Grouchybeast

I've seen a few people sink ridiculous amounts of money into gambling for purely cosmetic items on Neopets -- sometimes hundreds of dollars for a single item, even when they don't know what that item is going to be. So I honestly can't blame any company for wanting to try to get some of the action.

Personally, though, I never touch that kind of content, and I find it distasteful in games that are open to children below the legal age for gambling.

I think a lot of people made a high tier Ionic when it was bugged and did ludicrous amounts of damage, but never bothered to create another one after the bug was fixed. None of the others are so great or even so situationally useful that there's an obvious benefit to sinking another bunch of salvage/Emps into them.

Maybe one of the problems you're having is that a villain looking great in tight leather pants or having a cool sword actually isn't enough for you to like them in the long run? You start off with the premise that actions aren't what determines whether or not you can like/respect a villain, but then you say that it's the actions the character has to do that turns you off them. There seems to be a little incongruity there.

What would be some examples of villains from books or films that you feel would be fun to play?

Yes.

The only thing to watch out for is putting it in a power that already had a KD chance. Every so often they both fire, and you get KB instead.

The whole system for awarding them seems to be in a complete mess. I was told by support that I would get my main account November token on the 28th, when my account renewal date is the 6th.

You can try putting a ticket in about it, but support seem to be as confused as everyone else about the whole thing. I'm a token out on my second account that dropped to Premium, too, and TBH I just can't be bothered to try to chase it up.

Well, it's certainly a theory, but unfortunately it's completely contradicted by the revisions to the new Incarnate powers and the trials that happened in the I21.5 beta, which were a direct result of player feedback.

I wanted to be able to create a story, put it up on AE, and leave it there for people to play if they find it and enjoy it.

I don't want to have to check the arc through every time there's a release because a map might have been removed or altered. I don't want to have to go through the arc with a fine toothcomb removing reference to Freakshow because some cack-handed filter system has rendered it unplayable. I don't want to have my custom enemies constantly messed with.

Writing the story was fun. Having to revise a published arc repeatedly because of AE changes that have nothing to do with improving its creative potential is annoying. So I wrote one arc, and I won't bother again.

I would prefer my game servers to be updated by people who are both rested and in a good mood.

Except now it's 30 levels, with First Ward.

I actually quite like the way that the lower level Praetoria content is being developed and released in tandem with the incarnate trials. It would be cool if both strands could move along faster, but I've not going to demand miracles of development. The problem is being mid-development, when both the trials and Praetoria feel half finished. In a couple of years I think it's all going to look very spiffy.

The biggest shame is that Praetorian characters have to make the hero/villain choice when they leave Praetoria, and are then cut off from their old contacts etc. I can only thing that it was something forced on the devs by the existing alignment structure of the game, because otherwise it seems rather odd.

Kinetic Combat would be a pretty bad buy under this system.

The main attraction of the attuned IOs is that they level with the character, so you can slot the character early, and get the advantage of increasing IO values as they level. Since Kin Combats will stop levelling up at 35, there isn't all that much advantage over slotting them around level 30-35, as normal. Paying real money to get to use the IOs for an extra 10 or 15 levels seems a bit redundant, especially when they're levels that go by fairly quickly anyway.

There's the bonuses for exemping down, but personally, I don't think getting to keep the set bonuses down to level 17 instead of level 30ish would be enough of a draw, either. If I'm playing exemped, I've very probably on a team, at which point the team buffs and debuffs will more than make up for missing set bonuses.


Of course, I guess all this is really aimed at Premium players anyway, who either have to buy sets like there or buy the IO (and AH) license every month. Personally, I'd still probably go for the licenses, but I guess it's offering a choice.

Zwill explained what kind of thing you need to do to trigger MARTy in the original posts about it. The examples he gave were:

- Simultaneously defeating every, single enemy in Perez Park.
- Simultaneously one-shotting the entire Freedom Phalanx, Arachnos Patrons *and* Praetors.

I'm afraid you just aren't anywhere near impressive enough for MARTy to care about you. :-(

I don't think there would be any need to seed WW, if it were possible to set the level of recipes for random rolls as well as direct purchases. If level 50 characters could make their Merit and ticket rolls at mid levels, then demand would direct supply to the most popular levels, and everyone would benefit.

I have stacks of merits on characters that I frankly can't be bothered to roll, because I have no interest in level 50 recipes. I'd rather let them stack up and use them to buy the occasional low-level stealth recipe. If I could choose to roll them at mid levels, all those merits would be used up and supplying the market.

Why not? If players other than the author had to play through the arc before they can flag it as active, then it would by definition have to be a valid arc that someone had checked out for playability.

Or to the RWZ quartermaster, who gives as good a rate as origin specific stores and is accessible from level 1. Cimerora and Midnighter stores also pay 40% value, but have access limitations.

1. Roll new character.
2. PL to level 10 in a few minutes.
3. Speed arc, claim completion AM plus bonus AM.
4. Buy high-value 2 AM recipe, mail to other character.
5. Delete, repeat.

That was the issue they tried to address with the change. It wasn't a great fix by any means, but there were probably limited by the tools they had available, trying to close the loophole with the least amount of new coding.

One awesome thing about the CoX market it that players who want nothing at all to do with it can still make a decent return on their drops by swinging by the AH and throwing everything in there for 1 inf. It requires *zero* investment of time or thought, or learning curve. I think it would be a bad idea to remove this aspect of the market, and thereby push people who hate the market into having to spend more time there.

At the moment, the market provides a mini-game for people who like that kind of thing, and at the same time, a way for people to get rid of drops at reasonable return with minimal effort. I think that's pretty cool, and valuable to the game.

First of all, I 100% agree that there should be something in the game, preferably at the start of the arc, that flags up the change.

However, there is actually a reason behind the change, which was made to close a loophole that was allowing people to generate huge numbers of high-value recipes by repeatedly rolling up new toons and running the arcs for the first-time bonus. It's a rather clumsy fix, and it has some undesirable side-effects, but I guess it was the best that someone could come up with at the time.

That would still lose from the search interface good arcs whose creators don't play any longer. Maybe it would be possible to have an arc reactivated by someone other than the creator playing through it? There could be an option in the 'Played Arcs' page to show inactive arcs.