Bosstone

Seen one in Virtue. A player was trying to irritate the spammer by repeatedly casting a Thermal power on the spammer and yelling at him in Local (or Broadcast, forget which). Frankly, the chump trying to aggravate the spammer annoyed me more than the spammer itself. My in-game email no longer fills up with spam; I can ignore the rest.

Not that anecdotes are any help, but the very first TF I did on coming back to the game was Tin Mage with a non-Alpha-slotted char.

I tried to stop them from inviting me, but they insisted! I even wasn't completely useless, since I ran around clearing mines during the D11 fight.

Now that I didn't know. Everything I've read on BG Mode says Follow/Defensive. It does make sense, though.

Put your pets in Follow mode and Defensive mode. Now, whenever you take damage, your pets will each take a share and you'll take two shares of damage. For example, if you have 1 pet, it'll take 1 share of damage and you'll take 2, 1+2 = 3, so you'll take 2/3 of the damage. Get hit for 60, you'll take 40 and your pet will take 20.

As you get more pets, this increases. At 6 pets, you're taking 2 shares of damage to 6, 1 for each pet, so you're taking 1/4 the damage. Get hit for 60, you'll take 15 and each pet will take 7.5.

If you want to make use of BG mode, and in the later levels you usually do, you need to keep the aggro on you. If an attack hits a pet, it won't count. The attack has to hit you. So you need to be active in the fight, or at least using Challenge or Provoke from the Presence pool.

Does that help?

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The pre-20s end management issue is one of the thing that can make me stay away from leveling new alts, and sometime from the game.

It's not a really clever game design choice either knowing that people who try and discover the game will only see this aspect of CoX (trial accounts stop at level 14).

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The only reason you think there's anything wrong with pre-20 is because you're used to post-20. Newcomers have no preconceptions about how the game should work and won't know any different until they get to SOs and Stamina. Pre-20 is perfectly viable and not nearly as difficult as folks make it out to be, otherwise nobody would ever even get to 20.

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However I think there's an issue with Stamina and the way it works actually : the "most powerful power in the game" as some people stated, the one you cant skip (or very rarely).

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It's perfectly skippable. It's just the end management option that requires the least amount of effort.

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I would bet that many people take Stamina because they were told to take it when they first started playing, then that became the "way" the game was "supposed" to be played.

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Agreed. I've noticed several recent threads in the specific AT forums where most of the posters take Stamina as a given, even on Willpower and Regen builds.

Yes, a whole hour after you posted. I'm bored on my lunch break, what can I say?

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24000+ views and 780 replies and still waiting for a redname post addressing the balance concerns.

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Wait for Godot. It'll take less time.

Seriously, you really think tapping your foot and looking at your watch is going to get a redname hustling in here?

Kosmos, Frosticus, I was indeed thinking of it as just the summons, not the pet powers. I suppose it does depend on how you view it. I'm not sure that looking at each pet power specifically is any more valid than looking at the pet summon, as it's just a flat 'no recharge change' and affects each pet as a whole, not individual powers. *shrug* But I'm not inclined to fight that point.

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Anyway, just so we are clear I'm not calling him out as in "omg you broke teh truce!!! you lied to me!!! what you said is written in stone!!!" like some would have you believe.

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Now this I find insulting. I read your sig. I read the links in your sig. I came to my own conclusion that you are misrepresenting what Castle said.

Sure, everything RIP sets do could already be done, but if you take Castle's word, and again there is no way to hold a productive conversation if you do not, then the RIP sets showed them what was happening more clearly than what already in place in 2007. That's what changed between then and now.

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Said they would NOT go back and give the SoW treatment to existing powers. HUNDREDS are being set to ignore recharge. Ok with that?

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First of all, misleading - not to hundreds of powers. And real smooth linking to Red Tomax's Dev Digest Database - did you actually READ what you linked to?

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I've been considering addressing this myself. The hundreds is simply hyperbolic, but I suppose "TENS of powers" just doesn't have the same rhetorical punch. Pets are not that ubiquitous.

Then the links. Yes, Castle said they had no plans at the time to give anything the SOW treatment...in 2007.

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My honest wish in all this is for the Devs to step forth and just admit that they were having major problems with the MA, and taking these steps is the only way that they can get it out on time.

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My honest wish is just for you guys upset about this change to step forth and admit that you weren't hugged as children. It works both ways, you see.

If you're going to involve yourself in development matters, the very least you can do while still being productive is assume the devs are not lying. You may think they're mistaken, you may think they've come to the wrong conclusions, and you may certainly pull out data to show how they're wrong, but if you claim they are dishonest then what else is there to talk about? You certainly won't accept anything they say except what you want to hear, so what's the point?

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I'm not sure "contrary to our vision" is the best definition for "broken."

Shortly after Issue 6, heroes discovered they could add villain costume parts at the tailor, contrary to intended design, by using a certain slashcommand. Had the devs simply treated that as being "broken" and stripped the functionality, the game would undoubtedly be worse off. Instead, the unintended functionality was used as the basis for a new and better design.

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Cool, so the devs are willing to incorporate unintended features into the game.

Means there's probably a reason they don't want this particular unintended feature in the game, don't you think?

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Well a little light should go off and say hey maybe i need to test that and compare it to other sets to see if those complaints are legitimate.

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"Right after I finish implementing the new proliferated powersets, fix those problems with War Mace that have been in the pipeline for three months, and get these more important bugfixes we found on test yesterday out of the way."

What is it you think the devs do all day anyway? Wait for your posts?

ETA: There are god knows how many different powersets and combinations thereof, and when you add IOs into the mix there's even more combinations possible. Players have the time, because there's so many of them; one player can exploit the hell out of one powerset, another can exploit another, etc. They only have so many devs that are already working on other projects. Datamining is more efficient because it gives them an overall view of what's going on, which is far better and takes less time than individually monkeying with each set like a player.

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What do you mean statistically significant?

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It didn't seem like it was worth spending time fixing before, but new data came in more recently that said otherwise.

And do you need to be reminded again about development cycles and how long it takes from someone saying "Hey, we need to do this" to implementation? The only stuff that really bypasses that cycle are emergencies, horrific gamebreaking bugs that have to be fixed or there is no game to play. This was not one of them.

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And while I do believe the devs are a great team who do fantastic work, a small voice in the back of my head screams at me to go study the code and find a better solution.

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I've worked with a coder for a combat system for a much smaller game than this. When she originally created the system, she built it organically, adding things as necessary and hacking them into the existing code. Several times she would go to add a feature, pause, and say she couldn't, because the structure of the code wouldn't allow it. Eventually she broke apart the logic of the system and rewrote it to be modular, cleaner, and more efficient, and even then down the road she found some things she couldn't do.

MMO code is a monstrosity. It's worked on by several different people, with folks leaving and joining the team on a semi-regular basis. There's no way to expect that Cryptic could have foreseen today's needs four, three, or even two years ago, and when NCSoft inherited the game they were even more at a loss.

It's entirely possible that it's impossible to make a change regarding -recharge to only one pet. Due to the structure of the code, the change would have to affect all or none. They could hack something, possibly, but that would make the system unstable and even more complicated. They could overhaul the system and rewrite it to allow them to do what they want to do, but it's possible that could take an entire development cycle by itself.

Given that an MMO that adds nothing new for too long stagnates and dies (we saw some of that between I12 and I13), they cannot devote all or even most of their effort toward cleaning up existing code. They have to balance code cleanup with gamebreaking bug fixes, balance tweaks, and new content/mechanic creation. Given everything that demands priority, they can't take the long, hard, but correct path. They have to take the compromise path that's not perfect but is quicker.

And I say again to EvilRyu: you cannot know what they are or are not capable of doing. You do yourself no credit by insisting otherwise.

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They could have just as easily fixed it that many issues ago if it was truely a problem.

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You do not know that. Standard Code Rant applies.