UberGuy

That's not true. Inf is not "infinitely" renewable. It's renewable at some finite rate. The folks removing/destroying inf are reducing the net rate. At any given point in time, the current total of inf in the system is a function of the net rate at which it was added up until that time. Removing inf reduces that net rate, and so reduces the amount of inf at any given time.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree that it's important or valuable to reduce the inf rate this way, but it's just not true that you can't reduce it.

Everyone who's using the market is paying for the game. As others have posted, that doesn't give them any expectation about interaction with other players that isn't outright griefing. Failing to cut people a break isn't griefing.


The notion that such a person is "stupid" is your attempt to color the seller as the bad guy, and isn't necessarily held by the seller. The buyer may be uninformed (which is not the same as stupid), or they may not care, and may just want the shiny right damn now.

A really nice prospective seller might ask a prospective buyer if they knew the price is almost certainly about to fall. Failing to be a really nice person in a video game does not definitively make you a bad person. It makes you a less nice person than it's possible to be. No one in this game is mandated to be as nice as they can be.

It's funny, because while there are some excellent "one-off" missions out there, by and large I really don't miss the stand-alone missions. I prefer that newer contacts from content like Striga and, heck, most of CoV, pretty much just give you arcs.

To me the broad difference is similar to episodic TV series, where some shows have almost completely independent episodes and other shows have such tightly sequential stories that missing an episode means you may not know what's going on the next week. I like both, but I become more engaged in the tightly sequential ones.

This depends somewhat on the stratification of prices that happens. I don't think the low end is actually going to change that much. A lot of stuff will still sell for 1-10M inf. I don't expect the Reward Merit glut from Super Packs to be sustained at levels it's at now for the long term. Combine in the "buy it nao" behavior, the cost of Rare salvage, the perceived cost of time spent crafting (related to "buy it nao"), and the general inf-generating power of pre-existing 50s, and there's good reason to think that the low end of market pricing will hover around historic levels. What I expect to change is that more goods will drop down into this price range.

Most people seem to be predicting that the expensive purples will drop in price something like 30-60%. If the price of low-end market goods drops 10%, that's a net win for folks who "subsist" on drop sales. The risk of big impact is on people who don't "subsist", but go right for high price goods, selling them for inf with which to buy other goods. But from what I saw, things like LotGs and Miracles only lost around 50% of their market value even at the peak of the Reward Merit glut, and LotGs have bounced back up to 100M since then. (I don't know where they are as I write this, though.) Even at a worst case of them losing around 50% of their value, that puts them on a price scale drop comparable to the price drop in valuable purples, meaning they would still be a good targeted buy.

We'll have to see where this all shakes out over the next two months or so, but right now, even though I agree with the thinking underlying your concerns, I am not sure that the market will stratify in a way that makes them materialize. We shall see.

I very much disagree with this. These things (The Hollows and CoH) absolutely do have overarching plots and (mostly) logical progressions. However, the mission experience does not present those plots as though we are reading a book. They dip in and out, showing us segments of that story. Story arcs in particular present this in a logical order presented as the process of discovery for our characters. Over the broader game, many of these story arcs weave together to construct a larger picture of the game world - for example the way the level 30-39 story arcs remind you about Nemesis, then suggest someone may be acting as a copycat of him, then making clear the original is "back". Earlier arcs show you that the Sky Raiders are connected to the Nemesis organization. Later arcs tell us in great detail the pivotal role Nemesis had in the Rikti War.

What's clear to me with info gleaned from these arcs is that there is a larger rather specific backstory for the game world, but our characters do not know all the specifics. The "toybox" of specific content gives our individual characters a specific role in that backstory. Initially, that role is one of discovery, but often later, at higher levels, we become important players in the story. Think of how we start learning about Crey, interfering in "street level" plots of theirs, and eventually uncover the true identity of and arrest Countess Crey.

We can choose to ignore the overarching world stories, especially early on, because we start as relatively bit players in them, largely peeking in through small viewports. But as we progress in level, and the game injects our characters more deeply into the specifics, the less and less like a "sandbox" (or diverse "toybox") I feel the game becomes.

I think many players want this progression, though they might quibble over how it is presented, as it is important to making their characters progress from being relatively unimportant to significant in the game world's events. It's hard to continuously indicate significance in poorly defined stories, so presentation of increasing significance is going to tend to create increasingly specific plots.

In case there is info there you (or others) do not know, this guide to defeating them might help.

Thing is, I think he'd go out feeling vindicated in having gotten you to do it that way.

He never specifically comes across with "join the dark side, Luke" kind of evil, but he's just so damn into spreading despair that I think he'd take pleasure in the notion that he'd gotten someone to kill him like that, just for the idea that they'd probably do other bad things later having crossed that line.

Unless, of course, you were already across that line, in which case he'd probably figure it was just bad luck.

They do accept both those things, but Membranes slotted there because those powers accepts them on that basis will no longer enhance the recharge. That makes doing so a fairly poor choice, because you really do want recharge very much in Mind Link.

The applied debuff is supposed to be -150 on live, not the resulting debuff after resistances.

Nothing can turn an applied debuff of -150 into a result of -1000.

It has to be a buff. The original raw value was -150. There's no way for having made it unresistable to make that into -1000.

When you get MaxHP buffs or debuffs, your current health changes to the correct proportion of your new max health that you had before the buff/debuff. If this did not happen, people at full health who received Frostworks would appear as if injured, because their health bar would no longer be full. (Frostworks does not include a heal the way many self +MaxHP powers like Dull Pain do.) The same thing happens in reverse when the buff/debuff expires.

When you gain or lose max HP, the effect on your time to defeat under a given DPS changes as though you gained DR (to all damage) equal to 1-(1/(1+HP_buff%)). So Dull Pain, which is worth around 60% +MaxHP slotted up, makes you as hard to kill as if you had 1-1/1.6 = 37.5% DR. (If you have any real DR, its benefits are multiplicative with this effect. If you receive any healing, it's as if you resist that too, unless it's a heal from something like a Cimeroran Surgeon, whose heals actually scale with Max HP).

A MaxHP% debuff is just a negative MaxHP buff, and so a given HP debuff is equivalent to applying a resistance debuff of
1-(1/(1-HP_debuff%)). So a MaxHP debuff of 3.5% is equivalent to a DR debuff of about 3.6%, which is actually a bit better than Reactive, which is 2.5% per stack.

Unfortunately, -150 HP isn't as easy to calculate. We have to figure out what %MaxHP it is on a per-target basis. A Pylon's 30677 max HP makes the proc only a 0.49% MaxHP debuff, making it the equivalent of about a 0.49% DR debuff. Against Reichsman, the effect is vanishingly small.

I'm sure you realize that this is your opinion, and not an objective fact. Being highly combative/argumentative about your own opinions can be rather grating to folks who don't share them. I certainly am not suggesting you shouldn't post about things you care about (and why you care about them), but do consider how you present it when it's something so subjective.

I don't really mind the missions of the exact sort you're describing in this quote, but I do actually enjoy the more complex missions - the ones where you defeat the boss and a new objective appears, or where you go click on someone in mission and they say something to you. I don't value complex narrative trees, but I actually like smaller arcs that do more per mission, especially if "do more" involves plenty of combat.

I occasionally see the resist set used in Dark Armor and Fiery Aura builds because 3 slots gives you 3 points of KB protection. It's a way to save on having to add slots to a build to find places to slot things like BotZs, Steadfasts or Kismets. While you can sometimes slot those into the base slot of wherever you're putting them, sometimes you want to put something else it the power, and the KB prot ends up costing you a slot.

This approach might be more common for PvE builds but for the generally high price of the pieces of the set that are actually likely to be useful to slot in a +resistance power. It's also fairly common for folks to slot other things in their resistance powers that give +defense of one type or another (as set bonuses, not just the Steadfast and GA uniques). Between the two, I haven't seen this done much. But I have seen it.

Because the context was low levels with no enhancements, where all ATs actually have very similar AT damage modifiers, and Brute with Fury therefore do more damage than everyone else. This benefit decays as the AT modifiers diverge towards their "final" values around level 25, and people start slotting enhancements.

Clearly, "supply" to you does not mean quite the same thing it does to me.

That's not "supply" by my thinking. Yes, it forms a buffer, so that an abrupt halt in actual generation of new supply will not immediately strangle supply on the market. I do not envision it functioning the way you do, because I question some of your assumptions.

First, in my experience, people who hoard things rarely hoard them as future market fodder. They hoard them for future personal use. When people know something is hard to replace, their personal hoarding instincts become more aggressive - "if I get rid of this without using it, I might not be able to (easily) replace it, so I'll hold on to it." I don't think as much of those hoards out there will make their way to the market as you do, not in a "long tail" way that does anything but slightly time shift an abrupt reduction in PVPO supply.

Second, I seriously doubt there are many hoards out there more than a couple hundred IOs deep. In the scope of things, that's not very much supply given the constant churn of new characters across the population. If the price on these items drops into the low hundreds of millions, more people will actually try to buy them, and sales/time will increase significantly, eating those reserves much more quickly than the market moves them today at 1-2B apiece.

I think you have the right general ideas about how to exploit this "day one", and for a period beyond that. I also think you have probably one of the largest, if not the largest reserves of stuff to convert and sell in the entire game population. I'm quite sure you'll do just fine. I don't think, though, that your predictions about how a PvPO farm nerf would work on the market ring true.

When you disconnect voltage source (PVPO farms) from a circuit with a large capacitor (hoarded reserves) smoothing the source voltage, you get initial oscillations in the voltage in the system followed by a exp(-t/K) (e to the power of minus elapsed time divided by some constant) draw down that eventually settles down to zero. I expect an shutdown of PVPO supply to have something like that effect on the market. I also tend to think that K won't be as big as your description suggests, meaning the drawdown will be faster.