Thunderforce

This seems a remarkable thing to suppose given that base PvP was turned off in i13 and at the same time bases were made much cheaper, enabling many more people to make serious use of them.

I daresay the original concept for bases was partly oriented around PvP, but things change.

I think it's more that I might as well have them. I've got two options to replace the existing mishmosh of forty-somethings; bid on everything at level 50 , or bid on some at 50 and some at 33. The latter isn't really more work.

Well, again, I don't mind leaving bids lying around for a while - I realise this isn't so easy for everyone, depending on what other market activity they're doing - so I don't see this as a serious issue. Of course the supply is much better at 50, but from my experience on the way up, once you get down to 33, prices are pretty reasonable and demand isn't that high either. Most of my Mako's Bite: Chance For Wedgie are around 28-35 - I bid on a bunch and took whatever filled.

I really mean it when I say I lack the temperament to grind purples. It took me a little while to figure out General Hammond was giving repeatable missions; for all that the SS is extremely pretty, I've street swept as many Rularuu as I ever want to. I'd like some real missions in the SS, but there aren't any.

I have had two drop so far. If I had sold them both (I used one), they would have fetched 190 million. Of course everything's cheaper to buy if you're patient, which I am, but even so... presently, if the other one hasn't sold yet, I've got about 160 million. I lack any inclination to grind them out at even a conservative 50 million a pop.

Looking at the Wiki, hm - the elbow in the IO effectiveness graph is at 26th! I remembered it being around 35th. Maybe I should be reworking myself around 33rd level IOs.

ETA: of course, I could look closely at which set bonuses I don't mind losing, like those 4% reduction in sleep duration (I'm a scrapper), and then keep some IOs at 50th for maximum effectiveness. I see a fresh page in the notebook looming...

Well, they do. :-)

I would argue that removing the incentive to have personal storage SGs - in a way that doesn't make people angry (in particular, my proposal doesn't take away that option, it just gives another equally good option) - would be of considerable benefit. Part of what keeps people playing is the social side. Of course, global chat has enormously improved that; however, being in a large active SG and coalition would also offer benefits. Keeping people playing has an obvious financial benefit, but beyond that, keeping people socialising - not running through any of that expensive-to-develop content - is a cheap and easy way to keep subscriptions.

It's a common confusion, but originally "RPG", of computer games, meant "stats and levels and character advancement, and probably some vaguely sub-D&D mechanics". Out of illusion, truth; a lot of people do roleplay in MMO"RPG"s, and single-player CRPGs often feel the need to have some sort of moral choice pseudo-roleplaying element - but what City of X is about is killing things, taking their stuff, and becoming game-mechanically stronger. If it was a tabletop game, it would be a tactical skirmish wargame.

That fits a neat analogy. Some people like to roleplay in wargames; I'm running a Silent Death campaign where some faction players write little fiction pieces about their battles, name their pilots, and all the rest of it. But some don't, and they are just as much playing Silent Death; the roleplaying element is optional. Now if two of these players are allied and one of them does something game-mechanically silly for roleplaying reasons, the other one is likely to be annoyed. That's the situation your teammates were in.

This is something I keep saying, so naturally I think it's spot-on. :-)

A lot of the leftover stuff just doesn't make sense unless you think of the original design as being to waste your time EQ-style.

I don't think the developers hate bases - taking base-building from being expensive to relatively cheap shows that. But that has had an unforeseen consequence - the rise of the personal SG and personal storage base (of course, people did it before, but it's a lot more viable now).

I think if you want to see bases - and supergroups - rise again, part of the answer is to cut that short. Account-wide storage is an often-made proposal, but it has to not be viable to take that _and_ a personal storage SG. I've suggested before - you can have account-wide storage, but then you only grant the 20K prestige to SGs you join once, not once per toon. That stops you from setting up a personal SG with 300,000 prestige, and makes using the account-wide storage and joining an SG with other players more viable.

I agree that base raids are basically a no-hoper given the overall failure of PvP (but, more controversially, I don't think that failure has anything to do with the i13 changes.)

Aha. But if you're running with any difficulty setting above "1 hero-equivalent", you can reduce that setting by 1 while you are SKing your trial account buddy. Even if you're not (and frankly, you probably are, because you're only going to bother with this when you're a highbie looking to clear up the last few badges), you could set difficulty to -1 to restore something like the previous challenge level. So I don't see that as a serious problem.

I'd like to point out that I completely called that one. :-)

Really? Because I've read the whole thread here and the opinions seem quite consistent. Don't tell me, the lurkers support you in email?

There are two obvious objections to this.

1) Is server population diminishing? I've been hearing that it is ever since I started playing in 2005. At that rate, I should be the only player left. Conclusion; people who assert without evidence that server population is diminishing are generally wrong.

2) Demand is proportional to server population too! There is no reason why a change in server population should increase or decrease prices.

So your 300 million a day from marketting consumes between 30 and 45 million in transaction fees. You yourself make up for that destruction of influence. Where's the problem?

It's not that all the influence is accumulating in your pockets. You can only make 350 million a day for six days before hitting the influence cap on one toon. It's curious you don't know that if you are making 350 million a day.

ETA "on one toon" to avoid nitpicking, but a more serious point is that almost no-one is going to accumulate billions of influence indefinitely without spending it. Why bother?

There's a peculiar kind of genius in both being blindingly obvious and wrong at the same time.

Firstly, we know. There is, I guarantee you, absolutely no-one posting in this thread who does not know that the market does not generate influence, and didn't know it before you pointed it out ad nauseam.

Secondly, you're wrong. Selling enhancements and recipes to the in-game shops also generates influence (as do mission/arc completion rewards, clicking glowies, and disposing of enhancements via respecs, but perhaps not in significant quantities, and probably something else I've missed.).

Nope. For one thing, practically everyone and their dog has Swift, and many people have significant set bonuses to run speed.

I've been doing more experimenting - now I'm reassured that I'm not doing anything wrong but that the geyser that led to my initial question is just a bit broken - and I'm pretty sure now all this "powers off" stuff is hooey. If you don't press movement keys when you're in flight, it makes no difference at all; if you do, some powers are giving you a bit more control, and what's wrong with that?

If you are going Shadow Sharding it's a good time to get the Day Job badge, since you start earning juice for the Day Job rocket pack, eliminating those embarassing "Raptor Pack ran out" situations.

Unfortunately the plural of anecdote is not data. In fact, in this case, the _singular_ of anecdote is not data.

Willpower scrapper if you want to play blueside. Why Willpower? Quick Recovery. It's the set Regen always wanted to be.

I have found little use for dual builds on scrappers or blasters. They seem to be most use on tankers, controllers, or defenders - to avoid having to compromise between teaming and soloing.

An even playing field for PVP and a loot system are largely mutually exclusive, particularly once you take into account people's expectations of loot systems - look at all the nonsense here about how people who've done the "work" should enjoy an advantage in PVP, so that PVP can be a test of your free time and boredom threshold not of skill at PVP. I've got a job, thanks, I don't need another one that I have to pay for.

The loot system made commercial sense (for all that I, personally, would much rather play the game with no loot system) but it was inevitable that it would make PVP the province of an elite few - however, PVP has never been particularly successful or popular anyway, so I guess that wasn't seen as much of a problem.

One question is whether people leaving the game are doing so (on average) with lots of influence, or whether they are doing so having spent most of their influence on kitting out toons, leaving that influence in other people's pockets.

I think I shall decline to bash my head on the concrete wall of the OP's total incomprehension.

Thanks. If it's not just me, I'll stop worrying about it.

Particularly in the RWZ! It's like a shiny new department store would look amidst the ruins of Stalingrad. AE terminals in an R&R area in the base itself would make more sense (given that there is a good reason to offer AE access in at least one co-op zone).

I have all my toons in a personal SG, but I still use the vault reserve. If I'm on a team and filling up with salvage, I can quickly dump salvage in the vault; my personal SG base racks are, to a first approximation, full - and when I drop salvage there, I enter it into my records [1], which takes time.

[1] Why? Because that way when the racks are full, I can run my salvage Perl script, and find out what I have most of and hence can sell, without looking in every rack to see what I've got.