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Roach Warehouse posted:So are sentinels an archetype where you should always take both of the first two powers, in order to trigger their weird class mechanic? Or is that just a ‘nice to have’ that doesn’t make a huge difference? I would definitely take them. I've got a Level 42 Sentinel and there are definitely times when you want one or the other. Also with enough recharge you can sometimes gently caress with the system and actually trigger both if the animations on the power you use first is short enough.
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May 26, 2019 13:23
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"Hey John Murdoch, why do you dump on Matt Miller a bunch? Are you some kind of weirdo who plays too much video games or something? I thought Jack Emmert was the idiot who almost ruined the game?" nobody asked. Well I woke up full of piss and vinegar this morning so strap in, motherfuckers. Matt Miller (aka Positron) took over for Jack Emmert (aka Statesman), an oft-reviled dope who got blamed for anything and everything wrong with the game during his tenure, and Zeb Cook (Lord Recluse) who really was only around to get City of Villains off the ground before leaving. Jack was definitely a dope, but most of the stuff that got pinned on him had roots in other places. Like Geko's (then power guy's) terrible sense of balance and math. The game was also a wild west clusterfuck at launch probably because it radically changed from its original design in alpha: Seven origins, which determined how many powers you got. Freeform power selection. An advanced targeting system where you could target individual body parts on an enemy. Zero contacts whatsoever, just faceless generic mission terminals in City Hall that would spit out an assignment. And Atlas's globe was wire-framed instead of stone! Like I said, pure madness. I'll probably make a separate post about Jack later because a lot of ya'll probably don't know a thing about why everyone hates him so much, and definitely not why I hate him for completely different reasons. So, why why why do I hate Matt Miller? Simple: Dude did not fundamentally understand the game he was running. That sounds cliche, I know, every overly-invested fan in every game ever says this exact thing. But how often do they have receipts? See, after the game shut down Matt had a column on MMORPG.com where he got to share his "wisdom" with the masses. Now, think about this very thread. Think about how many posts have been "I rolled up a character and by the time I hit level 10 I had an idea for another character and just had to go roll it!" or "the character creator is the real game" or whatever. Behold:  What Matt Miller thinks about alts. If you're going to read anything in this post, please read this. In short, alts were a mistake, were a bad idea, and were secretly bad for the game because...they caused easily solvable problems and weren't how Miller likes to play.Look, if you've been paying attention to my other posts I think it's abundantly clear that I am not a power gamer. I'm a cranky roleplayer who likes to punch bad guys up to a point, but the thought of endlessly grinding for that all important +5% whatever waiting at the end of the rainbow so I can more efficiently grind for the next +5% is not for me. I've played Diablo 3, I've been through that kind of endgame loop, I get the appeal to an extent, but it's just not in my wheelhouse. Matt Miller is clearly the exact opposite. The only thing he cares about it is developing and gaining power on a single character. Everything he was specifically responsible for in the game reflects that to some degree or another. Obviously with the crown jewel of that design being the Incarnate System. We're gonna go through a chronological summary of Miller's additions to the game and specific incidents that got stuck in my craw. Badges. Miller was responsible for adding the badge system back in I2. Ostensibly any of the really annoying early badges like the ones for spending X amount of time mezzed were his fault. Any of the poorly-considered ones like needing to kill 200 Banished Pantheon masks when on average you'd probably see like, 20 max in your normal play are probably thanks to him as well. And then there was Isolator, the badge for killing 100 Contaminated in the hero tutorial. See, badges literally did not exist before I2, so if you rolled your character up before then there was no possible way to EVER get Isolator. Similarly, by design the badge wasn't referenced anywhere in-game and the progress bar was prevented from appearing until you killed at least 25 of them in order to prevent casual players from exiting the tutorial and then having an incomplete progress bar in their list forever. This meant that lots of people never got the badge and would never do so. That's okay though, Matt Miller came up with a solution to the problem: He added a single Contaminated that would spawn...in the tram station in Recluse's Victory. You want that badge? Get ready for the hell grind as you dodge gankers, wait an hour for the thing to respawn, oh, and hope no villains show up and kill it because they literally cannot earn Isolator so the only thing they can do is actively deprive anyone from getting progress on it. All hail Matt Miller's grand benevolence. (Eventually they added the Ouroboros arc where you get sent back to your respective tutorial and can finally kill Contaminated there to get the badge. Thank god.) Gladiators. GLADIATORS ARE NOT BADGES. That's straight from Miller. That's why on live you couldn't "wear" them as titles. That's also why they use a standardized badge graphic, appear in the badge list, and are attached to other badges or require X (X = entirely too many) kills of a particular enemy type just like badges. The gladiator system was, AFAIK, literally made over weekend and it shows. It was unbalanced from the word go, poorly thought out, and required you to use the buggy and unpleasant Arena system to even access. It took years and years for it to be looked at in any capacity, and even then that was just for some minor balance tweaks and it getting the side-eye because of its use in grinding specific badges. No idea if this was Miller's doing or not, but when they added the second tier of healing badges they did not actually do the math to figure out if they were feasibly earnable. Suffice to say, they weren't. The requirements were something like a whole factor of 10 too large to ever realistically obtain through even dedicated play. That didn't stop people from trying - gladiators that healed counted as healing done by the character controlling them (and I think even if they weren't healing any damage, just producing a green number). This led to overnight heal farms where people would just idle in ideal conditions where one or two specific gladiators would endlessly spam their heal to rack up those numbers. (Eventually they cut down those badge requirements to be somewhat sane.) The important thing to note here is that Miller, when deciding to add a new system to the game, took the system he previously designed and re-used it wholesale. One final wrinkle: As a special reward for veteran players, having both the 1st and 2nd anniversary badges would unlock a special 5th Column gladiator (unique since this was after the Column were otherwise removed). Eventually somebody hosed up and this 5th Column Krieger, an overtuned boss only meant for gladiator matches, got added to the regular 5th Column spawn pool so if you're ever fighting the Column and suddenly are getting your rear end kicked by one of them now you know why they hurt so bad. Inventions. Something that the developers struggled with for years was what was called the "Skills" system. Basically, they had more or less figured out the part where your hero could punch bad guys, but what about the part where your hero gathers a bunch of clues, then takes them back to their supercomputer to analyze? Hack computers? Lockpick doors? Literally anything separate from combat that might happen during a mission? Suffice to say, they never hashed out just what the hell Skills would be or do. There were probably a lot of reasons for this - their mission map randomization meant they couldn't easily seed bonus objectives into maps that woudn't accidentally block progress and even if they could, what would be behind those locked doors or computer hacks or whatever? Whereas your Deus Exes and Fallouts could have oodles of goodies behind those, City of Heroes had no traditional loot to entice you towards any of that. At best, you might've been able to unlock shortcuts that let you sneak past mobs and go straight to the end boss, but that wasn't really sustainable either on account of the combat being fun, so why skip it, and you'd probably be hurting your own XP gains unless things were balanced super precisely. And how on earth would any of that work on a team? (To give an idea of how confused and uncertain these early drafts were, one pass had Skill inspirations that gave some kind of nebulous temporary bonus to a skill. This also leads me to believe that version piggy-backed on the combat engine in some fashion so you would've probably had to use your "Computer Hack" power on an actively-targeted enemy computer to make something happen.) The one surviving bit of design from this whole process was Inventions. Originally it was just a single facet of Skills, covering the whole Batman or Iron Man-style "make a useful gadget out of bits and bobs" kind of thing. That got plucked from the dead end that was Skills and slowly morphed into its own full system. The first new version of Inventions, created by Miller, was simple: Super powerful aliens would come out of nowhere and would be so strong that your only hope of standing a chance against them was to augment yourself with Inventions. Sound familiar...? Somewhere along the way this got stuffed into his back pocket and instead the more interesting angle of complex enhancements came about, finally making good on the promise of the controversial Enhancement Diversification nerf. In the broad strokes, I do not hate inventions. But in the details, I despise them. Crafting is a tedious, uninteresting process based solely on the whims of RNG or the AH. The system is stuffed full of low-level or low-quality sets that you would never bother to use because you'd be better off with generic IOs or saving your materials for actually good (rare) sets. Balance is a complete mess and was only brought down to mostly a mess shortly before shutdown by nerfing certain defense set bonuses and buffing certain resistance ones and totally revamping procs with the much more sane and controllable Procs Per Minute statistic. On that note, I hate hate hate the idea that with enough tinkering just about anyone can get soft-capped defense because this obliterates the whole point of certain classes and powersets. This will also have disastrous effects down the line because Incarnate enemies will mysteriously have in-built To-Hit bonuses that directly counter defense hmmmmmmm. Along the way there will also be bunch of oddball bugs and other issues with IOs that lead to things like someone soloing Hamidon thanks to a bugged proc. There's also the completely horseshit bit of design (in fairness, I believe this was a Castle decision, not Miller) where Night Widows' extremely powerful ability Mind Link will not accept normal recharge enhancements in an attempt to curb its power but will still gain recharge reduction from any IOs that can be slotted into it. Awful design. As a final note, City of Heroes has always had problems with surfacing information and to my mind IOs are some of the worst of it, where there really is no possible way to clearly get a sense of your build without using an outside planner. The fact that the game "helpfully" barfs up a long, poorly-formatted list of your set bonuses in your powers tab is just dumb. Down the line Purple, PVP, and AT IOs were added. In the case of the first two, they were originally only available at tiny, tiny drop rates from enemies and players in PVP respectively. ATOs came from loot boxes. These were all especially busted in some way or another. Another thing that will continue to be very relevant is the bizarre choice of having a small handful of costume pieces exclusive to Inventions. It's comparatively a drop in the bucket, but here's what Matt Miller had to say about loot boxes back in 2013. Vanguard Merits. Join the Vanguard, punch Rikti, get rewards. Sounds reasonable, yes? (Also pay no attention to how it is also "get randomly dropped currency, insert said currency into a crafting interface, get rewards" like every other system Miller designed post-badges.) Bad news though: You can swing through the entirety of the Rikti War Zone arcs, including the final mission which is literally called Save the World, and still not have enough Vanguard bitcoins to afford a full loving uniform. That's okay though, you can just do a server-haltingly laggy Mothership Raid where you will be downright showered in hundreds of the things for minimal individual effort. There are two very important pieces of design to highlight here: One is the continuing idea that as you're playing your character you'll chase after exclusive costume pieces to slap on at high levels as a way to show off or something. I'm sure there people out there that did and still do this (such that you need to worry about it with everything unlocked by default), but I have to imagine most players, especially the ones who roll up all those filthy, filthy alts, like to nail down their concept and look at level 1 and don't randomly swap to a random blend of new parts at level 40. Also, I was always very angry about Vanguard pants because they were inexplicably more expensive than most of the other parts despite just being the pants. The prices on that stuff were not logical at all. The second takeaway from Vanguard merits is the idea that if you're a soloer or like to stick to normal teams or whatever, then you're a second class citizen and a worthless piece of poo poo who doesn't deserve a shiny new pair of pants. Why don't you want to do raids, rear end in a top hat? Just do raids. The only reason you ever got a trickle feed of merits was to show you how awful your existence is unless you run some loving raids. Merit Rewards. This will probably be the one spot where I will actually change my tune to an extent: Reward merits are great. They're a very good idea. Before reward merits recipes would drop based on opaque and arbitrary drop pools; the type of recipe you would get at random from killing an enemy would be different from what you would get for completing a story arc would be different from completing a task force would be different from completing a trial. And this wasn't "IO set A comes from this, set B comes from that" this split sets up across a wide variety of content in a vain attempt to incentivize doing lots of different things. Unsurprisingly the most valuable individual recipes usually came from group content. Reward merits totally replaced this clunky mess with a much simpler premise: Do whatever content you want, collect a pile of merits over time, cash in for exactly the thing you want. There's still nitpicks to be made w/r/t the cost of certain things, the never not odd choice of being able to cash them in for booby prizes, etc. A more significant problem (that is still felt to this day) is that there was a promise to monitor merit gain rates and adjust as needed. This was almost universally used to cut down the merit rewards of content preferred by farmers (infamously the Katie Hannon TF in Croatoa was a big one) who knew how to run them at lightspeed for maximum efficiency. This would then drag down the rewards for everyone. Meanwhile a lot of story arcs and other more obscure stuff would have painfully low rewards or secretly have big paydays. If things were standardized better, I don't think I could bring myself to complain about reward merits at all. Architect. This is another case where I'll go a tiny bit easier on Miller. I love the potential in the Architect. I made good use of that potential back in the day. But one big problem with it drat near sunk the whole thing and the game in its entirety. See, Miller was adamant that you would be able to gain normal XP rewards in the architect. Drops would be a different story, but he staked his flag on the hill of being able to level from 1 all the way to 50 in the architect alone. And so that's exactly what people did...by writing perfectly optimized farming missions that could level a character to 50 within hours. This led to a large number of new players showing up in Atlas, getting powerleveled to 50, and genuinely not having any idea what to do next. As in, did not know there were other zones outside of Atlas Park or how to get to them. This was disastrous to say the least. Instead of cutting their losses and shutting off XP entirely, the devs would go on to keep slicing away at every last little exploit or loophole that might be used to abuse the system, neutering a lot of the storytelling potential that it was designed for in the first place. With the end result being that instead of being used solely for powerleveling, the AE became only mostly used for powerleveling. Crisis averted! The AE was also notoriously buggy and broke in some new way every single issue and rarely got tech time, probably because they were too busy nerfing yet another exploit instead. Lastly, big surprise, a system created by Matt Miller features an exclusive currency that once accrued can be traded in via a crafting interface to spit out a particular reward of your choice. Another failed promise was that they would actively support "Devs' Choice" arcs where they would elevate chosen player-made content into a form where instead of Architect tickets you would get normal drops. This failed spectacularly not only because they barely ever chose new arcs to promote, but the system was so buggy that most Devs' Choice arcs were more and more unplayable the longer they existed. And they couldn't be fixed because by design once they were promoted the creator could no longer edit them (to prevent say, changing the arc into a farm with full rewards or rewriting all of the text to just say penispenispenis over and over). Tips and Morality. Tips have (had?) a cap where only 5 per day would count. This meant that if you were exclusively picking the same alignment choice it would always take 2 days to reach a full Alignment mission. If for some reason you didn't pick the same alignment choice, like perhaps you were playing some kind of role rather than chasing mechanical power, you got penalized for it. Why all the bullshit? Because Miller made the morality system not actually about character concept or roleplay or literally any of the logical reasons to add such a thing but instead yet another vector for gaining player power. The restrictions were to prevent you from running infinite tips/alignment missions in a single day and reaping all of the tasty rewards waiting at the end of them. He doubled down on this by making being a Rogue or Vigilante the worst possible thing you could ever conceivably do, because gently caress you. Those alternate factions got to...travel to the other side of the game and play all of that content. Except almost nobody wanted to play City of Villains content so Vigilantes were especially pointless. At best, you could argue that having access to both sides might have enabled the ability to get extra reward merits by running both blue and red TFs. What did you get for steadfastly remaining a hero or villain? ANOTHER CURENCY!  Hero and Villain merits would be gained by continuing to remain in your lane and could be redeemed inside exclusive clubhouses in Atlas Park and Cap Au Diable where the Phalanx and Arachnos characters hung out for no particular reason. These special merits got you access to much better rewards like being able to trade them for Purple or PVP IO recipes at a more efficient (but still painfully slow) rate.Gonna take a break and split off into another post because next is gonna be about the Incarnate system and also Miller's direct and indirect influence on the game's writing, which is in all likelihood going to be as long as this one was. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 14:49 on May 26, 2019 |
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May 26, 2019 14:39
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Is flares worth taking in the fire blast set for a corruptor? It seems like even though the recharge is short the animation time is kind of long which makes it underwhelming.John Murdoch posted:stuff Sir this is an arby's drive-thru etc etc It's amazing how many times good games seem to come together as some sort of happy accident. Or more likely there were a lot of lower level people who really knew what they were doing and did a good job righting the ship. Damn Dirty Ape fucked around with this message at 15:20 on May 26, 2019 |
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May 26, 2019 15:18
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drat Dirty Ape posted:Sir this is an arby's drive-thru etc etc People keep saying that and I still don't have my goddamn french fries.
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May 26, 2019 16:07
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Hey, thanks for this effort post. I was too busy playing my three accounts worth of alts when the game was live t follow drama, so this is fascinating.
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May 26, 2019 16:32
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lmao I completely forgot gladiators existed
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May 26, 2019 16:55
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Thanks for the reminder that, for as much fun as I had and still have in City, there were enough questionable-at-best dev decisions that it's kind of miraculous the game had as much staying power as it did.
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May 26, 2019 16:55
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John Murdoch posted:Gonna take a break and split off into another post because next is gonna be about the Incarnate system and also Miller's direct and indirect influence on the game's writing, which is in all likelihood going to be as long as this one was. I knew none of that, so please follow this up. It's legitimately fascinating since I definitely vaguely remember States as The Bad One and Posi as The Good One.
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May 26, 2019 17:57
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John Murdoch posted:Badges. Miller was responsible for adding the badge system back in I2. Ostensibly any of the really annoying early badges like the ones for spending X amount of time mezzed were his fault. Any of the poorly-considered ones like needing to kill 200 Banished Pantheon masks when on average you'd probably see like, 20 max in your normal play are probably thanks to him as well. And then there was Isolator, the badge for killing 100 Contaminated in the hero tutorial. See, badges literally did not exist before I2, so if you rolled your character up before then there was no possible way to EVER get Isolator. Similarly, by design the badge wasn't referenced anywhere in-game and the progress bar was prevented from appearing until you killed at least 25 of them in order to prevent casual players from exiting the tutorial and then having an incomplete progress bar in their list forever. This meant that lots of people never got the badge and would never do so. That's okay though, Matt Miller came up with a solution to the problem: He added a single Contaminated that would spawn...in the tram station in Recluse's Victory. You want that badge? Get ready for the hell grind as you dodge gankers, wait an hour for the thing to respawn, oh, and hope no villains show up and kill it because they literally cannot earn Isolator so the only thing they can do is actively deprive anyone from getting progress on it. All hail Matt Miller's grand benevolence. (Eventually they added the Ouroboros arc where you get sent back to your respective tutorial and can finally kill Contaminated there to get the badge. Thank god.) Holy poo poo, I remember this one! It was one of the biggest dick moves of all gaming time! Like there wasn't any system limitation or anything for it, it was just Miller telling everyone who wanted that badge "gently caress you." For anyone not familiar, that mentioned hour-long respawn for a single one isn't hyperbole. It was actually a full hour for one to appear.
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May 26, 2019 17:59
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drat Dirty Ape posted:Is flares worth taking in the fire blast set for a corruptor? It seems like even though the recharge is short the animation time is kind of long which makes it underwhelming. I haven't done fire on a corruptor so if there's some meaningful nuance I'm missing, I don't have it, but I played fire blaster to 50 and Flares was dead weight and I was happy to spec out of it.
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May 26, 2019 18:06
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the coh devs, as a group, never understood what people actually liked about their game they would have spent a lot more time on adding variety - new mission map tilesets, new enemies for existing enemy groups, etc. - instead of chasing the dragon of "having an endgame" if they had understood
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May 26, 2019 18:15
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Don't forget Empath, a badge which required you to use some weird gladiator setup overnight to farm healing done by your gladiators, for a total of 1,000,000,000 healing done
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May 26, 2019 18:16
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like man i would kill for more mission map tilesets that don't gently caress the camera up like caves and offices do
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May 26, 2019 18:17
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A moonbase tileset to punch Nazis in would have been rad as hell.
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May 26, 2019 19:01
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Thundarr posted:A moonbase tileset to punch Nazis in would have been rad as hell. Well I mean now that people have the code...
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May 26, 2019 19:04
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Mesadoram posted:Well I mean now that people have the code... I thought it was called Portland now.
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May 26, 2019 19:18
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I'll have two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip, a number 7, two number 45s, one with cheese, and a large soda. Matt Miller and writing. Matt Miller acted as the de facto story editor for the game, because otherwise there wasn't one. He was not at all qualified. His single guiding rule for the writers seemed to basically be "do whatever you want as long as it's cool and doesn't require a lot of tech". (You see, at one end the studio was down to a 15 person skeleton crew at one point, and on the other end it had grown much larger but was being mismanaged so while they were trying to implement all these world-shaking events into the game the A team was busy trying to make a MOBA and/or City of Heroes 2.) This is what led to so many weird story beats and arcs towards the end of the game, because any writer could pretty much go down whatever fan fiction-y rabbit hole they wanted to. You also ended up with odd things like when they sat one of the map designers down in front of the nascent Architect and had him write an arc to see how easy it was...which is how we got the baffling character of Daedalus and his arc where Malta invades Cimerora and this is just kind of brushed off as whatever. Miller also acted as a writer himself on occasion, and as far as I can tell every single time it was awful. He was responsible for the VEAT arcs, which are pretty much universally terrible. He also wrote the Lady Grey TF which means I now have to explain the infamous "Hamidon is Rularuu" fuckup. Back in the day, one of the other folks working on the game came to Miller with a simple question. They were going to do a website update where they do a background page for the Devouring Earth, so what's the deal with Hamidon anyhow? Miller has an epic brainfart and proceeds to describe Rularuu. This was quickly caught and corrected and sounds like a benign error by itself. However, this was likely right around the same time Miller was writing Lady Grey, and is almost certainly why during that TF when you encounter Hamidon you get this piece of descriptive text: "You exit the chopper on the edge of the Abyss, the hole in the sea where the Hamidon rips through into our reality." Given you also harness some nebulous "power of the Hamidon" that lets you "affect transdimensional entities" and ultimately punch the Honoree at the end, I think it's clear Miller wrote all of that while under that exact same misapprehension. I wouldn't be surprised if this is what led to Hamidon being retconned into being an Incarnate as well. As a cherry on top, the entire TF is based on the Book of Revelation for no particular reason, which is why the Rikti, who have no gods or religion, base their elite kill squad on the Four Horsemen. There's also Dra'Gon, who inexplicably has fire powers despite being a totally normal Rikti dude from their homeworld. The entire connection is, I'm pretty sure, down to "this endgame TF is kind of like the end of the world, so what if it was like that bible thing about the end of the world" because that's just how skillful Miller is as a writer. Now we're going to ease into Incarnates with Dr. Brainstorm and Origins of Power. The former was a character created by Miller solely to explain the invention system and powerset proliferation in in-character terms in a particularly forced and cheesy way (note that this gets shoehorned into the final VEAT arc for no real reason). The latter was an arc used to casually slip the foundations of the Incarnate system into the game. Now I've always defended Origin of Power because it's vague enough to be inoffensive to me - the general idea is that there's some fundamental universal constants or overriding "potential" that ties all heroes and villains together. This builds on a lot of the deep lore established in the Web of Arachnos novel (the modern age of heroes began when Statesman and Recluse opened Pandora's Box, unleashing all of the pent-up raw potential and power onto the world, leading to a bunch of new heroes and villains appearing). I know a lot of other people hated this though, because they felt it essentially made all characters secretly and inescapably magic origin by default. If Origin of Power was the endpoint for this stuff I would've still probably defended it, but that's not what went down. Incarnates. What a loving mess. The original definition of Incarnate was "really super duper powerful dude or dudette who was granted the powers of a god" like literally a specific god...or something. Statesman was an Incarnate of Zeus which is why he gets to be both a SS/Invuln character and have a giant screen-destroying lightning nuke. Lord Recluse is the Incarnate of Tartarus which isn't even a god and nobody knows what the gently caress happened there. (Jack Emmert, remember him?, is a professor of mythology which is why this stuff is rooted in Greek bullshit.) The original plan, back when every other month they were teasing another new one, was for Incarnates to be some kind of Epic Archetype. (Alongside Blood of the Black Stream, Avilans, Coralax, and Spies. You might notice none of these exist in the game as an AT.) But then Miller salvaged (GET IT???) the Invention system from Skills. And there was that whole "super duper alien badass threat that you need to grind my special currencies to fight" angle. Thus began the construction of an endgame progression system that definitely, under no circumstances would take you beyond level 50. Right up until it did exactly that, five seconds in. Also, say it with me now: A Matt Miller system that's just the same loving thing as every other one of his systems, where you accrue tokens to plug into a crafting interface to get a thing. If you take five minutes to examine the system you can quickly realize there's literally no reason at all for the Incarnate system to use a million different types of salvage because most of them are completely interchangeable. The crafting interface is also loving atrocious. But it simply must be that way because That whole godly being thing got immediately and viciously retconned to explain why players had to slowly grind their way up to godhood instead of having it thrust upon them. So why is that the case? Well here we loving go. The ultimate super duper source of all power in the universe? Is a petty and pernicious sentient entity known as the Well of the Furies. If you do the whole Incarnate thing the "fast" way like Statesman and Recluse sure you almost instantly become an ubermensch but it also opens you up to being directly controlled by the Well, something that's demonstrated for you as you go through the arc to unlock the system. This was never mentioned before nor will it be mentioned again. Apparently if you slowly slurp a more generic and nebulous kind of power up through a curly straw you can get as much as you could ever want without being a puppet of an omnipotent god thing, so that's how you're gonna do it. Okay, so what happened to those big bad aliens that want to murder everyone and you need to be an Incarnate to deal with? Shut the gently caress up, we're not there yet, idiot. Praetoria is an alternate dimension where the Freedom Phalanx is evil. If you're at all familiar with the Justice Lords this is exactly that. The world was turbofucked by Praetorian Hamidon going green goo event on the earth and the amazing and benevolent Statesman beat it back before going on to become Emperor Cole. Sike. Hamidon kicked his rear end and Cole just barely managed to make a bargain where Hamidon would let humanity survive long enough to prove whether it was worth keeping around. Bad news...Cole's amazing plan was to put all of his favorite sociopathic and fashy buddies in power, and even juice them up with some extra Incarnate power. The end result was an "order at any cost" white dystopia where the average citizen is relentlessly controlled, suppressed, or otherwise kept in the dark about everything and anything while Cole and the rest plot to...well, that's where things start getting hazy. Depending on what you read where Cole wants to invade Primal Earth because A) it's a threat to Praetoria's fragile stability and will ruin his deal with Hamidon somehow worse than he already did, B) Primal earth's whole reasonably pleasant and just society will wake the sheeple up and make them start asking questions, C) Cole just wants to jump ship because the sooner he can get the gently caress away from the eldritch super horror that wants to devour or mutate all life on earth to its own ends the better, and/or finally D) The Well of the Furies wants him to prove himself by punching all of our characters. Now, this is where things get even more confusing. I THINK the idea is that Emperor Cole is both the Champion of the Well, handpicked by the Well itself to seemingly protect it from the Coming Storm judging from dialogue from the Magisterium Trial (and no they never bring up the idea of the Well controlling Cole like it can States or Recluse) but also the primary target of the Talons of Vengeance, a group directly representing the actual mythical Furies I think??, who want to punish him for murdering Lord Recluse as they were gaining their powers, resulting in Cole getting both Zeus juice and Tartarus sauce. Despite this, the Talons of Vengeance will never actually move directly against Cole and instead will act as a generic antagonist in Night Ward and Incarnate stuff. Cole loses his status as Champion at the end of Magisterium and is stuffed in a Vanguard prison for later. The plan was to have Cole (after being  interrogated by the Vanguard) secretly come back as Primal Earth's Statesman. The logic was that, despite all of the player characters growing more and more powerful to the point where they could bench-press the moon or whatever, Paragon City was still incapable of functioning without uniting behind The Guy On The Box. This was a prevalent issue with the writing around this time, where the story was split between player characters being sucked off at any and every opportunity while simultaneously reiterating that actually only the signature characters could affect real plot development. Ironically, back in the day people would conflate Jack Emmert's overlording incompetence with the idea that the game considered Statesman more important than anyone else, despite the fact the dude didn't even appear in the game at all and even once he did you had to rescue his dumbass from Tyrant. Funny how that works. I also have no idea why they thought they should try to redeem a fascist rear end in a top hat who was addicted to power, but they seriously were going to - you can play Tyrant's personal story and it seems try real hard to make him sound sorry for, y'know, literally all of the bad poo poo that went down in Praetoria. This is immediately before he loses his poo poo while punching Incarnates and nukes Nova Praetoria and absorbs the souls of anyone still there to power up further. Bizarrely the backstory given for his appearance in NCsoft's MXM crossover MOBA (yes, this existed, and yes it's already shut down) actually fixes this relatively gracefully by having him realize that he can't be magically redeemed simply by putting on Statesman's threads and pretending to be a good guy and so he fucks off to another alternate dimension to try not to be such a piece of poo poo this time. (And for some reason even more Loyalists like loving Marauder will also get redeemed for no conceivable reason aside from, again, the devs not understanding Praetoria and being too in love with their own characters.)So, mechanics. Incarnates were increasingly powerful gods among men, and so needed equally powerful gods among men to punch. This is why Cole can just magically hand out Incarnate strength to his lieutenants because otherwise the entire Praetorian War plotline would be much shorter. But raids can't just be 16-24 characters punching a big beefy bad guy for an hour. So begins the arms race of obnoxious mechanics and gimmicks. Since Incarnates can't be beaten through raw mechanical strength, Trials get to cheat. Sometimes this is reasonably acceptable (if still wildly controversial) - BAF has mez-immune enemies spawn during what is functionally a tower defense section so that mezzers cannot singlehandedly win the encounter. Other times you get tedious stuff like Keyes Reactor's unresistable damage pulses. Or how about needing to escort an NPC through the most difficult-on-account-of-gross-imbalance trial in the game. Finally, as previously mentioned, ALL Incarnate enemies have an in-built To-Hit bonus that unambiguously exists to counteract the broken levels of defense that could be gained by IOs. Y'know, the previous source of player power that Matt Miller also designed? Mysteriously invalidated by his new source of player power....hmmmmmm. It's no secret I hate raids. Because instead of just playing my character I need to follow specific secret protocols or else bad things happen. You think it's a pain in the rear end herding 8 players who aren't on the same page through a simple scanner mission? Try herding 24 through content explicitly designed to aggressively gently caress you over if you don't play right. Oh, and because of incredible negligence huge oversights happened like how Masterminds were borderline unplayable in raids for like five different reasons - your henchmen did not scale up in level, even if you had level shifts, your henchmen's damage didn't always count for participation so you could be denied rewards, and in general raid mechanics were not friendly to pets. Your reward for putting up with this bullshit (or more realistically, getting dragged through this stuff by people who actually know what they're doing but can't just solo it) are a series of powers that destroy any semblance of balance in normal content and homogenize ATs into a single boring omnipotent god AT. It's not hard to see: Every single Incarnate power past Alpha (the one reasonably fair and balanced design) is just "now your character gets to do X thing normally reserved for a specific AT". Pets? Hah gently caress you my Stalker can do that. Giant AoE nuke? Hah gently caress you my Tanker can do that. Buffs? Debuffs? Self-buffs? Check, check, check says the Brute who can now do whatever the gently caress she wants like solo the ITF for fun and profit. As previously stated, discussions did go down about whether or not they should shut Incarnate powers off outside of designated content but this happened AFTER a bunch of the powers were already out there and being used to break the game into dust. Thus, no such thing was ever done. This is all on top of the level shifts baked into some of the powers that effectively put your level above 50, further trivializing anything not expecting level 53 characters. (And of course as time went on Incarnate enemies would conveniently start getting their own level shifts to directly invalidate that advantage. This was a full raid and loot treadmill, plain and simple.) Now, what if I wanted to get in on some of these sweet Incarnate goodies but like to solo and/or hate raids? Matt Miller's answer: gently caress you. The exact same thing that happened with Vanguard merits happened here. Both things, that is. If you didn't want to do raid content, you couldn't do incarnate stuff past Alpha, period. Hybrid (and presumably more of the powers to follow) was even only unlockable via XP that could only be gained by doing <whatever new raid or whichever was most recently added>. But what about Dark Astoria you ask? That was added several issues after the Incarnate system premiered and the only new incoming content was raids on top of more loving raids. And even then it seemingly only came about as soon as it did after players begged/rioted for some kind of soloable or otherwise small-scale Incarnate content. Also, this was never well known but not only were the rewards from DA time gated much like Alignment Merits, but the raw reward rolls were insulting and clearly intentionally hobbled. Before I25 the chance of getting a Rare piece of Incarnate salvage from a non-raid source was 4% and Very Rare Incarnate salvage was 1%. Why aren't you doing raids, motherfucker???? Also like Vanguard merits, the Incarnate system had exclusive costume pieces attached. For starters, there was the Ascension set. While like the rest of the costume pieces gained through the Incarnate system it was an account-wide unlock, unlike those this costume set could only ever be worn by level 50 characters. This was some pretty big bullshit for a game that before then never went out of its way to glorify level capped characters over others. And again, I would much rather be able to tinker with those pieces at character creation instead of need to wait until endgame to wear the rear end in a top hat level 50 vanity set. Next were the Incarnate chest emblems which, sure, makes sense those are locked behind this stuff. They're just the icons for each Incarnate power that you can wear on your chest for some reason. Everything else though........want to wear a treble clef on your chest? gently caress you, become an Incarnate first. Want to use the top-tier Binary and Pixel auras to make totally rad TRON-style characters? gently caress you, become an Incarnate first. Want to just loving be able to have your character Now let's talk about Maelstrom's pistols. During the TPN Trial you fight boring grimdark guns man Maelstrom, who uses custom dual pistols. Wouldn't it be cool if you could use those custom dualies? Well gently caress you. During the phases of the trial there will come a point where you punch Maelstrom hard enough that he drops one pistol. Then another phase where he drops the other. Each time this happens there's a 4% chance that a random member of the league will get a recipe to craft the pistols. Actually, that's not true. Because the recipe isn't for unlocking the pistols, it's for unlocking A SINGLE PISTOL AT A TIME. BECAUSE MAELSTROM DROPS THEM ONE AT A TIME. GET IT????? An alternative was added where if you completed the trial on a DP character you would unlock the option to pay yet more of those shiny Incarnate merits to automatically unlock both goddamn pistols, but again you had to make it up to 50 and become an Incarnate and complete the trial and cash in your tokens so your character could at last use the pistols you probably wanted all along. Otherwise get ready to pay bonkers prices on the AH for two of those recipes, fucko. This stuff pisses me off the most not only because I'm, as previously said, a cranky RPer who doesn't care about all this raid nonsense but also because one of the brilliant and lasting reasons why City of Heroes was different and awesome compared to other MMOs is that your costume was wholly independent from your abilities. You could look like whatever you wanted from the word go and nothing could stop you. Other, lesser costume unlock stuff was annoying, sure, but the Incarnate stuff was 1000% an extension of Matt Miller's warped perspective that you should be playing a single character who gets increasingly more and more special and powerful and better than everyone else. gently caress that attitude. And those loving pistols? That's like something out of a completely different, much shittier game. As a tangential point, I also loathe how the Incarnate system only has one path: you go from having a pretty drat strong character to having a super ultra god character. What the gently caress is my street-level Batman or even Spider-man analogue supposed to do here? That's why the foundations were laid with the Well being this all-encompassing force, to try and handwave away why those characters aren't irrelevant and everyone can become a god just by trying really hard. But what about the aliens??????? Welcome to Matt Miller's world, where everything is conveniently focused on his pet project super duper evil aliens coming to blow us up that he concocted years ago alongside Inventions. See, they made the incredibly loving stupid decision to quickly write off Praetorian Hamidon (ie, the main antagonist of the setting that clearly everything was building up to and a genuinely decent reason to need ultra super god powers) because allegedly people were "getting tired of Praetoria". In reality it's real loving likely that people were tired of Praetoria because it was one long road of Cole and his cronies literally god-modding and a mess of piss poor writing trying to justify all of the wild swings of melodrama. So Praetorian Hamidon gets a weak send-off in a side arc and you never properly fight him (also that arc has him show up briefly in a human form to talk to you that makes him look awfully like a generic white guy which I gotta be honest, a dude named Hamidon Pasilima doesn't sound like a white dude). Ever since Issue 11, Mender Silos was pissing his pants about the end of the world. A catastrophic Thing called the Coming Storm. That's why he came back in time to warn everyone. (Note: None of Ouroboros' content has anything to actually do with the Coming Storm.) The Coming Storm, the ultimate force that would show up to break our Incarnate backs and make us haaahmble? Well, my man have you ever played Halo? The Coming Storm is an intergalactic alien army known as The Battalion who, based on how they were described, were literally just the Covenant. They go around from planet to planet, kicking their rear end and absorbing their Wells of power alongside recruiting their conquered heroes. They would finally ride up to earth and go "join or die" and obviously our answer would be neither of those two things. Incarnates would then have the rug pulled out from under them when Lady Grey turned out to be an agent working for the Battalion all along!!! ...Or she would be if Matt Miller had his way. See, Lady Grey has always had secretive, unexplained origins. A common (and much superior) fan theory was that she's actually the mythical Lady of the Lake, which is why she has such an attachment to Hero 1 (former wielder of Excalibur). But no, gently caress that, she's actually a secret evil alien. The purpose for this was purely for melodrama and forced plot development. See, by the time we beat Emperor Cole, our characters are ostensibly kings and queens of the world in terms of power. In order to keep the story going, they needed to inflict some kind of setback on them. Lady Grey was to dun dun dunnnn reveal her true allegiance, throwing the Vanguard, one of the main forces protecting the earth from poo poo like the Battalion, into disarray. This needed to be a convoluted narrative twist because like hell could they possibly depower or otherwise weaken Incarnates directly. Matt Miller tried to imply that this twist was somehow guessable because the Vanguard have lots of Impervium, and Impervium is supposed to be vanishingly rare. (This factoid is also vanishingly rare anywhere in the game's lore.) Thus instead of Lady Grey having a bunch of it because, I dunno, the Vanguard is a UN-backed earth-wide security force ala XCOM so maybe everyone is pooling their supply instead she was somehow secretly being supplied it by the Battalion, because they have some way to magically turn Impervium off. Or something. This was, in a rare event when it came to the game's writing, declared too stupid and messy. (Lady Grey's new pseudo-official backstory is that she was created by the Well to be its champion, but refused the offer. ...Look, she's just the Lady of the Lake okay?) Instead, the previously-unknown-yet-otherwise-unassuming architect of the newly-open Kallisti Wharf would be revealed to be the Battalion agent. This was also changed, because the writers had a terminal addiction to plot twists. No, the real mastermind who had been secretly pulling strings behind the scenes and laying the groundwork for his evil alien masters all along was.....DR. STEVEN SHERIDAN. What a tweest! ...Wait, who? Oh uh, well you see, he's a generic heroside contact, basically a retired hero in Brickstown who happens to be the guy who sends you on the arc where you find out the Rikti are actually mutated humans. He has no further plot significance or characterization, he's just scientist man. Well he was gonna hulk out and turn into a big bad Incarnate power guy and you would go fight him in space and punch him so, so hard he would like, fly back down to the earth with a big boom. And if this sounds like a five year old playing with action figures then you're starting to catch on. Oh and by the way, yes, this means the very pretty and awesome Kallisti Wharf was ultimately meant to be in service of yet more cosmic-level bullshit rather than more low-key stuff. The worst thing is that they had considered an infinitely superior option before crumpling it up and tossing it away. One of the original plans was to have a slightly obscure hero everyone had thought died a long time ago show up and be like "hey these cool aliens want to be our friends and make us super buff and help us charge our crystals" which sounds properly creepy and effective? Without being a stupid and pointless plot twist? So of course that certainly weren't going to do that. Oh also Citadel was also a Battalion agent. For no other reason than to "spice up his character". So loving dumb. drat near every single dangling plot thread discussed in the Lore AMAs circles back around to the Battalion. War Witch has come back to life (through another stupid plot), what now? She's gonna go hang out with Apex again...so they can fight the Battalion! What are the Rikti up to? Helping us fight the Battalion! Are we going to ever fight Rularuu? Not really, no, because he's getting used as a weapon against the Battalion. Characters with mysterious origins probably have some connection to the Battalion. Anyone who had nothing better to do was going to work on fighting the Battalion. That thing that happened that one time? Totally the Battalion's fault. This is why it was so important to get away from Praetoria already, we had to go from people being bored and frustrated with that so they could be bored and frustrated with the Battalion. After the Battalion things would get more and more weird and cosmic from there, where our characters would somehow become their own Wells, start loving around with the multiverse, fight weird angel people, fight Prometheus, fight the Real Actual True Super Rikti, and then finally they would be so uncontrollably powerful that everything would need to be blown up, depowering everyone. Cue City of Heroes 2. That was that real endgame all along: Grind your way to ultimate godhood and engage in power creep so heinously bad that by the end it had to be taken away. Now buy the sequel, idiot. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that if there's a single clear takeaway or moral from all this dumb stuff I've rambled about for entirely too long, it's this: If Matt Miller ever asks if you want to play in his D&D campaign, run away screaming. 
John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 19:56 on May 26, 2019 |
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May 26, 2019 19:43
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Was going to write some snark about your post being so long but a lot of it rings true tbh
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May 26, 2019 20:04
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By and large, I did think the later game arcs were a huge improvement over the ones the game launched with, but, yeah. A lot of that makes so much sense. The plot thread I was most miserable got dropped was Khelds. There was virtually nothing about them then they just get offhandedly mentioned as being dead in the future. Wheeee.
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May 26, 2019 20:25
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You really hate raids, huh? I think you dwindle a little too much into angry frothing and extrapolating personal theories towards the end there. And being an RPer is no excuse. You can enjoy both the RP side of things and the big monster mash raids and there's not really that big of a split between them With regards to Incarnates I think the game definitely goes "Okay, if you want to feel invested in the plot, you're going to have to tailor your expectations/backstory to fit within the bounds of the fiction we've set up" and like-- if you've played any MMOs with a significant RPer population that's going to be a really similar experience. If you want to be that invested in being part of the lore, you're going to have to play with what is available to you.
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May 26, 2019 20:26
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Suprfli6 posted:The AE fire farm mission that was giving me 10 million influence per clear (4.5-5 minutes) plus recipes/salvage/incarnates gives 28 million inf per clear on Halcyon when I have exp disabled for the bonus influence. Went from 100m to 1b influence in a few hours tonight. This was a while back but what are your exact settings for this? Do you need to turn off exp at 50? Do you exemplar yourself somehow for double inf/no exp? I finally have a Brute at 50 to farm with but I'm not sure how to do this exactly
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May 26, 2019 20:32
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Potsticker posted:You really hate raids, huh? I think you dwindle a little too much into angry frothing and extrapolating personal theories towards the end there. And being an RPer is no excuse. You can enjoy both the RP side of things and the big monster mash raids and there's not really that big of a split between them It's not an excuse and I know you can be both. But that's not me. Never was, never will be. Gimme a small team doing "normal" mission content while roleplaying and I'm happy as a pig in poo poo. None of that is a slight against people that do enjoy that stuff, either; I would never want that stuff stripped completely out of the game just because I don't like it. (And as I mentioned in another post, I actually did have at least one character that was certifiably an Incarnate and fit the system perfectly. I have issues with Dark Astoria but lord was it nice to have a zone almost custom-tailored towards that guy.) The problem is that to me the main alternative to going whole hog into power gaming is playing through the content for the story and lore. Well guess what happened there. The main reason I stuck around during that last year or so was because I was busy building up my own stories and lore to supersede the junk they were putting out. And I was beyond happy to accept the bounds of their fiction, too - I regularly made (and still make) characters that live inside the lore of the game - the difference with Incarnate stuff is that it was largely terrible and confusing. Very little of what I posted was personal theory. Obviously I'm biased as gently caress but almost all of my info comes direct from the man himself or similar sources. Whatever is conjecture is still ultimately extrapolated from plain evidence.
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May 26, 2019 20:45
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I guess, since folks who'd know are here, did the Khelds ever get any more detail than the stuff that you get in the kheld's storylines, the Moonfire TF, and the Nictus's cameo in Cimerora?
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May 26, 2019 20:49
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Harrow posted:I just want people to stop all the kickass time-related names I want for my DP/Time Corruptor so I can have a better name I am the one who has this name in Indom. I play on Everlasting so if you want it we can work something out. Best way to get a hold of me is probably going to be Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/solidsnakesbandana My only condition is that the costume you're using be as good or better than the one I'm using: 
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May 26, 2019 20:50
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spectralent posted:I guess, since folks who'd know are here, did the Khelds ever get any more detail than the stuff that you get in the kheld's storylines, the Moonfire TF, and the Nictus's cameo in Cimerora? Nope. Requiem and/or his Nictus was possibly up to something. Arakhn...existed. And that was pretty much it. The Battalion used Kheldians for rocket fuel and the implication I got from the very little the devs said was that they were retconning their entire presence on earth to be basically be them running away from the Battalion in the first place. Presumably by the time they get to earth there are no other Kheldians left. Hooray. :| Also I forgot to mention one last thing in relation to Miller, the Architect, and leveling and such. Beyond boosting the leveling rate a few times and adding a bunch of ways to get XP bonuses I believe he was responsible for the addition of Death From Below and Drowning in Blood. I find it a bit odd that said trials give a bucketload of XP to get new characters out of the low levels quickly (including the revamped Atlas and Mercy zones they were so proud of) and it's probably no coincidence that they teach basic raid mechanics like target prioritization, don't stand in the fire, and killing AVs simultaneously. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it speaks to how even if you weren't playing level 50 stuff the shadow of the Incarnate system loomed over much more than that. And by the way, there's a nerf coming where DFB will stop giving such good XP after level 10. Because people are hanging around in Atlas all day just doing DFB instead of getting out there and doing literally anything else. Sound familiar? John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 21:01 on May 26, 2019 |
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May 26, 2019 20:58
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raids are bad so anyone hating em is right.
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May 26, 2019 21:05
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John Murdoch posted:And by the way, there's a nerf coming where DFB will stop giving such good XP after level 10. Because people are hanging around in Atlas all day just doing DFB instead of getting out there and doing literally anything else. Sound familiar? On the one hand, playing this way is dumb. On the other hand, who am I to tell people not to play in the most boring way humanly possible?
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May 26, 2019 21:06
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John Murdoch posted:good posts all of this is making me realize that Incarnates and their game-breaking horseshit should just be an EAT that starts at level 50. make them be some New Gods poo poo, go on crazy Kirby Dot adventures, don't try to tie the galactic stuff too tightly to the streetlevel stuff if positron wants his level 1 iron man to level to max and become an incarnate, he can roll an alt with his account-wide costume unlocks, problem loving solved and if you want something to DO with your level-capped characters, take them out of mothballs to hunt giant monsters with your friends. let me buy a statue of my character to put in my base. maybe have a collection of level-capped instanced content you can queue for, so you can always hop on Ol' Badass and take them out for a spin. maybe reward me with currency I can spend getting my alts up to speed. did Positron ever say WHY he hates alts? there's a certain amount of reasonability there i.e. alts need content to consume, multi-alting in a game with only one content path is dogshit (champions online) but in the article you linked he never spells that out, and I'm not sure it even occurred to him EDIT: John Murdoch posted:And by the way, there's a nerf coming where DFB will stop giving such good XP after level 10. Because people are hanging around in Atlas all day just doing DFB instead of getting out there and doing literally anything else. Sound familiar? I've said this before but I'll say it again, having a bunch of people fall out of DFB with ~4-6 powers they've never been allowed to use and no idea how to do anything besides facemash into packs leads to lots of pain when you try to run actual content LordSaturn fucked around with this message at 21:12 on May 26, 2019 |
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May 26, 2019 21:09
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I appreciate DFB for allowing me to skip doing the Atlas arc for the 78th time in a row in ten minutes, but there's no real reason to use it past level 10.
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May 26, 2019 21:13
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John Murdoch posted:And by the way, there's a nerf coming where DFB will stop giving such good XP after level 10. Because people are hanging around in Atlas all day just doing DFB instead of getting out there and doing literally anything else. Sound familiar? Is there an actual source on this, cause it sounds like something people would be freaking the gently caress out about and I haven't seen anyone mention it.
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May 26, 2019 21:17
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They should just release a side-game, City of Heroes Clicker. Mash 1-2-3 in succession for hours on end until you reach max level, then you win.
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May 26, 2019 21:20
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that's pretty much every mmo though isn't it.
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May 26, 2019 21:22
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John Murdoch posted:Nope. Requiem and/or his Nictus was possibly up to something. Arakhn...existed. And that was pretty much it. The Battalion used Kheldians for rocket fuel and the implication I got from the very little the devs said was that they were retconning their entire presence on earth to be basically be them running away from the Battalion in the first place. Presumably by the time they get to earth there are no other Kheldians left. Hooray. :| Depressing. I find it truly bizarre how really fundamental stuff about the Kheldians doesn't get mentioned at all, even in the Kheld arcs themselves. Like, it's not even really very clear if Moonfire and Sunstorm are how the Kheldian hybrids are meant to look or if they're in some kind of full-body costume, though I figure everyone just goes with the costume idea. Is Sunstorm even the guy in charge? I think he's implied to be but there's no real Kheldian Government I can remember. It sure made it a pain in the rear end to RP when you had to make up so much.
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May 26, 2019 21:24
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So like, is there content in this game where Desdemona isn't useless/actively suck? Because she seems bad at things and I have more respect for like... Overdrive or Blast Furnace here.
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May 26, 2019 21:26
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Groovelord Neato posted:that's pretty much every mmo though isn't it. The issue with taking away DFB is that someone, somewhere is being robbed of something they find fun. I don't understand what there is to gain by limiting it. It's not like everyone else will now have 5% more fun as a result of this change.
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May 26, 2019 21:30
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:The issue with taking away DFB is that someone, somewhere is being robbed of something they find fun. I don't understand what there is to gain by limiting it. It's not like everyone else will now have 5% more fun as a result of this change. If they find it fun then they can keep doing it. Changes like these are aimed at people who don't find it fun, but (immense air quotes) have to run DFB forever because it's the most efficient thing.
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May 26, 2019 21:34
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It does clog up the LFG channel, in fairness. The trial itself, eh, but it's an impediment to finding a group doing something else when there's ten plus DFB announcements for everything else in a fast moving channel.
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May 26, 2019 21:36
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That all makes sense. I guess then that could feasibly result in 5% more fun for everyone else.
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May 26, 2019 21:37
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ban anyone queued for DFB from the LFG channel past level 10 imo
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May 26, 2019 21:42
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So my only disagreement re lore things is that I actually really love the 'twist' in the VEAT stories where they go 'what, you've been doing all this to be as awesome as a destined one super hero? Kid, the second you killed a dozen arachnos on your own at level 1, you were already super' It was super cheesy and goofy and I ate it up.
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May 26, 2019 21:48
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