Yoru-Hime

Thank you and Godspeed.

And you did it coming through Praetoria. Bonus points for added difficulty at the low levels.

The best memory I have playing Yoru-hime was a long time back on an STF that was trying it's darnedest to fall apart. Ghost Widow would heal off the tank, then hold him and rip him apart with his defenses down. Finally, I got frustrated and charged in with my Dark Servant without waiting for the rest of the team to get back from the hospital. Between our stacked debuffs and probably a nice dose of dumb luck, she never landed another blow. I politely refused the offer to try the same on Lord Recluse.

The thrill of finishing MoSTF back when it was the ultimate badge for heroes is also way up there.

Head to Freedom if you're locked out of Virtue.

33 APs on Virtue? How many Atlas Parks do we have on Freedom?

32 Atlas Parks. 200+ waiting to get in. Word is that the overflow is gathering on Freedom.

Atlas Park 29 just opened.

That Layton image is truly made of win. I actually have that figure, minus the shotgun hands.

Thanks for the first laugh I've had on this board all week, all of you.

Submitted, haven't done one of these years but I just couldn't resist.

No problem for me. It's just one more challenge to defeat. It'd be a little slow at first, since there isn't a well-established market to leverage, but with all the tools at my disposal, I'd be back on my feet in no time. The lack of vet rewards would be annoying, but hardly crippling.

Over the 12,000 mark!

William hit my feelings on the head. I won't avoid their games out of vengeance or fury. I'll avoid them because I now know how they do business and it doesn't mesh well with what I want from an MMO.

Not that a shutdown can't happen to any game, but NCSoft seems to prefer to euthanize their games at the drop of a hat rather than slowly letting them wind down for the sake of the community they've created. There are older games out there with smaller communities and worse graphics, but they're still hanging in there and in some cases, even still being updated with new content. Their profit margins must be razor thin, but other companies let them continue, even brag about their longevity. Not NCSoft. They have no sense of loyalty to their existing customer base. With this fact in mind, I would not purchase another game that they have the power to destroy the moment that their accountants deem it expedient.

Thanks for everything.

If you can come up with a workable plan, I'll throw some money behind it.

Thank you for everything. We wish you all the best.

Z,

I've laughed with you, argued with you, beat up the giant tentacle monsters that you set loose on my fair city, and enjoyed every minute of it.

Above all, I've respected you. You've always been straight with us, even when we didn't necessarily like it. You made this a better place. Thank you for everything and best wishes in whatever comes next.

Absolutely /signed.

I'd define skill as knowledge and the ability to use it effectively.

Someone who understands their own character and the situation well enough to do the right things at the right time is skillful. Skill is a learned attribute.

It's easy to pick out bad players. Those who don't know their own powers, who ignore directions, who have, for some reason or another either failed to contribute or are actively destructive to the team. Sometimes they're just novices and in the right environment they can learn a lot from being with skilled players. Sometimes they're fools who don't want to learn, even when given clear and friendly guidance on how to play better. Sometimes they're just jerks who get their kicks making others unhappy.

Most players are suitably skillful in most situations. With the exception of a few encounters, this game just isn't that hard.

Great players are harder to pick out because there are a lot of different ways to be great, and not all of them are obviously manifest the way that gross ineptitude is. Being truly great generally means that you've gotten past the point of desperate need for attention.

Great team/league leader?
Have lots of badges?
Know lots of ATs/powersets/builds inside-out?
Can solo hard targets/TFs/max difficulty maps?
Considered an authority on ____?

You could call any of these a sign of exceptional skill.

I'd lean toward Explosive Blaster over Nova for one reason:

You don't care that much where dead things land.

Mobs hit by Explosive Blast are a lot more likely to survive comparatively, so you want them to stay in place for further debuffing, melee beating, etc. If you hit something with Nova, it's probably not getting back up anyway.

It's not a question of taking more time to do them better. There is no programmer time here to play with, period. It's either do it with what a handful of community guys are capable of with existing tools or just not bother. Given the choice between doing them and not doing them, I'd certainly prefer to see them happening. It was an entertaining change-up from the usual.

Are these events memorable paragons of cool functionality and epic storytelling?

No, not really.

They're amusing if you're in the mood for them. They don't offer any exceptional rewards or get in the way of other content (See: Invasions, Rikti) so you're free to ignore them if you're not (except the spam in Admin).

For a few of the community team hopping on some admin accounts and trying to give everyone some light-hearted fun, they live up to billing. Keep in mind, they're doing this manually. For hours. On each and EVERY server. Much respect to the community team for the effort.

I ran up a full level on my Warshade on a calamari league on Infinity, taunting Mako and telling bad fish jokes the whole time. No code at the end, but oh well. Were the rewards epic and gloat-worthy? Nah. I'd have done better on an ITF. I've fought through ITF dozens of time, though. That's the first time I've EVER tangled with a hundred-armed tentacle monster off the shores of Talos Island.

From what I saw, those who showed up for nothing but a code, a badge, or epic XP may have gone away annoyed that this wasn't worth their precious time, but those who just wanted to have a little fun generally left well-satisfied.

Citadel is an absolute dinosaur in terms of game development. It's REALLY old. Pre-Issue 1 old. We'll never see it's like born again and we don't really want to, but it's also a bit of a history lesson. I dislike it as much as anyone, but I can see how it was created in the first place.

The original TF designers weren't nefarious villains out to make us miserable. They were doing their best they could under two very big handicaps compared to modern content writers. They didn't have the tools they have today and they didn't have years of experience to teach them what we do and don't like.

Keep in mind that back when the original TFs were written, the devs had fewer mechanics at their disposal than the average AE designer has today.

NPC Allies?
Hostages to lead out?
Prison maps?
Outdoor maps?
Wandering patrols?
Mid-mission ambushes?

Nope. They had none of these. They were still fighting just to get the TF system itself working right. (It wasn't pretty at first) Missions in general were really generic and TFs had little that really could set them apart from story arcs except for length, so that's what they went with.

There were no inventions, no merits, no badges, really no reward for TFs at all at first. Some XP, an SO, and a souvenir clue was about all you got for your hours of playtime. TFs were largely the domain of hardcore players who wanted to sit and play for hours on end anyway, so it may not have been immediately obvious that there was a fundamental problem with the way TFs were designed until they started drawing in a larger portion of the player base with more exclusive rewards.

If you trace TFs in the order of their creation, you see a slow progression from the hideous timesinks of the earliest days to sleeker, more fun and engaging experiences. They aren't all everyone's favorite, but I think it's safe to say that as time has moved forward, generally the TFs that have emerged are more and more popular than those before it.

So yes, Citadel is awful, but they had to start somewhere. Hopefully someday it and the remaining original TFs get a facelift reflecting everything the devs have learned in the years since.

For squishies, I would think that defense would still win for outright mez/secondary avoidance unless the status resistance aspect is very high, though they'll probably try to add in a little res with it to deal with RNG aggro.

The potential to even further ratchet up survivability for some melee characters is troubling. Tankers already seem superfluous in many situations and pushing the top end for other ATs even higher just makes their niche seem smaller. I think that we're either going to end up with really low resist numbers or we may have some stupidly unkillable Scrappers running around. My Energy Armor Scrap is drooling over the chance to layer some more resistance onto his defense and self-heal.