Smurch

Blue side that might make some kind of in game sense at least. I only play Red Side however.

And as a PLAYER, I'd much rather be allowed to fail (and learn to play better) than have someone adjust my play experience at their whim.

So, I'm on my Axe WP brute a few months ago in St Martial, testing "how many/tough can I handle at once?" so I can figure out where to put the new difficulty sliders at before I start missioning, and I start targeting progressively larger groups. I'm on a tough group of 10 freaks, and I've whittled them down to only 4 left. It's a close fight, I'm low on INSPs, and I'm on the edge of my seat with the excitement of "will I win or lose?"...

..and some drive by buffer comes by and removes the chance of losing from the scenario for me. Thanks for that.

If I'm standing around drinking a cup of coffee and someone drops some change into my cup, they are calling me a bum (and ruining my coffee) even if they're trying to be nice.

How about the devs not make any missions that can ONLY be completed in Open World?

Because they don't know how to read minds, they shouldn't assume I either want or need their "help".

None of which means I have to like it and cannot express my opinion about it.

Let me see if I can fully wrap my head around the complete and sheer idiocy of the statement you just uttered...

If I don't want "EASY MODE", but prefer to decide on my own level of challenge (and enjoy being challenged) and can successfully kill mobs WITHOUT your oh so magnificiently essential buffs that NO ONE can live without, all on my own, I should go to WoW.

Are you saying CoX is too easy for me and WoW would be more challenging?

I have a macro on all my characters that sends "please don't do that" to local. I use it whenever someone buffs me at random.

You don't learn to ride a bike without falling off once in a while. I'm much happier falling down and learning to play all by myself (I'm a big boy!) rather than having someone run up and slap the training wheels on for me because they feel messianic.

However, 99% of the drive-by buffs I get are NOT when I am struggling against a foe on the street. They're usually when

1.) I'm standing at the Black Market or at the arbiter (yay! I can buy stuff/pick powers faster! Thanks!)
2.) I'm in Pocket D (WTF?)
3.) I'm just getting ready to START a fight on the street (and now have to wait for the stupid buff to wear off so I can start)

It's #3 that bothers me most, the others are just plain stupid.

Yes, that'd be a very nice QoL feature.

They assume I both want and need their "help", when often times I don't. They can tell when I do want it; I'll join a team with them. Otherwise, I don't want it, I don't need it, and I think it's terribly rude and a touch arrogant to assume that I want/need YOUR help to do whatever it is I'm doing.

I'm doing fine on my own, thanks. I want to learn to master my character by learning what I can and cannot do at each level. That means your "help" is actually in my way and makes me waste my game time while I wait for it to wear off so I can go back to what I was doing.

This is the great thing about how they're setting up Praetoria. It's really a world with alot of shades of grey, which is what Going Rogue is all about.

/em marks date on calendar.

True, but irrelevant.

I'd rather have sucky RPers around than angry "I hate the world" elitists. I log in to get away from that sort of thing.

My wife had some guy send her tells, unsolicited, describing how he was forcing himself on her character on top of the bar. She put him on ignore and left, but it was pretty graphic.

I don't dislike ERP because I'm immature or uptight. I dislike it because I think ERP is immature and a even bit uptight itself. It screams of frustrated sexuality, of unvented urges coming out in an odd way, through the medium of a Video Game. It seems sophmoric.

I can't imagine anything more BORING as a sexual experience than watching someone else type dirty words into a computer poorly. I can do much much better than that in real life.

I saw a character bio on Virtue once that said "I no longer ERP as I have found someone in real life". That about says it all. Whenever I see someone ERPing, I think "maybe they, too, should go find someone in real life."

However, as long as people do it in private with people they know to be actual real adults and everyone's happy, I don't really care.

Power Set Restriction: Unnecessary.
Rikti: Magus: Well Established.
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Rikti_Magus

Right, like I said, it's not so bad anymore. Spend enough time in Pocket D, however, and it'll happen eventually.

The funny thing is, my wife plays often scantilly clad female characters as well. About half believe she's a girl and about half don't. She's been accused of being a guy more than once. So that could have something to do with it.

Outside Pocket D, she's only been hit on a couple of times in the past few years. When CoV launched in 2006? It was non-stop.

Which is silly! Thus the circle is complete.

chilly and silly in chile with chili

When we first started playing the game in 2006, we rolled initially on Virtue. However, after the first day my wife was so tired of being hit on constantly that we moved over to protector instead. We've been back on virtue for the past few years when most everyone we knew on Protector left the game and it doesn't happen nearly as often as it did then, but it still does happen. She had one guy actually send her tells RPing how he.. ahem... took her character by force on the bar in pocket D in very explicit details. She left the area right away and put him on ignore, but that sort of thing is the kind of thing that really makes people think they don't want to be around the kind of people who ERP.

Then there ARE people who like to make sure others "overhear" their ERP. Virtual Exhibitionists or something, I don't know. It's inappropriate no matter their motive, however.

I play on virtue and I've witnessed text fighting exactly once. And yep, it was in Pocket D.

The "regulars" in Pocket D are there to play an entirely different game than the rest of us. They seem to have little interest in doing much of anything than staying in Pocket D to RP out playing kissy face and text fighting over who gets to play kissy face with whom.

Fortunately, they're pretty confined to Pocket D, usually even just to Blue Side.

The ERPers and the text fighters and the like are all the lunatic fringe of Virtue. They're not representative of the server population as a whole. You need to actively seek that sort of thing out to find it there. I've no interest in that sort of silliness, and consequently I don't see very much of it at all. It's not nearly as common as you might think.

MOST people on Virtue are fairly Plain Vanilla players. Some are RPers and some are not, but aside from the occasional IC comment in a team, it's very difficult to tell them apart in the course of normal game play.

All that stuff happens pretty much just in Pocket D and is, in fact, very easy to ignore. You won't run into any of that stuff on virtue out in the main game, at least not often. Maybe once in a blue moon. But teaming and PVE and the like, I've never seen that kind of thing happen.

I'd do it. Do you play on Virtue, red-side? If so, ping me some time and say "hey want to get some PVP exploration badges?" and if I'm free, I'll join your team, no problem. I bet some other people would be willing to do that too. I'll bring in someone I don't have the badges on yet either, and we'll merrily go grab 'em. Maybe we can do some missions in the zone too, as those missions are short and great XP!

And how are we putting ourselves "at risk" by getting PVP exploration badges? There's the least risk in PVP of anything in the game: getting defeated anywhere else will net you XP debt, where PVP does not. It's less risky, in real terms of actual cost, than PVE. The great risk of PVP is being temporarily inconvenienced for a few seconds. That's not that bad.

They aren't unwarranted, however. If you're in the zone, you've implicitly consented to being attacked. It warns you no fewer than three times that if you don't want to be attacked by other players that you should not enter the zone. If you're in the zone, you're open game, and you agreed to that.

I don't see what's wrong with asking someone to not attack you, but if they attack you anyways, you have no cause to be upset about it.

No, hanging out in one tier with ubergear in WAR doesn't guarantee you top of the heap. I never got any "leet" gear in WAR, I just used the standard RVR gear from the vendors in the keeps and I was able to more than hold my own against other players.

In WAR, tactics are important, often much more important than levels or gear. Killhappy players who ignore tactics in RVR scenarios or keep battles may win the fight but lose the war. The PVP is objective based: take the keep, defend the keep, capture the flag, get the Thing, kill the dude who has the Thing, ect. Those objectives meant that smart players would almost always beat tougher opponents, even if they took heavier casualties.

While it wasn't a perfect system, it was fun much more often than not, and success in the game had alot more to do with tactics and understanding your role than it did with how cool your gear is or "optomized" your build is. It didn't really rely on those things as necessities, and you could do very well with the "standard" gear available from RVR vendors or Public Quests. Plus the large-scale nature of the RVR combat meant that even if you aren't the best PVPer, with a decent team who all do their jobs, you have a very good chance of winning a fight, or at least making a very good showing of yourself.

The unstoppable forces in WAR were pre-made teams in scenarios. Usually a guild would field an full scenario team who knew how to work together already, where everyone knew the battle plan and what tactics they would use, where the "random" team on the other end had the challenge of trying to herd cats to get people pointed in the right direction. It was discipline and teamwork that would smash the opposition, not uberbuilds or leet gear, and that's how it should be.

But there's a difference when it comes to subtlety.

Think of a salesman who appears to just be there to help, who seems like they're just trying to assist you, but are of course guiding you towards a sale.

Then think of the stereotypical car salesman with the loud tie who breaks out in a fake grin and salivates the second you walk in the door.

They're doing the same job. You just don't mind one of them quite so much where the other one is vaguely insulting.