Arcanaville

I don't believe I have to actually say this directly, but when people complain about something being bad, its often because they do, in fact, want it to not exist. If all the parts directly related to time travel, rather than just incidentally related to time travel were removed (and your percentages are severe overestimates) that would be a good thing. Even if the percentage was 100% that would still be a good thing.

Without time travel, we're still left with most of the Klingon arcs (hit and miss), much of the Andorian arcs, most of the Vulcan arcs, and the birth of the Federation at the end. And *most* of the first season does not deal with the time travel backstory.

Probably a reasonable compromise, especially because its likely the devs are not anticipating a huge conversion rate and if its RMT-related as Zombie Man suggests they can still ban you, and the ban stick works on your downgraded to Premium account much better than a newly created F2P account.

Its usually not easy to logic ourselves into the motivation for these changes, because often the changes involve forestalling something that may or may not happen, and only to a degree. That means the cause is often not logically deducible from the act to prevent it.

I haven't had that problem, although mine is literally called a challenge arc in the title, so its impossible for anyone to get the wrong idea.

My guess: no one thought to write code to disable level pacting someone from VIP to Free and power leveling them with pacting or something similar, and launch is too close to commit code to change it. That's why we get pacts in head start then they go away after launch: they are fine with VIPs having them, but not so much with Premium and Free players being beneficiaries of them for some reason.

This suggests VIPs will get pacting back eventually, and launch is less than 30 days away.

And yet, someone who really enjoyed the part with people swinging sticks at flying balls but really hated the part with the jello who kept going to game after game after game and not leaving at the seventh inning stretch would still be an idiot.

The problem with your analogy is that there is still a certain incentive to either stay and watch or at least find out later what happened: to find out who won. Here, in City of Heroes, no one ever wins. There's no reason to stay for the jello except masochism.

That's like saying if we removed all the bad parts of X-Men The Last Stand we'd only have a twelve minute movie. Implicit in the complaint a movie or tv show has really bad parts is the assumption you're going to replace them with better parts, not have viewers stare at a black screen.

Some people are doing that, and these people are morons. But there are other people that aren't exactly falling for that, their problem isn't quantity per se they just aren't expressing their opinion consistently clearly, and they aren't asserting its logical conclusion.

Some people have a specific preference that they can always afford everything. And the logical consequence of that statement is that everyone should get only what that person can afford. In other words, if everyone paid X dollars, that would be tantamount to the devs having enough resources to make Y amount of game. If X is the budget of this particular individual, they are essentially telling the devs to never make more than Y amount of game, so they can always afford it all. They don't want to play a game where different people can afford different amounts of game.

Its a variation of the completist philosophy that says, essentially, everything in the game should be theoretically acquirable by me. If it can't be, it shouldn't be in there. Extended to a subscriber that does not want to pay any more, it says anything you can't get with just your subscription is wrong to add to the game, because it represents things I cannot get in theory.

This completionist attitude is not a right or wrong attitude per se. Its just one that has to be abandoned with City of Heroes Freedom because the Hybrid model being executed all but forbids it. And its not like arguing about the price of server transfers: this basic principle of the game's business model is changing fundamentally to be incompatible with the completionist attitude in a way no level of complaint will be able to reverse.

Yes and no. When Issue 1 came out and levels 41 through 50 were released, they too were the "end game" and the future advancement of your character. You could say that levels 41 through 50 were more important than levels 1 through 40, but I don't think of them that way. The existence of level 41 doesn't detract from my experience playing at level 31.

Most cases of burn out are self-inflicted. The devs should try to minimize the opportunities for it, but ultimately its the players fault, and not the devs fault, if they have a compulsion to grind content they don't enjoy because their sense of reasonable speed does not match their sense of reasonable effort.

I did get a little bit of a Bluth vibe off of it. Not a huge amount, but some.

We already know just the name Star Trek itself is not enough to make enough money to sustain much of anything. However, that's sort of besides the point: a really good series that happens to be set in Star Trek will make a ton of money. The BSG2k series is a good example: nostalgia might have gotten them some attention, but it would not have sustained a new series. The fact that the writing was really sharp in that very first season is what propelled them to success. A Star Trek series with episodes like 33 in it would be successful no matter how much Trek burn out there is.

And above all else that is debatable, Abrams proved you can make a movie called Star Trek with Kirk and Spock and McCoy in it, and people will pay to go see it if they perceive a high enough entertainment value.

If my memory serves, I recall someone telling the devs that in-person and the reply was that there *are* actual women in the art group that makes costumes. Assuming there aren't any is actually a dangerous presumption in a lot of ways.

Most people thought the time travel elements in Enterprise were silly and unnecessary, because they were silly and unnecessary, not because of any perception of time travel inconsistency. I should point out that my not refuting your assertion above is not an act of acceding to your interpretation, just not engaging in a debate of it. I can say your interpretation of time travel in Star Trek isn't common enough to be the source of any large percentage of viewer incredulity.


Actually, as I said it was made because they wanted to make another series, and decided to return to their roots of making a space adventure. But perplexingly, they made it a space adventure where all the main characters hated the fact they were on a space adventure. That's unlikely to work unless the writers are incredibly clever.


Okay.


1. The two concepts for the next Trek series after Voyager were a birth of the Federation concept and a Star Trek academy concept, both of which predate Star Trek First Contact.

2. The time period of Star Trek First Contact is the end of the last world war, 2063. Enterprise takes place around the birth of the Federation, starting at 2051, almost one hundred years later. They aren't in the same era.

3. The creators and writers said many times in interviews they wanted to do something completely different, and they set Enterprise as they did to give them what they thought was the freedom to do something completely different. Even small details like dropping the "Star Trek" from the title and using non-orchestral music for the theme were explicit decisions intended to be different. There's even evidence to suggest the entire reason for introducing the temporal cold war was to give them an escape hatch to violate prior canon and hand wave it away. Which, on a Star Trek series, you do at risk to your own life and limb.

Its an interesting idea in theory, but in practice it never seems to work. To work, you have to somehow make sure the audience never really connects with the characters in a way that makes them hate you for getting rid of them, while still making enough of a connection to keep coming back. This was actually supposed to be something they were intending to do on Heroes, but of course that was one of the first things to go.

This can only work in anthologies with a strong enough theme that the theme itself is the hook. Like the Twilight Zone, for example, as mentioned.

If I was going to pitch Star Trek for television, I wouldn't even do a series. I just don't trust the writers - any writers - enough to sustain a Trek series anymore. I would pitch it as a series of made for TV movies, like the Columbo movies, say. Give them two hours to tell one complete story. No grand story lines they seem to have difficulty making work in Star Trek. No set up for the future. The grand excuse of Enterprise: we were saving this and that for the future. When you're saving ideas for four years into your future, you're either extremely arrogant that you'll even be around in four years or incredibly talented. You, Mr. Star Trek writer. Do you have a story to tell? Great, here's two hours. What's that you say, you want to save your best ideas for the future? Great, we'll give the two hours to someone else who wants to tell their best story now. You can go back to writing dialog for the SyFy movie of the week.

On Triumph, the standard AFK check that most seem to use is to ask players in league chat to rally to a position (you know, I suggested that in a day one trial before I ever saw it done, but its the sort of thing that is probably so obvious its been reinvented many times before and since).

Even if people have league chat turned on, in the heat of the trial with people looking at many different things all at once its often the case they simply get tunnel visioned and stop looking at chat in the middle of the trial, even if they were looking at it before launch. I've noticed that if something changes the circumstances of the trial enough for the leader to start giving out new orders, in *any* of the trials there are a substantial number of players who very obviously didn't read it, and weren't even looking at chat at all.

The simple fact of the matter is I've seen lots of trials - again, not just Keyes - where the leader will ask if everyone knows what to do, if everyone has done it before, if anyone has any questions. No one says anything, because they are embarrassed to speak up. Then they start asking questions in the trial when its clear they are so lost they can't even figure out what anyone is doing at all and aren't likely to simply pick it up as they go along.

When that happens, you can try to detect it and weed them out as soon as possible, or you can try to roll with it and hopefully get them up to speed quickly and reasonably. We could be much better, but Triumph has a history of at least trying to be inclusive, going all the way back to the earliest (level 50) Hami raids conducted on the server.

"Monster" is a class, like minion, Lt, Boss, Archvillain. "Giant Monster" is not a true class, its what the devs call a Monster class critter that is specifically flagged to ignore combat scaling rules (i.e. the purple patch). Technically, the critters that scale to you in zone events are all using "Giant Monster code" even though they are themselves minions, Lts, Bosses, and EBs.

Giant Monsters are not necessarily stronger. If the level 50 Giant Monsters on Monster Island in PI were not giant monsters, they would generally be stronger, not weaker, because players can't be higher than level 50 (outside of level shift). But as Giant Monsters they always con even to any player, if they were just Monsters they would only con even to level 50s: any player lower than level 50 would have a harder time fighting them as Monsters than Giant Monsters, because the critter would have an intrinsically higher level than them. So as Monsters they would be as strong or stronger than as they currently are as Giant Monsters (except, as noted, for level shifted level 50 players).

Also, the class shown by a critter in a player's GUI can be overridden by the devs, so that it can read "Object" or whatever. As far as I know, there is no "object" class: I believe most are usually a subtype of minion.

I don't have any undefended exhaust ports.


It may seem odd my making jokes about my own exhaust ports, but around these parts its probably better than letting other people do it.

I generally liked the Andorian story lines, most of the Vulcan story lines, and I did like the way the Federation sort of converged on Archer's past good deads coming back to him at the end. It wasn't portrayed as "humans are the best things in the galaxy" so much as "humans are too young to know any better, so they tend to have fresh eyes; also, they want to be friends with everyone, and they have a bad history with no one."

In fact, you almost got the sense that everyone felt they should try to stick with humans because there were initially very selfish reasons for doing so. The Andorians thought humans were relatively straight shooters who would stand up against the Vulcans, but were no threat to them. The Vulcans thought without their guidence humans would become the Hells Angels of the galaxy. I think each race saw humans as something that was either useful or dangerous, but at least fair enough to be given a shot. Except of course for the Klingons.

I think Enterprise had a lot of potential, but a lot of it was frittered away.

Did You Know that in the early days of the game, a favorite past time of some high level radiation defenders was to head to Perez, lock their debuff toggles onto a critter, lead them all around the park, the debuff toggle aggroing everything those critters came anywhere near to, and then bring them in one giant glowing debuffed mass to one of the gates, sometimes in numbers of hundreds of critters, all of which were debuffed so strongly they couldn't hit anyone and couldn't damage them if they did.

You'd be in Perez minding your own business when suddenly you'd hear "Skyway gate" in broadcast, and then what looked like every critter that ever lived come bearing down on you glowing green. If you didn't know this practice existed, or for that matter what rad toggles looked like and did, this could scare the living crap out of you. Some players fled in terror, while others who knew what was going on took advantage of the free XP.

That's because I'm the strongest force in the universe.

I think some people forget that Star Trek is at its heart a space adventure, and it works best as a space adventure. It does not work well as a soap opera. TNG worked because it took what was most attractive from TOS and then, over time, refined and improved upon it. DS9 tried to change that, and eventually they were practically forced, kicking and screaming, to add the space adventure elements they tried to run away from. Voyager actually tried to say, ok, lets make a space adventure where all the adventurers don't actually want to be there.

I don't know what went wrong with Enterprise, except its clear the writers wanted to "be different" and "not do the obvous" like mine the rich history of Star Trek. Thus, the temporal cold war we've never heard about, the Suliban we've never heard of, the literally Earth-shattering Xindi we've never heard of. Meanwhile, every time they do manage to reference pre-existing Star Trek, its almost always goofy: explaining Klingon ridges, somehow getting the Borg and the Ferengi involved. Then they skirt the Romulans because I guess they didn't want to focus on the Romulan war, then introduce the previously unheard of Xindi war. Why invent the Xindi war when there was a Romulan war they explicitly wanted to ignore? Because, I'm forced to conclude, the writers on Enterprise were only using the name Star Trek to peddle their own unique stories that had nothing to do with Star Trek, rather than trying to act as stewards for Star Trek itself.

People rag on Abrams Star Trek, but I'll say this: its clear Abrams, Kurtzman, and Orci wanted to actually make Star Trek. They succeeded for some, and failed for others, but timeline or no timeline they at least acknowledged there was a Star Trek out there. In many cases, and I'm thinking about Voyager and Enterprise, it seemed the writers were trying to escape Star Trek, not make Star Trek.

Nobody makes design tools whose sole purpose is to do what they used to do, but a little faster. The devs have, supposedly, improved their design tools but that improvement goes less into replicating the past quicker, and more into making better things in the same amount of time.

And either way, the new tools and design processes are precisely what makes the old work of limited usefulness in newer designs.

It is an advantage for me. But the question is would some players specifically Lord that knowledge over other players. And based on the fact we keep having discussions year after year about which builds and playstyles are legitimate, and which powers and abilities are supposedly necessary, I'm going to go out on a limb and say there probably are.

But what I also notice is that the harder it is to gain that advantage, the more likely it is for the person with it to not use that knowledge against other players. For example, all other things being equal, its not the min/maxers that are disproportionately the lrn2ply people: the better min/maxers tend to avoid that. Most of the people who have figured out the details of this game (and I'm not talking about myself specifically here) tend to want to share that information with no strings attached. The know-it-alls tend, on average, to be people who have been handed this stuff to them on a silver platter. That's a generalization, and like all generalizations you can find exceptions, but my impression is, for almost as long as we've a min/max community, the people that work the hardest to get information are the people least likely to attempt to inflict harsh judgment on other players.

I have theories on why this is the case, but they don't really matter here. What does matter to me is that this is a fortunate happenstance I would not want to tamper with unnecessarily, so I tend to tread lightly here.


To make sure I contribute to the premise of the OP, a few other unofficial history facts:

* Our understanding of how accuracy works owes a lot to the first Winter Event. The first Winter Event, which actually occurred at the beginning of 2005, was the first time the players had the ability to attack each other, using the snowball temporary power. This ability, which predates even the beta testing of the Arena by months, allowed some players (most notably Stargazer and Pennelope) to test how tohit and defense worked to a much better extent than previously possible.

* The original thread mentioned that Peregrine Island was an experimental city/hazard zone. I don't think it mentioned what that meant. PI used to have quad boss spawns. You could - very often - see four Warhulks or two Warhulks and two Fakes, or even four Master Illusionists spawning all over Peregrine Island.

* The Rikti Magus Elite Boss you see in ship raids made their first appearance in two missions in Angus McQueen's arc. Originally, and up to about Issue 9 or 10, one missions spawned one of them, and a second mission spawned nothing *but* them throughout the entire map. And this was true even if you attempted to solo the mission, and there was at the time no way to downgrade them.

As opposed to when the devs happen to agree with us, because group think is wrong, unless the group includes me.

We were giving warnings, and eventually I added the specific warning to stop shooting altogether when the warning was given and do absolutely nothing but watch the countdown clock and wait for the beam. Even so, what I noticed is that when there's just five people out there, all five instinctively seem to know to spread out away from each other around AM, whereas even I had difficulty doing that when the full league was out and about. And if you move around too much when the beam is about to fire, you could spawn the beam on someone else: someone who won't get the "beam is targeting you" message on their screen. Its just a tiny bit harder to notice, and a tiny bit harder to dodge, and those odds start to stack up.

I am the consummate don't-tell-people-how-to-play player. When I'm saying "lets just duo the son of a gun and get outta here" (we ultimately needed five) its crossed a line for me. And I'm not saying everyone who enjoys Keyes or even this specific badge is wrong: I'm just saying I normally cut the devs enormous slack, and even though I can do what needs to be done and I can do it repeatedly and I already have the badge so its a done deal for me, I think this one is, if not too difficult, then too difficult too soon for the playerbase.


I should mention, in my opinion every single person on the trial league that awarded that badge earned that badge on Sunday. They earned it by doing what trial league members are supposed to do: listen to the trial leader, and try to do what they ask in a manner well enough to earn the rewards being sought. They all did that, and we all got the badge. Its just unsettling to me that for two-thirds of the league, the instruction we asked them to execute was "die, and wait in the hospital." But they all did what was required, on top of running Keyes dozens of times before in many cases, and that's all we can ask of any league: they do their best to follow instructions and help get the rewards for everyone.