aethereal

I am not double adding, and my example was well short of the cap. You are correct, enhancements are part of the cap, if you have a kin or two, or eat a tray full of large red insps, or whatever, you will not see a difference between damage enhancements and no damage enhancements. But, critically, the cap isn't that important unless you always play with someone casting fulcrum shift, or you're farming. Most people, even on 8 man teams, will not be at damage caps unless that team includes a kinetic.

I disagree. It's entirely possible that we have a rump population of 20% or so who could engage more with the game if they were given a chance, and I think it's worthwhile to target them.

You're overlooking normal enhancements, which shift things somewhat. A stalker with a 100 damage base attack almost certainly enhances it to +95% damage, so 195. A brute, if he does that, gets to 146.25. Now let's assume 80 fury, so that's a further 160% damage (of the base 75), leading us to: 266.25. If a stalker is on an 8 person team, his basic crit chance pretty exactly closes the difference between 195 and 266.25, so then the auto-crits from hide and the proc hide and the superior build-up uptime (build up is also better for Stalkers than Brutes) and the presence of his really high-damage Assassin's STrike certainly causes the stalker to pull ahead. Solo, it's a bit more of a matter of whether the stalker can actually effectively broker the auto-crits (etc), or whether he leaves a lot of that on the table.

If lots of people switched from buying converters to buying inf directly, and we seeded the market with converters at a somewhat higher cost than is typical now, the net effect would be to sink inf, not create it. If there are large numbers of people who are currently stockpiling merits or spending them in inefficient ways, who would convert to selling them for inf, it would inflate.

Whether this would cause noticeable inflation depends a bit on how many players there actually are out there who previously have been sitting on merits/using them inefficiently, who would switch to using them to buy inf. My intuitive guess is that the amount of inf created by this is negligible compared to the amount of inf created by farming and general high level play, but I could be wrong depending on the numbers.

I agree, it just mitigates some of the difference in size.

Albeit with many fewer characters slots per account.

There aren't enough whip animations for a whip melee, but there are enough for a hellfire assault or manipulation set.

But that's actually not true at all. Selling a merit for 200k remains less remunerative than selling enhancement converters has ever been at any time I've seen. It's much less remunerative than actually using enhancement converters, or other auction-house related strategies. It's less remunerative than farming. All it does is close some -- but not all -- of the gap between low information and high information users. It doesn't preclude any activity today. It certainly doesn't preclude anything that actually requires effort.

I feel like I addressed that at the bottom of the post, did you read it all the way? My suggestion also gives less inf per merit than you'd ordinarily expect to get on the AH -- the floor price for enh converters is almost always 80k ea, so that's 240k for one merit, -10% for AH fees, leaves 216k per merit. At the high end, you might get as much as let's say 270k inf per merit. Players who know about enhancement converters will presumably continue to sell them. But players who don't will be much closer in income to those who do. This may even get some of those players to engage the AH -- right now, people who don't understand how to make money in the game look at the AH, see prices in the millions, and just in many cases shrug and ignore it, because they think it's out of their reach. If the market for enhancement converters does dry up, we can seed them at 110k or 120k each. That way, players can still sell them, but if nobody is selling them, the people who play the converter game (of whom I am one) can do so at minorly less profit than they do so today.

Can't you bet on the monkeys in the original MFC in Sharkshead? NPC dialogue suggests that you could, but I never actually tried it.

So my strong guess is that the reason why CJ doesn't stack with things like Ninja/Beast Run (or why ninja/beast run don't stack with each other) is to preserve the value of the actual travel powers -- If you could stack, say, ninja run, CJ, and Shinobi, you get something that's more-or-less as fast as Super Jump without spending the power on it. Why don't these powers stack with Super Jump? To preserve the viability of the other travel powers (Super Jump is already the best travel power, it doesn't really need to be even faster and have even more vertical freedom). Now, that was all from a time and place where the travel powers were... more of a big deal. Where they were gated at a higher level, with more prerequisites, and where you spent more time traveling around. I think it's arguable that in the modern game, you don't really need to preserve the viability of the travel powers. But that argument should be made proactively.

They have not so far implemented the name clearing service, but if it were implemented as-described, it basically would allow a name to be taken from a character based on a combination of how long it is since the... account? That specific toon?... had been logged into, and what level that toon was. So if you made a level 1 character and never played it, the name would fairly quickly be back in action, while if you took a character to 30 and then took a hiatus for a few months, the name would be safe. At the other end, as you said, if you reached 50, the name would never be freed up.

I remember an SG-mate telling me, with some pride, that now that her character was at or near 50, she had blown her lifetime earnings on some sets. What were her lifetime earnings? 30M inf. I was like, "Oh, uh... no. No, that's not what needs to happen. How many merits do you have?" She had like, I dunno, 120, she had already blown a bunch on ATOs at 100 merits per ATO. So I walked her through converting her merits to enhancement converters and selling those, turning those 120 merits into let's say another 24M inf and making her aware that she'd blown several times her "lifetime earnings" already. This is not an uncommon story. While the people reading this message probably broadly know that you can net a lot of money per merit via simple strategies like "buy enh converters, sell on market," or yet more money by slightly more complicated strategies like actually using enhancement converters, this is by no means an obvious fact to new players, or indeed older players who don't read the fora. Let's just... let people sell their merits for a reasonable price. It's not like we're adding gameplay challenge by making people go through the process of converting them. It doesn't even add grind, the difference between: Go to merit vendor > buy enh converters > put on market and Go to merit vendor > buy inf is like maybe 30 extra seconds of work. We can seed enhancement converters on the AH if this means that the market for them dries up. I don't think that we gain anything by making players who aren't aware of the market for converters (or boosters or whatever the currently-optimal thing is to sell) jump through this hoop.

That's not my understanding of what a "pseudopet" is. My understanding of a "pseudopet" is that it's something that a naive player of the game would not think of as a pet, but which was coded as one in the game because it's a way to get continuous effects and other things that are hard to code as a single power activation. So, patches like Rain of Fire are pseudopets (that is, there's an invisible pet that sits there and applies damage to everything in a radius around it). Voltaic Sentinel and other untargetable pets like Lore Radials and Phantom Army are still, to my understanding, pets.