hastened

I usually ramp it up over the course of a character's life so that there's a chance of not winning in any given mission if I screw up or things go poorly. Currently playing a Thugs mastermind with mostly SOs, ran at +0/x2 until level 12, then +0/x4 until 24 except for mayhem missions, then +0/x8 when the second enforcer showed up and I got her first two IOs for the +Def auras.

I am actually doing this right now with a mastermind. I decided to purposefully not take a travel power, and walk between all my missions, following a semi-rp style of movement (like, no jumping off cliffs, even though I would survive fine; find the stairs instead). And its actually kind of awesome! I've been admiring all of the little details in the zones, how all the neighborhoods fit together, street sweeping out the spawns and the extra care involved in moving around. Brings me back. I joined in I0, quit just before the I1 release, came back and seriously played from a few weeks before the CoV launch until I13 or so, then was out until coming back in I20. I0 was special in a lot of ways; it was way slower and more brutal than today, but since I had come from everquest, it still felt friendly and like leveling at blazing speed. I started with a Blaster, which was...less strong than a lot of potential choices. There weren't any difficulty settings, so in some ways things were too easy, but the combination of not being able to afford enhancements and being a squishy blaster made up for it some. I only got up into the low 20's before I decided the game didn't feel finished enough and stopped. I think it had gotten to be pretty repetative without the difficulty slider, and the writing quality on the early missions is much worse than the later stuff. The game was so, so much more fleshed out by the time I came back in I5. There were a lot of good times in those days, City of Villains dropping, lots of high quality story arcs coming. Faultline, Statesman Task Force, Rikti War Zone, Ouroboros, Imperious Task Force....loved that time.

I should be able to come on Synethesiatica.

Its been a while since I really looked at the terminology surrounding economic supply demand curves and income elasticities. Its kind of interesting. actually; I don't really agree that enhancements are a normal good, but I'm not sure if there's a good term for something with an income elasticity of 0, which is where they're at at current prices. My income could drop by a factor of 5 or increase by a factor of 100 and it wouldn't change any actual purchasing behavior. That's not really an inferior or a normal good. Anyway, it is correct that Fees are a direct control on inflation. But so is anything that takes currency out of circulation permanently. I submit that by far the largest source of this is people who quit with a substantial inf balance. I'm currently sitting on 3 billion influence. I'm not actually going to spend that, becuase I have everything I want. I don't even bother to sell things on the market anymore becuase I have everything and its basically pointless to gather more inf. As long as I never spend it before quitting, that 3 billion inf is essentially gone, plus any more I make as a side effect of playing. There are people with 10's or 100's of billions of inf. That's the real mechanism removing inf from the market, not the market transfer fees, which is why I'm leaning towards agreeing that they are basically pointless. In most economic systems, especially real world ones, people leaving and destroying their wealth when they go isn't a common enough destruction of currency to curb inflation, but it is here.

Yes. The sort of reasonable point in there is that a soft cap of 40% on non-tanks would help balance Def vs. Res sets. A hard cap just causes huge amounts of problems with to hit debuffs/hit buffs and defense focused sets like forcefields while being worse at the desired goal of balancing damage mitigation types than a soft cap. A 40% hard cap is just a really, really bad idea even if the underlying premise it is trying to fix is accepted as needing fixing. That part is more debatable, but even if you agree with the underlying point you defintiely should not try to fix it with a hard cap.

I think you're correct that this is the best place to try to add difficulty. There are a few interesting possibilities for mechanical difficulty (see the winter ski lodge skiing challenge; imagine chasing enemies down a mile long ski slope and trying to defeat them before they hit bottom), but its not really where the focus is in this game. There's a bunch of things you could possibly do on the tactics/strategy front with mission and NPC group design. It helps if you have objectives that can actually be failed or where there are different gradations of success Some other possible ideas: --Have a full-scale invasion of an instance of Steel Canyon or other zone where NPC heroes are actively fighting off waves of invaders from the start. Give a badge based on how many survive the mission (overwriting, like Ten Times the Victor) --Have a defense objective map with incoming ambushes from multiple corridors coupled with time sensitive pop-up intermediate tasks on the main map (disarming planted explosives somewhere on the level, clicking a glowy somewhere out surrounded by enemies, etc) --Have an enemy group with weak toggle aoe debuffs; if all 16 enemies in a spawn had radiation infection, for example, is probably enough that few builds could just faceroll it with a strong defensive setup, but there's a bunch of ways that such a group could be handled. --Custom AI; even an enemy group with weaker abilities could be substantially threatening if it spread out to avoid AOE, called for backup on the map, coordinated their attacks on specific targets, had some way to change up their abilities to an extent based on what they're facing. You could imagine even tying that type of behavior into commands issued by bosses or lieutenants, such that quickly taking them out would help break enemy coordination and render them easier to defeat. (part of me has always wished Malta has fewer silly abilities but played more like this) --A hold the line scenario where the enemies gradually get stronger and more difficult and you're graded by a badge given based on how long you can hold out or how many enemies you can defeat. --Add optional mission objectives gated by difficult to defend escort missions/low timers/etc that unlock challenge contacts or even just badges. --A mission where you have limited time, an unlimited amount of mission floors, tasks on each floor to add additional time and to unlock the next floor, and an escalating enemy strength as you descend (this is the mayhem mission design crossed with a roguelike, essentially) Some of these things are harder than others to implement, but I think there is design space for some interesting things still.

I would generally be supportive of making IOs free at this point. They already basically are if you know what to do, and it would remove an hour or two of grunt work per character to get them fully specced out, plus be generally helpful for people who don't know what to do on the market to put it together. I actually like having resources be scarce so there's something to build for progression-wise, but that's the opposite direction from where this project went, and I think that's fine too. At this point it just seems kind of silly to have any non-XP awards at all.

The more I think about this, the more I think I agree. I also feel like the fact its pointless means no effort should be spent to change it though; generally I would recommend to not do development work to remove things that are not hurting anyone and don't actually impact anything. Specifically, you need to extract Inf from the system to combat inflation. But Homecoming made it so easy to synthesize whatever you want as a side effect of playing the game, that the amount of product greatly dwarfs what people actually want, leading to persistent deflation. Influence stops being a limiting factor, and inflationary pressure is relieved by people not bothering to spend their inf rather than by ensuring it is destroyed.

I'm actually not sure this is doing very much, but only because things are essentially free here already. The whole reason you need money in any system is to decide who gets limited resources. Once someone has everything they want that can be acquired in a system, giving them more money only does anything if they can trade it to other people to get them to do things. There's some of that going on where people have costume contests or bio writing contests with multi billion inf payouts, but generally anyone who is trying at all has more money than they actually need for everything they want to buy. That makes the real inf sink the accumulated resources on characters who have nothing to spend it on, and I suspect that is a lot more than the amount being drained by the auction house fees.

I mean, that's what you have to do to have any semblance of challenge right now. "Don't try too hard or you'll break it" isn't really that helpful for supporting a playstyle where you would like to actually have to try hard to succeed though. Its equally valid to state that people can just turn down their difficulty settings if they want to be able to solo hard content. I'm not opposed to having even team content designed to be difficult to be possible for optimized builds at -1/x0. There's only been a handful of cases where I've done something here where there's any question on whether we're going to succeed or not, and almost all of them have been self imposed challenges of some sort. Mostly small team attempts trying to keep various assist NPCs alive on +4/x8 maps with ambushes, or boosting difficulty quite high relatively early in a character's career where its still hard for them despite optimization.

Its mostly the lack of hard content for teams. If you can build to solo anything in the game, its almost impossible for it to also be a challenge for a group of competent players. The proposed fix here is a bad one, but it is problematic that there is not really much that is challenging in the team space. There is some stuff that is still pretty hard (try rescuing Waylon McCrane successfully on +4/x8 with a team of 4 or less, or do the 6 negotiator mission in RWZ while freeing the assistant NPCs first), but you have to go out of your way to look for it or choose to purposefully limit yourself. That's ok, but it would be nice if there were some things that were legitimately hard for a full team with good builds to do.

I used to run a forcefield defender on live with another forcefield defender friend. We would form teams together, bubble each other and push 85% def to the team, -usually- making everyone unhittable with enough def to stop cascade def failure. IIRC, we actually got a SR reflex scrapper up the point where they could mitigate most of the damage from those jerks, but they still were not quite floored unless Elude was used. Good times, good times. Did enjoy watching someone dodge them, at least. Same thing with a quartz emanator.

With regards to 7, you also get to stack many buffs this way since the source counts as different when outside and inside. I'm always sad when on a Kin or Bubbler and noone waits by a mission entrance to get doubled speed boost or forcefields.

Joined with my new Ill/Rad Controller, Sythestesiatica yesterday! Soloed a bunch when I made her on Monday, but haven't had a chance to team up yet. Looking forward to doing that some time in the next few days. This has given me a new appreciation for street sweeping missions, actually. I used to think they were kind of lazy filler design, but they actually forced me to explore and really engage with the main world in a way I have not in a long, long time. It was actually kind of cool to go finding the bridge in King's Row where the Lost congregate and fight the skulls, or searching the rooftops for Circle rituals after running up a fire escape (and running into an exploration badge accidentally) or searching the back alleys for Vahzilok. Perez Park too is a windy, twisted death trap, but is fun to work through. Much care needed to be taken to pick apart the groups and clear the Perez park kill missions.

What you are trying to go for is almost certainly a 40% soft cap, not 40% hard cap. The Hard Cap constrains how much defense you can get. The Soft Cap constrains how low the hit % chance can be after defense and to-hit adjustments are applied before accruacy. Hard Capping Def to 40% screws over defense based sets (especially in cases where you need it to fight enemy To-Hit; Elude becomes completely redundant instead of a situational, mostly redundant power for example) but doesn't change durability for anyone applying any -ToHit debuffs at all. This mirrors the resist btw but not as strongly, in that 45% defense = 90% damage mitigation, 90% Res = 90% damage mitigation; Tankers cap at 90% resist/45% Def but squishies cap at 75% Res/45% Def, so locking the defense and res mitigation levels across archetype does make some kind of sense. That would be equivalent to instituting a 37.5% Soft Cap on squishies, at which point capping Res mitigates equivalently to capping Def. That being said, I get where this is coming from as I like things that are challenging, and there's somewhat limited design space to create challenging content when everyone is running up against the def caps and recharge caps. Incarnates powers make this situation a lot worse when everyone can cap everything and become a demigod. I'm not really sure this is a good fix though. Generally, I like to see harder content introduced instead of nerfing people, but it can be hard if the math behind your system is too broken.