Sardan

Agreed, that's very annoying.

Start running HeroStats and get some real numbers. It's been well proven that players notice misses more than hits, so if you think it's missing more than normal get a few hours' worth of real data. No dev will pay attention if you say "I just believe it misses more".

That's my understanding as well. At some point if this bothers the devs enough they can close the loophole, but my guess is that it's on about page 25 of the to-do list and will never percolate to the top.

B_C, first I appreciate you coming in to clear this up and I appreciate the great service that vidiotmaps provides. I just donated for the first time. Keep up the good work, and I totally understand you using an ad service to help defray costs. Hopefully your next one will screen their ads better.

I agree with that as far as it goes, but it shouldn't be an auto-join feature. A team lead should be able to list his team as LFM, at which point it'd show up in a Team Search window, along with any comments the leader has set, plus other stuff like leader's level, team size, mission level, and mission difficulty setting (there's a big difference between a mission set for +0 vs +4!).

But the leader ought to be able to set filter criteria like you can in the existing Search window. So for example you could leave it as "all ATs, all levels" or you could be more specific. A character doing a team search who didn't fall within the level range or match an AT that the team lead set would simply not see the team listed on his Team Search screen.

Also, no autojoin function. You'd have a "request to join" button that would send your name, level, AT, and optional tell text to the team lead. The team lead could accept or deny the request just the same as an individual can accept or deny a team invite. Having that type of control would prevent a scenario in which a 4th tank joins the team and the team lead immediately kicks him.

Oh and if I've GIgnored someone or used the player note feature and given them 1 star, please have my team never show up in their Team Search window. It'd save me from going "Welcome to the team! Err, oh wait, it's YOU..." *kick*

Someone upthread mentioned it's like an 8MB download. That might be enough for a story arc or two I suppose. When GR is available for download, expect it to be many hundreds of MB. It's going to have all kinds of new textures, mapsets, etc.

If that 4th slot in Stamina is a regular endmod, it's being wasted. Instead, buy a Performance Shifter Chance for +End for the 4th slot.

Oh yeah. The OP was talking SD and I missed that Mylia switched to talking about SR. I have both SR and SD, and I agree SR is easy to softcap inexpensively. Has way stronger defense debuff protection too. With adequate (read: absurd) investment, SD can be extremely survivable and due to Shield Charge and Against All Odds it is an offensive powerhouse. It also looks cooler with a big friggin' axe.

You continue to ignore the difference between generating currency and accumulating wealth. You yourself pointed out upthread that you make about 50 mil a day from farming and 300 mil a day from marketeering. That 300M is real buying power even though it's not newly created inf.

Are you familiar with the concept of money supply in the real economy? Wal-Mart pulled in over $400B last year. Did it create brand new dollars to do that? Did it increase the money supply by $400B? No, it aggregated money from millions of people mostly on the lower end of the economic spectrum. (The money supply did grow, but it grew via other means.) According to your thinking, Wal-Mart shouldn't be able to buy anything because it merely moved dollars around; it didn't actually create them.

What I'm trying to stress is that two separate things are going on: yes, inf is being generated but also inf is being aggressively collected by marketeers and farmers. My post earlier about a hypothetical 10B/day entering the game economy was just pointing out that it's entirely reasonable to suppose that a huge amount of new inf is created each day. But completely separate from that is the fact that a small number of people are quite skilled at accumulating inf (whether newly generated or not) and they're driving the high end market. Casual players don't buy purples. They never did even when prices were much lower.

Yes, we already established that. The some one is known as "the entire player base".

This is true too. No one has ever been able to purple out a character through casual play, nor will that ever be possible.

It's probably because the voices in your head don't have forum logins.

Hmm, maybe it's because I went for soft capped defense plus high recharge that my experience was different, but I'd say it was stupidly expensive to soft cap, not stupidly cheap. Capped def on an SD tank is cheap, but capped def on an SD brute isn't.

How can too much recharge mess it up?

I don't monitor this forum much, but I think it must come up fairly often. When I started my first Dom there was quite a lot of talk about this combo, which led me to create one. I agree, incredibly fun, easy to solo and great in teams too.

That's just utterly wrong. It's entirely possible to understand and even predict how a game economy operates under various conditions without knowing the actual numbers. In fact, the entire academic discipline of economics has to cope with this constantly. That's why you see things like GDP numbers for a given year being adjusted even years after the fact. I'll agree that no player has a perfect understanding of the game economy, but that's not necessary in order to understand underlying forces that can drive trends.

There's an amusing sex advice columnist/podcaster named Dan Savage. He has spoken or corresponded with thousands of people seeking his advice over the years. He made the observation that inevitably when someone seeks his advice and says "Oh Dan, I date person after person year after year, and every single one is a complete jerk! They're all awful, every one!" that the common denominator there is the person complaining. So if every thread you are involved in degenerates into "the usual cluster @#$!", guess what? It's YOU THAT CAUSES IT. These forums are full of the most helpful and polite gamers around. If you look at your threads and the threads of a guy like Fire Kin Master (take solace that you don't come close to his nuttiness), you'll see people first trying to help, then becoming annoyed when rationality and decorum are thrown out the window.

I can guarantee some folks have learned things from this thread, but apparently you're not included in their number.

Oh look: I just facepalmed myself so hard I knocked my cerebral cortex out of my cranium!

It's funny that if that's what you were trying to find out, that the first time you mention it is now.

As has been explained many times in this thread, WE ALL UNDERSTAND where influence enters the economy.

I'll ignore explaining yet again the whole "inf generation vs inf sink" stuff, since you've been immune to that the last 10 times it was explained in this thread. Instead let's focus on the difference between inf generation and inf accumulation.

The total market for purples in this game is quite small compared to the tens of thousands of people still actively playing. Thus small changes in demand get reflected in the price of purples, but so what? It's like observing that a collector Ferrari went for a record price and going "why are all car buyers suddenly so rich?" Plus, prices for rare goods can spike regardless of whether overall money supply is growing or shrinking. All it takes is a small number of individuals who have been successful at accumulating wealth who are chasing after rare goods.

Let's run a small thought experiment: let's say that 10K players log in each day on average. And let's say that because that's a mix of all level ranges, that they generate about a mil of brand new inf each on average. That's 10 billion inf a day entering the game economy that didn't exist before. Some people are very good at accumulating that new wealth, and they in turn end up buying rare goods like purples.

Honestly, I don't know why this is so hard for you to grasp.

My favorite Roses/Violets poem is:

Rose are red,
Violets are blue,
This line doesn't rhyme,
And neither does this one.

Okay, it's not poetic genius but it used to make my daughter laugh every time.

Yup. I used to occasionally farm but it was a hassle getting the fillers. Now I can run my brute or fire/kin through a mission set for 8 if I have just a few minutes of downtime. In fact, if I want to play but know I won't have enough time for more than a single mission I'll sometimes do this type of soloing because it can take so long to assemble a full team. I'm guessing the net effect of this is that there's now a legion of casual farmers like Organica and me.

I agree with your hunch. Vets have 50s. 50s generate obscene amounts of inf compared to low level characters. And I am not talking about getting expensive drops; it's been repeatedly stated that an expensive drop is just moving inf from one character to another. I'm talking about Fulmens' point about how 50s literally create tens of millions of inf via defeating large numbers of mobs per hour.

Final point: the amount of inf in the game is ever increasing. The accumulated inf spirals ever upward. A natural result is that prices can spike up not because players have suddenly generated new wealth but because they're deciding to use some of their massive accumulated savings.

Arctic Air is unbelievably good. Due to the -recharge it essentially halves incoming damage. And then there's the lovely confuse on top of that. My only gripe is that damage avoided is not really obvious. The Emp defender still gets all the applause for the green numbers above everyone's heads. Sigh.

It all comes down to situational awareness. I ran a mission recently with a fire controller that had such high recharge he opened every fight with Flashfire and Fire Cages. In that situation I didn't bother with Ice Slick because the mobs were already taken care of. Likewise it doesn't bother me if another controller starts using immobs on my Ice Slick once it's safe to do so. The only annoying tactic is when we're fighting a dangerous group like Arachnos, I open with Ice Slick, then some noob does an immob which immediately enables all the Arachnos to shoot back, killing him and endangering the rest of the team.

I thought that you can't do this in arena any more? Didn't they change it so you don't get rep in arena and to have a chance at a drop you have to earn rep when you do the kill?

I predict that as game design matures as a profession there will be entire semester long classes on this topic. It's not at all simple. Fundamentally in an MMO most players want character progress, however that's defined (typically moving up a skills tree and getting more effective loot). Players generally want this to happen as fast as possible--remember the AE farming craze? That's a natural and predictable outcome of the way MMOs are set up. Most players will gravitate to the path of least resistance/fastest progression.

Game designers want a game that keeps players entertained over the longest period possible. Give the players super fast character progression and you risk boredom and burnout and there goes your subscriptions.

Also, where game designers really earn their pay is by stepping out and giving players stuff they don't want because they have a long term vision of turning it into something better. Did players want ED? The combination of ED and set IO bonuses gave the game a lot more depth. My main gripe is that ED happened many months before IOs, so A+ for concept but F for execution. I think it's safe to say that most of us would not like to have IOs taken away and ED rolled back.

But sometimes devs swing for the fences and miss badly. PVP anyone?