Eisenzahn

So, if I'm getting this right, the source of the OPs discontent is essentially a minor RP concern, correct? I'm all for satisfying RP concerns, no matter how trivial they may appear, but it's always a matter of comparing cost to benefit. As big of a modification of how zone to zone travel works as the OP seems to want would likely constitute the bulk of the offering for a small-sized issue (which is all we seem to get any more). That's just too much work for too little reward.

/unsigned.

Because my (now ex) girlfriend was playing the game a lot more often than I was, and I got tired of getting /tells from her freaky ERP guild buddies whenever I'd log in.

More specificically, since I wouldn't be surprised if you're a bit out of the information loop as a first-time poster, here's what the Going Rogue expansion will let you do.

- Take a Hero or a Villain into morally grey territory, becoming a Vigilante or Rogue respectively, who have access to the zones on both sides (but still use things like the Markets only native to their original side).

- Take a Hero or Villain all the way across to now being a full member of the other faction, with access to their markets and whatnot.

- Stick with your original faction, and earn extra rewards for doing so.

- Start any AT from either side as a neutral character in Praetorian Earth, and decide through the storyline whether they're going to become a Hero or Villain.

So no new pet-based ATs that we've been told of, or any New ATs at all for that matter, but All ATs are effectively going to be for Heroes and Villains both.

I was already on board with putting AE in Pocket D, and I'm additionally on board with the expansions of that idea presented by the OP. Good work!

And a slightly more serious attempt than my first...

From the lovely Lunaticia.

*ahem*

I really don't anticipate a shift in recruiting priority for teams. Many (but not all) Hero teams will still operate according to a rigid set of party role requirements, but with a couple new ATs that can fill each role (Brutes & MMs can tank, MMs, VEATs & Corrs can support, all villains can DPS). Many (but not all) Villain teams will stick with the old standard formula of grabbing whoever and whatever is available and overcoming obstacles with big chunks of overwhelming but poorly coordinated damage rather than planning out any kind of coherent strategy, but with the addition of the two most damage-focused ATs in the game (Blasters and Scrappers) and other characters who don't necessarily count Damage Dealing as one of their primary functions like all Villain ATs do. Both sides will see some increase in flexibility, Hero Side much moreso because the migration of players seems far more likely to flow from Red to Blue than the other way around. But overall styles will likely remain consistent.

What seems far more likely to me than team recruitment requirements changing is a change in what actual ATs are being played. I've got a few ATs I anticipate never playing again, once I have the option to pick something from the other faction that better fits my playstyle, but that's a matter of personal taste. Game-wide, though, I'd bet on a significant drop in Defenders in favor of a huge boost in Corruptors, and Heroic Masterminds becoming as common as any of the native Hero ATs. Brutes, I foresee catching up to Tanker numbers, but not to Scrapper numbers. Stalkers and Dominators, I don't imagine changing popularity much in either direction. And Hero ATs moving to Villain Side, I anticipate being extraordinarily rare. The one AT I'd bet on making a big leap from Blue to Red, surprisingly, is the Warshade... but that only in the RP community, where I've talked to a lot of people who are still disappointed Nictus weren't the VEAT.

Personally, I slot all three shields with 3 Resists and 1 EndRed. Even with one of the most efficient endurance management tools in the game appearing in this set, I want to reduce my endurance use, so I can focus my use of Power Sink more on sapping enemy strength than replenishing my own.

Lightning Field, I slot with 2 Endred, 2 Endmod and 2 Acc. Lightning Field's damage dealing component is secondary to its impact on enemy endurance, in my use. But I've only ever paired Electric Armor with Electric Melee, so it's not like I was hurting for AoE Damage. Out of all the powers in the set, this is the one most likely to vary in slotting from player to player.

And as a final note... should your Electric Armor Brute choose to fly, with Swift and Lightning Reflexes both slotted with a level 50 Fly Speed IO, you can cap flyspeed without adding any additional slots to Fly itself. That's a nice trick that only Electric Armor and Super Reflexes can pull off.

Ninja Run being incompatable with Combat Jumping is disappointing, but I'll cope. It looks pretty excellent otherwise. How about Stealth, Invisibility, etc.? Just want to make sure my one and only actual ninja-themed character, my Nin/Nin Stalker, can use this thing without suppressing Hide.

Also, costume bits look sweet. There are several I anticipate using, even on non-Ninja Themed characters. Sounds like it would have been a good idea to throw it onto the Test Server for a bit first, though.

Here's a concept I've been playing with in one of my MA arcs. Mission sequences that involve multiple directly connected instances, where you don't go back outside or even talk to your contact again. You get your instructions for a large-scale operation, and then infiltrate the location stage by stage from the inside.

An example. In my MA arc, you still have to go outside, but the holo-contact gives provides some narrative about how that's "not really happening" before you jump back into the data stream. In the real version, you'd just find the door to the next mission inside of the current one.

Mission 1) Investigate enemy base. An outdoor map. After defeating the boss there, the contact narrative would suggest that you actually found a key on him that allowed you access to the tunnels underneath the Croatoa Farmhouse they were fortifying, and went straight in.

Mission 2) Sneak through the tunnels. Acting on a hunch that there's some more serious enemy activity going on here than was visible on the surface, your team heads into the tunnels to find out where they go. A series of sealed doors bar the way, but chances are you'll have defeated the scripted encounters with the security codes before getting to each one. The final door, guarded by a particularly fearsome boss, leads to...

Mission 3) The enemy stronghold. Or right outside of it, at least. Looks like this is actually the base of operations, and the farmhouse was just there to guard the emergency escape tunnel. Too bad they got spotted fortifying it by locals or satelites or whatever. There's some kind of big horrible thing in the middle of the main courtyard, providing a mid-point boss. The trick is taking out all the snipers and patrols arrayed around that courtyard first, without aggroing the Big Ugly, so your direct fight with it can go uninterrupted. After doing so, you earn access to...

Mission 4) The stronghold interior. With security so tight on the outside, the inside is pretty straightforward. Thoroughly packed with enemies, though. You'll have to be pretty cautious about pulling to avoid operating at the Aggro Cap from one end of the place to the other, where you find...

Mission 5) The Big Boss's private accomodations. A brutal gauntlet full of mechanized defenses, traps and nasty critters, all leading up to the last fight of the arc.

Each of these missions would be kept deliberately small, but packed with a lot of scripted events and tricks. The idea is to give each phase its own unique feel, beyond just a series of standard encounter spawns.

One major concern would be the inability to visit vendors, SG base storage bins, the auction house, etc. For this, I'd a slightly lowered Salvage, Enhancement and Recipe drop rate, and an increased final merit reward to balance it out. Also, the end of mission EXP, Influence/Infamy and Prestige awards would be awarded all at once after the final mission. This is pure psychological trickery, to convince people to play through all the way. Finally, Inspiration drops would be bumped up, because you can't visit a store for more of them between missions.

The other major problem: What happens if people log out or are disconnected? Or if they use an Ouro portal or Base Teleporter to leave? Under ordinary circumstances, they appear outside of the door to the mission they were ejected from. But that's the door way back to Mission 1. Would they return to the team through that door, and be loaded directly to whichever mission they got kicked from, or where the rest of the team is now? Would they have to run through the now empty maps of the earlier missions to catch up? I suspect this is a big part of why missions are currently handled the way they are, and I don't have a good solution for this right now. All maps would be equipped with a Jail or small "home base" with secure medical support though, to avoid the most common reason for leaving a mission, getting defeated.

__

My original assumption about Praetoria (which I'm slowly preparing myself to abandon, as it's all intricately woven into the stories of several of my favorite characters) has the turning point of Praetorian Earth being a version of Brass Monday where Statesman lost control for just a split second and killed Nemesis instead of merely vanquishing him. Discovering that he could outright kill a villain and not really lose any heroic status in the public eye would have started him down the slippery slope of evil, which eventually resulted in him just taking the whole place over and declaring himself emperor. This notion seemed satisfactory at the time because it accomplished the purposes of provoking a darker shift for Statesman without doing something hokey like saying "in this universe he was beat as a kid or something", a much more sinister suggestion that this is a path the Primal Earth version could very easily have found himself on, and at the same time removed Primal Earth's biggest player from the board so the divergence's history would be free to evolve in a very different direction without just a moral flipflop of some main characters occupying a world with an otherwise very similar timeline.

This notion has apparently already been overturned, as Praetorian Cole was already a murderous thug as early as his first acquisition of superpowers, and a lot of other stuff is going differently enough (the nuke-tastic Korean War, and earlier rise of the Devouring Earth for example) that it's clear the divergence was a lot earlier. But it's still possible that the end of Praetorian Nemesis was in an early encounter with a much darker, much more brutal version of Marcus Cole.

You win the award for most excellent thing I've seen all day!

Almost all of my characters will go Vigilante/Rogue. This is because I overwhelmingly prefer the gameplay Redside, but Blueside is so much more populous. My concepts tend towards more murky moral and ethical foundations anyway, so this won't really be out of character for any of them.

The exceptions: Euroclydon (my first and greatest Storm/Elec Defender) and Lunaticia (my Elec/Elec Brute and favorite character of all time) will be sticking strong with their original factions until I figure out what the impact of changing would be on their badges... since they're my two main badge characters. Again, both have very solid in-character causes to stick with their sides. It should come as no surprise that my most often played Hero and Villain are my most Heroic and Villainous characters respectively. But I could imagine both drifting to the other side and back, as well.

My namesake, Eisenzahn, is likely to be my only character to immediately pursue the path of total redemption. He's a nasty guy, a killer for hire and self-described "scariest man alive", but he's always had good intentions (no matter how deep he's let them get buried), and I can imagine a solid storyline for his return to good.

The standard MMO formula is... kind of like an abusive relationship. People may hate certain things, but if they're not offered alternatives until they've become accustomed to those things, they may become convinced that those things are actually positive.

When I quit FFXI for this game, some of my old guildmates actually argued that things like quick travel times, solo gameplay, flexible build options, mild penalties for death, lack of competition over outdoor spawns, and a loot free (at the time) system of character improvement were bad ideas.

And yet... these were the same people who would complain constantly over Linkshell Chat about having to wait 20 minutes for the airship to show up, or ride a Chocobo for half an hour to reach some obscure camp in the middle of nowhere. Or about the number of hours they'd spent sitting around in Jeuno trying to get a team going. Or about the number of months it took them to obtain all of the gear, spells, level-cap unlocks, secret zone unlocks and faction reputation necessary to be considered worthy of team invites within even a 5-10 level span. Or how much of a hassle it was getting a good camp location where you could effectively fight the monsters you were grinding for EXP without having to compete with a dozen other teams over the same spawns. Or the Notorious Monster system, which encouraged all kinds of ridiculous griefing and drama, and was the main way most players encountered RMT farmers in game. Or about how many times they'd died enough to de-level entirely, and how wary that made everyone of trying out any new content without following someone else's fine tuned strategy to the letter. Or the incredibly low drop rates of the high-end raid content, where you could go for months at a time without successfully completing an event, and even when you did, your chances were less than 1 in 100 of actually getting a reward. Or about how we'd been camping King Ranperre's Tomb for six hours, but some other guild was able to get the Vrtra legendary dragon spawn because they were using taunt bots, or because of server latency, or because it's just crummy design to put something like that on a 3-4 day timer and then load it with some of the best loot in the game, if you don't want players getting pissed at each other over it.

What they didn't seem to realise was that these problems could all be summed up as Time Sinks. The game developers needed to keep subscriptions going by making everything as time consuming as possible. There was a lot of excellence and beauty in that game, but it was clear that it only existed to provide a minimum effective incentive to put up with the rest of it.

This game... the developers seem to respect our time. And more importantly, they get involved. I haunted the official FFXI forums pretty much around the clock, and I didn't even know the names of any of the developers. Maybe that's because they were focused on communicating with their core audience, the Japanese players, but it's still a pretty unfavorable contrast to the way the developers here operate. They respect us and they listen to us. They may not agree with what they hear, but they bother to check in the first place.

...

That said... MORE STORY CONTENT IN ISSUE 17, INDEPENDENT OF WHAT'S CONTAINED IN THE PAID PORTION OF GOING ROGUE, PLEASE!!!