Ukase

So..this is probably more just my issue..but maybe others have it. I just recently goofed - to the tune of 140 threads, an uncommon salvage and 8 emp merits. In my hybrid slot, I had a t-3. I had one uncommon, 140 threads and a few more, plenty of emp merits. So, I proceeded to burn the threads and 8 emps for a rare to complete my 2nd t-3 on hybrid. Still would have 40 threads and enough emps to make the t-4. But - no sooner did I craft my second t-3...I see that I already had a second t-3 crafted. No idea when I did it, but there it was. Now I have 3 t-3s. A waste! Is there a way to make these that are crafted stand out a little more than they do? The one that's slotted, I can see very clearly. The one that wasn't...I didn't even notice it until I crafted the third one. If it's just me, I'll go get my eyes checked. But if I'm not the only one, I sure would like these to stand out a bit more.

Darkity? That made me laugh!

Thus far, I've only got three people on ignore. One - I've never encountered on a team, but I see his commentary on Excelsior chat. From the names of his characters, and his comments, I am convinced that this person is stoned out of their gourd and/or a serial rapist. Obviously, it's unfair for me to pass judgement that harsh on someone simply for comments made - but the names with the comments are just so gross, I don't want to think about it. Another person was someone I'd done several leagues/teams with - who no longer plays. No sense getting into it - but I just got tired of seeing messages spamming throughout the day for folks to join his sg after I read/experienced bad behavior towards another teammate during an ITF. Lastly, was a person who'd just sent me a tell asking me to PL them, as if it was the most normal, reasonable thing in the world to ask someone you'd never teamed with or spoken with before. At the time, it was just ...offensive. Anyone who'd just send tells to anyone else with no introduction for something like that is just not someone I want to know. So, to sum up - to get on my list - be unknown to me and ask me for influence or a PL out of the blue, or be very gross, or be very critical of new players without offering any solution or advice to them, nor recognizing the possibility of being completely in error about your own understanding of the game. (you kind of had to be there)

It's not a secret that I am quite lazy when it comes to costumes. I have probably only 5 costumes across 50+ characters. The female characters have 3 costumes. The colors might change, tho. I've got one tank with a unique look, the blasters have two looks, same as the brutes. Controllers/Corruptors/Defenders will look pretty much the same as the blasters or brutes, depending on the gender of the character. While I have a couple of characters that are the same powersets - the builds are not the same. I have picked up various habits with builds as I've played. They used to be about as much defense/recharge as I could get, but I did an experiment with my blasters and learned that max HP with a decent amount of defense (25-35%) is a lot more survivable than 200Hp less than max and 45% defense. So, the change in builds is reflected in this new philosophy. Mind you - it's anecdotal - but my last blaster had no defeats until level 50, Vet level 1, in a hami raid. Silly tanks weren't keeping aggro enough...but then, I shouldn't be stepping in the midst of a Monster scrum to use inferno without taking some lucks first. Had a second defeat when some idiot on a Keyes badge run couldn't stop hitting AM - killed the whole league. I don't consider that my fault, but defeat is defeat. Still, for a blaster to go 50 levels with my increasing difficulty settings every 10 levels from level 15 undefeated, I think that's a testament to the build.

I did, but they wiped my characters off. It's easy enough to replace them - but that's time spent I could have been actually playing. Further, the last time I was on, I couldn't test anything because they had disabled the ability to make incarnate components unless you already had the threads from live copied over - which I didn't/don't.

Not reading through 6 pages, (so far) but I am looking forward to seeing how this pans out! It's a real gift for those that still use SOs in later levels, but the real fun will be actually having competent characters with the right enhancements instead of those useless TO/DOs - that I have never used because they're so useless, relative to SOs. A really nice QOL update, if it proceeds. My question is - for folks like me that might just have End Mod and recharge SOs -- will it update those and ignore my IOs?

You're likely correct. I hadn't thought about that.

Never underestimate the greedy farmer with a lot of free time. I have an alt account with 3 spines/fire brutes. Sadly, I had no idea that patrol xp had an impact on inf - farms were the only place they played, once I got them all their passive accolades. Candidly, I've always been more focused on recipe drops than earned influence for running a map. A cheap recipe with a few converters would net as much or more than one of the missions (of 5) in a comic con map. And for the curious - I have one on each server in case one server goes over the threshold to allow for multi-boxing.

It was strange. Earlier, except for Jav. Volley, (Targeted AoE) ALL of the recipes in the last 5 section had sold for 8-9M. Now, they seem to be back to "normal", the 4-6 range I was used to seeing. Guess I just figured someone was up to some shenanigans. Or maybe they realized that at 8-9M, it was still cheaper to buy craft and convert than to pay 12M. <shrug>

An observation - and maybe a prediction. No idea how accurate it will be. I suspect that the price of PvPIOs is going to get much higher. Why? Because I noticed someone buying the recipes for almost twice as much as what they have been selling for in the past month or so. 8M for a recipe and the Crafted IO isn't selling for much more than that. I've no doubt someone is buying these, crafting and converting them to the main 3 procs, which are routinely selling for 11-15M, maybe more when supplies are scarce. With the salvage costs of about 600k to 800k, and if they use level 10 recipes, negligible crafting costs. after the fees of a 12M sale, they're only making 1 to 4M per sale. It adds up, but some players won't invest in a margin that small, so fewer PvP IOs on sale. The price will rise. I might stop crafting my pvp recipe drops and selling them just to save me some time and the salvage.

I completely agree with you. Never said you did. But - we have 1000 slots. And, if you want your character to be as good as you play, you want the better IOs. Depending on your AT, that typically means: 1 Gladiator's Armor 3% def (all) & Teleportation protection - about 11M currently, but I've seen them sell as high as 15m. Smarter players will buy a lower cost PvP IO recipe, craft and convert. Even if it takes 30 converters, a 5M recipe, plus crafting costs of less than 1m, you come out much cheaper. 1 Panacea +hit points/recovery - another 12 m 1 Shield Wall 5% res (all) - another 12M Numina +recovery/hit points - 4M, Miracle +end -4 M, Perf shifter +end (currently going for 6M because of the new end mod IOs) 1 set of Winter-Os for the melee attacks, that's 100m, more if you go for the winter packs to gain them that way. 1 set of Overwhelming Force - which you can do 5-6 Summer BB's, but after you've done that a hundred times for your first 20 alts..I'd rather buy 'em straight out. At 15M each - 10M if I'm fortunate, patient and bidding intelligently - that's 50-60M. Purples are called for with most dominator builds aiming for perma dom. Those are 100M per set, easily. You can certainly bring the cost down to 90M by getting recipes and crafting, converting as necessary. Or you could be a sucker and use merits, but nobody sane does that. Better off using merits to get converters - which is another thread all by itself. Melee characters tend to have armor - either resist or defense focused - and those cost about 4-5M for each IO. Usually 3-4 armor powers, so that's about 60-80 Million there. It adds up, as we all know. Depending on your AT and powersets, a solid build is going to cost at least 200M. More than likely double that. A very resourceful player could probably get my with prodigious use of converters & reward merits at half that cost, it just depends on how much time they want to spend playing for converters instead of playing for fun. (the same thing for the lucky few of us) No; there's no rule that says we need the best our inf can buy. But there's also not a rule that says you should get the cheapest Training Origin enhancements either. Some believe that common IOs or even SOs are good enough. They can be, if you team frequently to cover up the holes in your build. I think half the player base solos for their own reasons half the time. So, yeah, they need the better builds. At a minimum, they want them. The folks with time on their hands - like me - can read the market forum, soak up the tips & tricks and do those things themselves - like I have. Now I have four level 4 characters who are waiting in Ouroboros for the Chronologist badge and I'll start playing one of them in a day or so, staggering the play time, giving me 10 days to get to 50 and t-4 it. Plenty of time for me. Not nearly enough time for most because they don't play as much as I do. Ultimately it doesn't matter to me. I've got over 80 Billion. I'm just trying to be helpful.

There is so much truth in this! One of my globals, who has stopped playing around Christmas time, was what I call a younger guy; we'd played back in live from time to time. But since I work remotely, I can easily log in, place some bids - get some work done - check back in, etc., whereas he could only come on at about 9pm Central. He'd try to make it to the hive, but more often than not, just couldn't get in. So - there I am - in the hive, I'm earning 160 merits in a relatively short time, but he's only getting in on round 2, if at all. So, as a week goes by, because of our different schedules, I've got over 1000 reward merits and he's got maybe 400-560. Let's not fool ourselves - free time is a huge variable in the influence disparity between the "haves" and the "have-nots". I don't have access to the data - and even if I did, I wouldn't know where to find it - but it would be a curious thing to see how many folks have influence in excess of 100Billion more than 50 Billion More than 10 Billion More than 5 Billion More than 1 Billion I suspect everyone with only 1 level 50 would have somewhat less than 10 billion, depending on whether they farm or use the market. Folks with multiple 50s might have more - because the wealth accumulated is a function of time, as well as efficiency at gaining xp - whether farming or teams of 8 running normal content. So - if the goal is to make the "average" player be able to afford the good stuff - how do we define "average"? How many hours a day/week do they play? This is the kind of thinking that kept me out of the good schools.

Well..if you have a friend or an alt account that has these badges, you can get those badges at level 1. Level doesn't matter if you're sidekicked.

My thoughts are that we're very fortunate to play on a server where making inf is far easier than it was on live, if you're inclined to do so. Whether it be the market, or just doing a kill most ITF - however you play - you can make scads of influence. But there was, and still remains a backlash over the removal of the double inf when exemplared. So, here's my suggestion: We all know that a level 50 incarnate still has all their powers at level 45. So why not allow for the double inf when exemplared for all characters that are 44 or below? These are the levels that really need the influence anyway, particularly if it's their first character. If you're level 45-50, no more double inf. It just makes more sense to me than an across the spectrum change. Any player that has a 50 is aware that inf is no longer an issue. First characters may be an exception, as they may not have been kitting out their characters as they leveled and feel a big obstacle to come up with the millions required to deck out their new 50. But still, this would be a better solution than the one that we've just been saddled with. At least, I think so.

They were addressing either another, or the same AE issue. Presumably, it will be a quick fix.

What I've done is this: Give to random teammates 100m each if I see even one character's build that doesn't have an IO. Donate 50 to 100M to whomever gets the drop ship kill after an MSR. I tried to give a purple IO of choice to whomever got the kill shot on Hamidon, but I could never get the kill shot to display on my system log. I subsidized more than one man hunt 1 billion inf. I've given away entire sets of Winter-Os, purples - I even gave away an entire build for a fire/rad controller. Despite these charitable gifts, I have more inf than I did before I started giving it away. Just passed 80 billion yesterday. This is despite running the last 20 or so characters on 2xp no inf, and the last 10 or so, paying for all the amplifier buffs, tps, Summon pets, envenomed daggers, workbench, etc for all my characters.

I guess I need to raise my prices. Mine sell daily. I convert and probably sell 10 of them a day and seem to always get about 10% more than what I ask.

An email wipe would piss me off for sure. Mainly because that's where I stash half my inf. My characters each carry 1B, and I have my emails with 900M each. I would have them carry more, but if I did, I couldn't retrieve them with my characters. I don't trust the HC devs to not have a crazy sale and saddle me with a zillion winter packs or hero packs, and honestly, it's neat and tidy in the emails. It's convenient. It is something I would consider rage quitting over. I know it's easy to make, and I know I have more than I will likely ever need - but when the devs seeded the market with salvage, they lost something with me. I can't trust them, because I'll have no idea what they'll do with regards to the market. Worst case, I can take the micro's out of the 30 some odd characters that have them but I'm not really playing anymore. I should do that anyway. Doesn't really make sense to have 500-800m worth of IOs just sitting in a character I'll probably never play again. At this point, they just hold inf. As far as this nerfing of inf while exemped...*yawn*. Who cares? I doubt anyone who plays the market or even has a farmer cares two bits about this. I think it hurt the beginning player who needs more inf to kit out their non-farmer more than anyone else. Now - those who have not are going to be left with a couple of choices: make a farmer and / or learn the market. Or continue on and struggle a bit. Life goes on. Fortunately, I'm at a place where I don't have to do anything. I tallied up my inf and while I'm not close to 100 Billion yet, I'll probably be there in a couple of weeks if I would put in the effort - which I won't. I've been actually having fun playing the game with a "delete the toon if it gets defeated" theme, jacking up the diff every 10 levels. So far, at level 43, and have only had a couple of close calls.

This was amusing for the first +2 hellion. Now it's just annoying. Wake me when it's over.

That darn trial is still my favorite!

So, I have patiently read through ...14 pages! instead of continuing with my 36th rep of Tina Mac's Anti-matter arc. I see a small contingent thankful for the costumes and other additions. I see a LOT of fuss about this stop of double inf while exemped. For the farmers - you'll be fine. It's not like you weren't going to run the map again anyway. It's not like you need the influence immediately, and honestly - it's not that much influence. You make more from crafting a few of the recipes, converting them and selling than you do in the entire map. The time spent complaining, you could have already made millions in the market. For the non-farmers - you may see this is a slap towards someone else that gave you a glancing blow. It might sting a little, but knowing you weren't the target should be some solace. If I understand this issue correctly, the problem folks are having is they think their influence earning has been cut in half when exemped. It was never truly double influence while exemped. Was it close? I don't think so, but I have never paid attention to those numbers, knowing that an uncommon recipe was going to net me 3-7m, depending on the conversion rng. It really seems like much fuss over very little. I am far more upset about this General chat channel. I can no longer get angry at people telling me to hush up in Help or LFG chat when all I was doing was trying to be a part of my community that would occasionally discuss things that had little or nothing to do with teaming or helping answer questions. Who'm I gonna tell to shut up now?

I farm. I play "Non-farm" content regularly. I even lead the occasional hami raid with one tank or another. I also buy certain recipes at a given price, craft them, convert them and sell them for what I think is a reasonable price. Usually about 10% below what most people seem to be willing to spend based on the past 5 sales. I also subsidize costume contests and manhunts to the tune of billions, and Mothership raid drop ship kill shots. I also just give random teammates 100m when I'm in the mood to do so. I globally ignore those who beg for inf. Giving should be my idea. You are of the opinion that what I do, and others like me do impacts how you can outfit your characters. On one hand - I can understand that you may only play a few hours a week and may still be working on your first character and having trouble making influence. Have you ever tried to make influence? Have you ever read through the marketing section in this forum? I am hard pressed to understand how anyone can't fathom how to make influence in this game, and lots of it! I am more than happy to share what I know, how to make it fairly quickly and easily if you're inclined to learn. The help channel is FULL of people more than willing to share this information, as are these forums. My issue is that folks have given freely the information, but you (and others) seem to find it impacts you - but if you'd only taken the time, you'd have billions and billions just like so many others.

This isn't the proper forum section for me to share this, but simply send me a tell in game @ukase and I will type up a storm in an email for your reference. A child could make a billion inf in a week if they have the time and inclination. But it does take time! And, you will need to actually roll a character to get some explores if your current characters have already spent those reward merits.

Anecdotally, converting/flipping surpasses all. The only issues preventing folks from making billions is the start-up inf required. (or converters/merits which can be converted into adequate inf easily enough)

Ha! I'm glad you said it would never happen, because I love CJ/SS. All but three of my 30 something level 50's have CJ/SS/FIght/Leadership or CJ/SS/Fight/Sorcery. I do get hasten on all my characters as it's essentially required if you want dish out as much DPS as you can. Anyone that says it's not necessary isn't doing as much dps as they could. That's a fact. There is no way around that fact, either. I understand that there are people who do things differently than I would..and I suppose that's fine. But, me, I like hasten.