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Because I feel it at the market.

And because I find it contradictory for farming to be declared a problem in I14 and then mechanics developed to make farming easier in I16.

I'm not saying Rick is a good or bad person to work for, just that he didn't have the management skills to deliver and was basically driven out of the company he helped found as a result.

I'm not going to comment about where someone's heart is because it is an incredibly subjective idea, but I will say that the vast majority of lead developers attract an incredible amount of flack for what they do or don't do.

It wouldn't have launched.

Dakan was open about about not managing the Cryptic staff well enough to deliver what was required - he'd listen to everyone then go off and make a decision without giving the 'why' and annoy people because they thought they'd been ignored. He'd also take people at their word about work that was being done when he recognised after the fact he should have been checking more closely. It was why he was replaced - Cryptic management (and probably NCsoft management) didn't think he could deliver.

People like to decry lead developers for having a vision about how gameplay should be. In my opinion, without that vision, you end up with a wishy-washy title that no-one likes because it doesn't do anything well. You don't have to agree with that vision, but I think it is weak to decry it completely simply because you don't like it. Positron has a vision for CoH/V too - something that PvPers and MA players have found out recently in ways that weren't exactly positive.

Emmert made mistakes, but I find his regular burning-in-effigy events to be fairly hollow affairs.

We're like bad pennies - we always turn up. Which is ironic, because we don't even have pennies as currency.

I don't want to point out 'firsts' since there is probably a game that came before that did it, but CoH's zone events like the Steel Fires or the Skyway Troll Raves I actually see as being public quests before they were called public quests in WAR.

However, WAR packaged them up better, put them on an easy-to-follow timer and provided rewards for getting involved in them. In CoH/V, players do them for the badge and then never bother with them again.

I think Paragon Studios learned that giving someone a lore-related red name looks bad when they go.

Like with Lord Recluse: "Hey, here's Zeb Cook, Lord Recluse of CoV! Everyone ask him some questions and he'll answer them when he ... what's that? He won't be answering them because he is no longer at Cryptic? Okay... but here is our new Lord Recluse, Serdar Copur! With that kind of handle, you just know he's going to hang aroun... or go off to join John Romero's studio. And here comes our next red name. Guess what? They just get a title and a number."

What's worse, SilentSpy is actually Jack Emmert's father. Thanksgiving is a cold, uncomfortable affair.

... who in turn stole from the Champions PnP game. It's the circle of life! :-)

Only if it enters our territorial waters. You're all fine where you are.

... until we get that giant outboard motor attached to the Bight and we shift the entire continent. But we aren't there.

Yet.

I'd suspect one of the major conditions would be getting it signed off by everyone. Any materials created have to go through an extensive vetting process (does it fit with the lore? does that animation still even appear in the issue about to be released? are the devs, marketing team and management all happy with it, or do they think camera is a little too close to the power effect at the end and oops, that costume piece just clipped through at that other point and could you please fix that before release?).

There's probably not a lot of other restrictions - font, appearance and focus on the key issue features - but I'm sure signing it off and booking it into the marketing schedule is a major hold-up.

Ultimately though, I think that Dark Respite's talent is wasted by only doing issue-related content. What would be much more effective use of her ability would be doing some CoH/V short films and possibly even a much longer movie. But for that, she definitely needs to be paid and NCsoft isn't going to hire her just to churn out CoH/V movies.

Rather than spend 3 paragraphs attacking the messenger, another simple reason why external RMT prices have dropped is that inf is now stupidly easy - especially for farmers using AE - to get so the actual $-per-influence exchange rate has seen a huge drop. External RMT farmers can get more inf-per-hour than ever before and can help pass those savings onto the customer.

As another anecdotal data point, I've seen gold-selling spam rates go up, which certainly doesn't suggest that the external RMTers are hurting due to farming. If selling inf in CoH/V wasn't financially viable, the external RMTers would leave.

Blue balls and red marks all over your face? I can't possibly think of a single funny thing to say about that.

Ahh, but producers of what?

This thread is full of examples of farmers who say they horde the good stuff for themselves, delete the trash drops and only sell what is going to get the best return. All the while earning inf that in turn fuels market inflation for the more desirable IOs.

Yet the price of purples - as you mention - is the thing that keeps going up. This is because farmers aren't just selling those purples to the market, but hording them or giving them out to SG members.

Also, purples aren't generated in isolation - they are generated alongside inf with inf being a lot more common. MMO economies continually end up in mudflation situations because so little currency actually leaves the game compared to what goes into it.

They might earn you inf, but that is nothing compared to the inf a farming team can pull out of an optimised farming mission.

If salvage is worth something, then the farmer will keep it to sell in the market. If it isn't, it is deleted as trash. Besides that, the 'casual gamer' might see some hypothetical common IO go from 10k to 20k in price, but that is nothing compared to having to spend 10m to 20m on the recipe they'll want to use it on.

Deleted recipes have no downward impact on the price of those recipes in the market. They don't make anything cheaper. So how are farmers driving prices downward again outside of a handful of good return-on-time recipes like the same ones people keep bringing up?

Because it is easier to generate inf than ever before? Inf supply is at an all-time high so cost per-inf-generated decreases. Hence lower prices for inf across the board.

I've also seen more spam since I14 than I can remember in a long time. Used to be that I'd have to delete about 3 messages when I logged in once a day or so, now I'm seeing 10 or more in the same time period.

*This post was written with the full knowledge that in a contest between trying to convince Nethergoat about something or bashing a brick wall down with your face, you'd have more success on the brick wall*

Take it for the team when he calls you up. We need the /em whip_react emote to look perfect. ;-)

For someone only 4k posts away from Cuppa Incarnate status, your naivety is... refreshing. ;-)

Every forum has its juvenile moments. Or arguments that sees different sides spray bile at each other in multiple ways.

Get rid of the rep meters. That way lies madness. That way lies... Sparta.