Siolfir

Aren't you depriving a village somewhere of their idiot by posting here?

Ack! My eyes! Troll showed me his rack!

*runs off to wash eyes out*

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I see I see, well I'm having a helluva time fitting text into a avatar I'm making >_<

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The huge rack just won't squeeze into 80x80...

I've tried.

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Why are you trying to make a bunch of spices into an avatar?

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This bug affects PvP only. Why would Castle bother fixing something for six people?

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Last I checked, it still affects PvE as well. At least the DoT's aspect of it does.

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I can state with certainty that it affects PvE on my Elec/Nin.

Placate boss who is getting up from being knocked down from Thunder Strike (no attack started because it's impossible).
Boss gets purple glowy-head animation.
Boss takes a few steps away.
Boss turns around and thwaps me while AS is still interruptible.
Stalker curses loudly, queues Havoc Punch, mutters about how this still is broken.

The good news is that the LR+TS took out pretty much everyone else, though...

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What you see on the boards is only 10% of the data that will be migrated. We have found that the most data intensive and hardest area for us to transfer is our personal messaging system. We are working on a system that should enable us to move over messages for any active accounts, and we are also taking under consideration accounts that have been active within a certain time frame.

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Translation: we're in ur mailbox, movin' ur mail...

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This process is taking us a bit longer than normal due to limited internal resources for our team. So I'll put a move on things and hopefully we'll get our UBB's maintained within the next two weeks. The Community Team is running in critical operations mode for the time being and that is why many of you may have noticed some of the normal things we do on the forums slipping a bit.

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Translation: NCSoft is now hiring, please visit our job site.


Hm... but if I don't use read receipts, how will I know that my ideas are being laughed at by Castle and BackAlleyBrawler?

Oh, well. *wanders off to clear inbox*

Also: wanted to echo the request for a possible timeframe - are we looking at January, February, or Soon?

Concept is listed in the first post; ideally all of the characters know each other, however distantly, due to being on the same squad.

It's based in the Victorian era, which is why the concepts are listed for "thematic" characters; those are your 'careers'. As for levels, anywhere from 1-4 should be fine. I know that I just finished the tutorial, ran to WW to drop off the large inspirations, and then headed to the sewers, so Aluriel is barely into level 2. If you start at the high end of the range, the rest of us will catch up fairly quickly in the sewers anyway.

Sign up! You know you want to!

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Hurm.

Does this mean the Refugee team on Infinity is going kaput?

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Not until January... it was always supposed to be a time filler until this team started up, and something that I wanted to do at some point. This upcoming Tuesday we can do a respec trial and if someone else has any ideas for the folllowing week feel free to suggest them over there.

And Blood_Spectre, if you'd like to reroll feel free. Nobody's locked into anything yet, although the only real problem I can see with 3 Tankers on the team is that Aluriel isn't going to die quite as often for using Blazing Aura. Well, okay, and maybe a bit less damage.

Did you know that bumping threads is against the forum rules?

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Oh, and Jan 7 2009 is a Wednesday. Do you mean that?

G-

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There you go again, using logic on her.

You know how she feels about that...

Aluriel.

And since I was asked to host it, here's Patches.

Try to guess what they are!

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Now about the PGT, seriously people need to chill with this. That proc thing on PGT was horribly broken and folks need to admit this. I hardly ever talk about saying something needs to be nerfed. I am in fact very anti-nerf, but the PGT thing was insane. Traps is fine after this. The range thing on the trip mines was a bug and is fixed now no one needs to be [censored] about traps.

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I'd be content with Poison Trap working how it did at the end of i8. But it was nerfed last issue, too. I don't care about the procs if it actually, I dunno, holds things. I wanted to make things puke, instead I'm the one feeling sick to my stomach as the whole spawn just ignores the green cloud and runs right past it.

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Hey, not trying to argue with you here - from what I can tell, the change coming can only help you out.

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Yes - I've said as much in the threads about the merit system.

My only real complaints stem from the fact that other people (who haven't already milked the current system to get the recipes they're looking for) are going to have their rewards reduced due to people (like me) who intend on milking the new system to get the exact recipe I'm looking for, and that some of the merit costs for recipes don't accurately reflect the interest in having them (ie, some are drastically overpriced, some mildly overpriced, and some IMO are underpriced).

Costs are a relatively easy adjustment (likely just changing a spreadsheet) and the amount of interest in an item can be found using comparative prices on the market - the %chance for each pool C to drop is identical in each level group, so consider the supply a constant and then demand is the variable causing price fluctuations. That they have the ability to determine this quickly and haven't done so has led to several people wondering about why things are priced how they are: as I said before, junk recipes are still going to be junk. It's just that you can skip your chance to get them.

At the very least, purely IMO, you should have the choice of a random roll at the end of each TF/SF; whether this is through lowering the cost of the random roll or through setting a minimum value for them doesn't matter. What does matter is that if they truly are going to datamine the times, the devs are going to find most of them will be below 20 merits after the others end up being farmed - my estimate if they're going to include each speedrun in the average will be that the numbers for the Tarikoss SF and Hess TF are representative of the numbers you're going to see.

Katie Hannon is a special case in that even if you require leading Amy out in the second mission and removing flight from Katie in the last mission, you're adding probably around 5-10 mins total - still under an hour for nearly every run. But it also has a higher number of AVs per run (10 vs the usual 1 heroside), so you can argue a risk/reward situation there.

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Wow. So... they are worthless for you, because your definition of "worth" is greatly skewed due to what you already have. Good to know.

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And current market value of what I can sell it for, but once i13 goes live that's a more or less moot point.

If I can make more inf running missions than speedrunning TFs and selling the recipe (specifically on the BM since I play villainside most of the time), getting something I can't personally use on a random roll is a waste of time.

Edit: Not that I expect some people that are still equipping multiple characters to skip random rolls - for some people who have a lot of characters that for whatever reason don't have many of the IOs they're wanting already it's not a bad option - although still worse in i13 than on live due to nontransferable merits and requiring longer TF/SFs to get a roll; I've only stated that I personally won't roll anymore and expect that many other people who are in similar situations - looking for a very limited number of particular recipes - also won't. In my case I have a 3-in-52 chance of getting something I can use, that's around 5.8% and 10 rolls is a really poor way to meet those odds.

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Then add in the items that he didn't include in his list that could be useful to you, Siolfir... or include the ones he did simply for market value. Your choice.

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If you'd rather I get extremely specific, I can trim out all but LotG +7.5% recharge, Posi's Blast 3-way, and the Decimation 3-way. Those are the only ones that I don't already have extras sitting in the bin. Yes, that includes the Numi and Miracle uniques - I have 2 Numis and 3 Miracles in base storage right now just waiting for the characters they're going on to level into them. What about alts? Well, unless I migrate to another server (unlikely - the group I play with stays on Infinity), I'm out of slots and don't plan on buying more. My next freebie comes July 27, 2009; I don't anticipate that I'll be needing a large resupply before then.

I'm counting the pool C recipes that I either have currently slotted, or plan on slotting. And the vast majority of it is junk I'd rather never see.

As for converting it to inf using market value - as others have said in this thread, merits are more valuable simply be being harder to acquire than inf; why would I buy something that's useless to me simply to make 1-5m that I could get just as easily farming mobs and have a chance to get purple IO drops also?
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For all the people who have claimed to be "Good at math" or similar, and have stated that Pool C is "full of garbage":

I counted!

I don't know if the new IO's keep the roughly 1:2 good:bad ratio.

But 12 rolls looks better to me, assuming the market doesn't dry up and blow away, than one LOTG.

And speed-TF'ers are going to do that math. Or one of them is going to do the math and the knowledge will spread.

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Looking at your list, I can trim off eight that I personally never use and wouldn't particularly want. So now you're down to 11 of 52, which means that 78.8% of pool C is crap - as opposed to the 80% claim that people made up off the top of their head.

It also gets worse as you lower the level of the roll and add in more "who the heck wants this?" recipes.

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Does anyone else see the fundamental contradiction here? I've seen many statements from people that "Pool C will shoot through the roof" and that "nobody will take random rolls because they are worthless".

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I disagree that pool C will shoot through the roof, except for the desirable recipes that are already somewhat valuable.

There will continue to be little to no demand for most of the pool C sets, simply because they're in rare powers (Sleep, Confuse, Fear, Teleport, heroside Pet Damage) or powers that are frequently skipped and/or if taken hardly ever slotted (Snipes, Taunt). Those will remain low in price - often less than what vendors will pay villainside - and still take up a large percentage of the pool C recipes.

So yes, the random roll isn't worth it for many people; the high-end recipes (Numi, Miracle, LotG) will likely stay close to where they are in value and some of the others will rise, and speedrunning high merit-per-hour runs and buying them will get you those faster than multiple rolls will; depending on what the value goes up to for things like Posi's Blast, Scirocco's Dervish, or the Celerity or Unbound Leap stealth recipes goes to it may be more worthwhile to aim for a Numi/Miracle/LotG and just sell it on the market for inf.

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So you'll get your 100 merits, but miss other content along the way including the awesome Faultline arcs.

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So I'll get 100 merits and 9-10 levels of exp, at the cost of skipping arcs that I can go back and do for merits later and dealing with CoT, Vahz, and Clockwork - all of which are really fun to confuse?

I'm not seeing how gaining even more levels is a problem, here.

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A: You can earn an infinite number of merits through Ouroboros by running your favorite story arcs over again.

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Will these arcs get "nerfed" if it is determined later that people are just running the same arcs over and over for the non-diminishing merits?? Basically... will we get punished if we're operating within the current rules even if its not what you all intended for the system?

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Yes.

See: KHTF, Eden Trial, Tarikoss SF.

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The problem is weighed against casual teaming as in no one will want to bother doing insanely hard AV mishes when they can grind Freak Paper/Radio mishes all day.

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Hey, they run Council missions too!

At this point I think it's a fair assumption that the merit system is going live as-is, and may or may not be adjusted (probably downward) sometime before i14. I'd like to see some adjustments made but I'm just trying to be realistic, and the Q&A gives some of the reasons but reading between the lines also confirms many of the things that several people don't like about the system - that they're not accounting for the effect on the market as they just assume that everyone's taking random rolls; that they'll datamine speedruns and reduce rewards at a later date; and that they don't feel that balancing rewards around a small minority of the playerbase is out of line.

That's not even going into the reduced rewards compared to what is currently on live to penalize players for not playing in the developer-preferred playstyle (read: only completing the objectives and not lollygagging along the way).

While I appreciate the chance to have our concerns heard, the replies don't leave me with much hope that something will be done about them.

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Poster: Wuigly_Squigly
Q: Would it be better if the reward of merits we're timeX spent on said TF, instead of the current: This tf is long, this tf is medium-long, this tf is short, categorizing? For example, you finish a 20 min katie or w/e and get 5 merits or something, whereas you finish that same katie but take an hour you'd get 15 merits, essentially the longer a tf takes, the more merits you get?

A: Well, this would leave a lot of room for exploitation. Players could complete all but the last objective in 20 minutes. Sit around for an hour and 40 minutes and then finish to get the additional merits for doing nothing. So there has to be other factors other than how much time you've spent doing the TF.

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How about:

Datamine long it takes to run through these TFs actually fighting everything in sight.

Assign a "bonus merits" that equals your ratio of merit/hour minus the current default awarded meirts.

See how much XP/Inf is granted in average during both types of run and again, get the difference of xp/inf granted from one version to the other.

Now grant extra merits to people that earn xp above the short run grant, but no more than the max run would grant based on xp/inf granted for killing.

I apologize for my bad english right now, alt-tabing between work and this , my point is to get an xp/inf grant measurement that will grant players extra merits should they not rush the mission and actually stop to fight but set a cap so that players dont just go about farming the mission that is the most easy to herd.

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I still like the idea of representative runs, each weighted equally; one "speed run", one "kill on the way to the objectives", one "kill all", and so on with a couple of different team makeups and builds.

That way the speed runs work to counterbalance the kill-all runs, and you end up with something closer to mid-range instead of weighting the speed runs so heavily simply because they're run more often by the same group of people.

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QUESTION: How will you be looking at merits for story arcs with PUG teams.

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Can anyone explain to me how this is different than the current setup with the reward window and the arc bonus XP only going to the mission owner? This is what they made shared missions for. (now, some aspects of sharing mission completion don't work as well as they could, I'll grant you...)

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It's not different other than the scope.

Merits have a defined value greater than the exp/inf bonus and possible choice of DO/SO due to the ability to accumulate them to purchase some of the most expensive IO recipes in the game.

So while many people won't care about someone getting a little extra experience since they'll catch up quickly enough by running the missions at one level higher while the mission holder is getting less proportional experience than they are, they may be upset if someone's only selecting their arcs so that they can get merits while the rest of the team gets nothing (barring simultaneous completions, which often has issues given the order that missions are given even from the same contact).

Meh. I was expecting something less linear in the reward structure, honestly; something with a minimum number for a TF, and then fractions of that value for other difficulties.

These numbers are just purely made up, but as an example:

Katie/Cap/Eden/Respec Trials: 10 merits
Manticore/Sister Psyche/Operative Renault/ITF/etc: 12 merits
Positron and similar "long-ish" but not "zomg-there-goes-the-day" TFs: 13 merits
STF/RSF/Dr Q: 15 merits (first two for "difficulty", last one because it's just horrible and needs a bribe to be done)

Set the cost of a random roll at 10, and keep the expensive uniques around where they are now in the 200-250 range, so that the rolls represent a reasonable chance of getting what you want if you use the same amount of merits on rolls vs the exact recipe. They already have the problem that you can't set their level and it's not guaranteed.

This would keep the current "1 run = 1 recipe" standard, and if you were doing some of the others you'd accumulate a few merits on top of it. You could also skip the recipe and choose to build up merits faster, but not quite at the rate they are now.

It also doesn't overly penalize people due to speed runs, since it's not a linear increment based on time. I'd also leave in the 3-hr timer per alt, so that the speed runs are limited as much as they are currently.

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I think you should base the amount of merits rewarded by the average time a TF takes, rather than what it can be sped to.

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Except that they didn't, really.

They provided a huge amount of weight to the small percentage that speed runs multiple times - case in point: Eden. Do you honestly think that the average group of players is completing it in 10 minutes, or is that just the speed runs?

They need to not take the average of all runs being done, but take the average time across each account (or, run them a variety of ways and take that average time).

I agree that Katie in particular is still a short TF and likely wouldn't go up much if it went up at all, but some of the values they have are just way off for others - both high and low.

I expect that I'm going to hoard merits for a while. I have 3 different builds in Mids that are only lacking purple sets and LotG +recharges from being put together. All told, I'm aiming for 13 of them - and that's just for one of the builds for each of those characters.

Random recipes being 1/10 of a LotG isn't efficient for me when I know through experience that random rolls don't get me anywhere close to that percentage.