Captiosus

I did that after thinking about it, thanks. It got squared away pretty fast.

But I still can't go to Talos Island, at all. I have to avoid it entirely. If I try to go to Talos on ANY character, it just hangs until I get either a pop-up that says "mapServer disconnected. Try again.", OR I get dropped back into the tram with this error, but have to force close to be able to log in again.

Will drop them an e-mail at the official support site stating the above. I'm hoping it's an i21 hiccup. I've had to do WAY too many force closes since this issue went live.

Gods, this argument? What is this, Burning Crusade-era WoW?

Stacking groups with 'perfect' compositions is not a challenge. It's antithetical to being a challenge because the concept of stacking perfect comps is so you can blow through the content with minimal effort. Saying "We don't want to carry a weaker AT" is just a veiled excuse trying to justify the behavior.

A challenge is taking anyone who meets the basic requirements and making the raid work, regardless. There's already enough challenge in hoping to assemble people who are capable of listening and following directions, now it's OK to bench people unless they play the FotM, percieved "best", powersets for their AT for a specific raid?

I had to defend against this exact same line of reasoning back then when WoW Mages were poorly designed and raid groups were stacking Warlocks at the exclusion of Mages. And that was, ultimately, the beginning of the end for me and that game and why I returned to this one. If this game follows the same path with the incarnate trials, I suspect I will end up the same way, except with F2P, since I'm 2 tokens from full Tier 7, I'll just stop subbing and still have access to the vast majority of the game at no cost.

Or, instead of getting rid of the origin requirement, at least ditch the blueside quests at the 35+ SO level, and revamp the stores where you can sort by enhancement function rather than having to look at them by color because of the wonky origin naming.

Seriously, simply revamping the UI of enhancement stores to a two pane window identical to the enhancements option at the ticket vendor in AE would be a godsend.

Edit: Guess I shoulda read the thread before posting this, so basically, just consider myself signed to the renaming and/or redesigning vendor idea posted by others. Also, I like Xanatos' simplification concept, to be honest: Simple TOs, Complex (but optional) IOs.

Thank you. A million times, thank you.

I saw people posting crap like "the game begins at 50" in the MARTy thread and wanted to slap them. That line of thought is true in other games like WoW, but not this one. This game has always, always been about the experience of going to 50 with a new class, gradually feeling more and more super, making new friends, new alliances.

Maybe I'm just jaded by remembering what it was like to have a level 50 during i1, when there were no badges, no raids, no PVP, no crafting, no epic ATs, and just the original Freedom Phalanx TFs. "Congrats on hitting 50, now go make a new toon and do it again immediately!"

We should be thankful that they've added any end game at all. That said, I'm not terribly fond of the Underground Incarnate Trial. The length, mechanics and players feeling the need to organize leagues by perceived perfect group composition is starting to smell a bit too much like WoW's end game.

ROFL, no.

If they were the best dev team, they'd understand you don't pull down live servers when it's day time across all of North America, and peak hours in Europe. Network Engineering 101. Yep, they're coming in on a Saturday - should that give them extra credit? No. I've spent many a Friday night/early Saturday morning/early Sunday morning fixing network issues, updating servers, or running full and/or incremental backups. It's part of my salary. It's also part of my salary to do these things when the least number of people are affected.

Fully agreed. Between the pricing being all over the map and the reliance on "but it's global!" as a catch phrase, I can't see any way the market will be profitable over the long term. There's little nickle-and-diming in Paragon's plan, which is the bread and butter of a microtransaction model. There's just "pay a higher amount now, and it's yours on that account forever".

That WILL eventually reach a plateau and new revenue will fall right off a cliff.

Yeah, because it's a issue with phasing. That other W-named MMO has the exact same problems in every zone they employed phasing in.

Phasing, in my experience, has always been far more trouble than it's worth. It leads to a lot of technical problems, and the issues I encountered in that W-named MMO are too numerous to list since they implemented it.

And now I'm seeing the exact same issues here. For example, I was running the Aaron Theiry arc via Ouro on my Corruptor and I got to the mission where I had to kill the Wolf Spider Commanders. I was purposely in Atlas Park 5 on Virtue so as to avoid too much competition. There was only one other person there working on the arc in that zone. Walked down the street and there was nothing. No mobs, no pylons, nothing. Ran around for 10 minutes - nothing was showing up. Then, all of the sudden, it's like the game put me in the proper phase, and I was standing in the middle of three packs of mobs, and everything appeared at once.

Mobs materializing on heads in Mercy and Atlas is a testament to just how poorly phasing works - and if that B-company still can't get it right with far greater revenues and now two expansions using it, I can't imagine it'll ever work right here.

And I, sadly, must agree with jwbullfrog - I hate the new tutorial. It's too fast, doesn't really TEACH anything and, until he mentioned it I never really thought of it (but he's right), it's too much like that other super hero MMO's "tutorial".

While I'm glad they streamlined the missions from 1-20, I've gone back and done the new intro arcs and the ongoing training arcs (ugh, Bimbeaux.. err.. Flambeaux), and never want to see them again. They are the epitome of mindnumbing. Part of it is the phasing issue, but in terms of the Shining Star arcs, too much time is spent traveling, and the attempts at teaching are shrouded by hard to read text (looking at you Dillo) or humor that's out of place. If I were a new player, Flambeaux whole "OMG BECKY LOOK AT..", err sorry, "Look at these pretty hair enhancements" would have told me a grand total of jack and squat.

That said, there's a lot to like here, but the early game, which I was desperately was hoping would get a much needed face lift to be interesting, got a face lift, but is still pretty ugly. The best part is the sewer trial. Beyond that, I'd still rather skip the tutorial and PL to 22 or street sweep to 5 and get a radio like before.

While I agree with the majority of your post, this last line has me scratching my head.

Give it some months to settle down, see what happens to people's buying habits in one, two, or three months. Let's see how often the store has new product for people to spend their money on. Let's see how free and freemiums react to the store once they have access.

It's far too early to call it a success and a new era. Everyone is still in the "oooh, new and shiny!" mode. Right now, I can't see the store having that much new stuff being cycled in that isn't already there. It's not like, prior to this, they were putting out new booster packs and new QoL pieces every month and they probably still aren't going to. So, in a couple of months, if the market still has the same items it has today, and the only thing that's cycled have been sales, microtransactions will plateau and then fall off from VIPs.

We need to see how all of the above comes together over the long term before coining it a success.

Very glad to see I'm not the only one with this opinion.

Having done the "tutorial" twice, it's a terrible tutorial. It exists, almost solely, to have you pick your morality. It doesn't teach (you know, the whole point behind a tutorial) anything beyond going to see the trainer and is over within a couple minutes. The event mode is poorly explained and a complete flustercuck and the voice overs are horrendous. Captain Chipper sounds way too happy to be directing you after the city just got hit with a very large meteor. Then, it ends as fast as it begins, shuffling you out to Atlas Park where the real tutorial begins with the initial arcs and the Twinshot ongoing arcs.

The beauty of the destroyed zone is overshadowed by the fact that we barely get to see it because it pushes you out the door so fast. I'm not even so sure it can be viewed as a fitting introduction to grouping since the Giant Shivan event doesn't even require a group, and people don't bother with grouping for it. It might be a good introduction to world events like those found in Praetoria, but that's about it.

Frankly, it took years before I regularly skipped Outbreak and Breakout; I'm skipping this one, every time, after day one.

Edit to add TLDR: I honestly cannot understand how people think this is exciting. It's just as mindnumbing as Outbreak. It explains little to nothing, the forced grouping event is meaningless, and then you're out the door. I fail to see why I should praise the devs for this new not-so-tutorial. It's pretty, but ultimately, not worth the time.

This is the one thing I worry about actually keeping free/casual returning premiums from resubscribing and, as Maestro rightfully points out, it's all about perception.

Let's hypothetically assume their drops will be identical to VIP-status, they just can't do anything with them as VIPs can, other than vendor them for a pittance. The way I understand it, and I might be wrong - feel free to correct me if I am - salvage and recipe drops are semi-shared with enhancement drops, meaning you'll get one of the three on a given mob kill.

That makes it even less likely they'll be able to keep fully slotted with DOs and SOs because they're getting drops that will end up vendoring for far less than selling enhancements not for their origin. They will actually be in a worse boat than we were in "the old days" when all we had drop were enhancements.

Then when they hit 22 and realize they have enough INF to buy MAYBE 2 SOs before being broke... They might just tell the game goodbye. And heaven forbid they are able to look at prices in Wentworths/Black Market, even if they're unable to use the market itself. The first time they see things that cost tens or hundreds of millions when they are struggling to get 20-30k together to buy a couple DOs or one SO, it might turn them off the prospect of ever subscribing.

Same boat here. Although the discount for bulk purchase is still nice, I think I'll just stick with month-to-month until there's a solution for this particular issue.

I knew someone was going to make that argument. Incarnate access is a perk, yes - it's a core part of the game and SHOULD be a perk for VIPs only. The same is true about First Ward because all of Praetoria is VIP only (for now), so First Ward isn't going to be any different.

As for character slots, that is a non argument because it goes right back to value. If you take the amount of slots I can have open right now should I go to Premium Free, I can have every single one of my 50s unlocked AND have room to spare. And they're purchasable with points, so if I wanted more, I could buy more. Just because I have 160 slots doesn't mean it is a value unless I'm using a majority of those 160 slots.

None of this negates the fact that we're only getting a fraction of the points a freemium spending the same amount gets and then being told we have to pay out of that allotment, or pay extra, for what should be core additions to the game. One extra token per year doesn't cut it. Unfettered access to character slots we may or may not use doesn't cut it.

Do what I did: Sit down and make a bullet point list of everything VIPs get versus everything Premium Free and Standard Free gets, then compare the costs given various situations. You'll find out that VIPs, despite what looks like great "benefits" continually get the shorter end of the stick when it comes to overall value, not just in terms of points allotted vs. points paid, unless you're in the 1 or 2% who have the highest possible veteran rewards and are overloaded with characters.

We get Time Manipulation free, but Beam Rifle is considered a "premium" power set that will cost 800 paragon points, regardless of whether you're a VIP, Premium Free or Standard Free player.

As I posted above, since we get an allotment of 400 points per month - more if you're tier 9 VIP - one can argue that it's still technically "free". Just "free" with the caveat that we're losing 800 points out of our annual 4800 allotment (or will have to buy extra points in a month to get it).

Sorry, but I have to agree with Feycat. Value is subjective; If you have 20 toons and it comes out to 50 cents per slot per toon, that's great value to you. But what if someone only has 7 or 8 toons? The value for them significantly diminishes until they potentially make new characters.

This is why the last known pricing bothers me. Successful free to play games nickle and dime. They would charge you for a costume slot, per character, at a minor to modest cost. They don't put up a big sum and make it account global, because that makes people have to evaluate the overall value of dropping a larger amount for something they may only want for one or two characters, AND developer only gets the revenue ONCE. Using your hypothetical, if you have 20 characters, and you have to buy a slot for each, but the slot is only 80 points ($1), you'll probably impulse buy them because of the low price, and Paragon would make twice as much off your doing so than if you spent $10 globally. Plus, since it's not global, if you make a 21st character and decide you want another slot you'd have to spend another $1, meaning more revenue for Paragon.

The same can be said of the "VIP Rewards". The free monthly transfer token reward is only a value if they're used. For most of us, they're just going to stockpile, collecting dust - making the effective value zero. That's hardly much of a "reward" for being a subscriber. The value of the signature arc depends on how frequently new signature arcs are added and how long each arc is. If the Hero Death arc is the only arc for months, and it only takes an hour or two to complete, that, also, is not much value.

To be honest, I really do not like how they are handling subscribing members, at all. When you do the math on it, we get the short end of the stick in terms of "value". Why are we being forced to buy "premium" power sets as if we're freemium or just plain free? Other free to play games give those to subscribers for being a subscriber. Sure, one can argue that we're getting free points so, in effect, we're still getting it for free, but considering we get a laughably small amount of points per month compared to someone who spends $15 a month on points alone (4800 points + 13 reward tokens vs. 14400 points + 12 reward tokens), it rubs me the wrong way.

Power sets should be viewed as core content and should be a "perk" of being a VIP, period. It should not cost our reward point stockpile, not cost extra real world cash, et cetera. The whole point of being a subscriber is to NOT be constantly reaching in to the wallet to buy core content items. As a VIP, I have no problem being nickle-and-dimed for QoL additions.

You gave it your best try, though!

Pfft, when *I* was a new player, there was no such thing as these newfangled "Epic Archetypes". All we had was getting to 50 and then killing Nemesis endlessly, then sitting around by Positron in Steel Canyon fielding lots of "can u give me money" questions from lower level characters.

I see your canewave and raise you /e walker.