Reduce the Price for Low and Mid Level TOs/DOs/SOs

Again, we're posing scenarios about two different types of players:

1) Those who might make some minor mistakes along the way that they want to fix, or

2) Those who plan ahead enough that they don't need a respec.


#2 can then easily use a respec to do what I'm suggesting because they won't need to bank them for build mistakes.

#1, the guy/girl who made a mistake as a new player that they'd like to correct can do so, just in a fashion that also helps them with their money issues.



If you never needed to use a respec until I6 when ED came in, then why not use it to get yourself some extra money? If you didn't need it to fix a build mistake, then you lose nothing by using it this way, so I don't understand what the problem is there. It's not burning a respec if you didn't need it anyways, but it helps you to afford the next level's enhancements.

I'm not saying that you NEED to do this. I'm merely suggesting it as a way to help buy enhancements when you need them if you're otherwise short of cash.


The discussion at hand is that free players can't buy SOs and DOs at the levels that they can begin getting them. Aside from the development decision there, there are ways that a smart player can get enough influence to do just that. Suggesting several ways to do that, including the respec option to sell back old enhancements, is not out of the picture here.

Well, you get 2 at each odd level from 3-21, so that's 20 slots to fill. (edit - forgot the base slots in the powers, so that's an additional 11 slots, is that right?) Do I think it's going to be tough? Yes, I do. Do I think it's impossible with smart decisions? No, I do not. I am also assuming that this test won't make me SO-out powers like rest, brawl, and hurdle/swift/health, but I will probably try to get Stamina 3-slotted with enhancements quickly.

However, even if I do this, the results may not be achievable to all characters, and I am aware of that. I think that I could probably speed up inf gain on a /WP scrapper more than I could on something like an Ice/FF Controller playing solo. So I admit that there will be some variability in this. The Scrapper could likely take down tougher enemies (either more Lts and Boss or higher-level enemies, which would yield a better Inf/XP ratio) than the Controller.


However, I think that some of what this argument comes down to is perception by the new players. For instance, I don't think that new players will have the expectation to fully SO-out their characters right at level 22. That is something that the Vets are used to, but the new players aren't. So does the new player have an expectation that they even need to do this, or should be able to? I don't know. Certainly, new players who are brought onboard by current vets may, but that will be given to them by the veteran player, not the new player.


So a better test would be can a new player buy what a new player expects to be able to buy, and that would very wildly by new player. We can certainly test whether a free player can achieve what a vet thinks that should get, but is that the right test to perform?


Further Edit -> As an addendum to this last point, since vets can likely e-mail funds to new players that they bring on, are we only talking about new free players that do not know anyone in-game? If so, what would their perceptions be? Can we even tell? We can guess, but can we know for sure?

Well, I can only speak for myself but I feel that using DOs from 12-22 and SOs from 22-50 should be available as "basic gear" for all players (TOs I tend ignore since the 1-12 levels go by to fast to bother).

Basic gear in an MMO is not a static target. Changes to the game adding new types of gear results in a rolling target where as the power level of the top end goes up so does the power level of the lower end. When the came was new making full SOs somewhat difficult to obtain made sense. They were all that mattered so giving a bit of a stretch goal made sense. Since the various new enhancements have been added I think regarding full SOs as basic gear is a reasonable assumption.

The other side of it is that the difficulty level of content has not remained static throughout the life of the game. Newer content, and in particular the new level 20-29 story arcs, are more challenging than the older content, especially for solo players. Several of my characters struggled with doing them using SOs, having to use a mix of SOs and DOs sounds very painful. This is another reason for rebalancing the games to make SOs more viable as "basic gear", the game difficulty has increased so increasing the power level of basic gear to compensate makes sense.

You may have a legitimate concern with this being frustrating to F2Pers who don't want to put any significant effort into this game.

On the other hand the problems you're describing with affording enhancements don't usually hit players until they have characters above level 20 or so. I suspect most F2P players will be deciding if they want to keep playing the game or not long before they encounter this relatively minor roadblock.

Your last point here may have some merit to it. If new content in the 20-29 level range is based on a fully-SO'd character or higher, than yes, the expectation should be that all characters in that level range should be able to fully SO-out their characters reasonably (obviously, someone that decides to completely change their costume every other day may have some issues affording stuff, but that's their own fault).

However, your point before that seems to make the completely opposite point. For premium players with access to the invention system, and for VIPs, the stretch goal is Inventions, and SOs are actually pretty easy to afford. However, for free players, SOs are still the stretch goal for them, as they are the best that they can get as long as they are free players. So does that mean that they should be a stretch to get?

Well, it would still help, depending on if they reduced sell price by a proportionate amount.

For instance, let's say that they dropped purchase price by 50%, and dropped sell prices by 50% as well. You'd still be better off, since you're still getting the same amount of influence per kill as you were before, meaning that you have proportionately more than you did before even though the sell/buy prices dropped by the same percentage.

The problem is that the basic gear level needs to be the same for VIP players and free players just from a content balance point of view. Content in an MMO is balanced assuming a certain level of gear, if standard content is balanced around SOs then SOs should be available to all.

Honestly though I think at this point the discussion has pretty much run it's course, we're pretty much reduced to quibbling over semantics .

It's certainly better than some of my characters have been doing, and I drop salvage on the market if it's an item that will sell in a useful fashion. I've been holding off until level 22-23 to buy Enhancements lately just so I'm not spending Inf on DOs and I've only been able to slot with SOs if I either get lucky with salvage drops (as opposed to my usual haul of salvage which has several thousand for sale on the market and no bidders) or transfer Inf from one of my other characters.

Forbin's test seems to have proved that free players can get enough through drops and content to fully DO himself out at level 15, with ++ DOs, to boot. How is that arguing over semantics?

The theory was that free players couldn't afford to buy DOs and SOs for their characters at the respective levels they open up. Forbin pretty well found out that that's not true for DOs, and had enough cash left over after buying ++ level DOs to be well on his way to buying the next set.


Also, you're assuming that "balanced around SOs" means "SOs are required," which I don't think is true. Will it be slightly more difficult with DOs? Yes. Can it be done? Most certainly.

Given the price of DOs, it seems he's spent around 500k on DOs, and has 300k inf leftover. At level 15. I'd call that an impressive feat without selling salvage or having a sugar daddy. I currently have a level 17 character who hasn't purchased any enhancements. That character has 110k influence before I grab the influence earned from the salvage sold in the auction house. And after, about 140k influence. From doing DfB and some missions. Quite a disparity in numbers there. I couldn't even buy all the DOs once, let alone thrice. Is it any wonder I don't buy any until level 22 and SOs unless absolutely necessary?

It's a lot better than I do most of the time. I sell salvage and recipes, on the market and off and still I often find myself unable to get a full set of DOs by level 12, let alone ++, let alone having 300 000 left over. I'm not sure what that test did right that I'm doing wrong, but I thought I was selling to the right stores.

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Speaking of "the right stores," it's high time we dropped the price disparity between stores of different origins, as well as time to stop "buy only" vendors from ripping players off at a tenth of the price they'd get by selling to the right store. Praetoria (I know, purchased content, bare with me) is especially bad about this, because it doesn't HAVE right stores. The Nova vendors are Training vendors, but there are no origin-appropriate vendors for anything there. What this means is you get massively ripped off on your enhancements sales.

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More than anything else, I feel SOs are the problem much more so than DOs. Even at the worst of times, I've been able to buy at least half a set of them. When it comes to SOs, I usually can't buy more than about half a dozen when the time comes, unless I've made a lucky Market sale.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Probably selling his DfB SOs, as well.

Originally Posted by Back Alley Brawler Did you just use "casual gamer" and "purpled-out warshade" in the same sentence?

IIRC from when I was looking at the numbers this morning, it would take selling over a hundred of even those to make up the difference to 700k+ influence. Even if one got really lucky and filled up one's tray completely on each run (the best I've gotten so far was 6 enhancements in one run), I believe the number of runs involved would put a person well over level 15. But I've slept since then.

If I had an Arcanaville in my pocket, I'd whip it out and tame the numbers in a much more accurate fashion. But anyone with access to the game can look at the rewards involved and see that that much influence at that level would be atypical of normal play at the very least. We're talking about an amount of Inf that's something like 25 times the total XP to achieve that level. The ratio of Inf to XP from defeated enemies/missions isn't even a tenth of that. It's more than vendor sales of that level could reasonably explain. There's a smelly Danish corpse somewhere.

Fine with me, especially since level 25 generic IO recipes are much more scarce in WWs now.