Andreah

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.

I'm left hanging a bit by this section. It seems clear the intent is to expand these new settings to other content after it's been tested and tuned from the new Dr. Aeon SF; which sounds great. Is that content only to be new content, or will it also, perhaps in increments be used for prior existing content such as existing SF's/Tf's/Trials, old story arcs and newspapers and radios, and perhaps even to AE missions? In short, will this eventually be everywhere, or limited to new content?

If a player has purchased several hours worth of a temporary power (for example an Offense Amplifier from a P2W Vendor, which can stack up to eight hours), and enters into content running at Ruthless or Relentless, is the power suppressed or suspended and then resumes its effect and duration countdown afterwards; or is it cancelled, in which case the player has lost potentially several million Inf worth of purchase?

I used it once on Live, and immediately dropped it because it gave me vertigo and motion sickness. Edit: even remembering it back then has me feeling a little vertigo right now. Ugh.

I can understand the catchy thread title, but I did not read the first post. I'm old enough I don't need people making their content deliberately hard to read.

We have a pinned topic for roleplay suggestions via CR Tempest: The top post has a nice list, the second from the bottom of which is variable distance chat (i.e., a shorter range /local) It would be worthwhile, I think, to add a link to this topic to the end of the suggestions in that topic; or even better, to distill out a summary of what's here into a post for there. 🙂

I posted some related QoL ideas for the conversion window a while back as well.

I posted some related QoL ideas for the conversion window a while back as well. Edit: Some weird double post thing here. Please ignore.

Since we're looking for bold, innovative ideas. I have a good one. Without devs discussing, announcing, or even hinting at it, after some future maintenance, we should be logging in to find out every character on every server, every supergroup, every base code, every player global handle, has been genericed and there's a 24-hour lock against creating new accounts, characters or supergroups; and we're then invited to rechoose our names, limited to one per hour the first day, universally fresh and fair.

I haven't been actively playing much for quite a while, so I'm not in a really good spot to create connections, but overall, I'm of the mind that lighting a candle is better than cursing the darkness; and in that vein, not to ask people not to light candles because we need a brighter light. One of the things I've enjoyed being a part of is when a core of people do something in-character, and use LFG or the other channels to invite other roleplayers in to join. Sometimes this has been radio, mission, or other content teams, or just a group doing casual RP in a public SG Base setting, such as a bar, billiards club, or shopping center. If the styles and personalities click, then one's circle of roleplay connections grows, and if not, very little is lost.

Who, me? I love the auction as it is and am having a great time.

I think there's a missing option: 3) Delete the Auction house, email system, character to character trading system, off-character storage, and character bind all drops on pick-up. Nothing is free; everything is earned from play of that character and that character alone. There's probably lots of other ways too. Most of them are really bad. As far as the auction house, I like how it is structured at present, because it puts a little strategy and thought into it. If others don't like that, they don't have to use it. Just sell drops to vendors, save them in email or storage for alts and use merits to get the things they actually want. The auction house has particular bits of hidden information on purpose. If it were a full public market, your listing prices would be public. It would show your IO listed for sale at 1 inf. You would see the lists of bids other people set at their specific price points. You would see the detailed sales history going back some distance in time, and probably daily high/low/average/volume before that. We don't have that kind of market, and I wouldn't want one.

I could see an option to allow players to toggle their own KB to KD, but that negates much of the value of the IO's that do that now. Would you have the toggle be by power, or for the entire build? And what if the team leader could set a team toggle for KB to KD?

Could be. 🙂