seebs

Even just a few friends is plenty. Right before the Real ID thing, I was hitting ICC25 and the like, just because I was friendly to hang out with.

I guess the thing is, though... There's a lot of high-end stuff that really does REQUIRE that you group. There's virtually nothing in CoH I can think of that you can't get, eventually, by soloing or shopping.

I also get the impression that CoH's baseline difficulty is intentionally fairly easy -- you can pretty much get any group together and do whatever you want, and it'll go fine.

I actually now have two semi-complete sets; I'm 4/6 Theft of Essence for Twilight's Grasp, and 4/6 Nightmare on Fearsome Stare. Which cost me, between the two of them, oh, probably nearly a million inf. And even though a couple of the ToE pieces are maybe level 20 or so, it's still pretty decent as bonuses go, and now, unless I decide to hop to a different set, I can upgrade that power pretty cheaply whenever I feel like it.

This is getting uncomfortably close to the "compare/contrast" rule, but I think it's a relevant point.

And the fact is, this isn't the case. The only "literally can't" I can think of is that a very badly geared character can't use the random dungeon finder to get into a couple of specific instances. Apart from that, I've had characters that weren't qualified for some of the entry-level content get taken through ICC25 (third-from-hardest in the game at the time) by people who were well-geared and had a couple of openings in a 25-man team. There's also the guild <Undergeared> who have been clearing raids without any epic gear at all, and last I heard they were 6/12 ICC.

There's a huge difference between what pugs can do and what organized people who have chosen to cooperate on content can do. Furthermore, the content that's restricted like that, well... Yes, it's the gateway to more of that same content, but there frankly isn't that much content like that. There's bazillions of other things to do. Not everyone in WoW raids.

And finally, while I'm correcting things, I'd point out that some of the very best gear in WoW can be purchased. For oodles of money. Which a lot of people have a very hard time coming up with. There are similar complaints about the "broken" market, even. :P

Wouldn't we have to come up with a clear explanation of what's "broken" first?

Hmm. Sprint isn't insanely expensive or anything, but it's expensive enough that I'd rather not have to keep it up very often. I guess I don't actually have to, though, with the 120-second proc.

Yeah. I was just thinking, if I have two of the freebird pieces, the third would give a somewhat handy set bonus.

Interesting. I don't fully understand how enhancements work on pet powers. The question is firmly moot for a few levels, mind.

So far as I can tell, it got to a 5% miss chance a long time ago, and nothing I ever do can improve on that.

Even with everything slotted, removing the 5% miss chance guarantee wouldn't mean that TG could never miss. It'd just mean that there'd have to be some kind of unusual defense in place for it to miss. Since a heal failing to go off can be a pretty serious problem for the team, I'd actually rather have it be pretty unusual.

Yes. But then, real markets have a lot of crazy incentives. Consider the parody ad "Diamonds: She'll Pretty Much Have To"

The biggest difference is that, in real markets, the incentives to take advantage of inefficiencies are much, much, larger -- meaning that the available remaining inefficiency to exploit is usually much, much, smaller.

Yes, it is.

I beg to differ.

This is a market in which real people are exchanging things that have some kind of value to them. It is, by definition, a real market, governed by the same fundamental principles that govern any market in which humans are exchanging things which have value to them and which cost them some form of time, effort, or other resource to acquire.

There's a reason that tests involving manufactured games with arbitrary rules (e.g., prisoner's dilemma, etc.) consistently predict the results of similar trials with things like purchases of houses, decisions about whether or not to commit crimes (or to inform on people who did), and so on: Because humans use the same rules to evaluate them.