Talen Lee

Oh yeah, that's why I had the review thread.

Maybe I should start it up again.

You'd be surprised the number of people who don't like turning off damage auras or avoiding using AoEs.

I'd be even more impressed to see who could stand basically living in that animation for that long.

Mind is also very cheap to permadom (it has a lot of powers that can hold cheap 6.25% recharge bonus IO sets), and has two very serviceable low-level blasts in it that happen to also be control powers early on.

Yeah. Plus, our developers have a very strong philosophical stance against that kind of thing. Gates tend to be time sinks, rather than skill divisions.

When AE was first announced, I had a very negative view of the very idea when it was mentioned to me by my friends. My reasioning at the time, which has borne out, is that most people aren't very good at writing. I hang on Virtue, which draws a large body of people to it who are, supposedly, roleplayers and creative. What I'd learned in a year of playing there was that most people aren't good at creative storytelling.

So when AE finally hit, I hadn't once considered its exploitability. Or even that it was going to be used for challenge mechanics.

Now, I'm too much of a pluralist to act like it's wrong for people to do this. It's fun for them, so hey, let them do it. But the AE will never provide for me the kind of things I want it to provide in its current state. It's not going to be like a periodical fiction publisher, where you submit and editors review and then the best gets published. It's much more like fanfiction.net or livejournal, where everything that can be seen is seen.

I've never been a big advocate for fan-created content like this. When I dorked around with games like Dark Reign and Quake, I was happy to see the difficulties involved in making something decent, because it meant that the community's control mechanisms pushed the best stuff to the top of the pile. There were huge FTP sites full of crap, sure, but there were far fewer, and far more interesting, small sites full of tested and quality-controlled project.

(Now, to be fair, that's what this forum is for. My inability or dissatisfaction with this forum is not actually a sign of the success or failure of the system at large.)

Where was I going with this?

You can't. That's the worst part of it. Hence 'wish.'

The only real opportunity I have is for a much, much better search engine.

Speaking in a general sense, I agree with you, Rigel, that this sort of suggestion isn't useful. It's not the kind of thing that will help players in general. But in this specific instance, given the OP's post, I feel it probably best to present simple, binary options like that that will drive the player away from the AE.

AE is one of those things that I, in my elitist way, wish was somehow gated. Not necessarily 'you can't play AE unless you're one of the chosen,' but I would very much wish there was some way to ensure you had to be good at using the tools before your material could get put up in the AE.

Failing that, search engine overhauls, etc.

I wouldn't disagree that Spines is a widget set. It's got a lot of odd stuff in it; stuff that is commonplace amongst scrappers at large, but Spines concentrates them heavily in the one place.

Claws has a widget and two arguable widgets; Shockwave serves its job as an AOE damage source (however mild or great), and Focus and Follow-Up differ from their normal compatriot powers, with heavy-hitting, level 18 unlocks like most set's PBAOE, or Build-Up. But in both cases, one is an expansion - Focus is just a longer range attack, and it does serve just fine in melee (and given its short range, it's hard to make it serve more dutifully as something else), and Follow-Up is an attack in an attack set that gives you a damage buff.

I won't argue that they're widgets - they are odd, different, powers that behave away from the norm for the type of sets they're in. Widget sets are necessary - they're full of interesting tools that draw problem-solver players. Fire Blast is the benchmark for efficiency, but that doesn't make it by any means the most important set.

Devices is a widget set. Electric Blast's a widget set. Spines... probably also a widget set, you can make a case for it, certainly. it's very easy to avoid actually meleeing with Spines. Widgets are the kind of thing that you can only have in a game with uniform options, with sets and striations like we have. And they're wonderful, enjoyable things, things that we as players can pick up and examine from new angles, and we get our own beautiful excursion into exploration and discovery.