Freedom? Hardly

That's an opinion, and one you've chosen not to explain or support.

Here's another one: I enjoy the invention system as-is. It's a mini-game for me (as it's intended to be) and building and filling out IO builds using Mids is a big chunk of my enjoyment of the game.

If IO recipes were available in vendor stores, that enjoyment would be greatly lessened.

So... what makes your "it's not fun!" more valid than anyone else's "I enjoy it!" ?

How would enjoyment be greatly lessened if you can have what you want and I can have what I want? With The Three Ts (Taskforces, Trials, Tips), it's almost like that now, I just wind up sacrificing most of the other content to use them. if there's a way that I feel rewards me for my time spent, I'll take it, so long as it's not a game exploit (like buying influence from a site is).

Nitpicking here, but as it happens, store-bought enhancements are not actually "cheap" if your only source of income is selling dropped-loot enhancements. Enhancements don't drop as loot very frequently any more. Tip missions make up some of the difference but not as much as you'd think. The game's power may or may not still be balanced around them but the game's economy ceased to be balanced around them shortly after inventions hit the scene. Freems and Preems are going to have to get creative about working for their upgrades or else do a lot of tip missions and sewer trials.

I've been playing since the game came out and I very rarely had any issues making the money to SO out my characters every three levels, through normal legacy game play. And I never relied on drops, because almost all my characters are Magic origin and fighting legacy CoT always sucked :P

What subscription model will Wildstar be using?

That's a load of rubbish.

Prior to the auction house and salvage/recipe drops there was no way that a character could afford DO's at 12 never mind SO's at 22 without financial assistance from an alt/friend/whatever.

You can think that if you like, doesn't make it true.

My mistake, this is what I was thinking of:

Source

Whatever the case, it doesn't change my position that I completely understand why Paragon Studios is making Incarnate content VIP only and can support them in doing so.

Actually there is truth to what he says, especially for the powerlevelers. They would level faster than they could earn inf to afford enhancements. But that was the trade off for that style of gameplay. Players that ran regular content didn't find themselves out of funds as often as people like Badger.

From release to about I2ish, that was impossible, as the influence vs XP ratio was too low unless you were permanently in debt, and even then it wasn't possible to fully outfit every three levels. There were discussions about that back then, where it was mathematically demonstrated what the limits were.

And up until I9, it was still difficult to do so running only the normal story arc content.

This is not a matter of opinion or personal experience: the amount of inf you need to buy most of all of your slots into SOs and the amount of XP you need to gain the number of levels which would make those SOs invalid is calculable and the ratio between the two is not generally affected by playstyle to a high enough degree to significantly alter things prior to the introduction of inventions. And for much of the early history of the game this was simply not possible. This has nothing to do with being faster or slower, but rather the ratio of inf per kill and XP per kill for all normal critters. And you couldn't claim that mission completion bonuses could make up the difference because for a while after release those bonuses were so low its not too far from the truth to say they that compared to the amounts being discussed were approximately zero. At release, in fact, the mission completion bonus was far less than the award for killing the lone boss at the end of most missions.

Well, will you accept first-hand experience as evidence?

Whether it was true or not in the old days (team-size and mission choices and etc...) it is true now that financing a character solely on enhancement drops is not very viable for values of "viable" that mean being well-slotted, never mind fully-slotted. (Though I'll grant you that a character that manages to always be on 8-man teams that always turn their difficulty up to generate a lot of bosses will see a lot more enhancements than one who plays solo or small-team.)

If you don't believe my experience then you can test it yourself by just making a new character and refusing to sell any of your salvage or recipes. Make a rule for yourself that you'll only sell enhancements and only slot loot-drop enhancements or enhancements you buy at the store.

Enhancement drops are far less frequent than they were in the old days, for good reason - salvage drops replaced them. You simply can't use the "old days" as a yardstick any more in regards to the "TO/DO/SO" economy.

Arcanaville says it, and so I must accept it as truth. (No sarcasm.)

I suppose it had to do with me running mostly defenders and being constantly in debt, but I honestly do not remember having much trouble affording to slot out my characters.

Wow I had no idea how special it was that I managed that back prior to I6 even. Actually I think I had managed it much sooner than that but trying to remember exactly when I went past 22 the first time is fuzzy. I mean at 22 drinks isn't everything fuzzy?

I found my XP chart from August 2004 that a player compiled. It doesn't have all the data in it, but I can get the basic idea since many numbers were calculated by formula back then (and now). Lets pick level 27 for an example. To get to level 32 from level 27 according to my calculator took a total of 1,073,650 XP. How much inf you would have had depends on what you killed. Minions would have given about 70% of that value, Lts 1.2x, and Bosses 2x. Realistically speaking, you were very likely to end up with about a million inf or less from that leveling. I don't think the level of the critter mattered then because I believe the ratio of inf to XP was similar for higher level critters.


Assuming you had a full set of level 30 SOs to start and you were then buying a full set of level 35 SO at level 32. At level 32 you would have had 18 powers not counting Brawl and Sprint, and 31 discretionary slots. That's a total of 49 slots not counting Brawl and Sprint. The cost of level 35 SOs varies depending on the type, but your absolute budget for them was about 22k per SO. That's very low relative to the cost of level 35 SOs: most cost more than that and the ones that don't are infrequently slotted (things like taunt duration and jump, for example). The big four - accuracy, damage, endurance reduction, and recharge - are all about 40k each. If you were in perma-debt, you could have a budget of as much as 44k per enhancement assuming you didn't spend inf on anything else, which now is within the realm of possibility to slot aggressively with SOs, but barely.

It got better as levels got higher because eventually you caught up: the amount of XP it took to level rose faster than the number of slots you had. The problem usually disappeared by level 40ish. But lets look at level 22 when SOs first became available to us back then. Assuming we spent *nothing* from level 1 to level 22, we would have earned about 190619 XP, and a similar amount of influence. We'd have 13 powers and 20 discretionary slots for a total of 33 slots. That's a budget of about 5800 inf per slot. *No* level 25 SO costs that little, and in fact almost all of them cost more than double that (11600) which means even at perma-debt you are not likely to have enough influence to buy a full set of SOs at level 22.

So it started off mathematically impossible in the 20s, became barely achievable if you were constantly in debt in the 30s, and then became much easier in the 40s. That was basically the SO curve for much of the game from release to Issue 8, although mission bonuses could help a player gain on the XP/inf ratio for kills after they were boosted (I forget the precise moment they became more than ridiculous: I2ish I think). Even so, they had only a small effect on the ratio most of the time.

Another thing that could help was getting on steamroller teams that were seeing a high percentage of bosses, which would increase the amount of Influence relative to XP you were earning, and make SOs feasible as early as the mid thirties in some cases. But I don't think *anything* makes SOs feasible without influence donations prior to I9 in the 20s.

As someone who still doesn't even know HOW to power level in CoH, outside of tagging with friends crushing RWZ repeatables, I can atest to never ever having the cash for SO slotting at level 22 just on one character with no support.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

That's odd. Running just tip missions and utilizing the market in a relatively simple way, by not selling common salvage below vendor cost, I usually end up with enough inf to cover at least 3 characters with SOs by 22 if needed.

Actually on beta I had problems getting enough cash to get my DO's. It took several levels to get most of the slots with DO's.

So yeah, it can happen.

Granted when you get to the higher levels and start making the serious influence things are ok. But low level? It's tough.

Edit: On second thought in the regular game I could actually use the market effectively to make enough money to get what I need. But without it, even selling salvage and inventions doesn't cut it.

Yeah, nobody uses the consignment houses in Beta.

I think that is more because you gain levels 1 to oh 15 or 16 so very fast that you can fall behind on the inf gain you used to get.

Actually, some of the people that PLed themselves sometimes had less of a problem for the simple reason that they often didn't slot anything at all until the upper levels, so they had influence saved up. No reason to slot enhancements if you're mostly along for the ride and the ride's not lasting very long anyway.

Yeah, there's that too. On low-level defenders back then, my job was pretty much to ride along with the SG teams and buff them, when I wasn't pathetically plinking away at street sweeping. If enhs went red back then, it's not like you left the team to go fix that, you just kept riding.

I can believe that was true in some cases where the player was smart enough to plan it that way.

My god, I prefer to solo thru the low levels and I never have less than a million inf by level 10 from just selling drops on the market. Heck I usually get between 100k and 500k by selling the two inspirations that dropped in the old tutorial.

I plan ahead and place some cheap bids on IO's at the market and when I reach the appropriate level I slot them and don't worry about reslotting until I hit the 30's

Why do you assume I Powerleveled? My first character took 400 hours to reach L50 after spending most of the 30s/40s in perma debt (good old blasters)