Venture

No.

That quote gets abused way too often. It only means you should feel free to change your opinions to fit new information, not that there's something wrong with being consistent.

Yeah, I get that, but Maelstrom has been slapped around by everyone and his kid sister for months now. No one is going to take him seriously as an Incarnate-level threat, backstory be damned.

Pics or it didn't happen.

No I can't, and neither can anyone else.

If story progression requires level progression, then eventually an intended story addition will run into either the top end of the desired faction or factions' level range or the level cap itself. E.g. we have the current Rikti War storyline, if we want to advance that so that, say, Vanguard pushes through the portal and takes the fight to the Rikti homeworld we can't do it because there is nowhere for it to go. The current storyline takes place at the level cap so we've got no level progression left to use. Either the level cap has to go up to make room -- which is wagging the dog and causes more problems than it solves -- or we just cram it in there and to hell with whether or not it makes sense or how badly it breaks the existing material. Which is what the devs have been doing, bringing us to:

What we are getting feels inconsistent and bad to you because it IS inconsistent and bad. The devs have been claiming to adhere to one paradigm (story progression equals level progression) but they've been violating it at every turn for another because they have to. They can't do what they want to because it's impossible.

I'll get to the rest later.

RPG worlds do not and can not run on the same principles as commercial comic books -- especially when said principles don't work all that well for the comic books, either.

Without explicit evidence (e.g. the characters have the same codename or real name) or Word of God, any such conclusion is unjustifiable.

This means you either waste travel time grovelling over the zone to change difficulty, reacquiring the mission so the difficulty change actually takes, returning to the mission and then having to reset difficulty again since you don't know (until it's too late) whether or not the next mission is either a snoozefest on base difficulty or a deathtrap on anything else (and, likely, a snoozefest on base difficulty).

If difficulty adjustment is supposed to compensate for build capability, i.e. it is something you are supposed to set once and leave alone, then every mission's difficulty needs to be within some acceptable delta of a base value. If you're supposed to change it for every map then it's got to be a menu option.

This statement makes so little sense as to not require further refutation.

It isn't more challenging at the default level. This is the point. It is practically impossible for the devs to kill a player on a standard mission at base difficulty without making an overt attempt to do so. I.e. they could drop fifty mobs on your head for clicking a glowie, but that would be kind of obvious. The game is not merely easy at base difficulty, but stupidly and mind-numbingly so. You can't fix the problem by throwing more mobs at the player or even making them tougher, again not without resorting to outright killer-GM tactics (which doesn't solve the problem either). Fixing this requires changing fundamental game systems the devs don't have the will to change.

I doubt it.

Level 20-25 is not neonatal. Characters get SO-level enhancements at 22, which is where the game breaks. I raise difficulty on almost all my characters in the low single digits, and so do most of the people I've spoken to about it. People running on base difficulty are either playing very weak builds, or are incompetent players, and in either case are fossils.

It's not difficult, it's tedious. I never fought anything that was seriously likely to impede my forward progress. It just wasn't any fun dealing with it.

It can't. It isn't doing it now, precisely because it can't.

You can cure the Lost at level 10, but the mission that formally drops the reveal doesn't hit until the 25-30 bracket. Crey isn't formally outed as corrupt until 45-50 unless you run tips in which case you know at level 20. (Villains get it at level 15 through regular missions.) The Praetorian invasion is all over the place. So is "the coming storm". The 5th/Council nonsense is a Gordian Knot. And on, and on....

If content set B is added after content set A in real time, then content set B must take place after content set A in game time as well. In most cases this means A must be removed to make way for B, and there is nothing wrong with that. Dynamic worlds require change, not mere agglutinization.

Where did that come from?

No, we should drive a stake through its heart and fill its mouth with garlic.

The storyline needs to progress in real time.

Not obvious. Lots of people leave them off so they can blow through missions faster (esp. if they're running Tips on lots of characters for AMs.)

BTW, Eva, "bosses off" is the default. You have to explicitly turn them on.

Do not assume. Difficulty adjustment was pitched as a way of keeping challenge in the game for more powerful builds. Some, myself among them, argue this means anything that forces players to lower difficulty is too hard.

This is another reason why people argue that anything that requires lowering difficutly is too hard. The game is profoundly uninteresting at default difficulty. You can take a Man Build through FW on default difficulty. Turning the game down that low removes any value in the gameplay. The only reasons to do it are either, as alluded above, to blow through missions as quickly as possible to obtain mission-based rewards or to experience the story. FW offers no noteworthy rewards and its story is not worth experiencing at all.

Not sure if this is sarcasm, but if it isn't, I don't see why you would draw that conclusion.

• I did not find it particularly difficult on that character. Scrappers in general are powerhouses and SRs at that bracket have good defense against anything that isn't unpositioned or AE. They also have Confuse protection, which matters because one of the mutant Seer powers is an escalating Confuse. (I had to look up what it did because it was doing nothing to me.) Melees with different protective sets might not have it so easy and I expect squishies to have issues thanks to everything and its dog throwing status effects. Not to mention....
• ambush ambush ambush ambush MUSHROOM MUSHROOM ambush ambush ambush....
• Mobs with aggravating powers that made many fights feel like kicking dead whales down the beach.
• Too many cutscences/talkies breaking the action.
• Wretched, miserable storyline that took everything that was wrong with Praetoria and dialed it up to 11.

Just off the top of my head.

Edit: Oh, and:

No, the point is we are on the Well's path, we are being manipulated and played for saps in a stupid and obvious manner.

The idea that "level progression equals story progression" has been on life support at least since CoV, and as of the destruction of Galaxy City is now Not Merely Dead But Really And Sincerely Dead.

I've started writing a level 5-10 arc so I'll always have something worthwhile to do instead of the new crap.

...making scanner missions and tips look a whole lot more attractive than running actual missions.

From who? Feedback here is mixed at best.

Lots of them. The devs don't appear to have any finer control over ambush spawn points than the players do in AE, so there's not much they can do to prevent Rocks Fall Everyone Dies situations.

You answered your own question:

Did you have Bosses turned off too? Post-SO I would expect anyone but the mythical Pure Empathy Defender to have a fairly easy time with First Ward on base difficulty.

For the record, I played through it with a SJ/SR Scrapper in beta and more or less tore the zone a new one on +0x2+B-AV, but that's SR for you. I would never touch this zone with a live character because there is absolutely no impetus to. Primal Earth characters have less than zero reason to go to this zone. Praetorian characters might have a ghost of a reason but they've got a far better incentive to go to Primal and never look back. As MrCap says, the zone is pretty to look at, but it's got miserable gameplay and a Shoot The Shaggy Dog story line.

That should still be there, though you may need to do a Safeguard to get into the regular Contact chain.

Yes, we get that. The problem is the Incarnate storyline sucks.

I don't think we can count one easily-missed off-hand reference from three years ago as "foreshadowing" here.

Mind you, I don't really have a problem with the Rulu-Shin per se. I'm not sure where the "ninja" label comes from; 'round here these parts ninja don't dress in day-glo colors.

It isn't.

Yes, but can he write "Rulu-Shin Go Home!" in Latin?