thunderforce

I know that i27 has eaten at least some of these messages.

What server is this on? I've not seen anything like this (specifically, the lengthy doubling-down) on Reunion, even speaking as a notoriously acerbic player myself.

The market should not use blind bidding. Inching up bids to find the sale price is the worst downside, but not the only one. Let players who want to buy or sell now - or to post the best offer for a quicker transaction - just see the other bids. I think "right now" can reasonably be thought of as more than five transactions, though. The eyeblink we get may just reflect someone fatfingering a bid or sell offer, or dumping something in a hurry. I think "now" covers a week, given the way prices naturally change at the weekend as people have more time to play.

Well, I don't like the market the way it is - indeed in the early days on Homecoming I got quite severely lambasted for suggesting the market interface showed more data, although I hope we're over that phase now - so: Whether the first of these is unhelpful really depends on what "it" is. If "it" is convert Merits to Boosters and AH same, then yes, anyone can do that. It is not an operation too complex for anyone who can manage the rest of the City interface, and in and of itself it makes plenty of money. I don't think anyone is saying the second thing; what people are saying is the related (but true) observation that the Merit Vendor does provide an upper bound on AH prices. The seed prices haven't been relevant for months and will never be relevant again absent some major change, so who cares? To have a lot of them to sell you have to be doing Field Crafter, in which case you're hardly new. Simply checking the price history would tell anyone they're worthless (and in the department of "I can do it, so anyone can", I don't think it is unreasonable to expect someone who wants to sell something to see what it's worth, especially if the price display bug is fixed); and matters would be further improved if the AH interface showed more data (eg if you know there was one of something sold in the last month, it's a safe bet it'll take a while to shift). This is a complex proposal - "impartial, factual data" is a handwave over the fact that choosing the right data to present is itself a loaded question (eg "400% increase in revenue" can be a true fact presented by a RL startup, but it still can be masking the fact that in Q1 it was $1 and in Q2 it was $4) - and seems to have little merit compared to just giving more information about price history and buy and sell offers. The linked proposal is a bad idea for two reasons. First of all, any increase in transaction fees encourages off-market sales. This is awkward, makes price history even less accessible (worse for the novice than for the experienced trader), and means that to buy or sell expensive stuff at all you have to know where to ask. Secondly, it's a solution in search of a problem. There was a real problem on live inasmuch as the most expensive enhancements commanded huge prices, sometimes in the billions; and part of that was down to the fact that old players had billions accumulated (from the pre-AH years with almost no inf sinks) and could outbid any new player. That isn't the case here - there are rich players, but the disparity is not as great, converter roulette means supply can increase to the point where the most expensive enhancements cost 20 million not 2 billion, and factors like selling converters mean that it is relatively easy for poor players to get some of the money from rich marketeers who need those converters for their own operations. City of Heroes doesn't have that crown. If nothing else, "City of Heroes but without inventions" used to exist and was considerably more accessible. ETA: Converter roulette is the key insight here. On live, a lot of money was made by flipping. From the point of view of a producer (someone who gets drops and wants money) or a consumer (someone who has money and wants enhancements), a flipper is a middleman who extracts money and adds no value. In game as in RL, producers and consumers have no use for such middlemen and would like to eliminate them. Hence the adversarial relationship between "ebil" marketeers and other players who wanted to limit their time in the AH. But on HC, the equivalent is converter roulette. Now the middleman _does_ add value; I sell my useless IO and they use their specialised knowledge to turn it into a useful one, which I or someone like me will be happy to buy. The middlemen compete with each other - if LOTG Recharges command a high price, they all want to produce more and to price them relatively low so their stock will sell. This is a far healthier situation for everyone - including the player who wants to have as little as practical to do with the AH - and does not need to be changed radically. I proposed some pretty radical approaches on live - the most obvious being that you could only, by price, sell a proportion of the items you had bought on the AH. I would not propose those now because the situation on HC doesn't need or want them.

The signs are accurate; the map is what is wrong. You can tell this because if the map was accurate, it would be impossible to go from Yellow to Green line without travelling between the tram lines. Since no-one in their right mind would design a tram system with two lines that have no interchange, presumably the interchange at Paragon Hauptbahnhof was destroyed in the Rikti War, and it has since been restored to service.

If the time period is long - months, not days - they've probably forgotten about it (and/or the game). (But I agree there's a lot of nonexistent problems being fixed here. To my mind, the problems are the noob trap of the Merit Vendor, the lack of data, and the bugs.)

Now, I agree that the market is, in a sense, not playing the game, but a bit of a bag on the side of the game - but two things: On Homecoming, you can get far more goodies with far less time spent in the AH than on live. This is good and should not be tampered with carelessly. You don't _need_ boosters at all; ED means boosters typically give very marginal benefits, and in particular if you're boosting a basic IO in a slot that could sensibly take a set IO, something has gone very awry. On a personal note, the arrangement I have with my more casual-interest friends is "give me your crafting stuff; I'll give you sets". This is an extremely good deal (not many novices slot ATOs at level 10), and if they want to take an interest in crafting later than can. I'm surprised every time I find it's still true, but boosters are very seriously close to converters for merit sales - close enough that the time you save not dragging endless stacks of converters into the market might make up the difference. But this is why I propose making merits directly AH-tradeable.

Hopefully uncontroversial: Just have the Merit Vendor warn you, with one of those "never show this again" tickyboxes, that stuff might be cheaper on the AH and it might be more efficient to turn your merits into converters/boosters and sell those. Yes, we can brainstorm more complex changes, but right now "new player earns merits" -> "new player spends 100(s) on ATO(s)" -> "someone enlightens new player who is vexed" is an open wound; slap a bandage over it. Better yet, cut out a lot of the merit derivative stuff by making merits directly tradeable on the AH. As a very definite stretch goal, match merit buy/sell offers on the AH up with special salvage buy/sell offers when possible. Probably still controversial: There's definitely MMOs out there with worse AH implementations, but the way the City hides almost all the information is terrible (and no, it is not how any real-world trading process whatsoever works) - and perhaps after a year of Homecoming we know that the way people make money isn't now by being more willing to put up with that, as it was on live, but by (eg) using converters to provide a service to other players. Show us the buy offers, and let us "buy now". Show us the sell offers, and let us "sell now". Show us more than an eyeblink of price history. This would not ruin "market PVP". In EVE, players can see the last year of transactions for any commodity, both as a simple list and in a wide variety of chart formats. They can see every buy offer [1]; see every sell offer. EVE is not short of cutthroat market activity! [1] In the "region" they are in, yes, but the City's market doesn't have any idea of where the item physically is.

Speaking as the angel of cynicism I quite like the idea that people who want to change them have to get set up to edit the Wiki, because we could really use more people who are. (The more I think about this the more I think, yeah, just keep them as a gateway edit...)

GM Kal has been creating https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Indomitable_Base_List (and the four obvious equivalents). I feel a bit ambivalent about whether it should be done here or on the FBSA Wiki. What do other people think?

I think there's two things going on here; yes, MMs struggle more with +4 missions than other characters, and yes, that should be addressed... but I don't think the way to do that is to cut the top off the difficulty slider so it effectively goes from -4 to +1.

Er... I said the short-term consequences would be drastic. You didn't work hard for them for two reasons; you were playing a videogame, which I hope you enjoy, which isn't work; and you can get incarnate level shifts on Homecoming by doing anything at all because the early veteran level rewards give you enough stuff to craft a set. The only remotely challenging part is figuring out the incarnate crafting interface. Taking them away would only make the game harder if you have notoriety set no higher than +1 even in DA (which is effectively -2); otherwise, you could just turn the notoriety down as needed. Frankly, I don't think many characters at level 50 with incarnate powers are going to find fighting -1s hard _at all_. If you really find the game so boring you don't want to spend more time playing it, perhaps you're not the target audience.

Palatine, First Ward: "Even after the Hetman antagonzied them so?" I think the Klingons had an antagonziser booth? Later, message in chat channel: "You were even offered the choice of interviewing the captured recon soldiers without intereference"; "interference".

This is a good idea, but I'd like to see an option for more general AV scaling. With 2 players (who don't have super-boffo builds), an AV is a tough fight. With 8, it's a speedbump.

That would improve matters in non-incarnate content, at least (better yet, remove the -1 level penalty while sidekicking. Right now a non-50 on any late-game TF faces the triple whammy where they're level 49, other people are level 51, _and_ those other people have ludicrously overpowered incarnate powers. Returning briefly to the topic of player retention, well, not reducing people who haven't hit 50 yet to spear-carriers would be a good start.) It still leaves the notoriety settings broken in DA, but that doesn't have much to do with player retention, I guess. That's true whenever an excessively effective power is nerfed, but that doesn't mean it isn't desirable. Sometimes mistakes are made in development and something's added to the game which is excessively strong. Such mistakes should be rectified. You also don't have the option to pack an entire outdoor map of enemies into a dumpster at once and Burn them to death, and this is a good thing.

Hard mode: get rid of the incarnate level shift altogether. No, really. This doesn't affect players who want "easy mode"; you can still fight -1s. (I know, this isn't going to happen, but also it is almost certainly the single most straightforward change which would give higher endgame difficulty - and without changing the gameplay in any respect). As partial penance for flogging my favourite dead horse, a serious suggestion about more content: one of the games I played during the interregnum was Star Trek Online. The AE-equivalent ("Foundry") there was more sophisticated; where in CoX the scope for originality is custom enemy groups and the accompanying text, with the actual mission mechanics coming from a very limited pool (limited to around issue 4, I guess?), in STO - although the tools will seem relatively familiar - the variety of player-created missions was considerably greater. (Crucially, it had map editing tools). Of course, this could be a great deal of work; but also, done right, it could realise the original vision for AE. Many STO Foundry missions were just as fun to play as the game's built-in content. Even getting the later issue mission mechanics into AE would considerably widen the scope of what could be done. (Sadly, I use the past tense; I gather it was shut down in late 2019.)

Not if they don't exist, which they shouldn't, and while the short-term upset would be considerable, would improve the game and hence retention in the long run. There's a false dichotomy here. The miniscule amount of work to implement the change I propose would not be _instead of_ new content. ETA: rather than spin out this discussion, which isn't really germane to the topic - most people instinctively hate this idea, but, what's a +3 level shift in DA get you? The difficulty slider caps out at +1, not +4. The numbers are slightly bigger. Er That's it?

It seems extremely simple. Turn off level shifts; adjust enemy levels on some TFs and iTrials. Far simpler than "build higher level incarnate content".

It would; it would eliminate the way the notoriety slider effectively goes from -4 to +1 difficulty in DA, just at the point where characters are strongest and players are crying out for more challenge. But hang on, you say, that just leaves iTrials. They don't really do much there - fighting 53s at 53 is much the same as fighting 50s at 50 - except stuff the occasional player who's not got the full +3 yet. So yeah, remove them altogether, adjusting enemy levels down if need be in content where they were raised above 50 because everyone was expected to have a level shift. They're bad. They're _worse_ in non-incarnate content, but there's literally nowhere they do anything but make the numbers slightly bigger. (ETA: let's assume I have already read the "well, just don't slot..." reply?)

I agree; but I think this is another case where doing something for the long-term good of the game might have such drastic short-term consequences as to be a Pyrrhic victory. (That said, I think level shifts are _so bad_ (in DA content, too) it would be worth trying it.)

Check the FAQ section.

I might guess wrong. Back in the day, some PVP groups on the EU servers tried a scheme of giving themselves a misleading name - a tanker called "empathy defender", and so forth - in the hope of confusing their opponents, or maybe just for a bit of amusement.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~damerell/games/coxincarnate.text is a short guide to Incarnate content in what seems to be the chronological order. As others have said, there are some other post-Fall arcs that aren't Incarnate.

I completely agree... but, even though I touch Suggestions and Feedback now and then to advocate toning down some particularly egregious examples, I'm aware that any kind of nerf is hugely unpopular, and the short term consequences of seriously addressing the balance issues might well make doing so a Pyrrhic victory at best. To the OP: the best thing you can do as an individual player is to tell your friends about it, albeit stopping short of the point where they're bored to death with you mentioning it. I play more than one evening a week with people I know IRL who never touched the game on live.

I like to start my posts here by questioning the judgement of half the readers, too. Fort Trident was added in issue 18; the LFG teleporter in issue 20. Hence, I suspect the "why" may be connected to the developers not being precognitive. Let me see if I've got this straight. Turn on the slash command again and make SG bases the best method of fast travel, so everyone can use it; make SG affiliation mean something again and make SGs pay for the privilege of fast travel, so members get something non-members do not, so... everyone can't use it? https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Experimentation I guess the original developers were precognitive, then, since they were looking at implementing a Homecoming homebrew power set in 2012! Empathy and FF, of course, being well-known overperforming powersets right now. Why am I nitpicking? Because when you turn up thinking you're God's gift to game design, confident that the mere mortals who worked on the game for actual money are idiots, and that the people who work on it now because they remember a decade of it live are equally ham-handed... you look a bit silly if it turns out you're talking through your hat. (Also, there's a certain delightful irony in complaining about too many words to read when it takes you half a screenful to say "there seem to be too many enemies in mission 3 of this arc"...)