MadScientist

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Like the Master of LRSF/STF badges they're bragging rights badges. Not everyone will have them or should.

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but there are a few differences.

MoLRSF is obtainable thru normal play, if you're good enough. Empath is unobtainable over the course of normal play no matter how good you are at healing.

MoLRSF can not be farmed. Therefor it is truely a recognizable achievement for people who are really REALLY good at the SF. Empath is not serving its purpose of rewarding dedicated healers. Instead, it rewards people who can configure their gladiator team.

MoLRSF serves to enhance gameplay. It makes people want to try to earn it by forming better SF teams. Empath does not motivate any gameplay. No one goes out to try to be a better healer because they see this badge as a goal. Empath is far too unreasonable to be used as a motivational goal by anyone. Its existence at it is now does not enhace a healer's gameplay because a healer will never actually see the badge.



so I agree with you that...
A) MoLRSF is a great example of a well-implemented Epic-style badge.
B) It is possible to create badges in the game that some people can earn, others can not earn, and people will accept those as a challenge.
C) Such badges do act as a true sign on honor for those who hold them.
However, I do not think that the current implementation of Empath (or a lot of the other Epic badges) act in service of those goals.
In short, if anything is learned from MoLRSF, it's to show exacly where Empath pales in comparison to an Epic done right.

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Im stating..... That people CANT and should not always expect to have everything they want.

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You're saying the Devs bothered to code this Empath badge into the game so that we could... what? Look at it on a badge list instead of getting it?

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You may be waiting on the steak and the really fat guys with high metabolisms may actually sit through all of the fixins before hand and eventually eat that steak while YOU get to enjoy those same fixins and be happy with that as you walk home steakless but without the added cholesterol. People should learn to enjoy what they DO eat rather then have eyes too big for their stomach while those fat guys should not be punished because some thin guy cant clean his plates to get to the next one....

Did I say I hate anaologies?

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You're expanding the analogy without actually listening to what it's saying.

Rationalize all you want how some people might not, or should not have Empath. That doesn't change the fact that people are here complaining that they *can't* have Empath.

And your suggestion is... what? Give them something else. How does offering any other badge change that fact that people are here complaining about Empath?

You're not suggesting a solution by adding more badges, you're ... OH! Look! Shiney things....

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I did say they should "ADD" badges.... Just sayin'

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which would leave Empath still unobtainable.

Say you order steak. The waiter brings you salad, it's good, but you are looking forward to your steak. Next, you get soup, also good, but the steak will be better. Now he brings you fries. You ask what happened to your steak, he says he added more food. You ask again, he adds an order of onion rings. and then yet another appetizer, and another after that. "ADD" as many as you want, doesn't change that fact that you're waiting on Empath.

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... wouldnt it be more productive to ask for more badges added instead of changing the existing stock? ...

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Depends on what you hear when people complain.

If you hear "I want a 6th healing badge and I want it easier", then yes, adding 6 more badges for healing 1, 10, and 100 HP could solve that.

If you hear "It's an impossiblly long time to get Empath" then addressing just Empath may make certain characters happy if they want something named Empath.

If you hear "It's an impossibly long time to get every healing badge in the game" then you HAVE to address the highest of all such badges in order to address that complaint. It wouldn't matter if there are 3 badges or 30 badges, if the problem is getting The Last One then you need to focus on that, not on distracting the issue with more in between.

(QR)
Badges have had their requirements altered in the past and it's caused no problem.
People with the original Reformed didn't throw a huge fit when everyone else had a better (even dare I say "more legitimate") way to earn it. Zookeeper was reduced and no one wanted Legacy Zookeeper to show they killed 9000 more Monkeys than someone else. I haven't seen one person complain about Isolator being even easier with Flashback.
So if they did the same thing for Epic Healing, what would the problem be?

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One thing I'd really love to see added in a SG is an option for a 2x3 entrance room. I hate that there's no way to line up a centered entrance with a centered hallway to give you that grand entrance feel. Do to the nature of the room adjacency limitations, I've got enough room for something like this anyway.

It's probably technically impossible with the way the entrance room seems to be coded into the base system (ie the only thing that perpetually exists), but it would be wonderful if we could do something with this.

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Would be plenty easy, I think, within the current building system.

You can have many Control Rooms, but only 1 Control Main. Allow multiple Entrance Rooms, but only the 1 undeletable Portal.

If you want to upgrade, you do a room shuffle. Place the new room, move the portal there, delete the old, move the room into the old spot. Pathing rules simply apply as normal.


In fact, I'd be very clean and simple if all decorative rooms could serve as an entrance. Now they don't even have to add new rooms to the editor.

A short description for each SG Rank would go a long way towards helping people manage their SG's promotion systems.

More details in this thrad, figured it just needed a summary in this big post.

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Actually the damage badge for the villain accolade is not an epic badge (anymore). 10 million hitpoints is the last of the regular damage badges.

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Depends how you define "epic".
A badge that takes over 3 years of play to achieve without farming is pretty damn epic if you ask me.

Whatever you want to label it, there's a chance of getting 1 million damage naturally in a reasonable time, as opposed to having to farm 10 million for that accolade. THAT's the key issue, never mind the labels.

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The money badges should allow the sale of items on the Market by now though. They will be easier to get, but it makes more sense.

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Be way to easy to farm out the money badges that way. We have badges for items sold now instead.

Ah well back to money badge grinding....

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So it could be farmed. So what?

We have other badges that get farmed, and that doesn't ruin the game.

And remember the Market takes 10%. So to farm a 2 billion Inf badge the game as a whole is eating 200 million Inf from someone. That's a lot. I'm sure the Devs would have no problem using the Inf badge as a means of fighting inflation.

Is it possible to love a patch more than the previous issue?

well, IMHO, "let's find time to sit down, discuss this, overhaul the whole system, test the balance, and code what we settle on" is going to be a lot longer to get this fix in place than "set them all to 1 and be done". and what benefit would we get for that added complexity? I'm not sure we want to bother with any suggestion other than making them work like Temps and Vet Powers.

Now if we didn't already have a huge amount of powers that just worked at level 1, there may be a reason to examine other systems, but we know the level 1 system works OK... why settle for less?

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Also sign the one here guys in the beta forum Thanks!!

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Yes, because this is related to I11 Beta.

So when you bring this up in the other thread, please be sure to mention that it's because of all the flashback stuff in I11! Make the posts there relate directly to Beta. (otherwise you're just cross-posting and will get Mod attention instead of Dev attention.)

Even if it ends up being too late for I11, maybe showing the Devs the connection can get this prioritized for one of the first patches post-I11, instead of being filed away for I12 or I13. Any connection to I11 may help us get this addressed now instead of later.

(and in a fit of irony, I write this while watching my level 29 brute farm a damage badge for Born in Battle...)

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I would prefer, if you were to go ahead with this type of option, to have it automatically set so that the information is NOT published on the WWW. Having such a setting set to grant access, as it appears, is a false agreement between NCSoft and myself. I would consider that type of publishing data, without prior consent, an invasion of privacy.

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I don't know if I feel quite so strong about an invasion of privacy, but I would indeed like my characters' privacy to remain intact.

I would much prefer an opt-in system instead of an opt-out one.

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if I haven't already signed this, I will sign it again. In some post somewhere else I suggested similair improvements to the accolade design. I like the idea of removing any level restrictions. I also purported that you could just assign certain levels to each accolade so that once you get one it will always act as a level 25 accolade, so regardless of what level you obtained it at, if you exemped below 25 you would lose it (and everyone else who got it would lose it too). Each accolade could have some level atttributed to it that gave some freedom to those who REALLY wanted it and earned it earlier on, but wouldnt penalize those who got them later. This would also put some more balance on it than the system where all level requirements were just removed.

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The problems with separate levels per accolade...
- Probably more complex to update all existing accolades to different levels compared to level 1 for all.
- Putting balance into the system, as you phrase it, will then require design consideration to see if that balance it right. Pushing everything to the minimum is a different kind of balance, but without the detailed analysis.
- Different levels may not be seen as equal for heroes and villains. If you end up with different amounts by the level settings, or with a different set of available accolades, people will argue endlessly about whether things are fair.
- It's harder to figure out different levels than just 1. This helps players understand builds, and helps guide writers.
- It will be harder to maintain. We will have to file /bug reports and start threads about why the set level for Vanguard needs to be dropped from 40 to 35 thanks to the changes in the new issue. The Devs will have to spend time updating those levels once we file enough reports. New accolades will need more code to add that set level in the first place.

So for all that, what do you really gain by setting different levels?

When talking about a coding issue it's important to distinguish what type of issue.
There's the "that will take a lot of effort because it's new and we have to design the whole system"
and there's the "that takes a bit of time to type and then test".

This is probably the latter, since the request is to make Accolades work just like Veterans powers. It doesn't need to be INVENTED, it just needs to be DONE.

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What if you had 4 seconds of fly instead of 4 seconds of hover at the end of a teleport?

I know I have often tp'd my self just to the edge of a building and not quite been able to make it to the edge and I think fly would have given me the extra oomph to make it.

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the hover was added to tp, for lag issues. It was too great a chance of some slow data causing you to plummet down to the ground. Now you could probably make a pitch for lessening the amount of hover after a TP, but you're probably not going to get rid of it outright.

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I think you've keyed on the issue.

The Hover is to prevent you from plummeting to the ground.
The problem is when you *want* to be on the ground immediately!

I target a spot on the ground 80 yards away where there is combat. I port there. Why do I end up materializing 2 feet *above* the spot I targeted?
Even a .5 second hover would be a problem - if I teleport in with my Stone with Rooted on there's still a delay as a I fall those 2 feet.
Consider how useful TP could be for chasing foes on the ground if you could materialize and immediately be in motion.


There's no problem with hover running if you're in the air. It does what it should, and the time is fine - it may even be too short for that. and increasing the mobility during that time may be great for attacking foes in the air. so maybe there is a problem that TP is a bit weak for vertical movement.
There's a 2nd problem with teleport, though, when using it on the ground.
No, I doubt there's a single setting that reconciles both issues. So why not treat them separate? Give TP different behavior if you target the ground or if you target the air.

And let's not forget there are more problems trying to engage in combat with TP, such as the activation time, the inability to control its range, and the inability to use a Follow command, the much higher End cost than Fly/SJ/SS, movement buffs like SB and AM don't buff TP, etc. TP may just need a complete overhaul. THAT's why TP is an issue. The "hover on the ground" thing is just maybe the most noticable, and most straight-forward.

For those not watching the Test board, Castle speaks!
(Castle seems to be getting invovled since this relates to powers.)

So maybe we can at least get a bit more dialog going after I11.

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1. While some people dislike that the hundreds of millions they spent on an inventions don't give them even more of an advantage in lower level zone PvP, others argue that having their effects minimized via the current system is actually a good thing. IOs are very poweful, newer players often already complain about having to fight IO'd opponents as is, and the people with twinked IO'd builds aren't generally the ones who need more help. If there's widespread agreement that the impact of IOs in lower level zones should be altered and that the haves really ought to get more, everyone should go ahead and speak up.

2. The speed of combat is one of the things many people really like about this game. There's not widespread agreement about reducing it.

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Wouldn't be the only things on the list that are issues with no unanimous agreement about addressing them.

specifically, though, on the IOs... it's already possible to get max set bonuses. it's just a royal pain to slot for 1 level zone only, and to have it not match your level 50 slotting. Making it generally easier for everyone to do that wouldn't increase the cap, it'd just make it easier for casual non-PVP builds to be at the same power level as the dedicated builds.

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3. Removing the three second hover period on TP in PvP zones would harm what people currently use tp for, namely as an escape power and for moving across large distances. Falling to your doom every time you try to tp some place is going to be annnoying and debtful. TP may need some sort of a buff, but as is it's pretty powerful and reasonably popular for PvP. It's the only travel power out there with absolutely no counters.

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This is partly what I get for typing quickly to get on to other things in the morning, and partly you forgetting what the original discussion was that I was summarizing.
The point is to remove the Hover when you teleport onto the ground. Obviously I'm not asking for people to be dropping out of the sky as they go across the zone.

as for the other post saying that TP can never be viable... I don't buy that, and neither do my 2 Kheldian characters. There has to be some way to address it. Such as, oh, half an idea... have the Hover turn off if you attack or try to move, so you can pre-empt it instead of waiting. Maybe combine that with the drop location not being 2 feet above the target spot so that when it does expire you don't wait a moment to hit the ground.


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4. The way movement works in PvP is something that's absolutely beloved by many people who PvP. It's also one of the things that makes CoH PvP unique, and the reason several old timers have started to return. There's no other MMO out there that's as fast paced or that lets you move like this. Lots of people like jousting, lots of people would hate decreasing all movement buffs or increasing the end cost of all travels.

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Again, details of solving it can be addressed. but the point remains: people are exploiting the lag between moving speeds and attack speeds. If suppression would stop a jouster dead in their tracks within melee range of the person they're jousting, then I don't know if it matters how fast they closed in to that distance. maybe it's simple enough to say suppression is not working optimally, though others suggest removing suppression complete so I'd like to hear how they would offer a solution to jousting.

In general, though, PVP movement speed is too binary.
It's too easy to hit the move cap, so it's a matter of are you there or not. If there was a bit more difficulty in reaching it, with lower move buffs, then it would matter more to builds. It would have more of a cost of getting there, or would value thing like Speedboost for their movement. It would also create a wide spectrum of move speeds, instead of the entire zone moving at the cap speed.
Not saying reduce the cap, just saying that it's way too trivial to build to it as we have it. Imagine if the damage cap was as easy to reach, how would that over-simplify builds?



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5. I'm not quite sure what "no PK" means, but there are several issues at the list aimed at trying to increase overall zone population and cross-server zones (which would increase the number of people in each zone).

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Another suggestion to help fix that, which got a bit of discussion earlier, is to have NPC PVPers. So not AV's, they regen too fast, and not EBs, they're too weak. But NPCs of exact PC stats, resistances, regen rates, etc, affected by powers as if they were players (eg less end drain on them), and that give Rep instead of XP.
That would then populate the zones a little, so there would be no dead-time. They could also be good for new PVPers to practice against. And you could pad Arena matches with them, maybe even making the arena usable solo.
Unfortunately, it's maybe a big project to get their AI to act like a player. but the programmers may have someone on the team who'd love a project like that.

(ps - "No PK" = "No player-kill", what some people keybind for when they're not there to PVP.)

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I also removed MadScientist at his request.

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I requested no such thing.
What I did was challenge you to explain why you were constantly not including items that I listed as PVP issues because you (and only you) said that they were not relevant.


For everyone else's reference, I'll sum up the issues,
- set bonuses working when exemping helping bulding for PVP
- many people complain PVP combat is too rapid. not speed of movement, but over too fast. as in: do we do too much damage?
- teleport is not up to par in PVP because of the hover effect delaying your movement.
- jousting is still a problem. (For those unsure of what I'm refering to, this is when someone very rapidly moves past you and their attack fires when they're far away. this is not a suppression problem - suppression is suppose to have helped minimize this, it wasn't totally effective.) possible solutions: lower the movement buffs. increase travel end costs to make it more costly to attack while at travel speed.
- zone activity is hit-or-miss, it's too easy to get used to not PVPing for Nukes, inviting non-PVPers who say "no PK!" also it's too likely to get a lopsided battle if a side is underpopulated.

Perhaps from a different perspective...
One person has an Atlas Medalion which provides +5 End when they're level 27 or higher.
Someone else has an Atlas Medalion which provides +5 End when they're level 40 or higher.
Someone else has an Atlas Medalion which provides +5 End when they're level 7 or higher.
Yet all 3 did the exact same thing to get them. Why are the effects not the same?

Your logic doesn't pass the Task Force Commander arguement. I can earn my TFC by doing the exact same thing as you - beating Numina at level 40, Positron at level 15, and all in between. Yet if my security level is different, we get accolades at different levels. So there's already an unequal setup even if we're both the same "level" when doing the earning.


And how did you earn the accolades early anyways?
Did you kill Fake Nemesis or Carnies at level 30? I doubt it. so either...
- You had someone else kill them for you. In which case don't come here talking about how YOU earned them early.
- You sidekicked higher to earn them. So you were level 49 and killed Fakes, I was level 49 and killed Fakes, we both did the exact same thing, why do you get to use your FPR +10% HP in Warburg but I can not?
No one's asking for anything except what they rightly earned, the same way you earned yours. Why do you claim your accolade earning is better than anyone else's?

Someone asked Positron about it when he was standing in Ouroboros chatting with players. He responded "Possibly." So at least we know he knows about it.

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This issue has caused me so much personal stress and anxiety I've basically stopped playing my Dark/Dark/Dark defender--at level 41. I'm just dying to get Archmagus so I can actually use it. Previously I got my first character to 50 and then collected about 5 accolades. And, as mentioned, it leaves a bit of a sour taste that I can't use my Elusive Mind power if I'm exemped at ALL. Accolades should be like inherent powers, I firmly believe.

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What's funny is that my Dom is 44.5 and I'm starting to ponder whether it will take longer to just run to 50 than to wait to find a Recluse SF that will take a 45 Dom along.

Personally, I don't care if someone else has Portal Jockey at 20. Congrats, that's impressive. but it doesn't affect me when I play.

What does affect me is the problem that *I* can't have Portal Jockey at 20.

or, more specifically, that I can't have Archmage at any level below 50, so why should my 50 bother killing all these Carnies to finish off badges?


so, yeah, jealousy shouldn't really matter.