gameboy1234

Progress so far: I've made 51 million so far this week (including last weekend) and it's still as exciting as watching paint dry. It's nice to be self funding but it's not really fun. Other market improvement: the search function needs to also be able to search for any of the text on the IO, sets, insp, etc. That would be very helpful rather than simply searching for the "name" of the item. A feature like the "Find" button which goes to the right spot in the collapsible menu tree would also be helpful (maybe "Show Item". Once I have searched for an item, I normally want to see other similar items, which are often nearby on that collapsible tree. This is something I agree with a lot. The current system is far too obtuse for new players. I know it (mostly, I still have to ask lots of questions) because I've been playing very seriously and reading every guide for like years on live. But it's bugger all complex. We really need to reconsider it completely imo. What I think is fun: I like doing arcs, so arcs after level 25 or so should drop a "super merit" that is good for one attuned IO of your choice. Below 25 arcs can drop a merit which can be used for an SO of your choice. We'll need a few more drops like those because players will rocket past arcs and not have enough super merits, but the general idea is to reward players with something significant and useful for doing fun stuff, not farming the AE or fiddling about with the market. After that everything about the invention system can basically be removed: all drops, recipes and regular IOs which differ only slightly by level can just go away, they're not needed. That would simplify things a lot and make it easier on players who want to play the game and not a spreadsheet.

Just a quick UI note while I'm thinking about: 1. I wish I could drag and drop items stored in the AH so I can reorder my storage. I wish new items I add to the AH went to the TOP of the list, not the bottom. 2. I wish also that I could drag and drop my bids in the AH so to reorder them also. Thanks!

Volcanic Basalt released.

Honestly this is a good idea, and sounds less risky than putting a system in place that has to do this automagically. (As they said, they get one shot at it.) A more manual system that they can inspect before releasing it (run the script over the database, test it to make sure it did the right thing) sounds much more likely to be bug free. I'm not against the kind of thing the devs originally proposed, but if it's as risky as they say, they should take their time with it. In order to get at least a few names freed up however the devs should take into consideration something like the above, if it represents something that can be implemented easier.

Contrast the above with: I think telling people how skippable the market is doesn't help improve things. (In fact, now that I type that, it feels a lot like gate keeping.) The goal is to find ideas to improve the market, make it work better for players, and make it more accessible. Not tell people that if they don't like it they can not bother.

I'm probably going to ditch the spreadsheet after a while, I'm just confirming about how much inf I'm actually making. Once I have a better idea of how much I've made and the effort/expenditure involved, then I'll be able to decide better which items I want to pursue. Since roughly last Friday (I realize now I'm not recording the *time* of a sale) I've made about 20 million, in about three to four days time. That's still a little bit short of where I need it, but I'm inching up in the right direction. But the point is that I really don't find it fun. There's a bit of interest finding recipes and IO sets that are going to be profitable, but I'm basically running an item shop at the moment, and I don't even get to have a store front to go with it and watch customers browse my shop. This is kind of the way I feel too. If I didn't feel I needed certain IO sets for the bonuses, I'd never touch the market. I'd rather the game reward me *directly* for doing fun things in the game, not making me perform some dubious/unfun side activity in the the name of "player interaction." I think "junk the whole thing" probably isn't advice they are looking for, so I'll try to add something constructive. The first thing I think of is my salvage, which is all pretty much worthless. That's a good sign that your system is broken btw. I think perhaps if all salvage were convertible to another type we actually could use, then it would be worth something. So maybe any three common salvage can be converted, for free or a small amount of inf, to what you need for a recipe. Same for uncommon salvage. Rare salvage I think should take one merit to convert to another other rare salvage you need for a recipe. Now those salvage drops are actually worth something and maybe I'll feel excited again at getting a drop, rather than "ugh, gotta clean that out of my inventory." Same for recipes. I mentioned earlier that I think recipes could go down in price (merits) by around 70%. Maybe allow that price for converting a useless recipe into something I want. Now at least I can get the recipe I want from a drop, again instead of having to vendor it for next to nothing (no one else wants it either) or just delete it. Summary: one of the *big* problems I see is people just using the market to dump unwanted junk. Drops have to be valuable or no one wants them and no one is excited when they arrive. This includes sellers as well as buyers. A junk recipe that no one wants just sits around on the market, and that isn't "player interaction," it's being told to clean your room. It becomes a chore "managing inventory" and that's a problem squarely on the designer. You need to find a way to make those drops interesting and exciting.

What's really bad with these systems is that they're a time sink. Not a money sink, but fiddly and obtuse for players to deal with and time I'm not spending actually playing the game. I've got some new bids on the market, and I now have a literal spreadsheet I'm using to track bids, costs, sales and profit. I'm not joking. This is bad design, I'm sorry. What I'd like to do is get the stuff I want and move on, but I really can't do that because I have to "play" the market to get them. (And I don't grind or use the AE so I have to do this or I have to go without. Not great.)

I'm also appreciated that link. What I think is most concerning: Just because it's player interaction, doesn't make it good. Sure a lot of player interaction is the way to go in an MMO, but this particular type of interaction in the market isn't great imo. It's basically like playing with a spreadsheet, which isn't the type of interaction I'm after. Interaction -- teaming up and doing content -- that's what I'm looking for. Impersonal interactions like the market not so much. I think the Enhancement system as a whole is a bust, and needs to be rethought. If that means figuring out how to get more, good, player interaction, so much the better.

Whoa, somebody's reading my mind. Yes the whole Enhancement system is a mess, and the current model that tries to preserve what was supposed to be an upgraded enhancement system for paying players is likewise a mess. In the short term you could reduce the cost of recipes bought with merits by around 60 to 80% (this is my own guestimate on what I actually make on the market using Converters, my actual "cost" for an IO is about 70% less than what I'd pay for it using just merits) and also reduce the cost of Catalysts and Boosters by a similar amount, just to be proportionate. You might consider allowing Merits to replace salvage directly when crafting recipes, just to avoid buying that junk on the market. Or make some form of "universal salvage" that we can get with merits (or change our junk salvage into) that allows us to make any recipe in our inventory. I'll point out also that people are asking for buttons to stop salvage from dropping, or auto sell salvage. Which kind of tells you the state of the whole crafting / enhancement system: not good, and not valued by players. In the long term I'd probably get rid of Enhancements entirely, if I were king. I'd replace all Enhancement systems 1-50 with a skill tree system that just adds skill points to an entire power set, improving all of its powers in all aspects (accuracy, damage, other "effect" -- healing, hold time, taunt, etc. --, recharge, end rdx) in one go. Yes please, bug fixes too.

Found that other "hard mode" thread I was thinking of: The important thing about that thread is the poll. There's a large bump in the center that people answered "the game is basically fine." However there's also a bump on one end where some people are saying "the game is too easy." What's important is both bumps are large; in other words the sample is bimodal. There are two groups of people out there, and that includes a real and statistically significant group who say the game is too easy. (OTOH that group is about 20% or so of those responding, so we shouldn't go nuts for making content just for them.) There's also some really good discussion about what hard mode might be and what it shouldn't be. Some folks are against WoW style raids where every member must do a perfectly synchronized chicken dance or the raid fails. I don't play WoW but that sounds like something to avoid. Then there's some discussion of hard enemies and what makes them hard and how players counter that, and I think that's a better direction. Anyway, those are my two main points here: there's a real population that wants harder content, and that "hard" doesn't mean chicken dances or (to me) +6 level content, it means challenging play that requires some thought and player interaction.

I have very few toons at 50 but quite a lot in the mid levels vying for attention. OTOH I like eating dinner quite a lot so that tends to get my time too (just bought fixing for homemade chili).

Part of what I think is "wrong" with missions and the way they are presented is the "wall of text" style of story telling. In a visual medium like movies or games, you need to show, not tell, the viewer what is going on, and "wall of text" is just a much worse way of telling the viewer. Revamping the in game cut scene engine is a different topic though, so I'll stop here.

I think putting "vs." in there is unnecessary. Can it not be both? Given the "vs." as a something fixed and not mutable, I'd say overwhelmingly new content would be the way to go. I can't see enough support for "hard mode" to make the critical mass necessary for it to work. Hard mode should be about teaming up and solving problems that are too tough to handle yourself. We'd need enough folks doing exactly that (and not "AE farm starting door sitters welcome") or it won't work. What I'd like to see is a hard mode server (maybe name it "Hardcase", a contact in St. Martinal) where all the hard core folk will be together so they have the best chance of getting that critical mass. Otherwise, like I say, I don't think you'd end up with enough people, as they are currently spread over four servers. Also if "hard mode" is just equivalent to Notoriety then we have that already, then there's not really any point in trying to just make a different one. We'd need something different. Edit: also there was a discussion some months back of adding a hard mode, and it had a poll attached, which was pretty valuable because quite a lot of people responded. Anyone got a link to that thread? I don't see it linked above.

This is my main complaint, even back on live. They should look more like an actual villainous mastermind's henchmen or some pineapple dictator's thugs rather WW2 soldiers. It's just a bit incongruous to the whole milieu. Oh that and serum. Maybe boost damage output of the other T1 by a bit and turn the Medic into a buff bot. Allowing him to heal at range (tranq gun?) would be a big help.

Also play through the arcs in First Ward. Some pretty good stuff there. But sure, adding some more mid level missions with the Midnighters where you have to rescue Percy would be great. That's a great idea for new arcs for the devs. For random missions? ... maybe some of the current magic contacts could have a new mission inserted where you need to rescue Percy. I kinda feel it should be thematic though, not 100% random but part of a theme of the sorts of missions the Midnighters might actually be on. Perhaps more mission types than just magic, but still should be part of a theme. But that's just my opinion.

I saw that someone had picked up "Almighty" as in "The Almighty." I thought that was a good name. It's also kinda funny because I have Stoned Jesus and now I'm trying to arrange for the two to "accidentally" run into each other.

About an hour after the first error (and several retries) it started working again. I'm assuming it was some sort of network event by the ISP, but who knows? (Sorry I didn't have the time to report back immediately when it worked again.)

Besides Athletic Run, I've also noticed that Walk will blink continuously if you have it on when you log in.

I need the badge anyway and selling the merits takes only a moment. I find the email system to be pretty tedious actually, and I'd have to log out to switch characters. In summary: nope.

I need to convert Merits into Converters, and the vendor to do that is in Wentworths (in Atlas Park, the vendors are in other locations in other zones).

As of about 6 am Pacific Time, I can't connect to the HC wiki. Firefox tells me the certificate is bad: Sorry if this is the wrong venue for reporting this, but cityofheroes.dev is now completely unreachable for me so I have no way to contact anyone at that domain. Hopefully someone from HC will be able to rattle their cage and let them know what's up.

Thanks, I had the same experience as the poster you quoted. Solo on a Bots/Time MM, and the spawns were just brutal. On a full team it would probably be pretty fun, and that's fine, but it didn't seem to scale down to normal solo levels. Also the map is huge, I basically tried to "stealth" it at the end. (Where "stealth" means runs past them real fast and let the bots soak the damage.) But unless you have two maps available I don't think that's feasible to fix. Well actually thinking about it right now, it could be fixed by just not spawning enemies at all locations. If solo or if two players, maybe only spawn about half the normal spawn points on a large map like that. It might make big maps like this less tedious when someone is just soloing for the story. Now if the map is supposed to have lots of enemies on it, that's fine. But maybe that should be only for team sizes of 5 and up. At smaller team sizes and especially solo, I think the map is too big and the spawn sizes are too large. Please tone it down a bit.

There's a cable and hook in Boomtown that is misbehaving. Location -1340.7 64.1 4964.6 and look east. It's standing straight out in the air and if you bump into it it moves around. Only about 133 yards due north of the base portal there.

I get Vanguard first because I want to end up near Wentworth's. On a new toon my first act is usually to sell a few converters so I have some working capital. Getting the one in the upper right corner (Gargoyle, I think) leaves me close to WW. Speaking of Wentworths, I thought the patch notes said the teleporters were being removed from those locations and the new base teleporters were going to be used instead. WW gives brainstorm ideas, like the old base reward did. Or did I read that wrong? One last thing, /enterbasefrompasscode does worth within about 40 feet or so of a base portal, and the Long Range Teleporter (the zone exploration accolade) dumps you right next to a base portal for that zone. (At least, the one in Steel Canyon did.) So get an accolade for the zone, and just portal there then use the macro as normal. LRT has an 8 minute cool down, so you'll need to manage it somewhat, but it'll reduce travel time for long hauls across multiple zones.

Girlie Girlie wasn't working, so for a while she was Girlie Lass. Then got changed to Astounding Lass, which is definitely working. The two former names are released, but I think it's better just to be inspired and try to find something that works best for you. Just keep at it, cool names are out there.