seebs

BTW: Anyone who wants to post specific recommendations? Feel free! I will happily look at stuff when it's in my level range. Currently 7.

Illusion control isn't a super fast set at this level (no PA, no terror, no phantasm, no ancillary powers), so I'm not clearing things overly fast -- my one advantage is that I'm getting a lot more XP/minute than I would without Deceive. No AoE damage coming before PA, though.

Up next (#5): Idol Hands (#141376). Picked it for the "so read up on clues". I'm currently searching 4-star arcs because I know a lot of GREAT arcs get some idiot downrating them as poor farms. Now level 7, with a handful of generic level 10 IOs slotted, and bids out on a couple of low-ish level Kismet accuracy procs. (I love that proc way too much, the difference it makes before you have 30%+ accuracy in everything is phenomenal.)

Arc #4: Just Say "No" to Dihydrogen Monoxide! (#176460)

I loved the intro text, and the first map is perfect. (Down side: There are targetable destructibles which I can't attack until I clear the guards, which was not totally obvious.)

Loving the writing. I've heard nearly all of this before, but the presentation really works for me. It feels just right for a superhero comic. Second mission, one hiccup, found the glowie before I found all the funny patrols.

Second mission got me to level 7. I'm taking a bit of a break to run and get some enhancing done here, because even the relatively weak bonuses of a level 10 IO are a pretty big upgrade. Since I'm still hoping to reduce alchemical silver prices, I'm funding this by rolling 30x on common arcane salvage, 26-40.

A lot of people come here because they're broke, and find that... well, the market minigame? It's not for everyone.

And they find that becoming fantabulously wealthy, while "easy" for some of us, is either not-easy, or not-fun, for them.

So.

You can equip a character with SOs, replace them every 5 levels, and keep yourself basically enhanced, for about 20M over the lifetime of a character, typically. You won't be as powerful as someone who's got a ton of IOs, but you will be Good Enough -- up through incarnate, game content is balanced around the assumption that you're on SOs. Especially on teams.

Remember that stuff about fantabulously wealthy? I'm like the most casual marketer ever, I spend more time listing stuff for 1inf to open up slots than I do trying to make money, and I have maybe 8 billion inf lying around.

So.

If you can't afford your basic enhancements, feel free to drop a global email in-game to @Seebs Dot Net, and I'll send you 20M inf. You can have SOs, you can enjoy the game roughly as it was balanced, and you don't have to mess with the market to do it.

(Note: I'm not the only person who does this, there's others. Heck, I suspect most of the marketeers would send you 20M if you asked because WHO CARES, it's only 20M.)

The Windows help claims (I don't know whether I trust it) that if UAC is off, admin accounts can always do everything, and non-admin accounts can never elevate privileges.

In any event, it turns out that all the claims that the launcher "needs" admin privs are 100% false. It doesn't need admin privs. It asks for them. Leaving things configured to always say "no" has not prevented it from working, including updating the game when patches come out, or updating itself.

Okay, here's the gimmick:

Don't spend enough to get the one that's currently listed.

Bid a more reasonable amount, and be prepared to wait for a while.

And by "more reasonable"... if you take something that's not a multiple of five (level 35 and 30 cost a lot more than 34 and 31), and leave some bids up... You can often pay 1/5 or less of what the "going rate" looks to be.

This, BTW, is a process that VERY much rewards an alt-heavy play style.

Boy, that's... hard. I don't think any character can possibly do EVERYTHING. The closest you'd get would probably be one of the VEATS, assuming you are allowing use of two builds.

I am still pretty happy with dark/dark defender -- it's not the fastest farming build ever, but AMAZING team utility and can kill all sorts of stuff solo.

I did once get a ton of use out of trip mine, did a Citadel TF with some people and somehow we ended up with the entire TF at +3. We were having a heck of a time killing stuff, and we actually started doing the thing where I set up mines and the tank brought things to them. Just because of the huge damage of well-slotted mines, it was actually worth it. (This may seem weird, but here's the thing: Mobs regenerate. Doing a bunch of damage all at once can cause them to stop regenerating.)

The funny thing is that I have maybe 8B and I feel like I'm pretty well off.

Soloing, on dp/dev, I have been known to place a trip mine, go around to the other side of a creature, and toebomb it. KB into another mine, instant death.

DIE FOR MY AMUSEMENT!

Note that I don't really care whether I'm playing efficiently a lot of the time, so my dp/dev tends to play at slightly higher levels, then spend 2 minutes setting up mines, drop a time bomb, then wait around a corner until the one surviving critter with two pixels of health bar comes around the corner so I can kill it with my T1 blast.

Trip mine, hugely.

Time bomb? My dp/dev uses it when soloing hard stuff, but it's mostly unused on teams.

Up next (arc #3): Arc #58363, "Nuclear in 90 - The Fusionette Task Force". It's... what it says on the tin. It's a task force. With Fusionette as the contact. Good plot, good writing. Fusionette... well, it was true to her character. Arguably this should have warned me off. Made level 6.

... And that's the end of tonight's runs, I gotta sleep. Will be doing more. And my plan, at least for now, is to solo the whole thing. I will probably be sort of aggressive about getting at least common IOs slotted because life with low accuracy is sucking, and you may rest assured that a Kismet +accuracy proc will be involved as soon as I can get one.

BTW, just because it seems to fit the theme, no gleemail finding for Entertained. She'll just have to use reward rolls.

Arc the second: "It's Possible", by @Carnada (arc #44393). Claims to be very short. Is not kidding. No kills, no XP, click one glowie. Does get a note for the very cool looking mission contact, but I'm not sure why this was tagged SFMA. Gave it three stars because at least it was right about being fast.

Arc the first: Grim and the Green (#61156), by @Quinch. Has backstory, has dialogue, has Skulls to beat up in a warehouse. Has plot point you miss by not reading. :P

I'm glad I went ill/rad. I had to solo an elite boss at level 4.

Overal impression: Okay, remember what it was like to be low level and find out about interactions between skulls and trolls, back when you were more worried about OMG THAT GUY IS GREEN than worrying that you'd kill the lieutenants first and your team doesn't have enough AoE to burn down that warhulk? Yeah, this was that, only the writing was a bit deeper. Fun experience. Good use of dialogue when you approach NPCs, good use of allies to round out a weak player character.

(I didn't "call for backup (optional)" on the last mission. No point in playing ill/rad if you aren't soloing elite bosses at 4.)

Leveled to 5 on the elite boss, who was... get this, worth a lot more XP than minions. Like ten times as much. He also took at least 10x as long to kill. He didn't get to hit back, though. Just as well.

Okay, time for an experiment. Levelling 1-50 in AE...

... Doing ONLY story arcs. Notes to follow.

And yes, there's an IC reason. There is no actual person with these powers; there's an infant in a very very expensive care facility after some idiot went into AE 8 months pregnant. An infant that has spent its entire life hooked up to AE experiencing learning programs and the like at about 20x normal speed. So those "super powers" are really just understanding AE well enough to manipulate the "reality" within the sim.

In the case where a clearly non-farm arc is downrated with a comment specifically about it being a poor farm? I do not think ncsoft would come out behind banning the handful of people who would do that.

I'm not talking about every case of someone giving a bad rating to any arc. I'm talking about people giving 1-star ratings for which the stated reasons are blatantly inappropriate.

Seriously, how many people are sending messages like "bad XP compared to other farms"? Not all that many, I'd guess, but I bet they're a BIG part of the rating hit real writing is taking due to the existence of farms.

(BTW, Bubbawheat: Ctrl+Alt+Reset was one of the first AE arcs I played, and I loved it.)

Oh, hey, that might be a viable alternative. I could do that -- I do have an admin account, after all.

I didn't realize that turning it off wasn't just the same thing as disabling security features. I'ma go fix that now! Since my admin account has set things up so that CoH runs without admin privs, I really have no reason to ever have them available.

ETA:

And NCAccess still prompts me to tell me that if UAC were enabled, I'd need to say yes.

This software is making me seriously consider removing all my credit card information from my account and going to time cards. The people who did this are not "bad at security"; that implies some kind of basic comprehension of the issues, with some mishaps along the way. No, these people have a kind of active hostility to the very concept of security going on.

I can accept AE farming as a concept. Heck, I made a farm arc because I wanted to drive down the price of alchemical silver. But...

Can we get some dev care and concern for the problem of people 1-starring story arcs because they don't give amazing XP?

This is not a one-time thing. This is not a couple of times thing. This is a serious and recurring problem.

I would like to propose:

1. Any one-star ratings that show any signs of being thus motivated can be appealed and will be removed.
2. Remove the ability to rate arcs from players who do that. Possibly nuke their AE privs.

The problem here is not just that people are doing different things with MA; it's that the farmers and their players are now attacking the storytellers.

I am posting this partially because today's announcement of a new Dev's Choice gives me some tiny hope that the devs actually care about AE and mission arc writers.

Seriously. If you guys wanna one-star my stupid farm, please feel free. I would rate it one star if I played it on my other account, because it is uninteresting and serves no purpose other than to make alchemical silver quickly for a fire armor brute. But... I am not so okay with story arcs getting rated down because they aren't good farms. This is ridiculous.

If I had to choose between losing my stupid farm (and all the inf I got from it, and from silvers, and so on) and seeing authors get 1-star ratings for not producing farms, I would rather lose the loot.

When I came to this game, I genuinely though that "AE teams" were people roleplaying the AE arcs. I thought AE was the most amazing thing. I played @Twoflower's arcs, and some of @PW's, and @Bubbawheat's, and I thought "this is the coolest thing a video game has ever contained". The farmers are endangering that, and I think that's a problem. And yes, one-star ratings (in this rating system) do make it hard for me to find the stories I care about.

Disabling UAC would create exactly the same problems, so far as I can tell, as running as admin.

So, I did an experiment.

I just tried clicking "No". Sure enough, everything works fine. The program does not actually need admin privs. It just requests them unconditionally because the nscoft launcher devs were lazy.

I think I'm about ready to concede. I can't even make a DENT in the bids on alchemical silver. I've dumped 440 of them so far, and the prices are GOING BACK UP.

I've never gotten a TA/A (or A/TA) up to a level where either rain or oil slick was available. Keep planning to, keep not getting to it.

So, people are gonna come to this game, and they're gonna be free players. They can still READ the forums, I think. (Hi, freebies!)

So.

What's your advice to a freebie player? What should they know, what will help them decide whether to spend money? ("Go VIP, the game is awesome" is very practical advice, but I'm thinking stuff a little more applicable.)

Well, obviously people can't tell me what will be fun for me, but I figured they might be able to tell me what's been fun for them, and that might give me ideas.

One of the issues I always face is that I can't tell whether something will be even viable for killing quickly without dying at high levels. And if it's not, levelling one to try to farm with it is stupid.

I'm experimenting with dual-boxing. So far as I can tell, a pocket empath who stays back and provides heals and buffs (but not debuffs) does not seem to get aggro, unless the empath also adds damage, in which case there's some aggro, but if I stick to ST attacks, it's not much. But this makes life MUCH easier for a tanker.