Empowerment buffs to last 8 hours

[shortguy on indom]

31 minutes ago, arcane said:

Because some of the buffs aren’t negligible at all.

That is not the point which CD5 is rebutting.... 

 

 

[shortguy on indom]

18 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

And I again I ask: just how hard is it to go drop by your base to pay for it with trash-level salvage?  It's not.  At all.

This is the point which is being rebutted, and the view which I agree with.

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, Greycat said:

One, not everyone runs max team, max level (and/or exemped.)

The not exemp'ed I will concede. The rest I find not relevant because most of the time, I don't either and it takes me only about an hour to run any TF/SF I'm on either solo or on a small team. And we aren't speed running them either.

 

1 hour ago, Greycat said:

Two, the buffs start when you get them, and can expire partway through. If you're a low-to-midbie running stuff, don't have all the fancy (say) END boosting IOs but are at a point where powers are being used enough to make that an actual consideration, being able to stack them and *keep* them just because you joined a TF that was forming right now would be nice... instead of having to check their duration (if you remember) and/or hold up the team while you run back to base. (And if you're in something that's a *bad idea* to leave partway through - such as getting into an MSR, where the zone can be filled and you *can't* get back in, well...)

I haven't met a TF leader yet that when asked for a few minutes after getting invited didn't allow the player(s) a couple minutes to do what they needed to do before launching the TF/SF. And as far as MSRs are concerned? On the ones I've been on, there were so many buffers pumping up everyone that I doubt a lowbie, midbie, or anyone else would even notice that their empowerment station buffs wore off during the fighting.

 

Edit: I would like to also point out that I am fine with the craft a usable power but can only have 1 in inventory at a time, and only 1 in effect at a time, proposal from @Luminara. That would address the concerns provided in this thread while still limiting the stacking ability of the buffs like some of the rest of us would like to maintain. (Though I would still want the buff itself to be cancel-able by the player.)

 

Edited April 10 by Rudra
Edited to add missing "few". And again to remove extraneous data point.

[Captain Fabulous]

This is why we can't have nice things. 🙄

 

/powercreep

[arcane]

Honestly the recovery and resistance ones are nice but I bet I’d have no objections if it weren’t for +20% recharge. Having that for 8 hours at a time AND basically for free unlike Amplifiers… seems like too much.

[Rudra]

Then how is this? The time gets reduced to 1 hour duration, but you can stack up to 8 hours. Each hour after the 1st you craft uses twice as many components as the previous hour, with the second hour also having a 100K crafting cost. So it would go as follows:

 

1st hour: Normal crafting as is except for reduced duration.

2nd hour: Requires twice as many resources plus 10K inf' (except for recharge speed which costs 50k inf').

3rd hour: Requires twice as much as previous. (So components are quadrupled cost of normal and costs 20K inf' except for recharge speed which costs 100K inf'.)

4th hour: Requires twice as much as previous.

5th hour: Requires twice as much as previous.

6th hour: Requires twice as much as previous.

7th hour: Requires twice as much as previous.

8th hour: Requires twice as much as previous for crafting cost of 128 of each component and 6.4M inf' except for the recharge which costs 32M inf'.

     Total resources for all hours combined: 255 of each salvage and 1,270,000 inf' except for recharge which is 6,350,000 inf'.

 

Edit yet again: (To move previous edit up here.)

1st hour: Normal crafting but is reduced to 1 hour duration.

2nd hour: Adds 20k inf' cost except for recharge which is 312.5k inf'.

3rd-8th hours: Doubles inf' costs of previous hour.

     Total resources for all 8 hours combined: 8 of each salvage and 2,540,000 inf' except for recharge at 20,000,000 inf'.

 

So what happens if you craft 8 hours of buff, play for roughly 3 hours, and go to renew your buff? Well, if you have anywhere from 4 hours and 1 minute of time left to 5 hours of time left, then you are crafting your 6th, 7th, and 8th hour buffs again. If you have 5 hours and 1 minute of time left up to 6 hours of time left, then you are crafting your 7th and 8th hour buffs. What if you played for less than an hour and still have more than 7 hours of buff left? Then you can top off at the cost of the 8th hour buff.

 

Personally, I think @Luminara has the best means of answering this suggestion to meet the requirements of those that want the stackable effect and those that think just going back to your base as needed to refresh isn't a problem. When you craft a buff, you get a temp power that you have to click to apply. This means you can save it for whenever you want. If you choose to use it immediately? Then you can craft another temp power that cannot be used until the previous active effect wears off or you cancel it. With that, there is no need to worry about your buffs wearing off while waiting for a TF, SF, raid, or trial to launch. You just don't click it until it is time to go. And if you click it and craft another, then you're carrying around 3 hours of buff. More than long enough for anything in the game.

 

Edited April 10 by Rudra
Edited to correct 3rd hour inf' costs. Edited again to bring alternate proposal costs for recharge in line with buying 8 hours of amplifiers.

[Luminara]

2 minutes ago, Rudra said:

crafting cost of 128 of each component

 

Salvage caps at 200.  This would add up to 256-384.  Won't work.

[Rudra]

1 minute ago, Luminara said:

 

Salvage caps at 200.  This would add up to 256-384.  Won't work.

Yeah, I thought you could use salvage racks to make it work, then realized even they wouldn't. I've already edited the post.

[ScarySai]

4 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Not every desirable change is powercreep.

People hear a term on extra credits and proceed to use it incorrectly eons later.

[PeregrineFalcon]

1 hour ago, Rudra said:

Then how is this?

What? No!

 

Look, the good thing about the base temp powers is that they don't cost a zillion Influence. Believe it or not, not everyone has 8 billion Inf socked away in emails. All your suggestion does is take the base temp powers out of reach of new players while not giving them a significant cost for the zillionaires of Paragon.

 

Suggestion: "Hey everyone, let's allow the base temp powers to stack duration so that people won't have to keep running back the base all of the time?"

Rudra: "I have a better idea! Let's jack the cost of the temp powers into the millions! Yeah. That'll keep the power creep at bay, right?"

 

Other people are trying to come up with ideas that reduce the non-fun portion of the temp power process, but your post reads like you're trying to actively punish the player base for remembering that base temp powers exist.

Edited April 10 by PeregrineFalcon
Added another thought.

[Rudra]

16 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

What? No!

 

Look, the good thing about the base temp powers is that they don't cost a zillion Influence. Believe it or not, not everyone has 8 billion Inf socked away in emails. All your suggestion does is take the base temp powers out of reach of new players while not giving them a significant cost for the zillionaires of Paragon.

 

Suggestion: "Hey everyone, let's allow the base temp powers to stack duration so that people won't have to keep running back the base all of the time?"

Rudra: "I have a better idea! Let's jack the cost of the temp powers into the millions! Yeah. That'll keep the power creep at bay, right?"

 

Other people are trying to come up with ideas that reduce the non-fun portion of the temp power process, but your post reads like you're trying to actively punish the player base for remembering that base temp powers exist.

One of the complaints about the OP was that there is no mentionable cost to base empowerment station buffs. The reference are the amplifiers players can get from START. (Edit: And that reference was used by @Laucianna as justification as well. So using Start as a reference for pricing seems fair to me.) My proposed costs are for a level 50. So just have the costs scale down like they do for the amplifiers from START. So the base cost for level 1s would be 8 inf' for the 2nd hour progressing up to 512 inf' for all but the recharge ones, while the recharge ones would start at 125 inf at level 1 progressing up to 8,000 inf' for 8 hours of recharge.

 

For those saying that there should be a cost, I think that is fair. I personally think players are fine with 90 minutes per buff and dipping back into their base to refresh. Or go with @Luminara's suggestion. The costs stay as is, nothing added, but you can carry 1 charge of each buff around with you until you click it. You can stack 3 hours that way or just use the buff when it is time.

 

Believe it or not, that was an attempt to find a middle ground. Not as elegant a solution as @Luminara's, but a middle ground nonetheless.

 

(Edit: And the 1st hour is still free of inf' costs.)

 

Edited April 11 by Rudra

[skoryy]

23 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

A majority of players have probably gotten their new toons to T4 by the end of 8 hours though. 

 

See, its stuff like this that I can't take the talk of 'powercreep' around here all that seriously.

 

I mean, if you want to balance this around the START buffs, that's a good idea.  Throw in a couple orange salvage items in the recipe, boom, now you're talking real inf.  There, now you can make it stackable.

[lemming]

Right now, you can do these with going to the base every 90 minutes and the proposal wasn't even asking for more power, it's asking for less tedium.

[ScarySai]

24 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

How many M&Ms do you think you need to be happy?  Where and how do you draw that line?

How many do I need for you to stop posting?

[Videra]

35 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

How many M&Ms do you think you need to be happy?  Where and how do you draw that line?

 

I am completely neutral on the initial proposal. However, everything you've posted has been brainlessly contrarian - most people don't even know that the empowerment station exists. The impact it would have is null save that I might pick up some recovery and RCH from time to time.

Hell, like other temporary powers they even turn off during content that disables temps. What's the harm? You've said it yourself, game's already easy.

[Rudra]

17 minutes ago, Videra said:

What's the harm? You've said it yourself, game's already easy.

When the argument is to not make the game any easier, that is not a solid rebuttal.

[Videra]

7 minutes ago, Rudra said:

When the argument is to not make the game any easier, that is not a solid rebuttal.

 

Explain how eliminating tedium makes the game easier.

Edit: Very few people on this forum respond in good faith, so I will clarify, how does eliminating this minor bit of tedium related to The Empowerment Station temporary powers make the game easier? It does not affect important content, the majority of the player-base is unaware of its existence, and amplifiers from P2W are cheap as well.

Edited April 11 by Videra

[macskull]

+1 to the OP. Zero reason base buffs shouldn't be stackable when P2W buffs already are.

[Rudra]

20 minutes ago, Videra said:

21 minutes ago, Rudra said:

When the argument is to not make the game any easier, that is not a solid rebuttal.

 

Explain how eliminating tedium makes the game easier.

When getting buffs is essentially free, only costing 1 to 3 common salvage, having a limitation on length of availability becomes its cost. The cheapest temp power from START is 5,000 inf. Buying 3 common salvage from the AH can be 15 inf' for all 3. And those temp powers from START come with their own limitations, in the number of charges they give. And to the best of my knowledge, you can't buy more than 1 of each temp power at a time. (I may be wrong, I don't buy temp powers.)

 

START's amplifiers have been used as a reference/justification for empowerment station buffs to stack up to 8 hours. However, at level 50, those are 2,500,000 inf' per hour of use. (At level 1, that is still 1,000 inf' per hour of use.) @Clave Dark 5, to the best of my ability to interpret forum posts, wants equilibrium. Right now, empowerment station buffs are basically free with the caveat you can only have 1 of any given buff at a time and it is limited to 90 minutes duration. And asking for that duration limit to be removed without something to apply a cost to compensate for it, means that players can always have those empowerment station buffs on their characters for a pittance in procuring common salvage. (Edit again: At least right now, they have to spend the time returning to a SG base to craft a new buff. That time is also the buff's cost.)

 

I'm for players using the empowerment stations. Too many forget they even exist and what they do. They are there to provide buffs for our characters, so use them. However, they should either retain their 90 minute non-stacking limit, or they should have another cost applied so players and their characters aren't always running around with free buffs. (Edit: Or the craft clickable to activate power version works for me too. You can still get 3 hours of use that way, so those calling for stacking should still be happy.)

 

Edited April 11 by Rudra
Edited to add "also".

[Laucianna]

3 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

You bloody well have loads of nice things already, the list would stagger a player coming in cold from Live.  How many more nice things do you need?

 

That doesn't mean we can not suggest new improvements that help with the QOL of the game, this is a small change that will help bring attention to an almost forgotten feature in the game ❤️

[Luminara]

3 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Go look around the forums for those threads like "where can I farm merits the fastest" and "which solo toons can clear farm maps fastest?"  Go check chat in-game for a bit and see how many speedruns you can count up.  Seems to me like lots of players here find time to be very very important.

 

That's as much the fault of the game as it is the players.  Most buffs have very short durations, encouraging players to move as fast as possible if they want to accomplish something before the buffs expire.  Merit rewards are set according to an average of measured completion times, and merit prices high enough to ensure that players can't purchase things quickly without also rushing through content quickly.  Leveling requirements steadily increase as levels are accumulated, driving players to speed up if they want to maintain a consistent leveling pace.

 

The game tells players to move their asses.  Get moving before that 120s buff expires, go faster if you want to buy <cool thing> in less than a week, hurry up if you want that next level.  Don't dawdle, run.  High speed, gotta beat feet, gogogo.  Time's a-wastin', slowpoke, so book it.  Tick... tock... tick... tock...

 

Credit where credit is due, but also blame where blame is appropriate.  As long as the game treats everything like a race, people are going to look for ways to go faster.

 

And regarding the potential for power creep in this suggestion, there isn't any.  There's no change to the availability of the buffs, because bases are free for everyone.  Nor is there any change to the accessibility of the buffs, because LRTP allows anyone to teleport to a base instantly.  And the strengths of the buffs is unaltered in the suggestion.  The durations of the buffs are already long, and if we equate "have to go back to the base and refresh" to recharge time, shaving a few seconds off of a 90m recharge doesn't even approach power creep.

[Snakebit]

I want this. 

 

Suggestion:

 

An 8-hour version that costs rare salvage instead of being able to buy it at common salvage 8 times. 

[Ukase]

On 4/9/2024 at 7:33 PM, Clave Dark 5 said:

A majority of players have probably gotten their new toons to T4 by the end of 8 hours though. 

 

These players are very likely in the minority, not the majority. 

The idea is a good one, on the surface. But let's say they are stackable, as suggested. 

The grant invis gives only 25 feet of invis. With SS, that would give 60 feet of invis, as it stacks. 
How would this impact other facets of the game? Eh...there are some that would likely forgo a celerity in lieu of one of these buffs. But I suspect those are just a few. It would probably take a year for it to become standard practice, if it ever did. People are lazy. There's a fair number of folks who have zero desire to make their own sg base for any purpose, let alone make use of a temporary buff ( that might as well be permanent, because for 8 hours, this is an easy time investment to make) 

The hitch is how these buffs are handled in advanced mode tfs - and they do work in the 1* - not sure about the 4* cuz I haven't been that crazy yet. 

So, in a nutshell, while I like the convenience of letting them stack, I am not smart enough to know how clever some folks are when it comes to squeezing out all the juice for more power. But, whatever that would be, they can do it now, but just for an hour, instead of 8. Ultimately, it's not that big of a deal, I don't think. But, what the heck do I know? 

I like it. And if some folks don't like it, I have to wonder why not? If they think it makes the game too easy, they certainly don't have to use them. 

But an option that might go over well is use it as an inf sink, which the game needs more of. The more hours you stack, the greater the cost. 
First hour is free. After that, a rising inf cost. 
100k, 2nd hour
200k 3rd hour
400k 4th hour

800k 5th hour
1.6M 6th hour
3.2M 7th hour
6.4M 8th hour. 

It certainly doesn't have to be doubled each additional hour, nor does it have to start at 100k. That's just an example of how to make an inf sink out of it. 

[Ukase]

7 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Seems to me like lots of players here find time to be very very important.

My father used to say, "Time is the most valuable resource. I can accumulate money. I cannot accumulate time. So, that's why I tell you to move with a purpose, so you don't waste it." 

Should we be surprised that people want to go fast? Some folks look at speed runs like they defeat the purpose of the game. They do not. 

There's a chap on the internet somewhere who said something that resonated with me. I'll paraphrase. 

You can make a good decision for yourself today. But will it be a good decision tomorrow? Next week, next year? And will that decision be good for your family today? Will it be good for them next year? 5 years from now? And what about your community? Will it be a good decision for your community today? next week? Next year? 


Most of the choices/decisions we make, we're too shortsighted to see far enough into the future to know how they'll impact us. 

Our characters...if this 8 separate stacks of 1 hour buffs were implemented, I might take less damage, get mezzed less, and attack with greater frequency. But - I might up the difficulty a notch to keep things more interesting. And I might make a little more influence, great. 

How does that impact anyone else, other than removing salvage from the game? Nobody would stop you from using them. Nobody would force you to use them. 
There's tons of common and uncommon salvage put on the ah. And there's a max price to pay, too. And, if salvage costs were to go up, that would actually be a good thing, because of the influence taken out of the game by AH fees. Granted, nobody likes to pay 500 for a common salvage, and for some reason, paying more than 2k for uncommon has me break out brain storm ideas and use those at a loss just so I don't have to pay more. It certainly isn't rational, but I do it. 

So, yeah, from this player's perspective, as a stackable 1 hour buff for 8 hours, I see no real problem with it. If every other player had all of those buffs but me, I'd still be able to play the game the way I typically play it. It wouldn't impact me at all as far as I can tell. 

[PeregrineFalcon]

2 hours ago, arcane said:

After watching entitled players bully others over this suggestion, I’m changing my vote to a hard no.

People disagreeing with you IS NOT BULLYING. And people aren't automagically "entitled" simply because they disagree with you.

 

I love how you all speed-hammer the report button whenever anything I post is even slightly confrontational and then you'll turn around and just insult a large swath of people like this.