Void_Huntress

Standard Code Rant. In short? Assuming you think you know how something might be done, or how difficult or easy it might be, or how much rote effort is involved, is a losing proposition. Even programmers get this wrong, because unless you actually work for the company in question, in the department in question, you neither know the technical constraints or procedural constraints that govern the environment in question.

We've already been told that code changes are 'locked' for the upcoming months. The possibility of this facet of I21 changing is somewhere between 'only if the game will die if we don't adjust it' and 'the game died so I21 isn't happening anyway'.

SCR, ahoy.

Does this include the Alpha slot, since it's earned and advanced through core content?

I went through that "What do you mean I'm not durable?" transition with my main, as well. I still forget sometimes and try to do things that work in normal content but don't have a remote chance of working in a trial.

Hey, wait a minute.. This looks awfully familiar. :D

So... you want ZombieMan to call them genderist decisions?

It may be trivial, but casual and respectable together are not an overwhelming majority of what we're offered, particularly with some of the perk packs (see: Slu^H^H^HWedding Pack) being more strongly slanted.

In talking with others in-game, I experience both that, and people complaining about how it's one of the slowest melee sets around but doesn't have damage like other slow melee sets. Which gets pretty fascinating to discuss.

I keep having to remind myself that you can't reason people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

(The same people also talk about how fast the dual pistols attacks are.)

That's an alarming assumption. There aren't a lot of things that could reliably hit -60% res, are there? I'd think the effort to maintain that would require some pretty specific builds and/or reduce the debuffer's damage contribution.

EDIT: I see that I was mis-remembering Sleet's stats. Huh.

As Vanden notes, you can actually make patron pets perma. I've done this on two characters, and it was an incidental effect to other objectives I was chasing. Basically a 'hey, look at that' bonus. The Lore pets have NO way of increasing their relative uptime.

As I noted in closed beta, I would have liked a branch that stayed an LT the whole way up the tree, but the recharge time got progressively shorter, with it hitting perma or very close to it -- but still just a single LT -- at Very Rare. (Even BETTER for me would be a pet that stuck around forever like MM pets do, and for THAT I'd accept a minion. But I imagine that will never happen.)

That would be worth it to me, even if I couldn't have the incarnate shift in the slot. I play a lot of squishies, so the idea that some random burst of damage after I summon the pet locks me out of a power for that long is highly alarming to me.

That's why I still don't have Lore unlocked, and intend to do everything I can not to (or if I end up getting iXP for it from doing a new trial, I'll just never CRAFT anything for it) as long as the Lore pets don't provide something I'm remotely interested in having. What good is giving us a pet with MM controls that we can't have around?

This is exactly my position.

Absolutely agree with that, that's more or less what I was thinking when I brought it up. (though I was VERY happy to discover that the mayhem exploration badge accolade transforms into Task Force Commander; I still find task forces stressful even though I'm alright with incarnate trials. I think it has something to do with sustained effort; I need downtime).

In theory, it could grant the faction state but still be considered to have not run the morality for hitting that alignment yet. So to start getting alignment merits, you might need to do one morality to 'finalize' your alignment (hitting the conditions for the badges), then continue as normal.

That assumes, of course, that the devs are concerned about being able to pop over, start earning alignment merits, then pop back whenever. They seem to be, given the current arrangement. (Personally, I still think that vig/rogue is underpaid for the purported ability to ALMOST play both sides' content, but that's another story.)

A token to add credit to a time-gated badge is probably the cleaner way to do that from a broad design perspective, leaving potential UI complications aside for the moment.

It's the price of a purchased instant faction switch then spending two hours to bribe folks to let you run in their mayhems, then another instant faction switch back blueside. :D

(hypothetically speaking, of course. An instant faction switch could be roughly analogous to the types of gate-related items you can get in some F2P games that can be earned normally or just 'Hey, I want it now, so I'll buy it dammit.')

Strongly disagree, and there are contrary examples out there. It's entirely possible to have all of the temporary things be purely 'this is a nice extra' type things, alongside permanent 'I REALLY want to have this.' items that unlock account wide.

Of the three MMOs I've played that made the transition, the one I think is the strongest has no 'must have' temporary items. They DID at one point and decided they didn't like it so removed them from the game.

Let me share some more items of note:

Of the Subscription -> Hybrid F2P transitions I've seen that seemed successful, there were three ways of obtaining 'store points'. One was through straightforward purchase (CC on the website, point gift cards in stores, etc). One was through community awards (i.e. contests, but this doesn't get used as much as maybe it should). The third is important:

You can earn them in game.

In the tabletop-inspired game, every completion of a specific mission (they're all unique in that game, for the record, no semi-random or mad libs style creations) is worth a certain amount of 'favor' for a certain faction. At certain milestones of total favor building (all faction favor combined), you get store points.

You can even do this multiple times on different characters on that server (albeit for reduced benefit), or on different servers (for full benefit).

... it's slow. It's painful. But it's POSSIBLE. You can actually get the entire game this way, "free". It costs a lot more personal effort, and some people might go "Well, I'll just go mow a lawn then buy some turbine points." That isn't the point.

The point is that you CAN earn things. That's an excellent selling point for a lot of people. You don't HAVE to pay, you can CHOOSE to pay. It sets up the expectation in players that they can 'just play' and still be able to get more stuff.

I've seen this fact change many players' perception from "Meh, but I'll have to BUY stuff in order to play anyway, so what's the point?" to "Oh, really? I'll give it a try." Of all of my friends I've had try the game, almost all of them have a few days later gone, "So, the higher price points have a better deal on points, right?" And they're deciding what price point they're comfortable with.

Obviously, this doesn't work if there isn't a solid game in there to begin with, but having the ability to earn what you want gets more people in the door with an open mind in the first place.

Regarding the trolling/griefing/etc, there's ways of handling that. I've seen developers take a few approaches, but honestly, treating people who've paid absolutely nothing as slightly better than second class citizens is the most effective and fair.

Given an environment where they CAN earn things takes away the feeling that they are somehow not being 'allowed' to get what they want due to a price barrier, so they seem far more tolerant of things like trade and communication constraints, money caps, and less storage. More of them seem to 'get' that there's a genuine reason for that.

Actually, the tabletop-inspired product was released in early 2006, and went to their hybrid F2P model in late 2009. Three years is a respectable gap before changing business models. The other game by their creator was launched in early 2007 and went F2P in late 2010, so another 3 year gap.

A 7 year old game naturally has a more entrenched playerbase, but I think the effects would definitely be more relevant than the 3 year old game against a 1.5 year old game.


Personally, I'm of the opinion that if City were to lower the base monthly price slightly and increase their microtransaction offerings a bit, they'd see a lot more customers and more overall income.

If they were able to go a step further and subdivide some of the content/zone access to 'mission packs', and shift to a point system for grabbing mission packs, booster packs (or subsets thereof), I think it has the potential to expand their customer greatly even with the increased costs of having to maintain additional server capacity for the moochers.

But that's just from my perspective, having played three games that went from subscription to F2P of some flavor.

When I tried it earlier, I was able to use the lacy choker with masks w/hair and full masks.

That was actually the second title that Turbine transitioned to a hybrid F2P model. Both of their MMOs were subscription based at first, then they switched to 'you can have a subscription and get all the story content and most of the classes/races or you can be free and just buy what you want'. I personally think their tabletop inspired game weathered the transition better, because it's so focused on instances it's much easier to group content into purchasable packs.

EDIT: Forgot the rest.

Yes, it helped both games immensely. They're VASTLY more popular now. Their operating expenses went up a bit because of the larger population that isn't paying monthly, but people seem much more inclined to spend SOME money as opposed to the "spending every month" or "not playing at all" options.

It seems to be a win for everyone involved IF you have your content and gameplay set up in a way that can support it.

Good god, that's alarming.

and I was all proud of myself for having a peak regen of ~100 HP/s.

An alternate possibility is that the leagues were just as good in both cases, but the stalker for whatever reason wouldn't have qualified without league assistance and did with. nudging stalker from threads to commons.

We don't know how Shade plays a stalker. It could involve running around away from teams.

In comparison to HEATs they do. :D