Eva Destruction

You can't destroy everything. Where would you sit?

Story writers shouldn't be deciding on motivations for us to begin with, and they don't need to. There are many examples of villains seeing the results of their ambition taken too far, and showing remorse, or seeing the potential consequences and deciding not to go through with their plans. We have examples in this very game...although most of them do go through with their plans anyway. A nihilistic villain would go through with a course of action that would destroy everything, but most villains wouldn't.

As long as "challenging" doesn't mean "defense is useless," bring it.

But they absorbed the 5th, so some of them are. We can't really tell which ones, so we'd better beat them all up, just to make sure.

Hehe, this person was flying just high enough for me not to be able to see the blue patch, but low enough for me to be hit by it. And still got killed by floating swords.

Zooming out too far is....weird. I find it weird.

This made me laugh because it's happened to me.

One of our best authors has a very unfortunate global handle.

I would too.

Either it was a rhetorical question or he really is working on it. It's a pretty long list. And as much as many people hate the term, Mary Sue is near the top of it.

At least, it's near the top of mine.

It also wouldn't make much sense for a slot called "lore"

You can never tell what a teammate will do until you play with them for a while, and frankly, what their pets can do is just a minor part of what a teammate can do.

I would think adding a new powerset and figuring out how the rewards should be treated would be more effort than enabling Super Stunners, but I could be wrong.

Or it could be that the new sets for custom critters had to be worked out anyway to make the Doppelgangers work properly outside AE.

This. I don't expect to have access to every NPC group in the game as a pet, just a variety of them. So you could have a CoT mage, a Rularuu Wisp, a PPD psi dude, or Fortunata that have the exact same powers as a Seer pet. Wisps are more powerful than PPD psi dudes, but it doesn't matter, because it's not a Wisp, or PPD psi dude, it's a Seer wearing their skin, that has "Wisp" over its head.

Warriors would probably be out, since none of the pets presented could be reskinned and passed off as Warriors. But you could have, say, a Coralax with Seer powers without making any changes to the NPC Coralax group. Why does it have all those powers a regular Coralax does not? Because it's my freaking pet, that's why. I'm an Incarnate and I beat up an awesome uber Coralax that you mere mortals wouldn't stand a chance against, mwahaha. Or I imbued a Coralax with some of my power. Leave it up to the players to explain.

Yeah, the Praetorian stuff wasn't added at all until i19. (It's unlocked with tickets by the way, in case people are wondering why they don't see any Praetorian groups and maps). Some groups that exist at both 1-20 and the high levels go all the way up to 54, namely Seers and Clockwork. The Resistance don't (not that I'd want to fight the high-level Resistance anyway, they're annoying), and the IDF and War Works aren't in there at all. That's the part that bugs me. They added it, an issue later, but it was incomplete.

Super Stunners, Chi Masters, Girlfriends from Hell and level 50 DE that aren't rock dudes aren't in there either.

Kinetic Melee and Electric Control were late, but Dual Pistols was made available with i17 and I think Demon Summoning was too, even to people who hadn't bought the pre-order.

Unless of course they have something nice to say. There is also that; people think that everyone will love what they create. A lot of people can't handle negative feedback.

The strength or weakness of the NPCs the pets are based on is irrelevant. The pets are not the NPCs, they can be balanced as pets.

I'd also accept those battle orbs the IDF summon, without needing the IDF guy to summon it. They do look pretty cool.

It is in the sense that "we don't have time right now" is better than "we don't care anymore."

Oh, don't get me started. Part of the what drove me away as a player was trying to sift through the dross to find something good. And I know the tricks. I read the forums. I shudder to think what kind of trouble a newcomer would have.

I honestly don't understand why you get tickets for plays at all. It's not just because the number is so insignificant. The people who need that kind of incentive to write arcs shouldn't be writing arcs. And adding badges for having people play your arcs and rate them highly is possibly the worst mistake they could have made.

Oh, I have a long list. I certainly don't expect them to do everything on it, and certainly not all at once. I see nothing on it in this issue so far. Last issue we got the incomplete addition of new Praetorian mobs, but not the new Primal Earth ones. I found that a bit odd, since at release pretty much every enemy that existed in game also could be used in AE except for a few that I'm sure were excluded for very good reason (such as GMs and Hami). Super Stunners have far more uses than...Mitos. They really should have been added in i18, honestly.

That blinky bug fix was either at or just after i18 release IIRC.

It matters in this case, because a user-based system can't work without users. If writers think the devs don't care, they stop writing. If they stop writing, the only arcs being made are farms, and the players stop playing. If players don't play, writers have less incentive to write....see where this is going? It is a community tool, it only really works with an active community, so whatever the reality, the perception that the devs don't care and their issues will never be addressed does drive people away from it.

The lack of high-level Praetorian groups was....extremely unexpected, and very confusing considering how much they're pushing this new area for end-game. Not that I was planning on every actually using them, I just wanted to set up massive giant robot battles in test mode. The IDF soldiers would also add some much-needed "generic sci-fi shock troopers" that could be appropriated into custom groups.

Still no Super Stunners, Chi Masters, or Girlfriends from Hell when I checked on Beta yesterday. Granted, adding them wouldn't make a huge difference, but not adding them does send a pretty strong message to some people. A lack of major changes would be understandable, priorities and all, but a lack of even minor changes will inevitably be interpreted as "they've given up on it" by people who care about the system.

We've already spent over a year complaining about the utter lack of Dev's Choices that didn't come from contests. And don't get me started on the potentially arc-breaking (by "breaking" I mean "make it not work as the author intended," not necessarily "make it not work at all") changes that didn't get a patch note, the most recent being the fix to back-middle blinky spawn points. Yes, it was a bug fix, but it was a consistent bug so authors found a work-around, and the bug fix broke the work-around.

These pets are rewards handed out for doing specific tasks. So, it makes sense that conceptually they should be linked to these tasks. If Vernon Von Grun let you choose between spiderlings and bees, the first thing I'd ask is "where did he get spiderlings?" How can you get a Freakshow Tank pet out of a meteor fragment in Bloody Bay?

As for the Lore pets though, either they're tied to the Well or they're not. If they're not, you can pick a different pet, and if they are, the Well is powerful enough to provide a different pet. Insisting that "they must be Praetorian because they're linked to the Well" is either lazy or obstinate.

Have you actually read the text on some of the newer exploration badges? They've already given me a mom and a childhood I wasn't aware I had, I wouldn't be surprised if my best friend was next.

And yet they've pretty much stopped supporting AE, which at least provides story options for people who don't like the ones presented by the devs.

The thing is though, I've been getting the distinct impression since i17's clone arcs that much of the game's "writing" has been an excuse for the mechanics. It wasn't that they wanted to do a story about Protean and developed Doppelganger tech to make it happen. The clone arcs read very much like they developed Doppelganger tech and then used Protean to make it happen. They wanted to use a "stop the escape" mechanic for whatever reason (possibly because of the player-base's "love it or hate it" response to the "Stop 30 Fir Bolg mission?) so they came up with the Mindwashed prisoners excuse. Why do we fight our doubles in Positron's Task Force? Oh, it's maaaaaagic.

It should be pretty obvious by now that I think the writing has suffered terribly for it; in fact the only thing since...well since before i17, but this approach has only been really painfully obvious since then, that I'd consider remotely decent have been some of the arcs in Praetoria. And those had their priorities straight. They were there to give you background on the world, not show off a new shiny.

So if they're willing to write around a mechanic just to show off Doppelgangers, or pick up an established piece of lore and work it into their new storyline just to give you an excuse to mow down hordes of Legacy Chain, why shouldn't they be willing to tweak their future storyline to accomodate a cosmetic change many players obviously feel very strongly about? Because no matter what they do with the Well storyline, people who hate and resent its involvement in everything will still criticize, people who like it will probably still like it, people who don't care still won't care, and people who are willing to handwave away the parts they don't like will find it just that much easier to handwave away this specific part.

I'm not saying they shouldn't care. I'm actually saying they really really should care. I'm saying they should take a good long critical look at any planned future storyline developments and ask themselves: Is this really so compelling as to drive every aspect of the game's storyline from here on in?

THAT DOESN'T EVEN MAKE ANY SENSE. Not even by your standards.

FunstuffofDoom is right. "Because the big blue guy told me so" is a stupid reason to not do something. Let us show some initiative for a change. We're Incarnates, we're supposed to be the world's movers and shakers, not obediently doing what we're told by one mysterious figure after another.

Heck, screw the Vanguard, and just throw in "Incarnate tips." Yes, it's another currency. I don't care. These tips would only drop from level 50+ enemies, and only if you have your Alpha slot unlocked, and would be used to set up solo incarnate missions, or even mini-arcs. Each tip would offer a heroic option with a slightly vigilante slant (because sometimes heroes have to get their hands dirty for the greater good) and a villainous option with a slightly rogue slant (because no matter how much of a jerk you are sometimes you have to realize it's not all about you.) None of them would have anything to do with Praetoria. They'd be a firm reminder that there are still other threats out there, and if done correctly could be used to foreshadow future developments.

I reach into the Well and pull out the essence of a War Works. The Well being the capricious and insane entity that it is, my War Works runs on Vista.

This was around 9:30 or so, and so there weren't all that many people in Pocket D. I doubt there were more than the 24 the BAF allows. When I moved away from the group, I still had a very distracting bubble on me. Intense graphical effects like this that tell my brain "hey, wait a minute, what's this?" and I keep focusing on it instead of what I'm supposed to be looking at, namely the seer over there trying to scramble my brains, or where my teammate is going.

And oh yeah, back to those darned Praetorian pets....if I'm fighting Sky Raiders and there's a Traps user on the team, guess what I keep trying to do? Whenever I mention it in team chat I usually get an "lol, me too."