Merits for Story Arcs
By
CactusBrawler,
Posted on: 2008-11-10 06:45 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Not sure on taht one once the existing C/D Pool recipe supply dries out in AH, unless most people prefer to go the random way and sell what they don't need. Can't see many people grinding TF's for a LoTG to sell it afterwards.
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I think people of the age that play this game (i stress play this, not post on these forums) are spenders not savers by nature, and will carry on going for the random chance thing and selling them as they do now. Because random is here and now, not 5 merrits on the never never.
No doubt i will now get a barrage of 17 year old saving fanatics reply to this 
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That's the problem as I see it, people aren't going to go through the bother of running a load of TFs just to sell their reward because they can now pick what they like.
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See i think thats wrong, i know a lot of people that grind TF's to do just that, get the inf then sell the recipe if its worth anything.
Hell we used to do 3 runs of recluses sf a night to do just that.
And there is more of that still on the US servers where the bulk of recipes come from anyway.
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Question is, does this system make achieving your desired build a longer or a shorter grind?
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The recipes for you build should be much quicker, if you don't include any Purples. a Purpled build will take a lot longer.
However, the thing you really need to worry about is the price of salvage.
The changes to bases mean salvage racks can now hold 30 pieces of invention salvage. This means a lot of players will dump excess salvage in thier base, rather than on the market. There will also be a proliferation of single player bases containing nothing but salvage racks.
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God knows how you came to that conclusion. People will still sell salvage the way they do now.
And if they do dump 30 pieces of common salvage (cos lets be honest, no one is dumping rare salvage in the base for it to be stolen) that is going to effect salvage prices how?
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You can have 18 salvage racks in your base, thats 540 pieces of salvage. If it's a tight supergroop they won't worry about theft, they will share. People who don't care to much about thier SG will quit so they can have their own personal salvage racks, which you can be sure they will fill chock full of rare salvage.
I really should do something about this signature.
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These merrits are not going to cause a sudden glut of rares on the market. People will just sell drops as usual, i cant see many saving merrits to sell a recipe, and if they do it will be so few as wont matter.
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No, supply won't increase, in fact it will decrease, but the demand for anything hugely expensive will disapear completly.
Consider a new popular recipe. The price will rise on the market until such time as it is quicker to get it with merits from TFs than earning the inf. At which point people will use that method instead of buying it on the market.
Thus, the merit value of a recipe serves as a soft cap on the influence value.
I really should do something about this signature.
Definitly dont like the max 30 salvage in a rack thing. It can work on smaller one man sg's where you just fill them up. Bigger sg's... with more people.. it just seems a waste that the rack now holds 30.. instead of the over 900 it could hold with base salvage? shrinkage!!
Now if it could work like the vault.. then it would be a different idea. (but not being joined with the vault)
Each rack can hold 30 salvage from each player. I would love such a change...
Lady Arete on Unionhandbook
My Excel Badge tool
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Question is, does this system make achieving your desired build a longer or a shorter grind?
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The recipes for you build should be much quicker, if you don't include any Purples. a Purpled build will take a lot longer.
However, the thing you really need to worry about is the price of salvage.
The changes to bases mean salvage racks can now hold 30 pieces of invention salvage. This means a lot of players will dump excess salvage in thier base, rather than on the market. There will also be a proliferation of single player bases containing nothing but salvage racks.
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God knows how you came to that conclusion. People will still sell salvage the way they do now.
And if they do dump 30 pieces of common salvage (cos lets be honest, no one is dumping rare salvage in the base for it to be stolen) that is going to effect salvage prices how?
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You can have 18 salvage racks in your base, thats 540 pieces of salvage. If it's a tight supergroop they won't worry about theft, they will share. People who don't care to much about thier SG will quit so they can have their own personal salvage racks, which you can be sure they will fill chock full of rare salvage.
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Riiiiiight, tell me again why this sudden hoarding of salvage and mass exodus of SG's to make bases full of salvage racks is happening?
Because it strikes me that its much easier to store rares in your personal vault, on chars, on the auction which people can do now. So why they all going to suddenly start doing what you forsee?
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These merrits are not going to cause a sudden glut of rares on the market. People will just sell drops as usual, i cant see many saving merrits to sell a recipe, and if they do it will be so few as wont matter.
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No, supply won't increase, in fact it will decrease, but the demand for anything hugely expensive will disapear completly.
Consider a new popular recipe. The price will rise on the market until such time as it is quicker to get it with merits from TFs than earning the inf. At which point people will use that method instead of buying it on the market.
Thus, the merit value of a recipe serves as a soft cap on the influence value.
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Thats an opinion not a fact, i dont think merits will turn people into a game of savers at all, so will have no effect except in small bursts when people save in the background and buy items.
Mind you thats only my opinion. You should try disclaimers too, saves you being wrong as often as you are
Disclamers would be redundant. Everone knows what is said here is opinion.
You will find out soon emough that I am right about auction house prices.
Currently, the AH is a monopoly. If you want a lotg, you have to go to the AH. So sellers can ask whatever people can afford to pay.
Adding the merit vendor is like adding another shop selling the same thing next door. People will go to whichever they judge to be cheepest. Competition drives down prices. You don't need to be an economics genuis to understand that. Since the merit vendor can't change, it will drive down AH prices to be competitive with the Merit vendor (or in some cases drive up prices to be comparable to the merit vendor).
I really should do something about this signature.
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Disclamers would be redundant. Everone knows what is said here is opinion.
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There are different levels of confidence of opinion; for example all of the following:
"Some Base prices will be cheaper in I13"
"More Day Jobs will be announced soon"
"PvP will be very different in I13"
"PvP will be rubbish in I13"
"Rare recipes will cost more at the AH in 13"
"There'll be a higher proportion of science origin toons created in I13"
"Shields won't be worth using for Tankers"
...are opinion, in that none of them have actually happened yet.
Even so, in terms of likelihood they range from "bound to happen, barring major incident in test", through "my projection, based on experience", to "complete and utter guesswork".
As some things in I13 are in the "bound to happen" category, I find it worth adding "I think..." qualifiers to all the other categories, just to make it clear what's speculation and what's not.
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Adding the merit vendor is like adding another shop selling the same thing next door. People will go to whichever they judge to be cheepest. Competition drives down prices. You don't need to be an economics genuis to understand that. Since the merit vendor can't change, it will drive down AH prices to be competitive with the Merit vendor (or in some cases drive up prices to be comparable to the merit vendor).
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See you keep doing it, people read this forum and could make the mistake of thinking you know what you are talking about.
What you have said is completely wrong, the merit vendor adds a vendor for things that need saving for, in some cases saving for an eternity if you dont get a lot of merits.
He is not an alternative, he is an option once you have saved. And time/merits vs time/inf winner still remains to be seen.
At the end of the day, it's not that our opinion matters much or anything at all, we might have a chance if in US forums and stuff... in fact, now that I come to think, if not servers, they could at least merge forums.
At least we can discuss opinions here and deal with job boredom, you know, world wide crisis and all that.
Just going back to merits for story arcs a moment, this is one experience of the game that makes me smile whenever I see it;
I'm in a team, be it PuG or friends, and someone in the team has or gets one of my fave missions in the whole game from Buck Salinger - 'Stop takeover of Salamanca' (the one where you have to rescue and lead out 3 hotages and defeat the hordes or red caps to save the day) - it just makes me feel heroic OK.
Anyway, after rounds of "GJ" and "well done team" we all exit. 5 to 10 seconds later the arc owner suddenly levels! He/she has called the contact and got the 'Massive' xp arc bonus.
In all the times I've seen this happen I've never heard a disgruntled comment about it being unfair - not once.
It's my opinion that stroy arc owners rewards are just a 'bolt-on' to the thing that really needed reworking which was the trail/TF reward system.
Seems to me that the devs have, for the most part, not changed the dynamics of offering rewards. It appears that whereever you were being offered a choice of reward before you are again.
I understand where folk are coming from with the whole 'It's unfair' talk, but arc owners are once again being rewarded for helping their contacts with something useful. Before inventions I found the limited choice of SO/DO really useful, we didn't have endless inf as we do today, heck AV drops were a godsend. There was never-ever (in any team I played in) talk of 'unfair' that someone got an SO for their trouble.
What I like about this new system is that it would seem to encourage less farming of 'same' missions and more 'farming' of the best things this game has to offer which imo are the trials and TFs. Nice to see that the devs have had good sense to widen this system to compliment other 'lesser' rewards with a cutdown version of the same thing.
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At the end of the day, it's not that our opinion matters much or anything at all, we might have a chance if in US forums and stuff... in fact, now that I come to think, if not servers, they could at least merge forums.
At least we can discuss opinions here and deal with job boredom, you know, world wide crisis and all that.
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Oh yes, I'm all for discussing what might happen, and whether this or that is a good idea.
At the same time someone not up on the background of things might stumble into a discussion, read someone saying "XXX will be the case in I13" and get completely the wrong end of the stick because they mistake it for a dev-level commitment.
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the merit vendor adds a vendor for things that need saving for, in some cases saving for an eternity if you dont get a lot of merits.
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Sorry but I still don't get it, I agree with the above but, at this stage, that implies that people will aim merits towards high end recipes, mainly from pools C and D, with no other source than merits for these recipes, sooner or later AH will run out of them, hence no demand because there won't be supply.
Your previous assumption that most people will go for a random roll clashes with your above statement (bear with me I might have misunderstood something), but even if your assumption proves correct, it is, the big majority of the platyerbase will spoend 25 merits on random rolls and sell what doesn't fit their chars, the pace to fill the AH will be much slower since now, in most cases, you need more than 1 TF to get enough merits for a random.
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Just going back to merits for story arcs a moment, this is one experience of the game that makes me smile whenever I see it;
I'm in a team, be it PuG or friends, and someone in the team has or gets one of my fave missions in the whole game from Buck Salinger - 'Stop takeover of Salamanca' (the one where you have to rescue and lead out 3 hotages and defeat the hordes or red caps to save the day) - it just makes me feel heroic OK.
Anyway, after rounds of "GJ" and "well done team" we all exit. 5 to 10 seconds later the arc owner suddenly levels! He/she has called the contact and got the 'Massive' xp arc bonus.
In all the times I've seen this happen I've never heard a disgruntled comment about it being unfair - not once.
It's my opinion that stroy arc owners rewards are just a 'bolt-on' to the thing that really needed reworking which was the trail/TF reward system.
Seems to me that the devs have, for the most part, not changed the dynamics of offering rewards. It appears that whereever you were being offered a choice of reward before you are again.
I understand where folk are coming from with the whole 'It's unfair' talk, but arc owners are once again being rewarded for helping their contacts with something useful. Before inventions I found the limited choice of SO/DO really useful, we didn't have endless inf as we do today, heck AV drops were a godsend. There was never-ever (in any team I played in) talk of 'unfair' that someone got an SO for their trouble.
What I like about this new system is that it would seem to encourage less farming of 'same' missions and more 'farming' of the best things this game has to offer which imo are the trials and TFs. Nice to see that the devs have had good sense to widen this system to compliment other 'lesser' rewards with a cutdown version of the same thing.
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Good post well said, iv never seen anyone begrudge the arc holder getting a boost either. And in their time SO's were just as relevent as a recipe or merit now.
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At the end of the day, it's not that our opinion matters much or anything at all, we might have a chance if in US forums and stuff... in fact, now that I come to think, if not servers, they could at least merge forums.
At least we can discuss opinions here and deal with job boredom, you know, world wide crisis and all that.
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Oh yes, I'm all for discussing what might happen, and whether this or that is a good idea.
At the same time someone not up on the background of things might stumble into a discussion, read someone saying "XXX will be the case in I13" and get completely the wrong end of the stick because they mistake it for a dev-level commitment.
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I'm getting bored of agreeing with you Standoff.
But absolutely. Saying "This will be case..." indicates you've read or heard something from the Devs or Patch Notes and are passing it on, not that it is what you think may be the case, IE is total guesswork.
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I'm getting bored of agreeing with you Standoff.
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Oh no you aren't.
(That help? 
)
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Sorry but I still don't get it, I agree with the above but, at this stage, that implies that people will aim merits towards high end recipes, mainly from pools C and D, with no other source than merits for these recipes, sooner or later AH will run out of them, hence no demand because there won't be supply.
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It dosent matter what they use them for, unless they have them saved they wont be buying anything.
And in the case of cheaper recipes it will be just as easy to carry on buying from the auction.
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Your previous assumption that most people will go for a random roll clashes with your above statement (bear with me I might have misunderstood something), but even if your assumption proves correct, it is, the big majority of the platyerbase will spoend 25 merits on random rolls and sell what doesn't fit their chars, the pace to fill the AH will be much slower since now, in most cases, you need more than 1 TF to get enough merits for a random.
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I didnt say most people, i said people that farm strike forces, which i could be wrong about, im talking from my own experience and my usual team of tf farmers.
Also is that correct about needing more than 1 sf worth of merits for a random?
If that is the case apologies i misunderstood that.
Edit, thinking about it if enough merits are gained from single sf's i think a lot of people would take the random because its here and now, if saving merits is required for a random, i still think when that number is reached people will give it a go rather than saving for ever.
Never underestimate the here and now or the gamble appeal. 
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Also is that correct about needing more than 1 sf worth of merits for a random?
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Depends on the TF, for a random you'll need 25 merits and not all TF's grant 25 merits. Agreed that the most common ones nowadays, STF, LGTF and ITF grant more than 25 merits (lowest one is ITF for 25 merits iirc) but otheers such as Hess, Katie Hannon or Eden Trial grant less (far less) than that, hence why i am mentioning TF's over and over again in this thread, indirectly, Story Arc merits are very unlikely make someone get a Miracle out of them, but they might provide the few merits remaining for someone who wants it, hence why some people on certain moments might prefer to solo doing their arcs rather than teaming and do someone else's arcs.
Probably ITF will be the new Katie Hannon substitute for grinding, since I can't see many people farming Positron (55 merits) or Dr. Quarterfield (90 merits)... unless some genius finds a way to finish Doc Q. in 1 hour or so...
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Also is that correct about needing more than 1 sf worth of merits for a random?
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Depends on the TF, for a random you'll need 25 merits and not all TF's grant 25 merits. Agreed that the most common ones nowadays, STF, LGTF and ITF grant more than 25 merits (lowest one is ITF for 25 merits iirc) but otheers such as Hess, Katie Hannon or Eden Trial grant less (far less) than that, hence why i am mentioning TF's over and over again in this thread, indirectly, Story Arc merits are very unlikely make someone get a Miracle out of them, but they might provide the few merits remaining for someone who wants it, hence why some people on certain moments might prefer to solo doing their arcs rather than teaming and do someone else's arcs.
Probably ITF will be the new Katie Hannon substitute for grinding, since I can't see many people farming Positron (55 merits) or Dr. Quarterfield (90 merits)... unless some genius finds a way to finish Doc Q. in 1 hour or so...
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In that case yea i still think that more people will chose a random than save, as it was the bigger tf's i was talking about.
Obviously just my opinion.
Hmmm, not a bad idea after all maybe alternating stoof, ITF is a short, nice (nicer when they fix lagville) and fun TF, wouldn't mind to farm it and get some randoms and also keep some merits that might come handy, doing ITF 4 times on a Saturday and 4 times on a Sunday would mean in such case (let's make it 50%) 100 merits and 4 randoms, a Miracle or a LoTG will be achieved by merits in a couple weeks (more or less, here's where Arc Merits may factor in) plus some pool C and D from random rolls available in AH.
Basically, for people who want top of the line builds, you can still farm same mission over and over for inf, plus same TF over and over for merits/recipes and IF you still have spare time and will, can do some story arc teaming... 
If the majority of players are not so fussed about high end builds and prefer casual teaming, then the Merit System adds nothing for them, might be well the opposite, while if the majority of players are looking forward top end builds and willing to farm, this new system just changes the farming choices...
Can't see it being too useful, time will of course tell, but a priori seems that Positron could use his thinking time in much better ways...
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What you have said is completely wrong, the merit vendor adds a vendor for things that need saving for, in some cases saving for an eternity if you dont get a lot of merits.
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And the AH is also a vendor for things that need saving for, in some cases saving for an eternity if you dont get a lot of inf.
I've news for you, most players don't go around with a couple of hundred million inf available in ready cash. I cetainly don't, I spend it as fast as it comes in.
I really should do something about this signature.
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What you have said is completely wrong, the merit vendor adds a vendor for things that need saving for, in some cases saving for an eternity if you dont get a lot of merits.
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And the AH is also a vendor for things that need saving for, in some cases saving for an eternity if you dont get a lot of inf.
I've news for you, most players don't go around with a couple of hundred million inf available in ready cash. I cetainly don't, I spend it as fast as it comes in.
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Righto Praff
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Probably ITF will be the new Katie Hannon substitute for grinding, since I can't see many people farming Positron (55 merits) or Dr. Quarterfield (90 merits)... unless some genius finds a way to finish Doc Q. in 1 hour or so...
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It will probably be LGTF first, I know a way to cheese at least one of the long missions, cutting the required time for the TF by about 20%.
But the prefered merit farming TF will simply be whichever gives the highest merits per hour, once you have cut the time to a minimum. It will probably take players a couple of weeks to figure out (if its not LGTF).
I really should do something about this signature.
That's the problem as I see it, people aren't going to go through the bother of running a load of TFs just to sell their reward because they can now pick what they like. This may well puch the Miracle through the roof because there's all demand and no supply.
Farmers will still be making enough inf to be able to spend stupid amounts on single recipes, but now there'll be far less "oh a lucky drop" as TF rewards
"Well, they found my diary today.
They were appropriately appalled
at the discovery of the eight victims
They're now putting it all together.
Women wrapped in silk
with one leg missing
Eight legs, one body, silk,
spider, brilliant!"