MadScientist

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Edit:
I am at work right now, but an idea just spawned of items that "block pathing" but shouldnt being consolidated into a list in this thread.

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yup, exactly one of the hopes for this thread.

bridges should probably be given whatever code stairs got to not block pathing.

the trouble is, how do you control that when a bridge has railings? Do you end up with an item that doesn't techincally block pathing, but still can block if you put it sideways? maybe it's better to ask that question in terms of the arcane archways.

What about icons instead of text or snapshots? Something bold, colorful and obvious. A ship for Indy Port, bull horns for Talos, tiki mask for Astoria, Rikti Drone for RWZ, Aeon logo for Cap, Arachnos logo for Grandville, pyramid for St Martial.

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I like the idea of a porter accessing all the beacons in a room. Would lessen the amount of porters needed, for sure. Small room, fill it with one porter and as many beacons as you can place, and no more do you have half the plot filled with porters, especially heroside.

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as I understand the idea I was referencing, it wouldn't change Aux limits.
so you'd still need 2 porters for 4 beacons. but you wouldn't have to figure out which beacon was attached to which particular porter, both porters would show all 4 beacons. hence, less need to tab thru the whole room, just click any porter and read the list - but not a full redesign of the room/aux limits.

but yeah, if more beacons per porter would be what's needed to make beacons non-pathable, then that's worth pondering, too.


IMHO, I'd be inclined to just make them non-targetable, non-pathing right now, and see how people react. It may turn out people just adapt to it. but I'm no Dev.

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I'd be against having them require a raid porter, because for those SGs that dont ever plan to raid or do the pvp thing, we dont have a raid porter and if your base is already stuffed then requiring an SG to increase the plot size to get another tp room and thus pay rent would kind of suck. If you have a raid porter great but also make them like a train mish for those of us with no room to expand.

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It's the "I don't plan to raid" part that made me suggest renaming it a "Team Teleporter", since it'd no longer be a raid-only object. Requiring a certain amount of "stuff" to run these missions doesn't seem like a horrible request - groups may find squeezing in a mission computer on a mainframe to be more inconvenient than fitting the porter (cue discussion about a new class of object instead of Control Aux).

However, note a part of the idea as presented that may have been too subtle: The missions are runnable by anyone, they are not limited to the one SG.
So you could take 3 members of your SG and join 3 members of your coalition who have the MissionComp and Team Porter. That reduces overhead for smaller bases. And in fact, since you can use a coalitions normal porters, perhaps using their raid porter is just as easy - especialy if they implement the idea of zoning direct from your base to a coalition's.



some other random thoughts on this tangent,

Train missions are interesting, but there are no trains villainside. I would think it could be layered into the ferry system (could be wrong) but those aren't clickable like train doors so it may not be as user-friendly.

Making it a plain old door somewhere is a bit inconvenient if you are trying to team with a variety of levels an SKs.

What if there was a "SG Mission" beacon to drop on a normal porter instead of the grossly oversized Raid Porter? Where does that relate to the old forgotten "return to mission teleporter" idea?

Could all this have an easy solution if the Raid Porter is deemed too outrageously huge for its own good?

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The custom "targetfriendnext" command lets me cycle through them with the repeated press of a key. Same method but easier for me.

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They snuck that command on the Options screen a few issues ago, actually. Under Targeting. For those like me who can never remember command names when binding.


What would you feel would be needed to identify each beacon *without* targeting them somehow?
Larger artwork? Color-coded artwork? Floating names hanging above them like you see over NPCs? (actually, I kinda like that last one, if each player can turn it on/off as a client-side graphics option.)

or perhaps the extreme solution that people have mentioned... all attached beacons are available for use at all teleporters in the room. That way you don't have to keep searching, you just need to check one porter in the room to see if it has your destination. Would that remove any need to make beacons targetable and pathable?

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What if you removed all XP gain from SG missions and doubled all prestige gain. I'd like to see something like that whether they used the invasion/GM code for mobs on the missions or not. Certainly would eliminate issues with using the mission to power level at least.

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But then you can get more Prestige for your SG by letting a 2nd account idle at the door.
Essentially changing from a character PL to a SG Prestige PL.

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If everyone is the same level it will not be as good for PLing as the normal "bridge" set up. In fact it would be identical to SKing. The only difference would be that in theory one character could SK 7. No a big deal IMO.

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The problem comes in being AFK. Let me simplify the example with 1 lowbie.

Current setup: your 2nd account, so something you normally can't move around. Let's figure it's too hard to auto-follow a 50 AOE herder farmer character on some maps. So you need another mentor to stand at the door with them. Say it's a 50. Now your 2nd account gets 1/3 of the mission XP at +1, and you collectively get 2/3 of the loot drops.
Proposed setup: no mentor needed. Now your 2nd account gets 1/2 of the mission XP at +0, and you get 100% of the loot generated.
This is going to come out in favor of the non-mentor setup.

the key difference is that without a bridge you're not wasting that chunk of the XP on someone who's not your 2nd account.

This math is going to favor the no-SK setup for 2 lowbies each getting 1/3 of the XP at +0 compared to 1/4 of the XP at +1. and for 3 lowbies getting 1/4 at +0 compared to 1/6 at +1.




Edit: but let me be clear where my actual concern lies.
A recurring theme about SG Missions is to make them a source of extra SG rewards. Things like extra Base Salvage, or more Prestige, or SG Badges for doing some number of them. This is to make them distinct from other random-generated content like Newspapers, and it creates a way to get more rewards working as a group instead of as separate individuals.
If you don't even require a mentor for a low level characters to get that benefit, then the SG benefit becomes too easily farmable with padding. This also happens at the expense of bringing along higher level non-SG people who would be active, removing some multiplayer aspects of what would seem to be a feature with a lot of multiplayer focus.
IMHO, I thought the idea of added SG-related rewards was a huge selling point for any system we come up with in here. I'm going to lean in favor of that feature over a little convenience in sidekicking.

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So why are they clickable at all?

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One speculation. Something I do in bases with a large hall of TPers, especially arcane ones, with beacons lining the opposing walls, is to mouse-over/click each on in sequence down the hall to see which beacon it is, in order to more quickly find the destination I want. If they were not clickable, I'm not sure I could get their names quite as easily. This is especially useful for the arcane ones, which are visually very hard to differentiate one from the other.

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so is that a reason they have to be clickable? or is that just something else the devs should keep in mind if they made beacons non-pathable?

it'd lean towards the latter. make them non-pathing and address the fac that they all look alike from afar.

so this isn't really about the flexibility of the plots, it's really all about the prestige costs of the entire base system?

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So yes, base plots stifle creativity.

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what I'm trying to get at, though... (and this is both as I consider how to summarize items on The Big List, and just a general challenging people to back up their opinions that I seem to do from time to time...)

do you really need completely free-form base plots overhauling the entire system?
or would you be happy getting a spaceship-shaped plot within the current system?

I'm not sure what shape your ship is. Would it waste less space if there was a pyramid-shaped plot for you to use?

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I would seriously like to see the base plots done away with. They are very restrictive to creativity.

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Would it solve enough problems to get a huge variety of plot sizes? Everything now is close to square.

Sure it wouldn't give you everything, it'd over-charge for "donut" shaped layouts and such. But looking at it from the point of view of the most bang for your buck, would adding more plots be trivial to code? Considering we get very little coding attention to begin with, this could solve most of the request and leave more time for other requests.
or not. I don't know the code. but I'm trying to get at the heart of your post. Is it truely "we don't have enough layout options?" or is it "we should have infinite layout options?"

Beacons are certainly interesting.
They're a great example of a "raidable" item that serves no raiding purpose. You don't need porters in a raid, and I'm not sure what trashing a small beacon is useful for in regards to permanent damage. (Heck, trashing something that drains control may be counter-productive if you also destroyed some control Aux.... not that I think control Aux should be targetable, either.)
They also serve no PVE purpose for being "clickable" - especially since you can move them to a place that's unreachable because of height.

So why are they clickable at all? Is it a subtle way to enforce people into not blocking them *visually*? That seems odd, since there's no rule about how logically they need to line up with the porters.

I would think that a group is on their own to make them unblocked for visibility. If the group makes the porters too difficult to figure out because things are in front of a beacon, that's the group's problem, people can complain to the architects.

focusing discussion about base pathing into one thread.

for example,
- are there base items that adversely affect pathing rules? (eg, floor tiles seem to be path-limiting, where they should probably be more like stairs)
- is there a way to improve pathing in general? what would be the pros and cons of removing it completely?
- just how much of pathing is truely raid-related? what non-raid setups get referred to as "raid pathing" but are still considerations in PVE pathing?

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Let people that want to use thier bases for pvp have them flagged for pvp and bases that are not flagged for pvp not have to follow raid pathing rules. If a group wishes to later flag thier base for pvp then they will not be able to set the pvp flag until raid pathing rules are met.

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They should also clarify which pathing rules are raid pathing rules and which are non-raid pathing rules.
In fact, if they did that first, this entire request may turn out to be a rather small list of rule changes in exchange for coding that switching system.

would this also be a good time to restart and clean up the other 2 lists?
- Base Items We'd Like to See
- Decorative Items That Exist and should be in Bases.

I'm willing to do it, just figured it'd wait 2 days for I12 to hit Open to include any changes.

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As far as level requirement i think if it wouldn't be to hard. that mobs in this type of mission should be much like GM and the Rikti invasion spawns. this would allow all members to gain xp despite lv differences in the group.

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does anyone else fear that auto-leveling to the content would be a potential for massive powerleveling? You could take a 50, PL a pair of level 1's, and not have to find mentors for both of them. And yes, they gain XP at 50, not 49, but on only a 3-man team instead of divided by 4, or even divided by 5 if they were planning to sit AFK at the door with their mentors.

and now expand "powerleveling" to include the question of if you give extra SG Rewards for such a mission. You'd get a setup where it's easy to pad the mission for that added reward without regard for levels or "presence".

just a thought.

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Is it time to rescrub the list?

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Probably. Though I believe most of whats come in has been additions more than repetition...

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then perhaps it's time to expand the list?

thogh with I12 about to hit Open, what's the rush?


In the mean time, have you seen the Issues list in the Dominator forum? They have a good setup with a mostly read-only list and spinoff threads for discussion. Doing something like that may keep the main list up to date, and may help organize those big threads of ideas.

as mentioned, I'm writing an update to this list.

out of curiousity, what's the best format for this?
would it be best to just list every broken IO, in the order they'd be in the market?
or is the categorized listing by bug more useful?

Currently it's like a variation on the Bugs+Issues lists in other forums, I'm wondering it should be more like a "before using that IO, note that..."

Thoughts?

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Hey here is one for ya...

How about Veteran Players being able to choose their Vet emblems for SG emblems? I would love to have a captured Council flag hanging in my trophy room.

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I think the Banners (and other logo items) should be reworked to be crafted items. If we had an interface similar to the costume creator, we could choose colors and logos easily, and have them stick to the one item without concern of the emblem resetting.
That would make it easy for a Vet to craft an "epic logo" item without letting non-vets get those logos thru actual SG emblems in SG Mode.

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Who Necro'd the thread?

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well, it *was* marked "do not delete" for a reason

I'm gathering an update. But with I12 on Test, I'll wait until it goes to live beta and pick up any updates from there for the new list.

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The best I've heard so far, first from Ilr was to simply have the drops tilted towards the actual use of them. Remaining fixed like that it would allow anything to drop, but would also keep it proprtionately in balance.

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You mean like skewing the number of Snipe and Melee drops relative to each other to better reflect the relative amount of Snipe and Melee powers in play?
I'm not so sure about that. Inevitably, the rate never can get pinned right where people want it, so everyone just keeps asking for it to be tweaked. (aka, create an endless string of "I'm not getting what i want, the problem MUST be the drop rates! We must tweak them further!")

My favorite idea is to let demand directly affect drop rates. Instead of dropping a random recipe, pick 2 at random and give someone a choice. Then supply will eventually favor demand with less randomness.
That works for pools C+D, is there a way it could work for pool A?

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Someone upthread reported it doing 2 points of negative energy damage instead of stunning in pve.

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Found that reference.
They're looking at Jacob's Ladder. That power ALWAYS does that, something I remember noticing myself even before the Proc existed. (Used to watch the channel to see my Healing procs go off in other Elec powers.) The answer I got way back when was that Jacob's Ladder does not appear to ever give combat messages for draining End, so either it's doing the completely wrong secondary effect or it's triggering the wrong message when it drains end. I'm not aware of anyone actually testing those theories and my Elec brute is now deleted to my alt obsessions, but regardless, it has nothing to do with the EndMod Stun Proc.

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Energy Manipulator / Chance of Stun is working properly now. I've seen it proc on several mobs standing within my lightning field and stunned various foes with the one in charged brawl as well.

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was it ever not working in PVE? the problem was always with it working too much in ally buffs.

don't confuse this with the Taunt set chance for stun that isn't stunning anything at all.