The Division

[PhantomRescue]

Picked up The Division, a shooter with a little bit of customization flair and rpg elements added in.
Buy it, get on your Xbone and play it!.....which I think is only Den and Tristan.....anyone else?

[Matt Varnish]

I just spent 79 on Fallout 4 and another 69 on RB6 two weeks ago... youre killing me....

[Twinlinked]

is fallout 4 any good?

Armoured Warfare is about all i play these days

A.

[lothlann]

fallout 4 is good, not as funny as fallout 1, more on the serious side. I'm enjoying playing it.

[Matt Varnish]

I play ELITE and Archage on PC, and if I get booted from my PC I play Fallout 4 and w/e else on XBOX, the problem with Fallout 4 is I have no idea what I am supposed to do... having not played the prior ones. I open my pip boy and there is the skills map, and I don't even know how to select one.. for example, I want the better Aim one, and I see it on the big skills map but cant click it.. do I need pre reqs??

[Diragi]

Well I talked about it at a fnf or two but since you went xbox and not PC...

[Twinlinked]

i might pick up fallout 4 for X box, i really enjoyed fallout 3,

how is the open word? is the AI pretty tough?

A.

[Diragi]

It's really popular on Twitch.tv atm -- you should take a look.

[PhantomRescue]

It's pretty good, a nice solo game that will likely top the charts this year for new releases, even though it came out in the fall.

Right now, I have RB6, GTAV, Fallout, FIFA 14, and The Division on the go....

[Diragi]

... a nice solo game.

huh?

[PhantomRescue]

Fallout. Pretty much all alone in post apocalyptic setting. That's not solo? Division is definitely not, it's more like Destiny.....

[Diragi]

Oh sorry I thought you were still taking about the division, not fallout.

[Diragi]

(The Mighty) Jingles put a review of this... didn't watch a whole lot (because he's crap at actually playing) but he did come up with a pretty good observation, and that his reminds him of the NY parts of The Secret World. And that; is a good thing.

Probably will pick up next time there's a Steam Sale... could grab it earlier if people are gung-ho.

[Diragi]

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Kind of a bit damning. Classic -- first wave is over-rewarded and the rest are damned.

[Joyous_Oblivion]

Forbes doesn't let you view their site when you have ad-blocker enabled...thus no viewing forbes for me, lol.

[Matt Varnish]

Yeah its hilarious... "were losing revenue because you guys aren't watching our ads" much like TV you can PVR it and skip or switch channels. Goddamn vultures with their ads.

My bigger problem is with xbox ... last night when I was all set to play.. frigging xbox live wouldn't connect. I was online.. my router was working as I had just been watching House of Cards like it was crack cocaine. Could even see Matt online but couldn't even connect to xb live. ofc, this morning it works fine, as I head off to work

[Diragi]

OK the crux of the Forbes article was that the drop rate of the endgame tokens was 10x too high for the first wave of people (who were able to put the bosses on rotate and get all of the endgame great). Subsequently the devs nerfed the shit out of the number of tokens to a fraction of what it was so that's a big fu to people who can't play 10-hour days. On the other hand it sounds like it will take about 20 hours to get to level 30 so you will still get a ton of content for your money even if the dark zone pvp if a shot show.

[Diragi]

"After five days of playing The Division, I’ve finally hit level 30, and not just that, but I’ve cleared every story mission, side-mission and activity in the “Light Zone” area of the map, meaning all I have before me now is the endgame.

Things change when you hit max level. You unlock daily missions that can be completed for prizes in the Light Zone, and the Dark Zone shifts into something much, much more dangerous, where AI enemies are all now 30 and above in the various sections.

But as many feared, once the first players reached the endgame in a matter of days, problems arose. Currency problems, which Massive has already attempted to fix, but also basic, structural problems that are making the Dark Zone endgame specifically kind of bad right now.

Let me explain.

The first major problem of the Dark Zone was Phoenix Credits. For those who haven’t reached 30, once you hit the level cap, Phoenix Credits are a new form of currency that is introduced to the game which you will use to buy all the best high-end (legendary/yellow) items the game has to offer.

There are two main sources of Phoenix Credits, Light Zone hard/challenge missions, and killing named enemy bosses in and out of the Dark Zone. But as players raced to the endgame, it quickly became apparent that the rewards for boss kills were too high.

Light Zone daily/challenge missions give 10-20 Phoenix Credits per completion. But the simple act of killing a named enemy alone would also give you about 10-15 credits per kill. Immediately, self-proclaimed “no life” players, who had reached the endgame in record time, set up farming routes where they and their group would take down relatively easy named bosses on a loop in the Dark Zone, where such enemies are the most plentiful. That led to mass Phoenix Credit accumulation by a select tier of players, and the discovery of a cap at 1,000.

With high-end items and blueprints costing only anywhere from 80-200 Phoenix Credits each, players were able to farm enough to more or less buy every good item in the game. A few days into week one of this supposedly massive multiplayer Destiny competitor, and they were done. They’d simply won, and there was nothing left to do.

Massive flew in and nerfed Phoenix Credit drops from named enemies, taking them down to 2-3 per boss kill instead, while daily missions remain the biggest source. This is probably closer to where the numbers should be, but the problem is that there’s now a group of players that have full end-game loadouts by the end of week one, and nobody else is going to even compare to them for weeks now, because of how slow farming for Phoenix Credits has become. These farming routes only yield a fraction of what they once did, and there are only so many times you can do hard/challenge missions in the Light Zone.

So the situation has upset everyone. Players who are just now arriving at the endgame are annoyed that these fast players got all this gear with less effort. And those “no life” players now literally have nothing to do and will quit, or they will spend their time trolling lesser geared players as unbeatable Rogues because they’re bored.

And speaking of Rogues, this is the other major problem with the Dark Zone endgame right now. Nothing has really changed since the beta, where the incentives for players to go Rogue just were not worth the risk. Back in the beta, I think Massive and the playerbase itself was getting a poor representation of how the Dark Zone would play out in the final product, because it was a “lol nothing matters” situation where all progress would be reset, so everyone just wanted to mess around.

But not so in the level 30 endgame Dark Zone. Going Rogue there is not just suicidal, it’s a way to effectively erase hours of your progress earning elusive Dark Zone ranks. Players have been running Rogue “experiments” to show this, and I saw one example where a guy who had gone full Rogue died after killing a lot of people. He lost something like 95,000 Dark Zone credits, and multiple ranks of Dark Zone levels, hours of progress at higher levels. His reward, had he survived, would have been about 1,700 credits.

Quite simply, the rewards for living through a manhunt are minimal compared to the losses you’ll take for dying even once after going Rogue. And while yes, if you kill people, you can take and extract their loot, but there’s no guarantee they will be holding anything you can use, and you might as well be killing AI bosses who will also drop good loot, and will not sic the entire server after you for killing them.

So what this has created is a situation in the Dark Zone endgame where people rarely go Rogue. Everyone just sort of shuffles from place to place killing pockets of AI enemies, extracting when they feel like it, and so on. If one group does decide to break the norm and go Rogue, they have a server full of high-geared, upset players chasing after them for consequence-free loot and XP. Whereas on their end, they are risking so, so much.

You may hate the idea of backstabbing Rogues, but their existence is necessary for the Dark Zone to be even a little bit interesting. Otherwise, what is the Dark Zone? Just a bunch of max level players farming harder-than-normal AI mobs who constantly respawn. No challenges, no objectives, just killing the same enemies, extracting, killing, extracting, and so on. This is not a viable endgame, and I’m not sure it would be even if the Rogue system was fixed.

The Dark Zone has other issues too. There is little reason to go into the hardest parts of the zone because enemies in the earlier, easier areas seem to give roughly the same rewards. Those magic chests you see all over that are inaccessible until DZ level 30 are only filled with blues, and that point, you will believe blues are only for peasants. And because of Phoenix Credits, Dark Zone funds become almost entirely useless in the endgame, as you can only really buy inferior gear with them, and you’re more likely to get better stuff from enemies themselves. It’s why endgame players now have hundreds of thousands of DZ credits without anything to spend them on.

It isn’t all bad news. I think the Phoenix Credit situation has been fixed for at least newcomers to the endgame, if they can ignore the elite tier of players who is already maxed out in the best gear. That will create a farming opportunity for most players for a good long while to come. I like the way the daily challenge missions are set up as rewarding Phoenix sources, and matchmaking for those missions works wonders. I look forward to Incursions, a PvE endgame activity supposedly coming next month.

But the Dark Zone itself does not feel like it’s in a great place, between an awkward reward system and the relative non-existence of Rogues in the level 30 endgame. Are there fixes? Sure, and Massive has shown that they’re more than willing to listen to fan feedback. But this is not disabling an overpowered perk. These are some major, major overhauls that are needed, not like my fun little fixes I suggested yesterday for the non-endgame.

So, what to do? A few ideas:

*   Lower the cost of Phoenix Credit items a bit so the disparity between “no lifers” and normal players isn’t quite so huge.

*   Introduce another few levels of gear in a little while, so everyone has something else to work toward, even those who have gotten everything already.

*   Rework the Rogue reward/penalty system so it’s not quite so brutal to go Rogue and lose. Or at least if you succeed, it’s a big reward for the amount of risk you took.

*   Change chests in the Dark Zone to give actual, useful rewards,

*   Create events and rotating objectives in the Dark Zone so the mode isn’t just people running around killing the same enemy mobs.

*   Let players spend (high amounts of) Dark Zone cash on high-end items, not just Phoenix Credits.

*   Honestly, seriously consider a separate PvP-specific mode for down the line other than the PvPvE Dark Zone. The game would really benefit from one.

That’s all I’ve got for now. The Dark Zone is in trouble, but it can be fixed, and Massive has shown they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get people to stick around in The Division. I would assume we’ll hear something from them shortly about potential changes to the endgame."

[Joyous_Oblivion]

Ok so good game but endgame is 'meh'.

[Diragi]

Ok so good game but endgame is 'meh'.

I think you are the type of player that will buy game, burn through it in a couple of weeks/month and move on (or I suppose an extremely casual that doesn't care about end-game) then The Division is probably 9/10. I'm just sure it's not a long-term game for me.

Esp when Paradox Interactive (maker of the best grand strategy games on the market) have a ton of releases on the horizon that I'm interest in: Stellaris, Hearts of Iron 4, etc...

[CA$H]

Its a poor copy of Destiny for fans of Gears of War (cover shooter). Destiny, with all it's faults, has a much more robust "end game". I also prefer FPS to cover shooters, but thats me.

That's it. Nothing really new about it.

[Joyous_Oblivion]

Its a poor copy of Destiny for fans of Gears of War (cover shooter). Destiny, with all it's faults, has a much more robust "end game". I also prefer FPS to cover shooters, but thats me.

That's it. Nothing really new about it.

It does now, or so I hear, but this looks to have about as much as Destiny had when it launched...

[Matt Varnish]

Meh I like it so far. Matt and I are level 12.

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