Lunar Ronin

Yeah. I personally know at least three people that have been wanting to make and play Warshades for over two years, but won't until the Changeling exploit is remedied because they don't want to use an exploit but feel that they will be forced to do so on teams. I pointed them to play Kheldians on the Rebirth server instead, although only one has done so.

Bingo. I've been seeing nearly a month of people complaining, whining, filling up over a dozen pages of forum threads, attacking people that use Group Fly and insulting them... all because their problem was already solved years ago, but they won't take the two minutes to do it.

I hear you. I'll give a personal anecdote: I left Homecoming towards the end of 2022. I was seriously burned out from both playing and leading content (including advanced modes), and I felt like I reached an impasse with the majority of the Homecoming player base, who seem to only care about speed, efficiency, and rewards. Things I care little to not at all about. I'm nearly 50 years old. I don't care about speed at all. Seriously, I don't. I take the average of how long a piece of content should take without speeding it at all, and then I add an extra hour to that mentally to give myself time for it. As long as we fall within that, I'm good. I care about efficiency very little. I care slightly about rewards, but only slightly. Everything on Homecoming is very easy to come by, and I can get level 50 characters with top tier Hamidon origin enhancements, purple IO enhancements, winter IO enhancements, and everything else easily enough. What I do care about is the experience, and taking in the content. For me, skipping 80% of content and rushing it as quickly as possible is just not enjoyable. At all. I honestly feel cheated at the end of it. When the NC deal was announced in January, I came back. I formed my own group on the Indomitable shard, one dedicated to steamrolling/kill most content, not speed runs. We've been doing pretty well. A couple of friends I made in my new group both told me that they did Dr. Aeon SF speed runs with others, and hated it. They are like me, and both felt cheated out of the experience. So we did a (regular) Dr. Aeon SF steamroll/kill most. It took roughly two hours and 20 minutes, but it was a blast! We had a lot of fun. My point is this: Not everyone enjoys speed running. While most people who currently do advanced mode content are speed runners, there are some people who don't enjoy that and prefer to do things the long way. Find them, and make your own team if you want to do advanced modes without meta character requirements. Start with 1* or 2*, and work your way up if you're interested in doing that. As said in this thread, 4* advanced modes can be done quite successfully with non-meta characters, it just takes longer. Find people who are willing to put in the time. They're out there.

The last word from a developer on Group Fly was this. - Let me quote the relevant part:

I just use Defense Amplifier and/or Clarion Core Destiny if I want mez protection. I use Flight instead of Sorcery because Afterburner makes Fly faster than Mystic Flight, stacking Hover prevents Fly from drifting (last time I checked, you still drift with Mystic Flight), Hover is a lot more efficient than Mystic Flight if you want to fly in combat while granting extra defense, and the Flight power pool acts as a very good defense IO enhancement mule. To each his or her own. My point was that Mystic Flight isn't any better than Fly, and the Flight power pool is largely fine as is other than Group Fly.

Yes, so Afterburner, which is built-in to Fly, makes Fly faster than Mystic Flight.

Fly being slow depends a lot on the map. I find that only people with Teleport beat me to missions in Grandville, and not by much. 😛 Seriously, an enhanced Fly with Afterburner is faster than Super Speed was four years ago.

Exactly. Flight is a great power pool for defense IO enhancement mules alone. And in no way, shape, or form is Mystic Flight superior to Fly. Mystic Flight is nice if you want a slower version of Fly combined with Combat Teleport, but it's significantly slower than Fly, and with the Flight power pool you get Hover, which you can either stack with Fly to get fast flight with no drift, or use on its own to get flight and extra defense while in combat without using a crazy amount of endurance unlike Mystic Flight. The Flight power pool more than justifies itself as is. There's no need for change, outside of Group Fly.

It was rhetorical. My point is that I find Fold Space just as obnoxious as others find Group Fly. Yet it has become so prevalent in game play that my only recourse to avoid it is to only play on Homecoming a fraction of the time that I used to. Yet for those who find Group Fly obnoxious, they have a simple method to disable it... yet many people refuse to do so. Instead, they'd rather rage, complain, and/or kick people.

Personally, I find Fold Space to be just as obnoxious as some people find Group Fly. I wish there was a Null the Gull option to disable Fold Space on teams. Sure, Fold Space can be a boon when used properly... which occurs about 0.1% of the time it is used. Most of the time, it actually slows down team play. Sometimes, significantly. Any time I get a PUG on my team that has Fold Space, I mentally prepare myself for a bad time. The proliferated use of Fold Space over the past couple of years is one of the main reasons why I don't play on Homecoming as much as I used to.

The options to turn off Group Fly, Speed Boost, and Team Teleport are individual. You can do one, two, or all three. You may want to turn off Team Teleport as well though, because that's about the actual power in the Teleport power pool, not Assemble the Team nor Incandescence Destiny. The option in the options menu has no impact on the actual Team Teleport power. Null the Gull is the only way to disable it.

Group Fly is a necessary tool for Mastermind henchmen to be useful during the pylon and Rikti drop ship phases of a Rikti mothership raid. If I disable Group Fly during the pylon phase, my henchmen are dragged through all of the level 54 mobs on the ground while moving between pylons, and summarily get defeated in seconds. Then it's about ten to fifteen minutes of constantly re-summoning, re-equipping, and re-upgrading the henchmen during the pylon phase, and doing no damage. If I keep the henchmen up in the air with Group Fly, then that is not an issue, and I don't have to re-summon, re-equip, and re-upgrade them nearly as much, meaning they do a lot more damage. Group Fly is also the only way they can do damage against the Rikti drop ship. So yes, sometimes Group Fly is actually very helpful and necessary. If people are too lazy to take the two minutes to go to Null the Gull, or take the additional ten seconds at Null the Gull whenever they change alignment, then to be frank that is their problem. Not the Group Fly user's.

This is all just IMO. Personally, if asked to turn Group Fly off, I would have just one starred the TF leader so I know to avoid him or her in the future, and politely left the team. But, but, but... Group Fly was buffed to be much better for Masterminds to use back in April 2021, three and a half years ago. As a result, quite a few Mastermind players are going to use it. It's not just a decorative choice. Group Fly makes Mastermind henchmen both more survivable and do more damage in quite a few instances. Sure, we could turn it off every time we're asked to, and I personally did just that for years. But what happened? No one bothered to take the two minutes to go to Null the Gull after. They just kept repeatedly insist that I turn it off. So after I while, I stopped turning Group Fly off. I mostly lead my own teams now. I give people warning that I use Group Fly. Heck, I have it in the information channel in my Discord server. I give people time to go see Null the Gull if necessary. But I don't turn off Group Fly anymore.

I agree, but there's nothing you can do. Just one star the team leader so you know to avoid him or her in the future. You can also start forming your own teams. If people complain about you using Group Fly while leading the teams, you can point them to Null the Gull. If they still complain, then you can kick them. I do.

A couple of fairly popular YouTubers have released videos this week stating that we need to slow down MMORPGs and value leveling. I wonder if the pendulum is starting to swing back the other way...

I'm sure that I'll come across as a grumpy old man, and a bit of a paradox (since I'm known to love the Mastermind AT), but I have no interest in the prismatic aether vanity costumes, nor any of the vanity mini-pets that have been added over the past couple of years. The various vanity costumes I've acquired all seem to be temporary and will eventually fade away, good enough. However, I don't see any way to delete some of the mini-pets I've accrued. I think I got them while trying to obtain the new anniversary event badge. Is there any possibility of this? I'd rather not have them both clog up my power list and my information screen. If it's not easy, then don't worry about it. It's a small little thing in the grand scheme of things, and it's probably just me.

Some LLM scrapers are better than others, theoretically. OpenAI and Anthropic both say now that they'll respect robots.txt, but they also keep changing their crawlers' names. Perplexity will just outright ignore robots.txt. I try to keep my robots.txt updated on all three websites I run to block all known LLM crawlers, but who knows how many (if any), will actually respect it.

That's funny. My experience has been the opposite. As someone who was born in the 1970s, I've found that younger millennials and Zoomers tend to be more impatient and want everything "now now now," compared to Generation X. I also found that they are a lot like Boomers in wanting to openly discuss politics. Just goes to show that very few experiences are universal, I suppose.

Not a GM nor do I play one on television. However, as someone who runs two other web forums and a wiki, those are almost certainly mostly bots and LLM scrapers.

Yeah, the art style was an intentional choice and some people are just not going to like it. On the other hand, others will love it. It's to lower hardware requirements (more realistic the graphics, the greater the CPU and GPU requirements), lower development cost and time, and to attract a wide range of players. Playable Worlds did quite a bit of marketing research and discovered that it's mostly hardcore bros who want realistic graphics, and they're not really the target audience. According to their research, most other types of gamers prefer stylized graphics. To each his or her own.

The game is starting to look good!

This has been an issue since live, when the patron power pools were lowered from level 40 to 35.

I played Star Wars: The Old Republic at launch. I made a serious mistake of both playing on the wrong server and with the wrong crowd, so after about a year I left. I gave it another go around 2016, but I was completely on my own and had no friends with me. I found the leveling satisfying and made it to the level cap, but I made no friends during my leveling and I'm not one for joining a big guild/clan/supergroup/what have you, so I left. I tried it again around 2019... and the leveling has been so watered down. Leveling was both ridiculously easy and ridiculously quick compared to both 2012 and 2016. It's obvious you're being funneled to the maximum level. I got so bored while leveling that I left. I tried it again last year. Leveling felt even more ridiculously easy and ridiculously quick. I got bored again and left.

Former World of Warcraft developer Greg 'Ghostcrawler' Street stated in a X/Twitter thread recently that quick leveling in MMORPGs was a mistake, one he won't repeat in his new MMORPG in development. Good on him. I happen to concur. Raph Koster (lead developer of Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and the upcoming Stars Reach), said recently that the concept of endgame is a relatively new phenomenon. It simply didn't exist in the MUDs and MUSHes of the 1990s, nor even the MMORPGs of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Before, it took you a few to several months to level your character and experience the game, and that was it. When you reached maximum level, you either started a new character, or in some of the MUDs and MUSHes of old players would become developers. The concept of endgame didn't really take hold until the 2000s, and didn't become the focus until the late 2000s/early 2010s. As someone who played MUDs and MUSHes back in the 1990s, and played MMORPGs starting in 2002, Raph Koster is correct. Endgame didn't become the focus of an online game until sometime after World of Warcraft became mainstream. Perhaps with Raph Koster's Stars Reach and Greg Street's Ghost, the trend will start reversing.

No, and to be blunt calling anything fictional the "9/11 of" anything is a bit crass.