Captain_Photon

"I might get saddled with a crap team. Ergo, you get to be held up as if you had."

... Yeah, not buying in, sorry.

Is there a particular reason for the "somewhat slower" qualification there? I'm not clear on why not wanting to team up to do this stuff necessitates a time penalty.

You converted your apartment into a metaphor for workplace discrimination? Avant-garde!

Really? Having some people in an English-language community for whom English is a second language excuses everybody there from corrective action? That's interesting. I'll have to remember to run that argument past my military history prof in the back of the booklet for this Friday's exam. I'm sure there are some foreigners in that class - they're easily identified by their much greater fluency than most of the locals - so I should totally not be expected to make complete sentences when I'm essaying about the Moscow campaign of 1812 and its significance to the fall of the First French Empire.

OP acknowledges this, deems it insufficient. I have no position on the matter myself.

Lithium.

... Um, I mean, I'm told there's a slider for it in the audio controls. I haven't actually looked. At present I avoid them through the simpler expedient of not playing the tutorial.

Well, OK, but... so? I think if you took the chipotle sauce out of Taco Bell's new chicken flatbread sandwich it'd be really boring, but I don't want chipotle sauce in City of Heroes either.

"Use Only As Directed", I think.

In this case I'm not complaining directly about the "your difficulty setting isn't really your difficulty setting" thing - I know it's been like that forever and the designers may not even perceive it as a fault, let alone be arsed to fix it. I'm complaining about the fact that Who Will Die? defeats my workaround for same for no evident reason.

If it's turn-offable without disabling all the rest of the sound effects, it's no skin off my back. If not, however, that gets a big ol' Jranger from me. The tutorial voices are Not a Win. Particularly the guy who can't pronounce "Shivan", but I dislike the concept in general. Among other problems, they set a precedent that could lead to character voices being introduced, to which I am entirely opposed.

(Also, I'm not sure how a game assuming you can't read is "more modern", except in a really cynical "this is the post-literate future" sense.)

I know, that's what I just said. I normally play on -1 because that way, when the "randomly one level higher than you asked for" thing happens, they're +0 (yellow lieutenants), which is what I actually want. I trade the lost XP for the ones that spawn -1 for the reduced annoyance of not having to deal with +1s I didn't order. Which is fine; unlike a lot of people around here, I'm not in any great hurry.

Who Will Die?, on the other hand, ignores that setting. I get set to level 20, the mission gets set to level 20, orange lieutenants spawn at random - even with "-1/0" still showing at the top of the mission tab. It's hella annoying.

Yeah, that looks more like a warning label than a brand name to me. You can bet that any actual such product would be covered with stickers warning the holder that the pointy bits go into the bad guy and you should never, ever use it on your cat, that kind of thing. The same product safety mentality that gives us Caution: very hot coffee!, except with slightly more reasonable intent.

Warning! Pedantry!

Also: The item pictured is not a Taser, it's a stun gun. It's designed to rely on what the beating-people-up industry calls "pain compliance" - making it hurt to the point where the other guy says "uncle". Tasers are ranged weapons based on a different principle - they shoot little darts (like the Tech-origin starting temp power) that cause the target's muscles to stop working momentarily. They're much more sophisticated than stun guns, which are really little more than compact versions of electric cattle prods from the 1940s - about what you'd expect from Malta...

Also also: Taser is a brand name; it's a registered trademark of Taser International. The generic name is "electroshock weapon".

More to the point, it's an individual store's individual insurance company's policy. A lot of outfits that insure retail establishments don't want to spend time talking to your lawyers because you rocked up to the drive-thru on foot and some coked-out d-bag in a Hummer ran you over, so they tell their policyholders, "Don't let people do that."

I congratulate you on your perspicacity, sir!

... Which is great, and all, except that we're pretty specificially discouraged from doing that kind of thing. So you're sort of asking for a costume piece that would have no usefulness other than in making costumes that would get GMsmacked automatically. As we used to say in sales-engineering at GTE, not seeing the "value add" there.

Yes.

Nope, but the Number Slaves don't care about us. They're just talking to each other. To them, we're Doing It Wrong.

Keep in mind that there are most likely tons of casual players in the game itself, but not many of them are here on the boards. They're too casual for that.

To be fair, the End Game itself is farming, so this question is kind of moot.

I'm also disappointed with many aspects of the way the game has evolved over the years, since the days when I was drawn to it specifically because it was so unlike the rest of the MMO market. No loot, no PvP, no "give us real money and your character will be better"... those were the days.

On the other hand, there's still plenty to do without bothering with the stuff you have to be a Number Slave to excel at, so I'm still here despite all that. My personal strategy for avoiding your concern about being hassled on teams for my non-Incarnate gimpiness is to solo pretty much exclusively. This solution is not for everyone and I don't recommend it without reservation; it's just my own niche. To paraphrase the great Hunter S. Thompson, I hate to advocate misanthropy and isolationism, but they've always worked for me.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Internet, summarized in two words. Well, one word and a slightly crap acronym.

I believe you have the design team's intentions surrounded.