QuiJon

And if the AE didnt have rewards to begin with, it would have been dead on the first day it launched instead of waiting until 2 issues later.

With the new SSKing system and difficutly system, they should have just left the AE alone until they came up with ultimately what would be the xp system for it. Much of the out of hand leveling would have been curtailed with the simply forced level 49 already.

Actually the normal was that the MA had double xp. There had only been one event since the MA was added and in that event they allowed double xp in the MA. They claim that this time it was a bug, i dont believe that, but that is what the post said.

Losing the MA for double exp doenst mean farming is doomed. People farmed before the MA they farmed after the MA. The really ****** thing IMO is them not just coming out and saying that the MA will not provide double XP. They tell us about these events before hand so that people can be prepared for them. And i think many like me, were planning on, and created character on accounts with the expectation of partnering them with certian other accounts that had viable missions to play in the MA.
By far this was the most disappointing Double XP weekend ever. And its only because the MA was "bugged" with no xp. I had my plans laid out only to log on and find out that what i had plannned for would not work.

If it was a bug they had no time to fix, i want my double xp MA only weekend then.

It would depend. Say in 2004 you made a character named FoxBat. And no one has cared for 5 years. However now champions comes out and someone petitions it, and you loseit. You can argue that you had the name before their game, but you cant argue that that character has been in Champions pen and paper lore for probably 2 decades before COH even came out. So then who wins?

And im using that as an example i dont know the name your talking aobut.

But there is a difference legally between using characters that clearly fall in the public domain like a shakespear character or GoldiLochs and using say Superman. If you made a super strenght character named Paul Bunyon your not violating anyones active trademark. If you made Super-Duper-Man, a Invul.SS tanker with flight, in blue tights with a red cape, boots, andbriefs, and a yellow belt, with a S on his chest, your pretty clearly violating someones trademarked character.

Now as someone said, NC Soft was already sued by Marvel. It was dismissed BECAUSE the court decided that NC Soft had appropriate systems in place to watch guard the abuse of trademarked characters. One means to that is players reporting the violations for review.

Now having had a character get genericed let me just say that i would preffer that someone tell me they think its wrong then report it. The GMs dont just look for that one character, they go over your entire account looking for violations to trademarks and taste and hit everything. And their definition of what is wrong is much wider then players. Like making a "Darth" anything character is a violation. It doesnt matter if its an attempt to make vader or not, the term Darth they see as violating trademark no matter its use.

So in that way, i could say take a bit of abuse, let that player in the game feel they made their point and avoid the petition if given the chance.

Even if that was the case, which i believe it isnt, i dont feel that making sure to keep the customer happy would mean that it was the most terrible thing in the world if for 3.5 days that the changes were rolled back. You stil have the SSK system and difficulty sliders in place so that the boss farms at +7 wont happen again. And it would roll back on monday morning. So personally i would be even more upset if this was the reasoning behind it.

And trust me i have gone through this with many other players. Most people define farming or PLing as seeking a means to earn more profit or rewards then the normal time invested would allow for. I think double xp qualifies under that.

If i log on because i can team and run missions and level fast, or log on to play the AE solo because i level faster, its the same difference, i am looking forward to logging in to gain more then i normally wouldhave been able to.

Who says that this would upset anyone just wanting to door sit? Who says that was my plans? Maybe it upsets me because my best opprotunity to earn xp or influ was to use the AE. Maybe its upsetting because i could have taken the week to make sure that some of my best capable villians or heroes bad more profitable missions to use then they have right now.

Double XP weekends have always been about farming. Its prettymuch the reason why people look forward to them. Be it farming radio missions, farming TFs all weekend or yes farming and door sitting.

Mistake or not, the lateness of this announcment that atleast should have been warned to customers ASAP is enough to make alot of players plans, no matter if you agree with them or not, have now been totally wasted. There is really no reason for me to spend any more time playing this weekend then i would have normally. So for me and many others this is a fail.

The MOTD basicly says sorry it wont work for the weekend.

I personally have to feel this isnt a bug. They would have tested the double xp, and it would have come up in time to fix it. It worked perfectly well last time around. And personally my expectations would be that if you broke it, and there is an event like this, no one goes home until its fixed. We all have or have had jobs with insane deadlines, had to make accomodations in our private lives for work, i see no reason why these devs should be any different. If they knew it wasnt working, guess were pulling an alnighter to get it fixed would have been my response. That is if it was truely and accident.

Now if it wasnt, and it was planned but i was to chicken **** to say this is how i wanted it, I would have snuck a message into the MOTD late at night that said it wont work, then i would have went home and enjoyed my weekend. Wonder what it seems like is going on here?

Its a fine line IMO. We have all seen the LoganX claw regen scrappers, or the Punisher Clones named Frankie C, Super strenght tankers in blue with red breifs and boots. The problem lies in that they are not your trademarks to have fun with. No matter if you pay 15 a month to NC Soft or not.

So now do i think its the end of the world, no i guess not. But NC Soft already had to deal with a suit from marvel for this sort of thing, and so making an "Inspired" character i guess is kinda questionable.

One could argue that any scrapper with claws and regen was knocking off Wolverine. But i think it takes it to a new extreme when you have the black and yellow outfit, the hair (or as close as you can to it) maybe adding the cigar.

Basicly i guess it comes down to if your attempting to make a character because you were inspired by a character in comics or cartoons or whatever, there is a really good chance your breaking the law and violating someones trademarked works. So in that relm, ya i do think that you should really not be having "fun" at the expense of protected works.

I also think that you probably shouldnt be drawing attention to it here in the forums. Trust me you might think that the girl in game and those like her that talk to you are an iratant, but its the ones that wont talk to you and just send in a petition that are going to cause you grief.

First off if i was to do this, you can be damn sure that i would have before taken all the influence off the toon, respec out any worthwhile stuff etc etc. So splitting up his influence isnt a good enough reason.

I dont think a XP boost is a good idea either, but i dont see why being able to replace a level 50 with a standard level 20-22 character with no other benefits is a bad thing. I fail to see how it makes good sense to PL a character up to level 50 and then turn it in for a 22 you want. So i think that arguement you made is kinda pointless. But ya i prob have a few characters i wouldnt mind replacing with a 20 or 22 if given the chance.

Not just that but ifyou hover over the different attacks and click on info, in the short info it says on each attack if they are part of one of the combos or not.

See my problem is that there appears to be a good way and a hard way, no matter what a player enjoys doing. Now prior to i16 i might have agreed with you. But now a solo player being able to choose to spawn a map for 8 players and keep the level range below +3 and +2s means that a solo player can crank through content. Be those radio missions, be those contacts, oroborus missions or choosing to farm one mission over and over.
By pure chance that solo player will get all the drops from enemies originally blanced to providing drops for a team. That solo player doesnt have to share. So the chances, not truely reality, but chances are better that when a good drop comes alone, purple or just a good IO set piece, that now it goes only to him.
I didnt say they couldnt get them from team play, and i havent said that all players care. I have only said that when looking at the numbers were given and how the system works, that under the new difficulty system, a solo player, if he can solo effectively can reap all the rewards that had previously been idealized for a full team of characters.

Now if a system is in place that limits the drops off the difficulty slider settings i didnt hear about it, but otherwise, the chance rate is the chance rate, and if all those chances will only benefit one character, that is an obvious boost to what that character will earn. I dont see a way it couldnt be.
Well the thing is these same rates of drops and such, affect all drops not just purples. So under the current system, i player on a team will also recieve less standard IO drops, or uncommon or rare recipies based on the same per chance v team size v difficulty slider. Now granted random is random, you cant pick what drops. However when that one good drop comes along, its nicer to have a 1 in 1 chance of getting it, then a 1 in 8 chance of gtting it.

So i guess what i am trying to say is mostly this difference is mostly related to changes since i16. The ability for a solo player, no matter farming or not, to be able to face content that is team size content previous to i16 IMO has the ability to skew more favorable returns to the solo player. Again has the ability to, i agree without dev dataminning we will never know the reality.

It would depend on the team, the difficulty setting etc. However i think the point i was going for was that even if they do plow through the content 3 times faster, it means that that 3 times faster is going to equal out to you running solo and getting 3 times the xp. So the xp benefits of teamming are limited. However when soloing your drops are all your own. And when you could argue that previous to i16 you were limited solo by your group size making small spawn, you cant argue that anymore since you can now make 8 man team size spawns solo.

So when you figure that things drop at no faster rate teamed then solo, the benefits I believe are going to be to solo, since then you dont have to share what drops.

This was a thread about purple recipies i thought. I might be drilling into only that one aspect yes, but i thought that is because its what the thread was intended to discuss.

But since people are saying that the parity comes into play when you figure that a team can earn xp faster then a solo character, let me also post over this little quote from another post from a thread on SSKing.
So again now with a difficutly slider that means that a solo player can ramp up his difficulty to the +1/8 that this chart was figured at, that same level 45 character running solo fighting only +1s set for 8, something that many toons can do by level 45, would earn solo 1376 per minion. being on a team alone with 2 equal level characters knocks that immediately down to 860.

So you figure with the new SSK system and the new difficulty sliders that benefit solo players missions, and detract from team xp respectively, the gap between what a solo player and acheive and what a team player achieves is ever widening.

No figure in that the enemies a team fights, now the same for a full team v. a solo player still have the same chances of dropping loot, but that loot is devided between 8 players randomly means that a team focused player WILL recieve over all less drops then a solo player as well as possibly less xp, less influence depending on the over all effectivness of his team. But the drop ratio is definately lower.

Now we can all say we funded our characters in any way we wanted. I funded my perma dom because i got really really lucky with my first 10 or so ticket rolls and got like 7 recipies that all sold for 100 million plus. But that pattern didnt keep up. Eventually the streak broke and i was getting less valuable merchandise. So same thing, i have run TFs with people weekly that seem to every week say they got a purple of this or that. I have never on a TF or SF gotten a purple drop, since they added them into the game. I have gotten a few running a solo farm mission when leveling a character, with only my two accounts on the team.

So yes i know its random, and i know its possible to earn purples on a team, and i know i dont need purples to play effectively. I know that there are players that just log in and dont look at rewards and leveling, i know there are players that log in and only look at rewards and leveling, but there are alot of players falling somewhere in the middle. And those players should have an expectation to not be left out simply because they choose to make a defender, or a blaster or whatever.

The solution of "make a new character if that is what you want to do" also doenst really solve the problem and probably contrinutes more to the farming/PLing going on in game then almost anything else. I know when i decided to make a toon to farm when the MA first came out, i wasnt gonna spend the time to play that character up to level when my only expectation was to farm with him.

Atleast what i would like to see is an increase in the modifiers that regulate what drops for teams. Maybe something like since every enemy has basicly the same chance to drop something add like 4 percent to that for each team mate on the team. So a full team's enemies would be dropping roughly 32 percent more then a solo player. When you guage that against the drops being spread out among a full team, that isnt a huge increase, but it helps to balance the playing feild, wouldnt say that the drop would be something great, but increases what you get and its chances of being better then avgerage.

Ok ill correct you. A solo player can make tons of tickets in the MA at just about the same rate of gains that it would take to complete a TF and earn a random roll. He can solo buy salvage, which if you play it right can earn maybe even faster then off recipies. I can take two accounts into a mission, my level 50 earns about 2 million killing the mission and 1500 tickets per account. (lowbies make less money but same tickets) so now i got 3000 tickets to spend, i buy say magical consps, i get about 5-6 of them every 30 minutes off that run. So in 2 hours i have basicly made about 20+ million once i sell.

The question becomes do i want to have toplay this way every night to outfit a toon. Which is no, i dont.

But depending on the character solo is not slower anymore. At one point you could say it was because a team spawned more enemies, however iwth the new slider, if i can handle it, a solo player can spawn a map for 5-6 teammates size team, and reap all the xp. And solo xp in every case per kill is higher then teammed xp even with the wieghts they put into the xp system. Then you figure that now iwth SSK there is only a 1 level split to any team and even teaming xp from pre-i16 is actually lower then it was before by about 5-10 percent depending on where on the team you would have fallen in the level range before.

So honestly i16 IMO created a system that for most people if they can is much more favorable to solo then to team. Couple that now with characters that dont have the option to solo effectively, its no longer a play style choice. Teamming since i16 is basicly slower in every reguard to soloing.

Well honestly its not just purple drops. You do have to take into account that all the drops of salvage, recipies etc are spread out amongst teammates when running on a team. So the more teammates you have the less likely it is to get any one reward when it comes due.

So when people say they play the game and hit the auction house at the end of the night and sell, someone that spent all night teamed has still likely also gotten less to sell, limiting further his ability to earn for what he might want to buy that isnt dropping.

Actually Cryptic sold the game to NC SOFT who then hired those devs that wanted to come over to work for them and continue to develop the game. Jack still works for cryptic. Not defending him, but he wasnt fired. But hey great post that offers no opinions or information other then your attempts at snide insults.

I welcome the company i will find on your ignore list.

But the archtypes exist that was the the devs made them. Some are simply killing machines some are not. I dont believe its fair to simply say "oh well you should have made a scrapper" The game would not be fun, or probably even playable for most teams without defenders of some type, With out controllers, blasters etc. The game should be designed around the principles for the genre game it is, a massively multi-player game.

Now im not saying that i want to have purples raining from the skies like skittles. I am simply saying it would be nice for the devs to look at what they would consider to be the optimal rate of an assured drop and in their judgement find a way to make mostly sure it drops at that rate for all players. Not that it cant drop more often if the randomness takes it that way.

This is why i thought the strike breaker method seemed to work the best. It would not effect in any way those that wanted to keep making concentrated efforts for rewards. It would not make your drops any harder or easier. It would only make sure that at whatever ratio the devs say a drop mathematicly shouldhave been earned, that one got earned. If you got one before that point, great, but if you had hit a dry spell, then atleast there is an end in sight.

Support players and squishie make just as much of a contribution in time and play to the game as anyone else does. They choose to make it in such a way that is contributory to the enjoyment of other players by nature of thier ATs being more reliant on team play. And for that they have a much harder time earning the rewards that more solo capable characters or ATs can earn. I personally would just like to see this adressed. I dont want rewards given away for nothing, it would just be nice if the wealth of the games content was more widely open. Addressing the issues of limited rewards on teams would definately IMO be a step in the right direction.

I understand choices, its why i have choosen to make the multiple toons i have made. And as i have said, i DONT mind the idea of rare content. However that being said your last edit is really what i think applies the most to my feelings. The essentially lower rewards that a player earns while teamed limit the ability of that player to recieve rewards an upper tier loot far beyond the differences between say what a blaster can farm vs. a scrapper.

So essentially the gap between wanting to dedicate yourself to only seeking rewards, and choosing to take a limit by teaming becomes larger and larger. My personal belief is that reguardless of if i choose to team or solo, neither choice should penalize my rewards that greatly. As so many call out in so many other threads, this is an MMORPG. the MMO standing for massively multi-player. So that being the case, why then are the reward structures going to so vastly favor people that choose not to team or take part in the social climate of the game?

Yes but the main difference here is that to get a HO, every player was subject to the exact same requirements. Simply you had to stop doing whatever you were doing, go and join a raid about an hour or so later you had a HO. that isnt really the case with purples.
No its not proof. And let me just say i am not in favor or nerfing Purples for their effectiveness. I dont recall saying i was, only that in comparing a enhancment that offered the level of balance you claimed that Purples offered, has in the past been determine to be game breaking and required a change. I am not saying i want them nerfed, or that they should be, only that by your very comparison to what they allow you to do, gives them their inherent value to ALL players, not just uber players. Even someone that commonly wants to run TFs or mission would probably like to have a character that is that strong when running a STF or LRTF and such.

It wasnt horrific no, but it was strong. I went from having a blaster that EVERY attack he had was at the damage cap to basicly one that did actually had a need for build up and aim again. Even slotting all dam/acc the nerf basicly took him from 300 percent damage and acc to around 200 percent. And yes i didnt scream about it, i understood it, it seemed odd to have a maxed out toon with no team support or even support powers needed.
You dont deserve more for doing less no. However your kinda nailing the point i was trying to make. In that three hours, your chances go up considerably for getting the drops you want. But not just because your soloing, and doing nothing but cranking out enemies. A bubble defender just plainly doesnt have the same killing capacity that your scrapper would. They are much more tied to team play. To running mission etc. This by nature then inherently lowers his chances of getting the same level of drops that you do. And why? Because someone enjoys team play and support characters more then the fighters?

This is what i would like to see changed. Simply put the chances to get the drops IMO are based on keeping the items rare. Im fine with that, but in doing so it seems their rarity has ot be,or has been based around what a tooled up toon can crank out on maximum. I dont mind items being rare. I dont even mind not having something like purples, as has been said if i really wanted them i could probably start farming out the same radio missions over and over, running solo, fighting the wall, running RWZ or whatever. I do choose not to, and i am cognitive of that choice.

And as has been said but i might not quote, im sure the idea of the sets are much more prevalent here in the forums then in the real game. But im sure there are probably tons of players in the real game that have just written off the idea of ever earning these rewards because of cost, or time, or how they would have to play to earn them steadily.

I agree its worthless to do, but it still has a sound to it that sounds neat.
I have had a toon that soloed AVs, its incredibly boring to do, and tedious. I dont much worry about it anymore. However i made that toon because i heard of others doing it. And it sounded cool to have a character that could do that. Especially since i was normally playing a blaster and just couldnt imagine standing toe to toe solo with an AV. So though i understand how useless it is, it still has a sound to it that entices other players to say you can do it.
Well here we will probably disagree. I personally feel that we got the new sliders because without them, the SSKing system would never have been accepted by the players. The SSKing system is a complete nerf for just about any player. It slows down xp for lower players, and for the higher players they suffer because the team is more close in level and therefore they lose some of the weight of being the in higher positions on the team.

The slider as postiron said in his post is the solution to that. Cause now you can still earn the +3 and 4 xp but you have to fight harder opponent to do it. So all those that would have been really pissed got somthing that sounded nice in comparison. It was kinda like ya your lowbie will level slower when you have him in tow, however you wont lose xp to pads, lose drops etc. So basicly sliders offset many of the complaints that would have errupted from the SSK.

Now thats purely conspiratorial on my behalf i admit it, but it is how i see it. When i looked up the xp effects of the teams running all within 1 level of a mission, most people on that team were lossing anywhere from 5-12 percent of the xp. Yet this seems to have slipped by alot because the options for customizing the missions seemed to over shadow it.

Where i have even once suggested that any change would effect your or anyone else and their ability to earn the drops at the rate they currently can earn them? If some poor bubbler gets a couple more purples here and there, does that take one away from you? Will only so many purple drop per hour and if he gets one that means you cant? I dont think farming is evil. I dont think earning is evil. I dont think overall building an uber character is evil. And i am not trying to plant such a seed in any players that it is. I do farm, i do work the market the best i can to get what i want. However i also, team. However i also like to run TFs, and dont spend my entire night logged in just doing things that increase my drops, xp, etc. It would be nice if it didnt take 4 month inbetween purple drops when doing these other activities to earn a purple drop.
If this is the case, again i will ask, how would effectively allowing players that dont play as you do, that do like to team, or do PUGs, or run more TFs or SFs to earn some of the same rewards that you do, effect your ability to do anything you have stated in that paragraph? It wouldnt. Nothing on this game is limited. Your chances to earn drops are not effected by how many people are playing, nothing given to player A or B takes anything away from you.

Now i am not saying its true, however the only reason i can see that just slightly increasing other players ability to achieve some of what you say is your intrest in this game, IS because you would feel less special for doing it. You might not want to lord over other players what your toons can do, but it just comes off sounding like you dont want others to be able to achieve it either. Just my opinion of that paragraph, it does just sound like its saying "even if i dont lord it over others, im special and if they are special also, im less special."
The devs have said over and over again that Bosses are considered difficult, EBs more difficult, that AVs were considered team content. I am not saying I agree with that, or that its even true, but it is what they say they follow. Companies make cars that can go 120 mph. And people buy them up. Why? No place in america atleast is it legal to drive a car on the road going 120. But nothing stops them from being able to do it other then police, or thier ability to keep the car on the road.

Same thing here, more options sounds great to players (unless its in the Sidekick apparently) so here is the new slider go nuts. The question is do the devs expect every player to be able to do it? Is the game now being designed around the idea that a standard everyday player can solo a mission set to 8? No its not. Its there just as the old slider was, to increase the difficulty to the level you wish to play at. But your talking about a mechanic that allows players the choice. The system of random drops of recipies that is not adjustable. But the slider being able to do what it does now, also just serves to ever increase the abilities of some to get things others have trouble with earning. My tanker can kill a mission set at 8, my blaster cant for instance. So again even running through normal missions, my tanker will get MORE opprotunity to earn drops then my blaster would, even running solo.
Wow i think we actually agree with each other on this one.
My problem over all i guess is what you have to do to earn it. Overall the desire to earn money in the game creates greed. Its a virtual world the only reason to have greed is to buy more and more stuff. Which creates the demand, which creates the cost, which creates teh need for more greed to keep up. Yes i drop things into the market, but i dont play the market. I store things i think i might want oneday, and i usually get most of what i want for a character.

But it does kinda feel like there is a tier of this game that is simply off limits unless i want to funamentally change how spend my time in game. And i personally dont feel that is the best design to follow for a game that has so little to actually use that next teir of abilities agianst.

And again, do you remember a post, way way back around issue 3, where statesman said that those who put in time to earn HamiOs were going to reap the ultimate rewards for them. And then one issue later they were nerfed. Just because the devs know its going on now, doesnt mean it will go on forever. What is ok when a few people are doing it, suddenly seems to become a problem when many people do it. Every time you say you solo a pylon you plant a bug in someone's bonet that they want a toon to solo pylons with also. That person goes out and makes the build, and suddenly soloing pylons was never intended and breaks the risk v reward mold or some such ****, and something changes to make it worthless to do, or unable to do.

I pay attention to the history of the game. And these devs have really proved no different then the old devs.(though some are the old devs) in that things are being "fixed" years after they were implements but never broken like say SideKicking.

I just maintain that they should be equally availible to all player with the invested time no matter what style of play you enjoy. Keep in mind through out 20+ level 50s i have maybe 3 sets total. I really dont care to go out and solo team content and say "ohhh look at me you cant do this because im uber and farmed my *** off to earn purples and you didnt" Frankly if they let standard IO sets exempt down i would say there is really no need to purple anything, short of the occasional build like perma doms that need a butt load of one attribute. (can you guess what toons my sets are in)

So see IMO there most valuable asset is that they exempt down. That is when you take out the ability to solo team content with them which im sure you can argue isnt an intended result of any system in the game. So frankly they should be more easily obtained by content players then farming. Atleast IMO.

You could also argue that they were so good and so rare that the devs figured that no one would go out and farm for hundreds of hours just to get a toon full of them and the buffs offered were so good because they figured the most anyone would have is 1-2 sets in a toon anyway. Kinda again like hamiOs. I dont think the devs ever considered someone would go to enough raids to have full slots of hamiOs. At one time my blaster was at his damage cap off HamiOs with no build up or aim. It wasnt intended and it was changed. Does that mean purples will be? I dont know, i hope not. I just personally dont like the have/have not attitude when it comes to them. Its a game, if its availible in the game it shouldnt be easier to get because you farm then if you play. That is my personal feeling on all drops of any type. It doesnt mean its going to change, or the drops will. Its just my personal wish list that something could be done.

Nothing i suggested would change anything about how you play or earn your rewards. If you want to spend hours cranking out maxed out missions or farming one area of a zone you still can. And you would still earn about the same level of rewards. But you and others should realize that other players are just as dedicated. Other players have invested just as much time into the game and to playing it and to building their toons and because of what the choose to spend time doing, earn less for it. And because they choose to play more with friends, their chances get lowered by having to share.

All i have suggested is that for EVERYONE, a certian level of play will grant atleast a certain level of reward. Lets say you get a purple drop a night, if not more. Say your getting a drop every 60 recipies, that wont change. But if the numbers started going against you and you did get to 100 with no purple, then you finally get awarded one.

Same thing, a player logs in night after night, teaming, running TFs etc. However you cant buy purples, they only award from drops not merits or tickets or the other means by wich this player has availible tohim or has to buy it for a insane price on the markets.

So when you figure that to get enough influence of selling on the market to buy a 250 million infulence purple, you probably would need to get2-3 really good IOs like miracles or LotGs, now to get those you would need to get what? 500 merits or so? Or get really lucky on random rolls which is more likely you will have just wasted your merits. So you figure 500 merits is like 10 positron TFs? How many purple drops do you earn in the time it would take to run 10 positron TF? Thats my issue really. The time investment is pretty wide spread just because one player wants to spend time playing one way, and another spends time another way.

I dont really give a crap how hard they make them to get overall, i just think you shouldnt be penalized to get them because you want to take advantage of different content. If they were tied to sa story or something like HamIOs were, then i can understand saying its going to be the only way to get them. But since they are not, then it should be all equal.

No one needed the buffs that HamiOs originally provided, but people strived for them anyway, and they got nerfed.

From a game play point of view, you really just shot yourself in the foot. No player is suposed to be able to solo a Pylon, a mob of +4 enemies with 3 bosses, is suposed to kick a players ***. If purples are so good that they allow you to live through that, then there is something wrong with them. Strive or not, all you basicly said again was that purples grant such a high level of buff that they allow you to get away with things that are not intended. Now for the sake of argument, why cant a mission runner STRIVE to get a build that can be almost invincible for the LRTF? That can stand toe to toe with 8 +4 AVs? Why isnt that just as viable of a reason to strive for excelence, the soloing a pylon?

However your missing the point, there are players that strive for excellence, that dont want to farm. That dont want to kill the same missionover and over agian. That dont want to just work the wall in Conan world, or rikti street hunting in RWZ. They want to team, they want to be social members of their SGs, they want to run task forces. Essentially they want to play the game as intended and have just as good of a chance for the rewards as anyone else. The current system doesnt really allow for that. Yes it all comes down to killing quickly. But someone that preffers say to play team support might not simply have the toon in their arsenal to power farm for the drops. So they get told what?Sorry you made a defender, next time make a fire tanker and only play the infernal demon missions over and over and over again for months.

Being that many of these players are going to be more prone to exempting, and having the majority of their IO set buffs be useless, i would say that for intende purposes there is more reason for the standard play style to want purple sets then farmers who are clearly just basking intheir own glory of doing things that are not intended to be done.

I am not saying that the COX system doenst have benefits above other MMOs, but the system is hardly even. The system grants higher possible benefits based on how a player chooses to spend his time. And i know that there is not a great fix for this. But it does extend beyond simply purples.

If i play solo in the MA, i can earn tickets faster to take a gold roll for a recipie then most teams can finish a TF in to earn a random roll. So i can increase my chances to earn say a LOTG recharge by the simple idea that i farm for nothing but gaining tickets. Since normal play will probably be with a toon not built to handle what i can with my farmer, since i can then tailor the mission to my best benefit, and run it endlessly, then i get more for it.

The same thing goes with purples. I am just saying it would be nice if the Dev could not change the habits of those that like to farm, but to simply have alternate systems in place so those that dont are not always the ones comming up short.