Silver Gale

And here come the Dev fanbois to try to defend the evil money-grubbing Paragon. Wake up sheeple! Who are also fanbois! Fanbeeple!

But seriously. Has anyone noticed a sudden surge in drops, unrelated to anyone using XP boosters or Windfall?

Well, "have to" is relative. The Best Stuff (like purple IOs) is easiest to obtain by playing the market game. If your goal is to get the Best Stuff and quick, then you have to either farm or play the market to reach that goal. But if you just want to play the game, then you can do that.

I just play my characters and sell the stuff that drops. I also run Hero and Villain Tips on those characters who are Heroes or Villains, and use the Alignment Merits to create recipes that sell for a lot, and market those at "patient seller" prices.

I've never felt particularly poor. Sure, not all my 50s are purpled out. But I always have enough Inf for my next SO set, and if I put in the time to figure out a frankenslot IO build then I never have to buy SOs again and any Inf that character earns is pure profit.

My husband and I are living in a flat. The flat does not belong to us, we are renting it. We've both signed a lenghty legal agreement when we first rented it, and let me assure you, I read through the whole thing carefully.

There was, in fact, a provision that the landlord may use his duplicate key to enter the flat at his discretion. I actually asked about that. IIRC the explanation was that in case there's a reason to believe the tennats have abandonned the flat, the landlord can come in and check and not have to wait until the rental agreement has run out.

I didn't demand that the provision be taken out. I don't believe I have signed away any of my rights. I am still legally protected from being stabbed in my sleep or having my stuff taken away, because those are both crimes. I still have to take steps to protect my data, because that's something I should be doing anyway. And, after all, the landlord *owns* this appartment. He has a right to check up on it if he wants to.

No additional comment here, just wanted to point this out.

I don't want to dictate how you should respond or anything, but if you'd taken all this energy you're using to tell us how much you don't care what we think of you, and put it into crafting an actual good argument supported with facts, then we could've had a nice reasonable discussion about the actual topic by now.

But instead it's three pages of you repeatedly telling us how you REALLY DON'T CARE what we think.

That just makes me kind of sad.

The 400 points comes with your subscribtion, so whatever you spend those 400 points on comes with your subscribtion. Before, there were things that came with the subscribtion (like Willpower and Dual Blades) and things that cost extra (like GR or the boosters). You couldn't choose what comes with the sub, you could only choose to spend money on the things that cost extra, or not. If you wanted to have everything you had to spend money in addition to the sub.

Now there are just things that cost points. Some things come with the sub (like Time Manipulation and GR access), and you also get to choose 400/550 points of stuff every month that also comes with the sub. And then if you want *more* things and are willing to pay extra for them, you can do that too. If you want to have everything, you'll have to spend money in addition to the sub.

We have to make a compelling case for you to present actual arguments before you will back up your statements with facts?

That's like telling someone to ask you out to a "asking you out on a date" event before you allow them to ask you out to an actual date.

"Once X happened, Y was only a few months away at most" = "X happened, and then some months later, Y happened".

In this case, X = "allowing us to e-mail items and inf between factions". The bolded part is the important one.

...yeah, sure, let's go with that.

EDIT: Okay, I did your research for you. Transcript of Positron appearance in the D.

At the very, very bottom:

From this, and the fact that the Devs never, ever change their minds in response to new developments, we can conclude that the amount of Infamy existing on redside came to match the amount of Influence existing on blueside around May 2010.

Because if a guy walks into your store with his own idea of what you're selling based on skimming the words in your ad that were in the biggest font, the right thing to do is to adjust your entire store to suit that guy, and forget your loyal customers.

And a certain segment of the playerbase will immediately decide that Cole must be using mind control and memory editing and everything to set this up and just *pretend* to not be an evil kitten-murdering ******* who wants to kill all the things.

Morally gray areas? For shame, sir. Bad guys are bad guys, and you know they're bad guys because they're on the side that is WRONG.

Oh good, I'm not alone.

I am not saying that "the devs implemented the email feature in order to keep the markets separate", I am saying "the fact that you originally couldn't email influence or items from heroes to villains was a measure put in place to keep markets separate".

Going back to a previous post of yours:

This quote from you implies that the e-mail attachments, as originally implemented, allowed heroes to send inf to villains and vice versa, and furthermore, that this was *intended* as a way to bypass the market separation and equalize the number of Inf on both sides, leading up to the market merge.

Facts that directly contradict this:

1) As originally implemented, the email attachments did not allow villains to receive Inf from heroes. Proof: poshyb's posyt.

2) We did *not* get the ability to send Inf attachments from heroes to villains until *after* the market merge was implemented.

3) For a while in GR Closed Beta, the three markets, Hero, Villain, and Praetorian, were completely separate, Inf did not carry over when you switched sides or moved from Praetoria to Paragon/the Isles. Proof: ask any Beta tester.

Source for a quote for "the devs have always wanted to merge the markets"?

Here is a FAQ for the Market Merge, dated 22 Jun 2010.

Here is a thread started on 3 Feb 2010, titled "So really no market merge?". There are no redname posts, but everyone seems to be under the impression the markets are not going merge come GR. (Arcanaville *is* holding forth the position that "at this point, there is no good argument for keeping the markets separate from the point of view of the ingame economy", but Arcanaville is not a dev.) The thread peters out without reaching a conclusion on May 13th, and the next post is a single smiley on June 22nd.

Before the announcement on June 22nd, merging the markets was widely believed by the playerbase to be something that would never happen. The main disagreements were on whether or not it *should* happen. Nobody seemed to believe it *would* (you'll note Obsidius accuses EvilGeko of lobbying early on).

EDIT: Here is a post from Positron dated March 30th, 2010, where he talks about how your Influence is put into "escrow or Limbo" when you change sides. This would be nonsensical if they were planning to merge the markets at this point.

Also, note that originally, Heroes and Villains were not able to gift each other Inspirations, even on co-op teams (a source of much frustration during the Valentine's and Winter events).

This is only conjecture, but since you can sell Inspirations to a Tree of Wonders or Auto-Doc, if Inspirations were tradeable it would've been possible to pass Influence from one side to the other, even if at incredibly slow rates. So I propose that this was another measure put in place to insulate the markets from each other.

Further proof: the restrictions on gifting Inspirations were lifted at the same time as the markets were merged.

From this, my theory is that the decision to merge the markets was made at some point between April and June of 2010, in response to what was going on in the Going Rogue Closed Beta. The changes to e-mail attachments and Inspiration gifting were a result of the merge, and proof of the change in direction.

Again with the mythical returning former new Free player, who shifts between being a vet who would like to check out the game again to a complete newbie depending on what the argument requires.

Sorry if I came across as accusatory - no real value judgement is implied, you just hit me with a Wall of Text and I was just trying to make sure I got the right points out of it. By all means, keep organising large-scale events. From the response you got, it seems like the theme of the groups is wide enough that plenty of RPers can find a place for one or more of their characters.

I'm sad to have missed the Sadism of Defenders, the Gallery of Frontline, and the Infiltration of Blacklist. Thankfully I seem to be right on time to jump in early with the ERA of Challenge.

There's no such thing as "returning Free players".

If a player has played the game before and comes back to their old account, then they are a Premium player, and the restrictions on Free accounts do not apply to them. Depending on how long they've played, they might already have access to IOs unlocked.

If a returning player has for some reason forgotten their old account into and is starting over on a new Free account, then they have no characters with IOs that are suddenly grey. And, really, it only makes sense that if you start from scratch on an all-new account, you're going to have to pay to get back where you were. There's no "looking backward" there.

Now, you might want to argue about the actual timing of when Premium accounts get what, but if so, you'll have to talk about Premium accounts. Because if you say "Free players should have access to X" then you're saying "we want to give away X for free to anyone who wants to download the game". Which is a much stronger statement than "People who used to play the game should get their X back". You might have people disagree with the former who wouldn't disagree with the latter.

Uh, when e-mail attachments were first introduced, you could only claim the inf or items with a character of the same faction, precisely in order to keep the two markets separate.

As late as the Closed Beta of Going Rogue, there were plans to keep the markets separate (as well as the third Praetorian market) until it became obvious that it was far too much of a hassle for both players and developers. The decision was made to merge the markets, and the ability to email stuff to the other side was a consequence of that.

But if you skim an advertisement and form a complete idea of what the thing is they're selling based on whatever words are in the biggest font, and then you go and see it is *not* the thing you were expecting, isn't that totally the fault of the company?

There's the word FREEDOM and my account is called Free. Clearly that means everything in the game is available for free except some XP potions. So it's Paragon Studios' responsibility to make FREEDOM match my expectations, otherwise it's totally a bait and switch scam.

So you're not running a RP event, you're just hoping to run a bunch of public RP events with the idea of "our Villain Group is behind everything bad ever and our Hero Group is the only one who can stop them". And you're declaring this to be the start of "our VG and HG story time".

Merging the hero and villain markets.

"We looked into the crystal ball and didn't like what we saw"

*later*

"So looks like it's either try to keep three different markets entirely separate, which means a whole bunch of code for all the different edge cases, or just merge them all into one. Merging it is! Also, Gleemail now works for all your characters, you can give Insps to enemy alignments on co-op teams, and Santa is making a special appearance on Easter."

That doesn't sound like a very good tennis strategy.