UberGuy

Oh, I did figure. I meant it as a reinforcement of my wanting the digest format back.

Now, that's weird. What version of Firefox? I'm on 3.6.24, and the skins both seem fine for me.

>.>

Yes, that character is heavily IO'd, but with +recharge, not high +defense. (She's got around 22% ranged defense and negligable melee defense). I intentionally endeavored to offset those benefits somewhat by choosing to fight him at +2.

Everything doesn't solo as well as Dark Miasma. It, Rad and (I think) Time are very solo friendly. I don't claim no one will ever have trouble soloing arbitrary foes with wholly arbitrary powersets, but if you know you're playing something that is meant to be challenging, a poor soloist is going to have extra trouble taking it on.

I don't disagree that mez is a problem for squishies soloing. I've never liked it, and I take always Clarion on my Incarnated squishies who have no alternatives.

You should note that they have amended that. They went to pains to say that you have to be active. I quote...


Now, don't get me wrong. I am an active anti-fan of the participation system, and I am not making excuses for it. However, it's pretty clear there's more that needs to be going on here than just being on a league that completes the trial.

Were you active? I can't say, but I easily give you the benefit of a doubt on this in particular. The issue we often seem to run into with this thing is that it's metrics for "activity" don't align well with what players consider being "active" for some powersets or even whole ATs.

Yellow emphasis is mine.

It's possible Statesman and/or Recluse may die, someone (us?) gets their power, and then they are resurrected.

I'm not sure this fits well into any of the other information we have, such as the lack of marketing information changes, but I thought it was interesting in the context of the announced death.

Strawman. What was being objected to was the explicit link between "I'd like my expected reward" and "otherwise I'll be leaving".

I think all of us would probably prefer the reward to work as expected. Not all of us will be leaving over it. I'm supposing there must be some element of "last straw" involved that's not explicitly stated in this thread.

On topic, I believe that whoever said the Rare/VR reward was not implemented is talking out of their posterior orifice. Since that change was posted in the notes, I have only gotten Rare or VR rewards from it, as have everyone I have direct interactions with who has played the trial. However, I have seen people who I don't know directly report getting Uncommon or Common rewards in the trial. In most cases, those people were inactive for large parts of the trial, or they crashed and missed AV fights. This, combined with the redname posts trying to clarify that the Rare/VR are for "active participants" in the trial suggest strongly that getting anything less than a Rare is due to the "participation system". In essence, not getting a Rare may be the modified UGT's version of giving you 10 Threads.

I'd be interested to know if the folks who have been getting non-Rare rewards are playing MMs or support characters who don't attack enemies much. I have seen at least one poster reporting not getting Rares on their MM.

Look, I'm not going to rant about this trial in general. I don't think it's very hard outside the abrupt need for leaguemates to restrict what powers they use and what targets they attack, which is virtually non-existent in the rest of the game and therefore hard to get people to do.

I am going to rant about this change, though. Here you deprive people of a quite sensible tactic of using their powers to move these foes out of the immediate vicinity of the spawns of civilians they're in, which can allow safe use of AoE attacks on the Telepathists if the character happens to have a weak single-target attack chain.

There's a fine line in trying to get people to use a specific tactic and railroading them to do it one way. This smacks of railroading, and not many people enjoy the sense of being railroaded. Let me be clear. I do not believe this is going to make the trial significantly harder. I just feel it makes it more annoying. "You have these tactical options, but now they don't work by fiat." I learned not to do that to player in my tabletop gaming sessions when I was about eighteen, and have come to intensely dislike when it is done by others. Consider me an anti-fan of this change.

Be that as it may, it happens to be valid in this case. The evolution we're talking about is at least 100 years old.

I saw a few people melting pretty rapidly on the one I ran with last night. I am speculating that the patches are treated as if summoned by the AV, which would make them deal damage to unshifted 50s as a +6 critter. It's about the only way I can explain the difference in how comparatively easy my own characters in the trials, all of whom are +3 (and one of whom was a Defender, so not high HP) have had it in terms of time to escape the patches.

Even better!

Heh. Don't sweat it. It actually did occur to me that all you were doing was trying to explain it, but I was also confused how that could be due to the existing reference it turned out you had missed.

You did notice that's actually referenced by the quotes in my post, right? I'm well aware (and was before I went looking for them). My point in posting the dictionary references is to illustrate that the Latin use is a nonsensical thing to lambaste someone over when a trip to any modern dictionary reveals the Latin use of the term is, if not obsolete, only one of (basically) two accepted uses. Edit: And doing a little more digging, it looks like the newer use of the term has been with us since the 19th century.

It looks to me like an example of pedantic argument gone wrong.

I can't tell. Are you serious?

Edit: Just in case...

Dictionary.com
verb (used with object), -mat·ed, -mat·ing. 1. to destroy a great number or proportion of: The population was decimated by a plague.
2. to select by lot and kill every tenth person of.
3. Obsolete . to take a tenth of or from.

Merriam-Webster
1 : to select by lot and kill every tenth man of
2 : to exact a tax of 10 percent from <poor as a decimated Cavalier — John Dryden>
3 a : to reduce drastically especially in number <cholera decimated the population>
3b : to cause great destruction or harm to <firebombs decimated the city> <an industry decimated by recession>

The Free (online) Dictionary
dec·i·mate (ds-mt)tr.v. dec·i·mat·ed, dec·i·mat·ing, dec·i·mates
1. To destroy or kill a large part of (a group).
2. Usage Problem
a. To inflict great destruction or damage on: The fawns decimated my rose bushes.
b. To reduce markedly in amount: a profligate heir who decimated his trust fund.
3. To select by lot and kill one in every ten of.

This isn't just something "that's in the dictionary". I'd say that the alternates are well accepted, and the OP's use is frequently denoted as obsolete. Contrast that with "ain't", which is usually denoted as informal or slang.

Well, for one thing, I think that assertion is too broad a generalization. I personally feel that release quality has been improving for quite a long time. I agree wholeheartedly that issue 21.5 was a massive step backwards in that trend. I take that as a whole picture, and think that long slow progress with a single big step backwards is not really correctly described as "not the standard of quality I'm used to".

Again, hyperbole would be taking that and saying how any of it shows, for example, that CoH is less important than Aeon. Hyperbole is saying how the ongoing forum problem shows they don't care about their customers.

Let's say that the NCSoft web team doesn't have a test environment for forum infrastructure where they can test their integration with game log-in. Maybe they never communicated that clearly to the management types. Or maybe the management types knew and signed off on it because they believed they couldn't justify the infrastructure costs for a test environment for the forums. Or maybe there is a test environment, but someone on the forum admin side of things is a lummox who's only been able to hide that fact until something went seriously wrong.

None of those things would mean that NCSoft doesn't care about us as customers. It means choices were made, possibly with the best of intentions, that are now biting us and them in the posterior. They would not be good excuses - they are only explanations. We don't care if those are the explanations, we just want it made better. We want NCSoft to show us we matter by fixing the issues, whatever the root cause. But now that the problems are glaring at us in the light of day, that does not mean that they're simple or quick to fix.

If no maintenance to fix this forum stuff was being scheduled at all, that could be a sign NCSoft doesn't care about us. It was scheduled once and bumped. Then it was actually attempted and failed. They are trying to fix this stuff. It doesn't make me happy that it's not being fixed, but the apparent effort does count for something.

I explained them in my post, in the parts you did not quote. You've been making statements that imply heavily that the inability to fix this shows NCSoft doesn't care about you as a customer. You've said how this makes it clear that CoH isn't a priority at NCSoft. Those appear to me, as TrueMetal said, childish over-extensions of the problem at hand. They're possible, but not reasonable conclusions to draw from the fact that the game's forums have been screwed up for so bloody ling.

I, and pretty much everyone I've seen, agree that there's a problem at hand which it's fair to complain about, extensively. Apparently there's either no valid test environment for the forums software/infrastructure, or the people responsible don't know how to use that valid environment to test properly. Or both. Neither is cool, and either is wildly compounded by the fact that it apparently takes weeks or months to get problems that hit the live system fixed. Something in all of that badly needs to change for the better. Everything is not fine. But that doesn't lead logically to some of the other things you've stated in your posts on this.

No one sensible has said that. What people have said to you is the way you complain is hyperbolic, which is wonderfully recursive here, because this post of yours is actually hyperbolic in how it describes most people's reactions to your posts on this subject.

Complaining about the broken forums, and how long they're broken makes perfect sense to me. Translating that into all sorts of nonsense about how it proves NCSoft doesn't care about its customers, how CoH second fiddle to other NCSoft games, and all sorts of things that don't follow from sensible indignation over the forums being screwed up is what's hyperbolic.

This situation is bad. It's really not acceptable. You can say that, even repeatedly, and still not run down paths that will get other posters to point out that you're being unreasonable. Being pissed about this is reasonable. Telling NCSoft you're pissed about it is reasonable. Acting out how pissed you are on the forums is not.

I don't understand why that's difficult to grasp.

This is already prevalent in the end-game. Not just in the form of unresistible damge like Keyes, but in the damage types Incarnate-centric foes deal. For example, War Works deal heavily in ranged Energy damage, and 9CU-line robots and IDF Heavy Commanders deal the thoroughly odd combo of Toxic and Energy damage at range. Seers also of course deal in Psi damage, and also wield terrorize effects, which a lot of melee powersets lack protection from.

They also deal significant defense and DR debuffs, which are auto-hit.

It's worth noting that such foes are not totally new - the IDF bear a lot of similarity in terms of damage they deal to Arachnos, with less Fire damage and more Energy. Now, especially since Arachnos predates IOs, they seem to have been designed to bypass common powerset protections more than IOs, per se. However, I think those same design happen to also serve well against IO'd characters, and I think it's telling that some of the abilities underwent such a direct translation into "end game" critters.