Sardan

It's nowhere near as powerful as either SS or SJ.

It's not slottable.

Nope. And you're not the only one who'd drop regular travel powers if this was better and/or slottable. I'm sure the devs are sensitive to the folks who complain about not wanting to feel forced into having to do microtransactions in order to have a strong character. Hence the high end cost, incompatibility with CJ, no Def bonus, and inability to slot.

To be fair, Synapse is well aware of the inequities of the current system. I chatted with him briefly about this a while back and in essence he said that they had some good ideas for a more fair and balanced system of awarding merits (not just for TFs but arcs too) but it'd take a fair bit of programming time and it just wasn't a front burner task.

I did exactly the same thing in order to solo Sea Witch. I like the intent of the OP's suggestion but would want it to be an optional switch in the mission difficulty settings so that people could set "use my current level" vs. "use the mission's level". As long as it was set up as a user-selectable option, I'd love it.

Not exactly right; it's not the value but the name of the bonus that matters. Per paragonwiki:

As you surmised, not yet.

This analogy doesn't work. When I have to go to a gunfight, I always take a ripe banana instead of a gun because:

1) With the banana, the other guy looks at me, laughs, and walks away shaking his head. If I had a gun, it's highly probable he'd shoot me.

2) I might get hungry. Bananas are way better in that department. Sure, you can use a gun to get food, but there's all the noise and blood and running away from the 7-11. It's just much more direct with a banana.

3) You might be tempted to bring an unripe banana. Don't. It's not nearly as good a weapon as a gun, and not nearly as good foodwise as a ripe banana.

4) I know what you're thinking: better to bring the gun and just take the other guy's ripe banana because then you end up with both a gun and a ripe banana, and it really doesn't get any better than that. But if both guys think that way you're back to the noise and the blood again. Don't get fancy, just stick with the ripe banana.

I guess this really proves that using RP as a rationale against merging the markets make sense, but that wasn't my intent. I just get so tired of all the noobs bringing guns and/or unripe bananas to gunfights when it's so much better to go the ripe banana route.

Yup, a team size as small as 3 will make outdoor Igneous bosses abundant.

Look at the bright side, at least the thread title is clearly a question. Her *Going Rogue update* thread had loads of people complaining that it looked like it had info rather than being a request for info. So kudos to P_P for learning rules of basic punctuation.

Oh, and on topic: of course there will be new mission maps. We don't know how many but anyone who proposes with a straight face that the number will be zero is either laughably clueless or a troll. Can you imagine a new expansion with no new mission maps at all? What I'm more interested in is not just how many new maps there will be, but maps with special features like security spotlights that trigger ambushes, or maps with destructible objects like the one with the subs in Faultline.

I hate the idea of an underwater zone, but I LOVE this idea. Having a window that shows an underwater scene, or a space scene, or the shadow shard would allow missions to use normal maps yet be set in underwater or outer space bases. Ideally they'd make those same windows available to base builders for ambiance.

I think just the opposite was stated by Sunstorm and Posi, as summarized by Fire Away: That means that while they have ideas for base raids, the work is not currently scheduled. Even if it was scheduled, it looks like it'd be Q3 2010 at the earliest. Now, priorities can get shifted around or maybe they'll get a bright new hire that can get started on this stuff in the near future (they're hiring!). But "not in current plan" implies that not only is no one currently working on it, there's not even any concrete schedule when they'll be assigned to start working on it.

Sigh. I wish they'd just merge the markets already.

Agreed. We're looking at a target release of April-June of next year. That's a long way off, folks. But in addition to the long amount of time left, one thing mull over is the increased resources they have now. The Paragon Studios team is now over 60 people and they still have 8 open reqs! I have faith that they are all go-getters and that a team that large is going to crank out a ton of stuff.

Plus think about the fact that devs are not interchangable. The type R programmers who did the reflectivity/water/shadow effects aren't doing costumes, enemy groups, buildings, mission instances, new arcs, etc. Think about how much Jay, Babs, and Posi (and their new-hire minions) can crank out in a year, and then reflect on how little of their work we saw in the GR preview.

For example, two HUGE items we know will be in GR from the San Diego Comicon dev discussion panel are a new end game for level 50s and a way to make our level 50s more powerful. This is a big project being created by a big team. It's incredibly premature to be disappointed by GR at this stage. I'm sure they're going to have a couple of big reveals prior to open beta, and even when open beta begins there are going to be some "holy cow!" moments when players see stuff that hadn't even been previously hinted at.

Altough I do have to confess to my own pet obsession: I think a desperately needed QoL improvement is a revamp of the Search window and the addition of a Team Looking For More mechanism. If they roll out a ton of new shinies but omit those, I'll be the one posting an "I'm disappointed" thread!

So while that's not a "for sure this is coming" nor any promise of when it might come, it's a positive step. As has been all too often noted here, most MMOs already offer this capability so hopefully the devs are looking at this as simply part of keeping the game current.

No mention of when this will go live but I'm guessing it'll be by or before GR or they wouldn't be talking about it. This was also confirmed by @Gothess via Twitter.

This claim is so absurd as to be laughable. So rather than rebut it, I'll just say thanks for a good laugh.

Just in case anyone is reading this thread and isn't familiar with Fulmens, I'll chime in for some reassurance. He's a well known player, wealthy to the point where he listed a stack of 10 common salvage for 2 billion each (costing himself a billion in market fees) just for grins, and has been offering inf xfers to players for a very long time. He's quite reliable and trustworthy.

Well, FWIW I just gave you +rep. Excellent guide. The next time I'm doing an extended session at the auction house and see some forlorn character broadcasting for 10 solid minutes that they're looking for a team, I'm going to send them a link to your guide.

(Of course what I continue to hope for is a "Team LFM" function since some people just won't form their own teams no matter what; but that's another subject entirely.)