UberGuy

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Go into atlas now and look how many 20s 30s 40s and 50s you will find looking for team.

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I have. It's way, way down from where it was.

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The ticket farmers were running below level missions in mass because the comm officers paid incredibly well. The numbers were something like 4 million inf/15 minute run on an 8 man map and about 3k+ tickets. thats 1 1/3 merits/min equivalent and heck of a lot more inf.

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You do realize that those rewards were proportional with XP, right? Yes, level 42 Comm Officers were massive reward in XP, inf and tickets.

I saw nothing that indicated that the majority of people were coming along on the ride for tickets. This was especially true when being on a large team diluted ticket drops worse than standard drops. (Ticket rates were related to the inverse of team size squared). For essentially the whole of the time that the Meow farm was available, if you were farming tickets on a large team you were really ignorant or unobservant.

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Actually, yeah, low level is where ticket farming pays off the most.

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In case you haven't noticed, you don't have to be low-level to get low-level drops from the ticket vendors. For any recipie I've looked at, the highest sales througput density is clustered at the level cap for desirable low-level recipies. If you want to make the most money over time, instead of just the most money per individual sale, you don't bother parking someone at low levels. More people are placing bids at the recipie cap levels, so you're better using high-level characters to farm for tickets, since they're universally more effective at combat, and they earn more inf per kill on the side.

So no, I disagree completely.

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Dual box'ing really helps with this ebil slot building ... I worked on it last night for about 20 mins and racked up 800 sales for each ... that was at selling at 1 and buying at 5

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You know in that other big long thread how they were saying "you'll know it when you see it?" Yeah...

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I'll tell you what. I sort of get the dev dander raising over the massive powerleveling thing. Keeping people on the treadmill is their lifeline. But if they they start punishing players for the sort of thing above the day I finally close up shop and start spending 20 hours of my week on something else. That would be them needing to do a better job picking their battles. They need to either not create anything for which this sort of optimization is a viable means of progress, or not get their underwear in a bunch about a lot of catagories of it.

I vote for option two.

And unfortunately, I don't think they can do that if they want TT to do mixed damage the way it does.

I really wish it was all negative damage, to be honest.

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how many times did you wipe on the freedom phalanx as you attempted to split the spawn?

i do NOT consider wiping-on-purpose to split the spawns and get numina and positron down first a valid strategy. yes it works. it's also stupid as all hell.

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You need to find people who know how to play better.

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Power leveling and exploit maps are not the same thing. There was overlap but there were plenty of people going onto a comm officer map just to grab tickets.

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I'm sure all those "L12 Dom LF meow team" were in it for the tickets.

Did you actually read what you quoted there? Ticket farmers weren't filling the MAs with characters under-level for the zones they were in.

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As I see it the easiest way to reduce the amount of Inf in the system is simply to lower the amount that the uber-rich can earn. . Since many more times the Inf can be earned in the Market than actual play I feel this is where it needs to begin.

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Your TL;DR version sums up a massive and (IMO, pretty inexcusable) lack of understanding of what the market does.

The market doesn't create any Inf. It doesn't add inf to the system at all. The only things it does is move inf around and delete 10% of it while doing so.

Making it so being uber-rich can't be attained on the market essentially guarantees that most inf will be laying around on whatever characters earn it. Note that this does nothing to stop the existence of the uber-rich. Instead, what it does is limit the ability of people who can't play thier [censored] off to become uber rich through the shuttling of money. The uber-rich will still exist - they'll just be the people who log tons of time in game. Things like having mutliple accounts or spending time farming will be the premier ways to make money since you can't concentrate wealth from other players.

Consider that every 50 in the game that plays 100 hours at level 50 probably creates a bare minimum of 100M inf. If there were only 1000 level 50s played 100 hours this way, that would be 100B inf in the system. If I can use the market to earn just 1M inf from each of those 1000 players, I end up with 1B inf (900M after market fees) and they all are left with 99M. No one got scalped, and I got way rich.

There's too much emotion-laden focus on people who get like 100M per sale on something, as if that's the only way to get rich in this game. It's not.

Fundamentally, you want the market to be a store. You believe that inventions should be provided to anyone who asks for them. This overlooks the notion of IOs as alternative progress for characters. They are not something that everyone is supposed to automatically attain simply by asking the interface for them. They are intended to be something attained through effort and play. Whether that effort is spent at the market or through long hours of play isn't particularly relevant - what matters is that it takes personal investment in some activity to attain it. The devs need us to spend calendar time on that investment. They don't care if we're logged in or not, just whether we're engaged enough to stay subscribed. I guarantee you that chasing IOs is keeping a subset of the playerbase engaged and hanging around.

I am not a "marketeer" in the sense that I rarely ever flip anything. I track the market fairly closely and I sell drops and buy shinies as smartly as I can. I have 5B inf on my villains and around 3 on my heroes. Even if we accept that inventions are now a pervasive part of the game (hard for me to accept since they are still not required), my own experience allows me to categorically reject the notion that we have to become marketeers to get rich enough to by damn near anything. Nor do we have to suffer unduly because of those marketeers that are out there. If we did, I wouldn't be both heavily IO'd and stupid rich.

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Being able to ghost (with the help of a stealth IO in sprint) TF, Flashbacks, missions, or just take down one group beside another is very nice, never gets old and has spoiled me.

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I have the same "problem" with Dark Miasma/Shadowfall on Defenders and Corruptors. It's a huge spoiler.

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In summary, Deflation means people run around with better Enhancements, and spend less time getting them. That means faster leveling, dogs and cats sleeping together, and the end of civilization as we know it.

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In the scope of recent intentional dev increases in leveling speed, I'm not sure we could even perceive the effect of that power shift in a statistical analysis of leveling speed across the playerbase. That doesn't even include (other) potential unintentional increases.

Edit: It's also worth noting that the whole "my enhancements are expiring" was one of the more consistently mentioned dislikes of the legacy enhancement system. I wouldn't be too sure in assuming that the devs didn't swamp it intentionally.

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Looks like someone won the lottery, though I guess someone else lost.

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There are no winners here. Did you see that Went's fee?! Oh, the humanity!

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What's sort of amusing there is that the market fee alone is on the order of market bid-O's that get people complain to their friends and on the forums.

"You bid 50M when you meant to bid 5? Hah! The market fees on my mistake were bigger than that!"

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What a great question. I usual define per capita as instantaneous value and as a percentage of the currently online population.

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Well, I can't see how you can possibly say that per-capita PLing is not down significantly now. There are...

1) fewer people in the most populous zone MAs
2) fewer zone MAs in significant use (before the Comm Officer change, I couldn't find zones where they weren't in heavy use, except maybe Galaxy City)
3) less apparent PLees. I define an apparent PLee as a character with a security level significantly lower than the zone level, hanging out in the MA frequently zoning in and out of the digitizer beam.

One way we can conclude that the per-capita use of PL hasn't gone down is to assume that the per-capita amount of PL before was actually smaller because a smaller percentage of people were doing it before the dev's changes. However, I think there is significant anecdotal evidence to the contrary, because (if nothing else) of the sheer volume of broadcasts regarding it (usually Meow-related) in nearly all zones.

The remaining way is to have the same percentage of PLers in a smaller total MA participants. However, it's clear that things like Meow had such simple access (being, among other things, immediately in beginner zones) it greatly increased ease of use of PL by people who otherwise did not seek it out before (or after). Again, there is significant evidence of this, only some of which is anecdotal.[*] For 1.5 days after the Comm Officer change, popular MA zones echoed with the equivalent of "aw man!". This would not be the case if these players were willing to/able to/aware of PLing using other means, inside the MA or out.[*] Custom nobs in the MA were previously significantly easier to defeat in large numbers. This lowered the bar on what builds could effectively act as the PLer in such missions. Builds that were good PL builds before I14 still function fine, but there are fewer them than were able to PL in the MA.

Yes, PLing is going on still, in and out of the MA. Yes, the MA is still one of if not the premier place to get leveled to 50 as fast as you can. But it's simply disinginuous to suggest that it's going on at anything like the population density it was between the release of I14 and the combined change to Comm Officers and custom mobs.

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He does? Really? That's funny, I never noticed that. Then again I'm usually Eluding when I fight him, and have nearly every hero you rescue during the oraboras arc based on the comics wailing on him... I always thought the biggest hurdle was the bane spiders he summons repeatedly.

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In no way to pick on you, most of the folks around here don't really consider bringing in all the helper characters to be "soloing" him.

As of the current patch on test, I15, when you submit changes to your character's description any line breaks are lost. Your description appears as a single (potentially long) paragraph. Ending a sentence with a line break causes it to run on directly into the next sentence with no whitespace at all.

A character with existing line breaks keeps them unless you enter the character info screen, which causes them to be lost with no way to confirm or abort.

Please revert this to the old pre-I14 behavior, which allowed line breaks. For anyone with a carefully written character discription, this is really crap.

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I hope its a bug

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Given that it's being described as a clarification for how it works in the IO's description, I don't think I see how it could be a bug.

I agree it blows, but it looks like they're saying this is how it is.

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I cant see why this enhancement set is so imbalancing.

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I seriously doubt its got anything to do with it being imbalancing. I suspect it's a collision in how purples only work for security level 50 characters and the critters not being level 50 characters.

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The concept is per capita vs total population.

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How are you defining "per-capita PLing?"

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The PLing would have gone down without the FUD. They removed the ease of access. Now you need better builds to farm with because the mobs aren't retardedly weak. (Note that I didn't mind, but I knew they were retardedly weak.) There are a metric boatload of lemmings in the playerbase who won't pursue something like this unless the barier to entry is very low. Now it's higher.


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If its higher its not much higher.

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Bull. It isn't even 1/10 of what it was the two weeks the MA was online full bore.

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An assumption. I am not going on the people I know. I am operating off observed pug behavior. You go into an ae building and you get a tell for a team even on virtue more often than not its still an ae farm. Stories are being formed as often as ever.

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No they aren't. You're exaggerating or you were ignorant of just how much it was being used across the board during those two weeks before the hammer fell. I doubt you're ignorant of it, but I suspect exaggeration is likely.

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Now the total number may be down, but that might just be because it isn't reactivation weekend or the start of the aniversary anymore. But the percentage use of MA is still there.

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No, it's not.

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See above. What you are saying is MA use is way down. I won't argue that. The why is another matter.

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You're contradicting yourself. The usage connot be down and the PLing where it was. A massive fraction of the initial use before the Meow change was PLing.

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Lol I am at risk ? Not likely. If anything pointing it out in the forums places me at greater risk than my use of MA. The assumption that because I object to injustice renders me guilty of crimes is false.

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I don't know what you're talking about with respect to risk. I'm describing how I'm familiar with your stand on this from context beyond this thread and nothing more. I'm also not accusing you of any crimes, as that would likely involve stones and glass houses.

I don't have to be anti-PL or even someone who doesn't farm/PL to disagree with what I see as your position on knowledge of what could get people in trouble with all this, just as I don't have to agree with the devs for even making it an issue.

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Looks like someone won the lottery, though I guess someone else lost.

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I'm going to have to flog you when I log on.

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Drop rates determine scarcity. Scarcity fuels the market, enabling low-risk, low-time invented, high-profit gameplay. In my opinion, logging a character in for a few minutes a day, flipping slots, and profiting immensely, should be acknowledged by the devs as "aberrant gameplay" and steps should be taken to ensure that it isn't orders of magnitude more rewarding than playing the game "normally."

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"Rewarding" in what sense? You can't level to 50 (or to anything) playing at the market a few minutes a day.

What you want them to ensure isn't possible will always be possible as long as there is scarcity. If things are less scarce, the absolute value of that play will go down, but the relative value will remain largely the same, because goods will be less scarce for everyone. (A flipper won't make as much money flipping more common goods, but won't need as much money to buy more common goods.)

The only way to prevent such play from having high relative value is to prevent reselling completely, which seems a highly draconian approach for little actual benefit to the players as a whole.

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You show me someone who has been here more than three monts I will show you someone who has been on a farm and power leveled. They may not have cared for it may not be their thing but they know what it is and they know how to do it.

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I would win that bet hands down. I know people who've never been PL'd, ever.

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LOL you think I don't understand ? You don't think I didn't realize positron's missives were badly done attempts to create F.U.D. ?

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The PLing would have gone down without the FUD. They removed the ease of access. Now you need better builds to farm with because the mobs aren't retardedly weak. (Note that I didn't mind, but I knew they were retardedly weak.) There are a metric boatload of lemmings in the playerbase who won't pursue something like this unless the barier to entry is very low. Now it's higher.

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And if you think the powerleveling has gone down you are wrong there.

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No, I'm not wrong. The number of people involved is down massively. All you need to have to see that this absolutely and inarguably true is a working pair of eyes. You appear to constantly conflate how fast people you know are leveling with how fast the average playerbase is doing so. They are not the same thing.

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When someone says AE team looking for more 9 times out of 10 they aren't out to enjoy a story.

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If you think people are asking for AE teams at even 1/10the rate they used to be, across all zones, then you need to work on that "working pair of eyes" thing.

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You talk about my opinion on this matter being everywhere and then you go comment on it, but it seems you haven't read anything I have said. Instead you seem to be arguing with the Another_Fan that lives entirely in your head.

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No, I'm arguing with the Another_Fan that I've seen posting all over the forums going on about the matter of unstated rules being unfair and the dev's changes not stopping PLing. Yes, the unstated rules are unfair, but you have to be mentally deficient not to know what put you at risk. And the devs weren't out to stop PLing across the board.

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You are making the same mistake Ogon is. You are both defining yourselves as the measuring stick, and then are shocked that other people have different rulers.

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No, you're making the mistake of thinking that I (and maybe Ogon) are so foolish as to think we are good measuring sticks for the rest of the playerbase.

If I was the measuring stick on how fast people could level, we'd all have a lot more 50s next week.

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I know of entire SGs that will level their entire group up from 1 - 50 in that time. I know of one that just created a series of themed characters, clowns, african tribal, and archers were amongst it.

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That doesn't make it a remotely reasonable average. If you are so blindered as to think that just because you know a bunch of people who do it that it's common, you're hopeless in any conversation on the topic. You could know 500 people who can level to 50 in 10 hours and it would not make it close to the speed most people do it in on average.

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2nd What a few people know everyone winds up knowing and usually pretty quickly.

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Yeah, that must be why everyone's all waiting in line in PI to get into Behemoth and Battle Maiden missions. Wait...

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MA pling has not gone away. Not by a very long shot. It is still the preferred method, the auto exemp feature cuts out the need to find mentors.

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You're preaching to the choir. Do you really think I don't know these things? I think you don't know how I play very well. I'm a powergamer. I knew that the MA would be the best PL around unless they gutted its QoL features within three days of its release. (I really didn't mess with it much in beta.)

And yet the continouss broadcast cries for PL teams in every zone have grown far, far less frequent. The lines of security level 10 and under characters standing outside the arc digitizer are essentialy gone. And I would bet you all the inf I have that this was really the change the devs meant to cause. Don't make the mistake of assuming that the devs actually intend to squash all PLing, even in the MA. They just intend to squash most of it.

How the devs went about this was a colossal mistake. But when they first announced that they would go after people who went to town on PLing with the MA, I immediately identified players in the global channels I hang out with who I figured would get the stick, and these are people who PL all the time. One of the idiotic things was that nothing happened for two weeks and we all started figuring that the "real" exploits must have been something much worse. Then, with no word that the hammer was still falling, they all got the boot like two weeks later. Oh, and a bunch of people who didn't PL in the MA at all got axed too. That helped.

Indeed. Of course, I play nearly everything that way, including my Defenders and Corruptors.

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You seem to think that a 12% survivability edge for brutes (your number) AND a damage advantage (regardless of how small), again for brutes, is parity. I'd suggest you look up parity in the dictionary.

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He didn't say it was parity. He said he considered it balanced by other factors not captured in those numbers.

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less than 20 hours to 50 is nothing spectacular or even impressive.

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It is when it's roughly a factor of 10x faster than anything you've experienced before.

Look, I think how the devs approached this whole thing was the pinnacle of stupidity, but your stance on it, posted far and wide across the boards here, is ludicrous in the opposite direction. Getting to 50 in under 20 hours is spectactular and impressive exactly because it's not something the general playerbase either knows how to do or wants to futz with learning how you do it. This is "easy" to do in the same sense that beating the STF and RSF is "easy" for the general playerbase.

Even if you just have to haul your butt to PI/GV and ask for a PL in broadcast, it was still vastly more accessable to wander into the MA in Atlas/Mercy. You didn't need a SK, and it was easy to find people who wouldn't charge for the "service" of having a farmable map on hand.

It's obvious that not everyone finds access to PLing easy, because we saw how many people did it with the MA, and yet when easy MA PLing went away the volume of PLing clearly took a dive alongside it. If PLing was as accessable as you seem to claim, everyone would still be doing it.

The devs freaked out because everyone and their dog could PL to 50 in sub 20 hours. Not because it had never been done before (or since).

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That's already been dealt with: the 1500 per mission limit.

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You think that actually stops ticket farming?

I played this game from pre-release of CoH and didn't get my first 50 until late in I8. Of course back then, I considered there to be no reason to get to 50, and I essentially avoided it as it implied retirement of my characters.

Now I've got nine of them.