Fraktal

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You can whine all you want F but at the end of the day they still haqve more HOs than you.

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Since I don't ever PVP, I'm not quite sure I follow how it would matter to me how many HOs they have.

F

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They are better in PVE too and will b3e universially choosen over you both for their skill, their powersets, and their HOs.

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What will be universally chosen over me?

Are you saying that the players who own these characters will be "universally chosen over me" to do something, like a Hami-raid? Or a pickup group?

* I don't do Hami-raids
* I don't even play my level 50 because RP-wise she was killed and resurrected as a (now 30th level) Kheldian
* I don't play on pickup groups, ever.
* No one in my SG has any HOs, nor wants any. We don't play level 50 raid content... we have 50s, but mostly retire them and start over with alts.
* Even if I played my level 50, I can do so on Invicible without any HOs. The game's already too easy -- why do I need to make it easier?

I was addresssing the original point, which was that "good" Supergroups are those that do Hami-raids over and over again and powerlevel each other's toons to Hami SOs and the likes. I think that's an inaccurate generalization, because it depends on your definition of the word "good." Certainly, there's nothing WRONG with what they are doing, and I would agree it is a "good raiding SG." But not that generally it is a "good" SG, or that it is better than one that does not do this. It depends on your GOALS.

The goal of our SG is to roleplay, have fun, and enjoy the regular content of the game. None of us have interest in raids. I suppose to someone like you that makes me inferior. I prefer not to judge people "superior" or "inferior" but rather, to just let people play the game the way the wish. I'd never suggest that my group's M.O. was the only "good" way to be... and I think it's unreasonable to suggest that a Hami-raiding uberleet SG is the only way to be "good" either.

F

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As opposed to as often as possible with Hami? Not exactly fair, since for hami, good SG's will just share acct info around, and folks will run multiple boxes since you can just stand there for an hour and get your friends an HO.

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I suppose the truth of this statement depends on one's definition of the word "good."

F

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You can whine all you want F but at the end of the day they still haqve more HOs than you.

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Since I don't ever PVP, I'm not quite sure I follow how it would matter to me how many HOs they have.

F

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As opposed to as often as possible with Hami? Not exactly fair, since for hami, good SG's will just share acct info around, and folks will run multiple boxes since you can just stand there for an hour and get your friends an HO.

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I suppose the truth of this statement depends on one's definition of the word "good."

F

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- I expect a buff that is as strong as using an inspiration, but lasts a lot longer (15 minutes).
- I expect to choose when this 15 minutes start (delayed activation with a click) so that i don't lose 75% of it in travelling and zoning.
- I expect it to cost about the salvage a player would get after 5 missions. That would mean, 1 buffed mission every 6 missions. Sounds about right, means you can collect during broker, get a buff for the mayhem. Collect during an arc, get a buff for the EB at the end.

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This is excellent. You are right on target. I'm not sure if "6" is the right number, but thereabouts (in the single digits anyway) sounds reasonable to me.

F

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At 300 salvage, a SG of 75 will have to contribute 4 salvage each to build these.
A SG of 5 people will have to contrubute 60 salvage each to build these.

if I take my personal salvage to create buffs, I'm better off joining a large group of people than a small one, as my share of the station construction is less. assuming I'm not a freeloader.

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Right.

And also, assuming you and your SG get along reasonably, etc, etc... You could mix and match salvage items each other need more easily.

"Hey Bob, do you have any Body Armors? I need just ONE more to make this thing..."

"Well, I can give you a few, but I need some blood samples to make something I want..."

"Oh hey, I have plenty of blood samples... let's swap."

More people in the group = more chances to swap around and get the right combo you need to construct whatever it is you're looking for, including empowerments.

F

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However, if you're going to argue that larger SGs have an easier time gathering salvage/player, then you'd have to come up with more than that "It's demonstrably so".

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You might be somewhat on track if the TYPE of salvage dropped did not matter. Then maybe (maybe, but I would argue probably not), the guy on the 2-man SG might have the same total # of salvage pieces to his name as the guy on the 75-man SG.

The problem is, the total # of salvage items is not the only thing that matters. The types of items and how many you have of each does matter.

To see that this is so, imagine you have exactly 20 salvage. I use that number because it is the cap of a given type. Imagine that, just by some strange quirk of fate, you happen to have 20 Crey pistols, and zero of anything else, in your salvage. What can you make?

Odds are, not much... probably nothing. Because almost every schematic I can think of requires at least two kinds of salvage to create. So even though you have 20, it's not a very useful 20 just at the moment.

On the other hand, imagine you have 20 salvage, but you have 5 pistols, and 5 body armor, and 4...etc, etc. You get the idea. Now you might be able to craft something. But hold on... you'd be just as bad off if you had 1 each of 20 things, as if you had 20 of one thing, because most items take 2 or more of a given thing (sometimes into the double digits) to create. So what you really want is about a half-dozen of each thing.

If you are in a large group, it is MUCH easier to combine those 1- and 2-unit item types into a large amount. My 2 body armors and Fred's 3 body armors and Sally's 1 body armor combine to make 6, and you can make that item that takes 6 body armors. If you're going to have to rack all 6 up by yourself, and right now you just have one, well, given that there are about 100 different types of salvage drops out there, you could be waiting a very, very long time.

You keep looking at the raw total # of salvage components, but that is not the most important factor. What matters is how many you have of the relevant types for what you want to make. The BEST case scenario is to have 20 of every single kind of thing. A large SG could, perhaps, pool together to give one person 20 of everything, and you could get some serious crafting/empowring mojo going in such a case. A single person would not be able to do that, not even close... nor could a small group.

F

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Large SGs are at an advantage because they have an easier time soloing?
Yeah, that makes sense.
It's so hard to find a good solo group these days.

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Well you can be snarky all you want... The reality is that if we assume soloing, a larger group has more people who can solo more enemies than a small group.

Let's take an extreme: An SG with 2 members, and one with 75 members (no alts, for simplicity). Let us assume that each player plays exactly 1 hour per day. Let us assume they solo 100% of the time (to get the best drops). Let us further assume that they fight about the same # of enemies per hour, and that this nets, just making up a number, 10 new salvage drops per hour. Each day, the 2-member SG gets 20 salvage drops. The 75-member gets 750. This is just with people soloing but being members of a large group.

You still going to maintain that a small group can get as many salvage bits as a large one? I don't see how that could be maintained with any claim to realism or honesty.

Beyond that, the more people, the more slavage total you have -- and the more total, the more likely you have enough different things in different "categories" of salvage to combine them. Certain types of mobs drop certain types of salvage. So if you are on a large team, you have more people doing different arcs, fighting different guys. The large group will be bringing in Crey, Rikti, Family, Arachnos, etc, drops all at once in a given week. The small group, both guys might be doing the Crey arc this week, meaning they will ONLY be getting whatever salvage the Crey drop, and NONE of the salvage dropped by Rikti, Arachnos, etc, etc. That means it'll take the smaller group more time to get combinable salvage dropes relative to the large ones.

Finally, although your per-kill rate might be higher for drops (as it certainly is for enhancements) soloing, the mob TYPE also affects the drop rate (as it does, also, for enhancements). I don't know what the salvage drop rate is, but the enhancement drop rate is about 12% for minions, 25% for LTs, and 66% for bosses. That means if you kille more bosses relative to minions, or more LTs, you get a higher drop rate (true for enhancements, and I believe, though I have not tracked it carefully, for salvage as well). In larger groups you get more LTs and more bosses, which means the chance a drop of any sort will occur is much higher, so even though you are splitting it with your team mates, the actual drops within a mission may go up, rather than down. This will depend, of course, on group size, type of mob, and especially difficulty setting.

All of that means that it really can't be true that a small group can "out salvage" a large one. Far from it... a large group can way WAY out-salvage a small one.

F

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Well lets face it, they spend too much time worrying about what people can do at level 50, and not enough time worrying about the other 49 levels.

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Another mouthful said there, Circ. You are just full of zingers this week. Heh.

But you are absolutely right. I have said this before in a slightly different way: they worry too much about how the game plays at "cap" of a thing (capped resistance, capped defense, capped to-hit-buff, whatever) and spend all their time balancing the CAPS... when 99% of the players spend 99% of their play-time nowhere NEAR the cap.

So yes, "Oh if you hyper-stacked this stuff you would be so uber and powerful!", meanwhile, I'm sitting here with a +2% buff asking what the point is, since I have no way to stack it, and 2% is basically not noticeable in gameplay (and no, I'm not saying any of the buffs are +2%... it's just an example number).

F

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As sarcastic as I was before, the idea that work is fun in a video game is piss poor and 20 years out of date, yet its a repeated mistake and why video games, and specifically MMOs can't advance. And why games that are so bogged down in minutia like CoH is will never appeal to the masses.

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You said a mouthful right there Circ.

A game should be so blindingly fun you can't stop playing it... We all have plenty of work to do at WORK (or school)... we don't need a game to simulate WORK for us.

F

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Multiple empowerment stations will stack the buffs that are offered (by design). If we made the buffs as good as players "expect" right out the gate, they'd be WAY too good when stacked.

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So don't make 'em stack, and then you can make 'em as good as players "expect."

Its your al-mighty obsession with stacking stacked stacks of stacks, and how powerful that can be when stacked some more, that makes almost each and every individual buff in the game hardly worth having on its own. How you can't see that this is a fundamentally broken concept after 2 years is just beyond me.

F

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This isn't complaining, this is QA testing to make the game better.

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Foo, do you ever get the odd feeling that a certain number of people who play the game and post to the forums don't want the game to get better? It seems inconceivable to me that this would be so (if you play the game, and pay for it, why would you not want the best you can have for your money?), and yet it seems to be. Almost any time someone dares point out that accuracy seems not to be working right, or damage is off from what one would expect, or anything like that -- frequently even when there ARE good numbers to back it up -- there is no shortage of people coming out of the woodwork to gainsay them.

And I just don't really understand it. If there really is a bug that's making the streak-breaker not work, for example, and the streak-breaker is SUPPOSED to work, then why would you try to shout down someone who had posted evidence that the streak-breaker is broken? If Luck is supposed to be a +25% buff and has been for 2+ years, and you find out that it isn't, why in the world would someone flame you for posting it?

Don't we WANT the devs to find the bugs and exterminate them? Do people really prefer playing a BUGGED game?

And yet, apparently some people do. I just don't get it.

F

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I think, in fact, that Fraktal is actually correct in this case, the poor example aside.

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Thanks for pointing out that my example sucked, Foo.

(Heheh... Foo and I are friends... I'm just teasing him.)

Actually I'm glad you came up with a much better one:

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If fifty diehard baseball players and fans are noticing there's something wrong with their swing and saying, "The bat feels light", you don't just check the weight of the bat by looking at the number printed on it. You don't demand that they each take 10000 swings and report the results.

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This reminds me of a story my father told me many years ago.

Ted Williams was one of the best ball-players of all time. He had supposedly "perfect" vision -- it's why he was such a good batter. He played in the outfield (Left Field to be specific). He played for the Red Sox. Thus, Ted Williams was used to standing in the Fenway Park outfield looking toward home plate... he did it for thousands of hours.

One day, as the story goes, Williams and the team's owner were out walking in the outfield, talking about something or other to do with the team. They were all the way back by the left field fence, when Williams stopped, gazing at home plate. Then he turned to the owner and said, "Home plate's off-center." The owner laughed, and thought it was a joke. But Williams insisted that home plate was off-center.

Now, home plate was supposedly where it had ALWAYS been, and thus in the correct position. There was just no way the plate could be "off center." Impossible.

Or so they thought.

Williams was so insistent though, and his eyesight was so legendary, that the owner finally agreed to have a team come out with precision instruments and measure it. And it turned out home plate was in fact off-center... by some 6 inches. And Williams could see that from the outfield.

Did Williams have surveying equipment out there? No. Was he a surveyor or a field attendant? No. Instead, he was an experienced ball player, who had stared at home plate a billion times from that position, and he could see that it "didn't look right." Fortunately the owner listened to him, and they fixed it... but the point is, long experience does give you a "feel" for these things.

Again, I am NOT saying "ignore the numbers" or "the numbers do not matter." I'm saying that the absence of numbers does not make the claim automatically false... especially not when it comes from an experienced player.

F

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A Tennis player using instincts is using "Muscle memory", not traditional memory.

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Untrue.

You did not read my example carefully enough, or you are confusing two different things. "Muscle memory" is about the swing motions and other physical movements you execute to hit the ball. "Player intuition" is about knowing WHERE to hit the ball to make a winner, or knowing "I double faulted a lot today." Those have nothing to do with muscle memory and have everything to do with having a feel for the game.

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This is a very different thing than "instinctually" knowing that a random sequence of numbers is wrong.

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So it's your contention that is is not possible to get a "feel" for a system whose underlying behavior is in part dictated by a computational random number generator? I simply disagree. Anything that is repeatable, one can get a feel for.

Heck here at work where I run models that use Random Number Generators (RNGs) all the time I still hav e a "feel" for the models I have built. I have watched them over and over for more than a year. When, contrary to every bit of experience I have ever had with these models, one of them starts pumping out imaginary numbers, I know something is wrong. I don't just toss up my hands and say, "Oh it must be the RNG and I just can't instinctively know what a random sequence of numbers should do."

I *do* have a feel for it. I have generated thousands of datasets using this model. They've never given me imaginary numbers before. Therefore, although something might *not* be wrong... it sure as hell is worth investigating.

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Frankly, if people start giving more credence to instincts based on this thread they want to, rather than it being a good idea. I respect you in general Fraktal but in spite of your claims to being a stats person you jump on to the "instinct" bandwagon far too fast.

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Numbers are great to have but one cannot always get them in the desired format (not everyone has a logger -- for example I flat out REFUSE to use them because I do not trust them not to bug my install, and I don't feel like having to re-up all the damn patches -- paranoia maybe, but I rather play the game than re-install it repeatedly). But when 20, or 30, or 40, or a hundred, veteran players all say the same thing -- "I do not seem to be flooring bosses the way I should with 3 def insps" -- it's worth looking into even if they don't have the logged numbers to back them up.

I am a stats person, thank you very much. I was party to a very long thread on chi-square analysis of AT frequencies explaining that the chi-square showed that what people "felt" was true was incorrect. But I didn't just wave my hand at them and say, "Because you don't have data you must be off your rocker." I accepted their feel for the game as presumably valid until the numbers showed they were not... and then I explained WHY the numbers showed they were not.

I'm not talking about asking the devs to nerf a power because players have a "feel" for it. But I am saying they, and their apologists, need to recognize that just because someone didn't do 50,000 trials vs. the level 1 thugs in Outbreak, doesn't mean his "feel" for the game should be dismissed. Veteran players do have an innate feel for "how the game usually plays," and if they, as a large group, start saying that their feel for the game is telling them something is wrong, the devs should look into it and stop blowing it off.

Want proof I'm right? It's right here in front of you. A large # of people had a very correct "feel" for the games. And as we saw, a simple check of the SQL database by a dev demonstrated that something people had "felt" was correct.

Again. I'm not asking them to nerf a thing, or even consider nerfing a thing... or buff a thing... or do anything of the sort. Just look at the damn code when vet players flag something as having "odd behavior" and stop dismissing them out of hand because they don't have "datamining" quality numbers. It's not the players' jobs to do statistical analysis -- it's the players' jobs to play the game and report bugs if they find them.. and the devs' job to want to track down those bugs, rather than putting their heads in the sand and pretending the bug is not there.

I would think fans of the game would want bugs or errors fixed... yet so often they try to shout down those who find problems as if we are enemies of the game. I want it to play right too.. and if vet players are saying, "This doesn't play right given my experience," the devs need to listen.

F

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As someone who does bug testing, it's actually very easy to miss bugs that seem blindingly obvious once they are discovered. Especially in software that is being constantly tweaked by multiple people. As much as people like to rant about this sort of thing, it really does fall under 'these things happen sometimes'. And they happen to everyone.

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This would carry a bit more weight if players had not been complaining for many months about issues like Acc insps not seeming to do much good, 3 lucks not flooring bosses, and the like. Every time we said these things, we were completely blown off by the devs as being off our rockers. That means that, apparently, they didn't even bother to check.

It's one thing when you check and you miss the bug. It's another when you completely blow off the bug report as if the person making it belongs in a nut house, and then it turns out the bug was real. The wave-of-the-hand, "working as intended", "show me the numbers" attitude is what bugs me the most. Especially given how they have been WRONG about these basic things time, and time, and time again... and every single time it was done with the same casual wave of the hand until someone finally figured out how to definitively prove what the veteran players could "feel" or "sense" just by playing the game.

The proof is in the pudding here. The vets have been right over and over again about this sort of stuff. This is not a one-time thing. It's just the most blatant case of it.

F

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The best I could really come up with, when reporting these things, was "this is really weird behavior." The number of times I'd pop three lucks and have a boss chain multiple hits on me was higher than it felt like it should have been if I was flooring those bosses. Of all the reasons that this would happen, I would say that "these are about half as effective as the text says they are" was not on my list.

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This really illustrates what I am talking about though Kali... as a vet gamer and someone who just freaking knows the game backwards and forwards, you can just TELL something is wrong, intuitively, "by feel." There are people who just discount this but I think it is foolish to do so -- just as it would be to discount a tennis player telling you that his service motion doesn't "feel" right even though he has no "first serve percentage" stats to back him up.

We have been playing this game for a long time... for hours at a time. We can TELL when something looks funky, with or without the stats to prove it. And my point is that just as a coach should listen to his tennis player saying, "My serve doesn't feel right," the devs should listen when multiple vet players say, "This or that doesn't feel right." Stop trying to assume people are trying to get each other nerfed or themselves buffed or whatever, and realize that most people really do just have the good of the game in mind when they report these things.

F

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More than likely, F, it just gets lost in the code. There's alot of it and if they lose a key programmer or two, it becomes difficult to track down some of this stuff

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Shame on them if they have this massive engine and do not have it documented properly. As professionals they ought to know better.

F

I think whatever the explanation this is rather ugly. If the devs can be this wrong on something this basic for so long, it makes me wonder what ELSE they are wrong about.

In particular I think there are real issues with finding bugs that occur between the value of a thing in their SQL (or whatever it is) database, and the execution of the script implementing it. The example of a 25% def buff being, further down in the code somewhere, multiplied by 0.5 to get 12.5% as a final number, is a good one. I have had this awful feeling for a long time that when we report something seems off, the devs check their SQL spreadsheet, and see that the "numbers are right" and stop there... when in fact what might be off is a script routine down-stream... one that never gets checked because (as I mentioned above) player "feelings" get dismissed out of hand -- especially if those feelings do not dove-tail with the SQL data.

I just wonder how many more of these little nuggets there are in the game. At this point... I'd bet on "hundreds" at least.

F

Heph...

I was just thinking that... wondering if these #s have always been there, or if it has just been since one of the updates... They changed the insps but not the text, perhaps "accidentally on purpose" as my mom likes to say.

F

My main point Arcana wasn't which side was right or wrong but that people need to stop dismissing veteran misgivings based on "you don't have the numbers to back that up."

If a bunch of veterans say to the devs, "Boy we seem to be missing a lot," the devs need to freaking check into it and stop asking us for demorecords. Assume we know how to play their game after 2+ years for crying out loud.

F

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Geko is basically right: accuracy is not broken, and basically never has been. But practically everything related to accuracy has been broken at least once in some way, sometimes for extended periods of time, and often the hurdle to prove it is extremely high.

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Even that is not a correct statement. One of the serious problems with the game is that there are THREE things related to to-hit, and those things are confused even by the devs themselves. In this case when Geko said "Accuracy has not been nerfed," what he meant was, "Base to-hit has not been nerfed", but he called base-to-hit, in this case, "accuracy."

There are three numbers here: Base To Hit, To-Hit Buffs, and Accuracy. The problem is that the devs use them interchangeably with WORDS, but they are not interchangeable MATHEMATICALLY. So Insights SAY +25% _Accuracy_ but what they mean is +25% (or not even that, but whatever) _To_Hit_Buff_.

The devs need to learn to, as Lucy said in the Peanuts years ago, "Say what they mean, and mean what they say." The sloppy use of the lingo is 90% of the problem.

F

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But in this case, it was the people who complained about seeing oddities that were right, and the people who thought they were working correctly that were wrong. Including me: sorry guys and gals, it took me a while to eventually come around and devote testing time to this.

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I've said this before, and I will say it again. Statistics are great, and I love them, and I work with them all the time (right now I am running two statistical model analyses on my desktop and its companion machine as part of my job, doing Multivariate Auto-Regressive community models). I am not someone who "does not believe in numbers" or any of that.

HOWEVER, I also recognize that games, like sports, are often played "by feel." In a sense, what happens is, when you get really good at a sport or a game, you internalize a lot of the numbers. A good tennis player doesn't have to look up the fact that hitting a cross-court return into the wind against this opponent is a 'high-percentage' shot, and he's certainly not computing averages during the match. What he's doing is instinctively, from his experience playing tennis, returning the ball where he just "knows" it's the best place to return it. He knows this because he has had hundreds or thousands of hours of practice and match-play to tell him, without needing to resort to calculators or lookup tables, what the "right play" is here. At the end of a match, a player probably can't tell you he had "10 double faults" or that his normal average is 6 per match... but he will definitely (after dumping 10 second serves into the net) say something like, "Wow my serve was off today." He knows how it feels to play "right", and not so right.

By the same token, a good gamer, who has long played a video game and gotten good at it, has a good "feel" for the game. He knows what normally happens, or what he might say is "supposed to happen" -- that is, what experience tells him is common -- in a variety of circumstances. A good veteran COH player has faced a 3-yellow-con spawn of Vahziloks hundreds, probably thousands of times, on a whole range of characters. He knows pretty much what to expect, and he can play the game against that spawn pretty much without thinking, by reflex, by instinct, the same way the tennis player can do so. He has the "feel" of it down pat.

As a result, when something bizzare happens, like getting one-shotted by something that's never done half his hitpoints on his squishiest character before... or whatever odd thing might happen... when something goes on that simply "feels" wrong, and goes against his instinctive expectations of the game, the player will notice. When an experienced, veteran player, therefore, says, "Wow, I am missing a lot today," unlike most other stats-oriented people (as I say, I am one), I do not discount it just because he "has no numbers to back it up." Rather, just as with the tennis player who said (without any stats to back it up) "wow my serve was off today", I assume that a good, veteran player knows what he is talking about, and it's at least somewhat possible that something strange is "up." Maybe the RNG got "stuck" today... or maybe he's fighting something with +def and doesn't realize it (but that's unlikely if it's a vet)... or maybe (insert one of a thousand possible reasons here)... Whatever the reason may be, I think just waving one's hand at a vet player who knows the game backwards and forwards and saying, "It's all in your mind," or "you just notice bad luck streaks" is not only contumelious, but completely mistaken. It'd be as foolish as waving your hand at a tennis player after he said, "My serve is off today," just because he doesn't have a video recording of all his double-faults.

I hope this little nugget will be a lesson to the Doubting Thomases who arise to shout down anyone without a 5 MB file of 10,000 hits and misses to back him up. The people who were correct in this case were, not the statistical gurus (sorry Arcana, but then I am in this group most of the time too), and not even the devs themselves, but rather, the people who KNOW the game inside out from many hours of playing it, and could tell just by feel, that something odd was going on with inspirations. So maybe from now on people will be a little more open-minded when the more intuitive, but experienced, gamers have something to say about these things.

I know, I know... "dare to dream." But hey, I can hope can't I?

F

Could the acc strangeness be due to the change in how to-hit is calculated vs. the old days? In the old days accuracy and to-hit buffs were basically the same (if I recall) but now, to-hit buffs are ADDERS and acc buffs are MULTIPLIERS. If Insps are acting as a boost to your multiplier, that could make it seem rather wonky. Do we know where the +to hit is being added? (Yes, I know it's supposed to be added as a +buff, but I mean where it's *actually* added vs. where it's *supposed* to be added.)

Things like this are why I question the devs so much on crap like, "75% is base to hit and we're sure it's right." Apparently they were "sure" that +acc insps were "right" too, but they're clearly NOT right (at least not according to the values displayed in game for the last 2+ years).

I think they need to stop looking at the SQL database that stores the percentages and values of things, and start looking at the actual CODE to make sure that things are being added and subtracted in the right place.

F

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This kind of reminds me of the first time I encountered a fake nemesis and I saw a force bolt headed my direction. I had tried FF defenders before and was a bout to laugh... then it hit and did like over 200pts of damage.

But, yeah... mob versions of powers are ridiculous compared to player versions...

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Paragon Protector MOG vs. player MOG. 'Nuff said.

F

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This bug has also been getting worse, it seems. I regularly have to exit and re-enter missions in order to see the enemies (which is a stellar pain in the behind if you're an MM).

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Right, and this is my point. They have a BUG, that has existed since beta, that looks EXACTLY like the super-powers of this villain type. How in the world does one expect the players who regularly experience this bug from mission to mission, to magically know that this one time it's now villain powers and not a bug?

They need to fix this bug. The bug should have been fixed before they ever introduced a villain with powers that look just like it. That they haven't done so is rather sloppy on their part.

It's also pathetic that this fundamental and very serious bug (whole entire missions full of mobs being present but not visible to the end user??) has not been addressed in any way in two years. That's SOE quality bug-killing, that is. (Which, if you know SOE, means 'crappy'.)

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Along with the mob version of Invincibility, Cloaking Device, Flame Thrower, and a whole host of other powers. I'd love for them to address this, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Because I have a /Devices Blaster it pisses me off to no end when I can't hit a Longbow Spec Ops because his cloak is engaged.

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Yes, one thing that annoys most players is when the NPCs don't "play by the rules." Those spec ops guys do tons of things that'd drop my Stalker's hide instantly, and their hide stays up. That's frustrating... because you think to yourself, "Ah, I have had my cloak dropped by this, so I'll do it back to them" and it doesn't work... Which screams "cheat!" (or at least, "fudge!") quite loudly.

Too many elements of this game are kludgey hacks designed to paper over all the massive inadequacies. Villains getting uber-versions of player powers is one of the worst kinds.

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