Nethergoat
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:nice to see you still fighting the good fight Geko!Originally Posted by EvilGeko
Without having to be a villain or do the patron arc. Thank you.
/signed -
Quote:There are genuinely underperforming sets out there that could use help. But the devs rarely make drastic, massive changes to established sets- they tinker, they fiddle, they tweak, improving things over time.Originally Posted by Waylorn
Electrical Blast and Energy Blast - hardly seeing anyone playing these.
Two of my current levelling projects are an elec/
Ice Control - needs some love, back to the times it was awesomesauce, now it just sits at the bottom of the pile. Sad.
Force Field - this is odd: it just adds def, some def and another bit of def to everyone that's already softcapped. Really useful just in low-mid lvls. Have no idea how to make it more yummy or something.
Battle Axe/War Mace/Broad Sword/Katana - these stay on the same boat: they're not bad, they're simply...meh. New weapon sets just have more gimmicks, more interesting mechanics, more appeal than just whack-a-fu. Probably they just need something special, if not unique, to appeal peeps. Dual blades, for example, is not a wonderful set, but it feels unique in its way. Claws is another example of uniqueness in swift attacks and a nice mix of ranged and melee.
Regeneration - good for pvp. whait, who said lolpvp? This one lost its uniqueness with the, albeit needed, old big nerf. Playing it nowadays in normal/high content is just asking for a hard beating. Needs something more than a bit of s/l res.
Ice Melee - Uhm. Well, I just never ever played this one, so it may be an hidden treasure, lol. Seriously, a bit of touch may be needed, especially in the DPS department.
Ninja and Mercenaries - Need some work to be on par with other MM sets. Some survivability tool for ninjas and attack cycles revamp, especially for the tier2 henchies, for mercs. Oh, and shorten the laughable recharge on serum, at least.
I know it's a big pile of work, but I think it's needed to give more difference and variety to the playerbase.
Which makes sense, because if you're going to drastically change an existing set you're probably better off just starting from scratch on a new one. More is better, even if some sets end up being percieved as stuffy or old fashioned.
And it's been my experience over the years that every set or AT, however underperforming, has its fans & adherents.
Over time most legitimate complaints get addressed. Perhaps not as dramatically and comprehensively as we'd like, but it's a big, complex game and even little changes take a lot of time and energy. -
well, last nights session was frittered away on costume fiddling & marketeering rather than gameplay. Well, I did do one MA farming run with my fire tank just to see if my favorite ambush map still worked, but that was it.
This reminds me why I stuck with my subscription for so long even as my free time to play dipped toward zero- I liked having it there do pop in on when I had a free moment, or needed to space out for a couple of minutes.
I may not have had time to run a mission, let alone level a character, but once you've figured out the basics marketeering is the work of moments, and messing around with the character creator lasts as long as you want it to- especially after they added the 'save costume' option.
Ran into my old pal Talen Lee in the market channel, along with several other familiar names. And let me just say that the ability to pull up an AH window while sitting at the Mission Architect ticket counter is like having a printing press for money. -
Quote:that'd just be good business sense, otherwise people start looking at your discounts with a wary eye- "oh it's 25% off now, but where will it be next week?"Originally Posted by Codewalker
50% off slots is cool, though I agree that it's a bit crappy to do it right after they were 25% off. Normally I'm pretty "caveat emptor" when it comes to the market and the last one to call for refunds. I didn't actually buy any last week but IMO it would be a good PR move if they refunded the difference of the points to people who did.
Although it's a proximity thing- if it's a month between the two sales, that's one thing. But dropping it the very next week is poor form. -
extremely happy with my 5 pack of character slots & bonus purchase of Steampunk costume bundle.
I might feel different if I'd been here all along, but as a returning player the market is packed with things I'd like to buy. -
very little time again last night, just logged in my stalker Mope to check his traps & take advantage of the sale on character slots.
Amusing to scroll through the many ragequit posts about staff fighting (which I have no interest in) and hear how terrible, awful, no-good and slap-in-the-face this week's market offerings are when it's running a half off sale on the one game item I desperately wanted.
Dropped $15 on points, picked up a 5 pack of slots & used the leftover points on the Steampunk costume bundle.
For those keeping store, that makes $30 I've spent this month on playing the game for free. =P
Which strikes me as the reason FTP with a market is the best model for MMOs going forward. Anyone who wants to can check out the game, wherein you tempt them with premium goodies. And VIP is an attractive option without being required to have fun.
IMHO they've done a really good job with the whole Freedom thing, my quibbles with the storefront aside.
So the other night I noticed there were some new IOs, 'Attuned Enhancements'. Checked the stalker set, bonuses were great & I liked the idea of not having to mess with them ever again so I thought I'd pick up a set for Mope.
Crafted the 'going rate' seemed to be around 20m for the good ones, so I put in bids on the whole set at 7m for the expensive ones and a little over half the 'last 5' for the rest. Checked in last night and lo, all but two bids had filled.
Nice to see bargain hunting still works.
I really need to DL that build planner so I can take advantage of inherent stamina on my stable of level 25-40 character who still have their legacy builds. Tried to respec my cold controller on the fly the other night and made a hash of of, reminding me why I didn't bother messing with anything when stamina was first made inherent.
It looks like I'll have a few hours to myself this evening, hoping to get to the next bit of Twinshot's arc. -
Quote:Bahah!Originally Posted by MajorDecoy
And yet you abandon your efforts of constructing an airtight case.
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Quote:If you aren't trying to "prove anything to anyone", if your hypothetical "airtight case" still wouldn't make a "lick of difference" to the developers, why are you still posting about it?Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
You mistakenly assume I'm out to prove anything to anyone. I could produce and airtight case and it wouldn't make a lick of difference.
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I can honestly say I've only been seriously annoyed at the market a few times- annoyance is, on some level, part and parcel of a crowded public sphere.
And I'm not being that nostalgic- the current system is a gargantuan improvement in nearly every way.
I just like gathering spots in the game world- i like to see people's costumes, read their bios & generally feel like I'm in a City of Heroes rather than a City of Instances.
I mean, I got mad when they added the auto-logout feature way back when. Not because it spoiled my XP farming in bricks, but because I really liked seeing a ton of heroes at the train station. =P -
Quote:at the moment I have, I think....10 total?Originally Posted by SwellGuy
Careful. I think at Premium only 36 of the 48 are available.
So plenty of room to grow! -
red side has a LOT more status effects starting at much lower levels than blue side, which can be annoying.
but hard?
c'mon now. -
Quote:this is very true!Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Actually, anyone who's farmed with melee probably knows this intuitively. The only way fast kill speed helps with survivability tends to be when you kill so fast you earn insps faster than you can burn them.
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Quote:They aren't scouring Craigslist for work-for-hire temps, they have an in-house team already drawing salaries. Your list of imaginary expenses remains irrelevant.Originally Posted by Snow Globe
The web-devs in this case would be NCsoft's, not Paragon Studios. They have to cost things separately.
I can make a new user permission group for an old as hell UBB commercial forum in less than a minute, it shouldn't take any longer here.Quote:Two (at least) different groups responsible for global chat (which didn't need to be changed much) as compared with messing with the forum software + the market.
Automating validation is the only hangup, aside from whether they care to be bothered improving things for an admittedly small population of forumgoers.
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switching gears to thinking about numbers, I've been scanning the 'currently online' listings the past few days.
Registered users swings between 1100 -1400 users, non-VIP registers users fluctuates between 30-40. Of those, quite a few are names I recognize as involved, helpful vets (Leandro, Bill Z, LISAR, etc).
Not a huge percentage, but on forums of a certain size quality trumps quantity. -
not much time to play, so a few random observations:
The remote auction house is ridiculously useful, but I miss seeing everyone piled into the physical wentworths/black market space. In a game largely bereft of busy public spaces, this is a genuine loss. No complaints about the convenience or utility of the feature, but regrets about further erosion of populated public spaces.
Logged in my fire tank to mess with his costume this AM (hooray, barbarian costume pack!), pulled up my global tab and had a nice chat with Cyvert & some other folk I didn't recognize in TheMarket channel. Gated forum access looks even siller compared to the full run I have of global channels.
I see they're having a 50% off sale on server slots this week- definitely going to pick up five or ten of those. The severely limited 'premium player' slots don't do much to limit my gameplay, but they play hell with my inveterate costume tinkering. I have a bunch of characters that NEED revision in light of new costume options added while I was on hiatus, but they aren't necessarily ones I play enough to warrent using one of my severely limited slots on right now.
Time to buy a little breathing room... -
Quote:I've never had problems finding teams red-side when I had the urge, even on my off-brand home server of Triumph.Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
Is this entire thread out of touch? Has anyone actually tried forming a team redside, or has everyone just stood around watching the Broadcast channel hoping for someone to announce a team looking for more?
It's never going to be like playing on a busy server blue side, where invites rain down from the sky, but if you invest a little effort you can usually round up a team fairly quickly. -
Quote:second best returning player advice I got, right behind hey, try typing '/ah' the next time you log in. =POriginally Posted by SwellGuy
Search is definitely the way to go. I think I recommended it to Nethergoat in his returning player thread last week because any other way is just too slow.
I'ma gobble up some of those discount server slots.
More slots would be ridiculously useful right now, and even if I re-sub it's something you can never have enough of. -
Quote:price is a gating mechanism.Originally Posted by Dz131
You should lower the prices of stuff like Alignment change, respec, and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember by alot. I mean there's much more chance of people buying convenience items at a whim if it didn't cost something like $10 for an alignment change.
a high price says they don't want that item to be a casual decision, but something to be carefully considered and rationed.
you may disagree with their ranking system, but they have their reasons. -
and another note on the foolishness of the OMG IT SHULD ONLY B 4 PAYING CUSTOMERZ 'argument':
Logged in this AM to do some costume fiddling and marketeering (which I can do at the same time now, hurrah!) and thought I'd check in on the Market global.
Got in fine, had a nice chat with Cyvert & some other folk I didn't recognize.
In terms of general utility access to global chat is VASTLY more useful/desirable than access to forums. If a high tier vet has unlimited access to global chat, there is no philosophically defensible reason to deny ungated access to the forums. -
Quote:Once again you're pretending this would incur an extra expense when it would not.Originally Posted by Snow Globe
Go look up web development salaries sometime. You'll see that I'm actually understating the numbers (for competent staff, that is). For Aggelakis' $500, you'll get staff that is actually worse than the current NCsoft web staff.
it's like this-
If I'm some random citizen that wants to get some legal work done, I'm going to need to hire a lawyer, which will impose an extra expense on my budget.
If instead I'm a fortune 500 CEO that wants to get some legal work done, well, I send a memo to legal and they take care of it. Because legal work is an integral part of the business and they have a bunch of salaried employees who's job it is to handle these things.
The cost of this project would be a time measurement, not a dollar measurement- their payroll remains the same regardless.
Which isn't to say they don't have better things for their web devs to work on, just that your argument is a load of hoo-haw. -
I for one vigorously applaud this small upgrade to my game experience.
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Quote:you're pretty good at making up numbers.Originally Posted by Snow Globe
At $5/month that would take 2,000 subscribers for the first month, or almost two years for those 100 users to pay for the system (if the price tag was $10,000).
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Quote:Hah!Originally Posted by Aggelakis
EDIT: I will say, though, that my faith in the NCsoft web team is pretty much nothing at this point, so I will put that as a point in favor of not doing it at all.
At last, an irrefutable point.
=P -
Quote:If it goes in the store as per my initial suggestion, price it accordingly.Originally Posted by Snow Globe
All that still doesn't account for the Web Team developing the system for however many players that would potentially buy access. Those costs would also have to be included in any proposal to change how things work currently.
If it is instead added to the 'tier' system as a reward for longterm subscribers, those players have already provided the game with literal years of material support. -
Quote:Mildly annoyed that you failed to read the thread and note that your points had already been addressed. The validity of your opinion I leave to the judgment of the readers, having already clearly stated my own.Originally Posted by Snow Globe
Considering that the opinion you are saying is "badly considered" directly opposes your's, I'll go with "hit a nerve" instead.
Forum moderation is already in place, imposing whatever "true cost" you're imagining on the groaning backs of the playerbase.Quote:Most players would balk at paying the true cost of forum moderation, so it would cost resources that Paragon Studios doesn't have to service a few players. This game is already the bottom of the heap of the NCsoft priority for web development, and you are talking about wasting the precious amount of time they do get to appeal to a tiny fraction of 1% of the players.
Adding a "tiny fraction of 1% of the players" (your words) to the existing population would present an insignificant increase in workload for the mods.
They need their own mods, which isn't the same thing at all.Quote:The European players have a stronger position than you do (after all they are paying for subscriptions), and they are losing complete sections of the forums.
That really does impose a significant extra cost to running the forums.
The quality of your logic is consistent, if nothing else.Quote:Two words come to mind after reading this: "Yeah, right." The more passionate the player usually means more active moderation is required. Also there have been plenty of examples of long time players that continually need to be moderated over the years. At its most basic level, this quote has no basis in reality. -
here's a weird thing-
checking new posts a whole bunch of beta boards & stuff came up, posted in a VIP forum stalker thread, and it let me?
Now I'm back to being Mr. Nobody.
ODD.
/edit
here's the thread, I'm post #213