yasfan

I have reproduced the type of situation you're describing--I've now got an unpublished mission that in testing gives an entire map full of high level +10 mobs. But since the only application of it that I can see is even more egregious farming than is already being done, I'm not inclined to share it on the forums.

I personally consider this kind of "field of uberpurples" mission to be a potential game-breaker--but as the devs are soon going to be giving much more flexibility in difficulty settings than is now possible, perhaps they don't care about this kind of thing any more. And given that what I did wasn't particularly difficult, I'd be a little surprised if they weren't aware of it already.

But I wouldn't presume to read the dev's minds on this. If the devs A) aren't already aware of how to do this and B) are still interested in limiting the ability to do this, they should send me a PM and I'll explain what I did so they can consider ways to plug the hole. It shouldn't be particularly difficult. If I hear from them that they don't care whether this kind of thing happens or not, I'll post it and y'all can farm your brains out. If I don't hear from them, which I think is the likeliest outcome, then this is pretty much all I've got to say on it.

Finally got a map to spawn with the crystals--still not 100% clear on why it happens sometimes and not others. But whatever the reason, non-combat escorts don't appear to notice the crystals at all, they just run right through no problem.

Gonna bump this one because I'm having the same problem and can't seem to find an answer. Maybe my search-fu is off.

My rescue escort hits any color crystal field and stops. Doesn't run, won't cross it, just stands there in an alert pose. Needless to say, quite the problem for mission completion--particularly since the crystals are sometimes placed in narrow segments of a room where you really can't cross the room without crossing the field.

Also quite the problem for testing workarounds, since for reasons I don't understand, most times I load the map to bug test it has no crystals at all but once in a while it seems loaded with them.

Is there a workaround? Would it be enough to set the escort to non-combat (not ideal, but at least doable)? Not using CoT maps for CoT abductions seems a little extreme, but its the first mission in an arc and it would be nice if it were reliably possible to complete it.

Ah, got it. Had to go through some of the troubleshooting in the bugs section, but it's working now. Never mind. >.>

Hi all,

Sorry if this has come up a billion times, but I tried looking for it and if it's there my search-fu is broken...

I'm trying to publish a mission arc and instead of it happening, it mapserves me and disables my router. I can get onto the game just fine, but the publish thing has now shut down my router in a way that is clearly time-locked to my hitting the "publish" button 3 times in a row...

Any thoughts about how to fix this?

Hilarious, good use of the emotes, true to the tone of the original ads.

Oh, and poor hero. He can't catch a break.

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The Moderators... can ban the account if it is being too disruptive. I really don't know why this hasn't happened more.

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You don't? I think it's rather obvious. We buy the game to have fun, but NCSoft didn't make the game purely for our purposes. NCSoft made the game to make money. Accounts provide NCSoft with money. Banning accounts causes them to lose money.

So bans are something that are only going to be worth the company's loss of money if a player is so utterly disruptive that they are causing other people to _quit the game_ rather than use the other tools available to them, the most simple and effective of which is the /ignore command.

I have experienced behaviors of a player that were so offensive that I /ignored them. I could imagine behaviors so offensive that I would /petition them, while recognizing that most likely little will come of it. I'm having a hard time imagining what behavior a player of the game could do that would be SO obnoxious that it would cause other people to quit the game in outrage--while still knowing that the company did not invite, endorse, or encourage the player to be obnoxious, and in fact provides many mechanisms to ignore said player and discourages said obnoxious behaviors.

Hence, banning is quite rare.

Ah, so you were using diffusion, then.

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Um. I don't even begin to PvP and I'd say "lern2playnoob".

It's a game based on super-speeded, flying superheroes that shoot laser beams from their hands.

...what the heck else would be smarter than "run in... nuke... flee before the return hit.?

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I am not arguing that the hit-and-run approach isn't a smart tactic. It is very smart--and I've said so, in a prior post. Of course, as tactics go it would be even smarter still to have a laser-based satellite that plugs your opponent from orbit without you ever having to enter the battlefield at all. I'm sure that the smart tacticians among us are eagerly awaiting the "Nuke 'em from Orbit" AT.

What I AM arguing is that as tactically smart as hit-and-run is, it isn't representative of the superhero genre that the game is--at least in principle--trying to emulate, and it isn't nearly as fun to have done to you as it is to do it to someone else.

Since this is a game and not a battlefield, smart tactics that make the game unfun are things that any sensible game designer has an obvious interest in discouraging. I don't think it's a huge leap to suggest that this is why movement suppression is now making it more challenging to perform the hit-and-run attack successfully. Similarly, I'd suggest that this is why the tacticians among us will be waiting a loooooong time for the "Nuke 'em from Orbit" AT despite its obvious tactical advantage.

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While I can agree that burst-damage hit-and-run tactics were somewhat irksome when I first started pvping (I say when I first started, as it didn't take long to realize it wasn't really that hard to get some return hits in), I still have to disagree with the implementation of movement suppression as we have it now.

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Fair enough, your post is both reasonable and reasoned. Thanks, I appreciate that. I also take your point about how your brute now has a harder time of avoiding Storm Controllers--and your point about how fun and free it is to move about in all 3 dimensions. Of course, you can still do both of those things. All you have to do is stop hitting long enough for movement suppression to lift, and off you go.

What you can't do anymore is race in with a high-damage burst, smack someone, and then race just out of range long enough to recharge and blow them away without facing any significant retaliation. If you hit, you must be prepared to be hit back. If your build is not usable in the absence of the hit-and-run strategy, then yeah, you are going to have trouble with the new system.

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At any rate, just because some people were "abusing" (I put that in quotes as I personally don't see it as such) the previous unsuppressed movement, there were many more reasons why it was a viable system with some definite good (and I daresay necessary) aspects.

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The only counterargument one ever needs to make regarding whether or not the old system was "abused" or "viable" is to note the ghost-town nature of PvP zones for the last few years. It was abused, if the metric for abuse is the extent to which the playerbase avoids a feature of the game that was intended to be a major and heavily-used aspect of the game. It wasn't viable, if viability is assessed by whether or not the playerbase uses it. Whether the new system will prove to be viable or not remains to be seen--I'm hopeful, but time will tell.

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While yes, I could move on and adapt as certain people keeping bringing up, there are even less fights I can hope to win now, not more as Castle and crew seem to profess is possible.

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I'm guessing motives on the part of the devs here, which should always be taken with a grain of salt, but I would imagine that when Castle and crew talk about increasing the odds of winning, they don't mean for the set of playstyles and tactics that were already heavily favored to win in the old system. In a competitive game, you can't increase everyone's odds of winning simultaneously--you can only make it easier for a broad set of tactics to win by making it harder for the previously favored narrow set of tactics to win.

If you are determined to _not_ adapt to the new system, I would suggest that you might look forward to the increased challenge that the hit-and-run playstyle now faces--it will now require substantially more skill in order to do it successfully, and I am constantly reminded by hardcore PvPers about how skilled they are.

I do not, of course, know whether or not you count yourself as having mad combat skillz, but if you do, I'm sure you're secretly delighted to have this long-overdue opportunity to actually put those mad skillz to the test.

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They could fight back before. Nothing stopped them from doing so.

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Ah, do I detect a hint of "l2p"? Thenk you!

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Also, hit and run tactics not thematical to comic books? Have you ever read an issue of the Flash?

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I haven't. I have read Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, the Hulk, the X-men, and so on and so forth ad nauseum, but I'll admit that I have not read the Flash.

With all due respect to die-hard fans of the Flash, I think it would be very ill-advised to try to emulate the comic-book genre style of combat with a PvP system that so obviously favors Flash-esque behavior. I would call that ill-advised in much the same sense as a PvP system inspired by the fighting style of the Wonder Twins.

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You'd be surprised at how much good movement and evasion skills came into play in PvP matches.

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No, I wouldn't. I do PvP, although I'll be the first to say I'm not terribly good at it. All I'm trying to do is get some clarity on what the core issues regarding movement here are. For knowledgable players, who understand and use the auto-locking and auto-follow, there is no such thing as evasion--at least in the sense that a shooter game would use it, where you weave and bob to avoid getting nailed by a freely-moving process of aiming. Here, you're locked onto by me hitting "tab" no matter how much bobbing you do, unless you break line-of-sight or run faster than I can.

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...when the entire game for them gets slowed down exponentially, thus driving the unique feel of it (as compared to other MMO PvP systems)...

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Ah, right. Here's the "I'm good at it, you're not, and I like it that way" part of the argument. You might be interested to know that while you describe PvP in this game as having a "unique feel" and lamenting how it's getting slowed down, many other people--including but assuredly not limited to myself--describe the same principles of PvP as "broken" and complain about being killed too quickly and too easily. Which is unique, I suppose, but I doubt many people outside of the hardcore PvP crowd would view that uniqueness as a good thing.

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So instead, all we have to do now is smack our keyboard! Button mashing is clearly more skill-determining than tactics. Clearly.

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Ah, thanks for rephrasing my use of the word "fighting" as the obviously more accurate "button mashing". And while you're at it, I enjoyed your correction of "burst-damage hit-and-run" to "tactics". I bow to your new and improved verbiage, which obviously clarified my unhelpful terms.

Blowing someone to bits and racing away before they can respond is assuredly tactically brilliant, and my hats off to you for such a clever strategy. Were we on a battlefield, I would definitely want you on my side.

Of course, _we_ _aren't_ _on_ _a_ _battlefield_. This is a game. And your brilliant tactical manuever is also only fun for one of the two people involved in your tactic. While we're on the topic, it's also entirely antithetical to the style of comic-book combat that the game is supposed to be emulating.

Now, your tactical strategies will have to incorporate the idea that your opponent can fight back. I'm sure you'll manage.

Well, first-- yes, I think balance is important. I like to think that you do too, even if you put the word in quotes. Perhaps I'm wrong about that.

As far as movement suppression goes, your mad keyboard skillz don't play much of a role in the outcome against an experienced opponent--since there's no such thing as having to aim at your target in this game, and you can also auto-follow them with a single key-stroke. Most of the importance of movement as it has been up to this point has to do with line-of-sight issues--and of course it's a great way to smack around n00bs who don't understand how critical the "F" key is in PvP, since it's not terribly useful in PvE.

The major dynamic that is affected by movement suppression is that you're no longer able to smack someone with massive burst damage upside the head and race away before they even knew what happened. I hope you'll forgive my lack of sympathy about you having to hang out long enough to fight AFTER you get in the first hit.

I sincerely doubt that--the whining has been hard to miss--but by all means feel free to correct me.

I'd love to hear a reason why PvPers hate the new system that can't be quickly and easily shortened into "hey, I spent a lot of time and energy making my build/IO set/team a system-breaking invulnerable juggernaut, and I resent any effort on the part of the game to level the playing field for new entries or casual players". Go for it.

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/unasked opinion mode on
I think they should start a new server. This server should keep the old PVP dynamics and be deemed an "expert level" server.

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Unsigned. PvPers can learn to play the game as it exists now just like everyone else. And there's nothing "expert" about being unable or unwilling to adjust to dynamic conditions--in fact, that's the opposite of "expert".

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How about instead of focus on the negative we do something positive like brainstorm names for issue 14 after they tell us Architect is too hard to do again.

How about...
Issue 14 - Go Play Champions!
or
Issue 14 - You're not getting the hint, we want you all to leave!
What names can you come up with?

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I like

"Issue 14: Since you think it's so easy to do without ever running into unanticipated problems, why don't YOU make a MMORPG and run it flawlessly?"

or maybe

"Issue 14: Good Luck, Champions, Apparently the Angry Whiny People Are Coming Your Way."

I'm sure Issue 13 would totally RAWK if I could actually play it.

>.>
<.<
x.x

Uh... never mind. Now it's showing up.

Better go find my meds. I'm hallucinating again, I think. x.x;

Sorry if this one has been posted, but I did a search and it didn't pop up:

Radiation Infection is a Defense Debuff that will let you enhance with Defense Debuff SOs, and slot Defense Debuff IO Sets, but if there's any effect of a DD IO, it isn't showing up on the detailed info menu...

I'm no number cruncher, so I couldn't say if it's applying a debuff without reporting it, or if it's really not applying the debuff.

Also haven't tested whether non defense-debuff enhancements in defense debuff sets work or not, either--I bought a DD IO and slotted it, and it doesn't appear to do anything.

First, it seems to me that the second farm suggestion (using two accounts with multiple characters) will be faster and requires fewer trustworthy people than the first.

Second, I'm not terribly clear on why you'd want to do this, but... takes all kinds, I guess.

Third, I'm really not understanding all the complaints about this. These farmers are going into the PvP-capable part of the zone, so if you wanna attack them and insert yourself into it, you can. And I've been told--frequently, and loudly--that the zones are "anything goes". So what's your problem with this? "If the game allows it, it's fair game", right?

Just thought I'd note that "variety" seems to be a recurring theme here. Not enough variety in enemies. Not enough variety in settings. Not enough variety in motives.

And for the devs, I know this is a hard type of content to do. It requires a lot of time to revise zones and add content.

But I bought CoV before CoH--I LIKE playing the villain role. And for several months, I wasn't interested in even looking blueside. But once I rolled one hero, I've rarely gone back to the redside--there's just so much more available to DO blueside. I haven't even done all the low-level story arcs heroside, with several heroes running. Villainside, if I have to get a lousy snake skin for Burke one more time... x.x

So I would ask the devs to consider how variety and playerbase interact. If the perspective has become "well, there's nobody playing villainside, so no point in putting more content there", it's self-fulfilling. People don't spend their time there because there's not enough new, and there's not enough new because people stay out.

I hope that the VEATs are the start of a change in this dynamic.

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Speaking as mad scientist in real life myself (No really ^_^), they would leap at the chance to show their superiority and proselytize in class. All onerous teaching responsibilities can be dropped on underling slaves (i.e. grad students).

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I am a grad student and can vouch for this. The only thing that makes researchers happier than doing their research or experimenters happier than doing their experiments is lording it over the unwashed masses...I'm pretty sure some of them actually orgasm from telling entire auditoriums of students that they are stupid.


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Uhhh... you two need to change labs. Seriously. Discovering something new is what should make a scientist do the squeeee, not ego-stroking.

Good guide, but I will never get my Whiny badge if I pay attention to it!

This is the awesomest most convincing guide that I've ever seen. 6 stars to you, good sir. I shall delete my /regen straight away.

I thought it was really doing pretty well, but--you've got numbers. You can argue with opinions, you can debate experiences, but you just can't argue with numbers, no matter how they're used.