seebs

This is an interesting comparison, and one I hadn't thought of. What you're suggesting is basically comparing:

1. Someone who subscribes for a year, then stops subscribing.
2. Someone who buys as many points as you'd get for the cost of a one-year subscription, but never subscribes.

The latter player could in theory end up, after that year, with access to things the former player hasn't got. Now, they're still better off than they were under this regime, but... You do have a point. If you plan to pay a certain amount of money, then stop paying, or think it likely that you'll do so, going premium and spending money on points directly could be a good choice.

Homogenization could be bad, but making something that defeats its own purpose doesn't seem like a good idea. It's not that it's a weakness, it's that the otherwise rather special trait of the set ("offers stealth", which most defense secondaries don't) is negated by its shiny new design.

Mez protection is something people generally really, really, want to keep on.

Okay, a few thoughts:

1. See the /devices guide in my sig. If you want to solo on a blaster, play with /devices as your primary. You pick it second, but it is the set that defines how you play.
2. Controllers and dominators can solo pretty well for some kinds of stuff, but will be at a big disadvantage against things that don't mez easy. I love mind/ and ill/ for that.
3. Scrappers, brutes, and tankers are all pretty durable, and by a few levels in can be quite fun to play casually without worrying too much.
4. Consider setting difficulty to something like -1/x2, or even just -1/x1 if you're having a hard time. You'll get levels/inf slower, but you'll win more fights.
5. Don't worry about "XP debt". As people like to say, the "XP debt" bar is just the game's gauge for how much Awesome you are generating.

Mostly, what matters most is what's fun to you. You will do better playing a character that basically fits your style than you will one which doesn't.

Yeah. I would rather have the taunt aura be a distinct toggle so you can still have mez protection without taunting.

Well, no. They're making a reasonable and informed decision to treat your posts based on how you presented.

Ahh, but here's the thing.

You are sending exactly the same messages to any devs who read the posts. Furthermore, the devs in this game generally like the players. They have been known to ask players for advice about things, act on player guidance, and so on.

And they use the experienced players who know the game as one of the filters to identify "feedback worth considering".

You've just told the developers that your feedback is insincere and unconsidered, and they will doubtless react to it accordingly.

This defeats your stated purposes.

I can't, obviously, but sometimes people helpfully state their intent.

I started this thread because I know multiple authors who have gotten comments which specifically bashed non-farm mission arcs for not being farms.

(Note: All the stuff about whether or not ratings or comments are "anonymous" is uninteresting to me; I don't consider that a significant factor. You can argue that with people who care about it, if you wish.)

Okay, tell you what.

When a redname comes here and says "we specifically anticipated and intended that players would use the rating system to one-star arcs that were not designed to exploit the AE system in order to yield disproportionate rewards", I will concede that you are right, and the ratings in question are "using the system as intended".

Until that happens, I will go with the more reasonable assumption that the rating system was not intended to be used to penalize people for not creating farms.

This is... Not right.

If someone one-stars a farm for giving poor XP, that is fine by me. What I don't like is seeing people go out of their way to judge an arc as something it wasn't intended as.

Imagine that the game let you "rate" power sets. What we're seeing here is a bunch of people who play blasters going through rating every tanker primary, scrapper or brute secondary, 1 star because "it does crappy damage". And that makes the rating system useless for the designed purpose.

The intended purpose of the rating system is to make it easy for players to find "good" arcs. Since different people are looking for completely unrelated things, it is pretty likely that some arcs are well-done and of high quality, but not interesting to me. Instead of rating them one star for being stupid, I ignore them because they're not what I'm looking for.

I would say that they can. Griefing is all about attitude and intent. Griefing is "things done with intent to cause other players grief". The current rating/search system does not provide good tools for players who have different interests; you can sort of cover this a bit by using informal tags (such as SFMA), but the net result is that people are trying to wreck the scores of other peoples' arcs, not because they think the arc is bad writing, but because they don't want other people to be able to play the game differently.

For all I know, this was started by story fans who were one-starring farm arcs. Or maybe it was started by farmers. I don't know. I don't much care, either. The reason I framed this in terms of story arcs is simple: It's not hard to find farms, and they're by nature interchangeable. No one cares what the skins are on the lovingly-crafted things that do only fire damage. Story arcs, however, are not interchangeable, and making it hard to find good story arcs hurts both the writers and the players who enjoy stories.

You should ask Positron... Whoops! Sorry, under the new filters, that name is no longer allowed. :P

Preference is what you have between things which are at all alternatives. You can prefer one girl to another, but if you're a straight guy or a not-straight woman, it's not that you prefer girls to guys, it's that only girls are getting any response at all from that hunk of your brain, and guys just don't even register.

I "prefer" delicious chicken sammich to overcooked spinach. I don't "prefer" sammiches to guitar picks; the latter simply aren't food to begin with, and aren't eligible for the comparison.

I have been unable to find a way to do stuff like "move this complete Cloud Senses to that power" remotely quickly, and I am ADHD enough that I can't remember what I'm trying to do when I have to do all the steps individually.

Wasn't there something about points being cheaper in larger quantities? If so, is it one token per $15, or one token per 1200 points?

... Not that I am quite ready to spend $500 extra per account to get an extra 150 points per month, which I would not need for a long time, having 39,600 points and already being a VIP. :P

Hmm.

So if I start a brand new account, there exists some number, N, of tokens I could have which would get me into Tier 9, and since Tokens come from Points, if I buy enough Points, I will go from 400 to 550 PP per month. And in general, I'll be getting Tokens about 3x as fast as I was getting Vet Rewards, yes?