The Purple Answer

For the curious: Arkell v. Pressdram.

Only the stupid and/or indolent are 'hurt' by 'the system', which offers equal opportunity to all players. Which is in stark contrast to most MMOs of my experience.

I have a couple toons with 2 slotted*


*dual build.

I make money the old fashioned way.

I steal it.

You know the uber player doenst need purple either. So that arguement goes right out the window. Purples are a plus, i agree. NO build needs them and in some cases i feel that the purple bonuses are not as nice as some of the standard IO sets. However they are in the game. There is no reason to make them something that only one class of player will ever see.

100 recipies is not easy. It would mean the game guarentees that 1 percent of your drops when you get to level 47 are purple drops. Not that they will be able to be used by you, or that they are what you want. It would not effect the natural drop rate of the recipies, would not slow down those that earn them more frequently then that. It would simply be something tangible like tickets or merits that can be looked forward to awarding from time to time.

I would imagine that most people dont earn much more then a couple hundred recipies going from level 30-50. So when you figure that purples cant even drop until your 47, I dont find that to be a drop rate that doesnt require HARD work. All it means is that your hard work will EVENTUALLY give you a reward. Why should a player that likes to run TFs or SFs or SG teams etc. hard work have less of a chance to earn a reward then the hard work of someone that takes one mission and spends hours a night doing nothingbut killing the same mobs over and over agian?

Then by that definition NO ONE needs purples. So either lets get rid of them all together or lets balance out the ability for ALL players of ALL playstyles to earn them equally.

Now also with the new SSK system, people might be playing thier 50s more often, and on exempt purples are the only IO sets that degrade when exempting. So right there is a viable reason why a player that is running normal game and mission content as intended would like to see a purple set in their build here and there.

I guess my point is that if purples grant buffing that is not needed to play the game, then NO ONE needs the buffs. SO the argument that they should be only there for the uber building farmers and not the standard player (trying to avoid casual, many people put in time like a farmer, but arent farming) is really moot. If only outrageous builds need them, and those builds far exceed what is needed to play the game, then infact purples are game breaking content and should be removed.

As the people who farm have a much higher chance of having a purple recipe drop, as they are killing more foes

Soz that you didn't learn maths, but stop crying, the WHAAAAAAMULANCE is currently out of service due to the rediculous number of babies who can't accept that there are means and methods of getting mass amounts of influence WITHOUT farming

I am not saying that the COX system doenst have benefits above other MMOs, but the system is hardly even. The system grants higher possible benefits based on how a player chooses to spend his time. And i know that there is not a great fix for this. But it does extend beyond simply purples.

If i play solo in the MA, i can earn tickets faster to take a gold roll for a recipie then most teams can finish a TF in to earn a random roll. So i can increase my chances to earn say a LOTG recharge by the simple idea that i farm for nothing but gaining tickets. Since normal play will probably be with a toon not built to handle what i can with my farmer, since i can then tailor the mission to my best benefit, and run it endlessly, then i get more for it.

The same thing goes with purples. I am just saying it would be nice if the Dev could not change the habits of those that like to farm, but to simply have alternate systems in place so those that dont are not always the ones comming up short.

You missed the point by a country mile.

They exist for people who want unneeded benefits to strive for. For people who want to do things like solo pylons, or take on level 54 spawns of Rikti that have three bosses in them. Those are things that some people like to do, but they are not required for anyone to be able to do. Nothing in the game calls for such antics except the drive of some people to strive for them.

And strive is the operative word. Your suggestion is that no one should have to strive to be able to achieve ridiculous heights of power. Yet, by definition, achieving ridiculous heights of power is not something a casual player does.

Don't you understand? These things are like this specifically for the people who want something to strive for. You want to take that and, essentially, communalize the them to an extent that no one needs to do any (or much less) special striving to get them. And that defeats their purpose.

It's acceptable for them to exist in this form for those people who are compelled to strive for them, because no one needs them. If everyone needed them, then there would be a reason to make sure everyone had a simpler chance at achieving them.

The best rewards requiring the most effort is an intentional design.

'The System' isn't configured to get the best 'gear' in the hands of every mouthbreathing layabout who ponies up a sub, it's meant to reward the players who extend themselves to earn it.

When 'The System' is as egalitarian as ours, complaints about it are hard to take seriously.


Whatever alternative they design will require a roughly equal (or greater, see 'merits') time/energy investment.

What you actually seem to want is a handout.

HAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHA!

Oh, wait, are you serious? Because see, I like games where I have to EARN my loot. And my levels. And so on. Maybe you don't. You might prefer a nice first person shooter. MMOs are time sinks, and reward time played.

We could apply your same argument to your level. "By definition, NO ONE needs to be level 50. So let's either get rid of level 50 altogether, or let's balance out the ability for ALL players of ALL playstyles to earn level 50 equally." So... it shouldn't matter if I play one hour a week or 10 hours a week or 40 hours a week... I should have my 50 just as fast as everyone else?

Look, you're not WRONG. There's no right and wrong here. There's just how people want their game to behave. I do NOT want to play a game that levels me automatically to the maximum and then showers the best equipment on me, all with no effort involved on my part. Similarly, I do not want to go to a school where everyone gets an A. I do not want to work at a job where everyone receives the same pay. I do not want to play an MMO that rewards casual players with builds just as strong as people who have put over 5000 hours into the game and have studied and mastered it intracasies. I just don't.

And I'll say the same thing playing a new MMO. I'm PLAYING another MMO for the first time that others have been playing for years. I don't WANT to just suddenly be as powerful as top tier raiders and PvPers. I haven't paid my dues. I don't know what I'm doing. I haven't earned a thing. I don't deserve respect, I don't deserve good equipment, and I don't deserve being max level. I have to earn those things through the hours I put in playing and learning the game. I might never put in those hours. And if I don't, I will always be mediocre. I'm FINE with that. I can still have fun in that game with a perfectly mediocre character, and that's enough for me for now, and possibly forever. If I ever want to be top tier, I know what to do. I have to put in the hours, and I have to study and master the game.

If that's not the game you want to play, cool. And I realize that City of Heroes has always been pretty casual-friendly. It's part of the niche it has carved out. That's great, and if I were the devs, I would definitely err on the side of being casual friendly. But as a player, I want the hard core. Conveniently, the game also caters to ME, not just to the casual player. Can't we all just... get along?

No one needed the buffs that HamiOs originally provided, but people strived for them anyway, and they got nerfed.

From a game play point of view, you really just shot yourself in the foot. No player is suposed to be able to solo a Pylon, a mob of +4 enemies with 3 bosses, is suposed to kick a players ***. If purples are so good that they allow you to live through that, then there is something wrong with them. Strive or not, all you basicly said again was that purples grant such a high level of buff that they allow you to get away with things that are not intended. Now for the sake of argument, why cant a mission runner STRIVE to get a build that can be almost invincible for the LRTF? That can stand toe to toe with 8 +4 AVs? Why isnt that just as viable of a reason to strive for excelence, the soloing a pylon?

However your missing the point, there are players that strive for excellence, that dont want to farm. That dont want to kill the same missionover and over agian. That dont want to just work the wall in Conan world, or rikti street hunting in RWZ. They want to team, they want to be social members of their SGs, they want to run task forces. Essentially they want to play the game as intended and have just as good of a chance for the rewards as anyone else. The current system doesnt really allow for that. Yes it all comes down to killing quickly. But someone that preffers say to play team support might not simply have the toon in their arsenal to power farm for the drops. So they get told what?Sorry you made a defender, next time make a fire tanker and only play the infernal demon missions over and over and over again for months.

Being that many of these players are going to be more prone to exempting, and having the majority of their IO set buffs be useless, i would say that for intende purposes there is more reason for the standard play style to want purple sets then farmers who are clearly just basking intheir own glory of doing things that are not intended to be done.

Nothing i suggested would change anything about how you play or earn your rewards. If you want to spend hours cranking out maxed out missions or farming one area of a zone you still can. And you would still earn about the same level of rewards. But you and others should realize that other players are just as dedicated. Other players have invested just as much time into the game and to playing it and to building their toons and because of what the choose to spend time doing, earn less for it. And because they choose to play more with friends, their chances get lowered by having to share.

All i have suggested is that for EVERYONE, a certian level of play will grant atleast a certain level of reward. Lets say you get a purple drop a night, if not more. Say your getting a drop every 60 recipies, that wont change. But if the numbers started going against you and you did get to 100 with no purple, then you finally get awarded one.

Same thing, a player logs in night after night, teaming, running TFs etc. However you cant buy purples, they only award from drops not merits or tickets or the other means by wich this player has availible tohim or has to buy it for a insane price on the markets.

So when you figure that to get enough influence of selling on the market to buy a 250 million infulence purple, you probably would need to get2-3 really good IOs like miracles or LotGs, now to get those you would need to get what? 500 merits or so? Or get really lucky on random rolls which is more likely you will have just wasted your merits. So you figure 500 merits is like 10 positron TFs? How many purple drops do you earn in the time it would take to run 10 positron TF? Thats my issue really. The time investment is pretty wide spread just because one player wants to spend time playing one way, and another spends time another way.

I dont really give a crap how hard they make them to get overall, i just think you shouldnt be penalized to get them because you want to take advantage of different content. If they were tied to sa story or something like HamIOs were, then i can understand saying its going to be the only way to get them. But since they are not, then it should be all equal.

No one shot themselves in the foot, because that gun wasn't loaded. Do you actually read things like, oh, the Dev digest? The devs are keenly aware of what people are doing with IOs. Castle even posted in the thread we had way, way back, about the "Scrapper Challenge" where people were doing the +4 hazard zone RWZ thing. Are you really this in the dark about what a totally tricked out character can do? And do you think that just because you are, the devs are too?

Seriously, why do you think all the sudden we have difficulty settings that allow one player to take on +4 foes spawned for an 8-man team?

Speaking of shooting one's self in the foot...remind me why casual players need something that's so good that you think it's surely going to be nerfed?

Wish granted. If you play your 50s, you're likely going to get a lot of purples dropping, whether that's farming, running task forces, or just doinking around on radio missions with your friends. The drop rates aren't so low that you can't purple out a character by just playing the game and trading the purples that dropped for you for the purples that dropped for others via the market. I purpled my first character by simply playing the end game content "the way the devs intended" for a few hundred hours. It wasn't one per night, but I think that's asking a bit much.

Now fine, yes, if you have a hard core farming build and are hard core farming, you're going to get more purple drops than the role player that runs one mission per night because they're busy talking instead of fighting. I suppose we could call that "penalizing role play" or something. But I think that's going a bit too far. Even in "role play" terms, the hard core farmer has done MUCH more to turn the tide of evil during a night's carnage than the role player.

Now, you WON'T get purples is by leveling up, playing your lowbies, or playing exemplared down to other lowbies. I don't see that as a problem. You don't get raid gear when you're running lowbie missions. You don't get raid gear when you're palling around with your lowbie friends. You get raid gear when you raid. That's about as standard as it gets.

(Edit: Conveniently, this game DOES let you get raid gear without raiding. The drops aren't bind on aquire, so you can buy and sell them on the market. It's going to take you this side of forever to buy them if you're a casual player doing nothing but running low level content, but buy them you can.)

I really don't care about purples. I have a couple characters with one or two purple set bonuses; none has any more than two of a set slotted. None are boughten; all are drops.

But mostly, what interests me and keeps me going is to experience new powersets and new combinations. Levelling up new characters and getting them the bonuses I think will benefit them most is what keeps me playing. And what concerns me about prices is not the price of purple sets, but the prices of a number of lesser sets - indeed most of them are lower level sets - that have the bonuses I particularly want.

I realize that I'll eventually be able to get them with merits if I run enough task forces. So that's what I do. They aren't available on the market for prices I will ever be able to afford. The characters I want to have them are also fed by my squishies, who in return get the dropped IOs my melees can't slot.

I have been buying more random rolls for recipes, especially on characters that don't get played a lot that have fewer than 100 merits on them. But if anything good comes out of a random roll, it sure ain't going to be sold on the market. The history of the market suggests that anything you sell there will have to be bought back for twice what you sold it for when you had it in your hand. Or more. So only the crappiest of random roll results get sold; the rest get held; somewhere down the line, some character may want that.

Holding inf seems to me to be a bad investment. I'd much rather have crafted IOs in the base. They're a hedge against inflation, which has abated only slightly in i16. Converting my roll results to inf in order to buy on the market is what makes no sense to me. I might not get it, naow or ever. I'll be stuck with inf, and that inf will be worth less tomorrow than it is now.

Hmmm... I think you just explained why you can't afford them.

And again, do you remember a post, way way back around issue 3, where statesman said that those who put in time to earn HamiOs were going to reap the ultimate rewards for them. And then one issue later they were nerfed. Just because the devs know its going on now, doesnt mean it will go on forever. What is ok when a few people are doing it, suddenly seems to become a problem when many people do it. Every time you say you solo a pylon you plant a bug in someone's bonet that they want a toon to solo pylons with also. That person goes out and makes the build, and suddenly soloing pylons was never intended and breaks the risk v reward mold or some such ****, and something changes to make it worthless to do, or unable to do.

I pay attention to the history of the game. And these devs have really proved no different then the old devs.(though some are the old devs) in that things are being "fixed" years after they were implements but never broken like say SideKicking.

I just maintain that they should be equally availible to all player with the invested time no matter what style of play you enjoy. Keep in mind through out 20+ level 50s i have maybe 3 sets total. I really dont care to go out and solo team content and say "ohhh look at me you cant do this because im uber and farmed my *** off to earn purples and you didnt" Frankly if they let standard IO sets exempt down i would say there is really no need to purple anything, short of the occasional build like perma doms that need a butt load of one attribute. (can you guess what toons my sets are in)

So see IMO there most valuable asset is that they exempt down. That is when you take out the ability to solo team content with them which im sure you can argue isnt an intended result of any system in the game. So frankly they should be more easily obtained by content players then farming. Atleast IMO.

You could also argue that they were so good and so rare that the devs figured that no one would go out and farm for hundreds of hours just to get a toon full of them and the buffs offered were so good because they figured the most anyone would have is 1-2 sets in a toon anyway. Kinda again like hamiOs. I dont think the devs ever considered someone would go to enough raids to have full slots of hamiOs. At one time my blaster was at his damage cap off HamiOs with no build up or aim. It wasnt intended and it was changed. Does that mean purples will be? I dont know, i hope not. I just personally dont like the have/have not attitude when it comes to them. Its a game, if its availible in the game it shouldnt be easier to get because you farm then if you play. That is my personal feeling on all drops of any type. It doesnt mean its going to change, or the drops will. Its just my personal wish list that something could be done.

Sidekicking always was broken to some extent, being lower level than average to the team should have been less rewarding rather than more as you contribute less, IMHO of course.

Don't forget there have been several iterations of trying to 'fix' sidekicking before this latest overhaul

Level range for XP on a team was originally 9, then 5, then the whole within 2 levels of the average.

Been through this before. Boughten: Commercially made; purchased, as opposed to homemade: "boughten bread."

Even once they were nerfed, HamiOs were the ultimate reward available at the time. Even today, in a world of IO bonuses, go look at the market price of Membrane or Ribosome HOs. Using them extensively after they were nerfed, and even after ED, still allowed things no one else could do.

Observing that, once, something powerful existed and was nerfed, and then holding that as sure evidence that something powerful will be nerfed again is foolish. Every time through this the devs learn something new. I can promise you that vastly more testing and consideration has gone into the design and implementation of IOs than ever went into the original incarnation of HOs.

That's not proof that they'll never be nerfed either, but in the context of the history of the game, there's a hell of more evidence that the devs are mostly comfortable with them than there is that there's some great nerf lurking, just because a nerf happened once long ago.

By the way, the HO nerf wasn't actually that horrific except for category "B" enhancers. HOs used to be 50% enhancement in all categories, even for boost types that were normally 20%, like Defense. The nerf made them follow the same rules SOs follow - 33% for category A (damage, recharge, etc.) and 20% for category B (defense, toHit, etc.) Notably, a common level 50 IO is 42.5% enhancement for category A.

Lets set aside all the "aberrent" things players might do in play. Lets say you and I both play for an three hours. In that time, I solo a Scrapper. I'm inherently decently tough, and I hit hard. I go fight +2 foes in missions as fast as I can. You play a FF Defender. You spend some time looking for a team, updating your costume, and running a Master Of the ITF. You get a good team, but they approach the ITF cautiously to get the badge, which you all do.

At the end of the 3 hours, I have earned a level and a half and a lot of drops. I quite likely defeated more foes in that 3 hours than the whole ITF team did on the TF. Do your character and mine really deserve the same rewards, just because we both logged in for three hours? I'm not trying to twist your words here. Rather this is what I see you saying, and I'm asking you if it's right.

You mean like you seem to want?

As pervasive as IOs may seem here on the forums, they are not that pervasive in game. The percentage of people who invest in extremely powerful builds seems to be very small even this long after the introduction of IOs. Don't be fooled by the fact that those people make a higher percentage of forum posters than they do of players.

It's already worthless to do. It yields absolutely zero XP, inf, or drops, unless you happen to maul some Rikti along the way. It's a lot like soloing AVs - it's crap reward for the time it takes. People do it to say they can.

You remember the history of the game and are viewing it through a heavily filtered opinion of what it all means. I don't find your interpretation of history especially compelling, and I consider it to be formed by discarding information that don't fit your interpretation of things. It's a common thing people do, and I won't swear I am not doing it myself, but I think you're doing it really severely. Again, if no one is supposed to be able to do these things, why did we get the difficulty options we just did?

(And as Cat said, Sidekicking was a wonderful idea implemented in a way that made sense for the comic genre, but that didn't actually work out that well in practice. Its mechanics were fantastic primarily for power leveling and not really that wonderful for everyone else. The devs didn't undertake this change with the justification that the old SK system was broken, but rather that they had come up with something better. I agree with them.)

And here you expose a dirty little bias. You think that people who do this sort of thing are motivated by a desire to lord how good their characters are over other people. It conveniently vilifies the people with significant IO investment, and is often used in an effort to plant the seed that this villainous nature justifies that their advantages be stripped from them and given to everyone else.

I couldn't give much of a damn about what most players think of my characters, because I don't interact with most players. I mostly play the game solo except for running TFs, which I do with a long-standing group of players who share my interests. I almost never pug, and almost never have - it's got nothing to do with getting drops. I get deep personal satisfaction from putting together a character that can take on ridiculous odds and win. I enjoy it even if I do it all by myself where no one can see. The other people I am most likely to tell about it are other power-gamers like myself, who have characters of their own who can do these things. I am actually careful not to be perceived as lording such achievements over others, because I don't like people who do that sort of thing.

The structure of that paragraph confuses me, but no, I don't even remotely agree with that assessment. If team content is not to be soloed, then why were we just given settings that allow solo players to fight 8-man team spawns? Why did Invincible/Relentless give AVs even when you're solo? This is why I don't think that much of your interpretation of the history of the game - you seem to ignore really obvious counters to your positions.

Let me be clear. I'm not nuts about the fact that teaming dilutes drops more than I think typical team speed counters. Really bad-*** teams I think do make up for it, but I don't think the mythical casual player ends up on those very often. I accept that things work like that, but I don't think it's inherently good just because it's how things are. I sometimes wish that there was some sort of drop rate boost for being on a team. On the other hand, I can imagine some reasons the devs might not like that. No system is going to be perfect.

Except we know they didn't do that with IOs. We know they expected people to trick out characters fully. They made it easier than people with HOs ever had it by giving us a cross-server market! You have to stop comparing these devs now, who have 5+ years under their belts and quite a lot of new staff, with ones from just 1 year after releasing their first MMO. Yes, our devs still do make some boneheaded mistakes - they're human and all humans have some good bonehead potential. There's always the possibility of change, but the motivation for change is different. It's vastly more likely that individual IOs will be tweaked, or individual categories of function, like +Recharge or +Def, than it is that the whole system will be redone. HOs were created at a time when the devs had almost no damn clue how to balance the game. IOs were created by a team much more comfortable with balance, with a lot more experience with their player base, and who therefore thought of a lot more possibilities.

Then stop having it, because you're the only one here promoting it now. Well, I guess you and Heraclea. They're "have not" if you refuse to do the things that get you purples. I have never been much of a farmer. I stick with my 50s, play the game, I sell my drops. It's gotten me billions of inf for market use and let me purple 5 characters. I'm not doing anything you couldn't do. You just don't want it to take as long as I was willing to accept.