Andreah

It sounds like you deliberately made the character for the theme, knowing it would limit the character's power; and not to maximize the character using both temps and an powers build optimized around having them. For example, knowing you would get some +recharge and +defense from having amplifiers on 24/7, and therefore deciding to end your conventional build that much short of perma-hasten and that much below the softcap, and then putting the rest of the build's trade space against increased damage.

I'd be on board with at least making it impossible to claim anything from emails while inside missions.

I don't know anyone who has specifically built around temporary powers; but several who build around incarnates. I do the latter myself -- I'll look ahead to which alpha I intend to use, and then build around having it and the corresponding level shift in 50+ content. I think anyone who doesn't do this will be at a disadvantage, of sorts, in the same content. But is it a serious one? I think generally not. They will still contribute to the team, feel needed (as much as anyone is), and enjoy the game. Most content is easy enough for well built non-incarnate and non-temp users to do just fine.

If a player opens a lot of packs, they will have plenty of amplifiers to use. You can't sell them, so using them on level 50's is a good way to go. Some inspirations are powerful but may not be cost effective, and can be quirky to use -- like needing to pull them out of emails one at a time. If a player has paid the cost and gone through the effort to make use of temps, empowerments, amplifiers, incarnates, IOs, rare inspirations, and so on, they should not be denied their use. In my opinion, restricting use of these things to create more difficulty is bad design. Design content and systems changes to support the level of difficulty desired. Don't weaken the players. strengthen the content. If they're unbalanced, then instead of turning them off, they should be fixed. Inspirations, specifically, as a system need some work. They've always been an easy crutch to lean on. Something like them having certain kinds of diminishing effects and cooldowns could work.

I appreciate seeing the post to LFG letting us all know the team filled. Sometimes the person who was advertising goes the extra mile, and posts something like "Sorry everyone I couldn't add - there were lots of tells and there's probably enough of you to make another team" It's not always about getting the most for one team in the least public typing.

I think both these arguments go together; it's supply being more restrictive due to the generally higher cost of winter packs, and the demand is there for almost every serious build.

And if you're good enough, you get FREE surgical insertion into a wild and crazy eight-legged cyborg suit!

I don't get many merits, so I just buy my converters off the auction. The profit I make off each converter is high enough whether I buy it at 60k or 80k makes no appreciable difference to me.

There is only one market shared by all the servers. Also, there are players who go through hundreds, and possibly thousands of enhancement converters each day. I'm one of them, at least in the low hundreds ranges. I generally put up bid for them at modestly low offering prices, and let those sit overnights, or even several days to fill. Chances are, when you list your few dozen or even hundred converters, someone like me already has bids for many hundreds in above your listing price, and they sell instantly. If you list them higher, you could sell them more slowly, and get better prices. For example; if you go to the market with a hundred converters to sell, try selling just one first, listing it really low, and see what price it actually sells for. Then, look at that price, and if that price isn't crazy, list the rest just a tiny bit above that, and let them sit for a day. You could easily get ten or even twenty percent more for your converters by listing them at a price point that doesn't sell instantly.

I think I would be there already if I posted more often and people liked those posts more.

Psizzard

Crevasse

:D

I think it's fun to discuss mechanical issues and speculate around possible fixes, both large and small. But I don't expect (or even support) making such changes any time soon. So, enjoy the discussion and don't worry about your expensive build being wrecked.

I would prefer the hit determination algorithm be altered so that the chance asymptotically approaches 100% for sufficiently high to-hit+accuracy vs defense, but never gets all the way.

Imagine if the random number generator had moods. One day, you log in, you character falls out of bed, stubs a toe on the door, drops their favorite coffee cup, backs the car into a fire hydrant, and then can't hit those -49 skulls to save their life. And a week later, the stars align, and not only can't they miss, but no one can hit them either, and they win $10 on a lottery ticket AND a costume contest for 100 Million inf. Designing a uniformly distributed and also very streaky (sequentially correlated) random number generator is not difficult. Streakiness could even have multiple characteristic time correlation cycles in it. Think of it like the old fad of Biorhythms. One can do the opposite too; there's such a thing as QRNG's -- Quasi random number generators, which are specifically non-clumpy.

I'm a medium-large?-ish? marketeer. I go through a couple hundred converters per day. Considering how fast it is to get converters and less-valuable enhancements, up-convert and then list those for sale, I'd say this is the very nearly best possible use of minutes and clicks for gaining inf. Maybe multiboxing full teams through farms is close, but we don't measure this in millions of inf per hour, but millions of inf per minute. I just wear out from it after ten or fifteen minutes. :) I think the difference would be if one enjoyed farming at scale enough to do it hours and hours every day. And then there's the tedious task of selling all that stuff when inventory gets full. I feel like I'm drifting us off the OP's topic, so I'll drift a little back that way -- farming for long periods will also pile up converters and other special salvage, and I suppose a farmer might elect to save up each thing until it gets to the cap before listing it out for sale. If so, I think that would use up a lot of market slots -or- if dumped all at once, even the converter market might temporarily get a price crash if someone tried to sell-it-now 10K converters all at once.

I wouldn't be surprised if Yomo went through 1,000 converters each day. I'm also pretty confident none of the serious marketeers deliberately hold onto thousands of converters at any given time -- a converter sitting idle as inventory isn't making you any profit. It's when you hit 10K boosters or catalysts that you know your life is being misspent. :D And then there's that fellow who set his personal goal to maxing out all the salvages, including Hero/Villain and incarnate merits. o.O Converters are current selling around 70k each or, so, so getting 10k of them would only cost 700 million or so. It would just take a while to buy that many without driving up the market price too much.

I played it quite a lot. It is beautiful in many ways, and has a good, tight core level 1 to about 30 game loop. it runs out of steam fast after that, and substitutes heavy repetition/grind. It suffered greatly from its redirect from pvp to pve/pvp two years ago, and needed more time, imo, to be ready, perhaps another year of content development and systems polish, maybe two. It also suffers severely from all sorts of bugs and exploits, although it seemed to me for a while they were getting this under control. There are additional problems in it that I would want to type far, far too much for; even going down into the base design and vision. Much of that is subjective and others would fairly disagree. Even though I've stopped playing it, I got my money's worth of entertainment, and others may too.

I usually load CJ or Hover up with those kinds of uniques. They take one slot regardless of the power they're in, so these are good places for them, especially if you have a tight set build to achieve other things from sixth slot bonuses in other sets.

I have two use cases for complicated (to me, at least D: ) binds. Finding, Combat Teleporting to, casting Vengeance on, and then rezzing a defeated team- or league-mate Casting Fold Space, but using one or two inspirations first, such as an accuracy or ultimate. I currently don't have (1) set up satisfactorily. And I think it's a pretty important function to be time efficient with, since no matter how many times you ask people to count to five before self-rezzing, they will anyway. So getting to them quickly is key to getting Vengeance fired off. I have a key set to select nearest defeated friends; and another key to combat teleport to the selected target. I suppose those are fine. I'd like to try setting them to use the +$$ system, and perhaps it would require a two-file rotating bind to work properly; the first to select the target on press-down and to load the second bind file, and then the second bind file to execute the combat teleport. Would that work? The second part would be to do the same with vengeance and rezzing -- vengeance on key-press, and rezzing on key-up? Again, would that work? Generally, if I read the above right, worst case is I would need a "return to base state" reset key for when they get out of sync. For my fold space use case; I'd use an accuracy insp on key-press and execute fold space on key-up? Or would the key-up interrupt the key-press part? This doesn't work well in a normal (e.g., "powexecname Fold Space$$inspexecname Uncanny Insight") bind which you just press twice, because it just uses up all my insps before it casts fold space. (It works with ultimates though, they have a cooldown, but that's kind of spendy to do automatically). So I'm wondering if the +$$ method would have any potential to make a single key system. As an aside, Fold space itself seems a little weird to me, I think it only gets one dice roll to hit all the enemies, and then each one comes if it's defense was low enough to be hit by that roll. Fold Space seems to get everyone or just about no one on account, and I like to up my to-hit if I can before doing so.

Some of the examples in the PDF doc reference either "+$$" or "++$" to lead off the bind string. Is there a nuanced difference, or is one a typo?

I think most of the "one extra power" wishes would be ones that added power. However, it seems a lot are for completing theme or for non-power utility. What sorts of gaps in your characters are we needing to fill with our one extra powers?

It can be -- sometimes they turn out to be good ideas after all. Maybe not this one here though. :D

It leads me to wonder how winter packs would normally be bought in a years' time, and if we're risking having supply outstrip demand? From looking at the auction screen just now, at least 50K packs have been sold already. Will there be cutthroat competition to unload these over the next year? Will it get so bad people feel a need to dump them at no profit? Could it get so bad that late next year, we start seeing them being sold at a loss just to get something back?