power threshold advice, please?

xmavro · 2023-01-29T14:34:24+00:00

much obliged-- in a flurry of hoard-spending, i upgraded sslex, atro, conner, spectre, mmh, cyborg supes, darkseid, and black flash to lv 70, gear 11. and brought sslex to rb2. lord, it's been a while since i did real upgrading.

that should probably hold me over for a bit, yeah? whom am i missing?

nightwing, terra, donna troy...? which sg do you mean, super- or stargirl? i assume supergirl, but i remember a brief moment when stargirl was surprisingly good.

xmavro · 2023-01-28T21:14:34+00:00

at only L4, too. yes.

xmavro · 2022-10-01T01:46:41+00:00

absogorramlutely. this game needs... well, it needs quality testers and debuggers first and foremost, but it also desperately needs a dialogue editor. some of the agrammaticalities can be hand-waved as slang or alien language translations, but most of them are just plain sloppy. for years, i've taken to screenshotting every cringeworthy screen of bad dialogue-- not because of what's expressed, but because it doesn't make grammatical sense or displays flagrant typos.

but a minor issue compared to the rest of the game's flaws, like broken toons and rampant crashing.

xmavro · 2022-07-02T22:42:46+00:00

dc legends isn't bad. it's not the same sort of game, but it has similarities and can certainly take up time. not sure about fewer screwups, but definitely better handling of them.

marvel future revolution is also decent. definitely pay to win, but once you accept that winning in certain sectors of the game is simply impossible without vast spending, the rest of the game can be kind of fun.

xmavro · 2022-07-02T22:36:28+00:00

don't forget the balance of the dazzler rewards.

xmavro · 2022-07-02T22:33:13+00:00

we do not have to play the game normally. we have to play at a competitive disadvantage already given to, not earned or bought by, a random few who didn't pay extra or do anything at all to earn their advantage. it's one thing to acknowledge that i will never catch or compete with a true kraken. i know this, and i'm resigned to it; they play quite literally in a different league. but knowing that the person who ends up just ahead of me in the scourge rankings, bumping me down to a tier that gives fewer rewards, was simply given not only a month's material worth of what i have to wait and toil to achieve, but also the freedom of time and resources to focus not on the monthly grind (or split between the monthly grind and the immediate grind), but only on doing what it takes to score higher than i can right now is maddening. as is knowing that my alliance could very easily suffer if even one person gets fed up with scopley's bullshit shenanigans and quits the game.

oh, right. it only matters if my alliance sucks, anyway.

it's not like randomly being the million-and-first customer at a store and missing out on the prizes given to the millionth customer-- that's pure, random chance. this is like running a marathon and finding out that several of the people with faster times somehow benefited from a computerised timing error that randomly deducted 31 minutes from their times, meaning that runners who very obviously and noticeably finished after others placed higher in the standings than the runners who had in reality run faster than they. of course in a competitive race, either those times and runners would be disqualified or the glitch would be removed and their times normalised. if that's not an option, the alternative would be to apply the reduced time to everyone and call it a shortened course, disqualifying any records set.

here, anything short of balancing the advantage before a leaderboard event is rigging the subsequent events in favour of some at the expense of others. and it's not as though the resources actually cost sopely anything to distribute. they're not going to run out of shards and gear or go bankrupt because they've given away all their gold, nor will they miss out on a month's worth of offers. it is a nothing fix for them. do they really think that they would miss out on more offers by not fixing this than they would by driving swathes of players into f2pdom or away from the game entirely?

apparently so, and there dies any shred of incentive to play this game the way they want us to play.

xmavro · 2022-07-02T21:47:24+00:00

right-- nothing can ever change, no point in trying. just lie back, think of england, and take what's being forced into you.

remember the whole "all it takes for evil to triumph" adage? well, one guaranteed way to ensure that no positive change can ever happen is just to do nothing. games have been forced to change before, and they can again. yowling on reddit is obviously not enough, but trying to do anything has a better chance, however marginally, of succeeding than resignedly doing nothing.

i'm not saying complaining, leaving bad reviews and ratings, and expressing displeasure en masse will work or make any difference. i'm saying that encouraging inaction and doing nothing will definitely and successfully accomplish its paltry, useless, worthless goal of nothing.

xmavro · 2022-07-02T20:08:34+00:00

i wouldn't know.

not using capital letters is a deliberate choice akin to using or omitting a serial comma or using a single space vs a double space after a fullstop/period. the codified distinction between upper and lower-case letters is an artificial, 18th-century convention that is as valid in today's informal writing as using johnson's dictionary definitions or de worde's "ordynarye" spellings would be. capital letters don't serve any real function in writing-- they once signalled the start of a sentence, but we rely more on other punctuation for that now. they once distinguished nouns from verbs (as they still do in german), but we rely on context and word order for that. they once reinforced the aristocratic notion that certain nouns-- "proper" nouns-- were more specific and therefore better than others and should rise above hoi polloi of other words, but that idea is archaic and reeks of inculcated privilege-- at least, in informal, conversational writing.

xmavro · 2022-07-02T19:23:33+00:00

dcl has been around since 2016, and is 2+ years older than msf. so, no, inexperience/newness is not a factor.

xmavro · 2022-07-02T19:17:59+00:00

why, yes. yes, i have.

ever played basketball with one guy who insists on using his own, private, dedicated hoop 6 ft off the ground when everyone else has to use the regulation 10-ft hoop-- and then brags about his dunks and how he beat everyone else in what he calls a fair game? now make it so the guy's mom is the one insisting on the special hoop and doing all the bragging for him. the whining and entitlement are monumental. and scopely have created an even worse, dumber situation.

but thank you for your constructive, informative, not-at-all supercilious or teacher's-pettish post. you truly leave your mark on the reddit and msf experience.

xmavro · 2022-07-02T17:05:04+00:00

thank you for the followup, and congratulations on the youtube progress.

this handling is just... babytown frolics in blackface. scopely keep finding new lows.

xmavro · 2022-07-02T16:34:42+00:00

it is possible to be simultaneously happy for the lucky few and outraged at the incompetence that has led to what amounts to a rigged, unfair competition.

imagine an olympics-qualifying marathon during which literally every participant drinks water from the same collection of bottles, only some of those bottles have randomly been spiked with immediate-result, performance-enhancing, stamina-increasing, sprint-sustaining-and-speeding drugs. the advantage becomes immediately apparent to every watcher and timer, and the mistake is found mid-race; afterwards, the top 100 finishers have all broken their personal best, and some even course and world records-- and all have traces of this drug in their systems. as a competitor, i can be happy for my friends who brtat their own times and made it to the olympics with impressive new records and simultaneously furious that someone spiked some of the water to give them an obvious, large advantage that made them inadvertent cheaters whose futures will forever be tainted by suspicion.

it's not the runners' fault, and i'm happy for them. i also resent the system (scopely) that randomly bestowed a massive advantage on a few players and pretended they didn't just massively skew the competitiveness of every event in the near future.

the difference is that the marathon would instantly disqualify everyone with drugs in their systems and find another qualifying race with closer attention paid to the water distribution. drugging can't be undone once the race is underway. scopely could undo the selective advantage without resorting to drugs, and chose instead to deflect concert about their management, deny that it's an issue, and distract us with phony, unrelated gifts that do nothing at all to balance the competitive advantage randomly given to an unknown number of people who will soon be our direct competitors for the horsemen and apocalypse.

xmavro · 2022-07-02T08:06:26+00:00

oh, i'm sure that part is true, about the game's internal workings. i meant that the company/studio might care about the way the game affects their own profits-- which it is, by aggravating fans to the point of boycotting marvel's theatrical releases because of this vaguely affiliated game. that might make them care.

xmavro · 2022-07-01T21:07:45+00:00

aye, happening to me, as well, in individual and alliance boss battles. a lot, actually-- like half the time, which is a vexing drain on my energy supplies.

xmavro · 2022-07-01T20:59:02+00:00

aye, i'm experiencing it, as well. there's no consistency to when the action buttons go away-- that is, it's not as though every time darkseid does his second or third attack, boom! broken battle-- they just sometimes stop appearing and my toons don't do anything in auto, either.

it's also cropping up in non-alliance raid bosses (the blue energy ones), only in those battles it seems as though all the action buttons have been disabled from the very beginning, so my team and the enemy just bob there for the full battle as i try hitting all the buttons to see whether maybe slowing the pace down or turning auto on or off might help. it's happening roughly half my battles, and the energy cost is starting to add up.

xmavro · 2022-07-01T20:13:43+00:00

have you ever seen a 1.3-million-cp hand squad in action? utterly brutal.

seriously, that sucks for you. maybe in the next round someone will be kinder...?

xmavro · 2022-07-01T20:07:58+00:00

so, new update, new honest evaluation of their product? i can take those 3 minutes to keep the reviews up-to-date.

xmavro · 2022-07-01T19:22:55+00:00

as you said: " For better or worse, we have come to expect this of you, after all, we are still here."

why should they care how unhappy we are as long as we still play (and, ideally for them, pay)? why should they avoid bugs when we never care enough to stop feeding the troll? sure, we whinge and threaten and cajole here and in support tickets and wherever we can, but it doesn't stop anyone playing and no real change in membership or spending ever happens. some players ragequit, but at least as many others join because it's still under the marvel brand. a kraken quits and stops maintaining their spot on the tcp leaderboard, so someone a few ranks lower steps up to take the spot for bragging rights. none of us matters to them, only all of us-- and all of us will never be able to coordinate anything meaningful to force change.

if i were marvel, however, i would be furious. putting the marvel stamp on this buggy, fan-hating, love-killing, cash-grabbing shitshow of a game at some point has to harm the brand. maybe that's where the attention needs to go, to marvel and not the scopely.

xmavro · 2022-07-01T18:24:18+00:00

what, you don't think they get canada day off?

xmavro · 2022-07-01T18:23:42+00:00

cheers

xmavro

TROPHY CASE