Another_Fan
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Quote:Devices plays slow. It's strength is setup and solo play, slow solo play. If you aren't playing to its strength you will do badly. Defense is nice but patience is what you really need with devices. That said ranged is the choice for defense. You have caltrops and the web grenade nothing should get to you unless you want it to.Originally Posted by evoallover
hi all i have a blaster with 50% def to S/L and he still gets his but kicked, is it better to go soft capped ranged def.
I have a corr with 51% def to S/L and he dose just fine, I'm not to sure way the blaster gets hit more.
So S/L or range def? -
Well you made a hover blaster with its defenses optimized for melee and S/L attacks. Combat jumping has better synergy with your build and uses less endurance.
Speaking of synergy with your build goals flurry has an incredibly long animation and root. TK thrust is actually useful
Fire blast or if you replace it with flares is overslotted for damage, instead of the nucleolus the pvp damage proc will give you better results especially if you switch to flares.
Also if you are going to slot subdual for immobilization and def bonuses six slot it, drop air superiority take tactics and get a better slotted power, and more defense bonuses
Edit: forgot to mention Rain of fire is really counter productive with melee def /drain psyche/psychic shockwave builds. It scatters the spawn and makes certain they will be hitting you with ranged attacks. Its very nice as a soft control with ranged def builds though -
Quote:Just so you understand Major league baseball implements revenue sharing amongst teams to prevent the situation from getting out of hand. Professional football implements a salary cap and revenue sharing. Both sports do this to preserve the integrity of the game. They realize that if they allowed the richest teams to buy a pennant, or the championship it would spell the death of their sport.Originally Posted by Chad Gulzow-Man
That, and there's no CoH equivalent of the Super Bowl. Neither the Luck of the Gambler +Recharge, Numina's Convalescence proc or ANY of the other items in the store are rewards that can only be gained from winning a gigantic championship. They aren't even awarded as PVP (competitive) drops to begin with.
The comparison is indeed laughable.
On the other hand, I'm sure there are professional football teams with more money for training equipment than others... meaning those teams have access to better enhancements due to buying them with real money. And in the end, the vast majority of those who watch could care less if the team that won the Super Bowl did so because they were able to purchase superior equipment or they just practiced more than the team they beat using the equipment they had.
Edit My own sport golf uses a more extreme method. There is a very strict limit on the performance of the equipment and non sanctioned equipment is just not allowed. Other gear heavy sports do the same -
Quote:Its not about the competition, its about the fact that the people participating are all involved in the same event.Originally Posted by Dispari
City of Heroes is not an Olympic event. There's nothing at stake and you don't stand to gain anything by getting a head-start.
If you and I are having a friendly game of golf and some random person wants to just shoot the 9th hole and leave, what does it matter to me? If that's how someone wants to spend their time, who cares? They don't win anything by finishing earlier than me. My ability to play and enjoy a round of golf is not damaged.
Imagine city of heroes isn't a sport, but one of those odd pieces of performance art. I believe there is an artist that wraps islands and other very large things in plastic. Now lets say some people for whatever odd reason want to be part of the art, but (don't have the time, can't wrap things whatever) so instead of participating in the art, they use some sort of mechanical means to do the job. There is a connection between people participating. A shared experience. The people that bought or just didn't fully participate alter the event for those that did.
Another way to look at it is imagine you have a bookclub of a few people that meet weekly to talk about a book you all have read. Part of the event is you all chip in a few bucks to provide snacks. You have someone that comes in and wants to attend the bookclub always contributes cash but never reads the book. They may be really great people but they aren't bringing the shared experience of the book to the club.
The nature of the events are fundamentally different when you allow it to be changed or violated for a dollar.
Just take a look at the recent AE nerfs. These are put in to maintain the integrity of the game, but for a little money the integrity isn't all that important. Well we put marty in to prevent people going too fast and getting rewards too quickly, but buy a windfall and an xp booster all of a sudden too fast really isn't. -
Quote:Hi I don't have the time to run an entire marathon, let me make a donation to your race committee so i can start at the 10 mile mark.Originally Posted by OneFrigidWitch
Hi. I have one char, that I barely play a few hours a week. Pleasure to be acquainted with you. I have neither the time nor the patience to set up a char to use IOs without spending very large spans of personal time. Being able to use a mixture of amerit generation and store purchase is great. And unlike many, I totally disagree that KinCom sets _are the bomb_. Sure, they are nice for some rare occasions, but thats just those occasions. People complaining in this thread seem to have a case of tunnel vision. Maybe there is more to this game then softcapping your s/l whatever.
Hi I don't have the time to play a full game of golf, let me shoot the 9th hole and we can multiply my score by 9.
Hi I haven't had the time this year to maintain my physical training, here is $200 let me use a jetski, a motorbike, and skates in the triathlon.
Hi I haven't put the effort into this game to learn how it works or do what is needed to advance my characters let me write your producers a check. -
LOL I love it.
But only because I got to listen to my lovely lady, fume that I was right. And i get a good laugh at all the people in the pay to win thread who were jacka$$es
Well back to virtual golf -
Quote:Rofl, you have to realize the people "Hating on the farmers", live lives informed by the belief, that if they keep trying they will find the correct way of kissing dev rear end that will let them get the things they want. They are completely incapable of directing the proper levels of opprobrium at the cause of the problem. In some cases you can even see them acting like complete gits (looks up thread) towards anyone who hasn't embraced their philosophy.Originally Posted by King_Moloch
Read this whole thread.
Couple of things.
I couldn't stop myself from laughing in disbelief at the sheer quantity of barely restrained misplaced hate the AE 'community' has for 'evil farmers' and how eager they are to lay the blame for the sad, shameful condition AE is in on them.
Again. The farmers are not responsible for no one playeing your arcs. The devs are. You can sit there and hate on your coplayers all you like, but the burden of efficacy remains with the devs. Already in four or five other posts, I've seen about a dozen different ideas that would fix a lot, if not all of the issues presented by these evil, sinister, diabolical people that would have minimal to no effect on the rest of the game. The farmers can't enact those changes, the devs can, but evidently don't read the forums or don't understand how the game or it's community works anymore. Given the state of 'content' being pushed lately, I'll vote with the latter.
Point is, it's not the farmers you should be directing your ire at. If the devs wanted to eliminate the issues that cause people to farm, take a hint from GW and a few other games, if you have had an active account with them for a number of years, then just put in the damned button that will allow me to avoid going through the laughable content I've been enduring since launch. Fix the damned drop rates and reward tables for necessary salvage and recipes. FIX THE DAMNED GAME instead of puking up more of this Praetoria garbage no one cares about. -
Put a the chance of knockdown proc in it and have fun laughing. Goes real well with blizzard as well
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Quote:Tell you what next time you play chess, well in your case checkers why don't you try rules where you and your opponent can buy pieces as you feel you need them. You wouldn't buy from each other of course but from someone who is standing nearby laughing their head off. If you want to go for the advanced version he can put marks on a few pieces that let you move them in new ways, for a small additional charge of course.Originally Posted by MajorPrankster
My view of the world is simple as well.
Games need money to survive. I am happy to give the ones I enjoy playing money.
I could stand to lose a few pounds, but I think calling me a cow is a little extreme...
Also, in terms of a simple world view, there are people that don't like other people making money.
Since it takes money to make the game continue to be available, people resenting Paragon for making itself more profitable are not really needed as customers...
Edit: If you want to go for the really hardcore version of this game, periodically he can come over to the board wreck your positions and charge you to put them back to the way they were -
Quote:Maybe this will help youOriginally Posted by Ironblade
Well, most of your so-called points in that big paragraph are wrong. Market slots = power? Get real. They're selling CONVENIENCE, not power.
But from the general tone of your comments, you seem to hold the game and the devs in nothing but contempt. So why are you still here?
pow·er/ˈpouər/
Noun: The ability to do something or act in a particular way, esp. as a faculty or quality.
Noun: (physics) The amount of work performed per unit time.
You see most of the world views being able to do more faster as being more powerful, and as a coincidence being more powerful is considered convenient. -
Quote:Accuse you of developing something ? Try reading for the win it really helps. I accused you of polishing the devs turds for them and that's something that anyone who has seen your follow up posts on anything from the F2P changes to positrons rant over AE can't help but be aware of.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Either stop pretending to have a brain, or please inform the class about all the notable bombs I've been involved with in this game. Or for that matter, prove you're not just covering ignorance by actually naming *anything* I've specifically had a hand in developing in this game. The list is long enough that even if you guess randomly you have a shot at it. But I'm pretty sure that as with everything else you claim to know, you don't actually know jack.
When positron says "we need the solo path to be less rewarding than the trials otherwise the people who enjoy the trials wont be able to play them", that's not just people.Quote:People have been saying the devs have been forcing people to run the trials since the trials first arrived.
Care to shoot for the devs forcing players to play a particular way is actually a good thing ? You might have a little more luck with that.
Yes, only because if its something I had put money on at a prediction market, I would now be collecting my winnings.Quote:The empyrean merit change might have been something you could take credit for
But lets see I would also be collecting on the devs selling fixes and improvements for ATs. Then there was the prediction they would sell power directly in the game, which we have in terms of extra market slots and soon will broaden by selling every IO in the game and a bunch that currently aren't even in the game. Then there was my call that they would sell fixes to existing problems that were trivial but dress them up a little. Well we have attuned IOs selling the fix for the shortage of off max level recipes.
That puts me on a solid 80% with one undecided as yet. That would be creating problems so they can sell the fix ? Well attuned IOs could be argued as that but I expect a much more decisive example will be when they start selling something along the lines of incarnate XP boosters, Incarnate windfalls that boost your incarnate drop quality, and maybe Incarnate salvage surprise packages.
Yes my view of the world is simple. I view the devs as farmers that have decided to milk their cash cows. -
Quote:http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/earnings.aspxOriginally Posted by William_Valence
No kidding, this games been on it's deathbed since the GDN, and ED, and the reduction of Hami enhancement values, and the EM nerfs, and the Botz nerf, and the Meow farm nerf, and the Monkey farm nerf, and the regen nerf, and hami damage that made Phantom army and phase shift pointless, and the purple triangles, and the purple patch, and the Items of power/Original Cathedral of Pain. Man, they've changed so much stuff that players have completed and earned this game should shut down any day now.
There's the ncsoft financials. 2nd quarter 2011 is the report you want to look at and for craps and giggles you can also look at 2Q 2010.
Now not that I think you are the kind of guy that will actually look at them*, but they show city of heroes as a franchise has been doing really really really poorly.
A reasonable person might connect the dots with the way the management has handled that problems that you list and others like insane levels of downtime, telling people if they pre pay they will get their tokens up front, in general taking actions that are annoying and bothersome to the players to "protect the integrity of the game" and then turning around violating that integrity for anyone willing to pony up cash in the store. -
Quote:You succeed incredibly well.Originally Posted by SwellGuy
You will never know because I am certainly not interested in informing posters like you and the others.
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Dark/anything is going to be one of the more viable blaster builds.
Life drain by itself makes that happen. Add in -to hit and a hold you have addressed some of the big blaster survivability problems just by taking that power set. Mental shores up its aoe nicely and gives you drain psyche. -
Quote:There isn't a single storyline in this game that rises above mediocre. Some of the problem is the nature of the source material. 15 pages with a fight in the middle isn't much to tell a great story. You combine that with a videogame where people are going to be fighting and want to be fighting 90% of the time there just isn't much room left to explore the human condition. Toss in that fact that every story is going to end with you clicking on something or killing something, just insures that anything trying to raise its head above mediocre has just been pounded into the ground like a tent pegOriginally Posted by Venture
Right, they'll be too busy playing the non-crappy ones.
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Quote:Originally Posted by DocBenway
wow. that is just....wrong. I have somthing on the order of 17 level 50s, 2 of which have any purple or expensive IO sets at all. 70% of my other level 50s don't even have IOs, only SOs. I could get on any one of those lvl 50s slotted with only SOs and kick butt all over Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. I don't need the shinies to make my toons effective. And I certainly don't feel the need to compete with people on my team.
LOL if you define good low enough everyone is great -
Quote:I'd give that a signed.Originally Posted by AmazingMOO
Confusing goals aren't fun.
Keyes Facility is currently the worst about this. There are dozens of subgoals with frequently only slightly differing requirements and a not a lot of information to tell you how to meet them. My experience is that most people get through Keyes the first time and still don't really have much clue what was going on.
Being Insta-killed isn't Fun
There's at least some of this in all the trials. In a lot of cases, players are defeated with no warning and through no fault of their own. In cases where they have warning and can evade death via skill or sheer toughness, it's great! In cases where you can't even see WHY you died, it's simply frustrating.
Zerging an Objective isn't fun.
All the trials suffer from this to some degree by including so much unresistable damage and insta-kill effects. The single worst offender is the glowie hunt in Lambda. When a player is defeated and has to run back into the maze after going to the hospital, chances are the enemies left behind in the mad rush are going to zap him again before he catches back up to his team.
Sitting in the Hospital while other people finish the challenge isn't fun.
All the trials have the frequently pointless 20 second lock on the hospital doors (as does Death From Below!). That's frustrating. However, the worst single example is when a team leader asks part of the group to sit in the hospital while another part finishes an objective. I've seen this happening pretty frequently on Keyes as players attempt to earn the badges. Players who have problematic hardware-- they can't see the green patch or lag too badly to avoid it-- are asked to stay in the hospital. Neither the team leader nor the rest of the team begrudges them the badge nor holds them responsible for their hardware issues. Still, I wouldn't even WANT a badge that I didn't help earn.
Grinding for Currency to Buy Rewards isn't Fun. (It's called 'Work' in the Real World.)
What can I say? Some people really enjoy Skeeball. I like the rolling the balls part of it, but the collecting tickets bit comes off as just kinda dumb to me.
In the same way, getting 1 or 2 Empyrean merits a day and then discovering that you need dozens of them to get the costume pieces you want is EXACTLY like getting 12 tickets from a Skeeball machine and then discovering that you need 5000 of them to buy the crappy black and white TV at the rewards counter.
In the real world, you can say, 'Screw this. I'm not enjoying the game any more, so I'll just go to Best Buy and buy the TV I want.'
In the game, however, there's no way to do that. By gating those rewards behind untradeable, uncraftable Empyrean merits, the designers can say, 'No! You cannot have that unless you do EXACTLY what we want you to!'
Downtime is no fun.
Queuing for an incarnate trial could work if people used it, but most don't, perpetuating the problem. Instead they sit in Pocket D or RWZ shouting 'LFT for BAF!' over and over again.
When I do run a trial with friends, I typically pull out something to read while I'm waiting for everyone to assemble. I'm not even PLAYING the game at that point, let alone enjoying it.
Trying to Corral 16 or 24 Strangers is not fun.
When I'm trying to meet new people and play with others I haven't before, I feel like that if there are any more than about 5 or 6 others, I can't really keep track of what's going on, especially if I'm also providing any kind of leadership.
Trying to do the same thing with 16 others is about as much fun as listening to a screaming baby in a restaurant.
You can't immediately weed out the bad seeds or the abusers simply because there's too much going on to keep track of everything.
Regardless of the Designers' desire to make the trials accessible, they DO need leadership. Someone has to make decisions, even if it's only flipping the coin to decide who pulls.
When you're on a team of 16 and 24 and there are no leaders, or worse, there are several people on the team who refuse to listen to the leaders who do step forward, it's not just the crying baby in the restaurant any more. The screaming baby's 3 year old brother has just taken his pants off and is running around the tables, half-naked. He keeps running up to your table and trying to grab your dessert and his parents won't do a damn thing about it.
I, and a lot of others have made suggestions to alleviate some of these problems in the past, but I think that the trial designers need to go further than simply tweaking numbers. They need to step back, take a hard, deep look at what they've built and ask themselves 'Why isn't this fun?'
If you get it right, you won't HAVE to keep fiddling with the drop rates, cool-down timers, and introducing new currencies to keep people's interests. People will do the content because they WANT to do the content. Right now, a lot of people simply don't WANT to do the content and that's not something that putting a new stereo up on the counter and tagging '8000 Tickets' on it is going to fix.
But the big problem is the one you listed last, Trying to herd cats is not fun.
If the trials didn't need large numbers of people simply to run and didn't self terminate when people tried to do them with fewer the other problems they have would just not exist.
Confusing objectives would still be a problem but explaining to 8 people and having them understand is much less an impossibility.
Needing to focus the team and move as a group is immensely easier when you have a third of the people.
Downtime and waiting to form, just goes away if you are dealing with our regular team sizes.
Grinding would hardly be as bad because for the most part the trials would be considerably more fun and if you are doing something fun, its not really grinding.
The insta kills, the gimmicks, the insanely obvious cheating that the npcs are are doing would still be very bad, but if they dropped the group sizes to manageable numbers the trials would be something that people wanted to do not felt they were being compelled to do. Also with smaller groups people can see who is having trouble and help out. -
Quote:I wonder if you will be able to trade them in for hospitalizationOriginally Posted by Giant2005
Yes this is it.
If those new trials are actually playable enough to have a chance of getting teams for them, the fact that you can get an infinite number of Emps is a very big deal.
You could farm enough to get the most expensive recipes in a couple of days.
I suspect prices might be about to plummet in a way this game has never seen. -
Quote:LOL that is so far off its not funny. In pve with a few exceptions, you either have a build or you suck.Originally Posted by Mr. DJ
across enough people with billion dollar builds to know well enough that they die just like everybody else. There is no real advantage in PvE, you either know how to play, or just suck. PvP on the other hand, is a entirely different beast where "pay to win" will actually apply and thus, this thread would make more sense.
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Quote:Looking at the I21 announcements it seems not only have I been right I have been positively prescient. Especially about the devs philosophy of forcing content down players throats by any meansOriginally Posted by Arcanaville
I'm glad you apparently enjoy being wrong almost as much as I enjoy pointing it out.
Tell me are you hard at work coming up with a way to polish the 121 turd as you have done with things like the I13 PvP changes and other notable bombs ? -
Quote:Pretty much this. For -1/0 be sure to take telekinetic thrust. If anything gets near you push it away. Ice or mace are also good choices over force.Originally Posted by concreteshift
Easy.
Fire/MM/Foce of Nature/Incarnate Barrier. Get Combat Jumping and Aid Self. Sprinkle in self bubbling if needed after Level 41.
Get every defense you can. Soft-cap range. Grab Archmage, Geas, Portal Jockey.
Build Envenomed Dagger, always keep one extra recipe for it and salvage at all times.
Foce for when chips go all down. Hit Barrier. On tough foes, use Envenomed Dagger to kill their regen. Go to town.
Use MM buffs as needed. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Tubbius
Are ambushes that much of a problem that they needed to do this? I'm not being sarcastic. I honestly would like to know. What IS the source of the ills in AE? Do the farms rely on ambushes?
They are if you are selling XP boosters, Inf boosters, IOs, etc, for real money. -
Quote:The reason anyone should care has to do with how microtransaction games work and evolve. They wind up catering to the bat feces insane players that don't spend hundreds of dollars or even thousands of dollars but multiple thousands of dollars. We are talking the kinds of people that bankrupt themselves from QVC.Originally Posted by Doctor_Gemini
My question would be, "why do you care?" I can probably count on both hands the total number of players who care how many badges another player has.
The only argument against having things for sale on the market I'm hearing is that it makes some players self-worth plummet. If a players ego relies on being in competition with other players for the best or most stuff, then I feel sorry for those people, especially given that the vast majority of players couldn't care less what you have.
Most people that play (Popular free game found in your browser) spend absolutely nothing for it. When I say most I mean 99+%. Its the few that spend nutsy amounts where the profit is in those games, and that is the market that gets catered to ? (ruthlessly exploited would be better) in those games. -
Quote:No you were just wrong and pretty much speaking without any facts, or even arguable references to examples as back up to your position. Usually only the pope gets to speak ex cathedra. I am sure you feel your position is better than his.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
uses a picture in lieu of making a point
Paragon studios has already embraced the increased power, increased rate of progress, and competitive advantage as substitute for actual content. They have even demonstrated that they will be pushing this forward. We have the AT specific IO sets which for some ATs are easily the most powerful sets in the game. We also have attuned IOs which in general are plain more powerful than anything you can win in the game.
Funny as hell for me, because in beta I said they would be putting in fixes to the game and charging people for them. What do we have ? The fix for not being able to roll IOs at the level you want then ? Paragon studios: thats too much work to fix its linked into the whole rewards system (then) now: Here just buy these sets at 12 bucks a set (or whatever the price winds up being). Oh Kheldians have problems ? Oh you need the kheldian IO that bumps up your overall effectiveness.
Your response was something to the effect that it would be crazy for them to sell fixes to problems in the game. Yet that is what they are doing. -
Quote:Last first, City of heroes is indeed now free to play in that if I want to I can start a new account and pay 0 to as much as I feel is needed. So a subset of its market is exactly F2P and does indeed depend on forcing the people to pay in so their characters can keep up.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The classic free to play model generally relies on essentially infinite treadmills. Games like Farmville can trivially add content at a pace faster than nearly all players can acquire it, so there is only a small chance of someone actually outpacing development: it takes a huge investment in time and a lot of money to outpace those kinds of games usually, and their strategy is to essentially trade money for time: you can buy your way further along the treadmill. They don't care, because the treadmill is incredibly long.
Most MMORPGs are not like that, and cannot be like that. Neither our no all other sub MMOs I'm aware of that are now implementing Hybrid models can or do follow that model, because the content pipeline simply cannot keep pace with it. If you let people simply buy their way down the treadmill, you will run out of treadmill. So the monetization of more standard MMORPGs has followed other paths: monetizing customization, for example.
Its one of the reasons why incorrectly called City of Heroes a "free to play" game is not just a matter of incorrect semantics. The business models of virtually all the genuine free to play games and all the hybrid ones tend to be completely different, and applying the thinking of one to the other invariably fails to be remotely relevant.
As to the rates any game can introduce content that is only loosely related to the business model. It is much more a matter of how large their market is, how willing it is to absorb the content and the cost of creating content for the game.
You can see this with that very large game where their big content dumps are practically rewrites of the game.