Inheritor

Force Field needs some form of offensive support. There is no amount of additional defensive support you could give it to make it good. Even if you gave it "all teammates are immune to damage at all times", it would still be contributing absolutely nothing to teams that don't need any additional survivability, which at endgame is most of them. Every other support set has something to contribute on offense. Even Empathy has Fortitude. Even Trick Arrow has Disruption Arrow. Force Field currently has nothing.

The inf timesink can already be trivialized through the AH. It takes 10 minutes to raise inf for an okay IO build and maybe 40 minutes for a top end one. You don't even have to go out of your way to do it, just bid/convert/sell while waiting for your TF to fill. The timesink is already nothing more than an illusion for newcomers who are unaware that it can be bypassed, and a self-imposed challenge for people who are aware but choose not to bypass it, to varying degrees. What purpose does the illusion serve?

You don't technically need IOs, but all too often I'm on a team of 7 IO'd "squishies" and 1 SO'd brute. The 7 IOs are breezing through the mission taking no damage while the 1 SO is constantly dying. I wonder if that person is having fun. I legitimately don't know, but if it were me, I wouldn't be. I don't think they should be shunned for their "ignorance" or "laziness" because they just wanted to punch nazis in PI with their cow-themed superhero instead of looking up a guide on how to make imaginary money in a dead superhero game, even if the guide is very simple.

Ah, no, my post had nothing to do with inflation. Prices have stayed mostly stable since launch, with only things that were objectively undervalued, such as converters, rising in price. The "approximate income" values are the converted inf value of the stuff farmed, not the actual inf generated. For example, playing the market obviously doesn't generate any inf, in fact it sinks inf thanks to taxes. Mostly this is an informational post. For the kinds of people who think ITF is good money (it's decent xp but garbage money). For the kinds of people who think fire farms are the easiest way to get rich quick (they're not). The issue with the meta-discussion about game balance is sort of an aside. There's a reason I didn't put this in the Suggestions forum.

There are plenty of level 50's with barely any set bonuses. There are people who argue that the game should be balanced around SOs. For these people, game balance is different. As an example, the value of powers that offer survivability is much higher because they don't have IO's softcapping their defense. The value of powers with high recharge and low uptime is lower because they don't have LotGs and perma-Hasten. They *could* easily make inf, but they don't. Whatever their reason, if that leads to them being in a totally different stratosphere than the people who do take like 5 minutes a day to convert level 41 Red Fortunes to LotGs or whatever, then they're playing a totally different game from everyone else. When one group of people is playing a game where inf is an actual limiting factor, and another group can basically generate inf on tap, then they can't talk about game balance with each other.

In this post I'd like to shed light on the massive income difference between different types of players in CoX. In particular, I hope it puts into perspective why some people think IOs are something that only the elite have access to, and why some people treat IOs as a given for all their characters. I am categorizing the various economic classes by their highest inf-making activity. Of course, most people don't just do one thing all the time, so this just describes their ability to earn inf, not the actual inf that they do earn. Radio Runners Approximate Income: 0-1 million inf per hour Radio missions give practically no rewards, yet for many people it is their primary activity due to the ease of joining and leaving a team. As a result, they cannot afford even the very basic of IOs unless they happen to win the drop lottery. Casual Merit Earners Approximate Income: 5-15 million inf per hour These are people who just do normal, non-radio content, like story arcs, tip missions, or whatever task force happens to be recruiting at the time. They are not actively trying to get rich, but they are still pulling in several times the income of the radio runners because at least they aren't going out of their way to not make money. Although, some will waste merits by directly buying IOs with them rather than converters, in which case they are barely doing better than the radio runners. Optimal Merit Earners Approximate Income: 30-50 million inf per hour These are people who do content which yields the highest merits per hour, such as Tinpex, Hamidon, Smoke and Mirrors, etc. Again, the gap in their income compared to the next lower class is a massive 5 to 10 times difference. Despite the relatively high income, they can still play fairly casually, because their way of earning inf doesn't take very much time and can be easily done with an RP character. AE Farmers Approximate Income: 100-200 million inf per hour These people earnestly prioritize the optimal earning of inf over anything else. They work hard and are quickly rewarded with billion inf budgets with which to build their shiny TW/Bio scrappers and break the game. Considered by some to be an unfair outlier in how easily they earn inf, but even they are dwarfed by... AH Overlords Approximate Income: 500-??? million inf per hour These are the people who use the very simple concept of buying low and selling high. They put in far less effort than AE farmers while making massively more inf. At this point inf becomes simply an abstract concept with no practical meaning. Many people within a given class are unaware of the massive discrepancy between them and the class above them. This drastic income inequality, where some people can make literally a thousand times more inf than others, has a profoundly negative impact on balance discussions, particularly concerning the question "should balance ignore the existence of IOs?" Ideally, I'd like to see this income inequality reduced, perhaps by dramatically increasing the rewards earned from radios and weekly strike targets. Realistically, the top two classes will always earn too much and there's no simple or even desirable way of reigning them in.