Lothic

Given that the Devs are already well along the path of giving us Cape unlocks, Aura unlocks and Alpha unlocks I don't really see Alignment Change tokens being completely incongruous with the way the game is evolving. It's hard to say if the Devs would go as far as your hypothetical Incarnate tokens, but I suspect your main trouble with them would be whether they were implemented as unlocks or paid-for tokens.

Basically if people CHOOSE to give Paragon Studios more money for what they perceive to be a convenient alternative to spending time on something like this then at least I'll get to benefit from having Devs with more money to work with. *shrugs*

Again I think you're looking at this a little too one-sided. Players now have a CHOICE to play either way. Hard to argue against player choice.

There's no real need for there to be some kind of 50/50 split between the way players use these features. If it turns out that some relatively huge percentage of playerbase only use alignment change tokens to make that change in the future then so be it. That would not be a game-breaking scenario.

P.S. For what it's worth I already have a simple "explaination" for one of my side switching badging characters that actually makes more sense with these new tokens. She's an avid science geek hero who occasionally has "accidents" with her science experiments which causes her to temporarily turn evil for short periods of time until the nasty chemicals wear off. I know if I can come up with a quick working rationale like that anyone could.

I see it as giving players more choices. We all know that some players like the whole idea of "roleplaying" the game and being involved in the stories. We also know that other players couldn't really care less about that kind of thing.

Now we'll have the choice to either enjoy the tip missions and switching alignments without spending any extra money or being able to quickly shift to the alignment they want to be so that they can get on with playing the game the way they want to play. There's a cost to it either way - now we get to choose which way we want to pay.

I'm honestly having a hard time seeing a downside to this. *shrugs*

Posi's position on this is not completely hypocritical - it's just not completely obvious either.

The idea behind originally making it taking days to switch alignments was never about forcing it to be a super-slow process. The intent behind the time delay was simply to prevent it from being something we could trivially do every 5 minutes. The Devs didn't want people to figure out some fun new way to exploit the game somehow by being able to flip-flop back and forth between alignments instantly. Imposing a multi-day wait was ONE way to enforce that.

Another way to enforce that is to require people to pay for an alignment change token. By involving real world money in the process it naturally encourages people to -not- whimsically flip back-n-forth between alignments because each time you do costs money. This is the same method of control many MMOs use for server transfers - by making people spend money on them it naturally prevents people from abusing it.

So what we have now is two ways to switch alignments that are regulated by two different forms of control. As DMystic was saying either you pay via real life money or you pay via real life time. Both of these methods hamper us from insta-switching back-n-forth which is the main thing the Devs wanted to prevent us from doing. Sure if you want to spend a ton of money to be able to do that with tokens the game will now let you do that, but practically no one will be willing to spend the money to do that on a regular continual basis.

I brought up "ethnicity" simply as one of a possible million arbitrary reasons the Devs could use for something like this.

All else being equal the fact that NCSoft is an Asian company does give any addition to this game that's Asian-oriented at least one more point in its favor. If two possible upgrades to this game are absolutely equal as far as the Devs are concerned in all ways except one is Asian-oriented and the other isn't, I'd know which way to bet.

There is no way you could possibly "dispute" that terribly simple common sense. *shrugs*

I see what you did there... *golf clap*

Yeah and Zwii also made it pretty clear that they were shooting for Chinese New Year with this even if they miss it by a little bit. Sounds like that has something to do with it being Asian-oriented to me. *shrugs*

Seriously, the Devs literally only need one reason for the prioritization of any given costume pack over another: it's what THEY want to do. My idea that it had something to do with being Asian-oriented, in light of the Devs' ability to do whatever the heck they want whenever they want, is just as reasonable as any other silly idea you, I or any other player could dream up.

You're basically making a tremendous mountain out of what's ultimately a trivial molehill here.

It's definitely a better trend than the previous 4 or 5 years before.
But I'm not willing to rejoice and claim "the Devs love SG bases" again just yet.

Yes and when you add that to this new telepad you can easily AVERAGE out the number of tweaks we've had to bases to about once every few years.

My simple explaination needs no "would have been done already" time component to make it viable.

Today, as of January 2012, the Devs probably have several costumes sets on the drawing board. Assuming they had a meeting to prioritize them it's very easy to see that Imperial Dynasty might have bumped any of the others currently being worked on -right- now for the arbitrary Asian reason alone. Besides it's obvious they were trying to line it up with Chinese New Year regardless.

Eh, I don't think any one particular group of nasty inhuman hellish critters has the patent on "spiky jibbers and eyeballs."

I would have gone straight to saying it's trying for a Frank Frazetta vibe but since a lot of his artwork ended up in Heavy Metal anyway I suppose that's just a minor quibble on my part.

The art itself doesn't bother me but it is sort of surprising its oozing its way into this "Teen-rated" game. I think you're probably just going to have to brace yourself for the inevitable "please make her costume items available to player characters" suggestions sooner or later.

What's even more fundamentally amazing about it is that it's actually an improvement for SG bases, something that sadly only happens about once every several years in this game.

My guess is that even before all the "solo Incarnate" whining the Devs were probably considering revamping DA anyway (the same way they re-did places like The Hollows and Faultline). Once they realized they needed a "solo Incarnate co-op" zone they probably just decided to kill two birds with one stone and re-purpose DA for that.

You say that like it was a surprise to you.

Yeah that's pretty likely what were seeing in that pic.

Yep that definitely looks like a rather 4-legged wolfish type critter to me.

OK, now we have at least 3 timeframes I'm aware of: Soon™, Very Soon™ and Imminently™.

I demand an EXACT definition of the conversion ratio relationship between these three nondescript random time periods.

There's an even simpler explaination for this than trying to define what is or isn't "comic booky" enough. Paragon Studios is owned by NCSoft which is a Korean company. I suspect that any addition to the game which is even remotely Asian in nature is going to be more likely green-lit by the Devs than any other type of genre. *shrugs*

We know at the very least the Devs would never give us -both- male crotch and female mammary based weaponry and people would whine about which ever one we didn't get because it wasn't "fair".

You'll note that I didn't say changing the underlying data type would be simple. I just stated that it would not be impossible.

We obviously don't know the exact details of how hard it would be for the Devs to make this change. But we can assume there would be some amount of effort and risk involved and clearly that would have to be factored into any decision the Devs made about this. Even your idea with coming up with a new system of "salvage to represent chunks of INF" would have a certain amount risk involved. Basically -any- change would have to be justified as far as the Devs are concerned.

I simply don't believe the desire to surpass the cap has outweighed the reasons we're better off without such a change - at least yet at any rate.

It's really not -that- much of a disadvantage as long as you have dedicated alts who'll stay true to being a hero or villain and can then email the results of their hero/villain merit farming to other alts. I play many rogues and vigilantes for RP purposes but I have several other heroes and villains I could use for merits if desired.

Considering what you're having to do to PL level 50's in 10 hours then yes, you are arguably a "mutant idiot of the game".

P.S. For what it's worth I don't really care one way or the other about people who like to PL as long as they aren't trying to sell that service for money. Just because it doesn't personally thrill me to finish and instantly retire characters ASAP doesn't mean that's an invalid way to play. Just means there's different stokes for different folks and what-not.

So instead of being lonely in Outbreak he's now a multidimensional being that can exist simultaneously in multiple zones... cool.

As long as this game maintains the idea of having a separate redside and blueside Ouroboroi there's always going to be a bit of a hassle using them regardless of what alignments you like to play. You have to bother remembering which goes where no matter what so I don't really see this as being a specific disadvantage of playing a Rogue or Vigilante.

I agree with what you said about PvP IO prices but the top 2 billion INF cap has never been changed. That's been the top INF cap since the beginning of the game.

What did change a couple of times was the max amount of INF you could manually trade to another player per trade. When the game launched you could only trade 9,999 INF per trade. Then they raised that limit to 99,999. After another year or so they finally raised the limit to the current 999,999,999 per trade.