Venture
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Posts
2357 -
Joined
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#3. It gives noobs an incentive to clue up, since if they don't they'll hit a point where they start losing XP faster than they gain it.
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Quote:It's necessary for his powers. He doesn't generate enough antimatter on his own to do anything useful. Or not, depending on who's writing and the phase of the moon.
Just still begs the question of why Posi still lugs around that bulky armor? -
Oh good, Praetorian zone invasions, so we can farm the mobs we farm in the trial farms free-range style.
Exactly how happy should I be? -
Quote:My main character could do that easily. Of course, when everyone is super....
Weirdly, the best hope for a fair and civil society may be to empower everyone
More seriously, it would be a pretty bad idea. Magnifying the pettiness and short-sightedness of the average person would not end well. -
Quote:Best explanation for Praetoria yet.Originally Posted by Jophiel
Everyone is a Rikti in disguise with "Praetoria" actually being made of plywood and located in the middle of the Sahara.
"You can't go exploring beyond the sonic barriers to keep out the Hamidon"? You guys FELL for that?? -
Quote:Power Loyalists are "loyal" to their own status, and the apparatus of the State that maintains it. They are loyal to Tyrant as it is convenient for them to be so. Responsibility Loyalists are loyal to the State and the fiction that the State is necessary to preserve order and safety.
Sometimes people seem to forget that Loyalists are loyal to Praetoria, not necessarily to its leader.
"Loyal to Praetoria" is meaningless. -
Quote:"In the end, the world didn't need a super man...just a brave one." -- C. KentOriginally Posted by Moderator 05
Agreed. In a world populated with extraordinary beings whose decisions affect the very universe, everyday people are often no more than hapless bystanders.
"Captain America was wrong. Power doesn't corrupt, it just magnifies what's already there." -- TigraQuote:That being said, the morality of heroes and villains is always up in the air. Would they be callous or empathic? Would their morality change as they received more power? -
If I'm looking for a game with no story, Zuma Blitz is waaaaay better than any MMO.
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Quote:Praetoria causes more problems than it solves by making players generate characters that don't actually belong to the world they're going to be played in. It also creates the impression that the devs are treating it as a "do-over" of sorts, that they feel the old Paragon/Rogue Isles zones are so yucky that even the devs don't want to deal with them any more.
The way Praetoria is set up, game-play and lore-wise, gives way more flexibility and development openings than a revamp of the blue or red side lower levels ever could.
Really, it's a darling that should have been killed. And buried first. -
Quote:Which was a bad design decision. This is where we came in.
Yeah, there is. They are differentiating the end game from the 1-50. -
Quote:No, it would be the right answer. "Development time" is why there are only two Incarnate trials. There was no reason a priori to wed Incarnate progression so firmly to those two trials. The Alpha slot didn't require grinding Apex/Tin Man over and over; there was no reason to make the next slots require grinding the trials.
That'd be the wrong answer. The correct answer would be "limitations of software development." -
Quote:Having sat on the other side of the screen for several decades, I am well aware that you need to leave yourself room to work with for the future. However, (as usual) TVTropes has summed up the issue nicely in the entry for Kudzu Plot. They mention the "Claremont Coefficient" as a measure; the number of plot threads introduced divided by the number followed up on. If that ratio is over 1 in most or all episodes (Issues for us), you have a problem. I haven't actually sat down and worked out City's CC but I'm sure it's well over 1.
I really do think people "Don't get" MMORPG design: The devs are, I suspect DELIBERATELY leaving plotlines unfinished so they'll have something to work with later on. They're not going to resolve anything.
See also The Chris Carter Effect.
This is also entirely separate from the general quality of the writing, which has been going downhill in these parts for rather a long time. -
Quote:Codswallop. The dialog in the Sutter TF makes it clear that the action is part of the invasion portrayed in the Apex TF.
Lower-level content is always assumed to chronologically precede higher-level content. If you're doing Sutter, Apex hasn't happened yet. -
What ruins my "immersion" much more than the lack of lasting damage is the fact that the Sutter TF puts comparatively low-level players against the same opposition as the Incarnate content, only now all of a sudden level 40 non-Incarnates have no problem fighting it.
Handwaves notwithstanding, all this does is further lampshade how unimpressive the tasks given to Incarnate characters are. -
Quote:Sorry, that's just fanwank. "The Coming Storm" is just this background macguffin that even the developers don't have a handle on. Given what we've gotten about it so far it's obviously less significant than "the plan" the Cylons were supposed to have in Battlestar Galactica, which turned out to be (in hindsight) "nuke the colonies and kill everyone".
The Coming Storm is the reason the Well has chosen Tyrant as its champion - it's the reason its "woken up" now.
As for the Sutter TF I found it to be a complete Michael Bay production: $250 million spent on scenery and FX, $0.89 on the script. -
Thanks for playing the arc, and for the review.
We are, however, going to disagree on this for a few reasons. I don't ever include allied NPCs as "difficulty compensators". I only use them when I feel the story requires them. (I briefly considered having the player find Bluehawk's body in act III but decided it played better if she lived.) If a player finds a mission too difficult he can get far better help than an NPC by asking another player.
That brings us to the AV/EB issue. As I said above I cleared this mission with a KM/SR Scrapper using only SOs, Incarnate powers deactivated and on elevated difficulty. (Prior versions were cleared with a Peacebringer, a Defender and a Corruptor, the latter two way below the arc's level.) As far as I'm concerned that makes the arc "not too hard", though if other people with melee characters don't get similar results I would reconsider. I do not consider non-melee ATs to be solo material, and that applies double to Controllers and Dominators. Those ATs are heavily dependent upon status effect powers, meaning that if I were to scale arcs to suit them I could never use anything with PToD's or status protection and would probably want to shy away from mere EB's as well. I do have arcs that fit that criteria but again that was because the stories involved did not demand heavy-duty opposition. Those arcs, as a result, are little more than speed bumps for melee ATs. Conversely, there is nothing so difficult in "Blowback" that it couldn't be duoed, and I have a hard time believing that a twosome would be "bored" by the rest of the arc.
The arc itself has the usual system warnings as to what it contains, and the specific missions that contain EBs or AVs have the usual bring-friends warnings in their briefings. It is up to the player, based on his own experience with his own character(s), to decide if he needs help. Trying to limit the spectrum of mission difficulty to "weakest solo builds" and "full teams" only is not productive. -
Hit PoliceWoman's AE contact tree, or the review threads, and look for decent arcs.
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"A slight case of serious brain damage"...is that like "60% of the time it works every time"?
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Quote:It was exactly the point you were making. See --->
Of course, not even close to the point I was making but thanks for the comment.
...right there, did it again.Quote:But making absurd claims like this endgame system is "hardcore" (not saying you said that, using that as an example) when it's by far the most casual friendly raiding I've ever seen is just beyond the pale.
In three months we'll probably get nothing substantive other than another two horribly grindy trials. Probably with a-n-o-t-h-e-r set of new currencies with punitive conversion rates, since by then your lot will have umpteen thousands of the old merits stockpiled.Quote:Let me ask you this. In three months when all this dies down and the game's still here and you all have been proven wrong like so many before you (see e.g. Issue 9, Issue 19), what then? -
Quote:The shortcomings of this system are not justified by the even worse shortcomings of other systems.
In a real hardcore system, the hardcore raiders would be complaining to high heaven about how "carebear" and "easymode" this system is. -
Quote:You would as soon as they did.
Orchestrating a dynamic and engaging end-mission encounter is something we sorely lack the tools to do right now, and I don't see the harm in rectifying that.
Moot point. The kind of thing people are asking for here is outside the scope of this system. It would require a fairly complex scripting system and that's just not going to happen. -
The inadvertent Tyrant/Domi pairing has been officially retconned out, so maybe it's time to let it go.
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Quote:All of this is only true for the Rikti on Primal. I expect that if the Restructuralists suddenly had full access to their homeworld, the recent converts would find their stock suddenly crashed.
Its the Converted Lost who tell us that they are being treated as second class citizens by the Traditionalists. And one of the Converted Lost Restructurists has risen to the rank of Ambassador status (Kuhr'Rekt in Grandville.) And in Angus McQueen's arc one of the Lost you meet has later risen to command status in the Rikti after undergoing full conversion, so it does seem like the Restructurists are doing more than just using them as troops. (Besides, the Rikti Magus would HAVE to be Converted Lost as there is no magic left on Rikti Earth, right?) -
Quote:That's debatable....
But this is creative writing.
And the point is that you can do that without stepping on the players' toes. Many, many people have done it in AE.Quote:You're telling more than events, you're captivating the reader. Not saying the in-game stuff all does this or that you need to dictate what the reader is feeling all the time to ever emote, but something needs to be said to make one care about what you're reading. -
Quote:I used to sell those books when I ran a game store, and you're right, they weren't even close to bad writing. It was TERRIBLE writing.
It was hardly bad writing. Not even close.