TyrantMikey

But you'll note that Mod8 doesn't appear to be unhappy about the "full blown" rumor mill.

/em recordplot

/signed

This idea has a *lot* of merit.

As I think about it, one problem it might solve is the reluctance of players to purchase those recipes with levels not evenly divisible by 5. Instead, you end up with a much smaller list of recipes on the market, and they're ALL equally valuable, since the crafter determines the recipe's level at the time of crafting.

This makes it much easier to get the sets you want and to offload recipes you don't want. Further, as others have noted, if the fee for crafting is a sliding scale based on how many levels of difference there are between your current level and the crafting level, it provides an additional influence sink for the devs.

All in all, a good idea. But, definitely open the full range of levels to 10-50.

The Information Control Gods are not pleased. You will be eliminated. Grab your ankles, and prepare to meet your Doooooooom™.

Let's compromise, shall we?

A Viking Zone with Velociraptors, Pirates and Ninjas, set on a lost planetary shard in outer space!! The Zone Monster is, quite naturally, either a Dragon or one bad-*** pissed off T-Rex who lost his teddy bear and is pretty darned sure you have it.

Zone events include Velociraptor Swarms, Dragon Raids, Pirate Pillagings, and Ninja Whoopin's.

And thrown in a Big Red Ball while you're at it. After all, that Viking Dragon has to be guarding something, right?

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This might be a good time to lay off the Red Bull.

teh 1n73rn37 15 4 pR0n - Freaks

(From Avenue Q)

I've played some games that had much smarter AI (Aion and Tabula Rasa leap to mind). There are pros and cons, as everyone's pointing out. However, here are some ways to make the AI smarter:

• Cover and concealment rules. Tabula Rasa nailed this. You got a defense bonus depending on how much of your body was covered by an object between you and the individual(s) targeting you. Say there's a half-height crate between me and Ghost Widow. 50% of my body is covered, which makes it harder to hit me (I'm a smaller target). Enemies could be taught to take advantage of cover and concealment, especially when ranged enemies are engaged.
• Higher Ground Rules. Individual on higher ground (or at higher altitude) gets an attack bonus. This helps to compensate for angles when cover and concealment rules wouldn't normally apply.
• Dispersion Intelligence. All enemies have been in Paragon or the Isles long enough to know what a controller is and how it works. Some of them are smart enough to resist the urge to stay tightly grouped.
• Minions remain canon fodder. Let's face it: that's what they are. However, they become smart enough to have basic dispersion rules and use cover and concealment.
• Enemy Morale. Take out the boss/lieutenant and the enemy suffers a morale penalty. But as long as that boss/lieutenant remains, the minions will rally to his cause with vigor.
• Smarter Lieutenants. Lieutenants don't directly engage in combat until they have to. Further, at any time a lieutenant can "take ownership" of a minion or two and command him/her like a mastermind. Thus, if the lieutenant orders the minions to take out the empath, the minions converge on the empath while the lieutenant remains behind to continue bolstering morale.
• Situational Awareness. Enemies become aware of the makeup of your team after watching you fight for a while. Eventually, it becomes clear to them who your healer, controller, and damage dealers are. Support personnel must be eliminated once the lieutenant has achieved situational awareness (a window of opportunity during which the team can eliminate him). Once that window of opportunity is gone, however, the lietuenants (or bosses)will order the minions to start targeting the support crew so that they can more efficiently eliminate the damage dealers.
• Call for Backup. In addition to patrols, give the Lieutenant/Boss a 1/100 chance of calling for backup when it looks like defeat is imminent. If he does so, a "patrol" spawn charges in to assist. This patrol spawn would generate separately from the patrol spawns generated for the map.

These are just a few ideas. Naturally, they'd make for a radically different gameplay experience that wouldn't appeal to everyone. I could foresee people being afraid to roll support toons if Situational Awareness were implemented; on the other hand, they might be MORE in demand if teams wanted to lock down the lieutenants who had the ability to provide situational awareness and provide direction and morale boosters to the minions.

If these types of "improvements" are put into place, you would necessarily have to give people the option to play without them. Even then, how would you do that on a team?

Go with the Mac Pack.

Trust me. The Mission Teleporter is awesomesauce. It works across zones, which is *wicked* nice to have when you get that mission in IP or somewhere else equally remote (Boomtown, Dark Astoria, etc.).

Only drawback: recharge time.

First, let me be clear and state that this is not a SUGGESTION.

I've been thinking about the way that powersets are built in this game. And it occurs to me that if I settle on a given powerset, virtually every other character with those powersets will have exactly the same powers once they hit 50. Yes, you can take power pools, epic pools, and you can diversify your effectiveness with IOs and even standard slotting. But, let's face it: a fire/fire blaster still has the same primary and secondary powers as every other fire/fire blaster in the game.

I wonder what this game would have been like had the powersets been more like power trees. Again, I'm not suggesting that it should be. But it would be nice to see blasters, scrappers, controllers, defenders, and so on with more diversity in their builds than simply the way they're slotted. Further, I kind of think that this game is really well suited to that type of a power structure.

We're *big* on customization in this game. It just seems to me that this is a big gaping hole in the veneer of customizability.

I was wondering what you guys thought. (Again, not a suggestion, just an opportunity to discuss.)

I don't think the idea is bad, per se; however, it would add to lag when you entered highly populated areas, as the client would have to retrieve the display settings for each hero/villain in the area and render that font appropriately.

I'm not generally in favor of anything that increases lag spikes. Can you imagine what it would be like during a Rikti Invasion? A Zombie Apocalypse?

Survey done.

But you might want to revise your initial estimate of completion. It says you'll only need to set aside 10 minutes. It was easily a half hour, if not more.