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

[Scarlet Shocker]

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.

 

 

I don't know how you play so I'm not aiming this specifically at you, but it could well be that you are one of the more below averagely skilled players (for the record that's also where I am)

 

That doesn't mean the game isn't too easy, it probably is for the majority of players. That said, "easy" is a very relative term and difficult to evaluate easily [sic] but I do feel that we are often spoon fed many of the goodies on Score and HC that were challenging to obtain before. It bugs me a bit, but as others have explained very eloquently there are reasons! and I totally understand them

 

To a large extent this is "you can please some of the people some of the time..."

 

Bottom line is I'd much rather have this game as is, than not at all.

[Uun]

Two factors are primarily responsible for eliminating the scarcity of desirable IOs: 1) pooling of enhancements/recipes on the AH and 2) enhancement converters. Pooling was instituted by the HC devs and enhancement converters were a late (I22) addition to the live game. In combination, this made it easy to increase the supply of previously scarce items simply by playing converter roulette. With the price of converters pegged at 30 for 10 reward merits, there is no meaningful cost barrier to converting enhancements multiple times until the desired result is achieved. The supply of LOTG +rech IOs and the like became essentially endless. I don't recall when PVP recipes started dropping in normal content, but obviously that vastly increased their supply and opened them up to the same converter roulette. 

 

Compare this to HOs and D-Syncs. While pooled on the AH, they cannot be converted. There continues to be scarcity of highly desirable items (Cytos, Enzymes, Membranes, Provocations, etc.) and prices on the AH reflect this. 

[Clave Dark 5]

10 hours ago, A Cat said:

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. 

I don't play the market, but I used to do a heck of a lot of MSRs, which generate a lot of cash over time.  Once you have a decent 50 going, you can also  just keep playing the game (doesn't have to be hard mode or anything else like that) and they just hemorrhage money.  The closest I came to playing the market was a bit of flipping and super packs, which I generally wasn't too good at ha ha.  And yet here I am with several IOed 50s now (many with ATIOs, but few purples). 

[tidge]

15 hours ago, A Cat said:

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. 

 

There is a LOT that I think is straightforward (and easy) but I don't know what Average Joe Man is and isn't doing in game.

 

(non-superior) ATO and Winter pieces are available from Merit Vendors for 100 merits each. (I think the Summer Blockbuster pieces are in there as well, but it has been a while since I've checked). Merits can be acquired any number of ways. A brisk (2xp) journey to level 50 usually averages me about 600 merits without really trying. If a player wants gobs more merits, it is relative easy to earn more with some cooperation from other players.

 

An Enhancement Catalyst will drop about once every 24 hours for a level 50 character after defeating something like 50-100 even+ level mobs. Catalysts (and Boosters) can also be bought through the Merit Vendors.

 

PVP enhancement recipes also can be purchased for 100 merits each. Note that the recipes will be +3 to the level of the character buying them, max 50. These have to be crafted. I use attuned ones for levels 7-49, then typically I will switch to boosted 50s when I can. This is not something I expect Average Joe Man to do.

 

It may or may not be more cost-efficient to acquire those pieces from the marketplace, but there is an alternative to "waiting for a drop" or "buy it now".

 

As for other pieces: There are two strategies for acquisition that I think are available to Average Joe Man.

 

1) AJM can wait for recipe drops, craft them and play converter roulette. Converters can be bought with merits.

 

2) AJM can put in bids at the AH with Inf.

 

I recommend the second. I don't think this is "playing the market".

 

Many commonly used enhancements (attuned!) are 2 MInf on average for "Buy it Now". What we think of as "common" IOs can be had for much cheaper... folks chase crafting badges and so a LOT of IOs end up on the market. Things like Enhancement Converters (from Merit conversion) can be put on the AH for sale... it has been a LONG time since I saw one of those go for less than 50K. Yellow salvage is fetching around 10K, Orange Salvage is 440K to 500K.

 

Regular vendors will buy stuff. Level 50 common IO recipes average 100K each.

 

I can believe that someone might pull up one of my builds and convince themselves that it is a "half-a-billion Inf" build... but I never come close to spending that much Inf(*1)... I am either recycling enhancements(*2) from the SG base or using Merits to "buy direct"... it depends on my mood. I don't equate spending Merits/Catalysts that were earned through regular play with AE farming or "playing the market"... I'm not passing judgement, I believe AJM can pretty much do whatever he wants to get pieces he may want. Some folks might look at a 6x slotted Superior Winter set and see an outlay of 150+ MInf. I see five days (or fewer, with multiple characters!) of Hamidon raids and a possible 6th day for the last catalyst (if only a single character was played).

 

(*1) I could convert the merits to other things and earn inf by selling those things, and sometimes the market is too attractive to NOT do that.

 

(*2) Between converter roulette and catalysts falling from the sky (and a couple of other shenanigans) I maintain a stockpile of Enhancement pieces that I know I will almost certainly be using in some future build.... just as I have some very favorable (to me) bids placed for certain items on the AH.

 

EDIT: I completely neglected to mention that the Very Rare recipes are also only 100 Merits each at the Merit Vendors.

Edited September 29, 2023 by tidge

[Doomguide2005]

     One of the primary ways my main got tricked out on Live (pre i21, since life, then computer issues knocked me out by then) is something no one has mentioned yet.  I got her Glad proc, Shield Walls and other 'pricey' IOs for Hero Merits by running tip missions.  It would actually take longer on HC than on Live where you completed 11tips (10 then the alignment) you ended up with 1 hero merit.  Here you get 40 merits (instead of the 50 required for a hero merit) if I'm recalling everything correctly (both then and now).  But it was definitely a way my minor league marketeer self made a buck to start acquiring pricey stuff on Live as well.  Using hero merits i could solo and pretty much get anything I wanted.  I purchased many LotG specials, at first using them then selling them on the market for fun and profit.

[macskull]

21 hours 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.

I think it's less to do with a few peoples' power fantasies and more to do with trying to keep game systems functional in an environment that had maybe a few dozen concurrent players at most. Incarnates were enough of a grind on live even when you could routinely field a league, but when you've got maybe 40 or 50 players online regularly that becomes a lot harder. Same thing for Hami raids - you pretty much needed every online player in the same zone at the same time to pull it off. None of this is even mentioning the market yet - without salvage and enhancement bucketing you have no little to no supply, so you're forced to grind out merits to buy stuff.

 

TL;DR: Most of the "easy mode" QoL changes that happened post-shutdown were less about making things easy and more about making things functional with population orders of magnitude lower than Homecoming's.

 

  

21 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

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.

The population is dropping. It's been on a slow but steady decline since April, but weekend peak player counts are still around 1700-1800. Homecoming's "throttled back on farming" several times over the last four and a half years - cutting AE XP in half, getting rid of AE mission/arc completion XP bonus, removing double inf while exemplared, etc., etc. As far as IOs go... no, IOs were added to give characters more flexibility and build customization instead of a homogenous "3 damage 1 acc 1 end 1 rech" that everything ended up with on SOs. The fact the IO system was mostly inaccessible to a large chunk of players was a failure, not a feature.

Edited September 29, 2023 by macskull

[biostem]

IOs, IMO, have an ironic sort of dual-effect;  They close the gap between what different ATs can accomplish, while at the same time widening the gap between someone using SOs or generic IOs, and set-IOs.  The latter definitely give you a leg up in content that was designed before IOs were introduced, but any content that came out afterward  still was under-tuned for how players ended up using the set bonuses and procs.

[Scarlet Shocker]

One thing we've not really covered in this thread (at least my cursory inspection of some posts give me that impression)  is that IOs (and doubly so for invention sets) create a whole new  reason to play a character. That in itself was great for the game, players and characters.

 

Whereas previous to IOs, often people would roll a character, play to 50, fill it with SOs, complain about ED, respec it properly, shelve it and move on to the next. With IOs and inventions it gave characters a new lease of life and a life beyond simply reaching level 50.

 

That in turn added a lot of new dimensions to the game which by definition rebalances (but not unbalances) it

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 9/29/2023 at 5:58 AM, 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.

 

Ditto.  Just because I'm slotted to the nines doesn't mean I'm not still trying to solo Bride of Hamidon.

[Yomo Kimyata]

4 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

One thing we've not really covered in this thread (at least my cursory inspection of some posts give me that impression)  is that IOs (and doubly so for invention sets) create a whole new  reason to play a character. That in itself was great for the game, players and characters.

 

Whereas previous to IOs, often people would roll a character, play to 50, fill it with SOs, complain about ED, respec it properly, shelve it and move on to the next. With IOs and inventions it gave characters a new lease of life and a life beyond simply reaching level 50.

 

That in turn added a lot of new dimensions to the game which by definition rebalances (but not unbalances) it

 

Especially when a power set has been revamped since the original got 50ed.  I do this a lot with other strategies as well -- what happens when I go from defensive to offensive and swap out Force of Will for Experimentation?

[KC4800]

4 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

Ditto.  Just because I'm slotted to the nines doesn't mean I'm not still trying to solo Bride of Hamidon.

Exactly. Plus sometimes I forget what difficulty level I am on, then I start a lowbie flashback, and try to finish the mission without exiting and resetting. Also, on a couple of toons I self sacrifice (probably not the correct word here) like turn off green drops, or play a solo defender who does not take a self healing power, just to add my own challenge to the character. I almost never start a character with the express purpose of min/maxing. I eventually just get to a point where I don't think I need to adjust this slotting anymore then I just play the character that way. Which is fine, until an update changes a power in a way that I have to address the power pick or the slotting by respec, which I hate to have to do.

[Clave Dark 5]

On 9/29/2023 at 5:00 PM, macskull said:

I think it's less to do with a few peoples' power fantasies and more to do with trying to keep game systems functional in an environment that had maybe a few dozen concurrent players at most.

 

Not power fantasies but to keep the game playable AND because they had keys to the kingdom after shut down.  "I never got enough pudding, always being served in these little cups!  Maybe I'd get one every other day, maybe two if I was extremely lucky.  Now I can open a whole institutional-sized can of pudding for myself!"  It's like being the last man on Earth, you'd go find a Lambo and gas it up, tool around for a bit.  😃

 

The population is dropping. It's been on a slow but steady decline since April, but weekend peak player counts are still around 1700-1800. Homecoming's "throttled back on farming" several times over the last four and a half years - cutting AE XP in half, getting rid of AE mission/arc completion XP bonus, removing double inf while exemplared, etc., etc.

 

Which is why no one farms anymore.  Oh wait...  Throttling doesn't really count if it doesn't meaningfully cut back on it, ha ha

 

As far as IOs go... no, IOs were added to give characters more flexibility and build customization instead of a homogenous "3 damage 1 acc 1 end 1 rech" that everything ended up with on SOs. The fact the IO system was mostly inaccessible to a large chunk of players was a failure, not a feature.

 

IIRC they said they felt they needed a crafting system because everyone else had one and CoH didn't (which tends to be an integral part of any MMO, not just something endemic to builds problems in this game only).  Also, if that inaccessibility was a failure, why didn't they fix it before sundown?  IOs were introduced in Issue 9 back in May, 2007 and the last live issue came out May 2012.  Five years to fix!  I still think they were working as intended, rewards dangled to keep people playing, but not to ever fully grasp, and certainly not at the levels we have here.

 

[macskull]

@Clave Dark 5 I'd quote you but the wacky way in which you format your posts means I can't really do that so...

 

Quote

Also, if that inaccessibility was a failure, why didn't they fix it before sundown? 

They were working on fixing it. First the market merger with Issue 18, and then enhancement converters were added to the game in late 2011 and IO prices were starting to come down in response throughout the first half of 2012. We never got to see that through, unfortunately.

Edited October 3, 2023 by macskull

[macskull]

Oh, I'd also add that the ingame economy faced one problem after another pretty much from the very beginning:

• Players who'd been around for a long time had amassed billions of inf before IOs existed because there wasn't anything to spend it on once you hit level 50.
• No one had any idea what anything was worth when Issue 9 launched so prices were just kind of arbitrary at first until people figured things out.
• Hero and villain markets were initially separate, which meant villains had a much smaller supply to compete for, and items that were trash drops blueside (hello, pet sets) were incredibly expensive redside.
• There was initially no way of getting certain recipes other than completing task forces or trials, unless you bought them from someone else who had.
• On live, AE missions earned XP and inf but gave no salvage or recipe drops, so people were earning comparatively insane amounts of inf without getting drops, so those players used their buying power to buy out the supply from non-AE players, driving prices up further.
• PvP IOs only dropped from PvP defeats, and once people started farming them, the drop rate was lowered and a lockout period was added, sending prices for certain pieces through the roof (remember not being able to get the Gladiator's Armor +def unique on the AH because everyone sold it off-market for 3-4 billion inf? I do).
• There wasn't an alternate method to get purples or PvP IOs from sources other than the market or drops until relatively late in the game's life, and the going rate for these alternate methods, especially for purples, was prohibitively expensive and time-consuming - 20 alignment merits which meant it would take a minimum of 40 days per recipe.

Edited October 3, 2023 by macskull

[Clave Dark 5]

17 hours ago, macskull said:

•  and the going rate for these alternate methods, especially for purples, was prohibitively expensive and time-consuming - 20 alignment merits which meant it would take a minimum of 40 days per recipe.

I pretty much agree/remember all that previous stuff being an issue; I would suggest that knowing that was all there before the market came along, the old Devs still had plenty of time to make "needed" changes, but didn't - as the above quoted bit demonstrates.  The original devs didn't mean for us all to get tricked out super cheap and easily - they understood (and said IIRC) that it leads to people burning through the game faster and leaving sooner. 

 

Seriously, five years to fix it, but they were just working around the edges to make things slightly less impossible to achieve.  Now compare that to what HC's done since opening up just a few years ago; take Market Crash alone.

[macskull]

5 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Now compare that to what HC's done since opening up just a few years ago; take Market Crash alone.

Virtually none of the market/economy-related QoL stuff came from Homecoming. What we have now, including Market Crash, is a product of the 2013-2019 timeframe when most people thought the game didn't exist, and even during that time period those changes underwent significant tweaking. Market Crash was initially supposed to be a one-off event but over the course of time it evolved into its current form - and I seriously doubt Market Crash makes up a statistically significant amount of the purple recipe supply when you consider you have to be level 40 or higher and only get a purple on the first completion per character.

 

There are other things that existed at one point post-shutdown but that were removed before Homecoming was even a thought in someone's mind - ATOs and Super Packs dropping from mobs was a thing for a while, so was Empyrean merits for every veteran level. There are also features that exist on other I27-based servers but Homecoming chooses not to implement, like forum-claimed coupons which give you enhancements ingame.

[Unclemarty]

The game is definitely not balanced around IOs but I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm sure there are large swaths of the playerbase that do not engage with the IO system at all. They either slot what drops from mobs or maybe go on a shopping spree and buy some SO from a vendor. And that's fine. The IO system is very convoluted so it makes sense why someone who plays casually would not want to engage with it. 

 

But, as many others have pointed out, now we have a situation where characters who are well built with IOs can stomp through 4x8 content no problem solo. This isn't necessarily a problem either, but it creates a dynamic of "speedy" gameplay that makes teamwork less important. On your tricked out IO character when was the last time you had to pull enemies a few at a time instead of just jumping in and blowing things up?

 

I don't think reducing the availability of IOs is the answer though. It would just widen the gap between players that have billions of inf and players that are just starting out and learning the IO system. People want to play with their fancy builds but they want a challenge. 

 

I think the best solution is to continue developing and proliferating additional challenging content to meet the power of IO builds. Hard mode ITF and Aeon are a step in the right direction. I'd love to see similar hard mode settings proliferated to other TF too. 

 

But more importantly I think making a reward structure for challenging content at lower levels is important too. We know players can easily solo 4x8 at level 50, but can they do the same at 40, 30, or even 20? What if there was a special challenge flashback that granted special rewards for completing hard content at lower levels? For example a lvl 50 team could flashback and do a lvl 30 mission series with 1* hard mode rules applied (or maybe some other challenge setting). The rewards for completing this could be additional merits, incarnate salvage, chance for rare recipe, badges, etc...