Golbeh

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Oh...and at the one store when I was buying it, the cashier remarked "hey, you know Champions Online is coming out soon, right?" As if I was loco for wanting to buy CoH.

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Just to go on the cashier's side for a second, the employees of those stores for the most part rely on preorders and the like for their hours. Chances are, he was just suggesting a game that you could potentially give him a reserve for that is in the same genre as COH.

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This pretty much. Gamestop employees are judged not by their usefulness, but how many pre-orders, magazine subscriptions, and used titles they can sell. The first because if is effectively a scam, as many stores will not actually hold your copy, keep your pre-order bonuses to themselves unless you hound them (most people will not), and generally operate on the assumption that you will totally forget about your pre-order and give them $5 for effectively nothing. The second and third are because it costs Gamestop basically nothing for them to obtain those products, especially the used games, since the cash you'd get from them is nothing and the store credit is, at best, a discount on something you'll buy at their store.

Don't blame the guy behind the counter. Blame the CEO in the office.

If this bug isn't fixed I'm going to

They would, but they are usually doing things like Hami raids, LRSF, and so on.

As for forming my own teams, I have tried, but I am lucky to find one or two people in my level range looking for something that isn't ye olde box-full-o-bosses, much less five. You are saying "start them" but the problem is there is no one to start them with.

I cannot for the life of me find a team any more, Virtue. I go into all your fancy global channels and inquire there, I set my flag in the little team window, I broadcast. I join a Supergroup; nice people, I enjoy them, but they are all running around in 50s I cannot play with.

A month ago, this is not a problem. I take a short break, come back, and my daily experience consists of yawning, bored to tears as I solo through some instance I could care less about. It does not matter if I am red or blue, the experience is all the same.

What am I supposed to be doing, Virtue? 'Network', they say, so I friend people I enjoy playing with. Now my global friends list is 50 names, none of which I recognize and 3/4 of which are usually grey.

Yes, Virtue, I realize that I am whining and pissing and moaning. But when I cannot freaking team on one of two servers actually capable of reaching yellow, it is like I am banging my head against a brick wall and there is nothing left to do!

There. I am done ranting and will not bother you any more.

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a problem that the devs said from DAY ONE was NOT a problem(ie. a ALL whatever map).

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[Citation Needed]

(PS. It's a problem if it's being used as a means to perform what the devs define as an exploit. It might not have been a problem to them then, but it could just as much have changed and viewed as a problem now.)

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I know that if you want to find normal teams..........you can join a supergroup, join a global channel, get on a more populated server and you can find NORMAL teams.


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That's funny, I'm on around 6-7 global channels, part of an active SG, and play on Virtue, yet I never get any "NORMAL" teams despite going through each and every one of my channels.

People need to quit saying "JOIN AN SG/CHANNEL/ADD EVERYONE AND THEIR MOTHER TO YOUR GLOBAL LIST" like it's going to change that 80% of the population is doing this.

Also, in before lock.

AE in of itself isn't doing anything to the game.

AE as an alternate leveling option isn't doing anything to the game.

Abuse of AE - blatant, exploitive farming, creating anomalous situations via the MA that the game's design was not intended to handle (all Bosses/LTs/whatever, objects or allies that make challenging, high-risk high-reward enemies trivial, et al), is a problem. Either the game's design needs to be adjusted to accept these situations, or the ability to set up the parameters that causes them needs to be removed or mitigated.

The incentive distribution between MA and 'Real' missions being stilted in favor of MA could be considered a problem - or it could not be. Tickets don't need nerfing, if you ask me, but things like merits from Story Arcs and the like could stand to be buffed so that players have reason to play "real" missions. Because, let's be honest here - the tickets you get from MA are fairly significant, but the merits you get from a story arc are fairly trivial.

I, honestly, dislike the centralization of MA - one thing that might help reduce crowding is the ability to have "simulated" contacts and doors throughout the city, with mission designers being allowed to designate which zone they want them to spawn in. You could even have an "MA Phone" to access the MA from anywhere, as opposed to having to run back and forth between the MA and your "fake" contact. It would help reduce the sense of sitting in the same room talking to the same hologram and jumping into the same portal ad nauseum, and mitigate the crowding, but honestly, it's such a minor problem that the only real reason to "solve" it would be to have a nifty new feature.

Long story short, MA is fine, it just has a few design kinks that need working out. Par for the course in any "new feature" of an MMO, honestly.

Any chance I would be able to get in on any of those redside SFs? I've got a 26 MM and I've always wanted to give one a shot.

Edit: Hurpadurp I just saw on the wiki that it Doesn't Work That Way, nevermind.

So...I'm contemplating rolling up a Brute, partly due to nasty, nasty altitis. I've been curious about two particular powersets, though, because with a quick scan of the boards I don't see them talked about much compared: WM and BA. Are these viable/decent as Brute primaries? I was thinking about using them, but the lack of discussion gives me a feeling that they're not very good..or..something.

Any people who're better at this build business than me care to comment?

My problem with MA missions lies in the fact that this 'farmable' content is being produced and used in large amounts. This impacts the game in two ways.

One, it causes 'farm missions' to flood out legitimate, original content. One of the key purposes of MA, to my understanding, is to allow players to express and share creative products with one another. The "farms" obstruct this design objective of the Architect - should I be correct in that it is an actual design objective - by limiting the scope and range of content being experienced and participated in to a narrow spectrum of 'what's the easiest to farm.' Progression via the MA is not a detriment to the game, but the excessively-speedy progression present in certain types of MA missions is a detriment to both the MA itself as much as it is the content outside of it.

Two, it makes other parts of the game obsolete. The average casual player simply wants to play the game, and most likely wants to do it with other people, and most definitely makes up the largest fraction of the userbase. The second-largest fraction is incentive-driven, and will go toward the fastest route of progression. When one route of progession is excessively skewed to a point of being vastly superior to all others, the incentive-driven group goes there. Since the 'casual' group needs someone to play with, they'll follow, and it's doubtful they will complain about said skewed rate of progression.

The final, smallest group, is the group that wishes to experience a variety of content and story. They are farther and more scattered than any other group, and with the floodgates to easy-farming open, the casual- and incentive-based players have all left for the "promised land" of easy advancement. They now have to search for dedicated groups to run non-farm content, which in themselves are far and apart, and overall, are harmed - as is the rest of the virtual gameworld - by the prevalence of easy-farm content.

The farmers are allowed to do what they want - and they have a right to, after all - but this does not give them permission to advocate keeping systems in play that are a detriment to other players' enjoyment. Before MA was released, they didn't complain that there wasn't an open floodgate of 'farmable content' for them to quickly advance through, and ergo, they will not be hurt in any rational or tangible way if that floodgate is closed, and doing so will ease the pain of the more minority groups.

Having to search high and low in secluded, private places is a sign that easily-farmable MA's are damaging the rest of the game, and while doing so is a workaround for those who enjoy varieties of content, the fact that they have to do it should be a sign that there is a problem, not the other way around.