Luminara

VPN?

Jumped the Snark, Snarkbite, Snarkfishing, Snark Attack, Snark In the Water, Snarkbait, Snarkfin Soup, Twinkles, Hammerhead Snark, Great White Snark, Nurse Snark... 😄

Presuming only those players used it. The point I was making is that there's a healthy population of people leveling normally. Adding an insta-50 token could change that and have ramifications which are not being addressed in the proposal.

You spoke of the importance of leveling to 50, at least one time to learn the game, through regular play. If it doesn't matter, why say If it's important, then you need to implement a method of ensuring that the auto-50 token is only granted when it's earned the way you outlined, through the normal leveling process. That doesn't resolve the question of meeting the demand when supply is reduced by your insta-50 proposal. There are recipes which are capped at levels 20, 30 and 40. SOs aren't attuned and can frequently be purchased on the market for less than vendor price. If there's a decrease in supply of these items due to more players going straight to maximum level, how do you propose to deal with that? I'm not kicking you in the balls for making the suggestion. I'm pointing out that there are issues which would need to be addressed. Failure to address those issues would lead to game-wide problems.

There are, as of the moment I begin this reply, 23,165 recipes on the market in sets which are capped at levels 30 or 40. Those don't drop from level 50 critters.

If playing from 1 to 50 the first time is important, how would your system differentiate between someone who actually had played from 1 to 50, and someone who was power-leveled to 50? How would someone with a single played 50 and multiple "free" 50's fund their characters if they're not acquiring merits, drops or inf* along the way? Presuming the answer to that question is, "Play the market", what would the impact on the market be if players stopped adding recipes and enhancements because they didn't have any to add due to skipping the leveling process? As it's reasonable to assume that they could continue to add to the market post-50, would there be an additional system in place to ensure that all of the recipes and enhancements added were appropriately spread in level ranges, rather than all at maximum level for the content in which they dropped (or at the character's level, 50), to ensure that players who aren't auto-leveling to 50 have a selection of 1-49 recipes and enhancements?

You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

In addition to @Greycat's point about merits (one can acquire nearly 250 merits from exploration badge completion), exploration badges are also tied to numerous accolades. The expectation is that we earn those accolades, not that they be automatically granted. Removing the exploration badge requirement on those accolades means you have to replace it with another requirement, or dump the accolades entirely. Additionally, it would make absolutely no sense for, to make one example, a native Praetorian to have exploration badges from Kings Row, or a level 3 villain to have exploration badges from the Shadow Shard. While that wouldn't be game-breaking, it would completely destroy any sense of immersion we experience now. The requirement to travel to other zones is the primary justification for having travel powers in the game, and for having travel powers function in the ways they do. Isolating everything to individual zones would necessitate redesigning travel powers across the board to give them purpose, or relegate them to something as meaningless as origin attack powers, barely differentiated and eventually useless. Finally, travel powers and exploration badges are intimately interconnected. Those badges exist, and were placed where they are, specifically to encourage players to explore the zones in an organic fashion, to acquire those badges on the way to missions or while passing through zones. And travel powers exist, and work as they do, specifically to enable players to move extensively throughout the whole of the game, not within individual zones (one can cross even the largest of the non-Shadow Shard zones in less than three minutes with no travel power). Both travel powers and exploration badges still serve that purpose, giving the character, and the player, a sense of the scale and scope of the greater game while rewarding them in some small way for using their travel powers and occasionally making a short detour on the way to a mission. I foresee both of these changes as being detrimental to the game.

Testing on some of my characters: the characters who already have Portal Jockey show no dialog option for Dimensional Warder progress; the character who does not have Portal Jockey does show the dialog option. The character without Portal Jockey has defeated Neuron and Antimatter, but none of the others. @Hedgefund is likely correct, you probably already have PJ on the character you're using to check.

Neinapple.

What "epic" pools And you still don't know how to play them? Impressive.

They're your teammates, not your employees. Get the fuck over yourself already.

That flux capacitor was on loan, not a gift, and you broke it? Again? If the universe folds in on itself, I'm telling everyone it was your fault.

I whole-heartedly agree. But the legal system doesn't (in most of the contiguous U.S.). And by running around in the buff, I'm becoming a "freedom fighter", assisting in overthrowing the clothed regime, which makes it a heroic act in the long run! IT'S A WIN-WIN!

Favorite villain personality... personality... hm... AH! Naked.

@Jimmy will never be free. We have him by the nipples.

It's not the worst with Kinetics, since you can cap your damage so easily. But if Sands of Mu had been available when I made Electron Girl, I would've used that instead.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120906094758/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=114451

Computer code. It's that stuff that looks like a wizard ejaculated on a dictionary. Guaranteed to be in Page 3.

A serious point to make: The economy is stable, and has been for quite some time now. There's no sign of inflation growing at a significant rate (or even a measurable rate, right now. prices have remained essentially the same for at least a year). Between the market tweaks (salvage seeding, auto-attunement) and the broad availability of converters, inflation has been very effectively controlled. As such, there isn't a need for a sink from an economic perspective. Even if we significantly increased the population, the costs of various things would (theoretically) remain relatively flat, because those costs are now ultimately tied to merits, not inf*. Now, obviously, people with more inf* than they know what to do with would like something productive, fun or even moderately worthwhile to do with that inf*. There's only so long anyone can sit in their counting room, polishing their stacks of coins and whispering "My precious" before it ceases to be entertaining, after all. But this isn't really a sink being requested, it's a reason to spend some of that inf*. Should people have something to spend exorbitant sums of inf* on? Yes. Every activity in the game should be rewarding in some way, even mass accumulation of currency, or the activity itself is meaningless and shouldn't exist. But should it be a sink? That would depend on how badly those exorbitant sums of inf* could damage the economy. If someone can demonstrate a detrimental effect on the game as a whole which comes from having several hundred billion inf*, then it would justify a sink. If not... then the discussion should revolve around finding a rewarding method of spending that inf*, rather than simply removing it from the economy. And while it might appear to be picking nits to point out that there's a difference, it is important to separate "fun way to reward having piles of inf*" from "too much inf* destroying the game". Though the two concepts might be superficially similar, they're wildly different in implementation and purpose. I'd also recommend that anything the developers implement, should this reach that stage, should recycle the defender inherent code to shut it off when teamed. That would alleviate a lot of issues before they become issues. No bruised egos (if it's a cosmetic effect), no power creep complaints/leveraging it in multi-box farms (if it's a buff), et cetera. This would ensure that it's personally rewarding, but not game-breaking or useful as a means of lording it over others. Now, back to one-liners and lame jokes that make me laugh like the Joker.

A winner-take-all-off dance would be more entertaining.

Which brings us to the other monumental development fuck-up that causes situations like this. This game doesn't encourage player to player interaction. In fact, it actively discourages player to player interaction. Not only does the game default to cramming all of the commonly used communication channels into a single tab, in which it also shoves the combat channels (thereby causing messages to be easily missed during combat), but it also demands that players pay attention to their power tray, health/endurance and the action on the screen, thereby reinforcing the behavior simply because it's impossible to keep up with what's going on in the chat window if you're actively participating in content (yes, we can move windows to group them together, and we can isolate chat channels in separate tabs so we don't miss communication, but these options don't fix anything, they merely move the burden of attempting to compensate for the horrendous UI onto the player). I never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. That's what I see here, and I'm not referring to the player, but to Cryptic and their ineptly designed UI. Yes, the player absolutely was a dick after the fact (appropriate response would have been to ask to place you on global friend list and help you get the relevant badge next time the event popped), but the ultimate source of the issue was not his/her dickness, it was the bad UI. Please don't make snap judgements of those of us who play heroes, @Snarky, based on this situation. People are going to miss messages. The UI strives to make that happen. That doesn't mean we're all assholes, it means we're all human, and until/unless the UI is redesigned to be more intuitive, expect it and don't let it frustrate you. And if you're still having trouble acquiring the badge, send me a /tell when I'm logged in and I'll help you.

The problem isn't the players, it's the event. The two badges were designed with conflicting requirements. The Raver badge requires defeating 50 trolls before they go inside and transform into Supa Trolls, whereas the Dee Jay badge requires defeating 50 Supa Trolls. Consequently, attending the rave event makes it nearly impossible for players to acquire the Dee Jay badge. That isn't because heroes are assholes, it's because the Paragon crew didn't think it through. For the Dee Jay badge, it's significantly easier to just zone in at the central Skyway station and pulp the Supa Trolls there (when they leave the event area, they go there). You can get all 50 in short order that way. Or you can have your ass handed to you, if you're trying to do it at level or below, since there can be a couple dozen at each stairway (again, Paragon's bad judgement, not player-created havoc).