Luminara

No, because all of the changes you refer to were not changes in the original live game, they were done here, recently. As you note, bases used to cost Prestige. The HC team made them free. The Incarnate system was heavily restricted and unwieldy to navigate. The HC team removed several restrictions and made it easier to work with. In the same manner, the HC team has applied their vision of easier and better access to zone travel with these changes, making inter-zone travel less burdensome than it was on the original servers. It's the same reasoning and approach they've applied to other aspects of the game, improving problematic areas by making them more universally accessible and less of a grind. Calling it arbitrary because it resulted in the loss of access to the slash command if the player isn't in a base or within 45' of a base portal is wrong because that slash command was never accessible to players on the original servers.

Don't make me bring my cats to your house. 💩

He's upgraded. He's pluralized. He's an infestation now. He is... @Bionic_Flea! Now with self-reproducing nano-technology! Nano-nano-technology, the nano-est of technologies, swarming a forum near you!

Teleport Target's stat panel only displays info for Teleport Foe. There's nothing related to teleporting friendly targets. The description does mention teleporting allies, but there are no stats listed on the info panel, it just says Teleport Foe and gives the data on that half of the power. The toggle for asymmetrical shoulders buzzes when you move the pointer over it. It doesn't make a click, it makes a constant buzz until the pointer is moved.

In fact, the thread appears to be focused on the rewards for gated content, rather than the gates themselves. I think that's a backward approach. We've primarily discussed what kinds of rewards we had, rewards which were made freely available, rewards which could be implemented, but that's putting the cart before the horse. Gates have to exist for rewards to have meaning and purpose, to be rewards. Without the gates, they're just handouts. Since I'm no less guilty of diverting the thread away toward discussion of rewards instead of gates, I'll nudge it in what I believe is the proper direction, toward gates and gating. Right now, the primary form of gating is combat. You need to engage in combat to earn XP. You need to earn XP to increase in level. You need to increase level to access more, more varied, or better powers. You need more, more varied, or better powers to continue to gain XP at a reasonable rate, due to the scaling increase in XP required per level. It creates a self-sustaining gate, and the rewards appropriately reflect the time and effort involved in passing through the gates presented by the XP/level/powers loop. Other gates exist in direct relation to the XP/level/powers gated system. Most story content is gated by level, with a gate "passkey" offered in the form of sidekicking. IO sets are gated by level. Various temporary powers are gated by mission or arc. Some story content is gated by specific powers (Lost Cure, for example), which are only obtainable once you reach a certain level. Faster travel used to be gated by both level (14) and power selection (2 powers to Fly/Superspeed/Super Jump/Teleport). Some gates have been removed. Team size used to be a gate for accessing some story content. Level used to be a gate for accessing some cosmetic items. Progression used to be partially gated by debt, which cut XP gain significantly in the past. So what kinds of gates do gate-seekers actually want? Level gates? Team size gates (solo is a team of 1)? Power specific gates? Archetype gates like EAT/VEAT story content? Or are there gates which don't exist, but could? Branching missions can gate story content, like what @Piecemeal has already accomplished. That's one. @Lockpick suggested using veteran levels as gates, as they do little at the moment, and linking them to existing gates in a unique way, so that's another. How about some more? Let's hear some creative suggestions for gates, whether they're existing gates used in a different way or entirely new gates. When we have some decent gates to talk about, then we can talk about what kinds of rewards to offer. And remember, gate doesn't necessarily have to equate to grind. A gate can be very difficult to surmount without being grindy, or it can be grindy and still easily accomplished by placing a power on auto-fire and going AFK for a while. There's no inherent conflation between the two, it's just how they've been traditionally viewed. If you realize that everything is gated in some manner, even if it's just pressing the button to log in, then you can look at the game in a different light, see the gates for what they are and let your imagination guide you in improving existing gates and making new ones which are both interesting and relevant.

OSA is a nested pseudo-pet. When you fire the arrow, it doesn't do anything except cause the OilSlickOil pseudo-pet to spawn at the targeted location. OilSlickOil immediately begins using a PBAoE which Slows and Knocks Down, and spawns OilSlickTarget, the invisible box that you can target and destroy with Fire/Energy damage. When OilSlickTarget is defeated, it despawns and sends a call to the server to spawn OilSlickBurn, which uses a PBAoE damage aura to create the damage dealt by OSA. This is why Ranged AoE Damage procs don't even make hit checks until the oil is ignited, because the entity which has access to those sets doesn't exist until that very moment. So to answer your question, the reason Defiance isn't applied to OSA is because the damage portion of the power is a pseudo-pet "owned" by another pseudo-pet, the target dummy, and the target dummy is "owned" by the oil slick. Your buffs are only applied to the slick, they don't transition two steps farther down the chain, and the slick doesn't deal damage. Can it be changed? Well... no. The Slow/KD patch has to be generated by a pseudo-pet to be persistent. Using Redirect doesn't create a persistent patch. And the damage has to be generated by a pseudo-pet to be appropriate for the power's persistence, in that it can't just be a 15s long DoT applied because foes can leave the AoE and the effects are supposed to end. And the target also has to be a pseudo-pet, simply because there has to be something there to hit. I said no, but technically, nothing is impossible, if one spends enough time and effort. Right now, though, there are no existing mechanics which could be substituted for nested pseudo-pets, and spending the necessary time and effort to create the mechanics for one power might not be the best use of the HC team's resources. It took almost two years to get OSA working the way it does now, and it does work well at this point, so the HC team is probably disinclined to mess around with it or try to replicate it. At least, for now. I suspect this may be on @Captain Powerhouse's private list of things to revisit when he's in a better position to do so. He's not a fan of pseudo-pet powers because they act independently from the player, creating the potential for problems and/or abuse. But I wouldn't hold my breath. Making something like OSA without pseudo-pets won't be easy, nor will it be happening any time soon. Any other questions I can answer?

THIS! ONE BAZILLIONTY FOUR TIMES THIS! @Jimmy! Make this happen! DO IT! Don't make me swamp the forums with that picture!

Urushiol, the compound in poison * plants, bonds with the skin. That's what makes it so frustrating. Once it's in, it's essentially part of your body until the skin peels or flakes off. Note that the compound itself becomes inactive eventually, some hours later, so it doesn't continue sinking in until it reaches your vital organs or anything, and it's not the compound itself causing the reaction, it's just an evolutionary quirk that we're so drastically affected by it. Humans specifically adapted this reaction to it. It's one of those natural world anomalies, like humans being particularly susceptible to funnel web spider venom despite not being a species preyed upon by that spider. Other mammals don't have the same reactions to poison * or funnel web venom. I wish I had access to scientific study tools, equipment and data. I'd love to trace the DNA sequence which causes this and find out where it came from. Neandertals? Homo Habilis? Homo Heidelbergensis? An older branch of our tree? Or is it native to Homo Sapiens? Did it come from a specific genotype, or was it common throughout the species in which it originated? Was it a response to the last ice age ending? SO MUCH TO KNOW, AND I CAN'T DO ANYTHING TO LEARN ABOUT IT! 😞

Oh, well... big hair went out of style. Casual dress, jeans and t-shirts, became fashionable. Grunge. You missed grunge. Several countries have had different heads of state. Recycling became "a thing". The educational system went into the toilet in the United States. Pet rocks stopped being "a thing". So did Chia Pets. And The Clapper. Oh, the Cold War ended, but another one sort of started relatively recently. Japan got weirder. China got angrier. Poutine was moved from the "junk food" category to the "cuisine" category. Some mountains grew, others shrank (erosion). Gasoline prices went up. So did inflation. Wages didn't match either, but smart people still found ways to stretch their money. The planet continued spinning, despite our best efforts. Some wind blew, somewhere. Top Gear happened. Then it stopped happening. Then The Grand Tour happened. It's still kind of happening. I think that about sums it up. Welcome to the next century! 😄

This is correct. The problem wasn't the doorways themselves, it was inherent in the Ambush code and the interaction with doorways. A new mechanic had to be created specifically to handle the problem, the AmNotBush code. Now doorways won't be able to appear to be bushes and deceive players any more.

The Stealth nerf to doorways was intentional. Players were expressing difficulty finding them.

I appreciate the mention, but I'm obliged to correct this. My initial character without travel powers wasn't made that way because I couldn't fit one into the build, it was because I envisioned her as a "true" natural origin character. In fact, she didn't have Hurdle at all, originally. I started out trying to make Swift + Sprint work. It was only after stumbling across a post which mentioned base stats on Swift, Hurdle and Sprint that I began experimenting with Hurdle, doing the math and learning how movement mechanics functioned in the game. After making the most direct and fair comparisons I could, at the time, between characters with Hurdle and Fly, equivalently slotted, then I understood that Hurdle could be a viable substitute for a travel power. I made my next character with Hurdle as a travel power in order to test and verify (or dispute) my observations, math and conclusions. And after that, it just became my default choice, partially because I knew the math and mechanics quite well at that point, and partially because I enjoyed it more than any of the actual travel powers. Having made the transition to Hurdle for nearly all of my characters might have unintentionally freed up a couple of power selections on some, but that was never the intended goal or purpose of making that choice. I did it because I liked the way the Hurdle worked mechanically and knew that it was fast enough, even when teamed (yes, i did, in fact, play on teams in those days (no, i was never last to the door (usually third or fourth, sometimes first), and no, i never needed to be TPed to keep up)). Tight builds were never a factor for this decision. They still aren't (most of my characters now are Hurdlers).

Of all things, it's not the thing I thought people would make a thing of, but things happen.

... *chases*

I really wish people would stop referring to me as a "thing".

I'll send you my laundry Wednesday afternoon. I have to rip out a couple of decades of poison ivy growth on an old well. I'm prepared this time, though. It should be cool enough to be comfortable wearing a long-sleeved shirt, and I bought some gloves. I might wear my Cold War gas mask, too, just because.

Fascist - Mind/Darkness controller. Terrorist - Mercenaries/Traps. Other - */* and get the hell out ASAP, before the Loyalists turn you or the Resistance murders you.

The existing solo options are actually a little too quick. But that is better than too slow, and the original design was definitely too slow (I19.5, estimated time to unlock and complete the Alpha slot solo, 4-9 months depending on difficulty setting and RNG). I wouldn't complain if the HC team slowed it down a little, or added some difficulty to it by preconfiguring certain enemies to always con higher even when set to +0 or -1 and no bosses/no AVs. But the original design was a complete mess anyway. Making acquisition of Incarnate abilities part of the end-game content was a mistake because players had to experience that content without Incarnate abilities, and by the time they finished becoming Incarnates, there was no content which could require their newfound power. Unlocking and creating Incarnate abilities should always have been the solo/small team content, and the Incarnate content specifically requiring Incarnate abilities and full teams. As always, though, they had to compromise and try to make it all work as the same content because they couldn't dedicate the resources to doing them separately; and they worried about the possibility of non-Incarnate characters being "excluded" from end-game content, but rather than re-examine the solo route to becoming an Incarnate and adjusting it to make it more viable, they charged ahead with the all-in-one package. The result was the content shortage for Incarnate characters that we're still dealing with today. Had they been left to continue development beyond I24 beta, I don't think Paragon would've fixed this. They would've continued along the path they laid out for themselves and painted themselves into another corner. Again, a large part of that was the lack of personnel and time, but it was also the pencil and paper RPG background that most of them brought to the team. They were accustomed to countering players by making something up on the fly, an approach that isn't remotely applicable to long-term game development and design. There is no on-the-fly when it takes 8-16 weeks to release each update. By the time Paragon could've addressed the problems inherent in the way the Incarnate system and content were designed, they would've been up to their ears in the Coming Storm stuff, obviating any changes they might have considered or made. There was a definite lack of foresight in some of their development decisions.

John Nash carried it further in showing that self interest in cooperation with group interest produced better results for the person and the group. Perhaps marketeer collaboration on winter pack purchasing and item sales could provide some improvement to the economy. Or, at least, some interesting data resulting from the experiment. How much inf* is in a millimeter?

I have to contest that conclusion - this game was never hard, nor designed for the hardcore. The biggest, hardest hitting change was Enhancement Diversification, and it was a joke to hardcore players. I proved that with my Kin/pool melee character. When a player can solo a GM with zero damage enhancements, zero status protection, zero Defense, zero Resistance and attacks which dealt less damage than defender T1 blasts, that early in the game's life and immediately following a massive global nerf, it's not a hard/hardcore game. Hardcore players expecting hardcore content in this game were destined to be disappointed. Co* was never designed to be anything but a casual player game.

Anything subjectively viewable as "better", i.e. "Yay, ShinyThing makes me prettier!/Yay the might of @Jimmy's nipples has made me more fearsome!", don't gate. That's my position. Branches in arcs or missions, temporary powers, accolade powers, whatever, as long as they aren't required to progress, build your gates. Badges and titles are arguable, as titles themselves are subjective improvements to some people, but they don't alter the core of the character, they're extras. Not having a desired title doesn't change how we see a character the way not having a cosmetic item does. As such, I'd lump in with the content safe to gate. People can still make the characters they imagine and play them, and pick up the badge/title whenever without feeling morose or frustrated. I'll also add that gates shouldn't be extraordinary unless the reward is similarly extraordinary. Defeat 500 Skulls is an example of a bad gate. Despite having the option to defeat that many Skulls "quickly" with a level 50, it's still significantly more time than similar badges, and the reward doesn't reflect that. Make the gates accessible by making them organic (meaning, something earned through natural progression and which promotes continued participation, not making them out of the bones of your enemies (unless your enemies really, really deserve it (and you won't be caught (and you don't mind the smell (and there are no wild animals who will eat your gate))))), or make the rewards worth gating if the gate is notable in requiring effort or dedication. You suggested badges for veteran levels in concert with specific other badges having been unlocked. The question that comes to mind immediately is, is an extra badge/title really for grinding veteran levels enough incentive to accomplish the goals? For those who are already invested enough to continue playing the character, the badges/titles are irrelevant. For those who aren't, does that badge/title provide sufficient reason to invest further in that character? Does placing badges/titles behind veteran levels satisfy the crowd who want more gates/grinds, or are they going to look at it decide that these badges/titles aren't actually worth bothering with because the reward doesn't justify the time invested? Essentially, do the gates and rewards meet the goals, or are they just concessions?

I'm telling you what the result of gating cosmetic items really is and how it comes across in this game.

Then you're also saying that it's unreasonable to be an Italian, in the case of the Roman costume options. Clearly Italy exist in the game world, or there'd be no Cimerora, and there are no references in the game which indicate that it was destroyed in any way, such as during the Rikti invasion, or by the Devouring Earth, so there must be Italians, but you're outright saying that it's unreasonable to be an Italian hero/villain by restricting that costume option. You're saying that there are no custom-made armors available because no-one in the game world can make them, yet we walk, run, fly and jump past Icon and Facemaker stores every day, so there obviously are people who can tailor-make something like a lorica segmentata. You're saying that nothing can be inherited, borrowed or stolen, but there are numerous references to NPCs inheriting, borrowing or stealing things. You're saying that nothing can be found archaeologically, in direct contradiction to an entire series of missions in Faultline which involve you participating in archeological excavations to find a buried weapon of immense power. You're saying that these costume options only exist within one specific, narrow framework of explanation and that anything else is wrong, and you're saying that in spite of in-game references and evidence disputing that assertion. Time travel may be the only way for you to obtain Roman costume options, but they're not the only way they can exist within the context of the game, because the game specifically allows them to exist by explaining that existence in a variety of other ways. And this is applicable to all costume options. No-one says someone wearing a Vanguard costume is a member of Vanguard. It could be a reproduction, it could be found, it could be stolen, it could be inherited, it could be a gift, it could be a magical hairpin which makes the character look that way, it could be any of a hundred million things. Cosmetic items should not be gated. It's contrary to the game's established lore, not complimentary, it's arbitrary, it's restrictive and it's discouraging of creativity and diversity. It tells players that they're not allowed to be smart, or rich, or conniving, or creative. And that's just wrong. You might as well lock femininity and colored skin behind cosmetic item gates, too, because that's the message it sends to players. City of Rich White Dudes in Spandex.

Because it's arbitrarily restrictive. Disallowing character concepts because they aren't at X level, or haven't acquired a late game badge, or weren't there for an event, or are of a specific ethnicity (yes, that is the message sent when something like Roman or Greek options are restricted) forces players to either abandon the concept or accept not being allowed to play what they want, or jump through more hoops than other players. Toga and Hellenic sandals - On the original servers, my main's entire theme revolved around having those costume parts, which forced me to wait for Valentine's Day before I could make and start playing that character, and still had do so in a hobo outfit. Roman costume options - I unlocked them on exactly one character on the original servers, a character which was never intended to use them, and I couldn't access those costume options on any other characters unless I leveled them to 35+. So even though the costume options technically existed, they were non-existent for the characters I wanted to create and play. I had to settle for spandex and blue jeans and slog through half (or all) of the game looking nothing like what I envisioned, or abandon the characters entirely. Now put robotic costume options behind those gates. Or plant costume options. Or different skin colors. It's no less arbitrary or restrictive, regardless of which options are gated or how thematic it might be for the gates to exist, and it's discouraging for everyone. It tells players they're not welcome or wanted unless they conform to a specific model or mindset. And it doesn't improve retention by making players more attached to characters they finally unlocked those options on because they're typically unlocking the options on the "wrong" characters. Gating the way we look in-game is a bad reward model, because characters looking the way players envision them shouldn't be a reward. Being Greek isn't a reward. Being a robot isn't a reward. Being blue-skinned isn't a reward. Powers, yes. Bonuses to character attributes, yes. Those are rewards. Upgraded versions of costume options with extra detail or particle effects or shiny metallic surfaces, yes, those are rewards. Waiting until level 40, or 8 months for an event to start, just to look the way we want, that's not a reward, it's a discouragement. We don't all want to wear tights and a cape when we're being a hero/villain. That might be okay for some people, but in a game like Co*, freedom of expression and the ability to probe the depths of our imagination by exploring less ordinary costume options is a strength, one which should be continued and perpetuated, not curtailed with gates.

*uses all of Mac's packs as marshmallows in the hot cocoa*