EarthWyrm

The thing that bothers me most about this issue is what it's doing to the community.

The incarnate system won't drive me out of the game, even if I don't have access to absolutely everything.

The community turning into a toxic bunch of name-callers (not you, Nal...) who make it so that I can't even read a patch notes thread without spiking my blood pressure?

That could get me to leave.

Absence of monkeyfarming exploits =/= "XP has been regulated in there"

And mission complete.
SOs at least, yes.

I didn't assume otherwise. But, as a teacher, I felt obligated to note that the timing will create non-standard effects.

And there's nothing to say that the project couldn't be re-done, informally, a month down the road. I'd be really interested, in fact, to see a good analysis of the same item(s) (a) during and in the aftermath of double xp and (b) 30-60 days after original data collection. I think that'd be kind of a cool contribution to the market community, albeit one that goes beyond the assignment as presented.

Interesting project idea. Keep in mind that starting Thursday, the market is going to be FUBARed for at least a couple of weeks due to double-xp weekend spiking inf generation to even higher levels than usual, so you might delay onset of data collection if you want to get a more "representative" view of price fluctuations.

I don't. I had it while leveling, but dropped it later in favor of pools that would help me soft-cap the build. If I'm solo on x8, I usually have enough mobs around me to heal anything that needs healing with Energy Drain, and if I'm teamed there's usually enough support that having Aid Self would be redundant.

If I wanted to solo pylons or AVs with the build, I might go back to Aid Self (it'd take some finessing, but I think I could make it work), but the damage type from SS is resisted enough (and the rage crash would do enough to cripple my dps) that I don't tend to bother with those particular challenges.

/EA is a fun set that can be made pretty ridiculously powerful with the right IOs. Because almost any melee secondary can be made pretty ridiculously powerful with the right IOs, I'll just say that I find my /EA brute to be my most fun character. He solos well and teams well. He never runs out of endurance. He can cap his own HP.

I wouldn't go with fire as a melee counterpart for it, though. The early levels would be a misery. WM would be a much better counterpart, for the reasons noted in the post above mine. A primary with mitigation built in helps a ton (mine is SS/EA).

I know whereof you speak, and agree with you, for the most part.

There's no community where there won't be occasional conflict. Or, if there is, that kind of community would rapidly turn into a bizarre groupthink-y cult. The community here shows that it can have its differences, and in the end still all log in and do their best to save the world.

And it helps that we have devs who generally listen to and try to act on what the players say, standard pvp rants aside.

Petition and it will be fixed. I lost 2.1 billion across 2 accounts, and by close of business Thursday it was all back.

They have occasional issues with email getting "rolled back" during server maintenance, and have always been able to track down the problems for me when I've submitted petitions and told them which character(s) had sent items or influence that had gone missing.

This time they even restored 3 level 10 IOs that I hadn't bothered to ask about, because I didn't want to clog up the system with cheap requests.

Would. Buy. NAOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Let's take "challenge" down to its simplest level: Defeat one enemy.

If a team beats one enemy, it gets 8 shard checks. (Note that if you were a member of that team, you would get one shard check for that enemy.)

Under your proposed system, you beat one enemy solo and get 8 shard checks.

If you are not willing to admit that this would actively disincentivize teaming, then there is zero conversation to be had here.

A "team" and a "character" are not interchangeable units of information when it comes to evaluating drops, especially when the drops are not tradeable. The team is not creating a larger pool of resources for the community, as is the case with recipes and salvage. Only the drops received by an individual matter. Continuing to pretend that the number received by "the team" matters is, at best, fanciful.

The relevant data point is the number of shards received by an average team member, because that is the metric that should be compared to the soloist. I know you love your "8 times as many" argument, but it does not mean what you portray it as meaning, and I find your continued insistence on it to be intellectually dishonest.

I'm still trying to process your suggestion that you might be morally superior to people who team. Frankly? You've flummoxed me pretty completely with it.

Drops from the Chronologist day job badge are actually Pool A, not B. I've gotten Impervium Armor End/Res, Numina: Heal, LotG: Defense, and other worthwhile Pool A drops during my Chronologist bonus period. Back when you got double mission complete bonuses doing Ouro, I'd speed-run the "Couch Potato" badge mission in about 5 minutes to get the merit reward and the possibility of 2 Pool A *and* 2 Pool B drops on mission complete. It was fun to see how many times I could cycle through that mission before my Chronologist bonus wore off.

I never got a purple from Chronologist, but I got (and still get) good stuff from it. The Impervium Armor End/Res was today, along with a (less impressive) Serendipity: Endurance.

Are you actually suggesting the removal of the "teamed-shard" bonus?

If so, I have a hard time understanding why. The bonus exists because, if shards followed the same drop logic as other drops, it would actively disincentivize teaming. People who wanted to get shards would be encouraged to avoid joining teams, because for any individual enemy defeat, they would only have a 1/n chance of getting any shard that dropped (where n=size of team). The change to the drop logic means that each individual has the same probability of getting a drop from each defeat that they would if they were solo.

What matters - perceptually and mechanically - is how many shard drops a given individual can expect to generate with his or her play time. You keep talking like the number of shards the team as a whole generates is meaningful, but it's not, because shards aren't tradeable. The only thing that matters to me is how many shards I get. As such, when you say,

I don't believe that's meaningful. Every time you get a chance for one shard, each member of that team gets a chance for one shard. "The team" is not a meaningful entity when it comes to counting shards, because "the team" is not an incarnate and "the team" cannot use shards. As such, saying that "the team" gets shards 8x faster is not meaningful. If every person on the team were getting 8x as many shards as they would in the same amount of time solo, then I would see a major problem. I'm pretty sure the math doesn't work out to support that, though.

The teamed shard bonus keeps teaming from being strictly worse than not-teaming for folks who are working on their incarnate paths. If teams generate more shards/hour for the average player than a soloist can generate, the answer to your (somewhat earlier) question of why teams should provide greater rewards than solo is two-fold.

1. Teams are more efficient at doing the same thing than soloists are. Last I checked, despite all the discussions of risk vs. reward flying around, the prime mechanic being used in this game is still time vs. reward. If you can do the same thing in less time, the rewards are proportionally better. If teams defeat more enemies in the same amount of time, people on them will get more shard drops than if they'd been solo.
2. The longevity of any multiplayer game is based on people forming connections with other people. Systems that discourage teaming are antithetical to the health of such games. Systems that encourage teaming support its general well-being. It's not just a matter, as some have suggested, of putting a carrot on a stick to get people to play just-so. It's a matter of supporting and encouraging those behaviors which are demonstrably related to the long-term success of multiplayer games, while still providing advancement options for those who prefer not to engage in those activities.

It's not a matter of the devs not providing options for soloists. I prefer to solo. My main has his uncommon alpha and over 150 banked incarnate shards, plus various components. I've another with an uncommon alpha and a couple more with commons. There are options for soloists. We're not being left out in the cold. We're not being ignored. I highly doubt that we'll be ignored going forward.

But I have to agree with Arcanaville's assessment that what has to be prioritized is the team-based content first and foremost for balance reasons, as she noted. Secondly, from my perspective, because that is what helps to create and maintain the social element of the game. I fully anticipate more solo-friendly incarnate paths down the road, but as it stands I'm quite happy with what we've been given as a start.

Snipped for brevity (though you did leave out Titanium Coating for resistance ).

I knew if I read far enough in this thread somebody would say exactly what I had Mids open to say, with numbers.

The other bonus here? The level 50 recipes are generated in higher volume than any other level. The demand may be highest here, but so is the supply. Prices for uncommons really aren't so bad at level 50. Even crafted.

I bought 10 full sets of Thunderstrike shortly before the market merge, just to see if I could. They were all crafted, and I paid 650,000 per piece (because I don't like paying less than the crafting fee). When I've been too lazy to raid a base bin to find the right piece of Crushing Impact, I don't think I've ever spent more than 2-3 million crafted, and recipes can be had for even less.

The goods are out there at level 50, they're pretty affordable, and they will improve performance.

Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?

That seems generally like what I do, except that I care less about having things at an exact level. A level or two in either direction for 1-3 of the IOs in a set is, to me, decimal dust in terms of performance impact.

I remember when inventions came out and I saw screenies of folks' beta builds that included IOs from 27-50 in one power, and thinking, "Man, they're giving up so much!" Except that, in the end, you're not. I have level 50s that I play regularly who still rock off-level IOs from the low 30s in "mixed bag" kinds of sets.

But, to answer your question - I don't think you're doing anything wrong. With patience, you can get exactly what you want. With a little less patience, you can get close enough that you probably won't be able to tell the difference.

I do it completely passively. I put up bids with the amount I'm willing to pay and wait. I don't level just one character at a time, so I can leave a mid-level alt for days or weeks while I go do other stuff.

And if people could do that right now, it'd be a big problem. But even you admit that they can't. You can go on arguing fringe-cases if you like, but at least have the decency to not treat the most extreme exploits as somehow normative.

The fact that AE can be exploited, has been exploited, and will be exploited again is not a reason to gut rewards from it (and I say this as someone who uses it very infrequently). It's a reason to respond more quickly to the issues when they arise than was the case with the monkey farms, which unfortunately had a fix that somehow got tied in with the patch that launched an issue and couldn't be pushed live faster than it was.

Here's the problem. In the last month or so, people have gotten all of the following:

a) a third build (equals more demand if the third build is to be slotted)
b) multiple freespecs (equals more demand if new powers are slotted or old ones are re-slotted)
c) a reason, in the incarnate system, to play 50s who generate twice as much inf as they used to rather than lowbies who put less inf into the system (equals more liquid inf to spend at a time when demand is already higher for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to those above)

That's what we have right now, and all of those things can contribute to price spikes. To blame "inflation" on the AE is to ignore many of the variables that contribute to the overall system that the AE and the market are but two pieces of.

On the other hand, I'd like to take whoever wrote the General Aarons mission out behind the woodshed. 15 ambushes and a lead-out on a Longbow map where the captive stops at every group and gets "re-captured," turning it into a defeat-all?

Thanks. I love missions that take over an hour to solo on my defender, set to +0/1.

I'm going to pause you there. Freezing rain has a pretty substantial -defense component, and she's an EB so probably has pretty effective debuffs. The first thing a defense-based melee toon should do, if she drops Freezing Rain, is move. Get out of it, and kite her until the -def wears off. I was on my soft-capped brute and watched my s/l defense go from 47% down to 9% or so before I dropped down the hill and out of her patch. Standing and slicing isn't going to work well with her.

She's tough, and for a lot of characters she's going to require different tactics than what we may have had to use in the past. I don't see that as a bad thing.

Does "incorrigible" mean the same thing on Defiant that it does on Champion or Virtue? Just curious.

I suspect that, as others have speculated, we'll see some sort of apology with an in-game manifestation. Extended event, etc. I see no reason to assume the worst and even less to imply that they did this on purpose.

There is a non-subtle difference between "asking us" to do something and "providing us with the opportunity" to do something.

Flexibility is good, but using every ounce of flexibility offered us is not a requirement.