Invention Origin enhancements: The mandatory option.

You ever found a really sweet free to play game online? Maybe it was a simple 2D flash game, or a really badass 3D freeshare FPS, but either way, it was way more fun than it should have been.

So you play this really sweet, free-to-play game for a few weeks, at which point you find out, "Hey, there is a whole 'nother level here I've yet to touch!" But then you find out that level comes with a $15 price tag to it, or that you can buy in game money (which takes forever to earn), or that in order to access a certain realm, where all the good items are, you need to purchase a subscription?

Yeah, IOs are like that.

They don't cost money (real money, at least), but the principle is the same. You don't NEED them to play. Quite the contrary; most players have been dominating in City of Heroes/Villains for years without them. However, the gulf of power between a Hero without IOs and a Hero with them is staggering. Furthermore, you can see exactly which bonuses a player possesses by looking at their powers tab. If you click on a Scrapper and find out he has 3 Ultimate Recharge Bonuses, you know that this Scrapper is filthy rich, as he probably has billions of influence worth of IOs slotted into his powers (::cough::Karou Non' Drak::cough::). Using this, people are able to pick characters which are seemingly more powerful, or at least wealthy, based on how many IO bonuses they have (Within SGs, this practice is nearly unheard of. In PUGs, in can be, at times, rampant.).

Now, I have no problem with IOs. They add a new level of depth to the game, and allow a person to make their unique Hero (or Villain) even more unique. However, I think it's a tad misleading to say that IOs are completely optional. By that same logic, all gear is completely optional. You don't need it, it just helps.

And I think we can all disagree with that (barring Vow of Poverty).