White Hot Flash

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Of course...if they did clowns, then the gang war animation would have to be changed. A small little car would need to drive up and they'd ALL have to climb out of that.


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They should have done this with Carnies. It would have been epic!

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However, I would like to see more options added to the arena so that one can create an i12 environment, as far as mechanics go. Make it so that those of us that enjoyed THAT style of PvP can have it, and those that enjoy i13 PvP can have theirs too.

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If you do that, though, you'd never see the hardcore PvP'ers in the zones ever again, unless there were big changes to the zones. The general argument for the I13 changes has been that they were implemented to try to attract more people, and it didn't. If you work to further separate the I12 PvPers from the I13 PvPers, no one wins. Zones would be even more empty than they already are, and Arenas would just have the same people getting tired of fighting the same people over and over again.


I think people need to be patient and see what the Devs plan on doing with the Zones and Base raids before they totally give up on PvP.

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The devs choice should go bye bye for a couple of simple reasons... The devs have shown they already have too much on their plate, it's hard enough to get them to fix stuff that should be fixed and what, they are going to take time to play our arcs and give them the honest attention they need in order to qualify as a dev's choice arc? YEAH RIGHT...

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How long does it take to play an arc and decide if it's something you really enjoyed? Are the Devs supposed to be chained to their work stations and only allowed to use their work programs? It's not something they need to do in their official capacity as a Dev, with Paragon Studios computers. I'd be willing to bet that most, if not all, of the Dev Choice arcs were run by the Devs with their personal accounts (the ones where we don't know who they are), and they just make note of them, talk about them for ten min in a meeting, and make a decision.

Would anyone be complaining about the Dev Choice system if one of their arcs was labeled as such?

I've received every newsletter. Maybe a day or two later than it should be, but I always get them. I have Hotmail, in case that matters.

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I'm so tired of the nerfs. I've lost so many friends in this game that have left for many other reasons, but yet I stayed hoping it would get better someday. It seems like the devs spend so much time nerfing things other than fixing long standing bugs. MA was fun while it lasted, when they starting nerfing ticket rewards, that was it for me...I'm through.

/em *throws in the towel*

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While you've been focused on what's been changed in a negative way, you've missed what's changed for the positive. It's still 90/10 in the positive for the majority of the players. It's why the game is still active after 5 years.

Devs are allowed to change things after it's gone live. To expect otherwise is folly. They don't always get it right out of the gate, and they've buffed a lot of things as well.

I like the fact that the City of franchise is getting more and more exposure in the public eye. It took a bit for NCSoft's investment to start bearing visible fruit, but now we should see some really good things coming our way.

Please stick with "When it's ready" for your release date as much as possible. Box expansions should be as finished as possible...even more so than a download Issue.

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about THIRTY HOURS of work I had in the MA is now GONE.

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Your work is not gone. It's all still there, on your computer. They didn't remove your entire arc. Just leave it sitting there, waiting for the map to get fixed, and start writing another one.

I would also watch for when a player in any sport starts doing something detrimental, like not using the right form to shoot a basketball, or "aiming instead of just throwing", or tackling with his head instead of his chest. When they're that age (8-10), they should be concentrating on repeating the same good actions. Not only will they learn bad habits, but they might start doing things that are dangerous for themselves and others. If a player of mine started showing bad habits, I'd have no problem sitting them on the bench until they could show me the right way to do things.

What you're describing might also be a sign that the child isn't enjoying what he's doing. Kids go through stretches where they really like playing something, then they decide for whatever reason that they'd rather do something else.

Should do it in Galaxy....just to be different. Isn't that what Pingus are all about, after all?

Good arcs tonight. Ran the first three. Rolled some crappy rewards with the tickets though, lol.

That's a nice gesture, Dinah, but if we're calling ourselves the Community server, we shouldn't have to all be in the same SG to support each other. That is why all the different chat channels were created, or so I thought. All I do to find MA arcs to run is just go down the member list and see if they've published anything. Or I ask a particular person if I suspect that they've created something with some personality.

Search by global names that you know are from Champion. You'll hit a bunch of people that way. And a few of them will hit yours.

Ex-

Thank you for the superheroic effort you've shown trying to herd all of us cats. Your passion for this game and the community that enjoys it showed in your words and deeds, and you will be missed on these boards. Good luck in your next adventure, and welcome to our side of the fence. I can't promise we won't bite, but at least you can bite back now.

WHF

Objective: If powers can't be omitted or taken as necessary while creating critters, can we adjust the timer on when a defeated mob uses its self-rez? They pop up way faster than any current regular mob does. And they do it EVERY TIME. Freakshow don't rez every time.

I would also like to be able to add an extra power or two that is not part of the primary/secondary sets, either for flavor or to provide a melee-centric critter a ranged attack. Perhaps a limited pool of the pool/epic powers?

The Weight of Power

ID# 49639
@White Hot Flash
Morality: Heroic
Length: Very long (not sure why..its only three mishes...big map in third mish, i guess)
Mission 1: small map, lvl 40+, Ambushes, Boss, Defeat last room
Mission 2: medium map, lvl 35+, Ambushes, Boss, Collection, Release Captive
Mission 3: Unique map, lvl 1+, Ambushes, Elite Boss, Patrols, Defeat last room.
Enemies: Carnies, CoT (in-game description doesn't say this, because they only appear in a couple of fights in first mish, and the boss in first mish is an Arch-mage), Vanguard Sword, Custom

Teaser: When righteous rage becomes blind obsession, will somone step up to stop it?

I died several times soloing on my blaster, mainly against the bosses and the ambushes that spawn during the boss fights, and the EB packs a punch, so if you're a bit squishy, bring a friend or two. Plus the Vanguard are a PITA in general, so plan accordingly.

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Siphon more cash from the masses. How about some cool free stuff?

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Good ol Angry...that dead horse just needs to be beaten some more.

Since "good" is subjective, if you didn't like what came with the Issue itself, just wait for the next one. There's cool free stuff all the time. Nothing wrong with releasing some extra stuff that costs only as much as your next lunch out, and if it's stuff that you don't like, you can opt not to buy it.

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Why can't the Founding member be made the "Super Leader"? If the founder is no longer in the SG it should go to the next in SG membership time. This way a level 1 "LEADER" won't magically become "Supreme Ruler and Dictator".

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Why are you promoting level ones to leader level?

Why are you assuming that every SG has a dictator waiting in the wings for the opportunity to take over? Geez...the paranoia is strong with some folks. Again I ask, if you can't trust the people you play with, why do you play with them? Why do you play with people that invite and promote folks you don't know? If that bothers you, go the way some have, and keep it a personal SG.

There's a need for this new rank. Not every SG was born yesterday, and not every SG has had the same leaders for its entire run. People find themselves, due to RL issues, locked out of their base when their leaders are auto-demoted and there's no one left that's active to fix it, for example. CS says "Hey, we could do our jobs better if there were a way for players to designate the leader of the leaders (which shouldn't always be the founder, as much as some folks want it to be). This way, a lot of the more trivial problems with accidental promotion/demotions, permissions, etc., can be handled at the player level, and we can concentrate on dealing with more pressing matters, like investigating griefing."

You can dispute the methods they chose to implement, but I don't think there's been a good argument yet for why they shouldn't do it at all. There shouldn't be things a leader can do that can't be undone, like promoting others to leader rank (and no, having that person quit the SG and get reinvited with zero prestige is not a valid option. It's a poor work-around at best, and one done grudgingly)

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And it isn't my job to make theirs easier at my expense. I am paying NCsoft money to provide a service. I have a problem with them offloading their work onto me.


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No...actually, it is exactly our jobs to make CS's job as easy as possible. We word our petitions the way they want them (if we want them to know what's going on and how to duplicate the issue). We give as much information as we can when we describe griefing, including taking our own screenshots. If your car breaks down, and when the mechanic asks you what happened, all you can do is say "It made a funny noise and then it broke. Fix it." he'll figure it out...eventually, and you'll probably spend twice as much on labor as you would if you could be more descriptive of the problem. If you want good service, you don't leave all the work up to the person providing it. They're not mind readers, and as you said, there's a mound of data to sift through. Why make them go through more than they have to? It is your problem, after all. You pay for service, but you have to be prepared when you ask for it, or your service will be poor.

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Who would they /petition against?

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The SL, of course. That's kind of the point of having someone designated the #1 leader. CS has someone to go to first, without having to wade through the mire of "It's my group, no it's mine!"

If, as a lower ranked member, you have no one at leader rank to turn to, it might be time to go find a new group. And that's probably what CS would say if they didn't find any evidence of actual griefing.

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And they could have been asked to leave prior to the boot. If the leadership decided on a whim that a character "didn't fit" and booted without warning, then that is griefing. If they have a communication that the character didn't fit, CS would see that (as you have said below), and not ban.

I see no issue with the auto /petition if the leader in question puts forth a minimum amount of effort to explain themselves before they act.


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Except that this feature is intended to provide less work for CS, not more. They want disputes to be handled by the players, whenever possible. Since griefing can come in many forms, and is such a grey area for most, don't you think that the onus to resolve things should be on the players themselves, first and foremost? There's a reason the technical side of CS has you jumping through the same hoops when you first start petitioning with a problem. They want to see if you can fix things on your end before they have to get involved further. Why? Because the majority of issues fall under the same few problems that other players have already figured out how to fix. Then they (CS) have time to deal with the stickier problems more directly. SG/VG internal problems are no different. They should be worked out as much as possible before anyone petitions CS. Accidental promotions is just one problem, and probably not as big as you claim, though as you say, we don't know for sure either way till we can see some numbers. But that alone isn't even enough of a reason to make the act of promotion/demotion auto-petitionable. If the Devs/CS set a line for when the auto-petition triggers, the people that are actually trying to do sinister things within their group can find a way around it, and still get their job done. It wouldn't slow down anything, much like the SPAM button in the email system seems to be doing little to deter spammers.

If you've got a real problem, you should be man enough to put your name behind a petition and follow through with it. Who would CS talk to if there were an auto-petition generated? They'd have a much better chance of picking the wrong leader (if there were multiples) than the one with the problem.

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The following should have been put in place:

Auto message to those being removed from a group stating the global account doing the removal, the character name doing the removal, and the time of removal.

SG log stating the character name of the person doing the booting, time of removal, and the character name being removed from the group. This log should be separate from the other activity logs (storage interaction).

This way CS and the rest of the group do not have to sift through mounds of data to determine who did what.

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These are separate issues from what the SL rank is supposed to address. And if anything, they should be put in just for the players to do the investigative work themselves first. CS shouldn't be first on the list to work out anything, unless it's a bug. SG problems are not bugs.

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just my opinion though, which of course only matters to me lol.


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If it only matters to you, why'd you post it?

Castle can only do what the project lead lets him do. If you want to blame someone for your problems, blame Positron. At least get that part right.

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of course, Castle being the math and spreadsheet worshipper that he is see that in a particular instance with a particular build with a particular set while being under the influence of particular external buffs a pet MAY be summoned that deals fractionally more DPS than he could stand for.

Gamebreaking = player benefits

Inconsequencial = player detriments



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Before you continue bashing the spreadsheet approach to trying to make powers work, how else would you propose Castle do it? People in here complain that the Devs don't have a clue about how the game actually plays. It takes more than "how it feels" to make the powers, or animations, or writing, or any other aspect of the game, work.

Also, if it were inconsequential, it wouldn't be worth fixing. Since we can't see as far down the development road as Castle and the other Devs, I'm guessing that the problems Castle described are a little bigger than that, and therefore, worth fixing now that there's a way to do it. And when a better way is found, that fix will supercede this one.

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Eldest boy officially completed his 10th trip around the sun this morning but is very upset because his optometrist gave him some bad news.. he needs glasses.

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He made it further in life than I did before needing the specs...I was in 2nd grade. Happy B-day to the first-born son.

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Then plunk down the time, the effort, and the focus to get to that.

Speaking as someone who still has chronic altitis, but prefers merits.. I don't feel an overwhelming need to consolidate them, and I frankly don't mind it taking a while to get what I'm after. I'm patient. I've got a lot of characters. And I also don't particularly need to be OMGWTFPWNAGE to enjoy myself.

[/ QUOTE ]I been doing that, and have completed several builds already, what I am talking about is for the casual gamer. They wouldnt be able to complete a build in a years time or even 2 years.

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What's wrong with that? If they want an uber build, they need to work harder (play more) like everyone else that has an uber build did.

Casual gamers play the game for fun. When they start worrying about merits, and IO's, and drop rates, and such, can they still be considered casual? It's not just a time investment that makes someone casual or not. It's what you're doing with the time.

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Figuring out a way to kill Hamidon without killing through the blooms, just using a very well crafted strategy and the right powers would technically increase the reward well beyond what was intended.


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The flip side of this is that the method most folks use to do a Hami Raid (go through the waves of mitos) is not the intended way to do the raid, but one that works anyway, and in fact, the Blitz raid as you describe is indeed the intended way to do a raid. Or neither way is intended, but works.

The mechanics of the game determines what's intended and what's not. Glitches in code, or holes in the geometry of a map aren't part of the mechanics. They are unintended, and if used, exploits. I think we're suffering from poor use of the word exploit in the past. Not all bugs are exploits, but all exploits are bugs. Many things people keep bringing up as exploits are really either poor design or human error, and when they're figured out, they're fixed, and the Devs let us know about them. The rest are the true exploits, and we don't hear about the fixes because they don't tell us what they did per policy.

QR-

I was reading one of the other MA threads and they were talking about worrying about finding teams and getting "No thanks, I'm making mishes" kind of responses, and it made me think of a question I don't think has been asked yet:

While we're in the MA interface, will we be able to keep our chat window open, a la the market interface, or is it going to be more like the base editor or the enhancement window where we only hear the tell beeps and have to close the window to see who's talking? And a followup to this question would be, is there going to be some sort of indicator on the search window or globals that says a character is in the MA or is it just going to tell us what zone they're in?

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I don't know. Three just seems way too few to me. Five, maybe. Seven would be plenty. But three?



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By the time most folks have gotten around to having to worry about the small amount of arcs they can have, most likely the number will have been raised.*** I want there to be relatively few HoF worthy arcs. I don't want to play through half of the HoF list and say to myself "Meh...the load I left in the toilet this morning could write better." I hope the Dev's Choice arcs are an equally small list. Maybe not "Bug Hunter" small, but it should be a bit exclusive.


*** I realize the prolific writers amongst the playerbase will easily fill up their three slots. I say to that "Be self-critical when you decide which ones to post." Give a few a test run before you leave them on there, especially if there's a way to save them after you pull them off the live list.