Eisregen_NA

Arc Name: Bad Ground
Arc ID: 43034
Faction: Banished Pantheon, Arachnos, Special Guest
Length: Three rather short missions
Synopsis: I just wanted to offer a short arc that'd be fun to do, employing an underused contact and the criminally underused Banished Pantheon. Linked together by a solid if not revolutionar story. Solid mission design should always be more important than trying to be funny or telling your character or SG's great story.

Now look what I did there.

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Let's assume the plaque in one zone on all servers as a non starter, with a fair share of people.
Since this thread has had some attention, what if it's politely nudged to IanTheM1's quote above, or the post Arcana replied to.

An MA style Hall of Fame per server, and or client side in-game recognition.
IanTheM1's right that is a good idea, I missed that in the summery of alternate suggestions.

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I saw that after I posted, and while I'm not generally against this, I wouldn't want to be the one to decide on the criteria. There are virtually tons of players who'd probably deserve recognition, both game-wide and server-wide. How do you pick them? Cause you know for everyone who gets in there, there'll be dozens of envious players wondering why they didn't get in there.

Granted, noone would question the merits of, say, Arcanaville, Ascendant or TheMightyStorm assuming they know who these guys are. These are people we can look at and say, 'yeah, they've done a lot for the game or at least their subcommunity of the playerbase'. But where would you draw the line?

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Fictional scenario: There's two big SGs on your server who contain literally hundreds of players and constantly run SG and community events. The leader of SG A constantly brags about their achievements and actively seeks recognition for their deeds while the leader of SG B just goes about their job.

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You've heard of Stryke Force?

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

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I was actually thinking of a real example here, yes. But there's really no need to add unrelated tensions to the thread by naming names. Either way, apparently the image did its job. This makes me happy. I'm currently learning how not to type in paragraph-sized sentences.

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If you think that Tanker Tuesday has not met some nebulous set of criteria for a plaque, please list the criteria you would consider appropriate. I encourage you to be as specific as possible. This will help a productive dialog, which we can all enjoy.

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Countersuggestion: Define your own criteria by which any player-driven community effort in the game should be worthy of a plaque across all game servers. Scope, lifetime, impact and so on. Be proactive. Saying 'we want this cause we think we deserved it but we can't really say who else deserves it nor do we care' is plain selfish and proves a lot of the counterarguments made so far right. Be proactive, not defensive.

[Collision warning: There's a wall of text coming your way.]

But keep in mind that if the criteria are too loose, City Hall may soon vanish under a pile of plaques. There is so much that I know to be worthy of recognition. The people who came up with Crey Files, BadgeHunter/Vidiotmaps, CityInfoTerminal, ParagonWiki and all the websites I've forgotten (or just forgotten the name of, like RedTomax' site, whatever it's called). Joe Chott and all the other people who coded Hero Planners. All these reached out beyond servers and made a huge impact on a lot of players. What about all those community artists like Juggertha or Toxic_Shia who've by now probably done thousands of paintings for hundreds of players in their time? You're not gonna tell me these guys are less deserving of anything than a server specific AT-centric event, no matter how regularly it's been held.


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If you think that a plaque specifically is inappropriate, please feel free to suggest alternatives, if you think of any. Alternately, provide some productive feedback on some of the alternatives already suggested. I don’t doubt that the proponents are willing to consider a thoughtful response.

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Suggestions have been made in spades. I'd again challenge you to be proactive and actually research what other rewards have been given out, but it's pretty much been covered. Rare case of a badge put into the game where it made sense, tons and tons of yellow titles given out. That's what you can reasonably expect the Devs to be willing to do and what you should look at.

Based on empirical evidence.


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If you are opposed to the idea based on some type of comparison (valid or otherwise), please keep in mind that this is not a contest. The proponents of the idea don’t seem to be attempting to invalidate anyone else’s events, and your similar courtesy would be appreciated. Having Tanker Tuesday receive a plaque (or alternate) will have no impact on anything else receiving a plaque. If you think that something else is just as worthy, please start a separate thread suggesting that it receive a plaque, and it can stand on its own merits, just like Tanker Tuesday.

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Maybe the thing that irks people is that everybody else who did or does anything in game can do without receiving tangible recognition? Have you ever considered that?

Fictional scenario: There's two big SGs on your server who contain literally hundreds of players and constantly run SG and community events. The leader of SG A constantly brags about their achievements and actively seeks recognition for their deeds while the leader of SG B just goes about their job.

Question: Which is the more sympathetic person?

This isn't to say that giving credit where it's due isn't appropriate, but as with respect it can't be petitioned or demanded. It's either recognized or not. You can strive to be recognized, but that needs to go before the demands for credit.


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I'm sorry if you take that as a dismissive response, but dragging the "single server" argument out just isn't productive.

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It's being brought up because noone has successfully been able to refute it yet. Stepping onto the spot on Virtue and reading -essentially- 'this is where a couple Tanks meet on Champion' just won't do.



Edit:

Oh yeah, I also want a commemorative plate for the power Hurricane which Castle murdered in cold blood. That affects all servers and a whole damn lot of players.

If someone hasn't kept a subscription for 36 ongoing months, I really don't think they should be able to expect anything. If their characters and stuff are still there, and only their names gone, then that's already more than generous. If they absolutely must retain the names of their 50s, they can reactivate the game for one month every year or so, just to keep their 50s.

Otherwise, good riddance.


Also, I don't think military duty is an excuse per se. It's not like you people have a draft over there. I realize that it's too common an occurence among gamers not to consider, but by no means does it warrant any special consideration by itself.

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or for 10 bucks you can buy 100 mill inf from one of the stupid spam in game emails that continue to fill my in game mailbox. and with that 100 mill you can buy 5 in game respec recipies.

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Sure, if I wanted to lose my game account, I could do that.

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My point was who is the real crook?

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If you have to ask like this... You, for making the comparison. Seriously, this level of stupidity should be criminal.


This is NCSoft's game. Completely, now. This means they're the only ones with a right to make money off of it. Because they're the ones who pay Posi and company's salaries so they can fix bugs and create new contant. Because they're the ones who maintain the servers.

Respecs are still in game, and can still be gained by either just waiting for the next VetSpec or Freespec to become available, or can be gotten with a 1-2 hour time investment. Or you can buy them with in-game currency off the market, or even just find them on accident. NCSoft is now simply offering another way for people to get them. A way for people who don't want to commit themselves to waiting or investing 1-2 hours of their time in a Respec Trial.

I find it hard to conceive of there being a huge customer base for this addition, but I have seen the request for exactly this feature pop up once in a while on the Suggestion Boards. And it's completely optional. If you don't want to pay ten bucks for a Respec, don't pay for it. It's not like Ex Libris is coming over to your place and forcing you at gunpoint.


Meanwhile, RMTs are selling a commodity they don't own.


You do the [censored] math.

<QR>

I don't get all the fuss. Trial Respecs are super-easy to come by with the rate the game and especially the Blueside Trial has been dumbed down over the past couple years. It's not like anyone's forced into shelling out money for something they could get for free. If they do it anyways, all the better for us.

I for one fully support cashing in on people's impatience and stupidity. For all I care, NCSoft can start selling Purple IOs at 25 USD a pop.

There was a young man from Calcutta
Who spoke with a terrible stutter.
Saw this thread and said,
"It's d-d-d-dead."
And then he revived it, the nutter.

Mhmmm. Then lemme toss in one more thing for the 'community' listening.

As I already said above, we're doing this thing for the community. If we just wanted to do our own thing and take along whomever could fit our mold, we'd have done that. If we wanted to lord over people... Gods, you have no idea how many Virtueverse entries I'd love to just delete because they're literary crimes even by US public school standards... or because I just plain dislike their authors (and most often, both). If we couldn't host it anymore, we'd have found a solution that is not Wikia.

Benefit of the doubt. You know this [censored] can turn into hard work. You think we'd want to see that go down the drain?

Oi. I didn't ask you to bow out. You know me, I'm all for verbal bloodshed on the forums. It was more that I don't really think this was worth getting all worked up over.


Lemme fully recycle and complete the image I used elsewhere for everyone.:

From its conception, the Virtueverse project was comparable to a Mom n' Pop store. Small, family-run, exists to satisfy a need. The store is so popular for one reason or another that the customer base grows day by day. So the store has to expand. Buy more warehouse space, order larger quantities of goods, renovate etc.

At some point Mom n' Pop get a new accountant who looks over everything and realizes that while well-run, the store isn't being overly efficient. Maybe they overstock food and its spoils or whatever. I'm not House, make up your own reasons. The bottom line is, the new accountant finds a ton of ways to make the store more efficient. And since efficiency is a good thing, Mom n' Pop roll with it.

Now, what happened furthermore was that the local customers caught wind of this and immediately assumed the store was being sold to Wal-Mart. And since it's not for as long as I have shotgun shells, there's no need to worry... unless the customer base decides they'd rather have a Wal-Mart in town instead of the Mom n' Pop store.

(And if anyone wonders, I'm definitely not Mom.)

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<sigh> can I just ignore your post as I don't want and can't bring myself to argue with you ?

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You're not supposed to argue with me. You're supposed to take my word for it, silly, flippant posting style aside.

Why?

Okay. Do me a favour and check when last I posted on the Virtue forums vs. how active I've been on the CoH forums at large. Now consider the possibilities that could make me come back to the cesspit of vanities. Now, do the math.

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I'll take it , Honestly its a well known fact im a hothead but I think my concerns in this are a bit more then "Scarf hates Sockpuppet Admin and Socksoul" and most of my concerns could be quelled with a simple post stating what direction the Wiki is going in.

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I'd threaten to spank you over this, but the whole 'naked lizard dreamt up by a little girl' bit sadly fails to turn me on. Right now, the Wiki isn't going anywhere.

In case you haven't noticed (though I'm sure you have), Scarfie-poo, the Virtueverse Wiki and its crew have always gone out of their way to make the Wiki what the community wants or needs. In fact, I'm currently typing out this very same idea on the ParagonWiki forums.

It's not your Wiki, not mine, not SoulTrain's and not even Kadekawa's. It's the community's project. The Wiki is just a house. It becomes a home due to the people who inhabit it; who make themselves at home. [censored] me, I think I stole that thought from an episode of Gilmore Girls.

I very much welcome the PW crew's idea for a more encompassing Community Hub type Wiki. Whether the Virtueverse will just dissolve into that or not is ultimately not up to the Wiki's admins but up to the people who inhabit the superstructure we provide.

And you should [censored] know that, [censored].

Energy Blast

Technically speaking, Energy Blast, like Archery, underperforms by Defender Standards. A long long time ago, when we first noticed the similarity in the performance of many Controller and Defender powers, Castle mentioned that no AT got an AT Modifier for Knockback. As such, Energy is another set that doesn't benefit from the supposed Defender Blast Paradigm of 'Stronger Secondary Effects'.

Maybe it would be fair to give Energy Blast a (tiny) boost in Damage output or an End cost reduction. As it stands right now, there are no reasons to choose Energy Blast except aesthetic ones; Sonic Blast does the exact same things Energy Blast does, and the pronounced -Res from Sonic Blasts Defenders enjoy makes it several times more desirable for any situation imaginable.

(But then it could be argued that Sonic Blast is overpowered as a Blast set.)

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An apology for what?

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Erratic was the first player to bring a report from the Test Server that Enervating Field's Res DeBuff had been lowered from then 37.5% to now 30%. When he did so, the Dev reply he got was along the lines of, 'this has been brought up time and again - it's still not true'. This is heavily paraphrased, but the general implication the community got out of the comment then was Erratic was not just mistaken, but lying.

Only, it later turned out they'd really lowered Enervating Field's performance to 30%. They'd just 'forgotten' about it.

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Storm Summoning

Balance: In an attempt to balance the PvP performance of Hurricane, the power was changed to ‘tick’ less often. This makes placement incredibly difficult for a Storm user. Hurricane’s repel combined with its ToHit debuff used to work well in corners or dead ends, where the user could keep enemies inside it’s AoE. With the slower ‘tick,’ it’s common for an enemy to charge in-between ‘ticks’ and either attack the Hurricane user or suddenly be repelled in a completely new direction.

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Personal Opinion:

It's fine that the Storm user can be attacked through the Repel ticks; Storm shouldn't offer 100% protection from melee and it still does its job pretty well. The problem is really that Castle's idea of a sweet spot for timing with regards to PVP will often cause an enemy to run past the Stormie and be flung in the opposing direction than is the Stormie's intention. Which usually means it will land in a gaggle of squishies. The last place you want it.

We can't reasonably expect a level 12 power to be perfect. It should however not be detrimental to our gameplay experience either.

Moreover, I feel that the original reason for the change, the fact that you could pin player enemies in PVP without Repel Protection into a corner forever and a day, has since been amended due to the addition of 50% Repel Resistance to even the lowliest of Break Frees. This affords anyone roughly the same level of Protection from Repel as the ranged ATs are afforded to Mezzing in general. If the excuse that you can carry Break Frees is sufficient to justify Defenders and Controllers not having any inherent Mez Protection (though some builds can pick up powers to bridge that gap), then it should be just as sufficient when applied to melee ATs struggling with Repel effects.

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[*]Quality of Life : Neither Erratic nor the Defender community have been given an apology, formal or informal, for the Developer behavior regarding the I5 Enervating Field changes. Still worth mentioning?

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It's been almost three years. I don't even think Erratic is around anymore, and half the dev team of that era is gone. There's no point in holding a grudge like this.

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It was Positron who said it if I recall correctly. And he is still around.

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(seriously, who isn't on vent, TS, skype, etc. by now?)

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Me. If I wanted to hear people's voices, I'd call them.

Great for the people I care, doesn't bother me who doesn't care and won't use the NCSoft launcher either.

Obvious question I haven't seen asked yet:

Are you related to the singer?

Minor quibble.

The Amazon legend is Greek, not Roman.

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I would say just have a special contact made available to military personnel and via email, allow them to simply be exempted form the name policy. I don't see why we need to creating sliding rules for names being freed up; let the GI's keep their names, and everyone else has to abide by the rules...

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Why?

I'm sorry, but why? All political considerations as to the justifiability of US Army activity abroad aside, people who are in the Army should be aware that their main commitment -armed service- may occasionally trump lesser commitments -online games- and accept that as part of the lot they chose. It's part of the inconveniences the job brings. Stuff people could take into consideration when they signed up.

I don't see the need to introduce a double standard for people based on their career choices. If they want to keep their characters even though they're going away for over a year, they'll just have to make sure periodically reactivate their subscription or plain not cancel it. For anyone with a steady income, a CoH subscription shouldn't be a huge financial dent, and they obviously have that.

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If you are actually going to sit around waiting for someone to log in under a given character name and then actually have the gual to send them a tell asking them to give up their character name to make you happy... don't you think that's just a little shallow and self-centered? No matter how 'nicely' you've asked?

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Speaking of being shallow and self-centered, no matter how nicely you put it. Hardly anything beats unjustified self-righteousness in that regard. But on to the fun part.

I've seen several situations where someone wasn't overly attached to a particular name, but just made a character because they could get that name. I've seen situations where someone else happened to have a concept that fit the name the other person was sitting on to a T. More often than not, the former individual has gladly given the name to the latter because they realized the other person had a better use for it.

There's never any harm or implied insult in asking. Quite the contrary. Asking surely beats whinging about how people can't get the right name or coming up with 'creative' misspellings. Belittling people who just ask (badgering is of course a wholly different business) just makes you a snot-nosed brat in my book.

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There are a number of reasons given to respect what those with inactive accounts have done.

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Right. Everyone who has ever played CoH was a great guy, a massive proactive force in the world etc. pp. If that description even applies to one percent of former players, I'd be surprised. So how exactly do these people deserve respect?

Also. They left the game. Some voluntarily, some involuntarily, but they're not here any longer. They have severed their relationship with the game. As such, I doubt they'd care whether the game respects them or not. If they respected the game, they'd still support it by keeping their account active, no?

Look at sports. Sure, every once in a while a jersey gets retired or whatever, but basically, when one player leaves a team, another gets his old number. Same situation here really, only that we don't get paid. One player leaves the team, another joins. Why not let them use one of the old players' numbers?


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I can also think of one other reason, it may not be the best of a reason, but it's also a valid one: What about all of those junk RMT names? Yea, accounts get locked/banned, but would you honestly want RMTers to get access to more of those kind of junk names? Please....

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Okay. There are what...? Hell, I don't know which ones they all are, but there are by my counting over 40 legal characters (26 letters, 10 numbers, dash, period, apostrophe, questionmark... underscore makes 41 already...) for CoH names and ample room for characters in the name space. Any of those 40+ characters can go in any spot.

40 to the power of a mere 5 already yields a number of possible permutations in excess of 100 million. 40 to the power of 10 (still not the maximum number of characters we can have in a name) is a possible number of permutations exceeding 10 billion. It's safe to assume RMT spammers will never run out of options in our lifetime.

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“WHY NO EMP FOR CORR?” – ELF_STALKER



Empathy isn’t a villainous trait, generally speaking. From a fiction standpoint, it will likely never be given to Villains as a set.

Back to thematics – Empathy isn’t really a villainous trait. From a fiction standpoint, it wasn’t our first choice to port over and the reason corruptors didn’t receive it in the first place as part of the release of City of Villains. If we were to add an “Empathy Like” set, it would need to be all new and not a port of it, to make it fit into the Villainous theme. As such, that fell out of the scope of Issue 12’s powerset proliferation and is why it wasn’t included.

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I keep seeing this argument thrown around and this is at least the third or fourth thread where I have to say it's wrong, wrong, wrong. The quality of empathy is in itself not morally weighted. Empathy in itself is merely the act of being in synch with another's feelings, either by happenstance or through intuition. Empathy is a very important trait to have for a con artist, door to door salesman or telemarketer for example. All of which could be considered rather villainous careers.

As such, hinging this decision on the label 'Empathy' is plain wrong. Sorry. It's not a villainous trait, granted. Neither is it a heroic trait, though.

[censored], it was Jack Emmert I believe who pointed to Raven of the Titans as an example of an Empath (and probably the best-known one in comics). Incidentally, this is a character who's spent half of her lifetime in comics as a good guy, and the other half as a bad guy.

Now, Samuel_Tow made a good argument that for example the self-sacrificing nature of Absorb Pain for example is more of a heroic trait, and I'll agree with that. I'm just sick and tired of an incomplete understanding of the term 'Empathy' being touted as the main detractor here.



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“Any Red name wanna come out and let us know if Elec/Elec tank is going to be added?” – Lady_Dee



Castle said, “No, never!” and Positron said, “Yes, do it!” In the end, the decision of which sets to give everyone bounced back and forth multiple times. The next question is, “Why did Castle say no?!” At the time, he wanted each AT to keep certain sets so they were only found on that AT – Ninjitsu for Stalkers, Elec/Elec for Brutes, Ice/Ice for Tankers, etc. Ultimately, that concept was set aside later in the process, but some aspects of it remained in the initial pass of Proliferation.

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Good thing this didn't happen or I'd have had to come around and key the Castlemobile. As of my last counting, Defenders had no Primaries they didn't already share, either with Controllers or Corruptors (and/or MMs), leaving a single Secondary Set unshared.

While I'll greatly enjoy making Storm Corrs, I could have lived without Power Proliferation. But no matter what shape it will finally take, I'd expect you guys to incept it fairly across the board. If there are exceptions, then they too would need to be applied fairly across the board. 'Saving' Primary/Secondary combinations for some sets and the less AT-defining Secondaries only for other ATs would not have been fair in this regard.

'Tomorrow' better mean right after midnight GMT.

I gotta say, I'm not all that happy with some of the changes, but more on that later.

Paths to the contacts, well, that's nice. Them assigning the proper mission doors is fine as well. But the one really annoying thing I didn't see mentioned was missions from outside of the Hollows that end up with a door in that zone. Every once in a while, someone I know ends up with the Jewel of Hera mission, and invariably it's in the north-northeast of a zone, halfway up a mountain, surrounded by purples Trolls. Which is, needless to say, a bloody pain to get to. I hope outside missions with doors in the Hollows got addressed as well, and if not, I'd humbly request that be looked at, especially for the Jewel of Hera mission.

Now, what makes me unhappy is the downsizing of spawns. With a low level AOE build I actually liked going to the Hollows over Perez Park because the big street spawns in the Hollows had no Bosses in them and because Trolls and Outcasts are still easy opponents when compared to the Vaz or CoT from PP. So I'm not super-happy to see intermediate Vaz spawns added and the easy spawns downsized. It's not a huge thing since you outgrow the Hollows relatively quick, but it used to be a nice spot to start levelling an AOE-heavy duo or trio and rack up quick XP until you can move on to Boomtown.