Rodion

I like the intent of the current PvP system: previous versions of PvP left you dead immediately or held indefinitely. Certain characters were nigh-invulnerable because they healed faster than you could possibly damage them. The intent of travel suppression is good, to prevent certain obnoxious tactics.

The problem with these changes is that they drastically altered the game from how it plays in PvE. PvP throws away exactly those characteristics that make our characters fun to play. The core game mechanics were altered to force particular behaviors on the players. Take travel suppression. When you fight your speed slows way down to prevent you from using hit-and-run attacks and fleeing battle.

Rather than force arbitrary rule changes on players to slow them down, there should be an intrinsic motivation coming from the game that gets the players themselves to eschew undesired behaviors.

I've always wanted PvP to be like the final confrontation in the Lord Recluse Strike Force. A big battle that lasts a decent while, where there's lots of duking it out. The standard PvE tactics don't work there, and you usually wind up fighting all the AVs at once (unless you use the Mind Dom sleep gimmick). You generally focus on one of the AVs at a time and whittle them down, but you still can't gank Numina in two seconds.

Now how fun would that be if every time Numina got down to 25% she bubbled herself and ran away? We know exactly how tedious that is from the universal hatred of the Diabolique AV in the Maria Jenkins arc. But that's how human players often react to impending death.

But instead of forcing a rule change -- travel suppression -- on players, the reward structure of the encounter should punish undesirable behaviors and reward desirable ones. Fleeing battle, for example, could be punished. Standing your ground heroically while taking fire from a half a dozen enemies should be rewarded. A full team ganking a lone opponent would be penalized in same way -- perhaps diminishing the likelihood of rewards for a period of time. A "Courage/Cowardice" stat could be added that adjusted the drop chance for juicy rewards.

What would the nature of those rewards be, and how would they be judged? Well, that's the tricky part. Getting a chance for shard or a component for extreme acts of valor seems reasonable. Controls are needed to prevent gaming the system. But if gaming the system takes just as long as playing the game as it's intended, it doesn't really matter.

Perhaps one way of doing this is to basically turn all player characters into AVs in PvP. You get the same purple triangle mechanic (important for squishies), the same level of AV hit points (but tanks still get more than defenders), etc. All powers would work the same way they do in PvE. This would allow defenders and controllers to last quite a while, avoiding the whole "kill the healer in the alpha strike" scenario. If a team brings six Mind Doms and holds everyone all at once, the punishment mechanic kicks in and the team gets docked Courage points, reducing their shot at a nice drop. Interactions with NPCs have be worked out. To avoid interminable battles the purple triangles or hit points might decay over time, equally among all participants.

The exact details obviously need to be worked out. But instead of changing all the mechanics of the game to prevent undesirable player behavior, it would be better to reward players for desirable behavior and make them police themselves. They will still have the option to do the undesirable things, but they will pay for it in some way.

Getting defeated in PvP doesn't have any real downside (except you don't get a reward), but there's still a perceived penalty. If there's an upside to getting defeated courageously (a Notice of the Well, for example), people won't mind PvPing. The system just needs to smart enough to differentiate between players farming rewards and playing the game as intended. Metering rewards over time isn't an optimal solution, but it would be serviceable, and is already well established throughout the game now.

If you define a "farm toon" as one expressly designed to run the same map over and over again solely to make influence and drops in the most efficient manner possible, then I've never made a farm toon.

But if your definition includes characters with good defenses and lots of AoE attacks that can wreck havoc over most of the content in the game, then I'm guilty.

But since the sole goal of the game is to wreck as much havoc over the maximal number of foes in the shortest time possible, having pride in your inability to meet that goal seems misplaced.

To the original poster:

One player can only have 20 or so slots per level 50 character. That means each character can bid or sell 200 or so items at most. If they have 10 level 50 characters they can only corner the market on 2000 items. And when other people start selling the items for less than they're listing them for, the price will drop again.

In the end this can never be a serious problem because it's just too boring to sit around buying and reselling salvage. It's a stupid prank, not very funny and not very ingenious.

You can easily circumvent these jerks in just a few minutes, if it's that important to you, by just running AE missions and getting salvage with tickets. I would much rather have the devs spend their time adding real features to the system, and the GMs spend their time helping people with real problems instead of riding herd on nitwits.

If there are indeed idiots who are getting their jollies buying low and selling outrageously high, you're only providing them the feedback they strive for by posting here. If you would instead spend this time producing a bunch of salvage and selling it for reasonable prices all the griefers' slots would be clogged with overpriced salvage. And you would make a ton of inf when people overpaid for your lower-priced salvage.

This is how regular markets work, and it's why the devs won't do anything about this. It's a self-correcting problem.

I followed the instructions and everything seems to be working fine.

I haven't found anything I don't like yet, and every time I thought I'd found something I didn't like I found a setting or an option that let me make it the way I'd prefer.

I really like the fact that the strike target is displayed. I wish it were always displayed, rather than one of several cycling notices, but it's a lot better than having to go to the forums to find out that information.

I use the test and beta servers, so it's nice to have only one place to go to start these up.

I also really, really appreciate the fact that the default browser is now used to display web pages, instead of forcing me to use Internet Explorer.

I also like that we have the option to tell the launcher what to do once it's started the game. I think, however, that the default action should be to exit. I can't think of any reason why I'd want the launcher to remain in memory (it's 34MB and doesn't do anything for you once you've started the game).

I've got an electric/electric blaster that can effectively drain mobs. It does take Short Circuit and Power Sink to drain them to zero, but if you go in stealthed, they're down to zero within seconds.

The downside is that you're in melee range. My build isn't soft-capped for anything, so I get hit right away, and usually stunned. Thus, my current build isn't really very good for solo sapping, but on a team you can really do a number on their end.

Once you've drained them initially, Short Circuit can recharge fast enough to keep them that way, especially if you're hitting them with Ball Lightning constantly.

The real problem is that once they're drained the mobs frequently run away. And by frequently I mean all the damned time. Freak Tank bosses are the worst cowards. Drain them to zero and they run for the hills.

I've also got a SS/Electric brute that is pretty effective as a sapper, and between Lightning Field and Power Sink, you can drain most mobs and keep them that way. Throw in the end use from their attacks against you, Ball Lightning and Electrifying Fences and you can keep them that way permanently, plus they can't run away.

If I were to redo my E/E blaster for solo sapping I would aim for S/L defense and recharge. It's possible to softcap an E/E blaster for S/L using Weave, Combat Jumping, Scorpion Shield, two sets of Kinetic Combat and Rectified Reticle, and one set each of Enfeebled Operation, Obliteration, and Reactive Armor. I would also get Stealth or Superspeed and a Stealth IO to allow you to sneak into mobs and sap them.

When Hasten is active Short Circuit is up every 7 seconds, and Power Sink is up every 20, meaning that even on a fast-moving team you can totally drain every spawn with just Short Circuit and Power Sink.

I'd suggest that you make a Mids build that implements the necessary power selections and slotting, but not buy the expensive sets yet -- just reuse your existing sets as they'll fit, or make a second build that just has SOs but is set up to take the expensive IOs as you get them. Then I'd run with a team and see how well you can sap.

If you like the performance on a team, putting in all the IOs will just make it better. Adding S/L defense will protect you from most melee attacks, but it won't protect you from a lot of the AoE stuns and some damage attacks that go along with being in the middle of melee. So you'll always need to carry a lot of break frees.

In the end, though, I don't think blaster sapping is ever going to be as effective as you want it to be. Your best bet might be to get permanent Domination on an Electric/Fire dominator. That would combine sapping with a high-damage attack set.

This would be cool, but we can already do this. If you create a base at level 10 and run in SG mode all the time by the time you get to 40 or so you have enough prestige to have several enhancement bins or salvage bins.

Once you do this on one character you can use global email to move things around to all your characters.

So, yeah, it would be nice, but the devs should work on new things before adding refinements to stuff we can already do.

I found the old defiance to be totally worthless. Almost as bad as the old Vigilance. So, no, reverting to the old Defiance would be a terrible idea.

The devs have been trying for years to get people to do more TFs. They added rare recipe rewards in large part to get people to do them, and then switched that to reward merits, and that still didn't get large numbers of players to participate. Part of the problem is that getting teams together for TFs is extremely difficult unless your supergroup is doing it.

By designating a TF of the week, the devs are gating a large number of players through the same content. This will make it much easier for people to find teams because so many people will be doing the same TF. This will also get a broader swath of players doing them, so a bigger segment of the player base will be more familiar with them, which means they'll know how they work and they'll (eventually) be more efficient doing them. Which will make them much less painful to do. When you know what you're doing, most of the TFs aren't significantly harder or time-consuming than a similar string of 5-10 missions.

It's a good idea to include lower level TFs in the WTF schedule so that more people can get the Task Force Commander accolade. By providing a way to make forming TF teams easier (making everyone do the same one each week), the devs are helping all those players who just haven't been able to get on a TF but want those badges and the associated accolade.

But if you don't want to do a certain TF because you don't get shards, skip it that week and do the ITF again. And again. And again...