Fraktal

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This is one of the things I LOVED in the WoW stress test. In that game, you can pick up any quests you want, dozens of them (sorted by zone for convenience), and then you can drop them if you feel like it, and even pick them back up again if you feel like it. There's no penalty for accepting quests. Any time I saw one I'd just snag it up, because who knows, it might be convenient to do at a later date.

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Yeah even NWN lets you do that (well you can't drop them but you can take 100 of them if the builder has them in there).

One of the fundamental design flaws of this game (wow there are a lot of them) is setting the mission level on acceptance of the mission rather than on mission entry. That's poor design, especially at the low levels. I've had cases where I took 3 missions... one led into an early story arc so I followed all of that... levelled 2 or 3 times... and now all the other missions have turned grey. Wow isn't this fun!

Mission level should be set at the time of mission entry, NOT at the time you get it. At high levels this won't matter much except the rare cases where you level between taking a mission and doing it... but in the level 1-20 range it is a very important issue.

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That's how you make a game that's designed to be fun, rather than a responsibility.

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I agree with this point. The way missions work ends up being more of a chore than something fun. This is agame. It should be fun -- not a chore, and not tedious.

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I submit that you just gave more support to the point you were trying to counter by pointing out various ways that folks can already do what you suggest.

As for bugged missions, well, they aren't supposed to be that way. As a software developer myself, I know that means that they won't be putting in game-changing mods to get around them.

Bugs are to be squished, not to be used as an excuse to backdoor a scope change into the game engine.

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Yes but waiting for several weeks for a bug to get squished is not fun as a player. That mission is now stuck in your "mission queue" and cannot be removed in any way (it's bugged, so you can't finish it, and it can't be deleted from the queue). This is not a wise setup. I tried to explain this in Beta... the Devs are forcing themselves to be TOO GOOD here -- no game is this perfect and now it has to be or else people's fun is ruined. In an extreme case it is (theoretically) possible to have all 3 missions be bugged, and thus impossible to successfully complete AND impossible to clear to get new ones. And this is a wise situation... how? "Well they should fix the bugs!" I assume they're trying but must someone wait for weeks to get missions cleared off their list? That's silly.

I don't see how the fact that you can street hunt whatever you want has any bearing on why missions should not be clearable/deletable/removable in some way. Street hunting (other than Hunt X missions) has nothing to do with missions. Yes you can get around *mobs* you don't like by street hunting but you can't get around *missions* you don't like in any way, shape, or form.

Great example: I said earlier I refuse to take DE missions. Well guess what? Sometimes you get multi-part missions where the enemy changes. Part 1 is against the 5th, say, so you take it. Now you finish that and you find a "sample" to take to a contact. After that the contact sends you to a cave and you fight DE. Now, you didn't know you were going to fight the DE first -- you thought it was a 5th mission. Now it's not and now you don't want to do it anymore because you don't like fighting the DE... but you can't clear it. So you're stuck with it.

The devs need to realize that there ARE bugs and there are too many missions that are bugged and frustrating to players (a friend of mine had one that was bugged and he attempted like 5 5 times before a GM finally helped him on it), and being able to just say "*bleep* this mission" and wipe it off the queue would solve the problem entirely.

Fortunately from Stateman's reply they seem to be realizing it and along with the slider they may be getting at the things that need fixing in this game. Actually I think the slider may be all that's needed here. If I hate a mission I could set it to "grey mobs" and just blow thruogh it. No XP but I can clear it from my queue. Though that doesn't solve the bug problem....

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Well no lets look at this from a hero's point of view....lets say abandoning a mission comes with a penalty, either influence or xp for ... "loss of courageousness" or something...

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I would be willing to take an influence loss to get rid of a mission I don't want. That's a good idea, since it would prevent people from doing things willy-nilly. Perhaps also have it be exponential if you do it multiple times in a row... That is, you lose X influence the first time... if you take and immediately abandon a second mission (without successfully doing another one in-between) you lose 2X influence... and so on. This way people won't take-abandon-take-abandon for some stupid reason... but if you truly get into a bad situation losing say an SO worth of influence to get rid of it is well worth it.

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I wouldn't hold my breath.

I bet the devs are thinking that if they allow cancellations, that players would just cancel out of any mission that had something they don't like. (Villain group X, More than one boss, Archvillains.) I don't like it, but I understand it.

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And this is bad for the game... why?

Let's understand this... Players might (gasp!) cancel out of missions that are NOT FUN? Well we can't have that! This is a game. What in the world do they expect it to be FUN for?

No, this is a poor reason to be unable to abort. The only reason anyone would abort a mission is if for one reason or another the mission became non-fun. Aborting sure wouldn't help you "grind" xp faster, so I can't see the powergamers doing it. And as to being able to "pick and choose" what mobs you fight, we can ALREADY do that. I already refuse to accept any missions or do any story arcs with Devouring Earth in them because either they are bugged (auto-hits vs. SR) or they just have too high an ACC bonus to make fighting them even remotely reasonable. Nothing can MAKE me take a DE mission. Heck I can even take one, group with someone who likes DE, let them solo the mission for me, and get the credit without "firing a shot." So how does letting me go "oops I did not realize this was a DE mission -- I'd like to drop it please and never do it again" harm anyone or anything at all? Because I can cherry-pick my enemies? Everyone who street levels does this already. I guarantee almost every level 50 who got there by hunting (and not PLing in the train station) got there by picking and choosing wisely which enemies to fight and which NOT to fight. I do not see how giving mission-runners the same flexibility would hurt anything at all. IMO, it can only make the game better.

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Sorry.. we're on Justice. I wasn't really posting looking for contestants so much as trying to give people non-combat ideas to try with their own friends and SG-mates.

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Having gotten tired of nothing but mindless combat, our hero team has come up with a weekly series of events we call the Hero-lympics. These are some olympic events that we did in paired teams with 2 team members (me and a guy named Facade) as referees. I thought I would post our idea here so others could use it. As we do more events I will post them. We have 5 scheduled for this weekend but I do not want to post anything unless we have tried it and found it worthwhile.

EVENT 1 -- Tram Race

We selected 5 tram track stretches in the following zones: Talos Island, Atlas Park, Steel Canyon, Skyway City, and King's Row. One ref stood at the spot where the tram comes out. That was the destination. The players were taken to the opposite end of the track and grouped with refs. All powers had to be turned OFF for this competition. (I have a slight warning about persistent powers below.) Only jumping and regular running (sprint is allowed) could be used. Each team selected one member to run each race, and each member had to run 2 or 3 races (who ran 3 was up to the pair). Runners were timed to the destination, if they reached it. The object was to run along the tram tracks and not fall off. If they fell down, they stopped there. If all contestants fell down, then the one who got the farthest along the tracks won. If 2 or more contestants made it all the way to the end, the winner was the one who did it in the fastest time. Referees should select tracks that are twisty and have a reasonable frequency of tram apperance. The contestants get a GO signal from the ref at the destination, who says go when the tram appears and starts to move on the tracks. The tram must therefore be hopped/jumped/avoided at least once for each contestant.

Points were awarded as follows: Winners got points = to the number of teams. Second place got that amount -1, and so on, until last place, which got 1 point. After the 5 events, refs added up the totals and the team with the most points won the gold.

Our SG split up into 3 groups of 2 and we had an absolute blast running this event. Watching people try to jump the tram with no superpowers and fall off was hilarious.

WARNING: Sprint, hurdle, and other similar powers will give people having them an advantage. Check who has what beforehand and try to even it out (each team having one person with swift or hurdle and one without would work, for instance).

Enjoy.

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Alderian/anti-plvlers,

Until you state a concrete reason why powerleveling affects you and your life and your goals, then you dont have much for argument. So far you have never provided concrete evidence other than envy. You are envious of people doing it because they are doing it with less work..

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Um, no. Not all of us.

It is a known fact that the devs released this game with MAJOR balance issues and that they are still working day and night to grapple with those issues. Because they released the game in the shape it was in last April, they had to leave their data-mining and gathering software from beta in place so they could figure out where the holes are and patch them. The burn/provoke nerf is an example. The Hasten nerf is another. A few other things coming down the pike are still further examples. They make these adjustments to the game based on the data they collect. These data include things like "how fast does it take builds with powerset X or Y to level relative to one another?"

When you sit there in the train station PLing, you aren't playing the build, which means any data they have on your build in their data mining procedures are faulty (your build is irrelevent in the train station). However they can't know you levelled this way, and so you are throwing their data and balancing attempts out of whack by doing this.

I get impacted by this when nerfs get thrown into the game because "people are levelling too quickly" -- which decreases my enjoyment of the game and increases how much grinding I have to do. I get impacted because people who have no idea how to use their level 1-32 powers since they've only had them for 3 hours go into a level 33 mission and get owned by it because they don't know what they are doing, /petition it as too hard, and the devs tone that mission down -- thereby leaving it hopelessly easy and trivial for someone who has played all 33 levels at their keyboard and knows their character inside-out.

PLing impacts my game-play indirectly, by causing the balance data mining to be thrown out of whack, but it DOES impact it. If it didn't -- if the devs had said, "Game finished, no more balancing to be done," then I wouldn't care. Since the devs ARE still balancing things, and they clearly ARE taking note of how fast people are levelling, then it does impact me, because dev decisions that negatively affect me could be made as a result of the PLing.

Again, I don't care what level you are. But I *do* mind if suddenly my missions all become too easy or I need 3x more xp to level up because of your PLing.

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I don't care so much about the powerlevelling in terms of people getting to level X or level Y. In a certain sense, who cares?

HOWEVER here is no question that such procedures are going to make a mess of the devs' attempts to datamine and find out whether the game is too easy in some spots or too hard in others. Especially for a game with as many problems in these areas (e.g., level 30-34 missions are a complete JOKE in terms of difficulty), anything that throws their datamining off is going to make it take that much longer for them to fix REAL problems in the game.

Let's just take controllers for an example. A normal controller who levels up the "old fashioned way" is going to have a damn hard time soloing until the 30s (pets at 32 for most of them). A PLed controller's player would never see any of that, and would start out with pets at level 32. This leads to two audiences or camps in the controller boards -- the camp that thinks controllers are soloing gods (most of whom PLed their way to pets and never experienced the level 1-32 game), and the camp that complains that controllers are too hard to solo (those who have been slowly levelling up the old fashioned way). Who do the devs listen to? How do they know which poster was PLed and which one wasn't?

The PLing makes the devs' balancing jobs harder because there's no way for them to know which characters were PLed and which weren't, and thus it throws off the datamining. If this weren't the case I'd have no problem with it, but as it is, if the PLing is going to make, say, my levelling slower because XP was changed as a result of people levelling too fast using PL methods, now I have a problem with it.

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My supergroup, Redux , is a roleplay-oriented group on the Justice server. They are ex-villains turned hero to atone for their crimes.

Each Saturday night at 8 pacific time we have a roleplay session that is devoted to non-combat (we RP other times but usually end up doing it in between encounters in a mission etc). It's open to any RPer whow ants to join us. The first week I did a riddle that led the team from Galaxy City to Talos Island, using land marks from the city, and they had to figure out how to get from one point to the other. They divided up into 3 groups and the prize was an SO to the winnders. Last week we had a beach party on Talos. In a few days we are doing a "best hospital story" night where people will be telling their funniest hospital trip story and the winner also gets an SO. In future weeks we will be doing olympics, and other things.

Look me up or any of the other team members (off the top of my head -- Davodd, Zergus, Eidolon. (note the dot), Facade, Solafire, Shivan, Incantation, Moonraven, Fiend Hunter, Frostfaerie, Iron Giant., Incantation).

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I hate to break the news to you but choosing to do something or not choosing to do something w/ out any consistency is not roleplayin. In other words your saying that you sometimes help a fallen character or sometimes dont depends on your characters mood. Thats the dumbest thing I have ever heard because basically all that u r saying is that your character has no character because there is nothing that he does which defines his character.

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No, he didn't say that at all. He said his character is gradually becoming darker over time, and becoming less willing to be a "good samaritan." How do you get from that, that he isn't roleplaying? Sounds very MUCH like he is roleplaying, to me.

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Well, it's not a Virtue SG... we are on Justice (sadly the most crowded server, as my luck always ends up in such matters, sigh), but my entire 18-player/35-character (most people have alts) super group is roleplay based. You can check out our forums and read our team charter if you like, and you are welcome to roll up a character on Justice and RP with us. We RP with anyone, whether or not they are in the SG with us.

Our team is called REDUX. Don't let the theme (ex-villains turned hero) scare you off. That is ONLY for the founding members. All newer members can be of any sort of background they want. In fact one of my alts is a Captain America/Supergirl kind of hybrid (sort of) and is utterly squeaky-clean, and also on the team.

You can check out our forums here.

Feel free to contact me (Fraktal, Liberty Lass, or Argent Bullet in game) or any of the other group leaders (Facade, Eidolon., Solafire, Elextrix., Davodd, Akiko, Shivan, Stormfront.). (Note the dots after some of the names).

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Well, it's not a Virtue SG... we are on Justice (sadly the most crowded server, as my luck always ends up in such matters, sigh), but my entire 18-player/35-character (most people have alts) super group is roleplay based. You can check out our forums and read our team charter if you like, and you are welcome to roll up a character on Justice and RP with us. We RP with anyone, whether or not they are in the SG with us.

Our team is called REDUX. Don't let the theme (ex-villains turned hero) scare you off. That is ONLY for the founding members. All newer members can be of any sort of background they want. In fact one of my alts is a Captain America/Supergirl kind of hybrid (sort of) and is utterly squeaky-clean, and also on the team.

You can check out our forums here.

Feel free to contact me (Fraktal, Liberty Lass, or Argent Bullet in game) or any of the other group leaders (Facade, Eidolon., Solafire, Elextrix., Davodd, Akiko, Shivan, Stormfront.). (Note the dots after some of the names).

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