Vindicus

Ever since about 1-2 months ago I've had resubscription charges denied by my bank. I was using the same card that I have used throughout my 3+ years with CoH. In each case, I had to contact my bank, try to find someone with the grey matter to assist in my particular case, and have them wave their magic wand to get the charge to go through. To make matters worse, the last time this happened to me was a Friday evening, after the credit card department of my bank was gone for the day. Oh, and they didn't work over the weekend either. It was extremely frustrating, to be a legitimate consumer, using my own card, and not being able to spend my money. The next time I fall victim to this, I'm going to demand that any charges in the name of NCsoft be permitted to go through. It's like the ultra-paranoia of airport security has found its way into online purchasing...

P.S. And yes, I was on a monthly billing cycle until the interruptions hit. Since I had to contact the bank to straighten out my situation, I opted to buy a larger chunk of time (3 months). That way, this nonsense won't be bothering me for at least a few more months.

Ok, I went through the entire thread and didn't see a good reason why NC Soft doesn't target the sites being advertised. These sites are obviously engaged in prohibited behavior, so why can't cease and desist orders be filed against them? Selling ingame assets for money is prohibited. Buying ingame assets for money is prohibited. These friggin' websites are responsible for fascilitating both actions. There HAS to be some legal action available here...

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What temporary powers did you use? When I took down Ghost Widow it was under 2 minutes.

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Um, I'm talking hero side here. I didn't have the benefit of an 850% brute damage cap.

Well when my Invuln/SS Tanker fought Battle Maiden I only used a Shivan. I posted the end of that fight on YouTube here .

When my Fire/Axe Tanker fought Bobcat it was pretty much a Shivan and Amy the whole time. I started the fight with a nuke from Warburg, but due to the length of the fight and Bobcat's Unstoppable period, it was pretty immaterial. I posted the video for that fight here . I apologize for the video quality; I'm new at the whole video capture/compressing thing, and YouTube has a 10 minute/100 meg limitation.

And note, I didn't post those videos to try to prove how uber I am; I just wanted to try to rise to the challenge set forth by Ultimus, and see if my suboptimal tankers could meet the challenge.

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I hear lots of people going on about how the devs do not want people soloing AVs. This is true to the extent that they don't want *everyone* to be able to solo AVs without trying, but really, *look* at the damn game mechanics. Look at how difficulty levels work. Let's examine the following facts:

1) The devs know that some players solo AVs. They do. Clearly. They also know some folks like it.
2) Up until a little while ago, the devs clung to their "1 hero = 3 white minions" mantra. This was blatantly untrue before ED and still is today. Why did they cling to it? Did they just not know that someone with decent skills could handle four white minions? Or are they catering to the lowest common denominator with that statement?
3) If you set your difficulty to relentless/invincible and solo, you will get AVs. Not EBs.

Now then: Which is more likely?

1) The devs forgot that setting the "required heroes to spawn AV" counter to 1 for invincible would force people to solo them.
2) The devs want soloers to never use invincible.
3) The devs want soloers to have to change their difficulty one notch down at the end of virtually every story arc from 35 on.
4) The devs know damn well that some folks can and like to solo AVs, and know that if you factor in all the time it takes to get the temp powers and take the guy down the xp/time ratio is such that it's not a PLable thing. Therefore, they left in the option, while saying that they aren't technically supposed to be soloable to make sure they don't set people in the mindset that everyone should be able to handle it.

AVs are soloable and the devs know it. And if they change the temp powers, the AVs will still be soloable by certain builds using certain tactics and other, different temp powers.

Leave the Shivans and nukes as they are. They're a great example of "fun" farming (as opposed to riding around picking flowers for and hour to make fire resist potions) that provides a kind release from the static mission formula. Making them worthless would effectively kill this activity.

- J

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I'm going to have to agree with all of this. Back when Ultimus' thread first popped up in the Tanker forums, it was met with a lot of mixed feelings. Some said he was nerf-herding, but he insisted he just wanted to share his accomplishments with everyone (to "prove how strong I am" I believe was his motive).

Before I passed judgement on his actions/motives, I decided to try to take down an AV on two of my tankers. Both of my tankers were able to take down AV's (though they were just Battle Maiden and Bobcat, smashing/lethal specialists) with the aid of temp powers. I received 1000 prestige for my efforts both times. When you look at the time it took to acquire the temp powers, and the time it took to fight the AV, the reward didn't nearly come close to the time invested. You can easily stealth two Newspaper/Safeguard missions on Relentless/Invincible and receive the same (or greater) amount of prestige. My AV fights lasted between 10-15 minutes, so the reward Vs. time equation definitely wasn't violated.

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Well, I consider the missions the only one of those three options directly as a result of the devs, so we're on the same page in terms of that, at least.

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They designed a powers system that allowed for those massive imbalances, and they designed an XP system that one-dimensionally rewarded only ability along a specific axis: speed of defeat (and as an underlying component: direct effective damage dealing).

A better reward system and a better balanced powers system could have allowed teams that were only a damage-dealing 50 to attempt to satisfy mission objectives in non-standard ways, for which they were a 250 instead. Or to put it in more direct terms, controllers could win with control, instead of having their control be a means to an end of delivering more damage while the targets were controlled.

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You could also make a case that the player base as a whole could use better education about the powers/slotting system. Is ED even described in the manual? If a larger segment of the playerbase made more informed power/slotting decisions, perhaps you could narrow the chasm of ability. I'm just thinking out loud here...

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What it is like, is like going into Pizza Hut after enjoying their vegetarian pizza for a year, and finding that it tastes radically different, and makes you a little queasy. You then notice that they have 3 new Meatlovers pizzas, and you wonder... are they cooking the pizzas on the same pan as the Meatlovers?

They *say* they aren't, and give you other reasons for why the vegetarian pizza is different, but it's still hard to stomach. (ba-dum-tch)

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I know man! Whenever my fiance and I go to this local restaurant, I always get a Philly Cheesesteak. But sometimes, my fiance will order the big [censored] burger with grilled onions, and the disgusting taste of onions taints my sandwich (yes, I'm a freak who doesn't like onions).

Oh, and I did a quick double check to make sure I'm on topic, and as near as I can tell, I am...

Personally I think personal spaces could be stand-alone housing that could additionally be connected to an instancing door in the base. The door could be a functional item bought for minimal prestige and placed in the base to allow common access to all the members' spaces (if they set the permission to allow non-teamed members to enter without the owner present). I also think it would be better to let inf pay for the personal space, since it would need funding even when not in an SG.

Just my 2 inf and whatnot.

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I'm not saying the change is a good thing, but if we've been living with it for the past year, it certainly isn't game breaking.

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It hasn't been game-breaking because there is a certain percentage of Tankers who do take Taunt and use it in AV encounters. It IS however game-breaking to all the players who listened to the "[Gauntlet] is the minimum necessary. Taunt adds flexibility" explanation from _Castle_ and yet are now being told in their finest hour (read: AV/GM battles) they better have Taunt or they can't do their job. Some validation on this would be nice though, before we all go grabbing up our pitchforks.

But assuming this is indeed the state of things, moving Taunt over as a clickable inherent is sounding better eh?

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make taunt a clickable innate, and move gauntlet to a powerchoice in secondaries?

I'm curious if that's what you're suggesting.

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Yes, why not? I mean Brutes don't have Gauntlet, can hold as much agro as a Tanker does as easily. And according to iakona their auras still work vs the AV/Hero class of mobs.

That means Gauntlet is far less needed that Taunt. Which means it should be the inherent.

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This sounds vaguely familiar.

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Yep, that's the event I'm talking about. I can understand them changing it so that GMs are unaffected by inherent taunt, since there are potentially dozens of different targets applying the effect. However, it doesn't make sense for AVs that appear on mission maps, since there are normally only one or two players with an inherent taunt effect on any given team.

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Why bother changing it for giant monsters? They already bypass aggro control by having multiple huge AoEs. Heck, I don't recall ever seeing a single-target attack from a giant monster.

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This is a key point in addressing the comment I've heard a few times now that "it's cool, we'll be like the Controllers with the purple triangles of doom". Even if we have the AV/GM Taunted on us, there are still stray cones and AoE's that can eat a squishy up. Ever stood in the wrong spot while a Tanker held aggro on Infernal? Ever gotten baked in two seconds by Fire Breath? Yeah, I thought so.

If controllers could just stack a couple holds and permalock down an AV, it would be much less risky to the team. I don't agree with the current triangle system because it goes too far, but I understand why it is in place. They just need to phase out more often.

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We should all ask about this.

If our Inherent/Taunt Aura is not sudposed to work in PvP. If our Inherent/Taunt Aura is not sudposed to work on AVs. Then is our Inherent/Taunt Aura only sudposed to work on minions, Lts, Bosses and mabye Elite Bosses.

Truthfully I wouldn't bet on it working on Elite Bosses. Tankers are REALLY getting the shaft all round.



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This is a point I was trying to drive hom in my "End of the Taunt Debate: Tanker Improvements" thread. Our inherent ability is turned off in PvP, specifically to neuter our ability to force an opponent to face us. Now it comes out that it's neutered similarly in the case of AV's/GM's.

At some point you have to say "I'm programming too many work-arounds for this kludgy piece of code I added.", and you need to sit down and start from scratch with something better.

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Don't be silly folks. Taunt isn't required it just "adds flexibility"... Isn't that what the man said?

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It certainly will add flexibility to your teammates. Once their bones are broken, I'm sure they'll be very flexible.

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Hehe, you owe me for that setup! I'll be in Atlas Park at lunchtime to get my 1 inf.

Don't be silly folks. Taunt isn't required it just "adds flexibility"... Isn't that what the man said?

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I agree with this idea also. It would be a nice compromise since player apartments were scrapped.

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I think the solution, which has probably been mooted already, is this:

Allow personal player 'space', about the size of a single 2x2 base room. Make this accessible by clicking a door.

That door can then be linked to a real door in the game world (say, one in King's Row) or linked to a door that can be put into the base as a wall detail.

Let's say I make 'Sadako's Room' complete with mini-fridge, posters and so on. I then connect that to my SG base by adding a Personal Room Door somewhere inside the base itself. You can already add those three bathroom doors. It would be like that, except clickable. You could set your personal room door location from the 'place personal item' menu, so nobody else could place the door to your room in the Vault or something equally silly.

The clever part is that the personal room doesn't actually occupy real space in the base (so it's not on the base map) and clicking on personal doors would be disabled during base raids.

So, you could have a personal space either as part of your SGs larger base, or somewhere in the city.

There's already a precedent for clicking on a base object and being transported somewhere else (teleporters, of course) so I don't see why this couldn't be done.

But what about the implied difference in scale, and the reality breaking step of having many personal 2x2 rooms with no 'real' existence in the base? Two words - Terra Volta!

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I like it! And to address Torak's concern about affording player appartment space, you can simply use influence/infamy to fund the personal rooms. This would be doubly important since many people might opt to just have their personal space and not join an SG. It wouldn't hurt to have a checkbox in the Options menu to allow fellow SG members to enter your appartment from the clickable door in the base. The idea certainly has potential...

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It would be a nice compromise since player apartments were scrapped.

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They've been scrapped?

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From what I've read over the past few months, yes. I seem to remember the smaller starter rooms and items for bases that were recently added were a consolation for the scrapping of the player apartment feature. They are a means for smaller groups to get a functional base much sooner. Of course if I'm way off here, someone feel free to chime in.

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Just thought i'd make a comment on why I think bases arn't as popular as States might have wanted it...

It's not as...personal, as your costume. You don't own your base. Your SG leader/s do/es. Theres a kind of dissconnect between you and it. When I walk into my SG's base, it doesin't feel like it's mine. It's this extra thing.

Now, I do have a suggestion for trying to change that.

Give players there own rooms in an SG base. One they can ajust to their hearts content, ala aparments. Theres a good chance that such a thing would mess up the SG's intended design, dissrupting Raid flow, just being to large, ect. To deal with that I would make it only avalable to Members who earn enough Pre/Salvage to buy a 'Portal' type item.

Like elevators in normal missions, clicking on one sends you to a new area off the normal map. The room would only be able to house non-functioning items. Room size/number of items you could have would be based on Pre earned for the SG.

And of course only the person who MADE the room would have the ablity to edit it and enter it, with some sort of command to alow others to get in. Also the option to restrict who can make these rooms based on Rank would be a good idea.

Summary: Not enough personal investment in SG-bases. Answer? Give players their own personal rooms.

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That sounds like an elegant solution to some different player goals. Why NOT combine apartment requests with group bases to give 'em a little more personal connection? I LOVE our SuperGroup on Infinity and CONSTANTLY play my alts in SG Mode to support the group and our base, but given a choice of a room to design, it'd truly feel like HOME.

And let's face it, this is NOT without precident. Most famous super teams like the Justice League and Avengers regularly build some sort of living quarters for their members.

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I agree with this idea also. It would be a nice compromise since player apartments were scrapped. I have to wonder however if such a purely decorational room would satisfy those who don't feel they get to "experience" bases enough as-is. If these player quarters also housed a bank terminal that was tied into your global handle or something, people would jump all over them for sure. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud here...

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I have to wonder if it would be better to have prestige deducted from a group when a player quit the group.

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This would be one of those "fixes" that actually creates a bigger problem than it solves.

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I'm assuming you are referring to the common practice of large SG's jockeying members around to alt SG's to make room for new recruits. Obviously the member limit on SG's would have to be removed for something like this to take place. Other than that caveat, I see no downside to placing a drawback on members "leaving" the group. Base mongers are far less likely to exploit players if you have to retain members rather than use them and discard them like tissues. And if SG's focus more on retaining members, those SG's are likely to be more rewarding for the people involved. And if the groups are more closely knit, perhaps more members can take part in experiencing base building. And as I mentioned, having another avenue of prestige loss in the game might make it easier to conceive of eliminating base rent all-together.

Like I said, a guy can dream.

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It isn't the popularity of bases so much as the fact that our programming & art team did a phenomenal job of allowing players to generate their own lairs. Maybe not enough players have experienced this content to comment on it, though hopefully Posi's changes will help.

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First of all, thanks to you and the rest of the team for bases. Despite some of the early inadequacies, bases do just about everything I came into base building expecting. I understand that Cryptic tries very hard to prevent cases of haves and have-nots, so I think bases are a great benefit with regards to that design goal.

Being a player who created his own group, I can tell you that your comment about the majority of players not experiencing the content is spot on. It's the reason I struck out to start my own group with the pending release of Issue 6. After two shakey supergroup experiences, I knew that unless I had a secure foundation, all the gametime I put in might be lost on a group that disintegrated (from a base economic perspective anyways).

Due to the way prestige works, it creates an environment where many players contribute but only a select few get to reap the rewards of a wealth of prestige. Some groups use the method described in this transcript, and twink low level players in exchange for them staying in SG mode. This system, while logically sound, creates less of a friendly tone in groups. It sounds more like a business deal than what you would expect from a comic book super team.

I have to wonder if it would be better to have prestige deducted from a group when a player quit the group. The prestige wouldn't necessarily transfer with the player; it would just cease to exist. If you think about it from a genre perspective, the Fantastic Four would certainly lose some pull with the city if the Thing quit the group. With no drawbacks to sloppy mass recruiting, many groups out there come close to resembling sweat shops. Recruiting people left and right to farm them for prestige should have never been a design goal of bases, but that is unfortunately one of the outcomes of the current design.

I don't however think prestige should be deducted from a group if a player deletes the character. I imagine deleted heroes as going to that big city in the sky, so I don't think any "prestige" would be lost from a group if such a thing happens.

This is all my opinion of course, but I feel there really needs to be a drawback to the slap happy recruiting tactics being used in the game. It can make new players jaded towards the game to see people treated as commodities like this. Adding a sting to the possibility of losing a member could add real credibility to groups. Heck, with such an avenue of prestige loss added to the game, you might even see fit to remove base rent all-together (but that's probably asking too much ).

All in all I think the base system is wonderful. The only problems I see are the limited content experience to the majority of players, the ceilings in place due to compounded rent, and the overall tone of many groups as a result of how the prestige system works. Perhaps if what I described above was implemented, groups would be more cohesive, more players could experience base building, and the lack of rent would let groups build something they could really be proud of.

A guy can dream anyways.

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I'll admit that i found this interesting:

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Vyktor: I guess it depends on where you look. I know a couple of, one villain group in particular, they want everyone on prestige. And they basically hand out Infamy to buy their stuff.



Statesman: We though that would be regular behavior. But it just isn’t. It isn’t, for whatever reasons.

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But the reason we've been given as to why we can't trade more than 100k at a time is specifically to deter this.

I'm confused.

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/QFT
/QFE
/signed
/whateverotherslashythingsIcando

I'm just overjoyed! That plot upgrade is looming ever closer over the horizon! Thanks Cryptic!

P.S. Ok, announcement about teleporters for COH, new base items to help small groups, double XP weekend, free prestige bonus per member.... Why do I feel like we're being setup for something?....

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I can't think of a reason why the devs would want to "avoid" having level 50's generate extra prestige. It sounds like a perfect reward for maxing out your character, to me.

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Why would you want anything other than level 50's in your SG then?

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Because those other non-level 50's are your friends too?

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i think break frees protect from knockback now...

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I'm pretty sure that they do, but not for 15 minutes. That's plenty of time for my squishy characters to go through an entire mission without getting knocked on my can.

I honestly don't know why Posi and company would go down the stackable road yet again. Isn't it obvious what a balancing nightmare stackable effects have become? As it is currently, some of the ES buffs are useful without stacking. My Corruptor is already a huge fan of the KB protection buff, nice and cheap as Lady already mentioned. But buffs like Smashing Resistance have shown to be of little value. I fought an EB with my Brute yesterday and purchased the Smashing and Lethal buffs beforehand. Let's just say I went in expecting to stand toe to toe with him and ended up dancing and floating like Sugar Ray Leonard.

They really need to abandon this stacking idea and make these buffs useful on their own. Allowing for stacking only broadens the range of benefit from these buffs, meaning the system as a whole will only benefit individuals sitting at the upper end of that spectrum.

The base economy as a whole is already inflated, please don't add Empowerment Stations to the list of disposable content.

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Well if anyone ever posts in the future that the devs hate powerleveling, I'm going to link this thread. Just incredible...

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Why? Because powergaming is similar to powerlevelling? Playing non-stop is an exploit somehow?

Dude, a powergamer can get more levels and more fun than a PL'er... I admit, I'm no powergamer, but that doesn't mean I'm going to accuse people of something -they haven't even done yet-.

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Four days to go from 40-45? Call it power gaming if you will, but I just think it's absurd to expect people to invest that much effort in such a short time into playing on a test server, which is actually supposed to help them debug their product. Four days to blast through 5 levels of the 40+ game, and the effort won't persist on the production server..

Call it what you will, but I call that absurd.

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I can see some teen spending the next 48 hours running that SF and a few really big teams. Seriously. I can also see some teen finding and using every exploit that exists. There's also some folks who call the test server home, they don't play on any other server.

I can see a lot of different scenarios. I choose not to lump everyone together under one heading.

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That's fair enough. And thank you Jester for further clarifying the target audience of this contest. At least we are being honest about who stands to benefit from it. But don't you think it would have made more sense to issue a level bump to players if the Devs seriously wanted us to test a 45+ Strike Force and Ancilliary powers you get at 41, 44, 47, and 49? Counting on your customers to grind for hours just to reach a point where they can test the new content is a pretty big gamble.

Anyways, no , I'm not villain enough, good luck to the few dozen that are.

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Well if anyone ever posts in the future that the devs hate powerleveling, I'm going to link this thread. Just incredible...

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Why? Because powergaming is similar to powerlevelling? Playing non-stop is an exploit somehow?

Dude, a powergamer can get more levels and more fun than a PL'er... I admit, I'm no powergamer, but that doesn't mean I'm going to accuse people of something -they haven't even done yet-.

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Four days to go from 40-45? Call it power gaming if you will, but I just think it's absurd to expect people to invest that much effort in such a short time into playing on a test server, which is actually supposed to help them debug their product. Four days to blast through 5 levels of the 40+ game, and the effort won't persist on the production server..

Call it what you will, but I call that absurd.