McSpazz

I'm sure this can be done much, much faster by someone with a higher pain tolerance than I. To you, I wish the best of luck and the strongest of drinks.

Ladies and Gentlemen...BEHOLD! No, this isn't the result of me running the Mapserver event. This is the result of me, after about seven months of not overly aggressive playtime, leveling a character up almost exclusively through street sweeping. The one AE mission you see completed there was for RP purposes, but even so, 80 is hardly a drop in the bucket in the number of defeats I needed to reach this point. The rules were simple. No missions of any kind. Anything that provides a mission completion reward is off limits. No joining a team of more than 4 people including myself unless the only objective is to defeat a giant monster. No SKing up to a level higher than 5 above my own. No farming of any kind. That means that while I can trick or treat and knock on doors, I cannot join a large team of people spamming doors. I basically skipped the Mapserver event on her. No AE. An exception was given for an RP event that didn't amount to much experience. Double EXP is allowed (because I don't hate myself THAT much) Optional Rule: No crafted enhancements except for invention origin and procs. This can be lifted at level 47. Was it painful? Yes. I'm glad I did it though. It was an odd departure from normal leveling that kind of gave me a new perspective on the game. Inspirations were more valuable, exp debt was more painful, and I had to be more careful about what kind of mobs I tackled and how. It often forced me onto a more even playing field against enemies that, in the past, I just steamrolled with a kitted out team. Literally any foe my own level was a potential hazard. I also learned that Perigrine Island is TERRIBLE for street sweeping due to weirdly irregular mob level placement and a small area. I got my last few levels in Grandville. Why do this at all? Between incarnates, set bonuses, and the speed at which you can level up, there's not just a lot of the game you miss but a sense of hazard. This gave me an honest to god feeling of being a street level hero clawing their way to the very top and not once looking a mob and not just assuming I'd win. I think this might be the most satisfying ding to 50 I've ever had. Now, if you excuse me...I'm going to be over here in this corner. Doing what? Not this challenge again, I can tell you that much. Probably finally unlocking my last three costume slots. Yes. I even put that off for this.

In Founders Falls along the central dividing canal (where the Pocket D entrance is located), civilians being forced into Circle of Thorns Rituals output the following text: It looks like the code has a missed closed quote or something along those lines.

Well, yes, but actually, no. Your level, as you said, is your security level. This is what is utilized by the pencil pushers to identify what kind of threats you can handle. While it does reflect power mechanically, trying to use it to determine power level as a measure of power level breaks down once you start applying it literally throughout the game. For example, the Family exists throughout the game from zones as low as Port Oakes all the way up to level 50. While their bosses are changed up some as are the weapons they use, they are still, overall, a bunch of dudes with guns. My favorite example for this, however, are Snakes. The Snakes exist as one of the lowest level enemy groups in the Rogue Isles and they remain that way. Right up until Grandville when they show up as level 50 enemies. What exactly is different about them that would explain pure power level? Not much. That's entirely speaking on lore, though. I can't speak much on PvP, but as far as Incarnates go? Yes, they are the more recent driver of making older content feel less intense. However, set bonuses LONG before Incarnates made the game trivial in many ways. It was then and now totally up to us to try and keep our expectations in line.

It's generally kosher to say you were involved but not necessarily responsible. Some things, such as TF's or even some of the story arcs you mentioned in your second post, could reasonably require a support team for the main team to do their thing. Nobody really needs to know who was responsible for most events, really. Just look at major busts of criminals that happens in the real world. The arresting officers are rarely made widely known. It's the criminal that got caught that's all over the news. Exactly right. You do have to get a little creative. Basic, common sense explanations usually work the best. Especially if there could be multiple reasons for things to be as they are. For example, Vahzilok's organization was made up of very dedicated individuals. Countless madmen just as dedicated to his cause as he was. While the organization as a whole might not have its figurehead, many would continue his work. Your thoughts on the Lost is a great example as well. As for the other things? Arachnos might not be actively excavating in Faultline anymore, but they have every reason to maintain outposts there. After the amount of money sunk into securing those positions, keeping those bases operating as forward outposts goes without saying. The Council is much more difficult to explain. The organization has been SEVERELY crippled by the outcome of that storyline which leaves their activity around Paragon more than questionable. The only surefire explanation is that they are potentially imploding in slow motion, but irregularities like this are far harder to explain away. Most people seem to just ignore it and pretend they're just as they always were. Not ideal, but until we get a better resolution, it's the most expedient.

It might not fix the issue, but the existence of hard mode at least suggests the existence of enemies on par with your character's mechanics. I do know that the devs are working on creating level 50 variations for ALL groups, so maybe, at the very least, a level 50 Hellion will help implant the idea into people's heads that the numbers beside your level aren't the be all end all to power level.

Until new lore is made, a lot of MMOness lore considerations requires a great deal of twisting to make sense. Some cases, like, Dr. Vaz, are far harder to work with because content about his operation kind of end abruptly. However, most people don't realize that, by the lore's most strict interpretation, he is no longer a threat. Hell, I didn't even know that until Chase mentioned it. Mismatches in how NPC's speak of the timeline is, unfortunately, more of a consequence of Paragon's later storylines. While there are some things early on (like Dr. Vaz) that can cause some confusion, their later storylines often introduced finality to threats that continued to exist in earlier content. The Praetorian War is one example, but there's also Dark Astoria and, even more potentially surprising, the Council. After the New Praetorian arc concludes, their organization is effectively put onto its death bed. Some other things can be worked around with some clever writing. The destruction of Galaxy City might have been 13 years ago, but perhaps the ramifications of it are still ongoing, Perhaps the areas of the city directly on the other side of the War Walls have to deal with Shivan attacks once in a while (not unlike the Rikti). Likewise, even though a cure for the Lost was created, the Rikti, the ones making the Lost to begin with, have no reason to stop making more Lost. Adapting the Cure to new iterations of the Lost mutation could very well be a constant struggle. But all of this is, of course, headcannon. Trying to balance all of this out can be an extreme pain, but some MMO's are harder than others. Final Fantasy XIV and its ever advancing timeline comes to mind. The best you can do is figure out what explanation is the least intrusive and run with it.

It's probably one of the harder arcs to do, to be honest. It's not every day Grandville gets stormed head on, let alone someone takes down Lord Recluse. The same can be said about running his strike force to take down so many high profile heroes. One option is to make it all some kind of simulation or you assaulting another dimension for some reason. Separate what you are doing from the main cannon in some way. The second is to add additional story beats to the arc as you go through. Maybe there's something that's lowering the power of the big players. Maybe you aren't actually defeating them so much as you're distracting them. For the big arcs like Liberty and Recluse, you have to really flex your creative juices to find good ways of making sense of what's happening. It really depends on the context of why you're running them. Basically, if you can accomplish the same goal by running a custom AE arc, you should consider it.

One of my earlier posts was on headcannon, actually. Just about anything in the game can be presented in a way that can make accepting it as cannon for your character with a little twisting and altering presentation. However, unfortunately, thinking it out and actually implementing it is often more work than people are doing what feels like a one-off that won't really be mentioned again. But these things stack up. Even if you don't directly reference an old Ms. Liberty run, you're still likely going to kind of subconsciously remember beating the snot out of Arachnos' highest lieutenants, the Patrons, and then Recluse. The ease of which these fights that should, as far as the lore is concerned, but extremely difficult is something that can linger in the mind. Hard fights and losses stick to the brain better than easy victories. I imagine that the more hard mode TF's get released and the more new content touching on old threats, the less pronounced the issue will be in the long run. Here's hoping, anyway.

I think there is a reasonable push and pull at play and I definitely agree that what you are describing can be a problem. I don't think there's a perfect solution to separating your character from their apparent achievements within the game's standard narrative, but one of the best I've seen actually came out of the FFXIV community. While some of your earlier achievements in the game's story could be shared (such as participating in battles and the like), it becomes less and less viable as the story goes on until you're literally saving the world. Thus, a saying arose: Even if you are a Warrior of Light, you're not THE Warrior of Light. It's entirely possible for a character to have done amazing things, tangled with immense foes, and all without claiming the spot of the singular or one of the characters that did "the thing". Which brings me to... This is actually part of the reason I encourage people to push their roleplay beyond what the game's mechanics and baked in stories give you. The world is only static if you focus on the constants and the things beyond your control. Not every achievement your character has will be known to the whole world and not every threat they face will be widely known. Maybe your character has been fighting a constant war against a Crey subsidiary or maybe you're fighting a high ranking Arachnos operative who oversees a special ops team out in Etoli. What you are describing is a similar struggle found within fanfiction communities. Wanting to write a story that feels part of the source material but not so in lockstep that it feels like you're somehow trying to replace it. There's a reason why the more "cringe" fanfiction people look at involve writing for the original cast as if they were just another element in the fan fiction. You don't have to have a story change the entire world to leave an impact or to be meaningful.

I don't remember the exact conversation we had when you proposed the Roleplay Workshop, but I'm glad I agreed to join in on it. If it weren't for the workshop, I'd have never considered writing my tutorials up here on the forums which I know at least some people have used as resources. Even when people weren't interested in coming to the workshops themselves, some have still felt the need to send me tells to thank me for running them. I almost always tell them I appreciate the thanks, but point to you as a big reason why they happen at all. More than anything, I feel that the effort to guide other roleplayers to improve themselves is something that extends well beyond the workshop. The creation of several roleplay discord servers for Homecoming, the regular SG and VG recruitment fairs, and even the acknowledgement of the devs and moderators of the roleplay community (the very existence of this thread on the forums is only the tip of the iceberg) shows a general desire for roleplayers to be better and to never stop being better. While you just tapped into that and gave others the motivation they needed to really highlight that, none of that would have been possible if not just for your own contributions but for the community's willingness to entertain those within the community desiring to push others to do better. I'm proud enough of this effort that it unironically sits in my resume. I'm glad to be part of it and look forward to see what else comes of it.

Just as the zone topic says. Found at the Perigrine hospital.

I think that your overall post really summarizes a lot of my own feelings on how the city actually is in terms of lore. If the streets were literally filled with roaming gangs and monsters, we'd need the national guard in addition to the heroes. All well said. I'll admit that this post is biased in terms of where my own characters have fallen in terms of interactions. There was a time when I was quite guilty of making my characters super jaded and I didn't realize the importance of, if a character is going to be jaded, to follow things up with a yes-and. What you said in the quote, most certainly, is what I want players of characters who are jaded to try and both recognize and lean into when roleplaying. You can both be jaded but still provide reactions that the other play can play off of. Also, to be clear, I don't want anyone to think I have an issue with characters that are jaded as a concept. I could have framed my post around extreme ambivalence, but that's not usually how I see it explained.

Entirely fair! I hope that I made it clear, but I do think some amount of jading does occur. What I'm arguing for is to consider the depth of the jading. What I want to encourage people to avoid is to let characters become so jaded to the threats in the world that they hardly flinch when facing it. Though, it's worth remembering that there is some evidence that, for some, the threats of the world has kind of done the opposite of jading and made people instead paranoid and even bigoted. The billboards that read "Earth for Humans" and the existence of the Malta show as much. All of this is just to say that the reactions to the world can vary greatly and it can lead to more interesting interactions to consider each new encounter and how it affects your character rather than lump most things into a similar pile.