Wicked_Wendy

Don't worry about it Combat... players have been coming here to rant and let off a little steam after a bad mission/tf/trial almost as long as the forums have existed. I do it occasionally myself and here is how I view doing it..

I get a chance to vent and release any negative energy I have after whatever went wrong. MORE IMPORTANTLY .. I detail exactly what happened, minus anyone's actual name to stay within TOS, so that other players out there that read it can see what happened.. pass it along and hopefully learn from it. Trial leaders that constantly offer up warnings during instruction are a direct result of someone, somewhere passing along the result of what happens when somebody did (insert action that resulted in chaos). Players that enter a trial and know WITHOUT instruction not to attack say civilians during a TPN are a result of this same sort of thing. It doesn't matter if it here, on a global channel or during instruction from a league leader prior to entering a particular trial.

If no one ever vented their frustrations and shared their storied it would take the player base a LONG LONG time to learn all the little tricks required to succeed on the new Incarnate trials... This all starts with the folks that test on Bata passing along what they learn and then continues with teams/leaders experimenting and refining strategies until the trials become relatively easy and players with limited amounts of time to commit to the game don’t find themselves wasting time over and over on failed trials.
Do some posts result in the inevitable flame wars? YES lol unfortunately we have a huge player base and there are always those out there that think only 1 way of doing anything can possibly be right. BUT .. there are also a lot of folks that benefit from every "OMG look what happened to me on X trial last night posts".

I am with you Gob.. the group I run trials with stopped messing with telepaths long ago and just moves from building to building taking down technicians until we score po victories. Unlike you I dont remove anything from tryas. mainly because I can use them inside buildings, but I seperate single target from aoes and cones.

Also like you our group realized a while back that the destruction of the odd camera is almost inevitable.. come on we are fifty levels and the cameras are one levels LOOK at them wrong and they will explode. The destruction of a camera here and there doesnt spell defeat it just adds a little more time outside before heading into tpn for the first time. AND .. when you start to battle Maelstrom outside if you wait for the civilians to clear, once the public opinion victory is anounced formally, the civs all disappear and you can use any attack you like outside because the only out there to hit is the AV and the IDF that resond to reinforce him.

The way we attack a tpn trial after that initial battle outside, the ONLY one where you need to concern yourself with cameras, there are rarely any times where players cant use all their attacks.

I am with the Captain on this one.. not that I would absolutely hate change but Atlas looks just a little too much like praetoria now. Yes its technically the seat of government in the game so it should look clean and shiny but with very little alteration it could be just another zone under the control of Emperor Cole.

Using the newer grahics I could see a small facelift to zones to make them newer looking but not a complete revamp. Kings Row is an industrial area with factories and warehouses .. its shhould be a little dirty and gritty not gleaming and with flowers on every corner. Steel Canyon is the busness district.. huge skyscrappers reaching to the clouds and lots of gleaming glass and steel. Indy port.. is, of course, a seaport with busy docks and huge warehouses.

If they want to CHANGE things start with some of the almost deserted hazard zones.. Boomtown is ghost town that players only visit when a tf sends them there or they take a fast run through to grab badges. The council occupy most of Striga and have a huge fortified base there.. why not do something similar in Boomtown for the 5th column. We all know they have plans to change Dark Astoria. I dont think zones like Terra Volta or Eden need any major overhaul.. change for no other reason than CHANGE is not a necessity!

Totally agree and the best, or worst, part of the whole Incarnate master of runs is I have seen trials fail because everyone was concentrating so hard on accomplishing some rediculous task and forgot to actually focus on finishing the trial! Badges are nice but they dont get me any emps, astrals or threads I need to build the powers I want.. which is one of the main purposes of the trials to begin with. On Virtue a certain segment of the player base has taken to ignoring them, badges, and focuses on winning the trial... the general response to the question .. will we be going after any badges .. isnt just no its Hell no!

AGREED!

Now dont get me wrong I enjoy the trials. I am art of a grou now on virtue that gathers nightly and runs Keyes, MOM, the UG and then the tpn. The leader does an outstanding job of organizing and explaning and we rarely have any difficulties... except with the tpn. Now none of us spent a lot of time on beta learning the ins and outs of the new trials and we didnt spend hours pouring over guides developed by players that did.. in one night we managed to work out a strategy that was efective and started winning when we did MOM .. TOOK us a whole 3 tries to et it.

Last night after 6, 7 .. I lost count tries we finally beat the tpn .. and how did we do it...

we completely ignored the telepaths and the civilains outside

we completely ignored Malestrom except when we had to .. inside the building the first time and after we reached 5 hundred points of public opinion outside.

all we did was race from one building to the next taking out technicians and locking terminals... We left with all but 1 of the required badges for a master of and were done in no time.

Before that we tried to do everything we thougt we were supposed to do.. defeat the seers, try not to hurt civvies even when they were trying desperately to kill us, ran off Malestorm every time he appeared. the result was multile deaths, many at the hands of civilians with rocks, frustration over being forced to ignore half the attacks we had to avoid a cone or aoe infuriating a citizen, and time and time again watchig our po go to zero and losing despite doing all we could to win.

Oh I gaurentee now that we know how to beat it we will continue to do it nightly but my opinion is it still sucks!

We have spent countless hours earning powers, including our incarnates, only to be told on THIS trial.. dont use them you will upset the civilains! I was using my Assault Rifle .. Rad Corruptor and I had 9 attacks and was only able to use 2 of them outside.. and one was my sniper attack which any citizen with a rock can interrupt. Seven other powers including my tier 4 Ion Judegement were useless outside because they might hurt a camera or a civilain. Its worse than any master of run I have ever been on and we were not even trying for an MO. At least on a master run for sat the Statesman trial I could use allof my primary and secondary attacks to help my team. On this mess the best way to help my team is not attack at all.. yeah that makes sense..

I see this trial being nerfed.. overhauled down the road just like keyes was. But until then ill enjoy beating the crap out of technicians inside and letting the piblic do their own thing outside.

To be totally realistic based on the history lesson we got from the op.... a thousand man unit is brought to a place and because ONE of them showed cowardess during a battle .. one HUNDRED or one tenth are slaughtered.. Sounds sufficiently brutal to me so exactly what makes the difference. If I was the wife of one of the 99 men killed because one guy ran away Id be devastated.

This is an excellent explanation of the decline in hearing gratz as often as long ago... even before the Death from below trial it was almost a common practice to skip the constant .. GRATZ! ... every time someone leveled on a sewer run in Atlas. The mentality was .. Look we will all be leveling repeatedly and the mobs in here are BIG .. So gratz right NOW and lets just concentrate on defeating stuff and not dying.

And of course the .. sorry I didnt hear you ding is always and has always been an issue. I was on one team and the noise during a battle was so loud I leveled and even heard the ding but it was so faint over the noise I didnt realize it was me and typed in G R A T Z wanting to ackowledge the accomlishment of my team mate .. LOL when that battle ended I realized I had leveled and had just congratulated myself.

I know I have used them to increase all of my incarnate brutes defenses to fifty three.. not fifty plus three. Then because the alpha is cardiac I gain an added twenty %.

The unslotters come in handy too When I hit level 47 with the brute mentioned above I was able to unslot and store a number of 45 level IOs in my base as I ugraded to fifty levels.

I guess was just curious if they were consideringa tier ten. Sounds like they just intend to add different tier 9 stuff to use which is sort of the same thing anyway.

Okay its not a part of the actual on line experience but, as mentioned, it is a part of the service we are paying for and today I typed in my log in info, because I gave up on being remembered long ago, and after i hit enter was redirected to... another log in screen. I used to be able to stay logged on here forever and now it cant even remember who i am long enough to switch screens.

Now when the game goes down andcant play.. I get uset. When the forums are a mess its just annoying... One big exception FIX the character copy feature or move it someplace else.

I agree and would add that because so many trials run the success rate is affected by the availability of players using characters that can control mobs and ones with tons of AoE. Ive seen teams with a couple masterminds and a few SoAs make the escape phase look easy. I have also been on pugs that had almost no control and a ton of melee and it almost always seems like at some point something slips through.

Imortant thing to keep in mind ... I have also seen leagues form that have done back to back to back mini BAFs and seed Lambdas on Virtue. At the end of the day when you have all the Emps you can get and a ton of Astrals .. losing one or two on a couple escapee at 4 threads er Astral hardly seems worth worrying about. Heck I have joined leagues that did a speed lam, mini BAF, full sized Keyes and ended with a full sized UG in just over 2 and a half hours.. I wound up with 4 emps and close to thirty astrals not to mention the threads and comonents.. I dont rercall caring a bit that 1 or 2 prisoners escaped.

Okay let us start with one that Masterminds have been asking about for years.. Aside from some paranoid delusion that allowing us to have the option to have female minions will result in the end of the known universe. Why cant my female MM have female pets!

please let me clarify that years back the answer was that the dev team was afraid that perverted males would use binds or marcos to have female minions bowing at their feet and this would be very sexist. Then the same group churns out one costume set after another that denies females some very cool things the males have while giving us one scanty option after another.

I understand where you are coming from but I think there are a lot of factors other than just .. the well of the furies involved in what we have to this point.

1. There are plenty of comic book references where heroes and villains that were normally sworn enemies set aside their differences to deal with a greater threat. That said we know from all the lore we have been given that Cole plans to attack, devastate and enslave primal earth. Now in doing that we can assume he has every intention of defeating and destroying any being that displays powers that may challenge him and his forces. So the question is.. What good does it do to ignore the threat and rob banks, kidnap peole, etc.. if you know you are eventually going to be dead. So reason #1 is Self reservation

2. As we all know NC Soft like many other businesses has made some layoffs in the past year or so do to the economy. There are less staff personel trying to continue the traditions established in the past 7 years. Despite that they have revamped the tutorial, given us 4 trials to daye with more on the way, are in the process of revamping Dark Astoria and continue to give us new powers etc along with the SSA that do provide similar but different stories for both red and blue side. So reason #2 is staff limitations.. imagine how much more work would be required to come up with seperate red and blue side incarnate trials


3. While many players enjoy both the red and blue side the fact is there are a great number more players hero side than there are villain.. and I am using my experiences on Virtue...one of the servers with high populations, when I make that statement. A coop trial allows players from both sides to combine forces to form 16 to 24 man teams. If we had seperate hero and villain trials I think there would be times even on the servers with heavy traffic where a red side league would find it difficult to find 24 fifty level villains to run a trial. On servers with a lot less traffic the problem would be even greater. So reason # 3 is making it easier to actually form a full sized 24 man league to run a trial

4. History of the game has shown that despite the arguments we some times see here players enjoy coop content.. It used to be the only time a hero and villain did anything together was during the events missions running out of pocket d. Back then people were actually here on these same forums expressing a desire for an increase in missions where their villains could team u with heroes. Then we got our first coop zone in the rwz. This turned a vastly underused hazard zone into arguably the most oular in the game. For the first time outside of a holliday event heroes and villains could combine forces to run contact missions and join a task force. Then they added Cimerora and the ITF which is probably the most run tf in game. So reason # 4 ... It certainly seems from the number of players using the content that the majorority of the player base likes doing coop content and it is good business to give your customers what they actually want.

It sounds like there will be options available when they convert Dark Astoria for seerate hero and villain missions that will allow a slower paced ascent to incarnate abilities but for now we have what we have and some enjoy it while others dont.

This is pure speculation of course since unlike some I never try to assume I know exactly what the devs are planning but I would say when the new coop Dark Astoria arrives a new system for entry will be introduced that will accomodate both hero and villains. ... Similar to either the RWZ or Cimerora. My best guess would be something like Cimerora and this would become the only means to access the zone. The old DA teleport beacon your sg now has will become a means to access the ghost DA in the same manner as what happened with Galaxy City. It just doesnt make sense to do this any other way with causing confusion.. the other way we now find ourselves with two seperate beacons to two different Dark Astorias hero side.

Now there is another option... unlike what they did with Galaxy completely remove the use of the old teleport beacon in bases and the only available means to go there after plaques and badges would be directly through Ouroborus. At that point in addition to establishing entrances in a few zone on both red and blue sides a whole new set of exploration badges could be set for the new DA and acquiring them would also allow SG members to teleport into the zone from their bases.

I dont see a problem with either solution .. villains never had access to the old, soon to be ghost, DA prior to this switch so they lose nothing either way. Unlike Galaxy Dark Astoria has no contacts so there is very little that needs to be done to make this switch.. a few contacts and even TFs occasionally send teams there but those missions can easily be fixed to send players elsewhere to accomlish the same things. While it was great that the old SG beacon allowed members to access ghost galaxy without going through Ouro.. The biggest advantage being that now players dont need to ask anyone to lay down a ortal for them to get into Ouroborus and collect the exp badge along with Keeper of the secret. Now if you belong to a suer group at level 14 just head into ghost galaxy, make your way to the train station and ick Ouroborus as you destination..pretty easy since it is your only choice. Once there grab the exp badge and earn your own ouro portal summoner. Well since we already have that advantage through the old galaxy beacon we really dont need to clutter upthe base and use up more power and control having another telepad dedicated to a ghost zone. Heck if you are badge and plaque hunting and belong to an SG.. just hit Galaxy and use the train to get to Ouro and then go back through the portal on Ouroborus and grab the badges and plaques in DA.