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They just want them to not be farmable - drop rate, availability, and price be damned.
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What they should do is make them available to be bought somewhere ... increase supply = decreased profit = less farming. Only way to stop farming is to make it not as profitable.
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They aren't looking to stop farming though they would love it if people would. They are simply looking to make it harder and thereby reduce it without increasing the supply to do so.
They want them to be rare but they want most of them to be earned "in the proper way".
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I think that the level of farming for PVP IOs pretty much forced this change. The sitting ducks in bloody bay usign rez pez from the vendors and afk arena farming would be the obvious ones that were pretty high profile in a few threads here.
Sure people can set-up a 2nd account still in Bloody bay, log off log on next target, but thats still putting ~60 seconds between individual kills. And means you need 5 or so 'targets' of the appropriate level on the other account.
Slowed down the peak AND redcued the window of possible farmers whoc an reach that peak.
I would like with tongue in cheek (and with a nod to the When I'm an Evil Overlord list) to suggest they hire the Posi-Tot as advisor on rewards. If they can see the holes for farming, then it really isn't a good system.
Eventually, I have litttle doubt there will be a 'merit type' system. Not using existing merits, but Longbow/Arachnos special ones gaiend through PvP victories and maybe even completeing the mini-games.
@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617
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Eventually, I have litttle doubt there will be a 'merit type' system. Not using existing merits, but Longbow/Arachnos special ones gaiend through PvP victories and maybe even completeing the mini-games.
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Even if that does happen (and I seriously have my doubts that it ever will) I'm guessing it will be a long time before we see any new PvP projects with Going Rogue and power customization on the way. I have a feeling we'll be stuck with this ill implemented PvP IO drop system for the long run.
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Even if that does happen (and I seriously have my doubts that it ever will) I'm guessing it will be a long time before we see any new PvP projects with Going Rogue and power customization on the way. I have a feeling we'll be stuck with this ill implemented PvP IO drop system for the long run.
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I agree. And to quote the great economist John Maynard Keynes, "In the long run, we're all dead."
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They just want them to not be farmable - drop rate, availability, and price be damned.
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What they should do is make them available to be bought somewhere ... increase supply = decreased profit = less farming. Only way to stop farming is to make it not as profitable.
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They aren't looking to stop farming though they would love it if people would. They are simply looking to make it harder and thereby reduce it without increasing the supply to do so.
They want them to be rare but they want most of them to be earned "in the proper way".
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I think that the level of farming for PVP IOs pretty much forced this change. The sitting ducks in bloody bay usign rez pez from the vendors and afk arena farming would be the obvious ones that were pretty high profile in a few threads here.
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I hate to nitpick part of your post here, but aren't you guys always claiming that nothing we do in this backwater forum channel is gonna make the devs change anything, that it's below their radar, etc etc? Wasn't this repeated several times in this very thread a week or two ago?
The amount of farming couldn't have been THAT bad...there were still almost no PO's on the market and the prices were still sky high.
They new all this before it was implemented and ignored the feedback.
They should have just moved the store in BB to inside the hospital and left the arena alone. That would have stopped the farming in BB just as effectively. Should have just left the arena folks and let them supply the market. You can't grief an entire zone from inside an arena map.
Typical Dev over reaction to what really wasn't that big an issue.
Now nobody but the good, lucky or smart will have them and the rich will get richer and the poor will complain even louder.
"If a system can be exploited, it will be exploited. And if a developer thinks their system cannot be exploited, it'll be exploited like a new actress in her first porn movie." Sanya Weather MMORPG Examiner
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I think "considerably" is something of an overstatement.
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Ok, we'll strike "considerably" and just go with "undermines".
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If you set out to equip your character with merits you're going to spend considerably longer doing so than if you use the market. What merits do in theory is damp the high-end pricing of items. Amusingly, prices on most high-priced recipies you can obtain with merits are currently back where they were before merits were introduced or higher.
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It's still an end-around and a sop to both villain players ("I can't buy them if they never get listed!") and price whiners of the Evil Ryu ilk, who'd rather grind TFs for 100 hours than spend 100 million on a recipe.
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I do not believe this was their intent. Merits were not created to "fix" high prices, but to address the concern of players who did not want to be "forced" to interact with the market.
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Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Giving players alternate supply because of their whining about prices is a 'fix', whatever happens to the inf value of 'the good stuff'.
And 'outrageous' prices were one of the motivating factors.
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Certainly it is impossible to fully extricate dislike of the market from dislike of "high" prices, but I think the distaste is as much directed at the various concepts of playing "city of day traders," of being "gouged" by other players, or of market PvP than the inability to actually pay the prices found there. In other words, merits were intended to bypass the market mini-game. Bypassing "ridiculous" prices was simply a by-product of that.
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I agree with all of your points except the last one- if the prices weren't high, nobody would have whined about the mini-game or city of stockbrokers or any of that. If everything was available at a 'reasonable' price they wouldn't have been demanding an end-around.
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Tickets undermine the logic only for non-common salvage. For set recipies, they are simply an alternative random supply.
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the volume at which they generate recipes, combined with weighting and the 'distillation' effect (tickets represent all of your drop potential, but who spends any on common salvage, or inspirations, or enhancements, or generic recipes?) increased supply to a point that it was a massive across the board price cut.
Things have bounced back a bit, but a TON of good stuff still sells for a fraction of what it did.
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In any case, neither tickets not merits appears likely at this time to provide purples, PvP IOs, or HOs. I could envision purples and HOs appearing at merit vendors someday, but I do not believe PvP IOs will ever be available there. I could imagine a PvP-only variant, however - some sort of bounty-like system.
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Time will tell, but their thirst for multiple alternate currencies and chains of supply appears insatiable.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
or make it so in a pvp zone wakies cannot be popped. that would have ended it right there without effecting anybody not farming whatsoever.
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They just want them to not be farmable - drop rate, availability, and price be damned.
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What they should do is make them available to be bought somewhere ... increase supply = decreased profit = less farming. Only way to stop farming is to make it not as profitable.
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They aren't looking to stop farming though they would love it if people would. They are simply looking to make it harder and thereby reduce it without increasing the supply to do so.
They want them to be rare but they want most of them to be earned "in the proper way".
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I think that the level of farming for PVP IOs pretty much forced this change. The sitting ducks in bloody bay usign rez pez from the vendors and afk arena farming would be the obvious ones that were pretty high profile in a few threads here.
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I hate to nitpick part of your post here, but aren't you guys always claiming that nothing we do in this backwater forum channel is gonna make the devs change anything, that it's below their radar, etc etc? Wasn't this repeated several times in this very thread a week or two ago?
The amount of farming couldn't have been THAT bad...there were still almost no PO's on the market and the prices were still sky high.
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Exploits would be an exception to that concept. AFK farming PVP recipes really goes against the reason they were added in the game. I didn't need anyone posting about it in here to figure out how to do it and I doubt anyone who wanted one and had more than one account needed to be told about it.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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Exploits would be an exception to that concept. AFK farming PVP recipes really goes against the reason they were added in the game. I didn't need anyone posting about it in here to figure out how to do it and I doubt anyone who wanted one and had more than one account needed to be told about it.
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Well you're smarter than I am, because I didn't know about it until someone mentioned it and explained it to me. And seriously, I think you're giving players WAY too much credit for figuring out this stuff on their own.
But I do admit, exploits are exploits and will be targeted. I just think they're shooting themselves in the foot here in how they "fixed" this one.
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I hate to nitpick part of your post here, but aren't you guys always claiming that nothing we do in this backwater forum channel is gonna make the devs change anything, that it's below their radar, etc etc? Wasn't this repeated several times in this very thread a week or two ago?
The amount of farming couldn't have been THAT bad...there were still almost no PO's on the market and the prices were still sky high.
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Feel free to nitpick away, at any of my posts.
I wasn't actually thinking about Snappin's thread. There were mutliple ones in the I15 feedback areas mainly about the Blood Bay farming, including several which got pretty nasty with back and forths. (the nastiness is why most of them seem to have evaporated into the ether)
That pretty much forced this issue onto Devs Radar, not that thye likely couldn't see it from datamining anyway, I have little doubt the drop numbers were well above their projections.
I still think that the Market forum is below the Devs radar, but there are certainly areas of the forum that are smack dab in the center of it.
@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617
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I hate to nitpick part of your post here, but aren't you guys always claiming that nothing we do in this backwater forum channel is gonna make the devs change anything, that it's below their radar, etc etc? Wasn't this repeated several times in this very thread a week or two ago?
The amount of farming couldn't have been THAT bad...there were still almost no PO's on the market and the prices were still sky high.
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Feel free to nitpick away, at any of my posts.
I wasn't actually thinking about Snappin's thread. There were mutliple ones in the I15 feedback areas mainly about the Blood Bay farming, including several which got pretty nasty with back and forths. (the nastiness is why most of them seem to have evaporated into the ether)
That pretty much forced this issue onto Devs Radar, not that thye likely couldn't see it from datamining anyway, I have little doubt the drop numbers were well above their projections.
I still think that the Market forum is below the Devs radar, but there are certainly areas of the forum that are smack dab in the center of it.
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So are you saying they changed the PVP drop rates becuase forum posters could not play nice and reported too many posts to their attention?
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I hate to nitpick part of your post here, but aren't you guys always claiming that nothing we do in this backwater forum channel is gonna make the devs change anything, that it's below their radar, etc etc? Wasn't this repeated several times in this very thread a week or two ago?
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Feel free to nitpick away, at any of my posts.
I wasn't actually thinking about Snappin's thread. There were mutliple ones in the I15 feedback areas mainly about the Blood Bay farming, including several which got pretty nasty with back and forths. (the nastiness is why most of them seem to have evaporated into the ether)
That pretty much forced this issue onto Devs Radar, not that thye likely couldn't see it from datamining anyway, I have little doubt the drop numbers were well above their projections.
I still think that the Market forum is below the Devs radar, but there are certainly areas of the forum that are smack dab in the center of it.
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Ahh, well that makes more sense then. I don't read those parts of the forums (in large part due to said nastiness) so I didn't realize it was being advertised to the devs so blatantly. And didn't realize that your "here" wasn't the market forums, just the forums in general.
Nit unpicked.
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I hate to nitpick part of your post here, but aren't you guys always claiming that nothing we do in this backwater forum channel is gonna make the devs change anything, that it's below their radar, etc etc? Wasn't this repeated several times in this very thread a week or two ago?
The amount of farming couldn't have been THAT bad...there were still almost no PO's on the market and the prices were still sky high.
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I think the argument was that some people posting about a particular activity or another on the forums, while likely to draw some attention, probably won't show up as big blips on the radar, as opposed to datamining of in-game actvities. I don't think anyone on the forums needed to say anything about arena farming, meows, or Freakshow, but they certainly showed up as "wow, look at this" points in datamines.
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"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."
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I just don't see the supply doing anything but dropping drastically. These are already rarer than purples and, tho similar and better than normal set IO's, they're not as good as purples with their Superior bonuses. My point is still valid I think. Why do the devs want the drop rate so low?
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In addition to being technically superior, purple and pvp sets are also suppose to be trophies of sorts. They are for "showing off." My guess would be the devs want these to be extremely rare, reserved for the "bill gates" of the CoH playerbase. Think of them as the "ferrari" in the game economy, items that the few who have can elicit jealousy from the many who don't. If they were to make purple and pvp sets more common, then they will just eventually have to introduce another set that is extremely rare. A big part of MMOs is the striving to join the upper echelon of the playerbase: the "epeen" mentality.
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I think the argument was that some people posting about a particular activity or another on the forums, while likely to draw some attention, probably won't show up as big blips on the radar, as opposed to datamining of in-game actvities. I don't think anyone on the forums needed to say anything about arena farming, meows, or Freakshow, but they certainly showed up as "wow, look at this" points in datamines.
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I really wonder. It was pretty eye-popping when Babs posted today that they weren't aware of the STF bug even though it had been repeatedly /bug'd. He essentially said, "If you want us to notice it, post it in the forums." He later backtracked, errr I mean clarified but it was still thought-provoking.
Many of us think that the devs constantly have analytics running that give them penetrating insight into all aspects of the game. They may, they may not. Just because data exists in a big DB doesn't mean anyone is looking at it. In my earliest job fresh out of college I worked in an IT department in a Fortune 200 company. One of the things that struck me was the effort put into collecting vast quantities of data that then went largely ignored. Data != knowledge.
I'm not going to the extreme of asserting that NO datamining takes place. We know that datamining resulted in XP curve smoothing. We know that at least once in a while Synapse looks at adjusting merits. But I really wonder whether the devs do much datamining on a regular basis--not data collection, but meaningful analysis.
I know correlation doesn't imply causation but the timing of the discussion of farming for PVP IOs and the subsequent "bug" that removed all PVP rewards is awfully fishy.
Freedom: Blazing Larb, Fiery Fulcrum, Sardan Reborn, Arctic-Frenzy, Wasabi Sam, Mr Smashtastic.
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A big part of MMOs is the striving to join the upper echelon of the playerbase: the "epeen" mentality.
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I think you're likely right but I also think that if that's true, COH has done it very poorly. A gear-based game like WOW got that aspect right. You can simply stand around in a high traffic area in that game and let people ooh and aah at all your epic gear that they can plainly see.
In COH if you have 600 badges, maybe 1 player in 50 will check your badge sheet and notice. If you have every purple in the game, you're just another face in the crowd unless someone scans your set bonuses.
There's very little in this game in the way of high prestige items that have obvious visual cues.
Freedom: Blazing Larb, Fiery Fulcrum, Sardan Reborn, Arctic-Frenzy, Wasabi Sam, Mr Smashtastic.
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This directly contradicts what I was told before. Can anyone please confirm?
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I can't confirm, but I can corroborate.
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And if so, why aren't they purple...or even some new rarer color?
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I guess they ran out of colors.
Purples have other stuff going on, so I sort of see them not being that. Purples have the largest set bonuses available and a larger enhancement scale than any other type of IO. However, PvPOs have pretty different characteristics compared to "normal" Set IOs. In addition to the exemplar behavior, they provide an extra set of bonuses in PvP on top of the ones they give in PvE, often of things you can't find in set bonuses anywhere else (+range, for example).
Unlike purples, they drop and can be slotted at levels other than 50. They also are not each individually unique - only some pieces are, just as some regular Set IOs are.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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I agree with all of your points except the last one- if the prices weren't high, nobody would have whined about the mini-game or city of stockbrokers or any of that. If everything was available at a 'reasonable' price they wouldn't have been demanding an end-around.
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There's a distinction between what was at the root of why people complained, and why the devs took action.
People complained about having to take part in the market mini-game. The level of price that caused them to complain about this was wildly inconsistent from person to person doing the complaining. I believe the devs took action because they accepted the resulting complaint - people did not want to be "forced" to use the market to get IOs. That is a very different position than taking action because they objected to particular market prices. In my estimation, the devs did not care at all what the actual prices were, because the actual prices weren't actually relevant. All that mattered were that prices existed that made people dislike visiting the market.
Under that paradigm, there is possibly no such thing as a market price that will drive the devs to take action. They would not, for example, datamine prices and then decide that they have become so high that they must add the item to merit vendors. Instead they would try to measure levels of player dissatisfaction at having to use the market to obtain these items.
While the end result may appear academic, since (as you say) no one is likely to complain about cheap items, it isn't fully academic in that sense. Consider for example the thread in this forum where a poster proclaimed that they were going to marketeer the prices of purples into the stratosphere in order to convince the devs to increase supply. If the devs don't use price as a determining factor in such decisions, that's a fruitless endeavor.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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They just want them to not be farmable - drop rate, availability, and price be damned.
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What they should do is make them available to be bought somewhere ... increase supply = decreased profit = less farming. Only way to stop farming is to make it not as profitable.
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A few ways to do this would be:
[*] Bounty System: Allow us to earn and save bounty when loggin off the game or moving to another zone. Once we achieve a certain amount of bounty, we can use the bounty to purchase the PvP IOs. This will entice people to PvP.
[*] Reputation: Increase reputation higher than 400 and allow us to earn and save reputation when loggin off or moving to another zone. Once a certain reuptation is achieved we can turn in the reputation for PvP IOs.
This is just 2 ways to allow us to purchase them through PvP. I'm sure others may have some suggestions as well.
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Ya know. To exploit that bounty system, beef cake, you would have to do the exact same thing that pvp recipie farmers will end up doing anyway. So no real change on the farmers end. But those that actually participate in pvp would not be hit as hard and it would actually bring some incentive to go to pvp zones again.
This is why I believe it will never take place. I13 has proven to me that the devs will do what they want to do no matter how much negative feedback they get and no matter how many alternate suggestions they get to make pvp better.
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Point 1- Yes they are. At least the Heal set and one other offer 7.5% recharge in PVE and since they act just like purples you get that 7.5 always.
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I was under the impression that they acted different from normal ones by TURNING OFF if you exemped at all, which made it pointless to farm anything below 50.
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Nope; full level 1 exemplar!
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This directly contradicts what I was told before. Can anyone please confirm?
And if so, why aren't they purple...or even some new rarer color?
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tested and double tested by marketeers yesterday.
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It one one of the first things I tested when i got my own set. Its the #1 reason WHY they are so desired, that and most of the IOs can be slotted in mutliple powers.
Between 5 sets of purples (5) and 3 PVP sets (5) I have 32 set bonuses that do not go away via exemplar.
By making it this way, which was IMHO almost essentail for a viable PVP set, they also made them hugely desirable in PVE builds for people who do a lot of non-level capped activties.
@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617