How long will the exploits go on?

What difference does this make if there is a net inf flow from one side to another?

I can respect your desire to remain neutral in the whole farming debate.
It doesn't address my original point, but that's ok as doing so might be construed as you "taking a side".

I don't have a desire to remain neutral, I am in fact neutral on the subject of non-exploitive farming. I don't care much if it happens, and I don't care much if it stops happening.

I addressed your point(s), at least as I understood them. The first was that you believed farming helps the game, and any statement otherwise was merely semantical. I disagree: farming does not help the game or hurt the game, at least in terms of adding supply to the game. One could argue - successfully, because it has been done in the past and is not just hypothetical - that farmers act to keep drop rates lower than they would be otherwise, which reduces the amount of drops everyone else besides farmers get. Either way, they don't add significantly more supply to the game than the devs expect to have actually in the game in total, plus or minus some margin of error.

The other point was the question of stigma. As I said, that's mostly a matter of projection, because I personally don't assert any stigma to non-exploitive farming. During the I14/I15 debacle, I argued both that exploitive farming was a detriment to the game no matter what sort of phony Robin Hood delusions anyone had but I also argued that non-exploitive farming was not something the devs cared all that much about and wasn't in the same category of detrimental activity. I believe both. That makes me "neutral" in the sense I don't believe farming is all good or all bad. But it doesn't mean I don't have an opinion. I have strong opinions: they are just inconsistent with the two largest sides to this issue.

I'm notoriously slow witted, but can you explain why that would matter? With the ability to interchange influence and infamy, and email money within an account, the only transactions that seem important to me are player to player. Red v Blue cash flow seems as relevant to me now as Steel Canyon v Atlas Park. What am I missing?

I'm guessing something about earning potential, wealth creation versus consumption rates, and how much people are actually getting things done redside versus blueside.

While we've come a long way in linking the two games together, in a lot of fundamental ways they're still two separate games that just happen to be running in parallel with a few catwalks connecting them.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

"Leveraging the available tools" sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for "farming." Or at least "grinding."

My Influence issues almost certainly stem from my playstyle: multiple alts which I play in round-robin fashion and casual "a few hours per week" play. I also tend to "retire" my toons once they hit 50, rarely bringing them out since there's no advancement beyond getting badges, and I have the badges I want on my first couple 50s. Do you play a single character for more than 15 hours a week? Is he level 50? Are you grinding content over and over again? If so, you are the opposite of me

Fair enough. I did misunderstand your opinion in your first couple of posts then. Thanks for the debate though, it's kept me occupied this afternoon while I wait for interminably long queries and scripts to run at work.

to me it sounds more like marketeering.

then there's Uberguy, who makes a metric ton of inf running regular ol' content with a well equipped but non-optimal single target oriented level 50.

You can certainly supercharge your earning power by farming or grinding in this game, but it isn't necessary. You'll still end up with a gigantic bankroll, it'll just take a little longer.

Why would it matter? It's not an economy as a whole, but rather just some individuals. Some people will sell more, some buy more, some break even. Redside is not even a real "economy" separate from blueside in the sense that the US and Bahamas are different countries.


The real problem is that some IOs are nearly worthless while others offer all the good bonuses. That issue is compounded by the fact that some bits of salvage are used for many IOs while some are barely used at all. It needs balance.

Yeah, see that style of play would bore me until I shot myself. I just like to take alts through different paths to 50, then start over once they get there.

So I maintain the only way to get a bunch of Influence is to farm or grind. Grinding is what Uberguy is doing there, plain and simple. Whether you call that exploiting or just plain old deadly dull is a personal call.

I give the short version answer to that question in the paragraph immediately following the one you quote, where I am very specific in saying the problem isn't the influence flow per se, but what it would be symptomatic of, which is essentially an abandonment of the red side markets of sellers. If that is the case, then the merge was practically meaningless: it just means rich red side players have more stuff to occasionally buy. But it also means villain-side market participation is effectively below a meaningful level. And that means even after the merge, the market isn't beneficially serving the villain side to the same degree as it is the hero side. In fact, its essentially not serving its original purpose at all.

I'm sure someone will come along soon to say "so what" so I'll anticipate that by saying: this would only be meaningful to game designers, and people who think on time scales longer than a month. The fact that there are potentially many ways to breathe liquidity life back into the markets that would primarily benefit hero side but may not be strong enough to have any effect on the red side is intellectually troubling to me. It means what you could have solved with a light tap in the right direction may now require a sledgehammer. And I hate sledgehammer solutions.

you are completely, absolutely 100% wrong.

I honestly don't get the issue. The merge can only be seen as a benefit for the characters in CoV. My 50 could finally complete the sets he wanted, while simultaneously selling extraneous things he didn't need. Neither of those were available before the merge. It's not like there's anything else going on in the CoV "economy." It's just the market. The market having more options is only a good thing.

The difference in utility alone doesn't explain the pricing differences in all, or even most cases. In many cases, the problem is that there are two exponentially amplifying effects on prices: the first is that the strongest enhancement, even by marginal amounts, are pursued by the richest players, and second the lack of general liquidity introduces time pressure as an unrestricted price escalator. Or to put it simply: impatient people with lots of cash will pay ridiculous prices for stuff if they can have it now.

Another odd factor is that most players see the invention system as a powerrgaming tool of the rich. They don't see it as a superior slotting system even to conventional SOs that don't take a lot of time and money to leverage. I usually have a weird mish mash of franken-ventions as I level up, because why not? They drop automatically, they are usually cheap to make, they are collectively stronger than SOs and they don't expire. But while people are willing to spend months tweaking that level 50 build, they seem less willing to spend a couple minutes trying to make the best of the inventions that they are getting automatically or could buy for practically nothing.

It suggests to me that lower level crafting needs to be streamlined somehow and possibly incentivized a bit, so more players actually use those lower level and less than perfect expensive inventions. I'd be curious to see the datamining on recipe crafting and slotting for all inventions at all levels. Given the relatively short amount of time people spend at level 25, or 15, I wonder if we made it too difficult to craft at those levels. Even I won't make a level 15 anything unless its a proc and I'm often spending more time at 15 than necessary to run story arcs.

I have often wondered if inventions should stop, or rather start, at about level 25. Which is to say, if you get a drop when you are level 12, it will be a level 25 drop. If you craft it, you will be able to slot it, but it will function as a level 12. As you level, it will scale up with you until level 25, when it will stop at its native level. This would make it much more beneficial to craft and slot inventions below level 25: it would be a slot it and forget it until at least level 25, and level 25 inventions (single aspect) are natively about as strong as SOs and don't expire.

It would basically kill off TOs, DOs, and SOs except as filler enhancements for slots that don't have inventions yet, but I'm ok with that. It would also eliminate all those low level weirdos that no one uses, but I'm ok with that also.The fact that level 25s would never disappear under exemplar actually creates a strong incentive to slot them: they would be a weird analog to purples. In fact, this is so useful a feature that the cutoff might need to be level 20 rather than 25, so they are slightly less strong than a standard SO natively.

All he's doing is running from mission to mission doing nothing but earning Influence. That's pretty much the definition of grinding.

I don't know how much simpler I can say it. I didn't say the merge was bad for anyone. I even reread what I wrote and there's no way to interpret what I said in that way unless someone didn't read it carefully. What I said was that if the influence flows were happening in the way I mentioned, it would be a sign that the red side had other, more serious problems.

Its like you said you were driving to a place that was giving away free money, and I said that's fine, but that sound your engine was making sounded like trouble, and you kept saying "I don't understand how going somewhere to get free money could possibly be anything but good."

I'm not saying its not, I'm just wondering if your car is going to blow up on the way back.

MAKE IT SO

Here's the level 50 character I'm playing right now. (I'm on the forums between hospital runs because Trapdoor is repeatedly handing her backside to her. I'm about to give up on this arc.) This is a typical build for level 50 for me: a little of this, a little of that. She currently has 21,313,954 Influence and 99 merits, so she can't actually afford any of the really good IOs. Just waiting on drops.



Were I creating IOs, I would've made each set have exactly one really good bonus (10% Acc increase or 9% Endurance Reduction, etc.) with a bunch of minor bonuses. Then we could tweak and toy to our heart's content. Now all the goodies are concentrated within the same few IOs and, as you point out, frankenslotting is often superior to trying to buy entire sets.

Edit to add a smaller image.

I'll let Uber answer you via his reply to one of the less salubrious market forum regs:

Or grinding.

When you use meaningless definitions your point becomes moot.

In any case anyone of any level can make as much money as they want via the market, which doesn't even require firing a shot in anger.

Fire in joy. Fire in joy.

Well, your original statement, that I replied to, was "The only way to get there is to farm exploits." You also mentioned RMT. You said nothing about farming in general.

I won't say I've never farmed anything, or that I don't have a farming character, but I will say that I do very little of it. I tend to find it pretty damn boring, and I think it is a suboptimal way to make influence.

'Leveraging the available tools' means nothing more than intelligent use of what's available in the game. Don't read more into it than is there. It would include such things as playing at level 50, running TF's, PvP, using the auction houses, marketeering, alignment missions and a number of other activities. Not necessarily all of them, or any of them exclusively.

Well, let's see... I have terrible altitis. I have two accounts with nearly all character slots on my home server filled. That's something like 50+ toons. Out of those, I think 9 of them are 50's. The rest are mostly in their 20's and 30's. I'm also a badger. My main just broke 1000 badges.

So, to answer your questions: No, I don't play a single character for 15+ hours a week. No, I don't exclusively run level 50 content. No, I don't 'grind' content over and over again, unless you count running the same TF more than once per character as 'grinding'.

Making lots of influence doesn't require exploits or buying from RMT sellers. It may include some things that you personally don't find enjoyable, but that doesn't mean the players doing those things are 'cheating' or 'exploiting' the game to get where they are. It just means they're doing something different than you.

And you'd be wrong...

How much ya need?

there's a fellow in the market forum handing out 5,000,000 inf to anyone who asks- look for the 'soup line' thread.

alternately (or in addition to), PM me your global and I'll send you a nest egg.

And to think I just gave away a whole cleavage thread.