thunderforce

That would improve matters in non-incarnate content, at least (better yet, remove the -1 level penalty while sidekicking. Right now a non-50 on any late-game TF faces the triple whammy where they're level 49, other people are level 51, _and_ those other people have ludicrously overpowered incarnate powers. Returning briefly to the topic of player retention, well, not reducing people who haven't hit 50 yet to spear-carriers would be a good start.) It still leaves the notoriety settings broken in DA, but that doesn't have much to do with player retention, I guess. That's true whenever an excessively effective power is nerfed, but that doesn't mean it isn't desirable. Sometimes mistakes are made in development and something's added to the game which is excessively strong. Such mistakes should be rectified. You also don't have the option to pack an entire outdoor map of enemies into a dumpster at once and Burn them to death, and this is a good thing.

Hard mode: get rid of the incarnate level shift altogether. No, really. This doesn't affect players who want "easy mode"; you can still fight -1s. (I know, this isn't going to happen, but also it is almost certainly the single most straightforward change which would give higher endgame difficulty - and without changing the gameplay in any respect). As partial penance for flogging my favourite dead horse, a serious suggestion about more content: one of the games I played during the interregnum was Star Trek Online. The AE-equivalent ("Foundry") there was more sophisticated; where in CoX the scope for originality is custom enemy groups and the accompanying text, with the actual mission mechanics coming from a very limited pool (limited to around issue 4, I guess?), in STO - although the tools will seem relatively familiar - the variety of player-created missions was considerably greater. (Crucially, it had map editing tools). Of course, this could be a great deal of work; but also, done right, it could realise the original vision for AE. Many STO Foundry missions were just as fun to play as the game's built-in content. Even getting the later issue mission mechanics into AE would considerably widen the scope of what could be done. (Sadly, I use the past tense; I gather it was shut down in late 2019.)

Not if they don't exist, which they shouldn't, and while the short-term upset would be considerable, would improve the game and hence retention in the long run. There's a false dichotomy here. The miniscule amount of work to implement the change I propose would not be _instead of_ new content. ETA: rather than spin out this discussion, which isn't really germane to the topic - most people instinctively hate this idea, but, what's a +3 level shift in DA get you? The difficulty slider caps out at +1, not +4. The numbers are slightly bigger. Er That's it?

It seems extremely simple. Turn off level shifts; adjust enemy levels on some TFs and iTrials. Far simpler than "build higher level incarnate content".

It would; it would eliminate the way the notoriety slider effectively goes from -4 to +1 difficulty in DA, just at the point where characters are strongest and players are crying out for more challenge. But hang on, you say, that just leaves iTrials. They don't really do much there - fighting 53s at 53 is much the same as fighting 50s at 50 - except stuff the occasional player who's not got the full +3 yet. So yeah, remove them altogether, adjusting enemy levels down if need be in content where they were raised above 50 because everyone was expected to have a level shift. They're bad. They're _worse_ in non-incarnate content, but there's literally nowhere they do anything but make the numbers slightly bigger. (ETA: let's assume I have already read the "well, just don't slot..." reply?)

I agree; but I think this is another case where doing something for the long-term good of the game might have such drastic short-term consequences as to be a Pyrrhic victory. (That said, I think level shifts are _so bad_ (in DA content, too) it would be worth trying it.)

Check the FAQ section.

I might guess wrong. Back in the day, some PVP groups on the EU servers tried a scheme of giving themselves a misleading name - a tanker called "empathy defender", and so forth - in the hope of confusing their opponents, or maybe just for a bit of amusement.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~damerell/games/coxincarnate.text is a short guide to Incarnate content in what seems to be the chronological order. As others have said, there are some other post-Fall arcs that aren't Incarnate.

I completely agree... but, even though I touch Suggestions and Feedback now and then to advocate toning down some particularly egregious examples, I'm aware that any kind of nerf is hugely unpopular, and the short term consequences of seriously addressing the balance issues might well make doing so a Pyrrhic victory at best. To the OP: the best thing you can do as an individual player is to tell your friends about it, albeit stopping short of the point where they're bored to death with you mentioning it. I play more than one evening a week with people I know IRL who never touched the game on live.

I like to start my posts here by questioning the judgement of half the readers, too. Fort Trident was added in issue 18; the LFG teleporter in issue 20. Hence, I suspect the "why" may be connected to the developers not being precognitive. Let me see if I've got this straight. Turn on the slash command again and make SG bases the best method of fast travel, so everyone can use it; make SG affiliation mean something again and make SGs pay for the privilege of fast travel, so members get something non-members do not, so... everyone can't use it? https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Experimentation I guess the original developers were precognitive, then, since they were looking at implementing a Homecoming homebrew power set in 2012! Empathy and FF, of course, being well-known overperforming powersets right now. Why am I nitpicking? Because when you turn up thinking you're God's gift to game design, confident that the mere mortals who worked on the game for actual money are idiots, and that the people who work on it now because they remember a decade of it live are equally ham-handed... you look a bit silly if it turns out you're talking through your hat. (Also, there's a certain delightful irony in complaining about too many words to read when it takes you half a screenful to say "there seem to be too many enemies in mission 3 of this arc"...)

This is probability, not statistics; and it would be more accurate to say you can pull the wool over the eyes of people who don't understand probability. For example, here, you are producing a figure which is numerically correct but not meaningful. Vanden's figures give a meaningful view of the change in effectiveness.

I'm not sure anyone has, even the OP (who may or may not be a "he"). Individual players can only really talk about what they would like to change. Then there's a discussion to find out if other players like that, or if some similar idea is more widely acceptable. The OP has done nothing wrong by talking about something they'd like to change.

I mean, this is why I say it opens a can of worms to think about changes to the to-hit system; each change naturally suggests a better but more complex one.

There's a bit of a false dichotomy here between it taking as long to get anywhere as it does in (eg) World of Walking [1] and it being possible to go anywhere instantly. Even on live, even without any of the veteran travel improvements, a City character with a travel power could get to where they were going much more quickly than in many MMOs... and IDK if this is true for everyone, but zone loading times for me are a lot less than they were on live, making multi-zone journeys quicker. I think this change is excellent; if anything, I'd be happier if there was slightly less fast travel. Just removing the exploit would have been good, but the developers seem to have put a lot of effort into an interesting replacement system. [1] You walk as fast as a City character (circa 14mph) would without Sprint or Swift or any run speed enhancements... ie, since inherent Fitness, your City character is faster out the box even if you can't find Sprint - until you get Walk at level 2, you literally _can't_ move as slowly as a WoW character. in the City, you get a travel power at level 4; even Fly, the slowest of these, does you circa 55mph. In World of Walking - I'll spare you the full breakdown, but you can ride at a princely 23mph at level 20, assuming you can afford the training, and you can eventually get to 59mph at level 80. In the City, the trams are free and instant. In World of Walking, you pay in-game currency for every flight. They go a little bit faster (but still slower than Afterburner, Super Jump, Super Speed, or Teleport)... but they don't go by a direct route. (Disclaimer; I've only played it enough to find I don't want to play it, so the minituae here may be off, but you get the idea...)

I feel a difficulty there is that it opens the can of worms of fixing Defence's crazy utility curve, where the more you have, the better it is to have yet more, until suddenly more does nothing at all except help against debuffs. I would love to see a diminishing-returns system for both accuracy/to-hit and defence, FWIW.

Quite. Thank you for actually reading the suggestion.

Right now, it is unclear - to say the least - as to when you can and can't have someone of the opposite alignment on your team. I wrote http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~damerell/games/cohrogue.txt to document what I know, but it's incomplete - and the system appears to be outright buggy in some respects; for example, recently I was trying to join a Sister Psyche run out of Ouro, but couldn't be invited to the team because I was a Rogue, even though I was in Ouro at the time. I swapped to a Hero, but when we tried to start the TF, we couldn't... because there was a Rogue on the team (who then had to leave, but how could they be invited to begin with if I couldn't?) Rather than try to fix the bugs, or document the behaviour, I suggest a simple and obvious approach: remove all the restrictions on inviting and automatic kicking outside of PVP zones. Teams can deal themselves with the case where a Hero or Villain actually can't get to a mission. cmdchat.c, the section starting with the comment - ah, I'd better not quote this verbatim, but pertaining to inviting the first enemy to a team in a "Coed" zone - seems like the place to address the inviting restrictions. I dunno where the automatic kicking happens.

But one of these things is not like the other. I have read many bios (and enjoyed reading them, or why do it? [1]) in the last year; I have commented on, perhaps, two? [1] this is a bit misleading because I'll read basically anything you put in front of me.

It's not only you; I read every bio I can, and I'm sure the other people in this thread do. I'd like more characters. The reanimated corpse came in at about 1022 after several rewordings.

I always write bios, although I'm about 50/50 on sensible versus absurd, the corpse reanimated by Black Swan versus the corruptor whose parents ate at a radioactive Tim Hortons.

This happened to me too, but it happened early in Homecoming's release, before much of this stuff had been figured out. These days - well, I can only speak for Reunion - anyone who asks in Help or General will be told not to do that but to sell their merits; anyone who looks at the forums will be told much the same; the Wiki gives a warning that buying recipes and enhancements directly may not be cost-effective. (Bit off-topic, but perhaps the merit vendor could have a little rubric about how "it may be cheaper to (blah)"...) There's a big difference between players who don't play the market - a perfectly sensible way to play, given the terrible AH interface - and players who won't touch the market, not even to sell merit products. The latter are cutting themselves off, for no very good reason, from a large supply of money from richer players which can be got with minimal effort. Obviously they're going to be short of money, but also obviously fixed prices can't be set with them in mind. One might as well worry about a hypothetical player who refuses to sell anything to a vendor.

Praetoria Responsibility: Praetor Tilman: "This 'Arachnos' she's apart of wishes to work together with our most hated enemies, all to destroy our beloved Praetoria". Missing space in "a part".

Only if you have the exploration accolade in every zone you might want to travel to. Keen badgehunters aside, I suspect that is not usually true.

New players don't do the Shards TFs, since you have to be level 40 to do them, and once again I was replying to somone specifically asking about the Shards TFs. Hence, there will be no effect on new players in the context I was discussing.