UberGuy

Listen to this carefully, Norman.

It would eliminate all immediate feedback. You wouldn't know if what you bid bought something or not until the next interval. You might have bid 20M more than required and you still wouldn't know until the next gate.

Edit: It would also reduce the ability to bid low and win by being the only bidder, because bidders would accumulate on items until the next window, at which time the highest bidders of the lot would win.

Overall, it sounds kind of horrific to me.

I also am beginning to wonder if there's something you're missing about the market mechanics.

The price cannot be both "blocked" and 50 in this market. The only way someone can "block" in this market is by buying all (or most of) the existing supply. That means they have to buy well above the floor of 50 inf, up probably into at least the 1s or 10s of thousands of inf. They also have to keep doing that. Let's say they want to buy everything listed below 10,000 inf, because they want to try making the price 50,000 inf. They have to put bids out for 10,000 inf that buy up everything listed from 1 inf to 10,000 inf. In this situation, no one who sells and item will get less than 10,000 inf for it, no matter what they list it for. Frankly, when I see this happen, I'm prone to dump my supply rather than delete it, because I'm getting a lot more than normal for it by doing so.

I don't understand how the seller gets screwed by the situation you're describing. Unless you're defining "screwed" as "selling what they sold for cheap a lot higher". I really just can't bring myself to see that as the original seller being screwed in that way, since it's they must get no less what they listed the salvage for (minus market fees).

I do it because I'm going for a badge. I used to never list anything for sale under 10 inf. Now I have to list most High Level Salvage for under 10 if I want to to sell. Why? Not because of what you've described in your OP, but because so much of it is available. I produce (and sell) and buy a lot of common and uncommon High Level Salvage. I have a very good sense of how volatile the market price of any given piece is.

Only one item has been consistently freaking lately - Rubies. Demand for Rubies seems very high - there are never many for sale at any given time. I don't seem to produce noticeably less Rubies than other Arcane salvage, so I attribute this to high demand rather than low supply. I am not sure what people are crafting that demands lots of rubies - the things I use them for are kind of crappy things that I wouldn't expect a lot of people to want.

Arcane common salvage is usually more volatile than almost all Tech salvage, with the only relatively volatile Tech piece lately being Silver. Silver I think I understand - it's used in a lot of important Common enhancements. I am not sure if Arcane salvage is disproportionately represented in frequently crafted recipes or if people still produce more Tech than Arcane salvage. I find the latter a bit hard to believe these days, but there does seem to be something of an overuse (from a crafter's perspective) of foes that drop tech as opposed to those that drop arcane or both.

Indeed. Getting back to the notion that being "forced" to do something in this context probably really means someone wants the end result but not the activity that leads to it, I think that Inventions and the things around it (including the Market and various forms of Merits) are sometimes characterized in the wrong way.

Most players view the purpose of a things like Inventions to be the benefits one achieves by obtaining Inventions themselves. Some (like Sam) have distaste for the various hills the devs have given us to climb before we can obtain those rewards. We don't get deep access these rewards automatically - we have to go out of our way to obtain lots of them, and some people seem to wonder why that has to be. They would prefer that we had to do nothing special and just have these rewards be bestowed on us naturally, for doing other things we did before.

However, I think that this misses the realization that the very process itself of working towards lots of Inventions is actually the goal of the Invention system. The benefits that Inventions bestow are intended to compel players to ascend the hills the devs have placed between us and those rewards.

Now, there's nothing wrong with asking for alternative means of obtaining such goodies, and the devs have actually given us several now. It's just important to understand that, if having some sort of hill to climb is indeed the very point, all the devs will do is give us new, differently shaped hills with somewhat different scenery. Some may be more pleasant to a given player than others, but all will require some climbing, and none will be particularly faster to climb except based on your willingness to climb a particular type of hill.

I'd find it incredibly unlikely that you were alone even if no one here had affirmed that you are not. However, I do suspect very strongly that you are in a significant minority of players. I am one of very few people I knew who started playing this game who still do play it, and they all left because they wanted something new. If CoH had not changed in some notable ways, even I probably would have stopped playing it seriously around the I12-ish timeframe. That's not because of anything that happened in I12, but because I think that, without Inventions to give me something to chase, I would have bored of playing without goals too much by then to remain active.

I actually consider my viewpoint on CoH more like yours than like most of those bygone players, in a lot of ways. That really suggests to me that your particular personal view on this is fairly out there on the edge. Even so, I don't think you're alone, and even though I think you have a pretty fringe perspective, I think there are people who share it to degrees. I very much don't think this is an "either/or" type perspective. People's tolerance for it varies so that they paint a kind of gradient. I think you just happen to be a very deep shade of black on that spectrum.

Edit: My own take on change in this game usually goes like this. I start with worry that I won't enjoy the new changes, followed by lots of reading and then experimentation when details become available to figure out what I really think of the on the change, followed by determining how to adapt my play to maximize my enjoyment in light of the change (which may involve avoiding/minimizing exposure to it if I dislike the change), followed eventually by absorbing the change into what I consider my baseline such that the next new thing starts the cycle again.

Nor did I claim it did. But there's a world of difference in contributing something and not contributing anything at all. Sadly, I feel that a lot of people here on the forums (and in game, particular in places like Freedom broadcast) completely gloss over that. Less becomes reduced to zero - anything that contributes less apparently should be deprecated.

I have absolutely zero problem with there being situations where melee contributes less than range, as long as they can contribute something meaningful. Given that the fight with BM is just a part of the TF, I absolutely feel like melee characters contribute enough to bother including. Case in point: I went on a 24 minute Apex with one Electric/Psi Dom and seven melees (four Scrappers, a Tanker, a melee-spec Widow and a Bane spec SoA). 24 minutes isn't a fantastic time, but it's awfully decent for that team composition.

Uh, I have plenty of melee characters that are not softcapped*, and I run this encounter repeatedly. I find your analysis of what a melee character should be doing ... rather odd. Few of my melees have any way to hold aggro on entire packs of swords, whether or not they could actually survive doing so. I don't take on whole packs of them. I take on as many as I can both engage and survive.

Also, are we assuming that such a character is typically unbuffed? My characters are usually in the mid-to upper 30s on their highest defense type (usually either Melee or L/S), meaning a single strong shield buff will softcap me. It's extremely common that I have buffs of this sort in a team setting. Sure, sometimes lack them, but it's not what I consider common.

Even when I have to survive on my own, sans buffs, I haven't had a problem contributing. I either spam my ranged attack on BM (when I have them) or hunt down BM's human accomplices (not swords unless I am trying to save someone from them).

* For example, I prefer Positional to Damage Typed defense on things like my DM/Regen and DB/Regen because it creates less variation in survivability based on foe type. This means these characters typically cap out at 35-38% melee defense.

When I solo, I moved my settings one higher to keep the net level offset the same. I play on the settings I do because it's where I ride the balance between some chance of defeat and speedy progress/reward. Making everything -1 to what it was knocked that out of kilter, so I put it back.

I did not change anything about EBs/AVs. In general I turn AVs off, unless I specifically want to try to solo them. I like trying to doing on new characters, but not generally while playing existing ones. It also depends heavily on AT/powerset.

Because we do it with no strategy guide. We say "X TF, 7 spots", and hit times like you see in the thread.

Not that we never talk about ways to make it go faster, but kind of screwing around and rocking out compared to the median completion time is a lot more fun than careful planning, at least most of the time.

By the way, are you looking at recent times? An STF in 6 minutes off good, modern ITF speed runs would mean you were doing it in about 14 minutes.

Since that can't be what's going on with Apex (because it's new and you can't be looking at old times), I'm curious what your times for that are.

Especially /Regens.

The patches actually escalate in damage over the course of the mission. I'm not sure if it's just a binary before/after retreat, or a more continuous increase, but the initial patch is pretty easy for something with Scrapper HP to wade around in for a bit, especially if they have a level shift.

Towards the end of the mission, even one patch is bad news.

I'm pretty confident that's not the case. No other faction does this, even on x8.

Neither is Dark Melee.

I really don't understand people who get so fixated on AoE. "Most of the game is about killing as much as possible as fast as possible" is a playstyle choice, not a requirement.

Yeah, I am just not sure how extensible that is. You can create an extra Notice if you have the metric boatload of shards required, but that might just be like that to encourage people to burn shards.