Venture

Obviously, running the same story arc I ran last week is equivalent to running the same trial six times in a row.

Hamidon raids were the only thing that gave anything meaningful you couldn't get elsewhere (at the time), and what they gave wasn't that important, particularly after ED. The new trials are a whole different kettle of fish.

All indications are that the next issue and possibly the one after will be much the same as this one, so you're being disingenuous.

It's not half an issue. It's the focus of the issue and the start of a major change in the game's direction. The TFs are crumbs.

Hint: grinding is found in your first sentence.

Why would I waste the mental energy required to try to tie this homogenized one-size-fits-none felderkarb into any of my characters' concepts? Of course I could, but why would I want to? Incarnate abilities weren't part of the package at the start, so any explanation will be artificial. They don't require any more justification than any of the 20 or so temporary powers my 50s are usually walking around with.

Tyrant's "power base" is the Well, the Praetors and an army that's mostly made up of machines (including the Seers). The people of Praetoria are utterly irrelevant, he doesn't even need them to run the factories. Robots do that.

Half of the Resistance is useless, and the other half has to be shot.

The entire framing device of this festering pile of suck that passes for a plot is only Incarnates matter. Non-Incarnates can't even engage Tyrant's forces at this point.

Except this wasn't really an intelligence effort, it's a propaganda effort being conducted against a population whose opinions really don't matter.

The BAF is self-apologetically a poor target.

OK, try this on for size: a Vanguard task force in which the players are sent to look into some energy readings that might be due to unauthorized interdimensional travel. Their investigations uncover a group of Praetorian sympathizers -- native Primals -- aiding and abetting some of Chimera's forces in making covert snatch-and-grab raids. They've been grabbing random people off the streets as dry runs, testing Primal security. The operation is shut down as a result of the TF, but the victims have all been sent to the BAF, where they've been mindwashed and dressed up as supers (given devices to simulate powers dangerous enough to be a threat to the public but weak enough to be easily smacked down by Powers Division). Doing the TF unlocks the BAF trial for your character, which continues more or less the same except with the fake "Primal supers" instead of Resistance.

Now, this ties into the Chimera/Mom storyline, it gives us some themes to play with in the sympathizer faction, it gives Primals a reason to be engaged with the BAF (which they currently do not have, ham-bluehandedness notwithstanding) and it gives a reason why taking out the BAF is a job for a team of supers and not an air strike.

Tell me with a straight face this wouldn't have been better than what we have.

Yes, they are, and no, there isn't in any meaningful sense, and erroneous math is still erroneous.

I've done Lambda once and BAF twice (all PUG; not counting a Lambda that didn't start and one I crashed in early on) and I already think they're tedious.

Even if this is true (it isn't), five times as long for one quarter of one of two paths is not "five times as long".

It takes an amount of teamwork that could be achieved by any group of people with a mean IQ above room temperature. Yes, the trials require more attention than most of the rest of the game but they don't require the strategic acumen of Sun-Tzu either. As tactical problems go, they're really not that interesting.

The "idea" behind Civil War, according to Millar, was "a big superhero fight". So it wasn't even a good idea.

I was in two BAF runs today. The first failed in the last stage. The second succeeded probably because we had people who already had Judgement powers. I tried Lambda, but the first attempt was stillborn because the (titular) leader couldn't figure out the League UI or get organized in any way. A second try ended up with me holding the star but it was DOOOOOOMed due to being six melee and two Blasters. We went ahead to do as much as we could for threads but my client locked up at the Security Guard and then I lost net service anyway.

Part of the problem is that it's not the Giant Robot Invasion. It's a prison breakout and one military depot, neither being even remotely jobs for people with supposedly godlike powers.

Right, everyone loved Civil War.

From what I've seen in the Incarnate window, the estimated time to accomplish anything noteworthy through this approach tends towards the expected heat death of the universe.

This argument would be more compelling if not for the fact that virtually all of these are complete garbage. I think Crisis on Infinite Earths was the only one actually worth reading, which is probably because it was the only one written for a reason other than "sell comic books".

There's also the fact that games are not comics, meaning things that work in comics aren't necessarily going to work in games.

I don't have anything against raid-level encounters per se, but these arguments in their favor aren't very compelling, and the particular ones we just got appear to have been designed in a ham-handed fashion that makes my preferred character into dead weight. That last is bleeding out into the non-raid portions of the game.

And therein lies the point you are missing. You put up with training that wasn't particularly enjoyable in and of itself for the sake of gaining a desired skill.

In BAF/Lambda, in any MMO or video game, there is nothing -- n-o-t-h-i-n-g -- to be gained except the entertainment value of the activity itself. (The number of opportunities to earn tangible rewards through professional-level tournament play are few enough to be discounted, particularly in our case since that number is zero.) The in-game rewards are figuratively and literally immaterial. They are not worth anything and one day they WILL be gone when the game ends. Players who lose sight of this are heading for the dark side.