Flux_Vector

My 0.02, for what it's worth. I'm prioritizing a little less on difficulty and a little more on importance for getting things going.

Basic Base Topics:
1 - The Big Picture. Plot and room related rules and limits - namely, how to tell what objects a plot and room can hold, and how many of them (main control/energy and storage items can be limited by either room or plot size). That what items show up to place in a room depend on if it can even take items of that category at all. Also, things about where can rooms go, where doors can go, base continuity, blocked doors, etc, and related techniques (like how you can put things in front of a door that already exists, but can't put a door behind things that are already there).

In short, first cover, "why is this red or not even showing up as an option for me."

2 - Basic functional items. Understanding energy and control. Understanding crafting and placing crafted items (add from personal base items, move in normal edit mode). Note that items placed from the personal item list have to be deleted out of a room individually before the room can be blanket-deleted. Note that some base items are yielded from sg badges. Zoom in on how to set up teleporters and how to set up a workshop for storage and crafting.

3 - Rent, rent payment, rent overdue behaviors. SG settings that affect bases, such as entry and edit permissions.

4 - Basic aesthetics. Introduce 'room style,' 'room color,' 'room topography/shape,' and 'room lighting' controls. Warn people about using 'apply to base' except on a fresh base! Point out that clipping and texture flicker is to be avoided.

5 - Basic 'avatar ergonomics' - leaving room for characters to move through, putting functional items in accessible locations, etcetera.

By the time they finish with the basics I think the reader should be able to set up a functional base and furnish it to their liking, without driving themselves nuts trying to get to their stuff, and keep its rent up and maintain it over time.

Intermediate techniques and issues would be performance and cosmetic ones.

1 - Warn about the 'high-object base data corruption bug.' Warn about the performance effects of lights, especially high-particle count lights like torches and bonfires, on PC performance, up to and including making bases un-enterable for some players (I've heard of several bases with so many torches, players crash trying to enter them and simply can't get in). Note that rendering in general in bases isn't well optimized and larger bases will consistently have poorer performance - for performance, less is more.

2 - Stacking/floating up from the floor. Cover stacking with desks, safes, and lamps and using the floor tile. Cover building platforms/second floors.

3 - Placing wall-mount items without a wall using the cubicle.

4 - Different methods of building walls using stacking. Mention SG glass logo windows.

5 - "Merging" discrete items to make "composite" objects and complex furniture/equipment. Good place to put in example furnishings.

6 - Specific room style options that have environment simulation uses or work well at something - like green miyuki gravel for grass and blue for water.

7 - Overall map design. Where to put what rooms (such as teleports and workshops near the entrance for convenience).

Advanced:

1 - Stacking ceiling items down from the ceiling.

2 - Sinking things into floors (and doing so at varying depths).

3 - SG logo and color interactions with "SG items" like glass logos and floor plates.

4 - Large/complicated merged objects, like simulated vehicles, vending machines or so forth.

5 - Interesting full-base themes - mazes, space stations, forests, etc.

Objective:

Sonic Blast's Howl power sound is exactly the same as the warwolf NPC howls. Why?!

Subjective:

Shut up the demons. Also, while mastermind robots foot clanking sounds are cool, they are also too loud compared to other effects and can overpower other sounds in the area.

Sonic blast and sonic resonance could use some other effects. The sounds do get annoying, especially for blast when you're fighting heavily. Scream's 'raspy cough' doesn't sound attacky or super at all, and howl as noted above is just cribbed from NPC sound files and isn't all that good.

Kinetic melee's sounds have, seriously, made me stop playing the set. I wanted to play the set. I think I might like the set. I cannot stand the sounds for the set.

The sound effects for most of the electric type powers also have turned me off from playing them. Electric blast's sound effects are annoying, while electric melee's are both annoying and wimpy-sounding (this makes electric assault really screwed).

Peacebringer hum being removed would be very nice.

Neutrino bolt's sound effect could be nicer. Options or updated sound effects for eye beam powers (x-ray, laser eyes, etc) might be good too, IMO.

IDF heavy trooper and heavy commander 'missile spam' sound effect is loud, high pitched, and practically constant because they spam those missile powers so much. It could really use a tone-down or something.

Balancing the trials around incarnate powers would've presented a catch-22 on their release: you'd need the powers to do them, but need to do them to get the powers. The likely outcome of that paradigm would be people failing numerous trials and progressing based on ixp and the astral merits from what stages they could complete, before succeeding at all, like in progression raiding in ye olde 'other mmo that was really really popular 10 years ago.'

Instead, at least in my circle of friends, we were consistently succeeding at both trials from day 1 onward after only a few failures to start, during which we gained sufficient familiarity.

As for actual incarnate buff usage, I generally see three types of people with them in trials: 1 - people using them off cooldown no matter what; 2 - people using them on an occasional basis, most often to try and buff the league or else gain burst survivability like a tier 9 defense; and 3 - people not using them at all for some reason, including 'not having them yet.'

I do not see people making a concentrated effort to coordinate destiny buffing of the whole league to any effective level on a consistent basis. The amount of effort it would take to do so would be prohibitive anyway, given approximately 1 minute of high-efficiency buffing per destiny power. The league would have to group hug and the designated people use their destiny every minute. You can't even get people to stand still long enough to get 2 bubbles cast on them every 4 minutes normally.

And meanwhile, the form that the incarnate content difficulty takes is fairly closely focused on accuracy and defense-busting. There's not nearly as much -resist, -regen, or -recovery as there is -defense and +tohit. Considering that directly addresses one of the biggest disparities between heavily IO'd characters and lower-tier builds, I don't think it's a coincidence. Edit: You're free to disagree, and I've never presented this as anything but an opinion. It's my observation that the trials include a lot of defense-busting enemies. It's my analysis of that observation that this is a counter-measure to 45% soft-capping IO builds. Amusingly, this counter-measure comes down even harder on non-defense characters, in my experience. My softcapped widow survives much better in the trials than my non-softcapped willpower brute or my fire armor brute. Or my 2 friends' peacebringers, or one friend's warshade.

The higher accuracy of trial mobs was noted, and asked about, in the testing phase. There was no dev comment on it, at least so far as I remember.

You have something of a point, but at least until the AOE buffing change goes live and people actually start using buffs more often, I don't see buffing as very prevalent in trials, beyond toggle (leadership or big bubble) and PBAOE type buffs (AM, mindlink, RA, etc). Heck, in normal content I'm pleasantly surprised when I run into buffing set characters who even have their buffs, let alone actually make a serious effort to buff me consistently for an entire mission.

I didn't say 'kheldians have difficulty completing trials' I said that the trial content seems to take at least some level of IO build into account in its difficulty tuning.

Meaning that the dev statement of 'the game not being made harder for IOs' is IMO now, 'the existing game wasn't made harder for IOs, but the new trials are.'

As for the high end build thing? Sure, I'll still take your challenge up. I seriously doubt we're going to see PBs pulling down 300-400 dps even in theory, while being softcapped (let alone 59% softcapped) and also having status protection, though. And 300-400 dps is the -practical- dps (ie, pylon measuring DPS) of endgame scrappers, who are surviving tanking said pylon at the same time. But I can't even get a softcapped PB that isn't a seriously convoluted build, let alone one that's softcapped and does 200+ DPS. And contrary to what some posters might have you think, defense outstrips resistance in actual gameplay because of the debuff avoidance it affords.

Nobody's enthusiastic about it because not that many forumgoers care much about SO-based performance. I'd tend to agree with you that the kheldian inherent will need to change if the ATs' powers are going to be improved on, because the devs at least pay lip service to SO-based balanced. I'd also expect warshades are going to get slapped with power nerfs if and when that happens.

But I also think that unless the overhaul takes IOs into consideration, kheldians will at best end up the 'dual pistols' of AT choices - looking cool, but at best mediocre performers in the end game. The reason scrappers are the gold standard for performance comparison and set the baselines for pylon times or AV soloing or so on isn't because of what they can do on SOs. And the incarnate trials seem to very explicitly acknowledge IOs, such as by increasing their NPCs' base accuracy and giving them autohit debuffs and special 'boss fight mechanics' to their AVs.

The mez and mez resist/protection paradigm in this game is just brokenly awful. Sadly there's a huge dichotomy between people who have status protect and those who don't. Really, we should be attacking this problem at its source, but it probably would be too much work for the devs to fix it at this stage.

Carry a few breakfrees and get a clarion destiny to make your kheldian functional, and hope that if/when they look at ATs again they'll do something about this issue. It'll be months or years before we see changes, if history is a guide, sadly.

IO set bonuses can make high-offense characters extremely survivable, but tend not to be able make high-survivability characters extremely damaging. (There are some exceptions/a few ways around that).

Throw in the lack of any meaningful death penalties, especially at 50, and the fact that high-offense characters make better soloists and farmers, and yeah you're going to find more 'top end' characters are high-offense builds. (Especially because they're the ones who can afford to farm up the money they need to get to be high end builds, making a powerful scrapper or brute starts a virtuous circle from the player perspective - the stronger you are the better you become at getting stronger still).

I noticed this trend several Issues ago, actually; it seemed like it really took off when they buffed +defense set bonuses (a move I was, frankly, shocked by from a balancing perspective and that I think caused several of my friends who wanted to play support characters to reroll or quit, as they started feeling more and more superfluous).

The Incarnate system seems set to just amplify that more, with Clarion offering self-sufficient status protection to squishies, and even more survivability to everyone else, and reactive and judgement boosting offense even further, to the point where a lot of spawns simply will never pose a meaningful threat before they're wiped out.

As it stands I tell people who want to play support characters to roll VEATs.

If you enjoy the character, you'll have enough contribution - even if it's more invisible than usual to many - to keep playing. The incarnate trial mobs do have a higher base to-hit (in addition to being higher level, which applies an accuracy adjust) and so most characters who are softcapped to 45% do need some additional buffing to reach the 'incarnate softcap' of 59%.

However, any significant defense buffing character provides enough to close that gap; most also offer other benefits over forcefield. Forcefield does provide more defense to people who don't have any, or more a debuff pad, but those things tend not to be as heavily valued or even noticed. So if you are looking for maximum mechanical leverage and the acclaim of your teammates, yeah, you probably would be happier with a different character.

"AFK, dog on fire."

For the OP:

What we know constitutes participation:

1: "Attack" powers - powers that target an enemy and require a to-hit roll to affect them. Attacking things is very strongly counted by the participation system. It doesn't (directly) matter if your attacking is single-target or AOE, or how much damage you do, or if you kill the targets or not. Damaging powers (including controls or debuffs that cause damage) seem to be weighted more strongly than pure control or buff/debuff, however, we don't know for sure on that one.

2: That's it, actually. Nothing else has been proven beyond a doubt to work.

What we suspect constitutes participation:

1: Staying near numerous teammates all the time. People playing 'pure support' with no attacking have gotten non-threads. It's possible their proximity to others helped in this.

2: Healing people who actually need it. "Overhealing" seems not to count - rocking the aura isn't going to get you out of the threads table by itself. But again pure support healers have gotten non-threads. It's possible that effective healing of others helped in this.

3: Directly assisting with trial goals. We don't know for sure it but it's been implied by dev statements that helping achieve objectives counts for extra participation in some manner. Such as hitting the crates/chambers in a lambda trial. Or hitting the AVs in the trials.

4: Being on a league that achieves badge goal conditions in the trials. The devs have essentially posted that your score is improved in some manner by being part of a highly successful league. There's weak evidence that badge conditions fulfilled may be what they meant there.

... and that's it. We don't have enough information to be sure about anything else. Though the devs have said certain unintended consequence "deviant behaviors" don't directly improve your score, there are ways that those behaviors can in fact indirectly improve it, because of how heavily weighted attacking is by the system.

I've led a pretty good number of trials by now, and I've frequently found myself annoyed by some missing features for league management and some of the behaviors of the league management tools we have already. Here's a list of improvements I'd like to see to make both leading and playing in a league a better experience.

1 - Stop awarding the league star to someone else when a trial starts. The person who had the league star when they queued for the trial should keep it. If two pre-made leagues are merged by the LFG system, the leader of the bigger one should get the star. The fact that someone can make the effort of putting a trial together only to lose control over it when the trial actually starts is really awful.

2 - Add league locking to tell the LFG queue not to add anyone else into a given league. This will smoothly and invisibly prevent numerous problems for both pre-made leagues and queued individuals.

3 - Add a "Ready Check" button that will play a sound cue and pop up a window to click "Ready" or "Not Ready" on within 90 seconds. Report to the entire league who clicks what or if they time out. This will help determine who's afk when going to queue a trial, and/or get the attention of people who have alt-tabbed or started watching TV or something while they were waiting. This can also be used in trials to help determine if someone's afk and deserves kicking.

4 - Add a "Vote for New Leader" option - target a player, then context menu "Vote for New League Leader" will announce through a popup that that player has been nominated for leader by the player that started the vote. The league would then vote yes or no via that box. A simple majority carries the vote. Limit the number of votes one player can start to one per trial. Under this system, players can't nominate themselves, and vote-spamming is prevented as a potential form of griefing. And because everyone's name is announced, frivolous nominations are socially deterred.

5 - Add a "Vote to Kick" option, similar to Vote for Leader, but to initiate proceedings to remove any other player from the trial. Limit it to one vote initiated per trial per character, and display names to help deter frivolous votes.

6 - Remove individual team locking by team leaders. It doesn't serve a useful function in the trials as far as I know beyond offering a defense against abusive leaders... which a vote for new leader would replace. Meanwhile, rearranging teams for Lambda phase 2 or to compensate for newly-joined LFG members or disconnected/quitting teammates is made more annoying by some teams being locked and others not, especially because the feedback message doesn't make it completely clear when a team is locked and the locking icons can be hard to see in the league window.

7 - When someone fails to click the Join Queue button when the trial is launched, display their name in some kind of feedback message so the team knows who was afk - or possibly, griefing.

Agreed. Social tools like kicking, player notes, and a more robust league management system would be the proper way to deal with doorsitters.

Sextuple-secret probation - not being told we're measured, not being told why we're being measured, not being told what counts or doesn't, not being told what score we have at any given time, not being told what score we need, and not being told when it changes - for everybody isn't justified by the existence of a small number of bad apples who can be punished without making everyone guilty (a doorsitter) until proven innocent ('active' - because it doesn't measure 'participation,' it measures 'activity').

If you're doing such a bad job that the people who you built a premade out of want you gone, and it overcomes their recognition of your efforts in starting the trial up, I think you probably really deserve it.

It's likely that if you did not get the threads table at the end of the trial, you had the same chance of getting a rare or very rare as anyone else on that trial. At the very least, if your individual participation score does affect your end roll, then Baryonyx outright lied to us all.

If you did get the threads table though, and get it regularly, you will be better served by changing your playstyle to a more aggressive, enemy-oriented one. A number of things seem to count for 'participation' but the only one that I consider solidly confirmed to count at the moment, and seems to count very strongly, is 'attacking things.'

How much damage you do doesn't matter. Whether or not you actually kill anything doesn't matter. If it's single target or AOE doesn't matter. Using powers that attack things a lot - even if it's the same power over and over - is currently what I'd call the best method to 'not get threads.' And thus to have a shot at a rare or very rare.

However, since we're on sextuple secret probation (1 - not told we're being judged; 2 - not told what we're being judged on; 3 - not told what helps or hurts our score; 4 - not told what our score is; 5 - not told what score we need; 6 - not told when it changes) in the trials, I have to add the disclaimer of "your mileage may vary" and "this could change tomorrow and we wouldn't know it until it stopped working."

"Vote to kick" and "vote to replace leader" options are two improvements (along with "lock league") that I'd dearly like to see with leagues. Give the playerbase the social leverage to deal with issues affecting them.