Thought exercise - GR Crashing the BM

It's just a zone with missions I really enjoy is all. Same with Striga. I never get tired of the majority of the arcs in those zones.

Actually many folks argue that the increased running around, decript, old zones and tfs (despite posi just being FIXED this issue), numerous EMPTY hazard zones are detriments to blue side.

Also the merit reward issue has already been explained by others.

I'd rather have faster, streamlined content, that doesn't have me running between zones and doing kill all after silly kill all (lears at some of the older tfs) AND gives less merit rewards than some of the dreck that exists blueside.

And even with that said many of my toons are going blue. Why? Cause of the market and how long it takes to buy ANYTHING redside.

I used to also enjoy the tf in there. Before i'd done it 1232343543 times.

As an aside, that zone would be perfect for a WarWtich tf

I can only find two points of adjustment.

Most (all?) red zones have hazard areas in them.

Mayhems are more fun than Safeguards. (an opinion, granted, but I like to see stuff explode)

This wouldn't work unless those contacts will only give missions to pure villains and not someone who is halfway across and can do villain content. The contact would also have to make sure that no one who was halfway was on the team either, otherwise they'll just get the drops vside and go use the blue market like they're forced to do when only halfway from hero to villain and thus give nothing back to the red side market.

What you are missing is stubborn, obstinate, developers at least where the market is concerned. We have been told by them that there is no disparity in potential earning speed because all the merit rewarding content on both sides has been balanced around a mean time/merit rate.

Implementing your idea would first take an admission from the devs that there is a disparity in the red side ATs merit earning potential.

What that means is that it LOOKS like there is a disparity when there is not. Virtually all villain story arcs run in the same zones they start in where as hero content can take as much or more time traveling than actually playing the mission(s). Dr. Q is notorious for spending significanly more time traveling that fighting. If you want to speed up your merit earning blue side you need to leverage the fastest travel powers; range boosted Teleport or Super Speed.

The real disparity in the sides are:

1) The amount of content available blue side is much greater though extremely old and in dire need of revamping. This gives more opportunity for things to do which relieves some measure of boredom.

2) Merit rewards/time are greater for TF and SF content than for story arcs. This means that since blue side has more TF content and it is available in multiple level ranges that there is more potential opportunities to earn merits on the blue side.

3) All villians are built to solo. Villians are all generalists. This means that common drops like salvage and junk recipes are more available on red side because many people solo their villians (soloing you get to keep all the drops from mob defeats rather than sharing them with the team). The best rewards in the game at this point in time are PvP IOs, Pool C IOs purchased with merits, purple drops, and HO/SHOs. Purple recipes are the only case where there are likely to be more drops earned on the red side than blue as that is the only thing that most villians will be able to solo rather than have a team.

4) Heroes are specialists. That means that many AT choices on blue side need to team to perform well. This means that more team oriented content (TFs) are run on blue side. Higher population on blue side also make this more likely to occur.

Your solution doesn't fix the root of any of the problems and won't solve the real problems on red side.

Fixing 1 and 2 require a huge amount of development time for redside only content, an expense we have been told won't happen. New content will be co-op or mirrored on each side.

3 and 4 can't be fixed since it's designed into the very fabric of the game. GR will fix this somewhat by allowing AT bleed through but it won't do any thing for the population disparity and most likely will increase that disparity by allowing villians to move blue side where there is more content available and more opportunity for teaming.

A market merger however fixes or smoothes over many of the problems.

If heroes out number villians by 3 to 1 (which at my last spot check they did) then merging the market increases villian access to goods by 300% while only boosting hero access by 33% (a win/win for both sides with the villians coming out on top by a significant margin).

A market merger means that more purple recipes will be available to heroes which will make money flow from hero side to villian side. At the same time merit reward goods will be more available to villians (especially in the case of non-level 50 IOs) which will make the money flow back. Rare salvage, and goods like pool A and Pool B recipes, are more prevelant on red side where there is a higher preponderance of soloers, netting red siders a positive cash flow. Perhaps most importantly, since a significant portion of the toons played on red side are master minds, is what are essentially junk and fodder blue side (pet recipes) will be greatly available at much much lower prices to red side master minds.

So does teh tinfoil hat accelerate or impede teh process?

I was able to purchase a LoTG +Rech on my Troller by level 28.

I had to wait until 39 to do the same on my Corr.

Doing the TFs available while leveling up, it's incredibly easy to bag 200 merits blueside, but it's horrible redside. I was able to get the blueside ones easy peasy, but I had to grind in Ouro to get them redside. Yes, blueside TFs take longer(usually), but there's just a ton of them to do, and they're run so frequently.

As for what I'll be doing, I've restricted myself from creating new villains until GR comes out. Everything will be moving to blue when it does. Some redside content is really awesome, like some of the patron arcs*, but besides that most of the game is mean. I don't dabble in the market for horribly expensive stuff like LoTGs, I use merits, so merit opportunities are very grood.


*awesome to play, I'm not one to determine whether something is good because of story or not.