Bubbawheat

update: I ran one more mission from my next contact: Angus McQueen, and finally got introduced to Tina.

They're my little pwnies! How cute.

One more day for voting. Get 'em in people!

Gratz Arrowrose, that's a great arc.

I used to play D&D first edition (with a little second edition) way back when (not THAT way back, they just preferred many of the old rules, it was actually right around when 3rd edition came out). But the only place locally I know where I could game has two cats (I think the guy lives in the other half of his store) whose smell override any desire I would have to play there.

Though I had wanted for a long while to run my own game using mostly D&D rules with variations of races from the Breath of Fire universe.

46

I'm honestly a little surprised that I was able to get Burnt Matchstick on 10 servers (all but Freedom). It was taken on a couple others, but I eventually managed to snatch them up at some point.

If you want to skip the story, scroll down to the TL;DR.

Ok, so I've been playing one of my characters a lot recently. My Burnt Matchstick fire/fire tanker. She was up to level 41 and I was ready for a break from AE missions. So I ran some tip missions, not to switch sides, just to get an alignment merit. Then I realized that you don't get one the first time around. Whatever, they were still interesting, and new content. But I decided that I wanted to do an actual story arc. Something interesting and fresh. I know! They recently updated the Tina Macintyre arc and that's level 40-44 range.

Ok, now let's see. I know it's not going to work but I try the direct approach first. She says I should go talk to Levantera. I figured that's just the generic "I'm not going to talk to you until you're introduced to me" line so I take the next step that I remember you need to do to get introduced to a contact. I run some radio missions. They're simple enough, the same ol' same ol', run a quick safeguard and I have three choices for contacts: Janet Kellum, Indigo, and Madeleine Casey. I go ahead and pick Janet Kellum and start running her missions. After one or two, I get another choice of contacts. I don't remember them exactly, but one of the choices in Crimson (or he might have been the only choice). Later on I realize this was an odd choice as he is a 45-50 contact and immediately goes into my inactive contacts tab.

I double check Paragonwiki.com and I see that Janet Kellum is one of the contacts that introduces Tina Macintyre, and I also notice that she has the Countess Crey arc. I've never fought Countess Crey before so I stick with her for a while. It takes me six or seven random missions before I get the one that starts the Countess Crey arc. And along the way, I get a lot of the horrible old style of missions (defeat 100 Crey, really?), and several maps that seemed to go on forever and ever and ever. I finally get to fight Countess Crey - in a rather anticlimactic battle I must say - and get to the next round of introductions. Still no Tina.

As a sidenote, shortly before getting to the Countess Crey mission I take a quick detour and finally cure those 20 Lost that have been sitting around for months and get myself into the Midnighter Club. Then I move on to one of the next contacts in range, Madeleine Casey and go fight some Carnies. Well, search for the three hostages on a large city map. After the first mission - which was a double train door mission - I get another choice of contacts: Angus McQueen and Indigo. Oh come on!

At this point, I'm starting to think there's something else going on here, so I decide to go become a member of the Vanguard as Tina suggested to me in the first place. While I'm going through these missions, I start talking in global chat about my plight. The first suggestion is that I have too many story arcs open. I check my active contacts tab and the only story arcs I have open at the time are Levantera and Jim Temblor. The next suggestion is maybe I have some other old contacts sitting there blocking her out.

So my first step is to autocomplete my Jim Temblor mission, which gets rid of his story arc and moves him to my inactive tab. That's a good step forward. I start going through some of my other old contacts and get introduced to more new contacts. But still no Tina. Then I get to Percy Winkley. I talk to him and he's got a mission for me, which I remember is a bunch of talky missions, so I decline. I also double check Montague Castenella to see if I hadn't fully completed his arc, even though the green book is gone. He wants me to go to Cimerora for more talky, which I still don't really want to do right now. Then I head back to RWZ to finish up Levantera's arc and notice that both Percy and Montague have little green books by them.

TL;DR I've been trying for about a week and a half, ran through probably 20 missions, including radios and regular contact missions (and a defeat 100 Crey mission in there), and I now have every available contact introduced to me except Tina Macintyre. Which is the only one I wanted to do in the first place.

Shouldn't there be an easier way to get the contacts that you want to do anymore?

twenty

...what would you do with your time?

Immediately jump on to your next favorite MMO?

Spend more time on console/PC games?

Or would you use your time to do something else non-game related?

And no, this isn't intended to be any sort of doom-crying, just random discussion.

One more guess before I go
Number 37... In a row?!

We doing a Sister Psyche or Silver Mantis this week? Haven't done a Mantis in a good long while.

Your custom enemy group still spawns according to normal spawn rules based on the user's difficulty, there's no way you can adjust the percentage of minion/lieut/boss spawns. Having more in any of those categories just increases the variety.

And currently you can't have two bosses in the same detail (An EB w/ a boss). But if you do a lot of testing, you can find maps that have two spawn points close to each other in the back. You can have one as the EB and one as the Boss and they both get their own set of dialog.

100

And the submission time in March will be longer as well.

Oh yeah, even though it's not quite what you are looking for, I thought I'd mention The Spiderwick Chronicles. It was a fun book, very different from the movie, and read by Mark Hamill.

Thanks for the pic, it turned out awesome! Now I just need to get around to updating my Burnt Matchstick thread again...

87

I haven't listened to them, but I saw at my local library that they had Twilight Zone episodes as a radio play if you can find them.

* The invention tables on the Vanguard map work in AE.

Letting my wife (mostly) pick her favorites for my vote.

1. Lousy Day
2. Christopher Robin
3. Airhead (third place was chosen by me between Airhead, Henri, and Battlewraith)

I had an idea. This isn't quite as popular as I'd hoped (though I do have 1-2 more people who have shown an interest - which I'm not quitting early on) but I was wondering if it would be interesting to have something of a video journal. This would be a mix of this video review project and my Time Shifter project. I would create a character and film here and there during his or her journey to level 50 running only AE arcs. The commentary would be done in-character, explaining what they were doing in each arc and how it related to them personally. Also similar to a video version of Pro Payne - a review but with the addition of character motivations and between the lines story.

I'm not upset that they didn't go to Pocket D 2 in Pinnacle. I'm upset that they went to Pocket D 2 (or 3 or 4 in some cases, I heard they made an appearance in PD4 on Freedom even without any codes) on some servers but not others. If all servers were treated fairly, that's one thing. But when they showed up everywhere on one server, and not on another, that's just not fair. And to have a group of people standing around waiting and nothing happening. No word, nothing whatsoever for a full half hour, that's not fun. Especially if you use your Pocket D teleporter and might not even realize you're not in Pocket D 1.