Rodion

Truly casual players are not reading the forums. They're just playing the game.

I recently looked at the powers chosen by all the characters in an 18-man BAF, and only about 12 of them had any IO bonuses, and of those four or five had only a few IO bonuses.

I can't tell if they were using SOs or common IOs, but we had no problems completing the trial successfully. On large teams with incarnate abilities, being IOed out just isn't as important as when you're trying to run content solo at x8/+4.

If people are kicking you from a 8-man team for not being IOed out the wazoo, they just don't understand how the game works.

If you're getting the stuff you want at the rate you want to, you're not doing anything wrong. I concur with your estimate of the value of 32 astral merits (basically they're the same as two alignment merits), and make decisions on whether to buy stuff on the market or use merits accordingly.

Having a pile of influence is not the goal of the game for me. Doing the things I find fun is. Once I have enough inf to accomplish, that I turn to more enjoyable pursuits than acquiring funds. Seeing as how playing the game also gives you piles of inf, there's really no need to focus solely on the market.

Yeah, I think this has to do with phasing.

Phasing is a system that puts people with the same mission in their own alternate reality, where bad guys exist for the mission at hand. This allows you to have an effect on the apparent world, so that the area you cleared Hellions out of will have cops there after you complete it.

Edit: this was done to reduce the need for instances, which are very CPU intensive. Since there are so many lowbies, it saves a lot of processing to have everyone in an open zone, but phasing allows you to see different things than people who are doing other tasks.

Travel powers are often required inside missions. For example, in one mission of the Lady Gray Task Force you have to fly up to mitos and use melee attacks. Which you can't do with your rocket board because you can't use any other powers when it's active.

Some brutes, tanks and scrappers have as many as 8 or 9 toggles. It's not a total deal breaker to waste 10 seconds turning them on again, but it gets old mighty fast. There are several other missions where you have to zip around vertically a lot -- the one where you fight on a Sky Raider platform comes to mind -- or the Sutter TF, and using a rocket board there would be very tedious and dangerous. There are also some rooms in the CoT caverns that are a lot easier if you can fly, and the rocket board is a pain there as well.

It's not uncommon for tanks and brutes to zip through missions using their travel power to quickly bypass mobs (this is common in the last mission of the Lady Gray TF). If you try that using the rocket board you will potentially take a lot of damage and will probably get held by the dozens of Rikti mesmerists standing in the hallways.

Again, not a tragedy. But if you're depending on the rocket board for all your travel needs, you'll suffer some annoying limitations.

I see the rocket board as useful for someone who prefers Superspeed, but occasionally needs flight. But, because of things like the LGTF, you're still going to have to keep a jet pack in your back pocket.

The point is that the rocket board is not game breaking because it suffers from so many limitations. It's not a one-for-one replacement for flight, as the OP opined.

I agree. These things need to be priced at a level that I'll buy them on an impulse. If it costs $5 more than a month of playing the game, it stops me cold. It will just make me wait and save my points from my monthly allotment instead of spending it right now. Which means I might be waiting several months if I buy some other cheaper stuff in the meantime. In the long haul, I'll wind up spending less.

Most consumers have a threshold where they tell themselves, "Heck, that's so cheap I can't afford not to buy it." You want all your items in this model to fall into that price range.

For example, that's how I bought the Steampunk bundle on day 1 of Freedom. And when I come up with a character for the Barbarian costume set, I'll buy the whole thing even though I might only use a few of the items out of it. Because, hey, it's so cheap I can't afford not to buy it. The same thing was true when they had the sale on the Science pack -- too cheap to pass up, and I had to buy it.

For me, 400-800 points is in that magic impulse range.

I find that Siege and Nightstar last much longer than 40 seconds in the BAF. They survive long enough for Melt Armor to recharge a couple of times (my controller doesn't have MA perma).

Yes, I have a level 50 Rad/Kin, and I just can't recommend Rad. With IO sets the -def only comes into play rarely. I was able to make the character fun by soft-capping to S/L and getting into melee so I can enjoy the benefits of Fulcrum Shift, but the character still seems less powerful than my Fire/Dark corruptor, which has three AoEs that play very well together.

Are you aware that when you activate the rocket board all your toggles go off and all your other powers are inactive, as they do with walk? That means, for characters that have a lot of toggles at least, it's not a practical substitute for a real travel power.

It's actually much more hamstrung than Ninja Run or the animal pack run power, which have been around for a long time and aren't seen as game-breaking.

I tried this out dual-boxing with a 50 and a lowbie on Beta last week. I didn't notice any change for the 50 (no change in inf or tickets far as I could see), but the lowbie stopped getting rewards after a time. I noticed no throttling when I did a Council radio mission.

The net effect was that I seemed to get to the same level in about the same amount of time in AE as I did in the regular mission. Which I would guess would be the point of any kind of throttling of rewards.

I do a similar thing, but I don't usually try to send salvage around. I typically just send the crafted IO to the storage character, and craft the recipes on the characters that have them. I buy the salvage if I don't already have it. I also don't try to do everything at once.

I recently consolidated around 40 purple IOs from dozens of characters played over several years this way, as well as many rares and high-demand uncommons.

It's really the sort of project you don't want to do all at once, because you'll wind up getting impatient.

It's consistent with Energy Aura's stealth power, Energy Cloak, which doesn't suppress when you attack.

And it's not clear whether any of these things are even enforceable beyond terminating your subscription. Anything else they might say is not enforceable, since you are under duress when you are forced to agree to them, and there's no signature or other explicit acknowledgment of the agreement. This is particularly germane the case of minors who may agree to things without the knowledge or consent of guardians, which is completely possible when time cards are used.

This is flat-out false. Wind turbines kill 150,000 birds each year. Cats kill 500 million birds a year. 100 million birds die each year flying into the sides of glass buildings. Power lines kill 10 million birds and cars kill 11 million birds each year.

Why? Simply because there are a hell of lot more cats and glass buildings and power lines and cars than there are, or will ever be, wind turbines.

Check out the article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...VlJ_story.html

There's a difference between making it easy for people to transfer and kicking them out the door. Facilitating the migration of people who want to go is a good thing: you don't want to play with people who feel they're "stuck."

I doubt I'll move any characters to Exalted, though I may move some characters to Pinnacle from other servers with my free transfers.

If lots of people go to Exalted it will be crowded, and crowded places seem to attract a certain kind of person. When I play on Freedom I just don't like the vibe. It's all about speed ITFs and speed Lambdas and submitting your resume to the team leader before they'll even consider inviting you. This ain't a mission to the moon, it's just a half-hour trial, for gosh sake...

When you have a large population people tend to be picky and snotty and petty, which is particularly annoying when these guys don't really know what they're talking about. On smaller population servers people have to get along to get anywhere. Yeah, there are some jerks, but the smaller population size reduces your anonymity and constrains the most overt behaviors.

Yes, in I21 you'll be able to get enhancement unslotters. To use these:

* Obtain them by buying them from the market or as rewards from the Paragon Rewards program.

* They will appear in your email box, under Character Items, I believe.

* Get the unslotter out of the email on the character you want to use it on. It will appear as Special salvage in your Salvage window.

* Go to the Enhancement page. Click and drag the desired enhancement on to a slot in the tray.

* A dialog will appear asking if you want to consume an unslotter.

* Say yes and you've got the enhancement back.

Fulmens has it right: patient bidding is the best way to get recipes for "reasonable" prices.

The other thing I'd mention is that if you're short on cash, you should assign an equivalent inf value to your alignment merits based on how much it costs you to get them. If a recipe is selling on the market for less than your cost of merits, buy it on the market. If it's selling for a lot more on the market than what your merits cost you, use your merits.

For example, if you get alignment merits by converting reward merits from TFs and arcs, they're costing you 20 million inf, plus your lost opportunity cost. If you cranked through Unai's arc for those 50 merits, that represents a lot of effort. If you get most of your reward merits from the weekly strike task, you probably don't spend much real time to get them. If you get your merits from doing tips at low difficulty levels, you're probably cranking through them with very little effort each day, but it does take you two calendar days to get one.

Since converting reward merits has a fixed inf cost of 20 million, that's probably the easiest thing to decide: an alignment merit is worth a minimum of 20 million inf, and potentially 30 or 40 million, depending on how much your value your own time. That means you would use an alignment merit to buy a one-merit recipe if you have to pay significantly more than 20 million on the market.

So, if you're pressed for cash, it may make sense to use alignment merits to buy things like Kinetic Combat: Dam/Rech and Dam/End, which often cost 40-60 million, Luck of the Gambler: +Rech, which often cost 100+ million.

(The exception is using alignment merits for buying things that just aren't available because there's no supply, which can be the case for rare recipes at certain levels. If no one's selling it on the market, you can't buy it there.)

You may also want to use some of your merits to get recipes that are selling for a lot, and then sell them on the market to get the cash to buy four or five other things.

You could just play the market, but if you sell things you earn, you're part of the solution -- creating more supply -- instead of being part of the problem -- creating more demand.

In the end someone has to do the work to make the stuff that everyone else buys.

One limitation that's very irritating is the inability to give or receive inspirations. That means if your F2P friend dies in a mission and doesn't have a Res inspiration, or can't combine to make one, you can't give him one. Which may mean he has to go to the hospital, which may mean a five or 10 minute delay depending on where the mission is.

It's reasonable to limit some trading of items, like inf, IOs and recipes. But you should be able to give F2P players all the things that normally drop for them: inspirations, DOs and SOs, in particular.