Ukase

Oh my. It never occurred to me to make an alt specifically for the 5 reward merits from the explorations and then get converters, sell and repeat. Yeesh, that sounds more tedious than farming. Still, clever. But more clever is to actually use the converters on crafted IOs. Faster, too.

So, I understand that you don't appreciate the market/farming methods to get what you want out of the game. I also, I think, grasp that you do it when you need to, in order to get what you need. I've no issue with options. But how would you go about resolving this issue you have? Make everything free? like on Brainstorm, the test server? I've thought about that. I have characters that have somehow managed to be on Brainstorm since page 3, without a wipe. I could have been playing there easily, I suppose. No need to market or farm, there. Maybe that's why my characters seem so much faster when using super speed! I mean, it's super fast. Like 4 seconds faster on the ski slope, without buffs. What would you suggest? I don't think making things free is the path. If they take away the carrots, the donkeys will not move! There must be a worthwhile goal in order to keep folks motivated. And the goal can't be too simple, or the motivation drops. And it can't be too hard, or people will give up. There's a balance there somewhere, but no matter where that point is, there will be some that give up because it's too hard/tedious/boring/adjective of your choice, and some that quit because it's too easy/dull/adjective of your choice. I think the HC Devs have done a darn good job keeping the Richie Rich's like me in check. The price of IOs continue to slightly lower over time, at least the ones I tend to sell have certainly dropped in price. That means my stack of inf is relatively larger, and so is everyone else's. We all have the ability to buy more with our influence than ever before. I'd say that's a good thing for folks that want to avoid marketing and farming! It's only going to get better from here.

While that's true - my point, (which I obviously didn't express well at all) had more to do with the competition for the Shiny McThingBobs. It ultimately doesn't matter if the inf is generated by farming, or accumulated by marketing. It's still being accumulated. The competition for the Shiny McThingBobs is still there on the AH, regardless of where the inf comes from, right? I do accept the rest of your logic trail, and appreciate the perspective. It's far too easy for me to only consider my own experiences and my own perspective.

Making the Shiny McThingBobs available for purchase on the AH was perhaps the wrong decision. Perhaps, introducing Shiny McThingBobs as a currency instead of using Reward Merits was an error. I certainly don't know, even with hindsight. I do know reward merits aren't earned in farming, although farming can lead to obtaining them by using the influence to buy super/winter packs. Still no idea why merits are in the packs, but I'm not complaining. I'm too obtuse to consider all the ramifications about this or that with absolute certainty, despite my best efforts. I mean - why was this new currency introduced? What did everyone think would happen? If it is true that my farming affects everyone else, then wouldn't my teaming and running content also affect everyone? The influence generated by farming is a pittance compared to the influence generated from the market, is it not? There are farmers who loathe marketing, and marketers who loathe farming. And some folks loathe both. This end result of people who don't want to farm feeling pressured into doing so to get their hands on the resources to acquire the Shiny McThingBobs through the AH is a bad end result, sure. But the end result of people who don't want to team up for hard mode content feeling like they have to do so to get their hands on the Shiny McThingBobs is also a bad end result, isn't it? Maybe introducing the Shiny McThingBobs wasn't thought out clearly enough. Or maybe, it's just a case of not being able to please all the people all the time, etc. I still remain pleased to be able to play. I could have done without the aggro changes, but I can adapt. And because you say afk farming affects everyone else, I'll stop. In fact, that's really all you guys had to do, was just ask us to stop afk-farming. Most will probably respect that request.

What our esteemed #6 meant was when the HMTF team sold some/all of their prismatics on the AH, and got 180 million for one of them...who bought it? I was a little more patient and put in bids for 20M, and get them filled in a few days. And it was because I had it laying around. I will never pay 180M for anything, lol. That's just crazy. I still have more bids in for 10M, and well, maybe they'll fill. Maybe not. No sweat either way. I need to re-read 6's post, because, well, I'm a skim/scan kind of person.

That's possible. Maybe it's easier to believe they're just lazy. I can only go off my own experience which is playing for a couple of issues (on live) before I knew forums existed. I learned so much, once I started reading there. I really was quite clueless. And, really, if it weren't for a few key players sharing info with me, I'd probably still be clueless, despite my best efforts to read up on everything.

There's that discord reference again. There's a small fraction of players that despise Discord. It's a useful tool, but until you get it figured out - you get bombarded with these stupid notifications at every turn. Someone you don't know posted something that you care nothing about! Quick, look at it! Ping, after ping. I get that it's the tool the HC Devs use, so if we want to be in the loop, we all have to use it. I just wish it were more intuitive to an older fella like myself. It's just not what I'm used to. I tend to only use it for SG communication, and even that's just once a week. I just don't get why they can't just use these forums, but that's out of my control, so I don't sweat it too much.

I used to tell people that anyone can afk farm and can earn billions. I haven't told anyone that lately. Some can, and should. Some can and won't. Some may lack the understanding on how build for it, and will need to rely on the builds of others. I didn't even know AFK farming existed in game until maybe 6 months after HC opened up. So, I never did it. Nobody taught me how. I used to have healing aura on auto, not burn! You remember us having a chat about that, way back when? I learned about afk-farming, that it actually existed from a chap called @payload. (Great name, for a farmer, for sure) As for brainstorm, we can't expect people to go to brainstorm and test if they don't know it exists. Or they don't know how to test, or what to test. That's all I'm saying. I remember telling someone before page 3 that farming was simple. They sent me a tell and asked all sorts of questions. I spent 45 minutes explaining what I knew. I even gave them the winter-os and Brute ATOs to complete their build. 4 months later, they sent me 500M without me ever expecting it. Sure, I will give a blanket statement that anyone can market or farm. But, if they ask me directly, I will go into precise detail how I've done these things. I even have a couple of word docs I send them. (That are too lengthy and need to be edited!) I don't just give fish, I teach 'em how to fish. (figuratively) I don't think it's fair to send people to test and then not suggest how they might test or what they might test. Not everyone will need that, but I did and still do. All I can do on test is just do things like I would normally do them. I don't think that really provides much value for something that's about to hit the server, unless something crazy happens. Like being put in disguise, having a different costume, all my powers greyed out, and then being discovered and having to retoggle and fight off an EB at the same time. I sure pointed that out, they were pleased about the feedback, but didn't do anything about it, lol. (that I could tell) That's just my opinion. Doesn't make me right, but it doesn't make me wrong.

I don't know that I completely agree with this. Not saying I disagree, but that lovely trite phrase "It depends" comes to mind. Mainly because we have a lot of players who don't post here that don't even know there is a brainstorm server. They may not be using the HC launcher. (although, maybe it's time to only allow the use of the HC launcher? I dunno. I'm sure some folks would hate to be forced into using it for whatever reason) There are folks who post here on the forums that don't know Brainstorm exists. And that's not their fault. There needs to be a greater push from HC to get people to go to Brainstorm to test things today for the next patch, whenever that is. And there needs to be a pop-up that tells them what's coming, and what they should be testing, and suggestions as to how to test for various things.

My understanding is prismatics won't drop from completing AE missions.

I just did the math. If the objective is for badges, you need 150 of them, at 24M each, you're looking at 6.3B. I realize for ...half of you, maybe, that seems like some obscene amount of influence. I'm not going to win any affection by stating it's a pittance. IF you wanted to, you could earn that in, well, hard to say, as it would depend on how you spend your time in game. If you run level 50 content with a large team, and did no traditional AE farming or marketing, I think the math works out to: 25M hour, so, about 6 weeks if you played an hour a day. That's just going off of my memory on a kill most ITF from a couple of years ago. I recall it getting me about 25M. I can't recall what the difficulty setting was, as I despise a kill most anything unless I'm in a specific mood. I'm sure others will have some fun coming up with their own math. If you crafted your drops, used reward merits to get converters and used the converters on your crafted IOs, sold those crafted IOs that typically went for 2-4M, you can get that loot a lot quicker. Exponentially quicker. Do you want to spend the time crafting, or bashing heads running content? Maybe do a little of both. Whatever's fun for you. I'd also like to offer up this for your consideration: Just suppose you were gifted with the 6.3B or, someone traded you the 150 Prismatics for all the badges for nothing. You'd have no goal. No reason to run the new stuff. No figurative carrots to chase. Is that really what you want? One less figurative carrot? There's no wrong answer, it's a rhetorical question. Food for thought, so to speak.

I gotta say, I do like the name and the look. I wouldn't say they go together - the name would be good with just about in any look.

So, let me be real clear. I got no VG merits when out of the bowl. Now, when I say that - I didn't have my salvage tab opened to monitor it. I know the team was doing at least some clobbering. But, I'm not in the habit of literally tracking each teammate to see what they're up to. And to be fair, while my damage aura and foot stomp gets applied to each herd I lead to the bowl, I've only damaged them a little bit, maybe 20-25% by the time they get to the bowl. I think it's possible that my team could have been in a different area of the bowl. The only thing I can say with certainty is I wasn't getting the vg merit splash message when out of the bowl, and I was getting the message when in the bowl. And it was an instanced MSR. Beyond that, the one thing I think that could be an issue is the lack of an HVAS. But, for the first raid for a character, I couldn't bring one. If I add in what those can usually add to an MSR total, maybe that could put me back on track to the numbers I'm accustomed to seeing. I'll be attending another, this time with the HVAS and see how things go.

So, I'm adding the emphasis merely to point out, that while the end result may be an erosion of enjoyment, I do not think that is their intent. I mean, what would be the point? If you're bored and want to read - keep reading. My first sentence is pretty much all you need. *********************** There is one thing that GM Jimmy stated a few years ago, right around the very first patch, maybe after they'd seeded the AH with salvage, where he claimed that farming was good for the community, but afk farming needed to be addressed. Now, I'm not going to read too much into that. I can't say at that time he'd done a long look at the impacts of it or anything like that, but at the time it was his view that something needed to be done. As to whether it should be prevented completely, or something else, I can't say. I don't like it, because afk farming is a great way to accumulate influence while you play on another account. And I don't think it would be proper to let someone like me who's been doing afk farming for quite some time to keep all those proceeds, while future players won't have that recourse. The only thing is, I don't know why Jimmy felt it was something that needed to be addressed. I personally see no harm in it, as anyone who wants to can do so. The barrier for entry is super low. You just have to start small, and work your way up, the same way I did, as did every other afk farmer. And this has already been debated. The horse is dead, many times over. Some folks like and love it. Some folks could care less. Some folks are literally excited that changes were made and afk farming being a bit more difficult for some players is simply a side effect they've not thought about or been concerned with, or an added bonus. We're all different and have different views. Nothing new there. And it is true - they cannot please all of us, all of the time.

I would encourage you to not quit over something like that. Just don't team with folks who require it. Incarnate materials aren't THAT easy to come by, until you don't need them anymore. Then you get all kinds of crap you can't use. I've got like 30 very rare pieces of incarnate salvage on my badge character, and can't use them, unless I want to make yet another lore pet. Hoping that one day, we'll be able to trade those to our alts. It is true that staggering barrier is a good strategy for both HM ITF and Aeon SF. But there certainly doesn't need to be 8 barriers. We did it last week with some folks having incan, some having rebirth and I believe 5 of us had barrier. The main reason for the barrier is not the protection, but the 2x rez. Even the good teams will need to rez fairly often.

I appreciate the link. I remember reading it somewhat recently. In fact, I tried a couple of times to click on what was in different color text in that previous post, and nothing happened. I figured you were trying to cite a source. As I said, I don't disagree with the logic trail. I just have never considered the influence I have to garner me any favor with any npcs. I can't get Yin to wear a decent costume. I can't get Manticore to cut his hair, no matter how much influence I offer him. I guess he's got his own stack already. I can't get Swan to eat a candy bar. Probably wouldn't do much good, she'd just throw it up. Damn girl is seriously unhealthy; will probably dry up and blow away. I can garner favor with other players, I suppose. Give out a few hundred million here and there. And that only gives me a thank you about 40% of the time. So, um, no. Influence is loot. It doesn't garner any influence. It's simply in-game currency. Now, that may not be what ol' Jackie Emmert was trying for, but that's the end result.

I used to chase reward merits, because I can exchange them for converters, which are the key to influence generation. And, when leveling, it makes sense to me to pursue story arcs, primarily due to the mission completion bonus. In some cases, it's only a bar of XP, in others it's up to 5 bars (with 2xp temp running). There's also a pro-tip where once the arc is over, before you call the contact to close it out, you boost your diff to +4 and get more of a bonus than if you left it at something less than +4. As far as getting more folks to do gold side, my best advice is to simply ask for commitment from other players to join you there for a specific time on a specific day and hope for the best. The SG I'm in, I've led gold side "crawls", where we only speed when the mission has a timer or something. And we sometimes turn off xp to complete all the arcs in the zone. I've also done the same for blue and red side. The downside seems to be that folks want to meet up more than once a week. Some folks, when they start a character and begin to enjoy it, they don't want to park it for a week until the next session. That was my biggest headache, really. One week, I'm level 7, and the next week two players are level 50 and need to be exemped. It's not a real big deal, but often these players are no longer challenged due to the extra slots they have. It can be hard to keep the interest of some people. And, sometimes, atrocious puns get out, and the groaning really starts. It would be nice for gold side to get a task force, though.

I promise you - I know mine are trash. I've only tried to do anything special with one - a play on Grod, called Thong Kong, an electric/psi tank. I had to get help on the costume.

What I'm after is information. I know that costume appreciation is subjective. I see people getting praised for a costume, and I look at it, and I'm asking myself, "What is so great about that? Looks like crap, to me". Sometimes, I see a costume and I think, "nice enough", although more often than not, I can't even see costumes. All the buffs and stuff going on, I never really notice them. And, during idle times, I'm far more likely to look at builds and badge counts. I see some of the pics in this forum section of various costumes, read the praise...and I am left wondering -- what is it that made player X think that was a good costume? Most aren't hideous, but I see nothing particularly special about them to be worthy of praise. How many colors is too many? Are there some rules of thumb that all of you go by that the rest of us are unaware of? Should the belt buckle match the boot color? Or should the belt itself match the boot color? Or neither? Should it match anything? Is the origin of the character supposed to have any bearing on the costume? Is an archery defender supposed to be natural origin? or Tech? I wouldn't think origin matters. But my thinking has never been seen as typical. Is a fire character supposed to use a chest symbol that's associated with fire? And the fire stripes for shirt and pants? Is a cape supposed to be shorter for certain body types? Larger? Can a costume be made to look like a naked mole rat? Should a costume be made to look like a naked mole rat? What makes a player think their costume is "good"?

Before this patch, I would have debated that. But, they did listen to my (and others) issue about the removal of vet level rewards while running AE content. I really can't express how that felt, to actually feel as if they listened. Prior to that, I would have said they never read a word. It may or may not have been the right move for the game. It may be too soon to tell. And, sometimes, even hindsight isn't 20/20. Sometimes, there is no good choice. But it was certainly my preference to keep the vet levels while running AE.

I'm not going to disagree with this logic trail. And it wouldn't hurt my feelings at all if the dialogue were to occur if my farm brute tried to start a Hess TF. "Who are you? Get lost. You bother me." But then, I should be able to burn him for his disrespect. And you're right - I do see it as just a currency, because that's all it is. I can't use my billions of influence to curry favor with Cole in the magisterium, nor Dr. Aeon, or any other NPC. Now, I can purchase certain things from p2w and minor things from certain other npcs, but despite my saving Tina McIntyre from the Rikti, she's not going to leave her post outside of Portal Corp and stand in Kallisti Wharf if I ask her to - as if I could actually ask her to do something. Inf has never had anything to do with a player's reputation in this game. Never. That may be the lore, but that's not the in-game reality. If it were, I'd have all kinds of influence over the npcs due to my very large stacks of influence. But someone with 20 inf carries the same reputation I do. There's never been any suggestion that influence has any bearing on this willingness of others to do things to support you that I'm aware of. So, I'm not at all sure where you get that from, other than maybe the actual definition of the word. But that's not what it means in this game. It's just synonymous with dollar, or bitcoin or gold or euro or any other currency. Exception being it has no real world value. (outside of nefarious transactions against the TOS)

Thing is - I'm just frustrated that the tether isn't larger. As I pull rikti from the upper tiers into the bowl, I've often seen Rikti returning to their spawn points. Not mine, mind you. I turn off SS and sprint, ensure they each get a tick of damage or two and lead them into the bowl, if they live that long. I usually give them a good foot stomp once I get them to the ramp, then off for the next bunch. Now, it could be that I just had a team of crappy people who weren't doing much of anything. That can certainly happen. It was doubly disappointing because my thinking has always been 35+ in MSR would get more vg merits than a team that had some lower level characters, simply because they die more often, and often just sit there as if it were a fire farm. I generally get 1200 vg merits. On my spines brutes, I tend to get more, closer to 1400. I think my best was 1450 or so. But 800...that's really a poor result. Not like it's the end of the world, but I expected more, given the sheer number I damaged. But, apparently, when I leave the bowl, there's no vg merits. Still get xp, which is fine, but not why I'm there. Need a longer leash, or what motivation does any tank have to do an msr?

So, I thought to myself, I said, "Self, what's your next alt going to be?" And Self said, "Why I think it should be a tank. Haven't done one in a while. An Elec/SS tank." So, I made one. It's level 42 now. I just finished an MSR. So far, the build is pretty good, decent dps for a tank, I suppose. But, I attended an "instanced MSR" and I didn't go afk and let my HVAS do my playing for me. After all, I'm on a tank, so it's incumbent upon me to lead the rikti into the bowl. So, I did. This is what I experienced. When I'm out of the bowl, I get no vg merits. None. In the bowl - while doing nothing but waiting for some heals and buffs, then I get the vg merits. VG merits are the only reason to do an MSR for me. But, if I'm only going to get 2/3 of what I would ordinarily get, why would I bring a tank? I can bring a blaster and just convert the vg merits to reward merits and send them over to the alt. (If the alt didn't have enough) I do sometimes use them for a gr'ai matter, and in those instances, I'd be stuck doing it on my tank, but I know I can't be the only person that's experienced this. And what kills me, is I remember having this issue a couple of years ago, and it's why I stopped playing a tank. I'd forgotten all about this issue. I hate it when I realize something I already knew but forgot. Still - how can this still be a thing? In the back of my mind, I was thinking the HC devs did do something to address this. But, I guess in my chronic sleep-deprived state, I'm not real sure. A damn shame. Full team, all over level 35, and I would have sworn this team would have out-earned a team that was non-instanced, as the non-instanced MSRs tend to let lowbies in as low as level 1. (though level 12 is the lowest I've seen in recent memory.) But there's something rotten with the msr if the characters that are bringing the rikti into the bowl - despite damaging all of them with foot stomp and damage aura - isn't getting the proper amount of vg merits. I didn't notice it until the latter part of the raid - no splash "Vanguard Merit Earned" (or whatever that message is) unless I was in the bowl. On the platform above it - near the grates - zero vg merits earned. It ain't right. Not the end of the world, but now I know why folks go afk. They get more merits.

I've been thinking a lot about this want/need for levels in AE. (or anywhere else that's as fast/easy) I've seen it requested - an instant-50. Whether it's from p2w as an inf sink, or just an option that's available. We know it's possible, as it can be done on Brainstorm. The question is - would it be good for the game? I can't definitively answer that question, because I'm just one guy with my own perspective, and my own preferred way to play. I've never cared how folks get to 50, as long as they're someone knowledgeable about playing their characters. I can run (barely) with the speedy folks, or I can chill out in a crawl/kill through team. All depends on my mood, I guess. But this is what I think: insta-50 would remove motivation for a fairly high percentage of players that are in AE for levels. I can think of 25 players off the top of my head who not only have no interest in sub-50 content, they would much prefer it if there were some way to run a positron at level 50, as well as the rest of the tfs. Not saying they should be easy - only that the mobs should scale up to 50, with all the extra hp/regen/debuffs/recharge/nifty powers/mechanics that would go with those NPCs. So what would that mean for the game? I think it would be less stress on the servers. It's my understanding that AE farms put a stress on the servers. No idea why, I guess it's kind of like an MSR, A lot of npcs in a small area, with a large number of powers going off at the same time. I'm sure there would still be farmers who would keep farming for whatever their reasons. I'm also sure that an insta-50 would probably leave at least a few folks wanting to get to vet level 9 or so, to t-3 most of the incarnate powers. So, not real convinced it would be any real solution, unless the option to get some vet levels came with it. And that leaves me with this question of where should the line be drawn? Candidly, for me, if I could give a character those 9 vet levels just by spending some inf through p2w, I'm almost positive I would, on just about every character. And I do understand, that's just me. No idea what the rest would do. And...once I did that, what next? Just make characters to instantly get them to vet level 9, try it out and then roll another alt? So, just speaking for me, I don't think it would be good to have the option. I'd likely end up getting stuck trying to come up with the next name, and leaving most characters "incomplete" without their t-4s. I think having the option to skip a few levels in an AE farm is probably the easiest and simplest solution - at least until there's a ton of new content to do across all levels. I should also add that I think the post 50 crowd needs content as much or more than any other level range, but that's just my two cents. We all know opinions will vary.

For me, I have really enjoyed leveling spines/fire and SS/fire. Of the two, I think the proc potential of SS in Foot Stomp and haymaker overcame the rage crash easily enough, and it was a faster leveling process. Part of that is because footstomp knocks 'em down, mitigating incoming damage so I could tackle higher level foes. I did try SS/Dark - it was, of course, good in the lower levels, but getting to 38 wasn't as smooth for me as fire. I have an SS/Bio brute...it's very good, very effective through the entire leveling process. Bio's adapative selection - offensive, with Rage is quite complimentary. I think SS is my preferred primary on the brute. And it's really hard to dismiss fire as the secondary. My biggest issue, however, is boosted ranged and AoE defense, without sacrificing S/L resistance. Fire's just not that great for that, and I do miss the lack of defense debuff resistance. And..another thing...I'm always reluctant to take a fire brute into iTrials other than BAF or Lambda. Granted, Healing flames is up in 6 seconds, so no real concern, but occasionally, without timely inspiration use, bad things happen, and that's a message to me that I need to focus more on durability, less on dps. Or run with 2 builds, which I'd prefer not to do. I hate that waiting for the longer recharge powers.