Lothic

Why should my choice to run on a less-than maximum sized league be less important than the desires of a LFGer?

Read my last post just about yours. *sigh*

How is it accessible to someone who keeps getting randomly thrown into leagues that don't want them there and getting kicked for their trouble?

If I was going to use the LFG tool I'd want to be assured that I only ended up on leagues that have not specifically selected their "we don't want LFG adds on our league" option.

I don't WANT to have to kick anyone. But if I'm playing with a group of players who for WHATEVER reason don't want to run a league with the maximum number of players we should be able to do that WITHOUT having to worry about kicking innocent LFGers.

All I know is that I would rather discretely select a "no LFG adds" option while forming my league than to have the awkward scenario of having to kick otherwise innocent players from a league which ultimately wastes both my time and theirs. *shrugs*

Yes I'm pretty sure I understood that intention. But I still think that it's fundamentally flawed.

If I'm forming a league, just as if I was forming a team, I should have control over who's in that League if I -want- that control. If I don't care who's in the league then sure let the LFG tool do its magic to help me fill up the league. But if I DO care who's in my league then don't force me to have to kick people who might have otherwise had a chance to be funneled towards another league that doesn't care.

If the Devs wanted to do everything possible to make sure every league was filled to maximum why did they bother to impose "minimum league sizes" in the first place?

Well I'm not going to "Cry Doom!" either but frankly I never personally counted on the LFG tool being a "successful" feature to begin with. I suppose on some level I'm glad they attempted something along those lines. But sadly I predict it's going to be a tool that most people won't use regardless if there's an option to prevent people from getting tossed into random leagues or not. *shrugs*

OK, then tell us which angle we aren't considering? I haven't bothered to figure out any exploit related to this yet so if that's what you're implying I'll gladly plead ignorance on that.

Regardless I understand the Devs currently have like their LFG concept. But if I'm in a League that only wants to run with say 8 players then why should we have to go through the annoying motions of kicking unwanted people out? If we're going to kick the uninvited people out anyway wouldn't it be easier to just have an option to not let the game toss in those random people in the first place?

Even if that could work that's a bit of a silly workaround in order to ensure that you'll be able to run a trial with only the people you want to run it with.

It really sort of surprised me to learn there's no way to directly control this. I mean to put it into perspective what if I wanted to run a TF that required 4 players with only 5 players. Nothing wrong with that. But wouldn't it be weird if the game could randomly toss up to 3 extra random PUG people on your team beyond your control? Sure you could kick them back out, but why go through that silliness? I don't see anything different with people who want to run with less than the maximum with leagues.

Honestly, it's much easier when most of the people on those teams are Incarnate shifted to +2 or +3 and there's at least one person leading the League around who knows exactly where all the specific temps are. Three minutes is "more than enough" time for some Leagues but probably not -all- Leagues. This is why that activity is worth a badge.

But don't get me wrong Beefy, I happen to think the badges for this trial don't really make much sense either. Having one badge be basically the exact sum of what you do to get two other badges is a bit lame. I imagine if they had figured out some badge requirements for this trial that were more uniquely different then the idea of having to run it multiple times to get the Master might make more sense to most people.

Well whether the "10 at a time" scheme was a godsend years ago or not I think Sailboat hit the nail on the head - the Devs really have no fundamental incentive to make this aspect of the game any easier for us regardless.

This is only one of maybe a dozen different things that need to be done to Group Fly to make it more "acceptable" to use.

I was simply relating what Posi was trying to explain during the Ustream chat.
If what he said doesn't seem possible that's his problem not mine.

The irony here is that getting only 10 of one type or the other at a time is probably harder than getting all 20 at once.

But I think the real "challenge" of doing the trial multiple times is that you have to have enough control over the herd of cats (a.k.a. the League) to make sure that people not only get the right kind of temps at the right time but that they don't use them during prolonged fighting. It may be easy enough to slam through that trial once, but 3 times basically "proves" that you getting the Master badge wasn't by pure accident.

I've seen people "tag along" during successful all-in-one MoBAFs and comment after the trial that they weren't even trying for the MoBAF badge. People shouldn't really be getting Master badges as unplanned accidents.

I'm pretty sure I'm not missing the point that there's an apparent "mystical aspect" between the wolves and the children. Heck I ran a D&D campaign about 25 years ago that basically explored this same kind of connection between wolves and the characters involved so I'm no stranger to the general concept. Maybe Martin stole MY idea in the first place.

I just see the wolves in this story REFLECTING the general aspect and personality of their owners, not the other way around. The wolves are an expression of the children's overall "Starkiness". The wolves are not the SOURCE of their overall "Starkiness". Sansa lacked a connection with her inner Stark from the beginning so she lost the privilege of having a wolf. If her wolf was the "source" of being a strong willed Stark then why was she "wishywashy" disloyal to her sister while her wolf was STILL ALIVE. She was weak-willed DESPITE her wolf, not because she lost it.

There are five baby Dire wolves just because there happens to be five Stark children. The wolves exist to provide a tangible thematic link to the "mystical" Stark family legacy. The five kids don't exist because the baby wolves were the "main characters" of the story before the kids existed. The wolves are howling because Bran's recovering - he's not recovering because they are howling.

I think you understand the mystical wolf-link thing going on here. I just remain convinced you have the cause-and-effect relationship between them backwards. Maybe the ironic part is that the story apparently works regardless of which way you think the link works.

Tyrion is easily one of my favorite characters of the show so far. His swaggering hyper-confidence despite his physical "disadvantage" brings a smile to my face whenever I see him on screen.

I never denied there were people out there willing to "pay" for badges, even despite Positron's apparent ridicule of that activity. I know there were people several years ago who temporarily transferred characters to other servers just to take advantage of leftover IoPs to get the Power Liberator badge. Of course at the time no one knew the Devs would ever re-release the CoP trial making the need for doing that moot.

As a player who enjoys badging I don't have anything against people willing to transfer servers and/or pay for badges in principle. Years ago I weighed the pros and cons of transferring my main badging character to an EU server to get Passport but decided as much as I would have liked another badge I had too many ties to my friends and SGs of my home server.

At this point I've pretty much accepted that Passport may be a badge I'll never have. But obviously I remain hopeful that there will eventually be a new way to get it eventually. If it happens it happens, if it doesn't it doesn't.

Yes these are valid points. For example Lafayette was only given about 2 pages of "coverage" in the books before he was killed off. Obviously he's been given more of a role in the TV show.

But I could see the same types of things steering Game of Thrones too. The books this show is based on may be very good, but there's really no guarantee that they will be able to translate it directly into a great screenplay word for word. As Cassie_Storm mentioned they are already having to "highlight" the main points of the story to fit within the hour episodes. The longer this show keeps going the chances that it'll evolve into its own "reworking" of the story to fit the confines of TV will only increase.

I suppose the only real question is how quickly it evolves and whether the people making it can keep it organized enough to be a good show -despite- the books.

As this game has evolved it's been interesting to see the broad spectrum of interpretation between what the Devs consider acceptable activity versus what they don't. What they define as an "exploit" or an "innocent bug" seems to vary depending on the circumstances. Finally what they consider "patch note worthy" also seems to be a random whim affair.

Bottomline they were probably more embarrassed by this particular set of badge bugs than usual thus the "silent treatment" patch note wise. When we first started reporting these bugs the rednames took the dismissive tact that "the badges aren't broken, you players just don't know how to earn them properly". Once it became obvious to them that they were in fact broken it was probably hard for them to admit it.

Well in all fairness the HBO True Blood TV series has also ignored huge portions of the Stackhouse books so far. Yes they started to grab plot points that didn't come up until the later books earlier than expected. But technically they didn't -have- to do that. There was more than enough interesting material there that the TV show could have kept tight to the story presented in the books season to season and still been a fun show.

So my curiosity still stands: Will the Game of Thrones TV series stick to the linear plot presented in its source books forever or will it begin to "cherry-pick" bits of the story from different parts of the books to weave a reformulated version? Either way I'd expect it to be an interesting show.

Again I'm not questioning the wolf-link. I'm questioning your interpretation of the cause and effect relationship between them.

I don't think Sansa is a weak-willed person who lets "circumstances control her" BECAUSE she lost her wolf.
I think she lost her wolf BECAUSE she is an innately weak-willed person who lets "circumstances control her".

Once again remember that even during the brief bit of time we see Sansa -before- she got her wolf it's fairly clear (at least it was to me) what kind of "less than exceptional" character she was going to be. She wasn't "Stark-y" enough before she got the wolf, so thematically speaking her disloyal actions towards her sister effectively led to the loss of the wolf because she wasn't worthy of it to begin with.

The wolves are a reflection of the characters they are bonded to. Not the other way around.

I'm pretty sure the Devs considered the "buggy" badge situation that allowed people to get MoLambda in one run to be at the very least not WAI. Posi himself was asked about this situation during the live UStream chat last week and he pretty much said that a multi-run MoLambda is what they wanted.

He also addressed why the MoBAF was acceptable in one run if MoLambda wasn't by saying that they were going to continue to tweak these two trials to make their awards more "appropriate" to the level of effort involved. The implication was that they wanted the BAF to be effectively easier than Lambda but that Lambda would be worth more rewards per run to make up for that.

A person named Suspicious_Pkg talking about putting the little blue hand on a NPC's crotch? Oh my...

Yes that it true. But if you recall the Devs had been planning on having a Server Transfer feature almost from the beginning of the game. They apparently didn't realize how long it would take them to actually get it to work.

Initially Passport was intended to be awarded for ANY server transfer and was installed into the game long before any transfers happened anywhere. This is when the handful of lucky NA players managed to get awarded Passport "by accident" due to some kind of bug that let them get it auto-magically when the badge was first slipped into the game.

But as time worn on and the Devs still hadn't managed to get the general server transfer feature working an opportunity arose to "re-purpose" the lingering Passport badge for the transfers to the new EU servers. The Devs managed to get those one-time transfers from the NA to EU servers going BEFORE the general server transfer feature was working.

So by the time the general server transfer feature finally arrived the Passport badge had been locked into the whole "one-time NA to EU transfer" scheme and was unavailable for its original purpose.

The Devs have never really been too keen on letting people transfer characters from one account to another regardless of any previous NA versus EU distinctions. Remember as of today there is no longer any difference between NA accounts and EU accounts. Basically you now simply have two accounts, one that used to be on a NA server and another that used to be on an EU server.

You can always try to contact customer support and see what your options are. But now that the difference between a NA server and an EU server is meaningless I sadly doubt they're going to be able to help you with this.