Yomo Kimyata

Another use of marketing fees is to help slow down or put some sort of a governor on flipping.

I think the problem is that there aren't enough numbers in a percentage system. If we change the number of percents in a whole from 100 to 120, that should solve our defense problem. Also, then people could actually give 110%, and we could get on them for not giving enough.

1. I'd say that the days of "billion inf" builds are pretty much over, but I'd say that a strong build would cost roughly 500mm inf, plus or minus a few hundred mm. 2. That entirely depends on how much you play that alt. I can't remember what the current earning rate for farmers is, but call it 100mm inf an hour? So roughly 5 hours? I'm just spit-balling here; maybe it's 5 hours, maybe it's 2 hours, maybe it's 50. But your investment in a character is only dead once you stop playing it.

I just want to be able to summon a Cairn.

I agree with you, but I suspect that is because you, like me, are already post-reward. We either have everything we need or we know how to quickly get anything we want, so for us, any rewards at all are superfluous. However, I dare to guess that the vast majority of players are always going to want rewards of some sort. And that makes sense to me. I personally want rewards to be pared back because, as you say, this project went in the direction of easy player gratification and that's really not my preference. However, I'm not making the decisions, and I have to assume the current developers want something that they want to play, and that they feel most people want to play, and that is not destructive for the player driven economy.

All this is very true, but my personal solution would be to address the deflation by changing some soft and hard caps and floors, and to address potential subsequent inflation by providing large scale influence sinks.

Absolutely. And lest anyone forget, you can convert an ATO by category if it's not the set you want for the low, low cost of 2 converters. The real time/converter sink is changing something from a sentinel set into a brute set. Once you get a brute set, however, you can quickly convert by category if it's the wrong brute set, and then convert within set until you hit your bogey.

10% on the price paid is generally more, and frequently significantly more than 10% on the price offered. Example: offer an ATO at 100 inf, sell it for 5-10mm. Market fees of 10 inf in your proposal versus 500k-1mm in current form.

Of course, we *could* just make everything free so that people don't have to farm for inf or items anymore. Then people could just play for fun. <ducks and runs away>

Raise it to 50%! Put a squeeze on all those unscrupulous flippers who are preventing me from buying my LotG 7.5%s at 5 inf!

In a world of make believe moneys which fall from the sky when you punch a Hellion in the face, nothing has to make sense. Some strategies are better than others at maximizing make believe moneys, though. I wouldn't recommend converting an ATO until it is exactly the one you want though. You might get it in one conversion at the cost of one converter, but the expected cost in terms of converters and time spent are pretty high. IMO you would be better off selling the ATO you have, buying the one you want, and selling converters to make up any difference in price. When I need ATOs (and I put them on almost every alt), I put in middle market bids on 5-10 of each one I want and come back a day or two later. If I didn't buy at least as many as I wanted in total, I'd increase my bid by 1mm and try again. If I bought at least as many as I wanted but they weren't the right ones, I'd convert the spares by set until I got the exact ones. After I have all I want, I will either relist the spares at the high end of the market or, if in my opinion I'm dealing with a lesser desired set, I will convert by category until I get a desired set then relist it at the higher end of the market. In general, I don't play the market much in the Hero Pack to ATO trade. It's too time intensive for my tastes and my character items page is already full of non-IO items I will never ever be able to use up. That said, so long as the expected value of the items you get from a pack is more than 11,111,111 inf, you're coming out ahead of the game. And if you don't care about coming out ahead of the game, so much the better!

Yes, indeed I did. Stupefy is a good bonus set, and if it were, say, melee damage, it would be spectacular. I'm afraid I'm a bit down on the stun mechanic in the game.

You answered your own question! You may not care to, but anyone seeking to reward themselves with challenge certainly would. In my opinion, and in my personal philosophy, it would separate grinding for reward from playing for challenge. If you want to play -1/x8 council farms and I want to play +4/x8 Carnie missions, great! And as you say, you would get to choose to fight who and what you please, so you could get the same rewards as I would and have a much easier time of it. Win win! After all, the game as it stands doesn't *really* reward based on difficulty. It rewards on number of enemies you defeat and to a lesserextent relative level of those enemies to you. It's pretty much hairsplitting though, unless you are really grinding hard for that last drop of inf or xp. Recently I ran two defeat all council radio missions, one at +0/x1 and the other at +4/x8. The inf earned on both of them (vendoring all drops) was more than 1mm and less than 2mm. In my eyes, that difference is negligible. The xp difference was probably significant, but I didn't track that. And finally, in my personal experience, once you are defeating +4/x8 handily, you're pretty much post-reward anyway. I have a handful of alts that frankly have won the game of Homecoming. I play them when I want to feel really overpowered, but there's nothing left for me to do with them. That may just be my thought process though -- everyone is going to play for their own reasons.

Actually, if I had my druthers, one would get the same reward from +0 as you would for +2 (or +6 if it happens). I mean, you get the same reward from a +1 Council minion as you do from a +1 Carnival minion, so why make the distinction one of reward? Maybe we would see teams doing +0/x8 Carnie missions in PI rather than +4/x8 Council missions. Who knows? But I don't have my druthers, so the point is mainly moot! I do agree that more enemies should lead to more rewards, but my opinion is also that I'd like rewards to be capped at x8 for much the same reason I don't want the aggro cap lifted. It's just fishing with dynamite at that point. But that opinion is also mainly moot, since I'm almost completely lacking on druthers.

Coming at this from the concept angle... Most of my solo gameplay is on redside nowadays. I still hate the color scheme, but the play is much more challenging there. And I also have been doing a lot more RPing, at least in my own mind, so your post got me thinking. Most of my redsiders, almost all of them, aren't what I would consider evil at all. They aren't murderers or torturers, but they *are* thieves and/or megalomaniacs and/or really flawed people. They're greedy and selfish, sure, but not truly *EVIL*. For example, I've got a whole gang built around a mastermind bank robber with a heart of gold. I've got another group who are personifications of the seven deadly sins. For me, something that is truly evil would be something transcending what I normally understand of the human experience. I have zero interest in roleplaying a mass murderer, or a tax collector, for example; that's probably too close to what we see as evil on a day-to-day basis*. But my most evil villain is inhuman insofar as his sole goal is to destroy the world (and himself) in nuclear holocaust. To me, that's evil in a way that steps outside of what we live with (I hope. I *really* hope.) Coming back to your final question, one aspect of evil that resonates with me is an unstoppable force that is coming to get you eventually. Think Jason Vorhees -- slow but inevitable. Also, I think of debuff powers as being particularly nefarious. I'm finding radiation and bio tanks and brutes pretty effective as villains. * I must admit I do have a villain in the planning stages who is a telemarketing bot asking about your vehicle's extended warranty...

I'm with you on this one. If you are geared up enough to tackle +6 instead of +4, then you are pretty much post-reward. Although I do think it would be fair to ask for EB quality xp/inf for defeating an EB rather than a boss.

Bio works on everything (I cannot verify that on sentinels, not enough playtime!). I have a broadsword/bio brute that I am trying to fine tune. For broadsword, you want recharge and -res debuffs. Same for bio armor. I play bio very aggressively and much more like Regen than most people. If Divine Avalanche is in your attack rotation, that will probably keep you well above soft cap melee defense most of the time. But remember that bio has no defense debuff resist, so you can (and will) quickly go from 45% defense to -45% defense, so be ready with your heals. I'm working on something like this:

This is *probably* some variation of the display bug, because that just shouldn't happen (exceptions occur; see below). Lately I've noticed something I always have bids in on slip in a sale for 1 in the last 5, and I've been writing that off to ghosts in the machine. Ura, can you clarify? If this is the locked market bug, then it can occur when you have bids and offers on the same item on the same *character*. The queue treats different characters, even if they are on the same account, as different actors. But if you are referring to a different bug, I'm all ears!

I guess this one is *kind* of a Praetorian Clockwork tribute...

They have been bucketed, so they are held in the database as Thunderstrike and don't have a specific level assigned to them until you buy them. This might give a better and fuller explanation:

AAAAARRRGH! So sorry, anyone know how to delete those extra images?

I apologize for reposting this so soon:

Send any and all to the giveaway in my sig!

No escalation or disingeniousity intended or interpreted! What I have seen, both in game and on these forums, is that people who solely use SOs either: 1. Choose to use SOs for their own personal reasons, knowing that they could get more bang for the buck from IOs. Nothing I can do about this. Choice is choice. 2. Can't afford the inf or the time to get IOs yet, but are working towards doing so. Lots I can do about this. Lots I *do* do about this. Education, giving inf away, etc. What I interpret from your comments are that you believe there is also a sizable portion of the community (5%? 50%? 90%) that use SOs because that is all that they have available, and they have no choice other than to solely use SOs. I really haven't seen these people, and maybe I should have put "mythological" in parentheses. I don't doubt that some exist, but I have to think it's a really really small percentage of the population on HC. So small, that I don't advocate balancing *new* level 35+ content around them. I do not advocate developing anything that takes away from anybody. I would never advocate rebalancing all current content for IO use. But developing future content that is balanced around what *I* perceive the vast majority of players use, yeah, I do support that. There are no gates preventing anyone from using the IO system, only choice, and if you choose to take the slow path, that's cool with me, but please don't ask everyone to balance their play around your choice. I'm saying "choice" a lot, and if anyone has no choice and is being forced to use a suboptimal system, let's focus on that and fix it. I absolutely understand that others may feel differently, and I'm going to use an almost certainly broken analogy. Let's say you choose not to fly for whatever reasons. Getting to Hawaii without flying is possible (take a boat, swim!) but is a lot more work and expense. If you can't fly because of a crippling condition, I am sorry, and I may be willing to chip in for your boat fare or your swimming training. But regardless I'll be waiting on the beach in Waikiki to greet you with a fruity rum drink. Again, just my opinion. Nothing to get worked up about.

Hmm, my experience has differed, but that's cool. I have not brought anyone completely new into the game, but I spend a fair amount of time talking to self-professed newbies when I'm giving away inf. I don't hear from them that they are intimidated or confused by the IO system or that they don't want to look at it and just use SOs. They have no idea what TOs or DOs or SOs are, but they know IOs. I hear from them that they want to figure out a way to afford "the good stuff". Now, that is certainly a biased sample set since generally I am giving away inf, but it is indeed my sample set. I hear your concern that you are not fighting for yourself. But I have to wonder, based on my personal experience, if the theoretical people you are fighting for really exist in large numbers, or if it is rather a general moral construct that "we *should* base this around the lowest common denominator, the mythological person who only knows how SOs work but can't quite grasp the small stepto the world of IOs. I don't know, honestly. Just my observations and opinions, and as always, yours may vary!