james_joyce

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Collection Objects can now be triggered like other objectives.

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WRYYYYYYYYYYY!

throwing my 2c into the pot:

There's nothing wrong with PLing or farming or wanting to farm or enjoying it or anything else. This isn't a matter of morality, or breaking the rules, or the EULA, or anything legal or ethical like that.

This is whole policy is based on conventional MMO-dev wisdom that goes as follows: players will take the path of least resistance. If you give them avenues to level that are fast, easy, and repetitive, they'll take them, level as far as they can, then complain that it's too repetitive, and in the worst case they'll get bored and quit.

Essentially, the whole anti-farming policy is to prevent players from getting bored and quitting - it doesn't matter if there's a small subset that actually enjoys farming, or some people that use it to skip boring level gaps, or use farm-like situations for a challenge. The devs of this or any MMO will attempt to eliminate farmable situations in order to keep their players playing and enjoying themselves.

I don't perceive that as greedy or underhanded. I think it's a function of the fundamental problem that content takes vastly longer to create than it does to consume. You want players to go through content you've designed for the purpose of their enjoyment so they'll continue to play. The fact that there may be slow level gaps or grindy gameplay should be fixed by addressing the gameplay, not by allowing speed leveling past those gaps.

I think it's reasonable for the devs remove quick-leveling tools (most everyone, I think, agrees). And although I don't agree with it, I think it's reasonable for them to roll back rewards on characters that were leveled too quickly in their judgment. I think it's less reasonable to hand out temp bans to players that did so, and I'm pretty confused by their decision to do so.

It's also pretty apparent that the devs screwed up by executing the deletions via script. It should have been handled on a case-by-case basis, although it's also possible that there were far too many offenders for that to be feasible. It's apparent that they deleted characters who were not guilty, although it's impossible to say how many. I believe they should have taken a far more conservative approach to deleting characters, because characters deleted in error will cause far more anger than it's worth, even if it's later corrected.

However, having said all that, I believe a lot of the mechanics of this game specifically call into question the conventional MMO wisdom that you shouldn't allow fast leveling through farming. This game's content is all available at level 50 via flashback, and the MA, which ironically spawned this whole mess, provides virtually endless content at level 50 as well. I'm not fully confident in saying it, but I believe this game may have beaten the symptom of fast farming prevalent in almost every other MMO. If I speed to 50, I, in fact, have a virtually limitless supply of things to do. It's unclear to me without some data whether or not the same trap holds here. I doubt, however, that the devs want to be guinea pigs in that experiment.

I believe as a matter of good business (not morals or anything so melodramatic) the devs should give a free month to every account that had a character deleted or an account temp banned in error. I also believe they should issue a public apology for it, and take more conservative measures in the future.

None of this is to say I'm angry or anything - I'm not affected at all by this. Just thought I'd throw my view into the pool, for whatever it's worth.

crack cocaine

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I want super strength for scrappers.

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QFFT

Also, Ninjitsu

Cocaine

...

Let's do coke.

(-_-)

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Illusion would be a craptacular set for Dominators, and as soon as the new Shiny Shiny wore off, people would start screaming for the devs to "fix" it.

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Illusion as it is now, I agree... but an illusion set for Dominators, I think'd be pretty cool. It'd be a practically new set, though.

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You must be new. CoV was a ~$40 stand alone game when it was released. It wasn't until GvE that you could get both in one. And even then, GvE was a Wal-Mart exclusive when first released.

Free extra content is the exception rather than the rule.

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Issue 6 was the first and only paid expansion we've had so far. Going Rogue, whatever issue that is, will be the second.

There have been 14 issues, 15 soon, and if you count Issue 1 as a for-pay issue, that's 12 issues for free, 2 for pay, not counting 15.

Paid expansions are the exception rather than the rule.

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Rogue will cost money.

Edit - AE was awesome for a while. Not so much now. (hugs her badges that are going away)

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Ug... will you at least explain what you mean?

They fixed some exploits that let people level quickly, and are removing some badges that encouraged farming.

Nothing else has changed about the MA

It's still awesome, and I highly encourage you to try it out.

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The basic idea is this:

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One key part you missed is that you're setting up a gauntlet of immobile weapons that the ambush runs through to get to the target.

Try a typical one here

You don't have to pay extra for it. You don't need the new Architect edition to use it, although it'd be a convenient way to get the latest game client and a free booster pack.

So come on in.

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So, I have this friend, and he posts on these forums, and he's just kinda curious.

Are you hot?

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I guess it depends

My favorite arcs so far are

10619 - IMPOSSIBLE KUNG FU MISSION - don't let the name fool you.

98943 - Invasion on Earth BX1132! - the penultimate mission alone makes this great.

17032 - Adventures of the Space Marines - unfortunately, I think this one got invalidated and hasn't been fixed yet. I haven't been able to find it recently. But I highly recommend it.

These are the ones I gave 5 stars to. There are a lot of other ones I enjoyed.

Interesting idea... There are a couple detail types that allow for a relatively static ally: ally boss, captive w/ ally surrounding group, and ally w/ "Nothing" behavior. The only things missing are the ability for players to have any control over where details are spawned, and some resource limiter that would force them to choose what to spawn out of a larger pool of possibilities.

If the devs added a "Here" spawn point, you could link the spawns to collection details. But of course you'd need to be able to have some control over the spawn point of collection details. You'd also need to preferably set ambushes to ambush to a point other than the player. So you could set up collection details where you wanted them, say in a room of a cargo ship, set each collection detail to spawn a different type of static ally, link the collection detail to an ambush that runs through the room, and you'd have a pretty damn good tower defense simulator.

Neat.

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I'm not sure what genre it qualifies as, but I'm kicking around an arc to answer the question "What if David Lynch wrote an MA arc?"

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Oh hell yes.

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Either the rules have changed, someone isn't paying attention, or the rules clearly don't mean anything.

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IMO, It's a silly rule and should be violated as often as possible, thus rendering it unenforceable. All works are to some extent derivative, and any humorous arc with even a whiff of a reference could be considered parody.

I'm hoping they're just using it as an excuse to be able to remove any content they want for any reason (which they're already allowed to anyway, so who knows).

yeah, I really like these types of stories that flow from one mission to the next without the need to "go back to your contact." Adventures of the Space Marines is like that, and it's one of my favorite arcs.

Of course, I'm not into RP at all, so I don't know if more avid RPers would mind.

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SF Western? That'll never work...

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u serious?

this'n?

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I actually saw a lot of people in the Galaxy City building last night on Infinity, which is unusual even for the pre-Posi-post world. So I don't know if I'd let a sample size of one dictate your opinion.

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That seems to be exactly what you just did or attempted to do.

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Hmm, so it is.

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Well, not to pick a nit here, bu showing there is a contradiction to a generalization is not necessarily subscribing to the opposite point of view.

Norp: "There's a Glarb over there, looks pretty Narb. Looks like Glars are Narb. I don't like Narb things, so I won't try any more Glarbs."
Gorp: "Well... there's a Glarb right over there that isn't Narb... maybe if you try another Glarb, it won't be Narb?"
Norp: "FLARGLEFARB!"

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indeed.

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I actually saw a lot of people in the Galaxy City building last night on Infinity, which is unusual even for the pre-Posi-post world. So I don't know if I'd let a sample size of one dictate your opinion.

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That seems to be exactly what you just did or attempted to do.

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Hmm, so it is.

I just teamed with some random dude on a trial account in MA, so take that very small, anecdotal data point for what it's worth.

On a related note, I was rather puzzled that trial accounts can't run MA missions by themselves. I would think you'd definitely want to give trial accounts access to it. Maybe they just don't have the code in to prevent them from rating and commenting?

It's no Helen Keller post, but still, good job.

I actually saw a lot of people in the Galaxy City building last night on Infinity, which is unusual even for the pre-Posi-post world. So I don't know if I'd let a sample size of one dictate your opinion.

This arc totally took me by surprise. I was expecting a killer-GMing mission, but it really was a tough but reasonable challenge that escalated nicely. But mostly, it was just really fun and well done. It had a bunch of nice little touches that really made it stand apart from your typical challenge mission.

Fantastic stuff - I added your other arc to my list.