battlewraith

People think and adapt. They will change their tactics in order to win. That's the core distinction here. I don't attack people in a pvp zone because I don't like them, any more than I attack a pve mob because of it's personality. So if there's a player in a pvp zone, despite the actual design/narrative justification/stated purpose etc. of the zone I should tailor my activities to what random individuals in the zone want. Is that what you want? Do you tell other people in pve how to play their characters?

This is an MMO. The core activity, which people do pretty much nonstop is grinding in order to get stuff. People want those set bonuses, accolades, incarnate abilities, etc. so that they can feel badass and easily tear through content. There's no referee that shows up on behalf of those poor mobs and says "hey, back off. You burned these guys down before they even were aware that you were there." Enter pvp. That same drive to leverage abilities and gain whatever advantage possible is used against other players. Now all of a sudden there are complaints about people being dishonorable because they have better gear, or the same group that gathered together to take down Lord Recluse are gankers because they focused down an individual in a pvp zone (who didn't go to the effort of getting a team). There's an obvious hypocrisy here. It's not about the other person doing something dishonorable. It's about the aggrieved not being willing or able to easily get what they want, so they vilify the people in their way. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter whether people agree with this assessment or not because pretty much all of the anti-pvp sentiment relates to one type of pvp: deathmatch. Coh offers two types of deathmatch: arena and zone. Arena is under-utilized and zone is an inherently unbalanced situation that people bumble into. These modes can be improved, but what the game really needs is other types of pvp that are not deathmatch. These game modes might not even involve characters directly affecting each other, or only being able to affect each other after completing a pve objective and earning some sort of temp power. There are tons of things that could be done. But any time "pvp" is mentioned, you have to wade through these rehashed traumas of people getting mocked in a zone by some twat 10 or 15 years ago. And yes, that is a gross simplification but it's close enough to get the point across.

Which team are you on?

Practically speaking if you've got the skill and knowledge to be competitive, you've most likely got farmers and whatnot. If for some reason you don't, then yeah, you need to do some grinding. But even then it's probably less hassle than it would be in some other games. A major part of the reason I stopped playing SWTOR was that every time they raised the level cap I'd have to regrind the damn augments for all of my armor pieces, for all of my characters. Pvp generally starts at lvl 50. Most people want most of their powers. On the other hand, you can arena at whatever lvl bracket you want--at whatever level of enhancement you want. That's an agreement between you and the person you're doing a match with. The prospect of facing an unfairly exemp'ed down person is, again, related to the implementation of zone pvp.

Emp defender. Probably psi secondary. Super speed. Go to children's hospitals/cancer wards/emergency rooms/etc.

Lol I always think of you as being older than I am, but you're actually younger. So I guess Deftones is a good pick. Kind of melancholy though.

It is! Or sometimes you just crank up the Whitesnake and punch away by your lonesome. That works too.

I think you farm way more than I probably do and yet I can scrape together enough for a build. I think maybe you're overestimating how much a decent pvp build costs. Yeah, my opinion is in the MINORITY of a game that YOU often point out is dying. So maybe close mindedness on the part of the MAJORITY is part of the PROBLEM?

You do you. One thing I learned from almost exclusively pvping since I4 was to get over petty grievances. Some of the rivals I hated the most later joined one of my sgs and became good friends.

It's summed up in the part you quoted. I don't know why this is so hard to grok. Many people went into zone pvp unprepared and undergeared and had a bad experience. That's fine. I'm not arguing that they should change their mind. The problem is that some of these people thus argue against ANY kind of pvp. I had shitty experiences on some task forces. I don't do them again. But I don't go on the forums and argue against the creation of new task forces. I don't go into threads about new task forces or task force proposals and say "I don't like task forces. I don't think this should be in the game. etc." There's no false equivalence here.

This speaks to the frustration the OP voiced in his first post. Any discussion of pvp on these forums gets bogged down with anti-pvp sentiment, and when this sentiment is phrased in terms of actual gameplay experience it generally boils down to anecdotes about people getting ganked in some sort of zone pvp encounter. Imagine you went to a Winter Olympics. You stood in line for a certain event, say ski jump. And it turns out to be a shitfest. There were delays. The snow melted. The judges sucked. People wiped out. So you go home and say "the Winter Olympics suck." And you keep saying that, year after year. The Winter Olympics suck. In fact, I don't want Summer Olympics either. I don't want ANY Olympics. And then some other person says "Yeah I don't want them spending money on the Olympics. I want it to go towards something that I would enjoy." That's a typical pvp discussion on these forums. And it was like that from day one.

I disagree. I think at this point in the evolution of the game getting geared is the least significant problem in the equation. Anyone can have multiple accounts with farmers, you can buy what you need on the market, and you can even get the accolades from the pvp vendor. The material requirement for entry has never been lower. Skill and knowledge are the biggest things, particularly working in the context of a team.

My first impressions were arena, which was added in Issue 4. Prior to the introduction of zone pvp, I ran regularly scheduled kickball events that were well attended. We also had arena events on test, to allow cross server participation, as well as server vs. server battles which were problemtatic because there were so many people that wanted to take part. There were tournaments, leagues, etc. I did a ton of zone pvp as well. If your first impression is going to define your perspective--then you probably shouldn't pvp in any game. Because you're going to hit a learning curve and you're going to lose. And it's probably going to involve putting in some practice before it becomes enjoyable. Nonetheless I had a lot of good times just fooling around in the zones with friends. Is the implementation of pvp in this game good? no. Can it be fun? Absolutely, in some cases more so than games with arguably better systems. So what should be done about it? Continued development, regardless of what the haters say because those people would probably continue playing this game indefinitely even if the dev team did nothing in terms of updates. And 9 out of 10 particle physicists agree that the most objective definition of bo-fucking-ring is playing the same static pve content over and over again, ad nauseam, for years. That is worse than watching paint dry--except that nobody actually watches paint dry, they hang out on the forums instead.

It could be paranoia if you think there's a perpetual history of griefing related to pvp in general. Usually when people say something like this they actually mean something very specific, typically along the lines of "mean pvper kepts me from getting a badge" or "toxic pvper insulted me in chat and I'll be damned if someone is going to force me to use ignore." Would love to hear otherwise though! (pulls up comfy chair)

In the second video I posted above ("PEMDAS is wrong"), she looks at examples from different sources in different fields using PEJMDAS. In physics, she looked at Richard Feynman's math in his famous lecture series. In the description for that video, she asks: "When it comes to order of operations (PEMDAS, BODMAS, BEDMAS, BIDMAS), who are you going to believe: your primary school teacher, or Richard Feynman?" That kind of settles it for me. "1" is the correct answer. The reason being that if we don't accept that answer, due to PEMDAS, then we would have to deem a vast quantity of theory by mathematicians, scientists, etc. that worked, AND was the foundation of subsequent theory, as incorrect. I understand that from a programming perspective PEMDAS is preferable, but maybe that preference shouldn't bleed into other areas.

You do not objectively judge such a thing. It's not a math competition. The judging of any artistic endeavor takes a number of criteria into account but ultimately it hinges on someone's subjective appraisal. The judge(s), prior to the actual competition, release a statement about the sorts of things they will be looking for in order to make the event less subjective. If the idea was a success, the event would be run multiple times with different judges to compensate for individual bias. How do you run it? If the devs are interested in the suggestion, they form a committee of avid RPers to formalize the structure of the actual competition, discuss rewards, etc. It's a general idea, I'm not going to spell it out for you.

How is this an RP event? Here's my counter proposal. You have some sort of scheduled event where you open packages or defeat minions or something. Doing so gives you a tomato. You collect tomatoes. Then at the scheduled time, there is an actual tournament style RP competition with a gm moderator. At the end of each round, the loser is flagged to be susceptible to the tomatoes, which do light damage and maybe randomly detoggle powers. The loser then has to try to escape the zone before being tomatoed to death. If they make it out, they get a badge. If somebody's tomato defeats them, that person gets a badge. The overall winner of the event gets a special title or badge or something that appeals to people that like ingame rewards.

Ok so the plot thickens! Here's a video explaining this mess: The people who arrive at the answer of 1 are following PEJMDAS (Parenthesis-exponents-juxtaposition-multiplication-division-addition-subtraction). As she states in the video, the majority of mathematicians, scientists, researchers, etc. follow this rule. Historically, juxtaposition was widely assumed before PEMDAS became a thing. So what's the issue? Educators in North America started pushing PEMDAS and it got picked up by calculator manufacturers. So depending on which calculator you were using, the answer to the original equation would be 1 or 9. That is a legitimate problem as she points out in the video. So I guess the takeaway is this: If you, like me, learned PEJMDAS--make sure that the calculator you're using is doing so as well. If you are strictly using PEMDAS--you have to make sure that your calculator does the same AND you have to make sure that the equation is properly constructed for PEMDAS. Which is something modern calculators are apparently doing. If you enter a PEJMDAS style of equation, the calculator will add brackets for you. But I guess you should still pay attention to make sure that is still the actual equation you want to solve. The youtuber I posted above has an earlier video on PEMDAS with more examples if people are interested:

So they didn't wait for the rezzes. Why did the rest of the team? The primadonna wants to burn through mobs quickly. So maybe the team should've just stuck with them rather than worrying about the strays? And then don't team with this person again?

I don't know. That's part of the reason I posted this. I was taught to answer this question the same way you were, but that was decades ago. I suspect that there has been a push to streamline mathematical conventions to make things simpler and more consistent for programming. But that's just a hunch. I'm not a mathematician or a programmer.

The way you've rewritten it is equal to A. The way you've rewritten it is the way I was taught to solve it in school--resolve the brackets and then solve everything on the right of the division symbol. So 6÷2(3) would be read as "six divided by the product of 2 times 3". If the equation was written 6÷2 x 3, that would be read as "six divided by two times 3" and the answer would be 9. Under the current understanding of PEMDAS these two versions of the equation are considered the same, both with an answer of 9. The way I was taught to do it, the 2(3) implies a grouping that needs to be resolved before the division happens. If you enter 6÷2(1+2) into Google search, it automatically changes it to (6/2)*(1+2)

So I wanted to get people's responses before I posted the video which is actually from 2016. The youtuber studied math and economics from Stanford. The comment section is interesting because there are people arguing for both interpretations. There is a general consensus that we shouldn't write equations like this.

Yeah apparently what is considered the correct answer is 9. The mathematical order of operations that I learned in school gave me an answer of 1. And I'm not the only one. The comments section of the video where I saw this issue discussed was full of people who arrived at the same conclusion. So now I'm wondering if the "old" way was some sort of fluke of the American educational system at the time. I'm also wondering if the "new" way is the result of the influence of programmers on the field of mathematics. I read comments to the effect that the order of operations that yields 9 as an answer is more reliable and less ambiguous than the order that gives 1 as a result--thus more preferable from a coding standpoint.

6÷2(1+2) = ?

The simpler explanation is that the person simply misspoke and said rage when they meant fury. And please remember that everyone should've protected Diantane--that sweet golden innocent that provoked hilarious ragefests with his honest, hard fought misunderstandings of how this game works.