UltraAlt

Uemura Masayuki (June 20, 1943 - December 6, 2021) was the lead architect for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super NES game consoles. This loss has slipped under my radar until now. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1850/ (this is on NHK an English language Japanese news website. They only keep their news stories up for a limited amount of time, so I'm going to include the text here. "Remembering Nintendo console creator Uemura Masayuki Engineer Uemura Masayuki had an outsized impact on the lives of countless children around the world. In the mid-1980s, he created a video game console for Nintendo that was known in Japan as the Famicom and elsewhere as the NES. It enjoyed enormous success, selling 60 million units and putting Super Mario, Zelda and Dragon Quest into homes everywhere. In the wake of Uemura's death in December at the age of 78, NHK's Kagawa Nao recalls a conversation he had with the gaming industry icon about his work and the nature of play. In the spring of 2019, I sat down with Uemura Masayuki to talk about what it means to "play". Some of his answers surprised me, and others resonated deeply a year later when the COVID-19 pandemic transformed the way people interacted socially. Ready, player one Uemura explained to me that the Famicom's success was the result of a confluence of factors, including improvements in computer processing power, the rise of gaming media, and changes in the ways children were brought up. "I think the Famicom games were a way to play at home when urbanization made it more difficult to play outside," he said. Children took to the new type of game console with relish, but parents and teachers worried about them missing opportunities to socialize. Uemura told me he saw no such problem. "When people criticize video games, they often portray it as a lonely activity with players sitting by themselves, staring at a TV," he said. "The reality seems to be the opposite. People watch the same screen, take turns, share information. I think the games are actually a social adhesive that connect people." Global success Uemura explained that it was the Japanese knack for creating cute characters that helped make the NES a hit overseas, and he attributed that knack to the animism that has influenced Japanese culture for centuries. "The concept says objects have lives of their own," he said. "And it manifests in gaming as simple, peaceful titles that contrast with the violent games from abroad. Pac-Man is really just playing tag, and Pokemon is catching insects. Anyone in the world can understand how to play that." Uemura retired from Nintendo in 2004 but remained involved in the industry at Ritsumeikan University's game research center, where he served as director for 10 years. I asked him if gaming had anywhere left to go, having already embraced the internet and virtual reality. His answer surprised me. "We still haven't created a video game that's better than menko," he said, referring to the traditional Japanese card game in which players throw their cards onto a hard floor, aiming to flip their opponents' cards. "In terms of graphics, we have attained the highest point we can possibly reach," he said. "But we can't reproduce that physical feeling of hitting something." In fact, Uemura thought that graphics had possibly become too good, so that they no longer left enough to the imagination. He felt that was why the old graphics of his first famous console had enjoyed a revival. "People prefer it when they can use their imagination," he told me. "What your eyes see isn't realistic, but it's real in your head. The more room for imagination, the more fun it is." Future of gaming We talked about what made games fun, and whether it was possible to create one that never got dull. "Impossible," he said with a smile. "The only thing that people will never get sick of is people." Our interview took place before the coronavirus pandemic. But I was reminded of it when that started and it became more difficult to interact with people, and Nintendo's latest “Animal Crossing” game became a huge hit. Over the past two years, games have continued to evolve, and on top of that, services catering to individual users have increased and become more satisfying. But for the first time, I have truly come to understand what Uemura talked about when he said that ultimately, we never get bored with people." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayuki_Uemura I was an Atari and Sega gamer back then and never owned a Nintendo system, but I know probably a good number of you did and enjoyed what he created for you, so I thought I should let people know about his passing.

You know full well that there is a difference between missions being repeated and missions created in the AE specifically for farming. Fire farms are created specifically to cheat the system. You know full well what I'm talking about, and don't act like you don't.

I didn't blame AE to be the root of farming. You thought that up as a rebuttal, but it isn't based on what I said. Of course, to a farmer, it wouldn't be. I don't know if banning for power leveling was done before the release of AE. There was power-leveling going on all over the place using the the old mentoring system. Banning was done the first week or so that AE was released. The DEVs caved, and I think they reactivated all the banned accounts. We don't know about banning, but I'm assuming if they reactivated one of the same thing, they reactivated all of them. They DEVs had a post where they stated that they would drop a "40 Ton Ban hammer" on anyone that did it. Might have been "100 ton" but I think it was "40 ton". After reactivating the accounts, they went back in and deleted all the DEV posts about banning accounts for violating their rules in regard to creating farming missions. They made moves to make those less farmable. They tried to make it easier to trip them so that they would complete. They also limited the number of targets that tanks could taunt so you couldn't pack 100 warwolves into a dumpster any more. (maybe not one hundred, but so many standing inside of one another that you couldn't count them) And it would be a lot slower than it is in the AE now. A lot slower. Yes. Players will cheat where they can and when they can. Most of the time they think cheating is okay as long as they can get away with it. "Account Actions Taken Today Today we indefinitely suspended over 800 accounts for egregiously exploiting a bug introduced in Game Update 119. Pending further investigation, we expect to convert most or all of these suspensions to permanent bans in January. This action is not comprehensive. Also in January, and again pending further investigation, we expect additional accounts to be suspended or permanently banned. We also expect to address at least some of the ill-gotten or even accidental gains for everyone, regardless of suspension or banned status. We will provide updates as we have them in the new year. No suspension appeals will be entertained." - https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dcuo/index.php?threads/account-actions-taken-today.320085/

It was never intended for XP farming - especially with nerfed villain groups that could not defend themselves. The DEVs were going to ban accounts for doing this. They started banning accounts when AE was released, and there was such an uproar and so many accounts were being banned that they caved on it with a week or so. It is accurate to say that the AE was NOT created for farming. The original intent of AE was for players to create NORMAL missions like those in the GAME for other players to play and enjoy - and to give more content to the game. The AE was NOT created for Farming. Farming was "misusing" the AE. It has been accepted (and most probably the majority of AE users are farmers at this point), but that doesn't mean that is still isn't misusing the AE based on the originally design plan for AE. Farming ruined the original intent of the AE.

I've always been against farming and power-leveling. However, I think it is a little late to put the genie back in the bottle. Creating Farming missions wasn't going to be allowed in the AE and the DEVs caved within a week of the AE's release. I don't think having 1 or more level 50's should play any part in being able to use Farming/power-leveling to get a character to level 50. If you want to chop off AE XP somewhere, make it no XP until you reach level 50. (I will, however, add that I don't think that this is fair to new players that join now or in the future as prior players have already had the advantage of this) If you are trying to stop some people from power-leveling/farming to 50, then it should affect everyone. Like I said, I think it is bit little late to put the genie back in the bottle.

Funny, but cool too at the same time.

And, as I stated, I recall way-back long-ago before the sunset, that (at least some of) the mobs were level relevant. I don't remember them being all greys way back then. It might even be that there were ambushes that conned mission setting level. It's a memory and these things fade and twist over time. I stated my memory. I doubt it was a goodbye tour since as you said it was only level 40. I'm sure they planned to expand the game from the get go. But they could have put it in as a grinder intentionally to eat up time until the game expanded more. Agreed. It's also a balance between merits, time investment, and the challenge of the content. So I guess we should list what is tedium? Hunts? Zone hopping? Length of time to complete a task force? Tagging things (police boxes/patrol, "talk to", and "fed-ex"/"take x to y") What else? I think that the hunts could be transformed into seeking a key/clue from a group in a zone; the key/clue would randomly drop on defeats. It could also include waves of mission-level/settings equivalent ambush mobs that spawn in the zone until the key/clue is found. Could be the key/clue location is known and guarded by a mission-level/settings equivalent mob(s) of equivalent hunt size. I like the zone hopping, but I know it is tedious to others I think 30-45 minutes for each section of task force content is a good time length. I say this because some of us, for whatever reason, need to bio more often that others, only have a limited playtime, can't always team with the same people, and can't alway play at the same time of day. Tagging things. If the there is a reason to go to a police box/patrol - change them to hotspots on the map mission-level/settings equivalent mob(s) form - and change it to defeating the mob at those hotspots versus just clicking on something. I know that the CITY is caught out-of-time and there are things from back then that are still in the game (old school computer CRTs, etc.), but I think the "talk to" should just be team leader calls. This allows it to still provide the text information from the original game but also doesn't slow down the rest of the team as they can't see the info anyway (and honestly, most don't take time to read that stuff during task forces any more.) -or- this could be handled like the below. There are many new style missions where you tell the contact that you are ready to go into the mission and they are the mission door. If you need to "take" something to them, then they should be the mission door or at least they should be standing near something that will take you to the mission (aircraft, etc.)

Are you being sarcastic and referring to the time-sinks in WoW? Yes, Time-sinks are built into all MMOs for player retention. I don't remember this being the case. I remember it being an actual challenge to fight the foes on the hunts. I do believe that the running around the city was to show the player how big the City is and how cool the different zones are. Some of the Task forces were a tour of the City. I still love flying/running/jumping around the city. Don't get me wrong, I always try to have team teleport, mission teleport, and assemble team on all my characters to make transport between missions faster when on a team. But that's mainly because there seems to be a good amount of "are we there yet?" This I can agree with. I think all the longer Task forces should be chopped up into parts like Positron's taskforce. Make all task forces gauged so that an average team can knock out one in 30-45 minutes. If there is some badge that you need for an accolade, then make that badge it's own accolade and require a badge for completing each of the sub-divided task forces which yields that accolade. (I'm assuming that would be easier/simpler than replacing the current badge for an accolade with x number of badges where x is the number of sub-divided task forces were created from the original task force.) Yes. Divide the merits for task force completion among the sub-divided missions. I do think it should be a progression like with Positron. That is to say, if you haven't completed Posi 1, you can't lead Posi 2. You can still join a Posi 2, if someone else is leading it has already unlocked it by completing Posi 1.

The Malta auto turrets stay. The Sky Raider force fields generators stay. The various devouring earth pets stay; some of them even spawn more pets when they are "arrested". Even spawned clockwork pets stay; and, again, spawn more when they are "arrested". Think the pets spawned by a Hellion Girlfriend from Hell even stay when they are "arrested". My point being, it is not unusual for NPC pets to remain active once their summoners have been defeated. There are multiple enemies from various villain groups that can phase and become invulnerable. All of this is what some might call "challenging content".

You are being very judgemental. Maybe you are just having a bad day. You usually don't behave like this. CD5 didn't say it "at me". Why would you need to say it at me? I have created a bunch of bases. I know full well how long it takes to build a base mild level base. I'm not claiming to be a CoH master basebuilder, but I know I have put a bunch of hours across the various bases that I have built. It should be clear by the amount of time that I took in posting what I did that I at least know a thing or two about bases, but some people just seem to like to pick on me because they feel it is a fun thing to do. Are you one of those people? If so, ignore is easy enough to use.

And I laid out the basics for them. It doesn't explain how to make it pretty. I didn't bother put in how to rotate base items or even change the style of the base, but what I laid out is the basic raw information to build a functional base without any extra bells-and-whistles. I think accomplished what I set out to do. If you think you can do better, then post it.

What does "decent" base mean? Practical and usable? Detailed with extra rooms? Placed base items based on your specifications? A big outdoor base? There are people that put a whole lot of time into a base. But as people have noted, some people can knock out a "basic" base in 30 minutes to 1 hour ... if you aren't bothering with any special customization. (so how much influence can a good farmer make in an 30 minutes to an hour? I would figure 2-3 times that as the base builder is actually working and the farmer is (supposedly) "playing" the game.)

I guess they want the gingerbread and various candies to taste like actual building materials so they have to artificially flavor them to give them that "real" building material taste. No actual building materials were used.

so what would this look like and how hard is it to do yourself? From the main base editing window, select "upgrade plot". Pick the biggest base plot. lower left, hit exit. From the main base editing window, select "edit base". Click on "current room" in the blue circle. Along the top click on "room". In the window that pops up, click on the "move room" option. Move the entry room where you want it. It already has the base entry teleporter in it. Click on "create room". If you are going for basic, you want to use this to place 3-4 more rooms. The first 2-3 rooms (main room with teleports/trainers/insp vendor/merit vendor/icon contact, a medical/storage room, and/or a storage room) don't need to be bigger that 3x7 and they need to be directly connected to the bse entry room. Place them how you see fit. The last room is the power room. You want to pick a big room for this in order to fit power and control units in it. This room does not need to be connected to the other rooms in order for it to power your base. Now that you have the rooms selected. I would place the power, teleporters, and med bays. The first thing to do is to decide if you want to go tech or arcane. You have to stick with one or the other for the power, teleports, and med bays. Click on "current room". Click on "room" in the top bar. use the arrows in the window with the rooms name to navigate to the room you want to place items in. Click "place items" once you are in the room you want to place items in. In the power room, place 3 1000 Energy/200 control base items (power crystal/basic generator) and one 5000 Energy/1000 control items (ley tap/turbine generator) from under the arcane/tech power tabs. In the medical room, place one or two hospital teleporters Arcane (Resurrections Circle)/tech (basic reclaimator) In the storage room (or medroom), place storage items from the Arcane or Tech Workshop tabs. I suggest not placing any insp target unless only you or your alts are using the base and you are only going to have income from running missions. I would suggest no more than 3 salvage containers; salvage is just too cheap on the auction house. make the rest of the workshop storage be for enhancements; you can always add more later. Again under the workshop tabs, you will need to pull the bar at the bottom of the screen as a slider to reveal the invention work tables; place at least 1 invention work table per character that may be in your base crafting at the same time. You can access your vault through the salvage screen so there is no reason to place a personal storage vault in a base (other than to look cool). You might want to throw a merit rewards ATM or two in your base as well (there is only a tech one, it is under the tech workshop tab). You might also want to throw in a (enchanting crucible, arcane crucible, or mystic crucible)/(radiation emulator, linear accelerator, or supercollider) or two in your base (again, only one character can interact with it at a time) In the main room, place 4 teleporters from the Arcane/tech teleport tabs. Space them out but make sure they are close to a wall. 2 of these are for hero zones, 1 for villain, and one for co-op zones. I suggest putting the lower level hero on one and higher level hero on the other hero one. using the bar at the bottom to reveal the teleport locations on the right side of the menu. Place these behind the respective zones that you want to go to (if I recall correctly the limit is 10 per teleporter). 4 teleporter is enough to control all of the teleport beacons. Next go under the NPC tab. To scroll the tabs, look for the arrows the upper right-side corner on the menu. You're going to want to do the same thing that you did with the work tables. If you think there maybe multiple people leveling up at the same time, figure how many that will be, then place that many Vanguard Drill instructors/Midnighter Lore Masters/Arachnos Arbiter's. Same goes for enhancement sales people (Vanguard quartermaster/Midnighter quartermaster/arachnos quartermaster), insps salespeople/vendors (Nurse or from the arcane/tech medical tab, Tree of Wonders/Auto-Doc), and Icon reps (Icon Employee/Facemaker). You get out of the base editor by clicking on "options" and then "exit base editor" I think this pretty much covers the most streamlined base. Anything else is decoration. So would various layouts of that do the trick?

I have defended my points. I'm not going to go grind some statistics. I play the way that I play. Other people play differently. I'm putting up information from my experience. I apparently play City of Heroes differently than other people. The OP say that Sentinels have no role on a team, aren't different enough from the other archetypes, and is useless on a team. I disagree with that and I stated why. My counter as well was that Stalkers are less useful on a team than Sentinels. I stated why. I was countered by the argument that the main "specialty" of a stalker - the assassin strike - was useless on a team because it took too long to execute. I'm wondering if some say the same thing about Blasters using a nuke! Some people only have an eye for mini-maxing and don't play for the flavor of the game. That is if it isn't some planned out build with all the proper power picks and enhancement slotting then the character is useless ... and you better forget about even playing a character if they aren't level 50! And I'm going to go ahead and go there, some people play on a team like they are the only one there and all the other player characters are NPCs. It's just run around and do what you want to do because you KNOW it's the right thing to do and everyone else better do what you expect them to do or they are playing wrong. This kind of player isn't playing like they are on a team. They are playing with themselves. I'm a character conception player and I try to milk as much as I can out of the character conception. The builds are nice and neat. They aren't what people would consider the way to play any of the archetypes correctly. When a team starts, it can often flounder around until the team finds there footing. This happens when at least one of the players starts playing with the team to make things work better. That is to say, if your teammates won't team with you, then team up with them, and then at least someone will be teaming up. I'm not looking to be the "big man" on the team. I'm looking for the way for my team to succeed. I can do that with pretty much any kind of character in most situations. Where it comes to fail is when I'm playing sub level 50's with a level 50 team .... especially when I'm playing a stalker. I clearly stated why. Teams can steamroll so fast that I can't get in position and set of an assassin strike on what I would consider to be the most important target I can go after - LTs or the Boss. The counter is "don't use your main attack power the way it was originally intended to be used" and just fight like a scrapper. I don't get into the kind of situation where I feel that I'm being totally useless on a team very often. Even if the other players don't know what I'm doing, I know that I'm doing something to make the mobs fall faster. The time it most stood out to me that this was not the case was when I was playing a mid level stalker on a level 50 team that was running like +4s and steamrolling mobs. regardless of what target I picked, I would run in, plant, and go for the assassin strike and before it could execute the target was down. My character conception is to play the character so that it performs assassin strikes form hidden. I couldn't do it, so I switched character to one that more fit with the team. Problem solved. It wasn't that I was lacking the ability to use the assassin strike, it was that the team was simply didn't need the ability of a character to do spike damage on targets because the rest of the team could quickly destroy (what was to them) defenseless mobs. So my evaluation is that stalkers seem to lose their main speciality and therefore lose their "role" on a team. The rebuttal being to play like a scrapper. Seems like the role of the AT is lost to me in that situation. How does this fit with the topic? The OP was saying that Sentinels didn't have their own "role" on a team. Of course, Sentinels aren't one of the holy-MMORPG-triad. Most of the other AT's aren't either. Call a Sentinel a jack-of-all-trades and useless because of it if you want. I don't find either to be the case. I think they are fine to play if you work with what you have. But I'm a character conception player that tries to find ways to use that character conception to work with my teammates, even if that means alt jumping or just looking for another group if I'm not enjoying playing the game for whatever reason. I'm not posting on this thread any more because there is too much hostility toward me for expressing my views. I firmly believe that if you think that Sentinels are useless that you haven't taken time to learn to play the Archetype the way that makes it work best when on a team. I pointed out where I fell that have been able to use one effectively when on a team. Other people dismiss it. That's fine. That's their opinion. It works for me, if they want to disregard it, I don't care. I'm done with this thread. Any replies to my post on the thread at this point are are free snipes at me. Feel free to get your shots in if that is what it takes for you to have a good day.

It's not your place to be the forum police.

it depends on the team that you are on. When I'm with a team that is steamrolling, it is worthless to try. When you are a team that is challenging themselves, you have plenty of time to use it multiple times per mob. Taking out Boss and LTs while on a team can be very helpful regardless of your AT. If you're not very skilled, yes - that can be true. And I'm not arguing that it takes a moment to move into position and set-up for an assassin strike out of hidden. sometimes it is a matter of setting up an position the enemy is running towards and assassin striking them as they pass by you. I always go for an assassin strike after placate.

It's is common parlance. I indicated. I'm done with discussing this with you.

It seem to be throwing out the baby and keeping the bath water to me. I use placate all the time to set an assassin strike, but I think it is the long execute you use as you act as though you are hidden to the target.