macskull

I'm a little confused, I guess. Your proposed solution (seeding the market with drops) solves a nonexistent problem - multiple people in this thread have stated they've had no real issues getting the stuff they wanted off the AH. Now, if you're referring to the AH's sale history listings sometimes showing "no price history," then I completely understand that, but that's a different and completely unrelated issue.

Ehh, not quite. When all you got out of AE missions was tickets, sure, you were generating a good chunk of inf but no real drops to go along with it. Here you're generating inf and drops, merit prices are cheaper/more items are available/converters exist and are practical, and there's a hard cap on how much a given recipe will ever be worth because of the inf/merit conversion rate. There were a lot of QoL changes on the secret server to accomodate a much smaller playerbase than live had and it's those QoL changes that are going to keep market prices reasonable.

Farming was pretty much the only reason a supply of PvP IOs even existed. Their drop rate was so abysmally low and the PvP population was essentially nonexistent (PvP IOs were introduced in Issue 14, only four months after the previous issue's mass exodus of PvPers) that the only reliable supply of PvP IOs were from AFK farmers. The developers tried to curb that by adding in a lockout timer for the drops and all that did was push prices even higher to the point where there were at least two PvP IOs that had no supply on the market because they were being sold off-market for 3-4 billion inf each.

Things on this market are dirt cheap and it's super easy to make inf.

It is worth noting that recipes are sometimes harder to come by on the market because people tend to craft and convert things these days instead of just dumping recipes on the market. If you can't find the supply for a recipe you'll either need to buy the crafted enhancement or use converters to get what you want. Then again, across all the builds I've made since coming back, I think I can count on one hand the number of times a piece I wanted had zero supply (and then I just bought a different piece of the same set and used converters to get what I wanted). Also, if you're trying to slot an entire build by only using reward merits to buy recipes, you're doing it wrong.

The inflation occurred all at once? My old emails gradually chronicling the drop in what RMTers were able to charge for inf would like to have a word with you.

I understand this is a few days late but all my testing has shown that given as-close-to-identical-as-possible builds there is no significant difference in speed between a solo Tanker and a solo Brute with the changes. I think if Tankers had kept their original 600% damage cap (vice the 500% it is on test now) it would be a different story but all I've found is that the difference isn't enough to make it worth rerolling my Brutes as Tankers.

No, the inflation was going to happen from the very beginning. Players had years to amass influence before the invention system/market was introduced and even though the devs made attempts to add inf sinks to the game they just weren't effective. Farming was never the fastest or most efficient way to make influence but it did help supply the market with drops. The systems Homecoming has in place should help mitigate the amount of inflation, to an extent - the "hard to get" stuff is easier to get, the prices at the merit vendors are reasonable and ensure that prices will never get as high as they did on live, and normal drops are available in every AE arc.

Are you running standard rewards or architect rewards? I haven't seen any stoppage of inf/xp/drops at all.

I am pretty sure the name you are looking for is "selection bias."

Welcome back Gers!

Travel suppression and heal decay no longer exist in zone PvP and are disabled by default in arena matches. Diminishing returns is still a thing, and most of the ingame combat attributes don't correctly reflect the effects of DR. Nothing with regards to diminishing returns has changed since live.

I agree that if every build were exactly identical player skill would be the only thing that would matter - but in a system like that there isn't a lot of skill required to master the game. Everything works exactly the same way and once you've figured it out, you've gotten as good as you're ever going to. MMO PvP (at least in a dueling situation) is inherently rock/paper/scissors but if the system allows for a wider range of player skill I can beat paper with rock, for example, instead of it being a foregone conclusion that paper always wins in that situation.

Perhaps I misspoke - it might not remove skill entirely, but it does lower the skill cap significantly and that's never a good idea. Issue 13 saw sweeping changes to the PvP system in an attempt to homogenize builds and make the skill cap lower and it nearly killed this game's PvP community. There's less diversity in builds and if anything the learning curve is now steeper than it used to be because many of your powers don't function anything like they do in PvE.

Nah, that's boring AF and completely removes player skill from the equation.

As much a cliche as "learn to play" is, in many cases like this it's an appropriate answer.

This is already possible and I think some of the servers out there allow it, but the server has to be taken down each time to update the character database, and there's no way to check whether the export file was modified (so you didn't grant yourself, say, every badge in existence and 2 billion inf).

I mean, that was pretty much the direction things started to head with the Issue 13 PvP changes. The competitive PvP scene in this game never really recovered from that, though we're lucky enough now where there are several active competitive teams that do unofficial matches most nights during the week.

Try the "sit at range and snipe people" in a coordinated PvP environment and let me know how that goes for you. If you're having luck with that strategy you might want to consider fighting against competent players. Hell, come out to Pocket D on Indomitable sometime. We do pick-up 8v8 matches every Wednesday and Saturday at 9 Eastern.

You can do pretty much anything on a personal server, yes.

So I suppose I'll sit here and make a more serious reply to the OP: It looks like you started a thread back in August about the lack of challenging content in this game and in one of those posts you said (and I'm quoting here) "I've never done anything in City of Heroes I actually got stuck on and had to think about." Looks like you've now found that thing you're getting stuck on and have to think about but instead of doing that you're coming to the forums and asking for a massive nerf. You wanted challenging content and you got it.

Is this a serious post? I can't imagine that this is a serious post. The movement speed is what makes this game's PvP better than just about any other MMO's. EDIT: I guess if you really wanted to you could disable travel powers in an arena match but good luck getting someone to fight you under those rules.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that 1) there's a 100% chance the old database exists and 2) there's a 0% chance we'll ever get anything from it on Homecoming.

I support this suggestion. There's really no reason why incarnate components can't be sent to alts on the same account especially since you can send yourself empyrean merits.

I mean, I probably wouldn't be using awakens in a PvP zone because you rez with like 25% health, no endurance, and the 30-second PvP timer doesn't apply. I'm honestly surprised when someone does use them because they're basically a free kill at that point. Plus there's the chance for a PvP recipe drop with defeats so *shrug*.