Do IOs unbalance the game? (Spoiler: by themselves, they do not)

[FFFF]

I like Inventions. I think they add depth and complexity to an otherwise bland itemization system. I also appreciate that they allow for further customization of your character.

 

I've seen a number of threads stating that IOs break the balance of the game. In its current implementation, I would agree. However, the game breaking part of them is how easily they are acquired. Back on live, the Miracle proc, the Numina proc would be tens of millions of influence. The Gladiator Armor Defense / TP protection was around a billion influence. PvP IOs were also extremely scarce due to them being loot that fell when in PvP zones.

 

In other games, your character doesn't have access to legendary gear at the ridiculously low cost of 5 million influence (the price I bought a Luck of the Gambler / Global Recharge IO yesterday). In an extreme example, in classic WoW, you may have to wait weeks and constantly raid to get a specific piece of gear that would allow you to progress. Scarcity, cost, progression are all barriers in other games that limit access to the most powerful gear. In our current state, the most powerful gear in the game is so easily available that we see complaints about how it trivializes content.

 

In addition, because you can buy the very best, why settle for second best? There are some invention sets that just go completely ignored because your average player can afford to go top tier immediately. Many of the second tier sets don't have the game-breaking bonuses top tier ones do. Would anyone object to someone getting 4% regeneration or 1.5% endurance recovery? On live, I remember waiting on the availability of certain scarce IOs/recipes but mostly settling on builds that factored in affordability as much as function. I don't think it's a bad situation to have some more second tier sets get more use.

 

I think like many of you, I'd like to see game difficulty better balanced. At the highest levels, support ATs are often unneeded and the availability of top-tier IOs + Incarnate abilities have made tank-mage characters more prevalent. However, I think balancing discussions that don't factor economics, scarcity and perhaps gates on certain materials are not the way to go. It's not enough to simply add higher difficulty modes. Nor do I advocate raw global changes like buffing all enemy hit points or damage. I think scarcity made the live game more balanced and the current economic implementation broke it.

 

 

 

 

[Greycat]

I'd agree with "on their own, no, but the way they're implemented, yes" hits it about right. Having characters that solo things designed for teams at full-team size (x8) and buffed (+4) being as common as they are should never have happened.

 

Personally, I'd have dropped the "rule of 5" to a "rule of 3" and kept *much* more from being perma'd without outside help. (Domination, for instance - used to be that, sure, it was easier to build *on* a team (and still is,) but on SOs if you wanted it perma, you'd make friends with a Kin or two, and it'd be situational otherwise, requiring some degree of thought as to "is this the fight I want to use it on this time." Now? It's practically taken as a given and/or people think it's something you have to do. T9 armors? Why deal with any drawbacks when you're already at def/res caps long before them, with an easy to get build copied from the forum or discord?

 

So... yeah. I think dropping to a "rule of 3" would have kept some degree of challenge while still allowing plenty of build diversity with IOs. But, ship's long since sailed, reached the other port, made multiple runs around the oceans, been updated, run some more, and gotten worn out enough to be sold for scrap right alongside any native difficulty in the game.

[drbuzzard]

On a live game, this may well be a valid analysis. On a zombie game of 20+ years ago origin, not so much. People play this for nostalgia and hanging out with friends. It is no longer there for driving normal standards of MMO consumption (more time spent=better stuff=more income for developer). 

 

I fully agree that the reason much of  the game isn't balanced is that the top shinies are too easy to get once you know what you are doing and put in some time. However there's still hard stuff if you want to do it. I don't see a supply nerf being overly popular (as in only for a select few). Also, doing that will have zero effect on the people who already have piles of stuff amassed unless they decide to nerf IOs. That would be an interesting amount of howling (and I'd probably howl too since I have so many builds which would have to be fixed). 

 

[Yep, Nope is right]

You DO know that all this was possible on live, right? I had the exact same build on live that I have on Homecoming. Literally the same build, I had MIDS saves to allow me to recreate it exactly. Only difference was on live it cost me a fair bit over 2 billion INF instead of just under 200 million. I do tend to agree that HC goes a bit too far into 'easy mode' territory, but it's not the fault of the IO system. 

 

The power escalation was well under way at sunset, but it also appeared that the live devs were in the progress of committing an equivalent escalation of opponents. If anything, some of the content they put out toward the end was moving us back into the 'bad old days' territory of extreme risk for not much better rewards.

[arcane]

Side note: if you’d like to take weeks to put a build together, try slotting a build with 6 level 53 D-Sync Provocations.

[Without_Pause]

The difference is in how the market works. The HC Devs made that aspect easier. It is understandable based on numbers of players. We might hit all of 2k worth of players at one time. That would be a low pop server on Live if even that. If the Market got switched back, we would see an instant pick up in prices. If you want a level 50 IO then you would need someone to put up a level 50 IO.

 

And as always, the game was going in that direction in terms of power balance to support a proper end game which never got fully implemented. 

[Spaghetti Betty]

40 minutes ago, arcane said:

Side note: if you’d like to take weeks to put a build together, try slotting a build with 6 level 53 D-Sync Provocations.

Ew, I felt this.

[Enchantica]

I don't think so at all. They are a flavor enhancer! I have taken toons from 1 to level 50 with just single origin enhancements and done fine. I/O bonuses let me make a toon with fire, flavor, flair! I can dial in the spirit of my new toon better with them (when I can afford them, I am probably the poorest incarnate in paragon lol )  You don't need Uber bonuses to give a little spice, sometimes a little is all that matters. 

 

To prove my point, I am going to direct you to Spaghetti Bettys gif animation.  If she just had the name you think one thing, see the cat girl doing that pully wooly thing and you think "Whoa who is that fun loving hero of paragon!"    ........I rest my case! 😀

[Yomo Kimyata]

I entirely agree with most/all of your observations, in terms of how the game has been changed to make it easy to acquire (almost) all of the goodies that the game has to offer.  But I'm not sure how that leads to the implication that the game is now broken because of it.  I'm not sure how the game is broken because everyone can now easily achieve, for example, a Shield Wall +res on every one of their alts.  Someone else being stronger in no way weakens me.

 

I will say, I play very differently than I did in Live.  I rarely team nowadays, and that's not because I can run +4/x8 content solo whenever and wherever I choose.  It's because my life is very different now than it was then, and my time constraints are erratic and inflexible.  So if I am able to solo a TF myself over a few days 10-15 minutes at a time rather than spend six hours organizing a team who all want to do exactly what I want to do when I want to do it for an hour, heck yes I'll do that.  Part of it is also that my understanding of the mechanics of the game is so much better than it was on Live, thanks in large part to City of Data (all hail @UberGuy).  Part of it is due to the fact that the current devs made a bunch of conscious decisions, like offer 200 market slots on each character, and up to 5000 character slots on each account, and a theoretically infinite number of accounts.  (THIS is what I think breaks the system, literally, since our relatively tiny population has the ability to eat up several magnitudes more strain on things like the /AH and the Character Items menu).

 

The djinni has been out of the bottle from day one on HC, and although it can be fun to play with various personal constraints, it's impossible to enforce them on anyone else with the exception of playing in various hard modes.  At this late point in the game, I personally wouldn't care if they made every item freely available like on Test.  With few exceptions, anyone with a working knowledge of how the systems work can create pretty much whatever they want just by playing the game.  And no, y'all can't have any of my 53 Provocations.

 

 

[Luminara]

29 minutes ago, FFFF said:

I think scarcity made the live game more balanced and the current economic implementation broke it.

 

As I've said many times over the last few years, hyperinflation was NOT an intentional control of IO availability.  That was a consequence of poor planning and lack of foresight, not a deliberate action, nor was it leveraged as a control.  It was a bad situation that couldn't be fixed with any solution short of a reboot (which is exactly what other MMORPGs do every time they release new content with new gear and a new currency.  they're rebooting the economy), and Paragon was too entrenched in the "make minute changes, observe, pray the problem goes away" approach to development.

 

The Invention system was intended to be used by everyone.  Not solely by the wealthy elite.  Not solely by the monumentally lucky.  Everyone.  The game we play now is the game we should have been playing 15 years ago, but Cryptic fucked up and Paragon was too timid to fix the problem.

 

That said, HC did increase drop rates and reduce merit costs when they spun up the first server, so it is even easier for players to acquire IOs than it would be if we were only dealing with a lack of hyperinflation.  But those changes were necessary because HC catering to a MUCH smaller audience than Cryptic or Paragon, ~2-2.5% of the original player base.  If drop rates and merit costs had been left as they were originally, there would've been a repeat of the economic failure we lived with back in the day.  Fewer IOs available would've encouraged higher bids.  Higher bids would've led to bidding wars.  Bidding wars would've kept prices high.  High prices would've caused hoarding.  Hoarding would've resulted in fewer IOs available.  An endless process which would've created the same spiraling hyperinflated economic conditions we lived through before, especially with HC not taking any actions to prevent farming.  The way things are set up now, everyone's a "have", no-one's a "have not", and that's a damn good thing.  It's always better to have too much of a damn good thing than not enough of anything.

 

On a personal note, I'm really not desperate to experience being limited by lack of funds in my pretendy fun time game.  I get enough of that in reality, since my income places me so far below the poverty line that even if it doubled, I'd still be below the poverty line.  I'm comfortable being poor in real life because my consumption is low enough to keep me well within my income, but I rather enjoy not having to struggle, scrounge, scrape, scrimp and save pennies in Co*.  Or having to budget inf*.  I have five budgets already (time i can spend working for other people; firewood i can burn in a day; water i can use in a day; electricity i can use between sunset and 10 a.m.; cashy money), I don't need another.

[tidge]

I agree that it is easier (and more straightforward) to craft/acquire Invention pieces. I disagree that this is somehow "breaking the game".

 

I'm sure we can dig up a thread that makes the argument that Prismatic Aether Particles have "broken the game" where the game is "costume design."

 

Oh there it is.

 

[UltraAlt]

@FFFF feel free to play the game any way that you like.

 

If you feel that IO availability has broken the system because they are too available, simply don't purchase and slot the ones that you feel are OP.

 

Can you make other players do that?

No. They are playing the game the way they want to play within the boundaries that the DEVs have set-up around us. 

[FFFF]

23 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:

@FFFF feel free to play the game any way that you like.

 

If you feel that IO availability has broken the system because they are too available, simply don't purchase and slot the ones that you feel are OP.

 

Can you make other players do that?

No. They are playing the game the way they want to play within the boundaries that the DEVs have set-up around us. 

 

I'm not telling anyone how they should play. I'm simply pointing out one of the reasons why the game feels unbalanced to some. No game goes out of its way to provide every player the top of the line gear this easily. With that said, this is a nostalgia game so who cares, right?

 

I agree with Yomo above that the djinni has been let out of the bottle already.

[Snarky]

....WTF.....?

[Skyhawke]

35 minutes ago, Snarky said:

....WTF.....?

 

[macskull]

6 hours ago, FFFF said:

I think scarcity made the live game more balanced and the current economic implementation broke it.

The post-shutdown changes to the Incarnate system did far more to break balance than the post-shutdown economy changes. Back on live Incarnates were an awful, awful grind, designed to reel in paying subscribers and keep them paying. The inability to afford things for many players wasn't an intentional feature, it was an unintentional side effect of an ingame economy gone horribly wrong. If Homecoming went back to the pre-shutdown implementation of the market and merit vendors, that'd be the end of Homecoming as we know it. Rebirth uses the same market system as the game did when it was live, and there have been multiple times I've gone over there looking for a specific purple recipe or enhancement and finding a sales history stretching back months. At that point it doesn't really matter how much inf you have, because there's no supply and you're forced to grind out the enhancements you want in a different way.

[Psyonico]

Agreed with what a few people are saying... the economy on live was broken, I remember selling a single white arcane salvage would be enough for me to DO out a character at level 12 and just by running a handful of arcane missions I could get a character what they needed to get running.

 

That was hyper inflation and it was no fun.  A lot of the IO changes that went into effect since shutdown were due to low populations meaning it would be nearly impossible to io out anything not due to cost, but to scarcity.  Simply put, the servers don't have enough players for the drops to fill the wants.

[SwitchFade]

The game is fine as is, on the whole.

 

The game is balanced around SOs as it should be. IOs make me super tasty.

 

I like tasty.

[Clave Dark 5]

My theory on this goes this way: 

 

Game is cancelled, so the small cadre of folk who still got to plat (thanks to that Dev) wanted to give it all one last go round and to finally get a chance to kit out that one AT they never tried or finished, etc.  So they set up lots of stuff to make getting all those IOs etc. easier. And it's been that way since it then went public, so we all got to have one last hurrah and really got to experience much of the game we may have missed out on previously, because who knows for how long we'd have it back. 

 

And now... here we sit with multiple tricked-out 50s and the ability to zoom a character from zero to T4 Incarnate in "just a couple of hours" (which may leave them feeling meaningless and without any investment), speedruns of ridiculous proportions... which is starting to leave us sort of bored??? 

 

At least that's me theory, because it seems the population is dropping; I've ever seen Excelsior with a single green dot some times now.  The problem with this then is you can't put this genie back in the bottle.  Trying to throttle back on farming or IOs or whatever would elicit screams of bloody murder that would echo down through the ages.  Classic case of having your cake and eating it too leading to a stomach ache and devaluation of said cake.  IOs were meant to be something to pursue, not something you ever actually got all of.

[FupDup]

15 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

My theory on this goes this way: 

 

Game is cancelled, so the small cadre of folk who still got to plat (thanks to that Dev) wanted to give it all one last go round and to finally get a chance to kit out that one AT they never tried or finished, etc.  So they set up lots of stuff to make getting all those IOs etc. easier. And it's been that way since it then went public, so we all got to have one last hurrah and really got to experience much of the game we may have missed out on previously, because who knows for how long we'd have it back. 

 

And now... here we sit with multiple tricked-out 50s and the ability to zoom a character from zero to T4 Incarnate in "just a couple of hours" (which may leave them feeling meaningless and without any investment), speedruns of ridiculous proportions... which is starting to leave us sort of bored??? 

 

At least that's me theory, because it seems the population is dropping; I've ever seen Excelsior with a single green dot some times now.  The problem with this then is you can't put this genie back in the bottle.  Trying to throttle back on farming or IOs or whatever would elicit screams of bloody murder that would echo down through the ages.  Classic case of having your cake and eating it too leading to a stomach ache and devaluation of said cake.  IOs were meant to be something to pursue, not something you ever actually got all of.

My experience is the opposite: Back in the early live days, I struggled to get invested into the game because I could play for many hours a day every day for weeks and not really have much to show for it. It was like pissing in the wind. I mostly only played on free trials for a little bit because it was just an endless Sisyphus simulator. I can only push that boulder up the hill so many times without it moving anywhere before I say "fuck this" and find something else to do. And this was before all that incarnate jazz (like before VEATs got introduced and a short while after). 

 

In the HC era, I've invested more time into my first toon than all of my live ones combined (not that there were many) precisely because I can actually make real progress playing casually (solo, not using boosters or such, no farming). My time actually gets respected and rewarded now. As a result, I've made way more alts here than I did on live (only made a handful back then because it was too much of a slog). 

 

If people are getting T4 incarnates in a "couple of hours," that only happens with major boosting/power leveling. And that's kind of their own fault for choosing to use those things. That doesn't happen in "normal" play. 

Edited September 29, 2023 by FupDup

[Clave Dark 5]

"an endless Sisyphus simulator" is pretty much the definition of an MMO; otherwise people drop their subs.  During live I think I had maybe two 50s after years in the game, and they still had unslotted holes in their weird mish-mash of IOs and single origin enhancers, because I could never afford to fill them up, even with those SIOs - partly because I also wasn't a power gamer of any stripe.  I know this feeling!  Now, not so much, I have over a page of fifties and they're fully IOed (no purples though because I often play at lower levels then lose interest once I hit 50, etc.)  Maybe this is all just me, it's possible.

 

And maybe I'm wrong about that "just a few hours" being a more common thing, but that's not the impression I get from anyone else here (you aside for a second), not by a long shot.  And certainly not from the amount of farming I do see in-game and on the LFG channel.

[Without_Pause]

5 hours ago, FFFF said:

 

I'm not telling anyone how they should play. I'm simply pointing out one of the reasons why the game feels unbalanced to some. No game goes out of its way to provide every player the top of the line gear this easily. With that said, this is a nostalgia game so who cares, right?

 

I agree with Yomo above that the djinni has been let out of the bottle already.

I explain it this way to my wife. If I need to go and make a build in certain MMOs, they are painfully obvious how to do. Power build? Collect Power items. DoT build? Collect DoT items. Getting the currency to do so or craft things, hey time gated crafting, and playing the game can be more of a love/hate thing. Mmm jumping puzzles. CoH? Getting currency and enhancements is cake. Playing the game. More cake. Need a build? *sigh* Go download Mids and start playing around. 

[A Cat]

Are things that easy to get for your Average Joe Man? I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people simply don't play the market. There are still plenty of types of enhancements that are pretty expensive. A fully built and fully sick character is still in the ballpark of a half billion for me. 

[KC4800]

I still get defeated at least once a day on one of my characters, so by that metric, the game is still not too easy. I slot what I slot to get the job done...eventually.

[Snarky]

1 hour ago, KC4800 said:

I still get defeated at least once a day on one of my characters, so by that metric, the game is still not too easy. I slot what I slot to get the job done...eventually.

Git Gud