Lazarillo

I don't know that I'd go that far. I'm not sure what he did and didn't write specifically, but there's plenty of stuff I liked that came after he was hired, including: -Everything about Dean MacArthur -Pretty much all the Praetorian starter arcs -Some of the Tips (these vary pretty widely though, I admit) -Dark Astoria (which has kind of a lame ending, but pretty good up 'til then) -The aforementioned Skulls arcs, which were good, just suffer greatly for being incomplete -The ideas he had for Kallisti and the Battalion arcs in the Lore AMAs sounded pretty good too, though admittedly here, there's a gap between concept and execution. And yes, that all said, there were also some real story stinkers in the game's last couple of years, too. I don't know which of those he did or didn't write, specifically, either, though.

I've actually been meaning to replay the Graves arc at some point (I never played it on the legacy servers, played it only once on Homecoming, and since I didn't know the ending at first, I wanted to see how it holds up when you know the "twist" ...if it's internally consistent as we talked about with Slot Machine, so to speak), but haven't yet so it's not as fresh in my mind, but I do remember for sure that the arc establishes at the very beginning that part of the "competition" involves mandating you act ignorant, in order to keep Arachnos' eyes off the participants. So flip-flopping does kind of make sense, in a vacuum (like I said, I don't recall the points you're referring to in a specific nature, so that may or may not be what you're getting at).

You better stop that, man. We start finding too much common ground, discussion in this topic'll die off really quick.

For what it's worth, I agree with pretty much all of that. My point is more that "lack of choice" does not necessarily translate to "bad writing". I could be remembering wrong, but I don't recall Twinshot or Graves ever telling you what your motivation was either. Does that put them on the same level? Eh, not really. I just don't think it's cool to trash them on the "don't tell me what I want to do!" factor when every arc is doing that to some degree or another.

So speaking of choice, I've been re-running an old villain arc for the first time since relaunch, and as I noted in a previous post, since it's in a story arc, there is no "choice" in it, no backing out from it because you're already locked into a story arc, and it's definitely not going to be appropriate for the self-aggrandizing evil types (even if it's just dandy for my morally gray, former-Power-Loyalist Rogue). But I'll be cold and dead before I'm okay with someone calling the Slot Machine's arcs "bad writing".

The Neo-Skulls arc. It was never finished. It "ends" with some unresolved deal with Atta, Morana disappearing (with clear plans to destroy the Zig and break her brothers out of jail), and a mysterious third party hiring an assassin to put BaBs in the hospital (and said assassin succeeding). This went along with extending the Skulls level range another 10 levels past where the arc that starts with Shauna ends, and was intended to be followed up by the original Dev team in i25 and beyond, but, well, we know what happened to that...

Aren't unresolved cliffhangers the real evil?

Not sure when you left, but for reference, the Twinshot and Dr. Graves arcs came out with Freedom/Issue 21. They were part of the revamped approach to telling the tutorial: expanding it out through several story arcs after a quick basic overview in Galaxy, rather than cramming everything into Breakout/Outbreak.

You get 37 up front on completion. You get the second 37 when you choose the "Reward Merits" option for your reward. If you take the Hero 1 DNA Sample, then you still get the "extra" merits but don't get the "base" 37. Note that this applies to any TF with multiple rewards, so level 50 TFs, Respecs, etc...

It really depends a lot on the content you're doing. If you focus a lot on iTrials and/or DA, Shards don't drop there, so you're likely to have a considerably smaller number of them, but a considerably greater number of Empyrean Merits and Thread-based components. If you do all 'round content, especially if you do stuff that drops what you need for the Shard-related recipes, Shards are far and away more economical, as you need fewer per component when compared to Thread recipes, and you only need them for one slot. Outside of the Incarnate specific content, Shards drop at about a 1:5 ratio compared to Threads, but are only needed at a ratio of 1:20 or so. Speaking from my personal experience, of the 5 level 50s I've managed so far, all of them hit their biggest Incarnate speedbumps over a lack of Threads...I don't want to waste what I do get on my Alpha, if I can help it.

Yet it seems to me like it's not the writing that's being inflexible? The game is, ultimately, pretty limited on choice once you start a story arc, any story arc. You don't even have the option of backing out, really, due to the nature of open-arc caps. You can pre-plan and choose mostly to do story arcs appropriate to your character; you can choose to do no arcs at all and do in-character stuff while street sweeping or the like; you can choose to consider your character carefully and come up with reasons that you are going along with a plot point you don't like.

"Shouldn't be that hard" are famous last words, 'round these parts, though. It sounds easy, but spaghetti code and all that.

I'd be all for this, but Standard Code Rant applies; I'm not sure it's just as simple as shifting an entire zone into the LFG. It'd definitely be cool if it were that easy, though.

...and then you look at the Water Blast options. Not that I'm saying that that's a reason to "open up" Ice per se. I think I recall this discussion when Water was released way back in the day.

Sure, but one would assume that if, say, there are 10 people leeching a group of 200, then there are only a couple leeching a group of 50. The Hive doesn't magically just give the leechers priority.

I've been using my dude with SS + Celerity this morning, and it seems to be working as expected for me. The numbers in the attributes window still match last night too. Is it possible you've got some sort of aggro power on?

Well, see, here's my take, and why I asked: Hamidon raids right now are absurdly broken. The "leechers" are clearly not impacting performance when a group in the Hive can ignore each and every Mitos and all the blooms and just war-crime the nucleus straight out. If the problem was people who aren't contributing keeping those who are out of the zone, then all those non-contributers apparently haven't been a factor in that insane performance in the first place, it seems to me. So it only makes sense to raise the bar anyway.

So, legitimate question here, if HC sees all this feedback decides "okay, we need to open up the Hive/Abyss to let erryone in" but also, say, triples the HP on all the Mitos and Hammy increases their target caps, debuff/control resistance, etc. Would you be cool with that?

You are getting a choice, though. Are you falling for it? Mind control? Playing along because you know about the other thing going on? Etc, etc. If you, at that same point in the game, try and go to Grandville and pick a fight with a Bane Spider Executioner, you're gonna get your butt handed to you in less time than it takes to say "EXECUTIONER'S STRIKE". You don't have a choice in whether you can win that battle, but you do have a choice in how you do or don't approach it. Same thing applies to the story. That you don't like the choices doesn't mean they're not there.

Yeah, this is definitely true. Raising the cap even a bit there also means not having to re-look at the VMerit -> RMerit conversion rate again if lower numbers start having a harder time of it.

I dunno, I feel like mental gymnastics are part of RP. If you're not playing your character to suit your world, but rather expect the world to suit your character, that's feels less like roleplaying, and more like mary sue-ing.

When has letting a giant manmade-likeness of a horse, sculpted by your greatest enemy, into your most fortified sanctum ever been a bad idea?

Like, I've been on your raids, so I want you to understand that I'm not knocking you, but because I've been on them, I think we both know just how bad Hammy can get warcrime-d when there's twice the number of people meant for the raid actually fighting the thing. Outside of what it's going to do scheduling-wise, I don't think it's gonna hurt performance as bad as some people think, honestly (the runs at least seem coordinated enough that I suspect things can still go evacless pretty easily). Granted, as I myself posted, too, it is indeed gonna be a nightmare for scheduling (which might have been what you meant?) when people who are eager to get their Hammy rewards are gonna flood the zone an hour early now.

It would wound their pride. That's even worse than the wounds to their body that they currently get.

The thing is, most of those come at a cost: they've got very long Recharge times and come as an aura, meaning you either have to have everyone stop what they're doing every couple minutes and gather up, or, more commonly, are gonna be restricted to yourself and a smaller number of teammates. Thermal and the like have minimal endurance costs and recharge times on their shields, allowing you to easily keep them on all teammates. Personally, I like having the mix of different types.