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How to have a bad time in Synapse ...


excessionoz

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17 hours ago, ForeverLaxx said:

Because some of us already are. Just because it doesn't conform to your arbitrary list of things required to be "the best" doesn't mean the character isn't exactly where we want it.


This is exactly what I need/want to understand more clearly in my feeble mind. I completely understand that there are thematic reasons or even at home/real life reasons why a player isn't out to be ..well....super fast. 
If the character is where you want it, then what is it that motivates you? After so many levels, doesn't something like War Mace's Crowd Control and it's satisfying crunch, doesn't that just get...old, stale? 
I have moods where the last thing I want to do are speed. And generally, I've found the squishier the character, the more likely I am to want to go more slowly - more order, less chaos. 
But, I'm not talking so much about in-mission tactics, but out of mission tactics. Is it just an old school preference to ride the slow turtle 30 miles to the quest door, a hold over from some game I've never played before? If that's it, that's fine - I just don't get it. And I don't have to, I'm just trying to understand it. 

I play a few characters that are "about the journey", not the destination. Oddly enough, I've learned to despise all three! A warshade, a widow and an MM. I chose the ATs because I hadn't played them before. Now I see why! Ordinarily, I'd just delete them, but they are each in a team crawl, so that would be letting the group down, so I suffer through it. 

My arbitrary list is exactly that. I've often heard that you have to measure something to know if there's improvement. So there's got to be a metric. Fun is subjective for all of us. It cannot be measured. We know it when we experience it, usually. But for me, because time is scarce, I want to be sure I'm not coming to the boards and complaining about people that don't deserve complaints, they're just...well, not in a hurry, whereas, I usually am. 
What really seems odd to me are the number of times the recruitment message is "speedy XTF", and there's usually that one player who never exits the map when the mission is over. Sometimes, it's just a long page load. Other times, they have scrapper lock and don't notice the mission ended. We'll yell in team chat, send tells, and optimally, use discord to ask what the delay is for. These are the folks that will make my hair gray. 
And one of the other folks are the ones with flight, have a celerity in sprint, but not realize that's not enough to let them zip by most mobs unscathed. You need super speed for that celerity:stealth to do you any good! And they die. And they wait there on the floor, as if some defender is supposed to tp them and rez them. The ones that do use the hospital, they miss the end of that mission, are late coming to the next one. In short - they prove themselves of no value to the team. Not even a joke as they lay there dead. 

It was advertised as a speedy run, and they are not speedy. Then THEY come to the boards and complain about how selfish we are. We're not selfish, we're just in a hurry, and our builds allow us to be in a hurry. We've gone to the trouble of making the builds, sharing it with friends, asking for their critical eye to help us make them better. We have farmers that allow us the resources to acquire anything in game without any hardship. It's so easy to do! And yet people say they hate it, can't stand it, it's ruining the game, etc. 

I stopped farming for one week on my accounts and suddenly the end mod perf shifter +end rises in price by 25%! Same with a number of other useful IOs that many of you use in every build. PvP IOs that I'd helped to reduce down to 8M are now back up to 10-11M as of this posting! Just because I stopped marketing for 1 lousy week. All thankless deeds, misunderstood by the casual gamer. But I digress. 

I just want to reach a place in my heart and mind where when I see someone who's playing slowly, I can instantly say to myself, "They're not stupid, Ukase. They just don't like the faster, more efficient way of play because X.  And "X" can be anything, I just want it to make sense. Doesn't mean it will make sense to me, it's just what I want. 

And I may not get what I want, and that's okay. But if I don't ask, I don't get. 

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What Ukase said, though if you wait 'til 20 it's nice as you can then finish the steel mayhem only for the quick recharging temp version of assemble the team. Bonus points if the wizard's whatever tip drops while completing the mission so you can do it to unlock morty kal sf before switching alignment back.

 

Edit, The 'what Ukase said' bit refers to the Invader one which was the last when I was writing this.

Edited by Mr. Vee
clarificiation
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3 hours ago, Ukase said:


This is exactly what I need/want to understand more clearly in my feeble mind. I completely understand that there are thematic reasons or even at home/real life reasons why a player isn't out to be ..well....super fast. 
If the character is where you want it, then what is it that motivates you? After so many levels, doesn't something like War Mace's Crowd Control and it's satisfying crunch, doesn't that just get...old, stale? 
I have moods where the last thing I want to do are speed. And generally, I've found the squishier the character, the more likely I am to want to go more slowly - more order, less chaos. 
But, I'm not talking so much about in-mission tactics, but out of mission tactics. Is it just an old school preference to ride the slow turtle 30 miles to the quest door, a hold over from some game I've never played before? If that's it, that's fine - I just don't get it. And I don't have to, I'm just trying to understand it. 

I play a few characters that are "about the journey", not the destination. Oddly enough, I've learned to despise all three! A warshade, a widow and an MM. I chose the ATs because I hadn't played them before. Now I see why! Ordinarily, I'd just delete them, but they are each in a team crawl, so that would be letting the group down, so I suffer through it. 

My arbitrary list is exactly that. I've often heard that you have to measure something to know if there's improvement. So there's got to be a metric. Fun is subjective for all of us. It cannot be measured. We know it when we experience it, usually. But for me, because time is scarce, I want to be sure I'm not coming to the boards and complaining about people that don't deserve complaints, they're just...well, not in a hurry, whereas, I usually am. 
What really seems odd to me are the number of times the recruitment message is "speedy XTF", and there's usually that one player who never exits the map when the mission is over. Sometimes, it's just a long page load. Other times, they have scrapper lock and don't notice the mission ended. We'll yell in team chat, send tells, and optimally, use discord to ask what the delay is for. These are the folks that will make my hair gray. 
And one of the other folks are the ones with flight, have a celerity in sprint, but not realize that's not enough to let them zip by most mobs unscathed. You need super speed for that celerity:stealth to do you any good! And they die. And they wait there on the floor, as if some defender is supposed to tp them and rez them. The ones that do use the hospital, they miss the end of that mission, are late coming to the next one. In short - they prove themselves of no value to the team. Not even a joke as they lay there dead. 

It was advertised as a speedy run, and they are not speedy. Then THEY come to the boards and complain about how selfish we are. We're not selfish, we're just in a hurry, and our builds allow us to be in a hurry. We've gone to the trouble of making the builds, sharing it with friends, asking for their critical eye to help us make them better. We have farmers that allow us the resources to acquire anything in game without any hardship. It's so easy to do! And yet people say they hate it, can't stand it, it's ruining the game, etc. 

I stopped farming for one week on my accounts and suddenly the end mod perf shifter +end rises in price by 25%! Same with a number of other useful IOs that many of you use in every build. PvP IOs that I'd helped to reduce down to 8M are now back up to 10-11M as of this posting! Just because I stopped marketing for 1 lousy week. All thankless deeds, misunderstood by the casual gamer. But I digress. 

I just want to reach a place in my heart and mind where when I see someone who's playing slowly, I can instantly say to myself, "They're not stupid, Ukase. They just don't like the faster, more efficient way of play because X.  And "X" can be anything, I just want it to make sense. Doesn't mean it will make sense to me, it's just what I want. 

And I may not get what I want, and that's okay. But if I don't ask, I don't get. 

Okay, so, first off... most people are subjectively minded and care exclusively about having fun. They have no intentions on learning rotations, managing mechanics, making OP builds or even getting things done in any kind of optimal way. This is something that exists in all MMOs (WoW, FF14, Rift, CoH, ESO, etc) and, though it can be frustrating at times, it's not something worth complaining about. As far as these players are concerned, they are just doing fun content with a group of fun people... they complain about getting kicked and/or yelled at because they can't understand how someone like you would just throw fun out the window in favor of efficiency. To hold these people under the same objective fueled standards is a fool's errand. They will not listen, they will not learn... because that's not why they play video games.

 

and second... just because they complain about something you do doesn't mean you should complain about they do in return. All that does is force a divide in the players, which is never good (hell, this entire thread has consisted of nothing but people arguing over whether the person who made this thread is right or wrong). All you're doing be complaining about the casual player base is giving said player base more reason to hate you and call you selfish. Because, in all reality, you are both being selfish by deciding your playstyle is the only playstyle and that anyone who doesn't agree with you is wrong.

 

You want to make sense of the casual player? Then maybe you should start by thinking of CoH for what it is. It's not a competition, it's not a sprinting test and it's sure as hell isn't a databook. It's a game. Always has been, always will be.

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I appreciate the perspective, thanks. 

I used to play the slow way, I promise, I did. I don't think I ever got kicked tho - and I've never kicked anybody for playing differently. But as I learned more, it dawned on me how much I was missing in the experience. Now, I guess I'm missing something else - more nuance, more silly commentary from the npcs, etc. 

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4 hours ago, Ukase said:

They're not stupid, Ukase. They just don't like the faster, more efficient way of play because X

This is where your primary disconnect lies. You assume these people don't know something because they aren't doing X thing at Y speed for Z reward as efficiently (in your head) as possible.

 

For a bit of perspective, I'm a min/max player. I roll up multiple Dark Souls/Bloodborne character builds for invasions, built for PvP and designed to do very specific things, whether that's playing into or countering the meta. I'm a deck-builder in MTG. When I'm playing Destiny, I'm grinding for the right loot drops and stat totals for the character I'm trying to build. Back when I played WoW I made twink characters for different PvP brackets and even got kicked from a guild for beating the guild leader one too many times. Even in single-player RPGs I'm making sure my character is built to be the best for the role. In tabletop RPGs like D&D I plan out my character's path and spell selection in order to craft the perfect version of that character.

 

I want you to read the last 5 words of the previous sentence again, just so it's clear: "perfect version of that character." "That character" is the operative phrase. People make characters for many reasons, be that for PvP, RP, concept builds, experimentation, whatever. When I min/max, I start with a goal. Depending on what that character is, that goal can change. Is it a PvP character? Is it a concept character? Is it an experiment? All of these characters are created for a specific purpose, and that purpose will dictate how that character builds and operates in-game. I'm not going to make a character designed for speed-running content if it's meant to be my PvP character just as I wouldn't make choices for PvP on a character who will never step foot in a PvP area.

 

In CoH, every character I make begins with a concept. I select powers that fit the concept, then set up a build to leverage that concept as far as I can. Sometimes that means the character is just a permaDom character. Other times it means that character has "sub optimal" Epic Powers or a "bad" Primary/Secondary Power simply because the concept doesn't work at all without them. You don't know the driving force behind the player's decision to pick certain things or play a certain way. All you have is an assumption that if they aren't playing the way you deem optimal, then they are, at best, ignorant of the systems involved. That's a very narrow-minded, almost elitist way to judge players in a game that never demands the player be turbo charged in the first place.

 

As long as you can recognize that your "best" isn't going to the same as someone else's "best", you'll grow as a player and teammate.

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exChampion and exInfinity player (Champion primarily).

 

Current resident of the Everlasting shard.

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I really appreciate this perspective! And the time it took to spell it out for me. I have never played those games you spoke of, but I got the gist of it. So, I'm grateful for the explanation. I knew I had to be missing something, which was why I was asking in the first place. 

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On 6/19/2021 at 7:55 AM, Ukase said:

For a master tf or trial run, at least 500 badges. Why? Because in my mind, it shows a commitment to badging.

I can't agree on this for one simple reason.

I have a character with just 225 badges that I created, built, leveled and incarnated (is that a verb?) SPECIFICALLY for the Magisterium iTrial.  He's done the Really Hard Way successfully at least  a dozen times.  He's also got Master badges for several other iTrials.  I was focused on getting this character to Tier 4 Incarnate across the board and didn't think about badges along the way.  You would be hard-pressed to find a better character to bring along on a Master run, but he doesn't meet your one metric.

Originally on Infinity.  I have Ironblade on every shard.  -  My only AE arc:  The Origin of Mark IV  (ID 48002)

Link to the story of Toggle Man, since I keep having to track down my original post.

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15 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

I can't agree on this for one simple reason.

I have a character with just 225 badges that I created, built, leveled and incarnated (is that a verb?) SPECIFICALLY for the Magisterium iTrial.  He's done the Really Hard Way successfully at least  a dozen times.  He's also got Master badges for several other iTrials.  I was focused on getting this character to Tier 4 Incarnate across the board and didn't think about badges along the way.  You would be hard-pressed to find a better character to bring along on a Master run, but he doesn't meet your one metric.

I agree, to a point. There's a number of GREAT players who, for one reason or another don't pursue badges on a given character. 

But here's the context: I'm running an MoTF, I've got some choices of folks among a pug crowd. First thing I do, is check global name, then powersets, then badge count. If I don't know you - you might truly be the best choice - but I have no way of knowing that. When you want to make the most of your time, and not have to redo the tf because of unfortunate missteps, what metric would you look at? Leave everything to chance? 

I ask myself - why do they want this badge? They don't seem to be a badge hound. Vet level 12 and only 223 badges. I'd think they'd have quite a bit more by vet level 12, if badges were what they were after. Are they trying to be helpful, or are they just looking to team up with anyone? Just the challenge?

And that's the dilemma I often face if I don't know them. I also look at vet levels if they're 50. Experience with a character is important, too. Although badge counts suggest they have experienced a lot of the game, rather than the same fire farm repeatedly. (not that high vet levels mean that - but they could)

Obviously, I know with certainty that high badge counts do not guarantee success on a Master run. But, to me, it's a fair indication that someone with a high badge count: 
1) wants the badge
2) has enough experience to know not to do things that are needlessly risky - like go afk during the 2nd mission of an ITF with all those ambushes
3) has stumbled across my path on one league badge effort or another in the past

I'm very open to finding another metric to use. But I can't think of one that's a better indicator of success when considering an MoTF with someone I am unfamiliar with. 

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1 hour ago, Ukase said:


I ask myself - why do they want this badge? They don't seem to be a badge hound. Vet level 12 and only 223 badges. I'd think they'd have quite a bit more by vet level 12, if badges were what they were after. Are they trying to be helpful, or are they just looking to team up with anyone? Just the challenge?
 

I'd think Accolades are a better indicator rather than badge count.  I have one badge character and many with all of the Accolades.  I like joining MoTFs for a bit of a challenge that has nothing to do with additional badges.  I have a badge character who already has that badge.  This makes sense looking at a fresh level 50 with 46 badges...but not really with a Vet level 12 with 223 badges.  

 

 

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1 hour ago, Ukase said:

I ask myself - why do they want this badge? They don't seem to be a badge hound. Vet level 12 and only 223 badges. I'd think they'd have quite a bit more by vet level 12, if badges were what they were after. Are they trying to be helpful, or are they just looking to team up with anyone? Just the challenge?

Many people, if they care about badges at all, usually only care about them for a single character. You may not be doing this intentionally, but you're sounding like people in World of Warcraft that would deny entry to a Raid unless you were already geared in armor/weapons that only come from the Raid you're trying to join. In effect, you can only do this Raid if you've already done the Raid.

 

It's your team and you hold all the keys and barriers to entry. I just find it marginally silly that you chose badges of all things to deny/allow people on. It's like you're looking for ways to screen players, find CoH wanting in that regard, and settled on one of only a tiny handful of options available that suggest potential character familiarity.

 

I just find it strange.

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exChampion and exInfinity player (Champion primarily).

 

Current resident of the Everlasting shard.

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2 hours ago, Ignatz the Insane said:

I'd think Accolades are a better indicator rather than badge count.  I have one badge character and many with all of the Accolades.  I like joining MoTFs for a bit of a challenge that has nothing to do with additional badges.  I have a badge character who already has that badge.  This makes sense looking at a fresh level 50 with 46 badges...but not really with a Vet level 12 with 223 badges.  

 

 

You're not the first person to suggest accolades over badge count. Certainly, accolades certainly suggest investment in the character, if nothing else, given the boost in hp/end. 
I appreciate the perspective and will give it an either/or kind of thing. Either know them (or their rep) or look for the passive accolades, or a relatively high badge count. 

Fun fact on the badge count, as a metric. I've got a warshade and a widow - both are levels 42-43 and didn't do 2xp.  All missions so far were kill through, unless mission objectives required otherwise. I've made an effort to get the exploration badges in each zone they're in, and neither one has over 200 yet. Mind you, I'd never make a badger out of these two, I just don't enjoy them enough to do so, but the low badge count makes me think that all of you are correct, I'm being unreasonable. (They are both locked to their alignment until 50 - so there's a limit to the low-hanging fruit badges for both as far as explores go.) 

I hope folks realize that even though I can be obtuse, I do try to take in other opinions and have an open mind. So, your counter-points are often considered! 

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