Andreah

It's a very good market. Valuable item, most builds will have several, if not the full five. Not so big people will consistently recycle them. For some folks, it's the easy go-to destination for their convertering. And I know some people still use their merits to make LotG's to sell. It's probably the single highest volume enhancement in terms of trades per day. Locking the LotG market would be possible, but I imagine it would take the market slots on several alts and a lot of constant wickering with bid/sell prices to do it. Ugh, no. And this is the problem, increasing dedication to such a purpose often leads to having less fun. It becomes a grindy job. I did this once, 1200 in one day, just to see what the magnitude of the effort was. Not worth it. Oh, it was profitable, but I felt like I was not only swamping the market, but wearing my fingers out. Depending on which market niches one is in, a sustained high effort is going to be noticed by other marketeers, and they'll probably respond cut-throat -- I know I would. Even if the reaction was "Darn, someone moved into my market in a big way, guess I'll leave", that player isn't going to stop entirely, they'll look for a new spot. And that will now have increased competition. I notice the actions of other marketeers now and then; and I'm sure if substantial new ones entered the field, it would have effect. I encourage other players to dabble, and I teach them how to bid more smartly and what to sell from their normal play to get better deals. But I don't try to encourage enthusiastic new high-volume, high-effort marketeers.

I'm feeling a little lost of the purpose here too. Do we believe that support AT/builds are too fragile, even with a strong group? Do we think they are too difficult to solo, and we'd want them to do better when not in a group?

Needs "Left Turn at Albuquerque"

Has there been any further thought to whether the Kheldian travel powers are being left behind?

Truth. It is big enough for a few more people to dabble. But if everyone went after it like the serious marketeers do, we'll we'd suddenly have an efficient, but unfun, market with base minimum profit margins on everything.

Respec recipes can be traded and even sold. How about a way, like a new slash command, to convert an unused respec into a respec recipe? Such as: /respectorecipe <n> This new command would by default consume one unused respec and create one recipe from it. If you put any number after it, up to say, ten, then it will do if for up to that many respecs, if the character has them. Perhaps no character can convert their last respec to a recipe, so you'd always keep the last one. There is another side to this that must be considered. Respecs drop from Superpacks, and those of us who've opened Superpacks have a lot of respecs ready to claim, and this would give us a route to sell them. I think that is a good idea, too. The market price of respec recipes will drop from the additional supply, as well as the prices of other items which are supplied via superpacks.

We would need a gold plated costume option for Feature Creep. And I'd like to have a custom 60 character note that I can set to be displayed under to each character on the character select roster.

I think it would be neat if the MSR being completed could trigger a Rikti World Invasion event, just like the LGTF does. Or perhaps, a 50% chance of it with a randomized delay of 1-2 hours after the "Shield Restored" message at the conclusion of the MSR.

Maybe it's all an AE thing, that would more likely keep child protective services out of it.

I'm pretty sure one got banned for being too underage.

Concur. I sell hundreds of stack of things during any given week, and the break up constantly. It's annoying in fact, since it won't merge two stacks of 5 at the same sell price, even after claiming the inf from the sold halves of the bids. Slots, even with 200, can be at a premium. The bid side is easier, since you can cancel them and rebid for a full stack without paying a penalty. It would be cool if there were a market function and button to "Consolidate Sales and Bids" There's been a lot of "Rumor-Int" about how price ties are broken; time, server, character name, all that. The best feeling I get is there's probably an internal sorted list, and there is no secondary sort key, and they're taken in a haphazard order depending on happenstance of data layout in memory on the server. If a developer, or someone with a keen eye for source inspection had a look and found that out, it would be good to settle once and for all.

One a weird whim today, related to some lighthearted chatter in my SG's discord, I discovered the name "Alien Space Cat" is free.

I have seen a team where a member left after the lead did not give up the star when asked. I've also seen teams, where the lead recruited the team to do certain kinds of missions, say peregrine radios, and a player has asked for the star to run the radios at a higher level, the lead consented, and then the new leader picked different missions, such as their story arc missions. Neither is common, but both do happen. In the first case, good riddance. That's a rule I try to follow -- Don't join a team if you don't actually want to do what the team is advertised to do. In the second case, a team member can have a mission and the team leader can select it as the group mission, and the team will run it at the mission-owner's level and difficulty. No star giving needed. TF's don't work like that, but many other missions do. Further in the second case, sure, the team as a whole could organically decide to do something else, and might have some turnover in that case; but it can also be a blatant bait-and-switch, and that's star-stealing. The player didn't want to go to the bother of recruiting people for the purpose, but assumed that once having gone to the trouble of finding a team, most members would just go along. That gets a team-quit, a one-star, and possibly even a global-ignore from me. That ought to be another rule -- if you advertise for a team to do a particular thing, at least try to do that thing.

For the Coyote and Panther travel powers, I'd like to see some limited coloration options. Such as color and pattern of coat. I'd like to be able to recolor the panther as a jaguar or leopard, for example. I'd also like to see an emote pop-up tray for these two (or equivalent slash commands) To stand then up, sit them on their haunches, or lay them down, persistently. I believe these three states are already in their current idle animations series, so hopefully that helps. And what I'd really love is for toggling walk mode while in these powers to leave their shape changes, and have them walk instead of run. That might be a bit harder, but it would be very cool.

Err.. how about an accolade for just defeating all the monsters, with no powers or effects.

As long as we're brainstorming, I'd like to see counts of sold and bought auction items. Or perhaps the title of the top mission from the mission tab, if any.

It might be interesting if Flurry had some explicit synergies with the other powers. For example, Flurry out of Whirlwind did double damage, or built up a stacking damage or to-hit buff, or increased the magnitude of its disorient, or even splashed damage to close nearby foes.

I like Kinetics/Repel the way it is now, thank you. I've built my kineticists to be able to sustain that toggle, with it converted to knockdown, even while I'm in the middle of large crowds of mobs. I don't believe Speed Pool/Whirlwind is taken often, and perhaps it could be used as a trial balloon for the sorts of changes you'd like to see; but not reach out and hit all these powers at the same time. I could see there being another topic to discuss changing all the repelling powers as a group.

I understand the desire to revise a lack-luster pool, but if you mess with hasten, I hope you have good torch & pitchfork insurance. Look at how the other pools have been revised. If a character went into the change with a certain set of capabilities, by and large they did not come out without them, even if they chose not to respec. The individual powers have not been severely nerfed, and certainly not in ways that would hit large numbers of carefully tuned builds. I believe there are a large number of build that have at their core, taking only one power from the speed pool - Hasten; and those builds depend on it delivering its current amount of recharge and having its duration and recharge period be what they are now.

I remember the phrase from live, but it went like this: "Red side best side". And it was because the zone design and story writing on red side were considered superior, since the devs had the experience of blue side development to build on. Yet the saying didn't drop when Gold side was introduced, probably due to a lack of good rhyming words, and the few that people could come up with rhymed with "Truck", not "Gold".

Mine too. That's the one, and yes, it doesn't fit perfectly, more as an analogy. It's been many years for me since my coursework. I also think of the Extreme Value Theorem, which I believe is a more accurate fit. In this case, the function is the expected value of the influence return per unit time invested, and the range is the mix of time spent on two strategies -- pure farming & selling, and pure snipe conversion marketing. Call this F(x), where F is the return per unit time, and x is the fraction of time spent farming ( (1-x) would then be the time spent marketing). F(0) is the return of pure snipe/conversion/marketing, and F(1) is pure farming/vendoring/auction listing. In this case, if one can successfully argue that the mix points of these two strategies are always and only a linear sum of the two, then we would say that F(x) = (1-x) * F(0)+x * F(1) . And if that's the case and if F(0) =/= F(1), then the derivative of F on the interval (0,1) is always non-zero, so the extreme values (one minimum and one maximum) are the two end points. It could be argued they are not linear if there's synergy between the two sets of actions, or useable overlap of steps, so that, for example, clicking that would need to be done twice in each pure strategy, but only needs to be done once in the mixed strategy; or data lookup that would not need to be done in a mixed strategy. I can think of one case already -- farming will get you a lot of invention salvage, and the random salvage will on average speed up crafting even if the cost is a wash. On the whole, I think there is non-linearity, but believe, again without much evidence, that it's weak.

😄 This is why I generally prefer to go the boosters route from my merits. It's often a wash, value/merit-wise, but the boosters are 15x less clicking/inf. And this leads me to another part of the equation; it's not just Value vs Time vs Clicks vs Fun, but also Complexity. A wealth building strategy that is complex will appeal to some people and less to to others. For example, if there's a simple and infallible steps 1, 2, 3, method, that's not complex. One's fingers can learn the motions to do it efficiently. But if one must stop and collect information, evaluate options and make choices to make a strategy work, that's more complex. Most people get overloaded by that fast. When I give advice to other players, I tend to tell them simple rules that I know will work for them, instead of complex ones that will require they look at the market and figure out best options. It's easy to tell people to vendors all the X's, and list all he Y's for 1 in the /ah. A little more difficult to flip rare salvage, harder to explain how to do the conversion game from low-ball snipes. And for myself, there's a limit to the complexity of a scheme I will tolerate. For me, there's a fine line between an interesting pastime that supports my active multi-player gaming, and one that is, frankly, work I ought be paid real money for.

Well, let me say that I believe (without proof) that if up-converting recipe drops from farming is worth the time it takes, there's a high chance that just low-bid buying recipes off the auction and upconverting them full time will be better than a mix of farming and upconverting. There's a "pure" strategy of farming/selling, another of buying/upconverting, and a mixed strategy of doing both. And, iirc, there's a theorem in game theory which has some harsh things to say about mixed strategies in most situations.

I just want to emphasize this. I tell people in /general, in /help, in my global chats, and in my SG discord DON'T SPEND 100 MERITS ON ANYTHING WORTH LESS THAN 20 MILLION. And they still do. I wonder about the time efficiency of the converter game on the usual grab-bag of recipes drops from say, an hour of farming. Everything we do has opportunity cost (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost) associated with it. For example, the time you spend getting the right salvage, inventing the recipes, and up-converting to valuable IO's could have been spent running the next farm. Surely there's a large luck component, but that tends to average out if this is something one does often. Has anyone collected data on this? Most of the farm advertisements I see seem to be oriented around faster leveling than inf gain, but a couple of people I know have said on occasion they farm now and then when they need Inf. It leads me to wonder if they're doing it efficiently, or if they might do better taking Yomo up the the signature offer, or accepting inf/enhancements/advice from me. Your friendly neighborhood Ebil Marketeer can help! Simple advice that saves YOU Millions! Don't Delay! Act Now! Call 1-555-CRA-ZY88! Marketeers are standing by!

Why not just make these powers behave completely the same in PvP forever, and then change them to something appropriately useful in PvE for those oh-shoot moments. Or, on the other hand, don't do anything to these. If they were worth taking, I'd have to respec to take them, and my PvE characters don't need them now. I don't need to be more powerful. I'd much rather more of the content caught up with my current levels of power. My Inv/SS Tanker doesn't need unstoppable. Even if Unstoppable were a good emergency power, I probably would not take it. I already have emergency powers sitting in my temp powers bar and in my inspiration tray. Those don't make me lose when they wear off. In principle, I don't like powers with crashes. I think these were a bad design choice from the beginning, leave them for the annoying NPC's to use. They are not fun, and I almost never take them. Now, too much of what we have is predicated on them being useless or essential, for when and where they are. If we make Unstoppable decent in PvE, the rest of the set would need to be balanced for it, and I can imagine the trouble that would stir up. I think that would go for all the crashy T9's across all the sets. These powers should be fixed only if it's deemed worthwhile to give the entire powerset a substantial balance pass. Not just tweaks -- a full rebalance. I hate them, but I don't think fixing them should be a priority right now, if ever.