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Over the weekend I posted:
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When people play your arcs, tickets earned that way go into a pool.
You can then claim tickets out of that pool onto any character.
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And a few of you said "Please let Merits work the same way".
I don't think a few of you understood me correctly the first time.
>>When other people play your arcs.<<
The idea is that, since creating MA content is account-wide (anything you write can be "published from" any character on your account), that the tickets generated from other people go into a pool. You can then claim tickets out of that pool on any character on your account.
HOWEVER, when you PLAY Mission Architect content, tickets you earn are exactly like Merits. They are earned ON that character, and can not be traded.
Merits already work like this, and there is no correlation to the account-based publishing for Merits to "work the same way" for.
Now if you are simply asking that Merits be a tradable resource, or even trade-within-account, I am sorry, but that's not going to happen. Characters of different levels earn Merits at different rates. Merits are supposed to streamline the reward process for that character, and that's not going to be changing any time soon.
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So you're basically saying that people with two (or more) accounts or SG teams who split writing story arcs covering levels from 1 to 50 and levelling their chars using their own created content from 1 to 50 can farm tickets like there's no tomorrow globally?
Wouldn't it had been easier to just allow recipe drops in MA or are you opening a huge door to ticket farming just to ensure the MA is a huge success?
Having said that, dunno if tickets count EXACTLY as merits at the time of recipe redeeming, but if it moves people to having two or more accounts, I guess the MA has accomplished its objective...
or keeping those with multiple accounts playing.
PS What is "TOR"?
Infinity and Victory mostly
dUmb, etc.
lolz PvP anymore, Market PvP for fun and profit
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In my opinion, none of the reward systems in this game have ever been remotely fun, so you can't claim that something enjoyable has been lost by changing it.
Honestly, I don't understand how people can boot up a game and start worrying about efficiency and ROI. Maybe it's because I get bombarded with that all day at work, but I think you're all crazy for even mouthing the word "optimal".
My fun is optimal when I stop worrying about how I can purple out and focus on hanging guys off of lamp posts with knockback, or getting PUGs to roll over Invincible missions, or completing Sara Moore on Invincible, without an emp (7 horrible hours well-spent). In all the time since I started, in beta, no changes made to the game have ever really changed that.
All this bickering over rewards systems is just symptom that the game is not providing rewarding new experiences frequently enough. I hope the mission architect helps to alleviate this. Loot is a bonus, not the goal.
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Finally, a board poster with whom I can agree on about this "merit-lust."
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or keeping those with multiple accounts playing.
PS What is "TOR"?
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The Old Repulic, me thinks
Leader/Founder of Order Sixty-Six Guardian Server
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I honestly don't see why tradable merits are such a big deal; they are redeemable for goods that are.
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The difference is somewhat abstruse, but it is very real.
As a reward, Merits are more "fungible" than recipes. That is, all merits are inherently equal, and exchangeable for anything. They can be given away in smaller increments, accumulated with other merits, etc. Influence is a completely fungible currency.
A "rare recipe" is not fungible because not all rare recipes are equal.
Once merits have been turned into something physical, that something is no longer equal to another (different) something that costs the same number of merits. For example, if my character has no power in which to slot a Luck of the Gambler: +Recharge, that recipe is useless to me (except that I can sell it to someone and get some fungible influence).
Similarly, when I accumulate 10 Trap of the Hunter recipes, they will never be convertible into a Luck of the Gambler: +Recharge, no matter how many I get (unless I convert a few million of them to a fungible currency such as influence).
Finally, even if I do convert my merits into something in high demand, there's no guarantee that I'll get the price I want if I sell it on the market -- just because that LotG: +Recharge is selling for 80 million today doesn't mean it will tomorrow. If you actually list it at that price you're taking a risk. Listing on the market costs influence, and if you list too high and your item doesn't sell you take a loss.
Fungible items are inherently more flexible, and hence more useful, especially in the presence of a market that facilitates free exchange.
Merits cannot be traded now, so they aren't truly fungible. If they were made tradeable they would be another currency like influence. They could be bought and sold by spammers, high-level characters could give them to low-level characters, etc.
The devs have pretty much said that characters should stand on their own, and this is why you can't trade merits or share them across an account. The absence of an in-game item-mailing system seems to reinforce this interpretation. (I have a suspicion that the original ridiculously low limit on trading influence was also a sign of this mind-set.)
True, there are ways around this limitation, but they all require a second account in some way. You either have to give items or influence directly to another character, or you can add items to storage in a base (which requires another account to invite you to the supergroup). The devs apparently want to make alt-boosting harder, but they're willing to live with a certain amount of it to give us convenience features.
All of which is of course irrelevant in the crusade against spammers, who have multiple accounts and are not hampered by these restrictions in any way.
This implies the following philosophy on the part of the devs (yeah, I'm putting words in their mouths): if you don't play a character enough to earn the merits to buy all the rare recipes you want to put on it, you don't care enough about that character to put the effort into it.
So tickets = Currency #4?! Joy.