UberGuy

Actually, I don't think that's it. I wasn't going to post a single arc experience, but last night I ran a level 40-44 Ouro arc, and I too got what felt like a lot of drops these days - 8 recipes over 3 missions.

I was not set to 1/+0. I was set to 3/+2.

Yeah. I don't really see how these can not be classified as "tankmages".

Fire/Kins are not a class. It's fair to say there are specific primary/secondary builds that outperform their peers. I'd be careful to not make it sound like the entire ATs you listed universally outperform all other builds of all other ATs.

79 minutes was a speed run on -1 level mobs?

And this is "way easier"?

When you do that with the slider, you get no bonus.

When you have real teammates, you get a bonus.

This is trivially easy to prove. Go in a mission with your solo team size set to one. Defeat something. /leaveteam. Change the setting to anything but one. Enter the mission and defeat the same thing again. Compare the rewards. Repeat to your satisfaction.

There is no longer a mission completion bonus for higher level foes. As far as I know no formal declaration was made that this was intentional, but I was told second-hand that a dev said it was intentional in the Beta Test channel on the test server during open beta.

I wanted to address this separately.

Consider one of the common standpoints on why pervasive powerleveling is bad for the game. If you can race to 50 easily, the theory is that many players will consider the game too easy, get bored and leave. There are a lot of counter arguments that can be made, but this is pretty much an industry-wide view in MMOs, and it's shared here.

"Loot" is an alternate progress to leveling. Really kick-*** loot is analogous to getting to level 50. New, more kick-*** loot is kind of like gettng a new level cap. Just like with XP, the devs don't want everyone getting access to the best loot easily, because it is there to be something they are to strive for. The more powerful it is, the longer it's to take, much like reaching level 50.

What you seem to be asking for is a new paradigm in MMOs. That's fine, but the question one has to ask is: is there a compelling reason for our devs to try it?

5M inf a day is 100M in 20 days. Every time you get something you can sell for 10M, 20M, 50M, shaves off chunk of those days. 5M inf a day is pretty much what I get most days if I spend zero merits. (Well, it was until I16 hit and my solo drop rate went in the can.) On good days I get something better.

Merits change the picture dramatically. If you're able to hold out for the long-haul, random rolls tend to be the highest average return per merit. If you're not patient, there are alternatives. LotGs are pretty good short term investments at 200 merits, especially on the Black Market. If 200 merits is something you can put together in a few day's time, these are nice "burst" progress towards a purple or what have you.

You aren't adequately defending this position. So far, what you're saying is "it's bad because I think it is." Anyone who is willing to use the market can benefit from it in this way. Even if everyone used the market in this way, which would undercut the means by which most rich posters here make their money (people using the market inefficiently or ignorantly - the two are not always the same), everyone would likely still get things fastest here. That's not the problem. The problem is that people don't all use it.

So the problem comes down to a large portion of the playerbase being uneducated in some form or another. They think that they can't use the market to get to these goods, when just about everyone in this forum is living proof they can. So we should change the market because people don't know how or don't want to use it?

You got ripped apart about what? Differences in drops or differences in XP?

You have read people posting. I have tested, on closed beta, open beta, and live. I have logs. Those people posting you saw? They are wrong.

Edit: There are bonuses for larger real team sizes. They do not apply for personal "virtual" team size settings.

You're talking to one of them.

Does "using the market" include just selling things you get from playing, including merit-created items?

I ask because of the relevance to the above quote. I have purpled out five characters doing nothing but selling drops. I play a fair bit, and I tend to play my 50s more than anything else, but it's not like I play a ton. I'm a working stiff with a job that usually hits 45-50 hours a week, so its not like I live in the game. I don't farm much, though I do it from time to time. I do run a lot of TFs.

So is selling drops "using the market"? Or do you mean things like flipping, etc?

Unless the bug is inconsistent, this is incredibly easy to test for. It's one of the first types of analysis applied to the situation in beta, and it was quickly discounted. Simply put, a team of size N should result in 1/N drop rate. What we're seeing is nothing like that.

Again, since we're talking about a bug, everything is on the table, so it's possible that sometimes the game gives drops to people that aren't there. Fundamentally, we're never going to be able to resolve that behavior on the client side.

Both were tested for in beta, or rather negative testing was done to ensure that switching to small vteam sizes or to high, low or even con foes didn't change it. It didn't.

I did mention though that the problem might be restricted in a way that makes it obvious to testers, farmers and soloers and yet not appear in larger datamining sample sets. The most obvious correlation in such people is that they all are solo or on small teams. If drop rates are more correct on large teams, and the majority of the playerbase forms large teams, then this problem could be hard to detect when looking at aggregate drop rates across all player activity.

Everything that's higher level than you. It's not specifically toHit debuff resistance, of course; higher-level foes resist everything thrown at them by percentages that increase the higher over your level they are.

This is one of the main reasons to prefer +Defense over -toHit. After all, a significant number of people play the game against over-level foes, at least in the 40+ game.

It's still slowly rising, as it has been since the collapse of things like "meow" farms in the AE.

The most I've seen any rare go for in a sustained way is around 2M, though. That's not been exhaustive investigation, though, just what I see while buying or selling them for my own needs.

Scrappers never provide force multiplication. They provide large force addition, as do ATs such as Blasters, Brutes and Stalkers. Each one you add to the team adds a large amount of damage potential. (Other ATs also provide this direct addition, but generally in smaller degrees.)

Force multiplication means you take what force you already have on the team and, quite literally, multiply it by some scale factor. ATs like Defenders, Corruptors and Controllers have very strong capabilities in this regard, although they also do other things. Adding one Defender to a team of heroes can, with powers like Enervating Field or Tar Patch, cause the existing team to do 130% of its damage without them. Adding a Kinetics character can cause a team to do 200-250% of their damage without them (if they can saturate Fulcrum Shift on the whole team and depending on whether the team's characer's damage buff caps are +300% or +400%). Adding both types of Defender is multiplicative with itself - a team with saturated FS fighting foes on a Tar Patch are doing 260-325% damage.

You're never going to be able to add that kind of damage by adding on 1-2 damage dealers.

I suspect you think this sounds like a great idea without any actual experience in what timeframes things actually sell currently.

It's relatively common that I price something in the 5-10M inf range too high, and it sits on the market for a week or so.

It's extremely rare that something I sell for 200+M takes more than one day to sell.

You're screwing the middle class, there.

We'll tell you as soon as we figure out why you think you have to give up eating, sleeping, and other hobbies in order to make that kind of inf.

Bleeding Stones were just selling for 500 or less on WW. Demonic Threat Reports had 4800 for sale and zero bidding. Most of the commons I listed were barely worth adding to the pile. I think I listed one arcane common at ~500, and the rest at less than 100 and a few at 5.

Yes. During beta, both closed and open, the devs told us several things.

• Mob level is not supposed to affect drop probability
• Virtual team size is not supposed to affect drop probability
• Drop probabilities were not intentionally changed

I have read but cannot confirm a post saying the devs were not seeing these reduced drop rates during datamining done during beta. What this tells me is not so much that there is not a problem, but that the problem appears in ways that are somehow obscured in the way the devs are looking at data. One possibility for this is that the change affects soloists more than large teams, since soloing is about the only way to get clean drop correlation information. I don't know if that makes sense on the test server, though, as it feels like a majority of testing there is done solo.

The devs are not regulating the rate of tickets any more than they are regulating the drop rate of recipes. Per map caps do not control drop rates, though they act as a limiter on the upper bound simply by reducing peak efficiency.

The devs do have the ability to regulate the rate of both tickets and drops, both of which are based on per-mob drop probabilities, through datamining. They perceive the average rate at which items are produced in aggregate, and can control that up or down by changing per-mob drop probabilities. Do not mistake variation in what individuals can achieve with the notion that the devs have control on the aggregate drop rate. Based on how they treat XP gains, and based on how drops are controlled at the individual mob level, it appears the devs are primarily concerned with aggregate, system-wide rates on reward generation. They largely don't care if individual reward rates by player or even build are higher than average unless they exceed the average by so much that they end up heavily skewing player activity.

I never actually claimed that. I said an open market. By that I mean one where people can trade anything, without restrictions such as account or character binding.

I think it's worth pointing out that most real-world regulation exists to prevent fraud, unsound risk, and unfair practices such as insider trading and the like, which can, by their outcomes, deprive people of access to such important essentials as shelter, food, health care, and education. That can't happen in the game. You can't be sold a lemon enhancement. You can't be sold something you didn't expect. There are no pyramid schemes. There are no lending institutions "too big to fail". And you can't pay more to buy anything than you offer to pay. There are no interest payments. So I guess I have to wonder what we'd be regulating? Doing too well? What's the return on investment for that for the devs?

It would serve all the players who want shinies well. It is very questionable whether it would serve the devs well. This gets back to my discussion on players having narrowly focused ways to obtain things. Yes, arguably simply focusing on money can gain you anything, but then again, that's a moving target. The more money people earn and throw at things, if it's consistent, the more the sale price is likely to rise as sellers realize they can earn more profit. That's a self-correction in the mechanism that's likely to damp changes in how long it takes people to earn things, and keep it closer to constant. Contrast that with an IO "store", like merits, which relies on the devs to constantly correct reward rates for individual activities to account for other balance changes.

Why should they care about profit? What do you think is more important to them - how quickly the player base at large is obtaining IOs and shifting the power balance, or how efficiently a small percentage of players is at concentrating the wealth of the rest of the playerbase? What do you think is more important? I can tell you that trying to address the ability to concentrate wealth by increasing drop rates affects player-base-wide balance far more directly, and probably in the direction that the devs don't want.

In any case, when I said "efficient", I meant as a means of shuttling goods back and forth in a system where those goods are generated and distributed randomly. A market system is the most efficient way to transfer goods from people who don't want them to people who do. Inf is just a proxy for the value of the goods which prevents the system from requiring direct barter and synchronous transactions. (I can sell 10 items for 10M then buy something for 100M instead of having to find someone who wants 10, 10M inf items for their one 100M item.)

It can't be helped. Its one of the only ways things around here can earn an "adult" label.

While I certainly won't claim no one in here is about preserving the market as the way to do things, I think you're letting your emotional position cloud some rather logical reasoning about why the market is the best place for the devs to leave these things.

First, you need to define "realistic" in regards to buying IO sets. Absolutely no alternative method introduced by the devs has been what I would consider as "realistic" in terms of allowing characters to completely bypass the market. Instead, they function as pressure valves which allow enterprising players to pick and choose the best methods. For example, buy cheap, highly available items on the market, buy items with radically high market prices with merits, buy rare salvage with tickets, etc. However, using merits or tickets exclusively to try to outfit your characters, while likely faster than relying on random drops, is still a fairly epic process which the market would beat out.

Why would the devs want things to work that way?

Because random drop rates control the average injection of these "carrots" into the game system, and a trade mechanism is the only way for randomly distributed goods to find their way from people who get them to people who actually want them (assuming someone who gets a drop doesn't also want it).

Any system that truly bypasses this random distribution + market delivery channel mechanism on a per-player basis is, almost by definition, going to be more efficient at collecting these goods than the devs would find desirable. This is because if such bypass mechanisms allow each character to focus on obtaining exactly what they want without regard to the rest of the game system. It provides and excellent channel for min/maxing with reduced focus on benefit to the general community.

Remember, the devs are extremely likely to view the rate at which players in general can "IO out" their characters very similarly to how they view the speed with which people can reach level 50. It behooves them to limit it, and so they don't want it to be too fast or easy.

Beyond any dev concern for balancing these market alternatives, there is a player-based consideration. The balance between using the market and alternatives like merits presents a rather classic prisoner's dilemma. Market alternatives risk being good enough that players abandon the market to focus on them, even though having enough people involved in the market actually keeps everyone involved improving faster than the market alternative. But the market is unpleasant to risk-averse or just concept-opposed players, so that has to be balanced in the picture or these people will jump on the alternative bandwagon even when it is a meaningfully inferior option. This is a self-reinforcing spiral - people leave the market, it becomes less attractive, so more people leave, and so on.

So the devs don't want the market alternatives to be too good beyond a point, and the market users don't want them to be both inferior to the market and yet close enough that lots of people bail on the market.

So, you see, people who don't want market alternatives aren't always looking out for themselves in the sense of wanting to keep control. We recognize an open market as one of the most efficient mechanisms for redistributing goods to all players when those goods have an overall supply is managed by the devs for reasons that have little to do with the market itself.

That is very much not beside the point. The very fact that you raise it clouds the distinction between very nice to have and required.

No matter how nice these things are, they are not required. They aren't even required for the game to be fun. That the game is more enjoyable with these benefits does not mean the game is not enjoyable without them. Some of us played the game for years before IOs even existed, including the gap between I6's ED and I9's introduction of IOs. Some of us enjoyed it. Liking the game better with IOs does not make them required.

Saying IOs are required implies that you cannot succeed at defeating foes without them, that it cannot be enjoyed sufficiently without them, or that you will find yourself generally excluded from teams if you do not obtain them. None of those conditions is true in general.

Consider this mutation of your quote.

Yeah, because RMTs are 5+ year vets with badge-laden characters.

Especially people like me, who lacks a single one of the popular farming characters, and who has a whopping two accounts to do high-volume farming with.

You're showing yourself to be epically uninformed about some really common sense things. Worse, you're showing a really bad side by reacting by efforts by others to inform you by name-calling and strong resistance to consider they might be telling you the truth.