Oklahoman

How strong are we talking here?

Sorry to ask again, but turns out we need a new football coach. Can you help?

Can you get me and my family back the 2 hours we spent in line waiting to ride Jungle Cruise on Monday?

I had someone in a BAF the other day asking how to tell what team they are on. I'm not sure I would be opposed to a "basic skills test" required to go from 49 to 50. Some kind of mission that requires you to pass a team or league star, give an item to someone else, use the map and navigation window, etc. But to the larger point of insta-50s, I'm against it. Get back with me if we start talking about 1 Transcendent per level or somewhere in that neighborhood.

I'm not sure if it's the same thing or not, but something similar happens to me. Usually if I left click the taskbar, then left click back into the game it fixes itself.

There are a number of bugs with league management that would be so very helpful, including @Dazl's suggestion. If you right click on a player in a full league there is an option something like "Mark character for league swap" - and as far as I can tell it does nothing. The only solution with a full league is to have someone drop, move people around, then reinvite. The wandering league star has plagued us for ages. Nothing like discovering after you zone in that you aren't the league leader anymore. Teams can swap, too, so the carefully designed team 3 you just created is now team 2. Someone who crashes out of a league may not be able to get back into that instance at all, even if they relog. Sometimes, someone joins and doesn't get sidekicked up to the team leaders level. You either have to move them to another team in the league, or have them drop and reinvite. Hopefully they notice is sooner rather than later. There is some weird alignment bug where you can't invite some people to the league if anyone on the league leaders team is out of zone. But I have also heard tell that particular section of spaghetti code is especially scary, and we may just have to work with it, lest the whole thing break.

I've never verified this, but for BAF I understand that the cutscene is skipped if (1) every character (not player) in the league has already done a BAF and (2) no one uses the door and instead flies over the wall. If someone has verified info on that (like a dev statement?) I'd love to see it.

Adding to what Mac said, I don't recall anything that ever let you auto-accept the license agreement, but there used to be a text file where you could save your username and password in plain text (!!). I wonder if maybe that's what you are thinking of? That was removed a while ago.

Yeah, we don't do optimism here. 😆 Back to your original thought about cross-server play, from a technical perspective when I've seen something like this mentioned in the past the response was (1) we don't have a good way to manage the same character name being present multiple times in the same trial, and (2) LFG sux and no one wants to touch the code. I recall it being mentioned that moving to a character name structure that somehow embeds and hides your global (I think Champions does this?) might work, because then "Oklahoman.Hero Dude" can be different than your Hero Dude, and what the heck - let's just have a league full of Hero Dudes. I personally think it would glorious chaos, especially if they are all masterminds. You mentioned server transfer tokens, but of course that breaks you out of your supergroup and potentially has other destructive outcomes. I recall one instance on live where someone transferred a character to join a tf on another server, and someone else immediately created a new character with that same name. If a server transfer token reserved your name on the outgoing server for 24 hours or so, I guess that might help, but you still have the other downsides. Something like this might be the easiest way to accomplish what you suggest. All the way back to my original post, still would love to be able to see what's running already on the server, which I am guessing would be easier to accomplish through the server status page than in-game. A lot of times I log in and wait at least 15 minutes before I try to run anything, or I will start with something that isn't run much like MoDD and just see what shows up in LFG as I go.

I feel your pain. I chuckle when I advertise an MSR and then see the ad scroll out of my LFG window by people asking for a farm. Like, why sit in a farm and do nothing when you can come punch Rikti and tell dad jokes, but whatevs. I try to keep 2 things in mind. First, despite how I feel about the farming chatter, my leagues always fill. Well, 9.9 times out of 10. People who are looking to play will scroll back through LFG and find my post. Second, we have absolutely no guarantee the game will be here tomorrow. If being PL'd brings you some sort of joy, go for it, I say. Gratz on your bright, shiny new 50 that you have no idea how to pass a league star or give an item to another player without using a trade window. But if it brought you joy, great. Having said that, I think people are more likely to have success by going to their favorite AE and speaking in LOCAL, rather than going to LFG - but maybe I am wrong. On those occasions I do farm, that's how I am looking for folks. And, also, I wish we had an "Ignore for 30 minutes" option.

Yes, they do. OK, fine. I *think* the scheduled ones start in The Hive and maybe move to The Abyss. My best advice for people is to start using /search around the start time to see where it appears there is a build up of players.

The event calendar doesn't include the nightly Hami raid at, like, 8/9pm Central? (He said, with no confidence whatsoever.) That's pretty consistent, and they rarely need to advertise for it because people just show up. In addition to that and the calendar, there are frequent Hami's and MSRs throughout the week as league leaders like myself have time and energy to do them. I run MSR's several nights a week at 10pm Central, though I may start earlier - I don't have any kind of schedule for that at all. Welcome to Ex! See you soon!

Definitely a lot of room here for big improvement, I think.

Had success on 2 out of 3 Triple Threat runs recently, and wanted to share what we did. This is via chat only - not using Discord or TeamSpeak. I only use 50+3's for this, and I mix the teams up as best I can. Sometimes, 11 blasters show up and you do your best. During the Kill 250 IDF phase, make this announcement in league: Just before all 250 IDF are killed (arrested?) make this announcement in league: The biggest change was this - when the league approaches 10%, 5%, and 2% on the AVs, make these announcements as appropriate BOTH in league AND request: Once at 2% on all AVs, hold until Chimera jumps. Then, make this announcement in league only once Team 1 is re-engaged with Chimera: Once you see Nega-Pendragon hit 1%, then announce for the rest of the league to go. I use F10 (multiple times) which for me says "FINISH 'EM!!" I hit F10 3-4 times so it occupies most of the chat window. Still some luck involved. In the one case we failed, Chimera ticked up a few percentage points after I called to "FINISH 'EM!!" Rotten luck. Of course, you can always have players who aren't reading chat, aren't watching their pets, etc. Best you can do as a leader, I think, is get the league in a position to succeed then hope for the best. Why announce both in league and request as you whittle the AVs down? For those who have the request channel enabled, it just emphasizes that stage. All the sudden there is purple text in chat at this crucial stage. Maybe it's catching more people's eyes at that point. People who have the request channel silenced still should see it in league. I have all my instructions in popmenus so I just send the same message to both channels with 1 click. Giving Nega that head start at the end let's you see if there is an issue there. If you notice they are hung on 2%, delay your call for the rest of the league until you see movement. It's hard to put the brakes on at this point, but if you do see one of the AVs tick up you can try to stop everyone and reset to 2%. Calling for Nega to go right after Chimera TPs will maximize the time that team has on Chimera in the final moments. You don't want Chimera TPing just before he's ready to bite the dust. I'll keep running with this method and may add to it, but for anyone else who is trying this using the chat window only, maybe it gives you some ideas. Share you experiences, too!

I mentioned this idea in another thread, thought I would break it out here. I think it would be helpful if we could "expand" any given server on the server status page and see how many of each type of trial is in progress. I'm wondering if that would be easier to do on the server status page than inside the game itself. Might also be helpful to know how many are in certain zones where zone events can occur (and PVP I guess, but I never do that) - RWZ, The Hive, The Abyss. That could be an indication something is about to happen there - or maybe just finished.

It would need to be auto-drop, I believe, but I would support this. When I run badge runs I have everyone pass me their grenades (and acids) so I know I am in control of all 10. Would help a lot if they just disappeared upon trial exit.

As I was playing the other night, I wondered about adding an ammunition to Swap Ammo. Healing Cloud, or something like that. I suppose you could have a targeted AoE heal with regular damage on the target, but an ally AoE heal around them. Not sure how you would buff that unless you allowed slots for Swap Ammo itself. It's not quite what you want, but maybe an easier lift programming wise?

I completely agree, and I absolutely do. I haven't seen on Excelsior, though, many attempts for Triple Threat without Discord. You probably don't see me join others runs as Oklahoman, though, but rather one of my alts. I'm always curious how others run things, even for things I run frequently myself. As an aside - one of the things I frequently learn from others runs is what instructions I no longer need to give, so I can streamline what I do. Less is more. I definitely need to check this out, assuming Everlasting will have any of my toons back. 🙂 I'd also welcome their input here, if you want to mention it to them next time you see them forming. If they've cracked this nut, we need to share that info with everyone else. I hate the Request channel slightly less than Discord. 🙂 I'm open to it if it would help, but any channel I have to give instructions to people to join and monitor is already problematic. I'll toy with this, though. I'm open to new ideas. First off, I scanned all my log files, because I save all of them like a digital hoarder, and I can definitely say I HAVE NOT used the word Varmint. 🙂 Your point is not lost, though -clear English at critical times. I think I do that, at least in this case, but I'm open to being corrected. Here is the relevant portion of my current popmenu for that run: I don't have this in a popmenu, but once everyone is at 10 I tend to say "GO TO 5 AND STOP" and "GO TO 2 AND STOP", or some slight variation thereof. I had some confusion from the group saying "WE'LL FOLLOW NEGA-PENDRAGON" (meaning Nega should drop first and everyone would take that as a cue to finish off the others), so I've been trying something different now. If any of that is coming across more as RP than instruction, check me on that. And I can definitely move a lot of that to Request (ick) to see if it helps. I do appreciate everyone's constructive feedback on this. It's hard for me to believe we can't find a way to do this with at least a 50% success rate.

Last night we were successful in getting Triple Threat on the third try. First try failed due to itchy trigger finger syndrome. I think it was a MM who wasn't controlling their pets. Second and third try used the same plan, which was to get all the AVs down to 2% and hold, then turn the NEGA team loose and ask the other 2 AV teams to take their cue from the NEGA team. On the second try we were off by maybe half a second - it was really close. On the third try all the AVs dropped at pretty much exactly the same time. No doubt luck and overall league skill factors into it heavily. My goal is just to get us in a position to succeed as often as possible. I'm gonna run with this plan and try to standardize it into my popmenu. Again, still love to hear new ideas, so keep 'em coming.

Is it possible an invite was sent WHILE you were zoning? I run into that a lot with my iTrials, where I don't mind getting tells for invites, but since I am recruiting fewer people it's easier to notice if I sent 3 invites but only 2 joined for some reason. I should have included that as yet another reason I ask people to broadcast for invites for MSRs - your invite could get lost while zoning, and I can't always keep track of it as well. Since others have listed their pet peeves in this thread, I'll list mine in hopes of completely derailing the conversation. I posted a suggestion once that you shouldn't be able to hog LFG by posting there more than once every 30 seconds (or minute, I forgot what I suggested). The people who post "DFB 2/8", "DFB 3/8", "DFB 4/8"... - all just a few seconds apart? I'm not that invested in your recruiting efforts. But, yeah, if you're posting every 30-60 seconds and include a count, as I am sure you do, that can be helpful.

I get what you are saying here, but you need to understand that after you say option 2, the conversation is almost never over. That's not a satisfactory response for someone who feels entitled to have it thoroughly explained to them in a manner with which they can agree. Your response here would probably elicit a response from the player of "Why? You just took all that time to type that and you could have just invited me instead." And on it goes while you are trying to form a league. Worse, even if you have decided to stop responding to the tells, they keep going. "What? Couldn't face you were wrong!?!?" Then it moves from tells to the LFG channel - "He won't invite me because I won't follow his silly rules!" Then come the nasty emails. So, now I am back to the point that if I have said "NO TELLS" and I still get tells, I just don't respond at all. And if they get nasty I gignore them, at least for a few months. Maybe, just maybe, if you tell someone to go search the forums (or provide a shortened URL) they get the info and never, ever do that again, becoming a better community member in the process. Maybe that's a better way to handle it than what I do. I can certainly appreciate someone trying to help someone else.

I like this concept of a safety valve, because as a league leader trying to guide everyone at the end there is SO MUCH to try to keep track of. Having someone else keeping an eye on a couple of those things would help. May play around with this idea, thanks!

We made 3 attempts at it yesterday. First attempt was my regular approach, and again someone got an itchy trigger finger and dropped an AV before I said go. The next 2 runs we did like I mentioned above, where starting at 5% I asked only tanks and brutes to fight. Again, the first result failed because an AV dropped before I said go. The last run failed because one of the AVs regenned a bunch right after I said go. On that last run, the tanks and brutes had trouble keeping the AVs around 2%, and we had to keep jumping in and helping. Someone mentioned Damage over Time as a likely culprit, as well, rather than an itchy trigger finger. Could well be given selection of interface. Also, someone mentioned dragging all 3 AVs together, but since Chimera jumps around that doesn't seem like it would work. Still looking for a solid way to do this with in-game chat only, so I am open to ideas. It's a tough badge to get, but I refuse to believe you need either Discord, luck, or both to get it.

Fight me. I'm looking at you SBB and DD!