roleki

Agreed, but to be honest, I question whether - even armed with every bit of data imaginable - the devs would even KNOW what they are looking at; not because they aren't up to the task or whatever, but there's a very high probability that what was happening in the real world for 2/3 of HC's reign of prominence would either skew the data or make it completely useless. Population spike/ebb could have been the result of people suddenly having a lot of time on their hands, then suddenly not. But I know I would have been playing the crap out of CoH whether there was a pandemic or not, and maybe that's true of the entire playerbase, meaning the data they have is dead accurate. Somewhere in-between? Regardless, publish that data and people of every stripe will use it as evidence to support whatever notion they favor, and unfortunately, none of them will be wrong.

There's also fires in Steel Canyon; I might not use superpowers to fight the fires, but these normies sure as heck aren't teleporting between burning buildings. Which reminds me, I find it hilarious that there's all kinds of buildings on fire, all kinds of heroes running around, and there's still thugs stealing purses from people right there. RIGHT THERE.

Looking at that picture, I can't see why they would have disqualified him.

Oooh, good question. Shit! What if it's just been the 6 of us all along? I swear I am not trying to move the goalposts, but I worded the question you answered wrong. I need to see proof that SYMPTOMS of inflation have affected anyone, anywhere. LotG have been at ~7M for the better part of two years and are still so today. All those little Kismets, Achilles' Heels and whatnot have been at 4-6M for the better part of two years and are still so today. All the Dark Watcher's Despair have been at ~1M for the better part of two years and are still so today. I mean, pick an enhancement, it's been that way for two years. All across the board - and outside of emotional transactions during peak hours - enhancement prices have been pretty much etched in granite for nearly two years. If that's inflation, then yes please, doctor, give me the inflation.

I got this one to 46% melee def and it'll hit S/L resist caps in Offensive with a couple foes nearby. Perfect for PI Radio missions or S/L farms, but vs. anything else you'll have to press green buttons judiciously.

Upside: all the ice cream machines at McDowell's would work flawlessly, all the time. Downside: soon as you got your ice cream, some Hellions would melt it.

Very well then, I farm because it is the most efficient means of amassing the resources that I find important. With that out of the way, I would love to hear someone offer concrete proof that AE farming has harmed them, the game, or the universe in general, or if it turns out this all boils down to "They have more than me!" That's the kind of idea that would make my head explode, but not for the reason you're thinking. I don't like telling people how to spend their time. It's none of my business, as mine is none of theirs. An AFK farmer having trillions of inf doesn't affect me in the least, and so far, nobody has proven its affected them either. I don't even mind people whose pastime seems to be bitching about AE farming, provided they're just farting into space instead of directly into the dev's ambrosia, which is too often the case for my tastes. That said, I don't like anything that lends inertia to the anti-AE contingent, and AFK farming does that in spades. It's both the least-defensible form of farming and the number one example the hooting masses point to when they demand AE get nerfed. Since there's 'nothing' to differentiate between cave mapping and AFK farming, any swing of the blade aimed at AFK farmers is going to hit me square in the crotch, and I'm in a completely different car with both hands on the wheel, so to speak. For some reason, I dislike it. In that light, nerfing one particular map seems like a perfectly reasonable, measured solution but..... Here we are, discussing a game that's old enough to be served curiously strong beer in Quebec. Maybe if farming were outlawed, it would increase server pop. Or maybe it would kill the game. We honestly don't know. What we DO know is there are nearly 1400 players logged in at 4PM EST on a Wednesday. How many games from 2004 can say that? We should be doing cartwheels that we are here at all, not finding ways to chase people off in the hope that maybe, if all the stars align, somebody else will replace them and that person will be absolutely enchanted by playing the game The Right Way instead of yet another dirty farmer. While it would be phenomenal to have all the servers at double dots during peak hours, this aged game has to compete with literally billions of other entertainment options, and more are added every day. We *might* have to accept that this group here is who we have, and for better or for worse, it includes AFK farmers and roleplayers and Wentworth drop-shippers, people who hate all of that, and people who are oblivious to everything, like me.

Any chance you could link to the thread with the build here? Tried an activity search, but no dice. Or more specifically, how do you have Energizing Circuit slotted, and, do you run it slotted like that all the time?

Show me the inflation.

Emmert is quoted as saying, at its peak, CoH had 180,000 distinct accounts. NOT concurrent. Total, distinct accounts. As of March of 2020, HC had 159,537 distinct accounts... not that far off the pace of Live, and, that's less than one year of data. So we're not talking apples and oranges, we're talking navel oranges and valencia oranges. As I noted before, we know that /Fiery Aura Brutes logged 14,007,639 hours of time. Let's generously assume that only half of those hours were spent farming in an environment that encouraged doing so. That's 7,003,819 hours, give or take. Assume they sucked at Fire Farming, and only brought in 5M inf an hour. That still translates to 35,019,095,000,000 inf. That's 35 trillion. Enough to buy 4,669,212 LotG at 7.5M apiece, enough to equip 933,842 characters with 5x LotG%. Me, I bring in about 22M an hour farming, and I'm not even trying hard. Half the /Fiery Aura Brute hours, making half what I make, would result in 77TN influence. And you know it was more than that. You are absolutely correct, we will never know how much inf was sitting in the wells on Live, but we can make fairly accurate guesstimates of what *just* the Fire Farmers were sitting on in HC... 28 months ago, and I will bet both our sets of nuts that there wasn't 77TN+ sitting around on Live, because there was no use to farm for inf on Live until there suddenly was.

I was in the market for a new computer at the time and wound up getting one with an Ageia PhysX card just for Croatoa. I must have spent 20 hours in that zone, just marveling at the swirling garbage and animated trees.

Circling back to this, but before I answer @Bionic_Flea's question, allow me to bloviate a bit... We can all agree that IOs changed the game drastically, and within minutes of their arrival created a massive gap between the haves and have-nots. Inflation was absolutely rampant at the outset, and only got worse as time went on. By the time I dropped out (Issue 18 or so) a decent build - the kind of build bandied about on these forums routinely as if they're no big deal - ran well into the billions of inf. No matter what the Live devs did to curtail or discourage farming, inflation just kept spiraling into the stratosphere. Think about that for a second, then think about it for a few more seconds. No matter what the devs on Live did to discourage farming, inflation was rampant. Fast-forward to Homecoming. The HC devs have had some simple/genius fixes for the market that, boiled down to its most basic concept, essentially made Reward Merits the 'gold standard' for enhancements. But they have also - maybe not intentionally, maybe despite their best efforts - fostered an environment where farming isn't just rampant, it's damn near the only thing happening. The last (and only) time they released player statistics in March of 2020, there were more /Fiery Aura Brutes than any two xEATs combined, and nearly as many of that particular secondary in that particular AT than the entire Stalker AT. In that snapshot of time between April 2019 and March 2020, players had amassed 14,007,639 hours of 'time played' on /Fiery Aura Brutes, which was 3.53x more than all Tanks of all stripes combined, or 36x more than logged with Widows. To save you the math, in less than one year of real time, /Fiery Aura Brutes had logged 1599 years' worth of in-game time. They probably weren't ALL farming, but, come on. They were all farming. They were all farming, and, they've been farming their nuts off for almost three years... which, oddly enough, is the same amount of time between the release of CoH proper in 2004 and the introduction of the Market in 2007, when everyone attributed whacky inflation to long-term players sitting on massive hoards of influence and suddenly finding an outlet for it. So then, if players NOT farming influence still amassed huge piles of it which led to rampant inflation on Live, then surely an environment where there's been almost nothing BUT farming going on for three years has led to even MORE insane inflation on HC, right? No, wait a second. Check that. A LotG Global Recharge costs the same or less today than it did in October of 2019. They *were* 4M apiece until around then, but they hit 7M around that time, and have hung within 500k ever since. When it comes to desirable IOs, at least at level 50, prices are pretty much stable and have been so through most of the tenure of HC. Now, you can credit a lot of that to the steps the devs have taken to level everything relative to Reward Merits, and (sigh) you can attribute some of that to marketeers converting my lead into their gold. But you cannot pretend that farmers don't have a hand in KEEPING INFLATION DOWN by raining shitloads of recipes/enhancements on the market in batches of 70 or so every 45 minutes per farmer. I would also argue, somewhat weakly but vocally nonetheless, that Farmers also make the market for IOs by sending a steady stream of doorsitters on their way to slotopia. Yes, people occasionally waddle to the Auction House under their own power, but nobody's sending cigarette boats full of people to visit /AH at the rate that farmers are. Simply put, if there is a problem with prices at the market, I don't think that's on farmers. Despite our supposed billions upon billions upon billions of influence, the stuff people actually want at farming levels costs the same today as it has for three years. If there's silly inflation on mid-level IOs, well, there's what your world without farmers would look like. I mean, it's not the farmers or PLers who are producing or looking for level 20 IOs, that's you naturally-aspirated types. If midgame shit is getting too expensive, maybe the answer is more level 20-40 farmers? Seems to work for level 50 stuff. Unless I am misconstruing what everyone's beef with farming is. I mean, if you're thinking that IOs should cost 5 inf more than what they cost to craft, I don't know what to tell you. At some point, demand drives price, and those IOs that people tend to want as many as 5x of (LotG% for example) are going to cost... wait... somehow less than 5x what a Stupefy Stun/Range IO sells for? Farmers! If it's PLing you have issue with, and the resulting relative dearth of midrange players for you to team with, you may just have to temper your expectations, as nobody owes you a good time but yourself. History, both measured and anecdotal, indicates that there is a very large contingent of people who have the option to play the progression game, but inexplicably pivot to farming and PLing instead. It's almost like they are deriving some sort of enjoyment from that, despite the insistence of a few forum harpies that such a thing is impossible. And if it's simply an issue of "Hey! They've got more stuff than me!" the most delicate way I can respond to that is to not address it at all. So, anyway... if you're reading this @Bionic_Flea , up until this point 'you' was anyone who suffered through reading this, not 'you' specifically. But now, I am addressing your enduring question... should fire farming pay better than anything else in the game? My answer is: it really doesn't matter. What really matters is that characters leveling through content earn enough in doing so to acquire a level's worth of IOs at the auction house, and do so from level 0 to 50. The devs should have enough data to know whether that is happening, but just poking around tells me it's not. I don't know what would help THOSE people out, but I am pretty dang sure that it isn't tied to how much inf a fire farmer makes or doesn't make. I mean, progressionists aren't fighting farmers for those sweet IOs between 1 and 45, they simply aren't deriving any benefit from that farmer until they ding 50. To me, the problem would seem to be, not enough supply for the ride to 50, and I can see where THAT could be construed as a problem with farming, insofar as there's a billion level 50 recipes getting dropped off, but only a handful of midrange stuff. If it were in my power, I would make the rate of drops in content increase dramatically in the 20-49 range, with a little bump in influence to bring both ends of the transaction together. And since I still have the strength to type, might as well throw out a couple other half-baked suggestions and get all my thumbs down in one shot. I would look into revamping the Architect Ticket system and make it more aligned with the way Vanguard Merits work; it would require some fancy footwork, but there has to be a middle ground between randomly getting a Stupefy Stun/Range and always getting a LotG%. If a decent middle ground existed there, then by all means, trade some of the AE influence rewards for tickets. I would take the framework of the Incarnate system, and lay it over content from 1-50, except instead of working to unlock an Incarnate slot, you're working through a tiered 'accolade' tree that would, I don't know, grant a 0.5% global defense(all) bonus up to HERE, then it gives a 1% defense(all) bonus and 2% movement speed boost to HERE, then in the final tree, gives a 2% defense(all), 3% recovery, and 3% movement boost. Then have other trees that also do defense, or resistance, or whatever, so that in the end, players that go through content basically get a couple extra IO sets worth of global bonuses not available to farmers/PL'd characters, and they can stack them to shore up one weakness or spread them around to make a more rounded character. Tie it to the number of contacts who won't hand you missions anymore or something, I don't know, so existing characters would get the benefits too. I would repeat that anywhere that devs want people to do more with (like, killing stuff in PvP zones grants PvP-only bonuses, and so on.) Put it this way, it's obvious the content isn't selling itself, and neither are efforts by people to try and force other players into going through it. If you want people to think twice about using AE as a leveling tool, you have to play on their FOMO.

Oh I wasn't trying to be contrarian, I had just been scrolling through the thread, noticing 'risk' pop up in a lot of comments and trying to formulate how to express why I feel 'risk' is a bad metric in this discussion, when I ran into your comment on the subject and quoted it for emphasis. Now, it's the end of a long work week and, having celebrated properly, probably not the best time for me to attempt an answer to the question you keep asking but nobody has addressed. I'm not much on restraint even in my right mind, so best I save it for tomorrow.

Level shift and Ultimates help a lot.

I still don't get that specific portion of the argument. What is risk, in this game? In the vast majority of circumstances, defeat is a momentary inconvenience. In those circumstances where defeat is MORE than an inconvenience, like say a Master Of run, the folks that choose to engage in that activity (and expect to succeed) will prepare in advance to minimize the chances they will be defeated. Step into a fire farm unprepared, and you will assuredly suffer an inconvenience. Step into it prepared, and you most likely won't. Point being, the vast majority of what constitutes 'risk' in this game is mitigated in advance by those that choose to engage in the activity. If it all goes pear-shaped and the map is littered with the corpses of you and your allies you have to... make a couple of clicks & maybe travel a tad before going back to do exactly the same thing you were doing before. Your gear doesn't get blown off and scavenged by passersby, you don't lose piles of inf, your ranking in the leaderboards doesn't slip... defeat is really trivial in CoH. To put it another way, you either spend your time/resources making preparations in advance to stave off defeat, or you don't, and you spend time/resources recovering from the defeats that result from that choice. I would take the pepsi challenge with anyone and wager that I spent more time and resources perfecting my Rad/Fire Brute than they have recovering from every defeat on every character they ever rolled in this game, Live or HC, combined. Admittedly, that's not saying much, I'm a slow worker and agonize over little details. But even if I scraped the build off the forums and just ran with it, I still would have invested quite a bit of resources in that character that your typical Heroic Streetfighter might not have. If I've invested what is necessary to survive in a 4/8 farm packed with hundreds and hundreds of angry jerks, the ROI on that is... I can survive in a 4/8 farm packed with hundreds and hundreds of angry jerks, and I get to keep whatever fell out of their pockets when I beat the dogpiss out of them, same as anyone else gets to keep what drops off THEIR victims in PI or DFB or wherever.

I still use Wormhole like I always have; the existence of a better, more effective Wormhole available to anyone who wants it and earlier than a Gravity controller would get it doesn't change how Wormhole works, how Wormhole has always worked. Though I will admit it kind of sucks as Fold Space is just one more step down the path of doing away with the attributes that define powersets and ATs in general, and just gives people another reason not to roll a Controller or a Dominator, but hey, them's the breaks. I look forward to the day when a Tank can bring a mob to it via Fold Space, cast their own Fulcrum Shift, deploy their own Phantom Army, then dial up a Gang War. Where we're going, we won't need teams, we'll just need tanks. Tanks tanks tanks as far as the eye can see. City of Tanks. You don't like tanking? Shut up and steer your tank. And if you even think of stepping a foot into AE with that tank, it better be to Fold Space and slingshot people out of the lobby and into an ITF.

When the reward system is tied to enemy defeats, those who defeat more in less time... get more rewards than those that don't. To be quite honest, thanks to the incessant complaining from a certain vocal fraction of the playerbase, AE farmers are getting LESS rewards per mob than they would in content, but, they're encountering more mobs per square inch than they might in your typical PI radio mission or even a +4 ITF. Instead of disdain, you should feel a sort of pity for the poor farmers. For a few more magic beans per minute, they are trading not only the opportunity to carouse through rich, delightful content like 'Find Wyatt a Clockwork Power Source To Study' but they are also robbing themselves of the opportunity to team up with the sort of people who would log into the forums and call them -specifically - all sorts of names just because they were feeling pouty.

I normally do either civilian clothes heroes or full helmet robotic types but I've always wanted to do a Monstrous -> Wolf Head character; I finally got a chance to this weekend. It's an Ill/EA controller who looks normal during the day, but in moonlight he transforms into a werewolf who makes copies of himself. He's called Lycanthroppelganger.

/Storm eats up a lot of endurance even at a normal pace; throw in a high global recharge and you have to pull out all the stops to get to a decent recovery scenario. First thing I do on a /Storm is get to work on the Atlas Medallion, since it is so easy to get and makes your base recovery AND PerfShift% that much better. If you can swing it, it helps to +5 the endurance enhancements on your toggles like Hurricane, Tactics, and so on, as well as Crushing Field and Wormhole (which is why I go GravAnchor/AbsAmazement in those rather than an ATO, so I can +5 them all where needed). I've done all of that, T4'd Cardiac and thrown all the recovery uniques in Health, and I still occasionally find myself on the wrong half of the endurance bar, but that's a side effect of running around at about 280% recharge in combat and having Speed of Sound on at all times. In any event, here's the build my Grav/Storm is running; may not be suitable to most but it works for how I use it; maybe you'll see something in there that you can use in yours, or, be glad you don't use in yours (?) as the case may be. Raniac 1.1.2 - Controller (Gravity Control).mxd

I would love to see it, but also, I would hate to see it. I don't want to be proven right or wrong, I just want everyone to be able to interact with this executable in the way they are accustomed to doing so. Some people can't have a good time unless they're actively shitting on someone else while doing it, and, unfortunately, that's the community the devs seem most interested in cultivating. Me, I'll be here until the lights go out, and when they do, I hope I am at the third intersection in the large cave map, surrounded by the only people who understand me - custom s/l mobs who are on fire. Some of you people will be legging it over to a warehouse.

It's at least tagged 'replaces existing effect' on COD, so I would imagine no?

Topic for another thread, but I suspect that's why the name reclamation system is finally getting deployed, in order to make the eventual server consolidation less horrifying to the proletariat. I wish we needed every shard and more, but for a while there, I was seeing more people in Brainstorm PI than in Indom PI... and it's been that way since at least October 2021. The devs are going to have to do something about that, and not being blessed with a lot of imagination myself, the only thing I can think of is consolidation. If that is what happens, I don't envy whoever has to make those decisions and field the follow-ups. I'll be among the pissed because Indom is 'my' server and it's clearly among the gangrenous that needs trimmed, but my disappointment will be tempered somewhat by the idea that it's for the greater good. Or, comedy option, make Indom the 'farming' server, where AE is presented as-is and all the other shards get the various stifles that people chant for incessantly on the forums. Would be interesting to see what THAT would do to the ghost town.

And every time this thread is created, the devs spend more of their precious time chipping away at farming. Look at the Server Status page, compare the number of people logged in to the number of map instances. Gosh, if everyone but the EBIL FURMERS are on teams, why are there so many map instances relative to the number of players logged in? It's almost like... there are a LOT of people who are on a map by themselves or 1 other. What do you suppose those people are doing, I wonder? These changes that get whined into existence don't serve the majority, they cater to the vocal minority for whom it's just not enough that we're running the same executable as they are, no, we have to share THEiR vision of how the executable should be run.

Fire/TA. Insane number of ranged attacks (meaning you can cap ranged def for chump change) and debuffs that feed right into scourge. Things just burst into flames and die when they see you.

If it wasn't a SR, I would say Scrapper all the way, every day. I just don't like SR on a Scrapper, it only feels half-cooked. But on a Scrapper, if you drop the Superior Critical Strikes proc into Eagle's Claw, MA turns into an absolute machine at the drop of a hat. You can GET there on a Brute, but it takes some doing.