Lothic

Has the badge text of any Vet award/power ever been different between heroes and villains?
I just think it'd be a little weird if they actually were different that way.
Let's just say I'd never ask that kind of question about them at any rate. *shrugs*

P.S. Congrats Turgenev. I guess you only got this one a week too early this time.

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I'm pretty safe in saying that'd account for about 99.9% of the playerbase at this point. Let's just say no one's talking about setting up AFK farms in the badging channels I'm involved with right now. *shrugs*

Any SG badge goofiness like you described is therefore your own problem.

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eh, I think more than .1% of the playerbase has altruistic tendencies. Look at PCSAR and the Taxibots.

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Most of what those groups do to be altruistic have nothing to do with AFK badging. My "99.9%" hyperbole was related to people being generally demotivated from AFK badging due to Day Jobs. That figure had nothing to do with the overall amount of altruism there is in this game or even random one-of-a-kind AFK farming exceptions like yours.

I was simply making the observation that the Day Job badges have had the amusing side effect of temporarily demotivating most AFK badging in general. Obviously there will be exceptions like ComixGeek mentioned (because there is nothing truly absolute in this world) but my key point still stands. I suspect there will come a time when AFK farming will return in popularity once the majority of the personal badge collectors have the Day Jobs behind them.

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It's funny but no one I know is currently running many AFK farms right now.
They cut into Day Job badge time.

But I assume once more people start to finish off the Day Job badges (assuming no more are added) then I'll start hearing about people doing them regularly again.

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I'm running one as I type this. Just not with my badger. He's got all the heal badges. Back when I was helping people farm rep, I got Disruptor on a second toon and, so far, have earned the first two SG heal badges for 20 different SG's. Currently working on #21.

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My statement was obviously based on the reasonable presumption that anyone who'd want to run AFK farms for personal badges would probably be doing it with badging characters who'd also currently be interested in collecting the Day Job badges. I'm pretty safe in saying that'd account for about 99.9% of the playerbase at this point. Let's just say no one's talking about setting up AFK farms in the badging channels I'm involved with right now. *shrugs*

Any SG badge goofiness like you described is therefore your own problem.

It's funny but no one I know is currently running many AFK farms right now.
They cut into Day Job badge time.

But I assume once more people start to finish off the Day Job badges (assuming no more are added) then I'll start hearing about people doing them regularly again.

I understand the general idea that you, as the player, paid for and enjoyed all that time with the game. But strictly speaking Vet Awards are tied to individual accounts regardless of which set of servers they are on.

Now if you had transferred from the EU servers to the US servers because the game was 'forcing' you to do so then I could see how you might have a case to have your Vet status transferred from your original "main" account to your new "main" account. But it sounds like you got a US server account just because -you- chose to do so. Even if it's your intention to completely abandon the EU account in favor of the US one that would be no different than if I had two US accounts and wanted the Vet status of one to be transferred to the other. The Devs have already made it pretty clear that kind of thing will not be allowed.

I wish you luck in your attempt to get this resolved the way you want but I have a feeling it's not going to work out for you. Sorry.

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Personally, Achievement is the tab I worry least about. I hate afk badge farming, and a lot of it leads that way. So I'm missing the top 2 infamy ones.

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If you are a "purist" about not wanting to AFK farm for badges the INF badges should be the ones you'd want to get. Out of all the epic badges the INF badges are the only ones you -can't- get via solo AFK farming.

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I guess the real question is: Do most of the "badgers" get this one, or is it too mind numbingly dull to stick with?

By the way, I'm really disappointed that we cannot get progress on influence badges in Mission Archetect. I would be trying out everyone's arc if we could.

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Well my main badger finally managed to get the Leader badge but as a badger I still consider the effort to get that badge "too mind numbingly dull" for the most part.

Years ago as a Controller it was far easier for me to farm in the Storm Palace than in RWZ. I tend to think the RWZ is more the domain of Tanks and Scrappers. But really the only thing that helped get me past the "I'll never get that badge" mindset to the "I might actually be able to get it" mode were the 2x weekends. People seem to be willing to remain super-focused on full teams pretty much every second of those weekends.

I think I earned about 500 million towards Leader during years of normal playing and 'traditional' farming. But I earned the other 1.5 billion towards it over the course of roughly 3 different 2x weekends. To me it was simply far easier to play several marathon weekends than it was to spend multiple months of tedious brain-optional farming.

As far as no badge progress with the MA yeah it kind of sucks that applies to the INF badges as well but I can see why they wouldn't want to make any exceptions like that. *shrugs*

Good luck to you regardless...

Actually most people don't realize that the /settitle numbers are -not- permanently assigned to badges when they're introduced into the game. It's very counter-intuitive if you ask me but apparently that doesn't matter to the Devs.

What I mean by "not permanently assigned" is that when new badges are added to the game they are typically shoved somewhere into the 'middle' of the existing list of badges which for some reason forces any badges behind them to have their /settitle numbers incremented. For example if a new badge X is added the Devs might assign it the /settitle number 300. But that means a badge that used to have the /settitle number 310 is now going be shifted up to 311, 311 would now be 312, and so on.

In practical terms what this means is that since the addition of the I15 arena badges many of the old /settitle numbers have already been shifted upward. I know this because I've been using the /settitle command with my costume change binds for years and I basically have to update them every time the Devs add new badges, including I15. My guess is that even if the MA badges had not been removed their /settitle numbers would have likely been different between I14 and I15 regardless.

Interestingly enough even though the Devs technically 'deleted' most of the MA badges the /settitle numbers for many other badges once again -increased- in value in I15. This tells me that even though the MA badges were striped from live play they are still in the system "under the hood" so to speak ready to be used again I suppose. I guess we'll see if they ever get recycled at some point.

I think the only reason some people have managed to keep old badge titles is that the system doesn't dynamically recheck those settings unless you manually change them. A person with Bard is going to keep it until they change it. The Bard badge is likely still buried in the .pigg files, but at this point it has been locked from live play AND its /settitle number is likely different as well (as much as the /settitle number for a locked badge means anything anyway). People are keeping these old titles the same way people keep old costume items - as long as you don't change them you still have them. This leads me to conclude that whenever the Devs 'delete' things they probably never actually -remove- those things completely from the .pigg files.

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I can't help but wonder if this thread prompted this announcement. I mean, I make a post about a new vet power I've found that I've never heard of before, and less than 12 hours later an official announcement goes up confirming it?

Sure the power's icon has been uploaded to ParagonWiki since March, but I'd never heard of it, and judging by the reactions in this thread and the other, neither had most of the forumgoers.

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Outlook is doubtful, considering that this was posted by Mod 8 almost 18 hours before that.

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Besides the first people who'll legitimately be able to have the 63th month Vet Award will get them in less than 2 weeks. The Devs were going to have to officially announce at least that one more or less now anyway.

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The real purpose of VRs is to entice players to keep paying and playing.
Every player knows that in less than 3 months, there is another little perk waiting for them, if they stay.

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Actually, the fact that I will never get all the Veterans Rewards, that there will always be another reward out there that I'll want and will never get to makes the Veteran's Rewards completely ineffective as incentive. "Collect them all!" is a pretty enticing idea, but when collecting them all becomes impossible, it loses its appeal.

As such, the idea of losing Veteran Rewards has absolutely zero effect whatsoever on my choice to stay subscribed. I play the game because I have fun with it and enjoy my VG, not because I have another Veteran Reward coming around the corner.

They might entice five-year veterans, but at this point, the already four+ years of rewards that I won't have for X amount of time has completely removed any ability for the system to entice me at all. Now, I am simply annoyed that, in a game whose primary strength over its competitors is the creativity and customisation of its character creation (and base editor), there are options that, for completely arbitrary reasons, I cannot use for another year or more.

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There was a theory for several years that the Vet Awards might stop at 60 months. People who looked into the .pigg files back around when the Vet Awards started found the 3-60 month Vet badges and generated a reasonable suspicion of that. I'm one of those long time Vets who would've not minded if that were the case. I can see the pros and cons of a Vet system like this finally coming to an end.

But I also understand the general type of player that the Vet Award system was established for in the first place. In the world of MMOs the most valuable type of customer a game can have are long-term consistent ones. They are the type the Devs can count on to be there month after month to produce a reliable cash stream for the budget and accounting folks. Between a guy who might randomly pop in one day and drop a $1,000 for 'purchasable' Vet Awards or another guy who will be constantly subscribed to the game for years at a time the Devs are always going to favor the second guy because that's the guy they know they can count on. They can't sit around "hoping" Mr. Random is going to decide to drop in or not.

Thus the Vet Awards are more about rewarding players for time subscribed than money paid. I agree it's not too friendly to players who come and go. I suppose you could try to make the "I didn't know there was going to be a Vet Award system" argument, but then again I didn't know there was going to be one either until it happened. If you had been around you, well, would've been around for it. *shrugs*

Better luck next time. It's probably worth realizing that in the future I would expect most MMOs to have some kind of "customer loyalty" program along the lines of CoX's Vet system. I'm certainly going to keep that in mind with any new MMO I ever play from now on.

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I'm against dropping the TF reqs. The reasons being given for doing so aren't any different than the reasons we've heard for 5 years.

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OK, so what are your reasons for NOT dropping them?

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Well I for one don't mind that there are a least a few things in a MMO like this that are actually -intended- for a team. There is absolutely no reason that a MMO must be 100% soloable.

With the difficult setting update in I16 people will now have the option to solo all sorts of missions the way they want with that feature. There's no "requirement" that TFs be made accessible that way as well.

Anyway we all know that if you still really want to solo TFs you can get padders. I basically see no reason why that should be "easy" to do when it goes against what the Devs intended for that content. We probably ought to be happy the game will continue to let us play through TFs solo once started to begin with. *shrugs*

Just be sure to report it in-game so that they can correct it eventually. Sounds like one of the original Issue 4 descriptions of the arena badges got used in the wrong place when they finally added them in Issue 15.

Yeah at one point none of them worked while Hovering.
Now only the "regular" one works while Hovering.
Maybe the rest of them will get accounted for in another patch soon.

The silly bit for me is the only one I -never- use at all is the one that's working at the moment.
I have flying Magic, Fire and Electricity users all waiting for theirs to work...

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You could always go to Pocket D and save at the Tailor right there in the Tiki Lounge. I have done this on several occasions prior to a reroll when I wanted to keep a costume, but use different powersets.

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That's a good point.
You'd have to have the Pocket D VIP pass to make that easy, but I guess most do by now.

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Not everyone can afford every little microtransaction the devs spring on us.

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Well that's more or less why the "tailor in the tutorial" idea is a better general solution for everyone.

Yeah as I remember it Positron himself said that big critters like the drop ships and Hamidon will likely never have defeat badges associated with them for that reason.

As an FYI even though the drop ships can still be killed now they were actually much easier back during the closed beta they were first introduced in. There was a group of beta testers who bragged that they killed something like 9 of them in a row real quick like it was some big "accomplishment". Of course since it was still during the beta all it did was motivate the Devs to make them harder to kill for people now. Oh well...

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You could always go to Pocket D and save at the Tailor right there in the Tiki Lounge. I have done this on several occasions prior to a reroll when I wanted to keep a costume, but use different powersets.

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That's a good point.
You'd have to have the Pocket D VIP pass to make that easy, but I guess most do by now.

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Scenario: you make a character, play him for a couple of levels, then decide for one reason or another to reroll -- different powersets, AT, even Origin if you're stupid like me. But you want the same costume. Right now, you have to drag your baby level 4 toon out to high-level Steel Canyon or over to Cap au Diable in order to save the costume. Although it occurs to me, you can just go into AE and save the costume there in the critter creator, but for villains this is still a pain.

When you select a character, there should be a button to save the costume right there.

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I understand your suggestion would directly solve your problem, but a button for that on the character screen would probably be used so infrequently by most as to not be worth it. It'd be sort of like attaching a flashlight to a golf putter. It'd be useful for the one time you decided to play gold in the dark, but really how often do most people play golf in the dark?

A more general answer to your problem would be to have access to a tailor in the tutorial zones that cost no INF to use. Many people have been suggesting that for years to deal with issues similar to yours. You could then save your costume there before you leave and try whatever after you've played around first.

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Guys and gals, we really need to up the maximum character capacity on each server beyond 36. By the end of this year (hell, even before then) it won't be enough character spaces for me!

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Yes please more slots!

And please increase the size of my global ignore by 100. It has been full for over a year now, and every time I ignore another scumbag RMT spammer, it drops someone else off the list.
*edit* and reason to justify this (if at all ever possible), one of my alts I didn't play for a month, and on login she had 88 RMTs. Most of my alts tend to get 2-5 RMTs per play session.

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I'm all for more character slots per server. Bring'm on.

But the idea of getting more global ignore space is self-defeating. What happens when you fill up the extra space they give you? Do you ask for more again? I agree that RMT spam is annoying as heck but worrying about people dropping of the list is effectively pointless. Most of the time the individual characters they use get banned within a day or two and end up appearing as "empty" in our lists anyway. The "empties" dropping off our lists aren't coming back anyway so keeping them around isn't doing any good regardless. *shrugs*

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wow we didnt take long to find something wrong with another cool issue

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Well you can certainly argue that people just love to look gift horses in the mouth.

But in this particular case it was bound to happen. The controversies surrounding how much some people hate the visual appearance of powers like Hasten and Superspeed were probably amongst the more cited examples of why people wanted ANY power customization in the first place.

For those specific powers to be potentially -not- included in the I16 updates would be a glaring omission that's not going to get overlooked. It'd be like a kid wanting and asking for a red bike for his birthday all year and then finally getting a blue one. Yes he got his bike, but it was clearly not exactly what was asked for.

I fully understand the idea that there was a lot of work involved in doing this and it's quite likely the Devs decided to prioritize on the primary powersets before looking at power pool powers. But I'd be willing to bet that of all the powers in the game a majority of players would have actually wanted the power pool powers to be considered for customization FIRST, not last. The power pools universally affect every character in the game so from a "bang for the buck" point of view that would have made more sense. Hopefully this will be resolved one way or the other.

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So Desdemona is basically Bettie Page with straight hair? I can get behind that.

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Think of this the other way around: If Bettie Page was a villain set in the "City of..." universe wouldn't you more or less -expect- her to be a magic wielding demon dominatrix? I would...

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How soon is very soon? Is that like the "Forum Migration Soon" that Ex, Lighthouse, and then Niv have posted? Isn't it your turn to post that now?

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Meanie.

Forum Migration is also Very Soon<sup>Tm</sup> but not as Very Soon<sup>Tm</sup> as the Vet Reward announcement (I'm trying to get the finishing touches on that one done as we speak).

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Hoboy. Text doesn't always accurately convey the sentiment behind the words. I was just teasing. PLEASE DON'T BANSTICK ME!

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I finally realized what we need here to better communicate the exact degree of "soon" to each other.

Consider the popular idea that the Eskimo have many different words for "snow" in their various languages. I propose somebody here come up with new words for "soon" so that we can tell the difference between things like "soon as in a week or two" or "soon as in several billion years from now".

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i think they should have stopped at 60 months and just continued with a free respec or tailor session of your choice, a badge and of course one toon slot a year.

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There was a working theory for a long time that they were going to stop at 60 months because many years ago people found the Vet badges buried in the .pigg files and they only went up to 60 months at the time.

I could see the pros and cons of stopping the Vet badges at a certain point like that. It would certainly make it fairer to newer players because it would mean they could eventually "catch up" to older players. On the other hand it'd be kind of disappointing to have nothing to look forward to if you finally get to the 'end' of the Vet awards.

Oh well. *shrugs*

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But of course, like most things, exploiters ruined it for everyone.

sigh

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Well you can certainly "blame" exploiters for ruining things in general.
That's a valid point of view when you look at things at face value.

But they can serve a roundabout positive function by exposing problems that the Devs can subsequently fix. More often than not exploiters ironically end up helping "normal" players by forcing the Devs to fix broken game features to make them work better for everyone.

What makes the whole CoP trial fiasco different than most is not that exploiters found a bug and used it. That kind of thing is pretty much always going to happen with newly released MMO content. What was different was that they found an exploit the Devs apparently -couldn't- fix.

So yes the exploiters caused the CoP trial to be removed from the game.
But what actually "ruined" it was the Devs' inability to fix it.

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Option C) We're putting up the announcement very soon

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How soon is very soon? Is that like the "Forum Migration Soon" that Ex, Lighthouse, and then Niv have posted? Isn't it your turn to post that now?

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Well since it's less than 2 weeks before the first people will be legally allowed to get the next one I have to hope that this version of "soon" is going to happen before that. If the Devs wait longer than that we'll probably have players out there who could tell you more about it than any Dev ever could.

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Actually there have been quite a number of villains to make it into Paragon City over the years. None have gotten to stay for any length of time and the holes that allowed them access have all been patched, but they have roamed the streets just the same.

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WHAT?!?

Please give me more details, or point me to where I can read about this.

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I'm not sure the "quite a number" is as high as DechsKaison is implying, but it has happened at least 3 or 4 times that I know of.

As I understood it there was no "on purpose" way to do it. It just happened as a fluke to villains loading into missions or what-not and accidentally ending up in places like Atlas Park. Not sure if I ever heard of heroes ending up in CoV but that might have happened a few times too.

These cases have always fueled the debate that if these "flukes" can happen without breaking the game why couldn't we have legitimate side switching. I guess the Going Rogue expansion will finally be the answer to that question.