TyrantMikey

I may be missing something here in all this, but I've seen numerous mentions in this thread of folks who could not afford the listing fee for their drops. This confuses me somewhat.

A listing fee is split when you post an item for sale: You pay half when you post it for sale, and half when you claim the influence. Further, because of the way that our market works, I know that I can get a very rare drop (say, a Deific Weapon) and offer it for sale for 250 inf. This makes the listing fee ridiculously low (something on the order of 7-13 inf). Finally, once posted at that price, it will be sold (usually immedately) to the highest bidder, and any remaining fees deducted from the sale.

It seems to me that you only hurt yourself if you sell really high. It's not a matter of impatience, really. We have a blind market. Lowest bids go to the highest offers, and it's true whether you're buying or selling. That's just how it works.

This understanding (coupled with a never-sell-less-than-the-vendor-will-buy-it-for mentality) has made it very easy for me to accumulate lots of inf on many, many toons. But, I readily admit, I could be wrong--and my understanding of how this works could be fundamentally flawed (I am not an economist). If it works differently, I'm a willing and eager student, and I'd be happy to be corrected.

Please consider adding a Field Trainer to Striga Isle. The nearest one is in Talos, and he's a bit of a jaunt from the Ferry.

Thanks.

EDIT: Duh. A Feld *ANALYST.*

Having read the replies, and understanding the difference between combat level and security level, I still have to say I fully agree with the OP about the lost story-telling opportunities.

I think it would be nice if there were junior superhero organizations in the COX universe (Teen Titans, anyone?) that were sometimes in over their heads, and needed big-league help from time to time. And they didn't always need saving, per se, but assistance cracking a tough case that turned out to be much larger than the evidence originally indicated. Because we are supposed to be big guns with the appropriate security clearance, we get called in to provide that assistance (or the occasional save).

(Edits highlighted in yellow, based on corrections kindly brought forth by other posters. I can be taught! )

(Warning: Free Associating to follow. Just looking for thoughts and comments.)

I love instanced missions. I really do. But I have to say, I miss the days when you'd see heroes street sweeping and patrolling.

If memory serves, some time ago, patrol XP was nerfed to encourage folks to do missions. This was incredibly successful. Now, you hardly ever see anyone street sweeping, and thugs rule the streets. There is also a perception that the game is dead because the players aren't visible on the streets (they're in instanced missions).

EDIT: Correction. Patrol XP was not nerfed. A bonus for completing missions was granted, and debt within missions was halved.

Then, along came AE. With the advent of AE, we had tons of new missions (good or bad), and new reward options. So players had yet another reason to do missions, but there was still no incentive to street sweep. So, between contact missions, radio missions, and AE missions, players see (what I imagine to be) a very tiny fraction of the online population outside of instances at any given time.

I believe that the reason for this is because there's no incentive to patrol aside from badges. In fact, you're penalized for patrolling because you'll earn less XP over time for doing it than you would if you were doing an instanced mission.

My point (and I do have one) is that I think it may be time to rethink the imbalance between non-mission XP and mission incentives. It might, in fact, be a good idea to incentivize patrolling in some way above and beyond badges. Doing so would bolster the perception that the game is not, in fact, dying, simply because more players would be visible (assuming they chose to patrol).

EDIT: The problem, as I see it, is that there is no balance here between missions and patrol; with the nerf still in place, there's really only one viable option and I *believe* that datamining would show a disproportionate (and potentially unintended) amount of XP gained in instanced missions versus XP gained from patrolling. I would hope that the developers would hope for balance here. Even if you took the mission incentives into account, you'd find that the number of kills is completely out of balance. But I am not a dev, and I can provide no statistical evidence for this.

I remember the early days of the game, when lots of heroes were visible in the streets all over a zone. As more heroes were present, more mobs would spawn. These days, many zones (like Steel) feel sparsely populated. It may not be numerically true, but it just feels that way. Traveling through a zone was a lot more fun when you would pass rampaging battles on the side of the street between villains and heroes, and not simply pass ten groups of Outcasts, each of which had a significant chance of deciding that they wanted to know what was in your purse or wallet.

Anyway, thanks for hearing me out.