serious amount. If you want purples, the market realistically is the only game in town. Nothing else even comes close.

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So we are left with the imperfect, but better than the alternatives, market price method for allocating purples.

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Except the alternative of letting everyone get the shinies, letting every player have a reasonable (a loaded word, I know) chance of getting what they want. A shocking idea that a game should be FUN and not WORK, but as I've said before, other games already do the high-end powergamer-only loot thing. CoX was always great because it was a casual game. Introducing ultra-powerful loot wasnt the bad idea: making it ultra-rare was a terrible idea from what the game has always been.

Wondering why the RMT spammers are such a nuisance? INF is profitable now. People, players, are more willing than ever to actually go to WORK and earn REAL MONEY to get the rare stuff. When that becomes preferable to people over playing the game because of a terrible reward system, the devs should realize that the next obvious step for a lot of subscribers is to simply leave, or go play a game that does the loot system better. They can act, or watch as people get fed up with always being behind inflation curve and leave.

Actually, Goat, I might not have been very clear there. The scenario I was referring to was:
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POs risk being relegated to a real Black Market, traded within the PvP community and never even getting on the market.

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That's what I was referring to for that entire post. I know that increasing the rewards might get some people to try PvP, and some might even like it.

What I meant, though, was that if the devs keep them very rare, they provide an incentive to PvP, while making them so valuable that they most likely would never hit the market. Traded, as you said, amongst PvP players on a server. However, The devs HAVE shown a tendancy to obsess at times over people playing the game in a specific way to get specific things. Maybe the rarity of PvP IOs is to make them too valuable to put onto the market at all, keeping them for the most part confined to the community of PvP players. I don't think that's a great idea ("doesn't make much sense to me") but I have seen a few times where the developers have specific idea of how players should be behaving, and will enforce that behavior with a heavy hand.

There is no practical difference between "none for sale at any price" and "one for sale for 1 Billion INF" to most players. When prices are out of reach for most players, then whether or not any are available is a moot point: there might as well not be any available. For most players, there is no practical difference between the availability on the market of the high-end stuff: it's simply not available to them.

PVP IO's traded amongst PvP players, and benefiting the players that actively PvP, instead of being on the market is a design failure only if the devs wanted these to be available in ways other than PvP. The scenario you describe would encourage people to PvP for IOs, rather than marketeer for what is supposed to be a reward for PvP. I can't say that makes a lot of sense to me, but it is a possibility for a dev team that is sometimes extremely concerned with players playing the game the "right" way.

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MOAR DROPS is an entitlement whine because all it does is increase rewards for something people will do anyway (team so they can steamroll stuff).

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What would completely fix this would be to have an occasional event that dramatically increased the drop rate for PVP recipes and XP too. Like, insanely hugely bump the drop rate to something amazing like 1:5 instead of 1:100 and double or triple XP too. Such that PVE'ers would have the same kind of slavering reaction they have to double XP weekend.

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that's a great idea.

I mean, some folk will just never set foot in a pvp zone, but it would be great incentive for folk like me who'd like to like it.

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Which is it? If the PvP IO thread, you advocate MOAR DROPS, even supporting a suggestion to increase the drop rate on them (for an event, not permanently, I admit) by a huge margin, for IOs that, as has been pointed out to me many times, nobody NEEDS and nobody is entitled to. When is something rare enough that you consider raising the drop rate to NOT be entitlement issues, but instead to be a reasonable, no, a "great" idea?

Because I want specific builds for certain characters. Not every one, but a few specific characters are going to be IO'd out. I can play the game, even high-end farming and running TF's until my eyes bleed,and make some small progress. or I can play the market, be bored out of my mind doing it, but reach the shinies many many times faster. As much as i farm and run missions, they're really a small supplement to the income I make on the market when I bother to play it.

AE. There are no salvage or recipe drops when running most AE missions, only tickets. And since recipes are the "big money" items, peopl are burning their AE tickets on recipes, not salvage. The result is that salvage supply went down. Right after I14, salvage prices REALLY spiked, they've come down a bit withint he last 2 weeks or so. What you see now is tame compared to what it was.

honestly, part of the efficiency of a market is also based on the idea that it becomes more efficient as more people participate. Making things easier to get in alternative ways means less people will play the market, which in turn makes it less efficient. Very small changes to other reward systems could easily snowball through negative feedback and the nature of markets. Probably why the devs decided to make merits so inefficient to begin with: the market works best when the market works best. This is why I suggested such a minor change to drop rates: the XP scaling system for teams increases XP gained by 2.5x for 8 people. It looks big, but like I posted earlier, it would still work out to less that one half of one percent chance for purples. And those drops are split among 8 people.

Of course a market system is going to be more efficient. If it isn't the most efficient way to do things, then it becomes completely pointless. But currently, it's not just the most efficient, it's several ties more efficient. Which is why I mentioned a "rough parity." The market should be better, but there are changes that would bring other reward systems a bit closer without making the market redundant. For example, if IOs were put into a store, but priced at, say 25, 50, and 100 million for uncommon/rare/ultra rare, that would still leave the market with a lot of room to play, but would also set effective price caps: nobody would buy it on the market when the store was cheaper (OK... yes, SOMEONE would.)

There is a middle ground between "the market is several times more efficient in generating rewards than any other use of time." and "The market is useless, the other ways are better." There's a LOT of middle ground to play in there, with the optimal result being "The market is better and faster, but you can get there nearly as efficiently using these other systems."

Most favorite: Arachnos. A large variety of types that can mean one fight is cake, and the next one, they pull out the tricks and you're suddenly on the defensive. I like that they can pull dirty tricks, have them feel like dirty tricks, and NOT feel like "the AI is cheating again."

Least Favorite: CoT after 15 and before 40. No coincidence, this is where the Spectrals show up. The ToHit debuff is what breaks it for me, miss miss miss miss miss streakbreaker miss miss miss miss...

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Freakshow. I think it's because they're such absolutely unshakeable optimists. They may be anarchic, drug-addled, gangbanging thugs with less sense than God gave a chicken, but you have to give them credit- they're resolutely cheerful, and, well... "Hey, this cape just beat me and six of my buddies unconscious with their bare hands. I think I'll jump up alone and go after them again!"

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Hilarious. Made me choke on my coffee.

Never expected a lot of support. What I expected, and mostly got, were people with a reason to dislike this. Even some feedback into improving the idea (such as making sure that a teammate can't contribute to any bonus unless they are eligible to actually get drops.)

I do get a bit snarky when the word "entitlement" comes up, because it seems anymore to be an unthinking reflex to anything that isn't "play the market, profit, buy what you want." Honestly, for Goat, I DID read your guides, and have made a lot more INF than I thought possible over the last few months following the advice in them.

I still don't think the system is flawless, though. I think that it can be improved. I believe, and this is one of the things that nobody here will agree with, that there should be multiple avenues to achieving IO's, which are really the end-game content right now. I also believe that those avenues should have rough parity: no one way is so much better than all the others that the others might as well not exist. Merits were a good idea, but the time investment in them is high. Adding Pool C drops to bosses is a good idea, and for someone soloing, I think the drop rate for them is just about right. Tickets give a random roll relatively cheap, time-wise: it lacks a systematic way to achieve any specific recipe, but adds a lot of random stuff to the game, which the market can pick up and run with. What it lacks, it makes up for in speed and surplus recipes.

Notice, each of those has made it EASIER for players to get rewards. Since the market was introduced, reward systems that bypass the market have been put in place specifically to make some things easier to get.

The proposed change would benefit teaming, rather than soloing. One thing that I've been thinking today is that, of the hero-side TFs, Statesman, Lady Grey, Khan, and Imperious can drop purples. None of the others. Villain-side, it's Recluse, Lady Grey, Barracuda, and Imperious. Of course, villains doesn't have anything like Positron with huge merit rewards to encourage low-level play. I'd imagine that Imperious, Khan, and Barracuda would be the most popular level 50 play, but those are already subject to diminishing returns. [edit- that discourage repeated running of the same content.] AE doesn't have a chance of dropping purples at all, so teaming there wouldn't have any effect on the distribution. The overall drop rate for purples would simply not go up much, across the entire game. Now the overall salvage rates would, and pool A recipes might once again become fairly common.

Overall, it would increase supply of everything. I mostly play red-side, where it isn't uncommon to see none for sale at any price on a lot of things. Blue-side, pool A recipes are generally plentiful already, and salvage is slowing down but still higher than it was before MA.

I think the the developers moves towards alternate avenues of reaching IO's, combined with the possibility of increasing supply on the red-side and the low impact it would ACTUALLY have on the drop rate of purples game-wide, made this a possibility. Thanks to everyone who posted with feedback, even and especially the negative that made me rethink a few of my original ideas.

"Entitlement whines" such as claiming that one specific playstyle SHOULD and OUGHT to have far better rewards than any other, even to the point of claiming that anything that takes away from that one preferred playstyle is a "backwards idea" by the developers? It has always seemed to me that the first people to start saying "entitlement" like it's an actual argument are the biggest hypocrites in defending the sense that their own preferred playstyle should be inherently more rewarding than any other.

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I think loose words like "fine" are the problem here. ET worked fine for a bajillion issues and changed. Hover and Fly animations worked "fine" for years and changed.

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I'm not saying they won't do something silly and misguided- we have ample evidence that they will. Tickets, for instance.

I'm saying the system we have now does what it was designed to do quite well and there the only rationale driving this call for change is "I deserve the good stuff for less effort!"

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Hmm. Try "They system we have now does what it was designed to do quite well if you play the market And the only rationale that I can see driving this call..."

Make sure to account for both personal bias and personal blind spots there. Motivations, especially ones from an anonymous poster somewhere on the internet, aren't always easy to guess, no matter how much you may WANT them to be simple and easy to understand and dismiss.

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I for one would welcome a small increase, simply because that means another market shake-up, and that's when I have the easiest time making big jumps in my riches. Change = recallibration, which is where risk-takers can benefit most easily.

RagManx

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I wonder... Is it safe to assume that as a whole, people solo more during the week and team more when there are more people on during the weekend? If anything, this would make the weekday/weekend price fluctuations even more pronounced, if it were true. Just a thought for the risk-takers.

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I doubt marketeers want drop rates up. Hurts their business. Wrong forum to ask about higher drop rates..

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'
Exactly the reason I brought it here. I wouldn't get very good feedback if I put it anywhere else. So far, the majority of the arguments against center around the effect it would have on purple recipes, with almost no mention of how it would affect rare salvage, desirable Pool A like Crushing Impact or Thunderstrike, or even the way people choose to spend their time playing. Even at 2x drop rate, teaming would still be less rewarding as recipe and salvage drops go, but increasing the rewards a bit could ease the strong DISINCENTIVE to team.

I found myself thinking today that perhaps the devs aren't picking solo play OR teams as a "baseline' drop rate. The devs have the resources to datamine the game as a whole. I wonder if they have the sophistication to figure out the normal reward rates for farming vs. running solo missions vs. 8-man teams. I honestly don't know how good their datamining algorithms are, and that's the sort of thing I don't expect them to ever reveal. If the drop rate OVERALL is what they're aiming for, then this suggestion is dead in the water, unless they want to use it to encourage teaming.

If they are concerned with individual reward rates, solo vs. teamed, then they might indeed take a look at this as a way to nudge things a bit closer to parity. Only the devs know exactly what they're aiming for, but after considering it, I have no reason to believe that they are looking at anything other than overarcing, game-wide drop rates for things.

Edited- typos.

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Well then, how is any of this an "improvement" to the game other than to perpetuate the notion that leveling to 50 in and of itself should be rewarded with all sorts of top-end items? The reward to leveling a character to 50 is simply having a level 50 character and nothing else.

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Still stuck on purples. You really don't understand how much a small change like this would affect things. All you can see is "OMG, the purple drop rate would go up" and you fail to understand that the limitation inherent in purple drops already would make them the LEAST affected of everything. But fine. It would help, slightly, the low supply of everything red side. Blue-side, it would do the same and probably actually start driving prices on the low- and mid-range IOs down. High-end stuff would still more than likely have far more demand than supply, and the game-wide drop rate for purples would hardly change at all, meaning they would still be ultra rare and highly sought after.

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There is a crystal clear concept: actions that (most efficiently) level a character are seperate from actions that (most efficiently) gain items for that character. This ideology has been around MMOs for a very long time.

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Maybe. So had the idea that creating incentives to team, or even putting roadblocks up that a player NEEDS a team to advance past. CoH is already very much solo-friendly, having thrown out the concept that players must be forced to team. Just because it is done elsewhere, does not make it a good idea. We're talking about THIS game, which has done a lot of things that broke out of the standard MMO model.

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By having an XP multiplier, but NOT drop multiplier in teams, is the devs way of suggesting that teaming should be the optimal choice for gaining levels, not drops. Again, this notion has been around for awhile. How many MMOs even have a drop multiplier for teams?

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Where is your source for what the devs are suggesting? To my knowledge, the red-names have NEVER said anything like what you just decided it must mean.

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the current setup works fine, there's no reason to change it.

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Under that logic, though, Goat, there is no reason or need to ever change or add anything to the game. The devs needn't do anything except bug fixes, ever, because the game as a whole works fine as it is.

I generally split my time between AE farming with my main and a lowbie alt, getting tickets for recipes, and running that same main (dark./dark brute, 50, hundreds of hours played) through my favorite farm spot, slaughtering my way through Arachnos and Crey, including a large number of bosses, at the bottom of the Fab. I will log on other characters, but that's the way I spend most of my time.

The brute, by the way, has a bit over 450 million on him, still needs a few purples and 3 LotG +recharge to finish the dream build I have for him in Mids. I haven't bought any purples for him because, honestly, he gets them enought that I know the ones he needs will show up. Patience, understand?

Your assumption is that you have the first clue as to my motivations. You don't, but that isn't a surprise. I genuinely want to improve the game overall, but you will never understand why, I think. It has nothing to do with greed or entitlement.

Want to make a few more wild, uneducated, baseless guesses about me personally? Hey, you did get the "ton of alts" thing right, you're doing well.

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Still, changing team drop rates wouldn't affect soloists one bit, and it would increase the rewards for those that do team, whether it be PUG or group of close friends.

Kinda sad, the thread became yet another farm thread. I thought the market forum might be better than the rest of the forums at keeping things on track.

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Hrm.....if changing team drop rates won't affect soloists, then why would the drop rate of the soloist affect teams in the first place? The logic should go both ways.

Anyways, the point is teams are already more efficient in many aspects of the game. Would you rather the other way around...no XP bonus, but drop rate bonus for teams?

Just a thought...have you ever considered simply putting more effort and time into getting the items you want? Just making sure all the bases were covered.

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1: Currently, drop rates for soloing are fine. The suggestion I'm making specifically is for teams. You CAN change one without changing the other, by adding in a multiplier for teams, which is what the thread was about if you had bothered to read it.

2: And now you try to make it a zero-sum game, where something ust be lost to have something else gained. A large part of the point is that teaming actually penalizes a person as far as salvage and recipe drops go. I would like to close the gap between a soloist and a dedicated team player a bit. It STILL wouldn't even be close, but it would be closer.

3: 2 accounts. 4-5 hours a night. Often 2-boxing. Off and on for the last 5 years. Does that meet your criteria? Have you considered your own assumptions carefully? Just covering all the bases.

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However, though...why is there an expectation that casual teaming should yield so-and-so amount of loot for players? Highly-sought after stuff should require more effort.
...
If you're so concerned about getting items as efficiently as possible, then start soloing.


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When I want drops, I DO solo. And I get drops. I have plenty of purpled out characters...although less so now that one purple can finance an entire mid-range IO build.

It's not about entitlement. I'm just saying this is an MMO, and MMOs are usually designed to encourage player interaction. Most of the game is set up to encourage teaming, so why is this the exception?

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Because if you don't cater to solo players sometimes too you lose the interest of a sizeable fanbase who sometimes enjoys not having to risk looking for teammates of questionable quality if their friends arent online?

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Still, changing team drop rates wouldn't affect soloists one bit, and it would increase the rewards for those that do team, whether it be PUG or group of close friends.

Kinda sad, the thread became yet another farm thread. I thought the market forum might be better than the rest of the forums at keeping things on track.

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there is no gap to close. i'll say it again, the drop rates for an 8 man team are the same for a solo person runing a non padded mission. each person has the same chance of dropping something the same way they do if they ran a mission solo. the padded mission solo runner has no place in this discussion. get over it.

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Say it all you like, you're not correct. The drop rate for the team AS A WHOLE is the same per mob, but per person, it's (normal drop rate) /(team size). The only possible way that the per-person drop rate would be the same is if spawn size scaled up linearly with the number of people (8-person team faces 8x the enemies) and that simply does not happen.

Also- yeah, any team member would have to actually be able to get a drop (be physically present, and not be fighting greys) in order to contribute to the bonus drop rate. If a solo farmer set a map for 8, and ran it himself, then he gets the same drop rate as he does now. If a team of 8 goes into a map, they would get, collectively, more drops than the solo farmer would, although still less per person. As it stands now, an 8-person team and a solo padded for 8 both get the same amount of drops. Adding a drop-scaling method would reward people who actually play in teams, without penalizing any other playstyle.

I'm not entirely surprised to see purples dominating the conversation, but I AM surprised that that seems to be as far as soem people can think. PUrples have several restrictions already: level 47+ mobs, only slottable by 50s, and an extremely low (1 in 600?) drop rate. (0.16 percent chance to drop per mob.) Even at 2.5x normal, the chance to drop rate would be 0.416 percent chance to drop per mob: still less than one half of one percent drop rate.

Where this would make a REAL difference, is in Pool A recipes (Crushing Impact? Thunderstrike?) and Salvage drops. The drop rates for these are already decently high, and increasing them could easily collapse some niches. The ultra-rare argument doesn't hiold up here, although they are listed as uncommons still. Would the extra supply be enough to help the anemic red-side market? Would supply overtake demand and collapse niches either side?

Let's have some fun. Pretend this suggestion doesn't apply to purples. Then make arguments against it. Seems like a lot of the opposition to is is JUST because purples would be included, even though the idea includes a lot more than that.

By the way: purples should still be included. Any argument against it that uses purples as a basis and can't hold up without invoking them, might need to be rethought.

The way I understand it, purples (and all drops, actually) are given a specific drop rate per mob. A solo person with the map set for 8 should get approximately the same rewards as a full 8-person team running the map, only concentrated. The concentration wasn't what I meant to ask about, though.

When a mob is defeated, it gives a set amount of XP. On teams, bonus XP is then added, depending on team size. a team of 8 doesn't get nearly 8x the XP of someone soloing the whole map, but they do collectively get more than a single person would. I was proposing adding a similar scaling to drop rates. It would lessen the heavy incentive to solo for drops, because teams would be overall more efficient. It would also add a lot of incidental recipes and salvage to the game, and hopefully those would make their way onto the market.

I was including purples, but not just purples. All varieties of salvage and all recipes that drop from mobs would get the same scaling.

For the numbers... A team of 8 has a 250% XP modifier, which is then split up between all team members (keeping it simple- I know it's a lot more involved). What I'm thinking is that if they did something similar to drops, it would go a long way towards increasing supply, but the rare recipes would still be very rare. Salvage and Pool A recipes are where the biggest differences would be seen, with their already high drop rates.

And Lavitae, CoX still is NOT those "other games." If that playstyle appeals, then by all means, those "other games" already have the gameplay mechanics you're advocating. Just because someone else does it, doesn't make it a great idea.

I've been wondering, what do the devs consider an acceptable drop rate? The thread about the "purple problem" brought up a good point: solo farmers get far more drops than team players.

If the IO and salvage drop rate is balanced around soloing, then should the devs add a scaling mechanism similar to teh way XP is handled, with large teams getting less per person, but more overall? Or should drops for 8-person teams stay the way they are? If the drop rate IS considered balanced for large teams, would solo farming be considered "not working as intended," because of the higher reward rate?

I obviously think that the drop rates across the board should be raised, and significantly. I would, however, be very interested to see what effect a scaling drop rate for teams would have on the availability of recipes and salvage on the market. I would assume that it would bring availability up and prices down, even without the need to remove INF from the game. Since large teams are more likely to spawn bosses, the Gold Roll recipes would be more likely to drop as well. Higher supply, would demand still overwhelm it and create the high prices that we see now, or would it eventually outstrip demand, cratering niches and possibly the entire market?

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It seems to be working as designed.
If anything, there are too many purples around.
Purples are supposed to be Uniques - aka Ultra-Rares.
These things are not supposed to be easy to come by.


I'm not for jacking up prices, but - hey - the price is what the market can bear. It is too bad that there are so many RMT's out there and that someone will be paying cash for a purple going for 180+ mil inf, but that is the awful truth.

Your inf gain is probably also the gain of an RMT/gold-farmer.

Market PvP powers activated!

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Think I've mentioned before, that when extreme scarcity is introduced, it opens the door for RMT traders. When I can work 4 hours and make enough cash to buy a billion INF, or I can marketeer for 20 hours to get the same amount, or farm myself for 40 hours to do the same, which is less "work?"

I have never bought INF, but I know people who have. They value these virtual items enough to pay real money for them, and value their time highly enough that "grinding" to get them is unpleasant.

When RMT becomes a problem in your game, your reward system is borked. When people would rather work at a real job to get things than play your game to earn them, the reward system is not functioning properly. And the more broken your reward system is, the more of a problem RMT will become for you.

Still not entirely sure what "the Purple problem" is. If its that they're too expensive, well, there's not thing that the players can really do about that. Supply, demand, and scarcity.

If it's that the drop rate is too low to begin with, well, nothing players can do about that directly either. We can try to tell the devs that the drop rates are too low, but the devs have been pretty clear that purples are going to stay ultra-rare. "Vision" and all that, I suppose. Funny how even after all this time, that word as relates to the devs still makes me cringe.

Simply put, there is no way to prove objectively that the drop rate is too low. Without that kind of proof, it's unlikely that the devs will revisit drop rates anytime soon, and without the revisiting of the drop rates, purple prices won't come down. Not entirely sure what the problem is. It sucks for people who want to try to earn purples without using the market, but at this time, that is the way things are and it is not likely to change anytime soon.

The devs can't make you use the market, but they can make sure that if you don't, you fall behind those that do.

Do the procs check on every tick of damage, or are they limited to "once every 10 seconds?"