Nethergoat

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It's also probably the most obnoxious acronym I've ever seen.


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Then your experience must be fairly narrow.

omg u r so awzome at life.

*faints*

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Are consolidated threads a wise addition to this forum?


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yes because nobody wants to wade through a wall of 15 threads all covering the same point.

Consolidated threads allow interested players to state their opinions for the record without chasing other topics off the front page.

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In my experience, I'm most swayed by threads that typically run about 2 or 3 pages in length, covering a very specific facet of a single subject. Why is this no longer allowed?

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I don't think they're all that concerned with your ideal method of processing information.
Consolidated threads suit their purposes, so that's what we get.

to me a group is a 'spawn'.

individual enemies are referred to by name- "there's one sapper around the corner" or "that sorcerer teleported away, he should be back in a sec".

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My empath was fun. That being said, past level 12, a good empath is a buffer, not a healer.

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a good empath is whatever the situation calls for.
which can be lots and lots of heals, depending on the team.

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As much as it should happen (hell it should've happened at I9 launch), I don't think it will.

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I bailed for blue side shortly after I figured out what an unfair joke segregated markets were, but I was an extreme minority.

It's always amused me that the villain population, so hyper-sensitive to perceived slights, generally ignores the single greatest factional inequity.

They'll march in the streets over a meaningless badge, but they sit on their hands when the issue of market parity comes up.

my experience as a Heal0r consists of 46-ish levels of playing an emp/elec defender.

I really, really hated /elec for most of his career so he's heavy on his primary and pool powers. Thunderous Blast rules, I like Tesla Cage, the rest of the stuff I'm not that into. Short Circuit is kinda fun.

so, as a primary-heavy emp I've done a lot of healing. Also a lot of Recovery Aura-ing, a lot of Regen Aura-ing, Clear Minding, Adrenaline Boosting and Fortituding.

At the lower levels I did a ton of healing. in the mid levels, not as much. At the higher levels, very little.

But his buffs are always welcome, and I don't think anyone missed those /elec powers I passed on.

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Removing the comm officer and super imp XP was necessary. The stern discipline wasn't.

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agreed.

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The people who run the forums are not the devs, but the mods. That is not a mere semantic difference. When you report a thread, it notifies the mods and if violates the rules of posting, it will get edited or deleted. Repeatedly getting moderated may result in loss of posting privileges.

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From what I recall of past job listings mods have to clock in at Dev HQ and have assorted other company duties besides wrangling us malcontents. So they're hanging with the 'big boys'.

And I'm assuming this joint runs like every other forum in the world, i/e mods deal with little stuff, admins deal with the bigger stuff that gets kicked up the food chain and the head admin/site owner deals with the rest.

I have a tremendously low opinion of the NC reps on the boards, but even the dullest pencil in that shopworn box would know enough to kick this thread up the chain of command.

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To assume differently is pure folly.

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As an admin for a busy forum for a web based business, I don't agree.

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When hundreds or thousands of players level at the speeds Smurphy is reporting I predict you will see a crackdown which may include nerfs, discipline, and stern posts from on high. But I don't have any particular empirical evidence for my prediction other than past history.

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you're not going to see hundreds or thousands of people doing what Smurph is doing because it takes dedication and a large up-front investment in IO's.

I think they'll 'correct' this 'problem' in the traditional way- quiet rule changes, no punitive treatment of players.

It's an approach that's historically worked fine and generated far less hostility and drama than the 'new way' they tried to pave in I14.

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Fixed.

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good point- I forgot to include TEH EEEBIL in my first draft.

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To state that the conclusions are "fairly obvious" is flat-out ridiculous.

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Here is a short play to help you understand the point you're oblivious to:

An MA Tale
Starring
Smurphy, a dirty farming PL'er
The Devs, all-powerful creators.

Smurph (addressing the Devs on high from their temple):

I'm going to PL a bunch of characters using MA without any of the "exploits" you've deplored in the past.
Smite me with lightning if I am doing wrong!

Devs:
(silence)

Smurph:
Okay, here we go!
(strolls over to the MA with his crew)

Devs:
(silence)

Smurph, exiting MA in a cloud of brimstone:
Wow that was fast, we hit 50 in a couple of hours!

Devs:
(silence)

The End

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First of all, this is posted in the MARKET forum, not the AE forum. If it were a true "challenge" to the people in control, it should've been posted in the category where Mod 8 would most likely be the first to see it.

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The 'report' button doesn't care where a thread is posted, and this one was turned in long ago.

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Secondly, to pretend like this power-leveling is some bold challenge is fallible. People are still power-leveling every hour of every day in Mission Architect.

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There's a world of difference between recruiting a farm team in broadcast and directly challenging the devs in the forums.

It takes an inspired effort to confuse the two actions.

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Third, the big technical debate wasn't over people leveling fast. It was over people using ABUSIVE missions, such as the crazy-XP trial comm officers, imps, and bomb-clusters in order to minimize the risk while maximizing the reward.

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It was absolutely 100% about leveling fast.
If the 'broken' stuff in MA hadn't resulted in super efficient leveling, they wouldn't have freaked out about it.

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People will always find ways to level quickly, and nothing they do is going to stop that.

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They could stop it tomorrow if they wanted.
It would probably be fatal to the game, but it's very do-able.

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And finally, if this were a true challenge, the exact technique and mission arc numbers would be posted. I understand the problem with doing so, because it would get insta-reported by the volunteer AE-police (players), but it would offer us, the observers of this experiment, full transparency and not just status reports.

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Smurph has given us all the information we need to access his experiment.
The devs see all, and chose not to react.

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In parting, I want to say that I actually have no opinion as to whether or not this exercise is good for the people or just some elaborate troll attempt.

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Your powers of observation and judgment are exactly what I'd expect given the rest of your post.

when we collect more data points, we can make more solid assumptions.

For now, a high profile challenge the devs failed to respond to leads to certain fairly obvious conclusions.

I'm guessing they've recovered from their temporary MA-induced insanity and will respond to this thread the traditional way- by changing the rules to make it impossible without lining players up for the guillotine.

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Today I decided to create a new alt on freedom, and I have to say that the endurance usage has gone through the roof.

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no it hasn't.

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Well technically, if he re-rolled the same powersets but didn't slot the same endredux in powers as he had on the original then, yes, his personal use of endurance is larger!

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har!


and a revision to reflect dom changes:

No it hasn't (unless you're playing a dominator).

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This is a rage post about why I refuse to invite people who advertise themselves as a healer and why I usually end up kicking people who ask for a healer.

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so you're some kind of weird counterbalance to all those people who won't invite you unless you're a heal0r and who will kick you for not heal1ng?

Cool, I guess, although I think both factions act like twits.

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the fire tanks and regen scrappers say wah!

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HAW!

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How is it that we cannot choose only one power set? I mean, for example, some heroes only have ONE power they manipulate and grow. For example, Cyclops only has his laser beam. Jubilee only has her flash bomb things, Rogue only has that power absorbtion (which yes can lead to OTHER powers, but not permanently).

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works in fiction, not so well in an MMO environment.

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In other words, we can't really tell if they experiment failed to trigger the RED ALERT siren or if they simply chose to ignore it.

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Due to dev reticence to provide meaningful guidelines, we don't know the process the black box goes through. it either acts or doesn't and we don't know why.

We must assume actions that don't trigger a hostile response have not crossed any of their invisible boundaries.

devs are on the forums.
someone posts a thread about pushing the limits of this or that, someone's gonna check it out.
even if we assume they're blind and deaf, smurph's run didn't set off their datamining RED ALERT siren.

I'm comfortable accepting his data point as inside the limits of their killzone.

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I truly admire Smurph's creativity and his accomplishments in the game, but I fail to see the "immensely valuable" contribution to the game's population here (I can see the immensely valuable contribution to the lowbie that zipped to 50, but that's beside the point ). What new information is being imparted here?

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the 'line of death' beyond which the devs take action against characters and accounts.

they won't tell us where it is, so anyone publicly exploring its limits is doing the community a service.

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On the larger issue: does anyone seriously think that the devs approve of leveling a lowbie from 1-50 in 5 hours? Would anyone be shocked if they clobbered Smurph's lowbie with the ban stick? If they don't, it doesn't prove that what he's done is acceptable. It just proves they're inconsistent in playing PLed character whack-a-mole.

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if they're not going to nail somebody who made a huge public display out of the feat, they aren't going to nail anyone for it.

the way Smurph has gone about this experiment,no reaction from on high tells us all we need to know.

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The point of this thread is what? Why worry about inf and other peoples inf? Why in the world would someone WANT to pay higher prices?

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probably because they like selling things for higher prices.

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without the innovations of I9 the game would have lost me.

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You say that like it's a bad thing.

I KEED!

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bad for their bottom line, anyway... =D

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The screams of "I didn't pay $400 bucks for THIS, omg they stole my munnies!" would be deafening.

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#1, I doubt it'd be $400. Just sayin'.

#2, since when has anyone ever cared about a few malcontents complaining?

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I took your point of your reply to be that nobody who bought a lifetime sub would cry about it because you haven't seen anyone whine about buying the game itself.

I'm saying yes they would.

Dollar amount is irrelevant, the moment something they didn't like happened some folk would be here moaning and whining about wanting their $___ back and claiming they would cancel if they could.

They wouldn't get any more play than the people who sign up for a year and cry about leaving after two months, but it would definitely happen.

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You guys missed the primary reason that CoH doesn't have a lifetime subscription.

The "I regret buying a lifetime subscription to this game! I'm quitting!!" posts every open beta would get really old.

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It's a one-time fee. There are no posts saying "I regret the 50 bucks I spent on this game and subsequent updates!" so your argument just shot itself in the foot with a freakin' railgun.

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people whine all the time about their regrets re-upping for a year or a couple of months when some change ruffles their feathers.

what makes you think they wouldn't whine about re-upping for ETERNITY every time something they didn't agree with came down the pike?

The screams of "I didn't pay $400 bucks for THIS, omg they stole my munnies!" would be deafening.

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Once, playing my BS/Inv Scrapper, I pulled so many Jaegers of them around a crate and used Headsplitter on them all, the resulting explosion and screenshake was so loud and disruptive that for a moment, I wasn't sure what had happened. I seriously thought that the Fire/Fire Blaster who was on my team had used Inferno, but she hadn't; it was all the exploding bots.

I also nearly died from the damage they deal when they explode.

Some passers-by actually applauded in /local.

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Good times!

A couple of times my kat/regen bit off more than he could chew and his Golden Dragon finisher did him in too.

My favorite though was my buddy's dm/regen. Nothing like landing Shadow Maul on a stadium full of bots...

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Today I decided to create a new alt on freedom, and I have to say that the endurance usage has gone through the roof.

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no it hasn't.