Evil Trout Posted:

I was tubmailed about this by markchd.

I agree they’re not as fun. The important part was making them all consistent in difficulty, since some were like 1/4 as strong as other forums for the same level.

I think very soon I am going to change them to make them less grindy, please just give me a few days.

Thanks ET Log in to see images!

Seriously, there’s like 5-6 forums that put up a fight now, and no one’s being forced to run them. I don’t see why people insist they must be able to pwn every forum by mindlessly alternating two keys. Just had a run on Second Wife and Dykea on a Camwhore and it’s very, very doable.

They may require you to put a couple of upgrade points into Ego and get some restoring items but that’s what you’d expect from the hardest forums in the game.

I think in light of the recent difficulty spike for forums, the recent clbum nerfs/rebalances might need revision. Since while all clbumes may do about the same damage now, certainly some clbumes do much better in long drawn-out fights than other clbumes. Trolls for example have high defense, essentially limitless douchebaggery, low refresh attacks, and have hugely effective douchebaggery restoratives. Hackers on the other hand have very limited processing power, high refresh on most attacks, and have weak processing power restoratives. So in a long drawn-out fight, the troll is going to have to restore its secondary stat less, is going to be more effective when it does so, and doesn’t have to use five or six different attacks in order to do so. So while trolls and hackers may do about the same amount of damage now, is that really how we want to balance the clbumes? It seems to me that trolls just have a much easier time pwning hard forums after the series of nerfs than hackers do, for example.

meeeeeeeeee Posted:

Long sensible explanation above

I agree on a lot of those points, the only caveat I have about this, is that ET buffed up all the forums before balancing out the clbumes.

I play all 5 clbumes, and had my hacker as a primary. I say “had” since it is now completely useless compared to the others, even though it’s the highest level I have (34) with the best gear possible (bar a few .moars).

My troll, a few levels lower kills Zombie Armageddon in triple the speed my hacker does, my camwhore somewhere in between the two.

The immediate anger from the hacker nerf has pbumed, but I still do not understand how that can be “balanced” enough for ET to move on to something else.

One thing is to collect data over a couple of days, but how about actually playing a few forums yourself with the clbumes at the same high level and noticing what a humongous difference there is.

You guys are acting like spoiled brats. If every forum played the same then what would be the point of having all of this different clbumes, skills, and equipment. If you want low risk with high reward then go play solitaire.

meeeeeeeeee Posted:

Nothing needs nerfing. We need to leave this for a while so players can experiment with the new difficulty level. There are better ways to do things than all-out offense, and players have gotten lazy in that regard. 30 seconds on the most difficult forum, which is just as difficult as the easiest forum, is stupid. I want some forums to be difficult, because that’s where players use their skills to best effect to extract an edge.

e.g. 300 is *not* the maximum ego you can heal per turn. It’s 350, with a combination of 5HTP and Endopatch. Expensive (certainly it will cost far more than you will get in return with some clbumes) but possible. With high defence, the PC misses a reasonable % of the time, so this isn’t quite so horrible as some people paint. Players, for the first time, actually have to unlearn some bad habits (everything into offense=bad), and learn some new skills. Everything in offence and no ego upgrades is a mistake. Defence plays a bigger part. Upkeep e.g. now has a purpose. So there’s an edge to actually knowing what you’re doing, and the game is edging towards working properly. If the most difficult forums had been difficult from the outset, noone would have seen any issue with it. We’re just used to being over powerful.

Having forums which require a player to use consumables to run is reasonable. It’s up to players to determine now what the most efficient combination of forums to run are, for grinding for flezz. And, if too many items are required, that means the player has to run easier forums more often, or perhaps that the consumables are too expensive.

Grinding the most difficult forums for the best .moar files now has a built in cost. That’s as it should be, though it’s unfortunate that some players got the best equipment before these forums were buffed. That, to be blunt, is an issue with ET not getting things right before releasing episode 2 though.

Also, if this had been in place from the outset (alongside the Geronimo nerf) getting to level 35, possibly might have been an achievement. For those who get there now, it is. For those who got there before, it was a joke and a disappointment. A random peen for running the same old forums again.

The only real issues I have here are the speedrun times which should have been reset, and that these forums were buffed, and I didn’t know anything about it. We need an announcement addition to the character page when you log back in, as, obviously, announcements are not going to be seen unless players check the twitter every time they play, which would be a stupid bumumption. There wasn’t a mention in Game Discussion until a number of hours after the change took place, and that wasn’t by a staff member. So, that it was mentioned at all is better, but is not sufficient. It was also a significant enough change it should have been announced *in advance* – give players some warning so they don’t lose a visit/a streak/whatever, and have a Haxlrose available to respec if necessary. Hindsight is 20/20 but these are common sense observations IMO.

I agree with everything meeeeeeeeeeee said. There should have been a warning but otherwise these are positive changes. And I say that as someone who has every character type.

whiny ****es please.

I actually had to use a few consumables to get through a 7 thread dykea, but was able to cruise very easily through an 11 thread second wife. Why is this?

to be honest, I think that emos should have stayed as they were before the banaceing of clbumes and this, before the clbum balance, it was a bit more of grinding and harder, but, not only did the high end attacks get upgraded damage wise, but, everybody hurts was hax before threads got an upgrade, one refresh was a little too overpowered for an attack that beats recepes for disaster, but, with the forum upgrades…it’s hard to pwn high level threads now, oh well, at least ET is gonna bring down the power of the high end threads a bit.

Possibly a Cabbage Posted:

Last night, I did Firewall and it wasn’t the first time I had done it, but it was the first time I had done it after the series of nerfs. Before, it was a relatively straightforward process. I maybe had to heal a couple of times, but I could hit a nice pace. This time, I there ended up being a lot of back and forth (which is good), and I used a bunch of consumables (which is fine), but the major problem was that according to my visit history it took 891s (just short of 15 minutes) to pwn the forum. Difficulty and expense are both fine, but it’s my personal opinion that this is a somewhat unreasonable degree of tedium. The thing that made it not fun wasn’t that it was hard, and it wasn’t that I needed to spend flezz on consumables. The problem was more that it was fifteen minutes of hitting number keys, and the payout wasn’t nearly worth that much of my time.

So I would heartily support changes that make the game more fun. Whether that makes it harder or easier or whatever. But fifteen minutes of 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 1, 6 etc. is not fun. I think that’s beyond my accepted tolerance of “grinding”.

There is a penalty on all of your stats when you take on a forum above your level. It wont take as long when you are less than 4 levels below the forum. Try it again when you are at level 30.

Possibly a Cabbage Posted:

I’m aware of the penalty to stats, but it’s the combination of:

1) My attacks now have less power than they did a week ago.

2) The forum now has more ego than it did a week ago.

3) The stat penalty.

That takes something which *used* to be fun, and produced something which is possible, but entirely unfun. This is unfortunate. I mean, if I’m trying to grind for cred, it’s only reasonable to be tackling the highest level forums I can possibly do, but it’s a problem when a forum in the “possible, but takes fifteen minutes of clicking” territory.

The main reason the forum takes 15 minutes for you to pwn it is the stat penalty. My level 33 hacker would probably take 3 minutes. Which might be too long, but I think that is a different discussion. Either pwn a forum closer to your level, Teen Momies, or endure the consequences of your eagerness.