Atomic_Woman

I don't really think it's about the team composition, but about the individual characters/players themselves. I've done TFs on very lopsided teams and as long as the individual characters weren't built horribly (the mythical Emp Defender with all 4 travel powers, etc) they've always worked out in the end.

8 Tanks? May not be the fastest TF but boy howdy nobody is gonna die.
8 Controllers? You mean these guys aren't supposed to just stand there and die?
8 Defenders? Oh man I can't see anything past my buff display!

etc etc etc

Tongue in cheek counterpoint: HALO and Call of Duty are really popular but I get my butt handed to me regularly even by the AI. Doesn't stop them from being massively played though.

Honestly I still consider it like that. Then again I ignore a lot of the lore for various reasons anyway.

Heroes are crooked, Powers Division is helping villains...

Okay, let's revamp the entire system so that some things are 'bought' with Inf* and other stuff is bought with the new currency, Cash.

The Well thing happens to be an example where the game mechanics and in-universe lore regarding Inf* just happen to match up.

Are you trying to make me feel old?

Since the auction house is pretty much as meta-gamey as the enhancement system I don't see an issue here.

Didn't we have this 'discussion' earlier in the thread? In game mechanics terms, yes, it's 'money'. In-universe, though, it's a measure of how much 'pull' you have. Whether it's fame, notoriety, information on the skeletons in everyone's closets, whatever. In-universe it's not money, it's a measure of power (for various definitions of power).

Since I am apparently one of those filthy powergamers (I don't feel I am but I have been labeled as such) I did a LGTF earlier this morning in 39 minutes. That was me, another 'powergamer' friend, 2 people I didn't know who I guess also count as 'powergamers' and 4 people that basically rode our coattails since we were doing a speed run anyway. I'm not saying every TF team is like that, but if you see something like "Speed LGTF lf4m" and can't devote 30-40 minutes to getting a Notice, well... have fun farming for a hundred hours for one?

I remember when Rest was on a 10-minute timer...

An influential person can ask for stuff and just get it. If Superman shows up at the Governor's office and asks for something, chances are it'll just be given to him. But as he asks for more and more things, people start to think 'why am I doing all this for him instead of him going out and doing it?' When Superman has asked the Governor for 20 yachts, the governor is likely to start considering saying 'no' to the 21st.

e: Phrased better by Bosstone, above.

The people posting in this thread (heck, the people who use the forums at all) are not a representative sample of the entire playerbase. They never are, for any game.

Is there a field agent guy in Nova Praetoria? I think Geko has a point in that a more challenging game tends to retain more players on average, but we have the ability to adjust mob numbers and levels for a reason. If (general) you find Praetorian mobs more difficult than 'old-style' ones, why not set your missions to -1x1? That should help a bit.

And if there aren't any field agent NPCs in Praetoria (and probably specifically in Nova Praetoria) then there probably should be.

However, new players are not FORCED to play Stalkers as their first characters, and this ambush situation only applies to them (outside of reports of people getting 'triple ambushes' all at once, which I would consider/suspect to be bugs). If they choose any other AT then the fact that ambushes see through stealth is pretty much moot.

So it's an issue, but it's not as large as one as you may think.

I'm playing a Stalker through Praetoria now (my first Stalker, to boot). Without magic ambushes it would be trivial, since I just find the objective and stealth back out for most missions (granted, I'm trying to see as much of the Praetorian content as possible, so I'm deliberately not killing extra stuff).

I can certainly see the argument that ambushes should be targeted at your last known location, but if that were the case then my ONLY challenge in Praetoria as a Stalker would be "Oh no, can I handle a boss and 2 minions at the same time?"

It's not an easy choice to make. Either you give one AT what amounts to a free ride, or you unfairly handicap that AT in comparison to the rest in certain circumstances.

I don't consider the above post to be representative of any argument that's actually been put forward in this thread.

Dunno. It would make sense to have it set up that way, but according to Arcanaville it's not (currently). Who knows if that will change.

If it only cost 24 shards to convert to a Notice then I gaurantee you people are going to be doing that was well as the WTF, getting 2 shards per week. For high-activity players 24 shards is not a lot.

All of that is true, but when the same players consistently claim to be getting more shards than me, over a several-week period when we're both playing the same characters, it makes one think. Unless they're exaggerating/lying, I suppose, but I don't see why they would need/want to.

In any case I wasn't claiming it to be fact, anyway. Like I said, nothing empirical, just anecdotal.

I know a couple players with Elec/Shield brutes and they can really be AOE beasts. I can't comment on your build, obviously, but I would think you could manage more than a shard an hour. I can generally do better than that on my MA/Inv (who I solo on +0x8, although I could probably do +1x8 without much problem other than going slower), and she has basically no AOE capability.

That said, I have noticed that some characters seem to consistently get shards faster than others. I don't know if it's selection bias or a (reverse?) placebo effect on my part, but within the group of players that I team a lot with, there are a small handful who repeatedly will get 3, 4, 5 or more shards in the time it takes me to get 1 or 2. I have no empirical proof of this, but anecdotally it certainly seems repeatable.

Edit: As far as the whole balancing WTF vs conversion recipe thing goes, I think there's room to adjust the current conversion rate (although how you measure what an 'average' earning rate for shards would be is another matter) but I think that at a minimum it should take twice as long doing that than doing the WTFs. If it takes 4 weeks to get 4 Notices via the WTF (in order to craft a Very Rare), then it should take at least 8 weeks to craft 4 Notices via simply 'farming' shards.

IMO this disparity is needed for 2 reasons:

- The conversion recipe isn't supposed to be as fast as doing WTFs, by design
- It has to be slow enough that people who run a lot of TFs and can generate shards very quickly (or have hundreds saved up already) don't simply do the WTF and craft notices, getting around the WTF cooldown

You take that back!

I don't think anyone is saying that this conversion recipe isn't tedious. It's supposed to be tedious. Since they're, you know, trying to incentivize getting Notices by actually doing the WTF.

Exactly. So why is it an issue now, all of a sudden, while it hasn't been an issue for the last 6+ years?

You and me both, bud. There's no 'forced teaming' required anyway (once this conversion recipe goes live, that is) so maybe if I bash my head in too I'll be able to understand why 'forced teaming' is even an issue.

I'd agree that a lot of the Incarnate stuff isn't very 'solo friendly', but then again TFs have never been 'solo friendly' so I'm not sure why it would be an issue now but it never was in the past (at least, I never noticed it being one).

When you consider that any character over level 6 (if memory serves) is exempt from name purges, I suspect there are quite a lot of characters collecting dust and keeping names tied up.

Well, if you're limiting it to captains of the Enterprise then clearly the answer is Kirk.

If you're just talking about captains in general, though, then The Sisko is going to give him a run for his money...

/treknerd