srmalloy

You miss the other fallout from farming the MA -- because you get only inf and tickets from MA arcs, and the farmers are using all their tickets to get recipe rolls that they can sell in the auction house, they're not getting the salvage that they would be getting along with the other drops in regular missions -- but they still need salvage to craft the recipes they keep or buy. As a result, the supply of salvage in the auction house has gone down, since fewer people are putting salvage into the auction reserve, but the same number of people are trying to buy salvage. And, inevitably, we're seeing prices ratcheting up -- common salvage bid up to 35,000 - 50,000 inf, and uncommon salvage up to 100,000, when it might have, if badly bottlenecked, have gone up to 20,000 for common salvage and 50,000 for uncommon salvage. This is then followed by people seeing the prices the inf-rich farmers are willing to pay for salvage and jacking their listing prices, keeping the prices cranked to the sky because they a) don't want to lose their listing fee and b) figure that if someone's willing to pay 75,000 for common salvage, they should be getting 75,000, too.

Armor was expensive, both to make and to maintain; so were swords. A landowner (lords down to franklins) could, if he was wealthy enough, afford to equip the troops he was required to supply to his lord with the trappings of mounted men-at-arms; if not, he would supply archers, levied from the yeomanry. The perception of the bow was, as a result, that of a 'lower-class' weapon -- the French knights, in particular, at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, fixated heavily on combat against their 'social equals', allowing the English longbowmen, shooting from prepared defenses, to shred their ranks. These three battles fomented the myth of the longbow, and battles like Vermueil and Patay, where the longbowmen were unable to set up their defenses and were overrun or routed, were ignored. The stereotype of the English yeoman archer, however, was what created the stereotype of the unarmored or lightly-armored archer (the lack of armor allowing them to run away if it looked as if they were going to be overrun, as they were too poor to offer a ransom and would therefore be killed outright).

Prior to the medieval period, archers also tended to be more lightly armored than the shock troops -- armor worn by the Roman sagittarii, Parthian mounted archers, and the chariot archers of the Egyptian, Hittite, and Vedic militaries was much lighter than the standard infantry.

With the decline of the longbow and its replacement by the crossbow -- it took many years of practice to make a good longbowman, while a crossbowman could be trained in a few weeks, making it much more suitable for intermittent levies and mercenary units -- the armor worn by the average archer improved, at least partially due to the need for them to be able to fight as infantry when the rate-of-fire issues with the crossbow allowed enemy troops to close with them.

Unfortunately, the game's combat abstractions ensure that a character is never "ignoring" hand-to-hand combat attacks. The way that MMORPGs, almost universally, are set up mangles realism badly in the combat mechanics. Take your average footsoldier straight out of what passes for Basic, and a footsoldier who has twenty years of combat experience under his belt, stand them up naked, and hit them with a broadsword. The weapon is going to produce essentially identical wounds -- but not in an MMORPG; the level-1 fighter may well be killed, while the level-40 fighter will barely notice the attack (unless the person swinging the sword is also a level-40 fighter, in which case the level-1 fighter is a blood smear on the floor and the level-40 fighter is hurt bad if not killed). "Hit points" as implemented in virtually all level-based RPGs, MMO or paper, are a measure both of how much physical damage a character can sustain and their ability to roll with, block, or otherwise avoid the incoming damage. With that abstraction built into the game, even if a character is "ignoring" an attacker, they are still "protecting themselves".

Trading blows is all the game mechanics will support for melee combat as long as characters' skill at defense is abstracted into level-based hit points.

On a related note, consider that virtually all RPGs, MMO and paper, have missile weapons disappearing if they miss their target, or allow you to shoot past your 8-foot-tall teammate to hit the 5-foot-tall target on the other side of him. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way in real life. Shoot an arrow at a man-at-arms 150 yards away charging at you, and if the arrow misses, it will land somewhere around him. Shoot an arrow at a man-at-arms 40 feet away that your teammate is exchanging sword blows with, and if the arrow misses, you may very well perforate your teammate. Or they may shift and interpose themselves between you and your target, getting an arrow in the back for their trouble if you can't stop yourself before you loose.

I've only opened up two threads, and already I badly miss the 'all' option to load all the posts in a thread at once so I can scan up and down through a multi-page thread that is new since the last time I read the boards and not have to keep doing 'back' and 'forward'.