Dark Zone suggestion

[Xeromaus]

so you think they just call 'time-out' when they go into the dz?

wow dude.  srs?  no mission in the dz?  every week isac sends you into the dz to kill 10 cleaners or something.  every day you get a dz assignment.  faye lau, the acting commander of the division wants you to check out supply drops in the dz. 

no, agents like these wouldn't be disavowed.  they would have no authority.  division agent shows up and tells captain benitez he's in charge, capt benitez says, 'no, i called the president, he doesn't know who the fck you are.  gtfo, and take your glowing watch with you.'   dude, the phone recordings.  benitez explains to the jtf who the division agents are.  and someone had to brief benitez, obviously.  they aren't secret agents.  they carry id cards.  they wear patches on their friggin shoulders. 

007 proved his own innocence. 

comparing federal agents to inmates is a long stretch.  comparing them to cops looking the other way when a dirty cop pinches some evidence in the form of money would be one thing, but they wouldn't look the other way if the dirty cop murdered another cop.

Look man, if you wanna see it as rosy as possible, explain why we're allowed to go rogue with no repercussions better than I've been trying to. I'm literally out of any other ammo than "the devs said so". If you have a better reason, shoot. It's a little hard to take your side of this seriously when the game doesn't agree with it.

 

[Codename Quincy]

you must have skipped my first post.  i said that it's fundamentally flawed to have a federal agent murder another federal agent, and be suspended from duty for 2 minutes, only to be reinstated without so much as an inquiry.

 

[Xeromaus]

you must have skipped my first post.  i said that it's fundamentally flawed to have a federal agent murder another federal agent, and be suspended from duty for 2 minutes, only to be reinstated without so much as an inquiry.

not at all. I'm saying that's EXACTLY how that works, and working to justify as best I can, as it's a mechanic that we both know isn't changing.

 

[ShootFirstPodcast]

you must have skipped my first post.  i said that it's fundamentally flawed to have a federal agent murder another federal agent, and be suspended from duty for 2 minutes, only to be reinstated without so much as an inquiry.

I think the point you have to realize is that The Division is absolutely a fictional game with a fictional story.  In real life.. yeah, you're absolutely right that there's going to be an issue with agents killing agents and all that.  However, it'd take a lot of "playability" out of the game if once you went Rogue once, you'd be stuck as that forever.  On the same note, though.... it'd probably be somewhat interesting to see how the player-base would react to that kind of thing.  Unfortunately, though; it'd mess up the PVE-side of the game if you wanted to get super technical about it since all the missions revolve around the fact that you're a Division agent and not a Rogue agent..

 

[Codename Quincy]

you can't justify a bad idea.  putting frosting on a turd doesn't give you a cake.  it gives you a turd with frosting on it. 

 

[Xeromaus]

you can't justify a bad idea.  putting frosting on a turd doesn't give you a cake.  it gives you a turd with frosting on it. 

I'm giving you as much ammo to justify it as possible, but you intend to make this operate on some other set of rules. I have no idea how to help you with this, but I hope the continued presence of federal agents murdering other federal agents, being suspended from duty for 2 minutes, and being reinstated without so much as an inquiry doesn't somehow drive you mad.

It gets easier when you just go with it man. If you want "real" step outside.

 

[Codename Quincy]

I think the point you have to realize is that The Division is absolutely a fictional game with a fictional story.  In real life.. yeah, you're absolutely right that there's going to be an issue with agents killing agents and all that.  However, it'd take a lot of "playability" out of the game if once you went Rogue once, you'd be stuck as that forever.  On the same note, though.... it'd probably be somewhat interesting to see how the player-base would react to that kind of thing.  Unfortunately, though; it'd mess up the PVE-side of the game if you wanted to get super technical about it since all the missions revolve around the fact that you're a Division agent and not a Rogue agent..

true enough, but this has the tom clancy label.  if you can find me a tom clancy novel in which an agent/soldier murders his coworker with witnesses and everyone has a cup of coffee and forgets about it, i will retract everything i've said on the matter.

 

[Xeromaus]

true enough, but this has the tom clancy label.  if you can find me a tom clancy novel in which an agent/soldier murders his coworker with witnesses and everyone has a cup of coffee and forgets about it, i will retract everything i've said on the matter.

you find me a Tom Clancy novel that I can shape and change with an xbox controller and I'll do the same.

 

[ShootFirstPodcast]

true enough, but this has the tom clancy label.  if you can find me a tom clancy novel in which an agent/soldier murders his coworker with witnesses and everyone has a cup of coffee and forgets about it, i will retract everything i've said on the matter.

Have you played any of the other Tom Clancy games by chance?  I'd venture to say that by their very nature games have to be a little bit different than the books.  The Tom Clancy label is just there to give you a "genre", would be the best response to it.  It's still a video game and has to operate on a video game's rules.

 

[Xeromaus]

@BoogerFat, sorry for the hijacking your thread there, I swear I'm done trying to ease Quincy's mind on this.

Edit: ...just one more, then I SWEAR, no more.

 

[Codename Quincy]

you find me a Tom Clancy novel that I can shape and change with an xbox controller and I'll do the same.

ok i get it.  you're a fanboy and will defend the game with your dying breath. 

 

[Xeromaus]

ok i get it.  you're a fanboy and will defend the game with your dying breath. 

You raise an issue with the game, I try to explain it as best I can, knowing full well the mechanic will not change.

I spend the better part of an hour and a half trying to help you wrap your mind around it, you fight harder.

Another board member hops in to try and explain it differently, you shift your focus to calling out the author of the source material the game is loosely based on, as if novels and video games are the same thing.

I again try to present an opposing view explaining why novels and games are different (though perhaps too concisely), now I must be "a fanboy and will defend the game with your dying breath"

Have you stopped to consider where you are posting this? Of course I'm a fan. I have dozens upon dozens of posts here detailing issues the game has, and just as many providing answers to them...as I attempted to do here for you. Unfortunately, now it's become personal (somehow), and that's a line I'm gonna draw. I'm all for a debate, but if it can't stay on the material, it's pointless. The problem isn't my level of fandom, it's your grief over things that won't/can't change (as they're already established, fundamental game lore) and an inability to accept anything you find outside of what you expected. This isn't a novel by Tom Clancy, this isn't real life, this is just a game. Get over it.

I'm literally going to post nothing else in response, if you want the last word, have at it.

 

[Codename Quincy]

You raise an issue with the game, I try to explain it as best I can, knowing full well the mechanic will not change.

I spend the better part of an hour and a half trying to help you wrap your mind around it, you fight harder.

you spent an hour an a half spewing nonsense tbh.  tell me the division has no mission in the dz, when i get a new mission for the dz every day.  tell me the division is so secret that the government would disavow them, when they walk around carrying strategic homeland division i.d. cards and sporting shoulder patches to match, meanwhile, faye lau, the division commander, is calling ppl on the radio announcing that the division is here. 

when a multiplayer game takes a nose dive right out of the gate, it shakes things up within the company that releases that game.  bosses want answers, then they want better results.  devs make changes.  i don't know if you noticed or not, but this game isn't doing so well.  you say the mechanic will not change.  i say the mechanic probably won't change.

 

[RimBlock]

You need to be DZ lvl 75/90 before running the DZ has any value at all...and even then, the blueprints/purchases top out at 204 (save for the Nomad set, but it's garbage). You're right though, it IS like playing with only a pistol...... you'll be under powered, under geared, and anyone that doesn't adhere to only that will destroy you.

If you can't handle running vanilla challenge mode runs with the random matchmaking system, I would ask why. The enemies are no harder than in the DZ, your loot can't be stolen, the drops are higher quality (182/191 guaranteed versus 163), and you get a group to run with you.

DZ loot/purchases of ANY variety will always be at least a step down from the power and quality you can get from PvE. Seems a shame to spend all that time and effort to be stuck in second place forever. You certainly CAN solo your way to the top end of the DZ, but if solo is all you do, those that group for bigger challenges will still wreck you.

You can say "the DZ is worth running because it's fun", and you'd be correct. To say it has any definite value beyond that is a joke. It needs improvements, and it's getting them soon, but it'll always take a back seat to PvE.

The DZ can be a very quick smash & grab to get items when leveling.  Enter the DZ1 in the bottom left, go in to the subway and kill 6 or so cleaners and their boss and extract at the extraction zone just outside.  Wait a short while and repeat.  It is a fairly easy way to get up to GS 163 but you have to watch out for players camping to go rogue for fun.  I find doing that more fun than doing a hard PvE mission now as the PvE are all so scripted.  At least in the DZ it is a little more open to chance (when the AI respawn, where you will be when it happens and what choice words to use when the shotgun guy appears right behind you and blows out your spine).  

When you are at the top of the tree it is also easy to forget the difficulty those below you may be facing especially if the devs change the goal posts (nerf crafting after closing the crafting materials exploit etc).  I see you got that with your reply to @Oh. daesu above.

For running challenging PvE missions, it is not the fact that they cannot be run with the matchmaking system.  Clearly they can but the rag tag bunch of players that get lumped together, if a team can be found at all, is usually a challenge all by it'self.  Most people have their own ideas on how to do the mission and go off on their own merry way.  No-one tends to work together, most don't seem to have any coms and, a fact that is probably overlooked in other countries / regions, most of the time the players are using different languages here in Asia.  

We (myself and @Oh. daesu) had some issues the other night trying to get a group for the Lincoln Tunnel.  We got a team.  They all charged in and all dead.  As I tend to stay back and use my marksman rifle I was the last to go down with no hope of rescuing the others at all.  The group disbanded instantly and same for the next try.  The third try gave us a GS 058 in the group although I don't think we did much worse as a team even so.  The fourth time we could not even get people in a reasonable time and so moved on to the DZ.  

Maybe the experience on the Asia server is different from those used by US / EU players.  

Don't get me wrong, we have also had success but it is more through muscle memory, it seems, from players playing the missions so many times than by group cohesion or communication.  The fact that challenging missions do not scale like the hard ones do depending on the number of players makes doing them solo very tricky.

Finding decent people to play with around your GS is tricky.  Luckily myself and @Oh. daesu tend to work fairly well together and are close enough on timezones to play and speak the same language.

I found the DZ quite good when I first got to cap. Though, this was at the time of the last patch release, where yellow was meant to become more common. When you have very little gs, easy gs163 gear is quick. It is hard to say what's good at times in this game, and there at some gs points you seem to grind more than others try to get to the next mission mode or incursion. Even reading the forums I can see there is an element of luck with drops with some people going for long runs of  diddly-squat. @Xeromaus, you know a hell of a lot more about how it works than myself. so not trying to tell grandma how to suck eggs. Mainly commenting on my recent experience at the low gs spectrum. Having run with @RimBlock, I think he is more conscience of being carried in challenges.  I can be like, I can feel as if each time I fall down shows I'm being carried.  But we have to get a gs up somehow. Actually @RimBlock, I noticed you got your gs into the 170s now.

Yeah, when there is a decent group for the missions, then if there are a couple around GS 200, they just seem to go charging in and destroy everything in their path.  Only once I felt I was really carried when that happened in Lexington.  By the time I could get my marksman aimed on an AI they were mowed down by the other two with us.  I like to 'pay my way' on the team even if it is with support stations and pinging the AI with the marksman rifle and taking a few out.  Going down and getting revived is not such a bit deal as long as the others are not always coming back for just me  :10_wink: .  I don't think that has happened yet.

Yep on the GS.  I swapped a couple of good 163s for a couple of not quite as good 182s just to get the score up.  I have a GS 131 pistol, my GS 163 FW M1A and 163 holster with 3x stats on it keeping my score down but I am not finding anything better for everything apart from the pistol which will not give me a big hit just for the sake of the GS.  Just saving for a 182 pistol BP and should be able to sort that out tonight.  Saw you pop up last night but it was just as I had logged off for the night  :12_slight_smile: .  Need to run some more of the higher DZs for 182 items when you are next around.

 

[g1nt3r]

Oh shit, this thread is getting heated!

 

[Xeromaus]

When you are at the top of the tree it is also easy to forget the difficulty those below you may be facing especially if the devs change the goal posts (nerf crafting after closing the crafting materials exploit etc).  I see you got that with your reply to @Oh. daesu above.

What you say about the top of the tree is true, but you need to remember or know a few things as well. I'm not trying to start a "you damn whippersnappers" kind of thing here, but we had it rough too.

We started from the bottom just like you. The game was in a much rougher state then, but we also didn't know what was coming...it seemed to be the best it was gonna be. There were glitches galore, and many chose to take advantage of them. Many others, like myself, chose not to. From day 1, this put myself and those that chose not to glitch behind. Personally, I ran solo until after patch 1.1 when I joined @HHHope in his clan. Lotta quiet time, lotta grinding hard modes/challenge modes solo, lotta filling out trophies. Maybe I am among the upper branches now, but there was no one there to give me a boost when I needed it.

Drop rates were abysmal. Any gearing past purple was a LONG road filled with MANY runs or kills. Sure, we could craft, but phoenix credits to get blueprints weren't as easy to come by either. DZ blueprints you say? Ha.

The DZ was a nightmare. If you weren't being blocked by a 2-3 man squad doing jumping jacks in doorways, you were crushed the moment you stepped out of the checkpoint into the zone. If you somehow made it past, boss kills granted certainly granted more phoenix credits, but that's about it. At best, you might have seen purple loot, with the rare occurrence of an HE drop. However, that assumes you even found a boss...most were in a perpetual state of "just killed", and those that weren't were ambush bait.

Even the open world conspired against players choosing to run clean. Roaming named elites respawned indefinitely, with the same odds to drop gear as DZ bosses, but some found a way to increase those respawns and farm a specific drop from them (most notably Bullet King). The right drop with an overpowered, pre-nerf talent could swing a player from garbage to god.

Challenge runs? No one knew them. Everyone was still learning each run, and a LARGE portion of the player base was calling a few "impossible". You think it's rough now? Try running Warrengate or Russian Consulate with a squad in all blue gear.

All this aside, we got it done. Now, the game has been put into a state we would not have dreamed of then, so it's a bit hard for us to see your plight. When you see or hear a maxed or near maxed player saying things (as I have) like "the DZ is a joke", "matchmaking makes challenge runs easy", or "163 is useless", know that it's because we HAD to learn to get past it, or just stay stuck there. Your complaints are no less valid because I wrote this, and I'm trying to see them more and more, but just bear this stuff in mind when you think we're looking down on you.

 

[HHHope]

I've never seen so much hypothetical talk in my life. Hahahaha unreal man , " it goes down in the dz it goes down " 

 

[RimBlock]

What you say about the top of the tree is true, but you need to remember or know a few things as well. I'm not trying to start a "you damn whippersnappers" kind of thing here, but we had it rough too.

We started from the bottom just like you. The game was in a much rougher state then, but we also didn't know what was coming...it seemed to be the best it was gonna be. There were glitches galore, and many chose to take advantage of them. Many others, like myself, chose not to. From day 1, this put myself and those that chose not to glitch behind. Personally, I ran solo until after patch 1.1 when I joined @HHHope in his clan. Lotta quiet time, lotta grinding hard modes/challenge modes solo, lotta filling out trophies. Maybe I am among the upper branches now, but there was no one there to give me a boost when I needed it.

Drop rates were abysmal. Any gearing past purple was a LONG road filled with MANY runs or kills. Sure, we could craft, but phoenix credits to get blueprints weren't as easy to come by either. DZ blueprints you say? Ha.

The DZ was a nightmare. If you weren't being blocked by a 2-3 man squad doing jumping jacks in doorways, you were crushed the moment you stepped out of the checkpoint into the zone. If you somehow made it past, boss kills granted certainly granted more phoenix credits, but that's about it. At best, you might have seen purple loot, with the rare occurrence of an HE drop. However, that assumes you even found a boss...most were in a perpetual state of "just killed", and those that weren't were ambush bait.

Even the open world conspired against players choosing to run clean. Roaming named elites respawned indefinitely, with the same odds to drop gear as DZ bosses, but some found a way to increase those respawns and farm a specific drop from them (most notably Bullet King). The right drop with an overpowered, pre-nerf talent could swing a player from garbage to god.

Challenge runs? No one knew them. Everyone was still learning each run, and a LARGE portion of the player base was calling a few "impossible". You think it's rough now? Try running Warrengate or Russian Consulate with a squad in all blue gear.

Yeah, I started playing a week after release, I just chose a different route to yourself and concentrated on PvE (story and ad-hoc missions) and waited for the PvE to be improved.  I also spent just about all of my pretty limited spare time playing and found I had enough to do with the compelling story that I didn't come across forums (like this one) or youTube vids until quite late and so was unable to benefit from the pooled community knowledge.  It was only finding out that the challenging / Incursion items recommended a higher level (later GS) that pushed me to try and raise it for the sake of being able to play the additional content.

I fully agree that finding decent clan help to do higher level missions with a semi organised group far outweighs the challenges of doing random matchmaking.  Maybe that is a big chunk that helps people get over the hill and enables for easier, more productive farming.  Finding decent players to team up with can be challenging though.

All this aside, we got it done. Now, the game has been put into a state we would not have dreamed of then, so it's a bit hard for us to see your plight. When you see or hear a maxed or near maxed player saying things (as I have) like "the DZ is a joke", "matchmaking makes challenge runs easy", or "163 is useless", know that it's because we HAD to learn to get past it, or just stay stuck there. Your complaints are no less valid because I wrote this, and I'm trying to see them more and more, but just bear this stuff in mind when you think we're looking down on you.


Luckily I have not said any of these things  :10_wink: .  The comments I have made are truly intended as observations from a different perspective and not intended as complaints, and certainly not intended to start arguments or generate bad feelings.  I like the game and can see great potential which is why I play and contribute here with like minded people.

I think it is very easy to assume that the gaming experience is the same wherever you are globally.  I know I did when living in the Uk.  Since I have been living here in Singapore, I have found that things are a lot different, especially with multiplayer.     The Apac servers tend to have Aussies (fine bunch of blokes aye @Oh. daesu), Koreans, Chinese and quite possibly a lot of others.  Matchmaking with 3 others with out a mic can be tricky.  Try it with 3 others who have a mic but all speak different languages and who all want to communicate at the same time  :1_grinning: .  It is actually quite amusing but doesn't help get the job done.

The other thing to remember is that you may just be better at playing this game than others like myself.  I am old, a casual gamer and have slower reactions.  Sometimes I am spot on and rarely miss a beat, other times it is like trying to hit Neo when he dodges the bullets on top of the building in The Matrix.  No matter where I point and shoot, the AI / player is no longer there.

I guess the point is that all things are likely not equal in the game experience across the player base for a number of reasons.  Trying to understand others perceived difficulties from a standpoint of solely personal experience without being willing to acknowledge that is likely to make it harder to understand / empathise with people making those points.  To quote Lau, "We don't know what we don't know."

On the other hand.... some people just like to whine  :10_wink: .

 

[Xeromaus]

preventing a wall of text again, I'll just throw out a" @RimBlock"...

I'm always glad to find others that CAN have a discussion like this and not go ballistic because our opinions differ...it's kinda sad that it's rare, but it makes it nicer when you find it.

I keep telling myself I'm not old (though I certainly feel it), and by the looks of some threads here, I seem to be upper-middle ground. I've always gamed though, as myself and video games came into existence around the same time. I don't feel like I'm "better" at it than others, but I guess everyone is above someone and below someone else in everything.

I do my best to try and stay objective, but I know I fail..a lot. It's tough to write an opinion and stay centered, but I think at least most here know by now I'm not trying to start a war or just writing to inflame others. We're all here because we have a similar interest, but you're absolutely right, "we don't know what we don't know".

Thanks for being civil about it all though. I'm glad we can "see" each other better now.

 

[RimBlock]

Yeah, probably a good idea.  I shall do the same @Xeromaus.

Now without turning this in to some weird internet 'The Division' bromance  :1_grinning: , fully agree as I do with the vast majority of your posts I have read since I have been here.