ForeverLaxx

"Without testing" according to who? Not agreeing with the direction of certain actions doesn't mean they weren't tested beforehand. It's the summary dismissal of negative feedback under the basis of "they must not have tested it, otherwise they'd love this change" that I also take umbrage with regarding "feedback" threads. Do you make people expressing their love for a change test them to be positive that they love it, or is this sentiment only reserved for the naysayers? I'm not going to put "and by the way, my testing agrees with me" at the end of every post. Exactly in line with my point in a previous post. Once it hits Open Beta, it's basically a done deal. Outside of rushed changes or those with huge amounts of negative feedback in general (and even then, it usually only results in a reduction in severity rather than removal), what's the point of the Feedback threads if it's essentially "set in stone?" I love this game and I'm thankful for the dev team putting in their own time and resources to keep it running so I can continue to enjoy it, but I don't much enjoy the illusion of input.

So you're thin-skinned, opinionated, and believe you "deserve" respect merely for existing in a space. It's no wonder everything gets under your skin. I'm now no longer confused about other posts you've made regarding other topics.

Well of course. The concept of "carbon offsets" work just as well for crimes, right?

Gaslighting? Seriously? Gaslighting would be telling you that the only reason you don't like PvP is because you don't like knowing how unskilled you actually are. Keep in mind I'm not actually saying this, so don't fly off the handle for it. Using my words of "standard trash talk" to spin up a narrative about gaslighting, though? I'd thank you to not use my words in such a manner particularly because "standard trash talk" is most often just generic schoolyard insults that shouldn't cause such a vitriolic reaction. Why people get irrationally angry over a "your mom"-level insult amazes me. My post was to point out that for every single case of someone calling PvP a cesspool, I can recall the same or worse coming from players in PvE. I do a ton of both. I'm a min/maxer in both. I tend to prefer my time in PvP to my time in PvE, but I don't slouch at either. I have a lot of PvP experience in games and not just fighting or FPS games. I invade in Dark Souls, I PvP in MMOs, I've been on competitive sports teams, soccer tournaments, played in multiple card game or chess tournaments, submitted art for scholarship competitions, wrote papers and science reports for review to win scholarships, etc. In all of these, yes, even the art and science-related ones, there were a handful (and sometimes more) people talking down to everyone around them, scoffing at a presentation, or trying to get inside your head so you'd make a mistake and lose. The same thing happens in PvE -- speedrunning, high-end content like raids, hell, even RP circles have the same level of elitism and criticism towards outsiders that PvP does. Just ask Wyrmrest Accord how they feel about Moonguard, or how some people feel about RPers who fill their background information with how big their dong is, what their kinks are, or how much they hate catgirls. How about the guy that sends you "unsolicited help" about your character build because you picked a power that they think is trash, or are playing a powerset they think is a waste of time? Or worse, the guy who just openly mocks all characters who roll Empathy in team chat because "Empathy sucks" and is only doing so because he knows you're an Empath and it will annoy you into quitting the team? And let's not forget the YouTube guy posted months ago who went into a Hami Raid with the express purpose of disrupting it just so he could make an extremely biased and false video in order to tell everyone that City of Heroes (and Homecoming specifically) is a terrible game and a waste of time with terrible people playing it. The reason I posted my original comment on the matter was to point out that PvE is just as much of a "cesspool" of elitism that PvP is. The only difference is that someone in PvP can take direct action against your character, and it's really on you if you take that personal. I get some people don't like PvP, but I never understand the reasoning and incessant desire to vilify people who do enjoy direct competition against another player. Players are way more interesting to fight than AI, and it's not even close. Just as PvE isn't all sunshine and rainbows, PvP isn't all doom and gloom.

And yet it accompanies almost anything people choose to compete in. Sports, games, even art or science competitions. I've experienced it all at every competitive venue I've competed in. It's just human nature, but pretending PvP is some kind of weird toxic outlier for containing one of the constants of competition is bizarre to me. It's all part of the mental game and some people can't deal with it. That's fine, but don't talk down to people with thicker skin just because you can't hang.

Not in my experience and I'm an avid PvPer in most every game that allows it, including CoH when it was still the Live server (I haven't bothered with it since coming back). Most of the elitist people I've seen have been PvE raiders and people who afk at the beginning of a mission/quest/dungeon and bark orders at everyone telling them to hurry up because they don't have time to wait around despite them doing literally nothing else but leeching. One of the reasons I liked CoH so much was because PvE Elitism is a much smaller problem, though it does still exist if you stick around long enough on the fringes and pay attention. I've been ran off maps, slain by my "allies" in a PvE dungeon simply because the game allows it and it's "funny," intentionally griefed by players who refuse to revive or refuse to move forward which forces you to quit and restart, players who suicide when something doesn't go their way, players who body-block you intentionally, players who stand in front of you constantly so you can't use rockets without blowing yourself up, watched loot be handed to the guy who did nothing but gets everything because he's the guild lead's best friend (or "girlfriend"), denied access to content I've solo'd tons of times because I didn't have gear from the latest raid, etc etc. In PvP all I see is standard trash talk. I almost never get hate mail, which is weird considering how long I've been swimming in the so-called "cesspool." Obviously, there are obnoxious children and manchildren that exist in the PvP sphere (just pull up a random Xbox Chat video), but I think you just remember those moments more because you want to remember them more, not because they actually happen more. And who knows, maybe you're part of a PvE Inner Circle and don't even realize it which is why you don't notice (or downplay) the constant exclusion and abuse directed to those outside of it. PvP seems it will forever be the eternal boogeyman for some reason. EDIT: Oh boy, a "thumbs down" for... explaining that PvE is also home to rude people and my personal experience regarding that? Some of you forum folks are strange.

I see you think all roads still lead to Power Leveling as "the big bad."

Oh, don't worry. I always know your opinion. You don't have to spell it out for me. Calling it entitlement is a nice touch, though. Might want to fix the straps on your mask -- it's slipping a bit.

Antagonize? Merely pointing out why so few people who don't agree with you choose to engage. You prove the point with your followup "uh, actually" rant. At any rate, you did as predicted and gathered up a bunch of new numbers once your original set was proven to still be a problem for casual play standards. If you want to move the goal posts, fine. I played soccer for 17 years and can hit a moving target. That said, nothing of what you claim can be considered "casual play," merely optimized play. Casual players aren't often going into a session with the express purpose of SS/Stealthing radios for an hour a day for 2 weeks straight just to get an NPC Costume. It can be argued that "casual play" isn't meant to get more than the most basic NPC Costume Vanity but that wasn't the contention. The contention was the time it takes for a casual player to get them and, using your original numbers (which you proclaimed to be simple, casual play), an entire month of spending 1 hour every single day chaining Radios is what's expected as a best-case scenario. That doesn't sound like casual play to me at all. Honestly you'd probably earn enough influence doing that to just buy them from the market directly instead of wasting your time to maximize such a poorly thought out "casual earning" system. And that's the real problem. You want to harp on that 50%? Hitting that 50% three times in a row is only a 12.5% chance, and that's just for the first 100 runs. You have to do that 2 additional times, plus another two more 50% rolls to get what you claim. That's why it's useless to consider it a given as you want so badly to do. Am I to assume that your 50% hits 12.5% of the time 100% of the time? There's a reason I pointed out that that would be considered a lucky streak, but you really want to base your entire argument on anecdotal lucky streaks and modify it further with intentional min/maxing of time vs reward (plus PC hardware!) just to pretend you continue to have a leg up with the figures? Don't make me laugh. I've said my piece and shown how relatively unreasonable the base system is. It's only going to be worse for the higher tier rewards. I suppose those filthy casuals aren't meant to have them, or something.

In my experience, new currencies are only added so people who have been around the longest can't immediately buy/unlock everything the day of release. Personally, I think that's a weird reason. It feels like long-time players are getting punished for playing a ton. Destiny does this constantly and it's extremely frustrating to have been playing for years, building materials, just for the next update to make all of it useless and you're at the same level Joe Shmo is who just installed 20 minutes ago. Why invest time when it's going to be spat on is how I look at it.

To be fair, it's rather difficult to have a debate or "battle of wits" with someone who tends to be overly self-righteous and believes themselves to be faultless in nearly every encounter. When you're not posting silly nothing-posts for stickers, you're declaring yourself the smartest person in the discussion currently at hand. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong, but you seem to believe you've always got the answer regardless of topic. I don't actually care about these vanity costumes, but since you want to talk numbers and belittle people who do basic logic (I mean honestly, a 2% chance means every 100 runs should net you 2 drops on average, or 1 drop every 50 runs; it's not a question of probability over consecutive runs and a 50/50 probability after 34 runs still isn't a guarantee. There's a reason you look at the entire picture and not just a tiny slice of it), I'm going to assume, for the sake of argument, that these 34 runs always coinflip in my favor and I get a drop. For the record, this would be 3 drops per 100 runs, which is more than the expected value, but let's roll with it. What does that look like? 34 runs for a single drop translates into 340 runs for 10 drops (the minimum reward level for the most basic outfit). This is already above the expected threshold and would constitute "good luck" to the player, but let's go with it anyway. With your own claim of 5 minutes of casual play in a mission, 340 runs becomes 1700 minutes of play time. Cut that into hours, because that's more useful, and you have roughly 28-29 hours of time to get the most basic level reward from this system doing 5 minute radio missions back to back. This means if you play for one hour each day for a month, you could reasonably expect a single vanity costume, but only if you're lucky and only if you do nothing else with your time. If you want the basic modal costumes it will take you a month and a half at this generous rate. And all of this assumes that you do nothing but run radios for an hour, have zero travel time, and complete each mission in the span of 5 minutes on top of winning a coin flip on every 34th run. That's not realistic but those are the numbers you want to play with and I still think it's too much. Again, I don't actually care about these costume things, and "heat death of the universe" is a bit hyperbolic, but it seems a bit excessive that the lowest level reward for an entirely cosmetic item requires an entire month of daily 1 hour play doing nothing but 5 minute radio missions without ever taking a break. Can you get slightly luckier than even this and maybe cut a session or two out? Sure, but you can also go on longer streaks without any drops and end up taking longer. Remember, even with this apparent best-case scenario, you're running 340 missions for minimum drops when the expected count for 10 drops would be roughly 500 missions over a long enough sample period. You're already assuming good luck to counter the argument and that's not a great place to be, if you ask me, and this says nothing about how long it's going to take for the real vanity rewards that are going to cost hundreds or thousands of aethers. Of course, you didn't ask me but, like you, I don't care if you asked me or not.

To the issue of respecs, the real problem is that the UI and systems used for a respec is just the standard level-up screen and it does not work very well when you're asked to re-pick all your powers, reassign slots, then drop in enhancements from a tiny enhancement window that likes to mix things up. IOs made respecs feel even worse than before because sometimes, changing powers drastically enough to require a respec could completely ruin your overall IO build if the sets you used in the now "dead" power can't be easily transferred to the new replacement power. You basically have to rebuild everything from the ground up to account for the new power and might even have to get entirely new IOs to outfit it with. Back when all you had were SOs and HamiOs, this was a much smaller nuisance. I don't think there can be a solution to this without completely redesigning the entire system and interface for it, and that's something I wouldn't expect even the Live Devs to tackle, much less volunteer ones. That said, wanting no change to ever require a respec and to "get it right the first time" is basically impossible. We're not building cabinets to suit a client's specifications, we're building character systems with a degree of personal autonomy and breadth of choice that something, somewhere, won't do what it's supposed to. Maybe a set is just so numerically bad that something has to be done about it. Maybe something is so far away above everything else that designing new content becomes difficult as you have to account for full teams of the OP thing and its wiser to just nerf the OP thing first. "Do it right the first time" shows a lack of understanding of how evolving systems and player influence can impact the final product. I get that respecs are annoying and IO builds just make them more so, but nothing in the game is ever going to be untouched after release for long. Something, somewhere, will always break.

The other thing that happens, and I know this because I've been slapped for it before more than once, is someone will make a post attacking another player to instigate a response and if anyone responds to it, only the responder's post gets deleted/hidden while the inflammatory instigator's post gets to remain. It reads as if they want you to know that you're being silenced; that it's not enough you're being put in the corner, but that you need to see that the people goading you are being endorsed. To me, the feeling that all feedback that isn't praise is ignored is a secondary issue. Outside of rushed ideas or last-minute additions getting cut and put back in the oven (just to come back out later), almost everything that pops up as a Feedback topic is happening whether we like it or not. All we get to do is decide how hard we're getting kicked, not that we'd prefer not being kicked in the first place. No, even that isn't as bad of a realization as being handed the impression that certain posters are allowed to belittle you and if you say anything back, even in a constructive manner relevant to the thread topic, you get deleted, handed a "be careful!" message by a GM, told it's not relevant due to some arbitrary reason, and the post that started it remains to taunt you. Yes, my words make it sound more serious than it is. This is just a video game, after all. Still, it's exceptionally frustrating and flies in the face of what a "feedback thread" is ostensibly meant to be. They're not meant for "player discussion," even though people can discuss ad infinitum about how much they love it. Perhaps they should be changed to "Bug Testing" threads instead since that's mostly the only feedback that gets considered in the first place. That is to say, "does it work or not" is what matters.

No, I'm pretty sure this is only better for players who never tried anything tactical when their toggle dropped to begin with, assuming they lived long enough in the first place. I can already fire off a heal, a cone CC, and jump backwards to recast my toggle around a corner (and out of LoS) faster than this enforced downtime of 5 seconds will afford. All I "gain" is more time exposed with this change. Unfortunately, it seems the change is happening no matter what and I still don't understand why toggle debuffs aren't allowed to just return to working immediately after mez wears off. I guess only armor toggles and team buff toggles are allowed to "power creep" while abilities that are weaker than them are deemed to require additional pointless drawbacks.

Was about to post this myself and it might be why I don't struggle to handle my endurance usage on my Titan Weapon or Dark Armor characters despite them not even being higher than 40 yet. Hell, I had a TW/Dark Scrapper on live that only ran on SOs and didn't have any major issues. Most players these days seem to be trying to build attack chains that spam as many aoes as fast as possible, move as quickly as possible between spawns without stopping for anything, and any endurance level below 80% is considered a "problem" that needs to be fixed. Since Incarnates are a thing, they just decide Incarnates will fix it. I can't say it's a bad way to design considering my min/max tendencies, but it does sorta mean your character is only functional at the level your endurance issues are solved. If you wait until Incarnates (or more likely, PL to 50) to fix your endurance problems, you're basically locking your character at that level for functionality. It is causing a warped view of powersets and how they function in the game "without Incarnates" though, as the post you quoted shows evidence of.

A fix isn't a nerf. It went unnoticed (or at least, unreported) for a very long time. Now that they're in the AE again messing with rewards, someone noticed that boosters were giving x3 instead of x2 so it's being fixed. I don't get annoyed by much, but framing a bugfix as a nerf is one of the ways.

Yes, that's why I said "not that I care about it." I was just curious for the reason why you'd downvote someone you actually agree with. But thanks for being the adult in the room. EDIT: non-specific you. English is fun.

Kinda weird you'd agree with me, but "thumbsdown" every post I made saying this. Not that I care about that; I just find it strange. I know why I got some other downvotes, but this one confused me. Ah well.

@ShardWarrior My last post on this subject: I haven't skipped or ignored anything. Claiming I have doesn't make it true, just as pretending the goal posts aren't being shifted in order to continue running a narrative about "the data" doesn't mean I'm not aware that that's what is going on. Repeat yourself all you like; it doesn't particularly matter. No data will be sufficient until its data you personally agree with and I've been noticing that for a very long time with specific people I'm not going to name here. With that said, I'm returning to lurking this thread. Watching everyone run in circles is way more entertaining than getting caught up in it yourself.

Or, in other words, you can craft whatever data you want to sell the point you're trying to make. So why did it matter if Flea did the test he was told to do if it ultimately doesn't matter and the requests for testing were merely facetious? I don't care who does what. I don't farm. I don't care if others farm. What bothers me is when people demand proof that they'll immediately dismiss by moving goal posts. Either you want proof, or you don't, but don't pretend you can be swayed by evidence when there's no intention to actually consider it. This is why I asked if it would even matter if evidence was presented. Everyone already has their own opinion. Threads don't reach 34+ pages when people can agree on something.

To be clear, I mean "trial" in a scientific sense, not specifically to refer to an iTrial. Yes, I realize I should have used a different word considering the game has content literally called a trial. That's my mistake.

As a point of order, an exploit, by definition, must be possible with the game's own code and systems. Otherwise it would just be a cheat or a hack. For instance, I would solo raids in Destiny by "exploiting" AI behavior and game mechanics to skip sections that were meant for groups or difficult to survive encounters without allies. Because of how the game was built, this was possible. Exploits are not inherently bad and usually more indicative of poor programming on the developer's part, high technical skill on the player's part, or good planning on the player's part. The most recognized version of an "exploit" that went on to define the entire competitive scene would be Wave Dashing in Smash Bros Melee. "Exploits" can become just as much a part of the game as anything else, but you won't be replying to this post because you've blocked me. I'm mostly saying this for others' benefit. Problem is, no one seems interested in running these tests that they demand be made, and the one time someone did run one, it's immediately ignored because it's just "one sample size." The fact of the matter is, everyone here has already made up their mind. Any data that's provided which doesn't jive with their established opinion is going to be discarded. Even if everyone on the forum ran a test and it roughly matched Flea's quick-and-dirty attempt, would you still be satisfied? I mean, people that use the forum are such a small group compared to the rest of the playerbase, after all. Frankly, if you or anyone else is so concerned about data, maybe run some trials on your own and come to your own conclusions instead of hoping that someone else's efforts will match your conclusions.

...what? Player attacks are being changed to Positional + 1 Element for Defense calculation and NPC attacks are being changed to Positional + 1 Element for Defense calculation. How is that not exactly the same? How does this somehow make players weaker? You're really off on this and I can't figure out why. The words are all right there, clear as day, and have been quoted to you by others and pointed out by me. What are you not understanding?

What are you talking about? It's like, the third line in the original dev post of this thread. NPC attacks are now only Positional or Primary Damage Type. It's the same thing happening to Player attacks. Annoyances with MoG aside (an annoyance I share, personally), you seem to be confused.

I and others have been saying as such since the start, but everyone's focused on combat scenarios that don't happen and playstyles that are essentially just facetanking while staring at a powers bar. It's a nerf for how the game works in a practical setting but they're only interested in the theoretical.