Eva Destruction

I meant the general "you" not you specifically.

What Venture said.

Also, what you said. Thanks for proving my point. Every "fix" does indeed hurt the intended use as much or more than the unintended use. Like the ticket cap. It deprives people of rewards, especially on smaller maps with multiple objectives. You could go over the cap on many maps even before the new difficulty sliders. Meanwhile farmers use an outdoor map with a single blinky to click when you hit 750 tickets.

Farmers will go out of their way to get around limits on rewards, because that is all they're concerned about. Legitimate users are concerned with putting together a story, putting together missions in such a way as to best tell the story, and working around the mechanical limitations of the system to best tell the story they want to tell. Worrying about arbitrary reward limits only gets in the way of that.

What part of "the ticket cap doesn't work either" can't you figure out?

You are assuming some of these people balance at all. I want a search function that allows me to exclude arcs with Extreme anything, and I would never turn it off. I also want one that allows me to exclude Archvillains, for my Dom.

Acceptable to you maybe.

Never mind that sometimes patches make updates mandatory.

Patches happen that have nothing to do with exploits. Authors need to update.

Feedback happens. Authors want to update.

Every update to a published arc would mean the arc would need to be vetted again, since the system has no way of telling whether you rewrote some contact dialogue or added a potential exploit.

You'll come across a few pages of well-done arcs before you run into the morass of stuff with one or two 5-star ratings from the author's friends. There are literally a hundred or so pages of arcs with one 5-star rating.

Most of the good stuff is down in the 4-star ghetto. Unfortunately so are most of the farms and abandoned arcs and lame "comedy" missions.

I pick what to play based on posts in the Stories and Lore forum. A lot of the arc recommendations there are from players who have played a lot of arcs. Yes, I've played through most of the good stuff, but people are still putting out new arcs, just not at the rate they used to.

There is no difference. Go run Liberate TV and keep your lame "Kill stuffz" missions out of MA.

It made everyone equal to an IOed out multi-billion inf toon, and made those IOed out multi-billion inf toons even worse. There is only so far you can go even with the best IOs.

And yeah, having to make that investment of inf, and the time spent accumulating it, is part of the equation. It's like running the RSF in an hour...after spending two hours collecting nukes and shivans.

How does that work? Since capping XP/mission won't work, do they cap XP/hour? What's to stop you from farming up to your hourly cap, then switching toons? XP/Minute? Sounds like a lot of effort to allow people to use MA for something it was never intended for.

When you're on an 8-person team you share the rewards. When those 8 people are NPC allies who buff and debuff, you don't have to share.

Once you reach the cap, you click the blinky and exit the mission. The cap would have to be rather high in the first place to avoid punishing authors of legitimate arcs or non-farmers who enjoy running heavily IOd melee toons through said legitimate arcs at high difficulty, so a farmer would be able to get quite a lot of farming in before hitting it. Then punch out, repeat. Just like they do with tickets.

The problem the ally nerf was intended to solve wasn't that people were actually getting more XP/mission. The problem is that they were getting said XP faster and more safely. Compare the kill rate of an SO'd Scrapper to that of a heavily IOd Scrapper with perma-hasten, soft-capped defense and added HP, regen, and recovery. The IOd Scrapper can survive tougher spawns and kill them faster. A map full of allies can, in seconds, give anyone that survivability and kill speed, that would otherwise take billions of inf to achieve.

Co-op zones can also host co-op TEAMS, which gives players more leeway in choosing characters, and makes it easier to form up a team, especially for villains. Hopefully this will be less of an issue after Going Rogue, if enough players choose an alignment that allows them to team with both factions.

(If it wasn't for that pesky "concept" thing I wouldn't keep a single character restricted to teaming with one faction after Going Rogue. And I am perfectly happy to solo so I'm not part of the "I can't find a team" chorus.)

If it's friendly to the player, it will reduce XP for as long as it's on the map.

No.

Why do I picture some lone jerkass clicking "play" on every outdated single-mission Steel Canyon blinky grab he can find?

Maybe not always. The various factions would probably not want people from the other faction reading their minds, so they would cut themselves off from the mental network. Maybe they still need the translators because they don't actually have a spoken language of their own anymore.

We have Ranged/Defense with the VEATs, but that is concept-limited.

How does "not as shiny pure good as they try to portray themselves" translate to "evil?"

In any case, hanging around waiting for a villain to wander by is a VERY liberal interpretation of the "superheroes are allowed to pursue supervillains across international boundaries" law. Never mind that VEATs are not Zig escapees. Nor are the numerous NPCs that Longbow are also hostile to.

Hey, it's not like I claim to have some lofty ideal for my AR/Fire "Hero," nor did I ever say she was a pure hero in the first place. She's going to end up as a Vigilante most likely.

It does give me the authority to make my own moral decisions. Just because the game world "flags" them heroic doesn't make them so. At that point we're trying to force everything back into a black-and-white mold that this game has moved beyond. It has to, as soon as you start telling players they can create their own heroes and offer Dark Anything and demon horns as options

Longbow are non-hostile to heroes and hostile to villains. That is all the "tags" mean.

"Attack Longbow base in Mercy Island" and such....hmm, I wonder where the Longbow base is? Yeah yeah, I know there are limits to the instance system, but if they wanted to make it clear that the base was in international waters I could just as easily hop a flyer in Grandville to get there.

Or if they were actually concerned about properly portraying Longbow as an organization that respects international law their bases would all be in the Nerva area.

The Longbow in Grandville are on the beaches and on the grassy area around the Fab, usually battling Arachnos. The ones in St Martial are up in the Dockworker area. From what I recall they are handing out pamphlets on workers rights or something...which wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't brought Ballistas with them.

Some disembodied narrator can tell me all they want. The day I let a comic book or a video game dictate what is and is not "heroic" is the day I lobotomize myself with a power drill.
Nerva, St. Martial, Grandville, all those mission maps that represent hidden bases they have all over the Rogue Isles.

What Arachnos does has nothing to do with what Longbow does. Arachnos show up in Paragon City, but we recognize that these incursions are illegal.

So now you know why I think and feel the way I do? I dislike the way they are written. I dislike what they represent, both at launch and now.

They don't have exclusive Rikti-fighting rights. If all Longbow was doing was fighting Rikti nobody would care, but when they're interfering with Vanguard, they overstep their bounds. The Vanguard is a UN-sanctioned organization. Where does Longbow get their authority from again? Do they have authority to interfere with an officially sanctioned group doing what they were put together to do?

I didn't say they were bad guys. I said they were self-righteous hypocrites. Wyvern is worse than them, but at least they're honest about it, which makes me loathe them less.

Yeah, so if "real" comic heroes do it I guess that makes it ok?

When do the PPD show up in the Rogue Isles and harrass people? Abyss sends you after some squid cops who are chasing a criminal (which I believe you are allowed to do, according to international law in the CoX world), and flat out says they're out of their jurisdiction, the ones guarding the schoolbooks Phipps sends you to destroy are volunteers, and presumably off-duty, and....where else do the PPD show up redside?

We go into Grandville to beat up Recluse because he has a WMD. We don't go taking potshots at random superpowered citizens while we're there, we don't set up bases there. Besides, Statesman is the kind of self-righteous jerk that Longbow holds up as an example.

Name me one military on earth that doesn't employ complete monsters and general jerkasses.

I view merits as a "reputation" reward, that has more to do with dedication to the cause than combat prowess.

They also are being crammed down both heroes' and villains' throats as "the good guys." Since their introduction they have unnecessarily been everywhere. They shouldn't be guarding labs or saving the day, we have police for that. And yet we didn't see a single police officer lift a finger in defense of Paragon City and its citizens until months after Longbow was stuck in everywhere.

I tend to reject anything that anyone tries to force me to accept. Usually it's because they're too enamored of their own creation, despite said creation being lame.

When the founder and leader of an organization butts in where she has no business being, that doesn't speak well for the organization as a whole.

You said "more content," and I can't argue with that.

Hmm, that would be interesting actually. Some young level 20 hero, fresh out of the portal from Praetoria, runs into a Longbow recruiter. Accepting his missions sets you on a multi-arc storyline involving working for Longbow. And if you stray from your heroic path, you get kicked out.

Player characters don't just hop over to the Rogue isles to harass its citizens. They don't set up secret bases all over foreign soil. We go to the Rogue Isles once in our heroic careers, and that's because Recluse has a WMD. (The RWZ arcs don't count because we're helping).

I don't see Vanguard or the Midnighter Club as squarely "grey." Their goals are clearly noble. They work with known criminals, sure, but when you're trying to save the world, you work with what's available. So they're a little grey but not nearly so much as Longbow.

Well there's the RWZ one for starters. Rogue faction my butt. And that arc in Nerva where you steal a prototype Sapper gun from them is pretty incriminating. All their terrorist actions on foreign soil, taking money from private citizens to fund said terrorist activity...and now we have a Longbow recruiter standing on the Use Might for Right badge. The evidence just keeps piling up.

Besides, like others have said, you can copy pretty much all their powers. Just make the hats, chest detail and tights pattern available to players, unlockable with a hidden badge that you have to kill a thousand Arachnos for, and there you go, you have your "Longbow AT" with much smaller investment of developer time.

While having that stuff would be awesome, I would be very very annoyed if it was locked into a specific concept.