seebs

Thanks!

I am certainly not discouraged. I have no expectation that, even if I play another five years, I'll ever get a single character fully set up with purples and PvP IOs. Seriously, I just don't think that's a thing I can reasonably expect; that's something that looks to require more effort than I want to put in.

I do expect to, within a year or two, end up with one or two 50s who can farm at +4/x8 if they want to.

I think it should probably take years, and I would be totally unconcerned if it turned out that it were about as common as, say, players who have gotten EVERY badge. (There was a WoW player who got every available achievement. One such player. One. Out of 12 million.)

I think it should take a couple to a few months to get nicely kitted out with a good selection of set bonuses, a couple of procs, and maybe one or two individual purple enhancements, if you get lucky on drops. At that point you can pretty much steamroll any content in the game. You are the equivalent of what might, in another game, be called "raid geared".

I think it works because I am one of those newcomers. I was briefly frustrated because I couldn't afford SOs, but once people told me about things like leaving bids up overnight I was happy. I am happy because at every time, I have the potential to progress, and because my character can be Super Awesome. That doesn't need PvP IOs and a dozen procs. It needs dual and triple aspect IOs which are giving me 25-50% more enhancement per slot than I would have gotten from SOs, and set bonuses which add up to another 20-40% regeneration, or 20% recovery, and that all adds up.

My bots/traps runs at +2/x3 or so, and I can read a book while steamrolling. Woo! I AM AMAZING! That's at level 35, with some mismatched enhancements and things I didn't think through as well as I should have. I'm happy. I feel like the game is letting my character be awesome and powerful. I am also happy because I anticipate a lot more development over the next year or three.

Ahh, but will it be one of the last times you make disingenuous posts such as this?

You're ignoring purple drops, but if you spent that much time farming stuff, you'd get purple drops. You'd also get PvP IOs if you did a lot of PvP. In short, it won't take nearly that long, because you will get many things during that time which are either the things you want or things you can trade for them.

Imagine that you find a purple which sells for 1B. You can get it for less than 20 A-merits, because you can make >120M for a pair of A-merits, so 20 A-merits spent getting trivially saleable stuff (LotG +recharge, celerity +stealth) will get you well over 1B. Do that a few times, get a few purple drops while you're running all those tips... it adds up. If you're getting reward merits too, you can't convert them all to A-merits, so you have some to put into buying recipes with them.

In short, it doesn't take that long, or even close to that long.

This is like talking about how long it takes to get a hamburger, assuming you have to work at McDonald's until you can save enough to buy a cattle ranch so you can raise a cow to kill to get the beef.

Okay, first off, people can demonstrably do that in under a year if they really want to.

I guess... I still don't quite get it. You seem to assume that a character not fully equipped with all ultra-rares is "incomplete" or something, but really, a character in all ultra-rares is no longer fun; there's no progress to be made.

I am not particularly sure that it should be practically possible to fully kit out a character in "ultra rares". Ultra rare does not mean "everyone you meet has twenty or more of them".

In another game I played, a friend of mine met a single person who had The Best Weapon, and top-of-the-line gear. The other 11M or so players did not have gear quite that good. Or even very close. But they were progressing, if they wanted to, so they were happy.

I play in order to advance my characters, because advancement is fun. No more advancement, no more fun, no more happy.

Actually, uhm.

No, you don't. Sure, it's probably faster to do so, but you can get all the salvage and recipes you want for merits and tickets. Do tips, run AE missions, you will be able to buy exactly and specifically the things you want. It'll take a while, but you can do it.

Except they don't.

That's the point. The price points are driven by the market as a whole, and the vast majority of the participants are not marketeers or farmers, just ordinary players.

Heck, I market pretty actively, and a good 20-30% of what I do consists of just listing everything in my inventory for 1 inf to clear out my salvage inventory or enhancement tray. For about half the enhancements I list, I don't even look at current prices or bid/ask, I just type 1, hit post, and move on.

And when I do set prices, I set them marginally above my costs, and leave it to purchasers to, without any prompting from me, offer 2-3 times what I listed for. Or more.

Again, I listed a stack of enhancements at 7k, and people gave me 400k for them. There were no outstanding bids when I listed, so this is people coming in, seeing 20+ enhancements for sale, and no bids, and STARTING with a bid that's twice the highest number in the last five.

Okay! I think at this point, I can understand where you're coming from.

I don't think I agree, but I think I get it. You're not talking about theoretical economics; you're talking about the experience of, as a player, trying to build a character a particular way and finding that you can't. Is that right?

... I'll continue this post as though you said yes, but if I'm wrong about that, the rest of this may be nonsensical.

Go look in early to mid July for a thread by me on how we're supposed to get stuff in this game if we don't have a level 50 to generate inf for us. I was having an experience similar to yours, except I was having it at a lower level; I was getting my first characters into the 20s, and I had some recipes for things I wanted to craft... and I couldn't. I couldn't figure out how to craft those things, because I couldn't afford the components for them.

People walked me through ways to make money, many of which required you to start by already having money. I kid you not, it was helpful to me when someone pointed out (in-game, not in the thread) that you could buy 51-53 SOs really cheap and vendor them. It helped me get that starting money, which I didn't otherwise understand how to get.

And here's the thing... It was, yes, a little discouraging. But not so much that I quit, and once I understood it, it stopped being discouraging.

So let's talk a little bit about feelings and expectations.

Here is the thing: If you are feeling discouraged, it's almost always because of a mismatch between your expectations and the world around you. This does not tell you whether it is your expectations or the world that is "wrong". I'm not even sure "wrong" is a meaningful way to talk about such a thing. I know people who hate cats, because cats don't obey commands. I love cats, because cats don't obey commands. Are cats right or wrong? No. Cats are just cats. Is obeying commands right or wrong? No. Obeying commands is just obeying commands. However, if you must live with cats, you will be a lot happier if you learn not to expect them to obey commands.

You seem to be coming to CoH with the expectation that it is reasonable to be able to "complete" a character by acquiring complete IO builds including purples and PvP IOs. I do not believe this expectation matches the developers' intent. I believe their design is that you "complete" a character by buying level-appropriate SOs, and that anything past that is progression. And progression is supposed to take a while. Possibly a long while.

I think the issue here is not that the game is misdesigned, or that the game is designed correctly. It's not that your expectations are right or wrong. It's that your expectations and the game's nature are not in alignment.

If you want to move from "my expectations and the game's nature are not in alignment" to "the game is wrong", you have to establish that your expectations are somehow objectively more reasonable than those that other players have. And I think you're going to have a hard time with that, potentially, because the current structure of the game is not inherently unfun. If your expectation were "my choices have some kind of impact on what happens", and the game's reality was "your character is instantly mind-controlled in combat and plays like a mastermind pet", and you said the game sucked, a lot of people would agree. Lack of control is
consistently regarded as "unfun" by most players.

But in this case, lots of people like and enjoy the progression aspect of the IO system. CoH has, always, been more about journey than arrival. There is a reason that so many people hold power levellers in contempt. One of my friends decided to pop into an AE farm to level... For about six levels, to get over a hump. As soon as that hump was over, it was "hey, let's go see if we can do some story arcs in Steel Canyon". Because that's more fun.

Imagine, if you will, a thing like an AE farm. Call it a Market Farm. You log in, you go to the Market Farm, you buy a bunch of Rikti-Os that are, due to a bug, giving you purples every time you sell them back to a vendor. You can purple out a character in an hour or so of messing with the Market Farm.

Would you use it? I wouldn't. I'd play the invention system the way it is now, warts and all, so I could be progressing over time. So that every time I log in, now and for the next few months, I would be looking to see if I'd gotten a recipe, and every purchase would be a noticeable, if small, increase in my character's power. That would be a fun experience of progressing and developing.

Being purpled is not as fun as getting purpled, and it's fine by me that it takes a long time. I don't find that "discouraging" any more than I'm "discouraged" when I kill my first Hellion, get 10xp, and try to figure out how many Hellions I'll have to kill to make level 50.

This is a non-argument until you can get EVERY player to participate. At which point... Buyers will indeed set the price at 100 inf, and at that price, there will be no sellers. If you set the price too low, you get no sellers. But hey -- you set the price.

A while back, I wanted a scientific theory. I was in a hurry, and bored, so I bid crept up to about 175k. There were 1800 up, none of them under 175k.

So I bid 12,345. And I waited five minutes. And I got a scientific theory for 12k, even though there were none for sale under 175k.

I was the buyer. I set the price. I got the price I set.

Yes, let's.

I have sold well over ten, probably fifteen to twenty, level 30 Impeded Swiftness: Chance for Smashing Damage procs in the last week or three.

Most of them, I have listed for 12,345,678 inf.

Most of them have sold for 20-25 million. Even after one clever person tried bidding 15, the next couple sold for over 20 again.

A month or so back, I mistakenly bid 5k each on a bunch of to-hit debuff level 50 common IOs, instead of the recipe thereof. I listed them on the market for 7k so I'd get my money back. The average sale price was over 200k, with at least one for 400k.

This was during a period of two or three weeks during which, at EVERY time, there was at least one up for sale for 7k. There were sales that didn't go to me, too, so some people listed things at under 7k.

That's the "serious pattern". That is the reality of the market -- buying prices are quite often much, much, higher than what people list for. This is not an anomaly or an isolated occurrence, but the usual, normal, daily pattern of selling.

I wrote a program to calculate, from amount paid to the market in fees, the listing prices of my sales. I would guess that roughly half the time, the amount I get paid is more than 20% higher than the listing fee, sometimes well more than 50% higher, and occasionally solidly over twice the listing fee. That, my friend, is the serious pattern.

If the devs did this, it would suggest that they were utterly, totally, wrong in their pricing of A-merits. Like, that they had not even considered what they wanted when they picked those numbers.

And I would not be much interested in the ghost town of people who AE farm to 50, get all their purples, and never play that character again because there's nothing left to do. I like the game now, where people can still have reason to play and improve a character years after starting, and progress means something.

Okay, but that makes it pretty hard to talk about economy, because you're depriving us of the last couple thousand years of research.

If it's an inconsistency, it means you're wrong. If you're not, maybe instead of telling us not to point it out, you could help us understand why that's not a massive inconsistency.

You've told us that, but not previously told us how you define "stupid".

Does it? I never got that impression; I just thought they were expensive. It also means I might get that much money from drops sometime if I'm lucky.

Several errors here.

First, you're ignoring random drops completely. But random drops happen. During the two months I spend trying to buy a particular I/O, I'm getting many others. Some of them might be the ones I want; others might be things I can sell for high prices, and then the system is helping me.

Secondly... Characters are, in general, not supposed to be finished. That's not the point of an MMO. In an MMO, if there is nothing left to work towards, the game sucks and people quit.

The entire point is to never be "finished", to never have everything you want, and to always have something to look forward to.

So if you are talking about a character being "finished", you are not talking about an MMO.

If you move the goalposts back to "well-enough equipped to handle the hard content", it'll set you back a couple million inf for SOs. If you move them out again to "well-enough equipped to solo stuff that used to require teams", you might spend a billion or two total, but you probably wouldn't have any purples or PvP IOs.

Discouraging would be, but this isn't discouraging. The discouragement comes, not from a flaw in the price of IOs, but from some gamers mistakenly thinking the goal is to get all purpled out.

A good design would let most people get powerful enough to be happy, and leave room for improvement for almost everyone.

That's what we have now.

No, because the price does not, in general, discourage paying customers.

If you could get everything you wanted, you'd be done and you'd stop playing. If there's more to get, you can have fun progressing, and you keep playing. Current prices are having the desired effect; you have more to reach for.

I wouldn't say "worried". Curious.

Despite your endless efforts to turn this into a personal thing, it really is a matter of wanting to learn more about the game. People (who weren't you, because you were too concerned with whether or not it was personal to answer the question) did point out considerations I hadn't been aware of in my thread about 'trops, and now I know how to use the power better.

It is just you. I don't care whether people "look bad". I do care whether I'm learning things or not, and I do care whether people who look bad are actually bad or getting a bum rap.

Because I was sick of hearing something like 90% of my server griping about how bad some guy was and not having any idea whether they were right or not, and I like to play with people to learn how they play. The specific guy I was talking to, I actually like; I disagree with him about a few things, but I think he's a nice guy. I would like to see whether I can find evidence that would either convince him that the strategy he uses is bad, or convince other people that the strategy he uses is good. It would be interesting to me to see how he reacted if he were proven wrong, and I'd guess that if we were able to show that he's right, a whole lot of people might change their play style. Either way, we win!

Don't make assumptions about people who are weird, your assumptions will be based on flawed premises. I write like this about any topic which interests me, and all it takes for something to interest me is ambiguity with a possibility for me to learn something.

There were no wipes. I do not dispute that the strategy in question is quite safe for the most part -- fewer deaths, I'd say, per mission completed. I just don't think it's fast.

I am a firm believer in the following general model of pugs:

There is no such thing as a bad group. Some groups are good. Other groups are funny.

I wouldn't, I don't think, group with them again except out of curiousity -- it wasn't the way I most enjoy playing.

I should point out, though, this is not a single tank; it's a large number of tanks, all trained by the same guy to use his tactics. (Not the guy I was talking to; he's one of the people who got trained to play this way.) But I figure, if I can get solid evidence either way, I'm definitely going to be able to play better as a result, and I may get to help someone else play better.

The big error in your thinking is that you're viewing this as a significant amount of effort, and assuming that my goal is to criticize. I've already told you it wasn't, and if you'd go look at the trops thread, you'd see that I've become convinced that there were issues I hadn't taken into account and that my strategy was wrong. That was the whole point.

If instead of making up this fantasy motivation of making someone "look bad", you looked at what I say I am trying to do, and whether or not I actually do it, you might have caught on that I'm just doing my usual aspie thing and trying obsessively to master a system because that's what makes systems fun to me.

It's not. I'm just curious.

While this is true, I think it makes no sense to speak of a "casual" player who expects to get the best stuff in the game. You can play baseball casually, but you can't play baseball casually and expect to win the World Series.

Purples and PvP IOs are exceptional rewards, and to get a lot of them, you have to do an exceptional amount of something. If you think you are entitled to them, either you're not a casual player, or you've got an unreasonable sense of entitlement. MHO.

So you're telling us you're making an argument based on data that you know, for sure, no one involved in the discussion can possibly have?

On what grounds do you make this claim?

I know people who have paid 2.5 billion for enhancements and been quite happy about the results.

I think I understand what you're saying, but I don't know how you come to that conclusion.

How do you determine what is "too much"? Why is it "too much"? Why is 2 billion too much, but 1.9 billion not "too much"?

Imagine that we find an enhancement which is worth one billion (a price which is not "too much".) Now imagine that some other enhancement exists which is better than it, and which is rarer. Obviously, it will be worth more. Lots more. Maybe twice as much...

Basically, I've seen people who are offering to sell these enhancements for 2B and up, and it does not appear to me that there is any malice in their actions. They are trying to get a fair price for something, and selling something for hundreds of millions of inf less than the going rate hardly seems like a "fair price".

Houses cost money. A fair bit. Many people can't afford a house. Your argument seems to be that, therefore, $500k is "too much" for a house, and anyone selling a house for that much is a griefer, doing it in order to make house-buyers suffer. Never mind that it's a three-story mansion which has lakefront access and is a block from a particularly well-respected school; $500k is "too much for a house", because you can get a perfectly good house for $110k.

Or scientist. Or skeptic. Or person who's heard a lot of hucksters pushing snake oil.

Well, that part's not true of scientists, skeptics, people sick of snake oil, or the marketeers.

I would dearly love to see a thread of logic. Feel free to provide one at any time.

Concepts? Great.

But here's the thing. I pointed out a specific, measured, verified, economic fact. You came back with a snide remark about "Glen Beck". (I assume you meant "Glenn Beck".) You were then presented with a variety of real-world examples in fields from coffee to basic food staples that have occurred over a period of decades -- but you haven't acknowledged them, conceded the point, or in any other way reacted to a clear demonstration that a point you'd disputed by insulting someone was in fact valid and proven.

You're making a number of claims which you have not offered any evidence for at all, and many of which contradict a lot of research we've done. Heck, just last night I bid 33,333 on about 6 stacks of level 50 recharge reduction IO recipes. They sold out of order; I had 3 left on one stack, 6 on another, 4 on another... Meaning that we've just totally disproven your claim that order of bidding wins when all else is equal. Same character, same price, same item, selling out of order.

I've yet to see you show the ability to concede a point. I concede points on the forums, as anyone who watches me will point out.