Lothic

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Does this offer include infamy by any chance, or just influence?

I have a red-side virtue VG that is newer and having trouble getting a viable base up and running.

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Well that'd be a question to ask Fulmens, not me.
My guess is that if he has billions to burn blueside he probably has it to spare redside as well...

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I get a number of things out of this:

1) Knowledge. Do people who hate 500:1 feel that 250:1 is a fair ratio? So far I don't think they do- people who take 250:1 seem to be people who are also OK with 500:1 . If 250:1 got me a ton of offers I'd potentially be able to make a case for changing the infrestige ratio. As it is... nope.

2) Inf destruction by the bucket. If inf gets turned into prestige it is out of the game. Inf that people are hoarding could get used for something else- costume contests, paying new SG members, midlife-crisis high end build, whatever- and it's back into the game. And it gets rid of some of my inf as well, causing me to make more, etc.

3) it makes people happy.

4) There may be some people out there who wouldn't otherwise think about turning inf into prestige, who now are considering it.

On point #2: Destroying ten billion inf is HARD. Doing it on market fees means selling a hundred billion inf of stuff. (or buying and slotting a hundred billion inf of stuff. ) This way is less work, although it burns through my personal money a lot faster.

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Again to be clear I'm not strictly criticizing you for your efforts.
I'm sure every person you help out with these deals appreciates it quite a bit.
Being nice to people just for its own sake is often, well, nice enough.

But I suppose I question the basic premise that having too much INF lying around out there in the game is intrinsically a "bad thing" which should be actively dealt with. For instance many of the things that you yourself mention like costume contest prizes or paying SG members seem to me to be relatively beneficial uses of spreading INF around.

As for the INF to Prestige conversion ratio being too unfriendly that topic has been debated quite a bit over the years. It has been generally accepted for a long time (at least as far as I knew from a mathematical argument point of view) that the ratio would probably have to be lowered to more like 100:1 instead of 500:1 for it to actually be considered "fair" from a time and effort standpoint of earning either of the resources in question. At this point it would have already been clear to many that "tricking" a net effect of a 250:1 ratio through actions such as yours would not have been enough to create a significant self-sustaining response to your proposal.

Ultimately your primary concern, which I assume has to do with the fear that prices in the markets are going to continue to rise, just doesn't seem to be -that- critical. Sure prices have risen over time and many could probably easily argue the prices are generally too high right now regardless. But I don't see a 'runaway' inflationary trend in the market. For instance purple recipes that are trading for 80-100 million INF now were trading for that much 6 months ago and so on.

I think by now if there was any impact to market prices caused by people sitting on hordes of INF the effect of that impact has already happened. Happened, as in past tense. Trying to spark a renewed campaign to get "excess" INF sinked out of the game now is a little bit like closing the barn door after the cows have run off. I don't think your intent to do something proactive to reduce inflation in this game is wrong per se, but I do think it's relatively futile all things considered. *shrugs*

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I wouldn't say the offer was complicated, but it did seem way too good to be true to say the least.
It's not a matter of shame but more one of realistic honest skepticism.

Let's be fair here: While it's interesting to see that there's someone out there apparently willing to be generous and philanthropic enough to effectively give away a billion INF just to be "nice" to other people you must admit there are relatively few people out there who would actually do something like that without expectation of anything tangible in return.

What people choose to do with their INF is their own thing.
More power to Fulmens I guess...

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Actually I do understand what Fulmens is trying to do: Destroy excess built up Inf.

What is Fulmens getting out of this? That is also easy if you have <a href="/showflat.php?Number=13608725" target="_blank">read Fulmens' posts</a>: Fulmens believes that excess Inf is driving inflation up. To combat this, Fulmens has come up with several ways to try convince people to remove Inf from the system. Fulmens is putting Inf on the line to facilitate this.

I have not a shred of doubt that the offer is genuine (until bored or a billion inf is reached).

((Edit for bad phrasing.))

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Yeah I assumed Fulmens was trying to "prove" something by offering this otherwise altruistic deal.

Unfortunately the basic flaw in this premise is that excess INF can only really drive up market inflation in this game if people are actually -using- that horded INF to buy things in the markets.

In this scenario Fulmens is likely only going to encourage those who were either A) planning on converting their INF to Prestige regardless of the offer or B) were not planning on spending it at all. I have to think the overall number of people who were going to spend their hordes in the market but were persuaded -instead- to go with this matching INF conversion deal to be practically non-existent, or at least so small as to have no significant effect at all.

Again everyone's free to use their INF anyway they want.
I just think that if Fulmens is "experimenting" with a market theory it's not really worth the effort. *shrugs*

For what it's worth it's long been speculated that the point behind the INF to Prestige conversion feature was as a means to encourage the player base to sink their own INF to get excess amounts of it out of the game. Of course that feature was put in place long before the markets even existed...

Ultimately if the Devs really wanted people to be motivated to use that feature they might entertain the long suggested idea to finally make the conversion ratio something better than the laughable 500:1 it has always been. That way folks like Fulmens wouldn't have to offer this kind of selfless deal in the first place.

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Snip:
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re-wordsmith

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Man... that brings back some memories! I haven't seen or heard that word (well technically I still didn't hear it ) since back when I did work for the school newspaper (both HS and collegiate papers).

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Well I seem to have the uncanny ability to write first drafts of a character descriptions for this game that are always roughly 15-20 characters too long for the in-game space provided. It's ironically funny on some level but a bit annoying as well. This is why losing any more text space, even if it's just a little bit, would actually affect me relatively often.

Anyway I usually end up having to waste time "wordsmithing" my descriptions to try to say what I want to say with several words less. I always manage to do it, but I imagine over the last several years I've probably spent at least a few hours total in the process tinkering with many different descriptions just for this.

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A simple fishbowl helmet as a shoulder item would be absolutley brilliant.

It would clip with some hairstyles, but we already have hairstyles clipping with certain collars and capes.
Leave that to the player to reconcile.

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I highlighted that phrase because I wonder how many 1,000s of hours of both Devs' and players' time could have been saved over the years if the Devs had been more willing to give us more options and let us players "reconcile" what clipped with what and/or looked fine anyway. Clearly the Devs are way, way too conservative about what they let us play with and have wasted far too much effort keeping us 'safe' from potential clips that are -not- that big a deal.

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I really don't get this thread...

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It's an act of kindness. He's offering to help people with bases and expects nothing in return.

It's a shame you don't get it.

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I wasn't being sarcastic ...I really don't understand what he's offering to do.

Is he offering to join an sg and convert 50 mill of his own influence?

You really shouldn't judge others falsely.

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I didn't make any judgement about you, nor did I say you were being sarcastic. I merely said it's a shame you you don't get what he's posting he'll do. His initial post doesn't seem that complicated to understand.

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I wouldn't say the offer was complicated, but it did seem way too good to be true to say the least.
It's not a matter of shame but more one of realistic honest skepticism.

Let's be fair here: While it's interesting to see that there's someone out there apparently willing to be generous and philanthropic enough to effectively give away a billion INF just to be "nice" to other people you must admit there are relatively few people out there who would actually do something like that without expectation of anything tangible in return.

What people choose to do with their INF is their own thing.
More power to Fulmens I guess...

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Putting it in those terms one can almost question the whole idea of "accolade powers" in the first place. *shrugs*

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It's a question of intent. I don't think accolades were meant to sweeten badges for everyone else, I think they were just supposed to be rewards for investing in the badge system. The difference is very small, admittedly.

It helps that accolade powers aren't really essential.

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I think it does come down to the vague realm of hair-splitting intents.

The current accolade badges require a set of individually unimportant badging activities in order to get the end result powers. For most people the badges/powers are the primary goal, not the actions it took to get the accolades. The ends tend to justify the means.

On the other hand the OP is interested in encouraging and/or manipulating a specific badging activity with a "carrot and stick" approach. The accolade power is not as critical as trying to permanently train people to perform a single desired activity needed to get the power. As far as the OP is concerned the nature of the particular "carrot" is of secondary importance.

The main problem with the "carrot and stick" way of thinking here is that eventually a given player can/will get the carrot. Once the player has the carrot (in this case the accolade power) there is no longer any motivation to keep up the specific activity (i.e. teaming) it took to get the carrot in the first place.

In a nutshell we players aren't puppies.
We can't be potty-trained to maintain any style of play we ultimately don't want to enjoy.

Yeah ultimately badges should not be seen as a direct 'tool' the Devs can use to -motivate- people to play the game in any particular way. They exist if you want them or not but they should never be "needed" for anything strictly necessary to succeed in the game.

I'll mention the I15 MA badge rollback again to point out that the Devs are mainly removing them because they felt they were encouraging people to play the game in a manner they didn't like. Clearly the Devs are now aware of the unexpected power badges have to "suggest" play styles and I would encourage them not get into the business of actively trying to manipulate people via badges one way or the other. The side effects of that kind of meddling could be widespread and counterproductive. Instead of having to grind for badges it looks like the game is swinging the other way where badges will become so trivial to earn there won't be any point to them.

Putting it in those terms one can almost question the whole manipulative idea of "accolade powers" in the first place. *shrugs*

Well as an avid badger I wouldn't mind a new series of "number of missions completed while teaming" badges. The idea of badges for "time while teaming" could (and would) be AFK farmed way too easily. Sure technically a "number of missions completed" series could be farmed as well, but at least that type of farming would require some "at the keyboard" player involvement.

Having said that I doubt this kind of badge would appear in the game now in any form. The Devs are on the verge of getting rid of most of the MA badges related to "completing X number of MA arcs" in I15 on the pretense that they encourage grinding/farming. My guess is that they would consider any kind of time/count badges associated with something like teaming to be just as bad at this point.

My guess is that we won't see a "female huge" body type even in the Character Creator 2.0 coming in the Going Rogue expansion.

As Derangedpolygot implied there are suggestions related to any game that run against the fundamental limitations of the game engine. This game clearly -could- support a "female huge" body type if it ever became a priority. But unfortunately with the way power animations are implemented (as explained by the Devs in the past) it would likely represent an overwhelming amount of work for the current game.

The Devs had to get this game working years ago and that meant having to live with certain compromises and sacrifices. In this case the game was simply never designed to allow for new body types to be easily added "plug-n-play" style to the game. I wouldn't really call it a "bad" design as much as it was a reasonably remote consideration that had to be sacrificed in order to get the rest of the game working.

Bottomline you'll probably have to turn to another/future game to see this body type at this point...

I think at this point it's all going to come down to what the Character Creator 2.0 is going to offer us in the upcoming Going Rogue expansion. That'll likely be what we'll get in terms of this game ever getting "modernized" in those kinds of ways.

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45 months would be a good place for one, I think

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There have been good arguments both for and against allowing MA slots to be given out as Vet awards.

I think as a compromise the Devs should allow one extra MA slot be given just for the 45th month Vet award. This would be more than NO Vet MA slots yet still allow the "pay for MA slot" idea to be of some value to everyone.

As the only Vet award that didn't get a "unique" award assigned to it the 45th is an obvious choice.

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Flight may be the coolest travel power in the game but why keep it so slow.

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It's kept "so slow" (according to you) precisely -because- it's the coolest travel power in the game.
If it were as fast as SJ or SS then no one would likely bother to use those powers. I wouldn't.
It's called power balancing. Think about it.

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Yeah basically the thing ought to be smart enough so that whatever they are using for embedded control characters won't count -against- the usable character limit in the first place.

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Why? The whole point is too be able to calculate storage space - THAT'S why limits are in place. Just because whatever they changed now takes up more stored chracters to implement a line break - it doesn't mean that the devs should resize (and increase)their data field size for something so minor.

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Players should not be forced to -reduce- the amount of text they have had for years in their descriptions because the Devs decided to change how they implemented it. That would be the very definition of A Step Backward™ and, apparently, exactly what we just got stuck with.

If the Devs have to (gods forbid) internally increase the storage space required for character descriptions by a few dozen bytes to mitigate the impact of their tinkering then I'm willing to let them make that change for me.

Maybe the Devs will remove random powers from a given powerset the next time they make a change to that kind of thing too...

Yeah basically the thing ought to be smart enough so that whatever they are using for embedded control characters won't count -against- the usable character limit in the first place.

This would be amazingly helpful. But sadly there would still be people out there who would refuse to learn or understand what it was for and find new ways to misunderstand your intent anyway.

Well it appears that Character Descriptions have been fixed in the I15 beta... sort of.

Unfortunately the game is still stripping out any Unicode from our text. Unicode had been allowed for 5 years up until I14. For the life of me I can't figure out what "exploit" that restriction is suppose to take care of in our character descriptions.

Also it appears while we can have separate lines of text again it's using some kind of weird <cr><lf> deal that ultimately wastes more of our allotted character space for text than it used to. I tested this by cutting-n-pasting a description that used to fit perfectly before I14 but now it has the last roughly 10 characters of the last couple of words truncated. Now I have to go back and re-wordsmith my descriptions to get them to fit again. *sigh*

The main question here seems to be why is something like Power Customization (however it is defined) more important to some people than general graphics improvements. To me I'd think they are equally important now, but to understand what's happened I think you have to review the timing of these suggestions.

People have been wanting Power Customization for probably as long as the game has been around. Five years ago, back when the graphics of this game were not so arguably "outdated" there was no need to work on graphics improvements. If we had somehow gotten Power Customization at some point in the past then we would not be in our current situation where people are still crying for it AND dealing with a game that now has a pressing need for graphics improvements at the same time.

One could argue, as you have, that general graphics improvements may be more useful to the average player than -any- kind of Power Customization at this point. But if the Devs had prioritized things differently we might have a game that already had one of these two things done instead of having to debate about which one we want now.

This is why I'm a bit more worried about the threat CO represents to CoX than you seem to be.
CO will have both arguably better looking graphics AND Power Customization at its launch...

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The game system itself is awesomely flexible, if a bit intimidating to those who hate numbers, but most of the number crunching is just addition and subtraction once you get past character generation and there have been numerous programs written to make it all easier.

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The system was very flexible if you could deal with the math. In fact whenever we wanted to try out a new rule system X but had to tinker with enough of its features with house rules to make it work a lot of times we'd throw up our hands and say, "Why bother with rule system X any more? Why don't we just play our idea using the HERO system instead?"

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Which is hilariously sad, as the background is all they have rights to.

They aren't allowed to use the Hero system.

LOL, then again i've heard some on outside blogs say the same thing about THIS game.

I don't agree, just saying they say it.

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Champs was a great set of rules attached to a mediocre 'universe'. I had a ton of fun playing it over the years, but we used our own settings.

I'm not fanatical about the CoH setting, but Lord Recluse > Dr. Destroyer, Arachnos > Viper, Positron > Defender, etc etc.

The Champs universe was just very derivative and stale.

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This pretty much sums up my experience with Champs as well.

I loved the HERO game system and used it to play many different characters and campaigns.
But I can't recall one time that we ever based any game using the established Champs "universe".
We always came up with our own settings and stories.

Frankly I'm not too impressed to hear CO got the Champs setting but not the HERO system itself...

If this was finally fixed then it must have been dealt with a few days ago in the 6/12 patch.
Pretty sure I tried this about a week ago and it was still broke then.

I'll have to give it another try tonight. Let's just hope it doesn't get re-broken again.
Sometimes little QoL fixes like this don't get checked back into the code baselines...

Well we can compare your suggestion to the only other obvious "currency conversion" the game supports which is the INF to Prestige conversion.

The INF to Prestige conversion rate has been set at 500:1 for years now. Many think that it's generally not worth it under any circumstances. There have been people who've suggested that if that rate was more like 100:1 then it would be much closer to what the two things are "worth" in terms of time and effort to earn playing the game.

So based on this example I believe that even if the Devs decided to give us a MA ticket to Merit conversion capability the rate for it would likely be prohibitive. My guess is that they would make it more like 500:1 or even 1000:1 (as in 1000 MA tickets per merit) to make it something people -could- use but would not go out of their way to farm for.

It might be of some use to review the contents of the current word filter.
Not exactly sure the best way to manage that or who'd you choose to spend the time to reoganize it.

Bottomline a simple -word- filter is never going to be the answer here because what's truly important is the context words are used in. There are remarkably few words that are "bad" 100% of the time regardless of usage. Most of the time words are only considered offensive or profane depending on how they are used. Until someone can develop a reasonable "context filter" this problem will never really be solved.

Like others have said I keep the chat word filter off and just let my brain sort out the context.
It's the best we can do at the moment.

People have been debating whether our Devs should concentrate more on content or bugs for roughly 5 years now. If this game lasts for another 5 years they will likely still be debating the same exact thing.

Now, while I'm sure you had the best of intentions with starting this thread I'd simply suggest you think about what I just said and realize just how completely pointless this 'question' really is.

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Responding to the "too little too late" comment made earlier.......

It's just my opinion, but some people still would have gone to CO, even if we did have everything anyone ever wanted, just for the fact that CO is new.

And I'm not saying that it's how the poster is, but some people are quick to jump onto something new and wish death upon the place where they came from. (From what I see on the CO boards when I read them, they want this game to crash and burn, and see CO as the end all be all of future MMOs. I don't see them comment too much on DCUO.)

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Well I did use a "too little too late" phrase earlier in this thread so I'll assume this was directed at me.

To begin with I'm a 60+ month vet of CoX so after that much time it's kind of hard to randomly question my degree of loyalty to this game. But by the same token I'm a realist and realize that CO does represent credible competition to this game which has otherwise enjoyed years of a virtual niche monopoly in the MMO world.

I care enough about CoX to understand that if by some miracle CO manages to answer most if not all of the lingering desires this game still fails to provide then it's going to encourage people to jump ship even more than just the "new game" factor by itself would. Based on everything I've seen so far concerning CO if this game ends up only offering a "half-baked" solution to Power Customization then it could very well be "too little too late" on that particular issue.

I'm not looking for either game to "win or lose" against each other. In fact if CO ends up being good I actually intend to play both so that I can enjoy their unique differences and strengths. But it's entirely possible that if one game doesn't stand up to the challenge and falls far behind the other then it could end up getting plowed under. I'm not "wishing" that fate on anyone. *shrugs*