The New Peer Pressure (Are You Feeling It?)

Nope, no pressure here. Play what I feel like, and leave it at that.

-Gate

Only picking up the Alpha slot for 1-2 toons, and the rest of the time probably will ignore the Incarnate content.

No pressure at all as the heart of this game is Alt-itis.

To me it's when you hit 30.

People are either playing the high toon, or people are playing the lowbie toons in praet etc.

It's when you hit the mid point where you're to high join the lowbies, and to low to join the TF.

Thats when it gets frustrating for me.

I don't feel pressured to play my 50, although she is my only one.

I have felt a personal need to skip the lower content. Perhaps once I have an upper tier alpha slot I may start again - but that time feels "wasted" if i'm not earning shards. Fix it so my 50's can get shards when exemplared and i'll be happy.

I may be repeating myself from earlier in the thread, but I do feel the pressure. Just about every call I see over any of my globals and over Broadcast and over tells from strangers has to do about WTF. Before I19.5, all of those had to do with Tin Mage or Apex or ITF, or anything that dropped shards. I assume post I20 it will all be about the new Trials I have no interest for.

But as before, I'm pretty good at farting in people's general direction, crass as that may sound, and ignoring the latest fad. So I've been doing whatever I want anyway, especially now that I realised the Incarnate system has not a single thing I want in it.

A couple of months ago, I had a SERIOUS influx of new characters, creating five at the same time, who grew to six. I made an old concept of mine - an intergalactic emperor in an unusual shape, and in an exercise of creative thinking, gave him three lieutenants who were as weird, inhuman and completely evil as I could make them, breaking even my own weirdness standards. Notably, a deposed space warlord lizardman, an insect hive queen and a creature incarnate of poison, pollution and toxicity that I just remade into a... Really weird costume. I realised I'd forgotten to give him a scientist, so I went back to basics and included a basic grey alien to the tune of an evil Mordin Solus. Recently I realised I'd forgotten to give him an army, so I added an alien psychic fielding legions of mind-controlled soldiers ala Paxton Fettel's replica soldiers.

That's SIX characters I need to level up. Add to that a story I wrote recently which gave birth to three characters - two shapeshifters and one shadow. Add to THAT the animal pack which tied together a few storylines for me and added two more animals to the one lizard girl I'd made at level 1 and abandoned before, so that's three more. Add to ALL OF THAT the fact that I've been rerolling all my Blasters as something else, as well, plus a 50 Scrapper, which will probably total about 10 more characters in the long run.

Really, I have no time to play a raid grind I have no enthusiasm for anyway, when I can instead squee like a little girl upon discovering I can customize my zombies' puke and my grave knights' dark blasts when I thought I couldn't.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I started Alpha on 8 chars, and quickly dropped two I wasn't that interested in. I got six to very rare, then dropped two more who aren't fulltime teaming chars. I'm down to four who will be jumping into the next levels when we get the chance. Right now I'm doing WSTs with the main four, even though they don't need it. Depending on how extreme the new stuff is, I may drop down to just a main 2-3.

But I don't think I'd call that "pressure" or anything. I'd be doing TFs anyway. I just gain something from them this way.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Well, when I play my lowbies, no. But when I play my 50s...I do.

Used to be a 50 was a 50. Whether you soloed your way to 50, or teamed your way to 50, A 50 was a 50.

Now however, there are +1s, and such running about.

Getting a + 1 on a solo character, as things stand now, is almost impossible, mind you I said almost impossible, and so, a plain 50 without a number attached is deemed to be an inferior 50

Sigh. So all my 50s, all very much played to get to 50, are now no good and inferior, and, as a result, of course I am feeling peer pressure in a bad way... I feel that all the cool kids will see one of my 50s zooming about and they will snicker "Look at her, she isn't even a +1, she isn't worthy to even lick our combat boots"

Oh well...such is life. I shall get over it

On a happy note, Mark is enjoying the race for shards and fav toon is level shifted

Lisa.

When I don't want to do Incarnate Stuff (like this week and the week Sister Psyche was the WST) I just go pvp or team with folks who prefer not to go through the dreck that are the older COH Tfs. (though Numina is a bit better)

Next week I'll probably get back to doing Incarnate Content, as I've only run Tin Mage once.

I think once they patch it so that 50's on lower level TF's have a chance to get shards, you'll start seeing some of those as weekly targets. Of course then it'll just be full of 50's and not lowbies...

I'm at the point now where all I really have are high-level characters. I don't have enough space on my server to start any new characters (which sucks, since new powersets keep coming out that I'd like to try).

I'm maybe a bit more encouraged to play my 50s, rather than pressured. Before they were characters I enjoyed playing (or they'd not have reached 50), but there wasn't much further progress to be made on them so they tended to fall to the wayside in favour of characters I also enjoyed but still had levels to gain. Now there's further progression to make, so I bring the 50s out more often. And yeah, when I19-19.5 came out I tended to play them almost to the exclusion of all else to get those shards and notices, but now that I have those on my absolute favourite 50s I'm not quite so focused on that area.

With regards finding teams for my lowbies, I'm not finding things too much different. At the times I play redside has always been close to dead, while goldside was much the same after the initial GR release surge (the people that *are* around goldside now seem to be mostly soloers, with the rest sticking to small private groups). Blueside, eh, still teams going and still non-WTF activities being advertised. Possibly less than before, but not such that I notice much impact, at least on the busier servers (I gave up actively looking for/forming non-TF pugs on Victory years ago).

So yeah, I'm playing my 50s more, but more through encouragement than outright pressure, and I'm not experiencing any big changes in availability of lowbie teams.

No not really. I think the main reason I have SO many characters is once I hit 50 with one and started to run out of contacts I'd retire them and start another because the idea of running nothing but newspaper or radio missions bored me. Granted doing the same set of high level TFs over and over for shards is similar but I look at it as working toward my goal.. being the best I can be with each of my incarnates. And when i get bored or tired of doing the same thing I just switch gears and do something else. My main in my Crab spider and she is also my badger so last night I didnt feel like running yet 'another" Numina TF and did her tip missions ... I picked up one shard and, please don't hate me, had a purple recipe drop that I was able to sell at WW for 405 Million in INF. In the midst of all the Incarnat hype Tessa has continued her badging and spent a little over 4 hours a week ago completing the Doc Q task Force which means that she has now done every TF, SF and Trial presently available in the game. She has every available exploration badge on both the Gold, Red and Blue side and every history Badge as well.

Of course Tessa is not the only character I am running through the incarnate system.. I have 11 Fifty levels currently working through it and seven have their tier 4 in place, all but one are up to tier 3 and are 50 (+1) and even one that hasn't gotten to 51 level status has an uncommon slotted.

I don;t feel any pressure to rush through stuff to be better.. I have seen plenty of TFs that had 50(+1)s, 50s and other players as low as 35 (in Cimerora) all on the same team. So I don't really feel anyone is pressing for NO ONE MY TEAM UNLESS YOU ARE A 51 LEVEL! Frankly I enjoy the idea that my 5o levels have something to work towards and I don't need to keep making new characters to run through the SAME content as I level them. We have two new TFs so far and while they are pretty short its new Incarnate content and with Issue 20 we will pick up 2 new trials .. add in the 45-50 level TFs and SFs (a lot of my characters are Rogues or Vigilantes) and we are getting quite a bit of stuff to do. Heck I almost forgot the two different Hami raids (red and blue side) and the Mothership raids we can also join. Best part is all 11 of my incarnates has an IO in every slot and thanks to kill all runs on TFS and numerous Purple drops I now have three different characters that are billionaires and not one of the others has less than 250 million.

Pressure? heck I am thinking of just bribing all the villains to stay home .. Game over I win! LOL

Nope. I play to have fun. Anyway I'm too old to worry about peer pressure. Blood pressure on the other hand...