Eva Destruction

My Task Force and mentoring badges say otherwise.

The "Work in Progress" flag was originally added to allow players to earn rewards while testing their unfinished arcs. Some players would never dream of publishing something they don't deem ready for public consumption *raises hand* but others obviously consider testing "a waste of time" considering all the Extreme/Extreme 1-54 custom critter arcs out there.

I agree, these arcs should not appear on the default search. Removing them from the search would also remove all arcs that were published in the initial post-release frenzy and never touched again, since everything was flagged "Work in Progress" by default when the flag was introduced and the author had to manually change the flag.

Incarnate shards already drop in Dev's Choice arcs when set to "normal rewards."

The search tool flags completed arcs by account, which isn't ideal if you have a lot of 50s. Also, some kind of reset would be needed, to not unduly punish people who have already completed a large number of Dev's Choice arcs.

I don't see this as a downside. Approving someone else's content is still easier and less time-consuming than creating your own.

If everybody felt the way you did there wouldn't have been a slew of "Lore pets suck" threads. From a pure performance standpoint, they don't. There wouldn't be complaints about the Incarnate storyline infringing on character concepts, because, oooh, shiny new powers. That there were shows that a large number of players don't play like you. All the character bios and sub-optimal power combos I see in game indicate that a large number of players don't play like you.

Your playstyle is perfectly valid, but it can very well exist alongside ours. In fact, nothing we do or that the devs add to help us do what we do infringes on your playstyle in any way. You can just ignore it like you ignore everything else "RP"-related. Other people though, who feel concept is important, won't play at all if they aren't allowed to realize their character concepts.

Yes please.

They'll screw it up.

The lab isn't too bad, but the warehouse has the same "whiteout" bug that some of the Cimeroran maps had when your graphics settings are low. It's also present in the new warehouse maps in regular missions. Apparently it contributes to lag.

Some people get lag in the warehouse, some don't. This one does seem to depend on your computer, although some people who complain about lag also claim to have relatively new machines. If your computer is awesome and optimized for gaming, I'm not surprised you don't have problems.

That's good to hear. Now can we get a fix for the Lambda warehouse? Especially for people running on low settings, who get to lag and go blind?

And if being a rogue doesn't fit your villain's concept? Then you're screwed aren't you, especially if everyone else is taking the path of least resistance and going blueside.

"Everybody else is doing it" is and always has been the stupidest reason to do anything, especially in your spare time, and especially if you don't enjoy what everybody else is doing.

Apparently so would a lot of other people. I like the treespec, so....shut up!

I did say "organize." In case it wasn't clear, I am willing to actually "get the ball rolling" as you said. I also belong to three TF/LFG channels, one of which is also a badge channel. This means hundreds of people are aware that I'm willing to get the ball rolling on a WST. If none of them want to do said WST, then there is nothing I can do to force them.

Turning your villains into Rogues doesn't make the blueside respec any less boring. I tried to form the treespec with a Vigilante, because the blueside respec is boring. Two hours later I got my Notice. If my playtime had been limited that night, I wouldn't have gotten one.

Really? Then why did it take me an hour to get a treespec going at 7 pm? Organizing a WST is pretty easy when a popular TF is WST. If you're trying to organize a redside WST, it's often not so easy.

Yeah, except for those people who don't play on Freedom or Virtue because THEY DON'T WANT TO PLAY ON FREEDOM OR VIRTUE.

It wouldn't help those people already on Freedom or Virtue who want to play there next double XP weekend either.

Nonsense. People leave in the middle of the trials all the time. Just pull the plug and everybody will think you crashed.

The thing was though, the accolades aren't your only means of progressing your character. You don't have to wait until 50 to earn TF Commander. You can run around racking up XP, and if there are other people interested in doing a Posi, you do a Posi. If there aren't you go back to getting XP, and keep progressing that way, while keeping yourself available if someone does want to do a Posi later. But if you're 50, have all the accolades and a complete IO build, the trails are the only way you can progress that character, which means if you don't have enough people online who also want to do trials your progress grinds to a halt. Time to log off. Which makes you unavailable if someone does decide to do a trial.

Yes, they encouraged mission running by buffing missions instead of discouraging street sweeping by nerfing street sweeping. You could still progress exactly as fast as you had before by street sweeping. And while, technically, you can progress slightly faster than you could before i20 by soloing, the previous progress rate was 0, and if people were happy with that they wouldn't have put "lack of endgame" as their reason for leaving on those oft-quoted exit surveys that every other forum poster's mutant exit-survery-seeing power allows them to see.

The trials take 30-40 minutes if you don't count the time spent forming them. On a less populated server during off-hours, that time can be significant.

Striga strikes me more as the sort of place that should have villain/rogue content alongside the heroic stuff. The contacts themselves generally have you doing good things, but Peebles and Long Jack at least are the kind of pragmatists who might tip off a Rogue, as long as you behaved yourself.
Until the mission where he has you send the Wailers to Paragon City, some Vigilante asks themselves WWPD (What Would Punisher Do?) and shoots him in the head.

Hardcase should totally give out missions to Vigilantes, so we can shoot him in the head.

I don't see it. In Crimson and Indigo's line of work, a wrong word in the wrong ear gets people killed. If you're for hire to them, you're also for hire to other, far less scrupulous people. Some of their missions could very well be repurposed as Vigilante content with only slight rewrites. The one where they have you sic the KoA and Carnies on each other and the one where you make a Malta agent look like a traitor are Vigilante missions already; you're killing the bad guys, you're just not the one pulling the trigger.

Ahhhh, that's why my arc is uneditable. It contains a custom Crey group. It still plays fine though, and the custom group is working fine and doesn't appear to be wearing anything they shouldn't, although the customs are in suits so if it put them in slacks it wouldn't matter too much (as a side note, the custom critters are called Security Agent and aren't actually part of the Crey Security custom group. Their base group is the default All Custom Characters, then I added them to the Crey Security group in the group editor. This allowed them to get through all the custom group bugs and patches unscathed, and may have saved them from the attack of the swear filter.)

Seriously devs, this going through and picking out wrongly flagged words one by one is stupid. A sweeping fix is needed.

Do you honestly think Positron sits down and says "Ok guys, we want the story going forward to be utter crap. You, mission writers...go write me some crap. I'm gonna come up with a premise for the Incarnate system that is as absolutely terrible as I can make it. I want the players to hate it"?

No. We're getting crappy writing because either they're incapable of coming up with something better or they honestly think what they're churning out is good. Or they just don't care. Saying "we need better writing" isn't going to make it happen, especially when a certain very vocal subsection of the playerbase has their lips firmly planted to the developers' behinds and keeps telling them how much they love it, and a far greater section of the playerbase doesn't even read anything.

No, it isn't. It is a bit of effort on the part of the organizer. For everyone else, it's just a timesink. It is far from hard to shoot someone a tell and stand around in the RWZ.

Yeah, it's a compound problem that could have been avoided if they hadn't insisted on basing the end-game around multi-team raids. And as an added bonus, people who dislike the trials due to performance issues wouldn't dislike them as much, so they'd be available to team with too.

Epic is hard to write. Go too far, and it becomes cheesy. Don't go far enough, and people complain that it's underwhelming. Incarnate storylines must account for a greater power level on the PCs' part than anything that has come in the game before, but must still be grounded in the existing world. At the same time, character concept must remain firmly in the player's hands. If that was easy to write, we'd have it already.

Incarnate story arcs would bomb if the rewards sucked. Most people don't bother reading the text boxes. Sorry Sam, we're a minority and you know it. That doesn't excuse the crap they've been shoveling out and calling a storyline though.

Except when you're running a strong soloer who needs something other than an Ancient Nictus Fragment and you can only play during off-peak hours. In that case, it's a hell of a lot easier to grind out the shards. And when was the last time you earned a Penumbra of Rularuu through a CoP?

That would be....hilarious and awesome. I'm not even a roleplayer.

And if the solo path was only "easier" for people like BillZ? For a lot of people, teaming is easier because they frankly suck at the game, or only excel at a small portion of the game (farming). If you can get a team to carry you, it doesn't matter how much you suck. If you're thrown into a difficult solo arc, you don't have that crutch.

Simple solution: "Encourage" everyone to do them once, or maybe twice in case someone has a bad experience the first time. Then people can decide for themselves whether they actually like the damn things.

Oh right, because the trials represent a triumph of MMO writing.

The whole Incarnate system is an utter failure in writing; from the character-hijacking in a game that prides itself on its customization to the reliance on a Villain Sue and a sudden omnipresent and insane! cosmic force to explain why they're recycling the same villains we've already fought before to the seeming obsessive need the dev team has to write up a storyline explanation for gameplay mechanics even though all previous attempts *cough*powerproliferation*cough* have been terrible and mostly ignored.

As far as "writing" goes, I want glorified paper missions. I would rather have no story to speak of than the tripe that passes for story these days. Make some arcs with neat mechanics and just don't bother slapping the half-*** attempt at a story on after the fact.

Yes. It also makes your lovingly customized Dark Armor that you wanted to see look like crap. Although lately I see more and more extraneous effects are still visible on very low graphics settings. If my settings are turned way down, I would expect Pyronic Judgement to not have that "I set the ground on fire too!" effect, wouldn't you?

Back in i5, we got "sparky" graphics on some powers. At the time, I was playing a Fire/Elec Blaster, which were two of the sets that got new "sparky" graphics. I could not for the life of me figure out why my framerate had suddenly dropped...until I started playing around with the settings found the ones that were causing the "sparky," and disabling them. However, Incarnate powers are so awesome we have to see their full effects even if we turn our graphics down to avoid seeing too many things. Again, a bad move on the devs' part.

The GFX people will remain gainfully employed by people who demand something new and shiny and preferrably flashy for next issue. Judging from the official GFX thread, those who think we already have more than enough GFX are a tiny minority of me and and Zombie Man.

But...everyone would just take the solo path and the trial-runners wouldn't have anyone to run the trials with them!

Kinda like how everyone takes the solo path to the common and uncommon Alpha powers and nobody wants to run the TFs. Oh wait....

That's pretty much the problem in a nutshell, from an "I wanna see my guy" perspective. There are too many effects and they DO. NOT. MATCH. What happens when you make a costume by hitting the "random" button? It usually looks like crap. A team situation is essentially a "random" button FX-wise.

From a combat perspective, my Blaster keeps dying in BAFs when I use an AoE on the AVs and a bunch of Vickys I didn't see standing behind them run over to gank me. My Brute would like to keep the squishies from being ganked like that but I have to zoom way in to be able to see if Nightstar is shooting at me or still shooting at the guy with two warning rings, so I don't see the Vickys either. I play this game to play a hero/villain fighting bad guys/good guys, not to play a vaguely humanoid blob fighting targeting reticles.