MadScientist

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I'm proud of my arc, sure. 426 votes and rising and 4 stars? I'm amazed its done that well.

But frankly, I liked being able to wear my badges I earned proudly. it let me see in a tangble form without checking the AE terminal or my PMs that someone out there liked my writing style.

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but why a badge?

how about starting a suggestion thread about gold above-name titles for your reward? or a popup window that lets you see your ratings from anywhere? or another permanent temp costume power? or a dashboard bobblehead sitting atop your powers tray to make you feel rewarded? or a special costume piece? or ask again for power color customization and request it be tied to architect writing capability? or anything else. Why does it have to be a badge when other options could also satisfy your desire for a more visible, any-location indictor?

Now, the converse of that, of course, is asking why is it a problem being a badge? Well, that's been covered repeatedly since Chosen One was announced: because a significant number of people have an issue with it. Kind of how a significant number of people would have an issue if the reward for your writing capability was an accolade power that buffed your damage. It'd be a poor reward choice, people would have issues with giving out extra power arbitrarily. Sure, those permanent costume powers arent' exactly obtainable by everyone, but you don't get nearly as much fuss over them as you have with Chosen One - and the art of good GM'ing is knowing how to please all your players in a balanced manner.

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In the other thread Synapse said
". . . they were unobtainable by a large portion of our players, . . . "

SO WHAT ??? Honestly do all badges HAVE to be attainable by most players, in MA?
They certainly are not in the other badge categories. My blaster will never get Empath. Why should MA be different ??

The point of getting a BADGE is that it is difficult and rare !!!
Some Badges (not all) should NOT be attainable by MOST players.

What are your thoughts ?

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I'd also like to point out (as this thread degenerates into various tangents) that the quoted piece may be getting taken out of context.

The actual line comes from Synapse's summary of badge changes.

In the detailed examination of changes, the only time Synapse talks about "fairness" is in relation to Chosen One and Hall Of Famer.

So what we have is a quote that *one* factor in *some* of the badge decisions was about fairness. That doesn't mean every badge has to be "equal" in some sense, it's simply a realization of why those few badges were a bad design.


Not everyone has to have every badge. But everyone needs to have the same opportunity for every badge, and Chosen One and Hall Of Famer did not present that. THAT is what Synapse's quote refers to, it doesn't refer to something like removing PVP badges because someone may personally suck at PVP.

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Hence, a little logic says,
3) They will not be doing anything to address older badge problems. Since deleting is not an option in their opinion, and they don't seem to want to put in more reasonable improvements to the badge system, we'll never see things like a fix to how the damage badges are counted.

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A little logic nothing... Synapse flat out said; "We have no current plans to revisit old badges at this time, and I don’t foresee us doing this really." (emphasis mine)

So Synapse has basically said they ain't gonna work on none of the old badges.

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my point being to clear up that it's not just a comment like "don't worry, we won't be removing 80% of all older badges, too" it's actually a much bigger problem if they won't even go back and fix the old badges that are definitely bugged - never mind the old ones that are terribly designed.



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The PvPers had a list of Known Issues. The Devs ignored it and did what they wanted to do.

The Base Builders have had a list of Known Issues since the dawn of time. The Devs just plain ignore it and them.

The Badging Community has a list of Known Issues. The Devs ignore it and delete 89 badges punitively.

You're definitely wasting your time. ...

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You don't have to tell me about the base issues
but in fairness, these collected issues *have* brought some things to dev attention. I can rattle off a couple of badge problems that got solved over the years that were on this list. (Though mostly the type of problem like "it plain old doesn't work, ya'know!")
AND these lists are encouraged by people like Ex Libris who monitor the forums. They seem to serve some purpose. or, at least, I used to think they did, now I'm not so sure.

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In the other thread Synapse said
". . . they were unobtainable by a large portion of our players, . . . "

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umm.. that quote has nothing to do with fairness. it has to do with achievability.

Is the LRSF "fair"? Probably not. MMs and Stalkers don't have as much to contribute to all those AVs as a Corr or Brute. (I'll skip classifying Doms cause of the whole PTOD debate.)
But is the LRSF "achievable"? Certainly.

Unfortunately, what we have here is that a fix to an unachievable badge like Virtual Slayer has taken out very achievable badges like Button Masher along with it.

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So, going forward—beginning with the Mission Architect badges—we’ve decided to move away from “count” badges that might encourage farming and/or aberrant game play.

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Synapse also stated the following...

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Q: What about non-Mission Architect badges?

A: We have no current plans to revisit old badges at this time, and I don’t foresee us doing this really. All badges unrelated to the Mission Architect will remain unaffected by the changes outlined above.


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So it could go either way. One statement says they will start with MA badges, i9mplying that they will explore other badges as well in the future.

And the other statement says they won't be messing with the previous badges we have earned for the past 5 years.

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The first statement is about future badges they create, not about addressing older badges.

I read 2 statements from Synapse,
1) The only "fix" (and I use the term loosely) that they like is to completely erase the problematic badge. (They don't want to make Virtual Slayer a level at which farming is irrelevant, they just want to forget they even tried it.)
2) They will not be deleting old badges.
Hence, a little logic says,
3) They will not be doing anything to address older badge problems. Since deleting is not an option in their opinion, and they don't seem to want to put in more reasonable improvements to the badge system, we'll never see things like a fix to how the damage badges are counted.

In other words, we may be completely wasting our keystrokes in this thread.

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Mission Statement:
Many MANY players approach badge collecting as a mini-game - and often a competitive one - no different than PVP, Market "PVP", SG competition, Kiosk rankings, TF races, etc.
Proceeding from that position, this list will take into account issues such as balance, achievability, openness to new players, challenge-vs-reward, the general "fun factor", and all the other design considerations one would normally expect for a major game feature.
It is our hope that the developers approach badging with the same care, insight and commitment they've shown other systems such as the Architect, Raids, Holiday Events, and so on.

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or, they could completely dumb down the system to marking if you've toured all the new content and no longer provide any sort of larger goals.
oh well.

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So the million dollar question:

Will a huge buff to damage sweep aside the PToD issue?


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back on this question for a second...

the damage buff is supposed to equate to the amount of damage done while in Domination. The nature of the base number change yields an additional buff from things like Leadership. Considering the team nature of AV fights, maybe it's fair to see a 5-10% buff when all is said and done.

Now, prior to this change, were Dominators only a mere 5-10% of their damage output away from PTOD's not being an issue??? I don't think so, IMHO.

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How much damage is enough damage for Dominators to make a fair contribution in an AV fight?

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Personally, I don't think it's a matter of damage. I think it's a matter of an AT that's never about just damage getting completely nix'd to being just damage thanks to PTODs. It's like if the AV had an ability to turn off Corruptor Buffs, or deny Stalker Criticals.
Which I guess is a better way of stating what I tried to say about about Dominators needing an increase in their Buff and Debuff AT Scalars to go along with the Damage Scalar. If hard mez is going to be binary (and this goes for MA designs, too, with the mez shields on custom critters) then Doms need to do a little better soft control.

Damage seems to be the proverbial hammer where every problem looks like a nail.

Dead Man's Deck from Mercedes Sheldon has an outdoor Carnie map. I'm not sure if it will spawn Illusionists at level 35, so give it a test. Unfortunately, it also will have 4 forced spawns of Ring Mistresses, which will cut down the number of Illusionists, but it may be better than indoors.

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Do you want me to demonstrate that 2-3 week timeline ?

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We both seem to agree that would be farming. I don't think there's a need to work out what's been shown in theory.

but just because it could be done in 3 weeks, or in 19, doesn't mean those are the benchmarks by which an epic badge should be measured.

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VS is an effective power.
It's also an annoying power.

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well said.

it does great DPS. It's just a pain stopping to resummon the darn thing every 60 seconds.
It should last 4 minutes, like Dark Servant, Extract Essence, Soul Extraction, every Patron Pet, the various Spider Reinforcement powers, etc, etc.

also, if we're talking about craftings being sold, what does it say that the top selling badge was put in at only 7k? Does that not indicate the devs expected 3k worth of "non-sellable" craftings per fabricator crafter? Would that be 3k of SG donations? More likely it was 3k of Empowerment.
But wait, that's very ideal, one has to figure the sales badges account for selling all the non-crafted stuff you could have, such as raw salvage.
This is back on the question of what the devs expected from Fabricator-worthy characters, so maybe we need more insight.

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To craft and sell, you are limited by the maximum number of slots (21) and rate of turnover.

During peak times, its not unreasonable to sell out those 21 slots in a hour,

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I think that 21 is kind of unreasonable for an hour. It's at least rather *ideal* - what if no one was interested in what you had in that slot that hour?
Plus I think the average would be a little lower depending on what you were doing in the mean time. Maybe it's 1:15 to the next refill if you're in a long mission, or you can't spare 5 minutes to hold up a TF team.

The thing is, cutting your 21 down to 15 or even 10 takes the timeframe up to 750 or 1000 hours of gameplay.
You see my issue right there? I don't mind a 500 hour estimate, but I question if your 21/hour is "typical play".


never mind, back on the Empowerment issue, if I was doing my standard empowerment before the change, I was still outdoing your sales per hour, and now that's been cut to a fifth of its prior progress.

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463 total craftings in 30 logins ...

463/week puts moving to fabricator from having field crafter at 19.5 weeks.

Then you can add base empowerment and the like ontop of this.

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but the important question, Cat, is this:
Do you consider your tracked behavior to be *farming* Fabricator?

This will sound like the Empath debate...
Sure, Empath is obtainable in some time of Arena farming, but still irrationally high for anything approaching "standard" but focused play. (the fact Empath is AFK vs @K "grinding" doesn't matter to the point of what type of farming. If one prefers, substitute Virtual Slayer for Empath. I just keep returning to Empath since it has solid numbers.)
Is Fabricator still irrationally high for people who are playing a "typical" game, but maybe with a bit of extra effort applied to crafting?


Perhaps it would be enlightening, if you don't mind sharing, to know how much play time you put in during the course of the week, on all characters. To see how that login time for crafting compared as a percent of your gaming time.

Where I'm going with that question is this: what if they were "normal" logins? My average play session is 75 minutes - sometimes longer for big TFs, sometimes briefer, so I'll say average. That would be a time to Fabricator of well over 700 hours of character lifetime at a rate of craftings-per-login that you gave. and yet I would think it's a serious crafting effort. I don't think that someone crafting at such a high rate should have that long a time to earn the badge.

just what are the badges only available on one side?

Explore
History
TFs, Missions
and I can think of a handful of defeats: a few from Croatoa, Marcone for heroes, and every giant monster

that's not a lot, though for villains that is a lot of explores.

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I shoot the Hamidon with it.

pewpewpew

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this gives me visions of Hammi with a very regal accent saying "We are not amused"

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and lot of av can almost one shot kills you at range anyway.

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yeah, but this is in regard to saying Doms will be about equal with Blasters. If they can kill you at range, then yes, all things are equal. For the other ones (or if you can stand behind them thanks to good teammate aggro control) then Doms don't really compare to Blasters.

another reason I think the buff alone doesn't fix PTOD is that many of the heavy hitting Dom attacks are melee. That's a big impact on the Blaster comparison. To get their full damage output, Blasters don't have to stand right next to a guy with AV levels of AOE damage and likely Mez. Yes, many Doms may only have 1 Melee attack, but remember we're talking about finding things to do while PTOD is removing other options, so that 1 attack may really have to fill a chain.
or in other words, if the whole primary is negated by PTOD, what percent of the secondary is negated by a Dom's squishyness vs AVs? This may go double for trying to solo/duo an AV-turned-EB with their PTODs.

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So the million dollar question:

Will a huge buff to damage sweep aside the PToD issue?

How much damage is enough damage for Dominators to make a fair contribution in an AV fight?

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IMHO, no.
You're still mostly reduced to only using your secondary. It's like telling a Corruptor to only buff and not shoot.


Perhaps if this was compounded with an increase in Buff/Debuff scalars, then
A) the powers negated by PTOD would gain a bit of a boost in their other capacities and maybe not be totally worthless, and
B) Leadership and the like would be more powerful, giving you more to contribute on a team (since an AV is a team challenge it's a fair consideration)
and I'll point out that buffing power aspects that are not tied to Domination would be right in line with their goals for making Domination less of an impact. To illustrate what I'm saying, say that Cim Surgeons and their anti-mez are a factor in wanting Perma-Dom, well if you did better Slows or more End Drain it may be less crucial to outright hold them.

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The fact that even emp defs have a relatively hard time earning the top epic level heal badges only goes to show that the whole concept behind earning credit for "damage healed" was more or less broken from the beginning.

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actually, I recall that the point of only tracking actual damage healed was to prevent a desire to spam a heal in a populated area just to accumulate credit.
you know what I mean... they didn't want people setting something on autofire and going AFK until the badge earned... waitaminute...

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So with this... we'll finally be able to get the 1000 or so badges you see on dev toons now eh?

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I'm not convinced we'll actually get hero ATs running freely around Cap. "Visiting" the Rogue Isles could be as simple as the way that villains go to Paragon for Mayhems or such.

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Temps should be light+quick.
Accolades should be once-in-a-long-while "I'm Awesome!!!" buttons.

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I agree with this. I will point out however that even compared with temp powers the Crey pistol is underpowered. And I am not even talking about the "heavy hitters" like the Warburg nukes or the Nemesis Staff/Blackwand with the origin bonus (Vet reward). Heck, even the revolver is more useful.

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yes. but my point was about more *how* to balance it.
You don't want to make it frequent-but-light. That's not the purpose of an accolade, IMHO. Nor is it really going to feel like a good reward to get something just like Ring of Fire.

actually, taking that logic a bit further, I don't think a badge-unlockable power should ever be on the same order as something you pick up by normal leveling. You don't want a "mere" level-like reward from badging, nor do you want people fixating on badges as a source of filling out an attack chain instead of getting around to their main powersets (or worse, fixating on having teammates do the hunting as a form of badge-based PL'ing)

so the fix for the pistol really shouldn't be "well at that level of ooomph it should recharge faster". The fix should really be on the order of the 30 seconds of pure unbridled power from Demonic or Force of Nature.

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If you have a full team, it will still be under what is needed for the badge. If solo it will require about

Also you need 200, not 100.

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But how is it any different than villains clearing the PVE map they've had? and no one has complained about that.
How many Shivans are in one reset of that map, compared to the villain ones? Plus you get an ally on the Obos arc.

regardless, it's definitely more than 3% per reset, and can be done solo, so it's nowhere near the Weatherman status. I haven't heard people calling for teammates to finish this badge, the complaint was only about PVP originally and THAT has been addressed it seems.


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On a related note is the DE Eminators requiring a 500 count.

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Yeah, probably as OK as the Raiders because of the amount you stumble across, considering almost every DE summons something. It's not like there's a real strategy to preventing that summoning - they're almost like MMs. Locking down a boss before it summons 5 other pets all with control powers, THAT's a bit different strategy than a guy producing a +Def buff that you happen to be able to shoot at.

So maybe we want to make a case for the badge being normal non-summoned Illusionists, too? Is that the best fix, since badge amounts very infrequently get changed?

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Like I said.. I already think the Nemesis Staff and Sands of Mu, and other "temp powers" recharge too quickly.. Adding even more short-recharge attack powers that anybody can get, we'll eventually end up with players who use the temp powers more than their Primary attacks. What's the point of having ATs? We can all be Temps! lol

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To me, there's a big difference between a Temp Power and an Accolade.

Temps should be light+quick.
Accolades should be once-in-a-long-while "I'm Awesome!!!" buttons.

Consider the origin powers, those are great temps. (Though really should be "inherants", but that's another discussion.)
Cryonite Armor is 11% defense to 2 types, Demonic is 50% to almost all types.
I'm not sure if the Nem Staff should be changed to Accolade levels, though maybe it does a bit too much damage for a temp.

So what is really REALLY awesome for a Crey gun? It's hard to equate it to a shield that protects you from many mobs, or HP that buff you in general.

now I'd love a power that completely shuts down the opponents, possibly in situations of dire need. like...
Targeted AOE, 30 seconds Immobilize, 30 seconds Hold (Mag 3), 30 seconds Placate (after .5 second delay).
That would be an awesome level of "you there, yes, you, the whole mob... FREEZE!"

edit: maybe if the above is too much kick, it could be Sleep instead of Hold? The placate fixes it so you don't shoot yourself in the foot with an AOE against certain anti-mez mobs, or (in the case of having the power do sleep) with certain teammates.

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* Some kill badge targets are almost impossible to find...

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various comments on that section

I'd clarify Bonecrusher as follows...
- Bonecrusher and Regenerator for villains are only in very low level newspaper missions, requiring large teams. Bone Crusher has one farmable mission, but like Weatherman it only spawns 3 on the map so it requires a lot of artificial resetting.

- Man in Black is only available to heroes in a PVP zone or in one mission at the end of Pilgrim's arc.
I think that's not really an issue anymore with the point about the Pilgrim arc. Unlike Bonecrusher or Weatherman, this is a badge for killing *any* Shivan, and there's a whole map full of them, which is really no different than how villains have used maps full of Shivans.
(In fact, how many Shivs are on that one map from Pilgrim? you only need 100.)

- Rularuu Overseers are limited for villains.
That affects unlockables.

Let's add...
- Illusionist. This is extremely rare in zones, and requires teams of 8 to spawn them on missions. The real problem is that, when playing well, you don't want to let a Master Illusionist summon pets, so the badge rewards "bad play".
This is similar to the problem that people were artificially letting Rikti Comm Officers summon portals to increase rewards.
Now does that mean Illusionist's very concept deserves its own bullet completely?
Wasn't Illusionist originally for the MI itself and not for the pets? I can't recall.
(and why does no one have similar problems with Raider FFGs? Probably because of the sheer number of them that you run into, being minions, and you only need 100.)

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I agree this is a novelty at best.

Look at the other click powers. Insane amounts of Def or Recharge for 30 seconds.
This power should compare. Once every 25 minutes you should have an insanely powerful hold/immobilize.

what would deserve that description? Mag 4 Hold for 30 seconds, perhaps. Still may be seen as weaker than other powers because of the limit to one target, but drawing lots of aggro with an AOE may still seem pretty useless.