Olantern

In all the hullabaloo over endgame content, I haven't seen anyone say anything about either of these new level 20-40 task/strike forces, aside from some grumbling from story snobs in beta. I just wanted to say that I have run and enjoyed both.

If you are the sort of player who enjoys task/strike forces, I recommend them to you, at least once. There's a fair variety of objectives, some new maps, and some characters we haven't seen much in combat before featured prominently.

(As an aside, in my own bit of story snobbery, Odysseus looks nothing like either the way I pictured him or his Praetorian counterpart. Also, wouldn't it have made more sense to make his powerset Archery rather than War Mace, given the importance of the bow of Odysseus in the Odyssey? But that's a minor deal.)

As someone who believes that endgame raids are the devil's works, it's nice to see that other things are still being developed, albeit as a sideshow.

Why was the NDA required? Someone at NCSoft was concerned about something being leaked and someone suing over it. It's that simple. It has nothing to do with the specific contents of the issue. It's a purely C.Y.A. thing. Issue 20 was just the first one for which the NDA document was prepared, approved, and ready. I assume there will be NDA's for all future closed betas from now on.

I found it amusing. The funniest thing, however, is there are still apparently people who not only thought "freeem" was funny the first time, but still think it's funny now.

All right, you asked for it:

1) Add the ability to customize powers other than primaries and secondaries, as well as adding the ability to customize powers that involve summoning/replacement of models (MM primaries, Traps gadgets, Kheldian forms, Granite Armor, etc.).

2) Shut down the forums. I'm tired of the constant complaints about anything and everything.

3) And, just to add a complaint of my own, if I could make it so all the time spent creating a raid-based endgame could have been directed toward anything else, I would. I don't like the sudden change of development direction, and I don't think it'll have the anticipated effect of growing or retaining some mythical cohort of potential players who've been staying away just because they couldn't previously participate in a mega-raid.

Several threads discussing the Rikti Crash Site back in 2005 and early 2006 suggested a number of ideas that appeared in i10.

I posted a thread that included some story arcs for the zone. The only one of my suggestions that made it into the game more or less unchanged was the creation of a character (a Longbow agent in my write-up, Borea in the game) who gave out repeatable missions, like the newspaper.*

In that thread and a number of other threads, various players suggested a task force or zone event that concluded with fighting a Riktified Hero 1, as in the LGTF.

Also in that thread and a number of other threads, several players suggested zone events involving getting through the shields on the crashed Rikti ship. (At the time, the shield was up all the time, and it was possible to "surf" on it.) The ideas of destroying a series of pylons to shut down the shield and entering exhaust ports to place bombs were featured at least once.

Turning to other parts of the game, it appears that Sally, the lake monster in Croatoa, may have originally been intended to be more of a garden variety giant monster. Her first write-up in the Paragon Times (a feature I still miss) implied that her spawning would be signaled by Redcaps performing a ceremony by the lake shore, followed by her rampaging around. As Skipper Legrange puts it in that write-up, "She has to be destroyed!" Players didn't like this, for some reason, and came up with the "Save Sally" campaign. Whether due to player pressure, time constraints, or development difficulties, we got the current, inoffensive version of our favorite lake monster.

* This was before police scanners and tips were added to the game. At the time, the only repeatable missions were in the PvP zones, in the Shadow Shard, and in papers (villains only).

It's this sort of thing that makes her one of my favorite villain contacts.

In a related matter, on St. Patrick's Day, I will be running around in my saved Allister McKnight costumes on various villains.

He's an all-American albino gangster haunted by memories of 'Nam. She's a psychotic kleptomaniac Hell's Angel with a song in her heart and a spring in her step. They fight crime!

Is it just me, or does that remind anyone else of every original series ever to air on HBO?

I found out that there's a waterfall in the "Reclaim Cimerora" mission of the ITF. I also found out (and saw for the first time) that there's a control room for the computer that controls the turrets in the Vespillo Pass mission.

I've seen such spawns in four places, all RWZ missions:

1) The "Rescue Nemesis Defector" mission, guarding the defector
2) The "Rescue Nemesis Defector," forming the ambush that spawns as you lead him out
3) The mission featuring General "Brawl Myself To Death" Aarons, in the large room of the cave. This may have been multiple spawns working together, however, rather than an actual Incoming Fake Nemesis Horde.
4) The mission and location shown in the screenshot in this thread.

I think it's working as intended, but it's very, very challenging for any character running an "ordinary" (no defense softcap, no Incarnate boosts, etc.) build. In the mission depicted here, I remember my team finally succeeding by pulling the spawn repeatedly through a narrow doorway into a heap of Trip Mines. Even so, it required multiple retreats by the team, several of which turned into team wipes as people couldn't run away fast enough to break the aggro.

This, more than anything else, convinces me that non-TF missions are (or at least were at the time) tested with solo characters or small teams on the default difficulty. I suppose the attitude is, "If you raise it, it's on your head," which doesn't seem too unreasonable. It does, however, cause sudden difficulty "jumps" when you run into something like this.

As an aside, I tried to do something like this challenge in an AE arc, where an unarmored Elite Boss was protected by the Grant Cover of a mob of shield-using Lieutenants. Unfortunately, AE enemies don't seem to use Grant Cover. Ah, well ...

Any kind of new thing to do is good in my book, so I have no problem with this. (For that matter, I don't have much problem with what we got, but that's a different thread.) If the missions are interesting, this goes from "decent" to "great." The fact that it fills a mechanical hole in the reward system is just gravy.

Further, since it's an EvilGeko suggestion, it will, someday, come to pass. Seriously, most of the large-scale suggestions I've seen out of the loot-loving lizard, over the years, have been implemented in one way or another. I think he must just have the same kind of brain as the devs do (which may frighten either the gecko or the devs, depending on the context ). I am pleased that this time, it's a suggestion I like.

Incarnate Strikes, coming in a future issue. You heard it here first, folks!

No, I wouldn't accept a delay for this reason, even putting aside the fact that it's totally unrealistic to expect anything to change. When the feature I wanted (create your own missions and arcs) was released, I don't remember the powergaming, Type A, ambition-focused players who drive me so crazy arguing that it should be delayed because it didn't fit what they wanted out of the game. So, no, even though I think the implementation is pretty wretched, mechanical character improvements like the Lore slot shouldn't be delayed simply because its backstory grounding and visual presentation is pretty wretched.

Someone in either this or another thread (it's getting hard to keep them straight) argued that "art wasn't a priority" for development. Well, no, of course it isn't. While there are players out there, including me, some roleplayers and some not, who view this game primarily as an animated movie about their characters, not all players think that way, and the devs certainly don't seem to.

The devs are game mechanics engineers. They, and, incidentally, a lot of players, view this as "game," not in the sense of "a game of 'let's pretend,'" but in the sense of "a game of football" or "a game of Monopoly." For those players, and for a majority of the dev team, the game is something that can be "won," in one fashion or another. Art and story are means to support the ends of gameplay, not ends in themselves.

For example, those who are AE mavens may remember Dr. Aeon stating that much of his job consisted of being told things like "write an arc about a hero who goes bad" or some other, rather broad, direction. He doesn't create a story about Incarnates and then send Positron and his minions off to develop a system to support it; it's the other way around. (Yes, I'm aware that development probably isn't quite that one-sided, but years of dev discussion of the way they work convinces me that I'm more or less correct.)

Similarly, Going Rogue was born not because the devs really wanted to show off Praetorian Earth, but to provide a mechanism for switching sides and for gluing an end-game system onto a game that hadn't previously had one.

With that kind of development structure, you're going to get some serious misses if you're the kind of player who prefers the "support" of art and story over the "meat" of gameplay. I'm not arguing that those priorities are necessarily right, but I think they have to be acknowledged.

Further, the gameplay element here, I think, is seen as particularly crucial to the life of the franchise. Incarnates are this game's attempt to capture the raider-/advancement-driven market of the hardcore MMO player. Rightly or wrongly, it's an attempt to bring in a demographic that hasn't been part of the game's primary market before. And I suspect that, for that reason, here even more than elsewhere, art and story have been even less of a driving force in creating the new content. I can clearly imagine a dev raising the kinds of objections players here have at a development meeting three years ago and being told in response, "Yeah, those players will be dissatisfied, but they got all those years of costumes and power customization and that AE thing. They'll be satisified with that. Anyway, people will only do this endgame stuff if they really want to win more parts of the game."

Now, you can argue that this represents a misunderstanding on the devs' part of how players can cross from one demographic to another, but I don't think it's a totally unreasonable mode of thinking. Yes, I'd be happier if some consideration had been given to granting me the ability to tailor Incarnate content to my characters in nonmechanical ways. But I can't really fault the devs for overlooking that option. They weren't expecting someone like me to use the Incarnate system in the first place.

So, to all those disappointed with the (over)emphasis on Tyrant, the Praetorian Lore pets, or the inability to make the fire from your Pyronic WhiteWall Radial Judgement green, I suggest keeping in mind that you're not the target audience for this stuff. The devs believe, rightly or wrongly, that you're already loyal to the game, that you have enough features to keep you occupied without this. Those boosts are meant to ensnare and keep players who just want to "beat the game."

Now, I question the wisdom of that design philosophy. I don't much like that kind of contest-oriented thinking, in a game or in life, for that matter. This new direction the game is taking troubles me on some level, but I'm not willing to hold back the enjoyment of people who have been screaming for it for years. I am not the only player here. I don't have to love everything.

I would just like to point out that this thread keeps popping up as "newest posts" in my default forum display, and I keep misreading the title. The first time I clicked on it, I thought it was another "Statesline" thread.

I agree. The Praetorians, while their zones have nice graphics and interesting mission mechanics, aren't too interesting in and of themselves. The Praetorian content is pretty much a one-trick pony. I can only have IF YOU'RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU'RE PART OF THE PROBLEM, SHEEP!!! shoved in my face so many times without getting annoyed by it.

I'd like to see the game get back a little more of the straight-up spandex-clad hero vs. strangely-powered villain (and no, dressing like Captain Steuben from The Love Boat and having your own pet government doesn't count as a "strange power"). It seems that with the Praetorians, the game became more about social commentary and philosophy than about having fun.

If such a release were made, players would still whine that "the devs never fix anything," "the devs are lazy," and "they never do anything right." Plus, a lot more screaming for "I want [insert player's personal preoccupation here, be it animated fingers, banking flight animations, or an Arcane theme for Traps]." Lately, this is all I ever hear about the game. A "bug fix" issue isn't going to stop this.

(As an aside, the building level of negativity really bothers me, given that the game seems better now than it's ever been. The attitude seems to be that if you complain about something long enough, it gets changed, or "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." This adage hasn't been borne out by my own life experience, for whatever that's worth. In my experience, a squeaky wheel is more likely to cause the car's owner [the publisher, in our metaphor, I guess] to decide to junk it entirely and buy a newer, flashier model.)

Also, I agree that the devs are thinking of much more extensive operations than the players are when they hear "zone revamp."