ForeverLaxx

Not to mention that an arbitrary price cap just becomes the price floor also without sufficient, overwhelming supply like we have with the seeded salvage here. The people complaining they can't afford it without a price cap probably wouldn't be able to afford that new cap when it's now also the floor, either.

I distinctly remember during Live certain PvP IOs that would frequently be traded for numbers approaching (and sometimes exceeding) double the influence cap. Obviously this meant these trades would be done in-person and a lot of trust was involved (since nothing technically stopped the person who has the half-payment from bailing, or the one getting the IO from leaving early with the goods). The PvP IOs got that expensive because of their very low supply. I'm a PvP player in other games, but even I know that the community who frequently PvPs here is very very small compared to the size of the rest of the playerbase, and that's even considering Live's much larger playerbase than we have now. Inflation also played a major role in all IO pricing and nothing the Live devs did really brought the rampant inflation down -- it was just part of the system by that point and had to be accounted for. Even something as simple as a Luck Charm would be 5k a piece, or 10k on a lazy day. While many of the in-demand IOs would hover around 40-80 million, which is more than double what they cost here currently, they could at least be reasonably "farmed." PvP IOs were so hard to get and so powerful to a build that the price ballooned to a crazy value. You were usually just better off not even bothering to use them in a build since you had to spend awhile farming or trading to even afford a single one if you didn't get lucky. This is probably why I still play the game like a "poor person," even today when everything is much more affordable. I'm just used to basic IOs because I decided on Live that making a character with sets would take me too long and I'm not a fan of partially-finished projects.

This seems to be what every game company wants to do now, particularly in the Indie sector. Charge people a fee for "early access" to their game with lots of promise, but not a lot of polish, get people through the door with that promise, then disappear into the sunset with the cash. Why continue to develop a game after you already made bank on just the bare bones alpha? It really makes trying to get into newer releases all the more difficult, and with budgets for games getting way out of control in the AAA sector (and their tendency to shoehorn in-game monetization for further milking), I don't have high hopes for the future of the industry as a whole. Pretty soon, everything is going to be a mobile gacha experience based out of China and I'm not looking forward to it.

This is why I either ask for an invite and wait where I am, or zone first then request one. Too many experiences on Live, both as the invitee and inviter, where the invite was lost due to zoning. Nothing more frustrating than being told you "lost your place" because of a loading screen.

My two cents (that no one asked for, admittedly) is that both of the individuals in this particular exchange were being rude to the other. Asking someone a question and being told "go read the forums" as an answer might sound good to people who think the answer to the question is complicated, but it isn't. If I ask for "broadcast when in zone, no tells" and someone asks why I don't accept /tell invite requests, it usually comes down to a few scenarios. For a zone event, it's a simple matter of "the zone has a player cap, so I only want players currently in the zone." If it's a mixed team, the reason would be that "mixed teams can break if the 'wrong alignments' aren't all in the same area." If it's personal preference, then just say that. None of this takes long, none of this is complicated, and if you really wanted further reasoning, then tell them to check the forums. Starting off with the "go look for the answer yourself," especially when you're planning to make a thread complaining about them, is just... well, rude. By the same token, though, responding to that rudeness with escalated rudeness in a "F*** you then" manner isn't really warranted either. Just suck up that first person's rude behavior, make a note on them (or ignore them if you really want to; I don't ignore people, personally), and don't team with them. Coming to the forum, finding the thread they implied would exist, and standing atop your soapbox declaring how everyone else but you is a rude dude just makes you as bad, or worse, than the guy who sent you here. It also makes no one want to play with you. In short, both parties were rude. I'm not sure why either person is being defended by others in this thread, to be honest.

So your problem with the facts is that you don't believe the facts. I fail to see how that's anybody's problem but your own. You know what would have happened if the Devs sent out a list of "freed names"? It would have been scanned for the actual rare good ones and you'd be complaining that someone else must be camping it now because you still didn't get the name you wanted. The name release system relied on being a bit opaque in order to avoid actual name camping, but the Devs themselves made us aware that the characters with released names were almost all names no one would ever actually want. I'm thinking "smacked head on keyboard" style names and not "real" names were 99.9% of the released list and that's why it was only ran twice with no appreciable affect. And frankly, if you want to keep reminding us all that most people who don't get the first name they want have no issue coming up with a backup/similar name, then I question why you're trying so hard to claim that a name release is something that absolutely needs to happen. Either people have no issue coming up with a name, or they're locked out of every conceivable iteration for a character name. And as an aside, "Metal Ninja" is super generic and I'm surprised this name was available in any form on any of the servers. If these are the types of names you're hoping will be released, well...

I'm not a fan of name-campers any more than the next guy, but sorry, I don't go for the emotional argument either. "Think of the newbies" hits the same for me as "think of the children." Emotional arguments are automatically weak arguments because they're not based on any kind of logic. The most "fair" system is the one we have, which is: First Come, First Served. As someone already pointed out, during Live (when we had many, many more players) the Devs ran a program to free up names that they felt would be the least missed by anyone returning to the game. In a relative ocean of players, compared to our tiny little pond, that program freed up so few names that it wasn't even worth doing and they only ran it twice before figuring that out. Live had more reason to care about taken names, and even Live gained almost nothing by trying to reclaim those names. If a population as large as Live was, when compared to ours, found no real use in freeing up names, how can anyone argue that it's so imperative that names be "reclaimed" here? I'm sure the argument is going to be "they chose too restrictive of a sample" but there's no other type of sample to pick from. The only person who really gets to say "they'll never come back" are the owners of the account/characters themselves, and who's to say they won't change their mind later? While I'm glad the game is still here, I log in infrequently and I know I wouldn't want to come back in 6 months to a year and find a character I spent time building a backstory and descriptive name for was now GenericHero1234 simply because some vocal mob decided my name was too good to keep to myself. So no thanks. You can take your emotional appeal, and everyone else who thinks they're more deserving of a name can take their ego, and stuff it. When the Live Devs saw no appreciable return on the reclaim initiative, it makes even less sense here.

I think anyone complaining about "not getting the right name" needs to flex their grey matter some more, modify the initial idea of the character to account for the tweaked name, or just suck it up and go in a completely different direction. I don't make a single character without first planning a background for them, and that background usually includes a first draft of a name. If that name is taken, you can easily modify it with an appropriate "title" like Doctor, Lady, etc. If that's not going to cut it, look for synonyms or "clever" respellings that fit -- you might be surprised in coming up with something better than your first snap name decision. For example, I made a TA/A Defender that I wanted to name "Quiver", but it was taken. A bit of modification to the story and she became QuiVR, a combined video game and player consciousness that was downloaded into a robot body. Restriction often breeds creativity. Get creative. If that's asking too much then I question how much the character name really matters to you in the end and why you feel like ripping the name off some other hero/villain's registration is justified.

My biggest problem with Fold Space is that the characters I'd want to try it on, I don't want to go 3 picks into Teleport because nothing else in the set helps that character function or fits the concept. Oh well.

It was bait, designed to get people to reply to you. It seemed to have worked. You're not here for discussion, though. You made a statement, decided everyone who disagreed either "lacked imagination" or "must be an evil flipper" and sat around waiting to see who would bite. For that, I'm not responding to you after this. The fact of the matter is, your problem with flippers is just that -- YOUR problem. It's not a problem in the game itself, so stop trying to push a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

And there's literally nothing wrong with this. YOU don't set the price anyway: the buyer does. If you think it's worth 3 mil, but never sells at that level, you just bought a bunch at 2 mil for nothing unless you're going to hoard them until you can make that tiny 700k profit (due to the AH cut). I have literally zero problem with this if that's what you want to spend your time doing.

Just for you, so you're not left in the dark (and to help you out), I'm going to reply to this bait to inform you that creating some arbitrary "if people don't agree then they obviously are lacking X or doing Y thing" doesn't really mean anything. I posted something in another "market price" thread that will be similar to what I'm about to post here now. My extent of using the market is to quick-sell just about everything. That includes in-demand recipes/enhancements I don't have a use for on a character, merits, salvage I don't need, etc. I buy what I need from the AH, craft the thing, and slot it. My interaction with the AH is about as minimal as it can get without flatly ignoring it. I say this because I "thumbed down" your post despite not being an AH flipper and not "lacking the imagination" to come up with my own idea. What you're doing is inventing a solution in search of a problem. Flipping is not a problem. Flipping takes the glut of unwanted IOs and changes them into wanted IOs that net the person willing to put in the work (and the tiny bit of risk) some profit. Flipping on the scale of "buy at 1, sell at 50mill" just doesn't happen unless someone gets really lucky after leaving low bids for months or someone else just keys in the wrong value and makes a purchasing mistake. None of this is an issue that needs "fixing." Don't propose solutions to non-problems. You're only hurting everyone in your crusade against something you, based on bad information, personally dislike.

This "without consent" thing is pretty much how every multiplayer game that anyone can stream is going to have to put up with. Look at Dark Souls streams where people are invading others randomly. Not only do you have a streamer in your game showcasing their attempt to come find and kill your character, you're dealing with another player trying to prevent your progress in the area, which is something lots of people already hate about the game (yes, I'm aware there's plenty of ways to avoid being invaded; it's just an example). Look at the League of Legends/Dota Streams. Now it's not just your own team that is being recorded "without their consent," but the opposing team as well. Do you think whoever loses that game really wants that loss being shown to a bunch of people? Or if they had a bad game, or said something they shouldn't that gets used to get their account suspended later? Of those examples, all of them incur penalties on the player who doesn't want to be part of it. Quitting out in Dark Souls (or dying) resets progress to the last bonfire you used. League/Dota will impart a queue penalty if you quit out of the game to avoid being streamed. City of Heroes doesn't really have an analog to this negative. It's just a "necessary evil" in the modern streamer climate. When your game is open for streaming, this aspect comes with it. The best you can hope for is the person streaming to either announce that they're streaming so you can leave, or be a well-known persona so you can just assume they're streaming when you see them online. I personally don't think it's worth getting worked up over, but I can see how others wouldn't have that same opinion. It's just the "gaming culture" of today. Not much can be done about it that wouldn't just outright inhibit the ability for streaming to function at all for multiplayer games.

I know you said you were "backing out" of this thread, but I felt I should say something since your argument seems to be that it's painful to play a brand new character with nothing. I'm going to point out, and this is just how I play, but I literally run with ZERO enhancements until level 22. Back on live, I used to run with ZERO enhancements until 32. The reason? I don't want to spend a dime on anything that won't last that character up to level 50, so I literally slot zero enhancements (outside of the free special ones from the P2W vendor, which really only help very early on and fall off quickly) until I hit the 25 Generic IO threshold. Then, do you know what I do? I spend more influence than I need to buying the salvage and recipes (if I don't have them from playing normally) to craft them myself. The closest I ever get to "playing the market" is quick-selling Converters that I purchase with merits en masse, often getting 5-10k less per sale towards the end of my stack. I have had zero problem playing unslotted up to that level and I have had zero problem getting fully slotted with Generic IOs (and even some procs, like Performance Shifter) after I hit the first breakpoint where it makes sense to start using them. The idea that "you don't remember what it's like to be poor" doesn't work on me, and I'd wager I'm not the only one.

I guess, but you can get much the same from split-aspect IOs (granted those IOs aren't full SO-level in each aspect like a HamiO). I can see it for powers that normally don't allow recharge slotting getting access to it by slotting a HamiO. Beyond that, though? Maybe it's my build philosophy that's off or something, but when I put something together based on the set bonuses I'm looking for, the powers in question are often approaching, or way over, the ED "redline". I'm not questioning that they'd be expensive, I'm just trying to figure out why. Perhaps a question for another time in another place.

Any particular reason Cytos are so pricey? I get that they're the +Def/+ToHit/-End HamiO, but I have a hard enough time getting the right set bonuses in the powers I'm already using. Having "free" slots for HamiOs outside of powers that don't take sets still seems strange to me. Other than the relative rarity of a HamiO and this particular ones usefulness, I just don't see why it'd be upwards of 20mil in today's build market.

I guess that's true, but much of the life and goodwill Blizzard had was due to North. The company became a shell when the studio was closed.

It had the advantage of an already in-built fanbase of loyalists who were unaware that the Blizzard they loved (BlizzardNorth) had already been dissolved and the Blizzard they were going to (then just Blizzard, now Activison-Blizzard) were not the same. Once they got entrenched in the game, they didn't want to leave, which is much the same here. That said, the WoW of today is much different than the WoW of yesteryear. Our CoH has changed, too, but not to the same drastic shift as they have.

Compare them to Live pricing and then tell us they're still expensive.

I've been on the other end of this, but for a Mothership Raid. One of my characters was in the zone prior to the event starting and the call came out to "Broadcast for invite to MSR" so that's what I did. 10 minutes go by and I still don't have an invite, so I broadcast a second time. Then a third. Eventually, the guy leading the event sends me a Tell and says "please leave the zone, I have others coming." So what did I do? I stayed in the zone and blasted Rikti in the bowl in my fancy team of 1. It's just the way some people are, I guess.

I received an email from Avast telling me they removed the site URL from the blocked list. Seems to be working now; we'll see how long it lasts this time.

Yeah, it's hitting me again as well. Filed another false positive report with them. I find it strange that everything worked fine for over 2 years, but in the last couple months the site's been hit with multiple "phishing" false positives. That said, going into "incognito mode" seems to prevent Avast from checking it, which is better than my previous fix of disabling the extension in my normal browser. Still, it's rather annoying.

I found the best use of PFF is to deflect the alpha strike of a mob rather than try and survive the damage afterwards if things go south. The most dangerous moment for most spawns is that initial attack since all the enemies in the spawn will be relatively in sync with each other. Each guy in the group may only deal 100 damage on its own, but when 10 different sources of 100 damage are all hitting you at the same time, you may as well be taking a single hit for 1000. PFF gets around this completely when needed and should still be back up in time to use as an "oh crap" button should you still need it.

Most people don't go to the Shadowshard unless "forced" when Dr. Q is the double merit TF. Then again, I think players have faster methods to farm inspirations than doing Kora Fruit runs these days.

Have you seen the animation for Dehydrate? It comes from that.