Blood Red Arachnid

It is hard to include all the diversity applicable to any origin in a mere sentence. But I think you know what I mean.

All players will only be 15% as effective at +3, and 4% as effective at +0. It is doable, albeit very hard. The trial will have to be built around the fact that players will only be this effective, but if it is done so then I can't wait for it.

I like tough fights. I want the brawl with Tyrant to feel like an all-or-nothing end of the world no-holds bar battle against a foe that is vastly superior to me in nearly every way.

This. So much this. Something that my sister said once that seemed quite profound to me is that if you continue make a series of bad decision, eventually you reach a point where you can't make a good one anymore. This whole "darned if you do, darned if you don't" situation sounds like one that could've easily been avoided if planned ahead two months ago. What has me irked the most is the pet functionality being broken. I've made my first mastermind, and playing him feels more like I'm wrangling a daycare than commanding an army.


Though I an a bit saddened at the flames being exchanged in the thread. It is one of those things where it seems like no matter where I go, the place eventually devolves into chaos. The bringer of disorder and pain... the Blood Red Arachnid.

It did. I had that stalker for a long time before Going Rogue and before I went to the forums. He sat at 50 for what seems like forever before I rerolled him.


That or I'm just not remembering things right... it happens sometimes.

I'm not falling for that "there's something on your shoulder" trick again...

Your maps are too confusing. The time it took me to be able to glean information from them and understand them was beyond the Tl;dr point. The whole "too long" and "couldn't be bothered" are basically the same point. Aside from that point, players who won't bother to listen can't be fixed by telling them things. Whenever we get that problem, I exercise the kick button.

This entire post is discussing what I call the "really enjoy the trials" aspect of running multiple trials. This doesn't truly change the limit of the playerbase as much as it may provide an additional factor which I believe I may have already mentioned. While this is all well and good, this doesn't change people still running the trial once a day, so it must not be hated that much. Though the difficulty and/or recruit length increases with each successive MoM and DD trial, I still see 2-3 of each of them being run in a single day on Virtue. The tendency to run the easy trials repeatedly reinforces the idea that players are attempting to go for maximized rewards more than they are attempting to entertain themselves or be charitable toward other players. The contrast would be that players continually run the Lam/BAF because they actually enjoy those trials, so much so that they are willing to run them multiple times a day every day while not becoming bored with them.

BTW, people aren't telling me that I am mistaken in explaining this phenomena. They are telling me that this phenomena doesn't exist. There is a big difference, since postulating alternate explanations for a phenomena requires the acceptance of such a phenomena as a premise. As long as the phenomena happens, I'm not really too concerned about the specifics as to what is leading toward a limited player pool. If it is because the community has the resources but lacks the will, this still means that the players are a limited commodity regarding forming those trials.

This doesn't make sense. One of the benefits toward running the trials with less stringent requirements is to show that they aren't as hard as people portray them to be. By doing so, it instructs players how to run the trials, lets players run them more often, and also makes them more enjoyable as a whole.


I have yet to be on a TPN that has failed *recently*. It is hard to pick out a failure in the past two months or so, and the TPN trial is now run about as often as Keyes, which are done so many times I can't keep count throughout the day. However... during the first two weeks or so the TPN on virtue was hell. The failure rate was through the roof, nobody had any idea what they were doing or how to go about doing it, and the entire league was still dealing with that whole "listening to instructions" problem that will occasionally plague other trials. But things have gotten a lot better through time, first impressions be damned.


This I am not so sure of. The tricks that the Sentinel has aren't too damning, especially if you get a team that knows and cooperates to remedy the problems. The biggest obstical toward fighting the sentinel is his heal. Outside of that, the sentinel has very little to give me the notion that it is anything but a gigantic wall of HP that needs to be whittled away. I already know how teams can improve, too: most leaders don't have memorized all of the effects that the Sentinel gets from the three heroes it absorbs. It is very possible to tailor the sentinel to being a lot weaker than it ends up on MO runs (25% resistances + regen boost + self heal + AoE Hold), and likewise each of his powers has several weaknesses to them that currently are just DPSed through. For instance, his AoE Pulse damage is targeted around a specific player, so in theory if you have one tank that holds aggro you can pull a similar tactic to air-taunting with the WWs in the UG. I have yet to see a team try this, though, so it remains in theory only.

As far as any particular server goes with tactics, something Arcana said about replacing all of the players with clones reminded me of a video I saw once. It is 16 minutes long, but the gist of it is that population size is directly proportional to innovation via the exchange of materials and ideas and increasing specificity of individual components in the network. A particularly interesting example is from about 12:30 on when he explains how it is Tasmania encountered negative growth when cut off from the mainland. When we apply this to the servers in the game, we see that a smaller server is at a disadvantage over a bigger server based on the very fact that one server is smaller than another. It is not that any individual is smarter, or that any individual is more skilled, but that there lacks a certain substrate for experience to bud off from, and the resources for ideas to be put to the test. You mentioned earlier how you've been on 18 MoMs. I've been on far more than that. Hell, I think I've personally hosted more than 18 MoMs. The people on more populated servers, they too have been on a lot more MoMs than on servers that are scarce. The knowledge, the practice, the innovations between leaders, all of that gives the populated server an incredible advantage. The differences between them extend far beyond the trials, and this can make a community that is anemic when compared to others, not only in population but in skill as a whole. Due to their specifics, certain trials take longer to get used to than others. If you want to apply that outdated theory of unilinear social evolution to it, then a certain minimum number of trials needs to be run in order to foster enough comfort with the trials in order to create an environment in which someone is willing to go out of their comfort zone.


My biggest influence over the server is when I actually host the trials, and I am getting the feeling that I am having a positive effect in that matter. The videos are mostly a side-project that deals with the issue of players not knowing what things like "voids" look like or how to tell when you're in the same realm as Aurora. A picture is worth a thousand words, and it conveys them in mere moments.