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Scorpion shield is one of the most meta-appealing powers out there, which is why it's in so many builds. It makes sense that build guides often include it. CoH isn't a particularly well balanced game, and probably doesn't need to be, but people still enjoy the variety more often than just sticking with the known meta builds.

Procs seem higher than they were and there are a few sets that have gone up, like Basilisk's Gaze. (I guess the 4-set recharge bonus is desiriable, but I don't see the current price point sticking). But mostly things have dropped. It's no surprise to me that the purples are evening out against each other. I think that's an effect of converters. Perhaps if there were significantly more purple sets (and I'm not saying there should be) the prices would vary more. I imagine they'll stick at 20mil until the playerbase really dies out.

I'd say banks or governance isn't a requisite for economics. Economics is just the behaviours of trade - it's more observational rather than trying to manage anything. It's very different from context to context, but a lot of the same trends apply whether we were trading in dollars, influence or oxen.

On the basis that the streets are practically a useless gameplay feature, I'd like to see any step towards making them feel like they offer some value. So I'd be behind the OP's idea. But I think an overhaul is in order. Especially one that makes hunt missions interesting.

Chumbawumba starts playing. Please don't do this.

I agree. The later faces had a very odd glossiness going on. Like polished marble. Steampunk too has this.

Perhaps 'healing' in support could be 'damage mitigation', so that +defence and +resistance sets can be compared. Buffs, then, would be the support toon's ability to make their teammates wreak more havoc. This is cool, though, and I like the criteria. I'll have a think as I play some sets.

I think this is a really fair comparison, kudos for the critical reflection. It's worth noting that microtransactions were a thing as CoH approached the end of its original life. Not nearly to the extent that CO has gotten to, but CO has had longer to let its market seep into the game. It could have gone deeper into that quagmire, but we'll never really know. In Homecoming, many of the items you'll find in the P2W vendor, as well as many of the costume parts and power picks had to be purchased via the ingame CoH shop. There isn't much I can say that I really liked about CO, but it's mostly stylistic and down to taste. In broad strokes, CO's art style felt a little bit forced and the writing in the game felt like a parody of nothing rather than a lore. I played it relatively recently, trying to level a few characters, and found that I was outlevelling the world really really quickly - like the game didn't really want me to play it, it just wanted to ferry me on to the endgame. There were some awesome parts of the world - Snake Gulch, like you mentioned, was absolutely fabulous - that I found I was outlevelling before I even got there. That made the game feel a bit bored of itself. That's a huge win for CoH over CO - I can enjoy the 1-50 journey at my own pace and be challenged at an appropriate level along the way. But the big turn off for me was the world design, compared with CoH. Most of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles are well designed and full of character. Exploring it still gives me the warm fuzzies, even when I have fewer choices for travel powers. Millennium City felt to me to be a bit lazy and dead behind the eyes. It had landmarks randomly thrown in with no consideration to its context. The biggest offender is that god awful hub: It feels like it exists without any kind of explanation. The buildings are nonsensical in themselves and each fight against each other for style while dwarfing the landmarks around it, which includes the crashed alien ship and the signature supergroup headquarter. You couldn't ignore its existence because the game seemed to want you to hang out there at the exclusion of the rest of the world. It was very hard to want to be part of a world that didn't care about itself. If it wasn't for how terrible that hub is, I probably could have put up with the game for longer. I will say that I liked CO's freeform characters and the range of characters you could come up with. By the same token, it made it quite unclear what would balance well in the game, but I got bored before I made it to any point that it mattered. It also felt like there was an enormous range of currencies. I don't know how it got to that, but it was impenetrable for a new player. But maybe CoH feels the same way to someone not used to it (with influence, merits, vanguard merits, threads, shards, incarnate merits...).

I was also surprised by the taunt opinion you encountered. Taunt and gauntlet work well together, one doesn't make the other obsolete. I could probably live without taunt, but it's really handy to be able to control aggro at a range.

If they have the mod as well, they would. Whatever is in the local file is what the client loads when someone pulls out the sword. So if you have a lightsaber katana texture and I have a, I dunno, smiley face katana texture overriding the same file, then when I pull out my katana, you'll see a lightsaber and I'll see a smiley face. ... Solarverse, smiley face katana sfx when?

I don't think anyone's mentioned this, but I'm under the impression that the team is fundamentally reworking how knockback works. I could be wrong and a quick search for evidence was fruitless. I believe that the april fools Freem brawl tested this: mobs flew in a random direction whereas usually knockback just propels mobs away from the caster. If that is the case, peripheral ideas like this sort of ride on the back of those changes. The fundamental knockback mechanics could change so much that the KB>KD IOs become undesirable, for instance. Otherwise, I'm torn. I'm all for options, but I also feel like mitigating a powerset's shortcomings is a fun part of the game that could be made too easy.

I might be odd for a forum frequenter, but above average for a player. I get my alts to fairly affordable builds of about 150mil inf and consider them done once they feel comfortable. But all of those have some ways they could go to increase their power. That doesn't interest me. Ones who are done to the best of my ability, with expensive builds? Three.

You can't enter the arena in Echo Galaxy, sadly, which means you can't get the badge.

It was for a good cause.

I'd make a character on there called Leandro, so that the mirror universe is complete.

None that survive! Muahahaha! (You might wanna track down SuperJoe and Spanky. They were doing this a few months ago, I dunno if they still are.)

I think the first one is MunkiLord.

Man, it always staggers me how much people make. I've definitely got less than 2 billion to my name, having been here since HC launched. 100 billion, that's mind blowing to me. A hard cap would absolutely be an effective deterrent, but also might be a bit of a switch-off. I wonder if it would change the state of the market currently. Stuff is so cheap thanks to supply that there's not much practical difference between my wealth and yours (except that a spending spree I might go on would be significantly shorter I guess). I'm not even sure the market would change all that dramatically. Well, actually it might. If there's an inf cap then farmers may stop farming once they hit it and not chuck supply at the market. Maybe prices could go up? I don't know what the turnover is for a farmer to make money, kit out an alt, repeat (to put it simplistically) so maybe it's rapid enough that the farming carries on? Are you talking about set prices for everything, then? At the current merit gains and prices it would be really slow, but they can be altered. Something else would be farmed that has a high merit yield, maybe MSRs. I think AE would fall into neglect. You're right, low valued items would need to feel proportionately smaller than they are now. That means the amount of merits you gain needs to be a lot higher, and the prices increase respectively. So that the resolution you can buy with is bigger. In the end, I think you'd end up with something identical to a pre-AH CoH economy. That might not be a bad thing, but it'd be a dimension of the game gone. The relationship of merits and inf is a good one, they work well together. Merits as a set currency with set buying power means that inf kinda-sorta has a set value, a bit like a gold standard. You probably know this already, but since when did I let things like that stop me waffling? You can trade a certain amount of inf (I can't remember what value. 1mil, I think?) for one merit. These means that no matter what, the price of a purple, which is set at 100 merits, will never exceed 100mil inf. It's pretty cool that we're at about 1/5 to 1/4 of that. Oh 100%. I'm no economographer but I'm really enjoying talking about this stuff. I was thinking earlier about what would happen if Earth ditched real world currencies and just went for CoH inf. My conclusion is that it would be indistinct, except that everything in the game would be considered a luxury and get super expensive, farming would be illegal (and maybe even playing the game at all) and trying to buy milk would be really inconvenient.

There's a distinction between inflation and prices here. If a community of wealthy players only traded with each other at the exclusion of other players somehow, prices could increase to reflect them. But if they're not actually generating any influence, there's still no inflation. And you're right, the converters and merits are exactly what prevent this. Supply is huge right now with no end in sight (thanks in large part to both marketeers and farmers - the exact people who drove prices up before now keep them down). Before, rare items were actually rare and the market was competitive to get them. (Switchfade posted at this point and described the problem that was resolved better than I was trying to) This is fair, and also why I think rewards from most of the game need a really good looking at. I certainly want to see good incomes from a lot of avenues rather than just two.

You're describing how the Live market got to here. If any inf generation stopped, inflation would also stop, regardless of how it was moved around. If one person amassed 90% of the wealth somehow, the market will adapt to the remaining 10% distributed among the rest of the playerbase. That one person can't make the market reflect their wealth. Live got to a state where the market was only even accessible to a certain part of the playerbase. Casual players were downright omitted and couldn't make an impact, except for occasional luck.

This is untrue in the long term. Casual players would struggle a lot more under rampant inflation than from this nerf. I was fairly casual on live, and the thought of a complete build was a pipe dream. I'm still quite casual in my playstyle, the difference in accessibility is tremendous. Unless such players never, ever touch the market, I guess... But I think that's a huge challenge to set oneself.

Not all poetry has to rhyme to be beautiful, my dude.

Yeah, this is largely true and quite interesting. There's a slight risk that if a lot of people who hoarded a lot of inf suddenly decided to make a whole lot of alts and kit them out all at the same time, overpaying on everything, there would be some weirdness with pricing. That behaviour certainly isn't exclusive to farmers. Their hoarded wealth gets redistributed around to the general playerbase too, so higher prices might get sustained for a while. In fact, I reckon we'll see this happen any time a new powerset is released. (though I think prices went down with Electrical Affinity, so maybe not. [Edit: maybe that was because the update saw an increase in players, and subsequently an increase in supply] ) The impact would be an outlier, though. It takes sustained behaviours across a wider proportion of people using the market to permanently affect the market. But I think it's safe to assume that farmers farm in order to create enough inf with the intention of using it, though (And there's nothing wrong with that behaviour at all). As some have said in this thread, they're not really trying to hoard wealth. I don't have the data to back this up, but I'd imagine that most of the inf generated from farming gets mobilised in the market. If the inf generation from farming significantly exceeds the income from any other gameplay, the prices would start to follow farming trends and rocket up until you had to farm to participate (as happened on Live). But you're right, any inf that doesn't get used basically has no impact besides increasing the impact of the unlikely potential scenario described above. Meanwhile, in a fantasy world where farming wasn't a thing for some reason, inf-per-player would be a lot lower, just because the remaining methods of generating inf would be less efficient. In principle, that means the value-as-proportion-of-total (there are probably real terms for stuff like this that I don't know) of each unit of inf is greater. It gets interesting when you think about prices - they'd probably be a lot lower against HC values, but since lack of farming would bring in less supply, the value-as-buying-power of each unit of inf might be lower. So in reality stuff could be more unaffordable for the average player. This is why trying to keep the difference between farming and other gameplay fairly level is so important. I'd say that the value of real world money is just as mythical as the value of influence. It's just that fewer people are subscribed to the latter myth.

So many good ones! I'll try and pick from the more obscure names. The Radio (Port Oakes, 10-14), later followed by Slot Machine (30-34, requires Gangbuster) and Television (Grandville, 45-50, requires Master of the Airwaves) - they may or may not all be connected. Seer Marino (Mercy Island, 15-19) is a classic. Marshall Brass (Cap au Diable, 15-19) is very good and relates to the PTS. He has two arcs and they're both worth doing. Bane Spider Ruben (Cap au Diable, 15-19) is a fairly recent one. It's quality. Vincent Ross (Sharkhead Isle, 20-29) and Diviner Maros (Sharkhead Isle, 25-29) are about The Leviathan. (There's one more really cool Leviathan arc and I can't remember who's it was) It's probably worth catching Darrin Wade (Sharkhead Isle, 20-30) at this point too, so you can see his later-significant plans starting to occur. Jury's out on if it's good though. People like Dean MacArthur and Leonard (Sharkhead Isle, 20-29), and they're really cool arcs. They're the equivalent of the alternate dimension self arc from blueside. A lot of Nerva Archipelago has arcs against particular signature heroes. They're a little samey, but it's nice to encounter them. Technicial Naylor (Nerva, 35-39) has some low-level lore about Nemesis and the Shadow Shards. I played Kelly Uqua's (Nerva, 30-34) arc for the first time recently. It's kinda bland but it's got a cool twist. It's preceded by Timothy Raymond (Nerva, 30-34) for more context. Hardcase (St Martial, 30-39) has a lot of minor St Martial-related arcs, and St Martial is my favourite zone. Vivacious Verandi (St Martial, 30-34) is fun. Johnny Sonata (St Martial, 35-39, requires Obsessed) is my favourite arc in the game. Mage Killer Kuhkara (Grandville, 40-44) is a really long trilogy of arcs, but it ends on a unique map that I've never seen anywhere else. It's really cool. Operative Grillo (Grandville, 45-50) will give you some closure with the Snakes.

The market on live wasn't accessible in practice or in theory. It's ok if people choose not to engage for whatever reason, but a problem if they can't even if they wanted to. That's the scenario we want to avoid. You're completely right, though. And anything that makes it more user friendly would be great.