Ardrea

Great replies and historical context!

Two questions more now:

- Should all the tentacles aggro on you if you attack any one? I mean, really, it's supposed to be one creature, not 9. If one tried to fight them all at once, and duo'd it, would that be impressive at all?

- If not, what should someone duo or solo for bragging rights these days?

I've been on a few teams lately who've taken down Lusca.

It doesn't seem all that hard or that dangerous. In fact, some friends in an SG claimed to have duo'd the monster, and I'm not surprised by that.

When I look over the wiki page on Lusca, it's like its about an entirely different creature. I thought at first it was our incarnate powers doing this, but GM's scale to your level even if shifted, and many of us haven't even had incarnate powers on some of the fights.

Then is strikes me -- only one tentacle at a time ever fights us. It's just nine sequential, separate, modest difficulty GM fights, not one really hard one. Is this how Lusca is supposed to act? It feels like there's a bug in its AI.

When I first started playing this game three years ago, I didn't use the market. I pinched pennies on purchasing DOs and SOs, and 100k was a lot of inf to have. I vendored all my salvage and recipe drops. Probably even a few that were very valuable, unknown to me at the time. Costume contests in Atlas would give away several hundred thousand inf as prizes, and the more extravagant ones might have given away a million as a top prize.

It was effort to keep my enhancements current to my level, and I felt "poor".

Then I entered the market, as I suppose a lot of new players eventually do. Inf starts flowing faster from selling salvage and recipes, and as time went on, prices for things generally rose. Costume contests were becoming more lucrative, with prizes in the tens of millions.

Now, the value of inf has dropped hugely, since there's so much of it floating around. To get respectable costume contest groups together, the more extravagant prizes are in the hundreds of millions, with lots of large lower-tier prizes. But still, the vendor prices are still fixed in stone at those trivial years-ago levels.

If a player isn't using the market to at least sell drops, or if their sights on what enhancements are needed to complete a character are high in IOs, then it's easy to feel poor still.

I suppose a lot of people still believe that your average piece of common salvage has a fair price of 250 inf, simply because that's still what a vendor will pay for it. That's not value anymore, that's round-off error. I currently list all my drops at 1 inf, basically unless it's a purple or equivalent, but only to get them sold and in the hands of people who might want them fast, and to keep my own slots clear for transactions with actual value. I'd list my drops at negative prices if I could. I'm generally competing in a glut market to get my goods out fast ahead of the other sellers.

I think the peak prices during the days better represent the true values of salvage. It's what the majority of people who want them will compete with each other to pay for the time scales of delivery they want, when they're all close enough in time to realize they're competing. And I think it also defines the smallest block of inf that people feel has any actual value -- probably 50-200k right now. Disagree? Try to hold a costume contest with a grand prize of 250k.

I don't believe there is any market supply-demand signal being created by prices that are lower than that; even though the percentage of profits may "look" amazingly high, a thousand percent of nothing is still nothing. We don't have the market throughput capacity to aggregate lots of small transactions into meaningful wealth. It would be like trying to trade wheat by the grain, or petroleum by the drop.

I think it would be fantastic to have a "Load" button underneath each costume in the costume window, even outside the tailor.

Person A: "I have a Something. I could delete it, or vendor it. But, I'm willing to bother to put it on the market if I can get some meaningful amount of influence for it. Say, 100,000. After all, I don't have to sell it at all; it's mine, and I have free choice to keep it, vendor it, delete it, craft it, or do anything else with it I want. That's what ownership means."

Person B: "I need a Something. I could defeat enemies until I get one by luck, or using tickets, merits, etc. But if I can spend some of my influence on it, I would look for it on the market. I'm in a hurry, because I could get it a lot of other ways. So 100,000 sounds reasonable to me. After all, I have the influence, it's mine, and it's my free choice to spend it or not however I want. That's what ownership means."

Person C: "How -dare- you two have an agreed exchange without me setting your terms! I don't think a Something is worth even a fraction of that! I demand market price caps!"

When I join a global channel, I understand I'm agreeing to the moderators' rules of conduct for that channel. It's a condition of continuing membership I've agreed to by either joining or not leaving.

If someone stays, and tries to use the channel otherwise, then I feel they're not showing personal integrity. Moderators ought to consistently silence or boot such members. It's not a whole lot different than people who exploit game-bugs they find, when they gave their word when they accepted the terms of service that they would not. Don't like the rules? Don't join, or leave at one's first opportunity.

If someone joins a channel and doesn't like how it's run? That person should leave. Don't stay and try to reap the benefits of that channel while willfully breaking the set of rules that have made it a success. Disagree with those rules? Discuss it with the people who've the authority to change them -- those same mods.

If moderators conduct a channel doesn't retain its membership or activity, they've no one to blame but themselves. Make a set of rules that works.

I don't mean this literally, but rather in a roleplay sense. Assume you had a former loyalist from the responsibility arc, and that character did not wish to completely abandon their Praetorian roots to the extent of returning to their home country and directly attacking its military forces (Lambda Trial) and established institutions (BAF Trial). I can seen both arcs of resistance doing so, and I feel a power-arc loyalist could easily make that choice, but I don't see a way to do so as a loyalist without abandoning what that character stood for. Doing so doesn't make one a responsible citizen upholding what is good, and fighting what is bad from within the system; in my opinion it makes that character a traitor and turncoat.

Sure, one could argue that the scripted character development asserts that a former loyalist must abandon their roots to this extent to play the content through, but I reject that. I feel we players decide our characters' development, not blindly follow a set, one size fits all, script.

Further, one could just skip the incarnate trials until there is incarnate content that doesn't involve the character's abandonment of principle I described above. I'm not holding my breath for that content. One could just ignore the roleplay basis of the incarnate trials, get the powers and boosts, and consider them one's core powers continuing their natural development. I've seen a few players roleplay this, and treat their presence on the incarnate trials as completely out-of-character. Most for their own reasons, not the one I described in my opening paragraph.

As an alternative, one might run the trials as is, but then write a substitute trial experience into the character's history. This is what I meant by 'reskinning' the trials from the thread title. So this is my question. How might the trials be re-described after the fact to support the enduring characterization of a responsible loyalist?

As I understand it, Freedom has the most robust server hardware configuration. That may be a factor in their choice.

I think this is a much better plan. But I think offering a special badge as the incentive to join the stress test wasn't an ideal option. Perhaps a special, 24-hour "Quadruple-XP & Double Merits" event on Freedom only would have done as well. Even offer characters created on Freedom during that 24 hours a server transfer token afterwards.

I think this belongs in the markets and inventions forums.

Past that, I couldn't disagree more.

Common salvage is cheap, and remains cheap. It spikes high when impatient people feel they absolutely can't wait even a short period to get it. There's also several effective and easy alternative ways to get it apart from bidding frantically high prices on the market. No one makes anyone bid those too-high prices except themselves.

No one needs purples or PVP-IOs. These are intentionally super-rare. Of course they're going to be expensive on the market, that's intentional. Not having them is not a sign of failure in any way; nor should anyone expect to gain full sets of them by random drops.

The Market itself is designed to be a competitive arena as much as a place to trade stuff. In that respect, it's not working incorrectly if it separates out "winners". That being said, if you manage your expectations and exercise some patience, the market will work very well for you, especially since the merge, to help you get a lot of cool, yet optional, stuff.

I was on a very laggy BAF the other day. I asked the league as a whole to dismiss their Lore pets, and it cleared up greatly. The server has to work very hard to manage all those extra pets, their interactions with players, other pets, and the npcs. As more players have been getting their Lore slots filled, they use more pets, hence, it seems like we have an escalating lag problem. We do, but I think it's from escalating use of pets.

If those players who don't need to use Lore pets would not summon them during the nasty fights, then the normal pets from MMs and some controllers wouldn't be much of an issue.

I've remapped my arrow-keys to do the movement. I rarely use "strafe" -- I find it an unnatural way to move. I also don't use the mouse to point my camera, unless I'm holding down the key that holds my character's orientation still; page-up, I believe. I don't find it comfortable to the mouse for pointing my character as holding it for any length of time can be painful. I also prefer to use my primary hand for controlling movement, hence I don't use the WASD keys for that, and have them remapped to do other things.

I recently tried another superhero MMO whose name I won't mention, and found it terrible as a play experience. The key binding options were very limited, and after discussing alternatives in that game's forums, I learned there was no way to avoid using the mouse to turn the camera; nor was there any way to have my character face any direction but north without using the mouse. I have to add that their user community was not particularly helpful to new players.

I consider it one of City of Heroes great strengths -- so many keys and controls can be remapped that even if one isn't from the generation who learned to play games with game-controllers and FPS mouse looking, one can still find a combination that makes controlling one's character comfortable and sustainable.

How about...

UNUSED ACIDS WILL EXPLODE AND KILL YOU IN TEN SECONDS ... NINE ... EIGHT ...

Players are using the Queue merely as a "Contact" to start the trials, and not as a method for forming the teams.

I was pretty sympathetic to Wendy's position earlier in this thread, but less so now. Please, ease up, calm down. When you bring an issue like this to the forums, you're going to get a a lot of replies that disagree, and many for good reasons. Pocket-D really is a zone intended primarily for socialization between heroes and villains -- that's the reason it's coop, and secondarily to support seasonal and other special events. The Devs said so. You're not prohibited from running raids out of it, and yet should be gracious good visitor while doing so; and not bring this angry sense of entitlement and consequent disparagement of other people's play styles to the table.

I'd like to see the Devs fix the problems with leagues that make everyone go out and do Zone-Tetris to begin with. That's the core problem here. No one should need to hunt down multiple instances of Pocket-D just to join the Trials Queue.

I think this is too wide a definition of griefing. If someone's trying to nudge me off a ledge, or emote-dancing their MM-pets around me and I ask them politely to stop, and they answer back snarkily with a refusal, then I'd say griefing. If they're in some actually legitimate game activity, like just running a toggle while they wait for a mission to start, that's not griefing -- it's missing the deliberate intent to grief. I may not like it, and it might be nice of them to accommodate my wish if I ask them nicely, but it's not griefing if they refuse.

This came up in the Ustream broadcast today, and the two devs there seemed surprised that people were using the D as a trial jump-off; and said that the D was intended as a social gathering place. I wouldn't put too much into that; but there it is.

I think the underlying problem is they didn't realize there'd be so many pre-formed maximum size leagues going at the same time -- so many that there aren't enough coop zones for them all. It'll probably ease up in a week or two.

Until then, I think it would go a long way for us all to try to ask politely, respond politely, and accommodate reasonable requests when we can.

If people say Level 52 or Level 53, we know what they mean, so it's all good.

You will only see 50 (+2) or 50 (+3) inside the BAF or Lambda trial. These two new shifts are for incarnate content only, and aren't active anywhere else.

Basically, these people are advertising themselves as having Tier-3 shifts or better in Alpha, and Lore and/or Destiny. They're not actually level 52 or 53 -- the maximum actual level of characters is still 50.

I agree, the LFG system doesn't work well at all, and I've stopped using it.

The main problem is that it makes teams that are too small. You always lose a few somewhere along the line, and teams made like this, out of essential random people are typically unbalanced anyways. It should never form a team from the queue unless it's at the maximum size for the trial in question, and it ought to aggressively add latecomers to existing leagues it's formed that have dropped down below the maximum even while they play.

The waiting time it shows is a joke, for sure. It should only show times for leagues formed through the LFG queue, and not pre-assembled teams that queue and launch in short order.

I don't know what the feedback was in Beta, but if any of these issues were considered there, and this system was kept anyway, the Devs likely think it's fine as is, and it'll stay as is. A terrible shame, if so. It had a lot of promise, and then hugely under-delivered once it met the live servers.

I like watching movies a few times over; my husband can't sit still for them more than once. Some people can watch one movie a few times in a row; others, like me, would prefer to only re-watch movies we haven't seen in a while.

It's a continuum of preference; I don't know where most people fall on it. This game, due to the variety of powersets and archetypes, made it possible to change-up the library of movies enough on your own, that a lot of people could rewatch them more.

Now we have a new library of content, but it's only two movies; and calling them movies is abit of a stretch -- they're 30-minute shorts. Very fast-paced and exciting shorts to be sure, but still just shorts. We have a lot of time on our hands, and a fantastic new big-screen and home theater to watch them on, but for some people, it's still just far too few movies.

The game had a strategy to gain and retain customers; it was, loosely speaking, based on variety. So many powers and archetypes, so many different ways to fight, and a lot of different stuff to do with them -- astronomical numbers of combinations. For variety driven players, who flocked to this game on account of that existing design, the new incarnate content with its current drive for repetition, whether done in rapid succession or over many weeks, it's sure to be a disappointment. Worse for them that the developer staff hyped the new content quite a bit. Alternative to the often-requested level cap increase, approachable, casual friendly, all that. I don't think they really understood this part of their player-base very well.

I ran the BAF and Lambda trials about fifty times each this last week, with a lot of successes in with a good share of failures. I got tier-3 boosts in all four new slots, and had a lot of fun. However, I can see where a lot of other people would consider this an intolerable grind, and feel the game has changed in a very bad way. They're not playing wrong; they're not maladjusted; they're motivated to enjoy this pastime differently and are speaking from their hearts over real concerns.

I hope the developers have more incarnate oriented trials and TFs in the works, and even more incarnate storylines aimed at smaller groups. In my opnion, variety built and sustained this game, and departing from that path entirely would be a problem.

Zone Tetris.

This is when people struggle to get all their league members into the same zone at the same time to start their trials. It gets really bad when more than one large league is trying this at the same time.

Broadcast in the RWZs can get almost silly, with people begging anyone to leave the zone so their last members can get in.

Tonight, a BAF league I was on went through two RWZs, the Midnighter Club, Cimerora, Pocket-D, and finally to Pocket-D-2 before we could get started. It took a while, with some members not being able to find these zones, not have access to Midnight or Cimerora unlocked, and so on. Players were getting impatient and dropping, and we continually recruited to get back up.

Short of being able to start the trial with a pre-made league from mixed zones, just like the individual queue allows; does anyone have any ideas on how to work with or around Zone Tetris?