When will the game be rebalanced around IOs? Never, and here's why.

[Redletter]

On 2/1/2022 at 11:31 PM, GM Tempest said:

If you feel you need more of a challenge, be a Mercs MM like me!

/sob

Mercs/Emp? Like me? Are we kindred? in suffering?

[Tahliah]

On 2/2/2022 at 2:05 PM, Bionic_Flea said:

Lumi, I love you but, you are overstating the difficulty of making influence in the game.  Like here, although to a lesser extent, all you had to do was play your 50s and sell your drops.  Of course, we didn't have converters for most of the time on live and those allow you to spin gold from straw.  But back then you could still vendor the straw and some straw still sold for a few million.

 

When inventions came out, I had more than enough infamy to supply my characters with SOs.  I then started slowly converting some old and most of my new alts to generic IOs.  I didn't start with sets because of the costs, but because I had no real sense of sets and bonuses and so forth.  And then I was introduced to a forefather of Mids (Lil Pips' Hero Builder, maybe) and was finally able to learn and think of builds as a whole.  I made an IO set build for a dark/regen scrapper that I wanted to PvP with.  It was terrible by today's standards but it was much better than either the SO or generic IO build.

 

I then started rebuilding my namesake, Bionic Flea an Inv/SS tank, and started slotting set IOs on new characters as I leveled them.  I found that many of the IOs that were terribly expensive were magnitudes cheaper as recipes and started buying stacks of 10 of whatever I wanted.  Then slot one, save two, sell seven.   If they were expensive, that meant that a lot of people wanted them for lots of builds.  And indeed, people paid me much more than the offer price just to BUY-IT-NAO as the cool kids said.  I was a billionaire within the year of my starting that buy/slot/store/sell strategy.  It may have been only a few months but honestly it's all a blur. 

 

Same thing here.  We all started at zero anew.  It wasn't long (a few months maybe) until I had a billion, then several, and now I have somewhere between 30-50 billion.  I stopped keeping track because I have more than enough.  I also stopped aggressively marketing, although I do still craft/convert/sell my drops and occasionally craft or convert things I bought on /AH months ago.  I know that many people have just as much and some have 100s or perhaps 1000s more than me.  And yet I still meet players every day that tell me they can't afford to spend a few million to buy an IO.  And that's just not people who started playing this week. 

 

It was the same in the live game.  Anyone can and could make INF if they took a little time to learn and a minimum amount of effort to do it.

 

I think this is true.  I don't play the market since I don't have much interest in it, but when I get something good, I will look long enough at the market to figure out if the recipe is worth crafting and then selling as is or converting to "the" enh in the given set. 

 

I have no idea how you guys makes billions, I think the most I ever had at one time on my main was 500M, but I use her inf (and merits) to build up other alts, including buying them Team Transporter, etc., so that's no surprise (I spend it as fast as I get it, in other words).  Even though I don't have billions, I do make it a point to email a few million to random people in chat who say that they don't have enough inf for whatever they need or if they are asking basic questions about the game (and thus seem like new players who might appreciate a few million inf in seed money).  Shrug.  What's the big deal? I can get that back on a TF or two (including selling whatever goodies drop).  No one I actually "know" in-game needs inf, but if they did, I would just give it to them (in the tens of millions if they needed it). It's just inf, we can earn/make more.  I think this is probably another reason I will never amass billions; I love to give it away!  Particularly during the holidays when @Marine Xposts his challenge, but just whenever I see an opportunity is also good.

 

Okay, I'm getting way off topic here, I think.  But I just wanted to point out that not everyone is interested in playing the market or even in casually selling/creating/converting for better things to sell.  It's kind of time-consuming (especially at first when you don't know what things go for in the market), and a lot of players have limited time to spend in the game and would rather run content than wile away their two hours researching/acquiring salvage/crafting/etc. I get that.  I have to be in the mood to do it, too, . . .  or really really need that super shiny set on one of my alts (NAO).  Heh.