Darmian

Apart from a few grandfathered in, all the Dev Choice winners automatically get booted to the HOF. And that's good. Farms get there from hitting 999+ plays. Frankly I'd kill that dead.

They simply don't actively discourage anything of the kind. AE story content, however well crafted, is ancillary to the full game, and that's where their full focus is. And it's where it should be. As someone who uses the AE to find story arcs of all kinds, any disincentive I see comes from wading through the metric tonne of crap farms that swamp everything else. And no, I'm not hammering farms as a thing here but for every "bad SFMA arc" in the AE there's probably 20 times the amount of bad or simply abandoned farms.

Can I ask for a definition of this please?

Removing XP buffs from the TFV/P2W and reverting to "Double XP Weekends/Insert other time here" like on Live.* *When I came back in 2019 I didn't know the buff existed and got to 50 the "normal" way, occasionally wondering if HC was ever going to do a double XP weekend.

Excellent post and breakdown here. Now, @Ankylosaur can hop in here and correct me, but I fear my own work may have skewed his naming conventions, since I felt he wanted more clarity than the vagary I deal in!

Applause! Also, did I give you the Zoe bio?

Tsk. Missed that.

I run a Main that is Mind Control/Empathy. Frankly, removing the rez is a no go for me. That thing is golden. Ok, it doesn't smack the enemy around like HT and so on, but so what?

It's all a matter of perspective. EDIT. That sounded like a diss, now that I read it back. It isn't! It's all a matter of perspective on who contributes in different ways. Whew. Got out of that one!

Never seen it on Reunion either. @Akalabeth, give it some time. I'm sure you'll work out a bio for your main at least, and once you've done that, well, sky's not the limit!

Just using your comment as a springboard, @BurtHutt, rather than specifically responding to you 🙂 For this player I heard a lot of fatigue over Incarnate Trials rather than what I'd call actual "Praetoria fatigue". The main complaints I heard about Praetoria were (from those who liked it) (1) you got through it too fast due to how the contact caps worked and (2) no completion to 50.

That's a nice idea. Has my vote. I have a floating tab 4 loaded for NPC Dialog & Cut Scene Captions that helps, but that's still only me. Pictured below between Target and Nav. The big loss is the post mission debriefs, the rest of of the team never gets those ones.

Last Bastion needs a remodel then! And not just be a reskinned map from Primal.

I'd love to think that the story arcs I write are enough to entice players into them without earning any XP, but that's ludicrous. Much as the AE is clogged to the gills with farms, it's NOT THE ONLY STUFF THERE. So removing XP would not help. Sure, back in the day it was tickets, and only Dev Choices had the option of both, but that ship seems to have sailed too.

I'd like to imagine that some things set up in this will pay off in the forthcoming Ahsoka series.

Thanks for the shout out, @TerroirNoir, appreciate it! I tried City of Dread Episode One yesterday myself. Good stuff, @Savantir07. I'll get to the rest as soon as I can!

NEVAH! We will fight them in the ruins! Goldarn bastich DE! Technically the last Praetorian area (as opposed to Zone) is Last Bastion. Those Resistance Beam Pistols are sweet! And I assume you're referencing Pyriss et al, though she had her mind restored, so something along those lines with some additions perhaps is what @The_Warpact is suggesting. Me? I'd have gone more D.U.S.T, though they're already a little VEATy. In all seriousness the binary "go Red/Blue" at 20ish route for Gold is, well, too binary. You CAN keep going straight to FW and then NW, but it's not very well signposted. What I'm saying is narratively an option to "stay and fight on" for either side (and that gets blurry in FW/NW) makes as much sense as leaving.* *Not to mention the sheer madness of introducing the newest, and IMO best looking zones in the game, just to have them go boom. Anyhoo. (Climbs off soapbox)

AWW. For a brief moment I thought you were in the ACTUAL Rikti Monkey Fight Club. 😞 That place needs to have a contact in it so there's a reason to go there other than nostalgia. Same with PDP.

This is not our Earth. So, prices/costs irrelevant.

You think those ideas are unique to Thunderspy? They're not. Thunderspy just got theirs out first. At what cost to stability and so on? Well, that's a different thing entirely.

Shakes fist! Curses! LOL. Hope your Forever Praet is doing well, @Krimson!

Katie Douglas's arc. Colonel Duray: Do you understand how ANNOYING it is for me to even be here?! Colonel Duray: I've got better things to do than clean up Tilman's mess! Colonel Duray: Like, say, invading a WHOLE DIMENSION!

I'll take someone who, for whatever reason, might be genuinely struggling in a team, over the douchebag who doesn't listen and runs off. Yeah I'm looking at you, Mr. Bomb Exploder in the UG! And was it you who used the grenades in Lambda? I bet it was. Stay away from ...oh, he's aggro'd all the DE in the DE Ripple in ASF. Sigh.

There are events and references peppered throughout the FW/NW arcs that place them later. Just one example, Praetorian Duray shows up and refers to the fact that he is not happy he has been pulled out of the invasion to attend to something there, which places that event post Sutter. There's more but I haven't access to my notes at the moment. Yes, the tendency to perceive level progression as time progression is an almost natural one, since it's pretty much how the game initially worked, but that was abandoned and then you get the little disclaimers saying such and such a thing happens before this or after that. We don't get enough of those unfortunately. The most egregious one beyond the FW/NW material is Marchand/Mr. G in Primal, where instead of being level 50 is 35 to 50. It is what it is.

Ah, I had elided Dilemma into the DA material, since you get an option to open it at the end of the DA material. I'll edit the above to place it properly.