Lunar Ronin

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.

Yeah, agreed. The extra bump in Indomitable's population at this point is mostly AE farmers that actually play on Excelsior and/or Everlasting.

One of the other rogue City of Heroes servers tried halving XP globally to 0.5, and it crashed the server as a result. So I'm not sure setting XP below 1.0 is possible. However, if it is, I'm all for having those options at the START vendor. If not though, please, remove it. It's (beyond) time.

If being able to halve XP via the START vendor isn't possible, then I must concur. The seemingly permanent double XP on Indomitable has long outstayed its welcome, IMO. It makes leveling normally a major pain in the rear.

I've been playing City of Heroes off and on for 19 years. Blue side City of Heroes is about as difficult as opening a box of Cheerios. Red side is slightly more difficult. Gold side can actually be a bit challenging, depending on AT and power sets. Soloing gold side on a Mastermind isn't exactly a walk in the park. Advanced mode isn't difficult either. Not even 4*. You just need to have a decent build (note: decent, not meta), and the ability to pay attention. That's it. I don't have much to compare it to other MMORPG wise as I don't play many, (most are medieval fantasy and I just find the genre dull as dirt). Here's the thing: Most people don't play City of Heroes for challenge. I think you know that, and I think that most others know that. I'm a loner, so I realize that this is a bit of a parodox: I play City of Heroes for both the super-powered fantasy, and for the social aspect. If I want a challenge in City of Heroes, I play gold side. One of the main reasons that I don't play blue side is because, yeah, it's too easy. This is just IMO, but as someone who has done and led advanced modes but no longer does so: It doesn't help that people have turned advanced modes into a meta build e-peen competition. It makes more casual players think that the advanced modes are more difficult than they actually are. Heck, some of those meta build e-peen competitors think that advanced modes are really difficult, which is just amusing. But I digress.

I know that this is easier said than done, but the trick is to form your own Labyrinth run and run it as a kill most/steamroll if other Labyrinth leaders are all running it as a speed run. I lead a group on the Indomitable shard. I actually had a couple of people tell me that they did a speedy Dr. Aeon SF with someone else, and hated it because they felt rushed and felt like everything was skipped. So I formed and led a kill most/steamroll Dr. Aeon SF. It took us about two hours and 20 minutes, about a hour and 50 minutes longer than the speed run they did... but they enjoyed it. They found it much more fun, because they got to actually see the content, and smell the roses. There are different ways to run content. Be the change you want to see.

My condolences on your loss.

This is the way. One star in player notes, and then /kick.

Triple XP.