Kitsune9tails

Blocking sales based on global ID will not do anything: people with friends or multiple accounts could get around that.

I like the system as it seems to be.

If you don't care how often Wents is used for it's own sake, it works perfectly fine. Trades between friends are still okay, and going to happen anyway. Went's will not bleed money out of the system, or be a safe and convenient way to twink, but it looks set to work perfectly fine to buy and sell at low prices.

High level toons are perfectly safe in using the system for it's intended purpose: unloading items they don't need at a reasonable price.

I'm pretty sure the design intent is to keep prices low, which makes me happy.
And I'm pretty sure that equal value and friend trades are okay with the Devs.
So everybody wins!

[starship troopers] "Would you like to know more?" [/starship troopers]

Maybe make the IO click buff duration a variable that sets itself to equal the duration of the power you slot it into?

hee hee, I can just imagine the "told you sos" from all of the Badge Hunters if that happened...

heh, I just did a Safeguard where I retreived a "Dragoon Ball".

So, just tie B drops to collecting 7 Dragoon Balls...

I like the idea of:

In addition to story arcs, whenever you get a Mission Complete, if you have finished 18 missions and it has been 18 in-game hours since you last got a B drop, you get a B drop.

That way, doing Story Arcs is still the best way to get Story Arc drops, but you are also guaranteed to get them from normal missions. It also doesn't discourage teaming, because you can be teamed for the normal missions.

Finally, it doesn't encourage people to bore themselves into burnout by farming missions or AFKing, because neither will speed up the process.

The numbers can be adjusted according to how plentiful the Devs want B drops to, uh, be.

The thing I like about the rarity in the system as proposed is that is a very different type of rarity than in other MMOs.

If you do a TF, you get a random TF drop.

That is much better than "If you do this specific TF, you get a 5% chance that one of you will get a specific drop if too many haven't dropped today."

Since there are less than 20 TFs per side, and IF the info indicating that each rare drop pool is less than 20 different items, it makes it seem like you might want to run through every available TF once or twice (and do some trading) to get one of everything. As opposed to 20 times for a specific raid to get once chance out of all the raiders to get something.

Story Arc drops drop to the person whose arc it is, guaranteed. Even with Story Arcs being unrepeatable, that's still much better odds than a WoW raid. IF of course, you can do the arc in question in the first place.

In any case, the IOs are specifically designed to be only slightly better than SOs and equal or less than HOs, so it's STILL not like other games, where you actually need the drops for PvE content (so far).

There are 2 possible benefits to rarity:

1) You don't want players to be 'fully slotted' with that specific item, at least not too soon. If B drops are limited to Story Arcs, then you can only get 50 or so per character, ever. Of course, that number will eventually be skewed as people shuffle them from less-played characters onto more-played characters.

For instance: the IOs that give +% to hp regeneration. A few of those per character, or a lot of those on a few characters has no effect on the game. But a lot of those on every character devalues end (and end drain in PvP) massively.

2) Fun for Acheivers. A significant minority of MMO players are what is called Acheivers. They enjoy a game more while they have a chance of doing things 'best first'. For a game to be successful, you want to cater to these folks as well as to the Killers, Explorers and RolePlayers.

It's likely that some builds will benefit more from full IO sets than others. It also seems likely that the level of a character will be a big factor in which IOs you want where, and depending on the availablilty of specific IOs versus specific HOs.

In most cases, you will want to slot just enough IOs to get a desired effect. Nothing wrong with that.

It's likely that after I9, it will be even more true that there is no "best" build/slotting combo for a character. Personal Preference Uber Alles.

Changing the Arc completion bonus so everyone gets it is not a solution...if the B drops were originally tied to single-player, non-repeatable content for a reason in the first place.

If everyone shares the reward for arcs other than their own, it becomes farmable, which may be other than what the Devs want.

If farmability is not an issue, then your suggestion works, depending on how long it takes them to write the code.

It's similar to an idea of mine:

When you receive a Mission Complete, if it has been at least 18 in-game hours and 18 different missions since the last time you received a B drop, you get a B drop.

If the 5% chance of Build up IO is in the B pool, then the level you get it at doesn't matter. But it might not be available at level 1.

No one's ripped that suggestion apart yet. Maybe I should PM it to Castle or Positron.

Posters asked for time/reward, and here it is. Now don't say the Devs never give you nothin'.

If all that the Devs want to do is reward time spent on content, then here is a rough suggestion, ready to be flamed and ripped:

In addition to Story Arcs, B drops can drop from any Mission Complete, at a rate of 1 per 18 hours (per character). They only drop if the user has completed at least 3 different missions in that 18 hour period.

[ QUOTE ]
My whole issue with PVP or PVE is twofold...
1 ) If a PVP zone will get you a IO or a drop after 2 hours of gameplay and a player take 8-9 hours to complete the Story arch, who comes out ahead? (besides if you know those in the zone you can "friend bounty" all day long and get boatloads)

2 ) Story arch's are non repeatable. PVP zones you can live in and continually get the drops.


[/ QUOTE ]

This is the crux: If B drops are designed to be limited to under 100 per character (hence attaching them to unrepeatable content), then no method of making them unlimited content works: they would need to be nerfed.

If B drops are not designed to be limited (and are therefore no more piffy than c or D drops), then we are all getting upset over nothing. At that point, you might as well add B drops to the C and D tables and call it a day.

[ QUOTE ]
Again, I have to ask why does an extant level 40+ have to wait for these drops to drop, percolate through the "economy", and be found at Wentworths or the Black Truck? What game mechanic, balance guideline, or reasonable economy makes that approach (which I deem inherently unfair) a good implementation?

[/ QUOTE ]

The question is: what % of players do the Devs want to be fully outfitted with these.

It sounds like the Devs may have learned a lesson from Hamidon here. If these are as great as they seem and in unlimited supply, a small % of players will farm them 24/7 until they are perceived as being unbalanced and Uber, thus triggering another 'nerf wave' a year from now.

A small % of them dropping just makes the grind longer and results in more player burnout. The player needs to B guaranteed a drop, but not an infinite supply based on how much they grind. The players would hate the grind, the Devs would hate the 'power inflation'.

UNLESS you are limited to acquiring 100 or less of these drops IN YOUR LIFETIME. Now, everyone only gets 10 or so of the really uber recipes that they really want. Only with some serious wheelin' and dealin' are you going to get more. The pool B slotters never become the 'new standard'...everybody has 5 to 20 of these slotted with various degrees of efficiency and less than .1% of active players have more than 30, let alone 88.

This also explains why you only get B drops from your own Story Arc missions: you can't farm other peoples missions to go above the 100 chances per character.

I think it's a great design.

Look at the +20% Regen IO Recipe. If you get 4 of those, it's awesome. But if they are 1 drop out of 30 in the pool, and you only get to go to that pool 100 times ever, what are your chances of seeing more than 2?

Now this does encourage people to roll alts and run them through Story Arcs. But what's wrong with that? It may encourage more soloing through Arcs, but it will also encourage more teaming for TFs and Trials.

A viable alternative would be to limit B drops to something like 1 per week.

I think the idea is that foes that 'require a group' *cough Ultimus cough* and occur in public areas will not drop Recipes, to avoid having camping issues occur.

AVs and GMs that appear in instances might be a different story.

I don't mean to offend anyone, but you have to do content of x type to get the rewards inherent in doing content of x type.

If you pay $15 per month to do nothing but costume contests under the Atlas Globe, you are not going to get rewarded for defeating foes, completing missions, doing task forces, story arcs, or Trials.

...oh wait, never mind, you will, because those things are given out as prizes.

Never mind, carry on.

That is only a partial solution.

That still leaves out people who would have done more Story Arcs if they had known they were mission out on rare loot; including people who helped others who did story arcs rather than their own.

A better solution than Flashback (for this specific purpose) would be to allow Mayhem/Safeguard missions to count as Story Arc completions, but still cap the number of total B drops you can get on one character at whatever number they want.

Alternately, I can see allowing infinite B drops from Safeguards/Mayhems in addition to Story Arcs if they instead limit how often you can get them. Put a 72 hour timer on them or something.

That way, people wouldn't be running them nonstop looking for 1% drops.

This all assumes that B drops were intended to be limited per character in the first place. If not, then it's no biggie how you do it.

The problem is that the effectiveness of the Story Arc Invention drops were probably designed around them being non-repeatable content. Since only get one chance at each one, they are probably not one-shot recipes.

Any solution that makes them infinitely accessible will probably also get them pre-nerfed into one-shot recipes and/or toned down in power.

This thought makes giving out these drops based on souvenirs more attractive. But that still doesn't address the disparity betweeen the number of Story Arcs villains have versus Heroes.

It really sounds like we need to just wait for B drops until content can be written specifically to give them out in a way that's fair to both old-timers and new, villains and heroes alike.

They have been heard. Just don't expect to see a Flashback system this year, whether or not they delay I9 to implement one...

You must focus upon the purpose of the thread in order to use it's power. Let go of all the petty bickering and thread jacking and the way will open before you.