Luminara

So, you're saying that you're not going to spend the next 79.5 years making 954 alternates to existing sets (presuming each takes one month to redesign with different secondary effects or mechanics, rebalance, test, fix, test again, fix again, beta test, fix again, beta test some more, tweak, release to live, fix again)?

Morality missions aren't subject to the tip mission limit, you can still acquire them even when you're at your tip limit, and acquire tips even if you have morality missions in your tip inventory. Keep killing stuff. They'll drop eventually. Tips can drop from -50 foes, so if you have one or two good AoEs, go to a low level hazard zone and blitz spawns. But you might want to double-check those two tips you have, one or both might be morality and you overlooked it.

If you consider being told to just ask for the new set or sets you want as "seeing a way forward", sure. But if that were the case, you wouldn't be arguing with the people who said it. Bad spin is bad.

There is no alternative, no modification that makes it work, with an idea like this because it not being feasible is an across the board problem, not an implementation problem. The why of it not working was very clearly explained. It doesn't work because the time and manpower required doesn't exist to copy every set two or three times, redesign the copies to do different things, fix problems, test them, et cetera. You're asking for up to 477 entire power sets to be duplicated at least once and possibly twice, with revisions to each duplicate, new mechanics, specific adjustments designed to differentiate each copy from the original or other copies, from people who take almost a year to make changes to fewer than half a dozen sets... and still make mistakes, like making Chilling Ray bypass the streak breaker entirely, or forgetting to remove the radius tags in Thunder Strike so it actually had a 10' radius, instead of the 7' imposed by those tags (it took them six months to fix that), and who have stated that they will not be making any more powers like the sentinel Master Brawler/Practiced Brawler fork because it was complicated and time-consuming. Your idea leaves no room for improvement, no possibility of refinement, because it's a non-starter. It is not feasible. The answers you've received have been as constructive as humanly possible because your proposal cannot be implemented in any way. Not just in the way you envisioned it, but at all. So unknot your knickers and move on.

+3 AV designed and intended to be tackled by a team and being debuffed by one defender that isn't even a specialist is such a blatantly contrived bullshit argument that it's pathetic. Live in shame.

In what way do you feel that the explanations, facts and references to developer statements which made it clear that the idea wasn't a feasible approach failed to be constructive?

If it hasn't happened after 20 years, it's not going to.

The powers are only the end point. Every time something, a mechanic, an effect, a modifier, an attribute, is changed, everything has to be checked, double-checked, tested and anything that's broken, fixed. Then the fixes have to be checked, double-checked, tested and possibly fixed. And they still miss things, because they don't have the time or manpower to find every problem. Even with scores of dedicated beta testers, bugs are missed, go live and have to be fixed later. Sleeps were changed to be auto-hit in PvE. If the power does something else, that still has to perform a hit roll. That introduced a problem with some powers, a problem they have yet to address. Sentinel Ice Blast's Chilling Ray and all versions of Frozen Aura have Sleeps, and auto-hit those Sleeps in PvE, but because that Sleep is auto-hit, the streak breaker counts that as a forced hit and will never force a hit for the damage roll. What this means is you can attack with Chilling Ray or Frozen Aura, or any power that Sleeps and deals damage, and miss an infinite number of times. The Sleep will take effect, but the damage won't, because the streak breaker never forces the damage to hit. No, they aren't going into the power definitions and making adjustments for Invulnerability or Earth Control on a weekly basis. But they are changing things in the engine, things which affect sets like Invulnerability and Earth Control, and that means they're constantly looking at powers to find problems caused by those changes. Active development means constant maintenance.

Doubling or tripling the number of available power sets, resulting in doubling or tripling the maintenance, doubling or tripling the work to fix bugs or make changes, and doubling or tripling the delay between updates isn't really within the scope of the existing development team. This isn't Ubisoft or Bethesda.

He wants to impose his preferences on the populace. Dictate how everyone else plays. Make others experience the game the way he thinks they should. Not the way it was designed to be experienced, not the way three development teams have agreed it should be experienced, not the way others enjoy experiencing it, but his way. Small wonder that he's been handed a bag of dicks and bottle of thin, watery catsup by a group of people who spend a not-insignificant amount of time beating fascists to death in the game.

I don't have Increase Flight Speed on this character, still happening.

My take is 60%. Welcome to da Fambly.

Further testing has given even less explicable results. When I started testing, I used several different characters, including one that had unlocked the Alpha slot, but not crafted any Alpha enhancements yet, and had not unlocked any of the other Incarnate slots. On that character, there was never a change in Swift's buff, regardless of how many times I zoned, or which map I zoned into (mission, base, world), so I focused my attention on level shifts. I went to the last page of my characters to access the one and only level 50 with no enhancements, an Elec/Rad dominator with no Veteran levels, no Incarnates unlocked and no buffs of any kind. Everything is empty, the stats are default. On this character, not one stat changes when I zone. This morning, I unslotted all of the Incarnate powers on the character in the screenshots in the bug report. All of them, all six, not a single Incarnate slot populated by anything... and Flight Speed was still lost when zoning. I zoned in and out several times, each time I changed zones, the character was reduced to 83.71 mph Flight Speed, then a few seconds later, went back up to the correct 84.30 mph. No level shifts, no Incarnates slotted at all. Swift's buff is still varying when it shouldn't be, though. I have Swift slotted with a single 50+5 Flight Speed IO. Replacing that with a level 50 IO results in 84 mph Flight Speed, 0.29 mph above the discrepancy, so boosters can't be the culprit. Removing the IO completely drops my speed down to 82.75, almost 1 mph less than the observed discrepancy, so the IO also can't be the culprit. And no combination of IO level and boosters that I can contrive in Mids' hits the discrepant speed. I went back to the unenhanced, default 50 Elec/Rad dominator and slotted a level 50 Run Speed IO in Swift and zoned several times. No change in Swift's buff, no change in movement speed. I repeated the test above with Sprint toggled on, and no enhancement slotted in Sprint, with the same results. Movement speed was consistent with every zone change. I repeated the test again with a level 25 Run Speed IO in Sprint, same result. Movement speed was consistent with every zone change. I repeated the test again with Infiltration toggled on, with no enhancement slotted, same result. Movement speed was consistent with every zone change. And on several of the Infiltration-using characters I tested, Infiltration only had a LotG: Defense/+Recharge IO in the default slot, no Run Speed enhancements of any kind, so I think enhancements can be conclusively removed from the list of possible culprits. Testing with a level 30 character, Swift's buff never varies. I have another level 50 character that currently has neither, but with a full suite of enhancements slotted, and like the Elec/Rad dominator, is not displaying variability in Swift. I'm going to run this character through some missions to see what happens when Veteran levels begin accruing. If that doesn't trigger the bug, I'll move back to Incarnates. All of the available evidence indicates that it has to be one or the other. Fuck. Why can't I find the easy bugs?

Musculature and Spiritual don't enhance Flight Speed.

Get out of my kitchen.

I'm referring to the "Yo, Lumi, do me a solid and run this CD over to Jake Montoya while I look at porn on my phone" type of FedExes crammed into so many story arcs. Like this. First thing the contact does is FedEx you, and then later in the arc, it FedExes you twice in a row. And these contacts, you either already knew, would've been introduced to later anyway, or couldn't use because they were an opposing origin, so the FedExes weren't serving any purpose other than to stretch out the time it takes to complete the arc. There's a difference between "Go talk to Guy in Zone, he'll give you some work and and an intro to someone else", and "Do this thing so the arc takes another 5 minutes".

You're conflating immersion with engagement. They aren't the same. Yes, some of the design elements in story arcs and missions are immersive, but they aren't engaging. If they were, players would be doing them. Engagement isn't an office map with 17 floors and nothing, not even an NPC, on 9 of those floors. A FedEx quest that doesn't introduce a player to a new contact or area or enemy or something isn't engagement, it's extension. If call boxes were supposed to be engaging, they'd do something other than make players crisscross zones for several minutes. Hunt mission after hunt mission doesn't appear to provide engagement for players, but annoyance. Enormous outdoor maps with four glowies to find, no direction little purpose beyond keeping the player busy for a few extra minutes hasn't engaged people, it's frustrated them. All of those doors that lead to empty 12' square rooms in tech labs and offices aren't engagement, they're a delay. If you look at what the engine can and can't do, you can tell that it wasn't built for engagement. We don't solve puzzles by moving crates around or touching colored panels. We don't follow trails and find clues. We aren't fiddling with valves or levers to open and close things. We don't even have animations linked to click activities like operating a computer or searching a chest, despite those animations being in the game. All of the engagement that Cryptic created was in combat. They didn't build engagement into it beyond that. We're hitting things, or we're staring at progress bars or clicking through text boxes until we can hit things. We're traveling to the next mission to hit things. We're slogging through the FedExes and talk-tos and empty rooms to hit things. What Cryptic did was take short stories and try to turn them into novels, but instead of adding sentences and paragraphs, they added monosyllabic grunts and swaths of blank space. Don't make an arc with 5 missions, split up some of those missions, add a talk-to, add a hunt, add a FedEx, send them to a couple of different zones, make it fifteen missions that way. Slow the player down. Drag it out. Yes, that is wasting time. And it was deliberate. It gave them time to work and kept players subbed longer between Issues.

Paul Verhoeven must have written that line.

That's not complete list. Callan Mulvey isn't on it and he was one of the Strike Team in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the 2014 New York sequence in Avengers: Endgame, as well as Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. You have failed me for the last time, Admiral. ... I'm not doing the heavy breathing noises this time. Every time I do, 50 of you whackos start humping my leg.

I wasn't. I've never seen the show. I wanted to know more about Spider-Man being Superman. You've ruined this entire minute for me. The whole 60 seconds. All of them.

It's not the rewards or lack thereof that deter players, it's the design of the arcs. They were designed to waste time. Patrols exist solely as filler, as a time waster. They never spawn an ambush. They never spawn enemies around the call boxes. They could literally be replaced by 5 minutes of standing next to the contact and checking prices on the market and it wouldn't change anything. Objectives are at the end of the mission just to force the player to spend a couple of minutes to reach them. Mission doors are randomized only to prevent players from going straight to them. Story arcs design uses so much padding and filler, like sending you to multiple zones, scattering hostages across eight floors instead of putting them in a single room, making you click fifteen different glowies to find the "right" one, FedExes with as much purpose as patrols, hunts, defeat alls, missions so short that it took longer to reach them than to complete them, that they're three times as long as they should be and twice as long as many people consider tolerable. The popular *Fs and select scanner/paper missions avoid or minimize design elements like those. Most story arcs, like the unpopular *Fs, generally don't. Some of us are okay with running story arcs, because we have time to waste, we like using travel powers and crossing zones and sometimes even loitering next a call box to watch the sun set can feel rewarding. For a lot of players, though, being asked to spend 10 out of every 15 minutes twiddling thumbs, in a combat-oriented action MMORPG, is where they've drawn their line because the combat is what they're here for. All the rewards in the world aren't going to drag them out of their TF > TF > TF routine. They're doing it that way because they're getting to the action faster and more entertained than they would be if they were reading through Azuria's latest excuse for losing an artifact and asking them to deliver something to someone 3 zones away.

Heh. Peter Parkour. Heh.

?

Look at it again. The parenthetical target info at the end of that line. (self only) I was tempted to make a blaster just so I'd have another character with a Confuse, because Confusing enemies to get buffs puts all kinds of happy on my face... until I saw the bug reports (one in March and one in April, shortly after the power went live). Noped out of that plan so fast I had to break out the BenGay for my back.