Anyone else never use IOs?

Replace "music" with "writing" and you'll have a spot-on hypothetic.

And my answer is what you would guess - no, I most decidedly would not put in the effort. Let me explain:

I've been writing for coming on 10 years now, for fun and mostly on-and-off. My oldest works are so embarrassing as to not be worth mentioning, but I've improved since. The trick is that I have not improved through hard work. I've improved through finding ways to have fun while writing, and improve in the process. I have never, EVER, taken to writing something for the sole sake of honing my skills, fully knowing it won't come to a good enough work.

The trick here is that I'm TERRIBLE at empty practice. To give a different example, I've always wanted to be able to draw, but I've never been able to commit to just doing lines and shapes to practice my hand. I mean, I've tried, but I get depressed of my inability to do anything decent and quit before too long. The only times I've been able to stick with any practice sketches has been when they were going well and I've been able to produce something that at least doesn't bug me to look at.

Of course, the only things I've ever been able to draw have been utterly simplistic, basically consisting of the Powerpuff Girls and the Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! monkeys. But even then, I know I'm producing SOMETHING that'll be complete and, if not great, at least not embarrassing. It doesn't mean I'll be a decent artist, since I'll take, like, half an hour for one girl whereas a professional artist could put one together in under 60 seconds, but at least I enjoy doing it nevertheless.

I'm incredibly bad at learning, training and working out of context. I've always sucked at it. The only way I've ever been able to learn is by doing, and not just trying and failing, but doing and succeeding. I'd sooner succeed at something smaller and simpler than fail at something bigger.

Back to writing, I honestly tried writing large, detailed, complex stories. And I failed, because I didn't have the patience or skill to put them together. The only way I've been able to write AT ALL has been in smaller, less graphic episodicals retold in first person or by a narrator and trading complicated descriptions for simpler observer reactions. In a sense, I write my stories like I write my post.

I hate long-term investments and working towards larger, distant goals. I don't specifically MIND it, to be precise, I just can't work if that's my ONLY goal. And if the only goal is an end so distant that I'm just not going to bother... Well, I don't bother.

The thing is, I don't fault the Inventions system for that. Its entire POINT is to provide incredibly long-term, unobtainable goals for people to engage in. It's what people wanted. "Raid gear," or the equivalent thereof. It's not something I've ever cared for, personally, and I was perfectly happy with SOs when SOs were all there was. I'm perfectly happy with Commons as though commons are as high as it gets. I don't get to use sets, but I don't miss them. Difficulty settings have ensured of that. Blasters are the ONLY AT that I actually feel the heat on, and even then only sometimes, but Scrappers? Brutes? Masterminds? Nah. I don't really need them to be any stronger. They're plenty strong enough for what I want out of them.

*edit*
One final thought that just occurred to me, and which is a major contributor for me not wanting to engage into Sets: I can go to the market, look at the insanely high prices for everything, grin and think "Cool! My stuff will sell well!" I've seen the grief-stricken complaints of people who can't buy the recipes they need either because there just aren't any for sale or because they go for hundreds of millions, cries of inflation, market manipulation, quarrels over drops, bidding on expensive items... And none of that affects me. Almost without exception, the Market is a place where I go to dump my excess if it will sell. And what doesn't see I turn around and dump at the vendors anyway.

I don't fret the market, and that really is the way I like it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Enemy difficulty is one factor of the game difficulty. It may even be the primary factor. But it is not the only factor.

Enemy powers and effects, spawn composition by faction type, ratio of minions to lieutenants to bosses, AT powers, etc. are all factors that affect the overall difficulty a particular player encounters in the game.

The spawn system allows for random groups that are one level above the mission level. I don't know if it has always been that way, but it has been that way since I started playing almost two years ago. It's a basic part of the game. To my knowledge, it is working as intended by the devs. Assuming that is true, the game is, to some extent, balanced around the fact that some random number of enemy groups will spawn as +1 level. This is no different from the fact that enemy groups will contain bosses when a player is not solo, even when the player has their difficulty set for no bosses. It's part of the game.

Prior to the new difficulty system, if a player was set to anything other than Heroic, they got bosses. Now, as long as they are solo, they can avoid bosses no matter what their difficulty settings are. It is pretty obvious that that change, along with the addition of the -1 setting, decreased the difficulty for players who chose to use those settings.

Changing it so that a player never encounters those +1 enemies does the same thing. It lowers the difficulty of encounters that player faces. Ergo, the game has been made easier for that player. Your whole reason for making that suggestion was because you disliked the difficulty of having to encounter higher level enemies. You, yourself, said in that thread that you found the occasional group of +1's "too hard when they spawn +1".

It's possible to debate the merits of giving players that choice, but I don't see how anyone can rationally argue that it wouldn't allow for even lower difficulty than there is now.

By itself, I would agree with you, but again, I made the suggestion within a specific context, that being that this allows me to increase my difficulty, thus making things harder in turn. Now, I know you accused me of wanting more rewards for less difficulty before, and I still deny that allegation. But the point is, I'm not looking for my game to be easier. I'm looking for it to be just as hard, but in a different way.

Currently, if -1x3 becomes too hard for me, I'll go go back to -1x2, but won't that make things even easier? As far as rewards go, reducing my spawns to the level of the mission doesn't grant me greater rewards, as spawn rewards depend on enemy level, so if I'm facing lower-level spawns, I'm getting lower experience and Inf. I believe we've already established that Inventions are not my motivating factor, so drops aren't really what I'm after, either.

What I'm after is big crowds, plain and simple. It's just disheartening when these big crowds spawn higher level and stomp me into goo.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Not to run off on some philosophy of life tangent, but your post made me think of one of favorite quotations of all time.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. -Theodore Roosevelt

And that's what is great about this game, it caters to a multitude of playstyles.

That's fair Sam, and I have no doubt that you mean what you say about rewards. In retrospect, I should have worded that differently, as my intention was to point out that it would allow greater rewards with less risk in general, not that you personally were seeking those rewards out.

Argh! I posted my reply before responding to the above..

Sure you'd be facing lower level spawns, since you wouldn't get the +1's in there, so your xp and influence per defeat would be less, but if the absence of those +1 enemies showing up at random made the missions easier for you, your overall rate of xp and influence gain might actually increase. And you'd still be getting drops from all those enemies along the way, which you've already said you happily sell on the market. You might even find that with the removal of the risk of +1 groups showing up, that you could bump your enemy count up from x3 to x4 or even x5, getting even more drops.

As I said above, I'm sure that the rewards are not your motivating factor, but they'd still be there...

Here we differ. I catalog my mistakes and go back later to figure out how and why the mistake was made, in the interest of correcting it.

I've never been embarrassed by anything I've created in my life. It is what it is. I've never been concerned with how impressive my music may or may not be. I'm not doing it to impress people, I'm doing it for ME.

In a way, a piece of music I wrote is better than a picture of me. A picture of me only shows what I look like. A piece of music that came from my mind shows the person I was at the time I wrote it. Each song that I have ever written is a little piece of my soul. To be embarrassed by that is to be embarrassed by who I am, which I absolutely refuse to do.


Again we differ. If I can't do something, it just drives me to try (and fail if necessary) until I CAN do it. I refuse to accept that something is beyond my reach, it's just beyond my reach right now. Eventually, if I keep trying, I WILL succeed.

If the only way to learn is to do it, then refusing to do something because you suck at it is a self-defeating attitude. Failing at the big stuff doesn't discourage me, it just makes me try harder. The man who never failed because he never tried never truly succeeded either.

Think about the writers whose work you enjoy. Do you suppose the first thing they ever wrote was as polished and "successful" as the things they wrote that you enjoyed? Highly doubtful. They wrote and wrote and wrote, and a lot of it was probably crap. But each time they wrote something, the next thing they wrote was better for it.

That's why you set smaller goals to reach on your way there.

My goal is to become a well-rounded guitarist who can play anything I can conceive of. That's a daunting goal, to say the least. If all I kept in mind was that one distant goal I'd probably give up too.

So I set smaller goals, like: I'm going to learn how to play this song, or: I'm going to master this one specific technique. They are all part of the larger goal, but much easier to grasp. Looking at a big goal only shows you how far you have to go to get there. Achieveing smaller goals on the way shows you how far you've come.

Edit: I didn't pick those quotes out because I was discounting the rest of what you said, I did so because I wanted to respond to those parts specifically.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Possibly with the deepest of irony given your stance on the matter, the part I quoted in yellow is probably the best attitude one can bring to the market. Success at using the market to get what one is interested in comes from using it as more of a swap meet than a store. (I understand that the rest of what it calls for to use that for IO investment, including long-term planning, is not in your scope of interests. I just thought that bit was interesting.)

It did not always do so.

Very, very early on, it was common for missions to be what people called "back-loaded". This involved coming in the mission door and having the 1st mobs be unusually large groups of -3 and sometimes even -4 foes. As you progressed through the mission, their levels would increase, and somewhere near the middle of the mission (or earlier if they started closer to +0) they would finally all be +0 through the rest of the mission. Back then, stuff didn't spawn at +1 or higher in missions at all unless there was something like a level floor problem with a mob. (For example getting a level 10+ critter in your mission at level 10 even though you were level 7).

People fairly commonly complained about these swarms of lowbie mobs, because even back in the early days (after the 2nd purple patch), -3 foes were considered pretty worthless, let alone -4s. At some point they changed it, but forever more after they did, you could find +1s in your missions. As far as I know, there was never any formal explanation of the change.

To be honest, -1x3 actually feels MORE rewarding than +0x2, the old Tenacious. I don't know if this is because I tend to move faster through it or if it's just a subjective impression because I down a dozen enemies per spawn, but I can certainly see what you mean. This is something that I would never have gotten with the old options, but with the new ones, I revel in it. I ended up turning off bosses, too. They're just irritating, they pop up too frequently and they actually show up more often at x3 than they do at x2. But the net result has been that the game is significantly more fluid now, even for my Blasters.

I honestly couldn't tell you if I level faster or slower that way. I do know that I'm able to play for longer stretches of time because I'm much less likely to ragequit if cheap bosses aren't downing me every other spawn, so I do level faster in terms of real time. Whether that's because I can get more play-time per unit of real time in or because rewards are better, I cannot say.

I do know one thing - the game became TWICE AS GOOD literally as soon as I swapped difficulty settings. Seriously. Even today, so long after the difficulty settings changes, I still catch myself thinking "I can't believe this is a real game I'm actually playing! This is so cool!"

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Mistakes WILL happen, obviously, and learning from your mistakes is crucial, but I still don't agree one should try something fully aware that enough mistakes will be made to fail it. Not without a pretty good reason, to, at the very least.

I think you missed the point. I'm not embarrassed of the things I've written because people who read them will think poorly of me. Heck, one look at my posts ought to prove that And, indeed, most people WON'T read them, if my experience is any indication, so I'm not exactly worried. I'm embarrassed of what I've written because I look at it and I think "Man, this sucks! I can't believe I wrote that and I thought it was good at the time!" It's simply depressing to think I could have failed so badly. Now, I can't say I wish I'd never done it, because it's part of the process, but I would not have done it if I felt it was as terrible as I feel it is now.

I don't consider my past failures as growing pains and learning mistakes. I'm realistic enough to see them for what they are - simple failures. There are no prizes for showing up, and an A for effort is still an F for content. If I don't think I have a decent shot at producing something nice, I'm not going to bother. If I commit to something, I never commit to fail. Even if it's the smallest, dumbest, most insignificant idea in the world, if I commit to it, I'm going to do my best to make it work. If and only if I feel it CAN work.

My mother always told me to finish what I started, and with more stories left unfinished because I bit on more than I could chew, I've learned to listen to her. There is no training. There is only doing. Do or do not. There is no "try."

If it's a self-defeating attitude, then so be it. I've long since accepted that there are plenty of things I'll never be able to do or be, and I'm fine with that. That's why I prefer to stick to my escapist fiction and do all sorts of amazing crazy things in there, instead of worrying about what I can or can't do in real life. It is what it is. I realise this probably makes me the emo of your typical Five Man Band (interesting that this isn't included) and possibly the wangsty hero of your typical JRPG, but there really isn't much I can do about it, or indeed much I WANT to do about it. I've done my trying, and it doesn't work. It just never does.

But you know what? That just gives me a potent standpoint to write from, and some of the better things I've written hinge on precisely that. I'm not boring enough to bring my pessimism into my fictional worlds, but it doesn't man I won't go out of my way to paint a pessimistic, depressing situation that has to be defeated by sheer grit and strength of spirit

I just don't bring my fiction into the real world any more than I want the real world into my fiction.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I just got done playing Aquaria... Again, and this time around I was able to forgive all the game's minor irritations. Backtracking, cheap enemies, TEETH-GRATING controls on land, etc. But the one thing that still bugged me to no end and that I'm simply never going to be able to get past is resource collections, and in Aquaria they are simply evil. You need food to survive some of the tougher boss fights, and you need ingredients to cook this food, but each ingredient type is limited to 8 items carried at a time and many of the ingredients required for many of the essential recipes are obtained in different places in the world. VASTLY different places. And, to make matters worse, some places don't actually drop ANYTHING in the way of ingredients.

What you end up with is resource management hell. You can never stockpile a lot of one resource in case you find the corresponding one since you're limited, which means that even when you find the "scares" resource, your "abundant" resource runs out almost immediately. Only certain enemies drop certain resources, and they can be literally the world apart, requiring massive travelling. And, to make it all the more funny, you may end up without enough food to survive and having to go back through three quarters of the game to shoot energy blasts at fish for fish oil and fish meat. I hate this system, I really do.

How this relates to City of Heroes is in terms of the annoyance factor. Aquaria, like City of Heroes, is a GREAT game. However, when you have to basically drop what you're doing and go trudge through half of creation to gather resources to basically pay the toll to be able to continue... That sucks. Even just taking things as they come doesn't cut it, because you don't get the resources you need when you need them, and you have a limited inventory. For instance, in City of Heroes, it would be pretty easy to look at all the Commons I'll need, write up a list of their needed Salvage and just stockpile that salvage until I can make them all in bulk. But if I try to make them one by one, I end up collecting 50 Boresights and not a single Silver bar, so I have to sell the salvage I need to make room for other salvage I need. And to make matters worse, I end up having to fight enemies of an origin different from the ones I had in mind.

It's annoying, irritating busywork. I realise some people have an easier way about this, and some even enjoy busywork as a general thing, but for me, it just hits the pause button on my game until I can sort it out.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Since I'm looking forward to what I'm going to get, I barely notice. It's very vaguely like having to tear the wrapping off of a present - sure, I just want to get my hands on what's inside, but there's a little bit of glee and relief at just knowing you have it there in the box, under that paper.

I don't sit down and craft like a rack of stuff at once. I do it piecemeal, swinging by the market when I log in, log off, when I have to delete something valuable because I'm out of room, or when I get the message that I bought something I was eagerly awaiting. Number three in that list is the closest to onerous that list get for me, but usually selling my stuff is progress for me on something I care about; badges, money saved up to buy some shiny, etc. I have goals, so doing things that makes progress towards them excites me, at least a little.

When I was planning out Togglobite in Mids, the necessary IOs in that plan were my initial goal. However, many of the individual recipes I needed were either selling for more Inf than all 20+ of my characters on Virtue combined had, or else not selling at all. And that's before even considering the price of necessary salvage to craft the IOs. And experience showed me that I certainly couldn't depend on drops. So instead of achieving my goal I had to largely discard it and play by ear. Goals so lofty that they seem unattainable to me are not goals at all, but rather pipe dreams. They instill me not with excitement, but rather shatter my motivation.

Since then, the Market has become even less hospitable to any such goals. And drops still suck.

I could only agree with this if you routinely get presents wrapped in cast iron and ten layers of kevlar. It's not the moment right before getting the thing that's the pain in the ***, it's all the time before that spent grinding out resources that really, really bugs me.

This was largely in relation to Aquaria's resource management, though. On this playthrough I avoided it, but last time I really DID have to trek through half the world, kill a bunch of fish, trek some more, harvest a bunch of eggs cook a few pies, then trapse all over again, all because the various ingredients are in different parts of the world, some fairly rare and because I can only carry eight at a time. THIS is needless, annoying busywork that I have no love for.

And again, as Tenzhi says... Ugh, I should have hit multi-quote. Hang on...

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That's precisely how I feel. Once I start getting into the "better" and more expensive stuff, really any illusions I might have had that any of my goals would be achieved go swirling down the drain. The sheer impossibility of certain goals makes me less likely to just work harder and more likely to just say "Screw it! I'm doing something else!" In fact, and let that reflect upon my character as it will, the harder, more cumbersome, more time-consuming and more unpleasant a job it is, the LESS I am likely to bother with it. Upon reflection, this ought to be logical, but I know far too many people do things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." And I just don't roll that way. Hard I can deal with. Consistently hard? Screw it. I have better things to do with my time.

To quote Yahtzee YET AGAIN:

"A challenge is one thing, but trying to break down a ******* cement wall with your forehead isn't a challenge, it's grounds for getting ******* sectioned. Although I suppose succeeding in breaking down the wall will give you a great sense of accomplishment, which is just as well, because you'll have lost all your other senses by then."

And I'll be damned if I can ever quote the guy without getting hit with the language filter.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That makes me so sad, in a completely irrational and ridiculous way. I love writing, and I love writing long, and I want to say, no, you can do it! It isn't as impossible as you think! I have friends who said exactly the same thing, that they couldn't write long, plotty fiction, and in the end they cracked it, and then wondered what the big deal was.

But I know that, really, it's like meeting someone who doesn't like chocolate, and having the urge to give them a slab of really excellent chocolate and tells that that yes, you will like it! You will! Just try it! You'll love it. Which, as I said, is irrational and ridiculous. You can show people how to do something, but you can't make them *enjoy* it. And with hobbies, that's really what matters, in the end.

Aaaaanyway, back on topic.

I don't think that's entirely true. If it were, then the only invention sets which would exist would be the ones with the best bonuses. In fact, the devs went to the trouble of creating, in most cases, rare sets with the highest bonuses, and uncommon sets with related but lower bonuses. Which suggests to me that, as in other areas of the game, they intended to provide invention system content both for people wanting long-term, difficult goals, and for people who wanted to access the system in a more casual fashion.

That is, at least, how I use it. Characters I really love, and believe I'll keep playing frequently long-term, I'll outfit over time with the shinier sets. Others that I'll play less regularly, I outfit more quickly with cheaper sets. And the ones I decide to abandon get common IOs.