PumBumbler

Then everyone would have PvP IOs slotted in every power, including brawl.

Stop that. Apparently I made a toon last night that someone said, "You look like BillZ". :P

I would like to see this proposed build that uses 20 x 2B+ IOs. All the most expensive stuff aren't necessarily going to be any good if it is poorly slotted.

I really think that your build is half of your problem. The rest is actually your attitude, to be honest.

It's obvious that you're angry that you haven't kept up with the Jones', and you feel that you are behind the curve with respect to some of the other posters here.

Making them mad isn't going to garner any sympathy here. A lot of posters here offered to help you mitigate your issue and give you a hand, yet you paint them as being the cause of your problems.

Your arguments aren't very sensible as well. You speak of selling a purple for 200M and being able to finance SO for 25 alts for a year. How can't they do that now, without needing to sell a purple? Besides, this 12 year old average player can do all of that without price caps, so what is the cause of the big outrage and need for price caps?

I believe the biggest cause for your complaints is because you don't have loot and you aren't willing to get it. There are plenty of ways to get loot without having to farm like it was a full time job, or use RMT. The fact is that many of the posters here have done so using these 'alternative' and still fun methods, and in their own way.

Many of these same people have published guides on what and how they have done things, so for you to paint them with a gold farm buying brush isn't going to engender much sympathy, if at all.

What's the point? He's already pointed out he's got nuttin'.

You could also try PvP as a way to get PvP IOs. Of course, farming said IOs is actually more efficient than playing, but that seems to be the way with everything else as well.

Should casual players be able to get a top flight build in a loot based game? That is the basic premise that you are putting forth. If casual players can get the best stuff, then what do the hardcore players do with their time? The grind is an essential part of that balance.

If you don't think that you are a casual player, then I suppose that there are other ways you can play the game to improve your inf/loot stream.

Also, there are many cost effective builds that do not require such expensive loot. Better that you post your proposed build and then get some community feedback on how you can reduce the cost of it while retaining most of what you are aiming for. I'm pretty sure you can get a build that would be 95% of what you are looking to build right now at under 2B inf, and 90% of what you are looking to do at under 500M inf.

Otherwise this is pretty much just a rant.

This is a bias that no one else has ever bothered to comment on when I brought this up. Reward merits were devised such that fast TF runners would see the lion's share of the rewards at the expense of the slow/casual/pug TF runners, and TF failures were never factored in.

If Alignment merits are meant to pull it back the other way, such that the casual player can get the similar rewards as TF runners, that's not such a bad thing. However, with so much more in rewards banked already, the fast TF runners already are making their presence felt simply because they can outbid/outbuy the casual player because they have billions of inf and thousands of merits already.

I suppose the only advise I have to anyone getting into the rewards game is to farm Purple and PvP IOs. The demand is much higher than the supply, and reward merits and alignment merits are being cashed in at a furious rate to get the right Purple/PvP IOs.

As long as your wife doesn't stay for BillZ, you're OK.

I stay because they won't have me anywhere else. That, and I like Cai's avatar.

When you say "switch", does that mean you can switch between earned ones like costumes, or "dump" one in favour of the other and need to re-earn the one that you dumped?

Just strip off the +/++ by giving them to someone instead of trading. Then they are email/AH friendly.

Entirely possible, I gave up on crafting a bunch of stuff a while ago since there was too much to do, so I was very happy buying specific recipes for merits and selling them for 300-350M (lowest level procs). I was able to sell a level 10 BotZ for a billion, but that could have been a 100M typo sale, but you never know.

I understand your reasons for not going the random roll route. After a while the crafting to maximize profits grind really plugs up your inventory and management of goods such that it makes you want to become a "Buy it NOW" kind of person when it comes to the salvage. Quintupling the amount of recipes to make up for the overhead can become quite a drag.

Yes, but that gap has always been there, before R merits were introduced. Reward Merits just made that gap even wider (which I had anticipated and forewarned about), and now Alignment Merits will just make that gap even wider. It didn't stop them from implementing the schemes before, so I doubt that it will give them pause now.

Can I have your stuffs? I should be more bugged than anyone else since I'm sitting on a mountain of merits that have 'lost value' because of the new system. Somehow it doesn't bug me at all. Maybe I'm too far gone to care about it or else I'm resigned to holding depreciating assets.

I'm pretty sure they want to care, but their development model doesn't give them the time to really delve into it. I think it's kind of the same reasoning on issues like ED back in the day. The devs are working on the next couple of issues ahead of where we are now; we are so far back in their rearview mirror that they can't turn around and come back to get us each time we cry foul. It just slows them down too much.

That may be true if you were explicitly buying low level procs with reward merits before, since they went for about 300M or so, but rolling randoms were supposedly better inf/merits AFAIR.

Since the A-Merit version of the Random Roll is actually better than a R-Merit Random Roll, you should be gaining more recipes than you did before the introduction of A-Merits.

However, like you said, this buff means that there is a greater supply of rare recipes, and consequently increased supply will drop the prices of rare recipes wrt to purples on a supply and demand basis.

Again, I don't think the devs look very closely at ratios that change market amounts unless they are an order of magnitude or greater in price, but they've done things to ease supply before. Take costume drops, for example. I don't think they cared about the cost of that stuff more than the availability of it.

It is possible that they've decided to proliferate the amount of good stuff starting from the bottom (if LotG and Numinas can be considered low rent) if things like the i19 incarnate task force is the new baseline for loot that you need to ensure that you remain semi-competitive.

And once again, I will state that the pursuit of loot (heh, it rhymes) usually means that getting a daily allotment of tips for Amerits and converting Rmerits to Amerits and accumulating Rmerits should be part of a ritual for someone who is serious about outfitting their toons.

Of course, anyone who is super serious about that can avoid the market altogether and farm maps for purples and PvP IO farm as well.

I am not a fruit!

They should launch a server for the die hard subscribers that allows them to log into version 1 of the game to see how far we've come. Let's say for the next anniversary party...turn test into Issue 1 for a week.

Personally, I think the lack of decently integrated PvP has held this game back as well. Good players can chew through any amount of content faster than the writers can put it out, so putting out a good PvP system would have kept a lot of people engaged because player behaviours cannot be anticipated as easily as a NPC; and players will keep tweaking their characters for an advantage in PvP. Tweaking toons for PvE is pretty much an exercise in how many angels can dance on the head of pin nowadays.

Since the rules were so different and poorly implemented in this game (let alone the i13 debacle), it seems better not to have PvP in this game at all.

All I know is that they all chose Jack to be the front man for the band. Either they sucked at the rest of it or Jack was the one with the biggest set. The fact that you had to look up the other names makes Jack's role even more prominent in the success of his position. Anyone of the initial crew who launched this game could use the pronoun "I". To insinuate that Jack shouldn't have is just a bit of fandom simply because he is on the other team now.

By that metric, a recipe roll averages 13.3M for 20 merits on average. That is .67 million/merit.

Converting 50 merits + 20M to 1 alignment merit gives you 5 random recipes, which would net you 46.5M (5x13.3M-20M). That works out to .93 million/merit, or effectively 21.5 merits to make 20M back.

Therefore 1 A-Merit equals 50 R-merits + 21.5 R-merits, or effectively 72 merits needs to purchase 1 A-merit. Close to 40% loss.

PS. That also means that rolling for 20 merits isn't as efficient as rolling with 1 A merit.

I think you mean 11 missions over 2 days.

So then converting merits with a 60% efficiency rate isn't as good as a free ride when buying LotGs directly, but you do get a two-for-one deal by rolling randoms when comparing AM to RM (1 AM for 5 random recipes versus 20 RM for 1 random recipe). Hard to say if that completely erases the 40% differential but it certainly lessens it.

I don't understand why people say that AMs are more efficient than RMs, since you are effectively gated from gaining more than 0.5 AM per day by tips but RMs are virtually a free for all. If you wanted to farm AMs anyhow you'd be doing all the ways necessary to generate AMs anyhow.

5.5 tip missions per day = 30 min = .5 AM

LGTF daily = 25 min = 39RM = ~.5AM (when factoring in 40% loss rate and 25 min)

Does that really favor tips over TFs? Play it smart and you can get loads of both anyhow. I'm saying the OP's dichotomy is a false dichotomy. They both work out the same in the end because the player will just choose whatever is most efficient in the end (within reason).

Could be that they will add more changes to allow Rogues and Vigilantes access to their own Merit system or maybe they want to push people to one side or the other. It's just speculation.

The fact that you can't take alignment merits with you is one 'lock in' already.

I have since pecking out cityofheroes on my iPhone was so much slower. I think the login bug probably started happening at the same time that boards.coh.com stopped working for me so that's why I suggested that configuration changes at that time were a good place to start looking.

50RM = 1AM (ignoring the 20M inf)

Since we are gated to 1 AM per 2 days, let's say 5.5 tip missions for 30 mins of work = .5 AM, or 25RM. Effectively 25RM = 30 min.

Typical TF farm times (+/-, decent team of TF runners - ie. not fully optimized)
ITF = 28RM = 25 min
STF = 38RM = 45 min
KTF = 20RM = 20 min
KHTF = 9RM = 20 min
SisTF = 50RM = 70 min
LGTF= 39RM = 25 min
HessTF = 19RM = 20 min

I don't see how that falls out of line with the current standards.

Um, you had 2 Alignment Merits for 1 LotG in your last post.

You get 1 Alignment Merit for 10 Tip missions and 1 Morality mission over 2 days. You can convert 50 Merits into 1 Alignment Merit plus a 20M fee every day. It is gated, but Task Force Merits are not as heavily gated. Probably the devs wished they would have gated them as strongly as they have Alignment Merits, but that is only my wild a** speculation.

It's just another way to do things, especially for people who don't have the inclination to do Task Forces.

Alignment Merits are probably intended to be a higher tier of goods/economy. Just like IOs are considered to be superior to the SOs/DOs/TOs system that was there before. I don't see a lot of posts wondering why the devs chose to implement IOs as a scheme to devalue SOs. It is what it is.

Just remember that Alignment Merits are probably going to be tied into the end game content including Incarnate slotting etc., so reward merits may be considered as legacy as SOs are today.

It did take a huge set of cajones to pitch the concept, hire people and develop the game for years before launch. While there were a lot of people around him, the CoH game was his baby and he saw it to launch.

I think it is appropriate that he used "I", since using "We" would be a bit confusing since Cryptic no longer owns the game and the staff at Cryptic currently aren't substantially the same staff who launched the game.

Isn't your answer staring you in the face? Your own optimized solution of using Alignment Merits to get LotGs to sell on the Market and then using the influence to buy Purples on the Market is spiking the supply of LotGs and causing a commensurate demand on the purples.

The segment of the market that is aware of the conversion rates is probably similar to the segment who is consuming the IOs so everyone is moving to do the same thing at the same time.

The bottom line is that LotGs (and other traditionally high recipes) will continue to come down in price until it reaches (a rough) equilibrium with Purple recipes on an Alignment Merit efficient conversion rate, and/or the purples will move up in price. Which is exactly what we have seen and will continue to see until a more efficient conversion mechanism is found to maximize the players' 'investments'.

I doubt there is any intentional reasons to change any market values from the devs, but they are aware that their additions and changes have repercussions on the market. It's not that they don't care, but it is what it is as long as they don't feel the game balance is being thrown off.