Repairing the merit system and the markets

This is pretty much it for me...I have a friend that wants low to mid-level stuff on his Dominator but there is never enough stuff on the market to kit him out. So he does tons of SFs but rarely rolls. When he does roll we just keep the good stuff in our base bins and check the market for the rest.

I'm much the same...my Cold Controller had around 500 Merits the other day. I got some decent stuff like a Numina +/+ a LOTG 7.5 and a Kinetic Combat triple but there was also a pile of garbage in the pet defense bonus, Ghost Widow proc, Mako proc and so on. Checking the market, most of the latter doesn't even sell above 10 million influence. I sold the first three for a good sum though.

My Cold has around 240 Merits right now and I'm not really planning on spending them...I would be very upset if I were forced to use my Merits, Influence, Infamy, stored IOs or anything I have stored away for any reason. For example, with Miladys Knight's plan, my level 11 Corruptor with 160 Merits would be rolling NOW, and I do not want to roll until level 25!

I'd rather they lower the cost of recipe rolls, allow us to choose the generated level and just make the prices on single items less stupid. 150 merits or something for a Mako's proc? Really? Check yourselves, devs...


Not to disagree but you can do Dr. Q in about 2 hours or so, give or take a half hour to an hour if you just bring a 4 person team, have one person sit at Dr. Q and the rest do the hunts and so on.

Villainside you just need to: ITF/LGTF/Respec (44-50) Respec (34-43) and you get around 80ish Merits. All in under an hour or two with a well-oiled team (ITF in 25-30, Lady Grey <if fixed> in 20-30, Respecs in 10-15)

So, yeah:

Merge Markets
Lower random roll costs
Re-examine Merit costs for stuff.

Maybe post less and play more?

I didn't see it as a nerf other than to any TF that awarded less than a random roll. At the time that was 25 merits.

It was a huge bonus to the longer TFs, but I've always maintained that it was another redistribution of wealth which would make the speeders way more rich than before.

As to Uber's comments about TFs being run more, yes and no. More different TFs, yes, absolutely more, probably not.

Nothing can compare to the KHTF PLs and drop runs since everyone was doing it and finishing in 17-24 minutes. Most TFs that people are running now aren't in that range or run as frequently.

So the devs did accomplish their goal of spreading out TF rewards to encourage TFs other than KHTF/Eden, but the side effect was that the supply of recipes dropped severely.

Doc Q can be done in 2:30 or so, but it is a tedious TF regardless.

And some people think a race of elves live at the center of our hollow earth.


Wishing doesn't make it so.

I'm not talking about TFs, I'm talking about market supply.

Merits were a massive, game wide nerf on the supply of Pool C.

I agree completely and from a villain standpoint no less.
Back in the day, we used to run Tarikoss five to six times per day, taking about 30-40 minutes per run. That generated an insane glut of recipes for our group, many of which found their way to the Black Market.

Now that that avenue is closed, we mostly just run LRSFs and hope for a Ribo or Micro we can sell to buy purples off the BM. ITFs are a nice option but they can get dicey with poorly slotted or non-50 toons.

Katies were great though, I remember getting a recipe, doing it a second time to get my reward window open, getting an alt, running it twice more then...sooooo many Pool Cs.

I'm not sure the forced roll is a good way of going about things, to be honest. On my previously mentioned Cold, I spent 200 Merits on a LOTG because my Rad was short one, then rolled away. I like having the choice, you know, even if one choice is incredibly less efficient.

For my own purposes, if I'm not getting 25-40 million back minimum from my roll, it gets vendored pretty quickly. Heck, so do Pool As and Pool Bs if they aren't big sellers.

I really don't see an elegant solution outside of allowing us to choose the level generated by the system, or a re-thinking of the individual costs, which are too expensive in some instances.

Or, looking at it from the other side, quick Katies were a massive exploit. Actually, there is no other way to look at it. The Task Force as it was when i9 went live was horrifically exploitable. This was entirely the devs' fault. It set player expectations to a level that was too high and based entirely on this one, broken piece of content.

Regarding your Edit 2, no we see it as a massive boon not a nerf. #1 the rare time that I can do a TF I get more than 1 roll worth of reward. #2 I have access to rewards that otherwise might as well not have existed for me thanks to story content and oro.

As more average than marketer, except for the lack of recipes on the market it was a massive boon to me. Before merits I did a grand total of 5 TFs in a year. I've done a few more in my second year.

but I run a huge number of oro arcs and I primarily do story arc content. I generate well over 100 times more pool C's via story merits than via TFs and I generate vastly more via merits than I would via the old 1 TF one Roll method.

So, as someone who has rolled over 300 times, but only done less than 12 TFs ever across all characters in two years, merits were not a nerf to what I generate.

To what I can buy off the market? yes.

This is a fair cop. Some things really are handy to get at level 11, but the roll pool also includes plenty of things that are largely useless at that level.

I can get behind this. Some items are quite overpriced for their general utility level. (Some things are also underpriced. This is a two-edged sword.)

I can get behind merging the markets, too, but there are Technical Issues. If I were to list things that hit the sweet spot of popularity, benefit, and implementability, this would be my list:
- Selectable roll levels up to the rolling character's level.
- Merit repricing.
- Merit mailing, and changing the vet reward merits to a roll discount.
The first two seem quite doable. The last has broader implications and needs to be considered and implemented carefully.

Maybe you should post smarter?

Many people can post from work but cannot play.

Correct - back when you could fail the first mish, we were knocking these out sub 10 minutes on a regular basis. I probabably ran 500-1000 of them before it was fixed.

The thing is, Katie is a nice TF, they should have simply fixed the last mission so katie's soul couldn't fly (and if they really wanted to, make the Amy mish a lead out) and kept the merits sensible or the random roll. By all means allow more than one random roll for the longer TFs.

Completely irrelevant.

The point is if the devs forced the random roll NOW, it WOULD be seen as a nerf.

Also it doesn't actually solve the market issue, as I said before, people can still HOARD, DELETE, VENDOR anything they get.

At that point you might as well just go back to the reward window at the end of every tf.

I doubt the devs want to go back to quick katies.

EDIT: Also part of the point of merits was to allow folks to bypass the markets completely, and buy exactly the item they want based on the time of their choosing, and not the whims of the market (especially redside). I don't think that needs to change no matter how much I want the red market to be better.

These three are more realistic than any suggestion posted here. including mine.

I can get behind these easily, and agree that the 3rd would have to be very carefully. But honestly, the fractions of merits on alts contributes HEAVILY to the issue of stuff not being on the market. Which btw, a forced random roll would not solve.

I believe people are doing exactly that which is part of the high prices for the things merits don't buy and the lack of recipes at the lower levels.

Now what could Posi's plan to fix the markets be...

Well, anyone who was doing TF anyway.

I've run Katie's...once.

I still think that this was a big part of the goal, as was throwing a bone to other content besides TF. I remember complaining about arc rewards before merits - "OOH BOY I RAN THESE TEN MISSIONS AND GOT ME A SHINY SO AT THE END WORTH A WHOLE 15K!!!" It didn't seem equitable that in contrast I could sit for 15 minutes doing nothing but riding along on a Katie to collect a Pool C.

I finished the Anton Sampson arc yesterday. At the end I received 28 merits, and opted to roll a random before logging. Result? Basilisk's Gaze A/E/R/H. Sells for 150M crafted and is something I needed. Would it be 150M under the supply old system? I doubt it. Would I have been able to buy the recipe for the 15k or so I would have netted from the SO? I doubt that, too.

I still think overall merits are a workable idea, they just need to be brought into balance. Rework rewards (on this...2 merits for a GM? Still doesn't seem like enough to get folks to care about them), do something to encourage random rolls*.


* heck, if they can add popups for selling/moving every stinking piece of salvage that might EVER be useful, add a popup that triggers if merits give you enough for a roll

I honestly am not holding my breath for Posi's plan, as they never seemed to get the market . . . ever.

There is one solution however that's been stated repeatedly . . . I'll stop there as it's been discussed to death.

who gives the spy hunt arc?

Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn Hazy is right

I would suggest the character's level +3. That's as high as the slider goes, and it gives you the highest level IO you can use. People who can roll for "the best thing I can use right now" might be more temped to roll than if they can only roll for "my level, but I can buy and use something three levels higher."

(Also because I am selfish and would like to start rolling my 35s at 32, because that is when I start buying them and sometimes I could use the inf generated by a good but unneeded roll.)

Here, I'm done with my sledgehammer for now, you may use it if you wish.

Just to help you for all your merit earning options:

www.paragonwiki.com

Search on "merit rewards"

Scroll down to Rewards Sources and choose villain in this case.

Dmitri Krylov, my good merit friend, for level 11-15 merits.

I don't think you can chalk up availability of IOs in the old system just to the forced roll. The game had a higher population at the time, and if you were a speed runner you could achieve very high rates of return/time by hitting the speed tfs, Katie, Eden, the Cap SF. These also contributed to availability on the market. You used to have hordes of people running TFs and Trials for better than a merit per minute return. Now you have less people and much smaller percentage that are achieving merit per minute returns.


Again Larger population and higher earning rates again are factors as well. Regarding the supply for max level items blueside I haven't seen anything at max level that hasn't had a reasonable supply for quite awhile

I don't think the devs have stated what the reasoning was behind the exemplar changes. Its a little hard to make the leap that the changes reflected that they wanted you to exemp but didn't mind you having set bonuses when exemped. The recent botz nerf could be argued as being a counterexample. If the devs wanted easier access to set bonuses at low level they could have changed the way the bonus rules work. Just a note taking set bonuses into low level content can easily be overpowering.


The last time I did survey of where the people were the single biggest concentration was at 50. That was awhile ago but, as I type this the server where I am on has 81 people visible 26 are 50s and 20 are 1-10s. The below 10s aren't eligible this gives the 50s single largest population concentration.

I completely agree with the intent of your changes what I have been trying to communicate is that the side effects might make it undesirable.

There was another proposal awhile back that would probably suit everyone better. Instead of having a slider for when you roll a recipe you could have a slider that would determine what level the crafted enhancement came out, as long as it wasn't higher than the initial level of the recipe.

Higher level characters exemping into lower-level content have always been more powerful.

As it stands, players need to make a decision: Keep set bonuses when exemped, or get the full value out of the enhancements in the set--enhancements that will further lose value when you exemp below a certain level. It seems like a fair trade-off to me.

Or use purples and PvP IOs.

and with the way the Pool c's are currently wieghted, it would be 7 slow recipes which might as well not exist....and 4 randoms that will not be what the player wants or could use.

The problem with the merit system is that Call of the sandman chance for heal is equal in merits to a numina or miracle unique. How many people can use a Sandman vs how everyone can use The other two? There was a Stun recipe that i wanted to merit, because it was pool C, but it costs exactaly as many merits as a Lotg 7.5 recipe.

Sadly the arrogance of the Devs regarding this matter is a dirty shame. The random chance was fun, Bmls runs were alot of fun. The Devs decided that Punishing redside because of Khtf was far better than just dropping Khtf from random rolls and putting in more Redside Tfs.

Maybe someday theyll listen to thier playerbase instead of Arcannaville (sp) half the time and rolling the keener players up with the dirty exploiters and ignoring both kinds of people.

Yes, I will post smarter. Hey hows that job of yours gonna like the fact that instead of working your posting about something that doesnt concern them?

Oh right......