Sig Story Arc rewards

Rogue and Vigilante "Merits" are the ability to play any content either side, something Heroes and Villains are unable to do.

Huh, interesting. I've only done a full side-swap once, and don't recall getting it. My memory could be off, it could have changed in the time in between. Dunno...

The fact that it's way out of line with rewards otherwise available for such little effort makes it obvious something wasn't kosher. If you don't agree, frankly, you're just deluding yourself.

So what are you saying here? That you just won't read the patch notes unless they are sent to you via e-mail? How are the devs to know which specific issues are SO important to you that they email you when that item, and only that item, is changed?

You can't just say, "Well I don't like to read patch notes!" and then claim ignorance to a change in the same breath. You chose to avoid spending a few minutes to skim patch notes. The changes are put forth for all to see, it is no ones fault but your own for not reading them. This is exactly why they have patch notes. You just took a class at the school of hard knocks, but did you learn anything?

I do not work for Paragon Studios and have no say in what is considered a show stopper. Do I consider this do be a showstopper? To be brutally honest, No. What would I consider to be a show stopper? A crash that affects everyone. An known vulnerability that is easy to exploit. Something that makes the game broken or unplayable In this case, you are still able to choose a reward. It just isn't the reward YOU want and you do have the means to obtain it. Even if it is more work for you. But, this is not unplayable. Sorry.

And to show you how silly your comment is... That bug didn't manifest in beta only on live. How was it known to be a showstopper? But, even if it did. These two are still not on the same level. The inability to communicate vs the inability to obtain a specific reward without having to do a few more missions first. Or having text saying as much. You don't want to do those other missions I get that but, it is not game breaking like the inability to send tells. I'm sure you'll agree.

The tell issue took two months to fix. Most bugs take more time than a few minutes to be fixed since there is millions of lines of code to shift through to untangle the cause of the issue at hand. As for their wording on the patch notes. I'll give you that it was poor. But, the difference is as I stated before, the global tell issue was not present in beta. There was be no possible way to say it was a showstopper if it was unknown until live.

Umm. I'm not a dev. I can pay or not pay attention to what you have been saying all I wish :P. But, you are completely right. Only those that are showstoppers would get such attention. They are after all showstoppers. A few lines of text, could be added during the next release cycle.

Having worked in customer service, while not for an online game but for an online company, yes I do. The question is; is this formulaic.. How many people do you think apologize in such a situation? What do you think the best response would be? Sympathy? Silence? Apology?

I'd go for either sympathy or apology, personally.

Why? Because it would be a canned reply I would make. I don't know if this is canned or not. But, I would not be surprised if it was.

--Rad

I actually agree it should be in game. Any time a patch note is put on the website it should simultaneously become the message of the day in-game. I've never understood why they don't do that.

However, the patch notes are publicly available. They are linked from the launcher and you are reminded to look when the patch is applied. People who can't be bothered to go have a quick look after receiving a patch shouldn't post rants that they didn't know about them in the same medium where the notes were posted to begin with.

I totally understand being upset, I just think the OP was a bit of an overreaction.

Because they have in the past, and people complained. Some complained (and I'm not sure if they ever were able to change the implementation) because when the Global MotD is changed, it pops up for everyone currently logged in. This seems to be set by the people in Paragon, and currently seems it must be set manually, so even "right after a patch" can be problematic (especially since a patch will go live before the OCR gets into the office)

The other issue people complained that it was popping up too much at log in and should only be for emergencies.

I make all my money from people who think like this.

Why do only one of the two options? You can only get 1 from the SSA per week, what are you doing the rest of the time you play? Earning merits probably. convert them.

Overreacting? I guess it all depends on someone's experience as to what's over-reacting and what isn't.

As for being reminded to look when the patch is applied? No, that's never, ever happened. I click on the launcher, select City of heroes, and then click Play Now. Then I play. At no time does it say "Read the patch notes! We changed stuff!". There is a heading for them, but why would I look? Why would anyone?

But, that's ok. I learned from this bitter experience. But, that doesn't mean I don't fully understand the anger that the OP feels/felt.

Whoa... hey.... "abuse" is such an unpleasant word. I didn't abuse it. I just ran it repeatedly.... with about 15 different toons.... using an Excel spreadsheet to track the timer.....

No, I'm pretty sure that to any reasonable, intelligent, SANE human being, pitching a foul-mouthed tantrum over not knowing something because you chose not to read the information that was readily available and easily found qualifies as "overreacting"...

That's exactly what they're doing. In spite of the ease of obtaining the merits through the SSAs, it might have been left in if not for how trivial it was to abuse them - and how obvious that method of abuse was. With the new sewer trials, hell, you can be to 10-17 within an hour tops.

And for the first time in a long time, the average price of lotg procs dropped!
This was a good thing. A shame they'll climb back up.

Funny how their price drops when people are abusing a bug or unintended enhanced rewards... a good indication that something nefarious is up.

Really? I figured, based on, you know, a rudimentary knowledge of economics, that it was simply supply and demand. When the supply goes up (due to extra A-merits in the system causing more LotGs to come around), and demand remains constant, prices go down. Pretty bloody simple, if you ask me.

Originally Posted by Back Alley Brawler Did you just use "casual gamer" and "purpled-out warshade" in the same sentence?

I was away for a while from the game and may not know of any other distortions in the price of the LotGs, but the other one that comes immediately to mind that dropped the price was a regular merit exploit. Of course it is supply and demand that is driving down the prices; the question becomes where did the bloat in supply come from? It appears to me that the bloat in supply come from exploitation. In the older case, exploitation of a bug in the game, in this most recent exploitation of unintended extra rewards. Now, in this most recent case, lots of arguments could be made that there was no way for the players to know it was unintended when they were doing it... or could convince themselves anyway. But, given that the devs have closed the loophole it is pretty obvious that they believed it to be unintended.

Given their power, the price drop indicated that they were TOO easy to get, which I'd consider a BAD thing, actually.

This is wrong. You can get an A-Merit at level 1. It has been done in the past.

I'm not sure what the deal is with this. The reward is on a week long timer. Not something that can easily be easily abused. Even with doing it with many toons, it wouldn't stop anyone from just affirming their alignment on all the toons (prolly have already). Only thing it effects are new players and ignorant players. People who we should be trying to help, not hinder.

1. Roll new character.
2. PL to level 10 in a few minutes.
3. Speed arc, claim completion AM plus bonus AM.
4. Buy high-value 2 AM recipe, mail to other character.
5. Delete, repeat.

That was the issue they tried to address with the change. It wasn't a great fix by any means, but there were probably limited by the tools they had available, trying to close the loophole with the least amount of new coding.

How? the only way I could think of would be not very viable, and I think it would make you level up past 5 or 10 at least (Inf and the non-tradable reward merit conversion)

That is some pretty faulty logic there. By that logic, it was also an "exploit" to play the game normally and run the 10-20 level mission with a normal 10-20 level character that you intended to keep playing. After all, that "loophole" was closed as well.

Ok, so how do *you* propose they keep A-merits at that level and not have people farming them en-masse with alts?