Lothic

I realize that the folks behind this game are in business to make money. I don't begrudge them any scheme they come up with to try to get more money from us. But I did imply them trying to be a bit more greedy "lately" because I think it's a very fair point to argue that the last couple of booster packs have not been as valuable/worthwhile for the price as the first Boosters were. I hope the trend of offering "less for the same price" does not continue.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that they didn't turn a tidy profit from offering the Boosters at the price they sold them for. But until the Devs reveal solid sales numbers on this (assuming they ever would) I will continue to remain convinced that their total gross would have been better if they sold these Boosters for closer to their generally accepted value.

If they want to sell me a Booster for $8 or $10 then give me something WORTH that much, or at the very least give me as much as I got out of other similarly priced items. The idea that they can get people to buy less product for the same amount of money could eventually backfire on them (via general customer dissatisfaction) if they try to press that gap too far. It's fair to highlight the fact that the Party Pack was the first Booster I recall that got such an obvious negative "it's not worth it" feedback on these forums. That's a bad precedent to set here. *shrugs*

In a generic buying/selling retail situation I can see where your "I'll pay more for something because low priced stuff usually equals junk" mentality has some merit.

But this is a captive audience (the players of this game) being offering a limited choice of hardwired bonus packs that simply need to be judged on their own obvious merits. I'm not going to look at a pack of 8 emotes for $7.99 and think "well I'll buy that because that must be better than the $4 emote pack" because there's NOT a $4 emote pack alternative.

Again I think it's good to compare this situation to other real world retail situations, but those comparisons can only go so far.

I don't think they're dumb, but I'm willing to believe they got a tad too greedy lately.

I won't talk about specific games, but I will point out that in your discussion about the Apple apps you didn't mention what the relative perceived value/worth of those highest grossing apps were. Maybe people were more willing to spend more money for those higher priced games because they decided those game were actually "worth" the money.

When you try to relate that to the last few Booster Packs for this game you run into the problem with whether or not people (for instance) consider 8 emotes to be "worth" $7.99 or not. I think what you'd find is that people wouldn't mind paying $7.99 for 8 emotes as long as those emotes were the best most game-changing emotes ever made. Problem is I don't think everyone thought those emotes were worth -that- much.

I think it's worthwhile to consider the Apple app statistics when talking about this issue, but ultimately what works in that arena is probably "apples and oranges" to what would work for a MMO like this.

I can understand getting used to the -1/x1 setting but then again there were years worth of this game when that was never even an option. Clearly you just need to slow down a bit, maybe get a few temp powers like the Backup Radio and you should be able to solo it well enough. There's nothing wrong with using the -1/x1 setting when needed, but you shouldn't grow to rely on it either.

Right, pets of any kind can die during this mission and it won't ruin your Dodger attempt.
That's why the strategy of summoning tons of pets to take out the Director works at this point.

As we all know the Devs have a tendency to listen to the "vocal minority" if that minority harps on an issue long enough. I imagine people have be complaining about "spammed blind invites" for years now.

Even though this change can be annoying to people who are legitimately tossing out invites very quickly I also suspect that the Devs will never change it back because it's ultimately solving the "bigger" problem of spammed blind invites.

You can thank the idiots who rudely spammed unwanted invites for this new feature we all have to live with.

Yes, these things really need comma separators everywhere they appear in this game.

Yes but according to you anyone who comes up against a "text limit" in this game isn't being "concise" enough anyway.

While you're free to have your opinion I will at least correct you on your facts: The character bio limit in the game has always been 1024 characters. This game has never seen an increase in this area. *shrugs*

[EDIT] I just checked and ironically your post was 1,061 characters long. How does it feel to criticize people's desire for more space when you couldn't even concisely express your ideas in the amount of space this game provides for this kind of thing?

I think the fact that people would automatically equate Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne to these Day Jobs is the very reason we DON'T have them in this game. This game already struggles with not allowing too many things which would make it far too easy to make clones of big name superheroes owned by other companies. City of Heroes was even sued by Marvel some years ago over related issues such as this.

Thanks to IP infringement concerns things that are too comic book "ironic" will probably never happen here. *shrugs*

I might actually agree that on a purely academic level it might be useful to have as much "number data" as possible to min/max your builds in this game. But on a much more practical level does it really matter all that much whether you can kill something in this game in 6.893 seconds instead of 7.123? I can assure you that in 99.999% of the cases it doesn't, especially if you don't PvP (and frankly even that's questionable).

There's reasonable min/maxing and then there's OCD anal-retentiveness.
One might be acceptable but like anything the concept can be taken quite too far for your own or anyone else's good. *shrugs*

I said it be cool if they accounted for that difference somehow. If you were to also ask me if I thought they would actually do that kind of thing I'd have to say something like "not in a million years."

If they ever gave me a Bug Hunter for "helping" them prove the original requirements of those badges were ridiculously too high I would laugh for days.

As it was I already think Positron waited for me to finish the 1 billion HP Empath before they changed it just to punish me for speaking ill of him in the Forums about it. They suspiciously lowered Empath only about a month after I finished it.

As others have said I'd only expect to rely on them to serve alpha strike absorbers. I don't bother to factor the buffs they provide into my overall build plans because you can't really count on them being there for a significant amount of time. Basically your best bet is to consider any buffs they give you to be more like "bonus icing on the cake" than critical components of your build strategy.

Well technically speaking they didn't really have to give us -any- freespecs.
Gift horse, mouth... you get the idea. *shrugs*

For what it's worth I would say you can get around 95% of the badges in this game without having to do anything even remotely "tricky" or unusual. Most of the rest of the other 5% just requires you to "farm" certain missions or areas to gain defeat badges or the top end epic badges like Leader, Immortal or Empath that no normal player would ever earn just via normal playing.

There are probably only a handful of badges (like this Dodger badge) that you seriously need to have some kind of so-called "crutch" team strategy to get. Ultimately if there's only 3 or 4 badges like this out of 1,200+ which require that kind of "out of the box" thinking I don't really consider that too bad.

As far as your idea of having something like a Dodger and Master Dodger badges I wouldn't mind that concept for other badges as well. For instance I earned all the top epic badges (Leader, Immortal, Empath, etc.) years ago back before any of their requirements were nerfed. It'd be cool if somehow that was reflected in my badge listing so that people wouldn't think I got the "crutched" easy versions of those.

Thanks to tips like these a team of us just ran a successful Master Tin Mage TF.

In our variation we didn't bother with AtT teleports or bubbles. We basically dropped a bunch of Shivans, HVAS and a handful of other temp pets outside the warehouse. We bio nuked the swarm with 3 Bio Nukes and all went in with some form of flight. As soon as the Director showed up we were all up towards the roof and dropped a few Chem Nukes on him. Not sure if any Nuclear Blasts were dropped. After about 30 seconds the AV was toast.

I'd suggest to anyone reading this thread that if you want to get this going you'd better do it now before it's nerfed. The Devs already nerfed this very mission in the last patch and they nerfed the CoP Trial to stop people from using nukes in similar ways. Seems pretty likely the same might happen here...

They've been CGIing stunts for almost decades now. I'd agree it's probably far easier to "fake a stunt than it is to fake a performance". But they've been making steady improvements to the stunt side of things for years. To believe that they'll never master the "performance" side of things is a bit naive at best.

I actually never cared about whether the Sun was right or wrong about this as far as Lucas was concerned.

This issue is one that has been talked about and considered for decades now. I still firmly believe that even if Lucas is not involved with promoting it there are still other people out there who are and this WILL be something that all the various actors, guilds, producers, lawyers and so on will be hashing out in the coming years.

Just because Lucas claims to be uninvolved doesn't mean this won't ever happen.

Yeah but if we had pools that were based on States, Positron and so on then heroes could have their own heroic patron pool powers without having to "invent" a reason why heroes would be using powers that have their basis on signature villains. It would also solve the problem of heroes not having to take a trip to the "dark" side just to unlock different power pools. Even from a game symmetry point of view it makes sense for there to be heroic patron power pools, especially now that villains have access to the ancillary power pools.