TonyV

Young people these days...

I remember when there were no badges (pre-Issue 2), and people ran TFs to get the guaranteed +3 SO enhancement... And we liked it!

Yet another person who doesn't understand basic economics. "They make what you want to buy on the market more expensive, and less available. That's a pretty big negative impact on your game-play." There, fixed it for you.

Imagine if the people who run the U.S. Mint decided one day to start printing millions of extra dollars and go out on shopping sprees. Your logic says that would be great for the economy. The stores they buy stuff from will have a lot of extra money and will spend it, the suppliers where they buy stuff from would have a lot of extra money and spend it, and so on and so on with a net "pretty big positive impact," right? So why don't they do it and just solve this whole recession thing we're in?

I could explain it, but chances are that you don't want to invest the time into thinking about it, you've already made up your mind and nothing I say would convince you that it is indeed a bad idea, and I don't want to turn this post into a book. However, I will say that this kind of thing actually does happen in the real world. It leads to a condition called hyperinfation, and it has destroyed countries because people who, like you, don't understand economics thought that what they were doing would have a "pretty big positive impact."

I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks that having a lot of influence being doled out to a few people is a good thing is just plain wrong. There are a few solutions to prevent long-term massive inflation in the game and make it more casual/normal player-friendly. An easy one would be to add influence sinks. Another would be to simply curb the supply of influence. If they really want to address the issue, they will figure out some ways to make getting stuff you can trade a "point of diminishing returns" prospect, where the rich will still get richer, but not as quickly as the poor.

Someone using the new rep function. It's not so much that I care, but I noticed it when I went to the User CP to change my avatar to the wiki logo. The rep comments are like the first thing you see, and I saw a little red dot with someone's "n00b" comment out beside it.

It's funny, really. I expect to rack up some negative reputation from folks because I can be vocal about stuff I believe in, and no matter what you're strongly for or against, there will always be people who disagree with you. It's just that I didn't expect my first red dot to come from something at silly as this.

I love the negative rep someone dinged me with on this thread with the comment "n00b."

When I posted this, I wasn't testing the forums, old or new. I was gathering information in the development of my PM Archiving tool so that people wouldn't lose their private messages from the old forums. Specifically, I was looking to see what HTML was generated by the various BBcode tags so that I could convert it in the reader, and the easiest way to do so was to post a message with all of the various elements in it. Once I got the HTML, I didn't need the thread any more, thus I edited the post to the "feel free to delete this thread" comment.

So yeah, I got dinged with negative rep trying to help people out. Whatever.

That's pretty much the tl;dr version of my post, and it's a 100% correct insightful observation that a lot of people overlook. It's the equivalent of the U.S. Mint deciding to print a lot more money. It doesn't work, because it's not increasing the inherent value of stuff, only changing the exchange rate we're paying for it.

And why do you need a billion influence?

This is why you "need" a billion influence, and it's flawed logic.

Farmers aren't solving the problem, they're creating the problem. Because of farmers dumping less used recipes on the market, when you get a drop, you can't sell it for more than the stores offer it for. Also because of farmers (who are the ones getting billions of influence through farming), buying the more used recipes on the market costs the billions that people are using RMT services to buy.

If farmers would stop doing what they do, two things would happen. 1) As the demand for valuable recipes and enhancements goes down, the prices would follow. You can't sell a purple Whiz Bango for a billion if no one has a billion. 2) As the supply of what are considered "crap" recipes dries up, the price would also follow, meaning that when you get a Pacing of the Wallaby, you could actually get something for it to put torwards buying the purple Whiz Bango you want instead of just dropping it off at the store or deleting it because you're in a mission. Prices would normalize towards the middle, making it easier for casual and normal players to get stuff they want.

Also, farming has other negative consequences as well. Because they "purple out" their characters a lot faster, they tend to have an advantage in places like PvP zones against others who are just casual or normal players. This, in turn, tends to make those kinds of players avoid those zones. I know that one of the reasons I don't like PvP is because on any given character, the most purple IOs I have is two; it's just not a priority for me, and the few times I've been in a PvP zone, I've been hopelessly outmatched. Not because of skill, but because I run into opponents for whom my holds hardly work, who do a lot more damage than me and take a lot less damage than me, etc. And, of course, let's not forget how stupidly dreadful it is that our broadcast channels are needlessly filled with "lf AE farm/members" drivel.

On top of that, how do you think that the RMT sellers are getting their influence? Farming. Do you think they're learning these skills on their own? No, they're using the very same techniques that are passed around within the farming community, a very "helpful" group of people who are more than willing to give them the knowledge of how to gather the stuff that they're constantly spamming us to try to sell.

Last but not least, it's not the farmers that are driving the prices down; they're not getting their influence from farmers. It is the easy availability of the influence. Look at it this way. If the devs release a new feature where you could play a mini-game and earn twice as much influence as you can in the same amount of time now, prices would drop by half again, even if it were completely unfarmable. Since the RMTers can pull in twice as much influence now, it lowers their own costs by half. Or put into a real life context, if you make and sell widgets for which there is a steady demand for $100, and suddenly an advance in technology allows you (and your competitors) to make widgets for $30, that would drive the price of widgets on the market to around 30% the price they are now.

And by the way, that is most definitely not a good sign. If I had my way, the RMTers would be selling influence for a dollar per. The higher the cost, the better, since that would mean that less people would be able to buy their wares, thus negatively impacting their business model. If we could get it so that it is prohibitively expensive to be in the RMT business, that would stop the RMT spam. As it is, even if it gets to a trillion influence for less than a dollar, all that means is that 1) influence has gotten to the point where it's virtually worthless, and 2) prices on the market have gotten so exorbitantly expensive (likely due to the farmers exploiting something) that casual and normal players simply don't have the opportunity to buy anything without engaging in exploiting the game themselves. That's not a good sign, it's a sign that your game is dead.

I don't know if this will be helpful or not, but three years or so, I was playing with a top-of-the-line ATI card, and I was crashing constantly. I got a low- to mid-range nVidia card that was over a hundred bucks cheaper than my ATI card and have only had one issue since, which I determined to be a problem with Vista, not the card.

If I had to pick one, based on manufacturer, price, and ratings, I'd probably go with this one.

I am psychic, and I see many amusing conversations happening over that phrase.

On a serious note, I don't think it will be too terrible. I mean, today, you have some teams composed of high-level and low-level players. If a few decide to go do RWZ or Ouroboros missions or something, either they decide not to and do something that everyone can, or the lower-level people leave and find something else to do while the higher-level people have at it. I don't think anyone feels alienated about it, or at least, it's not so bad that people are leaving the game over it.

I think that there will be a lot of non-GR players (and GR players doing non-GR stuff) that will keep everything very well balanced.

Oh, and 8-8-0. Those are tomorrow's Cash 3 numbers. You heard it here first.

To me, an "axe" is either a weapon or a guitar, whereas an "ax" is a tool used for chopping wood. I'm not aware that there's a difference in British English and American English between the two.

However, we might disagree on how much exactly a "billion" is. I say it's 1,000,000,000, and that's all there is to it!

As a separate but related thought, I want an Antarctic Lounge. Why are South Polish people being left out? They could side with the Aussies against all of us over which months comprise summer and winter!

Yeah, and I know it too.

One thing that's lacking from this story is the order of events. There's a huge difference between:

1) OP was autosilenced.
2) OP received e-mail warning that if he keeps it up, he'll be further disciplined.
3) OP appeals to the GMs.

and

1) OP was autosilenced.
2) OP appeals to the GMs.
3) OP received e-mail warning that if he keeps it up, he'll be further disciplined.

The former is probably just a form letter that gets sent to everyone who is autosilenced. The latter means that a GM probably looked at his situation and made the judgment that he was, in fact, spamming.

Also, you have to consider the circumstances and how it looks. There was a supergroup a while back called, IIRC, "Parallel Illusions." They all had variations on the names using lower-case L's and capital I's, and there were a whole bunch of them, up to 64 if you do the math. If 64 people who all look like they have the same name come around and start chatting in local chat, it's entirely foreseeable that someone might mistakenly think it's deliberately spamming the channel.

Were you doing something wrong? Maybe, maybe not. However, even if you weren't, you put yourself in a situation where it looked like you were. I'm guessing that what the GM is advising you is that it's probably a good idea to avoid such situations, even if you feel like you're not doing anything wrong, and it's good advice.

P.S. Also IIRC, the Parallel Illusions weren't chatting it up. I think they simply gathered for the spectacle of so many people who looked more or less alike and with names that looked identical gathered in one place. It was actually pretty cool.

That will be the tricky part. There are a few contacts who don't give enough missions to bump the bar all the way up. The City Representative comes to mind, but there might be a few others, such as the Architect Studio Manager, maybe Admissions Officer Lenk. I don't think that it's possible to get literally every single contact all the way up.

Also, be aware that you'll miss eleven contacts right off the bat when you pick your origin and/or archetype. (There are twelve starting contacts, one each in Galaxy City and Atlas Park per origin, plus two for Kheldians, of which you can only pick one.) Some are possible to get only during events, such as DJ Zero and Father Time. Task Force contacts are gettable at any given time, but will disappear after you've completed their tasks.

Anyway, if you want to know if I think it's worthwhile, sure, whatever floats your boat. I'm actually working on something like that for a pet project dealing with the Paragon Wiki. If you do decide to go through with it, good luck!

Here's how I do it.

First, click on "Quick Links" on the top menu. On the popup menu, click on that space between "Subscribed Threads" and "Who's Online." (Why it's blank is beyond me, but hey, it works.) You might want to bookmark that page; it's your profile page that other people see when they click on your name.

Click on the "Statistics" tab, then on the "Find all posts by [your name]" link in the Total Posts section. You might want to bookmark that link too, but if you do, make sure you copy it from the link, because the URL that it sends you to will be a redirect and invalid after that particular click.

In the resulting list, click on the top line in the message box, the line that is in italics. It will likely read "Re: [something]", and it will take you directly to the message you posted in that thread.

There might be a shorter way, though; I haven't completely poked around the forums enough to know for sure.

"Visually appealing" is in the eye of the beholder. I strongly suspect that most people find it visually appealing enough, and probably a fair number think it's downright pretty, but it's much more likely that people who think it's ugly will post saying so.

Personally, I like, as Steiner at Titan Network calls it, "yogurt" schemes, dark text on light backgrounds, but that's just me. I'm in the first category of people above, the theme is good enough for what it does, and I probably won't care one way or another if they change it or leave it the same.

I know I've seen you on the American forums before, I reported someone trolling your posts and I remember your avatar. Did you have your account transferred or something?

Oh, and it's not a state secret or anything, the little project I'm working on is a handy dandy pocket reference for City of Heroes, kind of a miniature "Paragon Wiki," so to speak. Right now, I'm working on getting the contacts module done, where you can quickly navigate to a contact and see their missions (with objectives), where they are, what levels they have missions for, and so on. When I'm done with that, I'll move on to badges, maps, and maybe some integration with the Titan Network sites, but how far I get depends on how much time I get to dedicate to it. In theory, it should be pretty neat, at least a pretty good little project for someone who is learning Objective C and the frameworks for the first time.

Games I'm not so good at. I'm about as artistic as a two-by-four. Pretty much anything I come up with will very likely lie squarely in the realm of utility.

I see it fine. Do you have it somehow filtered or AdBlocked? Can you ping the server it's hosted on from your machine? What happens if you try to access it directly via its URL?

They most definitely do. I think Firefox has supported it since version 0.1, and I know that Chrome has since it started, since it's based on WebKit. (As is Safari, so Mac users have had PNG support for a very long time also.) Opera has supported it for years also. Really, the only browser that hasn't supported it is IE 6.0 and previous browsers.

Oh, there is one thing that GIFs can do that PNGs can't--animate. Of course, that might not be a good thing, depending on who you ask...