Sister_Twelve

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  1. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Eva Destruction View Post
    I could get behind that if:

    1: Leveling arcs that attempt to use exploits, loopholes, or anything that made them more advantageous than dev-created missions are nuked with extreme prejudice and the authors lose access to MA.

    2: Leveling arcs that are labeled as "story arcs" are nuked with extreme prejudice and their authors lose access to MA.

    3: All arcs currently in the system are labeled "story arcs" by default, and any that are found to not be such, see #2.
    1.) Well, like I said, I'm pretty sure my attitude is in the small minority on this one, but I think any decision differentiating an 'exploit' from 'legitimate farming' is likely to be arbitrary and artificial. In fact, it takes more 'effort' to create and use a mission full of buffbots that still requires a player to actively go out and destroy every target on the map than it does to sit in a doorway and chat with your friends. Yet the former is now categorized as an exploit yet the latter never was. So really what is the point?

    Eliminate one thing and they will find another way to do it that eliminates effort. Eliminated that and they will find still another. My suggestion is that the devs recognize that a portion of the community will always find such behavior repugnant, while the other portion will never find it repugnant. Partition those two portions of the community from each other and create an interface that will conceal their activities from each other.

    2.) By definition, I would not be punishing anyone for anything. I don't see any real sense in it. I think it's pretty illogical that my arcs are being punished for the behavior of players I don't know, don't associate with, and probably wouldn't associate with even if I did know them, but their behavior is what it is... them getting another level 50 doesn't somehow mean that I don't have the few I have. Them having billions of influence doesn't somehow take any away from me. Them having characters loaded down with IO sets doesn't adversely affect me. In fact, as I said, the only time they adversely affect me at all is if they mistakenly happen to open up one of my story arcs and down rate it because it isn't their cup of tea.

    Defining something arbitrarily as an exploit is sort of like the congress suddenly deciding that since something is unhealthy for you, it should be criminalized and that everyone should have realized it should be criminalized all along.

    I disagree with that. People will do what they will do and as long as the behavior isn't inherently harmful to anyone else, who cares?

    So, yes, I think the exploiters, (and to a lesser extent all farmers), are largely tools. And I honetly don't really get what their activities do to give them enjoyment, hey, life is life and it does, so who am I to want to take it away from them?

    I just wish they'd have the same consideration and not downrate an arc that is obviously what they did not want to play. Of course, I have no real evidence that it's farmer and exploiters who give me the few low ratings I get, but I suspect by some of the ((LULZ! U SUK! U MISSPELED 'A!')) comments that accompany these that these are probably the players who do it.

    3.) I truly think a partitioned UI would probably solve a lot of these problems. I think the biggest issue is that the two portions of the community are just largely unreconcilable in what they want out of MA. As such, the answer isn't to take either thing away. It's to make it easier for each side to find what it wants.
  2. My solutions to the problem would probably be the opposite of what the developers approach seems to be:

    - Sanction the activity. After all, people would sit in doorways and do absolutely nothing to earn level 1-50 for 5 years in this game. Literally nothing. As in NOTHING. After that and considering the fact that it went on for 5 years, the entire concept of risk versus reward sort of fell by the wayside.

    - Have authors clearly define an arc as a 'story arc' versus a 'leveling arc.'

    - Change the interface so that 'leveling arcs' have their own space and are not included with 'story arcs.'

    The reason I say all of this is because it does not matter to me what people do to get 50 alts to 50. What they do does not affect me at all. I generally do not play with them and the only time their activities affect me at all is when they mistakenly play one of my arcs, give it 1 star because it is not what they want to do, and go on about their business.

    The people who do not want to exert any effort to level their characters will always find a way to do so no matter what the developers do. It is simply their nature.
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by BBQ_Pork View Post
    If this thread actually IS in the wrong section, please let me know.
    It's in the right section. It's just a really tough time for this sort of thread because all of the members of the normal MA community are sort of seriously bummed out these days because of the experience nerf on 4/7. Most of our arcs were affected by it, so there really isn't much community activity going on right now.
  4. Night Calls the Weaver appears to be giving full rewards all the way through.


    The Union of the Mask gives full rewards for the first 4 missions, then experience is reduced by 95% for mission 5 because there are a lot of color battles going on in the background and the character has the option of picking up both Back Alley Brawler and Swan during the mission.

    The Long Road Back is only giving about 60% experience all the way through for reasons I can't figure out. Even in missions where there are no allies, captives, or battles and the character is fighting stock Vahzilok mobs without changes, the experience is nerfed.

    Oh, well. At least the only one of them that was popular anyway doesn't seem to have been affected.

    (Though Venture and I have seemingly different concepts of popularity... if my non dev-choice had as many plays as his do, I'd be jumping up and down. )
  5. One Mission:

    1. Storming Citadel
    2. Don't Freak

    Two Missions:

    1. Death To Disco

    Three Missions:

    1. Drakule Vs The Werewolf Bikers From Hell
  6. Night Calls the Weaver is on the lower end of that range if you haven't tried it yet.
  7. This has probably been suggested before. So what would the drawbacks be? I imagine they could use the same time metric they use for the in-game story arcs. Ie... 8 merits per median hour of game play, plus the types of arcs listed have already gone through the dev filter to reach dev choice or guest author status, so the likelihood of potential abusers would be lessened.

    (Which was one of the reasons I didn't include HoF... it would be relatively easy for select groups of players to get an arc 1000 play, though to be honest if the time metric were in use, I'm not sure what form the potential abuse would take.)

    The only thing that I would really see is the possibilty that heavy story arcs might be weighted a little bit too highly, since the actual in-game content could be run much faster than it would take to actually read through it all.
  8. I guess I'm in the far minority on this one, because I've never actually completed an STF of any variety. I've only actually tried it once... with my Emp/Psi about two years ago or so. We didn't finish because no one on the team seemed to have any idea how to beat all of the Dr. Aeon EBs that showe up at once in one of the missions. Mind you, it's been a loong time since I've actually tried it.

    I do have the RSF Master badge on 3 characters though. In general, I've spent a lot more time redside than blueside.

    As far as the run of the conversation goes, I'm not averse to raids in theory, though I'd favor the 10 man variety over the 25 or 50 man variety. What I'm averse to is the 'raid treadmill' approach. When I played WoW last year, it was during the months after the Lich King release. By the time I reached 80 with a character, all of the raiders were already like, 'lolNaxx,' right?

    So basically they took me through Naxx and got me gear and so forth and then the next raid was released, so we went into that raid and all my Naxx gear immediately became obsolete. Then the next raid came out and all my gear from the Ulduar raid immediately became obsolete. This was all in the span of about 5-6 months, right?

    You can imagine how many people wanted to play all of the raids from Core WoW and the Burning Crusade. Which means there was a world of content I never got to see at all because if the gear from like 3 weeks ago was already obsolete, you can imagine how prehistoric the gear from last year is.

    At any rate, as long as they don't start the treadmill approach, I can deal with raids. I can deal with the idea that there are just some threats that cannot be handled by a single hero or even a single team of 8. But here's the thing... if you are going to do that, leave them like that.

    There's nothing worse to me than what was once a global level threat who gets thwacked to death in three hits because developers have raised the aggregate power level of the player base with the constant raid treadmill power boosts to the point that content from a year is completely obsolete.
  9. Again, like the Rikti, the ones that are psi-resistant are not the minions. The thing the causes the massive slowdown isn't psi-resistance in a faction, it's psi-resistance in minions, which you see a lot more of.

    (Of course all of this is from the standpoint of a solo defender, so I tend to see a lot more minions than lieutenants and a lot more of both than bosses.)
  10. While I don't necessarily disagree with this, it should probably go over into the suggestions forum.
  11. Sister_Twelve

    Female Minions

    I think there was some sort of concern about there being so many teenage boys among the player population having the equivalent of female slaves.

    I'm not particularly worried about it. Adolescent behavior is going to be adolescent behavior no matter what. But that was the concent I read when this came up awhile back.
  12. Cycling Clear Mind through an 8 man group is probably one of the most annoying things to do in this game and is the primary reason any invitation for my empath to join a team gets turned down. If there were a way to reduce that annoyance, I might consider teaming with her again.

    As it stands, just... no.
  13. DE aren't particularly resistant to it, but they slow you down in other ways of course. Malta are rough because any psi character you have isn't going to have any Mez protection per se, which means that you're probably going to be spending quite a bit of time stunlocked.

    For a psi defender solo, your best bets are probably CoT, Knives (if you have hover), Carnies, and Rikti. The Rikti do have some mobs that are psi resistant, but they are typically the lieutenants or bosses, which means you aren't having to beat through a wall with every mob
  14. Is it just me or are a lot of the factions designed during the early CoH days just exceptionally psi-unfriendly?

    I ask this because I soloed all of the RWZ arcs with my emp/psi defender with no problems at all. I also soloed the Midnighter stuff and the Cimerora stuff also with minimal issues. And then I went back to try to solo some of the earlier arcs, like those containing Nemesis and the Praetorians and it seems like every faction is heavily psi-resistant.

    Her psi-lance does about 195 to a white con minion. It seems like every minion I run across in this material drop the psi damage down to 95-98. Basically, for a melee character, this is more or less like every minion you run across being made of steel. It's not like, you know, she is in immediate danger of death. It basically means a mission that could be finished in about 15-20 minutes takes like 45 minutes to an hour.

    So my question is basically... why??

    It wasn't like /psi defenders were generating tremendous damage anyway. And if I recall, before power prolif, the /psi defender and one of the controller AT's were the only two that were generating this damage type anyway. So what was the thinking behind this?

    To stop the damage output of the illusion controller?
  15. Congratulations, Arctic Princess.

    This is an excellent piece of work.
  16. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Bubbawheat View Post
    This may seem like it's just a review thread, but I'd like to see a little discussion in here too:

    How many Challenge arcs did you play? Which ones were your personal favorites? Did you prefer one challenge over the other? Is there any from the first challenge that I missed and should check out?
    I played through about fifteen of the twenty-six that were listed in Dark Respite's thread with varying levels of interaction with the authors. With authors I did not know, I simply left a brief message. With authors I know very well or at least better, I offered more in-depth critiques or offered additional playthroughs.

    Overall, I think the general quality of the arcs for the second challenge was higher than the general quality of the arcs for the first challenge. There were some in the mix that were not quite as strong, of course, as there are in any cross-section of competition entries, but I think that this particular guideline was probably a bit more forgiving than the first one.

    Writing a story where the hero must do something evil tends to leads to a lot of stories about heroes doing evil things, with the only real judgment on the audience member's part being whether the 'greater good' in question is worth the hero abandoning his or her morals for.

    Writing a story about a character that loses his or her powers is q different sort of animal. The first sort of assumes that the hero doing evil will be the major focus of the plotline, while the second might simply be a characteristic of the contact or it might be pivotal to the plot. Overall, it led to a wider variety of types of stories, which I thing made the second competition a little bit more fun than the first, (even with the restrictively low level range.)

    Not sure if this is the type of discussion you were interested in or whether you wanted to talk about specific arcs, but that was my impression of the entire challenge.
  17. The Golden Age Secret of the Paragon Society Arc#344596 by @Wrong Number.


    This arc is a very good homage to the golden age of comics. The contact is one of the most memorable that you will encounter. The arc is written in such a way as to make the way that comic books were written back then not seem stupid or cliched, (which, if you read other books that supposedly hearken back to that period, is harder to do than it seems), and it ties what happened in the past to a compelling story occurring in the present.

    The author deserves a Developer's Choice.
  18. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
    When you join a PuG people have expectations about you based on your powersets. If you aren't going to fulfill those expectations then you should really warn the team ahead of time to avoid conflict. If the team is cool with it then no problem but if not it's better for everyone to find out ahead of time.
    Or just respond with the entirely reasonable, "no thanks," if someone decides they want you on his team and then thinks he has the right to 'vet your build' prior to deigning to allow you to join the team that... uh... he asked you to join.
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Catwhoorg View Post
    The Weakened Hami (in the Lady Grey) has been soloed.
    The full version, not so much. (outside of the above bug)
    You did that when you solo'd the Lady Gray TF a couple months after it came out, didn't you, Cat?
  20. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper View Post
    I believe Peace on Earth was the one who soloed Lusca. I never heard of him soloing Hamidon. The only case of soloing Hamidon I've heard of was a Warshade on Test exposing a serious bug which allowed him to kill Hami in two or three shots. I think he got Bug Hunter for it
    If the Devouring Earth monsters down on Monster Island count as giant monters, they are soloable. I slowly beat one down with my brute on Virtue one day. It takes a long, long time and is extremely boring to do. I haven't, however, tried to do the same with any of the giant monsters that have names.
  21. Congrats, PW!

    Very deserved with all of the cool arcs you've produced.
  22. I have an arc that in the space of 2 comments got called 'the best arc I've ever played in the game' and 'the worst arc I've seen in MA.'
  23. Quote:
    What do you people think?
    Defenders have an inherent?
  24. Sister_Twelve

    Fury for Tanks

    I did some personal testing on the notion that tank were so much slower than brutes running solo a couple of years ago when the Rikti issue came out. I had a SS/Inv brute and an Inv/SS tank.

    Running the Dark Watcher arc with the brute took me 44 minute, if I recall correctly.

    Running it with the Tank took me around 52 minutes.

    So yes, they are slower, I guess, but not so slow that it really mattered much.

    Now, of course, my settings are different than other people's. At the time, I ran both characters on the second highest setting, which is the last one that would not allow AVs to spawn while running solo.

    And these ATs, while mirrors of each other, are probably not reflective of mirrors all across the tank/brute spectrum. If I understand correctly, SS is considered to be a pretty high damage archetype for a tank.

    And I will say that there were some levels, around 15-25, where playing the tanker solo was deathly frustrating in comparison to playing the brute solo. But once the 30's hit, the tanker and the brute were roughly equivalent, imo, soloing experiences.
  25. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha View Post
    Depends what sets and what level you got to
    I was playing Thugs/Poison because everyone told me that was the set that was desirable for the LRSF. And I got to level 12 or so before VEATs came out and I moved on to leveling my widow.