Chase_Arcanum

Agreed.

I had a great many of my builds as non-stamina. They worked well- particularly when teamed. Heroside, odds are pretty good that a team will have a defender or controller that has a group endurance buff. When thats' the case, endurance is rarely, if ever, an issue.

And then there's good IO speccing- full IO sets give substantial endurance discounts... and when you consider what a 60% endurance discount on a single solid-attack-chain power saves over the course of a minute, then look at what stamina recovers in that minute, the performance improvement is clear. When it's absolutely necessary, I pop a blue skittle.

I also have specced many stamina-based builds. Got nothing against them, and when I add pool toggles to my builds, it really does help with the drain.

Huh? WHA?

Ok, I'll assume you solo. I duo'ed, and I play intermittently so my mileage may vary. I did absolutely NO street hunting, NO sidekicking, and did ONE of the 4 major paths (Power, Responsibility, Warden, and Crusader)... and still got to level 20 before completing them. Others in beta claimed they needed to do two lines to make it the whole way. I'm assuming that was soloing and sticking to the strict story path with less distraction. So that's 2-4 unique story arcs from 1-50, depending on how much you mix in a little street fighting / do the occasional teammate's mission / earn patrol xp.


You might be right that it was closer to 150. I was going from memory and think I miscounted the level ranges in haste-- there was a thread-- there were something akin to 10-15 unique tip missions per level range per alignment. Yes, there are variations for all the major alignments. Yes, if you do more than one side switch within the same level range, you'll see the same content.

Then again, if you opt to run a second Villain through St. Martial, you'll get the same missions too. Doesn't change the fact that this expansion had ALL NEW level 1-20 content for multiple paths PLUS added a mix of 200 additional missions with complex mechanics.

Your first post ignored all the TIPS missions entirely, and grossly underestimated the Praetorian content, speaking like there wasn't much more than a single path through it. That's normal- many people tend to speak of GR content as if it's just Praetoria. They crammed a bunch more into it that's missed.

Disappointment is understandable. I was very surprised there weren't some sort of zone event for at least two of the Praetorian zones, like we see in all the other non-starter zones.

I temper those feelings by looking at precisely WHAT was accomplished since that announcement. They also released three issues containing several strike / task forces, a few missions, the resource-intensive Powerset customization, powerset proliferation, ultra mode, etc. Many of these were very time-intensive code-heavy changes that carried a lot of risk and effort... and many of them legitimately could have been held off to beef up the expansion even more.

I also managed expectations by looking at what's normally made available in other game expansions, and what we got was VERY far from anemic in comparison. As pretty as it is, AoC's Godslayer doesn't have nearly the depth of content, none of EQ2's recent expansions come close, LOTRO... richly done, but little in between. In comparison, if GR had provided more than what they did, I'd have been amazed.

And as others have mentioned, CoV was released and marketed as a separate game as much as expansion-- the expansalone. GR was released, marketed, and priced for expansions.


From the looks of Incarnate leaks, I19's your baby, and you ARE well due some of that attention, don't take my arguments here as meaning that you aren't. For me- here since right after the purple patch, but with only 4 level 50's, dozens of lower-levels, and never-run-a-task-force... yeah, probably not for me. That's fine. I'll still be churning through the GR content I haven't covered yet.

... but, then again, if you ever DO want to break in a task force virgin... and I can get enough free time in one evening to do it, I've been itching to try one.

5 stars.

1) The 10 levels AFTER the last expansion (CoV) was in the issue immediately after it- Issue 7. Tuesday June 6th... 222 days AFTER CoV. This is also the longest delay between issues until I17, which was 225. Calling it "around that release" is a bit off.

2) Of the new archetypes that they had, count how many were near-direct-ports of the powerset equivalent heroside and the magnitude of the difference is much less... particularly when you look at the ones that needed wholly new animations.

3) The Praetorian content easily gives you multiple alternative paths of advancement, allowing for additional replayability. The CoV low-level-content began with just 1 path through Mercy with barely enough content in Port Oakes & Cap Au Diable to support two alternate paths as you proceed... if that. The rest fleshed out in future issues.

4) Along with the Praetoria content, there are over 200+ tips/morality missions added to the game, last I checked. Many of these have levels of complexity and depth that makes them far from being the equivalent of newspaper/police scanner material.

Not saying you're not entitled to your opinion... or that all this I hilighted makes it equal, but... it seems like much of that opinion could be better formed if its applied against actual facts.

EDIT 5) "It seems that they paid WAY more attention to bringing new players on then keeping the existing ones happy." You're assuming that YOUR interests are the norm among "existing players." The devs have access to the datamining. They see where most existing player activities lay, and they even noted that a large portion of characters stop leveling well before 40 (before 30, IIRC) for the players to create another one. They focused on Praetoria levels 1-20 for both the new players and that large portion of the playerbase that would appreciate it. They also planned on the Incarnate system for a boost to the higher-level play, indicating that they're not ignoring those other players... just placing priorities where they needed to be.

Yeah, I thought I'd stumble across a few more grayer areas in the warden arc-- particularly after encountering Belladonna in one: perhaps needing to turn a blind eye to more aggressive Crusader work rather than bring it to light.... but haven't really encountered anything as sharp as the Responsibility arc.


OR I expected a hero to find himself a loyalist-responsibility that shifts to warden-crusader only to find the best choice switches him back to loyalist next time-- a "must carve your own path and be loyal to yourself ideal." Haven't gotten far enough to test that theory, but from what I've heard, once you go Warden, they don't give you much reason to betray.

'Ello from a fellow Pennsylvanian. Good to have ya back

The fallacy with that argument is that Demon Summoning and Dual Pistols was available only to the Going Rogue prepurchasers. In essence, you've been playing and appreciating part of Going Rogue long before the expansion was released. It's still part of GR and still part of the GR experience... so guess there's something else to do...

...along with 2 new powersets that weren't made available beforehand, if you want to try the new content out.

--

The reality is that, as the devs have noted before, many longtime subscribers don't play their characters all the way to 50. They have the access to the datamining to see what the majority of their players are doing and what they'd probably get the MOST value out of in the expansion.

The OP's not in that demographic. Others won't be either. They weren't entirely ignored (CoP), but they weren't lavishly catered to either.

Improvise. This is liquidX. Add a puddle on the ground in the shape of a cross.

ditto

Yeah, growing up around PA, the worst you could encounter while out tick-tacking houses was possibly someone shooting rocksalt at ya... and even that was excessive (and painful).

Doing the same thing in Texas... well... it's amazing anyone makes it through their rebellious teen years in one piece in that state.

From a thematic point of view, I do like the feel of chasing down that last damn assailant as he tries to escape justice. When I'm bored and by myself, it can be a fun diversion.

Heck, I'd even imagined a kind of zone "pursuit" minigame where a bunch of foes scramble trying to escape you. ( They're invulnerable to most attacks / mezzes, except at certain points along the path where they pause and attack back. Your goal would be to pursue him long enough and "tag" them with an attack during the vulnerable moments, eventually leading to their capture. It might take 3-5 "vulnerable points" to eventually capture the guy, and your team would be rated based on their success rate at tracking them down. )

BUT... when on a team... when our goal is to continue down the mission map and complete it... the runaways become an annoying distraction, not an element of fun

he could probably be tried in absentia if he refused to show.

Not sure where you're at, but in the US, this is handled by STATE law, and it differs significantly:

In Pennsylvania, for example, you can never use LETHAL force to defend PROPERTY (under the idea that property can be replaced, lives cannot). You must attempt flight first. If at any point you reasonably believe that you, yourself are in danger of anything that justifies lethal force in self defense (kidnapping, murder, ****, serious bodily injury) you're free to use lethal force in self defense. If you have kids in the home and are afraid that THEY might be similarly at risk or be unable to flee, the same goes.

Compare that to Texas where homeowners are able to justify lethal force against property damage. One very public case had a man justified in shooting teens that were "decorating" his house with rolls of toilet paper.

-------

You also bring up a commonly used outrageous suit of a burglar suing a homeowner for his injuries. This is a little murkier, but I've seen the trend before, and it gets a little messier as things go on. The classic citation is the "Bodine" lawsuit where a teen vandal steals a floodlight off the school roof, and then fell through the gym skylight, resulting in becoming a spastic quadriplegic. Bodine sued the school, asking for 8 million, then settled for a lesser payout.

I can speak better from my experience, though: knew a kid about a decade ago that was sleeping in the back of his dad's pickup (legal at the time) as his dad drove back home from hunting camp- drunk. Dad went down a winding, narrow, one-way street the wrong way, and all the reflective street signs warning of the sharp turn ahead were, obviously, not pointing in the direction that CARS WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO GO.

Dad missed the curve, car wrecked, kid went flying. Broke his back. Dad's dead. Kid's in a chair for life. As a normal part of the process of getting any insurance payout, he signed an agreement to let them pursue any other responsible parties on his behalf. He didn't even KNOW that he was suing the PA Department of Transportation or the property owner of the tree he broke his back against until it broke the news. He had to testify to continue getting the insurance payments that were keeping his medical bills paid, and he was shocked to get a settlement offer right after he gave testimony in front of a jury.

Don't recall the payout, but essentially the whole ordeal was the insurance company responsible for paying out his claim trying to get other parties' insurers to share some of the cost or risk the sympathies of a 12-man jury toward a kid who's facing a lifetime of medical bills.

People are VERY generous to sympathetic characters like that... particularly when they're juries giving away someone ELSE's money.

wow. that's a lot less than I'd expect.... or a lot of us are on hide.. but damn..

* Assault, aggravated assault The use of force against another is only justified in certain cases of self defense or defense of another who would have had the right to defend himself. (If someone started a fight, and you thought THEY were being the attacked, so you jumped in to defend them, THAT person didn't have the right to defense, so you could find yourself charged)

Even then, "self defense" is an active justification. You have to PROVE it in court.... so if the scene is so confusing that it can't be said who attacked who, you're not able to prove the self defense. Many of batman's incidents apply.

Attempted Murder Little bit of self defense info here for people. In may/most states, the use of lethal force in self defense is EXTREMELY limited. You have to yourself be threatened by murder, kidnapping, etc to make it justified.

This is made more challenging by the fact that "lethal force" can be broadly defined. In several states around the mid-atlantic region (where I'm at) using a MAGLIGHT (not mini-- the bigger one) to hit a person above the shoulders- that's lethal force. (Generally, using any "levering" item against a person above the shoulders is considered "lethal force). That ruling came about when a security guard, jumped by an unarmed opponent, struck the guy in the head. He unnecessarily "escalated" the fight to lethal force, so he lost his "right" to self defense and was charged and convicted for manslaughter.

For Batman, any such use of a lethal weapon against a person that didn't warrant lethal force WOULD be considered premeditated, so higher charges like attempted murder would stick.

And yes, in many/most jurisdictions, solid-core (non-nerf) boomerangs are considered lethal weapons.... a batarang that has enough force to embed itself into a wall certainly would.

Reckless endangerment of a minor Recklessness is defined by how the actions appear to the general public, not a character's demeanor. Willingly allowing a minor to become involved in acts of questionable legality AND high likelihood of injury certainly qualifies. Negligence would be even easier to prove.

Exactly.

I'd love to see our sub numbers stay up, but even if there's only a surge-and-drop effect, if the surge is big enough to cover the expansion's development costs, that's still enough to justify additional expansions & sustaining the game between those bursts.

Let's not bank on that- be friendly, be sociable, be helpful...

...and for God's sake, Rian_Frostdrake, please don't scare them with Oddity McHuggens.

...for that matter, anyone seen Troy Hickman's "Disturbing Grandma" lately?

Well, going by the load they tested around the CoV release, the servers handled over 10,000 concurrent connections when they released the hard limit to stress the servers. After that, things got wonky.


IIRC, someone once did a rough metric back then. You needed something like 4,000 concurrent users to yellowline a server and 6,000+ to redline it. As a point of reference, WoW's servers from about that same time were independently verified to start queuing players at 2,500 concurrent connections. So, at the point a WoW server would have been too full to let anyone in, our servers would have still been showing "green."

Now, they may have pared back resources as demand shifted... but I doubt it.

Quite the opposite.

Back when the devs were leading up to the release of Architect, they stated specifically that AE began as an effort to expand on the internal development tools to make them more robust for their own use, so they could have a broader set of people work within the tools. See Joe Morrissey's Interview.

I'll quote it for you:
Where it diverged and by how much is open to question, but it was noted in the I14 beta that the I13 missions had actually been made IN Architect itself as a kind of alpha testing. Can't find the link, but I'll try to dig it up.

So, we can assume that there was a good deal of overlap.

As for the support issues-- "Support" is an entirely different skillset than development, but generally Castle's right- user-generated content (or user interaction like PvP) generally dominates support issues... well, after gold farming.

Got a friend on facebook that was /friended by his immediate supervisor AND the owner of the company. He didn't dare refuse the friending, but was paranoid that they were going to use it to monitor his online activity during work hours.

Then he started getting flooded with the farmville requests / gifts.
From them.
During work hours.

You're probably a bit mistaken in that opinion, though.

A great deal of the back-end that went into creating Mission Architect was an effort to improve the development tools the DEVS use to create things like the tips missions. Yes, they had to further idiot-proof them & then put out a lot of exploit-prevention patches, but the bulk of what makes architect ARCHITECT was also required to allow the devs to easily create new content like the tips and story arcs. When you think of what resources they "poured into" it, you have to look at what's needed JUST for the players, and not stuff that improves developer productivity.

As for "who uses AE now?" well, the devs stated they didn't want AE to be the ONLY way, but it should have some purpose. It gives a creative outlet to a certain niche, some new material to read for those interested in not repeating the same content, and an alternate reward system that, while no longer the be-all-end-all of reward systems, still has some good things going for it for people that know where to look. The ability to select your reward from the tokens given can be very helpful when the market monopolists have cornered the remaining uncommon you need.

But really, people severely underestimate the amount of time it takes for OFFICIAL content to be made. Take ALL the time that the devs have spent on producing the player side ofvArchitect and apply it to content creation? Ignore that it's an entirely different skill set and just go by sheer man-hours involved. You MIGHT have freed enough manpower to create something on the scale of Croatoa... maybe. Sounds like a lot, but some people devour content so fast that they "beat" croatoa in one good weekend and don't look back.

Given the choice of OFFICIAL content of that scale, or several thousand times that in unofficial content... with the potential of fresh stuff being constantly added to it.... even if it's just appealing to a segment of the player base... that's still a pretty smart investment.

Furthermore, while the number of creative people that enjoy making things in Architect may seem small, these types often fill "thought leader" roles in their various communities. They're GMs for the pen-n-paper games, the storytellers. They often hold positions of influence in guilds... if not leading them. They're more likely to be fansite organizers and actively advocate the game. They're the people that offers suggestions on what to do when others just passively complain that they're bored.

That's a small but very valuable niche group to have in your corner, since they've got a better-than-normal likelihood of encouraging others to try/stay with the game.

Ditto.

Oddly, last night I had some inconsistent hits where I DID seem to hit the store after logging in. Now, I can't reproduce it.

Hmm... I'm also getting a lot of "that account is already logged in" messages, even after long waits. Wonder if something's latching onto the existing login state and not freeing it or its connections....

Not entirely disagreeing with you, but as a software developer and system integrator, I know some of the limits these guys are working under. You can't just swap out or upgrade a live system without substantial preparation, so you have to weigh THOSE costs against the potential losses in revenue from a less robust system.

Personally, looking at their store... is that written in perl? I hope their webserver has some sort of backend connection, because I can just see how a perl-based web api would have issues scaling with these kinds of loads.

The difference is that costume packs work on a hidden badge system. You buy the pack, a hidden badge is applied to your characters, and that tracks what you've got access to. It's an account-wide badge, like Veteran powers, so it applies to new characters as well.

Slots, on the other hand, are managed before you load into the game... before badges come into play, so I wouldn't be TOO surprised that the "costume tech" can't be applied directly.


Someone probably was a little squeamish with tampering with something as critical as the account management server tech, so instead applied this to the store db. Maybe it was more malleable-- MMO's use a lot of 3rd party middleware: some permit modification, some don't (if you want additional support)... and it could be a matter of finding exactly WHERE to shoehorn the info.