Andreah

I like SJ because picking out my landing spots on a series of jumps is fun. I also like teleport for travel because I have to be clever with my route to get there efficiently -- it's a bit of a minigame. Fly is great, I like it too, but it's a bit too easy. Maybe if fly had inertia and I could accidentally bump into a building or obstruction and toggle out of it for a moment it would have similar draw to me. The only thing I don't like about SJ, and this is a bit contradictory, is the directional control seems too good.

Any long-time forum reader will recognize names of others and know their reputation from what they wrote and how they respond, and not from any metrics-based badges. However, for others I don't know from reading and interaction, I like to see when they joined and how many posts and responses (good, bad, indifferent) they've made and gathered. Mainly this will shape my interpretation of what they write -- are they new, possibly unknowledgeable, merit a gentle first interaction with the community, and so forth. I don't think badges, especially if they're new and spottily assigned will do that. Getting badges is cool, and I think mostly harmless. Judging other people from them, not so much.

They're pretty consistently between 1.3 and 2.0 million. 1.3 if a buyer is patient, 2.0 sometimes if they must be had right now.

In my case, I unslot the existing attuned one I had already. Next, I put the new one in and catalyze it. Then, I sell the old one. One cat and one unslot used. Fortunately, unslotters are cheap, even when you need to use two.

I wonder if it's all working correctly. For example, it only awarded me the 500'th post badge after I posted my 527th post.

Even people who won't use them can sell them for a nice bit. Great idea.

I found it, it was not a developer, but UberGuy who inspected some of the publicly available code.

I recall, here one of the HC developers posted some info about how it works, and iirc, (big iirc) it was a tree-implementation of a priority queue.

I wonder if that's still representative. There's been a few substantial changes since then.

I'd like to try a dark/dark dom, but I've been put off by the sheer number of active attack powers (which may be true of any dominator?). It looks like it would be very busy and perhaps complicated. Thoughts?

And give them a breather, to make progress without fanatically impatient players pushing them to show premature evidence of progress. It's hard work, and should take a long time with a small, poorly funded team.

I don't think it sends ten messages when you post an action on a single stack of ten, to post or claim. When you try to do actions for more than one unit or stack in quick succession, it does seem to have hard times with that. The ten stacking limit is probably a design legacy from long ago, and the question would be whether it's tangled up in too many things to safely change. If it isn't, I'd be happy to see it changed to 50 or 100. I would also like to see some currently non-stackable items be stackable. And i'd like the inf limit raised to some truly huge number. A pony for Christmas would be nice too. ^_^

I'm going to presume, from the wording in the patch notes that one needs to be level 50 to select the higher difficulty settings from this system, that it would not apply to content one runs exemped down to lower levels, such as Synapse.

Oh, I agree in principle. I don't even like the idea of system-gimping to create challenge, such as disabling temp powers or inspirations. I'd much rather counters to those were developed and made available to the NPC opponents on new settings intended for higher difficulty; or that those systems, if they're truly creating problems, need some deeper redesign.

There are still players who prefer to play the game on SO's and equivalent; and the normal setting and run at +0/x1 is still there.

I mainly post here, and in my supergroup's private discord. I've considered using FBSA, and made an account (I had a lot of trouble getting that set up -- the site's process for it was not intuitive to me), but I haven't put anything there so far, mainly because the time investment required and it doesn't seem like a high traffic area. I know that if I post something interesting here, it will get a few dozen eyes on it; on FBSA? Not so much., or no evidence of it. Here people can react/like/comment and I like that. It feels more like a conversation. I was in Shade's City of Roleplay back in the beginning, but I left it because I feel Discord is a terrible tool for large active communities; everything gets lost in the torrent of chatter and resulting scrollback. However, if that's not an impediment to you, I can recommend it.

Sid Meier once said, and I can't recall the exact quote, that fun gameplay was produced by meaningful decisions. I think having the play have to decide in advance which inspirations to bring to a mission where they won't drop, and then when and which to use is more of a meaningful decision than which of the random inspirations which already dropped one might use.

Well, if this system is going to propagate widely to other content, then the discussion here cannot be limited only to this beta testing. Yes, they did, but those runs were only about getting a one-time badge, and that apart from bragging rights, was the only enhanced reward one received for it. If these new difficulty settings propagate widely, with the proposed reward structure in place, they will become the new standard settings for the best organized and structured teams to run at. And that's why I hate to see core features of the game disabled in them.

This does sound good to me, but the impact of this would be far ranging and significant; e.g., some "I-Soloed-TaskForce-X" strategies involve rapidly spamming a bunch of reds would be hit hard and those who use it would want to be heard.

Well this is the most core of the core features of the game. Once you have a mixed team working well together, it doesn't matter much if the enemy's to-hit is buffed to high heaven -- we're all running at 100+ defense. And so on. When I am on such teams, I rarely use inspirations at all. It's when the content splits us up and our mutual support starts tofail that I've seen the worst mission fails. Or there's a dps check we just can't get past. The new difficulty settings here for which we're offering focused feedback seem on the whole to be good changes. The inspiration and temp power limits in them seem, to me, to mainly be inelegant, brute-force solutions to problems that ought to be addressed at some point. For example, if there were universal, consistent cooldowns on inspirations, then making those longer in some content is an extension of an existing and consistent system, not just turning something players consider a core feature off with a switch; and so on. Perhaps a separate discussion to discuss and brainstorm ideas for how we might tune up the inspiration/temp-power systems globally would be appropriate.

This is a good way to explain why I don't like completely disabling them. And I'd say the same for temp powers. I'd much rather have intrinsic limits that might be more strict , or new, interesting risks for using them in the most difficult content than just turning them off. For example, maybe using an inspiration or enabling/equiping a temp power ought to interrupt your current action, and put you into a one second long animation where your defense is -50?

Another different limit on inspirations would be to have a setting such that inspirations don't drop in this mission. Bring one tray and good luck, hope you picked the right ones.

It would not hurt the game to introduce an inspiration cooldown (for non rezzies) everywhere. 30s might be a bit too long for say, level 2, but say a 5s cooldown up to level 10, 10 s for level 11-25, 20s for levels 26-40, and 30s for levels 41+ in regular content would definitely put some limits on it.

I'm not much a fan of turning off player's abilities or resources in order to create artificial difficulty. I understand it's always been a thing, and it's perhaps low hanging fruit to go this route. I'd rather see, for example, instead of disabling inspirations or temporary powers, having in-mission means of suppressing them, which might possibly be overcome via strategy/tactics. Such as a suppressor node or mob that might be defeated. Or, alternatively, instead of disabling inspirations, give them a failure chance which causes them to be used up and provide no benefit, or even a critical failure chance which causes them to have opposite effect. That provides a player with a decision to make -- is it worth it to me to chance this million-inf Ultimate Insp? It might fail and do nothing! Or worse, it might lower my combat level !😮 Take both these ideas together, and it might offer layers of tactical subtlety onto the team's approach to a mission. Do we brute force through it, and hope for the best if we get in trouble? Or do we try to finesse our route to find and deactivate the deamplifier projector stations or take the time in each fight to prioritize taking down the deinspirator mobs? Deactivating normal content tools that players have at their disposal just doesn't feel very exciting or interesting. Imagine if another way to achieve higher difficulty was just lowering everyone's level by one and turning off their T9 powers. Yes, it's harder but not for a what seems a good reason to me. I'd prefer higher difficulty was achieved by moving the opposing mobs up the power scale, not players down it.

I like this idea, a lot, but it may also be appropriate to make them a bit pricier since they'll be easier to economize on usage.