Lothic

The Devs have told us for a long time that they were considering allowing us to quit directly to the character selection screen without having to log back in. They have never once mentioned the possiblity of lowering the 30 second timer. Those are two different things.

Actually my version of this suggestion doesn't really support the "get an advantage in place of a disadvantage" model.
I've always preferred a strictly optional "choose a Disad for yourself as an extra challenge" system.

Of course people like Samuel_Tow love to jump on that, even as a purely OPTIONAL QoL improvment. Go figure.

For what it's worth I've never STARTED one of these threads suggesting a Kryptonite system for this game. All I've done is responded favorably to the idea in the several dozen of these threads I've seen over the years.

Of course, as we all know, apparently NO ONE really wants this kind of thing to happen...
So much for your bud-nipping.

As I understand it Halloween Tips only drop from ToTing.
If that's true I don't think adjusting mission difficulty settings is going to help.

Good question.
They usually only leak videos out like this when they are within a few weeks of releasing something.
I'd assume we'll see this well before December.

Thanks for confirming the general sanity of the Devs.

Really? We've had 5 different Booster Packs that were "supposedly" geared toward each of the 5 origins without ANY restrictions. It would have never even occurred to me that the Devs would ever be that stupid as to restrict anything like that in these Booster Packs.

Well I can accept that at the time those badges were removed there was a huge amount of whining going on about AE farming in general. Of course 99.5% of the people "farming" with AE were using it to PL characters and had absolutely nothing to do with badges.

Unfortunately as you say the Devs had little they could do to look like they were "solving" the farming problem other that to remove a visible set of badges. Sadly those badges really had nothing to do with the "real" AE farming problems. They were used as a scapegoat.

Ultimately there was no real justification for removing those badges in or of themselves. People who did not want to "grind" for them had the easiest option available to deal with it: simply choose NOT do them. There was no good reason to punish people who actually had no serious problem with getting them or even worst were already done with them.

I had that one (as well as all the other AE badges that were removed) done within a few weeks after they were introduced without playing more than a few hours a day. I really don't think any set of badges can legitimately be considered "too grindy" if they could be done so quickly.

People who whined about it so much managed to ruin the effort I and many other people put into it. Frankly I think it was pathetic that the Devs caved into people who *gods forbid* got upset that they were going to have to put a little effort into badging.

If you considered "30K defeats in test mode" to be too hard or annoying to do then guess what? You should have just not bothered to do it. All the whining manged to do was to grief the people who actually played the game and lost the rewards for their finished efforts.

Thanks, but no thanks. That's the kind of help from my fellow player I -don't- need...

Many people do. Perhaps the Devs here will eventually catch up to what other "similar" MMOs offer in that regard.

Or to make the lingering complaints AGAINST them that much more pointless because there are now various alternatives.
There will now be -fewer- reasons to change the older status quo, not more.

This is how the Devs are going to "solve" the problems you have with unlockables.

Yeah pretty much every time someone suggests adding a "Kryptonite" concept to this game the pure MMO players come out of the woodwork claiming the idea that anyone would ever want to willing gimp themselves is borderline insane. Most people who play MMOs are always trying to do anything they can to min/max their characters into god-like Tankmages. The fact that a cornerstone of the comic book genre rests on the concepts of "vulnerabilities" seem to be totally lost on them.

I would never advocate a system of Disadvantages for this game ever be FORCED onto people. This kind of thing should always be 100% OPTIONAL. This is why the void/quant Kheldian thing is generally hated by most people. The Devs tried to introduce a Kryptonite-like weakness on them but they effectively forced everyone to have to deal with it instead of making something like that be optional.

Also plenty of people have mentioned in this thread the idea that many AT/Powerset combos already have built-in vulnerabilities (i.e. stone/fire tanks have serious problems versus psi damage). That's all fine and well. But when people like Next_Player suggest Disadvantage systems they are usually asking for optional choices to allow them to CHOOSE which things they are going to be vulnerable to, not just let the game decide that for them.

I've never really understood why people typically overreact to this suggestion. It's a suggestion for an OPTIONAL QoL improvement, not something that's going to be forced on you if you don't want to challenge yourself. This suggestion goes beyond just a new tool for RP expression - many people (including yours truly) consider this game to generally be very easy to play. Much like the introduction of the Mission Difficulty settings I wouldn't mind challenging myself even further with new optional ways to make things harder. Once again if you're the type of person who'd want to keep playing on "easy mode" with no Disadvantages you'd certainly be able to keep doing that. YMMV.

A logout timer is an MMO industry standard that prevents all sorts of problems, not just preventing people from logging out to avoid character death. It takes the servers of these game at least a few seconds to properly account for people logging into and off of a game. My guess is that if they ever allowed people to log on and off without a timer that they'd see some kind of weird account conflicts or other potential problems with their login servers.

I suspect that no matter how sophisticated computers become there will never be a situation where a game like this won't impose at least a 10 or 15 second timer. That timer basically solves so many potential problems for the Devs that it's hard to imagine a simpler solution for them.

I'd agree that a full 30 seconds is probably a bit of overkill at this point.
But I'll never get my hopes up to think it'll ever be lowered to 0 seconds in game like this.

Now that the Baby-Boomers are getting older I suspect we'll be seeing more "older people as the main stars of the movie" type action movies.

The way this game auto promotes and demotes people always seems to be very mysterious. I think there's always been a lot of semi-buggy things about it. For instance I'm pretty sure there is no "rule" that says a character has to be promoted once before they can automatically get the Red Star. On the other hand it would not surprise me if you actually saw two different SGs react differently as far as auto promotions go. *shrugs*

Apparently based on how much trouble it was for Castle to just "slightly adjust" the Vet pets' AI the whole pet AI system of this game must be very complex and inflexible.

It's funny I only learned of the "Vet pets counting for healing badges" thing just a few weeks ago, long after it would've done me any good. I got my Empath badges years ago now. I suppose it's only fitting (or slightly ironic) the Devs actually bothered to fix THAT method.

They also supposedly had tiny little "micro-brawl" attacks at one point as well. This apparently explained why for the first month or so after they were released that their movement AI was geared to -charge- towards enemies and get themselves killed. It took Castle several patches to finally tune their AI back to be 'slightly' less suicidal than they were at first.

Yes I originally thought their "fragileness" made them totally worthless. But I've come to realize they do serve pretty well as both passive and active aggro cannon fodder at the very least. You can cast them towards a group and let the MOBs Alpha the poor little pet first.

I honestly don't know if they buff each other, but if I had guess I'd say they don't. They are meant to be very fragile. I doubt the Devs would have purposefully allowed them to help each other that way.

Also their buffs do not stack on players. A Vet buff pet only provides its buffs to its owner, not anyone else. IIRC there was a time (while they were still involved in one of the beta tests) that they may have provided their buffs to other players (like mini-Leadership powers) but that never really made it to the live builds.