UberGuy

What springs to my mind with that is that I don't think it lines up very well with any of the analysis I've seen done for estimating the number of active subscriptions we've seen done in the threads that crop up when the NCSoft quarterly numbers come out. I may be on shakey ground here, because I didn't do any of those analyses, so I can't readily defend their conclusions, but let me at least mention them.

Up until Freedom, and if I remember correctly, the latest of those subscriber estimates put the number of paid subscriptions somewhere in the 65k-85k range. So the low-end estimate over 4x larger than what's required to make the Inf numbers line up. (For 85% or more of 100k accounts to be inactive, then that's only 15k active accounts, and 65k is more than 4 x 15k.) If the 65k number is even close to right, that doesn't seem very Occam's Razory to me. So I think something has to be really horribly wrong with those subscription estimates (not impossible) or for some 40,000 people to have been paying for subs they weren't really using (that seems to break Occam for me), or we're still missing something in the market usage model.

I do think it's unwise to ascribe to in-game markets the same assumptions that are valid in real-world markets. The actors have related but potentially critically different drivers. No one in an MMO will starve if they don't make money. (Well, OK, not in this MMO.) Being rich in an MMO almost certainly won't earn you the same things it often will in the real world - better health, financial security for offspring, maybe a bigger pool of sex/relationship partners.

I know that Pareto shows up in more places than (real world) wealth distribution, but I think it's a reasonable concern that the absence of directly comparable drivers might at least shift k away from 20%.

Does that include caring about slotted recharge?

Just to add some more nitpicking of the thread title to the pile, the opening post is not remotely "damning with faint praise". That means to offer praise that's extremely minor to such an extent that it's apparent you're actually condemning it. Your OP in the thread does not do this - it plainly and directly condemns the story telling in the Hollows. There's no praise involved, faint or otherwise.

In my opinion, the full-time mez protection alone would sell it. But being able to lay out one-shot boss mezzes with all the main mezzes in your arsenal is pretty fabulous.

Before, when Domination was also a major source of +damage, the prevailing sentiment was that a non-permadom Dominator was sub-par and a permadom one was amazing. Now a non-permadom Dominator is pretty good, and a permadom one is still amazing.

I wonder if the answer to the implied prevalence of poorness is simple, but seemingly impossibly mystifying to those of us who regular these forums. To this day there are people who almost completely avoid the auction houses. Some find the market thematically distasteful, some are afraid of the learning curve, and some just don't care if their characters have the best enhancements, even if that just means SOs at 22.

It may suggest assume that actually only a small part of the game population uses the market with anything like expertise, and only a small part of that subset of the population is actually toting around even hundreds of millions, let alone billions of inf.

Another thing to consider: it may be common for people to use the market effectively, but only to the degree they need to buy what they want, when they decide to try and get it. In other words, they may not use the market to earn inf which they keep, but rather only earn enough to buy what they want and then stop, presumably until the next time they want something. See the earlier question wondering why people are storing billions of inf.

I'm really confused by people's answer to his inspiration question.

He didn't ask if we use inspirations. He asked if we buy better ones.

Only if your maxHP is 10,000.

I know someone who makes "banker" characters, and I think he uses Stalkers.

I have no idea why.

Caltrops is handy as mitigation if you're playing something where you'd rather enemies scatter than pile in and beat on you. (Say, when playing a Blaster who can't readily AoE all their foes to death). I think it's dandy to add procs to Caltrops so it deals extra damage to them while it's serving in that mitigation role, but I don't do so with the expectation that it's great damage.

MaxHP changes change your current health proportionally. So if you lose, say, 10% of your maxHP, you lose 10% of your current HP as well. (The same thing happens when you gain maxHP, but obviously then your currentHP go up.

1000 HP is 2.78% of 36,000 HP, so when you lose that much from your max HP, you lose 2.78% from your current HP as well. It keeps your current HP at the same percentage of maxHP as you had before the change.