Aura_Familia

Originally Posted by Arbegla

The problem is high level characters multiply the difficulty bar. If the dev's design with 3 level 50s in mind, then with 8, its trivial, where if they design with 8 in mind, with 3 its a challenge.

Its like playing at a handicap in just about any game that allows handicaps. You know your playing at a disadvantage, but forcing everyone else to play that way just isn't fair to everyone else.

Originally Posted by SilverAgeFan

And perhaps be a different color scheme than most anything else--some sort of special two or three color temp power icon that if you are looking through your tiny icon power list to drag it to a tray--it stands out.

This way leaders can add one more bit of information: "the temp power icons are red, gold and blue. Can't miss 'em" Or something like that.

Originally Posted by EvilGeko

I understand the desire to have progression as a solo focused character. I don't begrudge people that. What I don't understand is this incessant need to use hyperbole to attack Issue 20.

Originally Posted by DarkGob

I still cannot understand the rationale behind wanting solo access to powers that are most useful on team content and would completely trivialize already-easy regular content. The best argument I've heard is that your interests are not being met, but you know what, neither are those of the base-building and PvP communities. You can't always get what you want. It sucks that you're not getting any new stuff, but you are making the choice not to play the new content, and the devs can't do everything at once. Right now they're focusing on Incarnate content. 5 years ago they were focusing on Villain content. Priorities change.

Originally Posted by Rodion

Would you rather have the people who are fixing this spend their time fixing this, or reading the forums and writing defensive posts about why the game keeps crashing?

Programming and debugging require intense amounts of concentration. Impatient complaints from whining customers only distract developers from getting their jobs done. And delay exactly the thing you're clamoring for.

Zwill's job is to write posts and interact with us. The other developers are responsible for making the system run, or overseeing the people who do. I'm always happy to see posts from devs when they have the time to post, but this is not one of those times.

Cut Zwill and the devs some slack and let them get on with it.

Originally Posted by VoodooGirl

Again, it should work the way it does now - you choose to have that status on or not (per toon), but it an account should be flagged to be "Helper" enabled.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

Otherwise known as the law of conservation of ninjutsu Something like that, yes. The more the characters in any given story, the less face time they get and the less memorable and awesome they are in the end. To wax anime for a moment:

Take Naruto, for example. That show has loads and loads of characters. I haven't counted, but there are probably over 50 named ones. They almost never show up together at the same time for anything other than epilogue greetings. Most of the time it's a team of four (standard for the show's canon laws) or several teams of four scattered across several different events. And even then loads of those characters spend months with no screen time at all.

In fact, the show had a couple of jokes about that. One was when Garra and his friends were shown in the script that they wouldn't be appearing in the next few story arcs, much to their disappointment. And indeed, we didn't see them for around a year. The other was a few characters joking about renaming the show into "Shikamaru Shippuuden" or "Asuma Shippuuden" because the titular protagonist was about to spend two full story arcs training and having not much of any plot to him. You know, like the last 200 episodes, but I digress.

Another good example is Shaman King. This show has a main cast of over a dozen, plus quite a fat supporting cast, plus a whole cadre of villains and a whole host of cameo characters. However, it manages to make all characters personable by leading them through each character's personal story arc one by one, highlighting that particular character as the story's main protagonist, with the rest acting like supporting cast and combat team-mates. I don't recall a single encounter in 64 episodes that wasn't focused on one specific character, up to and including the final battle that highlighted the show's de-facto protagonist.

What I'm saying is that, at least for some people, what feels "epic" isn't the number of warm bodies tossed at a problem like one might dispense bird seed for the pigeons in a public park, but rather a story which highlights a specific character or two or three and focuses on them. In fact, I just got done writing an essay on why stories should make us care and what stories should make us care about, and "characters" was and is central to that, in my eyes. And you really can't design any sort of gameplay which lets everyone shine in his own way when you're dealing with more people than you can fit on a bus.

That's not to say there isn't a kind of "epic" feel to a large-scale war where everyone in the show thus far goes all out. But it's a specific kind of "epic" that doesn't work for everybody.



I'm not so sure about that, myself. One of the reasons I've stuck with this game for so long can be summed up in the old 2001 trailer tagline: "City of Heroes, where YOU are the hero!" For the most part, this game does a great job of making me feel like THE hero. Not always on a team, no, but I'm careful about who I team with and what I team for. For the most part, I try to be on a team that specifically needs what I bring, and that goes some way towards fulfilling that specification. But when the team just needs "more" of what I have, it starts feeling faceless. I'm not a named hero, I'm "a Scrapper" or, more commonly, I'm just "DPS."

A poster recently said "Screw concept." in those exact words. This, to my eyes, is what these Trials are leading us to. I don't question whether the gameplay is fun or not. I'm sure it is for those that like that sort of thing. But it comes at the cost of fracturing my suspension of disbelief like a mirror by rubbing my face in the fact that I really am just another brick in the wall, just another face in the crowd, just another hero in a city that already has far too many. I know that to be true, but I try to ignore it as much as I can, and indeed pretend that the game is, in fact, all about me. I can do that solo just fine. I can do that on a small team. I can... Sort of do that on a large team. I can't do that in a league. Just can't.

So, no, I don't intend to work the Trials, and I don't intend to try and stop people from working them. To each their own. I just want to do what I can to cull the misconception that people like me are somehow callous or deficient or wrong in their preferences. No more, no less.

Originally Posted by Daemodand

Yeah, for PuGs BAF is the Trial to run. Lambda is a waste of time by comparison. BAF gives you more rewards more reliably as far as PuGs.

Originally Posted by Quasadu

Notice that in my post I was very deliberate in saying everyone and not anyone. Yes there's always going to be some outliers who push like mad to get it as fast as possible. Some folks are willing to spend tons of Inf and pay 2-1 shards for threads, just so they can get it right now. That's going to happen and there's not much point in crippling everyone to stop it.

But there is a value in limiting that to those handful of hardcore folks. If they had made these new powers use just Shards, straight up, I'm willing to bet that a MUCH larger number of people would have been unlocking and slotting the new powers without ever setting foot in an Incarnate Trial.

We can argue about whether that is good or bad, but the Devs have expressed that they think it's bad, and I happen to agree with them. So that is the reason. Even if some folks don't like that reason, that's the reason.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

I meant their hopes of sabotaging any type of endgame system at all being added to the game - yesterday, the endgame system went live, and they were defeated at last

Originally Posted by Quasadu

My expectation is that there will be a new tier of salvage and components like Shards or Threads that will be used to craft the next wave of Incarnate powers. Whether these will be introduced with the next wave of trials depends on whether those trials are related to the new powers or the ones we have now.

The reason I say there will be a new salvage for the new powers is the same reason we got threads instead of just using Shards again - the Devs will not want everyone to be able to stockpile enough components to just have everything on day one of the new powers going live. They will want you to do the content.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

They've been at it since the endgame system was first announced - yesterday they were finally destroyed

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

I only play the stuff I find fun

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

The Hamidon raid could be repurposed as an Incarnate Trial too.

Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim

Most trials, failed or not, have run me about 35 minutes or so. That's less time than any WST I've ever done ever, speed or otherwise.

Originally Posted by Ironik

I've done Hamidon twice. I hated it so didn't repeat it, ever. So I don't do things I don't find fun.

I said this a few weeks ago and I'm going to repeat it: the fixed cost for everything in your life is time. You have X amount of time to do something and no matter what you do, you can never get more time. For something that falls under "entertainment," then it needs to be fun or interesting or otherwise engaging. If it is not, then there is no shame in labeling it with the single worst appellation we have: a waste of time.

If that's how people feel about something in the game, then that's their right. If at some point people feel the endgame isn't fulfilling their entertainment needs, then they'll move on.

Originally Posted by Friggin_Taser

By your own failed logic, I guess that the ITF is the most fun task force every put in this game because of how many times it's run.

I'm not assuming, I already know you have absolutely no clue what the playerbase as a whole cares about or finds fun. You and a few others (hi, Venture!) are abusing the empirical "we" and continue to cast YOUR opinions off as the opinions of a mysterious amount of playerbase to try to puff up your own feedback's worth.

To combat your complaints, let me say that some people scoff at your attitude and we all think your feelings against this content are short sighted at best.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

I got 53% of the Interface slot open in my first Lambda run - we trashed almost everything on the map - and the second run got another 45% of the slot open.

Originally Posted by Venture

We did not fail. We won. It simply isn't worth playing a second time, at least not with a melee. I did it again with a Peacebringer, who stayed in Nova form and blasted BM from the air which wasn't too bad, but wasn't very exciting either. To contrast, that team got MoApex in one shot. The prior team was hung up on BM forever.

Originally Posted by Friggin_Taser

If that's reality, then I guess no one ever managed to take down Hamidon.