UberGuy

That screenshot is awesome. Kudos.

All my characters who have Vengeance have it on auto fire. It's just so much easier to activate that way. (And I don't really use auto fire on anything else.)

You're touching on the key here. It's a huge function of the number of people in a zone.

It's not just the trials, by the way. I went to a Hamidon Raid on Wednesday that had the worst raid lag I've experienced since back when you could have over 100 people in the Hive. I quipped to people at the time that I could have rendered the frames by hand and kept up with my power recharge and ability to move after activating a power.

This broke dramatically with the most recent patch. It was nothing like this on the prior patch level.

I can remember when everyone felt that was the case.

To be honest, very little has changed mechanically. We gained Criticals, and got a base AT damage mod boost as part of ED/GDN. The idea we were gimp was born of a couple of things. Probably the most significant is that not that many people were high level - the vast majority of folks were probably under level 30, and a large portion under level 20 or so. There was no "difficulty slider" - if you wanted over-level foes, your only choice was to street sweep.

Even today, one of the biggest factors in victory against foes from levels 1-20 or so is dish out a lot of damage. Obviously, we all need damage to actually defeat foes, but at low levels, you can carry the day on pure damage and very little proper mitigation.

Early on, very few low-level critters had ranged damage. Blasters all had ranged damage. Not only did this mean they could defeat stuff in great safety, they didn't need to chase stuff around. Scrapper AoEs couldn't compete with Blaster AoEs, with the exception of Spines.

We actually got Criticals out of the perception that we didn't bring anything to teams. Scrappers were designed as the "solo friendly" AT, but people playing them wanted to feel like they were wanted on teams. Thanks to the perception that Blasters were more effective, safer damage (how things have changed, eh?), giving Scrappers more (random) burst damage was probably seen as a "quick fix". It was billed as making us "boss killers". For how people played at the time, I think that probably made some sense. It set us all on an interesting road, though - one that I think shaped how other melee ATs work since they were (eventually) balanced with respect to Scrappers without Scrappers really changing that much over time.

If they were told the number verbally by someone from Europe and wrote it down in "American", then yes, that could do it.

The thread in question.

I consider most of the people reporting the occurrence to be reasonable posters. I do not think the sample size is very large, but it happened to multiple people, multiple times to the same people. That's highly unusual based both on past experience and past anecdotes.

It's not. I wrote a Python program that downloads from the site, and it hits the problem. It doesn't do any page parsing, so it doesn't handle anything that's "on" the page, and it definitely doesn't understand Flash. It hits hangups downloading from the main site and the forum, but not the server status XML file.

As mentioned, you can multi-stack Tar Patch.

If you're asking why it has a longer recharge time, it's because it has -DR, which is a far stronger damage multiplier than the -DEF from QS.

I'm confused. Creating them with Inf doesn't take any Empyrian Merits, and creating them with Empyrian Merits doesn't cost any Inf.

I know what he said. My assertion is that it is not unambiguous. It almost immediately spawned a number of nearly identical questions seeking clarification from a number of players. Those questions have not been answered.

Assuming is not sufficient. Interpreting is not wise. We each only know what we think he said. We do not know with certainty what he actually meant.

Possibly a decent theory, and also possibly a viable workaround if correct, but definitely not a good design, if working as intended.

That's interesting new info to me. I wonder if the web infrastructure for the CoH site (and forums) is shared with any of the core NC North America web infrastructure. If it is, it still could be something going on with a shared back-end (perhaps a single server hosting all the site databases). If not, that does point to some sort of network *****. That's somewhat supported by the phone always working, but oddly conflicted with the server status XML feed. It would need to be some sort of return packet screw up only for files above a certain size, or possibly only of certain MIME types. Anything is possible, but man would that be weird.

Edit: The fact that it censors "foo bar" makes it look far worse than it really is.

I don't think anyone here is baffled. That's the second time you've used that kind of terminology (baffled, frozen with indecision) to describe what people have said, and I think I'd like to see you quote another poster who used the word "baffled" when describing their objections to this system.

Since I know you can't actually do that, instead of leaving the matter there, I think I'll just point out some reasons I think you might actually be doing by posting that particular description.

1. You aren't a native English speaker, and are having trouble using the right words to describe what you really mean.
2. You understand and use English just fine, but cannot conceive of an explanation for objection to this system other than that the people opposed to it are actually baffled by it. Given say, mine or Obitus' command of things like sentence structure, vocabulary, and at least basic math (I don't think any algebra was actually wielded in this thread), I wonder if it strikes you as likely that we would be baffled by the choices in the Incarnate reward windows.
3. You are constructing a argument based on logical fallacy, attempting to make your own objections to the complaints look better through a not so subtle effort to cast our positions in terms we never used. Depending on how one reads it, you could be forming a straw man argument (saying we described being baffled when we never did) or a loose ad hominem (we're so dumb we're baffled by a simple system, so our arguments aren't worth listening to).

No one who has posted in this thread more than a couple of times has expressed any irrational fears of the reward window, or a terribly intellectual inability to deal with it. What has been said is that it's relatively easy to screw up with it, screwing up has a cost that seems high to correct, and there's no compelling reason it should be so costly. What we get from you is "it being costly doesn't affect me." That's not a very strong position of defense for the way it is. You see, I am fairly careful with the interface, and there are decent odds I will never have to side convert any salvage into another salvage of the same rarity as long as I don't pick a reward while half asleep or while Gaming Under the Influence. I still think it is too costly to side convert salvage for no particularly good reason.

I agree. Measuring it as I did would definitely require revisiting the 10% conversion cost's equivalent value (measured as something like opportunity cost) if you actually changed, well, the opportunity cost.

As with many things we've seen in the game, I suspect the devs just have to look at stuff like that, consider the various ways that players might valuate some obtainable thing, possibly consider which are more likely to be used (if they can foresee that), and choose a value that's a good compromise between the outcomes, maybe weighted by some fudge factor for expected frequency of use.

They can ignore all that, just pick the way they prefer to think about the cost (which I think may be how we got the 150 Thread side conversion price) and go with that, but I think that can end up out of synch with how the players actually end up interacting with the system.

That can cut both ways. In this case it seems to be considered prohibitively expensive by at least some players who think of the cost in a way different from that the Devs used. In other cases, the Devs might choose the valuation method that ends up seeming ridiculously cheap to players, and way more players opt to "pay" for (and thus obtain) the item faster than expected. I don't think there's a right answer. I just think there's an answer that aligns best with how I think it makes the most sense to valuate the item in practice. Well, actually I always think that answer is the right one. But I think folks know what I mean.