Doc_Scorpion

Why? I mean seriously, why? None of those groups have the potential to damage the economy or tilt the balance of gameplay that farming does. There's no possible economic argument for taking a look at them.

Pay attention and be prepared To do it right The super thing's the thing That makes you bigger than life

Never hurts to bring issues to the dev's attention! My reply was meant to be informational, not to shut you down.

Praetoria... I'm glad I ran through it once, back on Live, but I'm not sure I'll ever do it again. I'm very ambivalent about further dividing the playerbase by expanding it 50. The effort required to so might be better spent Blueside or Redside where the other 90% of the playerbase resides.

Protip: If you don't want to have your feelings discussed, don't enter them into the discussion. Also don't keep repeatedly using your feelings to buttress your points. And especially don't make your concluding/summary paragraphs about your feelings. If you make your post about your feelings, that's what people are going to discuss. You can't have it both ways.

That depends heavily on your difficulty settings and what you're fighting. With zero end redux I usually end fights with 20-30% of their END remaining - and the real problem is they have @%!% recovery. That being said, it's a known issue that was brought up multiple times towards the end of the Beta. I think the Devs intend to fix it, but it didn't make it into the final build.

Isn't that pretty much the last map of Twinshot's arc?

This is the only possible way I find this proposal acceptable, and even then just hanging-on-by-it's-fingernails barely.

Oh, that gut punch at the end of Gundam Mercury today...

I tried a bots/EA MM right after EA dropped, and he was at best marginally playable. The increase in the lethality of bots in page 5 made him playable and fun. Unfortunately, the Really Really Cool name I came up with for him... I've already transferred to an Elec/EA 'troller. So he's rolled up and standing next to Officer Flint - waiting on a name.

I don't know that there is a moment, a particular indicator... But, somehow, I generally know by the mid teens whether I'll keep playing, only drag them out when a low level TF is the WST, or delete them entirely.

It was exactly what I expected - cheesy human interest in between kaiju whaling on each other. All the better because it was playing at the dine-in place a few minutes away and I could sip on a pint of my favorite while watching the movie.

Yeah. I remember every quarter people would pore over the NCSoft financials, note the dropping number of players... "It's right after Christmas, they'll be back when they're bored with their new toys." "School just let out, they'll be back after the summer." "School just started, they'll be back after they settle in" Etc... etc.. Except they never did. Quarter after quarter, the same story, the same steadily slipping numbers. (IIRC, the numbers peaked about Issue 2ish, 3ish and slipped steadily thereafter.) The data was always there for those willing to see. Very, very few were willing.

*Shrug* Big deal, so you'd only be able to buy 10 rather than 20. That's still more than the 2 you claimed. No, you didn't try a new character, you tried a speed leveled character. Whatever your intent, the simple fact is that you did speed level and by doing so you far exceeded the levels this bonus is meant for. This is about increasing survivability, it's not about making it easier to level faster. It's about making it more attractive to play the lower levels, not about creating an alternative to speed leveling.

Try playing a new character without a sugar daddy or speed leveling (DFB or farms), and you'll very quickly learn that a) DO's and SO's make a significant difference, and b) 50k isn't trivial. You leveled to where SO's are expensive, and created an irrelevant comparison since this stipend is aimed a players of far lower levels. If you were a level 2 character, the level this stipend is aimed at, you could have afforded 20 SO's.

We're regularly getting new players. Not many, but not zero either. We're not holding anyone's hand - we're giving them a minor boost. And what kind of person feels insulted by that? Also, Twinshot's minimum level is far too high to serve as a tutorial.

Double so since base XP earnings are already considerably higher than on Live. To the point where you'll get people complaining about leveling too fast.

My friends would assure you that even though I'm still here, I'm definitely not all there.

I've got some thoughts on how I'd set up an AO system, It's almost bedtime so I'll write them up separately over the weekend to avoid further derailing this thread.

Right. So on top of everything I listed that they need to know, you can add in: d) what an exploration badge is, e) where they are, f) what the PTW vendor is.. while only subtracting c). You do realize you just proved my point? That's a much lower bar however. Especially since you learn about enhancements in the tutorials, the vendor is right there, and you've have to be pretty out of it to not grasp that Accuracy and Damage are good things. If there's a bar it's the stupid design of DO's and SO's. They should have been replaced with AO's (All Origins) long, long ago.

Could we please not derail this otherwise interesting thread with arguments about bots?

New players don't have sugar daddies. New(er) players may not have another toon with money to spare. There isn't. And even if there was, the newbie would have to a) know what merits are, b) know where and how to exchange them for converters, and c) know where to sell the converters for cash. That's a pretty high bar.

A reasonable suggestion. And it goes a long way towards solving a still unsolved problem that I pointed out when making DO's and SO's available at much lower levels was first discussed: Without a "sugar daddy", new characters and especially new players lack the funds to take advantage of that availability. And they have no easy way to get the funds that doesn't require pre-existing knowledge of the game.

No, I'm not misunderstanding what's being asked for at all and I've said nothing that could possibly be construed as meaning I thought people were asking to dictate to the Devs. The central problem here is that people don't understand what they're asking for and what useful participation at that level entails. Here's just one such post, right in this very thread, just a few posts above yours complaining you hadn't seen any. As I said, what you're asking for has been done and is being done.

You're asking for the Dev and Community teams to do more work within the limited time they have available, slowing down the process, and you don't think you're advocating "throwing sand in the gears"? And that's setting aside how contentious the process is unquestionably going to be. Participating at the point in the discussion, at the topmost levels and fairly early in the process, you are essentially a Dev. You're making significant decisions that affect the course of the game and the play of the entire playerbase. It's a responsibility, a burden. (Heck, so is properly participating in Open Beta.) And you need to be able to move beyond the weaksauce "well, I didn't see anyone asking for this" and "well, I haven't seen any builds using this". There's been several of them in this thread alone. It's been discussed repeatedly over the course of the last couple of years and especially in the last couple of weeks. It might be your client... But your snapshot of the Gold Standard discord is misleading and incomplete. It's blurred out because "what happens on Gold Standard stays on Gold Standard" - but this is what the Gold Standard discord looks like for Page 5 on my client. (I don't currently have as much time as I'd like, but I do try and keep abreast and informed of what's going on.) Each of those blurs is a channel dedicated to specific or closely related features. Some new, some changes to the existing game. (At least two have been on the Page disscussion for a couple of Pages now and have yet to make Open Beta.) And this is only a picture of one corner of the discussions.