Samuel_Tow

I feel the same way, myself. I've never been a fan of infinite exclusivity, and would rather things remain exclusive for a time only, upon which point they're made widely available. That's my position both for exclusive things I want and for exclusive things I own. Elemental Order is, to me, not functionally different from Celestial Armour.

I doubt the authenticity of your stories.

That's because "DFB BLUE" is unreasonably popular and partly because those of us left on the red-side are the kind of people who weren't all that interested in teaming anyway. I see a lot of people running around the Isles when I play there, but most of them run around alone. I realise your point is teaming, and I do appreciate that aspect, but teaming opportunities are not quite the same as population issues. You may not eliminate too much teaming opportunity if you were to remove redside, but you'd still take a chunk out of plenty of people's characters.

This is the same argument as the removal of Skyway City - just because it's not popular doesn't mean there isn't a decent number of people who still like it and want it around. There may not be enough to have a visibly high population, but there are enough to mind.

Sure, sure, whatever you say.

Of course, let's ignore what the term means and parse it word for word. I'm sure someone somewhere at some point has used the term "pay to win" to actually refer to paying to "win" at anything, so by all means - redefine your terminology and hold me to task on semantics. I'm sure it's more convenient to parse my posts as saying what's convenient for you rather than what you know full well that I'm saying. It's one more way to "poke holes in my argument." It's a pity it doesn't actually mean anything, but by all means, discuss what it means to win the game when I never actually intended to talk about winning. You pick the direction of the argument, I'll sail along and snark.

No, it isn't. I'm glad we've arrived at the same conclusion we started from, considering you invented my claim that it's "required" to begin with. But, hey, if you have time to burn, do go through my posts and find where I possibly maybe alluded to it. I'm sure it'll be time well spent and I'll be so broken up about it.

"Terminology" implies that it has a special meaning above and beyond the combined meanings of the words used to make it up. Even if I accepted your re-interpretation of terminology to mean whatever's is convenient for you to mean, you're still ignoring what I was saying in lieu of what you insist I must have been saying despite my repeated explanations.

But the truth is you know full well what I mean, it's simply less convenient to argue against me if I'm seen as having a moderate argument. It's so much easier to ridicule me if you put up a straw man of what science says my words must mean and then shooting it down. I admit it's fun to watch, but it's largely pointless.

Trying to clarify what I mean would logically involve asking me what I meant and waiting for an answer. That's as opposed to postulating what I must have meant and lambasting me for it. Which is what you did. Me? I've decided to stop being angry for the time being. Think I'll be snarky and sarcastic for a while, instead. Not really any more pleasant, but it is variety nonetheless.

I'd re-explain what I mean, but that's actually covered lower down.

What I asked is this.

OK, so this I can work with and respect, phrased like it is. The answer to this is no. I don't mind other people having the ability to purchase temporary buffs, specifically because I don't mind much of anything other people do. That this keeps circling back to "you're just jealous that your super IO build that you don't actually have isn't as unique any more" is where talks break down somewhat, since that's ignoring the problem in search for a straw man. What other people can do is never a problem for me. I'll never compete with them and, chances are, I'll never team with them, either.

What bothers me is that we're sticking Marketing into the actual game, and Marketing is one of those things that I REALLY don't want to be exposed to after I've already paid for a product and become a subscriber. I can see trying to market something to me to ensure I know about the product - that's prudent. Continuously intruding on my gameplay and swapping rules around in search for a higher profit really isn't something I feel I should have to deal with, and it seems like a VIP subscription ought to give me that.

It doesn't. It gives me free stuff, but it doesn't give me special treatment. And when I say "special treatment," I don't mean more powerful stuff or the ear of the Dev team or anything else unfair. I mean treatment that saves me from all the irritating parts of running a business and actually treating me like an important person, as opposed to a discount customer. Money I have, that's not the issue. I've spent on ridiculous things (like my Nerf Longshot that I had to buy second-hand because Nerf are idiots and discontinued it). I can pay for a better service, because I honestly don't want to be treated like a Free player when I pay a VIP subscription, and why I mean by that is I don't want to be treated as a money bag to be squeezed by Marketing.

This really strikes me as the tale of the goose that lay the golden eggs. I'm more than willing to spend money on this game, probably rather more than I should, but when I feel like that just isn't enough and this game's Marketing is ever devising newer ways to get even more money out of me, I find myself disinclined to pay even what I already am. When I feel like I'm being treated like a money bag, then I treat the studio like a cheepskate in return, and that ought to not be necessary. Sure, opportunistic promotions are the way of the F2P MMO, but I'd rather like to "buy" my way out of them so I can play the game without a real money marketplace being shoved into my nose constantly.

Quite a bit more than what? By this time, I've spent around $1500-$1800 on this game over all the time I've played it. I can buy most of the stuff a VIP subscription earns me for an extra $100 or $200 and be done with it. I can recreate the 60 slots I have for around as many dollars and that's about all I'd be losing. The rest I've already paid for in subscription fees. It's expensive, yes, but it's not THAT expensive, all things considered.

And again, I'm not looking for a cheap deal. I'm not looking for a discount. I'm looking for the "I" in "VIP" to actually mean something. Right now it just means I want to pay less, and this is the exact opposite of what I feel it should mean.

Probably not, of course. But I hate rentals considerably more than... Pretty much anything else I can think of, to do with the Market at least. I would sooner gamble with my money on Super Packs than pay for "rentals," because at least then I know that when I do get something I want, it'll stick around. I dislike renting power because it either increases my subscription fee by other words, or else it's really not that useful. Aside from the occasional boosts to get past a tough patch, of course. And it's not that I mind increasing my subscription, but I'd rather do that by, you know, increasing my subscription than by being loaded down with consumables.

[/quote]Again, stop with the "I'm a victim here!" ploy. It's not convincing anyone Sam. I didn't insult your intelligence, that is you reading something into my disagreement that isn't there.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, that's an easy claim to make, less so to make it true by saying it's true. If you'd approached my post like you did right before saying this, I would not have responded as I did. But you didn't. You chose to adopt a condescending approach that ridiculed my argument based on what you redefined my words to mean. So my response was overly hostile and unfair. Of course it was. But at least I don't try to pretend that, no, really, I was just politely asking a question and it was just you who read too much into it.

If you want to have an actual reasonable discussion, then I'd be all too happy to oblige. Simply keep off the mockery and the malicious arguments and I will respond in kind. Despite what it may seem like, I'm not an unreasonable guy and I can see you're perfectly good at having a reasonable discussion. But if you insist on actually quarrelling with me, then I will gladly play the bad guy. It's up to you how you want to play it. I'm game either way.

Because that's not the point. Zwillinger himself explained that people weren't buying the consumables as much as the Marketing team wanted, and this seems like an attempt to shove consumables in people's faces and go "See? See? Now don't you like it? Don't you want more?" with about the same regard as my mother trying to convince me to try a new type of food when I was nine.

Moreover, people have spent over $200 on those things in search for the costumes or the pet or just out of rotten luck. Making these things a gamble is an attempt to make the actual average cost of the item higher than it would have been if it were sold regularly, yet still make many people feel like they got a bargain. Even when they didn't. Oh, sure, it might have cost you 800 PP to get an otherwise 400 PP set, but look at all the OTHER stuff you got!

That's marketing at its purest, and I can't say I'm thrilled.

And you'd be horribly wrong. Plenty of people play villain-side, and I don't just say this because I do. I play villain-side and I see enough people there daily to know it's not abandoned. People would care because old, hard-fought characters would cease to exist and concepts would cease to make sense if they were moved hero-side. There are, as a point of fact, a good number of people who only play villains.

I get that you're exaggerating for the sake of an exaggerated point, I get that. But you can't just make these sorts of statements and expect people to not take issue.

Sarcasting disregard noted and appreciated. Can I another?

You're arguing that too much content is a bad thing and that giving people options is inferior to not giving them options. Perhaps not directly, considering I'm arguing for more options and you're essentially dismissing me as having any place in holding an opinion, you're heavily implying it.

Yes, I'm aware that those aren't options that everyone likes. What cannot be disputed, however, is that they are still options which exist, and as long as they exist, I refuse to be badmouthed for wanting to make use of them. As long as they exist, I see no possible rational argument to be made for removing them outright. At the very least not when we're talking about zones with a lower limit smaller than 15 - the Ouroboros entry point.

I realise that it's easy to shoot for the low-hanging fruit and dismiss me as a person who matters to begin with instead of addressing my argument, but you also have to realise that this does absolutely nothing to change my mind. In case you haven't noticed, my opinion is immune from unreasoned pressure and only ever alters from actual reasoned arguments. Yes, I'm sure you could insist that I'll never listen to reason. That's OK, I've heard it before. But the fact of the matter is that "reason" is what I want to discuss. Who has the right to hold what opinion and make what requests is simply not interesting.

You know as well as I do that "pay to win" is not a term that's interpreted any more literally than "free to play" or "VIP." You also know full well what it means - paying for power. Minor semantic arguments make no difference.

But a great deal of content that's normally a pain in the *** to run sure goes a heck of a lot smoother if you have status protection. The stricter your definition of "required" becomes, the less relevant the argument you're truing to prove with it is because you're simply painting it into a corner. Again, you know what I mean.

Which would be a reasonable assertion had I not said, in that same post, that I don't want my VIP subscription to be just about, or even at all about, getting free stuff. The last thing I want to see is the VIP player status become a "budget" option for people to get if they don't want to pay more. The VIP subscription should be the expensive option that's nevertheless the "best" option, but that's not how Marketing is treating it. I'm not interested in free stuff, I'm interested in not being part of the demographic that every little time sink is marketed to. I would like, for instance, to have the ability to pay - more if necessary - and get what's in the random result tables from Super Packs. It's clear those are aimed at sucking more money out of people by promising small costs but not giving you what you want every time.

Or did I not say that in this particular post? If I didn't, I apologise. I put it in at least one of the ones I made, but they're scattered all over the boards. In case it's not in this thread, that's what I mean.

*snerk* OK, I admit - that was funny.

What? I mean... What? I read words, they follow proper sentence structure, I know this is English, yet every time I read this question, I draw a blank. What are you asking? What, specifically, when I explained, and numerous times, that I'm likely going to buy a few of those to use to muscle through tough missions. Seriously, what?

Which I can buy, so that's a budget option.

So, Incarnates? Because everything else can be purchased, it just costs more. Again, I'm not interested in a budget option.

Which I can buy either way. Again, I'm not interested in a budget option.

Which I can buy either way. And I have. Repeatedly. If I see something I want and I lack the points, PayPal is within arm's reach. Again, I'm not interested in a budget option.

Oh, happy day. And again - I can buy those if I want them. That's not VIP exclusive. It's a budget option.

Which, again, I can buy with real money if I bonked my head and actually thought that was a good idea. Again - a budget option.

Which I'm pretty sure I could buy, if not directly then by purchasing enough points. Again, it's free stuff.

Aside from Incarnates and possibly the Architect, what is there in the VIP subscription that isn't just a discount, a budget option or a freebie? I can pretty much guarantee that if I dropped down to premium, the only thing that would change is it would cost me a couple hundred dollars in one drop to get back to where I was before. In other words, I would lose money but not perks. That doesn't make me feel important, it makes me feel like I'm being offered a discount, which I don't really need at this point in my life.

I would actually prefer these if they WERE permanent and expensive, to be honest. Yes, it would be selling power, but if we're going that route, then I'd much rather we SOLD power over RENTING it out.

Your compassion and solidarity has convinced me.

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Now, if you were actually interested in an honest discussion of opinion and preference, I'm open to it. But if you're just going to toss off-hand insults to my intelligence and try and fail to browbeat me, then we can just keep up this circus, derail the thread and get it locked. I've gotten pretty good at that over the years.

I wouldn't say it's fair to blame JUST Jack, though his tunnel vision certainly helped. What I want to blame, and what's the single most prominent source of just about every problem I've had with villain-side since its creation comes down to two HORRID ideas:

1. The Villain story had to inexorably tie the villain to the world, chart his story for him, pick his goals for him and eventually get him into Arachnos' employ. This was downsized from the original idea where players would have to choose from one of the stock villain factions to serve, a concept that made my beard stand on end as soon as I heard about it. That's why so much of the legacy villain content assumes you want "brownie points with the Spiders" and why, naturally, the final form of character progression is to get powers from Arachnos. The entire theme of the game built up Arachnos to be the holy grail of CoV that players would want to serve and emulate, and it's really backfired in the faces of the original writers since it transpired that... Players kind of don't want to be lackeys. Grandville does make a step in the right direction, but it's too early in the evolution of the problem to really make a difference.

2. Villains needed an "evil" version of everything heroes got and everything villains got had to be "evil." So, they got Infamy despite the fact that "influence" is not good-themed and is actually more appropriate for a villain to have, they got Strike Forces instead of Task Forces even though the difference between the terms is completely unrelated to good and evil... It's gotten to the point where people insist on calling villain Super Groups "Villain Groups" even though the game has never called them this. So, villains couldn't get Epic pools because "Anchillary Power Pool" is too "good." They needed something evil, and what's more evil than being a lackey of Arachnos, right?

As far as I'm concerned, while City of Villains revolutionised the game and introduced many positive changes, its central theme was irreparably flawed and continues spoil villain-side even to this day. Current content seems to have exactly the right idea and is making great strides towards cleaning up this mess, but there's just so much to clean up...

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On the topic of heroes getting access to Patron powers? I say enable them to everyone without requiring the Patron arcs. Those are still good enough to run for the content alone.

That's pretty much where I am. It seems heedless to me to put me through the catherine wheel over something I'm already willing to pay for in the vain hope of making me pay even more for it. Seriously, that's EA marketing right there, and it makes me unwilling to not just spend my money on this mess, but respect the studio that made this decision in the first place.

It's been, what... Months since those were introduced? And they continue to be a problem. I'm pretty sure there's a finite limit on the amount of good will you can cash in for green dollars.

Well, sure, but that's why I've been a great proponent for the difficulty settings in this game. I'd actually like to make them even more intricate and customizable so that everyone can tailor the game to his own preferences. If I want it easy, let me have it easy. If you want it hard, then by all means, I'd love to let you have it hard. It's what the settings are for, or should be for at any rate.

This I can agree with wholeheartedly. I HATE difficulty spikes when they come too prevalent. Easy or hard, what I want more than anything else is consistent difficulty. That way I can tally my strengths and pick my difficulty. This really isn't the case in much any of the I22 and I23 content. The "special" spawns in Incarnate content are just absurd. If I set my difficulty to x1, I get x1 basic spawns and x1 special spawns. If I set my difficulty to x2, I get x2 basic spawns and x4 special spawns. Wait, what? So if I set it easy it's too easy but if I set it just one notch harder it's too hard? Why? Why can there be no middle ground? Why can there be no consistency?

That's an entirely separate issue, I agree, but that actually IS the kind of issue which could make me buy a power amplifier. I'd actually like to buy one that lasts only 10-15 minutes, if I could. Just enough to blow through that ******* "Romulus' Army" mission where my NPC companions are useless and I spend three hours pulling spawns enemy by enemy and leaving for inspirations every other spawn. Or maybe I should save myself the trouble and just drop it. The "run the whole zone" reward is only once a week, so that's more than enough time to have my mission drop feature reset. CAN it be dropped, though?

Anyway, I'll probably get a couple of each and keep them in my e-mail in case something pisses me off, but that's about the only use I have for them.

I wouldn't say "amplifiers are the only way," but you can't deny content has been getting increasingly harder with each new addition. Even if the intent isn't to force people into amplifiers, we may end up going there for those of us who don't really have very impressive builds.

Other than the constant omnipresent ambushes, I agree.

Well, technically, I know why I'm paying a subscription - Incarnates and the 60 or so character slots I'm using. I can replicate all the character slots with enough of a cash drop, but the Incarnate system isn't otherwise available. So I can't say that there's NOTHING I'm paying a VIP subscription for, more that... I think I ought to get more "convenience" perks. A way out of the Super Packs would have been nice, say by putting the Elemental Order set in as an alternate T9 VIP set. That still makes it exclusive, but it lets the "very important people" among us use that VIP status and get it without the hassle. But the point here is to make us pay for the "surprise gifts," so that's not going to happen.

Why I say this is I've played a lot of F2P MMOs. Most of them have a pretty crappy deal for Free and even Premium customers, mooching money on everything from transportation to simple amenities to respecs to inventory space and so on. But when you pay to subscribe, all of those nasty limitations go away and you feel like subscribing really does give you the VIP treatment. That's not the case here. In fact, here I feel that subscribing barely gets me anything past Premium and even as a VIP, I'm still treated as a Free player to whom everything must be marketed and sold.

Maybe I just haven't joined exclusive clubs enough in my life, but I keep thinking VIPs ought to be treated with a little more respect. I'd even trade some of the free stuff I'm getting (like zones and costume sets) for more respect in how things are marketed to me. I would think that my recurring subscription ought to make up for the recurring expenses on consumables, where I would only need to pay extra for permanent content, but more and more I'm seeing rentals marketed to me, and it makes me feel less and less "important," is why I'm making these statements.

I honestly don't think the performance amplifiers are a good idea, but at the very least they're cheap. That's good marketing, if nothing else, and I might be convinced to get a few for special occasions. But what I dislike is the MMO tradition behind them - pay money to get a buff and then go grind with it. I just don't like that sort of design.

I'm reminded of the treatment of Bossman from the horrible Wing Commander movie. He died in combat, and the tradition onboard the carrier was to deny the man ever existed.

I don't really have a problem with the new Faultline. It's a cool zone with a very good story. But I can't agree that it gets the same point across. I guess if you consider "the point" to be massive destruction, that I could see, but we have a number of zones that do that on a much larger scale - Boomtown, Eden, and now Siren's Call. What the old Faultline was to me, however, was "big." Big enough to challenge the draw distance looking straight down. Big enough for me to drop half a mile down a sheer dam wall. Big enough to stand at the foot of the thing, look straight up and marvel at it.

I like big things and I cannot lie. And honestly, since CoV, we've been running on an economy of size. Even Recluse's Tower, the one that's supposed to be big and huge and imposing, is still pretty small. It's tall, sure, but even then not very, and it's so skinny! Honestly, think about it and tell me what the biggest single thing in the game is in your opinion, not counting the Shadow Shard. If you defaulted to the Terra Volta Reactor Complex cooling towers, then I agree with you, but besides that? Honestly, what else big is there that we have left?

I disagree with this, and completely. Yes, you could run Atlas Park and shoot past Kings Row. How many times would you want to do that? How many times in a row can you run the same series of missions, again and again, before you want something new? Because for me, that was "around three times." Ever since then, I've been skipping Atlas Park by streethunting around the zone and then going to Kings Row or the Hollows. Because at least there, I can run content I didn't run the previous time. I have multiple paths that I can alternate between. It's not always the same thing.

And I don't agree that the "low levels" fly by so fast. They do if you just nosedive into a hydra head, but for me, I tend to take a couple of days to get to 10, about a week to get to 20. And I WANT diverse content in that level range or else it just gets heedlessly boring.

They are meaningless not because they literally have no meaning, but rather because people use them as a crutch to prop up weak arguments, using them to mean whatever is convenient for the current argument. These are labels that have been thrown around so much they have lost their meaning because everyone has been called everything at one point or another. These terms are meaningless because people abuse them with no basis or justification for their use.

So do I. And it sucked. Hard.

Let me give you my perspective on this. I tried to make Blasters work for something like 6 years. I muscled through all the assorted problems they had until I finally just decided to cut my losses and reroll all of them. I WANT to play Blasters, but I just don't enjoy them. Yet at the back of my mind, there's always been this possibility that maybe some days the developers will salvage the AT and make it into something I want to play. I was actually considering maybe rolling some new Blasters, or maybe rerolling some characters back into Blasters.

Until I saw the changes. They're not bad in any way, of course, but they're far from enough for me to try and make them work. Instead of rolling new Blasters, I'll just keep on doing what I've been doing and reroll what's left into something else. My 42 Archery/Devices is probably going Katana/Something, my 30-ish Rad/Energy is probably going Spines/Bio and that might be the last of them. It has become clear to me that Blasters will never be what I want them to be, that neither snipes nor protection powers for Blasters will be what I want them to be. So I'm really just washing my hands of the whole thing and don't intend to get involved in Blaster discussions again. I no longer have a stake in them.

To you. I'm sure you read my post and didn't just stop at the first paragraph, so I won't repeat all the reasons why I liked the zone. You're free to disagree, of course, but please extend me at least the basic courtesy of not gloating about me losing a zone I loved irreversibly. Those absolute value judgements you're passing around are starting to get to me, to be honest, and I don't think I want to deal with them if you insist on persisting.

To prove a point to a friend of mine, I took a Super Speeder to the base of the dam wall, at the far end of the Reservoir. I proceeded to race back to the zone entrance without taking a single point of damage within the span of about 30 seconds to a minute while making precisely one wrong turn, relying on the inherent stealth of Super Speed and the slow reaction time of unaggroed critters when moving through them quickly. If the zone existed, I'd take you to show you in person.

Faultline may have been a bit harsh against Super Speed back when we didn't have jump packs, flight packs, all manner of teleporters or the Reveal power, and even then it wasn't that much of a bother. All it took is taking a single trip through the cracks to see what's down there and beyond that, it was as simple as following the streets in Steel Canyon. Pick a crack, follow it through until you reach the shallow bits and just jump out.

When the revamp of Faultline was being discussed, I suggested building bridges across the cracks and setting down a large number of elevators to bring you back to the top layer. That should have been enough to help anyone who picked Super Speed yet lacked any real ability to use it outside endless flat ground. What I specifically DIDN'T want to see was the cracks filled in, because with that, the zone looks like every other zone in the game, most notably Founders' Falls. And not just because it borrows the same building design.

Faultline was one of the game's most beautiful zones and one of the few places where you could see REALLY big things in the city. The Rikti Crash Site used to have a really impressive array of "something," I think it was solar batteries, but that disappeared years ago. It used to have the very imposing Rikti Shuttle sitting at a very steep angle so it towered over the zone, but that's now been laid flat so you can have a Trial in it. Because, honestly, aside from the Faultline Dam wall, the only other truly massive structures in the game are the Chantry and the Storm Palace, and those even I can't defend for accessibility.

Speaking of botching "improvements" on zones, by far the WORST thing that could have happened to the Shadow Shard was to slap those co-out teleporters and call it "fixed." It's not fixed. Every time I go there, I find yet another geyser has started shooting off to the side, to the point where movement around the place is becoming impossible even for someone as patient about this as I am. But it's OK, because the zone is "fixed." You can take a teleporter to a blotch on the map. In the meantime, the Mole Points rot unused, a great concept forgotten and abandoned with actual story behind it, and the geysers continue to deteriorate every time the dev team mess with the game's physics parameters.

Like the Shadow Shard, I don't disagree that Faultline needed help with getting around. It could be problematic, it could be difficult, it could be annoying. But the "help" it received completely ruined the single most interesting and identifying feature of it. I don't want to see what happened to Faultline happen to Skyway City or any of the old zones as a means to "fix" them, because it's not a fix. It's changing the zone into a completely different, entirely new zone that just shares the same name. Take the skyways out of Skyway City and it literally becomes a clone of Steel Canyon, the same as what happened when Dark Astoria bugged and lost its fog.