Ms. Mesmer

Love it. Love everything about it. Loved it when it was suggested before. Will love it when it's suggested again.

...on my BAF League tonight, when Honou No Ko passed the League star back to me, saying that he had tasted power, and was now relinquishing it. I said that he was just like Cincinnatus. People questioned if that was even a real person. Well...

Cincinnatus

There's always room to learn new things.

I ran Leagues for about 7 hours straight after dinner. I couldn't tell you how many. I saw no reports of 10 threads tables, but my friend the MM, previously consigned to Commons and Uncommons exclusively over at least dozens of runs, picked up a Very Rare. I also got my first ever Very Rare on a Lambda, but that might just have been my turn at the RNG for that one. It did seem like my rewards were more distributed than before the patch.

I'd say ask Golden Girl, since she was there for a number of them, but even I know how unlikely it is for anyone to believe her on here. I actually made a joke about it when I invited her to the League. "I had to invite GG. We can pretend like it's the forums and tell her she's wrong about everything."

Edit: Neglected to mention sizes. Lambdas were full, or at least no lower than 14 members. BAFs were in the 16-18 range. I call them BAF Lites. I'm hoping the term catches on.

It was requested quite often, actually. I wasn't one of those requesting it, but Praetoria came up a lot in requests for more story time. I personally didn't want it because evil opposite worlds, a category in which Praetoria still belongs, are basically only good for about one real story. Later attempts at the Mirror Universe from Star Trek on Deep Space Nine kind of bear this out. They lose their flavor when they get reheated.

I had a new one pop up last night. We were forming a BAF in Pocket D on Infinity, and got to the point where we were full and ready to embark. I got the usual sound that alerts you to click Enter on the little pop-up window, but I didn't get the pop-up window. I wonder if this is what's causing some of the long delays, only to have 1 member apparently decline at the end that we've been seeing.

This is the same reason that only the ones in the Mother Mayhem mission in Maria's arc count. The ones that you run into in every other mission are IDF faction.

Those kind of hand waves also fit in with the genre. It's very rare that the destruction shown in a comic book lasts for any length of time. Buildings get wrecked and are often good as new the next issue, unless there's a good story to tell about the damage remaining.

There's also the theory that levels in the game are essentially time passing. Kings Row can't be ruined for everyone because level 5 characters haven't gotten to the point in time when it gets ruined. Honestly, the damage to these zones isn't necessarily all that widespread in the new TFs, anyway. The area around Blyde Square, some small pieces of Kings Row, a little bit around the tunnel in Talos, and some sections of highway in Skyway.

Yeah, wow. Hateful messages? It's a game. Things happen that are beyond your control sometimes. It might be inconvenient to them, but I can't see myself getting so worked up over it to send nastygrams. If the person with the star suddenly goes silent and doesn't reply, you give them whatever you think is a reasonable amount of time (I'm pretty lenient, so it'd be a good 30 minutes for me) and then you quit the team and try again at another time. Avoid the leader that did this, if you feel that it's necessary, but let it end there.

As a follow-up:

I've gotten over it, at least for the time being. Logging in today, there was a group forming 16-player BAFs. I joined in on that and had a fantastic time. I now just want to maintain a roughly 16-person League all night, if possible. Switch over to Lambdas to get people their Empyrean for the day on it, but mostly stick to BAF, since my rewards on that are usually 1 tier higher right now.

Running these with 16 is just so much nicer. The Escapee phase is nice and smooth with 16, and everything else is still doable. We even did one at 14-players very late and won that. I'll likely be taking the lead in getting these going for the time being. I'm coining the term BAF Lite for them. So, if you see me recruiting for a BAF Lite, and you want to have a fun League, feel free to join. I don't discriminate in inviting to Leagues

Edit: LeBlanc, I had never really noticed your sig to see who your characters were. No wonder we get along, you have a Bucky avatar. Anyone who likes Get Fuzzy has to be a good person. It's science!

First, thanks for the kind words, everyone. Here I try and point out how the players on the server are generally pretty great, and you have to go and try to make me look good.

Mexico had a flag of their own by I845. That didn't stop us from essentially carjacking them for half of their country.

Back to yesterday's downtime, that patch almost certainly didn't pass QA until the end of the day on Thursday, as they didn't even put it onto Test until Thursday night Eastern time. It was definitely after 7 PM my time when it went up there.

It isn't necessarily someone holding out or not noticing that they have the temp power, or the destructibles not dropping one each time they're destroyed, or even people DCing and losing them. I DCed and still had one (unfortunately, since this was a Master attempt and the whole process flustered me so much that I forgot to move it out of my tray. One finger slip later and I threw it right at Marauder.) and later had a crash to desktop and still had one when I returned.

There's a whole other possibility that someone told me about, but I didn't believe until I saw it for myself. Two (or more) people using their acids on the same door at approximately the same time. This can easily happen on the obstructed view doors at the Northern corners. I always go to the one behind the rounded bunker that Marauder jumps to because he jumps there and because it's closest to the spawn point for more acids. One time, I came in from one side and threw it right as someone came from the other side and threw another.

To the topic at hand: I am all for a wholly-new aura to designate that a player has one of these temp powers.

People have been making threads to thank the leaders of TFs and Leagues here for a bit, but I wanted to do something a bit different.

Last night, not really by choice, I got roped into leading a League. I barely like leading a team for a TF, because I'm really shy with exercising authority over others, so I only do it when necessary.

We had a player who was somehow bugged, in that it kept telling us that he wasn't qualified to be in the League, even though he met the only qualification, being level 50, so the leader gave me the League star to see if that would fix the matter. It didn't, but we just kept going from there. All the while, I was hoping silently that the teams would swap when we loaded in so that the star would change to the other team leader. I had no such luck.

In the end, it didn't matter. I took my mostly hands-off approach to team leadership and applied it here. Picked a team for the labs and one for the warehouse, designated a grenade holder, and gave a few quick orders that were more like suggestions, such as cleaning up Marauder's buddies before pacifying, so we didn't have a bunch of high-damage Bosses following us around and taking potshots at the squishies, and we did great.

Then we gathered enough for the BAF, and I really wished the star would switch. It didn't, so I picked the team that looked like the best damage dealers to deal with the adds, told the group to have no more than 4 around any one door, and told the other Controllers to try and get on a door with no other Controllers in order to spread out the controls. Everybody followed suit well, from what I saw, and we beat the trial pretty handily.

So, thank you, assembled players of Infinity, for making my first League leads both painless and effective.

Thank you again for checking on it. I now think that his is probably absurdly high to keep you from locking him down so that he won't SJ around. Nightstar and Siege don't have that mechainc as part of their encounters, so their protection probably isn't quite that high.