Figure

Part of the reason why I think removing the 3 slots of additional secondaries was the item scaling issues they were encountering. When they added the difficulty slider, content took arbitrarily longer to complete, but the rewards were immense. They can't exactly stuff that back into Pandora's box, but they can use this opportunity to slice a little bit off the power creep of Difficulty Slider adjusted items. However, this specialization stuff seems like it will increase power creep to an extent and try to make it so that freeforms cannot dominate at every task simultaneously and that there will be a difference between the freeform who specced and geared and skilled specifically to be uber at everything and the tanking archetypes they release.

@SiML

Easy peasy. I solo'd resistance on elite with a primary melee tk blades build several times. It'd be even easier if I went LR or bothered to take a 100 ft power, but telekiness is an easily doable powerset to solo with, even resistance.

@TortoiseCan
Information leaks are entirely controlled by the marketing department of the gaming company, and are not at all the result of the people who produce the show. Uncontrolled leaks will quickly find the G4 on the shitlist of many major studios if they are the ones to break it. Pick your poison.

There's Dev interviews all the time on this show, but they're usually related to convention type stuff. Again, Dev interviews are arranged by a gaming company's marketing department and are not the fault of any reporter's lack of effort. You have to understand that the video game industry and the media that covers it are not in the same relationship as say.. politicians and the media. Politicians and the media have a more adversarial role, whereas gaming industry media is far more cozy with gaming industry people.

@Pat. Good Post dude. This thing has needed some attention for a long time.

@ElfLove

CO on Elite isn't really all that harder.. it's just more time consuming. It's not a challenge, just a time sink. I don't think that a whole 'elitism' vs 'casual' thing is even the point of this post. It's just a simple understanding of what's fun about difficult content and what's not fun. CO's Elite difficulty isn't about fun. It's currently about time consumption. Resistance has a few challenges that change the game on elite, but they are few and far between with the pervasive 'Elite Buff' that the mobs have that make the content arbitrarily longer to complete.

The implementation of the current Elite is not so much 'More Difficult than Very Hard', it's more 'Takes longer than Very Hard'. Check out the difference between 'real' difficulty and 'fake' difficulty. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty to get an understanding of what I'm talking about. This isn't 'elitism'. This is just arbitrary math getting in the way of fun. Elite needs to be interesting and a challenge. Currently it's just 'multiply all values by 1.3 and call it a day.'

Calling it elitism does a real disservice to the crux of the argument of Patrick's post and you should be ashamed of yourself.

I like RP far more than the next guy but I think I'm going to have to chalk this one up to 'no one except you cares'. It's energy weapons. Seriously. They've been a mainstay of comics and cartoons for several years. Get over it. They are no more immersion breaking than super powered people in general, and you have a problem with them, you should change your mindset.

I don't know why you're wasting your columnspace on this topic when there's a plethora of far more pressing issues you could be putting a spotlight on with your bully-pulpit. Your column is one of the ones that Cryptic listens to, and this is what you choose to focus your efforts on? Seriously Pat, find something else to talk about.

As soon as I saw that they were trying to go for the LARP experience, I knew it was time to pass on this game. Anyone who's familiar with the Camarilla (WW's organized LARP organization) knows that single world storytelling in a LARP system dependent upon storytellers is basically corruption fodder. You wake up one day and a higher up ST from a state over calls you up and says your character is dead because he's banging the chick who played the annoying Malkavian you killed when she came to visit your Storyteller's game from across state lines. Oh, and apparently she's alive and Prince of whatever city she's in. Oh, and she's apparently the grandchilde of an Antideluvian. Gotta love GM fiat. I'm sure the EVE players will just see this as another layer of the game and openly proposition GMs in order to get a 'leg up' on the competition.

"Granted, the new wave of MMOs is doing away with rigid class restrictions and holy trinities,"

And the article is about SWTOR. Man, someone is woefully misinformed.
Woefully.

Seconded on AO, but CO is probably a bit of a gem in the rough imo.

This is a great relax from the grind that I've been accustomed to in the past.

I looked into information on this whole 'Sakura Park' thing, and I have no idea what the hubbub is about, but near as I can tell, Cryptic held a contest to name an in game park during the beta months. Sakura Park won, but a lot of whiny people were upset for some reason.

Some people then got super upset and remained that way post launch, never to play the game, and bash it constantly. Some of these people claimed that the contest was 'rigged' or 'mishandled', when really they were the only ones causing any sort of controversy. The whole thing died down after the internet adage of 'nobody really cared to begin with' kicked in.

I currently play CO (and pay for a sub) because it happens to be a game I'm having fun with at the moment. I predicted I probably wouldn't be playing the game past october when I first started playing, but now I'm not so certain. In any case, it's not a bad game, and if you want to spin your wheels on an MMO for a while, there's a ton of worse choices than CO. (even factoring in non-F2P MMOs). Sure you may be the type of person to enjoy Rift more, but CO can be quite a lot of fun, and a relaxed MMO experience.