Eva Destruction

This is exactly what I'd do with #2. Once Arcanaberg has conclusively proven that the power is balanced, I'd have one of the powers team pop in and say she's right...or he. Arcanaberg could be a he.

Then I'd set everyone to fixing #1 before it becomes FotM. I'd set someone to post in the relevant forums that advocates of #3 would read and assure them that they'll be looking at it soon. Then when #1 is fixed I'd have them take a look at #3.

Of course if I were really thinking like a dev I'd ignore #1, 2 and 3 and set everyone to working on #4. When #1 becomes out of control I'd nerf it into oblivion. Three years later, people who like #3 would still be complaining.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't influence split evenly among the team? So how would it be used as a measure of your personal contribution?

If you kick the leecher they get nothing. Problem solved.

Does running the toggles that allowed you to tank the AVs count as participation? Your attacks do relatively low damage, and may be slow to activate, depending on your secondary. Taunting probably counts, but your entire primary may not.

If the Praetorian zone events were intended as a field test of weighted rewards based on participation, they didn't work. The MM issues alone should have indicated that the idea should be scrapped. Any system like that is pretty much borked at conception in this game, with so many varying mechanics and so many ways to contribute that can't be quantified. All it does is encourage people to figure out ways to game the system, and then do so, probably to the detriment of the team, which is the exact opposite of what they were trying to accomplish.

I think he was referring to the issue where MM pet damage didn't count as participation for reward purposes.

They HAVE, in the past, communicated with players even when they were busy. BaBs and Castle were great for this. They HAVE, in the past, come onto the forums and directly responded to player concerns and questions; even if the answer was "no, we're not doing that" it was still an answer. PAX and the webcasts reach fewer players than the forums do. Most of us come here to voice our concerns, and the lack of developer response to these concerns makes a lot of people think they don't care. And that's just bad PR, no matter how many Producers' letters and webcasts you put out.

The thread was started after level 50 inf earnings were increased, but it only measured the earnings of solo farmers--people running the most efficient maps possible at a difficulty set to maximize inf/hour earnings. Task Force teams are far less efficient. And 3 million/hour was the low end, some people were pushing 30 mil.

Personally I think the thread costs of converting shards to threads are irrelevant, they are so low. IXP costs are a bit more noticeable, but still low enough to not dissuade impulse buying of iXP. The costs of crafting rares and very rares serve more to provoke sticker shock and protests of "but I don't have that kind of inf!" than serve as a useful inf sink. Because what good is an inf sink if people don't use it? I also think people are hung up on inf costs because they have some conception of how much 400 mil inf is worth to them. It's a cost you can look at and say, "but I've never had that much inf on any one character, ever!" or "that very rare costs more inf than my whole build." Nobody can say the same about 1000 threads.

You earn 10 threads an hour running TFs? I don't think I've ever earned 10 threads an hour running TFs. I've hit 7 and maybe 8 once on an ITF, which usually takes me about an hour, but usually 5 or 6, and that's for the ITF. On other TFs I usually get less.

And regardless of what level it's balanced for, it will always show up on a "My level" search, making that particular flag much less useful than it should be. After scrolling past literally hundreds of these at lower levels, usually with Extreme Something and Archvillain warnings, I won't play them even at 50 because sometimes I am petty and spiteful toward things that have inconvenienced me.

Really, if somebody is interested in a mission out of their level range, they probably have an alt at a more appropriate level. I know, I know, that assumes people will make the effort to pick up a pen and write down the arc ID. But limiting the level range sure makes searching for missions easier and helps mitigate the perception that AE is full of custom critters shoved in there deliberately to insta-gank your level 10 Blaster.

Another thought...once the majority of people have their slot unlocked and no longer care, it might be easier to stick those who don't on the reinforcement team. Again, it will come down to what kind of players end up leading these things.

That was a really badly timed typo, wasn't it? It's probably so common because spellcheckers don't catch it.

When you're talking PBAoEs, then yeah, I'd argue that asking someone to turn those off isn't at all unreasonable. It's not like you have 10 of them. I have stood next to faaaaaar too many people running Quills at the market to have any sympathy for people who leave these on in places where players gather.

Buffing random people while you're still LFT in broadcast isn't pre-buffing. It's being a pest.

If people stopped spamming unnecessary powers then the few people running toggles would be much less problematic. A guy standing there on fire is just a guy standing there on fire. He's the guy at the other table wearing a really loud shirt. A guy who just dropped Freezing Rain on my head or threw a Cold shield on me...that's the drunk who just walked over to my table and insisted I interact with him.

That's more a failure in the design of the TF than a commentary on the utility of a specific powerset. Just because a specific team configuration can beat a broken encounter doesn't make it any less broken. Some people got MoLGTF when the green mitos were broken, after all.

Fair enough. I guess I've been in too many arguments along the lines of "new content is better written because it doesn't have defeat alls," so I think it's important to make the distinction between better writing and better presentation.

I'm really curious to see what happens as knowledge of how this works becomes more widespread. I'm sure there will be some jackholes who will try to hog the iXP for themselves, but it remains to be seen whether the non-jackholes decide that fair distribution is more important than convenience and efficiency.

Well in all fairness it's not like everybody else isn't doing it too.

It still doesn't help when people are firing off Judgement nukes on Lag Hill.

Nor does it excuse designing content that their tech can't handle. People report "my powers look recharged but aren't" issues during the BAF, and to my understanding that problem is not on the player's end.

I wouldn't even try for the 10 assist badge if my badger wasn't a Vigilante and wasn't still missing most of the MO badges. It should have been 50 WSTs, period, if they wanted a long-term WST badge. This badge falls into the "what the hell were they thinking?" category. A badge for "helping others"? Do they think people don't have alts that would also want to run the WST? Do they think the hardcore badgers that really want this badge wouldn't get it during the initial WST frenzy when nobody needed "help" getting a WST together?

Agreed. It pretty much amounts to the same thing, and it wouldn't have required a hamhanded story explanation either.

My husband: Do you have to yell "Soul Drain...BOOM! FWOOOSH! Your soul....is mine, suck tentacles!" every other mob?

Me: Um, yes?

And there is a certain hairy-backed multi-armed @$?#! still taunting me from his big fancy spider tower thing. I want a rematch. Another point for Rebirth I think. The ugly jerk keeps getting lucky and dropping me.

You also make a good point. It sounds like a "press this button to Continue" power. Kinda like Dark Regeneration only you can use it while you're running away screaming....

Which now that I think of it I do quite a bit. My Blaster is showing....

Ack, decisions, decisions.

This pretty much sums up my sentiments regarding the solo vs team debate.

Are you enjoying the newer storylines, or the newer gameplay? It's an important distinction that I've noticed a lot of people don't make. "It's fun to play" makes for a good mission, but not necessarily a good story. I love running the ITF but the story is weaksauce.

Just a tangent: for a while there I've had this idea in the back of my head to see if I could redo some of the legacy story arcs using AE. That's a five mission maximum....the trick is to do it without losing any story integrity. The one that got me thinking about it was World Wide Red, which would be very tricky and would probably require chained objectives to the point of extremely annoying, but To Click a Thousand Glowies or a Hero's Hero (or a Hero's Epic for that matter) could definitely be done. A Hero's Hero could be done in three missions.

Mortimer Kal's SF is just a fancy MacGuffin chase. The entire SF is literally "Go get your temp power." Yes, it has some fun mechanics, but the basic story is about as deep as the one you get from the scientist in Bloody Bay.

I take it you haven't been on an ITF lately, have you? You can add all the difficulty sliders you want, but unless you incentivize higher difficulties people are just going to steamroll everything.

In that case I hope the costumes are over-the-top and ostentatious and "epic" because then I won't want them. Whatever they are, they are still not a substitute for adding new, free costume pieces available at character creation on a regular basis.

Yep, that's pretty much it. I like my options, and I don't like when there aren't any.

Just for the record, I still don't like Notices being gated behind either the WST or a stupid number of Shards. But at this point it's like complaining about a hangnail when you have a broken leg.

Question: Are the Rikti that come out of the Comm Officers' portals level-shifted? Because I could have sworn I saw purple minions....

Because the solo costs (and I use the term solo loosely, since they can be earned on teams as well) are the only alternative to grinding the trials. If more alternatives existed, people wouldn't complain as much. I didn't hear anyone complaining about having to grind the Reichsmann TFs for Dimensional Whatsit components, because nobody had to. There were reasonable alternatives.

Not your fault the devs cut corners back then, and one minion, one lieutenant and one boss was considered a perfectly acceptable enemy group.

Actually now that I think about it, I think that was the custom Recluse after all. You asked for help testing him or something, and I discovered the ninja ambushes were more dangerous than he was.

Anyway, back on-topic....anything that looks interesting, but is flagged "Work in Progress," has no tags, and a low arc ID number. It's possibly broken to the point of being unplayable. An uneven level range is also a major warning flag in this case.

Heck, anything flagged "Work in Progress," period, if you find it through a random search.