Are we that hated?

I get his agrument, I just find it horribly flawed and opinionated - just as he probably views mine

Good point though

Your Move

I think you will find a correlation to the "Why is stuff so friggin' expensive" and the imergence of a PvP community trying to reform. I am not sure if people keep trends on the market like a hobby, but I would guess that the already low supply from having AE content - coupled with the extra PvPers who are trying to get IOs together to not get farmed - has resulted in an increased awareness of this issue.

I can tell you that that is the only reason Im here - I never had a problem on the market before i16, but the last time I played was i13 - so I'm missing the trends and patterns. I don't remember stuff being so expensive.


I'm an idiot when it comes to the market, but why is increasing the drop rates a bad idea to counter inflation?

Flawed? No. Merely something you don't want to hear. That never goes down well.

Opinionated? Of course! I've never exactly pretended to be a "neutral" voice of reason on this subject.

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Granted you never asked me if I wanted to play NOW.

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Merits were the first "blow". Now, instead of having a bunch of random "junk" recipes that made it to the market at various levels, people started getting merits, which can be vastly hoarded.

At this point, the market still had a relatively decent amount of these recipes available for all but the most desirable set pieces. However, the market started clearing out about this point. Recipes that were going for lower (than now) prices were bought up and became scarce. Newly generated stuff, if it wasn't consumed internally (by the person who it dropped to) went on the market for substantially increased prices.

By the end of i14 things were quite bad.

The advent of i15 and AE actually helped the situation. Because you weren't spec-buying recipes like you were with merits, you saw a lot more in the way of random recipes making it to the market during the height of the PL craze. So while you had tons of new L50's being created, they were actually feeding back into the market.

Now, post i16, we have greatly reduced AE use. Yet we've still got all these L50's out there who want nice stuff (not to mention the lower level toons who also want nice stuff).

The market is getting it's contents vacuumed out again. So, again, what was plentiful and cheap before is now getting scarce and more expensive.

The reason things weren't this expensive in i12 and early i13 is because there wasn't the level and type of demand there is now.



Because a modest increase in the drop rate won't have any real effect. Pricing might stabilize a bit, and maybe lower a little. But not substantially.

A crazy increase in the drop rate simply destroys the value of the IOs in the first place and turns the game into GearQuest.

And you're essentially asking the devs to fix a player-created problem (that scads of people PL'ed to 50 (multiple times) and now want "bling").

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I really don't think you can blame the players for all of the market's woes. Sure the PL'ing didn't help but there were several dev decisions (merits and the fix to level 50 inf earnings come to mind) that contributed at least as much.

All? No. I acknowledged the problem with merits, but L50 earnings is just icing on top of the PL cake.

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I'm rooting for O.

Oh, hahahah. I don't think you thought your cunning plan all the way through here, because you just basically proved his point.

If you give your opponent the first two moves in tic tac toe, you actually *are* getting a sure thing - a sure *loss*. Tic tac toe is nice and predictable that way, and if I'm allowed to plunk down 2 x's on the board anywhere I like, you will lose 100% of the time, guaranteed. It's very much like the situation everyone is trying to beat into your head regarding KB.

How about a game of Global Thermonuclear War ?

With the PVPers the argument really isn't, if their honest with themselves, about short market supply. It's about wanting to have the stuff readily available at low pricing without the need for any PVE interaction or marketing. "Because they don't enjoy that."

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Wrong! There's always the possibility that my opponent is an idiot (or at least does something dumb or forgets something).

Can I DEPEND on it? And would I want to do it ALL the time?

No.

But it doesn't always assure that victory for him is GIVEN.

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Yup. Like PVP, the only way to win is to just not play.

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You better hope your opponent is brain dead if you expect to beat them at tic-tac-toe given they have the 'first' move.

No, that's actually not what's being asked for, so I don't actually think you understand. You've overlooked the core point of Empire's original direction.

The market is a PvE-centric contraption. In order to be successful at it, you have to either use it fairly aggressively or you have to play PvE quite a lot.

Dedicated PvPers, are, by definition, here to PvP. Time spent fiddling with the market (despite arguing being a mild form of PvP) and definitely time spent PvEing aren't on their agenda. However, to be competitive, they must do one of these things.

Your comments that if they want to PvP in a more competitive way they should seek out a game with better PvP is a non-starter. The point of their complaints is that they'd like to PvP here, and are looking for improvements to the system that allow them to do this without having to spend time in PvE. It does not imply that they demand zero time investment at all, but simply zero (or minimal) time investment in PvE.

The solutions I described have nothing to do with breaking or correcting the market that exists today. Instead they strive a separation of PvE and PvP concerns (something our devs have struggled with from the very beginning).

I understand and sympathize with sentiments given here. Your position on this matter seems to me to purely argumentative for its own sake. And believe me, coming from me, I think that's saying something.

You have to hope your opponent is brain dead to win even if you have the first move. There is one potentially winning opening move in tic-tac-toe (a corner placement) and it's still trivial to counter that.

This comes under the heading of "well duh".

Maybe. The fact is that PVP really is the unwanted stepchild of CoX. Yes, there's a small, hardcore segment of players who want to do more with it. Unfortunately, reality intervenes quite quickly.

This is going to come under the heading of ROI. Again, the PVP crowd is relatively small. Such a change to PVP would be fairly to completely non-trivial.

So the devs could invest a bunch of time, money, and effort into segregating the sytems into a parallel setup

OR

They can concentrate on PVE and hit 99+% of the playerbase while continuing to play "Operation" with PVP.

What do you REALLY think is going to happen?


If I was being argumentative, you'd have put me on ignore by now. I'm simply mouthing unwelcome truth here.

Honestly, I really wish the situation for PVPers here was better. I do.

I just, truthfully, don't see any changes coming down the pipe to fix the situation and several of the purported "solutions" are equivalent blowing someone's face off with a nuke to get rid of a pimple on their chin.

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If the "duh" is in regards to what PvPers want to do, that's kind of silly to say, given my statement of "by definition".

If the "duh" is in regards to the need to use the market to get PvP goods, that's not a "duh" factor. It's that way because it happens to be that way, not because it has to be that way.

It's not as if the devs haven't spent significant amounts of time working on it. Not only in the past, but presumably currently - Castle has said enough to make it clear they're still working on things. The problem is that their results have been, IMO, disastrous, and served only to shrink the very playerbase that would have most used their changes.

If the ROI was perceived to be so small, I have to wonder why devs made any changes at all?

Based on their comments I expect them to keep making PvP changes when priorities allow until the game shuts down. I don't have a lot of faith in what they will do, but as pointless as giving them our feedback proved in the past, they're guaranteed to not take it into account if they don't get it now.

Surely you jest. There's many a thread around here that has my teethmarks on it. I don't let go that easily.

So we should just tell them all to go away and stop asking for things? If having even a high proportion of god-awful suggestions was the criteria for that, the whole of the forums should be shut down, erased with an EMP and smelted for scrap metal.

Shoot down bad ideas for being bad, and concede when good ideas are good, even if you don't think they'd ever happen. There's no need to play "no-man" for the devs, especially on things we don't know their positions on. I used to poo-poo lots of ideas on the basis of the devs seemingly never having time to make changes or fix things. Then they staffed up like mad and starting doing things we thought they'd never do. Like I said, I don't necessarily trust them to do a good job fixing PvP, but I don't think we're safe in assuming they aren't going to try (for better or worse).

Please inform us of these ways, oh wise and knowledgeable PvPer.

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"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."

And back to you

I'm rooting for enlightenment

They've been making changes in existing systems though. Tweaking values. Not adding whole new levels of functionality.

Ever have a cut on the roof of your mouth? Yeah, it hurts, but you can't stop yourself from running your tongue over it...

No, and don't call me "Shirley"!

(Sorry, WAY too much Airplane! as a kid.)

There does come a point of exhaustion. When people don't listen to anything you say and keep yammering about wanting things their way. Regardless of whether or not it's a Good Idea.

Beyond this point, about all you can do is offer a pointed GTFO.

DO NOT TEMPT ME!

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