2 billion per enhancer

If you read my posts, and you did not, you would see that I have a set of 6 Purps valued at 1.5 bill, and fully purpling a toon at 7.5 bill. Would you like me to reference the OP and break out the math for you?

Centurion, you realise you can transform a character for much less money right now?

The IO system offers a layered set of rewards.

Start off with Crushing Impacts or Thunderstrikes in all your attacks, this will cost the order of 20 million maybe? 50 million at most? Yellow sets.
Attacks you slot this way will be leaner and meaner than the SO equivalent, and you effectively get a few Super Reflex passive powers thrown in for free, either a rechrge boost or a Ranged defence boost along with some bonus accuracy. This difeerence is noticable in game.

Then progress to add sets like Positron's Blast, Mako's Bite, Touch of Death or Eradication. Orange sets. You'll pay maybe 20-50 million per power for these, and get better bonuses in your other powers and more set bonuses.

Then go onto the expensive stuff like Kinetic Combat, KB protection IOs, the Steadfast Unique, LotG recharge and you'll getting the big benefits like perma-ing some powers maybe or capping defence. You're talking 100 mill for some of these.

Finally there's the purple and PVP IOs. 2 billion for some.

If players could get this fourth tier of purple/PVP straight away, they'd be "Cool. Done that game. Whats next?". Easy come, easy go, off and play Champions or DCU instead.
As it is now, you do get rewarded for 3-6 months play if you go the IO route (yellow, maybe orange sets) and its a noticeable improvement, but there's still more to reach for.

THAT is what keeps people coming back to a game over a long time period. This is a subscription based game, so thats what benefits the devs, as well as the players. Its basic game design 101. Reward the player early, but keep offering new horizons to aspire to. Does that make sense?

Are you really saying if you could have the best build ever in 6 months you'd keep playing this game for years?

(I've been at this for over 4 years, and have purpled out exactly one character. Never slotted a PVP IO yet. Never did a LotG +Recharge till this last year. Now I've slotted maybe 10 of them across my characters? Did my first Miracle + Recovery's this week. I'm having fun.)

Dude.

Just take your fingers out of your ears.

I like how he calls it enhancer...... and other than that, we have ways of making influence in coh. Farming is boring in my opinion, yet i still have 6-7 pvp toons that have about 12 bil + a piece on them. All you need is a good group of people that you like to team with, then the merits and inf just roll in.

This thread makes me want to go purple out my warshade & then delete him.

Not that I agree with anything being said here but...IF the game is still balanced around SOs..
And assuming the current market system works..
Also making the idea of the in game economy work to some degree..

When I started playing back in issue..8 I think, on a trail account, I was lvling up a brute. I played flat out in order to try get to 50 asap. Now in that time, I teamed constantly BIG teams. And you know what I found? If I saved all the money I was earning from my missions and selling stuff, I could NOT afford to fully SO my toon in that next 5 level bracket.

Naturally this way before we had a market to make billions by lvl 17, and as a new player, I am certain I was doing this far from the optimum. But given that there was no way to slot myself with SOs from what I was earning...that seems that the game economy was wrong back then.

In other words..if it was wrong then, why MUST it be right now, as everyone but the OP is saying?

As for the OP. Dude, lemme tell you a story.

I recently returned from a year of not playing, and I decided I'd start slotting these IO sets to replace the vanilla IOs that I had slotted. I fired up mids, I did a bunch of math, and I respecced in to my slots.

From there, I set out on a grand journey. Not a journey of farming, but a journey of playing the game. I decided I'd take my Nin/Nin Stalker (who is my only 50, and the character I usually play) And begin tackling any content I'd missed on his way to 50.

I used the ouroboros crystal, and my badge history to mentally keep track, and started to solo everything on +1/0. I WASTED time reading mission text, even doing SFs.

Whenever I got tips, I stopped my mission arc and did tips. I bought a few of my 1-merit pieces this way. Once I got up to the 2 merit peices, I started using my merits every other day to just roll for recipes.

I am not a marketeer. Whenever I fill up on non-white recipes (usually every other day, or every three days.) I visit the market, check the listings, and if its worth over a million to someone I toss it on the market. I use the money, combined with what I make playing the game to buy the salvage and recipes I don't have.

Did I mention that this character has been in SG mode since level 25 and never turns it off? Technically I'm making less money than I *could* be making, doing nothing but playing the game WITH ONE CHARACTER.

Exactly one month later, my Nin/Nin stalker is capable of soloing most of the AVs in the game, as well as rikti pylons. The only thing stopping him from taking on the things he can't is a hard limit of the Stalker AT, the low max hitpoint cap. There is no enhancing around that unfortunately.

I have zero purple IOs. I did all this visiting the market two or three times a week for ten minutes. I did all of this with the squishiest melee AT in the game, using the most resisted damage type in the game.

I play 2-4 hours a day, 4-5 days a week.

Purple IOs are nice, but I think you're seriously overestimating how much anyone at all NEEDS them for a build.

If you have the kind of build that NEEDS them, then you have the kind of build that is so ungodly uber, or severely poorly planned that it SHOULD be an "only in your wildest dreams" goal reserved for EXTREMELY long term play. It's not like you can't already get an absolutely obscene amount of power with very little effort. Most games would have taken a look at builds like MOST set-driven players have and nerfed everything back to the stone age.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

What more do you need?

Wow, so there's no way that I have 2 of each of the big pvp IOs on my main toon huh? Guess it must be a figment of my imagination. Welcome to the ignore list, say hi to Johnny for me.