The_Alt_oholic

Uh, I was backing you up last night, but this over-board.

There is a time and a place for all powers to be used and all AT's can adapt to the use of any of power by any other player. If the melee characters can't keep the enemy away from the squishes they have a right to protect themselves and the melee players are jerks for thinking otherwise.

For the team's best interest, all should work in a way that augments each others powers.
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I don't think that I have taken force bubble on any of my bubblers (yet).
My controller bubblers tend to be built for melee combat so that their "big" bubble protects the melee characters; plus if I fight the same enemy as the tank and I don't have to worry about gaining agro.

The force bubble can be a very good save if the tank looses agro and that is what happened in the OP's case.

Like I said, it also can be very useful to shield the squishies when the melee characters "drop the ball" and let enemy pass them - which pretty much happens very mob that I have ever fought.

If player had force bubble up and were "on follow" to the tank and was knocking everything too far away from the tank to get to because they were constantly near the tank,and refused to stop doing so -- then I can see a problem that would involve kicking the bubbler.

I'm a multi-server alt-oholic so I char/level/server jump for teams if I don't think I have enough time to run or if there don't look like there are enough the level range I want to be worth throwing around invites.

Yes, use your flag. I look for it, but it doesn't stop me from sending a tell to people that don't have their red "not accepting invites" flag up or a search comment that implies that they don't want the kind of team that I'm running (or any team at all for that matter).

Try sending tells to people in your level range that are already on teams. Use the /search function to pull up the search window and search for your level range. Blue aren't on teams, characters that are grayed out are. Send a tell with your level and ask if the team could use your help. This works sometimes.

Broadcast in zones that are in your level range. Go to the tram and to it to all zones that fit your level range. Broadcast only reaches the zone and not even players in missions in that zone.

Don't be shy to use the [Help] channel ( use /hc [message] ), if push comes to shove - but many servers have their own LFT Channel. I suggest going to your server's forum and asking what that channel is. I don't use them because there is a limit to the number of global channels that you can have and I play on all the servers (Yes, really, but not Farmdumb or Virtue right now because they have their heads stuck up their AE). The [Help] channel also works as server wide broadcast - it reaches all players that are monitoring [Help] regardless of what zone they are in or if they are in a mission or not.
You might run into a few players that feel like they have the right to tell you not to use the channel to look for a team. Put them on ignore. They are few and far between.
Do you need help finding a team? Seems like you need help to me? What's the Help channel for? Getting help. Seems like help channel business to me.

If you can't find a team for one character switch to another character/server and try again!


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Yeah, you might not want to lead a team, but that may be the only way to get a team going. If anyone complains about they way that you are leading the team --

1. tell them to stop complaining
2. warn them that they can make their own team
3. kick them if they continue to be a thorn in your side.

That goes for bad behavior on the team as well (aka someone repeatedly causing team wipes that could be avoided with different tactics)

1. Never give up the star.
2. Always run the missions that you want to run.
3. The majority of players will follow you as long as you are clear on what kind of team that you are running and you stick to that plan.

What's wrong with you?

I see a thread about being kicked from team for trying to defend a team, and Turbo_Ski saying that they would just back away and watch the team fall if it was full or morons that would follow a tank that didn't know what they were doing.

I see Miladys_Knight insulting Turbo_Ski for saying that they would let the team fall so that they would hopefully learn a lesson.

The OP's post is about rushing in and getting kicked from a team for doing so.

I must assume by your position that you believe that Miladys_Knight is some how supporting the OP by insulting Turbo_Ski.

I don't understand your logic.

Miladys_Knight's foot is in his mouth up to his knee at this point. I see you are trying to get your's deeper faster.

You can still star threads. Look up there to the right and you will see the thread rating tab.
I just 4 starred this thread.

The Rep meter might as well just be mud-slinging prompter.
It is a bad idea.

It is not the same. If you think it is, you really don't have a clue.

AE Boss farms, AE LT farms, and other exploits are just that.

All the other content you mentioned have balanced groups with minions, lts, and bosses.

They are not the same.

Running multiple police missions and running a tf are also not the same as running the same mission over and over again.

I don't run tf's that often because they are long, but I do run police missions - mainly because the team doesn't have to run from zone to zone. There is more time spent playing than there is getting to the mission.
I've been on plenty of "normal" arc teams where there was more time spent getting to missions than there was actually running them.

There is a definitely difference in wanting to fight crime quickly instead of running around all over Paragon and wanting to farm/pl.

You'll enjoy it more if you do.

There were several reasons for lower server populations on Farmdom and Virtue.

Some players are actually moving away from playing on Farmdom and Virtue because they are the worst for AE farming/pl'ing/exploiting.
I know that I'm haven't played on either one of them for a couple of months now because of the rampant AE abuse there. I drop into pay base rent and set up some trades on the market every now and then, but I don't team there at all any more and won't until this situation calms down.
Oh, well my highest average character levels are highest on those two servers at any rate. Better to give the other servers some more love at this point anyway.

Another reason is that this wasn't a "welcome back"/account reactivation weekend - this usually corresponds with 2XP Weekend. I'm glad it didn't this time.

New player bad experience when entering the starting zones fulled with AE spams and not being able to find low level teams? Were there a lot of sewer teams running? Were there any activities for new players to get involved with recently? Anyone running any low level content to help players learn how to enjoy playing the game?

New players joining and burning out on farming or pl'd to "win"? If you are jaded to the game, farming is fun to some. If you are looking to play a superhero game and you are told to sit there and do nothing while others play or just fight the same thing all the time, it gets pretty boring. Some players only play a MMORPG to get a 50 and once that happens, they have "won the game", and are done with it.

Yeah, I wasn't too excited about 2XP Weekend either, especially after I found out that the DEVs slipped up and allowed 2XP in the AE as well. Heck, I was running on x1.5XP with Patrol XP on most of my characters already so the 2XP just stacked on top of that!

May I suggest that you start by reading the OP's post and work your way down and then see where the thread is coming from before your foot is too far into your mouth.

The melee guys can't claim to be doing all the work and glory-hogging credit for doing everything, and it deflates their egos to know a squishy can achieve the kind of mob control that they think they have?

I'm for this plan.
Don't forget to set up your options to show stars and one star the guy as well.

Of course, there is always running your own teams.

I've been in the habit of running no tanker/no scrapper team if at all possible. The teams usually do very well once they gel.


You know what you are dealing with when you are running with a Tank without Taunt. For some reason, many Tankers insist that they can keep agro without it, but the rest of us know that this really isn't true.
We also know that even Taunt can't hold a room full of enemies any more.
It's mostly a matter of what I call Tankertude.
The Tank that you were running with was full of it.

Endurance issues at the lower levels is among the lowest of my concerns.

I know it is hard to believe, but part of the act of gaining levels in the game is to give you a feeling of achievement and becoming more powerful.

When you hit 20 and get Stamina and go "Yes! I have enough end now to keep going for a while!" It is a great feeling.

I feel the same way about travel powers at 14 and the "true" capes at level 20.

For that matter, I feel the same way about running mission arcs and running into missions that are too hard to complete until you level up.

If the game is a cake walk the whole way through, there is no challenge. If there is no challenge, there is no game.

Oh, wait, your a farmer, you don't want a challenge or to take time to experience something challenging while you are leveling?!?
My bad.

Fortunately, we aren't all farmers; it is City of Heroes/Villains after all! Some of us actually like the struggle and sense of achievement when we can defeat something that was giving us a hard time or easily defeating us.

I honestly, have heard no one at the lower levels complaining about not regaining end quickly enough recently - and I do play at the lower levels quite often still.

Maybe it is just the Tanks that are complaining?
That would be a shame as they are the Statesman's pet AT, and is over powered as far as I'm concerned (and, yeah, I do play Tanks sometimes).

Or maybe it is that I haven't played on Farmdumb or Virtue recently?
That might be it as well.

If you had asked me that before the forum migration I could have linked you strait to it, and I have posted links to it on multiple threads previous to the migration.

You, however, were on ignore before, and you are going back on my ignore list again.

Part of "paying for content" is about how much you like the game and want to support it.
I might buy Going Rogue at some point based on that fact alone.

At this point, I only have one character that I would want to take from the villain side to the hero side. There are a couple of heroes that maybe should take the path to fall to become a villain, but I'm not overly excited about CoH:GR.

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I do think that that team search system needs a huge overhaul already. Once GR hits, I think that it will definitely need more settings. The looking for settings will have to include good, evil, and neutral settings as the kind of missions you run effect our alignment.

I'm sure that there are going to be some teams that don't care what kind of missions they are running as long as they get the right drops.
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I agree with you that it will cut-up/thin out the player base.

But it's going to happen, and we will just have to wait and see what happens. I just hope it doesn't become a tunnel for goods passing back and for between the heroic and villainous sides of the game.

Controllers do damage-control and can support a team if they are built to do so. I don't think that they outshine Defenders as far as team support goes. Of course, that is related to the power choices that are picked for those characters. Controllers can definitely do more damage; however, I've seen Storm Defenders that can tank.

Defenders are designed for team-support. The archetype was not designed for solo play.
In fact, as you have pointed out, Defenders are really intended to work best on big teams - aka a full team of 8.
Defender primaries are more powerful then Controller secondaries.

The Defender Inherent doesn't really help when it needs to help the most. If it worked more like RA and give you more +recharge and + regen along with the +end recovery, it would go a lot further to actually do what it appears to intend to do.

As for the lack of Defender damage, I'm still for changing the inherent to one of two mechanics ::

Increased Defender Damage when Solo

Defenders damage modifier would scale depending on how many other players that they are on a team with. More team-mates, less damage.
This would make Defenders more solo friendly (as they can not buff themselves).
It would probably need to scale the Defender back to current damage by at least a 4 character team if not sooner, but it should allow the Defender to do a good deal of damage solo which would at least approach the damage level of Controllers and Tanks (which are both supposed to do less damage than Scrappers and Blasters).



Damage Mitigation/-Agro (when Teaming)

When on a team, the defender reroutes some of the damage that they take to other members of the team proportionately to that other members HP and not to other Defenders on the team.
Defenders are supposed to be concerned about helping their team mates, but often those team mates aren't worrying about protecting the Defender.
Basically, it works to allow the Defenders a level of -agro.
Which would also be a fine change to the inherent as far as I'm concerned.


(don't even get me started on how lame the end drain is on Defender electric blast powers)

Don't stop there. Use /petition to petition the character. Don't forget to use the "Add Notes" or "Get global handle" feature to report the players global handle as well. Cut-and-paste the offensive comment strait into the petition report. Make sure to indicate the time w/ timezone when and server/side/channel where it occurred.
It is against the EULA to harass other players via chat, etc. Hate-based harassment is not tolerated.
Players can have their accounts closed for abusive behavior toward other players.

It surprised me because of the DEVs stance about the AE during the development period and even the Positron speech about bannings.

If it didn't have double xp, then players would have been forced to *cringe* play normal content for double xp?!
How horrible!

I think it would have been a good thing.

The DEVs could have done a lot of data mining of the XP growth of players in the AE that are farming/pl'ing in it and double xp in normal content - with the player groups that were playing both.
I think it would have yielded some good information for them.

If we keep going down this road I'm all for the DEVs just letting people make 50's if the want. They are pretty much meaningless as a sign of game experience at this point.

The whole thing kind of leave a bad taste in my mouth about even playing normal content during double xp weekend. Maybe I'll just PvP in the market and make alot of loot, but sometimes I debate the necessity to do even that any more.

Oh, well. I'll just go enjoy what the game is supposed to be about. I'll be a hero fighting crime. And there is plenty of crime happening in Paragon City.

Uh, farming in the AE is an exploit per the DEVs.

They can't both go off at the same time at the moment. If one is going on the other won't start until the first one has ended.
I saw this happen in the Rikti Invasion weekend. A Zombie Apocalypse ended and as soon as it ended the Rikti invaded.

I did think that this was a pretty cool idea as well though. I was talking to someone about all the zombies and Rikti spawning around each other in order to fight each other.

They weren't.

Epimetheus strikes again!
[ http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanEpimetheus.html ]

I'm looking at the reaction to the abuse/exploitation of the MA/AE and then this goes on.

Seriously, it is like them telling you not to eat some cookies from the cookie jar before dinner because they will make you sick and then force feeding you the whole jar.

It makes no sense.

I won't be farming either way.
I won't be playing with players that make a point of announcing they are farmers, etc. if I can at all help it ...I'm actively 1 staring them and putting them on gignore.

Honestly, it hasn't hurt my play experience at all. It has improved it. I haven't run into a single player that I have one starred on any of the teams that I have teamed with.

All this farming in the AE has pretty much driven me out of it, which is a shame since I think it is such a great idea from the player-generated creativity level.

Well, to get back around to the point of the thread... It's pretty silly to reward the people that the DEVs themselves have indicated are abusers/exploiters/cheaters but there they go doing it ... maybe they are trying to sucker them out for a mass banning?

You are wrong. I think that people should play the game as the feel fit. I'm against cheating and exploiting in the game.
Just because I'm against exploiting the MA/AE by farmers/PL'rs does not mean that I have a problem with the prices of IOs.
Go check. I haven't complained about the prices of IO's once. In fact, I have posted that I'm making even more inf because of what farmers/PL'rs are doing to the economy.
I'm not abusing the system to do it either.

Breaking the rules is just that.
It has nothing to do with the price of IO's.

I'll be dancing a jig when the farmers are gone from the AE. It would be good to be able to easily find mission teams in the AE that aren't running farms - better yet - aren't broadcasting in lower-level zones for AE Exploit teams.