Samuel_Tow

And have become only more broken since. I wonder if we can convince Neuron to back up a bit and fix them again?

I'd like you to quote me when I said that in those exact words. Because I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that your "rephrasing" of me is completely fictional.

Pretty much. I can ignore a lot of game faults if the story behind the game were good enough. I'd never have been able to play through the complete mess of gameplay that is the original Mass Effect if it weren't for the amazing storyline.

If the storyline cannot be decent, however, then the gameplay shouldn't turn me off, because then I have nothing left to cling to.

This is the last I'll say about it to avoid completely trashing my own thread: I don't need to avoid the boards in their entirety, because I have the tools given to me to avoid just you. I do not, however, want to do that, because I have more respect for you than to just up and decide you're not worth hearing from. In some small way, I hope I can make you see reason and get you to stop micromanaging the forums so much, but I don't intend to make a scene out of it if you refuse.

This is not the sort of discussion I want to have, and it is not the sort of discussion I will take part in.

*edit*
You, on the other hand, I have no such respect for.

I disagree. "Taking sides" never makes an argument better, it just devolves into faction warfare where arguing takes over fact and opinion. I always find that an outsider's opinion, one who isn't invested in the "argument," is usually the most useful, because it isn't marred by angles and prerogatives and agendas. When a person comes in and says "Man, I love this! This and that was great!" or "This was terrible. I'm never doing this and that again." I find that to be more useful than one guy trying to convince another guy why he's wrong to feel the way he does. A developer takes nothing away from a flamewar. That's why official Feedback threads discourage direct replies.

There's "so much negativity" because not everyone is as happy as you. In fact, I've never been LESS excited about City of Heroes in all of the seven years I've been with the game, and I've contemplated just cancelling my account multiple times since Going Rogue came out, precisely because the game is being made more difficult and more elitist and more raid-centric. You should know me well enough to know that I don't say these things lightly, yet you've made it a point to contradict me at practically every step, to the point where just seeing your name at the head of a post makes me apprehensive to get into it.

You may or may not realise it, but your constant insistence that this is great for the game and those of us who aren't happy about it are doing it wrong or aren't trying hard enough or are somehow at fault in another way is a large part of why I don't feel like coming to the forums these days, to the point where I'm considering taking steps I don't want to take. At the very least, you need to realise the effect you - and that's you personally, not "people like you" or "your position" or anything of this nature - are having on me and at least several people like me. What you do about it is your call, but you need to realise the devastatingly negative effect you are having. You personally.

You also have to understand that, many times over, you act like you're trying to shield the development team from the feeback of people who aren't happy with things. I know that's not your intent and we both know that's not how things work, but that's how you act - like if we choose to complain about raids or difficulty or content or anything regarding the direction of the game, you "feel the need to defend [the developers'] efforts" as though you're trying to shield them from criticism for fear of them changing their minds. You don't need to police the forums like this. If you trust the developers, then trust them to make the right decision based on direct feeback, not just feedback deemed acceptable.

Let people express their agreement or disagreement with the changes, and let the people whose job it is to assess these changes assess the feedback. You would have nothing to argue if you did not consistently force people to defend their right to hold an opinion they hold, because many of us would have simply stopped at "we don't like this, and we wouldn't like to see more of it" were we not pressed to explain ourselves. I shouldn't have to elbow my way past the forum linebackers before I can make my grievances known to the development team.

Again, please don't read this as a personal attack. This is what you can consider my final attempt at brokering some kind of peace between us. If this fails, then we will have to never say another word to each other ever again, because I am tired of fighting with you at every turn. You know how I feel, I know how you feel, so unless we can find something else to discuss, there's nothing left to say.

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And to stay on topic, if tangentially - "that's not what CoH is about," sums up my feelings on Praetoria neatly. It's not a question of how much more difficult it is. I've demonstrated that I can beat the content, by virtue of completing all four Praetorian arcs, and most of those at +0x2, no less. It's not a question of direct difficulty, but more a question of bottom line. There is no reason to elevate the difficulty of the low-level game, because the low-level game is not where one looks for challenges. The low-level game is the time when the game should be easier so as to allow one to familiarise himself with his character and get a grasp on the game.

That you and I don't need to familiarise ourselves with the game after seven years is irrelevant, because you and I can't pay for the game by ourselves. We need new players, and new players need to be given a new player experience, not a jaded veteran challenge. It's bad form to put excessive difficulty in the early stages of the game, and this is something Cryptic Studios understood and rectified with the Hollows. If Praetoria were level 40-50 content, or even 30-40 content, I'd have little issue. Our characters are able to look after themselves at that point. But it's not. It's level 1 content, and this is a mistake.

Moreover, ambushes in general are badly overused. An ambush rush once in a while really isn't something I'd complain about. I might not be happy with it, but it's a challenge I can meet. Ambush rush after ambush rush, mission after mission, that is what I have a problem with. Ambushes are not an inherently fun mechanic because they take the game away from the player's hands and because they cheat. Used sparingly, they provide variety and challenge. Used irresponsibly, they create hostile, unpleasant gameplay even when you win. And I won out against all of those ambushes, even if some killed me in the process.

Geko, please don't read this as an insult or a personal attack, but I'm seriously starting to wonder if you're ever going to post something I want to read again. It seems like everything you've posted for the last several months has been put-downs for people who don't enjoy greater challenges, and I'm simply losing my stomach for it.

It's like you've bugged my living room or something

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My general conclusion with the entirety of the Incarnate system for pretty much the entire year has been "Sod this! I'll do something else." Earning times and gates aside, until there's something entertaining to actually DO with these Incarnate powers, earning them is pointless. It's like working a job to make money that you never get to spend on anything other than job expenses.

I'm a patient man. I'll give this game a couple of years to see where it goes with it, and provided the rest of the game isn't kneecapped to account for Evil Geko's "greater challenge" mentality, it should all be good.

When that was just one SF, it was fine. When it was just that and the STF, it was fine. After all, these were supposed to be the pinnacle of challenge not meant for simple players, but for the best of the best. And I was fine with that.

I just wish all the Incarnate stuff didn't take that as a baseline.

I have to agree with Arcana here. Praetoria is so far outside the scope of difficulty for the low-level game it's amazing, to the point where returning to Primal Earth and taking post-20 missions there feels pleasantly relaxing, and the post-20 game is supposed to be harder than the pre-20 game. And I'm not talking about SOs, even.

Praetoria strikes me as a repeat of the Hollows - content clearly designed for not just late game, but actual END GAME, which then for various reasons was scaled down to low-level content, but with powers still designed for "complete" characters. With the Hollows, they at least had the good sense to remove the imps and the super powers from the 1-10 Hellions and Trolls, but Praetoria was never rebalanced, and it doesn't look like it ever will be.

Going Rogue's stated objective was to get new players into the game. As such, it should have been designed for new players, especially considering brand new accounts are (or at least were) forced to make a Praetorian before they could make anything else, supposedly so they could start with the good, recent content. It's really not a good idea to throw content designed with experience veterans with resources and contacts accumulated when that content is intended primarily for new players.

I've always believed that late-game content has no place in the lower-level game. The lower-level game should be there to ease us into new characters of types we may have never played, and to get us accustomed to said characters before actual challenges begin. That's why AT mods scale with level from essentially the same basic values at level 1, until they finally settle into their actual values at level 20. The low-level game is the time when the game itself should help us along so we can get used to the controls, the powers, the systems and out characters. Not the time to be tested to extremes.

The sad truth - and this is something that took me a long time to realise - is that either through shoddy design or cautious balance, Stalkers have ended up being just that: Slightly weaker Scrappers who get to fight slightly less dangerous spawns. You do have first strike capability, and Placate does help (when it doesn't get invalidated), but trying to rehide and inflict additional criticals, while possible, is so inefficient as to be pointless, especially within a team setting.

What made my Stalkers far easier to play was finally admitting to myself that I'll be spending most of my time scrapping anyway, and so trying to compress my "assassination" within the first few attacks so as to have fewer things to scrap with. It helps... Somewhat, in that ambushes notwithstanding, Stalkers still make for very solid characters. You just have to not play them how they look like they were designed to be played, because they weren't designed very well to play like that.

It's a really annoying bug that's been driving me out of my skin for a long time. It's especially egregious on Stalkers, because this bug overrides the interruptible portion of Assassin's Strike, making the whole power look incredibly silly. It has a similar effect on Blaster snipes.

I think I've pinned it down to a particular cause, actually. It's the transition from the idle stance into Build Up or powers which share the same animation (Reconstruction, Dull Pain, inspiration use, etc.) that does this, because this animation does not appear to put the character in the correct stance when it's done, or rather seems to put the character in THE SAME stance as he was in prior to the animation, but put said character in combat mode at the same time. The result is that you are in combat mode, but in the idle stance, causing animation problems and, in fact, rooting problems.

Speaking of Rooting, this is something I've been reporting for years and it doesn't seem to get fixed. I'm pretty sure it's caused by this bug: If you start Hovering forward and hit an inspiration or build up, then you have a very good chance of being able to override all power animations and rooting and keep shooting on the move. I still have an Electric Blaster who can do that consistently, and it HAS to be due to this bug. He ends up in the wrong stance from which attacks can't find their animations, so they play no animation with no rooting and you just see the sprite effects.

Does this need to become a legitimate exploit before it's at least acknowledged?

I don't know, I haven't tried. I can't imagine enemies who ignore stealth and interrupt Assassin's Strike will be any less annoying, however, nor will the fact that I'm forced into fighting multiple spawns at the same time a lot of the time.

But none of that addresses the problem of the development team abusing the ambush mechanic to outright absurd levels. Even the new CoV and CoH missions are rife with those.

And quite a few are tagged "get to this objective while ambushes are coming down on you." The mission to defeat Virgil Duray, for instance, triggers a whole load of ambushes as his health goes down, and those are IDF 2nd Division ambushes. The mission to take out the Seer centre for Dr. Steffard (not a Crusader mission) has Seer ambushes overlapping on you as you approach the final room where the experimental Seers are. The first mission from Dr. Helix requires you to click and activate 8 slow bombs, which aside from being difficult to actually spot, are also difficult to trigger with Clocwork DoT ticking on you at all times. The mission by Dr. Steffard that consists entirely of Ghoul ambushes... Consists entirely of Ghoul ambushes, the last few waves of which spawn up to three ambushes at once.

The game does occasionally tell you "Run away, ambushes!" but more often than not it will tell you "Rescue Blood Widow Scarlet, Rescue Blood Widow Dahlia, EAT AMBUSHES, SUCKER!" I can smell them at this point. Whenever I enter a mission, the first thing I look for is NPC chat for ambushes or a timer or a suddenly-appearing objective to expect ambushes. If that doesn't happen, I look to see if the mission is empty, or if the NPCs are friendly. And even if none of those is true, I'm still pretty much guaranteed to spawn an ambush when I finish the mission just to spite me.

You know, Vincent Ross' arc had a lot of ambushes in it, but at least all of those were location-based, so I could ambush them. You know, like a Stalker ought to?

Stalker. The AT that Praetoria forgot.

I went through pretty much the same thing. However, to me, the mere fact that I considered it and actually looked for other games I could be playing was very, very scary. Not because I'm afraid to play other games, but more because I don't like feeling that way about a game I like.

Personal base is not the same thing as a personal room. I would personally be very happy if we got personal bases that were unique only to ourselves and were paid out of our own pocket, as opposed to out of group coffers. I'd even be happy to use that without any practical benefits, the same way I create costumes.

So you'd think

Seriously, though, I know it's probably possible, especially given your Scrappers. My above assessment came with the caveat "to get back up to 95% to-hit," which you probably won't be able to do on an all-Scrapper TF. Or you may be able to do it, I don't know. Depends on what boosts Inventions Sets provide and how many level shifts you have.

Which is something I have to wonder, as well. Presumably, we won't have all of 10 level shifts since level 60 enemies don't exist in the game. However, one can infer that we'll have at least four, taking us up to the maximum level of scales available in the game. My question is "what then?" When the cheap and cheesy way to add fake challenge is gone, will the developers not be forced to create actually decent content, as opposed to relying on jacked-up enemy levels? Or will they simply invent level 60 enemies and go with that?