FredrikSvanberg

2010 Player's Choice Best Villainous Arc
  • Posts

    1426
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  1. Turning off shadows helped. I managed to play for 6 hours this afternoon before I crashed. I haven't tried doing a trial or the newer flashy zones so the jury is still out on those, but before I turned off shadows I would crash about once or twice an hour, or more often on trials.
  2. I can't believe I didn't try turning off shadows. That's the first thing I'm doing this afternoon. Although I would like to get the shadows back at some point.
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
    [...] I can still point to the Power arcs and go "Like that! More please!" We know this is doable, we know this is awesome, so why couldn't we have had more arcs like that on the actual villain-side?
    Because the Loyalist Power path isn't villainous. It's the Rogue path. The villainous path is the Resistance Crusader path - you know; follow your leader blindly and cause all kinds of death, chaos and destruction, as long as you oppose your world's version of Statesman.
  4. FredrikSvanberg

    Cebr

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades View Post
    If we had a Dev step in and actually say what THEY thought was fair we would have a guideline.
    The game outside of AE is a guideline.

    1-50 in 50 hours seems about average.
  5. Or let us change Origin later on at a trainer until we get to level 10, or during a respec anytime after that.

    In fact we could go with "Origin: Unknown" until level 12 when origins first start to matter, and when we level up to 12 we get to choose what origin we are.
  6. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Westley View Post
    ...who took the name Philotic Knight on the VIP server? I want your liver. With fava beans, and a nice chianti.
    I thought you quit.
  7. By then HTML will stand for Hyper-Telepathy Markup Language and we will all be floating brains in jars playing our pretendy funtime games forever. What bliss!
  8. I love slotting the chance for knockdown proc in Brawl.

    I usually put as many of the other ones as I can in my first area attack, as soon as possible. Then I forget about them until level 22 or so.
  9. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Father Xmas View Post
    Part of me wants to wave my cane and tell you all to get off my lawn after reminiscing how I use to walk to school in the snow, up hill, both ways.
    Here, you can borrow my cane. I have two.

    Quote:
    The other part of me says a simpler, less confusing, less run around to the various stores to sell for the best price gaming standard is a bit old, considering all the other streamlining they have added in with Issue 21.

    But the Freemies will still need something to slot, something to spend their Inf on and the staggered TO/DO/SO along with merging, ++ to -- scaling will keep them busy between missions since they won't have the traditional dropped loot in terms of armor and weapons that fantasy MMOs have. And since Freemies won't get recipe and salvage drops, you got to give them a reason to stop grinding every third mission to sell.
    Remove TOs and they will still get drops, just different ones.

    Quote:
    However removing the origin aspect does subtract a bit from the flavor of the game as each store catering to an origin with their Acc DO/SO named differently from one another. What would be next to go? Origin specific contacts? Origin specific threats and critters, which drops origin specific enhancements? Tech Vs Magic salvage drops? Let us try to hold onto at least some of the unique flavor for this genre of MMO and not simply slap basic enhancements in a generic white box with a barcode.
    I suggested that we keep all the different kinds of SOs but let anyone use any kind of enhancement. Want to play a Natural spell-casting cyborg? Now you can!
  10. I've wanted a simpler enhancement system for years, so, signed.

    While we're at it, can we remove the origin requirement from SOs as well, so any origin character can use any SO enhancement?
  11. I got a bunch of good ones, in my opinion:

    (The) Gentleman
    Perfection
    (The) Gunman
    Nihil
    (The) Nietzschean
    Primary
    Sandstorm
    Djinn
    (The) Missing
    Religion
    Head Hunter
  12. I am disappoint. Seems like they need to tweak MARTy a bit. AE farming still works.
  13. Quote:
    Originally Posted by seebs View Post
    I don't take power sets in which some powers use a weapon and others don't.
    I have the same problem. If I make a character with a set like that I will often try to pick only powers with or without weapons. I sure wish I could play Stone Melee without gimping myself.
  14. FredrikSvanberg

    Farm Reviews

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Aquila_NA View Post
    He was butthurt by someone looking for a farm so decided to bend over every farmer he could (til he got bored).
    I wasn't actually the target of the comment which gave me the idea for this thread.

    Quote:
    Pretending that it had something to do with improving the rating system (which is bad) is just pathetic.
    We have already discussed the ratings system and its flaws in this forum for the past two years so I didn't really think we needed another thread about it. That's why this thread is not about improving the ratings system. My previous post in the thread did go on about it but only because it came up in conversation.
  15. They're stress-testing the new server for a couple of weeks before the actual release of Freedom. I thought that was obvious.
  16. FredrikSvanberg

    Farm Reviews

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Ukaserex View Post
    So....what's this all about then? You want to have 5 stars? and you want this because...you want people to see it?
    Obviously.

    Quote:
    Now, I could be wrong,( I often am), but ratings are purely subjective. Some folks might rate something super high, just because there was a reference to their favorite football team.
    Yes, and this is another part of the problem. There are 5 different ratings but no two people can agree on what 5 stars actually means. It looks like an "objective" scale when it's in fact completely subjective.

    Quote:
    The only thing to gain by having your arc more visible is for more people to play it - and thus risk someone having no idea how 4 stars would impact your rating - other than it just averaging out to 4.6 or something. So, let's say yours is always listed first - more people play it -- besides the badge for making the hall of fame, (I seem to recall their being one for that), the only thing you can gain is tickets. Tickets are easy, as has been documented in this thread.
    It's not about the tickets.

    Quote:
    999 people play your arc and give it 5 stars.

    999*5= 4995 tickets. You can earn that many very fast, seems to me, that'd be the easier way to go. IF that's what you're actually after.
    Obviously it's not about the tickets. And 999 plays? We'll be stuck here till 2050 before a story arc gets 999 plays again.

    Quote:
    Now, if you're creating the arcs for fun, could that fun be enough reward?
    Certainly. I don't care about the tickets I gain from the ratings. This isn't even about me and my arcs and their ratings - it's about how the ratings system is completely useless, both for people trying to rate arcs and for authors trying to get people to play their arcs and enjoy them.

    Quote:
    The world is very diverse and many of us don't even think about how a rating will impact your arc, or anyone elses arc. Most just rate it 5 without thinking. Others (mainly the folks that create arcs, I suspect) actually look for dialogue and check clues, scrutinize costumes and yes, like me, check spelling and grammar.
    And other people rate a story arc 1 star for being a "bad farm".

    Quote:
    I do understand being frustrated by someone rating your arc low because they are petty and vindictive. I get that, and I'd say that feeling is justified.

    The rough part is, well, I don't think there's much to be done about that.
    Sure there is. Change the ratings system to make it better. We have talked about this for years now, there are a ton of different ideas for how it could be done. All it takes is for the devs to realize there is a problem and decide to fix it, and decide on which of a hundred better systems they want to use. Even removing the ratings altogether would be an improvement by now.
  17. FredrikSvanberg

    Farm Reviews

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Ukaserex View Post
    Regardless, I could be wrong, I very often am.
    If someone who makes an arc gets a 5 star rating and someone else comes along and gives them 1, I would think that would average out to a 3.
    Yes, but since 5-star ratings are the only ratings that count for things like getting into the Hall of Fame or showing up on the search lists, giving someone any other rating than 5 stars basically means that they don't want that arc to be played. Playing an arc and not rating it at all is better for the arc's average score than playing an arc and rating it 4 stars or lower, which seems wrong to me but that's how it goes.
  18. I don't see a "rash of 1-stars" since the game won't tell us when we've been 1 or 2-starred if we're not logged in when it happens. I noticed because I happened to look at my published arcs and found that "Fear And Loathing On Striga" (play it now, 100 million inf to the vote that brings it back up to 5 stars) had been demoted to 4-star oblivion to make room for another farm on page 3.

    I don't see negative comments either because the worthless asswipes who do these kinds of things are too lazy and cowardly to troll properly and prefer to hide behind the safety of anonymous downvoting. If someone actually had sent me a comment with their 1-star ratings I might have taken them serious.

    The best fix for the ratings system is to replace it with a like/dislike system or just remove it entirely. Then simply count all plays, not just every player's first play. At least that would give a more accurate account of popularity. Farms would still hold the top 200 spots I suppose, but arcs created on day 1 and never unpublished might reach more than 100 plays if every single playthrough counted...
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Eva Destruction View Post
    I am Jack's complete and utter lack of surprise.
    I'm only surprised it's taken this long.

    Well done, PW.
  20. Praetoria seems to me now like it was intended as a method for higher level primal characters to switch sides. Then they decided that it was going to be low-level content, and side-switching got another system.

    The tutorial in Praetoria makes me feel like I've completely lost all my memories of living in Praetoria all my life and becoming a member of Powers Division, or like I've just arrived from another world and don't know anything about what is going on.

    Recently (?) we learned that the whole Loyalist faction was a late addition to the GR experience. Apparently we were supposed to all be Resistance and the morality choices would only reflect Warden or Crusader mentalities.

    If they had introduced Praetoria as level 30+ content where Primal Earth characters are sent there to undermine Tyrant's rule, not letting us play Loyalists would have made perfect sense. Now we are instead stuck with a problem in the opposite end of the GR path, where Loyalists are suddenly forced to abandon or even oppose their home world.

    I think the whole idea of being forced to leave Praetoria could have been made much more palatable if we learned in the final story arc that Tyrant was about to give up on his Powers Division project, since it seemed to cause more problems than it solved, and was planning to kill off every super-powered being in Praetoria (possibly through his connection to the Well).

    If that had happened it would have tied into previous high-level canon content where we had learned that Tyrant and his lieutenants had killed every other super in their world and now ruled unopposed. It would have given our characters, loyalists and resistance alike, a perfectly good reason to want to escape that world.

    As it is now, when I play a Praetorian I usually get to level 20, enter Primal Earth, and then I abandon the character. Until recently they were abandoned indefinitely and usually deleted after a couple of weeks. Now at least some of them will be going back to First Ward to check that out. I'm thinking that not many of my Primal Earth characters will have a good reason to visit First Ward so now there's the same problem but in reverse.
  21. I want an Airstrike, similar to what Praetorian Durant (?) does in the Admiral Sutton TF.
  22. Quote:
    Originally Posted by AzureSkyCiel View Post
    I'm not sure that's doable at this stage, sadly, simply because it would require giving out respecs for people who slotted with IOs.
    You think anyone actually takes this power, or slots it?
  23. FredrikSvanberg

    Farm Reviews

    Well, apparently my trollish behaviour has got some people thinking about how to write more entertaining farms. Not sure if that's a good thing but it can't be worse than what we have. I'm too bored with farm missions to do more reviews for now anyway.
  24. FredrikSvanberg

    Farm Reviews

    I made a new thread for it here http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=270606 to avoid derailing this thread further.
  25. FredrikSvanberg

    Farm Reviews

    I tried to copy my fire brute in order to test the limits but the copy tool was down. Oh well.