Why were the new Merits made to decrease TF Recipe prices and increase Purple prices?
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2010-08-27 21:40 in The Market and Inventions
Quote:
I see your novel and raise you an encyclopedia!|
Originally Posted by Obitus
But I don't see how speed-running TFs for hordes of Pool-C recipes to sell on the market in return for purples is a relevant playstyle when we're discussing the nameless casual. Seems to me that the devs aimed A-Merits squarely at reducing the practical divide between casuals and the hardcore (or if you prefer, soloers versus teamers), and it seems to me they've succeeded.
Sorry for the novel. I think all that talk about Ferraris at the beginning got me spinning my wheels. |
My perspective on this comes from this: how many threads did you see on these forums where people complain about the price of LotGs? Miracles? Now how many did you see about the drop rate, rarity or cost of purples? I have no quantitative answer to my own questions there, but my feeling was that there were significantly more of the latter.
To your point, I think a lot of the people doing that frequently did so without regard to the actual value of purples in any given build. They leapfrogged right over the fact that non-purple sets would have given them a huge uplift over what's needed, and seem to just infer that, because purples have the largest bonuses and the highest costs, they must be something they should aspire to have.
Now, let me reiterate, I happen to have limited amounts of pity for people who get stuck in the mindset that they're a victim in a video game. A lot of threads griping about access to purples were made with what I consider a really poor mindset. That said, I think there's some value in trying to control sticker shock, because I think that the worse the shock is, the worse a new player's (or at least new market user's) first impressions of the market are, even if they will eventually learn better. It seems we can't help that newbies don't know that purples aren't the end-all, be-all outside of specific build goals. And honestly, maybe it doesn't matter. But at least on the forums, it seems to cause undue angst for a subset of the community that purples and PvPOs are very expensive, and I just think it's worth trying to avoid making that angst more severe or common. If nothing else, it might spare us more threads like another that's running here in this forum.
For those that really, honestly have a grasp of what purples can do for them and want them, I also do think that using merits (of any type) to buy pool C/D stuff and selling that for inf to buy purples was the primary viable alternative to marketeering to buy purples. I don't think there's anything wrong with marketeering to buy purples, but I dislike that a viable alternative was worsened in comparison. Again, marketeering is the source of a lot of angst and confusion, and I don't favor changes that risk making more people feel like they have to participate if they had an alternative. (Note that I don't want to advocate people avoiding the market altogether. When I say "marketeering", I'm talking about using the market as a self-contained profit tool, such as by flipping, etc.)
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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That's a good one, Uber.|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
Now, let me reiterate, I happen to have limited amounts of pity for people who get stuck in the mindset that they're a victim in a video game. A lot of threads griping about access to purples were made with what I consider a really poor mindset. That said, I think there's some value in trying to control sticker shock, because I think that the worse the shock is, the worse a new player's (or at least new market user's) first impressions of the market are, even if they will eventually learn better. It seems we can't help that newbies don't know that purples aren't the end-all, be-all outside of specific build goals. And honestly, maybe it doesn't matter. But at least on the forums, it seems to cause undue angst for a subset of the community that purples and PvPOs are very expensive, and I just think it's worth trying to avoid making that angst more severe or common. If nothing else, it might spare us more threads like another that's running here in this forum.
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Entitlement < Logic
=P
Also, if purples were at the store and they were 500 million each or whatever, and all the other drops you sold only went for a few thousand each, okay that's a valid complaint.
But the reality is if you play characters that can slot purples you will get purples as drops. And you can sell them for the going rate. So....
Here's an anecdote about one of my pals in my original SG. He was the definition of 'casual'. His main guy was an eb/dev blaster because it was thematic. He never registered on the forums. He didn't particularly care how powerful he was. When inventions came along he didn't really do much with them, but he was very excited that stuff sold for prices that seemed surreal to players accustomed to selling enhancement drops to the 'right' store to avoid poverty.
At some point just before they supercharged the drop rates he got a pair of Fairy Wings and sold them for whatever they were going for at the time, 15 million or something. Which at the time was wealth beyond the dreams of Midas. He was excited out of his mind.
Now, I guess he could have stared at the market screen, saw that Fairy Wings were super expensive and brooded over the unfairness of it all, loudly decrying the sadism of the devs and lamenting that his fae blaster costume would never be realized.
But instead he saw that valuable drops benefited him as a seller and he sought them out. When we eventually got to 50, he had a similar attitude toward Purples.
I think either you realize that markets are two-way streets or you don't.
Taking steps to appease whiners is pointless. If they stuck a vendor in AP that handed out purples for free people would complain about having to endure the idiots in broadcast and how all the people made it lag and why couldn't they have put the vendor in Galaxy, which was much more congenial.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
Like I said, I do have very limited patience for what I really consider to be a whiner, so I am not looking out for them, even if they will benefit indirectly. I am not about empowering senses of entitlement. I'm more interested in limiting negative psychological impact (often coupled with rampant misinformation) dissuading folks who will actually learn better. (And if some of the whiners will actually ever come around, maybe they would come around a tad faster as a side effect.)
Consider my position one of slippery slope. I view these sorts of "problems" to be sort of a mental hump a new player needs to get over. I don't think the hump is huge and insurmountable. I just object at a gut level at making the hump taller. It feels like it will scare more people away from the market, and I want more of them in there.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Yes, but there are also diminished returns on recharge as you get closer to the activation-time bottleneck. I remember that quote, and it's a good rhetorical flourish, but the fact is that you never can have a seamless attack chain of Headsplitter, Headsplitter, Headsplitter. As a practical matter then, any extra recharge beyond what you require to chain one or two next-best-DPA attacks with Headsplitter is effectively wasted.|
Originally Posted by Bionic_Flea
Two things:
First, set bonuses are added after ED calculations. So even if your regular slotting plus the alpha slot bonus had all you powers at 110% recharge, purple sets would give you even more recharge. You might think that extra recharge at that point is unnecessary. Perhaps, but as someone once said, unless your attack chain is *headsplitter, headspliiter, headsplitter,* you can use more recharge. |
And if my non-purple IO build has +260% recharge in every power (or every power that matters), adding another 15% from the upgrade to three purple sets isn't going to make or break me. Again, purples are nice to have, but unless you have a very specific reason to want them, they're generally not worth the extra inf -- even if you have money to burn, because this game heavily encourages alt play.
IOW, for the price of a single purple set, I can probably improve an entire alt's build by a factor of three or more. Doesn't mean I never personally use purples; doesn't mean I think they're always undesirable; I just don't see how they're materially relevant to any practical performance discussion.
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Originally Posted by Uberguy
My perspective on this comes from this: how many threads did you see on these forums where people complain about the price of LotGs? Miracles? Now how many did you see about the drop rate, rarity or cost of purples? I have no quantitative answer to my own questions there, but my feeling was that there were significantly more of the latter.
To your point, I think a lot of the people doing that frequently did so without regard to the actual value of purples in any given build. They leapfrogged right over the fact that non-purple sets would have given them a huge uplift over what's needed, and seem to just infer that, because purples have the largest bonuses and the highest costs, they must be something they should aspire to have. |
The new player is, in my view, less likely to get sticker shock from purples than he is likely to get sticker shock from the various more common recipes. Purples are supposed to be rare and expensive. Anyone who only looks at the price for the most extravagant item on the market and concludes that he'll never be able to afford anything is -- well, let's just say that, like you, I have no sympathy.
You seem to be arguing that, in order to keep new (and/or casual) players from suffering sticker shock, the game should be changed counter to their interest. That's sort of an odd twist on populism.
In any case, A-Merits make crafting an exemp-friendly build easier, on the whole.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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I like that speedbump analogy...to low, nobody slows down. Too high, nobody bothers turning into the driveway in the first place.
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Originally Posted by UberGuy
Consider my position one of slippery slope. I view these sorts of "problems" to be sort of a mental hump a new player needs to get over. I don't think the hump is huge and insurmountable. I just object at a gut level at making the hump taller. It feels like it will scare more people away from the market, and I want more of them in there.
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The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
I'm currently leaning towards the theory that this is, in fact, intentional -- that it was viewed as a problem that LotG +recharge was worth more than some purples, etcetera. Basically, the intent is to increase supply of the stuff that shouldn't cost as much as purples do.
Do you think it is a consideration along these lines:
It is content in the game, and I pay the same $15/month everyone else does -- why can't I experience purple IO sets?
(When I say *I*, above, I am not referencing me, specifically.)
Along those same lines, we get into power proliferation, and villain archetypes ported hero-side/hero archetypes ported villain-side.
Hopefully this doesn't come across as trolling -- I am just trying to add to the discussion.
Thanks.
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No offense, but that's extension carrying the logic to ridiculous extremes, and it's simply outright false depending the character in question. If your powersets call for high-order recharge to have high performance, once you're past slotting all the LotGs you can there's just no better way in terms of return per slot to get the kind of recharge such builds can put to excellent use than to include multiple purple sets. And even after we get Incarnate abilities, to Flea's point, most of those sets would still continue to benefit from more recharge.|
Originally Posted by Obitus
IOW, for the price of a single purple set, I can probably improve an entire alt's build by a factor of three or more. Doesn't mean I never personally use purples; doesn't mean I think they're always undesirable; I just don't see how they're materially relevant to any practical performance discussion.
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Case in point, <mostPrimaries>/Regen, <mostPrimaries>/Fiery Aura. Sure, is a huge part of increase in their performance in a high end build going to come from non-purple sets? Absolutely. But take a look at the recommendation for builds on anything /Regen, and you'll find many of the experts give +Recharge higher priority than +defense, because it's a huge part of those powersets' mitigation. Look at Dominators builds for those still seeking seeking (near) perma Domination for the mez protection and mez/sec benefits. There are plenty of examples where purples are just undeniably one of the most slot efficient ways to get the global recharge those builds want once you've maxed out on LotGs and taken Hasten.
I would never contend that every build benefits meaningfully from inclusion of purple sets, and almost never from something like including one of every purple set like we once had someone post about in here once. (They pretty much did it because they could.) But to claim that they're not "materially relevant to any practical performance discussion" (emphasis mine) is just plain false.
I'd accept the claim that they're not "materially relevant to every practical performance discussion" without pause.
Think of the weathered old 80/20 rule. If you're slotting purples and especially PvPOs, you can probably get 80% (say) of your performance benefit from IOs in 20% (say) of their cost. That last few percent improvement is still there to be had, but it's going to make your pockets bleed to buy it in comparison. If you, personally have better uses for that other 80% of your money then by all means, spend it on something else. I take the "max" in "min/max" to heart. I'm willing to fork out 80% of the cost (or whatever it really is) for that last 20% of improvement (or whatever it really is). The goal of maximization itself is more important to me than the cost required to get there, because I know I have the means to cover the cost. (I think you'll find that a fairly common mindset on the Scrapper forums.) But I do that when those gains are material, and I've seen those gains too often to accept your quote above.
So by all means, you, I and everyone else should make a point of trying to educate people that purples aren't the end-all-be-all of every build, and that all builds can improve dramatically without them, even when recharge is important. But lets not overstate things and somehow claim that purples don't do anything "materially relevant".
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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"You" can. You just have to do as much, on average, as the other guys who get them, by whatever means it is they get them.|
Originally Posted by B1u3Jay
It is content in the game, and I pay the same $15/month everyone else does -- why can't I experience purple IO sets?
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Of course, "you" might get lucky, or you might get unlucky, since the system is based on probabilistic rarity. That's why I said "on average".
What's key is that "you" have the basically the same opportunity for those shinies that pretty much everyone else does when they start.
(When I say *you*, above, I am not referencing you, specifically.)
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
Quote:
That really gets at the entitlement issue Uberguy was mentioning above. Does your $15/month give you the right to experience purples or the right to earn purples? |
Originally Posted by B1u3Jay
Do you think it is a consideration along these lines:
It is content in the game, and I pay the same $15/month everyone else does -- why can't I experience purple IO sets? |
MMOs are all designed not around getting you to play the MMO but getting you to pay your $15 again next month. The carrot is an integral part of that process, sure you don't have insert shiny item this month but surely you'll get it next month. CoX in unusual for an MMO in a number of ways. First off it is very flexible in what it allows you to do to chase the carrot. There are no Bind on Pickup items so as long as you are doing something that generates you inf (mostly playing the game or using the market) you can work towards having the very best gear in the game, the only issue is how long it will take. Additionally the difference between the very up-most top end gear and gear that is merely "pretty good" is actually very small.
Compare that to [Name Redacted] where the best gear is all Bind on Pickup which means that the only way to get it is to go and run specific high-end content and that gear makes you significantly more powerful than someone in gear they've gotten through lesser content.
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Let's back up a bit here. The context of the discussion centered around the comparison between so-called casual players and so-called hardcore players, and the builds available to each. Your position seemed to be the following:|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
No offense, but that's extension carrying the logic to ridiculous extremes, and it's simply outright false depending the character in question. If your powersets call for high-order recharge to have high performance, once you're past slotting all the LotGs you can there's just no better way in terms of return per slot to get the kind of recharge such builds can put to excellent use than to include multiple purple sets. And even after we get Incarnate abilities, to Flea's point, most of those sets would still continue to benefit from more recharge.
[cherry-picked examples] I would never contend that every build benefits meaningfully from inclusion of purple sets, and almost never from something like including one of every purple set like we once had someone post about in here once. (They pretty much did it because they could.) But to claim that they're not "materially relevant to any practical performance discussion" (emphasis mine) is just plain false. I'd accept the claim that they're not "materially relevant to every practical performance discussion" without pause. Think of the weathered old 80/20 rule. If you're slotting purples and especially PvPOs, you can probably get 80% (say) of your performance benefit from IOs in 20% (say) of their cost. That last few percent improvement is still there to be had, but it's going to make your pockets bleed to buy it in comparison. [snipped for brevity] But lets not overstate things and somehow claim that purples don't do anything "materially relevant". |
- That the introduction of A-Merits drives down the prices of valuable Pool C/D recipes, and drives the price of Purples up -- which means that you have to sell many more of the former to earn enough influence to buy the latter.
- That casual or new players may see the higher prices of Purple IOs and get sticker shock, thus driving them away from the market.
- A-Merits therefore increase the divide between casual and hardcore players?
My position is that purples are irrelevant when you're comparing the two extremes among the playerbase. A well-planned non-purple IO build is generaly more than competitive with a purple IO build. In most cases (as you acknowledge, above), the vast bulk of the practical performance boost you get from a high-end IO build comes from the non-purples.
What makes more practical difference? An extra 12-15% in global recharge, or the ability to soft-cap your defense? Or how about the ability to solve, once and for all, your endurance-management issues? Purple sets generally do not contribute to either of those goals. Purples are, essentially, nice-but-overpriced upgrades to otherwise very solid +recharge sets like Crushing Impact and Positron's Blast.
With all of that said, it is absolutely correct to argue that purples have no material influence on the over-arching performance comparison between high-end IO builds and baseline Single-Origin-Enhancement builds. I have a lot of respect for what goes on in the Scrapper forum -- spent, in fact, probably my first two whole years here hanging in that forum -- but the builds people post there are often fantastically extravagant.
Those Scrapper players obviously have the right to post and to play those builds, just as you do, but (again, as you acknowledge) many of those builds would be within spitting distance of their current lofty performance levels with fewer purples. We're talking about maybe a 10% average performance gap between the purpled and the non-purpled, if even that. Yes, there are some notable exceptions; if you're building a Dom and you're absolutely in love with the character, then you should strive for the purples. If nothing else, using purples in a perma-Dom build will save you some slotting headaches.
But it is not only possible, but eminently reasonable, to achieve perma-Dom without purple sets. It's even possible to achieve perma-Dom and soft-capped S/L DEF without purple sets. Aren't those two things by far the most materially relevant factors in evaluating a high-end Dom build's performance?
The point here is that the casual player was helped more by the increased supply of (and their increased non-market accessibility to) non-purple IOs than they were hurt by the increased cost of Purples. Now, thanks to A-Merits, casuals can earn an LoTG once every four days with about 3-4 hours of total, solo playtime. You seem to be suggesting that casuals should pine for the days when you had to speed-run TFs to earn R-Merits fast for the essential non-purples.
That strikes me as bizarre. The performance gap is what matters. Purples comprise a miniscule part of that performance gap. Of course purples aren't entirely irrelevant, but they are insignificant when we're comparing SO builds to IO buils. In fact, I think one of the reasons we see so much bitterness directed at the supposed Ebil Marketeers is that there's an over-emphasis on purples. The sooner the player base at large comes to realize that you can compete with purpled builds at a fraction of the cost, the better, IMO. And we're not going to ween people off the strange notion that purples are all-important if we have established and insightful posters like you arguing that Purple prices drive the market.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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I'm going to answer some of this out of order, because some of my responses are very nitpicky and would just obscure my main points. The nitpicky stuff is at the bottom.|
Originally Posted by Obitus
With all of that said, it is absolutely correct to argue that purples have no material influence on the over-arching performance comparison between high-end IO builds and baseline Single-Origin-Enhancement builds. I have a lot of respect for what goes on in the Scrapper forum -- spent, in fact, probably my first two whole years here hanging in that forum -- but the builds people post there are often fantastically extravagant.
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You have a very different understanding of the phrase "no material influence" than I do. I consider the factual claim you're making to be false. Just because the performance difference is arguably unnecessary does not mean it is negligible. See below for why, but the only thing I can take from your position is that because the benefits of purples (applied intelligently) are already far more than anyone actually needs to play the game, their benefit doesn't matter. And if that's what you mean, it's quite simply untrue. There are characters I have whose ability to play sustainably on the difficulties I set them is absolutely dependent on bonuses that I get from adding purples to in to the other stuff they have.
I makes me wonder if there's something you may not be considering in all of this, though I'm pretty sure you must be aware of it on some level. It's perhaps somewhat tangential to the discussion of extreme builds versus casual builds, but I think it's at least somewhat relevant. That something is this: In CoH, a lot of high end survival or victory criteria, when modeled mathematically using averages, involve terms in the form of 1/X. As you make build changes that cause X to approach zero, the metric in question increases non-linearly. If you happen to already have X small and you can buy yourself a small incremental boost that edges X closer to zero, you can gain significant performance benefits. The general forum community has some decent awareness of this effect for defense and resistance buffs (as defense or DR approach 100% avoidance/resistance, admitted average damage approaches 0). But it applies as well to Endurance sustatinability, and HP recovery rates (either healing or regen) as well.
Because purples give fairly large boosts to recharge and sometimes recovery, they can give meaningful increases even on "diminishing" benefits like recharge. Because they're expensive you add them last if ever, but when you add them they do move the attribute noticeably on a percentage basis. This is probably pointless improvement on small base values (4 sec recharge), but possibly very valuable on high base values (60+ sec recharge). If the powers affected can then benefit one of the 1/X factors in your performance, that percentage increase can buy you significant improvements.
I doubt this level of balance was explicitly intended by the devs, but having to pay increasingly large amounts (and thus take more time) to get small linear improvments that lead to asymptotic improvements actually works out pretty well, broadly speaking. The exact values involved probably are out of whack with an intentional effort to balance such a design, but the idea works out nicely, IMO.
The point is that those performance gains can be real and significant, and that can make people find them desirable. I think people idolize them more than they should, but I don't think we can make the claim that they're ignorable.
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| The point here is that the casual player was helped more by the increased supply of (and their increased non-market accessibility to) non-purple IOs than they were hurt by the increased cost of Purples. Now, thanks to A-Merits, casuals can earn an LoTG once every four days with about 3-4 hours of total, solo playtime. You seem to be suggesting that casuals should pine for the days when you had to speed-run TFs to earn R-Merits fast for the essential non-purples. |
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| [It] is not only possible, but eminently reasonable, to achieve perma-Dom without purple sets. It's even possible to achieve perma-Dom and soft-capped S/L DEF without purple sets. Aren't those two things by far the most materially relevant factors in evaluating a high-end Dom build's performance? |
You prevoously said:
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| I just don't see how they're materially relevant to any practical performance discussion. |
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| That strikes me as bizarre. The performance gap is what matters. Purples comprise a miniscule part of that performance gap. Of course purples aren't entirely irrelevant, but they are insignificant when we're comparing SO builds to IO buils. |
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| In fact, I think one of the reasons we see so much bitterness directed at the supposed Ebil Marketeers is that there's an over-emphasis on purples. The sooner the player base at large comes to realize that you can compete with purpled builds at a fraction of the cost, the better, IMO. |
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| And we're not going to ween people off the strange notion that purples are all-important if we have established and insightful posters like you arguing that Purple prices drive the market. |
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Now I'm going to get into the nitpicking. I don't think it's really furthering our core debate, so feel free to respond or ignore as you see fit.
I think your assertion about Dom builds is going to depend wholly on the dom's powersets. I qualify this with the admission I am no expert on Dom builds, but I find it hard to accept that the majority of builds can hit perma Domination without purples and hit the L/S softcap. I'm willing to suppose most could hit the L/S softcap with a consistent diet of the same pool and epic powersets and a few Kinetic Combat sets. I also think whether this is "the most materially relevant" goal depends on what you're fighting. Personally I'm not a fan of L/S as the thing to cap unless you can't cap at least one positional defense instead. (From other non-melee ATs I'm aware that capping positional defenses can be hard to do without armors to build on, at least without undesirable trade-offs in other areas). I prefer capping Ranged defense where possible, because I've gotten my in-game-derriere handed too me too many times by stuff firing Dark, Electric or Rad blast powers. Doms have plenty of PBAoE and melee attacks, so I accept that Ranged defense may not be optimal for them either.
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| What makes more practical difference? An extra 12-15% in global recharge, or the ability to soft-cap your defense? |
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| Or how about the ability to solve, once and for all, your endurance-management issues? Purple sets generally do not contribute to either of those goals. |
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| Purples are, essentially, nice-but-overpriced upgrades to otherwise very solid +recharge sets like Crushing Impact and Positron's Blast. |
- Let me consolidate the recharge benefits of two sets of CI into one attack, freeing the other to slot a +defense set
- Significantly improve the slotted recharge of the attack, which is attractive for long-recharge, high DPA attacks
- Include a proc that can double or more the average DPA contribution of a low-damage power, including most tier-1 attacks.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Originally Posted by UberGuy
The point is that those performance gains can be real and significant, and that can make people find them desirable. I think people idolize them more than they should, but I don't think we can make the claim that they're ignorable.
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| "Any" is a very strong word. You didn't say "non-purple stuff is the most materially relevant". You said, in effect, that purples have no relevance at all on practical performance. That's what I objected to. In my opinion, the facts don't even support that assertion with the qualification "practical", because purples do very much have practical impact on performance in builds that benefit from high recharge. |
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| Because purples give fairly large boosts to recharge and sometimes recovery, they can give meaningful increases even on "diminishing" benefits like recharge. Because they're expensive you add them last if ever, but when you add them they do move the attribute noticeably on a percentage basis. This is probably pointless improvement on small base values (4 sec recharge), but possibly very valuable on high base values (60+ sec recharge). If the powers affected can then benefit one of the 1/X factors in your performance, that percentage increase can buy you significant improvements. |
There are not many builds out there that make huge proportional performance gains with the upgrade to purples. The most significant over-arching boosts are generally from DEF -- which purples do not provide in significant quantities (with one exception). Recharge certainly plays a part, even a very large part of a build's overall performance, but again, purples generally do not represent a night-and-day difference.
You know what the difference is between +260% and +275% recharge on a 60-second power? 0.67 seconds. How about a power with a 120 second base cooldown? 1.33 seconds.
Unnecessary Disclaimer: Those numbers don't technically show diminished returns on the recharge rate, but they do illustrate how insignificant the upgrade to three purple sets is for most builds in practice. You can miss the bonus if you blink at the wrong time (hesitate before re-activating the power), or if you happen to be attacking when the power recharges. (The only true diminished returns on recharge bonuses come into play as you approach the bottleneck of the power's cast time.)
I have acknowledged repeatedly that there may be some very unique cases wherein that extra purple-granted recharge is the difference between having an absolutely essential power permanent and not. Those cases are nowhere near common. Regen Scrappers don't qualify.
I have also acknowledged that purples can save you slots, which can free up room for other bonuses (usually from non-purple IO sets). But let's be frank: We're not talking about such a massive savings in slots as to constitute a practical performance difference that is even noticeable to the SO-using observer. Either I have soft-capped DEF, or I don't. Either I have perma-Dom, or I don't. Those are the most noticeable distinctions. Everything else is shades of grey, the kind of stuff that powergamers find important, but almost no one else does.
If you want to toss the PvP +DEF IO into the mix, then yeah, I can accept that that's a real game changer, especially for Scrappers. But the PvP +DEF IO isn't a purple. It's similar to Purples in the sense that it's absurdly expensive, but the availability of PvP +DEF IOs actually went up with the introduction of A-Merits, and thus I find them exempt from the discussion.
Seeing that you seem to agree in spirit, I'm not even sure what we're arguing about. My wording? Ok, fine. Purples are not materially significant to practical performance from an SO-build player's perspective. How's that?
Now, in no particular order, a nitpickish collection of responses to your nitpicks. Feel free to ignore them:
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| It sounds like you're arguing about a different demographic of the game's playerbase than I am. You're taking the position of players who want more but not everything. I've never claimed that those players aren't better off now. I actually said fairly clearly that they are. The people who aren't better off are the ones who actually do want "everything", are willing to work for it, but now need to marketeer to get there at the rate they were before via other means. (The "willing to work for it part is key" - I don't much give a damn what befalls people who just want it all nao without doing something.) |
And they don't need to speed-run TFs to do that, anymore. Almost by definition, speed-running of TFs is not a casual activity. If you get lucky on a PuG? Sure. If you have a dedicated team? Sure. Otherwise, not so much.
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| I'm really not sure where you feel I claimed that [purples drive the market]. I think there's a relationship in that a lot of people want purples, and so money that's not being spent on purples is being used to buy them. I don't think of that as driving the market. Perhaps I'm forgetting something else I said, so do please remind me if so. |
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| I think your assertion about Dom builds is going to depend wholly on the dom's powersets. I qualify this with the admission I am no expert on Dom builds, but I find it hard to accept that the majority of builds can hit perma Domination without purples and hit the L/S softcap. I'm willing to suppose most could hit the L/S softcap with a consistent diet of the same pool and epic powersets and a few Kinetic Combat sets. I also think whether this is "the most materially relevant" goal depends on what you're fighting. Personally I'm not a fan of L/S as the thing to cap unless you can't cap at least one positional defense instead. (From other non-melee ATs I'm aware that capping positional defenses can be hard to do without armors to build on, at least without undesirable trade-offs in other areas). I prefer capping Ranged defense where possible, because I've gotten my in-game-derriere handed too me too many times by stuff firing Dark, Electric or Rad blast powers. Doms have plenty of PBAoE and melee attacks, so I accept that Ranged defense may not be optimal for them either. |
- If I can get 80+% in global recharge, and soft-cap DEF on a Fire/Mental Blaster, then Doms can easily do the same thing. They have access to Scorpion Shield, too. The Blaster is significant because it has four targeted AoE powers, and you'll note that targeted AOE sets are very light on helpful DEF bonuses. What Dominator power-set combo do you think would present the most difficulty? I'll supply a build if you like.
- Personally, I'd like to cap a positional defense instead too -- but that's not advisable on a Dom, because (as you note) Doms tend to be in and out of melee range. You have to pick your poison at some point. S/L is the best singular choice for a melee/range hybrid. Doms have so much freaking control that it's not like they're relying on the DEF anyway. It's a spectacular supplement to their control, though.
- The difference between having soft-capped DEF and not having soft-capped DEF -- whether it's to S/L or ranged or whatever -- isn't necessarily the most materially relevant factor when we're discussing Doms, but clearly it's one of the more noticeable practical distinctions in general. The most materially relevant factor for Doms is perma-Dom. The ability to toss around mag-6 stuns in a 25-foot radius, and have permanent status protection, and get a free full bar of endurance every ~80 seconds -- well, all of that's pretty hard to miss.
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| I hate to tell you this, but I have characters that don't have enough recovery for how I play them even after Stamina, both +recovery uniques, and at least one, sometimes two Performance Shifter procs. I have used, where I couldn't fit in some other source of +recovery (either because I didn't have powers that took sufficiently useful sets or I would have had to scrap sets I really wanted), you probably guessed it, purples to fill the gap. Three of the right sets of purples, just two-slotted, falls right in between a Numina++ and a Miracle+. I actually slot fairly aggressively for end cost, too, where I can. Obliteration sets are cruel in this regard. |
The point I was making was that Purples don't provide nearly the benefit of Numina/Miracle/Performance Shifter for mitigating endurance drain. Many builds can, in fact, eliminate their endurance concerns with those non-purple enhancements. If we're looking at the issue from an SO-build's perspective, those enhancements provide a much larger leap in overall performance than purples do.
As far as the +recovery from purples goes, yeah, it's nice, but there are a lot of sets that offer +2.5% recovery (the aforementioned Performance Shifter being one). Getting 4% instead from two purples isn't a night-and-day difference.
Bottom line: For most builds, adding purples won't suddenly enable you to perform tasks you previously found impossible. For bleeding-edge, Scrapper-forum, no-inspiration-or-temp-use builds, then yeah, maybe. Still not sure how those builds are materially relevant to a player who's used to SO builds. I think your perception has been warped by your own uberness, which I suppose is fitting given your handle.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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Well, at this point in time the only people who cannot experience purple sets are those who do not have a level 50 character. There is no other restriction beyond that. $15 a month ensures that you can play, but it does not buy you a 50 |
Originally Posted by B1u3Jay
Do you think it is a consideration along these lines:
It is content in the game, and I pay the same $15/month everyone else does -- why can't I experience purple IO sets? (When I say *I*, above, I am not referencing me, specifically.) |
To compare it to a Porsche or something from RL is apt. If you prioritize getting that Porsche, you can save your money and purchase one.
Or, you can take the GTA approach that this game has and go beat some guys over the head until they give you the Porsche. If its not the color you wanted (wrong set) then you sell that Porsche and go buy the Porsche you desire. If there isn't enough money left after you sell yours, then go beat some poor guy over the head until you get the color you did want.
If you are a pacifist and prefer to not bonk people on the head, the government has offered a new program available to all "low income" super heroes and super villains. You use some of their stimulus money and after a couple of months at your temporary job, you can buy the exact color Porsche that you want.
The disparity that so many people claim runs rampant in this game is just silly. To prove that point, I PL'd a character from 1 to 50 and never spent a dime on him. I did this in AE - rolling gold on his tickets and handing the recipes off. His income after all was said and done, just from kills, no drops, was over 50 mil.
Had I solo'd him and stopped to SO him out every 3 levels, I am sure I could have spent all of that on the way to 50. So essentially, he would have been broke. But then, once 50... what does he have to spend inf on anyways besides IOs? Costume changes? Temp jet packs?
Really, with the complete lack of any inf sinks in this game, there is no excuse for someone to say "I will never be able to afford this".
The disparity that people feel is ever increasing between the "haves" and the "have nots" is completely a "grass is greener" thing. You can realistically completely IO out any character now using Pool Cs (all of them) for under 200 mil. 5 LotG procs?! Sure thing! Here you go! And their FREE! Want a miracle proc and a numina's proc too? Sure thing! Those are free too!
Want 5 complete sets of purples? Sure thing! They're free... you'll just need to wait quite a bit longer.
Ooooo - side note:
Pretend Purples all cost 200 mil (low end when I started). 5 complete sets of 5 (what most people slot) would have set you back 5 billion. I don't think the prices of Pool C's dropping and Purples rising has impacted very many people' ability to completely "purple" any character. If you could scrape up 5 billion for a toon (plus the rest) you can likely scrape together the 10 billion it will run you now.
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Along those same lines, we get into power proliferation, and villain archetypes ported hero-side/hero archetypes ported villain-side. Hopefully this doesn't come across as trolling -- I am just trying to add to the discussion. Thanks. |
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I'm happy to let this go, but I still disagree. I don't accept that turn of phrase. I maintain it is wrong of you to say what you are saying - a point I understand and don't fundamentally disagree with - in that way.|
Originally Posted by Obitus
When I can IO a build with non-purples and get three to four times the performance of an analogous SO build, then yes, the extra 10% or so I'd get out of purples is materially insignificant. Frankly, I view this entire line of discussion the result of an overblown nitpick; you latch onto my use of the word "any" and type two exhaustive lectures about game mechanics that I already know -- when it should have been fairly clear that I was talking about the practical performance gap between SO and IO builds.
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| Seeing that you seem to agree in spirit, I'm not even sure what we're arguing about. My wording? Ok, fine. Purples are not materially significant to practical performance from an SO-build player's perspective. How's that? |
A response to one bullet of nitpickery...
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| You seemed to argue at one point that sticker shock from purples (and purples above all) would drive casual or new players away from the market, and that you wanted them to participate in the market. You may or may not be right about that; I can't read the minds of the playerbase. What I can say is that people who only look at the most expensive items to get an idea of what the market involves probably don't deserve our consideration. |
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
The devs got the A-merit price of purples wrong. This is pretty clear. They also got the price of the "non uber" PvP IOs wrong. Nobody that knows what they're doing is going to buy purples or the non special PvP IOs at the A-merit prices they've put them at.
What would happen if purples and the run of the mill PvP IOs were reduced to say 6 A-merits. It would still be cheaper to buy most purples by selling 6 A-merits worth of specifically bought IO recipes, but if you chose to spend your A-merits on purples it would not be ridiculous. 20 is just off the scale, hmm, I can spend 20 A-merits on a purple worth 400M or 30 on a PvP IO worth 2BN+ and buy several purples, no contest atm.
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
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It took them a while to tweak the reward merits' prices of some recipes so I would expect eventually they will lower the cost of the less desirable purples and PvP recipes in the future.
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Originally Posted by Minotaur
The devs got the A-merit price of purples wrong. This is pretty clear. They also got the price of the "non uber" PvP IOs wrong. Nobody that knows what they're doing is going to buy purples or the non special PvP IOs at the A-merit prices they've put them at.
What would happen if purples and the run of the mill PvP IOs were reduced to say 6 A-merits. It would still be cheaper to buy most purples by selling 6 A-merits worth of specifically bought IO recipes, but if you chose to spend your A-merits on purples it would not be ridiculous. 20 is just off the scale, hmm, I can spend 20 A-merits on a purple worth 400M or 30 on a PvP IO worth 2BN+ and buy several purples, no contest atm. |
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
I thought about that too. I could totally see it going either way.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
Quote:
I think the "ATM" part is important. The Dev's have set a (incredibly high!) ceiling to how much purples and PVPs are worth - purples at 10 times the cost of "highly desirable" non-purples, and PVPs at 15 times the cost.|
Originally Posted by Minotaur
20 is just off the scale, hmm, I can spend 20 A-merits on a purple worth 400M or 30 on a PvP IO worth 2BN+ and buy several purples, no contest atm.
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Using 150 M Luck of the Gamblers as the base, this tells us they think purples are worth 1.5 billion, and PVPs 2.25 billion. Right now, these prices are way too high - for some (most, virtually all) of these rare recipes; but notably, there are some that sell at or over that approximate value.
(Note that while the actual Inf price of the recipes involved may change, the ratio - a purple is worth 10 highly desired non-purples - won't. If you don't think the purple you want is worth 10 recipes, get the 10 recipes instead.)
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I had added a line like that and then removed it because I assume they set the prices based on a time to get "pricing" method. That is it takes X time (or Y-time plus Z-inf) to acquire 30 a-merits to get the PvP recipe and on average it would take M-time of PvPing to get any one of them then factor in the ability to make the choice increasing the cost in a-merits.|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
I thought about that too. I could totally see it going either way.
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The only way I could see them bumping up the a-merit prices is if we earn a-merits faster than they assumed we would.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
Oh, yeah. I didn't mean I could see the price going up, but I totally wasn't clear. I meant I could see them decreasing or staying where they are.
I'd be really shocked if they went up.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
Quote:
Current PvP proc recipes are 30 A-merits; how low do you really think the devs will pull those numbers down?|
Originally Posted by SwellGuy
It took them a while to tweak the reward merits' prices of some recipes so I would expect eventually they will lower the cost of the less desirable purples and PvP recipes in the future.
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I'm going to go with D: irresponsible.
The Devs aren't ignorant; however I don't believe they sat down and did the math either.
The devs have a track-record of being irresponsible.
Obitus, Uber,
Just a few random observations to throw into your discussion. Just my $0.02
1.) It seems to me that bringing SO builds into the conversation is a little unreal. Someone with a level 50 SO build isn't going to be able to follow the discussion in the first place. Its not about the relative merits of purples vs the alpha slot, or even numina/lotg/miracle; they'd get a huge leg up simply from slotting yellow recipes.
2.) I don't think that either one of you would disagree that (in general) when leveling/outfitting a character, stuff like LOTG/Miracle/Numina would take precedence over purple sets. You can slot them sooner, they are more easily available, etc. Outside of PLed toons, its hard for me to imagine a character these days standing at WWs and deciding whether or not to buy LOTGs or a Purple . . . for goodness sake, why didn't they slot those LOTGs earlier so they could enjoy them while leveling?
3.) On the other hand, I could easily see a level 50 standing at WWs and thinking "should I add a purple set to *this* character, or nicely kit out 2 of my alts?" And I don't think that question has an easy answer because there are going to be too many variables, it would be an intensely personal answer. If you enjoy having one super-awesome hero, eeking small amounts of awesome might be worth it. If you didn't see the need for it, it would be insanely stupid.
4.) As far as exemplaring goes . . . in general I think purples are *awesome* simply because their global bonuses are available at every level, no matter whether you have access to that power or not. And while level 50s probably value the +recharge from purple sets the most, level 15s get a lot of milage out of the +acc and + rec (though rec will be relatively less useful after the changes to stamina). Sure, you *could* make a special exemplar build and for the sake of argument purples might not be the best choice for that one . . . but at that point, haven't we veered a little far into the realm of extreme min/max?
4.a) Not that I have a problem with extreme min/max, I have mad respect for numbers crunchers. That said, I think a discussion about the best way to min/max *implicitly* stipulates that the extra 10% performance (or whatever) is worth it. That kind of discussion *assumes* its better to have one awesome character instead of 3-4 really good ones. (And also, if you are going to have 2 builds on one character, you really aren't talking about kitting out 3-4 other characters anymore).
4.b) Also, at the point when we get that far in the weeds about the relative merits of high-end IO builds, its worth noting that anyone with the understanding of inventions, the market, builds, & etc to follow it *also* has the knowledge such that getting influence via the market is fairly trivial and simply a matter of desire. At this point, we really aren't talking about casual players anymore. I agree that people who complain that purple sets are too expensive for "casual players" coming from SO-builds are probably missing the boat. If you are *that* casual purples won't get you the biggest bang for the buck in the first place.
4.c) Obitis, I'm sure there are some great exemplar builds that don't require purples to function at peak effectiveness . . . but at the same time, I think its clear that in some cases, purples *would* be the superior choice when exemplared. In certain level ranges, +acc and +recharge are simply not available. To the extent that one wants to exemp in those level ranges and to the extent that +acc and +recharge are what one wants to emphasize, purple sets aren't simply the best choice, they are the *only* choice. I think its a bit much to simply dismiss purple sets' value while exemplared.
5.) I would agree that anyone who slots purples solely in order to go from 260 recharge to 275 recharge is getting into the realms of dimishing returns. And I would agree that there are *plenty* of sets where you can get a more than decent amount of recharge. At the same time, it seems intuitive to me that if you are at 260 recharge *without* slotting any purples, you've likely made some *significant* build trade-offs. For example, if a scrapper has 2 sets of crushing impacts slotted, they have the same +recharge and + acc as if they had one hectacomb and one mako's or touch of death . . . but with the purple and one other, they *also* get +dam and + def. Is that worth it? Depends on your build, what else you would do with the influence, what you value, etc. But it seems clear to me that the extra amount of +recharge isn't the *only* think that matters. Its the ability to get more of other stuff while keeping a certain level of + recharge.
6.) I have a couple of characters who are already maxed out with +recharge, and I am thinking of what to do with the Alpha Slot. I could go with +recharge, and sell some of my purples . . . or I could go with something else in the Alpha Slot. Sure, I could sell my purple sets and get enough influence to kit out 5-10 alts . . . but I *already* have the purple sets, and I *don't* have 5-10 alts where I lack the $$$ to do what I want with them.
7.) On the other hand, I *do* have 5-10 alts where I've got enough influence to buy everything I'd like to slot with them except buy a couple of purple sets . . . and for *those* guys, the Alpha Slot is a no-brainer. At least at first. So I do see the Alpha Slot as driving down some of the demand for purple sets. That said, +30% damage over the ED cap is pretty sweet and I think it would be very, very difficult to get that via IO bonuses and would involve a lot of build tradeoffs. Whereas +30% recharge is just 2 purple sets. Its expensive, but influence is cheap.
Just a few thoughts while the servers are down! :-)
Tutor, thanks for sharing the thoughts. I like the way you think.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
Two things:
First, set bonuses are added after ED calculations. So even if your regular slotting plus the alpha slot bonus had all you powers at 110% recharge, purple sets would give you even more recharge. You might think that extra recharge at that point is unnecessary. Perhaps, but as someone once said, unless your attack chain is *headsplitter, headspliiter, headsplitter,* you can use more recharge.
Second, I agree that purples are overkill and sometimes counter productive to most builds except if you are building for ultra high recharge to get one or more perma powers or to have some specialized low level runner, since the purple bonuses never go away.
50s: Inv/SS PB Emp/Dark Grav/FF DM/Regen TA/A Sonic/Elec MA/Regen Fire/Kin Sonic/Rad Ice/Kin Crab Fire/Cold NW Merc/Dark Emp/Sonic Rad/Psy Emp/Ice WP/DB FA/SM
Overlord of Dream Team and Nightmare Squad