Lothic

I'm not arguing that the "AFK nature" of these badges is a good or bad thing. That’s going to end up being a personal opinion regardless. I'm just making the point that many of these epic badges have already had their original requirements reduced to 1/10 (or more) of their original values.

Whatever your position on HOW you earn these badges is I feel that the huge reduction in the requirements is a more than satisfactory compromise on the Devs' part to all the related concerns that these badges were unfair for whatever reasons people have traditionally complained about. Basically as far as I'm concerned the requirements reduction effectively "disarmed" any other outstanding argument against these badges. Frankly at this point the fact that there have been at least 4 badges lingering without their own unique artwork for years bothers me more than this. *shrugs*

While I might agree the original requirements for these top epic damage badges were too high they were finally significantly lowered (as people like Nericus pointed out) a couple of Issues ago. I really see absolutely no need to further reduce these badges to make them any easier at this point.

Your concern about the "extra HP" issue is vaguely legitimate, but based on the data available on the major badge tracking sites literally hundreds of people earned all these badges back when they were pegged too high AND still had the "extra HP" difficultly associated with them.

Basically they were earnable before they were fixed and now they are that much easier. I'd rather this game have at least a few "epic" level badges like this that are still relatively hard than to have all these badges be almost trivial to get.

Actually we "first heard" about the purposed expansion which evolved into Going Rogue as far back as August 2008, but I guess there's no real point in splitting too many hairs about it at this point.

Sure I'd agree having to log in 30+ alts to get the latest Anniversary badge on all of them would be a bit tedious. But then again you only have to go through that cycle once a year.

If the Anniversary badges had been designed to be global from the beginning that would have been fine enough. But since they weren't I really don't see a big enough deal to justify changing them now. Some of us have already "put up" with this situation for 6 years now. As cool as this game is it's not like it's going to last for that many more years anyway. *shrugs*

SG base raiding was a core feature promised by CoV. The CoP trial was a key part of how that system was supposed to work. I fail to see why being nitpicky about separating these things into specific "causes and effects" really changes the main point I made. The net EFFECT is that SG base raiding ultimately failed to catch on and the infamously buggy CoP trial was a major CAUSE of that. Maybe not the only cause (because if you'll recall those raids were always plagued by lag and balance issues which had nothing to do with the IoPs), but a major one.

Therefore it is easy enough to understand the failed CoP trial's role in one of this game's greatest overall development failures.
This is why there are some people who still care about it. *shrugs*

I guess it's up to what you think a "big deal" is but the Cathedral of Pain Trial does represent one of the greatest failures of this game's otherwise good development track record. It's the proverbial "train wreck" that everyone's fascinated with.

It was a core advertised centerpiece of what CoV was supposed to bring to the game. Clearly the Devs thought SG base raiding was going to be a significant part of the "end game content" of this game. Obviously that didn't happen and what we were left with was a sadly "swept under the rug" scenario of a major game system left buggy and unused. Lord knows how much effort they wasted on trying to make it work, effort that could have been spent more productively on other things.

I think at this point it would be good to see the CoP trial be re-worked into something that would be salvageable as non-PvP oriented content. I'd rather them get some kind of positive use out of all the original time and effort they spent on it.

Well it's always possible the Devs might change their minds about the anniversary badges. *shrugs*

But remember there was a time when the old event badges (i.e. first year Winter event login badge) were not possible to get again until the Devs made it possible. When the Devs made it possible to get those old event badges they -still- did not allow the Anniversary badges to be reearned. Obviously the Devs consider these two different groups of badges differently.

They've had years to reassess their stand on the Anniversary badges. At least during those years the Devs always hinted that they'd "like" to eventually give us things like Power Customization and Crossovers which finally became a reality. On the other hand I have never once seen any hint whatsoever that they would ever give us a new way to get old Anniversary badges.

Let's just say the Anniversary badges -might- be reearnable someday, but I definitely wouldn't count on it.

The fact that this badge is given out purely on the subjective whim of the Devs involved pretty much invalidates anything "official" in regards to the so-called rules of this badge, stated or otherwise.

I suppose we are free to choose to believe anything we want about what will improve or worsen our chances to get this badge. As long as there is fundamentally no objective requirement basis for it being awarded there's no real point in believing anything the Devs say on the matter one way or the other "official" or not.

Superstitions and voodoo hocus-pocus are as good as anything when it comes to how we should react to this joke of a badge as far as I'm concerned. The fact that I have always publicly criticized this badge is quite likely much of the reason I don't (and probably will never) have one. This is a consequence of free speech I'm quite prepared to live with.

Definitely do not ever ask for the badge at all and certainly do not mention any details about the bug/exploit publicly at all. Sadly the fact that you even asked about how to get this badge here may have already disqualified you.

The Devs basically award this badge on their whims and their whims alone. We players could give you all the advice in the world we think might help you, but basically you have to be in the right place at the right time for the Devs to subjectively decide if your case is worthy or not. Good luck I guess.

Sadly many people have reasonably concluded the Bug Hunter badge is as much a popularity award badge from the Devs as it has anything to do with real bugs/exploits. *sigh*

Me too... for the most part.

Actually to be totally honest I'm not strictly against the idea of some kind of reasonable "purchase" in principle. The main reason I "voted" no for it is that people have been whining for a way to get them ever since there were people who missed out on the first year badge. My guess is that after 5 consecutive years in a row of the Devs not changing this it seems all but certain it will NEVER happen at this point.

Basically I'm just tired of people wasting their time suggesting this when it seems totally clear to me that the Devs decided long ago that they'll never budge on this issue. There are probably better things to fight for than a lost cause like this. *shrugs*

Like the others I never saw/read anything that suggested offline SG rank features were going to be added in I17.

But since we still know very little about how SGs are going to be affected by the Crossover mechanics of Going Rogue it's still possbile that those kinds of changes might come in Going Rogue. That's just random speculation - like I said the Devs have not "promised" us anything like it at all yet and it still of course may NEVER happen.

Whenever this game adds new powersets there's always a handful of people who race up to 50 within a day or two just to be able to brag about it I guess. Playing this game that way has always seemed very silly to me, but who am I to judge?

I fully expect there are level 50 Demon Summoners already on the live servers, and I really couldn't care less. *shrugs*

The only thing "up" with this is that people have complained about the exact same things you did after pretty much every Issue since the first Issue back in 2004. I'm not saying the way the Devs do things is right or wrong. I'm just saying there's not much point to getting too upset by all this. The bigger bugs will eventually get fixed and life will continue. *shrugs*

I think the only reason this -won't- happen is that it's probably a little too close of a nod for intellectual property reasons. It screams Superman after all. Ever wonder why we don't have a newspaper reporter/photographer Day Job badge?

I17 is in open beta right now and is due to go live in about one day.
Not much point in being coy about it now.

Anyway I've got a few words about badges like Bug Hunter and Passport:

Bug Hunter:

As I've always said I'd have no problem at all with Bug Hunter if it was a badge that was awarded by fixed objective requirements that were NOT dependant on human intervention. Something like Beef's idea of "finding 10 legit bugs that are fixed" might be pretty hard to track like Snow Globe mentioned, but that would be infinitely perferable to having a badge totally dependant on the whims of the Devs. I don't care how benelovent or "fair" the Devs might be - having ANY badge based purely on human decree is fundamentally flawed and rife with favoritism intentional or otherwise. This I why I consider its existence a sad joke in this game and also why I believe many people legitimately "pretend" it doesn't exist.

Ultimately I have no doubt that anyone who has a Bug Hunter right now deserves it and I'm aware in Leandro's particular case that he does spend a lot of time and effort in this game's closed betas so congrats to him for what it's worth. I just wish I could respect the whole Bug Hunter badge concept more than I do.

Passport:

As for Passport and the related idea of "paying for badges" I probably wouldn't mind it. I don't have a problem giving the Devs a bit of extra money in principle. I'm silly like that. Lord knows many people basically paid for badges like Power Liberator when they decided to server hop to get to SGs which had illegitimately mangaged to keep their Items of Power longer than they should have been able to.

But our esteemed Positron himself laughed at the idea of paying for badges and has openly mocked people who would be willing to do that. In fact back when server transfers first happened and some people suggested a server transfer badge he specifically joked that he would call such a badge the "I paid money for this badge" badge. If the Devs would really consider me a stupid weirdo for being willing to do that I'm not sure I'd want to be the butt of another badge-oriented practical joke. Thanks but no thanks. *shrugs*

So I guess this means our Devs decided to copy Champions Online's Tunneling travel power.

If we're assuming there's a set of things you have to do to shift to each "alignment setting" then it's possible (possible mind you) you have to do them in a one way circle in order to get back to where you started. It might not be directly possible to go from say Hero to Vigilante back to Hero without first going all the way through Villain and back.

But I thought the whole point of having to do a series of missions in order to shift in morality was going to be enough to keep people from "flip-flopping" every 5 minutes without forcing people to have to go all the way around the alignment circle to get back to the beginning. I mean if it's going to take the equivalent of say a few hours to switch alignments even one step in either direction then that should be more than enough to prevent flip-flops on a whim without having to force people to travel all the way around.

I guess we'll find out if traveling the morality circle is one way or two way soon enough.
I just think if it's one way that's going to be a needless hassle when there seems to be more realistic ways to control it.