blaackbarrier

the 30 second buff timer is so dumb.

if you couldn't keep alive during the first 10 seconds of a match and lost because 4 bad ujl forts psy wailed you, or some fire blaster inferno'd your team, you should go play tetris instead of this game.

damage-type standarization (epic shield changes) was the first step in dumbing down team pvp. especially after psi-resists could be achieved by bringing in forts into a match (which is how team emo got that win against ajax's team that cant be bet in tpvpl season 2).

pay for my account.

i'm using the money i'm saving on a brazzers subscription.

you can dangle that cookie in front of that dog for a long long time, but sooner of later he's gonna bite your *** or just lose interest in it...

Z,
Castle and Posi said they were working on objective-based pvp a few months after i13.

Is that code still around somewhere?

Ok, i'm gonna go ahead and explain this for you pve kiddies (devs team, hear meh dammit). i had this argument with castle once, and he just shot me down by saying "this is a pve game" and walking away.

PVP rewards need to be ridiculously better than PVE rewards in order to encourage people to PVP. Simple. Oh and the fact that PVP builds still require you to run out and buy any PVE gear is inherently stupid.

Last time I was in game, I still had to shell out ridiculous amounts of PVE-earned money (marketeering is PVE, because my opponents are just as dumb as the AI in this game) to get purples to slot into a therm so I could get decent damage out of it is not the way you encourage people to PVP. Noting how ******* crowded wentworth's is compared to the deserted wasteland that is RV/the arenas should clue in the devs as to how players are actually spending their time (ie, not doing enough PVP).

Anyways, what it comes down to is this: PVP rewards needs to be ridiculously better than PVE rewards in both drop-rate and overall stat-enhancing power in both PVP and PVE in order to draw people into pvp zones.

These drop rates/stats can be modified as a balance between PVE/PVP is achieved, but as it currently stands, PVP IOs just up the have and have not differential in PVP zones as it currently stands and they are so rare that they end up discouraging new players from stepping into zones knowing they will not be getting PVP IOs and will still be getting jav proc'd to death by those of us who marketeered our way into wealth.

---

Finally, my beef with the retarded rep system.
The current rep system encourage stupidity in zones. Rather than going for the weak targets or the biggest threat, it encourages people to cycle through targets in an indiscriminately sequential manner. If you were facing a decent team, this would be a sure-fire way to get bent over.

A good game should reward strategic thinking as often as possible. The drops system as it stands does not do this at all. It is almost as if it is tailored to protect bad players from being farmed in pvp zones. This sort of hand-holding is what got people to leave this game in i13 and what has frustrated others into deactivating their accounts through the last few issues. Hand-hold all you want in PVE, your target demographic in PVP abhors that sort of gesture.

Oh and while the little rep bonus when you kill someone with a higher rep than you is cool, rep drop points are not correlated with IO drop rates, therefore it does not have a net impact on those players that keep cycling through targets in hopes of getting a drop. (Hint Hint, step one into fixing my issue with how drops are handled).

therms are expensive.

We want proof of life, Z.
Show us you're not bluffing. Take 1 day of Dev time and give us the right fixes in the right direction. It is not nearly as hard as it sounds.

I'm gonna be nice now, because I like reminiscing.

Favorite match ever:

UJL vs. VRC - second match

A video of people jumping around with someone occasionally dying on that match:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz1xBZjLL7w

After reading in the boards over and over how traps is bad, UJL recruits Arbegla. Quite possibly the best mastermind around, pre-i13. He rocks a build with taunt and essentially specializes in herding pets into poison gas and farming the crap out of other masterminds.
We work on that strategy for weeks. Things that seem completely out of whack start to make sense (I'm using sonic rings on him as an anchor, post sonic disruption agro nerf/fix and it works).
So yeah. VRC has destroyed us in practice. Their heavy therm team was pretty scary back then. So yeah.. destroyed us, just like every other team. Myk would go on to keep making fun of us for not taking practice seriously as we kept on trying to generate knowledge by figuring out odd team lineups that while unusual are still viable and optimized for specific circumstances.


So, in an i10 match, VRC attempts to use doms as blasters after having their poison mastermind team decimated by our trapper/poison team (blood mark/hellora is the poison mm). 4 doms. 4 corrs is their lineup. Great doms too. Aura is among them. Ajax is running sonic.

We end up out gunning them; net result double digits to zero.

What made this a fun moment was the way in which a number of factors came into play which then resulted in our win:

- Skill curve that was high enough to create actual high-end competition. The amount of skill required to run a coherent team in i9-i12 high end arena teams was far more than that which is required to run a coherent jump team in i13+. What that meant is that you felt an extremely sense of accomplishment when you were able to keep 7 clarities up while perma-caging a target (15 sec timer) and debuffing occasionally.
- Strategic thinking. While I won't say that villainside pvp required faster-twitches than hero-side pvp, it required a lot more strategic thinking. Countering a line-up was not nearly as easy as most of the i13+ cry-kiddies currently say it is. VRC switched to doms hoping that they could mez-out a team with 2 therms, a kin with ID and a sonic. We stayed on the mastermind knowing from previous encounters with the Renegades that poison traps were amplified by domination, so they would be getting held for longer periods of time. GMW and UJL had just figured out how to integrate storms into their line-ups just when i13 hit, and using them to counter therm teams was working out well enough (From what we were observing back then, the only teams that were using o2 boost adequately were these too. We were seeing fully drained players popping blues in teams with storms in every other team in the ladder.). The game was complex enough that no team held full knowledge of every possible interaction between power-sets and line-ups. i13 flushed that down the drain.
- Teamwork. With the skill curve being so relatively high compared to mindnumbing PVP, there was a tendency for teams to mesh in ways that made them look very similar to real-life sports teams. I think this is something that the devs never had a chance to see, but when it came down to it, we all had to spend so much time together to be somewhat decent at this game that bonds between people were inevitable. I still keep in touch with most of my UJL teammates in one way or another (even if it's just calling syph a fgt every 3 months or making shini angry every 2 months). i13 destroyed in this more ways than one. From the ****** beta experience to the buggy implementation to the end-implementation in which these three factors became pretty much irrelevant.


Second most favorite moment:
http://megavideo.com/?v=UCPN77WB