Important System Improvements in Going Rogue

I actually interpreted that as implying that the 'mysterious new source of shinies' was Praetoria.

YMMV.

Well, then. RP-wise, you can't purchase goods from other players who do use the market. Whether they prove to you that they legitimately found the item themselves or not. Because openly supporting a seemingly corrupt marketplace makes them corrupt as well.

That being the case, I can haz your stuffs?

That's why I deleted my last post to this mess because we're just going back and forth. I have mine, you have yours. You have an opinion it might be good, I have an opinion that it might be bad. Until it actually happens and stabilizes, one of us could be right, one of us could be wrong.

I'm willing to agree to disagree.

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

You'd be wrong.

I'm willing to wait and see.

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

Yea, such a consistent world it is, too. Huge items of power are stored in a vault by a magic hippie-chick that can't keep anything protected.

The world is being invaded by an alien race that only attacks one very small city on the coast of North America. Oh, and that little group of islands over there.

Enemies on the streets are capable of having their intestines sliced out of them and tossed a quarter mile away but they're able to be teleported to a hospital and repaired even though the PPD doesn't seem to be able to track anyone attached to this teleportation system.

Pedestrians can shove aside characters that weigh a ton and can rip thousand pound boulders out of the ground.

Again: /points and laughs

If I put quotes in my sig, I'd fully steal this.

Reason 2:
The mental image of Thulsa Doom squeeing almost made me hurt myself.

Oh, and because the markets are finally getting merged!

Thank you, devs!

Real economies are complex things. True story: back in early 2007 I was traveling in Europe and happened to notice a peculiarity: all over England I was seeing banks with signs in their windows advertising their interest rates, much like here. Except there, average interest rates on deposits was around 5%. Here, it was about 1%. And those were not introductory rates either.

When I got back I asked around to try to figure out how that kind of potential arbitrage opportunity could exist and could possibly be sustainable. Especially since it couldn't be an isolated phenomenon: it had to reflect a fundamental discontinuity between the US economy and the European (or at least British) economy. What I was basically told, by the smarter people, was that it wasn't sustainable, but they had no idea what would "collapse" the situation.

Of course, now we know.

Couldn't Wentworth's simply be in the middle of an ongoing investigation into corruption within, trying to reconcile lost trucks (or goods therein) which were shipping goods between Atlas and Founder's? Of course the info on such would be suppressed until they found out the culprit. Meanwhile going the reverse way, heroes in Wentworth's employ are recovering lost trucks, but the shipping manifests don't match... *thinks*

It's not the best solution, but there's something.

Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus This entire post should receive some kind of award for being both hysterical and fantastic. Well done.

I think you're assuming an asymmetry of power. If what you say were true, it would be impossible for any sufficiently public person to keep any secrets whatsoever. That's clearly not the case. That's justified because just as there are psychics and clairvoyants scrutinizing things, there are also psychics and clairvoyants hiding things. You can't assume that the good guys have infinite perceptive power, but the bad guys have none.

I'm not saying this is the way the fiction plays out - just that it can be used as a justification for the fact that the world has important secrets kept from the public.

You're right, they don't - they're playing a game. But also, it's utterly impossible to have a sufficiently complex fictional world with no inconsistencies - much less a game world where fun often has to override fiction.

My free advice is to worry less about fictional inconsistencies in a generally very inconsistent game world.

I am pretty sure it is impossible to be more right than this post.

Guys, for your RP: if something doesn't work, ignore it or rewrite it. The idea is to have FUN, you know.

Basically Wentworth's is an arms dealer is what you're saying. Wentworth's the corporate entity would not be shut down. If some of its managers are dirty they will be fired, indicted and sent to prison for illegal arms sales. Wentworth's the company will be fined by the government and then get back to business.

This is how it works with RL manufacturers of goods that can be used for/as weapons.

So why can't we just assume that every once in awhile, Wentworth's has to clean house? A few people go to jail, they have to sign a corporate integrity agreement, and a few years down the line, it happens again and the process repeats.

And you're assuming that just because people KNOW that some of Wentworth's goods are dirty that they can PROVE it. The devs just said that they can't. The lawyers aren't just going to stand by while you shut down a legitimate business because Sister Psyche said she read someone's thoughts.

There is no provision in the Federal Rules of Evidence for the admissibility of telepathic evidence! Or evidence obtained via X-Ray vision. And even if there were, such evidence must be obtained legally or it would be inadmissible in any event. So there!

Now there's the smartest thing anyone's posted to this thread. 8D

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

True story, a friend of mine and I used to work in a job where we regularly saw the types of financial instruments that did lead to the the mess we got into in 2009. I believed then, as now, that financial and economics literacy is a necessity. Unfortunately, as my friend pointed out, even if people know better they don't always act rationally when it comes to money.

The truth of that statement has stuck with me for years.

So you are assuming that the government in the CoH world is both competent and well-meaning, even though there is nothing in canon that states that. And that the average hero knows everything that goes on with everybody. Gotcha.

Thank you for proving my point.

Yeah, Venture's reasoning kind of blows my mind. It assumes that because something IS corrupt on some level, it will necessarily be brought down in total with a snap of the fingers. And that kind of belief, while touching, only works in fiction. Money goes a long, long way, and politicians are too busy chasing votes and pay days to go after big targets that would take longer than their term limits to take down. Again, if you've ever read the news or looked at the world for more than a few seconds, this should be obvious.

There's Crey, of course, which is the biggest example that counters Venture's sudden discovery of standards. That is a massive international corporation FRONTED BY A SUPERVILLAIN and staffed apparently exclusively with amoral sociopaths, and yet it chugs along just fine. There's even several storylines where the Countess shunts blame off to "rogue elements" in her company. There are a billion and one dodges for a large well-funded corporation to avoid total shutdown, and they employ them all the time.

There are so many contradictions in this game large and small and so many moronic fallacies that would make the whole thing fall apart if you took it literally. So you don't. You take what works, discard the rest, and find your stories in explaining the inconsistencies.

And, most of all, RELAX. It's just a story, not an exam. There are no extra points for adhering to every little bit of canon.

May I be the first to say "Pictures or it didn't happen."? Then again War Witch's husband might object.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

The problem here is that the two markets are actually extremely abstract conceptualizations. They present a single simplified interface to perform a lot of very conceptually different things. For example, you can "buy and sell" things that aren't tangible, and cannot, within the in-game canon, possibly be bought and sold. Inspirations, for example, are not "potions" in the in-game fiction. They are literally inspirations to higher performance. Inspirations changing hands at all is a very thinly engineered fiction of players ultimately exchanging some of their "influence" or "infamy" for some intangible benefit that will manifest itself as a sudden "author-induced" burst of performance for the fictional character. They are meta-entities that don't actually have *any* physicality within the in-game world. They cannot possibly be literally bought or sold, because they don't exist in the in-game world. They are really placeholders for the players not the characters.

Some enhancements are described as physical items, some are not. But its unclear and ill-defined what the players are even supposed to do with the ones that are physical. I don't myself presume that I'm carrying them all around with me. I presume they are somehow "used" to improve my character's performance. But things like Training Enhancements and Natural SOs are generally described as literal training. "Buying" them from a store or the markets represents the conceptual activity of exchanging inf for training. And its not even necessarily "an exchange ." It could be seen as a post-hoc decision that all along while you were earning that "inf" you were really expending time training yourself as you went along. In other words, rather than "earning inf" you were really "practicing to get better" and the use of inf to buy those enhancements is a retroactive decision.

All of these things are not consistent with a "market" that allows you to "buy" and "sell" them. *Some* things are, but the markets have to conceptually encompass all of them, and the only way to presume that is to presume that the markets themselves are a convenient fiction. We treat them like markets you buy and sell from, but that is a game mechanical dodge to prevent having to represent far more complex trading and training mechanics.

This means just because the only straight-forward way to conceptualize cross-faction execution is by a literal underground railroad of goods and services flowing between the two factional domains, doesn't mean that is the actual concept being represented. The markets are far too abstract for that to be definable. Now, if you *choose* to conceptualize them that way, and as a result role play that concept by opting out of them, that was always dealers choice. Some people probably don't even like the notion of "buying" *anything* from *anyone* that isn't an actual thing and clashes with their concepts of what the items actually are. But this is not mandated by the devs' actions, even if it appears to be an apparently logical conclusion. The axioms of that conclusion are far too shaky for that line of thought to be objective.

Two Words: Crey Industries.

The sheer existence of Crey as a legitimate business entity in Paragon is proof alone that in a world of super-powered legal scrutiny, there exists the presence of insidious dealings masquerading as something benevolent. I'm baffled to see such a response from a player who prides himself in a knowledge of story telling and insistence upon world consistency. If anything, the merger only further supports the reality that 'goods' can come from many sources.