Not joking at all. I also paid for a full lifetime (see sig), but I am willing to give up the benefits as a selfless act if it could lead to a more balanced and equally challenging game FOR EVERYONE down the road.
As a selfless act that cost nothing to you because you bought your LTS almost three years ago at $200 after launch (IRC your posts that got deleted in another thread where you brought this up) and already got your sub's worth over a year ago. Players like Meredy and myself payed $300 (that's $100 more than you did) for that same sub and still haven't seen a return for it because we've been LTS for less than a year.
Now you're tying to "selflessly" give away more than half our (and by "our" I mean those of us that have been LTS for less than 20 months) LTS's value for free? Like I tried explaining to you the last time, you're being overly generous with other people's sub.
And no, giving FF to everyone for free is a dumb idea when Cryptic could make TONS more out of FF by selling it at the c-store than simply handing it for free.
Me: Join Date: Mar 2008 (LTS)
You: Join Date: Feb 2009
I was playing before AT's were a sparkle in any Dev's eye.
At any rate no one's opinion matters here anyhow. Dev's gonna do what Dev's already gonna do (historically speaking).
Thats the forum join date :} as in when i registered in the forums, didn't bother doing that until 2009 sorry but yeah your idea is still ridiculous and unnecessary. Removing freeform is the worst idea, balance will never be achieved no matter what you do. Even whan you talk about class based games look at wow they have a class based system and still do balance passes every 2-3 months because of class imbalance. in fact its because of people like you posting on the forums that made me register for the forums so i could tell you when your ideas sucked and point them out to others so ridiculous stuff like that never goes to live. especially when you post those kinds of ideas in a forum heavily read by the devs.
Ok some live-ish feedback as I do this tutorial.
Beginning movie is pretty cool, needs more explosions and smoke layer.
Doesn't look so much of an attack as a ..hmm playset.
A visual of Socrates and/or Defender would be great.
Two disembodied voices is the same mistake as the last opener.
Currently Defender's "reveal" is in the HQ (unless PTS changed that), and that reveal is pretty lame.
I'm thinking dark halls of HQ, explosions and knock back robots and laser beams and
Defender reaches a Socrates console and then "message to all heroes".
Something like that.
Ok moving on. Tutorial.
Can you finally replace the Combat channel with a Mission or Journal or Tutorial channel?
Default "Combat (everyone in the world)" is so irrelevant to players.
If whats in the pop ups is going to a specific place in the oddly sized chat log, maybe
people will pause and say "oh what's this about perks?"
Probably not but more likely than a hundred thousand lines of "Qularr farts on you for five damage." being of any use to anyone.
The rewards spam might be rewarding but can't it be disabled by default and then shifted somewhere like our player icon area or the inventory?
Its almost like the default chat system is designed to blind people with too much irrelevant data.
BUG: HUD
Mission Heading Arrow
Opacity at 100% and show value defaulted to ON
Arrow didn't appear until I moved the Opacity slider.
My usual game play has it off.
Having adjusted it the tutorial just messaged me about it.
Was it supposed to do that before [System] [LegacyFloaterMsg] Deliver the photos to Chief Surhoff!
Tutorial tips off to the right are weird.
Like when it talks about the crime computer, that tip is three feet across my monitor from the 72 pixel icon its talking about.
The position can't be edited with the HUD editor and it seems like it never remembers where I like to read.
I wonder if the simplest solution here is to just have that Help text channel?
Maybe the Socrates channel?
BUG:Your balls are sticky.
Tutorial Inside Champions HQ
At the back of the HQ where Black Talon is.
Jump up on the balls here 7141 -3757 -868 or 7186 -3757 -868 or 7258 -3754 -947
Repeatable sticky situation, three out of three balls tested.
You should discuss with people close to you about maybe having your balls reduced, repositioned, replaced or removed.
Thats the forum join date :} as in when i registered in the forums, didn't bother doing that until 2009 sorry but yeah your idea is still ridiculous and unnecessary. Removing freeform is the worst idea, balance will never be achieved no matter what you do. Even whan you talk about class based games look at wow they have a class based system and still do balance passes every 2-3 months because of class imbalance. in fact its because of people like you posting on the forums that made me register for the forums so i could tell you when your ideas sucked and point them out to others so ridiculous stuff like that never goes to live. especially when you post those kinds of ideas in a forum heavily read by the devs.
Totally agree with the point about classes as well. I get tired of people saying "This game will NEVER be balanced... because its Freeform", like there's a single class-based system in the history of RPGs (including PnPs and MMOs) that's balanced.
The problem with balance in this game isn't freeform. The problem with balance in this game is that it isn't "true" freeform in the sense that power sets are built like classes broken down into individual powers. And just like in class systems some classes (or "power sets") have attacks (or other powers) that are demonstrably weaker than equivalents found in other classes (i.e. power sets).
In class-based systems, they can balance that out by giving something different (better heals, holds, etc.) to certain classes in exchange for having weaker attacks (or whatever type of powers are weaker in that class). In a game like this, it simply means people get to cherry pick the strongest powers, or take the most thematically fitting for their toons and potentially gimp themselves. And that's the problem with CO's balance.
But CO's balance problems have NOTHING to do with freefrom. Just the way it has been implemented in this game.
Bug: Avenger Spec: Round em up: Still doesn't work with lead tempest, or any other PBAoE, even though they're tagged as "Ranged AoE Damage".
A PBAoE is still an AoE, yes? And if not, why are there no differentiations in the tags on said powers? Or did i just get hit in the head with a sledgehammer too many times as a child and made an inaccurate assumption?
Building on top of your idea, I would suggest making the revive portion on heals a 2 point advantage. Second suggestion is to have dead players fall over grasping for help (the zombie animation) with an icon over their head to indicate they can be revived. Third suggestion is to queue-prioritize groups such that they have one tank-ish toon, and one player with the revive advantage. For groups unlucky enough to have a tank or healer, scale the "difficulty" based on whats missing in some way (no healer with revive, maybe the mobs deal less damage or the mobs drop more green orbs, no tank, maybe whoever has aggro gets a defense bonus or something).
Making them 2-point advantage would kind of defeat the purpose. It mean would mean you still have to take the separate resurrect power to be fully effective with your heals as a support character. It would also make it a difficult situation for archetypes who cannot make that decision when picking their powers. Either archetypes would only have the heal that can be advantaged to resurrect (and thus they have to make a choice between being fully efficient healer, or being less efficient healer, but able to resurrect), or they would need to have the resurrect power to begin with - and thus defeating the whole purpose. I guess this would lead to people taking a strong single target heal, and taking arcane vitality (or vala's light) as secondary heal for resurrect - or just taking a resurrect power if they wanted to save the advantage points.
The whole idea - as far as I can see - is to make resurrect a free extra, but still tie it to support-oriented powers (although like I said earlier, I could also see it working just fine as a plain rvive mechanic, where anyone could resurrect fallen teammates through a simple interacting mechanism, 'press z to revive' type of thing).
Making them 2-point advantage would kind of defeat the purpose. It mean would mean you still have to take the separate resurrect power to be fully effective with your heals as a support character. It would also make it a difficult situation for archetypes who cannot make that decision when picking their powers. Either archetypes would only have the heal that can be advantaged to resurrect (and thus they have to make a choice between being fully efficient healer, or being less efficient healer, but able to resurrect), or they would need to have the resurrect power to begin with - and thus defeating the whole purpose. I guess this would lead to people taking a strong single target heal, and taking arcane vitality (or vala's light) as secondary heal for resurrect - or just taking a resurrect power if they wanted to save the advantage points.
The whole idea - as far as I can see - is to make resurrect a free extra, but still tie it to support-oriented powers (although like I said earlier, I could also see it working just fine as a plain rvive mechanic, where anyone could resurrect fallen teammates through a simple interacting mechanism, 'press z to revive' type of thing).
But the whole point is that if you want ot be a 'fully effective' healer that rezzes, you can be. That's already in the game. The suggestion to make it an advantage would allow those who do not care to be as effective as either a healer or rezzer to do both using less power slots, but being less effective at either.
Making them 2-point advantage would kind of defeat the purpose. It mean would mean you still have to take the separate resurrect power to be fully effective with your heals as a support character. It would also make it a difficult situation for archetypes who cannot make that decision when picking their powers. Either archetypes would only have the heal that can be advantaged to resurrect (and thus they have to make a choice between being fully efficient healer, or being less efficient healer, but able to resurrect), or they would need to have the resurrect power to begin with - and thus defeating the whole purpose. I guess this would lead to people taking a strong single target heal, and taking arcane vitality (or vala's light) as secondary heal for resurrect - or just taking a resurrect power if they wanted to save the advantage points.
The whole idea - as far as I can see - is to make resurrect a free extra, but still tie it to support-oriented powers (although like I said earlier, I could also see it working just fine as a plain rvive mechanic, where anyone could resurrect fallen teammates through a simple interacting mechanism, 'press z to revive' type of thing).
I see it as giving a purpose, for all the reasons you described. Generally the idea I was running with was to fold the revive mechanic into other parts of the game and take it out of the power pool in as restricted a way that it currently is (and open it up to more players). As it stands,revive is terribly implemented with a fairly large opportunity cost. 2pt advantage is still an opportunity cost, but its a smaller one- especially when it's folded into one of your heal powers. Can't really bring AT's into this discussion because no game balance exists with them vs FF in pvp or pve.
Or like you said, just cut it out from the powerselection entirely and let everyone revive one another. So long as they cap the number of revives per player per ALERT + AP + CS + LAIR lockout, that'd be great imo. Works fairly well in GW2 for PVE, so it could work well here.
The main problem with res powers is that dying is irrelevant outside of a few boss fights with lockouts (and pvp, but res doesn't do anything useful in pvp).
I'd be down for increasing the death penalty.. then again i said that in beta.
I think back then i suggested an automatic mission fail.. and inability to restart said mission for X minutes.
problems came with teaming and rez.. of which I responded saying your time of death should go say 2 minutes before being rezzed at the nearest hospital.. oops i mean .. spawn point.
Still like the idea but it will be widely unpopular in this casual gamer setting.. i guess back then i thought this game would have a playerbase or something..
I'm leveling a Blade right now and occasionally a roaming group of mobs wanders by while I'm in the middle of fighting another group and I get ripped a new one just because some guys wandered by.
I would rather not have my mission instantly ended if this happened, or if a boss got a series of lucky crits that managed to four-shot my squishy self.
It'd encourage teaming for sure, but y'know what? I really would rather not have to call my SG friends for help for a simple instanced mission just because a group of Brickbusters out for a casual walk decide to wander by while I'm trying to cut up Soldiers and a Squad Leader.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again. I made a thread on it. I've poked at the numbers. I think this is worth making some noise over so here I go again.
A level 40 character with no con sked to level 30 has as much hp as a level 20 character. This character has far less hp then it is even possible to get at level 30 with no con buff gear and to get back up to speed they would need 100 worth of constitution.
This is a problem.
This needs to be looked at. People are getting one shotted by stray fire easily for bringing in a 10 con 40.
I've respec'd this character 3 times and the same issue has occured every time, so I'm not sure if the bug is related to this character or my spec choices. I make all of my specialization choices for the level 40 character, with no points remaining. Later, I go back into the Specializations screen and see something like the attached screenshot. It indicates that I have spec points left to spend, but the UI is frozen so that I can not actually spend any of the points it says are remaining. Note the totals it displays for the Commander section are not accurate.
The problem is that SKing really should be changed to work like skull difficulty foes: rather than adjusting hit points, it should just adjust damage done and damage taken. Same thing for damage.
Actually, why do alerts SK people in the first place? Skull difficulty is supposed to make that unnecessary, that's the whole point of skull.
The removal of the "Block" mission from the beginning of the tutorial is bad. Really Bad!
While in the tutorial you encounter Boss'. These Boss' hit hard and do knockbacks. Qularr Invasion Leaders and Bugkeepers also Destroids. How's a new player supposed to deal with this? You moved the knowledge that could have helped them.
Thats another thing. You moved the info to a little popup at the start of the Black Talon fight. Who's going to read that and understand what its about all the while engaged in a battle?
If your goal of all the Tutorial changes is for the benefit of new players then you need to rethink the removal of that mission ( mini-tutorial). It negatively impacts the new players knowledge and experience.
The problem is that SKing really should be changed to work like skull difficulty foes: rather than adjusting hit points, it should just adjust damage done and damage taken. Same thing for damage.
Actually, why do alerts SK people in the first place? Skull difficulty is supposed to make that unnecessary, that's the whole point of skull.
Might be to do with balancing healing, since a level 20 couldn't heal a level 40 very well. Then again your destroying the level 40 stats by sking so I can't see that being the idea.
The removal of the "Block" mission from the beginning of the tutorial is bad. Really Bad!
I =thought= there was something missing from the tutorial & involving the police-guys standing near the mayor!! I simply thought it was due to my sketchy recollection of the only-2 times I've done it.
But the whole point is that if you want ot be a 'fully effective' healer that rezzes, you can be. That's already in the game. The suggestion to make it an advantage would allow those who do not care to be as effective as either a healer or rezzer to do both using less power slots, but being less effective at either.
No, the whole point is that being fully effective healer with resses is too expensive. It's too expensive because resurrect is not very good power, and yet it is mandatory in some very specific situations. It's to the point that it's not rare for someone to take res as their last power, and swap it off to something more useful when they are not running a lair with group.
And my point is that I feel making one of your healing powers less effective is still too steep cost for res ability, for a healer whose main purpose IS to heal people. I could perhaps see it being 1-point advantage, but even that seems kind of wrong to me, based on the extremely situational value of resurrect. It would just be a pointless 'compromise cost', that isn't needed. I think either that power should be free (like in original suggestion), or it should somehow be much more useful than it is right now - but I have no idea how.
(SNIP)
Can't really bring AT's into this discussion because no game balance exists with them vs FF in pvp or pve.
That's really just troll-biting. Like it or not, ATs are still an important part of the game at the moment, and the game is currently balanced for them, not for freeforms.
Or like you said, just cut it out from the powerselection entirely and let everyone revive one another. So long as they cap the number of revives per player per ALERT + AP + CS + LAIR lockout, that'd be great imo. Works fairly well in GW2 for PVE, so it could work well here.
I'd be down for increasing the death penalty.. then again i said that in beta.
I think back then i suggested an automatic mission fail.. and inability to restart said mission for X minutes.
problems came with teaming and rez.. of which I responded saying your time of death should go say 2 minutes before being rezzed at the nearest hospital.. oops i mean .. spawn point.
Still like the idea but it will be widely unpopular in this casual gamer setting.. i guess back then i thought this game would have a playerbase or something..
...this ^
GW1 style death penalty would probably work better than GW2 style, and we actually already have similar mechanism. All it would need for being implemented would be: when running an instance at 'hard', 'very hard' or 'elite' difficulty, if all of your team members (this includes solo play) have lost all their stars, AND are defeated, the instance fails and you get booted outside it.
This would leave normal mode play unaffected - which I think is good, because it means casual play isn't made more difficult. For harder modes it would add a bit of flavor, which also would be good.
Of course this also means the 'star fills' from store become yet another pay-to-win item, but I guess I don't really care. If someone wants to pay cash to beat elite content - then more power to them and PW.. so I guess everyone is happy.
GW1 had it's own items for removing death penalty (candy canes, anyone?), only they weren't from cash store.. they were earned in game. And I had several stacks of 250 of them, because I never really used them
GW1 style death penalty would probably work better than GW2 style, and we actually already have similar mechanism. All it would need for being implemented would be: when running an instance at 'hard', 'very hard' or 'elite' difficulty, if all of your team members (this includes solo play) have lost all their stars, AND are defeated, the instance fails and you get booted outside it.
This would leave normal mode play unaffected - which I think is good, because it means casual play isn't made more difficult. For harder modes it would add a bit of flavor, which also would be good.
I could get behind this.
I'm sure that there are ppl that would complain about it as well, but i think the debt in cox made fighting a little more rewarding.
The main thing that makes this idea good is that it may make more money in the C-Store. Without a financial motivation, i don't think cryptic would bother to change the death penalty.
For the life of me I can't rmember what the added buff of Hero Stars even is..
Same for those glowies you pick up.. at launch I NEEDED them (again... played a munitions and telepathy character IN set aka no passive).. Now that so much of the damage done NOW is astronomical vs what you could get then.. the glowies and hero stars seem to lose their +BaseDamage appeal.
I still horde them out of habit.. thanks to the hero photographer, i always pick them up after PvP and before Lair hopping.
^^^
That goes with what I found. Science is giving Mystic tagged mods.
Wires are crossed I guess.
Either that or Cryptic is in the process of swapping a lot of the mystic and science dropped mods to match what was posted in today's main page article.
I'd much rather mystic keep the PRE, END, EGO stats since I originally picked mystic for crafting since it focused on PRE. If this change is intentional I'll likely be forced to pick up science crafting... which I'd rather not do.
But hey, at least all the Arms people don't have to worry about swapping crafting schools since the main stats are largely untouched.
Either that or Cryptic is in the process of swapping a lot of the mystic and science dropped mods to match what was posted in today's main page article.
I'd much rather mystic keep the PRE, END, EGO stats since I originally picked mystic for crafting since it focused on PRE. If this change is intentional I'll likely be forced to pick up science crafting... which I'd rather not do.
But hey, at least all the Arms people don't have to worry about swapping crafting schools since the main stats are largely untouched.
I personally don't like how Arms, Mysticism and Science affect the Mods you can get. I'd be okay if they increased the chance of getting certain Mods but to make them exclusive that's going too far:mad:.
Of course this also means the 'star fills' from store become yet another pay-to-win item, but I guess I don't really care. If someone wants to pay cash to beat elite content - then more power to them and PW.. so I guess everyone is happy.
Allods has something like this. Don't remember the details though. You basically bought an item that removes the death penalty for a certain amount of time. It was mainly purchased by high end raiders.
How does gathering questionite work? I know you have to do a mission from Socrates first but after that one mission do you have a chance to get more ore from Alerts automatically or no? Also is there a place other then Alerts to gain the ore?
As a selfless act that cost nothing to you because you bought your LTS almost three years ago at $200 after launch (IRC your posts that got deleted in another thread where you brought this up) and already got your sub's worth over a year ago. Players like Meredy and myself payed $300 (that's $100 more than you did) for that same sub and still haven't seen a return for it because we've been LTS for less than a year.
Now you're tying to "selflessly" give away more than half our (and by "our" I mean those of us that have been LTS for less than 20 months) LTS's value for free? Like I tried explaining to you the last time, you're being overly generous with other people's sub.
And no, giving FF to everyone for free is a dumb idea when Cryptic could make TONS more out of FF by selling it at the c-store than simply handing it for free.
Vision you aren't listening to what I proposed. I don't think lifers subs should just be cut. Instead, whatever time you have left from the $300 you paid you will get ANY content coming out during that time for FREE. That is what I purpose for Cryptic to do for those that were willing to spend $300 and have time left.
Why can't you just admit that a game can't be balanced for free form let alone FF and AT? As long as players have the choice to choose broken combos no boss or instance will ever be challenging and you know this.
If Cryptic told me tomorrow that all the content I was given for free was now going to need to be purchased I wouldn't care as long as it was to make it so that both people that can afford extra content and people that can't afford a sub were now equal. I think life time subs should just become a flat pay $200 bucks and get access to most upcoming content for the next year as free content.
But I am done with this debate. Instead, I will just return when kitchen sink 4, aka lair reviews, faces its share of issues, to say "told ya so". I am just glad I see others concerned with the issue that content can't be balanced for both the rich and the poor. Who knows maybe I am wrong. I hope so, because I would love to see a system where "choose anything you want" works.
Where it happens
After respec, on the power house.
What happens
Im on my Character Builds screen, tried to change my role and there is just the actual option, no other one. Also, no passive activer or anything that is actually restricted for a role.
Why can't you just admit that a game can't be balanced for free form let alone FF and AT? As long as players have the choice to choose broken combos no boss or instance will ever be challenging and you know this.
Sure they can be. They'll just be unbeatable by non-optimized builds. Some of the burst alerts are (presumably accidentally) this way already.
The problem is that SKing really should be changed to work like skull difficulty foes: rather than adjusting hit points, it should just adjust damage done and damage taken. Same thing for damage.
Actually, why do alerts SK people in the first place? Skull difficulty is supposed to make that unnecessary, that's the whole point of skull.
That still doesn't change regular mission sidekicking problems. I mean look. I'm all for adjusting the sidekicking to work in a more balanced fashion. I understand it's just downright ridiculous in live currently. HP got overbalanced however. Either scale it back or add some sort of floor at the very least.
How does gathering questionite work? I know you have to do a mission from Socrates first but after that one mission do you have a chance to get more ore from Alerts automatically or no? Also is there a place other then Alerts to gain the ore?
Word on the street is that you get 1500 ore for finishing an AP/Comic Series as well.
In the power selection window, when you select a power tab, the background and frame of the tab becomes transparent.
It's the part behind the power icons. I know it happens in the Power House when selecting new powers, but I didn't bother testing it anywhere else because I didn't think to. All of my characters are copied from live and it happens to all of them that I've been playing with in the Power House. Only a tab with a selected power tree is affected. If it's a tab where none of the power trees are selected, then the tabs appear as their normal, condensed selves.
I took a screenshot before realizing I'm a moron since the UI doesn't show up in normal shots.
In Romancing Saga 3, when one of your party memebers took a dirt nap, you just threw a potion or healed them and they came back to life with whatever health the heal gave them. There was no rez powers or items. Because having a power that does *nothing* other than resurect someone is stupid and I don't even know why every single RPG ever made has to have them.
Of course the downed party memeber would still take damage and eventally die permenantly if you let their life points fall to zero. Not that I'm saying if you lose all of your stars that you should die permanently, since that would suck, but that whole "you fail the mission" thing would be ok. Or maybe losing all your stars can horribly cripple you (stat wise) until you go to the hospital, healer, fairy god-mother, or whatever.
I think this was mentioned before by someone, but seems to have been ignored in favor of the "lets make rez on heals advantages" idea. NO! Just let a normal, boring heal bring Squishy McSquish back to life after fail tanking the entire room of some elite mobs. And he loses a star. Like normal when you die.
Bug
Demonflame - Infiltrating the Demonhame on Elite
Demon initiates are practically asleep, the brothers and the big melee guys are on the ball but I have murdered the fellow spawns and the initiates are very slow to notice me. Even when they do at least half the time they go for my support drones. My toon is Dex/End/Ego Ranged damage role and apparently I get 16% threat reduction from both my Dex and Ego.
Bug
Demonflame - Infiltrating the Demonhame on Elite
Demon initiates are practically asleep, the brothers and the big melee guys are on the ball but I have murdered the fellow spawns and the initiates are very slow to notice me. Even when they do at least half the time they go for my support drones. My toon is Dex/End/Ego Ranged damage role and apparently I get 16% threat reduction from both my Dex and Ego.
Mobs always go for any healing threat since it magically applies to them at all times even out of combat, this is true for healing toons as well. If your group doesn't have direct damage aggro on every single mob in a pull, all the mobs that haven't been hit enough go head on into the healer even if you only have something like a heal aura from specs, or if you're suicidally using the gadget passive. So yeah, support drones get the short stick as soon as they decide to think about healing you if you aren't AoEing the whole group of mobs.
Far as I know, the only way to get it is to level from 14 to 15, which is inconvenient, to say the least.
I'm in favor of having a Tutorials item in the [C] minimap button menu, where you can access all the tutorials anywhere, though I don't mind it automatically playing at level 15. I just want it available to everyone if they know to look, y'know?
FWIW, A level 40 character that I had (forced) respec on before the last (2) patches got the new Fusion/Mod tutorial added to the character.
The spec tree healing auras, just like medical nanites and seraphim generate thermonuclear agro with anything that hasn't taken damage. Makes teaming with those powers rather difficult unless you have a tank who sprays AoE first thing all the time everywhere.
Thoughts? I'm somewhat influenced by Guild Wars 2 in this, but also from seeing the Sentinel Aura bug. And I'm tired of having to cart around a useless power for most of the game, but being unable to do my duty as a support character if I don't waste that slot for lairs with lockouts.
I like the idea. I'm certain that Cryptic's power engine can hve the heal power rezz a fallen character if they are the target. Butt you don't want the rezz ability useable all of the time. And I don't think Cryptic's power engine supports a separate cool down timers effect of a power. And you have the problem with how to display the cool down timers on the the healing component AND the rezz component on the UI.
How does gathering questionite work? I know you have to do a mission from Socrates first but after that one mission do you have a chance to get more ore from Alerts automatically or no? Also is there a place other then Alerts to gain the ore?
Questionite will be a set amount reward for certain missions and event. Since it's similar to STO's Dilithium currency, I'll use example from there. They are sets of Daily mission player have access as they level up. A rough reward vs play time is 15 mins == 480 Dilhtium. A mission arc that has 3 missions rewards 1480 Dilhtium. There are certain events drive by the game scheduling system. 5 man mission feed by queues which will give Dilihtium for completing them. Generallly 480 Dilihtium per run per the one hour event slot. (Yes there will be like CO Alerts). There are PvP daillies which will reward 480. There also a differnet subgame to STO called the Duty Officer system, which will give players minor amounts of dilithium 5-10 per "mission" complete (player don't actuall do these. They are mission setup my players and at end of the duration time missions completes or fails. A critical sucess gives 125 Dilihjtium). A diligent player could earn in excess of 12000 Dilithium per day. But they are limited to refining 8000 units per day into a usable currency.
Purely speculating here...CO Daily Alert mission wrappers will give a an amount of Questonite. I imagine the Unity Daily mission wrapper will give an amount Questonite. Perhaps 2000 or so. Each sub mission may give a minor amount. There should also be some PvP Dailys as well. Alerts may give minor amount of Questonite for each run.
Refining Questonite will simply be done at touch of a button. But you have to be logged into to be able to do it. The reset of the refining amount is at 00:00 UTC. If they take the feature from STO. Gold accounts will have Questonite automatically refined for each day they are away when they log in. It will be up to 7 days worth. (i.e. Player doesn't log into the game for 3 days. When he next logs into the game she will automatically have 24,000 Questonite refined (assuming they have 24,000 (unrefined) Questionite) which doesn't count against their daily limit.
BUG: The Viper Rocket Pack (costume piece) looks like it should have flames when used with Jet Pack Flight (for its a rocket pack/jet pack), yet there are no flames.
While it may not be a bug, it feels like it should have the flames.
BUG: Loot drops in Alerts are not being assigned as need or greed
Loot drops in Alerts are being set as free for all instead of need or greed. Basically whoever is fast enough at looting gets the items. The Team Up feature needs to automatically set for Need or Greed in these instances or there are going to be a lot of complaints when it comes to people getting the costume items from specific groups that drop in these Alerts.
There is a lot to like in this series of updates - things that I feel bring a lot more to the game (see lots of comments by many people over the last month). However, I am seeing a number of fiddly little things that, I assume, will be polished up before this goes live - but bring a disconcerting feel right now. You probably know about most of these already, but I feel like I should bring them up:
Tutorial: Final Cutscene - Ironclad et al were embedded into the ground up to their chest.
UI: Power selection - The current powers tab that I have selected disappears. The icons from the tab remain.
Mission: Top Men - the map indicator indicating where my destination was pointed to the unused, very tall building with the elevator in central Millenium City. Hopefully, you ARE moving Unity HQ there - it would be a good use of an unused building. However, since nothing is there, its a bit annoying.
Crafting: The cut scene for fusing items uses a different fuse screen layout than the current screen.
The same scene also uses a different layout for the Item modification screen
When viewing your character, my character's personal view (Character: Tarilla@Brendt) fluxes in and out, making me look bigger and smaller.
Alert: Vibora Bay Alert: Somehow, I ended up not being able to enter Juryrig's garage - although I am flagged as inside, I am actually walking around outside getting credit for the battle. (I also locked up the client by toggling over here to write this - probably a cutscene issue).
BUG: Loot drops in Alerts are not being assigned as need or greed
Loot drops in Alerts are being set as free for all instead of need or greed. Basically whoever is fast enough at looting gets the items. The Team Up feature needs to automatically set for Need or Greed in these instances or there are going to be a lot of complaints when it comes to people getting the costume items from specific groups that drop in these Alerts.
That and the Burst bonus does not work at all. I've spent the last few days farming nodes, and burst makes a 0% increase in finding extra mods from nodes.
Comments
As a selfless act that cost nothing to you because you bought your LTS almost three years ago at $200 after launch (IRC your posts that got deleted in another thread where you brought this up) and already got your sub's worth over a year ago. Players like Meredy and myself payed $300 (that's $100 more than you did) for that same sub and still haven't seen a return for it because we've been LTS for less than a year.
Now you're tying to "selflessly" give away more than half our (and by "our" I mean those of us that have been LTS for less than 20 months) LTS's value for free? Like I tried explaining to you the last time, you're being overly generous with other people's sub.
And no, giving FF to everyone for free is a dumb idea when Cryptic could make TONS more out of FF by selling it at the c-store than simply handing it for free.
Thats the forum join date :} as in when i registered in the forums, didn't bother doing that until 2009 sorry but yeah your idea is still ridiculous and unnecessary. Removing freeform is the worst idea, balance will never be achieved no matter what you do. Even whan you talk about class based games look at wow they have a class based system and still do balance passes every 2-3 months because of class imbalance. in fact its because of people like you posting on the forums that made me register for the forums so i could tell you when your ideas sucked and point them out to others so ridiculous stuff like that never goes to live. especially when you post those kinds of ideas in a forum heavily read by the devs.
Beginning movie is pretty cool, needs more explosions and smoke layer.
Doesn't look so much of an attack as a ..hmm playset.
A visual of Socrates and/or Defender would be great.
Two disembodied voices is the same mistake as the last opener.
Currently Defender's "reveal" is in the HQ (unless PTS changed that), and that reveal is pretty lame.
I'm thinking dark halls of HQ, explosions and knock back robots and laser beams and
Defender reaches a Socrates console and then "message to all heroes".
Something like that.
Ok moving on. Tutorial.
Can you finally replace the Combat channel with a Mission or Journal or Tutorial channel?
Default "Combat (everyone in the world)" is so irrelevant to players.
If whats in the pop ups is going to a specific place in the oddly sized chat log, maybe
people will pause and say "oh what's this about perks?"
Probably not but more likely than a hundred thousand lines of "Qularr farts on you for five damage." being of any use to anyone.
The rewards spam might be rewarding but can't it be disabled by default and then shifted somewhere like our player icon area or the inventory?
Its almost like the default chat system is designed to blind people with too much irrelevant data.
BUG: HUD
Mission Heading Arrow
Opacity at 100% and show value defaulted to ON
Arrow didn't appear until I moved the Opacity slider.
My usual game play has it off.
Having adjusted it the tutorial just messaged me about it.
Was it supposed to do that before [System] [LegacyFloaterMsg] Deliver the photos to Chief Surhoff!
Tutorial tips off to the right are weird.
Like when it talks about the crime computer, that tip is three feet across my monitor from the 72 pixel icon its talking about.
The position can't be edited with the HUD editor and it seems like it never remembers where I like to read.
I wonder if the simplest solution here is to just have that Help text channel?
Maybe the Socrates channel?
BUG:Your balls are sticky.
Tutorial Inside Champions HQ
At the back of the HQ where Black Talon is.
Jump up on the balls here 7141 -3757 -868 or 7186 -3757 -868 or 7258 -3754 -947
Repeatable sticky situation, three out of three balls tested.
You should discuss with people close to you about maybe having your balls reduced, repositioned, replaced or removed.
ok done with that, so far so good.
Totally agree with the point about classes as well. I get tired of people saying "This game will NEVER be balanced... because its Freeform", like there's a single class-based system in the history of RPGs (including PnPs and MMOs) that's balanced.
The problem with balance in this game isn't freeform. The problem with balance in this game is that it isn't "true" freeform in the sense that power sets are built like classes broken down into individual powers. And just like in class systems some classes (or "power sets") have attacks (or other powers) that are demonstrably weaker than equivalents found in other classes (i.e. power sets).
In class-based systems, they can balance that out by giving something different (better heals, holds, etc.) to certain classes in exchange for having weaker attacks (or whatever type of powers are weaker in that class). In a game like this, it simply means people get to cherry pick the strongest powers, or take the most thematically fitting for their toons and potentially gimp themselves. And that's the problem with CO's balance.
But CO's balance problems have NOTHING to do with freefrom. Just the way it has been implemented in this game.
A PBAoE is still an AoE, yes? And if not, why are there no differentiations in the tags on said powers? Or did i just get hit in the head with a sledgehammer too many times as a child and made an inaccurate assumption?
Making them 2-point advantage would kind of defeat the purpose. It mean would mean you still have to take the separate resurrect power to be fully effective with your heals as a support character. It would also make it a difficult situation for archetypes who cannot make that decision when picking their powers. Either archetypes would only have the heal that can be advantaged to resurrect (and thus they have to make a choice between being fully efficient healer, or being less efficient healer, but able to resurrect), or they would need to have the resurrect power to begin with - and thus defeating the whole purpose. I guess this would lead to people taking a strong single target heal, and taking arcane vitality (or vala's light) as secondary heal for resurrect - or just taking a resurrect power if they wanted to save the advantage points.
The whole idea - as far as I can see - is to make resurrect a free extra, but still tie it to support-oriented powers (although like I said earlier, I could also see it working just fine as a plain rvive mechanic, where anyone could resurrect fallen teammates through a simple interacting mechanism, 'press z to revive' type of thing).
But the whole point is that if you want ot be a 'fully effective' healer that rezzes, you can be. That's already in the game. The suggestion to make it an advantage would allow those who do not care to be as effective as either a healer or rezzer to do both using less power slots, but being less effective at either.
I see it as giving a purpose, for all the reasons you described. Generally the idea I was running with was to fold the revive mechanic into other parts of the game and take it out of the power pool in as restricted a way that it currently is (and open it up to more players). As it stands,revive is terribly implemented with a fairly large opportunity cost. 2pt advantage is still an opportunity cost, but its a smaller one- especially when it's folded into one of your heal powers. Can't really bring AT's into this discussion because no game balance exists with them vs FF in pvp or pve.
Or like you said, just cut it out from the powerselection entirely and let everyone revive one another. So long as they cap the number of revives per player per ALERT + AP + CS + LAIR lockout, that'd be great imo. Works fairly well in GW2 for PVE, so it could work well here.
I think back then i suggested an automatic mission fail.. and inability to restart said mission for X minutes.
problems came with teaming and rez.. of which I responded saying your time of death should go say 2 minutes before being rezzed at the nearest hospital.. oops i mean .. spawn point.
Still like the idea but it will be widely unpopular in this casual gamer setting.. i guess back then i thought this game would have a playerbase or something..
I'm leveling a Blade right now and occasionally a roaming group of mobs wanders by while I'm in the middle of fighting another group and I get ripped a new one just because some guys wandered by.
I would rather not have my mission instantly ended if this happened, or if a boss got a series of lucky crits that managed to four-shot my squishy self.
It'd encourage teaming for sure, but y'know what? I really would rather not have to call my SG friends for help for a simple instanced mission just because a group of Brickbusters out for a casual walk decide to wander by while I'm trying to cut up Soldiers and a Squad Leader.
A level 40 character with no con sked to level 30 has as much hp as a level 20 character. This character has far less hp then it is even possible to get at level 30 with no con buff gear and to get back up to speed they would need 100 worth of constitution.
This is a problem.
This needs to be looked at. People are getting one shotted by stray fire easily for bringing in a 10 con 40.
I've respec'd this character 3 times and the same issue has occured every time, so I'm not sure if the bug is related to this character or my spec choices. I make all of my specialization choices for the level 40 character, with no points remaining. Later, I go back into the Specializations screen and see something like the attached screenshot. It indicates that I have spec points left to spend, but the UI is frozen so that I can not actually spend any of the points it says are remaining. Note the totals it displays for the Commander section are not accurate.
Actually, why do alerts SK people in the first place? Skull difficulty is supposed to make that unnecessary, that's the whole point of skull.
The removal of the "Block" mission from the beginning of the tutorial is bad. Really Bad!
While in the tutorial you encounter Boss'. These Boss' hit hard and do knockbacks. Qularr Invasion Leaders and Bugkeepers also Destroids. How's a new player supposed to deal with this? You moved the knowledge that could have helped them.
Thats another thing. You moved the info to a little popup at the start of the Black Talon fight. Who's going to read that and understand what its about all the while engaged in a battle?
If your goal of all the Tutorial changes is for the benefit of new players then you need to rethink the removal of that mission ( mini-tutorial). It negatively impacts the new players knowledge and experience.
I =thought= there was something missing from the tutorial & involving the police-guys standing near the mayor!! I simply thought it was due to my sketchy recollection of the only-2 times I've done it.
No, the whole point is that being fully effective healer with resses is too expensive. It's too expensive because resurrect is not very good power, and yet it is mandatory in some very specific situations. It's to the point that it's not rare for someone to take res as their last power, and swap it off to something more useful when they are not running a lair with group.
And my point is that I feel making one of your healing powers less effective is still too steep cost for res ability, for a healer whose main purpose IS to heal people. I could perhaps see it being 1-point advantage, but even that seems kind of wrong to me, based on the extremely situational value of resurrect. It would just be a pointless 'compromise cost', that isn't needed. I think either that power should be free (like in original suggestion), or it should somehow be much more useful than it is right now - but I have no idea how.
That's really just troll-biting. Like it or not, ATs are still an important part of the game at the moment, and the game is currently balanced for them, not for freeforms.
^ this and...
...this ^
GW1 style death penalty would probably work better than GW2 style, and we actually already have similar mechanism. All it would need for being implemented would be: when running an instance at 'hard', 'very hard' or 'elite' difficulty, if all of your team members (this includes solo play) have lost all their stars, AND are defeated, the instance fails and you get booted outside it.
This would leave normal mode play unaffected - which I think is good, because it means casual play isn't made more difficult. For harder modes it would add a bit of flavor, which also would be good.
Of course this also means the 'star fills' from store become yet another pay-to-win item, but I guess I don't really care. If someone wants to pay cash to beat elite content - then more power to them and PW.. so I guess everyone is happy.
GW1 had it's own items for removing death penalty (candy canes, anyone?), only they weren't from cash store.. they were earned in game. And I had several stacks of 250 of them, because I never really used them
I'm sure that there are ppl that would complain about it as well, but i think the debt in cox made fighting a little more rewarding.
The main thing that makes this idea good is that it may make more money in the C-Store. Without a financial motivation, i don't think cryptic would bother to change the death penalty.
Same for those glowies you pick up.. at launch I NEEDED them (again... played a munitions and telepathy character IN set aka no passive).. Now that so much of the damage done NOW is astronomical vs what you could get then.. the glowies and hero stars seem to lose their +BaseDamage appeal.
I still horde them out of habit.. thanks to the hero photographer, i always pick them up after PvP and before Lair hopping.
No idea what layer its in though so it could be meaningless.
That goes with what I found. Science is giving Mystic tagged mods.
Wires are crossed I guess.
I'd much rather mystic keep the PRE, END, EGO stats since I originally picked mystic for crafting since it focused on PRE. If this change is intentional I'll likely be forced to pick up science crafting... which I'd rather not do.
But hey, at least all the Arms people don't have to worry about swapping crafting schools since the main stats are largely untouched.
I personally don't like how Arms, Mysticism and Science affect the Mods you can get. I'd be okay if they increased the chance of getting certain Mods but to make them exclusive that's going too far:mad:.
Allods has something like this. Don't remember the details though. You basically bought an item that removes the death penalty for a certain amount of time. It was mainly purchased by high end raiders.
Vision you aren't listening to what I proposed. I don't think lifers subs should just be cut. Instead, whatever time you have left from the $300 you paid you will get ANY content coming out during that time for FREE. That is what I purpose for Cryptic to do for those that were willing to spend $300 and have time left.
Why can't you just admit that a game can't be balanced for free form let alone FF and AT? As long as players have the choice to choose broken combos no boss or instance will ever be challenging and you know this.
If Cryptic told me tomorrow that all the content I was given for free was now going to need to be purchased I wouldn't care as long as it was to make it so that both people that can afford extra content and people that can't afford a sub were now equal. I think life time subs should just become a flat pay $200 bucks and get access to most upcoming content for the next year as free content.
But I am done with this debate. Instead, I will just return when kitchen sink 4, aka lair reviews, faces its share of issues, to say "told ya so". I am just glad I see others concerned with the issue that content can't be balanced for both the rich and the poor. Who knows maybe I am wrong. I hope so, because I would love to see a system where "choose anything you want" works.
Where it happens
After respec, on the power house.
What happens
Im on my Character Builds screen, tried to change my role and there is just the actual option, no other one. Also, no passive activer or anything that is actually restricted for a role.
That still doesn't change regular mission sidekicking problems. I mean look. I'm all for adjusting the sidekicking to work in a more balanced fashion. I understand it's just downright ridiculous in live currently. HP got overbalanced however. Either scale it back or add some sort of floor at the very least.
Word on the street is that you get 1500 ore for finishing an AP/Comic Series as well.
Ebon Ruin and the advantage to melee powers Head Trauma do not stack as they do live.
In the power selection window, when you select a power tab, the background and frame of the tab becomes transparent.
It's the part behind the power icons. I know it happens in the Power House when selecting new powers, but I didn't bother testing it anywhere else because I didn't think to. All of my characters are copied from live and it happens to all of them that I've been playing with in the Power House. Only a tab with a selected power tree is affected. If it's a tab where none of the power trees are selected, then the tabs appear as their normal, condensed selves.
I took a screenshot before realizing I'm a moron since the UI doesn't show up in normal shots.
In Romancing Saga 3, when one of your party memebers took a dirt nap, you just threw a potion or healed them and they came back to life with whatever health the heal gave them. There was no rez powers or items. Because having a power that does *nothing* other than resurect someone is stupid and I don't even know why every single RPG ever made has to have them.
Of course the downed party memeber would still take damage and eventally die permenantly if you let their life points fall to zero. Not that I'm saying if you lose all of your stars that you should die permanently, since that would suck, but that whole "you fail the mission" thing would be ok. Or maybe losing all your stars can horribly cripple you (stat wise) until you go to the hospital, healer, fairy god-mother, or whatever.
I think this was mentioned before by someone, but seems to have been ignored in favor of the "lets make rez on heals advantages" idea. NO! Just let a normal, boring heal bring Squishy McSquish back to life after fail tanking the entire room of some elite mobs. And he loses a star. Like normal when you die.
No, and in fact, the C-Store button appears to have been COMPLETELY removed.
Because they are both considered a debuff called Trauma now instead of just one, and have the same effect; I'm almost positive this is on purpose
EDIT: Didn't happen the second time I retconned. Maybe it just happens if you use the Forced Reset.
Demonflame - Infiltrating the Demonhame on Elite
Demon initiates are practically asleep, the brothers and the big melee guys are on the ball but I have murdered the fellow spawns and the initiates are very slow to notice me. Even when they do at least half the time they go for my support drones. My toon is Dex/End/Ego Ranged damage role and apparently I get 16% threat reduction from both my Dex and Ego.
Mobs always go for any healing threat since it magically applies to them at all times even out of combat, this is true for healing toons as well. If your group doesn't have direct damage aggro on every single mob in a pull, all the mobs that haven't been hit enough go head on into the healer even if you only have something like a heal aura from specs, or if you're suicidally using the gadget passive. So yeah, support drones get the short stick as soon as they decide to think about healing you if you aren't AoEing the whole group of mobs.
FWIW, A level 40 character that I had (forced) respec on before the last (2) patches got the new Fusion/Mod tutorial added to the character.
I like the idea. I'm certain that Cryptic's power engine can hve the heal power rezz a fallen character if they are the target. Butt you don't want the rezz ability useable all of the time. And I don't think Cryptic's power engine supports a separate cool down timers effect of a power. And you have the problem with how to display the cool down timers on the the healing component AND the rezz component on the UI.
Most Regen'ers take Resurgance. Just take on the self-rezz there.
Questionite will be a set amount reward for certain missions and event. Since it's similar to STO's Dilithium currency, I'll use example from there. They are sets of Daily mission player have access as they level up. A rough reward vs play time is 15 mins == 480 Dilhtium. A mission arc that has 3 missions rewards 1480 Dilhtium. There are certain events drive by the game scheduling system. 5 man mission feed by queues which will give Dilihtium for completing them. Generallly 480 Dilihtium per run per the one hour event slot. (Yes there will be like CO Alerts). There are PvP daillies which will reward 480. There also a differnet subgame to STO called the Duty Officer system, which will give players minor amounts of dilithium 5-10 per "mission" complete (player don't actuall do these. They are mission setup my players and at end of the duration time missions completes or fails. A critical sucess gives 125 Dilihjtium). A diligent player could earn in excess of 12000 Dilithium per day. But they are limited to refining 8000 units per day into a usable currency.
Purely speculating here...CO Daily Alert mission wrappers will give a an amount of Questonite. I imagine the Unity Daily mission wrapper will give an amount Questonite. Perhaps 2000 or so. Each sub mission may give a minor amount. There should also be some PvP Dailys as well. Alerts may give minor amount of Questonite for each run.
Refining Questonite will simply be done at touch of a button. But you have to be logged into to be able to do it. The reset of the refining amount is at 00:00 UTC. If they take the feature from STO. Gold accounts will have Questonite automatically refined for each day they are away when they log in. It will be up to 7 days worth. (i.e. Player doesn't log into the game for 3 days. When he next logs into the game she will automatically have 24,000 Questonite refined (assuming they have 24,000 (unrefined) Questionite) which doesn't count against their daily limit.
While it may not be a bug, it feels like it should have the flames.
Loot drops in Alerts are being set as free for all instead of need or greed. Basically whoever is fast enough at looting gets the items. The Team Up feature needs to automatically set for Need or Greed in these instances or there are going to be a lot of complaints when it comes to people getting the costume items from specific groups that drop in these Alerts.
Tutorial: Final Cutscene - Ironclad et al were embedded into the ground up to their chest.
UI: Power selection - The current powers tab that I have selected disappears. The icons from the tab remain.
Mission: Top Men - the map indicator indicating where my destination was pointed to the unused, very tall building with the elevator in central Millenium City. Hopefully, you ARE moving Unity HQ there - it would be a good use of an unused building. However, since nothing is there, its a bit annoying.
Crafting: The cut scene for fusing items uses a different fuse screen layout than the current screen.
When viewing your character, my character's personal view (Character: Tarilla@Brendt) fluxes in and out, making me look bigger and smaller.
Alert: Vibora Bay Alert: Somehow, I ended up not being able to enter Juryrig's garage - although I am flagged as inside, I am actually walking around outside getting credit for the battle. (I also locked up the client by toggling over here to write this - probably a cutscene issue).
That's all so far today.
That and the Burst bonus does not work at all. I've spent the last few days farming nodes, and burst makes a 0% increase in finding extra mods from nodes.