Megajoule

I agree.

So how come, when I'm making the RL analogies, I'm wrong, but when you resort to that most tired and cliched of internet appeals, argumentum ad nazium, it's true and/or funny?

All I did was remark on the speed with which you resorted to it.

Godwin in four posts, very nice.

When some people are leveling from 1-50 in as little as four hours... the devs are probably going to do something about it. Possibly something you don't like. Especially if you're already negatively disposed to them (thinking that MA was put in because they're "lazy").

In the end, though, it really doesn't matter what you or I or anyone but the Devs want or think is fun. It's their game, not ours. Our only choice is whether or not to keep paying to play it.

In my experience, it's true. Noticeable, perhaps, but necessary? I do fine against reasonably-sized PvE spawns with just SOs and regular IOs. My friends who PvP more than I do have told me that's all I really need for most of this game. I don't need an Indy car to go to the supermarket.

Now, if you're the sort of player who's frequently out there on the edge of what you can handle, in PvE or PvP, then yes, you are going to want and need more. But then, as I said, I submit that you are not a "casual" player; you are a "serious" player, and should expect to put in the time and effort required to improve your personal skill and equip yourself properly.

Ya'Rly.

In my experience, the advantage conferred by rare and ultra-rare IOs only really comes up in high-end PvP, where every percentage point counts. Truly "casual" players aren't going to be competing in that league, any more than I'm going to be driving in the Indy or Daytona 500. IMO, casual players can get by just fine with generic IOs or even SOs, as we did for many years.

The problem (again, IMO) comes when people want to put in a "casual" amount of effort yet want or expect to reap the "serious committment" level of rewards.

I submit that "casual player" and "purple IO" are not meant to go together.

Story. Always. (But you knew that, right?)

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But my desire for the badges associated with it is robbing all the joy out of this game.

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Fixed that for you.

I'm never going to have every badge (not even close); despite your best efforts, neither are you. If that's the only reason you're playing this game, or enough of a reason that it destroys your enjoyment of the rest, I'm sorry.

(QR)

Fine, I'll take out the comparison to other/RL actions entirely.

Are you seriously claiming that the responsible way to bring a bug to the devs' attention is not to file an official bug report and then leave it alone, but to file no bug report and massively exploit it so that they will notice it in their datamining?

If it is a bug, then you shouldn't profit from it. Thus my suggestion to remove the ill-gotten 50s.

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They made it apparent to the devs with exactly the same result as if they had filed a bug report.

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Not if they proceeded to exploit that bug to their advantage, over and over. Most responsible bug reporters don't do that.

That's like, oh, saying the bank should thank you and give you money for proving they were insecure by robbing them.

Now, maybe if the Devs awarded Bug Hunter and deleted all the new 50s... that might be fair.

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Run it. It's good.

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As in "neither great nor poor"? *chuckle*

Well, I'm glad you liked it enough to give it four stars. Would you believe it started out, back in open beta on Test, with a chance remark to a friend? "We should do something to show the new players how much fun we used to have punching Nazis." Now that I14's gone live, and with the hints about I15... let's just say that seems to be adequately covered.

After I came up with the framing device, it turned into a flashback to each of the eras of the modern Heroic Age - Pulp, Golden and Silver, to use the comics terminology - and ending in the present day. The enemy groups were chosen to fit their times (including the 1960s Arachnos, with their goofy James Bond/Super Sentai spider costumes); I didn't concern myself much with a progression through level ranges, and if anything (as I've said on another thread) I wanted it wide open so that people could play it at any level and get xp. And while a bank job might seem like a rather pedestrian conclusion to the whole affair, it also was the most logical way I could think to end it. Safeguard missions cover the whole 5-50 range, right?

I'm glad that you didn't find the final villain overwhelming; I had some concerns about that during testing. (He's basically an EB version of a Mu.) I'm sorry you didn't find the dialogue and characters more memorable, though. I definitely tried to not make the ally too good, even though it's nominally his story you're experiencing. And yes, I did try to emulate the feel of the existing heroic arcs. If you're already bored to tears with those... well, I hope you will still find something to enjoy in this one.

Thanks for taking the time to look this one over.

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Exactly what is your complaint against farming and powergaming then.

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Aside from the fact that I think You're Doing It Wrong, I worry that the rest of us are going to suffer from what the Devs put in place to stop you. Because they have, and we have, in the past. So in that sense, it is about self-interest. I want you to stop pushing the game until it breaks and the Devs take something away from us to fix it.

I also worry that newcomers to this game, those brought here by the Architect Edition, are going to get an inaccurate or distorted idea of what the Devs want this game to be about.

Personally, I think how appalled the older bunch of supers are at the conduct of the younger ones in KINGDOM COME is a better analogy. Seeing that this game was, at some point, supposed to be about superheroes (and villains), not about who has the bigger stable of "50 toons."

(And if you don't even know what KINGDOM COME is - though I think THE NEW FRONTIER is better - why are you playing this game?)

I don't. I just find the irony and/or stupidity of complaining that a part of the game is no longer worth running, because it was ruthlessly and repeatedly exploited over months until the devs made it so it would not be, to be just... beyond the pale.

I have run Katie Hannon's TF once. For the experience, and I do not mean the xp (though they were nice). We did not use trickery to speed through it; this was before you lot figured out how to drain out all the fun and turn it into a grinding mill.

If Katie is broken and not worth doing now, guess what: YOU BROKE IT. Just like (I believe) you may break the MA, and possibly other parts of the game too.

When the Devs set up a fence, some people immediately start trying to figure out ways to climb over it, or dig under it, or go around it, or smash it down with a monster truck. Some people, however, respect the fence and take it not as a challenge but as a sign that they don't want us going there, period. Amazing!

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Ok, so how exactly am I supposed to run TF's?

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I'm pretty sure the Devs don't want you to find the TF that gives the best reward for time - especially if you find a strategy that lets you skip over the parts that aren't so rewarding - and run it over and over again as often as you can. Ditto Ouroborous arcs, especially if one is bugged to give far more merits than it should; that one was fixed too, as I'm sure you recall. And ditto Shadowhunter's wolves, and Dreck, and...

The worst part, as far as I'm concerned, is that whenever the Devs squash one of these "strategies", it's the people who were playing the game as intended who get inconvenienced - because they still want to do the content for its own sake, unlike the farmers who jump to the next cheap source of xp, inf, merits, and/or tickets. The new players in Atlas who have a question about the game - like "so, is this game all about farms then?" - are drowned out by the spam. The people who want to run the missions that the devs put in the game and even boosted rewards to get us to play them can't find teams. The people who want to use the MA system as Positron seems to feel was intended (based on his posted statements) are buried under countless repetitive farm missions. The person who wants to use a critter in his story that had to be taken out of the MA because it was being farmed, can't. And so on. [Censored] drowns out quality, and the game suffers.

I wish people would just... play the game. Don't game the game. Don't constantly look for ways to get the most for the least.

If I thought that adding an Instant 50 button to the game would change this mindset by getting you to recognize the essential meaninglessness of effortless achievement and collecting more level-capped characters than you have any use for, I'd advocate that. But the MEOW farms seem to have done such a thing de facto - congratulations - and the pigeons are still pecking away at the Skinner box, so I don't think it's fixable. But I still wish that you lot would go off to ProgressQuest or something else that's all about the accumulation of Points and leave me to enjoy a game that's supposedly about, you know, superheroes.

To everyone on this thread complaining that Katie Hannon's TF now gives crap for rewards:

That's because you farmed the hell out of it! Did you never consider there might be consequences? That the devs might act to stop you from doing things they didn't want you to? Or did you simply not care, because when it happened you'd move on to something else (as you have)?

The apparent failure to grasp the effect of your selfish actions on the larger game boggles me.

And in response to another post: no, I don't have to be looking for a team in Atlas to be bothered by the spam. Just going there has been stressful to me. Oh, but you have a solution: turn off Broadcast, set myself to hide, wear these blinders, lock myself in a room and shut up. Mass farming's here to stay, right? Yeah, just like endless speed Katies...

Was it really necessary for you to repost (quote) the entire censored thing?

*takes the thread down off its jacks*

Sounds like more trouble than it's worth, at least to me. I have one slot free at the moment, and I'm somewhat inclined to put arcs up in it in rotation, and to heck with ratings - it's been shown in practice that they're practically meaningless, due to rounding and people gaming the system. Anything other than a brand-new arc that's lucky enough to get five stars for its first few plays (and not immediately get 0-starred out of spite) is not going to be found by anyone except by specific search, word of mouth, or intrepid explorers diving down to page 146.

What I'm much more likely to do, however, is to continue working on the arc ideas I have and wait for the Devs to announce some alternate means for people who want/need more slots to get them. Because they've got to, I mean, come on. ("Soon" would be nice.)

I have to believe that this is a short-term limitation; otherwise, the MA system is doomed to failure. (Yes, I used the D word.) Imagine if we had only been allowed to create three characters at launch, total, across all servers. This game wouldn't be having a fifth anniversary now.

It's a variation on a rather famous saying about/criticism of television (small T) and mass media. [Censored] with mass appeal tends to drive out quality and niche content. Consider the channel that the thread title evokes, which actually used to show videos. We are, sadly, seeing the same process at work here.

"Five hundred channels and nothing on but farms." *click*

I did think about making it just hitting each other with rocks. It's still abusive behavior, but not necessarily lethal.

But let's try to strip that out. The argument seems to be that because a certain type of play cannot be entirely prevented, no efforts at all should be made to do so? Farming is being presented as a fait accompli, and that everyone should just give up and accept it. Laws cannot be 100% enforced; therefore, there should be no laws. Anything goes. Anarchy.

I suggest you look up the fallacy of the excluded middle. The devs' inability to do away with all exploits and forms of farming as soon as they arise does not consititute official endorsement or tolerance of same. And if one entirely rejects their authority to say whether it's right or not, because the cold practical fact is they can't stop it entirely, that doesn't mean we should just accept its presence either.

"The gun has been invented; it is therefore futile to implement any measures to keep people from shooting each other with them."

The problem is that the server architecture can't seem to handle that kind of traffic in one zone. There's "busy" and then there's "jammed."

I would now like to second Vermain's recommendation of "One Million Eyes", which I made a note of earlier. Excellent writing the whole way through, a good mix of seriousness and humor, and a twist which I should have seen coming but didn't (and which makes a lot of sense). I gave this one an enthusiastic, solid 5.