Darmian

Look, trees weren't invented until 1911, so whatever crazy you people are on, I want no part of it. Before that we would chase miscreants through the streets and then tie them up in the town square where they would be pelted with tinsel balls. (Tinsel balls at the time had the consistency of baseballs.)

Well, my badge hunter friend asked me to come to Siren's Call with her, so I did , and we spent the next half hour just shooting each other. Job done. No, it's not the original intent, LOL, but when your'e a badge hunter and you want them all...is it 1546 now?...you do what you have to.

What a nice idea! As a Goldsider Main (Responsibility) there's a mission where you have the choice of pushing on to finish the job OR leaving to save your Powers Division comrades who are under heavy fire elsewhere, and I NEVER choose to go on, I always go back for the team. So in things like that throwing a hidden extra or two in would spice things up a bit.

I'm ranting away tonight, apologies! It does boil down to what can be done to leverage what we already have into new, interesting and challenging things? Moving away from harder vs content for a moment now. Zones. Entirely new zones? That's a lot of work. Especially when we have quite a few zones simply underused and oftentimes just plain empty. Kallisti Wharf is top of the list to get stuff, no question really. Once the geometry is fixed that is. The hazard zones need more in them for people to simply go there. On other threads (for various reasons) I've advocated doubling certain zones to add content and lore to Redside, and those are Bloody Bay and Warburg, with the copies being PVE versions with different badges and new missions and contacts. Similarly for Siren's Call on Blue side.* @TalonBlue's suggestion of utilizing the floating islands around Ouro proper is a lovely idea and each island could have its own crystal and Mender. (NOT DEREK!....although...a Derek island with a crystal full of weird stuff might be interesting!) More later. The last few posts have just been me rabbiting on and typing as I think. *Why doubling? Well, why should PVPers lose those zones? Ok, to be fair almost all the PVP seems to occur on Indom in RV, and while I'm not a PVPer myself I see no valid reason to take those away from them, along with no PVE player wants to get ganked simply doing normal missions. So the zones exist, simply double them. You'll get PVE players using the #2 and the #1 will stay as is.

Welp, I'm going to stand up and say no, it isn't what this particular "most of us" wants, and having read most of the content on here I'd posit at best 50 % might want it, at best. And while I wouldn't complain if we got it I see it as a another dead end if it isn't accompanied by across the board, 1 to 49 level content to sit right behind it. This has definite legs to stand on. Many votes for this please. And a thing I mentioned on the Discord version of this topic, but I've been thinking about it a little. Stealing a little from the Kheldians here. Suppose missions from level 45 to 49 had a trigger added to them (oh, the pain I will bring to coders!), where if say a team with one incarnate starts a mish then the enemy will have at least one incarnate NPC opposing them. And then two for two, three for three and so on? Actually if the doppelganger mechanic were recoded for incarnate powers then drop those in! Face yourself at full power! This is very nice. Much approve. With one important caveat. Dream Doctor should be immediately killed and removed from the game. As a deus ex machina NPC he negates player agency and that's simply bad. So, maybe another character to hand out a dreamspace set of arcs.

So, making stuff harder, or making stuff more tactical? Which some see as the same thing, while plenty others don't. I still say it comes back to, essentially, new content. I've mentioned and gone around in circles a few times earlier, the entire "tip missions from AE to fill the gaps" thing, so let's park that to one side, though we may come back to it. What about content (dangerous word) aimed at each AT? Taking a leaf out of @CrudeVileTerror's post earlier, suppose you had a mission that is simply easier if you're a certain AT. (Yeah, "harder", I'm getting there!) Infiltration style missions that Stalkers and Widows would excel at but scrappers and brutes would finish on the red? Horatius on the bridge missions where you gotta be a tank to hold off the wave after wave of ambushes in the pass while your squishier buddies do their thing? (Basic tanking I know but how many missions are actually built to do that, as opposed to you've learned that this works for you, ie tanking Recluse in MLTF?) Missions where you get your full XP and drops at the end because you fail if you kill MORE than a certain amount? Bring on the Controllers and Dominators. The enemy killing each other doesn't count. Sentinels? Well, you got me, I only have one and haven't got the hang of those yet. This is just late night spitballing, so I've only thrown a few ATs out there. Feel free to tear holes in this.* *Because my main interest is still in the tips from AE thing!

Goldsiders? Spare? GRRR.

Nicolas Cage plays Cortex in the movie version? Yeah, I can see that!

DOPPELGANGERS! Because I was chatting to Norse Wind in the Winter Forest at exactly the same time! DUM DUM DUM!

Well, I'm not talking about power sets and so on, I'm just talking about dropping more maps and more NPCs that already exist. I really should clarify what I'm talking about more often. And Faultline has said the following about maps: "This is not difficult but it is very time consuming. Every enemy spawn, hostage and collection location has to be placed by hand. Older maps had generic spawns that translated easily to AE, newer maps are heavily scripted and don't have generic mission spawns. Slices of the city zones obviously have no mission spawns. It takes several hours to place and test the spawn points for a single map, and that's why you don't see a lot of them added to the AE. For the Arena you only need to drop a few player spawn points and call it a day, that's why eight maps could be added in a week." Several have volunteered just to help add maps, never mind actually write anything for the AE as well! So, some time consumed but hardly the work that Piecemeal has turned out! Yeah, Holy Mittens' Vig/Rogue work was...September 2019? Maybe October. So definitely a year. And as a dedicated Goldsider, I WANT those maps. How else am I going to provide tip missions for Praetoria? Since outside of following my other notion of porting Number Six's missions (via radio or static and moving a door) to Gold side, they're not seeing anything new for a while. (Will be delighted to be proved wrong on that!)

In order for any of this to even get a shambling start the options in the AE need to start matching the available options in the game proper. At least then we can see what we can do when not hobbled by some of the tools' currently imposed limitations. Admittedly the current limits push you to think laterally so as to get around them, so in a sense that's good.

Modestly leaving yourself out of the loop as usual!

Oh, "coloring between the lines" has a LOT of latitude! And I also do include new new new! I really mean I don't want to see a bunch of things that couldn't possibly exist in the game world, rather than "thou shalt only use Council!". So, no thinly disguised Orcs and Elves thanks very much, to throw a generic example in there.

I'd still advocate sort of coloring inside the lines re Lore though. Even as an advocate of AE I want the missions to at least feel like the fit in the world.

Well, there IS a stigma of some kind I think. And it boils down to Farms vs Story. And Farms can be great (I hear!). No, truthfully they don't do it for me but I've tried a few and I admire the good ones for their mechanics and design, I just happen to be a content lover and they usually have none. It's hard enough to get anyone who isn't a known SG/team mate to come with you on a story arc actually. Even harder to describe in the LFG as opposed to "AE Farm starting in Atlas LFM 2/8". And there are plenty of people who love content but don't do AE because "it's not real". I am lucky enough to have a tiny gang of team mates that regularly go through AE stories with me, and we ooh and aah, and wonder how things were done and then try to figure it out...or we go "ugh, ok, let's see what else this person did...no, still crap, no more of theirs!", but we play them. You can find stuff! Obviously the Dev Choices each month are to be looked at, then using the Search fucntion on "Hall of Fame + SFMA" and on "SFMA" alone. After that you're just scrolling. And @cranebump is doing an "Under the Radar" set of reviews for games that haven't got that many plays and posting them here too. But yeah, back to the topic(!). Sourcing tip mission content from the AE and then whooshing it a bit (since the AE lacks a LOT of stuff) could really add content that could be fun but doesn't actually need to contribute heavily to ongoing Lore, just stay within the lines so to speak.

Yeah, well, I have a set of 45 missions in AE that I'll happily donate to get reviewed and added and can add write ups if need be.

Slightly off topic but I was writing an AE where I had a scene where an Arachnos Flyer lands to facilitate one of their operatives escaping, bu I abandoned it because I don't want it to be the GM version that just murders the player, spewing out troops, that's not what it is for. And yes, you can make it a Friendly, but that is just weird!

A monster between Monster and Giant Monster?

8 for exploration badges. History plaques not so much. So while we might have missed a plaque it's also entirely possible we didn't. What IS interesting is that most, if not all (?) history plaques are cross zoned, so all the plaques we have in KW may not all be linked to each other.

I'd posit that that is correlation and not causation. Original devs being subject to getting as much "content" out as possible to feed the grind machine that a subscription business demands in order to retain incoming subs means that is how the game is built, and that's what you end up with and are used to. Of course it's more nuanced than that but not a lot IMO. You get genuinely creative devs fighting against the dictum of "how little can we give and get away with without losing income?" that is dictated to them by the paymasters. We're in a "can't please all the people all of the time" moment here I think!

Hmm. Tip missions adapted from the best of the AE material? Doesn't have to be "Lore Heavy" just not so far out there it's Elseworlds or What If... So you would be looking at a tip "arc" of no more than 5 missions , done and dusted. And I realize that as someone who doesn't know how to "only" write a 5 mission slot I've instantly disqualified anything I've done, I STILL say this could work. Parameters. Here's the Tip template. Give us up to 5 missions involving X group with Y maguffin and so on. And adapting the tip missions so that for example if I have the choice of hero or vigilante then choosing one of those could generate a follow on tip mission? (a) Send the miscreant to prison or (b) break his arm and send him packing, which leads to (c) vengeance on you!

As an advocate for more and better Praetorian material I agree with almost all your post except this one. Dear Stars, no! A thousand times no!

I'll post a proper and thought out reply later, but for now, tips to drop in co-op zones as well!

You know, from this entire discussion I still have no real grasp of what old school playing is! Other than it is apparently rare now. I mean is it this? Or what? I mean that seems interesting as a challenge but I can't say it's for me. Then there's this argument. Each have their adherents and live and let live I say. Personally? Levelling up is a thing that happens to my characters as I play the game, it's not the point of the game for me. So is that a third option there? I doubt I'm alone in that. But that's not "old school" either, I'm just a story hound and like to explore all the things all the way through. I mean I never played a WS on Live and now I'm working my way through all that lore. Fun times. There's room for everyone.

Throughout the Praetorian zones there are little incongruities. In reality I think they are the equivalent of not thinking things through or seeing a wristwatch on a character in Ben Hur, HOWEVER, storywise they throw up ideas and theories. Here's one. There's a small airfield in Neutropolis across from the reactors, mainly small aircraft, and plenty of Syndicate guys around. So far so mobs with cash dealing and so on. BUT...where are they flying to or from? And how? The area is surrounded by the Sonic barriers. Over the barriers? If they can fly over how do the barriers stop DE things getting in? Things to ponder.