UberGuy

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It's possible with the last patch that since you can now choose 'Regular' drops with AE missions that is recipes/salvage/base salvage that the market might start to come down again since the supply of items may start to go back up again now that people have the choice.

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You could always choose that.

It was just filed away somewhere that apparently a lot of people didn't notice it.

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I still don't think the system is flawless, though. I think that it can be improved. I believe, and this is one of the things that nobody here will agree with, that there should be multiple avenues to achieving IO's, which are really the end-game content right now. I also believe that those avenues should have rough parity: no one way is so much better than all the others that the others might as well not exist.

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As long as a player-managed market is one of those ways, it will always be the most efficient way.

That's the whole point of markets. It's why they spring up in the real world, where we don't need devs to institute them.

The only way to break our game market down so that it's not the most efficient way comes down to two rather extreme scenarios.

1) Change the alternative mechanisms such that they are so easy to use that there is no added value in trading goods on a market. For example, remove random drops and change everything to a store.
2) Introduce such gross inefficiencies in the market that you dissuade people from using it. For example, extreme fees, limits on how many items you can market per time, or price caps. Note that these inefficiencies do not prevent trade, they simply dissuade the use of the market channel for that trade. Such systems create actual "black markets", though they would not be as effective since they would not likely be cross-server.

Merits are the closest thing we've gotten to option (1), because they add a high degree of determinism to purchasing specific goods. As noted, merits are a comparatively time-inefficient way to directly outfit a character. I interpret this as intentional. Though it's been argued that the introduction of merits had a deleterious effect on the game's markets, I believe their slow rate of progress is intended to ensure that random drops (and thus the markets) are not completely swamped by their use. If true, that means the devs essentially want us to prefer the market as a means to obtain rare goods. That makes a certain sense, seeing has how the market was introduced simultaneously with IOs.

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That has to be one of the funniest things I have ever seen on the forums. Did you expect a pat on the head for publicly demonstrating someones incompetence or error ? Is this how you "Make friends" ?

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He pointed out a problem, his evidence of which was publicly discounted (not just ignored) and then the problem was admitted to and fixed.

There's nothing in pointing out a problem that says "I'm demonstrating your incompetence" or even "your error". It's saying "hey, there's a problem, here's evidence".

I don't think people should expect a pat on the head, but I don't think they should expect the devs to come across as quite that dishonest, either.

In other words, this wasn't like what you're implying it was.

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I have yet to see a toon cap both to all damage types. maybe I am just missing something...

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That's sort of the point. The argument is the devs don't want people doing that.

That's not to say the devs couldn't improve on the +RES bonuses in some ways without making capping both viable, but the fear of people capping both is one of the most sensible positions explaining why the devs would choose only one mitigation type to make readily available.

There's certainly an argument to be made that they may not have chosen the "right" one, depending on one's perspective on balance, but there are some pretty obvious issues with letting people hit both. If DR bonuses were easy to come by alongside current defense bonuses, some ATs and builds would find it pretty straightforward to cap both.

It depends very much on the type of marketeer. Niche flippers like things with low drop rates. However, drop rates are largely irrelevant to people who act as producers (farmers, common IO crafters, etc.). For them, higher drop rates mean lower prices, but higher volume.

There is a point of course where no one who sells on the market wants supply to increase too far, because if supply swamps demand then no one will be able to sell things. From the persepctive of people who want to buy things, that's fine so long everything does that, because then there's essentially a free supply of whatever they want. However, as long as some things don't get that kind of supply, then all the other things that do cease to become viable stepping stones to the still-rare items.

If I can sell 100 things for a million inf, I can still (maybe) buy a 100M inf purple, even though it's slow going. But if all my stuff is selling for 10k? That's a much harder mountain to climb.

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Hardly. I submit Psychic Shockwave as an example. They may just not have had time as yet, as that would be a significant recoding.

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Even better example: Energy Transfer. I'm pretty sure that's the longest standing thing they've changed quite so dramatically.

There's definitely no merit in the "they would have done it by now" argument. There almost certainly never was, but these days we have some very stand-out examples of it not being true.

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i dont car about people taking holidays off....however...today was NOT a holiday..tommorrow is..and yes im working it.

with a exspansion,new issue and tons of new bugs to squash... frankly they should all be at work today. even the banks and post offices were open..give me one GOOD reason why their not at work and ill retract it.

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Today is the national observance of the holiday, which falls on a weekend and would not otherwise give a weekday off.

For regular 9-5, 40 hour week types, that means they get today off.

I work for a bank, and it was not open. Neither were government offices.

Because of a bug.

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2^31 = 2 147 483 648
31 bits used in the value and the one bit for a checksum in all likelihood.
(When dealing with rapidly changing important data you should ALWAYS checksum)

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I would honestly expect the last bit to be reserved for the sign, not a checksum. If they have data integrity checking on network data, I would expect it to be more at the packet level, not the individual piece of data like that.

I would expect any such integrity checking to be for use in network transfers, and not storage checking. I have never known any software system I have worked on to build data integrity like that into the application's own data on the database side of things. That includes an enterprise banking transaction system responsible for handling potentially billions of dollars in currency transfers between reserve banks. Instead, the application usually relies on the database and its underlying storage for data integrity.

At that level of detail, though, only a select few devs probably really know.

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As feedback I must once again disagree with the Temps being tied to given ATs. It is not that the Temps make the fight possible or impossible, it is that they make it more interesting. Limiting the Temps to specific ATs limits what players can try or how they can experiment with the encounter.

It also makes forming a team, or finding a team being formed, far more difficult. Now rather than my normal mantra of "bring whatever character you most want to play", I have to ask SG-mates "could you please break out that other character you have instead of the one you most favor which you are currently on?"

Please consider revising this.

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I concur.

The existence of the temps is fine. Tying them to the ATs is not. Especially when the difference that the MM makes appears to be dramatic. Players are going to consider having the "right" ATs "necessary" in the way that they consider Hasten, Stamina and IOs "necessary".

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Ive been here for close to five years and this game has gotten WORSE since AE dropped. Horrible teams. Constant team wipes from level 20's trying to fight 54's ( I wont even joing a level 54 team ) . Terrible builds the likes I have never seen before.

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I'm sure it's impossible that those things could be from new players who might have actually been lured to the game by the MA.

Right now, nothing is dropping. All the previously added rewards are gone.

The 5th difficulty is only higher level mobs, not higher spawn count.

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The only reason to play the AE would be for it's actual purpose...which is to make and play quality story arcs and missions with creative and thought out stories, charcters, and dialogue.

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To make and play.

If the rewards are reduced, and people are playing content that actually plays like normal content (so they aren't farming), then essentially no one will play that content, because normal content will offer significantly better rewards.

Put simply, if the rewards are reduced enough to discourage farming, the MA will be a ghost town. How willing you are for the MA to be a ghost town is irrelevant. What matters is whether the devs are willing for that to happen.

I promise you the devs didn't create the MA to be some tool for the game's small proportion of earnest would-be authors to huddle in some narcissism-filled bunker where the majority of the players avoid them. Especially not with the way they touted it across publications.

Are changes to the MA in an effort to reduce farming done with? Probably not. However, changes that reduce XP and inf would be incredibly foolish inclusions.

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I know that sounds dumb, but think about it.

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I thought about it, and it's dumb. People before you or me thought about it, and it was dumb when they thought it, too.

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AE is meant for the players to make story arcs that are fun/challanging/ expand on their characters. It would make become more like it was meant to be played.

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What's the point in being "more like it was meant to be played" if it's only experienced by the ridiculously tiny portion of the playerbase who are willing to play content for no reward?

That would amount to a complete failure on the part of the devs. There is simply no value in the tremendous amount of time they spent developing and improving this feature if it's only used by a tiny percentage of their subscribers.

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Something new:
Unyielding difficulty can spawn Bosses in the +1 spawn points for a solo character (The +2 spawns are too small for this). This might be the case for tenacious too.

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That seems more than a little odd. That's a significant bump in difficulty, and seems unlikely to be both intentional and (intentionally) not mentioned.

Then again, the patch notes this issue were complete garbage.

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When I politely bowed out I had two players send me tells which were vulgar in the extreme. An anecdote to be sure, but that crowd is part of the "new COX" you're so proud of.

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The AE neither created nor, likely, increased the number of these people. All it did was give them something new to do while being crass and moronic, as they almost were certainly before it came along.

That something to do just happened to overlap with what you.

Argh.

/em flip now ends with you permanently in the "idle ready" animation. The one where you have one foot forward, and females are arms akimbo.

This used to put you in the "hands on hips" animation, and leave you in the idle animation swap loop (moving between hands on hips, arms crossed and foot forward)

This probably seems like a silly thing to be frustrated by, but I used /em flip to force characters into the idle cycle for screenshot and demo purposes.

When I zone, I now replay my power activation animations for my toggles when I hit the destination zone. I am not sure how it chooses what to play - it only plays one if you have multiple toggles running.

I can't say I'm real fond of it.

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The devs should set AE experience rewards to a level where the very best AE PL farms reward about the same xp as running normal story arcs. This will of course leave non-farm AE missions granting somwhere around 1/4 of standard mission xp (perhaps less), and I'm fine with that. There are other ways to curb AE PLing but I have yet to see one which doesn't restrict creative freedom, which was originally the whole point of the MA system.

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The idea that you could do this and expect any meaningful percentage of the player base to actually experience the home-grown content in the AE is ludicrous.

What's the point of story crafting if only a few hundred people are playing any of it?

It boggles my mind that anyone could ever think this is a good idea.

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They changed the screenshot filename format from this:

screenshot_2009-06-30-00-00-00.jpg
screenshot_yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss.jpg

to this:

screenshot_090630-00-00-00.jpg
screenshot_yymmdd-hh-mm-ss.jpg

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Oh, what the hell...

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guess I am going to have to bug it.

Its not listing properly on mine.

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You're not somehow exemplared too low for them, right? On a TF or AE mish or something?

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Another person saying they see another thread about an important issue bothering a great number of people.

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It's funny how a "great number of people" seem to be relegated to these forums, no matter how many general purpose global channels I listen in on.

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*snerk* copypasta. Does that come with awesome sauce?

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Dude. People on the sidewalk outside are probably wondering what I'm laughing at.

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Implement Diminishing Returns on tickets and XP earned from running arcs within a certain time frame.

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It should be noted that the devs did not implement this stricture on their own repeatable mission provider: Ouroboros.