Discussion: Disabling XP No Longer Increases Influence

[QuiJon]

3 hours ago, Saikochoro said:

Converters definitely are not a problem. They are one of, if not the, greatest things about the market. They enable limitless supply which keeps prices down, which is good for everyone. They are also basically a gold standard for the market keeping everything in check.
 

They are an incredibly easy source of cash for people who don’t want to convert. They are an even better source for people that do. Converters are the best thing that happened to the market along with recipe fungibility.

But in that way they also become part of the problem. Because a converter allows for the freedom to change an enhancement, where it might might the old days of 150m LOTGs a thing of the past, it also takes the ones that used to be dirt cheap and makes them now worth more. When a yellow defense set piece canbe converted to a LOTG Proc or a crap healing to a numina Proc or a pvp hold to a damage proc etc, what is happening is people are buying the cheap (or what should be cheap) set pieces and converting them for less. This means that the marketeers are selling those crap sets for more money meaning even making a non-optimal build is becoming more expensive. 

 

If they seriously want to control the prices on the market then have vendor prices reflect the prices we think things should be. Just like ATOs the pack is 10 million. That is probably a fair price for an ATO and the market reflects that. Winters go for like 25 which again reflects the pack cost and hey bonus if you get 2 in a pack right? But to buy a purple recipe or a winter set or ATO is 100 merits. Which at the transfer rate of 1 million per merit is 100m. Lower that to like 25-30 merits. Most then TF give you almost 1 purple a run. Find the equity in giving those players that want to do TF and content rather then farming the option to earn their rewards their way in an equal fashion rather then telling people how they want to do it is an exploit and wrong. Hell maybe some of the farmers will come out and run content if the rewards from doing so seem more on par with farming. 

[QuiJon]

1 hour ago, RCU7115 said:

Players are limited to 3 accounts to Multi-box on.

With VPNs and such and multiple free email accounts do you actually think that any limit can really stop anyone? I mean granted I have not tried, but seriously if you can hide your IP from for pirating movies and crap I am pretty sure it is possible to do the same thing to a game server.

[Saikochoro]

13 minutes ago, QuiJon said:

But in that way they also become part of the problem. Because a converter allows for the freedom to change an enhancement, where it might might the old days of 150m LOTGs a thing of the past, it also takes the ones that used to be dirt cheap and makes them now worth more. When a yellow defense set piece canbe converted to a LOTG Proc or a crap healing to a numina Proc or a pvp hold to a damage proc etc, what is happening is people are buying the cheap (or what should be cheap) set pieces and converting them for less. This means that the marketeers are selling those crap sets for more money meaning even making a non-optimal build is becoming more expensive. 

 

If they seriously want to control the prices on the market then have vendor prices reflect the prices we think things should be. Just like ATOs the pack is 10 million. That is probably a fair price for an ATO and the market reflects that. Winters go for like 25 which again reflects the pack cost and hey bonus if you get 2 in a pack right? But to buy a purple recipe or a winter set or ATO is 100 merits. Which at the transfer rate of 1 million per merit is 100m. Lower that to like 25-30 merits. Most then TF give you almost 1 purple a run. Find the equity in giving those players that want to do TF and content rather then farming the option to earn their rewards their way in an equal fashion rather then telling people how they want to do it is an exploit and wrong. Hell maybe some of the farmers will come out and run content if the rewards from doing so seem more on par with farming. 

I doubt many marketeers are generally selling the crap IOs. If anything they are buying them making them more valuable, when they would otherwise be vendor trash because people generally wouldn’t slot them.  They are more likely selling the more sought after items because they are worth more. Converters brings value to otherwise basically valueless recipes. And they drastically reduce the cost of the highly sought after items. There really isn’t a downside to them. 
 

I’d be fine with lowering the merit cost of purples/ATOs. That wouldn’t eliminate the need for converters to keep market prices on non purple/ATO IO down though. 

[MunkiLord]

52 minutes ago, QuiJon said:

But in that way they also become part of the problem. Because a converter allows for the freedom to change an enhancement, where it might might the old days of 150m LOTGs a thing of the past, it also takes the ones that used to be dirt cheap and makes them now worth more. When a yellow defense set piece canbe converted to a LOTG Proc or a crap healing to a numina Proc or a pvp hold to a damage proc etc, what is happening is people are buying the cheap (or what should be cheap) set pieces and converting them for less. This means that the marketeers are selling those crap sets for more money meaning even making a non-optimal build is becoming more expensive.

Everybody sells the crap sets for more, not just marketers. So those casual players drops are more valuable as a result. Which is a direct benefit of converters. 

[Grouchybeast]

53 minutes ago, QuiJon said:

But in that way they also become part of the problem. Because a converter allows for the freedom to change an enhancement, where it might might the old days of 150m LOTGs a thing of the past, it also takes the ones that used to be dirt cheap and makes them now worth more. When a yellow defense set piece canbe converted to a LOTG Proc or a crap healing to a numina Proc or a pvp hold to a damage proc etc, what is happening is people are buying the cheap (or what should be cheap) set pieces and converting them for less. This means that the marketeers are selling those crap sets for more money meaning even making a non-optimal build is becoming more expensive. 

A. How many IOs does it take to outfit a character?

B. How many recipes will drop for a character over their played lifetime?

 

If A>B then the normalization of prices to lower the high end and raise the 'trash' is bad for the character.

If B>A then the normalization of prices to lower the high end and raise the 'trash' is good for the character.

 

Everyone who plays the game benefits from converter rolling, except possibly people who decide to PL their character to 50 by doorsitting in AE, then want to outfit it immediately with a build designed around Uncommon recipes and then never play it again.  And frankly, that seems like a rather niche playstyle around which to design the game economy.

 

[RCU7115]

On 3/31/2020 at 3:22 PM, Peerless Girl said:

Jimmy already went over it. The issue isn't the market, or AE, it's the fact that both exist at once, honestly. Original CoH progressed up through the issues with features as it went, and never had to "live" at the issue HC started at. People on live were sitting on inf capped characters before issue 9 even came out, the market insta-inflated and never recovered, and Paragon never really managed it. Live was HORRIBLE for purples. I spent the entire time from i9 until gamer shutdown trying to get my main kitted, and had about half of what I wanted by the time of shutdown, and a lot of that was market playing, and donations from friends better able to play that game than me (I made a lot crafting IOs early when I9 went in). It's a different beast. The whole "the AE XP is nerfed from live" argument is done to death, and actually factually wrong, it's reduced to the original live levels, the difference is that our AE has full drop access and the live one only dropped tickets. People mis-remember a LOT of stuff (or never knew it in the first place).

On live the AE was given recipe drops. I forget what issue that happened but it did.

[RCU7115]

On 3/31/2020 at 4:11 PM, StarWhispers said:

Thank you, I agree with you on the Ceiling prices. For now, everyone better get ready to pay 250 million influence for 1 recipe like it was on live.

That'll never happen.

[RCU7115]

On 3/31/2020 at 4:40 PM, Troo said:

 

Look at all the cool stuff that is included with Issue 26 Page 5.

 

Concerned with folks quitting over no longer being able to abuse an exploit = not much

 

The exploit bug getting fixed is not the issue. It is taking away the turn off xp and get extra influence option which everyone had access to. I personally turn off xp at vet level 10 for most of my toons.

[QuiJon]

4 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

Everyone who plays the game benefits from converter rolling, except possibly people who decide to PL their character to 50 by doorsitting in AE, then want to outfit it immediately with a build designed around Uncommon recipes and then never play it again.  And frankly, that seems like a rather niche playstyle around which to design the game economy.

Here is the niche that I like. I like to get my toon to 50 however I choose to. Be that power leveling (normally doing so myself with second account) or by playing or by combination most times. Then when I get to 50 if I like the character enough I want to unlock the incarnates, IO its build up, and then get t4s. If I don't then yeah that 50 prob sits around with common IOs and prob is not played much again. I have about 25 level 50s, and maybe 11 or 12 of them are IOd and T4d and that is including a couple of farmers. 

 

But farming allows me to not stress over it. With what drops from farming I can normally max out a character with 200-300 influence. I can do this because I work on earning influence, I create and sell stuff I don't want and I convert stuff that is easy to convert to high value IOs that I then store and save for my own use. This nerf is not the end of the world for me. Not by any means. My main issue with it is that is sets a very clear interpretation of how the devs feel the game should or should not be played. The very fact that they called it an exploit when it was doing nothing more then selecting playing options makes that abundantly clear. 

 

But why doesn't this standard cut both ways? I mean sure ok fine you say doing double influence by giving up xp is not fair. Fine well what about the people that latch onto a level 50 ITF that is gonna run +4 and they are a level 35 with crap slotting and with a double xp token will gain like 4-5 levels in like 60 minutes because a strong team is carrying them. Why is not that an exploit to the game mechanics as well. Maybe that double xp token should be scaled back depending on how far up you are being sidekicked to prevent this fast of leveling? Everyone should be able to play as they want and earn how they want. If the farming was making a increase in market costs the best way to remedy that is to seed the market at the level you want things to sell at and that forces prices to go down so players auctions sell and not the seeds. I personally believe that the market is going up because more people are working the market and getting greedy more so then the farmers have to much money to easily. With how much I earn in drops I can convert to private use from my farmers I find in most cases my friends that play the market rather then farming are spending 3-5 times more to IO out a toon then I am because they are buying what they need instead of earing it in drops. 

[ivanhedgehog]

6 hours ago, RCU7115 said:

But it doesn't. A farmer can do that in a few hours, now it'll ad a few more that's it. Before the patch it was about an hour to make 100 million on an average farming build. If you know what you're doing you can make a complete set of any IO set within 5 hours of gameplay running missions, not TF's just missons.

What will happen is a reduction in those large prize costume contests and giveaways. Less largess given to the lowbies. I view that as a net loss for the game. On my first day on Infinity server someone saw me in Atlas and gave me 50k. It was amazing and let me go into the game and find out just how fun it could be.

[QuiJon]

4 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

If A>B then the normalization of prices to lower the high end and raise the 'trash' is bad for the character.

If B>A then the normalization of prices to lower the high end and raise the 'trash' is good for the character.

 

And again this depends on how high that difference is. You cant simply say that more expensive crap is better. Lets say a sudden impact that was selling for 500k now becomes 2m. That sounds like a great return for crafting it. And sure you are gonna make more each one you sell over the lifetime of play. However if every purple recipe you have to buy for the life time of all your toons goes from 20million to 100m (the reflected price if you go by merit/influence standards) that becomes 80m more for EACH purple you might want to slot over your playing time. For every power that you want a set in that is 480 million more influence it cost you for a six piece set. And that is per power that you want a purple set in. 

 

The only way to assure that it remains good for the players and economy is to set the prices and seed the market to control greed. See my prob again is this fix assumes that only farmers are the problem. That the greed of the people working the markets are not at issue for driving up prices. Or that the complaints that the rewards are not as good for the "players" doesn't take into account that whenever I do TFs half the time the teams are stealthing half the missing and speeding by everything. Well fricken no duh you wont earn as much Influence and your chance for pruple drops are even lower when you don't kill half the map every chance you get. 

 

If players can earn 2x xp turning off influence I don't see how me earing 2 times influence turning off xp is breaking the game. 

[RCU7115]

15 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

What will happen is a reduction in those large prize costume contests and giveaways. Less largess given to the lowbies. I view that as a net loss for the game. On my first day on Infinity server someone saw me in Atlas and gave me 50k. It was amazing and let me go into the game and find out just how fun it could be.

They were cheap. A farmer running at +2/+8 made 225k in less than 30 seconds. I haven't checked how much it will make with the nerf. I would've given you more. I have on more than one occasion given away performance shifter procs to players I see struggling with endurance.

[Doc_Scorpion]

34 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

What will happen is a reduction in those large prize costume contests and giveaways. Less largess given to the lowbies. I view that as a net loss for the game. On my first day on Infinity server someone saw me in Atlas and gave me 50k. It was amazing and let me go into the game and find out just how fun it could be.

o.0  Even non-farmers generally have 50k they can spare, that's down in the "pocket change" range.

[Peerless Girl]

15 hours ago, DMW45 said:

Goes more than removing an exploit--they removed the entire mechanic, they've admitted as such it goes beyond removing an exploit.

You can keep pushing this theory, doesn't make it any more true than the first time you said it. It eventually boils down to "accept the devs decisions, or...etc. etc."

[Peerless Girl]

14 hours ago, Crysis said:

Honestly I don’t even remember the reason for Patrol XP.  I mean it’s the very example

of “AFK farming” that seems to be the issue that prompted this latest nerf.

Patrol XP was Paragon's "answer" to the by-then-common MMO system of "Rested XP" and to add another aspect to the game for newer players. As this game has, for some people, become a farming sandbox, that part would be irrelevant to them, since it's all about the "rush to 50 to make mad bank" by then. Which was never what CoH was intended to be, but rarely is something used exclusively for what it was created for. Ask J Robert Oppenheimer. 

[Peerless Girl]

12 hours ago, QuiJon said:

And the side kick.exemp system was also never intended to allow someone to play so far below their level. So maybe we now need to address all those that join level 50 +4 ITFs with a level 35 with double xp running and get like 5 levels in 60 minutes? Maybe we could say the same thing there that is an unintended consequence of having such a large level gap on a team and maybe we need to start giving diminishing returns on xp when you are sidekicked up? And BTW even if you call the exempt thing an exploit, that required you to leave on xp earning. There was a separate option to turn xp off that also gave a bonus to influence earning even if you were playing at normal level with no exempt and that was was also removed I believe. So please why should I not just get any bonus to influence for chosing to skip xp even at level 50 with no exempt?

The sidekick system was absolutely intended for someone level 35 to be able to play with level 50s, and you did level faster doing that. Cryptic still calls the system "Sidekicking" even in Startrek Online, and of course Champions, if you get far enough from a teamed Starship in STO (kind of hard to do accidently but doable) it will eventually say "you are out of Sidekicking Range" in the system messages. This is still one of the most innovative systems in any MMO ever. It was intended so people of all levels can play together regardless, and it accomplishes that beautifully. Will I miss making the extra influence if I choose to drop down and play with friends, sure, did it possibly make me do it more back in the day on live? Yes, will it stop me from doing it just to play with people in my SG? Nope. The issue is how all of this interacted with the vet levels and the fact you can earn "XP" over 50, plus a longstanding bug in Patrol XP (that didn't matter on live, since it was a very narrow window, then you hit 50 and it stopped). People are spreading misinfo, using it to further their own agendas and basically just argue about it. In the end it won't end up changing anything, the devs will be the devs, and those who simply can't abide the change will find somewhere else to play (but like most who threatened to "quit" back in the day on Live, they somehow managed to continue posting on the forums).

[Grouchybeast]

4 hours ago, QuiJon said:

And again this depends on how high that difference is. You cant simply say that more expensive crap is better. Lets say a sudden impact that was selling for 500k now becomes 2m. That sounds like a great return for crafting it. And sure you are gonna make more each one you sell over the lifetime of play. However if every purple recipe you have to buy for the life time of all your toons goes from 20million to 100m

Increases in purple prices have nothing to do with converter rolling, which is what I was talking about  Purples, are in their own category.

 

Although, actually, now you mention it, purples recipes are a great example of how good converters are for IO prices, because we know what happened on live when converters were introduced into an economy that had already suffered from enormous levels of inflation (caused by too much inf existing).  Before converters there were 'trash' purples that sold for the low tens of millions at best and there were the smaller number of 'good' purples that everyone wanted, like Ragnarok, that sold for the high hundreds of millions.  I think some were just about breaking a billion?  Anyway, after converters the price of the trash purples rose, and the price of the desirable purples dropped significantly.  That meant that every single purple recipe that dropped could be sold for good inf -- even if you didn't want to bother converting it, it was a better price than before -- and it was cheaper to buy the purples you actually wanted.

 

Or look at PVP uniques on live for another example.  They went from costing more than the inf cap to being buyable on the market again.

 

Converters are good for everyone.  Luckily, the devs seem to understand this very clearly.

Edited April 2, 2020 by Grouchybeast

[Jimmy]

All posts before this one were moved from the original patch notes thread.

[Lines]

Cool.

 

Will we see some more changes to rewards as well? It'd be great to see the buying power of merits increase to help us get our builds together via running content.

[Hardship]

If Patrol XP is really the problem, then don't allow level 50 chars to earn Patrol XP.  They don't "need" it since they are already "max" level. Vet levels come pretty quick already, so having Patrol XP isn't a big help with that.

 

[ZacKing]

What about exemplaring?  Is the double influence gone from that as well?  If so, this change is crap.

[ivanhedgehog]

7 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

o.0  Even non-farmers generally have 50k they can spare, that's down in the "pocket change" range.

That was in the days long before IOs when someone with 3 or 4 million was rich.

[arcane]

Yeah, the devs can do whatever they want, but I just want them to get this through their heads: this change expands economic inequality instead of reducing it.

 

The idea that this change reduces economic inequality was based on the lie that farmers were the upper class in this game. In reality, they were the middle class, and market manipulators were the ultra-rich upper class. This is a middle class nerf not an upper class nerf. 

 

So please don't repeat the economic equity rationale anymore because it's a lie and I don't want to see that lie propagated again. Thanks 🙂

 

That all being said, I don't believe equity is necessarily an essential goal or anything like that; I just believe in not lying to people.

[Jimmy]

1 hour ago, Lines said:

Will we see some more changes to rewards as well? It'd be great to see the buying power of merits increase to help us get our builds together via running content.

As mentioned earlier there's no solid plans right now, but on the subject of merits: It would be much more likely we increase the availability of merits in content that's currently lacking that extra layer of rewards, rather than increasing the value of merits themselves.

[Jimmy]

16 minutes ago, arcaneholocaust said:

Yeah, the devs can do whatever they want, but I just want them to get this through their heads: this change expands economic inequality instead of reducing it.

 

The idea that this change reduces economic inequality was based on the lie that farmers were the upper class in this game. In reality, they were the middle class, and market manipulators were the ultra-rich upper class. This is a middle class nerf not an upper class nerf. 

 

So please don't repeat the economic equity rationale anymore because it's a lie and I don't want to see that lie propagated again. Thanks 🙂

 

That all being said, I don't believe equity is necessarily an essential goal or anything like that; I just believe in not lying to people.

Please don't attribute dishonesty to what in reality is simply a difference of opinion.

 

Read through the thread, specifically the staff posts. This topic has been covered multiple times. This changed was aimed at balancing the ability to produce influence, not amass it. The production of influence is what creates buying power and sets prices in an economy where monopolies cannot exist.