SuperOz

Lightfoot,

I don't know how to multi-quote, so I'm just going to answer your points (if you can call them that), but you're really determined to either just have an argument for its' own sake or whatever. You can reply if you want, but more than a few of your statements are deliberately inflammatory. I won't be responding to those.

I concede the point on reboots, but I guarantee you from my perspective I've walked into stores over the last few years and I've lost track over the multiple changes of Batmen, Supermen and Flashes to the point where I never felt I could even remotely get on board as a casual reader. From Identity Crisis to Infinite Crisis to Final Crisis, DC didn't seem like they could stop having big multi-title crossover events to the point I frankly lost interest even as a semi-casual reader.

Regarding Zero Hour or Flashpoint, you're putting words in my mouth by inference. If I had a point to make about Flashpoint, I would've made it. I didn't read Flashpoint, therefore I don't have an opinion to offer on it. Done.

What's your point about Donna Troy? Are you just arguing that in your opinion 'Who is Donna Troy?' wasn't well-recieved, it's what...justification for removing her entirely? I don't know what to say there.

Post-Crisis on Infinite Earths: Again, you're arguing your memory of what you percieve as a disorganised reconstruction of DC continuity. It's established fact that Dick Giordano, Marv Wolfman, George Perez and many of the main writers on books of the time agreed on key events of the new continuity and moved forward from that point. The fact that Johns and Wolfman (to his detriment) wrote such an incredibly half-baked and barely credible response in Infinite Crisis (amounting to what...Alexander Luthor of Earth-3 is just another Luthor and is power-hungry? Doesn't that characterisation contradict the very nature of Earth-3 characters in that they were opposites, Ultraman being evil Superman and so on?) amounts to very thin justifications for later actions. If you can make Superboy-Prime the ultimate fanboy whiner with godlike powers, then you can justify not dealing with any continuity you choose.

And yes, that is a personal opinion, Lightfoot.

1938: Are you just being facetious? I'm saying DC has a rich history to draw upon. Period. You want to play some semantic game that I obviously don't know the rules of here.

....then you go on basically insulting me by saying I have a crystal ball and I don't know anything whilst saying they're being incredibly brave and foresighted, whilst also having no idea whether anything they're doing is of justifiable quality.

Nothing is permanent in comics: you know this, I know this. They do these things because the readership is largely cyclical and long-term collectors are a minority of their market.

I've responded to your points as politely as I feel I can to you, but instead of having a discussion, you're reactionary and almost spoiling for a fight.

You're welcome to rant or argue or make whatever point you'd care to if you choose to reply. But if I wanted a sparring partner, I'd go box in a gym. You've clearly chosen to be argumentative with more people than just myself in this thread, and you're welcome to continue to do so, just not with me.


S.

Lightfoot,

I think you're really missing the point here. Reboots are now commonplace within comics, and they've happened for DC at least three times now inside of ten years as opposed to the one singular reboot with the original Crisis after fifty years of continuity that was deservingly needed to be overhauled.

Yes, those stories you mentioned are still there to be read, but any good comic book history needs just that, history. If the continuity DC wishes to employ is cherry-picked from various eras of the last twenty or thirty years, then you by extension invalidate other eras of the same continuity. The examples given in another thread where they go over ten titles and point out very valid questions to be asked are just that, very valid.

For example, retconning the New Teen Titans run not only calls aspects of Dick Grayson's origin as Nightwing into question, but also the formation of the Titans to begin with by removing Donna Troy, as it seems they're planning to do.

The new continuity is haphazard at best; when the original Crisis took place, there was a unified approach to a unified DC Universe, with mutually agreed origins across the titles to ensure that the story held together. That unfortunately fell apart and 'necessitated' the woeful Parallax storyline.

And this is really the crux; DC has a very rich tapestry and history to draw upon going back to 1938. The Justice League really doesn't have a context without a Justice Society that came before it.

And Durakken's absolutely right in that the writers are just avoiding anything they don't want to write themselves; good writers either deconstruct or build upon what writers have done before them. One can't advocate a reboot of a title just because a creative team leaves a book, but DC is doing this wholesale and invalidating entire storylines, some of which have only taken place in the last two years, let alone the last twenty.

And Geoff Johns is responsible for not only Final Crisis, but the Superboy-Prime storyline, which he himself has come out and said was a mistake. Turning the character into a venting mouthpiece and a chariacture of 'rabid' old-school fans alienated readers, not just those who he aimed his self-conscious diatribes at. If the Modern Age was functioning remotely well, then we wouldn't have the figures of nearly one-third of their titles selling so badly they're almost costing the company a loss to make than they are any sort of profit.

Geoff Johns is not the wunderkind of DC Comics that many would wish to portray him as; I spoke to at least one DC artist three years ago and was told point-blank that many at DC didn't care for the lack of understanding he had of their characters. Yes, this is an anecdotal story without any proof, but I form some of my opinion on that basis.

In short, you can't pick and choose your continuity 'just because', and that is really what DC is doing. That's not clever editorial control, it's going to cause them even more headaches in the medium term as they discover that they're creating contradictions from the get-go in their new continuity, and ultimately, it won't stick. Every single time something like this has been tried, casual readers will ask 'Why doesn't Superman look like Superman?' or 'Isn't Bruce Wayne Batman? Who's this guy in the armor?' and they go back to the status quo. And the status quo is necessary for one word: continuity.


S.

I just needed to get some feedback on this one; the headphones were literally okay (if in need of turning the volume up a bit) until yesterday. I've been a bit concerned when the cabling to the headset gets stiff, which seems to be a sign of them about to start failing, but I'm now having an issue where I can seem to hear some bass and lower tone voices kind of okay, but mid- to high-range sounds don't seem to register at all. A good instance was watching a piece of game footage with people commentating over the top of it. I could hear the gameplay (explosions, gunfire) okay, but not the voices of the people talking.

I don't have an additional headset to try it on, though my iPod earbuds seemed to register the sounds perfectly fine. Is my headset indeed dying? I'm also getting echoey sounds with music.


S.

Uhmm....that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm just simply wondering what other ways I can put these new power levels and abilities to use beyond Trials. I'm not doom-crying, I'm not complaining about my strength levels, Stone Daemon.

I do apologise if I wasn't being clear about this.



S.

Hi everyone.

I was giving this some thought the other day. For some people, the concept of an Incarnate for their character(s) suits them down to the ground, and for others it doesn't work at all.

My problem is that once I've become an Incarnate and 'ascended' for want of a better term, what's next for me? Yes, there's the Trials, but let's say for argument's sake I've done what's out there so far. And if I'm being honest, I'm not a big Trials fan. Never really has grabbed me, never will, I don't think.

Am I then being in a position of being permanently overpowered in comparison to everything else in the game? I have at least one character where the Incarnate powers as they stand are really good for them, but I just don't want to cakewalk everything also.

There's TF's and exemplaring, but are there or will there be other avenues for me to explore these abilities? I wouldn't like to think they're just good for one area of the game only....

Anyways, what do you think?



S.

I have to walk away from my support totally of DC Comics if they're undoing the very run that brought me into comics as a teenager in New Teen Titans. The Wolfman/Perez run was intelligent, mature, enthralling comics. Perez blossomed as both an artist and a writer on this book. Wolfman wrote probably some of the best stories of his entire career.

And then they want to undo the original Crisis? Undo the sacrifice of Barry Allen and Kara Zor-El?

Way to spit in my face, DC Comics. Way to divest yourself of history that you used to be proud of.


S.

In your pants?

/Geoff Peterson

....like you didn't see that coming.



S.

Dumpleberry,

Headsets!

I still play with the music on as well, and I think it's a reasonable assumption that we'd get dynamic music; remember the missions in Praetoria? A lot of their instances and even open world encounters had encounter music, so presumably they can bring this into the new tutorial, if it's using the same technology and design that went into Going Rogue.


S.

So, quick question....is it worth seeing in 3D at all? Sounds like there's not a lot being done with it there, and it's the difference between a 10 and a 20 buck ticket for me here in Australia.


S.

They did do Superman/Aliens a while back, y'know. I have to love Supes; he recognises they might be intelligent and rather than go 'ick! you're scary mean!' he approaches them in a friendly manner....I've always wondered about a story where the Aliens were evolved just enough to at least talk to....


S.

Hello again.

I thought I should come back to this thread that I started and address a few things as best I can.

First of all, to Paladin and the other person who posted there, I apologise completely. What I was describing when I wrote my original post, was as much I suppose my stream of thought at the time as much as it was articulating things.

Yes, I did think those things about people, and yes, I did believe as it was happening and in my recollection that people were being unkind and greedy and terrible. And as I said in my original post, that is a form of negative thinking that's associated with anxiety and stress. Those thoughts are created in my mind to make me feel bad about me, and reality is just an inconvenience to that rationalising of feeling. You have to understand that for a large portion of my life that I was unaware of this was happening, and it's only since I've been in therapy that this changed.

And I am going to lapse. I can't always predict the triggers, I can't always control the outcome. Learning to let go of control is something I have to work on and that was part of why I did the Trial. I had a negative attitude about it, and I wanted to not only challenge that negative thinking, but also be open-minded to the experience.

Paladin, the simple story is that the conditions of that Trial, the concern about my friend and also being tired were a perfect concoction of triggers that were ripe to happen. And is often the case for people who suffer anxiety, the trigger can be something they're completely unaware of.

You're right; I was negative going in and expressing concerns, and those were warning signs and I didn't recognise them going in. Had I been more alert, or given a bit more thought to the situation, I wouldn't have gone in at all, or I would've coped a lot better. I didn't declare that I had anxiety for the very same reasons I hadn't posted about them on here til now. I still feel embarrassed, it's still personal and really, I'd had a resistance built up from doing the BAF stuff. I can't know what my limits are unless I test them, and while that might sound like I've just dived in the deep end, what would the alternative be? It's important for me to gradually expand those stress and anxiety tolerances.

As for the troll nature of things, what you're describing is known as catastrophisation. So when I start getting anxiety, the sense that it's becoming catastrophic grows and grows. So something that started out just as confusion and nervousness blew out for me, and I had to work at having to stop in place and gather myself again. If I hadn't then I wouldn't even be typing this, I'd be spending the next day or so sleeping off the stress I put my body under by going through it. I'm still a bit tired now, to be honest.

I was feeling (or so I thought) in a decent place to give this a try, but it's clear I wasn't. It's really that simple. To put that in perspective, I attended a social event today for four hours, ran some friends through an AE arc I'm working on for two, and then did a BAF straight into a Lambda after that without pause. My head was together, I was relaxed, I knew the BAF wasn't going to stress me and I made a distinct point of asking lots of questions to the Lambda group (who were gracious enough to talk to me both before and after the Trial had ended for long periods) so that there were no longer any surprises for me with it. And of course, no surprises is key to someone like myself. Control, control control. I must learn control. /yoda

I don't hold you or anyone else in that Trial at fault. I seriously don't. But that is the difference between someone who is emotionally shutting off and thnking catastrophically and someone who has rested and come down from that point of anxiety. It is a literal difference in thinking and I can fully understand why you see that disparity. I hope what I've said here helps clear things up.

Pramantiss, I apologise to you as well. Unreservedly.

A lot of what I wrote yesterday was from the heart and it just needed to come out how it came out. I freely admit I wasn't thinking too clearly once I got started and it really just had to keep going. If I wasn't going to be honest about how I felt and how I was thinking, I wasn't going to be able to look at the truth of those words and whether were in fact true.

And a lot of that is emotion. What Samuel_Tow said is true; those feelings I had/have about Trials is about that, Trials. I've always had a prejudice against raiding in every game I've played in that had it and it's driven me away from more than a few now.

And you do kind of lash out at people when that desire to just emotionally withdraw happens; it's like a raw wound that people are trying to poke with a stick. I couldn't articulate or express fully what was happening to me and the best thing to do was to just do what I did, which was to shut off for a while until I came back to myself. And that point, I was on autopilot and the thought of quitting didn't even enter my head. I was all about finding a target and hitting it. There was absolutely no finesse at all I was doing. None.

Now the question would be is if I wanted to go back and do a Keyes Island run again, and I'll answer honestly 'no', and that holds only for now, the present.

That experience is a negative one. And it's stinging enough that I'll want to avoid it until I have a resistance built up again.

Do I think Trials for some bring out greed, a desire to rush through and complete everything? Do I think for some people it's fun, they find it interesting and they do their best to help others? Yes. Yes to both.

I hope that answers the quieries and clears up where I am a bit.



S.

I really had to think long and hard about even making this post. I'll say up front I'm going to do my best not to say anything disparaging about this Trial or any Trial experience.

I didn't want to write this to generate sympathy for myself as I want none, but more to articulate my experience which may be the same as others or as a point of commonality. Additionally, I'm not writing this to take potshots at the people I did my first Keyes trial with, nor will I divulge names. And finally, I'm writing this for me, because putting it into words at least for me is a good thing.

I've written on these forums that I'm not really a raider, and part of it is my mentality, for want of a better word. Here's the thing; when I ask people why they raid or why they strive to be a particular level of excellence in the game, they either say it's for the challenge or to win.

And as odd as it sounds, I'm a gamer who...doesn't want to win. It's not because I don't enjoy challenging my own personal boundaries, but for as long as I can remember, I've found that working with people as a group or team or whatever is more satisfying to me than competing against them. I like the feeling of helping someone out and acheiving a goal as a group rather than individually. I like the feeling of shared purpose much more than I do 'winning' (I'm not even really sure what that means). And I don't feel I have anything to prove by having the best powers/enhancements/badges/whatever. To me, I take immense satisfaction in the stories I write, the characters I craft and the creativity I feel when I make videos. If that's winning, then I like 'winning' at that.

I should also say that I have raided in fantasy games before. I've also PvPed, crafted and badge hunted, all out of a sense to be fair-minded to the activity even if I should only do it once and say 'this isn't for me'.

Okay, that preface is out of the road. So last night, with an hour or so before I was due to visit a sick friend, I thought in the interests of being fair-minded and open to an experience, I would try a Keyes Trial. A very nice person invited me to a group, and an experienced raider who I'd met before sent me tells about what would happen, though it felt very abstract to hear it without seeing what was meant. I was open and honest and said I didn't take trials very seriously; I have to feel engaged and immersed in a story, as silly as that may sound for a raid. Anti-Matter's speech was kind of...well...unbelievable. Wouldn't this whole scenario that he was potentially going to blow up Praetoria be like...well..not a raid? It seemed too important to be something that was just repeatable ad infinitum. But I put that aside.

There were a few minutes to prepare and I listened to the best of my ability to what was being said, though I hoped that someone would run with me and basically point me in the right direction. Unfortunately, when the raid started, everyone just....charged off. I like to get my bearings, get an understanding of the situation, and people were halfway up ramps, fighting robots and I was on my own, feeling bewildered and confused. Someone said to target them, but people were moving around so much, all I got was the name and a direction that was basically 'ahead'.

Then I got hit by the first damage pulse, but didn't know where to find a healer.


I have to pause here and explain something. I'm not stupid or naive or a noob. What I am is a person who has for a few years now dealt with stress and anxiety due to some very bad events. What this means is someone like me needs a controlled situation, calm thinking and a lack of surprises. If anyone suffers from this, they know what I'll mean when I say that the feeling of anxiety is a feeling of loss of control, an overwhelming sensation of things being 'too much'. It sounds silly to say about a game, but the game is an escape from those things and a game is a manageable situation, or so I thought. I've never talked about this condition on this forum, and I had to think seriously about saying so.

So. Eventually I was able to find other people on the first tower only to be told that they'd moved to the second tower. People were shouting all over the place, things were spawning on top of me and killing me and....that was all she wrote. I felt tears welling up in my eyes, my hands began to shake to the point I couldn't type and the most I could do because my overwhelming instinct was to just 'stay there, stay RIGHT THERE', I refused a rez.

A game shouldn't be stressful. It shouldn't be causing anxiety. And yet it was and I felt upset and horribly embarrassed, telling people as best I could what was going on and handing over whatever the heck the temporary powers were to someone.

I knew I just needed a few minutes to calm down and just do what I could to offer my services in the limited way I could. So I did that, hitting NPC's where I could (I literally must have attacked five NPC's in the thirty or fourty minutes I was online) and did my best to stay with the pack.

I have to say right now the text that supposedly guides you is useless and would be better as a voiceover or something. It spawned under my team window and so of course I missed everything.

Somewhere along the lines some warehouses or something were destroyed, people moved onto the third tower and somehow this set up a showdown with Anti-Matter in a yard or something.

As is the case when you're overwhelmed with anxiety, the reflex reaction is to shut off emotionally to protect yourself and so I just stopped caring about what I did in the Trial from that point on. So then of course I missed the advice about protective circles and unresistable freeze attacks and super-damaging attacks.

I must've hit Anti-Matter maybe...twice, I suppose. I'd never felt less useful or worthless in a group situation ever. His attacks felt...well, like someone was cheating to win, somehow.

But in the end, Anti-Matter was beaten, everyone said good job and promptly logged off, bar a few kind souls who were at least aware enough to talk to me and ask if I was okay. To them I say thank you very much.

But emotionally I felt hurt. Hurt that everyone just seemed motivated by perfection or 'winning' or whatever to the point that noone bar one person sought me out and said 'follow me, I'll help you'. I can't even imagine not doing that for someone. It's just in my nature to be a helper. I mean, it's just a silly game, right? Shouldn't I help someone if they ask?

I came away angry, tearful, swearing if I did that Trial again that I would only ever do it with people I could trust, and protesting in my mind that I wish the Trials would just go away. That any sense of fun and open-mindedness I had put me in a situation I wanted to avoid.

One person in this forum said that they're the right kind of person for this raid; I am the person they are not. I'm sure people who may read this post may say 'oh, you won't get it til the third or fourth try' and my response is why would I do that to myself more than once? People may also post and say that I'm whining about some sense of entitlement and that I should learn to play or that it's not really that hard and I should be thankful it's not as bad as some.

Why should I be thankful for any experience that's a negative reinforcement and something I work continually against with a positive one?

I honestly came away from that Trial thinking that all it did was promote greed, unhealthy competition and if anything, a lack of any sense of teamwork or camraderie. I stress that this is the way I thought, and I mean no disrespect to anyone on that Trial or to those who do them.

I also came away thinking that if I were to meet a Dev, I would say the same thing to them. I would say that I'm not the audience for this. I would say I would like some of the rewards you're offering, but I won't do it this way. I've tried, and I can't. I may build up a resistance to the stress of that Trial, but do I really want to have my impressions just reinforced? A strong part of me thinks that there is no other experience than that. That there are no helpful, considerate people who think more about the people than the rewards.

I accept completely that is negative thinking on my part that will find the worst in a situation and amplify it and try and turn it on myself. That is the nature of such things. I'm certain people aren't like that, else I wouldn't be a six-year veteran of this game come this month.

Anyways, I feel better for typing this, and I hope that people who do raid can see the other side of the situation and those who don't can find some commonality here as I said earlier.

I deeply apologise if I've angered anyone with this post, and if I've crossed any forum lines with what I've written, I'm okay with having it removed. I do hope sincerely a developer or a community manager like Zwillinger or Beastyle or Freitag sees this and takes a moment to acknowledge the situation.

I ask for no favors or special treatment or changes to the Incarnate system or anything else. That was never the point of this. I only ask that people read with an open mind.

Thank you.



S.

I have to second 'A Savage Man'. It's a fine story of redemption and humanity, and the final mission where you encounter him on top of the tower...very cinematic in my eyes.

I have to cite the entire Peacebringer arc. As much as it may seem it's just the heroic aliens versus the Council, there's also a profound sense of loss and hurt that comes from Sunstorm and his allies upon finding out the abominations the Nictus and Council are making of their own people. The shock reverberates through them and I felt like apologising on behalf of humanity for our lack of humanity.

I'd also cite both the Lady Grey Task Force and the Alpha Slot arc for the appearances by Honoree. There's tragedy in this story that Honoree remembers his former life and mourns it. I secretly keep hoping that there's a way to restore him....


S.

Captain Marvel (DC's version).

The cape, the top, the sash, the lightning bolt....they're all so incredibly distinctive and sums up the character's powers and at the same time has a faint sense of whimsy and fun in it, like the costume is a swashbuckler's costume mixed with a musketeer and a superhero.


S.

First of all, I'm going to publicly applaud Arcanaville, one of a handful of forum vets that I respect and whose posts I pay serious attention to, for posting in this thread.

I agree with all of his points; I don't want to see anyone miss out on content that they like doing. If you want to raid, go for it. If you want to PvP, go for that. I'm not going to begrudge anyone a playstyle because this is a game that's built a reputation for supporting multiple playstyles a lot better than a lot of other games. Raiding isn't my thing, but I'm not going to say to anyone they shouldn't do it.

Beyond that, I agree with Arcanaville. The merit system and rewards for the Incarnate system are over the line. They're not proportional to the task (something I've said in every one of my posts) and I think it'll provide a very bad contradictory point when we get an online store where almost exactly the same kind of content will be available either for free or for purchase.

SPYDER, you can't have it both ways. You know it and I know it. You say 'tough' when saying we should go out and earn these rewards...so by your own logic, is it cheating to have exactly the same rewards be available by virtue of being a veteran or spending money without doing a specific task to get them?

I am directing this squarely at you so you can't mistake it or try and turn it around by saying I'm a crybaby when I say I am fine with earning my rewards. I am fine with doing content if there's a reward at it. Take a screenshot, it'll last longer.

What I am saying, and what everyone else who supports Arcanaville or AmazingMOO is that the rewards are not justifiable and proportional to the effort made to get them. Most of these rewards are either given to you for free elsewhere, earned by playing time, or available to buy online.

Tell me what it is that makes these rewards different from the others to justify the effort, and I'll concede a point to you happily. Currently you're just bashing people because presumably you like the system and you feel it's some sort of entitlement issue. Presumably then if the grind was like the fantasy MMO's you talked about, you wouldn't be saying it's so fair? And that is the issue, fairness and proportion. I put it to you to answer that. I'll do any content if the reward's worth the effort...do you think emotes, auras and costume changes are? Given how else you get them?



S.

I come to a definition of 'Incarnate' in a couple of different ways. I was fortunate in the first circumstance because I designed a character that was effectively already an underpowered deity that took human form.

Burnum was named after an Australian Aboriginal warrior of the Dreamtime and later fleshed out to be the Rainbow Serpent of the same time inhabiting a human avatar, giving him his powers. As time passed, not only did I change the look of the character, but I started bringing the deity's personality to the fore more often until the point where I 'killed off' the human host and had the host's spirit joined with a Kheldian to make my first Peacebringer.

By the time the Alpha Slot and the notion of Incarnates rolled around, I was more than ready to embrace the character fully as what he was. He was the living embodiment, the Incarnate representation of the character.

So that's one definition. To me, an Incarnate embodies something, be it a concept or a religion or something esoteric. Very much like how the Silver Surfer isn't the origin of the power, but very much embodies what it is.

The other definition of Incarnate to me is self-achievement. More accurately, I'd use the word Paragon because you're reaching for a pinnacle of ability or power or whatever it is that the character is striving for. Some Incarnate abilities I see as direct extensions of other powers, such as Pyronic Judgement being an extension of a Fire power or even Laser Beam Eyes.

Other abilities I see as extensions of non-power related abilities. I have one character that is meant to be a low-level powered character, yet he has Cryonic Judgement and two Lore pets. I get around this and say 'great, he's always been a tinkerer (I use the 30-day jetpack regularly and consider it 'his') and now he's invented both a freeze ray and cobbled together two Clockwork he calls his own'.

I don't think an Incarnate is a jack of all trades in abilities or powers, but instead takes what they do have to a new place or higher level. Actually, the character Neo from the Matrix I think is an Incarnate, now that I think about it. Most people in his world can learn kung fu, and jump long distances, but he goes beyond those limitations and does things other people say are either impossible or done only by certain individuals. What seems superhuman or even godlike to others is just the next plane of ability.

I hope this helps!



S.

The simple argument, and I agree with the OP, is this: the day you lock content and rewards behind any system and provide no alternatives, you will inevitably be doing a disservice to those players who cannot or will not do that content.

To say that the content is optional is a fallacy; the rewards as they stand quite clearly stand behind an artificial barrier of content for reward, and what I feel is a disproportional reward at that. The notion that the carrot on this stick is worth at most estimates two or three months of outright grinding is an utter fallacy also.

In the case of PvP, I have always accepted the notion that gear or abilities or purple enhancements, call them what you will, is an acceptable level of content for reward because the rewards visibly and demonstratively are of a benefit to that player doing that content.

The same cannot be said of cosmetic rewards, the most expensive of which is, to paraphrase Positron, to show other people how much effort and great you are at Trials.

This is expressly going against some of the core precepts of this game which have had at its heart an equality of experience regardless of playstyle, build or frequency. There are already posts in this thread and others almost being derogatory and saying effectively 'well, buzz off then. We don't want you in our part of the game.' That's a segregation and elitism that shouldn't exist in any game, let alone this one. I sincerely hope that players and developers alike give some serious thought to the equality of game experience, because it's precisely the sort of thing that if left unchecked will fracture a playerbase.

And I frankly don't want to see a necessity for a forum just dedicated to Trials, because that would just underscore how divisive it could become.


S.

I've only really got two comments about this Trial and Trials generally which I iterated some time ago.

Firstly, I'll be glad when Positron gets raiding out of his system. He's said for a while now raiding is something he wanted to do in the game and he got his way. That being said, I feel raiding is somewhat antithetical to a game that used as a selling point no level cap increases, no gear, and everyone being on a level playing field. It's great that raiding players are getting to raid, but tying story content and the notion of advancing as an Incarnate strictly to the raid mechanic is a wrong move in my opinion and I'll continue to be vocal about saying so.

Secondly, with the move to a free to play hybrid model and therefore a reasonable expectation of an online store, gating cosmetics such as costume pieces and emotes behind a raiding system is wrong, plain and simple. To me it sends a contradictory message that the same items are being held in different aspects of the game for apparently no good reason.

Let me clarify that statement; if raiding is in the game and people enjoy doing it, that's great. But have the reward be proportional to the activity. Emotes, costume changes, auras and so on are cosmetics to the game, period. The Incarnate abilities are concrete, improvable and measurable benchmarks of time spent in that activity. I don't agree with those abilities being solely tied to raiding, but that's a seperate discussion.

What I am saying is that raid rewards should be raid-specific. Temporary powers with raid benefits; more suits like the Ascension Armor, which at least visually and in terms of points spent equals elite gear. I personally think that which is being gained in Trials will become available in the store anyways simply by a measure of demand. Interest can't be manufactured in the Trials and Trial playing is as much a limited demographic of players as PvP is. It's not a mainstream gaming activity, as much as crafting and badging are the same.

I've personally only unlocked the abilities on the BAF because I was bored and have done a total of two Lambda Trials because...it simply doesn't interest me. I should have more alternatives to gain, as I stated before, cosmetic rewards.

I will break my rule here and say a third thing; please please don't preach the Trials as 'learn to play' arguments or 'the game's been so easy, isn't it great that it's harder and challenging?' City of Heroes has never positioned itself in the mold of other MMO's in that regard. If the game was so easy beforehand, why did these people stay and play? If it wasn't for the qualities that distinguished itself from the other games and had things that they did not, they would not play. I won't begrudge people who like raiding their activity, but please don't sell it as the playstyle that everyone wants to do. A lot of us are here because we don't like the hardcore style and the level cap and the gear. Please bear that in mind.


S.

Very nice work as always, Michelle.


S.

Happy Birthday!

Hope the weekend isn't too stressful and you're getting a chance to properly enjoy the day....may the next year be profitable, enjoyable and fulfilling in all the ways you hope for.


S.

A great actor and a wonderfully long career....I didn't know he lost one of his eyes at the age of three...I always thought he just had a lazy eye. But it never ever hindered his ability, that much I can say.

He'll be missed...but probably harassing the angels in that wonderfully laconic way of his.


S.

Weird. I was the player who actually came up with the question to Second Measure because I'd been following the chat about revamping old zones (which is really what Galaxy City is all about, btw) and wondered just what difficulties there were in doing this stuff.

I fully acknowledge and sympathise with the devs for the reasons both Second Measure and the OP listed, which is primarily the age of the game. Whilst I also acknowledge that in terms of overall performance, this might push up the game specs a touch (anything that adds to a game's complexity in terms of graphics is going to make a hit on performance however small), it's the best way to go with a game this old.

I'd like to see this approach continue across the board; people may complain that legacy costume pieces may disappear for example, but it may quite simply be the case that they have to because of the same compatability issues.

Bases are tricky, given how much work some have put into them, but I think if compatability isn't too much of an issue, I'd want to see replacements come into existence where possible, such as more furniture pieces, stairs and so on. I think base builders would appreciate having actual pieces to work with as much as they've invented their own.


S.