Luminara

You have children aging you prematurely. I don't. Who's the fogey? 😛

The same way someone got their chocolate into someone else's peanut butter. Wow. It sounded so innocent in the commercials, but reading it now...

Because many of them instill a sense of punishment. I have a Savage/something scrapper. I like the character, but I don't like trying to use Savage Melee because I have to watch the combo stacks and use them at 4 so I'm not arbitrarily penalized (using at 5 stacks results in loss of the ability to gain new stacks for a short period). I'm not playing the game, I'm not watching the action, I'm not enjoying the animations, I'm not responding viscerally to the combat, I'm just juggling the combo mechanic and trying to get through that spawn without fucking up and being slapped on the wrist for not paying attention to the stacks. If I hit 5, I have to slow down and wait until one or more drops, so I can use my big hitter without losing access to the mechanic entirely; or I have to suck it up and give up having stacks for the next X seconds. I have better, and far more enjoyable, things to do with my time than stare at one icon on the screen. I can do that without logging into the game. I suspect that's true of most players. On the flip side, my main is a Staff Melee brute, and I have no quibbles with the combo mechanic in that set. I don't care if I "waste" it, or if I miss it, because I know it'll always come back after three more attacks. I'm not obligated to stare at that one icon with Staff Melee because it's a fairly implemented combo mechanic with no penalty for failing to ignore the game in favor of that one icon.

From what I recall of the discussions on the original forums, the theoretical bonus XP per teammate (to compensate for XP being shared) was never quantified. This would be an excellent opportunity to do so, if you're so inclined and have sufficient additional accounts (i don't, nor will my sad little laptop support multiple instances of the game without dropping to an unplayable framerate). Test with a single character, your farmer, defeating a single critter at +0, +1, +2, +3 and +4 (to determine the baseline and account for level adjustment when adding more teammates (as the game natively adjusts critter level upward when team size increases)). The critter should be identical, other than level variance, for each data point. If the original critter is a level 50 Council Marksman, for instance, then the test should be repeated on a Council Marksman every time. Note the XP for each defeat, and the level of the critter defeated. Then add one teammate and defeat the test critter, noting the XP for each teammate and critter level. Repeat that second step six more times, adding one teammate each time and jotting down the XP earned by each member of the team and the level of the critter, until you have the results for a full team of 8. Bring the results here and we'll do the math (and someone can add it to the wiki).

Sausage. Like the Stay Puft Marshmallow man, but a lot gorier.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest

Ha! The maul worked! He's still short a few... maybe I should hit him again, just in case.

Hey, whoa there, hold up. He actually is stuck at 999. Perhaps some percussive maintenance? *thwaps @Shenanigunner* Hm... let me try with my 8lb maul...

You've earned it for all of the useful little things you've created.

Congratulations, @Katharos! And thanks for the mental exercise, @Yomo Kimyata.

Oh, I'm cheerleading this event? Okay, hold on, let me get into the right mindset... You are a speck a speck a speck a speck, an imperfection awaiting erasure. Perforrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm, iiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnsect, or I will use your meat as a decoraaaaaaaaaaaaaaation.

Nobody likes a busybody.

I almost pet a wild groundhog about three months ago. It'd snuck into a greenhouse at a farm where I help out. I cornered it and expected it to bolt past me, but it just huddled up and waited. Poked it with a rod to get it moving, because I was trying to trap it on the other side of the greenhouse so I could release it, and it still didn't move. I walked right up to it, my leg brushing against its fur, and, nope, just not moving from that spot. If I hadn't seen what their teeth can do, I would've risked it. Little bastard looked so soft and squishy. Now, I'll happily grab a wild opossum and carry it around, because they're the least aggressive animal I've ever encountered, and they're incredibly soft. Crazy soft. Fur like down. But they don't bite. Those giant rats, though, scary teeth. Yeah. No touchy. Plus, marmots can harbor Yersinia Pestis, and groundhogs are in the marmot family (which is in the Rodentia family, hence the giant rats reference (not to be confused with capybaras, which actually are giant rats (but not closely related to common rats (or lab rats (or the Rat Pack))))), and ain't nobody got time for no plague. What were we talking about?

Magnitude determines the final effect of the KB. Magnitude below 0.75 equates to knockdown, above equates to knockback, with increased magnitude resulting in greater distance. You're confusing "Chance to knock back/down" with magnitude. The "Chance to" flag is independent of and distinct from magnitude.

Rubber chickens don't have blood.

😢

I have a complaint. Where's my goddamn deep dish pizza, @Jimmy? I'm not paying a subscription for this lousy service! 🔪

I'm dinging the big 5 0 in a few months, I'm running out of time. I already addressed that. But to dig a little further into that, the lucky drops which would fund an entire build, recipes like LotG +Recharge, Crushing Impact, Decimation, Red Fortune, Karma, or Steadfast Protection, yes, those would pay for a (very, very modest) build with common IOs and IO sets, but you'd be using Sleep sets, and Immobilize sets, and Slow sets, frankenslotting and making do more often than not. The cheap shit, primarily uncommons or rares which offered no desirable bonuses which justified flipping, and that was if you could afford the salvage. At level 25, common IOs have values close enough to SOs to be considered an even swap, but the common IOs most needed and wanted, like Accuracy IOs, had the downside of having a higher salvage cost than expected, making even those difficult to justify or benefit from for the average player. And drop rates were atrocious on everything. LotG +Recharge recipes and Steadfast Protection +3% Def (All) recipes didn't rain from the heavens. Luck Charms, a common magic salvage item, weren't lying around, waiting to be collected. Getting that lucky drop to pay for an entire IO build wasn't assured, by any stretch of the imagination, and what you did get, and could afford to craft, typically resulted in having a wildly varying collection of IO levels, not always in complete sets, leading to wildly varying degrees of efficiency and total collapse of the build when you exemplared. Luck isn't a progression plan, it's the last, desperate hope of success when plans have failed. Buying and crafting is an investment, investment costs, and if you don't have start-up capital, you can't invest, so the foundation of this idea is still dependent on luck. That precluded the vast majority of players. Players who were lucky enough to get that one drop of sufficient value to begin marketeering were still playing the long game, relying on incremental profits and small margins to gradually build wealth over a long period of time. Market niches? Limited. There were tens of thousands of players logging in every day, but there weren't tens of thousands of niches. Most players were already locked out of niches by controlling interests, and niches never opened up again in a way which would permit new players to move in. If a niche controller quit, the next one, who already had billions of inf*, moved right in before you could sneeze. Flipping could not be argued, in any way, to be a strategy for new players. It wasn't even a strategy for most existing players, because of the inherent limitation of a set number of items. There just weren't enough recipes/salvage in the entire game to give every player a niche. That lack of niches to go around also precluded the use of flipping by new players, in the event of a population increase. If you only have enough niches for 10,000 players, it doesn't matter if your player base is 150,000 or 1,000,000, you're still leaving the majority of players without niches. Market arbitration could be reliable, but with common salvage priced at 100x the vendor value, and even "trash" recipes priced higher than vendor value, it was an extremely long-term approach. Put in lowball bids and wait (and wait, and wait, and wait) until someone dumped salvage or recipes at a low enough price for your bid to fill, and make your piddling amount inf*. Rinse, repeat ad nauseum, and eventually, you'd make sufficient profits to amount to something tangible. You're also forgetting that we were restricted to 22 market slots (at level 40, fewer slots at lower levels), which strictly limited the number of bids on "cheap junk" unless we spread our bids across multiple alts. In addition to limiting access to niches, bids and sales, that market slot restriction also imposed a purchasing/selling power contradiction, because the "best" level for drops was 25. At level 25, you had a chance to acquire LotG +Recharge recipes (which sold for around 125,000,000 inf* at that level, the highest value non-PvP, non-purple recipe), could still pick up Karmas and Steadfast Protections as drops (not as expensive as LotG, but still damn spendy), could still acquire Luck Charms (25k minimum sale price)... this created a disparity between when it was best to freeze a character's XP and remain perpetually at a set level while grinding, and when best practice marketeering could be accomplished, due to that restriction on market slots. E-mailing to oneself wasn't an option until Issue 17 (far too late to address the economic situation), and even when it became possible, it was limited to 20 emails and they had a 60 day time limit (at which point the e-mail was automatically deleted, so too bad, so sad if you lost 20 valuable items/amounts of inf* you'd mailed to an alt to hold and didn't remove in time). So engaging in high level marketeering before Issue 17 required a second account to transfer goods/inf* to alts, and after Issue 17, when it became "easier", was still time-consuming enough to qualify as a full-time job. These weren't solutions for new players. With niches filled, arbitration and crafting being slow, they weren't solutions for most experienced players. That was what I meant when I said, "immensely patient or incredibly lucky". Most of us weren't incredibly lucky, or patient enough to spend hours every day bouncing between alts to juggle items/inf*, flipping, scavenging for crumbs in the form of "underpriced" salvage and recipes, crafting and listing, scouring the market for opportunities and collecting tiny amounts of inf* which only felt like an accumulation of wealth after months of toil. That wasn't the game we paid a $15/month fee to play, it damn sure wasn't going to be the game new recruits would pay to play. Both Cryptic and Paragon were efficient in dealing with gold sellers. Not 100% successful, but enough to prevent them from seriously impacting the market. They were irrelevant in the long run. I've had no contact with any Cryptic or Paragon developers since Issue 19.5. My conclusions are based on an extrapolation of the design philosophy and process specific to this game, comments made by developers on the original forums, comprehension of mathematics, game mechanics and economic principles (nowhere near what can be attributed to other members of this community, but i'm not completely uneducated) and knowledge of the game's history. And copious amounts of caffeine and nicotine, but I swear, those are the only substances of which I partake. Pinky swear. Short term, not a bridge. A leveler. A new baseline from which they could proceed with future development plans. Incarnates would have allowed them to be completely certain that players entering new content would meet specific minimum requirements. Yes, the difference between an IOed Incarnate and an SOed Incarnate would still have been significant, but the Incarnate system would have accomplished the goal of assuring that the SOed Incarnates were performing at the expected level for the difficulty they envisioned. The IOed Incarnate would have been more powerful than the SOed Incarnate, but with the Incarnate foundation in place, they could begin addressing the power difference in future updates. It would have bought them the time they needed to implement a more thorough and lasting solution to the haves versus have-nots problem created by hyperinflation, without resorting to the solution other MMORPGs tended to use (gear treadmill). Bear in mind that the first iteration of the Incarnate system wasn't even completed when the game shut down, and Positron stated in AMAs that future development would have included more tiers of Incarnates, comparable to the max level bumps used by other MMORPGs, without the actual level bump. As each tier of Incarnates was added, the difference between SO builds and IO builds would have diminished, because the increasing levels of power offered by Incarnate abilities would be cumulative, but provide the SO builds with greater advantages since they weren't soft-capped on Defense, they weren't rocking massive amounts of global +Recharge, they weren't playing at the Damage cap at all times. Your build with 200% global +Recharge and someone else's SO-only build with 0% global +Recharge perform very differently... but +Recharge is capped, and when the SO-only player begins accumulating global +Recharge from Incarnate abilities, even though you can also benefit, the SO-only player benefits more (because of the way the recharge reduction formula works, you adding another 30% +Recharge to your maxed-out build isn't as pronounced in effect as it is in the build with less global +Recharge. you might shave 0.2s off of your favorite power's recharge time, whereas the other player might shave 2.3s off of an identical power in an SO build) and isn't bumping into that cap as quickly as you are, so has more headroom to use those click powers like Ageless. Consequently, after a few Incarnate tiers, you're no longer a god compared to the SO-only player, you're merely slightly more powerful. You might have a few extra tools and tricks compared to that SO-only build, but if you're both at or near the Recharge cap, the Damage cap, the Accuracy cap, et cetera, your IO build is only offering you more flexibility in how you approach and accomplish the content's directives, not more gross power. Long-term, the gap would have been all but bridged, and at the very least, made irrelevant. All we have now is the first round of Incarnates, which make a notable difference in play when comparing IO builds against SO builds, but, again, that was just the first round. There was more coming. And when that goal had been achieved, the hyperinflated economy would've been comparatively less pressing, something they could address gradually and without disruption. Carried to its full extent, the Incarnate system would've alleviated the problem of IO builds versus SO builds by bringing everyone into the same boat, side-stepped the economic instability and permitted development of more complex and challenging content without kicking players in the groin by expecting them to dump billions and billions of inf* into the market to progress. The game now, with 5% of the Incarnate system implemented, doesn't reflect that, but it would have if Paragon hadn't been shut down.

I cannot express how frequently and with what glee I would pick up the civilian and throw him/her back on the ground, in retribution for all of the misery they've caused over ten years of playing.

Oh, look, someone new to stalk.

Content balanced around SOs has to be restricted to a narrow range of critter capability and strict limitation according to player slot availability. This is why critter damage output ramps up very slowly, critters have comparatively few powers and they don't have many tricks up their sleeves. SOs impose a high cost of slots, which created restrictive slotting models as the norm as players pursued valued effects and eschewed slotting for other effects. SOs can also lose efficiency as players level up, and frequently need to be replaced, but due to the inf* cost, players rarely replaced (or combined) them at every level, which imposed a further limitation on design. Common IOs permit a more varied approach to slotting without sacrificing overall capability. As stronger IOs are acquired, fewer slots are necessary to reach the same result as what can be accomplished with SOs, and this would have allowed a design approach which didn't need to be quite as limited by slot availability. In other words, they have a lower slot cost than SOs, which permits more powers to be better slotted across the board, and/or more emphasis on secondary effects in slotted powers. IOs also never lose efficiency, they can't be "out-leveled", and their measurable improvement every five levels would have permitted a greater emphasis on critter and encounter variety across the entire range of the game, from levels 7 to 50. If 90% of your players slot their attacks with 2 Accuracy SOs, 3 Damage SOs and one Endurance or Recharge Reduction SO, then you're limited in how you can design content to challenge them. But if 90% of your players are slotting one Accuracy IO, two Damage IOs, one Endurance or Recharge Reduction IO and one or two other IOs to improve secondary effects, and have sufficient additional slots to improve other powers which would otherwise be left unslotted if they were using SOs... you can approach your content design from a much wider and more varied perspective.

See the second paragraph of the post you quoted.

If their attempts to bleed off the influence glut had succeeded, common IOs would very likely have replaced TOs, DOs and SOs entirely within the next few Issues. That would've been critical to designing harder content, because it guaranteed that anyone who had reached maximum level would also be using enhancements with known values (not values scaled by level difference, not potentially out-leveled enhancements), thereby assuring the developers that all players would've had specific minimum enhancement values. The new baseline would have been common IO values, and the post-50 content they created could then be made with the expectation that players were using level 50 common IOs, or would upgrade their existing common IOs to level 50. Concurrently, sub-50 content would be created around lower level common IO slotting expectations, and be neither too hard nor too easy. Even set bonuses wouldn't skew the curve much if they'd succeeded, because players typically slotted mid-level sets, rather than all 50. We didn't have attunement in Issue 9, or for a long time after, so slotting set IOs at specific levels, to ensure that they were maximizing the powers in the ways most important to us while simultaneously assuring us that they'd be viable even if we exemplared down a few levels, was de rigueur. And functionally, the difference between a build with level 25-30 set IOs and bonuses, and a build with level 50 common IOs and no bonuses isn't as great as the difference between a strictly SO build, and a build with level 25-30 set IOs plus set bonuses. And that was the sticking point for the developers. The bar had to stay where it was so the players who weren't marketeering, who weren't sitting on piles of inf*, who weren't using IOs, weren't driven completely out. They could've simply forced everyone to switch to IOs, removed all other non-IO and non-HO enhancements from the game and pushed forward, but they already knew such an act would raise more Hell than they cared to consider. Even common IOs have an associated cost, and like everything else, that cost was set with the existing influence situation in mind. Compare a level 50 Damage SO, 60,000 inf*, with a level 50 Damage IO, 464,400 for the recipe plus 464,400 crafting fee plus the cost of salvage. While a level 50 Damage IO does provide a larger bonus than a level 50 Damage SO, or even a level 53 Damage IO, the associated cost is still disproportional to the benefit if one is looking at having to replace every enhancement in a build. The uproar that would've ensued if the developers had deleted TOs, DOs and SOs and told everyone to replace them with IOs would've made the GDN and ED threads look like pleasant tea-time conversations. Even if they'd written a script to replace all TOs, DOs and SOs with comparable IOs, the future slotting of alts or respecs of characters requiring new IOs would have made it painful for a lot of players. So they could never integrate IOs into the base enhancement system more than they did, and they could never mandate a global IO change-over, either. The influence problem was just too profound and wide-spread.