Luminara

Ever since mid-screen notifications were added to the game, it's become increasingly difficult to see the game. These notifications pop up in the middle of the screen and during combat, obscuring the player's view of the action, of the targets, of the powers affecting the targets, of pointer location, everything. After combat, the player has to wait for the notifications to finish animating before the next spawn is visible or before he/she can safely move in any direction. And since these notifications move to different parts of the of the screen, depending on what they're connected to (tips, enhancements, recipes, salvage), even moving the camera around doesn't alleviate the problem. And now it's worse than ever, because tips overwrite tips and allow the notification system to spam the screen without restriction. There are no buff/debuff icons on the target window, so the only clue we have to what might buffs/debuffs are on enemies is the graphical effects of powers, and we can't see those. The notifications come up dead center on the screen, right where targeting is optimal, so we can't see location-click reticles, which enemy we've targeted, names, con colors... just notification after notification after fucking notification. We're playing a graphics-intensive MMORPG and we can't see the graphics because we have MUD text constantly obscuring everything. Added to that, it's now impossible to gather favored tips without accepting them immediately. In the middle of combat (which we can't even do since tips can't be accepted or dismissed inside instanced content). When we're pressed on all sides by enemies trying to Cuisinart us. That leaves only the options of going out and street sweeping spawns of 2 and 3 to get the tips we want, or breaking off combat and bolting for the exit every time a tip drops. Everything about this is detrimental to the fundamental experience of playing the game. Everything. There's no benefit to this, and I don't mean the bad outweighs the good, I mean nothing about this positively affects gameplay. It's bad across the board. But the worst part of this is that it was added to a release candidate 6 days before publishing the beta to live, without bring attention to it, without even mentioning it in passing, nothing but a few lines of green text at the end of the longest patch notes you've ever dumped on the forums. Yes, we all know that pushing things to the live servers is a volatile situation dependent on @Faultline available time and ability to connect, and you all have schedules of your own to which you need to adhere, but that's completely irrelevant in this case. This should never have been added at that stage. YOU DO NOT ADD UNTESTED FEATURES OR MAKE DRASTIC CHANGES WHEN YOU'RE IN RELEASE CANDIDATE PHASE. That's Beta 101. Release candidates are for polishing and fine-tuning, not cramming in spur of the moment changes to basic gameplay. This is something that should've been set aside for the next beta, brought to player attention and thoroughly tested, not dropped in and pushed out immediately because someone on the team was anxious to squeeze in one more thing. I've never criticized a developer before, but this time, it's warranted. Whoever did this made a monumental error in judgement and execution. And I hold all of you responsible. Publishing a change like this without any warning, testing, requests for feedback, or even consideration of the consequences, was a bad decision. No-one on the team stopped and thought, "Gee, maybe we should run this by the players, since it directly affects the ability to access content", or "Gosh, I wonder if there could be some downside to this", you all nodded your heads and said, "Yeah, throw that in there, it works, good enough!" This is Development Team Failure 101. It should never be repeated. Roll this back. Get it out. I don't care if you have to go in with a backhoe and explosives to remove it, get it the fuck out. We do not need the screen cluttered up with even more giant goddamn billboards blocking the view, and it's turned tips from an enjoyable way to experience the game to an unmitigated hinderance of combat and movement.

It was added in the second release candidate, the phase of a beta during which it's supposed to be feature-locked and players should be testing the fine-tuning of previous changes. It wasn't given a focused feedback thread, it wasn't mentioned as a testing point, it wasn't brought up by a City Council member in the New Player Experience feedback thread, it wasn't even given a passing reference beyond the patch note. And at the beginning of this open beta, people were pointing out that the patch notes were so dense and lengthy that they had trouble finding information. Pushing this to a release candidate six days before the beta went live was a mistake, and the failure to draw attention to it and request immediate testing and feedback compounded that mistake. They fucked up, not the players.

Go to Pocket D, make schmoopy talk to the seagull on the truck inside the red-lit area.

One of the balancing factors in this game is power availability. Auto powers add a constant small improvement to a character, for example, one which cannot ordinarily be removed by NPCs. Click powers are stronger than auto or toggle powers, so their availability more controlled. They have endurance costs, they have recharge times, they have ranges, and they have other limitations, such as not being able to set multiple click powers to auto-fire. They're stronger, so they're not guaranteed to be available at all times. In fact, they're expected to be unavailable at some times. That's the purpose of recharge times, ranges, endurance costs, and not having multiple powers set to auto. Another aspect of balance is how we utilize our options to respond to risk. When we're locked in combat, cycling through our attack chain, we have to make decisions, such as whether to continue attacking and ride out the risk of being defeated, or pause and activate a power to prevent what we believe to be imminent failure. Do we want to use this heal, or are the benefits of a damage mitigation buff superior? What about a damage buff, would it provide the edge we need to reduce the number of enemies around us in time for our HP pool to begin filling up again? That momentary pause, that choice of how to respond to the risk, is one of many aspects that cumulatively give the brainless idiots we beat to a pulp the faintest hint of a chance of defeating us. Without that, without players having to make any choice beyond, "Pause the attack chain for 0.92s after this attack, pause again for 1.32s after the seventh cycle", the NPCs, which are already crippled by limited scripting, by the game not using something like a cover system, by players having the capability to drop patches/rains around corners simply by angling the camera, by projectiles following enemies around corners and across hundreds of feet, would present even less risk than they do now. Being limited to setting a single click power to auto-fire is, for balance, no different from being limited to one *PP damage mitigation toggle, or one Miracle +Recovery, or four power pools. Restrictions like these aren't there to inconvenience the player, they're there to prevent the game from becoming unbalanced. Choice is one of the ways Cryptic designed balance into the game, while simultaneously retaining as much as they could of the flexibility of the original freeform power selection model they devised in the alpha. We're given enormous freedom in how we build our characters, but not unlimited, because balancing content requires some basic expectations of character strength and growth. One of those expectations is that there are limits to automating combat, and that includes automating click powers.

I said the game wasn't balanced around players having the option to set multiple powers to auto-fire. Convenience is not the measure of that balance, and someone of your "years of professional software development experience, decades on forums for numerous games" (see below) should be cognizant of that.

The game isn't balanced around players having the ability to set up multiple auto-click powers. If the limitation were relaxed, powers would be adjusted to compensate. Not being able to do something like set Hasten, Domination, Clarion, Rebirth and Link Minds all on auto is why powers like those can be as strong as they are. Balance matters to this development team as much as it did to the previous teams, so I don't foresee them throwing it all in the toilet by allowing multiple powers to be auto-fired.

Hate it. Hate it. More frequent screen spam obscuring the view of what's in front of my character (because the nearly constant flow of salvage and recipe and enhancement notifications apparently weren't enough), and now I have to stop in the middle of combat and exit the mission if I get a tip that I want, so it won't be overwritten by a tip I don't want to run. Hate it.

Feh. I was hoping for a tray full of boobs.

You're back! We missed you!

Always nice to see someone from the Foil Hat Society stopping by to tell us about the plotting and scheming of our evil overlords. It's a shame they never stop by the open beta server or forums so they actually know what those plots and schemes are... you'd almost think they make this shit up on the fly just to have a conspiracy to theorize about.

Pineapple pizza? Pineapple? Pineapple contains an enzyme (bromelain) which dissolves human flesh. @Yomo Kimyata's trying to kill me. As the duly appointed representative of the ruling body of the Lumiverse, I issue a proclamation of war against Yomopolis. 🔪

It's not a threat, it's an empty promise. I'll die with nary a lemon delivered to my fruithole, mark my words.

Pared down to the essentials, you want to take the third starter zone away from the players who use it to stave off burnout, make the development team spend time redesigning the zones and reworking the NPCs so you don't have to use the Flashback system, and create an instant 20 option with no plans for starter inf*/merits/enhancements/anything to either make said instant 20's playable or prevent AH chaos.

I LIKE LEMONS! 😄

Mids' isn't worth downloading at this point. The resource usage has shot up (Edge webview? really? they couldn't use something that wasn't a fucking resource hog?), they introduce two bugs for every one they fix and they haven't updated the database in five years. Added stuff, yes, but not actually updated. Rooted still toggles off Sprint in Mids', a bunch of sentinel *PPs are still using guessed-at stats, they made mutual exclusivity so aggressive that it takes ten times as much work to make an alternate or leveling build if it has ATOs... it's a goddamn mess and every time I've updated, I've had to comb through the entire database and fix all of the shit they've ignored or just plain fucked up. And they tried to lock the database so it couldn't be fixed... yeah, that got my hackles up. Fuck that. Edit the database yourself and skip the updates.

The only furniture I've ever seen in cave maps is the occasional altar or chest.

They stare at you, like this.

That would enable scripted AFK farming, so it's unlikely that it would be added to the game. If it's not visible, meaning within the camera's field of view, it can't be targeted. That's not an oversight, it's part of the basic targeting system, and that targeting system is shared by NPCs. It's what allows players to approach enemies without being attacked if those enemies are facing away, without a stealth power. Changing it would permit entire spawns to target and attack characters from maximum visual distance, even if they weren't facing those characters. That's why player characters have a zoom option, and why NPCs don't. That would enable scripted AFK farming, so it's unlikely that it would be added to the game. /targetdistance 1 adds a numerical range output to the Target window. Meaning, it tells you exactly how far away the target is.

They're drag and drop, so you can arrange them however you like.

I'll grab the free one and see if I can drive it insane. I'm lonely.

You forgot tiger blood. It's not winning if there's no tiger blood.

Other than the lack of spelling mistakes and apostrophe misuse, those would probably pass for an average player's bio. Too long to fit in the editor, though.