thunderforce

So, ah, I'm not calling out anyone in particular here - we've all done it - but it's usually worth searching the thread for your typo before reporting. There's more than one occurrence of "insturmental", but this is about the fifth time it's come up (and presumably if anyone fixes these they'll just grep every string in the game for known misspellings...)

It's not even remotely a core premise. It's about as much of a core premise as that the highbie exemplared to you should be kicked from the taskforce if, at any point, one of your housemates tries to use the telephone. [1] It's the last vestige of a mechanic every other part of which has been removed because it was bad. Presumably in the range-based suggestion (which is not as good as straight-up removal) the range could be generous enough that this wouldn't demand constant vigilance. [1] Exactly this would happen in the old days of dialup, exemplar/sidekick pairs, and rigid upper level limits.

Eh... if for some reason we don't just get rid of the -1 level altogether, having it exist but only when you're far from your mentor (and no pop-ups) would be an improvement on the current situation. It wouldn't be like the old days. (But it would still be a half-solution to just getting rid of a bad thing... and pretty aggravating for MMs if the 1-level change makes their pets go pop every time they take a lift.)

Maybe you should before replying? I'm not sure what kind of twisty logic makes you think the players who want to be effective contributors to the team can be so described. Where is that written? (And, of course, they wouldn't be, because they'd have fewer powers to lose). You seem to be suggesting the game mechanics should be entirely at the whim of whatever word was picked 16 years ago. Unless, in your world, "their own way" involves being able to contribute to teams effectively. I can't speak for anyone else, but this ain't so for me - I usually run ITF and the like XP-off.

This seems like a no-brainer for a Praetorian costume contest; hold it in Praetoria.

"Sidekick clicks a glowie" might make for an interesting comic storyline, but not every interesting comic storyline makes for good gameplay. When I die, I want to be rezzed or go to the hospital, not wait 3 months for the shocking revelation that I wasn't actually dead, or got better, or that someone else is playing my character now...

You don't say why. Because it would be a lot of work for little gain? Sure. Because Male Huge shouldn't wear frocks? Why the hell not?

It was much better than not being able to team with them at all, but the pairing up was obnoxious. Then Giant Monsters were made level agnostic, and that was better still, and some of us asked why everything couldn't be like that. Then Super Sidekicking came out and that was better again, and it was better because it made everyone in an instance nearly the same combat level. Every past step in this direction has been good; we should take the final one. Obviously it works as intended, it's not a bug. Is anyone saying it doesn't? The point is that the design could be improved. It evidently is; the OP and others on this thread have explained very clearly how it impacts their QoL and proposed a simple solution, and the issue with MM tier 1 pets is widely discussed and - while it wouldn't go away - would be considerably reduced. Personally, I'd just burn the entire incarnate shift mechanic with fire, but that's another thread; failing that, it seems to me like exactly another manifestation of the same problem. It's less bad (because "+4" difficulty is really +3 for those 50+1s) but it makes you miss, it makes your tier 1 pets miss, it makes you less effective when you're already less effective by having fewer powers... just as I say to someone else in the first paragraph here, follow it up to its logical conclusion and make everyone on the team the same combat level. The incarnates get their amazingly good incarnate powers, so it's not like they'll be no different to their teammates.

That would be easier to do if everyone's at the same combat level, rather than if the players with fewer powers are also at a lower combat level. Precisely the problem we have at the moment is it's hard to please the 50+1 to whom +4s (really +3s) aren't dangerous enough, and the 49 who can't really do much to +5s. Of course, it wouldn't fix all the difficulty problems, but this is an easy and obvious change which addresses many of them.

Don't tie 'em to each other. Let players (with all three body types) pick male or female pronouns in character customisation [1]; let players pick any voice. (You can already do some pretty good skinny-female costumes using stuff like the Circle bottoms on the Male body... except when you jump the UGH UGH UGH is a bit dissonant.) [1] Yes, there's an obvious stretch goal here, but this wouldn't require any extra NPC dialogue, badge names, etc...

I'm not sure there _was_ a reason, beyond the "sidekick" name. The -1 level on sidekicks is the last vestige of the bad old pre-Super-Sidekicking days (and as you note it's especially bad when you're effectively -2 in addition to not having boffo incarnate powers, and worse yet when you're a mastermind with pets at -3 to the team leader); there really is no reason not to make everyone in the team the same combat level at all times.

TBF, I think AH improvements might turn out to have a low benefit/effort ratio compared to some things... including fixing the egregious AH bugs.

Bid the price you put in on every piece. Presumably the intended user of this facility has more money than time.

Let me add that to my list. (That's also an excellent example of the sort of thing that would naturally tend not to be the case on a second attempt, giving the impression that leaving the base - or whatever - cured the problem). I feel that this is largely a response to something I'm not actually trying to talk about in this thread. Some responses read as if I'm making an extended criticism of GM behaviour, where the only thing I'm saying about what I think the GMs should do right now is "don't say things that are known to be false", which seems uncontroversial. (ETA: maybe I'm also saying they should test it? IDK that I am. I'm saying they could test it, in response to a suggestion that I test something which manifestly I can't.) What I want to talk about is - what do we actually know about what causes respecs to fail, and what is just accreted guesswork? I'm getting tangled up in the other discussion because in the Discord conversation, the GMs suggested they were giving this advice because it is well known that respecs fail if it's not taken, and it's useful to ask if there's any actual reason to think that's so.

Very probably you are not. If you have a cold, and I tell you to rub honey on your nose for a week, and you get better, the honey isn't a "solution" to the cold. The cold went away anyway. You don't know that. It is quite possible that all three of those achieve nothing, but the second attempt just tends to work anyway. It requires GMs to record one bit of information per failed respec ticket at the time they deal with it in the normal way (not to "drop whatever they are doing", as someone else said upthread). This is not an onerous task. "This" is the point that the idea that untrained levels are likely to cause a failed respec has largely been debunked. But "this" is the point of this thread. The harm is that players are given a small amount of pointless makework after a failed respec, but more importantly that we're less likely to get to the bottom of what (if anything) _does_ cause respecs to fail if we allow a mythology to build up supported by confirmation bias.

I did. The response was largely a suggestion that /levelupxp might work differently, and also the realisation that respecs are cheap and I might as well do it on live.

That seems unremarkable if that's not a thing you advise players to do. Of course, players only come back and say "I did XYZ and it worked" if XYZ is one of the things you advise them to do. Also, it's possible that some of the current remedies actually work and some don't. Perhaps busy zones do matter. I hope to shed some light on the other cases when I have time. The only thing I can test is assertions of the form "respecs are likely to fail under these circumstances". I don't have a convenient way to produce failed respecs for testing purposes. However, the GM team here is in a position to actually test this on a grand scale. When a player has exactly one of the supposed common problems, have half of all GMs advise people to use the supposed remedy; the other half, advise them to wait a bit. Document the results, being careful not just to rely on impressions of the outcomes. The benefit would be that in the long run players could be given better advice. Yes, not just "always" (although I submit that GMs should not make "hyperbolic" statements that an uninformed player would take as simple statements of fact; with no prior knowledge, anyone would have taken the statement that it fails "every time" as literally meaning just that) but, as I said, that it is "very likely" seems to be debunked. If the odds of a failure with uncashed levels are 90% - which sounds like "very likely" to me - the odds of my three consecutive respecs all working are one in a thousand (even if we suppose for the sake of argument that using /levelupxp is special and that VEAT forced respecs are special, so the successes there don't count against the idea that uncashed levels matter). The simpler explanation is that in fact respecs with untrained levels are not "very likely" to fail. "Because" is an awkward word here because it is very hard for either of us to demonstrate a causal relationship. All we can do is try and demonstrate a correlation, or the lack thereof. I think it is instructive to consider this: if my hypothesis is correct, if untrained levels have nothing to do with it, but because most respecs work, if you tell a player to train their levels they usually come back and say it works - how would your observations be different from reality? I submit that in fact they would not be different.

It seems increasingly likely to me that it's not the "solution" at all, it's just that most respecs succeed and so if the player stops whatever they were doing at the time of the first failure, it appears that that solved the problem when in fact it's pure coincidence. We could equally be in a position where when a respec fails, the answer is "turn off your aura", and hey presto, that works. We just happen to have fixated on things which naturally one would expect to be likely to true of a player trying a respec, because that appears to be the common element. In that case the advice would be no better than "wait a bit and try again", even if the intent was good. (That said, I might try the same process in busy zones, in SG bases, in Flashback mode...) Until they do so, it doesn't seem harmful to collect what facts we can as players. Already the idea that you must train your untrained levels, or even that it is very likely to fail if you don't, has been debunked. This will let better advice be given to other players. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest the wording should not include things now definitely known to be false.

Hang on, you seem to have missed out the bit where you promise to double the ISK inf I send you...

Well, exactly. That was my first objection to the idea that it was an "automatic fail"; it's in the first paragraph of the OP. But the response to that was that the VEAT forced-respecs are special somehow, which seemed unlikely but is not impossible.

Apropos of which, now respecs don't enforce that the slotting pattern be possible with normal levelling, it would be nice if there was an alternative mode that was less of a pain to move two slots. I wouldn't be surprised if "in SG base" turned out to be another one of these things that's just often where people try respecs because it's convenient.

We had a discussion on Discord today where a GM said that respeccing with earned but untrained levels is "an automatic fail"; it "fails every time". What about VEATs, who always do an untrained respec at 24? Well, they are somehow special. I went onto the beta server and started an energy/invul scrapper; did /levelupxp 11, levelled to 10, respecced. It worked. Reported back to Discord. Manga (Community Helper) suggested /levelupxp was somehow special and this might not apply in normal play; another GM said it "fails with untrained levels in the vast majority of cases". As it happens I have some characters on live with untrained levels. I've respecced an energy/fire scrapper (trained 12, earned 13); a fire/energy dominator (trained 22, earned 27); and an energy/energy blaster (trained 18, earned 19). All three worked first time. Obviously it doesn't fail "every time", but also, if it fails in the "vast majority" of cases, how lucky am I? (For example, if the "vast majority" is 3/4 of the time, the odds of this happening are 1/64). (Also, GMs only know about the cases where it _does_ fail; without knowing how many try it and succeed, how can we know if it's a majority, vast or otherwise?) I'm posting this because it seems increasingly likely to me that at least some of the things we think don't make respecs work are guesswork, perpetuated by confirmation bias and the way that anything that's likely to be true of a character respeccing is likely to be blamed. "Don't be in a busy zone" - most characters are in busy zones. "Don't be in an SG base" - that's where I keep my enhancement storage. "Don't have untrained levels" - why would you train a level when you planned a respec? But because respecs work most of the time, the player changes this thing and, hey presto, it looks like changing the thing fixed the problem. So... it would be very useful if people reading this, when they're doing a respec _anyway_, would first try it in one of the not-recommended ways - busy zone, SG base, uncashed levels, in TF/Flashback mode - and report back here.

Plus at least one other use of "ressurection" and one of "ressurect".

It really is best to have someone proofread a large suggestion of this kind before posting it, I'm afraid.

Ghost Widow's 40-45 arc, defeat 20 Circle, the clue says: "The Tome of Tormvodel? I know of it. It's secrets are useless to us, but if you truly sought to restore a ghost to it's body, perhaps it could work." Two misused "it's".