Lemur Lad

Not really. You have options available to shut off Auto Powers only, and set the stacking displays to Numeric.

While I fully agree the icons themselves are too small and the OPs idea (or something like it) isn't a bad one, I just wanted to point out that there are things you can do to cut down on the clutter.

Will it still slice a tomato?

C'mon Flea, you have a decent idea here. Even some good reasons for it. No need to promise it will cure cancer when anyone who thinks about it will realize there are enough other reasons these things happen, that 1 new zone won't make a whit of difference to a game wide phenomenon, especially since it's a PvP zone and PvP is not a driving force in this game.

Like I said it's not a bad idea. I say though they could give everyone who goes an alt spec that only works in that zone.

Personally I'd rather see work done on the baseline flaws of PvP, and the specific flaws in the existing zone games first, but the premise for YAPVPZ is, in this case, not bad.

I'll be ingame for several hours tonight. Give me a holla and I'll unsilence you.

Don't get me wrong. I wasn't talking about crashes. Crashes aren't usually mod-able by enhancers of any type, and in most cases, Global bonuses help mitigate them and shorten the downtime.

I'm talking about gimmicky mechanics that apply to a limited subset of powers (not END cost which is ubiquitous).

Slots are at a premium in every build. That's by design and unlikely to change. However I feel a gimmick that is only mitigated by wasting those slots, is a cost I'm not inclined to pay.

Like I mentioned above, I've had a fair discussion with BaB about this. He agrees a system would be nice. He's even been booted from raids on his home server as a player.

However his well explained answer boiled down to the following:

As long as there's only a limited number of "raids" in the game, there's not enough push to spend the time and money on it. This made sense at the time and it's a fair enough reason.

I will say though that that was year's go. It was before NCNorCal and Paragon Studios. It was before the big expansion in staff and budget. I'm not for a moment saying that this explanation and stance is the same now as it was then. In fact my own observations lead me to believe they're heading toward getting it done. More raids now (ship raids, CoP, even the winter event) means more "need". Between that and what they've said about Incarnate content (more raids or zone events), I'm led to believe they've been trying different ways to handle things, and will eventually come up with a solution.

To my mind that's good news.

I don't buy the comment above that there were "thousands" of people in one zone at the same time. The game has never worked like that, even in the biggest player events on Test. Same thing would happen as happens when you hit the cap in RWZ or the Hive or the Abyss. The instance will split. For a holiday event where people are standing around and chatting, the splits dont really matter. However for a raid when said raid is only happening in one instance, that's definitely an issue.

Neither raid requires more than 5 teams to complete or so, and both zones are capped much higher than that. Is it easier with more people? Yes. Are they required? No. Ship Raids go smoothly with as few as 2 teams, and Hami Raids are done with <40 quite often.

While I've always been in favor of a better system to keep raiders in raids (hopefully it will be coming now that we know more big events are on the way), simply upping the cap on a zone isn't practical.

I remember sitting in the Hive listening to long open discussions with Castle and/or BaB about why the cap got lowered, and why it can't be higher (during closed beta for the current Hami Raid) I've also had talks with BaB via PM about why they didn't then and haven't yet come up with a better solution for Raid Controls.

Is it a bummer to miss a raid? Yeah. It's more of a bummer when the entire zone crashes mid raid and EVERYONE loses out though. That's the kind of thing that is more likely to happen with more people. It's not worth setting things up for failure and really unpleasant raiding experiences by a "simple" fix of raising the zone cap.

Funny, the economist in me can't stand slotting and reslotting SOs when they go red every 5 levels.

Level 27 or 32 are the magic numbers for me. When I get there I slot in generic IOs or super cheap acquisitions I have laying around that are as good/better than SOs and then I can play happily to 50 just adding more to the new powers and slots I get as needed.

Way to make something sound worse than it is by being vague. The amounts of prestige needed to pay base rent can be earned in minutes. The salvage costs are moderate. And I don't remember the prestige costs to build it but none of them ever seemed excessive to me after the current round of cost cuts went through.

That's because you're anti-SG and anti-base Sam, trust me, you're not the norm.

You choose not to use a game system? That's fine. However look at the thread title.

As you said, you've been here years. If you'd chosen to, you could have learned about them easily. You're a smart guy. However you chosing not to use it for reasons of your own doesn't detract a whit from their usefulness. Just puts this on the list of things you're willfully ignorant of.

Edit to add- Bases, base rent, and crafting are nowhere near as onerous for a primarily solo player as you describe. I can earn rent for a month for all three of my small bases in a day's play. Once stuff is crafted, it's done. No need to repeatedly use the editors if you have what you want. For the time invested, my bases have paid back their cost a hundredfold in utility and convenience.

MMOs by design are about jumping through hoops, pretty much every game of any kind is. Whether you choose to or not, you've made it clear that your personal threshold for that is very very low.

Could bases be better? Most assuredly. Do the niggling problems that bug you mean most people ignore them altogether? You really sound like you're trying to argue that no one should make an effort to learn about bases and use them because you've already decided they suck.

Not really, sorry. What you said made it sound like the exact opposite of what it is. Depending on the Stat, there's several different ED caps (Schedules). Schedule A is the most common, covering Acc, Dmg and other common attributes. The closer you get to 100% bonus, the more ED kicks in.

What you said made it sound like lower level enhancers had lower caps, and the caps kicked in based on the number slotted in a power. Not at all true. You could slot 6 Damage Training Origins in a power and most of them would be fully effective, for example.

After reading what you wrote 4 times, I see what you were getting at, but the third sentence really garbled your meaning.

I'm sure they do, and I'm sure we can expect to see many more of them with Incarnate content.

No vote from me. My bet is the Holiday event.

Frankly, that's bunk. While characters have a definite progression and reading them in order can help, each story is written to fit within itself very well. If Pratchett really cared what order we read them in, he'd have started numbering them long ago.

I personally love the Night Watch books. Start with Guards, Guards! then look up the exact order of the following books from there. Night Watch itself is probably my favorite Pratchett book of them all. It's a really well done time travel story and I love it all the more for staying true to all the characters of Ankh-Morpork, past and present.

Thankfully you're willing to take advice and learn some lessons, because people are right, this really is an incredibly solo friendly MMO. I will say that you had taken your thought process about two steps too far when you made your first post.

Next time you feel like you're running into a wall, come and get some advice first, before you get annoyed and feel like you need to quit. Every character has good days and bad days, and not everything goes smoothly even for the best soloing builds. The foes change remarkably every 5-10 levels, and you have to be ready for that. The next big bump should hit you around 41-42, when groups like Longbow and PPD get their endgame modifications. You get better, and they get better, as long as you're prepared for it, you can still thrive.