Yomo Kimyata

I’d like to unpack, “I don’t feel useful.” I’d appreciate if people who experience it describe why. For me, I don’t feel useful in an Incarnate Trial or a Hami raid or a MSR. It’s too busy, I have no idea if I helped or not. I could be providing 90% of the damage or 90% of the control (I’m not) but I’d never know. That’s a function of the FPS but I don’t feel bad that someone else may be better or more powerful than me.

I thought of an iron idea that might be less draconian than "one and done." When your character dies, you can retire them and move on *or* give up an earned respec. Essentially this gives you an extra life, if you choose, at levels 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and gives you an opportunity to earn more by running a respec TF. I'd take buying a respec recipe off the table -- too easy and cheap. Then, of course, you actually have to burn the respec. Just a thought.

I don't usually play with the sound on, but I do love their splooshiness!

That set up was like this game: too easy! I'll let myself out.

Exactly. I don't think the purpose of any of the enhancers (boosters/catalysts) were originally intended to make things easier for you to farm for your alts.

Something to keep in mind is that some people view progression as the end game. Not everyone is rushing to 50. Some people like to take their time getting there. I think it *is* too easy to level to 50 quickly and it *is* too easy to equip yourself with top of the line gear, if you take that path. That said, that doesn't hurt me in the slightest except indirectly. I just don't want that path paved and equipped with scooters, because that affects my sub-50 play.

I feel like I touched a very sensitive nerve when I asked for HC to stop dumbing things down. Someone playing on -1/x1 has no effect on me other than it making it much easier for you to accumulate inf and goods and otherwise affect the player-run economy. I'm fine with that. HC changing the basic rules (like offering lvl 5 SOs at the vendor, instead of buying them from some other player who got them on a DFB) does. I've used this metaphor before, but this game is a chessboard. You want to play chess? Great. You want to play checkers? Also great. You want to move horsies around the board and whinny? Also great. It's when people say "The chessboard is too big!!! I want it smaller!" and the devs make it smaller. That's what bugs me. It's harder to challenge myself on a 4x4 chessboard. This goes back to my initial post in this thread. If the powers-that-be feel that dumbing things down is the right path for them to go, great! Please give me an option to opt into that will enable me to play on an 8x8 board according to the game engine, and that will enable people who join my team to play on an 8x8 board, if we so choose. Give me an extrinsic set of constraints. That's my wish list.

I don't want to crank up the difficulty. I'd like to roll back some things (like SOs for level 2s). But I'm begging the HC powers-that-be to stop dumbing things down.

It’s strange to me. It’s so easy to make enough inf to buy whatever you want in as much (little) time as it takes to PL yourself to 50. It’s so easy to get merits in the thousands. Are incarnate trials really that engaging? Or is the joy being one of a million Supermans in a world of muggles?

Yes please. Also cut the merit / converter rate to something reasonable. You can send the angry mobs after me. After all, I *am* overpowered.

In line with the various "challenge" threads going around, I've been pairing them with "No P2W, no AH". Vendor only. So, no ATOs or WOs (for example) without spending merits on them. Eat only what you make, and so on. I think a happy medium is one I'm doing for an Iron-themed alt: Estate Executor made a supergroup and invited Heir Apparent. Heir Apparent can add to or take from anything in the base. When Heir Apparent dies, he or she or huge gets deleted, a new Heir Apparent gets made and is given the keys to the base. And so it goes. It's intellectually satisfying, challenges me with allocation of scarce resources, and demonstrates clearly (to me at least!) how simple it is to succeed at this game even without leet builds.

*Hugs Reveal*

I've talked about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards before, but here I'd like to discuss intrinsic v. extrinsic constraints. I'm all for various challenge modes, but the problem is that our human natures (or at least *your* human nature. I'm a golden retriever.) lead us to maximize outcome given limited resources. If I'm playing in Iron mode (no deaths allowed) and I die due to lag, I might say, "Well, that didn't count." Or if I get ganked by a sniper while running to a mission, "Ogh, that didn't count either." It's easy to violate an intrinsic constraint. But if the game knows I want to play this character in Iron mode, it can say, "Nerp. Time to make a new alt." That's extrinsic. One thing that I think would help others as well as myself is to institute various opt-in settings (maybe just the ones currently in Ouro, but hopefully more) for all game play. This would be in Notoriety settings, ideally. No temp powers? Sure, and the game will enforce that for me to keep me from "accidentally" using them. Yes, it would be my responsibility to inform people who join my team that we are playing with extrinsic constraints. Overall, I feel that it's no so much that the game is too easy (I think it is) but that there are way too many tools that Live and, to a far greater extent, HC gave us to make things easier. I understand Live's motivation to maximize profit, but HC's motivation is less clear. I think it is to keep as many people *who play the way they want to play* around for as long a time as possible. If they want to add an insta-50 button outside of Test, I would rant for a bit about how lazy kids are nowadays and how I had to practice Galaga for hours/days in order to get good enough to put "ASS" at the top of the high score list. Then I would go back to my business, because it mostly doesn't affect me. If they doubled damage on Judgement powers, however, that's affecting all of us and dumbing down an already dumbed down game. I'd have a real issue with that.

Usually on brutes and tanks, I think of Ranged AoEs as "out of character" but I accept them as debuffing mechanisms. If I have enough powers and slots to add Fireball on top of Melt Armor (which I usually slot with an Achilles and a Lysosome), I can almost assure you that I'm gonna put a Annihilation -res in there. I vastly prefer Arctic Breath over Bile Spray because of debuffing procs. My M.O. is to gather up a big crowd, jump backwards (or up) and spray them, then move in for the kill. The cones are a little chintzy, but so be it!

Intrinsic motivation comes from within, while extrinsic motivation arises from outside. When you're intrinsically motivated, you engage in an activity solely because you enjoy it and get personal satisfaction from it. When you're extrinsically motivated, you do something in order to gain an external reward.

There are plenty of ways to put restrictions on yourself. Try them! I’d like there to be settings that put Ouro-type conditions on all your content so as to make it externally enforced. Re: +5, start running +4 content below lvl 49. Half the mobs should spawn +5. There are bugs to get a little higher, but you can’t currently run +5/x1. Only +5-6/x8.

With all this renewed interest in SOs, I'm going to start working on cornering the market. So long, suckers!

I usually go Pyre for Melt Armor/Fireball. I also like Leviathan for Arctic Breath/Bile Spray. If having endurance issues, Energy Mastery (and Energy Torrent is such fun with procs). I don't see much use for the others.

There are 8 new pages since I last looked, and I’m not going to read them all. Procs are overpowered. SOs are overpowered. Inspirations are very overpowered. if you all are fighting over how easy you want this game ofTic-Tac-Toe to be, so be it. Balance and challenge left long before Live finished, so let’s just be grateful we can play and solo ITFs on SOs and inspirations.

It’s exhibit A in my +4/x9 postmortem.

That's good enough for me! The only person who counts is you and I'm a little annoyed at anyone who is trying to take away from your fun. That makes it (counts my alts) my 156th favorite name. Oops, I just registered Executor of Estate and Heir Apparent on Reunion. So 158th favorite name.

It's relatively simple with an unlimited budget (and it really doesn't matter if you make a billion on your sugar daddy or on your level 2), true.

Hmm, I was thinking about IO sets rather than commons. My experience on my +4/x9 characters has taught me that equipping EVERYTHING with SOs and upgrading every level costs about 500k at level 18. That's going to scale up as you add more slots, and I'm not sure if the cost of upgrading SOs is non-linear or not, but I'm thinking it's reasonable to estimate a high amount of 2mm a level on average to upgrade all of your SOs, every level. So total ball park estimate of about 100mm inf? I don't have a lvl 50 with a build that's less than x4 or x5 that, and that's not counting swapping out IO sets as I level. I do accept the idea (although I haven't run the math) that you are better off buying/creating common IOs at lvl 25-35 and never looking back.

I love much about redside, hate a bit about it, but the unforgiveable part is that there is too much vertical, and the game is unplayable without travel powers.

Well, my self-funding no-market alts don't have the inf to buy and upgrade to +3 every time they level. But yeah, they are generally cost-effective in comparison to IOs.