M45T3RM1ND wrote:
Villemar_MxO wrote:Well looks like 12.1 will be set in International, starting in Ikeburo. Removing the "Oh noes your character won't be able handle hi lvl areas!!!" rationale for exclusionary criticals.It still doesn't solve the ACTUAL problem of being too low a level to DO the final mission.
Villemar_MxO wrote:
Well looks like 12.1 will be set in International, starting in Ikeburo. Removing the "Oh noes your character won't be able handle hi lvl areas!!!" rationale for exclusionary criticals.
It still doesn't solve the ACTUAL problem of being too low a level to DO the final mission.
Correct! The thing is, we could easily have our storyline content tripled by removing level restrictions (not rep restrictions or farming requirements!) from this new approach.
M45T3RM1ND wrote:Villemar_MxO wrote:Well looks like 12.1 will be set in International, starting in Ikeburo. Removing the "Oh noes your character won't be able handle hi lvl areas!!!" rationale for exclusionary criticals.It still doesn't solve the ACTUAL problem of being too low a level to DO the final mission.Correct! The thing is, we could easily have our storyline content tripled by removing level restrictions (not rep restrictions or farming requirements) from this new situation.
Correct! The thing is, we could easily have our storyline content tripled by removing level restrictions (not rep restrictions or farming requirements) from this new situation.
But if you have to have a team of 50's just to make it through the final mission, doesn't that amount to the same thing as a level/rep requirement? One is practical while the other is applicable.
ShiXinFeng wrote:
Villemar_MxO wrote:M45T3RM1ND wrote:Villemar_MxO wrote:Well looks like 12.1 will be set in International, starting in Ikeburo. Removing the "Oh noes your character won't be able handle hi lvl areas!!!" rationale for exclusionary criticals.It still doesn't solve the ACTUAL problem of being too low a level to DO the final mission.Correct! The thing is, we could easily have our storyline content tripled by removing level restrictions (not rep restrictions or farming requirements) from this new situation.But if you have to have a team of 50's just to make it through the final mission, doesn't that amount to the same thing as a level/rep requirement? One is practical while the other is applicable.
You had mentioned that upthread...I've only been able to do the Merv crits, and in 11.3.3 the Merovingian says, "Meh, I'm washing my hands of this Danielle Wright/BIP business. Let Zion and the Machines deal thith them." So, in Zion 11.3.3 is it suggested that the operative kill Wright? Or is it a requirement for completing Zion's 11.3.3? The latter would be alarming to say the least.
I still do think its more than fair and appropriate for a team to be needed to kill Wright to obtain the Decel bits for the 50 wireframe glasses, though.
Cadsuane wrote:
Purely for the record; there are players who have characters affected/excluded the same way who aren't complaining about it.
Sorry, I've been busy.
I would definately like to see the level requirements removed. I've got a Machinist and a Zionite alt on various servers and I was more than a little dismayed to see this change happen, especially since that would mean having to power-level those alts, and that's something I'm really not a fan of doing with my characters.
This is pretty much the only thing I disagree with (and to make it clear, I also think the level requirements were a poor move too). Given the ever dwindling number of players, to then shut off more of the content/awards from those who simply are unable to find others to help them, is just a poor move. An alternate means for farming should be supplied for those who have no choice but to solo - even if it's against NPCs with a far lower drop rate than say the ones in place for the groups to attack.
When most of the content in MxO is perfectly soloable I don't really see the problem of making some things that require a group to complete.
Unless you have a faction that loves to play the game 24/7 without dealing with real life, you're royally screwed. As I mentioned in multiple posts, I was around since Nightfall and had a lot of fun with the game, but the recent set of updates have been consistently leaving a sour taste in my mouth. Right now, the overall interest in the game has been so diminished I only see ten to twelve players on my buddy list tops whenever I jack in. I've already mentioned that I don't have the time commitment to jack in as much as I'd like to considering that I have to worry about real life than wait for 5+ hours or so just to get a reliable partner to help me out, or jack in for only ten minutes before I have to take off for martial arts lessons or work. Forcing group work for critical missions just already pushed me away as it is considering the maximum team size I can only take ranges from two to three teammates from my most active faction members depending on whether or not I can jack in around the same time as them. Hell, doing one standard mission solo as it is forced the whole game to rely on luck rather than my skill.
This is a multiplayer game.
Besides, if you can scrounge up a couple of mates for a couple of hours, as you say, then you can get anything you like.
This is a multiplayer game. Besides, if you can scrounge up a couple of mates for a couple of hours, as you say, then you can get anything you like.
Regardless of this being a multiplayer game, it doesn't mean someone should be *FORCED* to get a friend to help out on the mission. I jack in only to see how many of the people I know are online. If I see less than ten people on my buddy list in terms of who's in-game or not, it's not worth my time. Getting a reliable level 50 Zion/EPN friendly player is as common as a needle in a haystack, and this is coming from someone that lives in the same time zone as the devs.
Canbus wrote:
Regardless of this being a multiplayer game, it doesn't mean someone should be *FORCED* to get a friend to help out on the mission.
I'm sensing a fundamental flaw in this sentence.
Canbus wrote:Regardless of this being a multiplayer game, it doesn't mean someone should be *FORCED* to get a friend to help out on the mission.I'm sensing a fundamental flaw in this sentence. Besides, if you can scrounge up a couple of mates for a couple of hours, as you say, then you can get anything you like.
Easier said than done. My schedule just doesn't allow me to do so period, and by the time I'm able to spend a few hours on the game, my Italian faction members are already sleeping or at work. Things don't help much now that 98% of my friends are gone due to real life. I could just as well cancel my subscription altogether.
Most is not all. And why should players such as myself be denied access to some of the content simply because we tend to play at a time of day when there are no other suitable players online?
As it stands, to simply access new storyline content only, it is possible for a lvl 50 to solo these new critical quests to get a 11.3.3 Validation ticket. If that were your only goal. Are you suggesting that this shouldn't be the case?
If that's what youre saying then its the classic case of adding insult to injury. Going from 15 critical missions per update to 3, and on top of that making at least the last one un-soloable. That's insane!
Besides theres already plenty of team-required farming content ingame. Shadow pills, GM tokens, Kunoichi dolls, Decel bits, Seraphim shoes, Reader earpieces, OD bandos, Agent tie clips, etc.
The .3 missions are supposed to be soloable, but challenging. People play differently (just talking about solo here), and my guess is that for some people they were really pretty easy, and others found them nigh impossible. It's sort of hard to strike a perfect balance there, but I'd prefer not to make them just generally easy, because that seems like...eh why even throw in enemies at all, I suppose; why not just post mission text instead of actually making a mission and testing it and bug fixing it and so forth? Well because this is a story, but more specifically it's a game that has a story, and you're supposed to play it, which means that it's supposed to have some sort of challenge to overcome.
Of course I could be wrong about the actual difficulty level of those missions. But then again we have people who can solo or nearly solo the much tougher org area sims, so hey. When 12.1 came out I didn't notice many people saying the .3 missions just couldn't be soloed. Were those people all playing in groups? That wasn't my impression, but maybe I misinterpreted what everyone was doing. I hope the rest of you will let me know if I was wrong about this, because currently I don't know any better, and am a bit confused that there are a few people here all these weeks later saying that the missions are just impossible. Are these people not wearing good gear? Not fully loaded? Not carrying consumables for those nasty pinches that may come along? Are they just not used to having to work to win a fight? Or are the missions actually hopeless? I just can't tell from these late comments.
Mm oh and regarding all the level requirement arguing, I suggest waiting for 12.1, because that will give you a lot more ammunition one way or the other. It has three or so other types of things that I was able to do precisely because I knew the target player's minimum level. And I've seen people say that regardless of how tough the enemies are, I shouldn't set a required level, so people could at least try it, but that just isn't something I'm interested in doing; it's the equivalent of selling someone a ticket and being pretty darn sure they're just going to get owned. For side quests and things I don't have much of an issue with that, although I've tried to start putting suggested level/group size in details on items like the Playground toy boxes, but I think for the "main" story stuff it's important to be unmistakably clear about where the difficulty bar is set. I don't want to tell a level 20 player "look! here's the vital mission where you rescue Neo from the cave trolls!" and then force them to run through Industry Square or something to do it; on the other hand, I *do* want to be able to force level 40 or 50 players to run through Industry Square (naked, preferably, but I haven't found a reliable way to enforce that yet).
There are also a lot of people who seem concerned that level requirements are shutting off new players from the story, but these same people also tend to be those who have now found they can't use their lowbie alts to get the story from all three sides. Coincidence? Hm. I haven't seen any actual new players complaining about it, but maybe it could be argued that they just don't know any better, or haven't found the forums yet, or are just figments of our imagination to begin with, or something.
Anyway about the alt thing: I'm glad people are interested enough in the story to want to play it from all three sides at once, but you are extra special people, and not the target the game was designed for from the beginning. The "perfect world" intent is to make the content engaging for a player who is playing *one* of the three mission orgs. If you want to go the extra x2 miles and do it for the other two orgs too, hey, that's great--but I'm not going to dumb down the single-org experience just so that it's super easy for you to play three sides at once.
I'm not surprised that there's some confusion about that, because the mission system's auto-scaling that we've been relying on all this time is really quite lenient--much more lenient than it was ever intended to be, for those who might be wondering; a single three-chevron NPC of the player's level was supposed to be a very difficult fight--hasn't quite worked out that way, but that's the difficulty theory the mission system follows, if I just let it do its own thing.
Now, you could say that there's three or however many years of precedent saying that I shouldn't try to muck with the easiness, or at least not for the stuff involving the main story, but I simply don't agree with either of those statements. The story *is* important, and for that very reason it shouldn't be easy--at least not all of it. It is pretty front-loaded to the easy end, incidentally; the cinematic is the workhorse, and that's pretty easy to beat, and then the .1 mission will tend to have more "story content" than the .2 and .3 missions (or however many .x's there may be), although I will sometimes also (as with Wright in 11.3) save up a special bit of story for the very difficult "extra credit" part at the end, which to me seems only fair for those who could pull it off.
Which reminds me: getting back to the soloable vs group thing, what I shoot for overall is a mix. This is an MMO, and it seems to me there should be some group activities, just hoping for that lucky day when players log in by the truckload; on the other hand, the majority of the things I add are intended to be soloable--but not necessarily easily soloable. And while it sounds like a great solution to say that group things should also be winnable by some optional solo method, despite what you may think that would come close to doubling our dev/test requirements for quest creation--not to mention somewhat defeating the purpose of having group challenges in the first place--so that really isn't an option for us.
