battlewraith

"Ok, cool. Love you too Scutt!" There, that wasn't difficult was it?

"How d'you do, I See you've met my Faithful handyman He's just a little brought down because When you knocked He thought you were the candy man" I dunno. If that's emo, it's a bigger umbrella than I thought.

Most families have black sheep that act in bizarre ways that don't make sense. And the conventional wisdom is to have zero tolerance for their bullshit, so these people start getting passed around like a hot potato until they end up in prison or homeless on the streets somewhere. And not a damn thing is learned from the situation, so this sort of thing continues to happen and it's just as traumatic the next time it happens. On and on. In my extended family there's a lot of flavors and degrees of dysfunction going on. One relative in particularly is, at least on the surface, extremely fucking lazy. He's on the autism spectrum, but that can't explain how damn lazy he is can it? One day a therapist explained that this person doesn't have a neurotypical brain's ability to process social contexts and nuance. So in the course of a normal interaction, the linear thinking function of the brain is working twice as hard to try to decipher cues that people normally just naturally pick up on. Add to this the anxiety that comes from not being able to effectively read other people's reactions and know whether you're offending them or somehow not communicating properly. This person is mentally laboring through a mundane interaction that most people take for granted. With this in mind, characterizing somebody like this as simply lazy is akin to calling someone bound to a wheelchair lazy for not hobbling around on their atrophied legs. Calling someone with a neurological issue or personality disorder a drama queen is similar. This whole incident, as related in this thread, comes across as an episode of The Waltons. A drama queen rolls into town and sets her sights on a gruff but good natured farmer. John-boy and the others in their folksy wisdom suss out that this person is no good and try to intervene. The drama queen tries to frame the farmer, but the local lawman--he knows what's up and drags the ne'er do well off in cuffs. I mean, yeah you can look at it that way if it makes you happy or entertains you or something. It doesn't offer any constructive insights about why these situations occur or what to do about them. It doesn't entertain the possibility that this intern could've been handled differently to get different results. And it ends with the farmer in question no longer taking part in the intern program (despite having some good to decent experiences in the past) and presumably still needing help. Also, people getting this account are going to presumably less likely to take part in a program like this. It's not this farmer's fault that this happened or that things played out this way. But as a society we need to do better.

There doesn't appear to be a whole lot of fathoming going on in this sordid tale. The intern sounded like they could've been afflicted with a number of psychological disorders.

Nope, that's not how it works. Social media platforms make money by selling ads. The minority opinion that actually matters is the corporations that buy these ads--who don't want to risk having their ad associated with content that is objectionable. Which is why you have a pretty standard moderation policy across large platforms. Individuals deciding to mute or block things is not the issue.

It's a great idea and most likely the kindest thing you can do for another person. Rocket them straight to the end. Set them loose at lvl 50 with no idea what they're doing and no money. Hope they get chewed out on teams and turned off by the gameplay. Rejoice that you turned them away from a massive, open ended time sink in which they could waste their time grinding away indefinitely.

There's a couple of issues being conflated here. One is the requirement of having to take prerequisite powers. The other is the fact that some of the pool powers are garbage. There is nothing wrong in theory with having to take prerequisites in order to unlock more powerful abilities. However if you have a substantial number of players that routinely take some garbage power (e.g. boxing or kick) and then never even put that power on the tray or use it simply as a mule for enhancements, that's indicative of poor design that should be corrected. Change the pool to make it more generally useful, add an additional pool to give players access to the things they want without committing them to the chaf, and/or make the attacks in the pools respectable in light of other tier 1 attacks, which leads me to the next point. Yes there was a design philosophy back in the day that pool power attacks should be lesser in comparison to primary and secondary powers. It's idiotic and makes no sense in light of the massive proliferation of powers in the current game. Any power of the same tier, within the confines of an AT, should have comparable strength. Particularly if those attacks are necessary to unlock powers needed to make competitive builds.

Yes they are both xp, which basically undermines the whole complaint. It may be annoying or an inconvenience, but there is a solution that has been discussed by multiple people. Simply factor the patrol xp into the overall amount and turn off xp to compensate. His wall of text pretty much glosses this over. LMAO. The tape thing didn't strike me as a serious response but he wrestled with it anyway. And still came up with a bad analogy. The character and it's animations are core gameplay. The little patrol xp bar is not, unless for some reason you put it in the center of the screen and stare at it constantly. Options for customization are good, but there is a certain point at which you have to accept the UI and it's features. What if someone objects to xp bars in general? Or is rankled by squarish text windows?

That was actually a really dumb point. First of all, there might actually be a host of technical problems that would arise from the effort. Secondly, people would simply switch to some other form of farming (so waste of effort). Thirdly, it would be very unpopular and probably drive the population down to a certain extent. It's not simply about what they want, it's also about the consequences of changing things. I might want to sit on my ass and play video games all day. The fact that I don't doesn't mean the desire isn't there. It just means that I have to earn money to pay my rent and keep the lights on so that I can continue to play these games. Are the devs anti-farming? I would expect them to be to a certain extent because there's an inherent tension between creating new content and strategies for burning through content quickly. The stupid way to be anti-farm is to try to nerf it outright, which is how things went down on Live. The more intelligent approach is to try to lure people away from farming with other highly lucrative types of content while advancing philosophical discussions about how rewarding the activity should be. Then you gradually dial things down and make them less lucrative so that people are less likely to do it--without putting an "end" to anything.

I think it's debatable whether the "traditional" way even exists any more. Traditional to me suggests the experience that people had back in 2004, where lowbies didn't have access to travel powers right away, no prestige power attacks, limited respecs, etc. I think very few people still playing this game would sign up for that traditional experience.

Got it. Thanks people.

I don't think the forums are really representative of the playerbase as a whole. Even on the forums, you will have different groups of people hanging out in particular subforums. So I don't see a polling feature really telling the devs anything particularly significant.

I don't do much monster hunting, but recently I was leveling up a character via missions and ran into a couple. In Crey's Folly I saw Jurassik so I posted about it in lfg and started inviting people to a team. It filled up and everyone was in zone and close to being in position. At the last minute one more person showed up and a teammate said I should put them in the league, so I did. Then somebody else said I should move a couple people over to the second league team, so I did. Then there was a debate on the team over whether that was necessary, under what conditions the badge was awarded, etc. I decided to move all of the initial people back to the original team because, based on the discussion, I was worried that people who had arrived earlier and been moved off the original team may get screwed out of something. Ultimately first come first serve seemed the fairest way to handle the situation. We killed the GM. Everyone on the team got the rewards, but the solo guy said he didn't get the badge. So is there some general best practice or philosophy for dealing with this situation or was that a usual encounter?

I am absolutely against this change, which appears solely based on Rudra's antipathy to "having free xp shoved down his throat". Unless it is an actual "patrol dump". There is a portapotty that the character enters and occupies for a period of time to simulate this purge. Maybe 10 minutes? Perhaps a vendor could sell a laxative inspiration to hasten the process. Maybe a badge for using all patrol dump locations? A clogger badge for redside?

No shit. The hand of friendship is apparently a tinfoil hat conspiracy meme (her first post in this thread). And it's not about farmers, it's about drama queens. Except when she explicitly mocks farmers (her second post in this thread). It's not like you have to look hard to find this stuff.

It's not your position to give people what you think is their comeuppance. The devs can defend themselves. The moderation staff is perfectly capable of keeping the forums within acceptable behavioral norms. In fact they seem pretty clear that the best way to handle objectionable threads is to ignore them and let them sink off the page. Now if you don't want to do this, fine. But you're intelligent enough and should be mature enough to recognize that you are one of the drama queens. Pouring your anger into these discussions doesn't resolve them---it feeds the dysfunction. "We're all just tired.." Who is we? Why do you think people assume that there are hostile factions lol?

Most of the opinions expressed on these forums are based on subjective experience. Personally I think there's a substantial amount of anti-farming sentiment of the forums, I can't say I've run into much ingame aside from the occasional person in lfg ranting about pl begging. So where is this faction of anti-farmers? You've run into 2 xenophobically anti-farmers and Deputy Luminara has done her forum sleuthing and found nothing. Well the answer is that this is a rhetorical distortion, a kind of strawman. It's similar to when someone asks if there is fascism in a country and then goes out and can't find literal goosestepping nazis with swastikas tattooed on their foreheads. And then concludes that there is no fascism. The current state of the game is that a large percentage of players, if not a numerical majority, engage in farming to some degree. And importantly the devs, despite issuing some unpopular changes, openly tolerate farming. Under these circumstance, anyone openly arguing for a farming nerf will get flamed as a radical. If the devs changed their stance, I have no doubt that would change immediately. Anti-farm bias currently manifests as a kind of schadenfreude. People antagonistic to farming don't start threads. They weigh in on discussions started by people complaining. They will state at length that they don't care how you play, but in the course of debating something they claim to not care about the mask will start to droop and they will let their real feelings appear. People aren't earning stuff, they want easy mode, they're distorting gameplay, INFLATION, etc. In comparison, there are a lot of things in this game to which I am truly indifferent (badges, tfs) so I don't go into discussions to argue with people whether they have valid concerns or they're just ranting. Of course, there is a confounding factor in this: People who aren't actually invested either way but use a "free market of ideas" ethos as justification to be pedantic about anything because they are bored. Get your complaining off their lawn...which isn't actually their lawn.

People keep bringing this up as a defense of the market. The whole problem actually is the market. The absolute easiest way to deal with inflation is to just get rid of it all together. Assign all of the recipes, enhancements, salvage etc. to vendors that sell these things at an affordable rate. During the recent round of...umm...farming tweaks....some of the devs asked the question "how good should farming be?" Well let's ask the question "how cheap should goods be?" Find a reasonable answer and just lock those rates in. Easy Peasy no more worry about inflation. Why not? Well, because the market is a time sink for a lot of players. It's a minigame that a lot of people enjoy and in which they routinely participate. I have no problem with that. What I do take issue with is the implicit hypocrisy of people pointing their finger at farming and saying it's bad for the game because of the specter of inflation. This isn't COH: the market simulator, any more than City of PVP or City of Farming or anything else. Get over it. The AH doesn't generate wealth, and destroys a certain amount through fees. But it also redistributes the wealth that is actually in play. So it greatly increases the buying power of a subset of the population which factors into...inflation. Farmers, marketeers. Pot. Kettle.

Yeah it's absolutely fucking hilarious to read some of these recent comments and then go look at what the guy actually wrote. If he was trolling--chef's kiss. Masterful. Maximum outpouring of self-righteous mockery for the minimum input. Instant tinfoil hat memes. And then 15 pages later, some of the same individuals still seething about the apparent flood of verbal abuse they have to contend with, lol.

I've often wondered about this game community, and the active forum community in particular, if there's a high representation of people in technical fields and/or engineering pursuits where rulesets and application of established principles are very significant. Maybe moreso than other MMOs.

Yeah this pretty much hits the nail on the head. Particularly when looking at a statement like this: This is hilarious to me because there is literally no trophy in this game that has any significance to me as a player. I don't care about other people's badges, how many 50s they have, how many merits they've accumulated, etc. Resources to me are essentially the cost of doing business. I'm pursuing some interest or creative endeavor and due to the game mechanics, there is a certain amount of grind thrown my way as a tax to pursue that interest. It's in my interest to minimize that tax so that I spend as much time in the game doing the things I actually enjoy doing. Unfortunately, there is a large contingent of the community that view their achievements relative to what other people are doing. They feel it is in their interest to keep this tax higher to protect the subjective value of their "earnings." I guess I can understand this mentality intellectually but can't relate to it at all. If an activity is fun--that should be the reward. If other people have the option to skip tedious content or get phat loot--and this destroys your fun--then the activity in question must not be all that.

Well if you're one of those drunken sailors then they're probably a great bunch. If you're not, then they may reasonably come across as assholes, particularly if you have to argue with them and shout over them every time you try to order a drink.

I didn't claim that. I said that by the time I had earned 50k I was in the late teens. The price of SOs at that time was such that I could buy 2. And yeah, being able to 10 rather than 20, of the lvl 5s, is a pretty big difference. Yeah I don't think I would describe using 2x boosters, running 3 dfbs, and then soloing at default settings all the way to lvl 26 as "speed leveling." The whole point is to show that buying SOs early is unnecessary, particularly with the other buffs available. Same deal. If it's easier to survive, then it's easier to grind. And I doubt most players in the early levels are doing anything about their survivability. Being able to kill mobs is more important than having good resists or def at the outset. If you're support and know you will be teaming a lot, then buffs and heals are worth slotting--but if you're teaming a lot, you'll fly through this early content.

Maybe it would be more realistic to work in the opposite direction. The graphics of this game are antiquated. Meanwhile modeling, texturing, sculpting, topology, etc. tools have become incredibly powerful compared to what they were like in the early 2000s. Perhaps the dev team could outsource the production of assets which could be added to the AE system. Not just Egypt---a variety of interesting locales. AE content creators could then incorporate them into new player made content, which would give the playerbase a compelling reason to check out these AE missions. This would also act as an extended beta for the new assets to make sure they work/integrate properly. After a period of time, the devs could look at which assets are particularly popular and then use those as a basis for further updates that included new coding related functionality.

Lol no. The cheapest lvl 5 SOs are around 3k. Some of the more popular ones like dmg are around 6k. Nobody is buying 20 of these things for 50k, even if they could enhance fear in every power or something. I tried a new character as I said. I didn't give it any money. Also, the point of the dfb was to get the buffs, not to speed level. Those buffs lasted me until level 26 without really needing to enhance anything. That was using the 2x xp booster, but you could so the same thing without using a booster. Either way, that's a better option than investing in SOs that are very quickly going to be outleveled. The illogic of this quoted statement is that if SOs and DOs make a significant difference, then you'll level faster and they will therefore expire faster. If you want to level faster, just run some dfbs and/or use a booster to make easier settings worth more. Don't bother wasting the money. If you aren't worried about earning faster, then you don't need the significant difference that those enhancements are going to give you.