Kitsune9tails

I wonder how many people will convert to um, Mayanism or whatever, if there is some sort of huge disaster next year?

Is blood sacrifice basketball going to make a comeback?

The other side of this is that a year from now, when there is tons of Incarnate content to choose from, certain elements of the playerbase will still pick a couple of easy missions and farm them.

Maybe the Devs just figured, "If you can't beat them..."

A wave of disaster movies the likes of which have never been seen before?

Urotsukidoji.

What!? Somebody had to say it!

Happy Winter Holidays, Devs!

On the subject of re-learning to crawl:

If having to essentially re-learn how to use your powers is actually part of the storyline of Incarnates, that's fine. That's great, actually, because it reinforces my theory that iCoX is essentially CoX II

But if that is part of the story, the presentation of that critical story point has failed.

I think the issue here is actually one of presentation rather than writing per se.

Story wise, I can totally get behind the idea of the Telepathists getting people to feel like they are being hurt when they are not, the massive irony of Incarnates being brought low by the very average citizens they have arrived to save, and the emotional need of the heroes to tell the people The Truth.

That is actually great writing, and I feel the writing overall has improved since the iTrials began. I love First Ward, even if it is "the feel bad story of the year"

But in the TPN, it is the presentation of the excellent story that is having problems.

- The Seer debuff is not clearly presented enough. It's lost in all of the other effects on your buff bar, and the effect of Pacified comes off inconsistent, since it is murderous against the crowd, and relatively mild against the IDF.

- Due to this, the average player has no idea why being pelted with rocks suddenly hurts. This is the dramatic point of the entire confrontation (along with public opinion), even moreso than defeating Maelstrom, and needs to be shoved in the player's face.

This issue is not new, and it is not constrained to the iContent.

This issue has been around since you went from beating up the super-powered Outcasts to being defeated by the unpowered but skilled Warriors, and the retro-tastic Family.

Red side, its the same issue when you go from defeating the inhuman Snakes and the well-equipped Arachnos and Longbow to being defeated by the Luddites and Misanthropic Mine Workers.

I actually beleive that if you get/take the time to read it (and have something of a stomach for retcons) the writing of the overall story and individual missions have improved.

However, the design of the iTrials in particular exacerbates an overall problem with teaming in the game that prevents people from getting to easily see the writing, which leads them to ignoring it and missing out.

Things like the 'MoM hub' and including more cutscenes and in-story dialogue, are appreciated efforts in getting more story out to the players.

Also, and I am dead serious, I want Paragon Studios to spend the time creating a free Nakayama/Hickman comic to be presented in electronic format and accessible from the site and ingame. This comic would let Hickman work his magic with the personalities and characterizations of the Phalanx, while providing a central place where those who have been dragged through iTrials unknowing and uncaring can catch up on the story if they so choose. And it would let Noble Savage work his magic with the tech, beefcake and cheesecake

You can't appreciate the excellent writing with a death timer running and while receiving a literally atomic wedgie every few seconds, so if the presentation isn't excellent, it comes off bad.

[QUOTE=Scythus;4043776]And there's where your argument keeps falling apart. You wouldn't have to deal with rocks and molotov cocktails outside if you actually bothered to stop the Seers.

[QUOTE]

I think you are missing the point.

The point is not the mechanics. Being debuffed into oblivion would be just fine if the presentation of the things damaging the players were either suitably epic or well presented.

If everything were exactly the same, but the graphic of the ranged attack damaging the players were changed to a psi blast from a Seer channelled through the citizen, half of this thread would go away.

If the debuff were not zone wide, but a visible cloud around the Seers, half of the thread would go away, and not just because the debuff could be more easily avoided; because it would be clear what is debuffing you.

If the debuff made the fights inside the building uber killer as well, that would be an improvement. Not in terms of fun or gameplay, but at least it would be a consistent effect. NOT a suggestion, by the way.

Certainly there are ways around the debuff.

The point is that the visual of Superman being downed by a thrown rock is anti-epic, no matter how justified it is.

If our heroes got pecked to death by chickens in the next iTrial, it would not be well-received, no matter how strong the justification or fair the mechanics. However, replace the chickens with Godzillas and we're all good.

Grats! Looking forward to the articles.

It's not the mechanics, to me. It's perfectly fine for the Devs to have a few missions out of the many thousands in the game where our buffs are negated and where stacking debuffs are used against us.

It comes down to two things:

1) If Superman is to be hurt by a rock thrown by a non-powered citizen due to Phobia using her telepathy on him, it needs to be perfectly clear via visible ingame FX that this is what is happening.
That way, we don't have people getting confused and thinking that the citizens are well-empowered or that it's a bug or that Incarnates are inherently weaker than Praetorian citizens.

2) The larger issue is that there need to be more story presentation about how overwhelmingly powerful Incarnates are. We have been taking down giant robots since the Malta first showed up.
For instance (so to speak), making the environment in the trials mostly destructible would be great. Who wouldn't want to blast a gigantic hole in the BAF wall (although it would probably be a bad idea) with a Judgement?

A bunch of level 50s are enjoying some zone PvP. At 7:10 an Incarnate friend shows up.

Nice.

Well, that's exactly why the Devs usually (but not always) stomp on what seem like harmless abuses early: they grow, and while the game design can handle a thousand or so people exploiting something, it cannot usually bear ten thousand abusing that thing.

This particular abuse strikes me personally as annoying on principle but essentially harmless.

Rock on, 3%.

It occurs to me that the Devs could probably solve AFK farming by having PvP zones spawn ambushes.

This would be on the principle that AFK farming is abuse of the system and therefore inherently an exploit. It would not however make PvP more fun or garner goodwill with the playerbase, so probably not a priority unless people start quitting en masse due to outrage at the abuse or something.

Of course, they could go the other way and make the drops more frequent, but that just encourages more abuse as well.

I guess they'd need to make the drops more frequent and use ambushes or zone events to make actual PvP a more attractive method of getting these drops than afk farming.

Underlying all of this is the need to revamp PvP so that it is more fun. Balance ain't got nothing to do with it; that's what DR and the other I13 changes directly addressed, not to mention multiple builds.

Personally, I can't think of a single MMORPG with PvP that is more fun, varied, story-driven and balanced than the PvP in this game. FPS are a whole different animal, IMO.

One of the problems with this game and similar games, is that it is easy to get into a 'super power ghetto' where you can't really relate how powerful you are to things in the 'normal' world. Only in Mayhem missions do you get to realize that you are powerful enough to take out an armored van with a single blast or punch your way through a vault door.

Imagine Clark in Smallville being attacked by a crowd and having a thrown rock apparently cut his invulnerable skin. That would be a jarring moment, and it would immediately clue you that something was very wrong.

I think what happens in TPN is supposed to seem inexplicable at first; it just hasn't been built up to successfully. There may be a mindset disconnect going on. The Devs create the mechanics and the story, so they appreciate just how much more powerful the Brawler is in the BAF compared to the Jenkins arc, or just how Pacification works.

Maybe it's even supposed to be that way; sometimes in a story, you can just present things to the audience and let them fill in the blanks.

in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones somehow hitches a ride on a Nazi sub. How? It's never explained onscreen. But by that time in that movie, because of the other stuff you've seen him do, you just accept it.