Lines

I hear ya.

Like in the last thread, this is a single issue where folks have diametrically opposed expectations. This can only be a stalemate. Adding unlockables will deter one kind of player, front-loading all rewards deters another. Knowing that, can we keep this as a discussion. It's an important one to me and I don't want this thread to get heated over it. At the moment, I find the purpose for playing the game too lacking. Others will feel differently, of course, but we can't argue each other out of their experiences. I'd like to know where the compromises are for you guys in favour of no locking, referring to my earlier post.

Being naked too often.

For me, a lot of the rewards in the game have suffered from being a bit drowned out by homogeneity. There are, what, like 1500-2000 badges rolling about now? You get some of them by literally doing nothing for a few days. I have a badger toon at like 750 badges, but it's worn thin and lost its substance at this point. Some of us are making the case of "We need more drive" and the counterpoint is "You already have drive." It's not really anyone other than me who decides that, and it would be unfortunate for me if things keep getting given directly to us. I've not been able to get my teeth into the game for a little while now already, I'd like to have a little incentive to do things. But if others feel differently, then, y'know, there are plenty of games out there for me. For me this is coming from enjoying more traditional RPG progression, and the feeling that doing something leads to being rewarded something relevant and substantial. Souvenirs are a closer parallel than badges to what I mean, but the game gives them zero weight. You have to explore a few menus to even find them and they're clunky and unassuming in themselves. I don't care that I can't share them, that's not the point, just to know there was a reward for content. What about base items that are villain group members behind bars, even AVs for completing certain arcs or a string of arcs? Or relics, like the signature hero items you can get? I'm thinking of things that kinda level of relevant uniqueness and substance while avoiding costume elements.

Can we not try and diagnose each other's mental states here please?

Let's assume we take costume unlocks off the table for now. (Though I'm an advocate of unlockable, villain group specific, account-wide hats, like the arachnos ones you can get. I'd never wear them, I just want to collect hats.) What else could there be? Definitely more story content - there are a few examples of this already. Unique IO Sets, like the Overwhelming Force from SBB. Temporary Powers - This happens a lot already, and actually gets kind of annoying. Unless you're Coin. QoL features, like travel or crafting aids. Anything else? That feels kinda luck luster to me so far.

This is a ludicrous suggestion. I object vehemently. No Malta arc could ever be cool.

I did say this very thing from the start, that it’s the same effect regardless. Bentley’s story also said that this was what he was doing, hence why I raised it. You're right, but I was only providing numbers because I was asked to. They're entirely based on my experience and I'm not nearly invested enough in specific reward values to conduct a quantitative investigation. Those numbers are an approximation of my best and my worst personal contribution to the raid via herding - it ignores other incomes intentionally.

But I didn’t say that. I was always clear on my irritation, and reward had nothing to do with it.

PURPLE SKITTLE IS BUFF. JUST BUFF. BUFFS IT ALL.

I feel like buffers haven't had an easy time recently, but your mention of Force Fields is an especially sad example. They do need a little more relevance, I think. When you play a debuffer, however, you feel it. You can smell it when the defences and resistances of the enemy drop. It's a good feeling when the AV looks at you in the eye and they know that it was not the punches or the fire or the bullets that killed them. It was that -regen you stacked. And they know it.

Shall we just not herd, then, if we're not having enough of an impact for you? Best case: 12 herds, 204 merits, 2,221,723xp, (assuming as a worst case scenario that all the herds are lt level and no bosses or EBs were herded) Worst case: 5 herds, 85 merits, 925,718xp That's a difference of 119 merits and 1,296,005xp between my best and my worst performance, the biggest contributor being when herds are interrupted. I don't want to keep talking about MSR in a thread not about MSR. If you'd like to continue discussing this, please do PM me. I'm happy to try and share my experience of this with you.

I can't answer how much xp/inf/merits I lose out on from herding, because I already lose most of the rewards by going out of reward range to collect the herds. Altogether I reckon I end up with 60%-70% less reward than anyone else on the raid anyway. If I cared about the xp/inf/merits, I wouldn't be herding at all. I'd stay in the middle and reap everything like everyone else. I'm trying to get as much as I can for everyone else, not myself. I'm trying to answer your questions will all the information that I have, and I don't know why you're singling me out here without having a point of your own to make. Are you saying I shouldn't be annoyed when people are being annoying? Naturally I will ask in league chat to let the herds get snug into the middle before engaging them and I'll ask it as many times as I feel like I have to. I will mitigate the issue all I can, in good humour, but obviously folks don't always understand and on rare occasion people like to troll or benefit themselves before the group.

My statement was that one can be enough to slow me down, which is true and I've discussed that. There can often be three or four people on the shelf or on the slopes. Edit: If I were interested in the rewards, I wouldn't be herding at all. I'm trying to get rewards for other people.

This seems like a continuation of this thread, though I appreciate the specific change of title - it means a lot. And I agree with you. The lack of 'push' has been my biggest switch-off from the game recently. I know others will say it hampers their options and creativity. It's a fair argument, but I'll stick to my side of it. I'd rather earn creativity.

If you go into discord, you can see what games the GMs are playing. That might make them easier to find.

I keep the map up all the time in the bottom right of the screen. In an MSR I zoom it in so I can always see who and where where other herders are and I can go a different direction. I'm watching my map closely if I'm herding in an MSR. It's also obvious when all three bomb areas have all their mobs that nobody else has been herding. I don't mind if other tanks or brutes decide not to herd, that's up to them. I do my best to stay out of the way of the others and if another picks up mine with a taunt as long as they're going down into the middle, I try and salvage my aggro cap by grabbing from the shelf or moving on quickly. If a scrapper or someone has decided to get into a fight near my herd and my herd turns to fight them, I end up in an aggro tug-of-war that, partly due to the render limit, can take a couple of minutes to even figure out if it's worth doing or moving on. I'll also add, it is normally more than one person. There's always people up on the ledge. My statement was that one can be enough to slow me down.

Players down in the bowl would be out of range to aggro anything up on the sides, and if they're close enough then the lip of the ramp means they're not in LoS either to get aggro. Nobody down in the bowl obtains aggro from the sides unless they go up and purposely pull them down - which is fine. I would love it if more players did that. I'm grabbing mine from up in the bomb areas. Add to that that once I'm down onto that slope, the herds often end up getting culled from visibility because there's a maximum number of entities being rendered (actually, if I can change this, please tell me how), so I don't even know what my herds are doing. I just have to trust that they're still chasing me down until they've crossed that shelf. If that shelf area around the bowl didn't exist and the bowl were large and flat, this wouldn't be an issue. The geometry is the challenge here. If there's 20 minutes left after the bomb and Ukon phase, I can normally manage about 8-12 herds in a raid, with 17 mobs per herd. (That's if I go non-stop. If others are herding too, I'll fight a few between herds which will lower that number, so I can actually get some rewards.) So let's say about 150 mobs altogether and whatever rewards they give. If I find I'm yoyoing to try and aggro interrupted herds, I reckon that number drops down to 5-7. Trying to taunt mobs off a player takes longer than the whole herd all together, because of that dang slope into the bowl. In that one time I kept seeing the same player interrupt my herds, I barely managed to contribute anything. That's frustrating - I have one job in an MSR, for which I get rewarded less than those in the bowl, and I'd like to be able to get on with it. If others have herding strategies that don't involve breaking LoS, I'd love to hear them.

When LoS is broken, the mobs will attack the next threatening thing, so if someone hits (sometimes even just comes near) a group I've been herding in, they take the aggro. I can taunt them again, but now I have to remain in their line of sight to keep aggro, which means they take a lot longer to come to me. At the last part of the herd, there's the slope down where it's very easy to lose line of sight whether I want to or not. So I end up either frustratingly yoyoing up and down to try and get that group down, or ditching that group altogether and moving on. I have been on raids where there's only been three people herding, others where it's only me. If one person is circling the middle, then you never know if they're going to interrupt your herd or not. I've definitely had it where I've repeatedly seen the same player interrupt three or four herds in one raid. That's an impact, on the respect of the people herding if nothing else.

Less about being solo, more about being on the sides. Since the Rikti are mainly ranged, the best way to herd the rikti down into the middle is to break LoS and get them to gather at a few points on the way down. It means it's very easy for someone else to steal aggro if they're fighting up on the ledge and not in the middle. Trying to wrangle the aggro back off them just makes a mess. It only takes one person up there to make the tankers' lives slow and miserable, whether they're in the team or not. If the herds are coming in slower, then it does deprive the whole league of all rewards. In some parts of the ship, the tankers get no rewards whatsoever so they're not going to want to be any more slowed down than they already are. (I say tankers well aware that other ATs are capable of herding the MSR. I didn't mean to misreprisent)

You’re right. I’ve not appreciated how cool this is nearly enough.

Awesome! it would be sweet to randomly and rarely encounter something like this around the city.

This thread makes me think of something Abraxus said, that we tend to pick apart gameplay and playstyles here on the forums waaay more than we do in game. For all these things we're talking about - KB, Group Fly, Whatever - people have clearly had bad experiences with them and others have figured out how to use them to the team's advantage. Our feelings towards them are coloured this way. My entire experience of group fly has been someone turning it on accidentally during an office map, we all got confused for a moment, then the guy said 'oops' and that they're planning on respeccing it out. I've never gone and seen Null about it because it's literally not even occurred to me that it could be a problem. Knowing now that it benefits MMs, I might even get it myself and be aware of my playstyle around other people. This thread has made me aware of that, so that's great. Though I'd rather see Group Fly changed, I think. I was absolutely ignorant, but ignorance in of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's just how we learn and progress. Our attitudes towards ignorance can be destructive. We've all had bad experiences with knockback. Knockback done well should be unnoticeable - we notice bad knockback. I imagine that most of us aren't people who have carefully thought through how they'd use knockback (I kb>kd most of my AoE knockbacks and I feel that I'm not in the minority here), so most of us have a kind of focusing effect bias on those bad occasions. We need to be aware that a sweeping 'always kb>kd' unspoken law is overkill as knockback has a place and is part of the game, but also to remember to be polite when players may not understand strategy from the perspective of a tank or melee player. Similarly, let's not state that a team wiping because of bad knockback makes the team bad. CoH is an easy game, but there are still plenty of circumstances that can wipe a team and knockback is absolutely a contributing factor. Mix that in with being lower level, the enemy group being malta or the difficulty being a touch too high for the group, and you have a recipe for failure. If a storm defender is throwing around gale and enemies are being knocked off ledges, into other groups, or just generally scattering I'd say "steady on the knockback" and see if things improve. If it doesn't, I'd send a tell to see if they understand what they're doing. If it continues to the point that matey boi is clearly trolling, then the kickhammer comes out. So far, that's not happened. It's not a big deal. Edit: Though I am going to add that fighting up on the sides during an MSR is absolutely troll behaviour and the wrong person got punished, if that story is to be believed. Please don't do it; I don't care whether you're capable of it or not. I don't want to have to waste my time on my tanker having to wrangle my herds off you so I can get them down into the middle for everyone to fight.

Could the power grant people near to you a flight temporary power, appearing in the temporary power popup tray like Mystic Flight's teleport effect? That way it's clear when it's been turned on by someone, less intrusive than a popup and the player has total control over when they want to fly and when they don't. Edit: Just saw this was already suggested.

A money sink is an economical mechanism to try to balance currency entering the game with currency leaving the game, in order to prevent inflation. I can’t think of an MMO that has managed it well, as players will find optimal ways to bring money in. There is a badge for spending a large sum in the tailor. I wouldn’t call the badge progress a sustainable money sink, however, as once the badge is achieved then the sink no longer exists. Smaller, more regular sinks would be a better choice, such as the loot packs. Other currencies like the merits earned in game also help to prevent inflation, as you can now compare the influence cost versus labour cost to purchase something.