Sardan

They might've seen a Mind Dom putting Heroes to sleep, perhaps. There's no way to hold them very long.

Spitting, you set up your case well. I agree that any user-generated content system lives or dies by the quality of its ranking system. But I'm not sure I'm understanding the entirety of your proposal. Is the limit of your suggestion to just add aging? I agree that would be a very important improvement.

If aging was incorporated, I assume it would apply to date of arc publication, not just ratings? If so, you'd want to think through how the system could be gamed by an author constantly doing small tweaks.

I'd also be up for experimenting with novel ways of arc promotion. Set aside some real estate on the side of the search screen for a Google Ads-style purchased promotion space. Let people bid inf to have links to their arcs appear there. Just as with Google, it'd be obvious that the sponsored links were paid for. Currently the only way for an author to promote an arc is in the forums, which most players don't read. You'd probably have to limit it to one ad per global account, to prevent someone like Fulmens from owning all the ad links forever. He'd do it just because it's a new inf sink!

EDIT: it might come across that I'm joking about the benefits of selling ad space. Most of us recoil from that idea, because we associate ads with spam. But when I think of a new author who really cares deeply about an arc he's written and has no way to promote it, no way to get it to stand out from the crap that is cluttering the system..... that would be deeply frustrating. It just seems like allowing people a a way to wave a virtual flag and say "Look over here! Try mine!" is a nice option to offer, as long as it's clearly marked (search engines have proven that people get mad at search results that invisibly add purchased results to the top of the list, hence the need for purchased ads to be clearly marked). For people deeply offended by this, the AE could offer an option (off by default) to disable showing ad links.

That was fast, thank you!

I vaguely recall a post made by Smurphy or TopDoc in which they ran a farm repeatedly and measured the results. The conclusion was that purple drops, as rare as they were, basically were the biggest factor in inf/minute when farming.

I wasn't able to find that post. Can anyone point me to it, if it hasn't been purged?

I just made a suggestion about a change to the badge system. Those of you who've been following this thread may want to check it out. While I'm not a dedicated badger by any means, as I followed this thread I was powerfully reminded that there's a segment of players that really get into it. This new world of reduced badge requirements is good for folks like me who mainly want to get accolades in a reasonable amount of time, but if you really enjoyed dedicating yourself to the minigame of getting badges, it must seem like they're hollowing out the game.

Adding badges like the "Master of" ones are a great idea, but the problem is that a badger can get those very quickly, then it's a long wait for the next release, hoping for more badges. But if those new badges are very modest "kill 20" of something, again that gets done super fast.

So my suggestion is to extend the Ouroboros method of awarding challenge badges to normal content in a way that wouldn't be labor intensive for the devs after the initial coding was done and could be used to award several variant badges for any TF or arc.

Y'all might think it's a terrible idea of course , but I was trying to think of a system that would give you something to work towards that wouldn't be over the day after a new release, yet wasn't simply reverting to the old "massive numbers" style of badges.

Some long time badge collectors are bummed about the changes in i16 because they feel (with justification) that the new lowered badge requirements devalue their past accomplishments.

I like moving away from "kill 500 of X" type of badges. They're a test of nothing but one's patience. The devs have stated that Ouro-style "challenge" badges are what they'd like to offer more of moving forward, and i16 will feature two new "Master of" badges.

But the problem with the "Master of" approach is that it's an entirely separate badge and thus it's not very extensible to additional challenges because you'd have to create a new badge for each accomplishment.

For example, let's say they want to create 3 badges for a TF for beating 3 levels of time challenge, another badge for not using insps, yet another for picking "buffed enemies" and another for "team is debuffed", etc. It gets to be too much.

What'd be nice is a standardized way of decorating a badge for various challenges and have the challenge decoration show up under a given badge. Each challenge would increase your badge count by one but the devs wouldn't have to come up with brand new names and artwork for every single challenge.

So let's say you get the badge for TF X. You'd see that name/badge in your badge list. Then you do the TF again with enemies buffed. You'd see a standard little glyph for buffed enemies appear under the TF badge and your badge count would go up by 1.

Perhaps in i16 players who agree with Vanden will be able to tone it down enough to satisfy him. Personally I like the f/x a lot, so I don't think a BaBs-level adjustment is warranted.

One important thing to keep in mind in this type of discussion is that Castle doesn't balance powers against other comparable powers. He balances entire powersets. He intentionally allows outliers to give flavor to a set but tries to make sure that all in all there is rough parity. So often (not always, but often) this type of discussion ends with Castle saying in effect "well, I could certainly improve power X as you're asking me too, but then I'd have to weaken powers Y and Z. You cool with that?"