Lothic

If waiting for years for a "solution" to a "problem" that's clearly debatable whether it's actually a problem in the first place makes you happy then knock yourself out with that.

I'm sure there are AT's out there that 70% of the playerbase have played versus others that only 30% have played. Does that fact ruin the game experience FOR YOU or for those OTHER people. One more time I think you are desperately trying to see a "problem" here that technically doesn't exist.

If my deep end is "the way the Devs intended it to work" then I'll be happy to swim here for a long time.

I think your main problem is going to be convincing the Devs there's an imbalance here.
You think I'm being critical of your position? Wait till the Devs do NOTHING about this situation for you.

Yeah, people who whine for changes that aren't justified do make me mad. Make a serious argument for why your position would actually improve the game and I might be willing to listen.

Explain to me why a 40/60 split would be functionally better or make for a "better" game for you personally than a 77/23 split and I might consider your opinion here.

You don't have a good argument here other than the assumption that some alignments having A-merits and others don't is "unfair". If you can't give a legitimate reason why this is a game-breaking situation then yes I'm forced to just consider something like this a "whine" on your part.

You're wasting your time against me because you know my argument that you're just asking the Devs for an "unwarranted entitlement" in having all alignments have some kind of equivalent access to A-merits is valid. If I hadn't called you out you wouldn't be trying to defend yourself here.

I'm guessing you'd only be happy here if the population of alignments in this game was equally distributed 25% each compared to the playerbase. Is that a fair guess?

I contend it's NOT WORTH THE TROUBLE for the Devs to make the numbers equal like that. Who actually cares if all options in this game are equally liked by the entire playerbase? Would that actually make the game better, or just make it 100% cookie-cutter?

This is why my point about the "least favorable AT" was relevant to this discussion. Your Holy Grail desires for the Devs to waste their time making all OPTIONS in this game equally desirable by everyone is a Children's Crusade if I ever heard one. *sigh*

I'm willing to accept you see more of a "problem" with the current state of alignment balance in this game than I do. I think that stems from differing perceptions of just how important the ability to freely side-switch can be, especially considering the future of the upcoming WSTs what-not.

I guess if you care little or nothing for side-switching then the "counterweight" of A-merits may seem too heavy. Fortunately for myself I tend to see what the Devs did here in a more favorable light. YMMV.

I get that A-merits were added to the game during the I18 beta because people were complaining that the ADVANTAGE of being able to side-switch made rogues and vigilantes way too unbalanced compared to heroes and villains.

Now that we have a system in place to counter the advantage of side-switching people like you are whining that the "fix" broke things. Seems the Devs are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Heroes and Villains get A-merits because they can't freely side-switch.
Vigilantes and Rogue can freely side-switch so they don't get the benefit of A-merits.

I'm not complaining at all. I'm just pointing out that you people seem to want to break the game balance the system has established just because you think everyone's entitled to A-merits.

If anyone's whining and "complaining" here it's people like you, not me.

My point is pretty obvious if you give it a moment of thought.

In any game like this there will always be something that's considered the "worse" or "least" favorable option by a majority of the playerbase. The Devs could certainly spend time trying to improve that worst thing, but ultimately there will ALWAYS be something less desirable than the other unless all the things in question were made cookie-cutter identical.

The only total solution to this would be for the Devs to spend time making all the alignments 100% identical. Frankly I would consider that a fruitless and undesirable option for many reasons even assuming it were possible.

Basically you may be right that there's a perception of one set of alignments being less desirable than the other in this case. I just disagree that there's actually a need (or even the feasible possibility) of a "solution" to this. The system is currently balanced on its pros and cons. No one alignment deserves to "have it all" even if you want that really, really badly. Sorry.

Up until Issue 18 we only had two options for alignments. Now we have four. These four alignments come with their own pros and cons. Frankly I couldn't care less which ones the playerbase prefers more than the others. By the type of logic you're driving at here you'd get rid of the least popular AT even if that meant you'd piss off some several thousand players by doing that because solving the "problem" of that AT being the least popular was more important to you.

I think it's relatively pointless to try to quantify which of these things are "better" or "worse" when in the long run all they can possibly represent are expanded CHOICES for us to play with. If you think A-merits are more important to you than side-switching then play Heroes and Villains. If you think the opposite then play Rogues and Vigilantes. Is there an actual problem with that for you?

Frankly this idea of trying to claim that the equivalent of chocolate ice cream is somehow the "weaker option" or at a disadvantage to vanilla ice cream is a pointless exercise in "fixing" something that really isn't a problem to begin with. *shrugs*

P.S. Keep in mind people like me already had a bunch of alts to begin with. I didn't feel a need to create new alts just to "mitigate" this supposed systemic problem. I simply chose to view this whole situation as the non-issue it actually is and spread my alts out alignment wise as I saw fit mostly for RP reasons to be perfectly honest. The fact that I "covered all my bases" alignment wise was actually a secondary concern at best.

It's mostly a matter of perspective and priorities.

Anything important I can obtain via A-merits with heroes or villains can be emailed to any other character of any alignment. The "coolness" of A-merits is not really enough a strength to prove that rogues and vigilantes are at a disadvantage as far as that goes.

As for the alignment powers sure it's pretty obvious the hero/villain ones are better than the rogue/vigilante ones. But over the last six months I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've used/needed those powers on any alt of any alignment. Again this is an advantage for heroes and villains "on paper" but in reality it's relatively meaningless.

So, after you account for these supposed advantages it really boils down to whether or not the flexibility of instant access to both sides of the game is important to you or not. For some it is and others it isn't. But if it's not important to you that doesn't automatically imply that option is a "weaker" one unless it makes you happy to call it that. Whatever floats your boat I guess. *shrugs*

Well like I implied it's either a new "feature" applied to long time inactive characters as a means to conserve disk space or it's a fluke of some kind where they lost some of your character's data (probably as a direct result of being long time inactive). It's crummy either way of course.

Being safe like that is good advice. But I don't think what Samuel_Tow is talking about could be a case of account hacking. Assuming someone got on his account and decided to (only) /cleartray one of his characters as some kind of joke it still would have shown something more recent than 100+ days inactive. *shrugs*

Sounds like it but I'm just going by what's been said here in the thread. I'll have to wait to get home to look at it myself. Again with the name of "Freeeem" this sounds "incarnate-ish" to me somehow.

That's why I'm thinking it might be some kind of leak for an upcoming Incarnate feature or some-such.

I'm not positive if it's new or not but it doesn't sound familiar to me. Seems surprising that they wouldn't mention new power customizations in the patch notes. I smell another potential patch leak with this.

Apart from what the others here have said I think you have to fundamentally accept that low level Controllers will not be able to rip through critters as fast as say low level Scrappers/Brutes can. You mentioned that you've had "trouble" with controllers and at level 6 you think it's "underwhelming". I think it's just that you're probably more used to how other ATs work and need to understand that Controllers are geared differently.

Controllers don't really "blossom" until the late game. Even though they start out slower/weaker than others they easily become some of the most powerful types of characters in the late game. To put it into classic Dungeons and Dragons terms Controllers in this game are the Magic Users - they start out weak but become very powerful once they become high level. The "reward" for getting through the harder low levels is getting a character that works awesomely later on.

Good luck to you and I hope you'll be willing to give it a chance.

I had one computer get the pre-download after the first time I logged into the game yesterday. I played the game for a while on another computer and didn't get the pre-download. *shrugs*

It almost seems like instead of having a 100% chance of getting the pre-download the game imposes some kind of random chance to start the pre-download or not. Or maybe there's a limit of only one pre-download per account per day or some-such.

I'm not really worried about it one way or the other, but it does seem weird that it seems to be a hit-or-miss thing sometimes.