Andreah

I've said it before and I'll say it again. There absolutely was a problem before May. I've run into it all the time going back two years. It's been worse since May, but it is not a new problem. And it was a big problem before May if you happened to be operating at a certain scale and speed. It has all the same symptoms, same sensitivities, same peculiarities -- they just occur more easily, and more commonly. I hope they continue to look into this issue, and the possibility the queue barriers are causing this behavior seems very promising to me. And, if that turns out to be true, it may affect other parts of the game as well; even if we haven't noticed them as yet.

I think there's a lot of cool ways to make origin meaningful in game mechanics and design. I like a lot of them, but I don't want any in the game. I might like the game afterwards, but too many people I play with would not. If there are proposals to make more non-mechanical impacts from origin, those I could be on board for. Especially if they're specific and particular, not general. For example, imagine if every power had different animations flavored for natural, tech, magic, science, etc., and even generic; and you could choose freely between them power by power, costume by costume.

My old company (I am retired now) was a large aerospace company, and our IT provided gaming laptops to engineers and developers as a standard higher tiers, although they were called engineering and developer workstations.

If a player is hit with the -Def once, it's more likely to land the next time, and then even more likely the time after that. Even characters high above the defense softcap can have this effect happen. The only way to reduce this is to have high Defense Debuff Resistance (DDR) and/or a margin over and above the softcap. I'm sure many people in the forums know this, ofc -- it even has a name "Cascading Defense Failure". Once this has happened, all the other nasty effects are going to pile up; the movement slows, the recharge reductions, and the Mino diseased's.

Let's say you have a variety of supplies, extra costumes, a temp power weapon or two, and so forth. How do you assume and RP that you character carries these things? Do you try to set your costume up to represent this; e.g., with a tactical belt, harness, quiver, backpack, etc.? Do you allow for it in emoting, but not attempt to represent it on your costume? Or do you just hand-wave it away as not particularly important to your RP?

Was this happening while you were fighting the nictus, cysts, and dwarfs?

Teleport, with slots, patience, and learning; along with a skid-load of the right binds, is hands down the best travel power for me -- I love it. And I also hate it. I even stopped taking hover to match with it. If there was one small change I would want, it would be to have Combat Teleport not cancel the hover from Teleport.

I haven't used much SJ since the travel power change. I've liked it in the past, but don't have a lot of experiences with it since then. I'd like those who like it a lot currently and those who don't like the changes to lay out their reasoning for why they now feel it's good/bad.

I wonder, now and then, how much the current email system claim problem has to do with the various reported pricing issues on the market. It wouldn't directly affect something like, say, yellow salvage prices, but it would affect ATO's and Winter-O's. Also boosters and such to a lessor degree. What about the indirect effects? I'm not sure. Hmm.

I'd want all sorts of visual improvements, but I'd also want them to maintain the sort of cartoon-ish feeling we have as the game stands. I think a lot could be done and still retain that. I'd probably have my fantasy visual effect team start with a thorough texture/clipping/draping pass on all the costume parts and costume rendering. Then I'd have the team go over the animations and make all sorts of state transitional animations and extra emotes and stuff. Make it smooth and seamless and proportionate. Then I'd go over the streets and architecture, just to clean up the goofy stuff. Keep the basic styles and such, but add more varieties and reduce the copy/pasta. Finally, I'd have them go over the mission maps and make them feel a bit more realistic in layout, and less like mazes. And can we have destructible interiors in offices and banks and so on? My fantasy team says yes! Then we'd be ready to go after my real goal -- merging CoH with a city simulation game, but that's out of scope for this thread. :D

I would put in a second rotation, and call it Weekly Strike Arcs, or such, and rotate through arcs at all levels, both red and blue. In any given week, you would have the WST and the WSA, and they would be on cycles of different lengths, too. Of course you'd have to allow these to be done through Ouroboros, but IMO, doing an arc at native level with a team leader who has the contact ought to give an even better reward. Maybe double merits for Ouro, and triple for native contact at level.

This; for ages. It's how the "whales" on Live could play. It's significant, but not game breaking. One specific case outside of the Magisterium where they are very useful is if you are a Fold Spacer or Shadow Slipper in the Rikti War Zone Mothership Raid. These powers grab up a bunch of mobs from around you and teleport them to your location. But ordinarily, even for a level 50+1 character, they can't teleport level 54 Bosses or EB's. If you use an Ultimate inspiration beforehand, however, they do. These inspirations last three minutes and do not stack with themselves; only one can be active at a time. Since they're worth 1-2 Million each on the market, that's pricey, but it can dramatically increase the vanguard merits earned by the entire league over the course of a 30-minute raid by increasing the rate that mobs move down into the bowl where players' powers are concentrated most. But it's costing the one doing so ~10,000 Inf/Second. :D

I'm getting failures to load using either address right now.

I started composing a post for this thread, but it depresses me. The sorts of things that would fall to the depths to meet the standard are so rare I don't think there's value in my scrounging through them. Further, I don't want to indirectly disparage anyone's playstyle or build choices like this, even in partial jest. I'd rather talk about the best things people could do.

it's pretty bad right now. I'm holding off opening more packs and am just glad I can claim small numbers of things from email at all.

As an aside, I'm usually amused when people claim they post things for sale at 1 or 5 Inf intending to help "the little guy" or "average player". The little guy doesn't have hundreds of standing bids to buy all manner of things across the market ready to snipe those posts up. The average player doesn't bid 100 inf for things and let those sit for days and weeks until they get a hit. The one who helps the average player is the one who makes sure the market doesn't run out of items priced at reasonable levels, and that bids are out there at fair amounts, so when the average player is ready to buy, then yes, they can get that LotG or whatever for the usual going price set by long term supply and demand, and not the "Omg the only one left is at 20 million!" level; and average player can list their salvage or recipe at 1 and still get a fair bit of inf for it.

No one's using Brainstorms in mass to make uncommon salvage. 1 Brainstorm makes 1 common salvage. What's that, 100 inf per brainstorm? 5 Brainstorms get you 1 uncommon salvage. Call it 3,000 Inf per brainstorm. (uncommon salvage going for 15k right now.) 20 brainstorms get you 1 rare salvage. That's 25,000 Inf per brainstorm. That's 8 times better than for uncommons. Brainstorms themselves sell on the market for 22K and up. You could just sell them direct. Don't use brainstorms to make uncommon salvage, that's a losing game.

I think the difference would have to be between quitting out of the blue sky, vs quitting after telling people "This is awful, we need to quit and reform." In regards to the OP's original problem, I'd suggest to the rest of the team, possibly starting with a private tell to the team leader, that we should quit, and reform without the problem brute/tanker. I personally would not just drop out without a word or in a one-player ragequit. If I think something is going badly wrong, I'm likely not the only one.

This is a good idea; I may use it in my tanks, even if my wording will be a bit different. I herd, and I herd aggressively. I don't want controllers or anyone following me when I zip off to herd -- they'll either mess it up or die trying. I'll bring the herds back to where folks are fighting, usually where the most AoE vfx are clustered. I also don't deliberately try to wipe the team. I'll slow down or even only anchor for single groups if the team is having trouble. I watch the team health bars constantly and adjust accordingly. If someone's in trouble it's my duty to get the aggro off them if I can, and that takes absolute priority over herding. Fortunately, I build my tanks for battlespace mobility. I also carry supplies to rez and heal people -- if I get someone killed, that's on me and I need to make it right. My job, as I see it, is to pace things as fast as we can reliably clear groups without defeats. We should feel challenged, if that's even possible, but not overwhelmed. And it's also my responsibility to respect my fellow players' desires and to be a good follower if I'm not leading. It's not about me, it's about us.

We will also get hoarders trying to buy up yellow salvage because that's what they do whenever prices rise for any reason -- jump on and hoard before it's too late.

We're probably now also seeing The Streisand Effect, too.

At vet level 3 I don't believe you would have had a lot of incarnate abilities to slot, or even most of the slots unlocked. I have characters I haven't played in many months and I've never lost anything other than a temp power. Check your character to see how many incarnate components, emps, astrals, shards, and threads you have. Check the front page of your incarnate powers screen and see how many of the slots are actually unlocked.

Not only that, but you can BUY reward merits for 1 Million inf, each. 100 reward merits buy a Winter-O. If Winter-O's are ever selling for more than 100 Million + market fee, I'll mass produce them.

This. You learn to be efficient at it, too.

I pause from eating popcorn while reading this. First, I doubt there's market manipulation going on. I'm a fairly large scale marketeer, and I've tried just about everything, both on Live and on Homecoming. My opinion is that market manipulation at this magnitude and for this length of time would have to be done by a large team, or using quite a few bots, and would lose a lot of money. If they were succeeding, these hypothetical schemes could not be kept secret, or unnoticed by the devs, for long. Second, to claim it is a "fact" that this is happening and it's punishable, then evidence should be collected and given to the devs. Otherwise, this is not 'fact', it's opinion, and at best "possible", not even "likely". From what I see, this are reasonable price change stemming from general market conditions. There's no reason to believe the price of salvage should be constant, long term. IMO, we should see a long term secular rise in salvage prices because a larger proportion of Homecoming's player base knows they're useful and bids for them off the market. Certainly I've done my best on my server in chat to explain to folks how to use the invention system, how to bid smartly on the market, and how to use converters to produce things they need. I have seen other prices continue to change as well. Boosters have been rising, because they're useful to more of the existing players who pimping their end game builds, and catalysts have been slowly falling because more people realize those are bad choices to use on anything but ATOs. We tell people this in help chat frequently. It adds up to a collectively more market savvy community. Third, regarding flipping. It's a legit market activity. Flippers don't force people to sell game things, and flippers don't force anyone to buy them. If players don't like the prices flippers operate at, they should figure out their bid/sell points and squeeze them out -- it's not hard to do. Flippers exist because most people don't care enough to bother keeping the margins thin. And flippers actually perform useful services -- they even out sell and buy prices and they drain more influence out of the game economy. Finally, the entire auction system is optional. If some players don't like it, they should stop using it. There's nothing there we can't get for ourselves from content rewards and currencies. If we feel that's too expensive; well then, we're complaining the market isn't delivering us as fantastically good a deal as it used to. But if we still use the market, then we must, at some level, realize we're still getting a very good deal out of it. Back to my popcorn.