Luminara

Maybe they should give us the ability to use two power sets on every character so it's less unfair. We could have a primary set and a secondary set, and mix and match as we please, and have plenty of opportunities to slot in a variety of ways. Boy howdy, that'd be nifty.

Circling back around to this, I did a rough reproduction of this build to get a better idea of how it would perform. What isn't mentioned is that it's dependent on the Force Feedback +Recharge proc. That's what makes it possible for Seismic Smash to cycle in that period of time. If the proc doesn't trigger, or the power with the proc misses, the cycle time is longer. That's a pretty sizable limitation that should be noted, not glossed over or ignored. Two limitations, in fact - the Accuracy cap and the proc trigger probability cap. Additionally, the average damage over time doesn't favor six-slotting procs so heavily that it's a clear and obvious choice in this case, to my eyes. In my repro, Seismic Smash's recharge time is 5.16s and the average damage output with six 71.75 damage procs is 670.7. Slotting the power with 5/6 Hecatomb, including the damage proc, and placing the Unbreakable Constraint damage proc in the sixth slot, though, leads to a recharge time of 4.14s and average damage output of 669.7. Slotting with two purple procs and four 71.75 damage procs leads to an average of 734.3 damage, which is better, but still not mind blowing when compared to the average output of the Hecatomb 5/6 + UC proc slotting. Furthermore, when I examined the potential DPS of both attacks, accounting for maximum damage if all procs triggered and accounting for the complete cycle time of the power (animation plus recharge), I found that, even with 2 purple procs, the six proc slotting came out at lower DPS (114.0779522978476) than the Hecatomb 5/6 + Unbreakable Constraint purple proc (118.7158469945355). The damage can be higher per use of the power when slotted with six procs, but the damage over time is lower than slotting traditionally and adding one extra proc. And bear in mind that this was ignoring the 90% probability cap. Frankly, I don't see the allure. Or a compelling argument for proc nerfs. But that wasn't why I came back to this post. What's been bothering me about this is that it has certain negative implications regarding player investment and expectation. Any build focused this heavily on +Recharge is going to cost (i know, it's how i build most of my characters). I'm not saying that it's difficult to acquire the funding for this kind of build, but it does require an investment of time. Time spent farming, or converting and selling enhancements on the market, or creating that jaw-dropping costume that wins the contest. Time has to be spent to pay for all of the purples and ATOs that this build is going to need. Are we, then, concluding that the time a player invests in creating, leveling and kitting out a build should not be rewarded? This build requires heavy micro-management. There's Hasten and Domination to juggle, since only one of them can be set to auto-fire. The +Recharge from the FF proc has to be maintained or recovered (when it misses or fails to trigger). The endurance usage is high, so constant attention to that is necessary. This build is a lot of extra work for the player. Are we saying that working harder should not be rewarded? The build is comparatively light on AoE damage potential. A high damage single-target attack, with a 1.7s animation time, is of limited value in this game, whereas AoE damage offers significantly better return on investment. Consequently, the player is giving up the potential for higher AoE damage in favor of higher single-target damage. Isn't that always a factor in builds? Shouldn't that choice matter? Animation time imposes a ceiling on DPS. Recharge times directly impact DPS. Dumping the majority of one's damage output into one or two powers six-slotted with procs, on slower recharge times and with longer animation times doesn't actually improve DPS, because the overwhelming majority of combat in this game revolves around defeating minions and lieutenants, foes with far fewer HP. Having great DPS on pylon tests means exactly diddly squat in actual play, and in most cases, those heavily procced attacks are going to be overkill. Wasted animation time is a net loss in DPS. Slower recharge times are a net loss in DPS if you don't have comparable powers to fill your attack chain. Solo, it's manageable, but annoying. In teams, it can rapidly lead to feeling completely useless, with everything dying while you're still stuck in your animation, or the player displaying a single-minded focus on bosses and ignoring everything else to the detriment of cooperative and friendly play. When builds like these cross an indefinable line between "really good" and "rubbish unless there's a boss or better", is it the development team's responsibility to play nursemaid and prevent players from crossing that line? Shouldn't players be permitted to screw themselves over for the 95% or the game involving minions/lieutenants so the can shine in the remaining 5%, if that's what they want to do? The high endurance cost of Seismic Smash is a limiting factor. Only specific builds are going to work with this kind of slotting. Players who slot this way aren't going to be doing it on every imaginable build, it's only viable for builds which can improve Recovery in some way, include means of reducing endurance costs natively, or can drain endurance as a tertiary mechanism to support the use of powers not slotted for Endurance Reduction. Essentially, players sacrifice the opportunity to play more varied builds in order to make something like this work without even more effort on their part. Is that compromise not worthy of some compensation in game play? Lastly, the people playing builds like these are likely to be long-term players who have accumulated a great deal of experience and knowledge. Theory crafting at this level doesn't come from glancing at powers in the character creation screen six weeks after discovering the game. Figuring out how to squeeze everything in, how to pay for all of the enhancements, how to tweak just the right ways and in the right places... that's not newbies doing that, that's vets. Are we to expect every benefit of experience and knowledge to be nerfed? If so, best get started on turning every power in to Brawl, because that's the only possible solution. All of the talk about what procs can do when abused, but nothing about what it costs the player to do that. Time, work, animation times, recharge times, diversity, many factors are just as important as whether or not a character beat up something 2s faster than another character. If someone is playing a character that can't perform well unless a certain power hits and a certain proc triggers, they're constantly having issues with endurance, they're struggling to keep up a rapid pace because they spend too much time locked into longer animations, they're broke because they spent all of their inf* on their "perfect" proc monster build, and they're not contributing much to teams until there's a boss/EB/AV/GM, and in the long run, they're still not dealing as much damage as players who are slotted "normally", are they really a threat to game balance?

We have no idea if the planet is going to continue to spin, or the sun continue to fuse hydrogen, or the universe continue to exist, when we wake up each morning. But we can examine the evidence and reach a reasonable and accurate conclusion by applying logic and reasoning. This is equally applicable to human behavior and action, doubly so when the subject documents his goals and decision-making process and engages in discussion with others. As I've said several times, Synapse was direct and forthright in what he was doing, why he was doing it, how he was going to do it and what he expected as a result. The PPM mechanic as it is now matches. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I'm going to call it a duck, even if a bunch of fear-mongering panic monkeys are insisting that it's a kumquat. Well, I guess that means I'm sleeping alone tonight. Where's my sad face... 😞

You're right. I'm wrong. Thank you. That still brings the problem back around to identifying the power before modifying the trigger probability. Neither the PPM equation nor the proc system itself specifically identify powers, which means some method of identification would be required. There are 200-300 powers in *PPs which would fit the model suggested for modified proc trigger chances, so it can't be as simple as "If power = X, then -20% chance". X would be a sizeable list, an extra 200-300 lines of unique power names. That's not a simple modification to a formula, it's a database crammed into the formula. A separate database would be easier to work with, and it would have to be a database specific to PPM because the existing powers database would have thousands of entries, making it much slower. Even with a small database and a quick "is the power in here" check, it's not simple, or as fast (adding more checks and verifications slows down the processing, potentially adding a delay of 1/3-1/2s for even a fast pass).

Synapse posted his plan for the PPM revision on the original forums. Everything he said he wanted to do with the changes, he did. He did it the way he wanted to do it. The end product matched what he stated to be his desire. Are you implying that he changed the goal or decided to revise the system further? Do you have any evidence of that? Or are you just offering a lot of mights and maybes? Certainly. The problem isn't in the formula, it's in the powers. Most of them aren't archetype-specific, they're table entries which are later modified by the archetype scalars of the character. So for the formula to adjust proc trigger probability on the fly for different powers, it not only needs additional math to create that adjusted probability, it also needs a way to identify powers accordingly. It needs to be directly tied into the character-side scalar calculations which modify power entries on a per-character basis, or it needs that folded into the PPM formula. Even if it were as simple as "If DefenderEpic=Yes, Then -20% Probability", we wouldn't use something that rudimentary because it would arbitrarily penalize every *PP power without making a distinction, when we're only trying to adjust for the powers with high recharge times. So flag-based variations would require multiple lines, one for every power for which we desired an adjustment in a *PP, for every *PP. It's not nearly as straight-forward as merely editing the formula. Yeah, and having a +Recharge buff in TA would be nice, too, so it has parity with Rad. But it doesn't, and I neither ask for it nor expect it, because I don't want to play Rad-With-a-Bow, I want to play TA. Different IO sets should do different things, just as different power sets do different things. Constraining IO set bonuses to artificially impose parity between builds isn't a good thing, it's a kick in the genitalia for everyone who appreciates having options and building characters in their own way. I don't have to open a poll or use the developers' tools to determine how popular +Movement Speed bonuses are, I already know they're not popular. But I like them. I use them. I pursue them in my builds, even at the expense of +Recharge, +Defense, +Resistance, +HP or anything else that might be a "more useful" allocation of those slots. If you homogenize IO sets, you either remove those +Movement Speed bonuses, or you restrict me to only using the sets with those bonuses, because you can't put every bonus in every set, and either way, I'm under the bus. Diversity, freedom of choice, having options, those are some of the most fundamental strengths of Co*. Homogenizing IO sets so we're all "equal" isn't promoting equality, it's quelling diversity, squashing freedom, taking away options. No. Fuck no. Homogenize your milk, leave my set bonuses alone.

We're playing where it would have ended up. Everything we've been talking about was in the I24 beta. Planning for those changes began (at least) seven months prior to the game's closure. There were three I24 beta patches to the test server before Paragon stopped working on things - the PPM changes were in the first and not a single change was made to it after that. These changes weren't something they whipped up on the spur of the moment and dumped on the beta server as an afterthought or last minute addition. Nor was left incomplete, or untested. It was finished before it left the alpha stage. If anything, Synapse likely expected to have to buff it, if there were too many complaints, but surprisingly, very few people who tested it (or understood the math) considered it to be anything other than a talking point. Almost everyone either felt that it had little or no impact on them, or saw it as an improvement (moar damageses!). The PPM system we're working with right now is exactly what Synapse envisioned, outlined, created, implemented and was satisfied with. Since the HC servers opened, people have been running around, waving their hands in the air and screaming about proc nerfs looming on the horizon... but the changes to PPM and folding IO set procs into the PPM system in I24 was the nerf. It's an example of nerfing done right. It reined in the most extreme outliers at the top end without hurting anyone else, and it didn't even cost those outliers so much that they couldn't play without constantly worrying about being spanked (again), as evidenced by the constant fear expressed by people on these forums. No two sets are going to have the same slotting options. Nor should they. Nor will they, ever. Perfect balance between power sets will never happen. Calling for proc restrictions in order to impose your sense of equity between sets isn't balance, it's homogeny. Not interested. It doesn't work that way. The formula isn't applied to powers, it only checks the relevant aspects of the power to determine a proc's final maximum chance to trigger. You'd have to rework the formula to create new checks and trigger modifiers, and come up with a way that didn't turn it from a neat, compact equation to a massive, bloated, processor-hanging nightmare.

PPMs were being increased for every proc. Increased, not lowered. For every proc, not only ATO procs, or only Winter procs, or only purple procs. This would've permitted procs to be slotted into powers with faster recharge times and/or shorter animations, without sacrificing PPM rate, due to how the PPM formula is calculated, allowing for more frequent use of powers with procs across the board, in addition to the increased likelihood of procs triggering. That's a net increase in damage potential. The PPM formula was being adjusted to account for Recharge Reduction slotted in powers, which would've been a net improvement for the overwhelming majority of players. Even the outliers, the people who relied entirely on global +Recharge buffs and eschewed Recharge Reduction in proc-heavy powers, would've been able to adapt to this system and still see beneficial results, not the least of which was far less work (no need to juggle Hasten and Ageless and Lore pets with +Recharge buffs and second account pocket Emps casting Fortitude and whatever else they did to keep their recharge times manageable without slotting Recharge Reduction) and far less variability to their damage output. That looks suspiciously buffy to me. Proc chances were being capped at 90% chance to trigger, rather than guaranteed X/minute. Small nerf, but in conjunction with the adjustment to the recharge time part of the formula, unlikely to matter to anyone who didn't have a proc monster build. This would've evened out the curve a bit, bringing the most extreme proc monster examples slightly lower, but not really affecting most players. Lastly, all procs which had a % chance to trigger, rather than a PPM number, were being switched to the PPM mechanic (and as noted above, PPMs were being increased). IO set damage procs were especially well positioned to benefit from that, with their fixed 20% chance to trigger. That buff might actually have been over-powered, but I would've had to have my hands on it to say for certain. As I said, they had plenty of opportunities to nerf set bonuses and procs into the ground. Not seeing that in their last look at IOs.

In a team, everyone's responsible for dealing damage. It's everyone's job. You don't have an exclusive license to deal damage simply because you're playing a certain archetype. And in a team, your damage output is just one part of the whole. You don't matter, what your team does as a cohesive unit is what matters. Making it about you, about how much damage you do, about whether or not "your" territory is being invaded, is your problem, not the game's, not the developers'. If the team is functioning and everyone is participating, then why should you care whether or not a defender dealt 10% of your damage output, or 59.24%, or 90%? As long as everyone's doing something and it's all working, why does anyone else's damage output concern you to any degree? Solo, it's not your business. Low damage archetypes using procs aren't going to skew the reward metrics, ESPECIALLY not with fire farming being such a major enterprise. Other people using procs in solo content doesn't affect you, so don't go out of your way to affect them.

I click the big, ugly blue button in the navigation window, the one labeled Exit Mission, and use the buffs to beat the shit out of things outside. Makes more sense than letting the buffs, and thugs, expire without my intervention.

I've been thinking about this for a couple of days. It's odd that the focus is on low damage archetypes using procs to achieve near-blaster damage output. Specifically, it's odd because tanks, brutes, stalkers, scrappers, Kheldians, Soldiers of Arachnos and sentinels all have comparable survivability, which allows them to slot in the same ways low damage archetypes can... and potentially exceed blaster damage output, not just almost match it, because they also have comparable proc slotting potential... but no-one's complained about that in this thread. No, the complaints are about the archetypes which actually need the kind of help provided by damage procs. I understand now that this isn't about procs, it's about blasters being upset because they're not special. Because they're in the same rickety dingy with the rest of us. Because they're experiencing what "support" players have gone through since the game was released, that realization that they're no more necessary than anyone else because the game was designed to marginalize everyone, every archetype, in teams. And instead of asking for buffs and giving rational arguments for those buffs, they're kicking and screaming and demand nerfs to procs, and repeatedly pointing their fingers at the ones who suck the hind teat, insisting that they're the real problem while crossing their fingers and hoping no-one mentions that every high damage archetype is just as much of a threat to their pyrite- and paste-studded tin throne. Reality check - procs didn't steal your job, blasters. You're still blowing spawns to pieces while those low damage archetypes are staring at their power trays and gnashing their teeth in frustration because the rest of the team has run to the next spawn before they've even finished clicking/toggling on those debuffs, or chasing after others so they can do something with those buffs that they can't use on themselves. Or they're giving up and following after your one-track mind example, just trying to hit something while there's still something to hit, and still not doing it as well as you do. And they're wondering when you're going to notice that the dudes with status protection are pumping out as much pain as you are, and just as fast, and thinking that you're an idiot for shouting at them for trying to keep up. "HOW DARE YOU, PUNY DEFENDER! YOU DEFEATED THAT LIEUTENANT WITH A SINGLE USE OF THAT HOLD YOU SLOTTED WITH FIVE PROCS! YOU HAVE STOLEN MY TRASH KILL! I'LL HAVE THE DEVELOPERS NERF YOUR PROCS, YOU DIRTY CHEATING CHEATER WHO CHEATS! Uh... carry on, mega damage dealing tank/brute/scrapper/stalker/sentinel/Kheldian/SoA. Wonderful work you're doing, big fan. All thumbs up." Paragon had five years to do something about set bonuses and procs. Five years. What did they do? Buffed set bonuses. Buffed procs. Add more and stronger set bonuses and procs. And we know they weren't shy about nerfing things, sometimes to the point of outright gutting them. Strange, isn't it, that they didn't consider set bonuses or procs to be so detrimental to the game that they were in need of nerfs, when they were so quick to nerf anything else to oblivion when it threatened any aspect of the game. And still, we have some players who think the game needs to be redesigned around the "holy trinity" model, shoving low damage, low hit point archetypes into the back of the bus (while ignoring seven other archetypes who do the same thing (faster, as fast as blasters)). And people wonder why I seem a bit cranky from time to time. Hm... Yeah, procs do make blasters less exciting as an archetype, in that they reinforce the game's expectation that everyone, every player and every character, deals damage, by allowing everyone to deal damage better. And IO set bonuses make support less exciting by reinforcing the expectation that everyone be capable of bringing their own support (what, you thought the Medicine pool was only accessible to Empathy/* defenders? that the Concealment pool was planned out to be used as LotG unique IO mules four years before IOs entered the game? that the Leadership pool was only available if you lead X number of *Fs? that all of those "sustain" powers and controls liberally offered to every archetype were just there to fill space in the character creation screen?). But that's not the fault of IOs, it's the fault of the game. This is how it was designed. Teaming will always marginalize every archetype in the game. IOs, set bonuses and procs just made that a little clearer to some people... a decade plus after IOs were released, in some cases, but hey, better late than never, right?

Coming soon, to a Wi-Fi hotspot near you - City of Negotiated Settlements and Peaceful Resolutions! Calmly discuss issues! Rationally debate perspectives! Achieve lasting peace through diplomacy and understanding! Welcome to Paragon City, the most peaceful place in the world, where nothing happens that can't be resolved through dialog!

Blasphemer.

Not going into another archetype versus archetype debate. Start another thread, or dig up the last one that discussed it (in which i mentioned that Scourge is just as shitty as Vigilance... and neither really plays into procs, though at least Scourge can benefit from the lower HP of targets resulting from random procs triggering, as opposed to the zilch that Vigilance does in respect to procs (they neither use endurance nor benefit from +Damage)).

Defenders have to work for their supper. Buffing/debuffing/controlling takes time, and with lower HP and lower damage scalars, defenders are required to spend that time if they wish to both achieve decent results and survive to move on to the next spawn, especially with increased difficulty settings or in Incarnate/* Ward content. Like @Apparition, you're completely dismissing that and presenting this argument from the perspective of defenders waltzing into spawns and blowing them to bits like blasters do. They can eventually deal appreciable damage, after they've enabled the conditions for that to happen, and when the RNG gives it to them. Damage procs only do one thing. And all archetypes were designed to deal damage as part of their play style. The earliest version of CoH, as a matter of fact, used a free-form power selection model, and it was scrapped because testing showed that it was possible for players to create characters which couldn't deal any damage. Cryptic specifically steered the game away from that by implementing archetypes as a means of forcing all players to take at least one attack so they could deal damage. The intended play style is to deal damage. That's true for every archetype, every player. That is one of the constants of this game. But that's just pedantry. You meant we're doing something "wrong" by playing defenders who deal more than minor damage. Nope. Defenders were never intended to deal minor damage, they were intended to deal appreciable damage after putting in the appropriate time and effort to make it possible. Using the tools the developers gave them, deliberately and knowingly, to set up those conditional environments which amplified their damage output. Tools like -Res at the highest scalar value, pseudo-pets like Lightning Storm and OSA which deal far more than minor amounts of damage, and the same blast sets that blasters had. Procs don't alleviate the requirement to create those conditional environments. We still have to use our tools to make those procs worthwhile, and to stay alive long enough to see them do something. We're not shitting on blasters' lawns because we're not moving at blasters' speeds. All of the archetypes were designed to be flexible. They had to be in order to avoid the tank/healer/damage dealer standardization that was occurring in the industry at the time. And, again, all archetypes were designed to deal damage. Relying on archetypes to provide a sense of uniqueness is like relying on a Social Security number to provide a sense of identity. Roles are for people who need to be told what to do and how to play.

An archetype which has exactly the same opportunities for slotting exactly the same procs. Procs don't invalidate corruptors simply because defenders have access to them, any more than defenders are invalidated by corruptors using procs. Shitty inherents and poorly differentiated scalars are what create a sense of invalidation between the two, not access to procs, or procs working how they do. Yeah, I'm sure everyone who plays blasters is furious over the fact that what they can do in 5-10s, a defender might manage to reproduce after investing 20-30s, if the RNG decides to smile upon them. 🙄

When a defender still has to spend more time setting up to deal that damage than the blaster spends just getting on with it, and then only has a chance to deal as much damage as the blaster, no, there's no problem. Zero. Animation times matter, and expecting players to spend two to four times as long doing something just because they picked the "wrong" archetype is crap. This isn't 1997, Co* isn't EQ or WoW and the idea that there should be a greater damage penalty to accompany the existing animation time penalty associated with playing archetypes which are already dealing lower damage is antiquated.

Nerfing proc damage means increasing the number of attacks the low damage archetypes are forced to use. And as low damage archetypes, they're already forced to spend more time attacking than higher damage archetypes, plus they have to spend time buffing/debuffing/controlling just to stay alive, since they can't one-shot anything, or ignore status effects, or even shrug off incoming damage. The whole point of using damage procs on low damage archetypes is to shorten the time spent defeating each spawn. Compensating by increasing the trigger rate is like offering alcohol wipes after stabbing them in the genitalia. Bad nerf.

That's not the first step. The first step is devising an inf* sink, or sinks, to replace everything involved. Recipe costs (crafting table and market), salvage costs, crafting costs, SO costs... no sinks, no economy. No economy, no game.

Never spent any merits on ATOs, but I do use ATOs on every character I create now. They haven't changed anything for me. The bonuses aren't significantly better than purple sets at 50, or rare sets below 50, and I tend to run out of appealing powers to put slots into before I run out of slots, so having the occasional option to pick up a 10% +Recharge bonus for 2 or 3 slots doesn't make much difference. It's nice to have something to pick up and have level with the character, but with the easy availability of attuned IOs, ultimately no different from regular IOs. If the economy were in a bad state, reflective of how it was on the original servers, then I'd say that having ATOs readily available would matter. With inf* oozing out of every crevice of the market, though, and converters allowing players to vacuum up that inf* so rapidly that they can have everything they desire as they level (as opposed to waiting until 50, then farming for months to pay for things), ATOs are just the sprinkles on the rosettes on the icing on the cake.

No, because the premise, reasoning and conclusion are all flawed. IO sets aren't a/the problem. They never have been, they never will be. The problem is that this game is old. Face it, boys and girls, we've had nearly 20 years to find ways to beat the game, and we've gotten ridiculously good at it. We were so good at it that we had to live through drastic nerfs like GDN and ED when we were just starting to settle into the game, and even those didn't do more than sort of, kind of slow us down slightly. And that little hiatus that we had to spend without the game didn't really slow us down either, it just gave us more time to imagine new ways to break shit. Nerfing Defense isn't a/the solution. Defense has already been so heavily and thoroughly nerfed that the last development team had to partially reverse the nerfing just to bring it into a good position as damage mitigation. Reducing either the hard or soft cap isn't going to fix anything. The workarounds for that are way too easy to pick up, and they don't actually force the player to make any hard choices about slotting or power selection. It accomplishes nothing, other than irritating people and wasting development resources. Furthermore, attacking Defense without addressing all of the other forms of damage mitigation is biased and unbalanced. It utterly ignores every other kind of mitigation, including the inverse of +Def, -ToHit, and adversely affects players using power sets which are entirely reliant on Defense while doing nothing to any other form of mitigation. Doubling a Defense-based character's chance to be hit equates to doubling the damage that character is going to take, yet there's no corresponding suggestion for doubling the incoming damage for characters using other forms of mitigation. If survivability is a problem, it's a problem across the board, not just a problem for a single type of mitigation, but this approach singles out one form of mitigation and gives everything else a pass. It's narrow-minded, poorly thought out and never should've been proposed in the first place. So dismiss away.

I did it in 2005.

They can. I tanked AVs and soloed GMs with a melee-only defender. The problem, for defenders, is the melee damage scalar. It's shit. We can play defenders who use melee attacks now, with powers like Air Superiority, Cross Punch and *PP melee attacks. With a 0.55 scalar, though, they're not impressive, even with piles of -Res. A melee defender is, essentially, a petless mastermind with slightly higher HP pool and better buffs/debuffs. That's why almost no-one bothers. TA. And with enough status effects of your own, you can get by without protection. Pairing Dark Pit with Oppressive Gloom, for example, makes for extremely safe play in melee range. So there are more options than just the few primaries.

If you have a bow, it's a heel to the crotch. And yes, it is ever so satisfying. For all of you sad little people who don't use bows, it's the same animation as Kick (Fighting pool).

Inf* sinks aren't there to directly control inflation by themselves. They're there to act in concert with other inflationary control measures to maintain a healthy economy. All of the measures working together - the salvage seeding and pooling on the market, the auto-attuning done by the market, converters, inf* sinks of all types - do the job. Remove one and you alter how the control functions, but more importantly, you affect different groups of people in different ways. Some people don't use the market well. Some people don't use converters at all. Some people only purchase crafted IOs, never craft them for themselves. Every part of the inflationary control system affects everyone, and in different ways, but the overall result is to keep inflation from affecting any one group significantly. Because we have multiple overlapping methods of controlling inflation, no-one is punished for "not doin' it right".