Void_Huntress

While I don't think this is as large a category as PR seems to think, they do exist. I've had arguments with some of them. Tragic stuff.

It's kind of like the (significantly larger) category of people who encounters one person who strongly prefers to solo and thinks all soloers are anti-social.

I actually agree with you on all of this.

As Seebs' mentioned, I'd love to see an 'open teaming' mechanism. An LFG for regular content would be good as well. The devs are trying, as I understand it, but there's some technical and policy challenges.

Make it easier for the people who enjoy teaming with random strangers at random times to do so, and then the perceived impact (which I believe is far greater than the actual impact) of those of us who do not enjoy (or cannot handle) this will be reduced or eliminated.

I am. I _HAVE_ to. I have no other way of minimizing the flood of negative experiences.

An incentive would be nice. But you're telling people not to use a tool they have available to them to make their experience more positive.

Not only are you telling them not to, but you're implying it's wrong of them to do so. Not that long ago, before we had the ability to make closed leagues, people were kicking 'extras' that popped in from the LFG tool for trials.

And people were upset, because how could you, this is wrong. But they were using a tool to get the experience they wanted, lacking any other way. And the devs didn't remove the kick function, they added closed leagues. Because people should get to choose who they team with.
Here, we have a recourse. We can not put ourselves out there. Fun fact: I for years tried to simply have search comments set. First I tried 'no blind invites' in my search tag. That didn't work. I was more explicit: Send tell to ask me before inviting. That didn't work. I tried: I'm not looking to team. That didn't work.

Using global hide was the final step. I TRIED. Your unwillingness to imagine a world in which this is a sensible course of action is staggering.

Is it really so hard to believe that not everyone gets the same thing from the same events? That they have different impact on different people?

There's a few misapprehensions here. You're assuming that it will in fact improve our experience. This is not guaranteed. You're neglecting the fact that there are potential negative impacts to our experience, that they may in fact be significant, and that the knowledge of those potential negative impacts can outweigh the potential positive.

Note that we are still talking about UNSOLICITED attempts at teaming. We still team, as mentioned before. We still join pugs. But people don't get to impose themselves on us, which you seem to think is some kind of right.

'Being available' to randoms is not helpful to everyone. It can be of no value, it can be an inconvenience, and for some of us it can even be hurtful.

Or are you telling me that some unknown stranger's desire to join a team for a few minutes -- without caring who is on it -- trumps my desire to not have an unpleasant experience? That just because one person -- who has plenty of other people to potentially team with -- cannot team with ME when the stars align and I'm visible in their presence is going to somehow ruin their experience more than mine would be if I'd accepted, even though they have an entire other game of people to connect with?

This is also incorrect. When I am CAPABLE OF DOING SO I opt in to that 'potential positive experience', and I know that others do as well. I find teams when I can deal with the consequence of a potential negative consequence. I don't when I can't.

Simply because I sometimes choose to not do so does not mean I never do so. You are being presumptuous.

Something I think you're overlooking is that some of us solo, but are not at all a 'recluse'. We talk on global channels, we talk on broadcast, we chat in local between missions, and sometimes, occasionally, when we FEEL LIKE IT, we join pugs.

The disconnect here is that you seem to think other people get to decide when we team. They do not any more than they have the choice of when we log into the game.

What Nalrok_AthZim alluded to is reality for me: I have trouble socializing with humans when I can see them. I use City of Heroes as a substitute for that socialization.

I also find combat in City of Heroes distressful if too much is happening at once. I'm okay with one or two teammates, or more if everyone knows I can't necessarily keep up, but every time I've had someone who doesn't know me ask if I want to team and I say, "Well okay, but only if the team is small" I either suddenly end up in an 8 man if I don't have the star or if I do have the star I start getting guilted into 'you should invite more people'.

Seriously, without exception. I tried for years accomodating strangers, and each time I was punished with insensitivity or distressful circumstances.

Eventually, the ongoing problem reached a point where I associated 'stranger suddenly wanting to team' with stress. Whether you think I should experience this or not is immaterial. I do.

But despite this, I continue to log in. I continue to socialize through global channels, broadcast, tells, and local, I make new friends, and, yes. I do still sometimes PUG of my own volition.

When I decide to.

It works fantastic on my /Mental Manip blaster.

I meant to reply to this earlier. I was given the impression from Pummit stuff that the devs were looking at being able to queue while missioning?

As Sam notes, the devs have indicated that iXP and threads will be earned from enemy kills.

Emphasis added.

Every time I see this, it's vaguely disappointing to me. The Trapdoor fight plasters on the screen in big red letters, TRAPDOOR BIFURCATES AND BEGINS TO REGENERATE.

Even if you're not sure what that means, you should know that Something Has Happened. I have fairly notable sensory perception issues and have trouble perceiving a lot of things, and I've never missed that notice (or others like it).

Obviously, others are. I'm not sure why this is. I'm not sure there's any further a reasonable step the developers could take for an encounter like that (and it's an interestingly designed encounter).


An SO'd Rad/Rad defender has all the tools needed to make Trapdoor sit down and shut up, even if it's a team support focused build, as long as it has some decent single target attacks.

Some other support-centric builds could have trouble, but as Arcana noted I cannot fathom any viable build that can solo standard content that cannot take out Trapdoor by bringing inspirations and utilizing their powers effectively.


Defenders and Corruptors have a lot more mitigation available than people tend to realize and utilize fully. The Rad/Rad defender, for example, should have quite a lot of debuff and a bit of self buff available. Even solo on a team-centric build.

Controllers and Dominators can shut up a lot of threats if they're taking their mezzes and using them consistently on the right targets.

There's a lot more all these ATs, in their myriad powerset combinations, can bring to the table than people seem to understand.

Ramiel is definitely soloable by any AT. I've done it on an SO'd Mercs/Pain mastermind (not exactly a high performance build), I've done it on defenders, I've done it on a blaster (who was admittedly IO'd). Some things in the game require more effort than they're worth to solo for some builds, but it's usually POSSIBLE.

Honestly, I think Ramiel's Arc has two gates in it.

Trapdoor is one gate: It's a test of perception, power selection, and power application, not of performance.

The Honoree/Holtz is the other gate: It's a test of environmental awareness and spawn manipulation (with some performance gating on the side).

After all that, Minos is simply a test of endurance: Can you survive long enough to knock him down?

If you've passed the first two tests, then you'll know how to ensure you pass the last one.

We have one. The grammatical third person gender indeterminate singular for people is 'they'. It's been in use in English -- American and otherwise -- for centuries.

For what it's worth, that's how I see it. I mean, it's highly likely they'll consistently be 3 tokens of parts every 3 months based on statements at the Pummit and such, but... What if it's four, once?

What if they add a one-off for one token sometime?

Those questions will keep me banking reward tokens indefinitely unless we hear a hard 'We're not going to have more than 12 tokens of VIP costumes this year' statement from rednames. And then, maybe, if I've managed to buy points to have extra tokens, I MIGHT spend extras past 12 for that year on something in the repeatables.

That year. The next... Well.

I didn't say it was an entirely new idea, just that it was Paragon attempting to do something different. They're trying to explore revenue models, after all, and that qualifies as attempting to innovate within their market space.

The same logic you use here could be used to argue that Paragon should never have attempted the Freedom model, because it was 'less successful' for some competition.

You can't look at something from another context and use its success or failure to judge something similar in a different context. We don't have another City of Heroes to permit us control and experimental samples, so we have to do that here.

An enhancement catalyst turns an ATO into an Attuned ATO. This makes it untradable, but it also gives it better stats and set bonuses. This has to be done for each piece in the set you want to convert (and it's basically transitioning the pieces from the non-attuned set to the attuned set).

Do you consider it axiomatic that more customers in a specific subset of people is always better, even if that could come at less profit?

I would argue this is more a case of:
Player A announces how the money will be split between A and B.
Player B agrees.

Person C walks in off the street and vetoes the deal because they have their own views of what's fair for B different from what B does.

If our slightly less abstract example of the 'game' in question is, say, B agreeing to work for less than minimum wage, then there's documented economic, social, and other concerns at work that demonstrate this is a problem for the health of not just that person, but of others as well.

There are many things that would fall under 'demonstrably harmful', but I don't think grab bags with exclusive (either permanently or temporarily so) swag fall into that category.

There's more at work here than the binary outcomes you start with.

First, you have to assume some rate of acquisition cost for desired items in the packs, and some rate of acquisition for desired items through a hypothetical direct purchase scheme.

There's the question of how much of the relative population A, B, C, and D actually are. (we don't have figures for this, and there's a limited number of ways of collecting it.)

There's the question of which acquisition cost ratios will sway C (and maybe D) away from packs, and which will leave them purchasing packs.

There's the question of what acquisition cost ratios will be sufficient to meet some portion of group B's desires for a 'fair method', and how many of A will make use of the alternate acquisition method at various costs.

If a given alternate acquisition cost is insufficiently high, then Paragon might not get enough funds in order to sustain their accelerating development goals, further, insufficiently high alternate acquisition costs could undermine the time and effort that went into trying to create the category of option the Super Packs represent.

If the alternate acquisition cost is too high, then there's no reason to believe more income will actually be earned, and we don't know that the 'good will of the players' is necessarily going to be overall that much improved. Remember: Everyone's unhappy about something in every new thing.

The only way for Paragon to actually learn how this really works is to actually try it. If there's too much attempt to hedge bets before real metrics can be obtained, then the ultimate message is 'We can't afford to innovate'.

Lastly, I really get the impression that the people complaining about 'gambling' are (for the most part) either mistakenly attempting to impose specific morality views on others, or simply trying to find the best way to get stuff from Paragon with the least cost. And you know, there's nothing wrong with the latter, as long as you're honest about it.


Notably, we're still not talking about gambling. You can only call it gambling if there's a chance of not getting your 80 points worth. Unless you are prepared to argue that only your favored included item of choice has any value at all, (which is a bit of a hard sell since we know that 'people' as a set value many of the things in the Packs already extant), then the packs as presented are guaranteed to give at least what you put into it. It may have unpredictable distributions, but that's not the same thing as gambling.

They're (very well-stocked) grab bags, not lotteries, not slot machines.


With that aside in place, I'll assert the moral imposition is here: Essentially, people are saying Paragon Studios cannot perform this experiment, cannot determine what the constituency of their playerbase is, because it's 'wrong'. Except that's the only way for them to really know what proportions of their playerbase are what thing, is to put up offerings and see how the community at large actually reacts instead of how a handful of individuals insist they'll react.

Heck, they've already SAID they intend to be on the watch for potential pathological behavior, so they've got that in mind.

I have little respect for people attempting to impose morality, though, without any actual supporting evidence that harm has been done, is being done, or will be done.

This is the thing that perplexes me, and it reminds me of some of the pre-Freedom conversations...

Some folks were saying that they absolutely would not maintain a subscription unless <insert perceived critical feature here> was available to non-subscribers. Making it so they wouldn't need a subscription to get the critical feature they wanted. So.. where's the incentive for them to subscribe, again?

I'm not really seeing how this makes sense. "I will choose not to be a customer unless you make it so that I can choose not to be a customer and still get the stuff."

If by 'consumer' you also mean 'employer', 'project manager', 'direct supervisor' and 'coworkers', then we can agree.

It's not just about customers. Internal projects get treated the same way.

Arcana's point is, you can't randomly go 'well, all that math takes too long, I'm just going to guess' as an accountant. Programmers have been permitted to do that as a profession, and that's a problem.

... the new incarnate powers went live a while back. They aren't new this patch.

I agree about titan weapons, though.

This only moves the bar a bit.

Shamelessly stealing from Arcanaville:

400 points + 20% discount vs 400 points + 150 VIP bonus

@ 550 points of purchase: you pay 120 points, I pay zero
@ 750 points of purchase: you pay 280 points, I pay 200
@1000 points of purchase: you pay 480 points, I pay 450
@1150 points of purchase: you pay 600 points, I pay 600

Not everyone wants to buy nearly $100 of points every year. For those who don't, the current bonus is still better.

Personally, I think unless it's somehow necessary to achieve a target aesthetic, hair should be back-burnered (possibly for one-offs or a hairdo collection later) in favor of set-specific geos and textures.


To the overall question, I vote for the "80%" solution.

The whole situation is complicated by western culture re: gender divides, but what I think you guys should try to do where you can is design something that can be more easily modified either in the production or with a detail piece in order to produce something more 'feminine'.

Like has been mentioned in other threads (hi Bosstone!), aim for lego pieces. Parts that can be combined to produce something that feels different from its constituent parts.

In a thematic like 50s sci fi, I would think this would be feasible.. if you narrow the scope a bit. I agree with other posters that you're actually going after two thematics here, not one with two facets.

Last I understood, the analysis from the outside was that we weren't actually being 'logged out', the cookie that holds session info is being actively deleted. But if the cookie is manually re-inserted, the session continues just fine.

It's those spurious 'delete cookie' instructions from the server that's the problem.

The company I think Seebs and I are both thinking of responds to problems with the game on pretty much every level -- from powers balance to art design to UI to even event design -- on a timescale of weeks.. and sometimes days.

.... lolwut?