thunderforce

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.

If you have no idea why I am so "fixated" on that, perhaps you should try reading the earlier posts in this thread; it will then become clear that I was responding to someone asking about them specifically. It is usually useful to read what you are replying to before replying. I'd be all in favour of just getting rid of the exploit and adding nothing in return, which would indeed be simple, but I thought you were upset about travel getting harder.

Except they got the merits for any other TFs they did. 10 million is just not a lot at those kinds of levels - it's the price of one Brute ATO, say. You don't seem to have addressed the point that if anyone at all on the team has the power, you are already better off on a Shards TF post-patch than you are now. Please do so.

They do, because if they run TFs they have merits and a really regular topic in in-game help is how to turn your merits into cash. (To anticipate your next reply, the hypothetical player here was running a Shards TF, remember?) And as Jimmy points out, right now you have _no_ ability to use beacons into the Shards. If even one person on the team has the power, you get more post-patch than you have now.

Ha! I never used the base passcode exploit, so I didn't know the beacons didn't exist. So actually it's going to get _much_ easier to use SG bases to get around the Shards.

Well, let's see; anyone on your team will be able to have a power that lets them summon a base portal that the whole team can use every ten minutes. Anyone on your team will also be able to have a power that teleports the whole team to the next door mission, and unlike now, that power will recharge every ten minutes not every half hour. So, since this change will make getting around the Shards no harder and in some ways slightly easier, I would guess the answer to that is "there will be no real change in the number of Shard TFs being run".

They're not necessarily superior. If you want all the things the multiple-aspect IO does, a +0 SO is outperformed by a level 21 dual aspect IO or a level 18 triple aspect (or a still lower four-aspect but the Wiki doesn't have the specific number). Even a +3 SO - and unless you are very space rich, you won't have +3s all the time - is outperformed by level 20 triple-aspect IOs or level 24 dual-aspect IOs. ... and all this is before you count set bonuses, or just the fact that you can dump the attuned IO in there and forget about it for the next 30 levels.

Number Six, third mission: "If you can recover the sonic fence equipment, the Vanguard truck outside of the warehouse will bring it back and assemble it all to get Last Bastion." To get Last Bastion what? (Typo for "protect"?)

For myself, I am delighted to see the base teleportation situation change; I certainly don't expect this to happen but I think it would be better if the various 10-minute cooldowns were longer, perhaps half an hour like the current base teleporter. No, really. Mind you, I'd put a cooldown on the TUNNEL system. No, really. To be fair, it sounds to me like a rather unusual situation you are in, in that you have 70 or so alts all of which you play regularly, but each of which you only play for a day or perhaps two at a time. It seems unlikely to me this reflects the average impact per player. For example - while I don't suppose I am the typical player either - I have 10 characters who I have played in the last half-year, at least seven of which already have explore accolades or have spent an hour in Pocket D. To unlock LRTP on the remaining three will take 15 minutes, or 5 _seconds_ per day over the next half-year... and the impact of that does depend on whether I regard the time spent taken getting those accolades as entirely wasted or as something I'd probably do for fun at some point anyway and might as well do now. However, the suggestion of making it an (expensive?) unlock in the P2W Vendor seems basically harmless; it's an inf sink and it gives people who do have a huge stable of alts a getout, and being able to spend P2W money to shortcut the process of getting a teleporation effect is not unprecedented. This seems like a sensible proposal that's similar to how things work now.

This seems like a good idea. Right now SOs are frankly a bit of a noob trap (and I really feel sorry for the new player caught on the SO upgrade treadmill just because they don't know they could slot a plain IO and forget it). If nothing else, they could be made a cheaper noob trap. If I'm not mistaken, since SCORE got rid of the insane variable pricing, vendors buy at 40% of base price - so to-player prices could be cut by half without to-vendor prices being changed at all (avoiding knockon effects from changing the price paid for vendor trash).

NPC dialogue in Imperial City: [NPC] Hugh: string Maybe he just likes string?

TOs will still drop, so they won't be completely gone (indeed, I was worried they'd be a bit of a newb trap, but to be honest I think the way they're not in the shops will help anyone even moderately curious to figure it out). Removing the "beginner's luck" accuracy would make for a horrible new player experience.