Miladys_Knight

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No At can take out a Ruin Mage before he gets his bubble up.

Point taken though.

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Several of my controllers can, my sonic/ice blaster can, my arch/dev/munitions can, my Ice/MM can, my nrg/nrg/force can.

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They have the use of their secondary to help get the team back on it's feet by taking out a problematic enemy, that they normally wouldn't be able to.

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The defender doesn't have that ability. In fact I would suggest that you try it. Try using an SO'd or Generic IO slotted defender to do something like:

Take out a Malta sapper before it drains all your endurance.

Take out a Tuatha Champion, Freakshow Swiper, or Behemoth overlord before he can use his self heal.

Take out a red cap Hooligan before he dirt dives into a Feind.

Take out a Natterling before he can combine into a Bull Natterling.

Take out an Immunes Surgeon before he can heal himself.

Take out a Rikti Guardian before he can cast AM on his friends.

Takeout a Ruin Mage or a Crey protector before he can get his bubble up.

Take out a Paragon Protector before he can MoG.

The list is longer but this would be good for starters. Oh, and please do it with out using a control heavy secondary like sonic or Ice.

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Personally I'd like to see Vigilance turn into a scaling mez protection based on team health(modified to include the defender themselves)

So if the team is hurting the defender will be able to do what they can. Nothing annoys me more than getting mezzed on my defender when the team needs me.

Besides the scaling Mez protection is closer in function to the actual meaning of vigil.

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And how does that help the Sonic or FF defender that all ready has mez protection (and now has mez protection against sleep effects making them WAY overpowered since it eliminates their only weakness) but now no longer has any endurance discount with a powerset that makes end gurgle down the drain at an alarming rate?

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/Unsigned

Defenders are the most overpowered AT in the entire game, bar none. They don't need an inherent, much less a buff. Defiance was reworked because Blasters were hurting badly. Defenders? Far, FAR from it.

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It wouldn't really be a buff. It's more of a rework of the inherent. The actual endurance savings would be less than current vigilance especially at the beginning of each fight when you haven't built up any vigilance buffs.

It fixes the problems solo where the average defender isn't overpowered at all and is, in fact, a bit underpowered especially if you count on vigilance for end reductions while teaming and have slotted that way.

It doesn't make the defender any more powerful on teams. The average extra recharge benefit is going to be some where around 15% which is pretty much going to eat up the endurance savings (which is also going to be around 15% [about a DOs worth] good planning of an attack chain using low end cost buffs first may allow a bit more to be eked out). Meaning the defender is going to have to give up a little bit of the buff/debuff, recharge, damage slotting to make room for some end red slotting.

What it does do is make the defender's endurance useage consistant instead of all over the board making the defenders effectiveness the same regardless of team size, compostion, skill or even the AT combination the defender selected.

The little bit of extra recharge isn't enough to make the long recharge buffs like Adrenaline Boost recharge so much faster that it becomes overpowered and it barely helps the short recharge buffs like force fields or Speed boost at all (it would shave .26 seconds off the recharge of unslotted Speed Boost and even less on slotted Speed Boost)

It will make a slight difference on DPS with out changeing DPA or DPE and then mainly on single target blasts with medium-long recharges.

It doesn't change the strength of the buff/debuff the defender provides at all so no buff there. What it does do is make the defender a little less powerful on large skillfull teams (where they are slightly overpowered) at the same time as it makes the defender a little more powerful solo and on small or less skillful teams (where they tend to be a bit underpowered).

It simply changes the inherent to make the defender better balanced not buffed where they don't need buffed.

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Like to see a place to store recipes

[/ QUOTE ] Except for a few rare pool As and purples, the pricey recipes are all Pool C and Pool D.

When the devs introduced Reward Merits they did give you the way to store recipes. Since you can hold 9999 merits thats 499 recipes worth of storage from random rolls and at the very least 39 buy exactly what you want recipes.

You don't have to worry about merits being eaten by the market in 60 days since they are stored on your person. All you have to do is hang on to your merits until you are ready to use them.

To be honest that's more recipe storage than I thought we would ever get from the devs. I was totally surprised that we were allowed to store more than 250 merits.

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Would love to hear the reason why this needs to be put in _right now_

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Is next week good for you?

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I think that when it should be put in should be more inline with the speed that fixes are usually put in. Let's compare to CoP. That means that at least 10 issues should go by before this "fix" goes in that would be good for me and consistant too.........

Add it to Julia Pria in Cimerora and the Vanguard Quarter Master in RWZ. For single side content you can enter Pocket D or your base so no need in other zones on either side.

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So should we expect in i15 that we can't buff/debuff teammates now?

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That's all ready happened. Check out I13 PvP and Diminishing Returns.

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To me at least, it seems blatantly obvious that the RIP set IOs were *never* *intended* to boost the Recharge of powers belonging to the summoned pets, and once it was realized that they did, that was prevented from happening (well before those sets even went Live).

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I don't find this statement to be reasonable.

Going back to VS. VS accepts the RIP sets. VS has a limit of one pet out at a time, a duration of 60 seconds, and a recharge of 60 seconds. It can't really benefit from the +rech portion of the RIP sets except for increased attack speed.

Gun Drone which has a 180 second recharge and a 90 second duration but which can have multiple copies out could benefit from the recharge in the RIP sets but can't slot them.

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As I say in <a href="/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=Dev&Number=132589 50&Searchpage=1&Main=13242168Search=true#P ost13258950" target="_blank">this</a> post, the reason that Voltaic Sentinel accepts RIP sets appears to be that it accepts Pet Damage sets and Recharge enhancements.

Gun Drone does *not* accept Pet Damage sets, and was thus not considered for RIP sets. Instead, it can get Recharge from the Ranged Damage sets that it *does* accept.


I'm not really sure what that has to do with my statement being reasonable or not though.


However, claiming that RIP sets improving the Recharge of pets' powers was *intended* would seem to require that:
1) The devs are lying.
2) The devs accidentally made changes directly contrary to this goal during i13, without any apparent reason.
3) The devs did not bother undoing this change before i13 went live (or even up until now), even though it would have also had the significant bonus of also making the *other* aspects of the IOs (Damage, Acc...) work.

Now *that* would seem unreasonable.


edit: I should add that for 3), undoing the change was apparently also within the realm of what they could do since they did it with the patch that contained the change discussed here. It would thus appear that an added condition would have been that it was a pure coincidence that those two changes were added in the same patch.




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I'm simply saying that the devs have had (in some cases multiple) miscomunications within their own departments.

A few examples:

Procs in taunt auras. (This and Tanker Energy Melee are reasons that the triumphant insult proc is both mag 1 and turned off and most likely will never be repaired)

Stealth IOs and the negative stealth kludge.

Knockback changes put in before additional solutions to the nerf were put in game.

Gausians unique not being unique, patch notes, and in game help conflicting and being incorrect in the past.

I13 PvP.

I understand why people are anxious about these slap dash solutions, its because sometimes it takes literally years before the devs get around to resolving a problem.

Cathedral of Pain (off line and un-repaired since I5), base raids, (off line in I13 and I14 and who knows how much longer after that).

I too hate spending a bunch of inf to IO out a toon only to have a feature that has been in game for years nerfed or changed so that the feature no longer works with my vision for the character.

If I've spent 500 million inf on IOing out that toon that means that the devs have esentially caused me to waste 500 hours of game time spent accumulting those IOs. Nerfs/changes like this are customer service nightmares. They tick off and drive away your long term customer base.

I believe that the dev team would do well to take more time to actually fix the problem than slap a quick nerf bandaid on that may or may not get adressed again until the wound festers.

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Recharge intensive pet sets. I understood that these were created to increase the firing rate of the pets that they were accepted into. What exactly is their purpose now?

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That was never my understanding of what these sets were created to do. They are to increase the recharge rate of the summon power for the pet.

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Then why does Sparky accept these sets since they do absolutely nothing for this pet?

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The criteria for making a power accept RIP sets appears to basically be:

A) The power already accepts Pet Damage IO sets.
B) The power accepts regular Recharge enhancements.

So, the reason Voltaic Sentinel accepts RIP sets is simply that it fulfills both condition A) and condition B).
There's no specific requirement on "how much benefit" a power needs to gain from a specific set. In some cases this leads to situations where some people may feel that a given set confers very little in the way of benefit for a given power, and apparently that is the case here.

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Which highlights my point exactly. There is no consistancy in pet rules except for the inconsistancy of "flavor". It's really hard to balance numbers around flavor with out some kind of standard guide lines, which pet powers lack at the moment and have since I4 and earlier.

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To me at least, it seems blatantly obvious that the RIP set IOs were *never* *intended* to boost the Recharge of powers belonging to the summoned pets, and once it was realized that they did, that was prevented from happening (well before those sets even went Live).

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I don't find this statement to be reasonable.

Going back to VS. VS accepts the RIP sets. VS has a limit of one pet out at a time, a duration of 60 seconds, and a recharge of 60 seconds. It can't really benefit from the +rech portion of the RIP sets except for increased attack speed.

Gun Drone which has a 180 second recharge and a 90 second duration but which can have multiple copies out could benefit from the recharge in the RIP sets but can't slot them.

What I said before still holds true. Pet rules need to be made consistant (much like what was done with blaster primaries and defiance) instead of hasty changes being made that have varying effects with the different pets in the game.

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The only time the recharge in Sparky would have any benefit is if you are defeated and recast Sparky again after getting back up. You might be able to get him back out again in 30 seconds instead of 60 depending on where you were in the recharge cycle when you got defeated.

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Recharge debuffs cast on you, perhaps? It does happen. Quite a bit. I've been in plenty of fights where I've had my global recharge below -30. Fun times.

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You can easily get that much +global rech with sets, base empowerments, hasten. I personally have never been recharged debuffed so far for so long that I couldn't recast Sparky again before he expired. If I get recharge debuffed that much I'm usually defeated rather than merely unable to recast Sparky.

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damage, end reduction?

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Blood Mandate and Sovereign Right have better numbers than Expedient Enforcement in Acc, Dam, and End. Expedient Enforcement has slightly better set bonuses than Blood Mandate (unless you are specifically looking for +positional Def bonuses in which case Blood Mandate blows it totally away) but IMO aren't worth giving up the Acc, Dam, and End values to get.

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Recharge intensive pet sets. I understood that these were created to increase the firing rate of the pets that they were accepted into. What exactly is their purpose now?

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That was never my understanding of what these sets were created to do. They are to increase the recharge rate of the summon power for the pet.

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Then why does Sparky accept these sets since they do absolutely nothing for this pet?

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Sparky accepts them but post nerf gets absolutely no benefit from the "recharge intensive" part of the set or the recharge aspect that's a part of the IOs in these sets.

[/ QUOTE ]As has been said several dozen times already, that recharge will *still* allow you to get the pet out more often. Which was the point of these sets in the first place.

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Um, no it doesn't. Sparky's recharge unslotted is 60 seconds. Sparky's duration is.... 60 seconds. Sparky is set to allow only one pet out at a time. So how does the recharge (post nerf) help in any way shape or form?

The only time the recharge in Sparky would have any benefit is if you are defeated and recast Sparky again after getting back up. You might be able to get him back out again in 30 seconds instead of 60 depending on where you were in the recharge cycle when you got defeated.

Haven't read the rest of the thread except for spots here and there but my thoughts are these.....

Sparky was buffed a couple issues ago because it was under performing. It's not targettable (so it can't be destroyed), it accepts recharge enhancements, it has a finite duration, you can only have one out at a time, and it's recharge time matches its duration with out slotting, so the only reason that recharge is even allowed is that you devs know it was there to speed up the firing of sparky's blasts. In essence this nerf nullifies the buff that Sparky received so he's back to the same level of underperformance that he was pre-buff.

Auto turret was a poor performing pet. It took too long to cast, was interruptible, and was only mobile through the "unforseen" use of recall friend. When you fixed the griefing exploit from using TP foe on Malta turrets you made the old turret non-viable. It's "buff" was in the current form on live. Self mobile instead of fixed and able to accept recharge since it is both destroyable and has a shorter duration than recharge. Recharge still has a function here but the firing speed nerf makes gun drone not worth the power pick again. (If you want to really make gun drone worth it make it identical to the Malta Gun Drone. 1 second of non-interruptible cast time. Even at the current endurance costs and with the recharge nerf this would make it a viable power.)

Lightning storm was always good, even back in the days of SOs only. This change for Lightening storm just takes it from Uber back to good again so I have no reason to complain here.

Recharge intensive pet sets. I understood that these were created to increase the firing rate of the pets that they were accepted into. What exactly is their purpose now? Sparky accepts them but post nerf gets absolutely no benefit from the "recharge intensive" part of the set or the recharge aspect that's a part of the IOs in these sets. Since Sparky isn't targettable it's not affected by recharge slows pre-change anyway.

Gun Drone "could" actually benefit from the recharge in the intensive pets sets and the purple set but it can't slot them. What gives here?

What's the chances of getting some consistancy on pet rules before taking the proverbial machette to all of them?

How about waiting an issue (it's all ready in place on live can it be worse by waiting an issue to get a real fix toghether?) and actually getting consistant pet rules for all pet class powers (taking destroyable and non-destroyable into account) and making a game wide improvement instead of nerfs of various strengths?

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The real problem here is not that the markets NEED to be merged, but that more people need to play villains. Wouldn't it make more sense to make villains more enticing to play? The market merger is a one sided WANT from people that play villains and feel they are being cheated because heroes get more stuff to pick from.

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/e Queues Nethergoat

I've posted this solution before but here it is again.

1) Solo, vigilance provides the defender no benefit.
2) Vigilance rewards the defender for poor (reactive) play.
3) Certain power sets will see little or no benefit from Vigilance (Forcefields, Cold)
4) Non-healing primaries have little or no control over Vigilance.
5) Low defender DPE (especially for single target attacks)
6) Endurance management for defenders varies based on team size, compostion, and skill. Solo and small teams the defender needs different endurance reduction slotting than on large teams.

The solution to all the problems.
[*] Decouple Vigilance from team health. This needs to be done for the same reason that Defiance was decoupled from blaster health.

For the rest make Vigilance a scaling buff similar to Defiance.
[*]Every time a defender activates a primary or secondary power the defender gets a 5% reduction in endurance costs and a 5% increase in attack rate (powers recharge 5% faster). This buff lasts 10 seconds and the defender can stack up to 5 of them. This addresses all the main issues listed above.

1) Vigilance functions the same no matter what the size of the team is, including soloing.
2) A proactive defender receives maximum benefit and they get just as much benefit from blasting as from buffing. A poor player or "aura rocker" receives less or limited benefits.
3) All power sets receive identical benefits from vigilance even the power sets that prevent damage by buffing or debuffing.
4) The defender is in control of their own vigilance management even if they have no healing power.
5) The defender's DPE and DPS is slightly increased but not their DPA (a sticking point for the devs with current Vigilance).
6) Endurance management remains consistant regardless of team size, composition or skill.

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I haven't purchased an enhancement weaker than a lv25 IO since I9 launch >.>

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I have. I sell luck charms and get 40-50k each out of them and then turn around and buy level 10 accuracy IOs for 10k or less apiece.

Edit - I haven't done this since the devs added beginners luck though.

Getting your crafting badges requires creating more of one type of enhancer than one character can typically slot. The left overs get placed on the market by the badgers for much less than cost (they get to recoup some of the cost that way) to clear needed inventory space to continue crafting.

Crafting badges and alt twinking account for blue side high luck charm prices not some collusion of evil marketeers.

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lets see, the nearest event that caused this surge was the winter event. and of course dual builds. i havent seen anything drop yet.

and here is where the real problem lies: for all of you that can afford things on the market whitout having to wipe the sweat off your brow, take a magical trip back to the land of the new/casual gamer. ever wonder why there are so few people that use the markets? when going in as a new/casual player you get overwhelmed by the prices for the things that are suppossed to be low lv things.

the problem is that just because you all have this obsured bank role, doesn't mean everyone else does. or that everyone should play that way. i have talked tpo people who i've seen go into WW/BM and left 5 secs after being there and asked them why and gotten this exact reason: everything is to high priced. that is from new/casual gamers. not my own feelings as do use the markets.

but seriously, roll a new toon, or not, and go look at the market as a new player with no knowledge of flipping or anything like that. now think about merging the market from the red side look, the one bill and i are using, if blue already has more money then red side, who do you think will win the Market war? blue side every time.

until red side can equal blue side buying/selling power, there is no way i can support a market merger. and seeing as how red side will never equal blue side, then no merger will ever happen.

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Well lets see. Since there is beginners luck and slotting TOs isn't worth the effort or inf in the lower levels I frequently slot only what drops and sell every thing else I get. I can sell 1/2 the Luck Charms I get (not to mention the spell scrolls, spiritual essences etc.) and have more than enough at level 12 to slot a complete set of DOs.

If I want to twink an Alt I have to wait around for my wife to sign on to make a transfer. Using the market for SELLING prior to level 12 I can make more than enough to set up a bank roll to start what ever I want to do for set IOs when I get to the level I start slotting sets (typically around level 32).

Since I9 I haven't had to twink an alt. I can earn all I need through the market just by selling drops at low level with out a bit of performance sacrifice. I have started alts on 3 servers that I didn't have a presence on and have a crafter on each of them with out even using the market for an influence transfer.

All you have to do when you see that the prices are high is have the lightbulb pop on over your head and become a low level seller instead of a low level consumer. It's easy as pie on blue side to make a crap ton of cash by doing just that.

Red side that's not the case. Frequently to get starting cash on red side you have to do arbitrage (my wife calls them junk runs) that exists because of selling badges.

Your complaint is similar to the high school kid that graduates and gets a minimum wage job in the caviar plant.

"I can't afford caviar and champagne!"

He's going to have to work in the caviar plant at minmum wage selling it and live on beer and pizza until he makes enough money to go to college get a degree and get a job that pays well enough that he can afford caviar and champagne.

There are too freaking many people in the world today with an entitlement mentality.

It's like pitching a fit that you can't have your tier 9 secondary power at level 10.....

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The devs have gone to great lengths to add code to artificially separate the sides. The most recent example of this is the one that prevents you from setting a mission unless all team members are in the same zone. This was done to prevent hero players from playing villian content in coop zones and vice-versa.

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Thankfully, this is not true - what you are talking here is a nasty bug, not a feature. It is a real pain in the [censored] bug too.


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It is indeed true. I did not say it wasn't a bug. The separation code is indeed meant as a feature (exploit fix). The inability to set a mission without everyone in the zone is the bug. It's also a bug that may not be able to be coded back out if they can't figure out how to leave the exploit fix in without it and it may not be easy to do in any case.

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Positron stated that initially that Heroes had existed for several years and villainside was in its infancy. He stated that initially they wished to keep the markets separate but might revisit the topic at a later date. At the time, datamining showed that because Heroes existed for so much longer there was much more wealth accumulated heroside and it was thought that Villains would be unable to compete. Clearly, villains would have no problem competing with hero buyers now.

Then probably a year or so after the markets were created Ex Libris stated that she preferred a more dynamic market place (unmerged) than a more stable market place (merged). This opinion is very rational and based on economics. A merged market is more stable. An unmerged market is more dynamic. These states of the market are due to increased competition. More competition is more stability.

I believe my memory is accurate on these two statements. If my post is misleading or stated in slightly the wrong way than, anyone, feel free to correct me.

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You won't find the thread it's long since been eaten by the forum monster.

I don't have the exact quote but since the devs never visit the market forums Ex Libris was sent in to scribe Positron's comments.

The statement made was that heroes had too large a head start on villians in terms of influence and salvage for him to ok a market merger at that time. It didn't preclude a merger in the future but was not going to happen at that time.

Uberguy was quick to point out that the second half of that statement was bogus since base salvage (which now no longer drops) came into existance at the exact same time as villians.

Invention salvage wasn't added until I9 so no head start there either. Some folks think he mis-spoke or perhaps was mis-remembering. I think he was just shooting from the hip and didn't want to go to the trouble of looking up the actual data.

Ex Libris stated that her personal preference (not her professional viewpoint) was the red side market because it was easier to make inf there and that she had made multi-millions there by taking advantage of those fluctuations in the market.

Since that time the devs have released statements that it is the same game. BaB said that there is a single field that denotes whether a toon is a villian or a hero.

The devs have gone to great lengths to add code to artificially separate the sides. The most recent example of this is the one that prevents you from setting a mission unless all team members are in the same zone. This was done to prevent hero players from playing villian content in coop zones and vice-versa.

The 2 games (that are actually the same game) have been coming more and more together all the time though. There hasn't been more than a smattering of one side or the other content added since I7. It's all been coop content or both sides content and BaB has said that we can expect more of that in the future. They are unlikely to add more content to only one side.

Mission Architect will allow content to be played by any faction on any server so the games are being merged more and more as time goes on. I for one wish they would get to it and remove all the artificial divides. The main ones that cause me the most trouble are the artificially divided markets and the inability to gift a villian teammate an awaken in coop content.

Artificially divided as they are now it is a detriment to coop play, PvP, and marketing unless of course you are exploiting the lower market population red side to earn influence.

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Yeah. We should just trust the economists. Got any CEOs of banks to go with them? They've done such a wonderful job in the real world, they couldn't possibly guess wrong...

I do love the bit of "blame the players" vibe going. At least you mentioned holding on to reicpes instead of salvage. Know why my SG doesn't deal with the market, but passes stuff around to each other?

Because 60k for a luck charm is f'ing stupid. Because I'd rather have a friend have that nice Armageddon proc for their tank than a bunch of numbers nobody but I can see.

Oh, wait, must be exploiting something then, right? Just like my listing recipes low is seriously damaging supply... even if they don't sell for weeks on end. Yeah, theorycraft! Really matches up with the real (game) world!

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Most of the anti-merger crowd fall into 2 groups. The Role players that wouldn't sell to the other faction and the exploiters that don't want to lose out on the opportunity for profiteering.


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*snort* right. Go on with that. Just be sure to finish flipping something up to a higher price.....

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Well Bill even though you are being sarcastic you have for the most part hit the nail right on the head.

Most of the economists I listen to were predicting the current economic situation. Some of us moved our finances around and didn't suffer much at all. (Others actually increased their porfolio). Also CEO's /= to economists. The root causes of the economic situation can easily be traced to government interference in the free market and the main issues were caused during the Clinton and Bush II administrations. They are both equally to blame.

There's no blame the players vibe coming from me. The market is as it is because of the way the players use it. The problem arises when different players have differing and sometimes conflicting goals for the market. (Badgers, crafters, farmers, PvPer's, marketeers, and the poor, downtrodden, common, blue collar, "average" player)

The market on both sides is controlled entirely by the players. There is no outside agency of any kind involved in our CoX markets (excepting the RMT Spammers). The devs do not add "items" to the market and they don't take them away either (they do expire after 60 days in the CH but again that is a player responsibility to take care of their goods much the same as it is a person's own responsibility to manage the food in their pantry or refrigerator so that there is no spoilage).

I wasn't talking about giving things to your SG mates. I was talking about storing away something that you have no current use for (you can take you in the broader sense of you all rather than a single individual). Giving your buddy an IO recipe that he's going to use isn't a problem here. If he wanted one he could get it from the market or get it from you either way the demand was satisfied with exising supply.

60k for a luck charm. So are you calling the person buying it for that price stupid or the person selling it for that price stupid or both? The second line in my sig is the basis of all economics and it's been known for centuries. Our market demonstrates it every time that a transaction completes.

You don't have to use the market at all for luck charms. I've run several tests and in the range the luck charms drop as long as you fight a mixture of arcane and tech foes you will eventually receive all the salvage you need to make all the enhancements you could use from level 7-25. If you only run arcane content you will have more than enough of the "hard to come by salvage" (The caveat to that is that you have to run all the content on heroic. Running it on higher difficulty reduces the numbers of drops below the satisfaction threshold on tier 1 goods though not on tier 2 or 3).

Listing goods below the going rate enables flipping. What actually damages supply is vendoring goods. Vendoring occurs for 2 reasons.

1)Arbitrage and selling badges (those 2 things go hand in hand actually).
2)Finite numbers of transaction slots.

I don't need to flip anything. As a crafter I can buy salvage and create common IOs for much less than a player that hasn't memorized them can create them. I can sell that IO on the market for more than it costs me to make it at the same time that the player buying it spends less than he would have had he crafted it for himself and he doesn't have to waste any time at the market trying to figure out which pieces of salvage he needs for what recipes and what a good price is or messing with a recipe when I do it in bulk.

I've made a billion inf on the market since I9 came out on that alone and I can't see how that harms anyone can you? I trade a little of my in game time to make some influence and provide a service (I believe that Fulmens does the same thing). I don't see it as any different from "work" in the real world.

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oh, then blame the impatient for the high prices, can't forget that.

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Are you saying that we should blame the patient for high prices? Even in the real world its the impatient that over spend. As an example, I never buy new technology the day or week or even month that it comes out. Mass production, efficiences of scale, and reduced demand from all ready satisfied customers serve to drop the price a significant amount by the time I buy something. That also has the advantage to me of having the impatient work out the unforseen bugs in a product with that company's customer service department before I ever purchase it.

If I have a piece of equipment that still works for it's intended purpose as well as I need it to work I continue to use that piece of equipment until that's no longer the case. Then I buy a replacement. I don't have to have or even want to have the new stuff the instant it's available. It's not well affordable at that time.

I do the same thing in game. I never purchase new IO sets the issue they are released unless I see an opportunity to do so for less than the value I assign that IO. If I get one as a drop I'll use it but by the time the next issue comes out all the impatient people that cranked the price through the roof have purchased the sets they want and the price drops significantly. That's when I start looking to respec.

How do you manage your IOs and in game budget?

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look, all your theory of economics classes from college taught you was theories. doesnt mean that is how it works. if you increase demand w/out increasing supply(if you look at the markets, they are basically mirror images of each other for supply/demand) prices do not go down, they go up. even if suplly goes up(which inthis case, supply for high demand items might jump a whooping 3%) the demand has increased by at least 2 fold causing prices to go up.

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What are you talking about? If you merge the markets, demand and supply go up proportionally. Demand and Supply are based on relative population. The market would grow. Both demand and supply.

Seriously, what makes you believe that only one side of the ledger changes?

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What you are talking about is turn over and volume and you are absolutely correct about it's effects on price stability. The other factor at work in an anemic market (red side especially) is buyer confidence. With lower total availability (supply is a bad term to use here since people misconstrue it's meaning, ratios are the same but volume numbers means that fewer are being produced in a gross [or in total] sense rather than a per capita sense) you have hoarding and the quite correct perception that you "may need the item you found later and there won't be any available at any price in a resonable amount of time" this causes players to hang on to useful IOs and recipes that they aren't using rather than place them on the market.

Add in that market slots are finite (another contributor red side of low availability almost a double ding) and you compound this problem.

It's a catch 22 that results in a downward spiral of availability at the same time as there is an upward spiral of price even though the drop rates are no different from one side to the other.

A market merger will nearly triple availability for redside players while increasing blue side availability by about 33% but it is a net gain for both sides and it is completely indpendent of drop rates and supply which haven't changed at all.

Peterpeter did an excellent write up about this effect in one of his Scoop columns. Smurphy is a real life economist and has posted extensive info about this subject in the Market forum.

In short the players that benefit the most from an unmerged market are the ones who are exploiting the lack of availability on the redside market.

Most of the anti-merger crowd fall into 2 groups. The Role players that wouldn't sell to the other faction and the exploiters that don't want to lose out on the opportunity for profiteering.

Ok, so I was playing the other day and I finally figured out what it was about the run AI that is broken for me and why it feels clunky.

Supression. Yup that's it. In a battle especially defeat alls and prevent X from escaping (the prevent 30 fir bolg from escaping mission is a good example) supression is the problem.

Mob A attacks you. You retaliate (maybe with an attack that takes 2 or 3 seconds to animate) and the AI causes the mob to run just as you begin the animation. By the time you can attack again the mob is 80 or more feet away and out of the range of even most ranged attacks.

Your only option is to give chase and the mob is steaming away at full speed [u]because they aren't supressed.[u] Because you do supress, you will never be able to catch a mob before it gets away if you can't burst them to defeat just before the run AI kicks in.

It's annoying in the same way that the old stun bug was. A mob could still run away at full speed even if they were stunned simply because if you hit them while they were in motion their movement didn't supress.

Supression is a counter intuitive mechanic and at least for me has always been immersion breaking. I understand why it's in there but to be honest supression should apply to the mobs as well. It would then at least be consistant and many of the major annoyances with supression would be minimized.