Ironblade

Was playing today as Simon Bolivar, leader of Gran Colombia. Every time a new era starts, I get a special leader called a Comandante General. The most recent one was named Gregor MacGregor. Sounds odd, but I'm guessing it's a reference to this guy: General Gregor MacGregor (24 December 1786 – 4 December 1845) was a Scottish soldier, adventurer, and confidence trickster who attempted from 1821 to 1837 to draw British and French investors and settlers to "Poyais", a fictional Central American territory that he claimed to rule as "Cazique". At one point, he led Venezuelan troops against the Spanish with the rank of general.

As usual, really beautiful work.

I expect it to come all the way back down eventually. It's around 5000 now and I have my usual stacks of bids at 1400 just waiting. I've still been buying, though. Spending an extra 10,000 per yellow salvage is irrelevant when I'm selling the converted results for multiple millions.

I wouldn't say that I "track" supply and demand. I would say I briefly observe it. Most of my money comes from buying trash recipes and converting to something useful. A couple weeks ago, I noticed someone was buying my usual recipes at about 2-3x what I had been paying, so I just stopped. I could have bid higher or moved to some other recipes but that would have been too much effort. I spend VERY LITTLE time working on making influence. In the past couple days, it seems back to normal so I'm buying again. Regarding the LotG +recharge, I never even look at those. I buy cheap recipes and convert to get the ones I need and stop once I have 15-20 to put in base storage.

Pretty much. I wanted to do a 'high end' tank build and used both ATO sets and four purple sets, including six-slotting Boxing with Hecatomb. He also has Absolute Amazement, Armageddon and Apocalypse (in Laser Beam Eyes). My goal is to see how well he can tank the Avatar of Hamidon in the Underground I-Trial. So I wanted a lot of +regen, +recover, +recharge and extra hit points. On a side note, this was a relatively expensive build for me and I had the character self-fund. At around level 30, he started buying trash recipes, crafting and converting them. He has bought all his IO's (not slotted yet), and has 800 million inf extra at level 48.

Unless there's an open bar. There's your problem. No booze in the next arc. You think those are ice slides for playing on? Nope. They're ice sculptures to pour vodka into your mouth. Back on live, I would create a character and run him thru Atlas Park and The Hollows to meet new players to recruit for my SG. Then I would delete and recreate the same character to do it again. He was MA/regen and was named Dr. Smacky.

Missed opportunity. You have misspelled 'misspellings' and then edited to correct it. 🙂

I contend it's not trivial since we failed last week, with a core of highly experienced players. For some reason, our damage output seemed way below par despite having six corrupters.

No. Well, perhaps the curiosity is natural but don't expect an answer. And you certainly have zero right to demand an answer. Any negotiations are confidential. If you don't like how the server is being run, you don't have to donate. It is 100% voluntary. Me? I donate on a regular basis.

That link is broken. If you mouse over it, you can see that .jpg appears twice with a lot of seemingly extraneous numbers in there. Maybe it's supposed to look like that, but it still doesn't work.

Hmm. Just checked and the last five prices are 5.25 million.

As I already observed, most characters are not going to use exactly the same IO's so this is, in your own words, "a contrived nonsense scenario". Yep. Not playing 'optimally' ON PURPOSE. Way too many people playing cookie cutter builds where every character has to have capped defense, Hasten, etc. If I wanted that, I can afford it. But I prefer goofing around. I have characters with multiple travel powers. I built one named 'Toggle Man' whose reason for existence is to run toggles - just because. I'm playing a game where people do crazy stuff for entertainment value. (shrug) I built one character, leveled to 50 and got all incarnates to tier 4 JUST TO HELP WITH ONE SPECIFIC BADGE. I play this character on Really Hard Way badge runs every week and it's not even my badger. I'm having FUN. If you can't grasp that then yeah, we're NOT playing the same game. Toodles.

It's certainly possible. Some SG's will absolutely do this as an SG event and spawn a crowd of GM's. I participated in such events back on live and have seen it advertised on Homecoming. Specifically, "I seriously doubt that somehow 10 players could all coordinate getting to the right point in the Crimson arc simultaneously, and then have all their groups exit in Talos." Why would you have ANY doubt that could be done? That's *EASY*. I could EASILY manage three myself with my three accounts. Solo the arc until you get to the end of the correct mission, then just wait there. Solo on another account and wait. Etc. Then, one right after the other, exit the mission direct to Ouroboros - WHERE GIANT MONSTERS CAN NOT SPAWN - and proceed to Talos. Just like any other ambush in the game, the Titan will proceed to Talos.

Yes. This is a factor with all of the giant monsters. You (or your team) must do at least 10% of the total damage. So, if there's two teams fighting a GM and you're solo, you probably won't get the badge. This is also what causes a problem with Eochai and Jack in Irons. When they spawn TOGETHER and start fighting each other, if they have been fighting a while they do so much damage to each other that NO ONE can get the badge for killing them.

Well, I put a lot of thought into mine. I originally came up with the idea back on live but never got around to writing it up in AE (OMG the AE system is annoying to use). I wrote an origin story for Mark IV (the technology contact in Founders Falls). You can just search for 'Origin of Mark IV' or the ID is 48002.

And there is a completely understandable reason for that - badgers. In order to get all the crafting badges, you have to craft some of every type of enhancement in various level ranges. So people are crafting enhancement that they don't need and dumping them on the market to recoup some of their costs. No, that is COMPLETELY misleading and not at all comparable to the previous example. In order to craft that item you must have the recipe. There is NO OPTION to buy the recipe at the crafting table. You have to buy it from the AH in the 10-12 million range. These two examples have NO bearing on each other.

Ouch. Talk about throwing someone into the deep end. That's some of the hardest content in the entire game. 😛 Anyway, @Akalabeth I'm also a member of Cosmic Council even though my personal SG is on Everlasting. My girlfriend was already a member and I was always commenting how funny Ukase and Snarky were on the forums and she said they're in CC and always play on Friday night so I joined. I play on Excelsior every Friday evening and occasionally at other times. It's a well-run SG.

1) It's a waste of time since I can easily afford the new IO's for new characters. 2) It's a virtual certainty that the new character will need very different IO's anyway. 3) I might want to use the character for something months or a year later. Someone might be planning a Master badge run or something and ask if anyone has a specific AT and powerset. Also, it seems we build our characters differently. "5 gamblers, the full suite of defensive uniques, a shifter or two, and 3 or 4 sets of purps can be used on most builds." I have almost zero characters that can use 5 LotG since I don't play many defense sets and I usually don't take defensive pool powers just mule LotG's. Almost none of my characters have "the full suite of defensive uniques" for the reason listed above and also that I just don't bother. Most of my builds don't need "a shifter or two". (Probably because everyone gets the Miracle:+recovery in Health.) I agree on the purples but, as I noted in point 3 above, if I strip the character I might regret it later.

Sounds like human nature to me. I play all of my characters from 1 to 50, then get their incarnate powers. At that point, SOME of them just don't get played any more since I'm always leveling something new. The easier it is to get more 50's, the more 50's will be mothballed. That's how life is.

There was marvelous quote back on live. I don't recall who it was from. Playing two different scrapper powersets is like the difference between playing tennis and playing racquetball. Playing two different defender powersets is like the difference between playing hockey and playing piano.

And yet, as I specifically pointed out, you can massively farm without setting foot in AE. Defeat badges? Okay, let me run the Dreck map six times. So, unless you're defining 'non-farming gameplay' as anything outside of AE, it just isn't that easy for the game to measure it.

The problem here is having the game engine recognize "'normal', non-farming game play". As I recall, the devs said they would love to nerf AFK farming but had not found a way to reliably do so that would not inadvertently catch people who were not AFK farming. How do we define 'non-farming gameplay'? There are plenty of ways to farm without setting foot in AE. The Dreck map used to be a favorite. The warwolf and Axis America maps were also popular. How many times can I run one before it's 'farming'? What if I run all three of them back-to-back, then do that again. Will the game recognize that as farming? How about if I run the weekly strike target 10 times during the week - but on different characters each time? What if I have multiple accounts?

Sure, but we're on the definition of 'reasonable' again. I *DO* plan ahead, stockpile things, use converters, etc. So every one of my characters has at least two sets of purples, ATO's etc and some have a lot more. And I think the effort I expended is completely reasonable. 🙂

I will answer this two ways. 1) Nope, you've got all of it entirely right. My only additional comment would be that, for a bit of extra work, you can make even more by buying trash recipes and converting them yourself. You see, that's where all those converters are going - to people converting trash into gold. 2) Nope, you've got all of it entirely right. But sometimes I'm too lazy to take that extra step. I have over 30,000 reward merits spread across my characters so I can afford to waste them by buying the purples or ATO's directly.

You've just described the crafting system of just about every MMO or co-op survival game I've ever played. I think it works fine. I can, however, think of two systems I've dealt with that were WORSE in some way. In Black Desert Online, when upgrading your gear, if you fail the upgrade chance: 1) The gear is damaged. 2) The gear is downgraded to a lower enchantment or outright destroyed. In Everquest 2, crafting involved all the steps you described but the actual crafting process involved sitting there during an 'interactive' crafting process that was just tedious and mindless clicking. I like it much better in 7 Days To Die where you get your materials, go to the appropriate crafting table, click, and it tells you how long it will be until it's ready and you walk away and come back later. I still have to gather the materials and build the crafting station but they don't then add tedium.