Nethergoat

HOF missions losing their status is ridiculous.

The bar is high enough that getting over it represents a major achievement and a guarantee of a certain level of quality- where's the logic in 'losing' them at some future date?

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

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I don't think that the requirements for HoF need to change, I simply think that comments should be required if you mark any arc less than a 3, and that those comments should be annonymous.

It's frustrating when you see 5 people in a row give you 5 stars and then someone give you a 2 or less. Either they're just crapping on your parade or they think it could be improved. If they really think there's something to improve, they should be required to tell you.

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Here, I'll show you what you'll see a lot of if they start requiring comments:

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...

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People who want to comment already do, and you can't strong-arm the rest however hard you try.

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Honestly folks...this is an MMO. How high a standard do we want here? Most people aren't going to be putting weeks tweaking their arcs. If the story is good, the mobs acceptable in challenge and the whole is engaging it should be noted by both players and Devs.

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Why should an average mission the author didn't spend a tremendous amount of time on be rewarded with 5 stars?

The bar for a Hall of Fame should be higher than "the author spelled all the words correctly, and the enemies weren't terrible".

To me a pretty good story is a three star story- I don't grade on a curve because I'm worried about hurting someone's feelings.

With regards to Green Dwarf's story, the plot synopsis reminds me strongly of a low level mission in WoW where dwarven brewers send you around the zone collecting this and that for their special stout, and an enemy you can't defeat without ranged attacks is terrible design, period.

No ideas, but I'm totally gonna make a villain named RAGE QUIT.

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From the same mish as above. Apparently "Unforgivin 1" is Ms. Liberty, and here is the clue she drops upon defeat.

*ahem*

" It seem Ms. Liberty has bee up to the good things the capes know her for now we has see that she was weak and need to die."

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I <3 engrish.

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i'm pondering trying out an assault rifle/devices blaster,

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don't do it.

AR is an OK primary, but everything on earth resists smashing/lethal damage. Flamethrower and Beanbag are great, M90 grenade & ignite are crummy, everything else is 'eh'.

And devices is hands down the worst secondary.
It used to be pretty good, but the game has changed and /devices hasn't.

power by power:

Web Grenade
the usual 'throwaway' power, no better or worse than any other secondary.

Caltrops
a great power, useful solo or in groups.

Taser
beanbag without range- skippable for any ar/dev

Targeting Drone
the changed to toggles and addition of set IOs make this better than it used to be. Still sort of redundant- beyond the early levels, hitting people isn't really a problem.

Smoke Grenade
the definition of 'skippable power'.
If you really like stealth save up for an IO and save the power choice.

Cloaking Device
see 'Smoke Grenade'

Trip Mine
useless on teams- nobody is going to sit around while you spend ten minutes setting up your mine field.
Useful solo if you don't mind the set-up time, but still situational.
And 'situational' is just a polite way of saying 'skippable'.

Time Bomb
Absolute junk.
All the down sides of trip mines, but it never hits anything.
You'll hate yourself for taking this power.

Auto Turret
Used to be a complete waste of a power. But they made it mobile, which would improve it about 10000%.
Haven't played with it so I don't know how 'good' it is, but it sounds decent.

Of course the biggest flaw with Devices is one of omission- no build up. For an AT who's whole rational is dealing damage this is unforgivable.
Pre ED the ability to six-slot for damage and let your drone take care of accuracy made up for it, but not any more.

I'd love to help Keep, but my son makes teaming nearly impossible by randomly generating AFK's of indeterminate length.

But if you need someone to run arcs solo and give feedback, I'll lend a hoof.

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<QR>

First, sometimes it only takes two minutes for me to decide a mission or arc sucks. First impressions are extremely important. Therefore a quick one star rating does not always equal griefing. Second, if I play the mission/arc enough to decide it sucks and give it a one or two star rating, I don't owe you an explanation. If I'm willing to give an arc that kind of rating, that means I want to get away from it ASAP. I don't owe the author a damn thing.


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In general I agree with Monk's philosophy, but as a creative type myself I have more sympathy for the poor authors.

If I find myself in a really awful arc with no redeeming features, I'll one-star it as a warning to others.

If I find myself in a boring or uninspired arc, or an arc that has promise but is plagued by bad design or spellchecking, I'll send a comment to the author with my issues, but I won't 'rate' it.

I've seen a lot of arcs that seem like works in progress and it doesn't feel fair to critique them publicly.

As a note to authors, a story arc is like any other kind of writing- you need to immediately grab the reader/player's attention and make them want to see what happens next.

Especially in an ocean of content like the MA interface, where its easy to bail out on an unpromising arc because there are a thousand others sitting there waiting to be played.

From an authorial standpoint, I think engaging the people who take the time to comment on your arc, good and bad, is a wise investment of time.

It makes the positive types more likely to check out your other arcs, and it hopefully makes the negative ones give your work a second chance.

the one people usually use to farm BP masks, something about closing a bunch of ruptures.

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It's just dumb luck.

I've gotten purples in missions back to back and then gone many months without seeing one.

I've gotten about 15 or so purples to drop but only 2 respec recipes but I still am not willing to assume their drop rate is lower than purples simply because they are so rare. It is tempting from my own experience but I also know that is not a reliable method.

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Random roll is random.

I've *never* seen a respec recipe drop.
the Goat got had three purples drop for him between 45 and 50 (all ones he wanted to slot, alas).

Conversely, I've *never* gotten a purple drop on my fire/rad controller, who is configured explicitly to farm stuff.
He has several purple sets slotted, but he paid for them in inf.
He's probably nuked a billion zombies on his farm map, nary a purple has he seen.

word filtering common usage dictionary entries is silly.

viva Hybrid Vigor!

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Awesome, awesome guide. This needs to be stickied, so we can all point at it whenever those people come in here.

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Stickies get unstuck and lost sometimes. I think it needs to go in the guides section. Also, I think you (that is, you KeepDistance, not you Dumple, even though I'm replying to Dumple's post) should keep a local copy of the whole thing, just in case the thread is lost in the new forums.

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Absolutely- I weep for my lost DA thread and the documentation of my experiment with ancient bones.

Keep's odyssey demonstrates the beauty of internet communities in a nutshell- me 'n Uber had a little flare up and it sparked this amazing effort.

Seeing the effort it took to accomplish, I will have to amend my original statement that anyone "sufficiently motivated" could earn enough for a max build in a month and make it anyone "TREMENDOUSLY motivated".

Given Keep's journey, which I think we can all agree is at the bleeding edge of market performance, I'm amending my original off the cuff estimate of one month and making it 2-3.
What Keep did in a sprint I think most of us could duplicate in twice the time, or a little more.

Kudos sir on an impressive and highly entertaining experiment!

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The biggest reason why high level salvage is worth less is due to farming producing a lot of common salvage. I find it curious why with tools like Ouro portals and the ability to turn off xp we haven't seen low and mid range salvage farms.

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farmers like efficiency.
high level farms are much more efficient than lower level farms.



on topic comment on the merit system:

As a gamer with severe time constraints, merits are a huge drag with literally no up-side.

Prior to merits pool C drops were readily available at Wentworths. Now, supply has been greatly reduced.

The answer "well, just grind merits" isn't helpful, because I don't have the time for TFs or the inclination to play the same 'efficient' Oro story arcs over and over.

I've been dragging my namesake villain to 50 since returning to the game after a hiatus, playing through the high level villain story arcs. Yesterday he finally earned enough merits for a random roll (Ghost Widow Proc- joke's on me).

The merit system as implemented rewards one behavior- grinding merits. I see this as an unhealthy direction to take for a game that has historically avoided the usual MMO metric of "grind X hours for reward Y".

I could deal with the gutting of pool C's on the market if there was some faint hope of earning enough merits to buy what I wanted, or even accumulate enough random rolls to give myself a reasonable shot at something good.

Oh well.

OMG I SEE NOODLES

I'm disappointed that of your top 5, every one a seasoned veteran of the market forum, not one followed the golden rule:

never place a bid ending in zero!

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Why, dont you get it? Because this is all in their plan to time sink people into playing more/longer for more profits. This has nothing to do with our fun, risk vs reward of any of the BS they have spewed in advertisements and on this board.

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I'm no fan of their club-footed dancing with (on?) the market, but this criticism is unfair.
They don't care if we play at all, provided they get 14.99 every month.


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I'm not going to chase their fuggin merits.

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On this point we are in perfect accord.

This surprises who?

they've got no feel for and little enough understanding of the market.

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I'm not certain when it became a "cool" hip thing to call "crybabies"...

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Accurate descriptions are always in vogue.

the Snood Liberation Front is ever growing.

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Last time I checked, though, Blasters were at the rock bottom of performance, which is why they needed the Defiance changes. What happened to make them kings of the world that I missed? Surely it cannot have been the Defiance changes just by themselves. They weren't making my Blasters any more survivable than my Scrappers last time I checked.

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The only problem blasters had was getting slept/held/etc.
Filling your tray with break frees before every mission worked, but it wasn't fun.

Great on teams, but they could just be a pain to solo (unless you had a controller-y secondary like ice).

Regarding Newfiance, being able to peck away at somebody who's got you held is infinitely less frustrating than just sitting there dying.

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I am a person that has faith.

Heard the same thing when fighting for the IO system.

Also heard similar things from Statesman (Jack Emmert), I had to fight him on the boards to get respecs in the game, He did say at one point respecs would be in the game over his dead body. I convinced him that respecs were needed....

If were list everything I had done for the game the list would be pretty long.


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They need to get rid of the statue of that fat bald dude in front of the Kings Row train station and replace it with a tribute to a true titan of the game, LONGTIME.

*bow & scrape*

In the formative days of the game scrappers kinda stunk and nobody wanted them for teams.

Kids today, think ya know everything. =P


Anyone who says they stink now is smoking the good stuff, but back in the day they did indeed underperform & were kinda sucky.

This is back when you could do more DPS using pool power attacks than using the MA primary, and when hurdle was faster than fly.

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Mean Auction House vs. Consignment House?

I am looking for a third option due to not being able to get items in the Random Drop system or the Consignment house.

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Longtime, as beautiful as your dream is I fear you may have to let it go.

Alas, the chances of our coldhearted dev overlords investing in yet another way for players to outfit themselves with goodies are vanishingly small.