Lothic

That's cool. At least the lure of profits from the Market will continue to give them motivation to keep working on it. If it wasn't for that the Devs might otherwise give up on hard things like that completely.

Or to put this another way now that they have the Paragon Market where the Devs can sell us all sorts of extra stuff they might be more motivated to get this extra slot thing to work if it looks like it'd become something that'd generate a lot of extra money for them.

I suppose I did not see that you mentioned that already.

On the other hand from what I've seen it's actually not too hard to get a league to get that badge while completing the overall trial. I got it during my first run with a league which, like me, were mostly new to the trial.

Unlike some trial badges you don't really have to run a TPN in a completely weird/unusual way in order to get the Fair & Balanced badge - the Anti-Anti-Matter badge from the Keyes trial is a prime example of having to do something counter-intuitive just for the badge. In fact I almost see the Fair & Balanced badge becoming virtually automatic for most standard speed runs (just like the Not On My Watch and Alarm Raiser are now on the BAF).

So while your idea of ignoring the telepaths is certainly viable I'm uncertain that's going to become the status quo way of doing this one in the long run. Your method may be "easier" in terms of what people need to do but the real question is whether that method will prove to be "faster" once most people are generally familiar with the trial.

Or it could even be in the Spring depending on which hemisphere you live in and how picky you want to be about it.

Perhaps that's the point: only someone who was unable to "keep their wits about them" like Jack would have ever been able to become the poster boy of pointless "make a mountain out of a molehole" causes like his.

About the only downside to this strategy I can see is that it means you'd likely have no chance to get the Fair and Balanced badge.
But as long as that badge is not a priority then yes this would probably be a good way to get through the trial.

I'm willing to bet they've been toying around with trying to add more slots to our characters far longer than just during the CoH:Freedom beta. Afterall people have been suggesting this for many years now. The Freedom beta was likely just the first time we heard about a serious attempt at it. For all we know the Alpha slot became what it is today because they more or less gave up trying for extra slots the -first- time around several years ago.

In any event my suspicion that the Alpha slot will remain the "closest alternative" to extra slots will likely stand for the time being given the problems they encountered, regardless of when they encountered them.

Yeah turns out when I responded to you about this I didn't realize you had to complete a MoM before that progress bar would appear. I was lucky enough to finish the trial the first time I ran it so I just assumed the progress bar would show up regardless. Sorry about that.

I have a feeling the "hardest one to get" is always going to be the one that makes you have to re-run the trial several more times while you're stuck at 15/16 waiting for the last one to show. This is akin to always finding something you're looking for in the "last place" you look.

FRY: This is a great, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus. Heh heh.
LEELA: I don't get it.
PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
FRY: Oh. What's it called now?
PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: Urectum.

If it is true it's unlikely they would admit it until -after- it gets released for everyone else.

The only reason it was acceptable for Zwillinger to admit the TW "dirty dozen" now is that TW is finally available to everyone so the chances of anyone being too upset about it after-the-fact are minimal. But if Zwillinger were dumb enough to say something like, "Oh, and BTW there are like a dozen other people playing with Staff Melee right now too." there'd be a huge uproar on the forums with people whining "ME TOO" and "Release it NAO!"

I pretty much thought the whole reason for the Alpha Incarnate slot was to serve as a extra virtual Enhancement slot for all of our powers. In effect when you have an Alpha slotted you get a 7th slot for all of your powers. In light of the fact that they've had so much trouble adding -actual- slots to our characters I doubt we will ever get anything more than this. *shrugs*

Well in light of this info it makes it -less- reasonable that Dreamwalker's progress bar is gated behind the completion of the trial.

I guess the Devs still decided they rather hide the progress bar until you completed the trial so that people wouldn't be confused(?) about what that half-finished badge was for. Seems like a very weak rationale if you ask me.

Which has always clearly been a Nemesis plot but I digress...

Well I wasn't really questioning your badge progress as much as your "fuzzy math" skills.

You can't directly buy 3% def proc PvP IOs on eBay but there have been plenty of people who have been selling the meet-n-greet costume codes on eBay for ridiculous scalper-type prices. It was a very real possibility in this case.

While it's clear from the original post that The_Masque was interested in doing some in-game trades it was also quite possible that he/she was fishing for anyone interested in paying real money for them. Even The_Masque later admitted that the post could have been construed that way.

RMTs with in-game items (like these costume codes) are at the very least heavily frowned upon. That is exactly why I responded to this thread the way I did. So I'll just suffice it to say that you didn't read -enough- into the original post. That is all.

Actually that might have been fixed because of the complaints about it. There was a time when choosing "claim all" would work the items backwards off the queue so that the order of when the popups would come up would be reverse of what you listed. It made it very easy to screw up your "Origin-bonus" choice. *shrugs*

But even if that's no longer a problem I simply don't trust the "claim all" button enough not to have full control over what it's doing. Like I said I don't make near enough characters for this to really be of any serious benefit to me. Unfortunately I'm just not -that- lazy.

This raises a more general question that I don't think ever came up before: With all these Incarnate trials and their "sub-badges" as part of the Master badge requirement do you have to have the main trial completion badge before you can get any sub-badge? I'm guessing the obvious answer is 'yes' because of the way the badges are triggered.

Maybe this new badge is unique because this is the first time we've ever had a particular sub-badge that was itself a "count" badge - all the others have been the basic binary type (either you have it or you don't). The weirdness of being able to have a half-finished sub-badge probably caused all these questions in the first place.

I'm finding it somewhat funny that you think my -opinion- on this subject is absolutely wrong and your -opinion- is absolutely right.

Regardless as I've said this game already provides for a wide range of playstyles all the way from solo content up to huge leagues. Just because you don't like a certain subset of what the game provides doesn't make that subset wrong in the least. It's like saying a particular color in the color spectrum is "wrong" and the rest are "right". *shrugs*

For what it's worth I'm not against content that works well with a "four-person team" scenario. But there are already plenty of TFs/SFs/arcs in this game that can cater to that. The Devs are also currently working on "Solo Incarnate" content for those people who don't like huge leagues. My guess is that we'll also be able to run that stuff with small teams if you want. *shrugs*

Again that's something that you want stopped.
Offer an alternative that could actually work effectively in a MMO setting.
I'm all ears here...

EDIT: You added to your post after I posted this. So you want a bunch of small team content? What if I think epic "comic book" battles are better represented by massive 24 member leagues all working on a single trial?