Mind Forever Burning

Not that I know of, but you can create multiple details with the same parameters and have them show up as one group in the nav bar.

For example, if I have 5 captives, I can randomly pick 5 characters for 5 different details, and then, for each detail, set the plural nav text to "Hostages to Rescue" and the singular nav text to "Rescue Last Hostage". Then when someone enters the mission, they see "5 Hostages to Rescue" in the nav bar.

Er... you know there's a mini-map display in the mission editor, right? Is that not enough for what you need?

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Hmm, sounds like all the maps you've had this problem on are the ones with the orange box entrance. Incidentally, the outdoor maps that I KNOW captives run to the exit on have other entrances, such as a truck...I've also done escorts on some of these maps, and they worked correctly.

Could be related to the "exit is somewhere under the map" escort problem with these maps...the captive wants to run to the door but doesn't know where it is?

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You're right. I hadn't realized it before now, but that sounds like it's the missing ingredient. I haven't tried any of the truck related outdoor maps with this particular issue.

One more: chaining destructible objects can make them untargetable until "aggrod", which can be a problem for ranged characters. Targeting through pets works. I believe this one's still around because someone mentioned it in another thread.

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* Rescues cannot run to door when freed on outdoor maps, and will instead simply stand still (after playing any rescue animations). [Note: I'm not sure this one should be fixed since some authors may be relying on this behavior for story purposes.]

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This does not happen on all outdoor maps, so if anyone knows of specific maps with this problem that would be nice.

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Hm. It happened on all outdoor maps I've tested, which include the now-unavailable burning forest, the Perez Park/Shadowhunter map, the Talos outdoor island-to-the-side map, the Dreck map, the Dark Astoria graveyard used in the TV arc, and the St. Martial causeway map.

I haven't tested any but the Talos map recently though, so maybe some of them got fixed.

As for the other bugs, I was going from memory, and some were bugs I recorded but never personally experienced; so take them with a grain of salt.

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In I16, you will be able to set your AE mission to spawn as if you had a full team of 8.

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You are jumping to a huge conclusion there. It is just as likely that this feature will not work in AE at all.

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It seems extremely unlikely to me that the devs would want to maintain two separate difficulty setting systems. That would get confusing very fast, and I don't really see what the point would be.

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The point would be to minimize abuse. If they restrict the new difficulty settings to content they generated, they at least know there will be a reasonable mix of mobs. If they put it into the AE, they have to worry about custom critters tweaked to be very weak but still giving out full XP.

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All those problems exist already.

How would you even go about disallowing the MA from benefiting from the enhanced difficulty settings? The MA obeys difficulty today. Unless you are saying that MA missions would always be set to Heroic/Villainous, I don't see how this could possibly work.

My belief is that allowing the MA to benefit from the enhanced difficulty settings will allow them to correct what is, IMHO, the biggest existing balance issue it contains: auto-SK. If you change auto-SK to bring everyone up to the mission holder's level minus one, the balance problems inherent in team XP division disappear. The only reason not to do that already is that it limits the kinds of critters teams get to face - the experience of being on the lowbie end of the spectrum, fighting tough critters, more or less disappears. But the enhanced difficulty settings address that issue nicely.

Disallowing the MA from using enhanced difficulty settings doesn't allow that elegant solution.

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That's my only concern about this. It gives people much less incentive to team in general.

It's not going to help the fact that PUGs are hard to find for door missions. It could even make it worse.

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I don't see why. Teams can now bump up their difficulty to steamroll even more effectively.

I do wonder whether we will be able to spawn maps for team sizes of, say, 12 (by setting the difficulty slider to "team size +4" on an 8-person team). But even if not, teams of 4 can now take on 8-spawned maps.

Why would farmers leave the AE buildings and go back to PI? The new difficulty system will presumably apply to AE missions as well.

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In I16, you will be able to set your AE mission to spawn as if you had a full team of 8.

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You are jumping to a huge conclusion there. It is just as likely that this feature will not work in AE at all.

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It seems extremely unlikely to me that the devs would want to maintain two separate difficulty setting systems. That would get confusing very fast, and I don't really see what the point would be.

I think that's how snipers are supposed to work in general. You can't pull snipers in the general PvE game.

I started a thread on this when the AE was first released. Most of those problems still exist, but I think the thread has been purged.

Going from memory:

* Ally ambushes don't work
* Souvenirs will disappear at random
* Souvenirs are stored per-installation, which makes them visible to all characters that log in through that installation (even if on different accounts)
* Freakshow faction has incorrect level range designation
* Family faction has a level range gap which results in bizarre instance behavior
* Mission editor will sometimes refuse to publish arcs even though no errors are shown
* Mission editor will sometimes erroneously claim circular dependencies among chained objectives where none exist
* Editor refuses to allow editing of text fields at the first character location of the field, if the field already has any text
* Editor will often scramble text if typing temporarily introduces two contiguous spaces (probably result of   substitution being incorrectly accounted for in character counting)
* Mouse clicks sometimes "bleed through" to panels that are supposed to be collapsed, which can cause unintended changes (i.e. trying to click-to-edit text in mission detail 2 sets the faction for mission detail 1, which is hidden, from "custom" to "standard")
* Ticket vendor window and recipe inventory window cannot be open at the same time
* All patrol text is issued as soon as mission is entered, which causes players not to be able to see the text and also causes $name substitution to fail (note: also happens in general PvE)
* Allies set to "run to nearest door" or "wander" when freed will only do so when a player is in visibility range, and will otherwise simply stand still
* Rescues cannot run to door when freed on outdoor maps, and will instead simply stand still (after playing any rescue animations). [Note: I'm not sure this one should be fixed since some authors may be relying on this behavior for story purposes.]
* Some maps have escort waypoints that are not reachable due to being underground or otherwise outside of geometry. The St. Martial causeway map and the Perez Park (Shadowhunter) map both exhibit this but there may be others.

New to i15:

* Help text for spawn locations on mini-maps has legend tags for "boss spawns" and "ally spawns" reversed
* Story arc feedback comments will disappear at random
* Story arc feedback comments are stored per-installation, which makes it difficult/impossible to track feedback when using multiple machines to play the game

tl;dr:

With the ability to set spawn sizes as high as you want, no one is going to get free rides on farms anymore.

I agree it's brilliant. It also satisfies the one concern I had about the suggestion to change auto-SK rules to simply convert everyone to one level below the mission holder, closing a long-standing balance problem in team XP division.

Hopefully that change is coming also and has simply not been announced.

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EverQuest, like most games, required you to do a 20-30s "camp" when logging out to prevent misuse by people pulling the plug when they were gonna lose a fight.

The game would take over your char on network disconnect and fight on for you until the time ran out.

But...some dungeons had locked doors which the party needed to get a key for. Of course, the local monsters could open the door. So people would run at a locked door, disconnect their network cable, and the server would take over, converting you to NPC status, where you'd open the door and go through. You then plug back in before you're timed out and poof! You're on the other side of the locked door.


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That is pure awesome.

Minion debuffers, control-heavy lieutenants and damage-focused bosses with armor secondaries would be my recommendation. You have to take out the minions or their debuffs will kill you, but ignoring the lieutenants and bosses while you do so leaves you pretty vulnerable.

Nope. You'd have to contact the author and have them send it to you (or just ask how they did something).

This was discussed in beta and the consensus at the time was that this was preferable, as it maintains a little bit of the author's control over the work. (Yes, yes, everything can be copied if someone wants to go through the trouble, but it'd be a lot of trouble.)

OK, but that's still incredibly lame.

Best change ever:

Updates to the difficulty settings so you can spawn all maps for teams of 8 at +4 combat level.

Awesome. Pure awesome.

Mostly I roll bronze, hoping for steadfast res/defs. I have a pretty healthy stash of them at this point.

When I roll gold rolls, I do it more more to provide a service than to make inf. (I roll them only on 30-35ish characters since that range of C/D recipes is pretty hard to find redside.)

Also, I sometimes roll for salvage when supplies on things are thinning to the point that the arbitrage gap is 10x-20x.

For #2, you could fill half the regular spawns on the map with "boss" spawns where the boss is a lieutenant. That might give you some of the same feel without substantially increasing the mission difficulty.

I seem to recall it's used in Ambassador Kuhr'rect's arc. I could be mistaken though.

I can't believe they silently removed options... again. I don't think I was using any of the affected items, but it is an incredible PITA to have to re-edit arcs every patch. This is by far my biggest complaint about the AE, ranking far higher for me than anything related to farms.

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Also tired of posts vanishing into thin air, but that's a problem for next year.

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Eh?

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Don't bother PvPing if you're going to PvP with a PvE mentality. If you actually wanted to PvP, you would try to be good first before even thinking about any loot you "deserved" for your effort. The learning curve and the reward curve is much, much steeper in PvP than in PvE.

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Just out of curiosity, how much do you think skill matters in PvP? My experiences in PvE have sort of led me into thinking of the game as being primarily oriented around button mashing... which is probably your point. But I honestly don't quite get where skill enters into the equation. What "levers" do PvPers have at their disposal that require skill to utilize? Range? Corners? Knowing your opponent's attack chain in advance?

I think it was pretty much inevitable given the topic.

Rather than cutscenes, I'd like a little more latitude when "staging" scenes using regular spawns. For example, you can currently have a boss taunt you as you approach, but you can't have two bosses talking to each other, or fighting each other.

The advantage of that is that players can get right into the battle if they don't want to wait for the dialog. The disadvantage is that they might miss some stuff, but then that's what NPC chat logs are for.