Number Six

But you're buying converters. Or, alternatively, you're not selling converters and missing out on the inf that you would otherwise have -- the opportunity cost is roughly the same. Since converters can be bought for inf, out of control inflation driving up converter costs would affect you either directly or indirectly. I know of a number of people with loads of wealth who stockpile that wealth in the form of stored converters rather than inf because it's easier to manage. That's one of the reasons I view suggestions to reduce availability of converters, which would just happen to make the value of all those stored converters skyrocket, with a bit of skepticism. Watching how much inf is generated, destroyed, stored, etc. It's not affecting market prices currently because the market is actually quite heavily regulated and a number of prices depend solely on the number of conversions it takes to get there. A bit of a contraction / correction is not unexpected as the market adjusts to the page 4 changes. Nope, that's not one of the methods we use. It's all on the supply side.

One thing worth pointing out is that the majority of the activities that let people earn inf from the market are also activities that provide value to other players. The most obvious one is taking recipes and crafting them. It can be tedious to gather up the various salvage -- precrafted enhancements are much more convenient and some people are happy to pay a premium for that. Converting is the big one and the driver of much of the in-game economy nowadays. Since converters are tradable now they have their own inherent value, but people converting in bulk also save other players the time of doing it, and absorb the risk of playing converter roulette, averaging it out for more consistent pricing. Even the much maligned flipping does have value -- one of the main reasons things can be flipped are fluctuations in price over time arising from inconsistent supply*. Flippers get a bad rap but do help smooth out supply and make sure that items are available during times of high demand when they might otherwise completely sell out. * Price also fluctuate because the AH's terrible UI makes it hard for players to know what something is worth. Ideally I want to fix that and make more information readily available, but the whole data backend needs to be ripped out and replaced with something more sensible before that can happen. There are some more aggressive ways to corner parts of the market that are more dubious, but they're a much smaller segment.

Some things in the game are fixed price (SOs, costume changes, etc), while others fluctuate based on market demand. Merit costs are a price ceiling, the market value of something like a rare recipe will always be less than the equivalent value in merits -- if it ever got higher someone would take the opportunity to make some cash by flipping from the NPC vendor. Crafting costs are basically a fixed cost and are added on to the recipe value when pricing enhancements, plus some margin. The source of inf is important because the value of those items is based on supply & demand -- i.e. how much is someone willing to pay for it? The more inf people have, the more they're willing to pay, driving up the price. Prices increasing because of more currency being in circulation is the basic concept of inflation. Think of it this way, if everyone got their inf through the market, eventually people's supplies of inf would start shrinking because no more is being added to the game and transaction fees slowly whittle away at what they have. Having less inf on hand means people are less willing to pay high prices. Crafters/converters have to lower their asking price or they can't sell anything. Eventually there is a floor below which people can't make inf from the market anymore and aren't willing to go through the trouble to sell, and the market collapses. Keeping inflation in check has been a priority for us since HC started. I'm sure some of you remember the runaway inflation on the retail servers that led to things like certain PVP enhancements having a value of more than 2 billion and having to be traded off-market, or purple recipes selling for 500m+. As it's a game and currency is being constantly created and destroyed, we can do things like tweak supply through drop rates or add inf sinks. We can even aim for a deflationary policy at times, which would be insane in real-world economics but since our target is equilibrium rather than constant growth it works. There is definitely some inflation in HC but overall I'm satisfied we're in a much better place than retail was, as the economy is reasonably stable and we still have levers that can be pulled if things start to get out of control. So when I talk about which activities generate inf or destroy inf, it isn't so much about how individual players fund their builds as it is about keeping the overall economy healthy and functioning at a level that is actually useful to players. I know some people hate the market and that's fine; for those who don't it gives them the ability to quickly get the items they want at lower prices than if it didn't exist and they had to use merits for everything.

The market doesn't generate any influence. At all. It destroys influence because transaction fees delete inf from the system. You can personally gain influence from playing the market, but that influence always comes from other players and is not new inf entering the system. If everyone got all their inf from marketeering and never played the rest of the game, there would be no influence at all. A single player server is a good experiment (thought experiment or otherwise) that can be very revealing.

You really don't have to do that. I welcome criticism so long as it's civil. Preferably constructive, but even cries of 'I don't like that' do have some value. I would hope that the evidence of Not having done anything with purples one way or the other, and... Hard mode rewards specifically being purely cosmetic items that do not increase power level Would weigh in favor of that not being the case. While we're scratching an itch that has been requested by a segment of the community that feels the game doesn't offer them any challenges, there's a lot of new content has not been tailored for them. Freakloc arcs, Vigilante/Rogue arcs. Sister Valeria is Incarnate arc but the goal is for it to be in line with Dark Astoria, Belladonna & Number Six. Even ASF goes out of its way to offer a normal difficulty mode as well as the 1* mode with all the extra mechanics but none of the the stat changes that require decked out characters. Yes, ITF+ is in the spotlight because it had an advanced difficulty mode added this patch, but I don't think it's fair to focus entirely on that. That's a separate issue and while I normally don't comment on ongoing development as timetables may shift, we are aware that Masterminds need some attention, especially in high level content, and they are on the short list for some adjustments.

You missed one thing from your list. People who ran 4* on day 1 and made billions of influence did not magick it out of thin air. That influence came from the stockpiles of inf that other players had lying around -- stockpiles that a large chunk of was originally generated in AE farms. The introduction of Aether was not a wealth generating event -- it was a massive wealth transfer from farmers, et al, who wanted the costumes powers NAO to people who decided to jump in on hard modes early. It also removed a smaller but not insignificant chunk of Inf from the economy through AH fees.

Pop quiz: Where did that 3 billion come from?

Just picking a random post to reply to, but wanted to address a sentiment that I see a lot. It goes something along the lines of, "If I like farming (whether afk or active) and enjoy doing it, why should my rewards have to be balanced since it doesn't affect anyone else?" That would be a good point if this were a single player game or if there was no player economy and the only source of items was NPC vendors. However, there is an economy, and at it's heart it's a competitive economy. Even despite all the various things that have been done to act as price controls, supply boosters, and release valves (salvage seeding, recipe bucketing, merit vendors, etc), if there's only 100 Shiny McThingBobs in existence and everybody wants a Shiny McThingBob, then guess what -- the 100 people with the most Inf are going to get their Shiny McThingBobs first. The end result of that is that people who don't want to farm feel pressured into thinking they have to at least set up an AFK farm because that's the only way they can possibly get enough Inf to get the Shiny McThingBobs. They have to compete with people who do farm and make more Inf faster than they do. That in turn adds more Inf to the economy and perpetuates the cycle. Your farming does affect everyone else. Now I realize it's a bit more complex because farming with standard rewards does generate more supply of certain types of items which helps mitigate that -- and that's the entire reason the Standard Rewards option was opened up to all missions -- but that's the general gist of it. Early on Jimmy put the team's philosophy out there: We want people to be able to play how they want. That means no one play style should be the no-brainer "go to" to get ahead. So yes, if something is overperforming that means it needs to be brought in line, even if that's unpopular with fans of that style who like it because it's overperforming. Even things that have special rewards to make them worthwhile, like Prismatics for hard modes, can often be obtained in other ways like farming inf and buying them off the market. As for active vs. AFK: Active should obviously give better rewards since it requires more engagement (which it does). While we don't want it to be the default best method or the most prevalent, I don't think we want to completely eliminate AFK as there's long history of AFK-ing things like damage and healing badges in this game. Where we draw the red line is the use of external tools to automate the process and re-enter missions while AFK -- anyone who is doing that should be on notice that it's against the ToS and may result in account action.

I think it was mentioned in one of the movies (the latest Spider-Man?) that Wong "got it on a technicality" because Strange was blipped out for 5 years.

It really is what it said on the tin: The aggro changes were part of general and ongoing AI improvements to make the game feel more dynamic and fix the longstanding issue of enemy NPCs standing around and completely ignoring a fight happening right in front of them (something which in turn was broken by the addition of the aggro cap in Issue 6). That's it. Yes, it impacted AFK farmers, making it harder to run at max difficulty. Yes, it positively impacted active farmers (and certain exceptionally well-built AFK setups), making them potentially more efficient than ever. Yes, it raised the difficulty ceiling for soloing and made soloing at +4x8 harder -- but did not significantly affect x0 settings, so players can still step down the difficulty if desired. Yes, it made venturing out alone away from a team and stealthing missions more dangerous. Yes, it made it a bit harder, but definitely not impossible, to cheese the AI and survive in situations well beyond what would be possible based on pure numbers. All of those collateral effects were considered during both development and beta stages and found to either not be significant enough to be a barrier, or in some cases a net positive. None of them were the motivating factor. Sorry to disappoint anyone who wants to feel specifically targeted by it.

Heck I even read & shared with the team a long 10-paragraph screed about the AE adjustments that somebody typed into the crash reporter comments. Almost didn't see it because it was auto-flagged and closed by the system as a duplicate but it was related to an issue I was tracking down and just happened to be looking at the duplicates to gather more info. So, uh, PSA -- thanks for the crash report but don't do that. Definitely not the best place to send feedback if you want it to be seen.

GMs probably should hide the "yay I love this!" posts also that don't add any additional value to the thread. Some of it is a judgement call and humans don't always get everything perfect. Important to node that while GMs hide posts to keep the discussion on-track and keep players from descending into fighting with each other, admins and the dev team (at least the department leads) can still see everything and we do read as much of the feedback as we can, including the deleted posts. Especially the deleted posts.

@srmalloy It's not really target tracking, but sudden position changes do expose some of the underbelly of how the combat system works, especially with powers that use projectiles. The instant you activate a power, the to-hit roll happens and if it's a hit, the effects are attached to the target. Since powers have animations, a delay is often added to the effect to make the damage happen at the right point in the animation. For powers with projectiles, there's also a projectile delay that's based on the speed of the projectile and the range to the target. So in your grenade example, the distance you were from the sorcerer was calculated to take into account air time for the grenade before it hit. All of that is done as soon as you activate the power and is "locked in", regardless of what happens during the animation. The grenade graphic itself is purely clientside; the server has no idea it even exists and doesn't care, it just knows it needs to apply damage to the target after X seconds. On the client, the projectile is actually tracked with a fixed speed. It already knows that it's a "hit" and not a miss, so if the target moves it has no choice but to change direction to follow the target. A teleporting target can actually expose a desync here -- because the damage delay was calculated based on where the target was when you activated the power, but the FX on the client tracks the target at a fixed speed, a sudden change in distance causes the grenade to take longer or shorter to get there, but the server still applies the damage at the time based on where they originally were. The point where the grenade hits it on your screen doesn't matter. Very slow projectiles like the frisb flying disc might never reach the target on-screen and just time out and vanish, but the effects still happen when they're supposed to. I have some backburner plans that I'll bring back someday to enhance the FX system by adding a projectile deadline, so that the client can adjust the speed as well and make the "hit" line up when it's supposed to if the target moves. But that will only fix the timing; there's nothing that can really be done about homing grenades suddenly changing direction; that's just how the game works and we don't intend to redesign it from the ground up.

Oops, looks like that line got inadvertently removed when the rest of the section was deleted after the vet XP change was reverted during beta, then the notes kept getting copied from build to build after that. Added it back in to the final patch notes.

If we were only listening to the first group, there's a lot of stuff we could do very quickly that would be a lot more extreme. There's a reason vet XP is still a thing that gives you a stupid number of Empyrean merits and basically free Incarnate powers, that merit costs are an order of magnitude lower than they were on retail, that the salvage market is seeded to set price caps, that 2XP boosters are still basically free, that AE still has a standard rewards option, etc, etc.

...... no? That's not a thing.

I just want to say that I find something about this thread extremely amusing. Half the posters are saying the game is too easy, and we're either making it easier by buffing powers or not rolling back the i25 small-population streamlining as much or as fast as we should be. We're opening up too many options and a lot of them don't get used because everybody gravitates toward the path of least resistance which makes the game easy mode. The other half is saying that we're killing the game by making parts of it harder, hard modes are too difficult, all the powers are getting nerfed, and things like the AE/merit changes make the game far too grindy for a more mature playerbase who doesn't have as much free time. We're trying to take away options and force everybody to play a certain way. So I'm going to choose to believe both of them even though they're polar opposites, because that's what makes this a great community.

I recommend not editing the base for now. It's probably okay, but just in case the editor decides to shift stuff around based on the pivot point I wouldn't touch it. The fix for the object is already in the pipeline and will likely go in during maintenance on Tuesday, at which point the affected bases will magically look right again.

Just a hunch but if I'm right about the cause... try making nobody is in the base for at least 15 minutes so that the map shuts down, then come back and see if they work.

The weird thing is that after you reported that a while back, I triple checked the sound files, the fx files, everything for glowies and they are all *identical* to the original files from live. So either it changed sometime before shutdown or something else is going on. Are you sure you didn't have a sound mod installed at some point or anything like that?

Those probably started out quieter because they were designed with the volume stacking issue in mind, and could be raised up a bit now.

Are you suggesting that Aeon Corp staged the whole thing with HOLOGRAPHIC FIRE? Sounds like insurance fraud to me!

I kid you not I've seriously entertained the possibility of changing the in-game volume slider so that it goes from 1-10 instead of 1-100. Or make the current 20 the new 100 at the very most. Is there anyone at all who has ever set it above 15?

There's some really cool story stuff coming for AE that was supposed to be in page 4 but sadly didn't quite make it in time.

I see them, thank you for sending in crash dumps. Looks like they all have basically the same stack trace, too, which should hopefully make this an easy fix.