peterpeter

/applauds

Anything that involves War Witch getting a promotion sounds like a good plan to me. But I'm also desperately curious to find out what Nate is up to!

Yeah, I'm with Zombie. I plan to save 3 so I'm ready for the next costume set, whatever it is. Anything else will go towards superpacks, or maybe some other consumable.

It's a complicated issue. For example, one thing that hasn't come up in the thread is what happens when you have a whole team full of people with the same mission. This happens to me pretty regularly. We're all in the RWZ, we all have the same mission, we fail, and the mission owner gets a new mission from the contact but everyone else still has the old mission. Now we have an array of bad choices. Do the exact same mission over again (possibly over and over seven times to get everyone through it), or burn a mission complete (knowing that the same thing will probably happen in the next mission), or proceed with one person's mission chain while everyone else is left behind in terms of completing the content. They're all bad choices.

On the one hand, I like the fact that we can get a second shot at succeeding in the mission. On the other hand, I hate that we often need three or four tries before we can keep the stupid suicidal squishy hostages alive.

There's also a balance of happiness. I suspect that failing a mission causes more negative feelings than succeeding at a failable mission causes positive feelings. In other words, imagine we could measure happiness in units called "haps". Finishing a regular mission might give you 5 haps. Steamrolling a mission with no challenge might only give you 3 haps. The kind of mission where you're always on the verge of a team wipe but somehow you keep pulling it off with just a few deaths here and there might give you 9 haps. Now, if you add missions that can fail, succeeding might produce 10 haps. Perhaps 15 if it's really challenging. The problem is that failing at that same mission will produce negative 20 haps.

All in all, the existence of such a mission will result in an overall loss of happiness in the playerbase. That's not much of a goal to strive for. (Of course, I'm obviously just making up numbers here, but I do think these proportions are in the right ballpark on average.)

I didn't realize the ATO had to be slotted before you could catalyze it. In that case, yeah, you're screwed. Seems weird that the ATO can be freely traded before you catalyze it, and the superior ATO is account bound after you catalyze it, but the catalyst itself is character bound. Feels more like a typo than a design decision.

If it's true that both the regular ATOs and the improved ones are account bound, then no harm done. If you ever want to upgrade an ATO, you can email it to this character to be upgraded and then email it back to your other character. But I don't know if that will work or not. At any rate, I agree that it should be account bound, not character bound. Especially if the ATOs are account bound. It would be just silly to have one piece of that process be character bound when the others aren't.

In fact, it would be so silly that I had to go look it up. The regular ATO isn't bound at all, and the superior version is account bound. So the good news is that claiming it on the wrong character does seem harmless. You can just shuffle the ATO around. But the whole thing does seem ridiculous. The catalyst should be account bound, just like the thing it catalyzed.

I'm very disappointed that the gms aren't doing something about this. It absolutely is within their power. If the chat logs clearly show what trade was intended then there is no excuse for allowing this. It's pure griefing. A player who behaves that way is a plague on the game. One jerk like that can drive a dozen good players out of Paragon City entirely. Banning someone like that isn't just the right thing to do, it's also good business. I never would have guessed that the gms would be so callous. It really squelches my willingness to engage in trading with my fellow players.

EDIT: And Fulmens, to the best of my knowledge the GMs do respond consistenly in response to a wide variety of player actions. They can't allow griefing to go on unchecked because if they did then the game would soon become an unplayable sewer. I admit this particular case is more narrow than repeatedly teleporting teammates into spaces they can't get out of, but it's still griefing, and I still want the GMs to do something about it, and in particular to do something *to* the person responsible. Someone who will steal a billion inf and think it's both fair and funny is the same kind of person who will screw up someone's badge run on a TF just for kicks, or even ruin an entire trial if they're clever enough and annoying enough. The sooner a person like that is banned from the game, the better off we'll all be.

That would be pretty awesome.

Maybe Paragon City isn't really in Rhode Island; it's in Western Pennsylvania, about 8 months in the future.

I'd like to see buses added. It would be pointless but entertaining if you could click on a bus and be delivered to any other neighborhood in the same zone. Just like the train, but only within the zone. Also, you might have to wait several minutes for a bus to show up. The movements could be synchronized (an insanely complex task I bet) so that the buses reach all bus stops at the same time, so you could get on one and off another at the same time without needing people or buses to just appear out of thin air at their destination.

Bonus points if you can ride on top of the bus. I'm having trouble seeing how that could be exploited for massive xp gain.

Also, as much as I'd to see buses in the game, if the devs want to give us busses instead, that could be fun too!

With all of the abuse heaped on him since Freedom went live, I'm surprised this is the topic that got the Ghost's goat.

I don't mind the free server transfer tokens. I've even used a few for name changes or retiring characters that I don't want to play or delete (I put them on the French server and pretend they're on vacation in the Riviera.) I have a few piled up now, though, and no particular use for them.

I'd love to see the transfer tokens become something more flexible, as people have been saying. That sounds great. I can see why they wouldn't want to do that, though.

I'd also be happy if the monthly reward were random. Take that same list of consumable items of the same value as the transfer token, and give us one at random each month. That might push people into trying out some of the consumables and deciding they like them. The randomness could also be fun. Of course, you'd be guaranteed to get complaints from some people when their free bonus reward isn't what they wanted, but people are always going to complain about something.

Fridays I've been playing a beam/time corrupter on Justice, so I expect I'll be doing that during 2xp as well. Saturday I'll do what I can to get my warshade from 45 to 50. I'm not optimistic. I know some people do really well with warshades, but I'm not one of them. Sunday I normally play with a group of regular friends, so I reckon that won't change.

I'll also try to make a little extra inf off the market, as usual, if I can find the time to prepare in advance.

I've never bought or used or seen an ATO, so I assumed that what you received initially was a recipe, which you had to craft. Hence: ATIO. Apparently that is not the case, but I suspect I'm not the only person to be wrong about that.

It would make so much more sense for the contacts to give you a discount, and that would also reward players who took the time to play through the old contact trees. It would be a nice little benefit for the players who are locked out of the invention system, but it wouldn't have any significant impact on the economy as a whole.

Also, the UI for those old enhancement stores is awful. You can't just buy accuracy enhancements, you have to scroll through the list trying to remember the correct name for your chosen origin. For years I only made Mutant characters because they had the easiest enhancement names.

I can see why they wouldn't prioritize this as a fix, but I still wish they would as a QoL improvement.