Arcanaville

But that's not what happens. Your enemies do not "level with you." When you are level one fighting level ones, those level ones don't become level two when you do. Those level twos were always there, and always willing to fight you if you chose to. You can walk into PI and pick a fight with a level 50 as a level eight if you like. You're going to lose, though, which is why most people pick fights with the enemies that happen to be about their level.

Nothing really levels with you except giant monster class critters, and even they don't really level with you: they remain at even level for the purposes of combat modifiers (the purple patch) but their stats remain the same as you level. You can, in fact, "outlevel" giant monsters, just not in the same way that allows you to apply purple patch leverage. But that's why the Paladin ain't no thing at level 50.

That level 50 warhulk is in PI, waiting for you. Every level you gain brings you closer to being able to take him out. The same thing is true for the Lord Recluse, or the Avatar of the Hamidon.

The problem of course is rewards. At level 40, you can obliterate everything in Steel Canyon: you could take on the entire zone at once if it was possible. But you won't get XP for that. But that has nothing to do with whether you character really is getting more powerful or not. That's a question of how much threat you need to face to become even more powerful. I assume when you start out weight lifting that you start off with very small weights. Five pounds, perhaps. But as you get stronger, you move up to ten pounds, twenty pounds, fifty pounds, a hundred pounds. I'm not a weight lifter, but I'm guessing that someone who does that doesn't feel they aren't getting any stronger, because they just keep moving to higher weights that feel just as heavy if not heavier than when they first started. And I'm guessing they also don't ask themselves why they can't just keep using the five pound weights forever and eventually become Arnold Schwarzenegger. The more powerful you get, the more you have to challenge yourself even more in order to improve. Or you can be mighty and take on stuff that proves you're mighty by completely obliterating it. But that won't ever make you better. But you can do it. And you can in City of Heroes also.

The weight lifting analogy seems to hold for a wide swath of human endeavors. Even professionally, I don't get better by doing the same thing I can do in my sleep. I get better by tackling successively harder things. I've tackled so many harder things, I'm almost out of harder things. Literally. It seems so automatic to me I've never had this problem of feeling like I'm getting weaker as I level. I know I'm stronger by the only standard that matters: if I attack the same thing today as I did yesterday, I'm obviously better than before. But that's separate, to me, from what I have to attack to self-improve. What I have to do to self-improve will always be basically just as hard - perhaps even harder - the better I get at something. Real life self-improvement has the exact same treadmill, so I guess I don't see anything special about the MMO one, because it makes perfect sense to me. That's not to say that MMOs *have* to mirror real life in this respect, but to the degree that City of Heroes does, it seems perfectly intuitive to me. I'm getting more powerful, but what I have to do to improve is always going to be just as hard, or harder than when I start. Those two things are separate, and I can appreciate them separately.

Its not backwards. The more powerful you get, the higher the threat itself has to be to be challenging. But its obvious that as we get more powerful, what we can do tends to increase at equivalent levels of difficulty.

The one exception to that rule has been blasters. As they level, the game tended to get harder due to the increased level of threat, including mez. However, the incarnate system has totally reversed that. My blaster has rapidly accelerated in strength since becoming an incarnate, even compared to the new content. She does better in Lambda than she used to do in the STF pre-incarnate. She's certainly stronger in every bit of standard content outside the incarnate trials than she was before.

If you define "meaningful" to be "the very highest degree of difficulty content" then of course to do anything "meaningful" as you get more powerful will require doing content with ever increasingly higher difficulty. And there are limits to being able to make genuinely challenging content for a single player across all the archetypes. Still, I can flashback to content with AVs in it and wipe the floor with them on an energy blaster that doesn't even have capped defenses. I am very much stronger and I can in fact do very significant things with that strength. Including soloing task forces that would have been much more challenging prior to incarnates.

And with Freedom and free to play accounts, anyone can attempt to solo any task force with free fillers if they don't want to ask for fillers. You can test your new strength against challenging content without having to actually team with anyone else if you choose.

The good news: Second Measure told Black Scorpion to implement Shape-shifting.

The bad news: Second Measure doesn't enunciate well, and we're getting Sheep-shifting in I22.

Why should VIPs pay for anything is a rational topic?




I'd like a timeframe for this prediction, so that we don't have you claiming to have predicted Freedom would be the demise of the game in 2031.

Sorry, I got distracted and didn't find a good cap of it. I'll try to look tonight.

The best way to do this is probably to PL at least one freemium account to 35 and use that to fill. Then get a few others to fill enough to start it, and then they can all quit and you can run the task force at your leisure. You can do this for any task force as long as you can get enough people to just momentarily fill it to start, and as long as your computer can run two copies of the client for at least as long as it takes to start the task force (and then once started, you can log out and exit that second client).

You can also PL a whole bunch of freemiums to fill and not have to ask anyone to fill to start, but that would take more time, and a significantly beefier computer.

In all seriousness, I actually hope not too many of those. But I'm certain we're going to continue to get some new powersets for free, new costumes for free, new content for free (as in included with subscription). I'm guessing they will continue to expand on the small consumable perks, like signature summons. And yeah, probably a new system or two.


And although I consider the argument mostly invalid, there's also the simple fact that in incremental terms I don't pay very much at all for my subscription. Using the same line of thought that is often used to claim VIPs pay a lot and get little, I actually pay only $11.95 per month for my subscription, since I pay annually, and I get 550 points per month not 400 which has a face value of $6.88. That means I only pay $5.08 per month for my subscription separate from my point stipend. That's a trivial amount for what I get for it.

As I said, I don't buy that sort of valuation argument, but even if I did, its not a particularly good one anyway.

I don't know what you're missing, all I know is that I'm getting more for my money than I was getting before, that this is provably true in trivial ways, and that's all I care about when it comes to subscription value. If I'm getting more than before, and I was happy before, I'm going to be fine now.

The impression I got from the focus group was that the main concern was whether the devs were actually able to deliver on the feature set they previewed, which they did maybe 95% of. From that day until Freedom launch and past launch until today most of the people I've talked to in-game have been mostly positive about what they get in Freedom, by a very wide margin. All evidence available to me is that the people who think they are being in some way cheated as VIP subscribers is an extremely low minority. So given the fact they aren't cheating the VIPs of value and few people perceive that they are being cheated, I don't see the problem.

Are you actually saying that the value of subscribing is low, because of the perks you get for subscribing?

I will stipulate this as a given: every time the devs give me something as a subscriber that I get to keep whether I continue subscribing or not, they are in effect diluting the value of future subscription. That's what happens when they decide to reward my loyalty by giving me something with no strings attached. However I think personally that this is not a problem. I presume that, over time, they will also continue to *add* things that are free for subscribers, and I'm ok with them not being able to catch up with seven years of veteran perks with one month of Freedom release.

They can't add seven years of content instantly to counterbalance the seven years of perks I've earned as a long time subscriber, so they only way to equalize this situation would be to take perks away from me. Thank you, no: I'm fine with this imbalance existing for very long term subscribers, speaking as a very long term subscriber.

I am treating what you said as if it was what you meant. The "entire theory behind the endgame" I subscribe to says that creating options tends to be a good thing, even if the side effect is that completists will have to execute vastly more repetitions of the same content to acquire it all. The alternative to is reduce the number of options to the maximum allowable without repeating content, which limits repeat play. I've already seen what that does to standard content in another superhero MMO, and I wouldn't support it here myself.

An "entire theory" of the endgame would account for this.

I read everything in threads I respond to.


Thanks for reminding me what you quoted. Now let me remind you what you actually said:

You said the problem is "end game grinding that requires a dozen people and has virtually no benefit". How can end game grinding with no benefit be a problem, because no one would do *any* grinding that had no benefit.

Any content with no benefit and feels like grinding when you do it has a trivial way to respond to it: you ignore it. There is zero impact on a player that ignores content that feels like grinding when they do it, and has no benefit when they do it.

By definition, grinding and lack of benefit are incompatible for rational people. Rational people do not grind content that they perceive to have no benefit. They ignore content they don't like with no benefit, and they grind content they perceive to have a benefit that is high enough to warrant grinding. So your statement about "grinding for no benefit" is illogical.

What you perceive "grinding" for is different from what other people perceive is worth "grinding" for. So the correct response to content you don't like and don't see the value of running repetitively is to not run it repetitively. But its there for other people who have different values than you, so its not problematic that it exists, because the game isn't designed only for you.

I would think this was so obvious I would only need to hint at it for most rational people to get the point. I can see you are someone for whom explanations need to be much more thorough, and I will file that away for future reference.

As to making claims about being right with I21.2, pass the 50% mark first before you start taking credit for random things. People have been saying the devs have been forcing people to run the trials since the trials first arrived. The empyrean merit change might have been something you could take credit for if it wasn't for the fact that the change only kicks in after you unlock Destiny and Lore. As such, the change is a bit more complicated than your over simplistic and still generally incorrect view of the world. The change is still probably wrong, but not because of something trivial like "devs are forcing content down our throats." Rather, it breaks the balance between deterministic and non-deterministic rewards, and increases the probability that a player may not be able to achieve the level shifting incarnate powers at an appropriate time to be usable in the higher difficulty content.

Keep trying, though. With this one you actually have a far better chance at convincing someone than you normally have.

I'm glad you apparently enjoy being wrong almost as much as I enjoy pointing it out.

I tried to get Celestial eyes inside the tank but the orientation is wrong: I hope they fix that because two glowing eyes suspended in an empty tank would be interesting.

In terms of concepts for the think tank beyond the obvious, and what was mentioned so far, I can think of three off the top of my head:

1. (Tank with brain and eyes) Invisibility experiment goes horribly wrong when scientist tries to figure out how its possible for invisible people to see anything. Can make him an energy aura scrapper that can manipulate energy fields, but unfortunately everything except eyes (and brain attached) still invisible.

2. (Empty tank) Character is actually a telepresence robot: the tank is a holographic system allowing the player to remote control the robot from another location. The player stands in a holographic chamber far away from the fight, and the tank projects a 360 view of the environment around the robot.

3. (Empty tank, thunderhead aura on hair) Character is a storm elemental that is working off a community service obligation.

Not yet.

It also works for me with a brand new free account I just created. It doesn't work for a free account I created a few weeks ago. Not sure why yet.

Just tested: apparently not. When I try to /r message a VIP player that sends a totally free account a tell, I get the message "You do not have permission to use this command. Please upgrade to VIP or unlock Reward Level 2."

That account is a true free account with zero purchases.

Sometimes, though, you've got a full tray of inspirations and you say "I wonder how long these would last?" and just open fire.

When that happens at the end of a Cuda, and the game decides to throw a few thousand fifth column ambushers at you, and everyone else is literally just standing there betting on how long before you drop, and you don't drop, and eventually they ask you to exit so they can finish the strike force, its beautiful.