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shhh|
Originally Posted by Smurphy
Why aren't you out playing the game, finding stuff, and selling it on the market for these outrageous prices?
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That's MY market niche. I don't make money as fast as I would playing the market. But on the other hand, I get to spend more time smashing.
I'm an altaholic, I run on average about 8 toons at once on the same server, (Currently Freedom) and I rarely get them above 35ish before I decide to play something else.
I deal with my money issues by making my own base, getting all the toons into it and pooling all their dropped enhancements and salvage, if one of them gets a drop such as a respec it gets sold and that toon becomes a bank, if I need an invention i have the rich toon craft it and drop it into the enhancement table for the one that needs it, I've been able to handle some crazy expensive items because all my toons fund the one that needs it at the time. It's not hard, you just have to take 5 minutes to drop stuff into storage. I'm not trying to rip on the OP, but really, we all have money problems, I'm trying to buy 4 numina sets, I feel your pain, but such is imaginary life.
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Can I steal this?
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Originally Posted by Squez
Uli Ribbity, Frog Hero of Zandor!
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Be well, people of CoH.
Whilst I believe the OP overstates his case by a good margin, I wonder about the whole "Normal gamers wouldn't want those! They don't care! They just want SO's!" thing. There are two means of character progression in this game: the powers, and the enhancements. Even after the first is complete, the second can be continued. The game has been around long enough that inventions are known to some degree. Anyone familiar with RPG's and/or MMO's knows a bit about 'equipment,' which is what our enhancements are, basically. (They just don't alter appearance)
Enhancing progress is far less straightforward than power progress, as with the many set bonuses and effet IO's, it all comes down to 'what are you aiming for?' Defense? HP? Wierd extra damage types? Accuracy? Purples are the 'best' way of obtaining many of these attributes.
What bothers me is that the means of obtaining these has escalated to a point where many find only consistant farming/flipping a reasonable way of gaining a complete set. Both of these practices are rather solitary, and quite frankly, dry and repetitive. If the way to reach the 'pinnacle' of character progress is to do such, I find something to be awry.
But that's me. 
(And please, do not compare the way other MMO's grant their 'leet lewt.' Just because others do thing worse doesn't mean something can be done better.)
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Find me a game that doesn't do that with rare loot, and I'll show you a game that simply doesn't have rare loot.
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Originally Posted by Seldom
What bothers me is that the means of obtaining these has escalated to a point where many find only consistant farming/flipping a reasonable way of gaining a complete set. Both of these practices are rather solitary, and quite frankly, dry and repetitive. If the way to reach the 'pinnacle' of character progress is to do such, I find something to be awry.
But that's me. (And please, do not compare the way other MMO's grant their 'leet lewt.' Just because others do thing worse doesn't mean something can be done better.) |
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This is simply false. I do none of these things with any regularity at all (I haven't flipped anything in probably a year) and I have multiple characters with multiple purple sets.|
Originally Posted by Seldom
What bothers me is that the means of obtaining these has escalated to a point where many find only consistant farming/flipping a reasonable way of gaining a complete set. Both of these practices are rather solitary, and quite frankly, dry and repetitive. If the way to reach the 'pinnacle' of character progress is to do such, I find something to be awry.
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I play the game and sell what I get. I play my 50s. (I don't think the having the biggest cash benefits being from playing 50s should be a problem, since purples are only usable by 50s.)
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 don't think that it's so much they don't want them as they don' NEED them (although there are plenty of players who don't play their level 50s enough to really want purples). Unlike other MMOs there is no content that is inaccessible to a team equipped solely with SOs so the only purpose of purples (and indeed IOs in general) is character progression for the sake of character progression (and a few extreme personal challenges such as AV soloing). Given that I think purples should take time and commitment to get since otherwise there is no real sense of progression just a sudden leap in power.|
Originally Posted by Seldom
Whilst I believe the OP overstates his case by a good margin, I wonder about the whole "Normal gamers wouldn't want those! They don't care! They just want SO's!" thing. There are two means of character progression in this game: the powers, and the enhancements. Even after the first is complete, the second can be continued. The game has been around long enough that inventions are known to some degree. Anyone familiar with RPG's and/or MMO's knows a bit about 'equipment,' which is what our enhancements are, basically. (They just don't alter appearance)
Enhancing progress is far less straightforward than power progress, as with the many set bonuses and effet IO's, it all comes down to 'what are you aiming for?' Defense? HP? Wierd extra damage types? Accuracy? Purples are the 'best' way of obtaining many of these attributes. What bothers me is that the means of obtaining these has escalated to a point where many find only consistant farming/flipping a reasonable way of gaining a complete set. Both of these practices are rather solitary, and quite frankly, dry and repetitive. If the way to reach the 'pinnacle' of character progress is to do such, I find something to be awry. But that's me. (And please, do not compare the way other MMO's grant their 'leet lewt.' Just because others do thing worse doesn't mean something can be done better.) |
I tend to agree that it would be nice to have some team based methods for getting purples but I don't see a good option without greatly decreasing their rarity other than allowing them to be bought with merits (which isn't a great idea). Anything that is based on random drops will always favor farming and farming will always favor being done with the fewest people possible.
Purples could be added as direct buys with merits but overall I think this would be a bad thing. They'd realistically need to be at least 500 merits a recipe and that means people would start hoarding merits to buy purples rather than directly buying valuable recipes or better yet taking random rolls and injecting those recipes into the economy. The introduction of merits caused a huge decrease in the supply of Pool C/D (although subsequent changes have helped somewhat with that) and I think adding purples to merits would make that worse.
What I would quite like to see is a re-balancing of the purple drop rates in order to try and even out the prices somewhat. The market is pretty oversupplied with the purple mez sets (particularly confuse and sleep) and undersupplied with the damage sets (particularly Apocalypse). it would be nice if the devs did the same thing they did with the random recipe rolls and rebalanced purple drops so a higher percentage of them were the more popular damage sets.
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Just as an FYI we've been told by the devs that the number of merits required to buy a single purple recipe would be more than we can currently hold. Currently we can hold 9,999 merits so a 500 merit purple is a pipe dream.
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Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
I don't think that it's so much they don't want them as they don' NEED them (although there are plenty of players who don't play their level 50s enough to really want purples). Unlike other MMOs there is no content that is inaccessible to a team equipped solely with SOs so the only purpose of purples (and indeed IOs in general) is character progression for the sake of character progression (and a few extreme personal challenges such as AV soloing). Given that I think purples should take time and commitment to get since otherwise there is no real sense of progression just a sudden leap in power.
I tend to agree that it would be nice to have some team based methods for getting purples but I don't see a good option without greatly decreasing their rarity other than allowing them to be bought with merits (which isn't a great idea). Anything that is based on random drops will always favor farming and farming will always favor being done with the fewest people possible. Purples could be added as direct buys with merits but overall I think this would be a bad thing. They'd realistically need to be at least 500 merits a recipe and that means people would start hoarding merits to buy purples rather than directly buying valuable recipes or better yet taking random rolls and injecting those recipes into the economy. The introduction of merits caused a huge decrease in the supply of Pool C/D (although subsequent changes have helped somewhat with that) and I think adding purples to merits would make that worse. What I would quite like to see is a re-balancing of the purple drop rates in order to try and even out the prices somewhat. The market is pretty oversupplied with the purple mez sets (particularly confuse and sleep) and undersupplied with the damage sets (particularly Apocalypse). it would be nice if the devs did the same thing they did with the random recipe rolls and rebalanced purple drops so a higher percentage of them were the more popular damage sets. |
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
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That is really scary when you think about it. You can get a merit theoretically in 3.5 minutes so if the devs are saying it should take more than 9999 merits to get a purple what they are saying is it should take you more than 35,000 minutes of game time to get purple
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Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
Just as an FYI we've been told by the devs that the number of merits required to buy a single purple recipe would be more than we can currently hold. Currently we can hold 9,999 merits so a 500 merit purple is a pipe dream.
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I'm pretty sure there's more in their calculations than mean time to earn, if that's even in there. I'm guessing that some combination of set bonus scale, set bonus type and maybe enhancement scale factor in too, perhaps with a sort of fudge factor for how powerful/desirable the pieces are. (For the latter, see the merit costs of Blessing of the Zephyr.)
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Originally Posted by Another_Fan
That is really scary when you think about it. You can get a merit theoretically in 3.5 minutes so if the devs are saying it should take more than 9999 merits to get a purple what they are saying is it should take you more than 35,000 minutes of game time to get purple
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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 know that, it doesn't mean that I agree with them. I selected 500 for my example since that brings the current Apocalypse Inf prices into approximate alignment with LotG 7.5% which to me serve as a decent bench mark for a direct merit to inf conversion rate. Now obviously allowing Purples to be purchased with merits would change the relative pricing so if I was adding them I'd say to stick them in the 600-700 range, maybe 1000 max. Of course as I stated, I think adding purples to merits would do bad things to the supplies of pool C/D recipes so I'm against it anyway.
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Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
Just as an FYI we've been told by the devs that the number of merits required to buy a single purple recipe would be more than we can currently hold. Currently we can hold 9,999 merits so a 500 merit purple is a pipe dream.
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This would be especially stupid considering that you can get one random purple every 1 1/2 hours with a good farming toon...|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
That is really scary when you think about it. You can get a merit theoretically in 3.5 minutes so if the devs are saying it should take more than 9999 merits to get a purple what they are saying is it should take you more than 35,000 minutes of game time to get purple
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Btw: Where does the 3.5 mpm number come from?
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http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Merit_Rewards
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Originally Posted by Bierfuiz
This would be especially stupid considering that you can get one random purple every 1 1/2 hours with a good farming toon...
Btw: Where does the 3.5 mpm number come from? |
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
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What?|
Originally Posted by DSorrow
. . . The zero giveth, and the zero taketh away. . . .
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Is nothing sacred ?!?
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I haven't bought anything, haven't needed to. Slotting whatever trainings drop + 'beginners luck' = plenty of firepower to deal with stock content.
If you play 'normally' you're going to generate a TON more stuff than you'll use. Sell it, reap the rewards, then buy what you want. It's never been easier.
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and some of this... my tank is at 46. Fully slotted, no purples but I want defense and resist, so purps don't really suit me... maybe later if i tinker w/ second build... but I'm sitting at 28 million with stuff to sell doing much the same as Goat did. I did story arcs (freakalympics ROCKS) and a few select TF's for roughly 360 merits, a few AE runs, and some ToT badging. I have a Numina +Reg/Rec that I bought cheap for under going prices by waiting 3 weeks on a bid.
By the time I hit 20, I was planning ahead for key IO pieces. I don't wait til I level to run to WW's. I have only one bid remaining to fill and I will be slotted at 50 when I get there. My influence is all extra gravy on top now...
In the immortal words of Socrates, "I drank what?"
-- Real Genius