Give Merits for Everything and lets forget tickets.

Simple idea..

Give merits for everything..
You complete a mission you get X amount of merits..
You complete a story line or whatever you want to call it, you get bonus merits.

People do AE missions you get merit rewards..
The creator of the AE gets merits for people doing his missions..
A person is currently allowed to create 3 missions in AE..
If a player creates 3 missions and links them together consider it a mini TF, think Respec mission. Players get bonus merits for completing that.

You only get merits for completing missions.

AE farms..
You have 2 ways with this..
1. Find the common denominator for these farms and code it from people obtaining Merits for completion.. They might get Experience, but nothing else.
2. Hate to say it but warn and then punish repeat offenders of the AE system. Simple 3 strikes and your out.. You get warned 3 x and the AE is deleted. 4th time your locked from creating an AE mission for a week or so.. Do it again.. the ban is longer..
3. Give people merits for reporting farm type missions.

Okay I know #2 is pretty rough and not great PR for the company.. Then your gonna have to make sure #1 is solid.. Or more solid then it is now.

Will people be doing TV Farms again.. Yes.. But I am sure you will get more people doing missions and story arcs to gain the bonus merits..

Create a way for people to link story arcs. So if group gets together to do the Slot Machine contact missions ( yes there is a contact call slot machine ) and one player is on mission 1 and others are on mission 4. The players are able to click a link button that will allow everyone to start off on mission 2.. The benefit is those who already did it will get merits at the end again..

Create a search option where people can find others doing the same contact missions and where they are in the mission story line. This way I can find players on part 4 like me instead of redoing missions 2 and 3, because I'm like that.. I want to finish the story line to get my bonus merits and move on to another story line..

Now imagine how crowded Ouroboros will be with people trying to complete old story archs.

People get Badges, they get merits.. People get Accolades, they get merits..

Then you buy what you want with these merits.. Now IF your one of those players that like gambling, then allow players to random roll within a designated group.. I'm a Tank I want to roll between heal and defense sets.. I don't care about Mezz or Hold buffs.

This way by level 50 a player who does no farming but just straight mission leveling should have enough between drops..Inf.. and Merits to create a decent 50 build or the ability to buy maybe a set or partial set of purple IOs. If that is what the player wants.

I just do not see the purpose of having tickets.. it's a complete crap shoot for the time spent. Further your do not know how good or bad a mission might be, until you do it. You know some people are good at creating missions And then you have people that stink.. I'm in the stink department.

But at the end you have these tickets that you might have over 1000 or 8k like myself and have no clue what to do with them. Simply because you don't have enough room on your characters and mailbox to hold these rewards. You will random roll 8k in tickets and get some decent stuff but the rest is garbage. I wouldn't slot some of that stuff on my dog side kick..

The whole purpose of the AE system has been warped. It holds a data bank full of possibly great missions. But I am positive that most of the missions being run are some sort of farm.

I'm glad that some 30s cartoon creator plays the game and developed a missions that the dev rated #1.. But the greatest mission creator is that 15 year old kid that allowed you to farm some green blob called joe and got you from level 1 to level 20 in 1 mission.

Just get everyone on one system.. Give people a reason to run and complete missions and not farm them.

I really feel it will allow players to actually play their characters instead of the 2 games within Cox called Farm and Market.

No. Just.... no.

For one thing, I'm much happier burning tickets on salvage and whatnot. They're fine.
For another, you already *get* merits for finishing story arcs.
Merits for reporting? No. Just no.

See my Guides and Tutorials

I would like to see some changes in the reward systems myself, but to be honest, the current state of affairs is not bad at all. Think about it, in other games the absolute best "gear" can only be obtained if you are a member of a "raiding" group and participate regularly. Often you have to work your way thru a rotation, which means many sessions of "scratching the backs of others" until your name is at the top of the "loot reel".

Salvage : Piece of cake, run some AE missions and use tickets to purchase what you need. The only "random" salvage is the common stuff and at 8 tickets a pop, its nothing to get what you need. When I check the Auctions and see commons going for 100K or some such insanity, what I need is 1 AE arc away.

Influence : Yeah having the influence to buy those nice IO recipes is a concern, but after you hit level 50 and can do level 50 missions with Bosses, you should start seeing "Purple" recipes. You COULD keep them for yourself, or sell them for a big chunk of influence like I do. Even solo, I have made between 100million and 300million doing PI radios over the course of a weekend. I am a casual player, so I am certain that other folks can do even better than this.

Recipes : There are two kinds of recipes in my book; The ridiculously expensive and High demand recipes (LoTG, Miracle +rec, Numina proc, Kinetic Combat etc...) and the low to moderate cost recipes (everything less than about 30million). You use merits to get the ridiculous cost ones, and your Influence to get the moderate and cheap ones.

If you split your time between Merit Story Arcs, AE missions and Level 50 Missions, you will eventually get everything you need, provided you spend the commensurate amount of time doing so. The best part of the whole system is that none of the IO recipes are unavailable to any person. You dont need to be a "hard-core" raider, or farmer to get what you want. You simply need to "chip" away at your build one IO at a time, and eventually you will be done.

What I personally have trouble with is the difficulty of getting anything "Randomly". Those rare moments when something really cool drops are very nice, but they are almost never on your list of "needs". I sell more than 95% of what drops for me, and thats a bit too high IMO. Some ideas that I have thought would be cool are the following;

"SWAP MEET" You take your salvage over to this in-game bazaar and you can trade in 3 of any type of salvage for 1 of an equal value and type. Ex: need a "Luck Charm", trade in 3 common Magic salvage to get 1 Luck Charm. Need a Rare, trade in 3 Rares and choose the specific Rare you want.

"RESEARCH LABORATORY" Much like the Day-jobs, where you camp out for a certain amount of time, you can go to the Research Facility and access their main frame which lists every recipe known to man. You pick ONE and only one recipe to research. As long as you camp out in the Lab at the end of your play session, time will accrue towards the research of the recipe you have chosen. The amount of time will be factored on your level and the level of the recipe as well as it's rarity. Eventually, you will log in and get a message that your recipe has been crafted and you can rush over and pick it up. Then begin again on a new recipe if desired.

"COMMODITY BROKER" How about a straight up purchase of Merits or trade Merits for Influence. I have no clue how much 1 merit should cost, but based on WW pricing it should be between 250K and 500K per Merit. So need merits, bring cash. Need Cash, bring Merits. There would need to be a limit of how many you could trade in a given amount of time since Brokers cannot move "hot" items faster than they can find "buyers" for them.

dear plainguy,

im going to agree with bill. and i am also only goingot say HELL NO to any of your ideas in this thread. if i say anything else it will cause a **** storm of arguing that you will lose.

No! The more of something you give someone to less value is has. if you have a very small ammount of something it becomes very valuable like gold, and therefore if you have an abundance of something it has very low value like sand.

This same principle applies to merits. if you give people loads of merits, they start to lose their value, which leads to people not wanting them anymore. This would make it too easy to aquire certain IO's and slavage, causing their value to deteriorate.

This deterioration of value would create a dommino effect making IO's that are less useful almost entirely worthless, as well as making those more useful and very rare even more valuable meaning that it would be even harder to earn the inf for Purple sets and the like.

Concidering this, the only way to keep the games economy balanced would be to increase the number of merits needed to purchase the IO's and salvage. However, becasue everything in game (except inf) would now be bought through merits, the merits needed to buy them would increase by a very large ammount. Now im not an expert in balance, but if merit rewards become 10x more common, and there are 10x as many items that can be bought with them then to balance the new system items would require around 20x as many merits to buy enevitably making everything more expensive.

So to conclude, adding more merits to the game, rather than making it easier, would make it a lot harder to build your character, as well as demotivating people to earn merits becasue of their very low worth. It's like, if you had the choice of spending loads of money to find gold and making a nice profit in a short amount of time, or spending very little collecting sand, but spending years of tireless labour to make the same profit, which one would you choose??

Actually Neon,

IF Merits became more easily acquired (And I am not saying they should be) then the value of Purchased items in the Auction would go down due to the fact that MORE of certain recipes would be available. It does not stand to reason that the Developers would then have to increase the cost of recipes to "prop-up" the market.

I play on Protector which is a lower population server, and I can tell you that the "Market" in general could use an infusion of product, even if that meant the prices went down a little. Choose any recipe and scan thru all the levels and you will not find much available except the recipes that are only used for Franken-slotting. Any recipes in high demand will have very high prices and most likely not for sale.

My feeling is that the game market is "pretty good", and definitely "good enough" to allow even the casual player to "trick-out" their character with all the best IOs. This is a situation that you will not find in other MMOs. However, "pretty good" is not "perfect", so it doesnt hurt to entertain ideas on how to improve the situation.

Merits for all...

I say no. Thank you

I am not saying my idea is the end all be all. Maybe someone can think of something better. Again many ideas are off shoots of something else..

Further Does anyone remember when Merging the markets was "IMPOSSIBLE"

Wait it is possible now.. Oh MY, the earth and heavens must have been split in two to get this accomplished.. Or maybe someone(s) with some coding skills finally figured out how to do it..

I just leveled a Robot Traps up to 44 so far.. I have 40 million on me.. I had other toons make him some standard IOs. I would have had less if I had to buy the salvage and pay the fees to make anything I picked up.. Not including what I would have had to buy also. So I would have less then 40 million at level 44.. I have NOT picked up anything special or anything rare yet that I could benefit from to create a decent build with NO purple IOs... Again you can go over to the Mastermind forums to look up any builds I have to see.

Purple IOs is considered the lottery to me.. Meaning I will never consider having the ability to afford and use Purple IO sets.. This is also why I do not even try to PvP anymore.. Purple make that much of a difference.

End result everyone has mentioned either Farm and Market are optional and you can get enough money to buy stuff on market.. The reality is it just is not the facts. My character account is proof of that..

You are required to Farm or Market to obtain decent IOs or the money needed to purchase these IOs.

You cannot just do this through regular game play is all I am saying.. Well in all fairness you can.. But it would probably take you 8 months of doing missions at level 50 to obtain the cash required for a decent non purple IO build..

There is no casual put your stuff on the market and wait for it to sell.. I do that.. I can't count the number of times I sell below the current lowest price, only to see the next day the item is selling for less then half.. My items sits on market for 2 weeks before I have to take it down to resell.

Many make this stuff sound easy. .Hey I do AE farms on Monday and Wed.. And I do ST/TF on Tues and Thurs.. Then on friday and sat I do missions.. Then sunday I collect all my money from the market stuff I sold..

Thats great if you have 7 days a week to play the game.. You shouldn't be forcing people to conform to a system to obtain something.. It should be optional..

I guess people don't mind doing thing repeatedly. To obtain Tickets or Merits.. Or even IOs.

I just found it a bit dumbfounding when I just did my 3 respecs and ITF for the 4th day in a row to obtain merits.. It really just got to the point of what the heck am I doing.. Like Pacman trying to get his next dot or some junkie trying to get my next fix.. Even the people I do them with complain how it sucks, but what are you gonna do.. It really is a hamster wheel.

It has got to the point where paying 20 bucks for 2 billion is just much easier and much more beneficial then the time spent doing what I am doing now.. 2 billion would last me a life time. I can just clear out all the salvage racks.. Sell everything I get at the vendors and be done with it.. The build is done.. I can move on to my next toon.

I don't care how it's implemented however, I have to truly agree that merits are given out at a joking rate...

The cost for recipes is way too high. They either need to cut the merit price in half or double the merits.

/Unsinged.
They have balance ae tickets to the ae system. They have balanced merits to the general mission rewards system. They have balanced Rikti merits to the saucer raid. If people were able to use all these rewards on any map then the devs will have to balance everything to each other.