Kosmos

I've had that procedure fail to work on some machines/keyboards. I don't think it ever works in macros, as that acts like a super fast key press and release. On my desktop I can use this procedure without concern. On my laptop I have to hold the key down for a fraction of a second to get it to work. In the past I had a notebook that it didn't work on at all (presumably some funky non-standard keyboard driver was in use). That was more than 5 years ago though.

Oddly, I just tried this bind and it targets any living enemy, not just those with "slick" in the name. I didn't think targetcustomnext would target anything unless the name string matched but it seems to behave differently in a compound bind. In this case it will target the slick in preference to other enemies, but if the slick isn't in sight it will pick something else to target (the nearest living enemy in sight that is further away from you than your current target, I think).

That seems to be a minor drawback however. Just make sure you can see the slick. Oh, also, remember you can't queue the bind either; as the targetcustomnext will process while the previous power (presumably the Oil Slick Arrow) is still activating and then queue the powexec attack. Since the slick won't be there yet when the targetcustomnext processes, you'll send your attack at some other target that was there when you pressed the bound key.

targetname cycles too. It spams error messages if there's nothing matching though, while targetcustomnext doesn't.

Just using 'oil' as the argument to either targetname or targetcustomnext will target even npcs such as contacts with 'oil' somewhere in their name. So if someone names their Demon "Char Broil" (as I have), for example, you might end up using assist to target through that demon instead of targeting a slick. Using "Oil Slick" limits it to entities with that string as part of their name, which has proven reliable for me. If you get really worried about mismatches due to entity names use targetcustomnext alive enemy "Oil Slick" as listed above.

That still runs into the activation problem where you have to use the macro twice. Also, as written it will target anything with either "Oil" or "Slick" in its name because there are no quotes to cause that two word entity name to be treated as a single argument. You can add alive and enemy to narrow the selection if you want to get fancy...

/macro Ignite "targetcustomnext alive enemy Oil Slick$$powexecname Blazing Arrow"
Then edit the macro to put quotes around "Oil Slick". (Powexecname only takes 1 argument, so you don't need quotes around "Blazing Arrow" as long as no programmer comes by and changes the specific command format or alters the command line parser behavior.)

Unfortunately, pet_select_name doesn't work with Oil Slick so you have to use a targeting command. The drawback of that is that the Oil Slick has to be in your field of view. That's only a minor issue though.


I use a simple bind on my Mind/TA Controller: /bind o targetname Oil Slick


Unfortunately combining a targeting and a powexec command often misbehaves, requiring that you hit the bound key or macro twice. This occurs when the powexec attempts to execute before the targeting or selection command actually takes effect.


Here's one example of a macro:
/macro OS targetname "Oil Slick"Xpowexecname "Fire Ball"
Then edit the macro to change the X in the middle to $$

Like all other Stalker offensive auras (that is, those that generate aggro and notify foes) it suppresses when Hidden.

I'll have to check those out. I normally don't go to the City Life forum. I don't think many go there looking for game information.

Zwillinger should have a stooge, er... intern, making chat transcripts for him to post.

One of the recent problems regarding this is that the devs seem to consider a single comment in the middle of an hour long Ustream chat an adequate "announcement". In the case of I22 it was announced at a live event and they seem to have relied on Ustream and media coverage to disseminate the information. I don't think there is any official announcement for I22 anywhere on the forums or the website. I don't even recall seeing one on the facebook page, but then I don't go there often.

As it stands right now, if you don't listen to their Ustream broadcasts you are out of the loop.

I always use the "Claim All" and it works just fine. There's no way I'll go through and individually claim some 70 or so items even if I really only use the Vet Reward powers on most toons.

Menu -> Options -> General tab -> EMail -> Hide Unclaimable Account Items/Enabled

Remember to save the Options settings for your next new toon (or to load for an alt that hasn't been updated in a while).

The NCSoft/Paragon Studios red names probably know no more about what mmorpg.com is doing than the rest of us.

If you really want to know then I suggest asking MikeB (Michael Bitton) over at mmorpg.com; he's the one that started and ended the contest thread.

It's a bit fouled up at the moment. Read the OP from Zwillinger, 3rd paragraph.

This is what I thought too; they're waiting until they have 10 confirmations so if they need a replacement they can get that in when they do the announcement.

I apparently have a winner too, with Iron Queen. I was a bit surprised as I think the costume is good, but my "photography" sucks.

I think you must have misread the equation. Here it is again:

The only thing inside the CEILING function is "Veteran Reward Months". It rounds up the number of months, not the number of 3-month blocks.

I think what's confusing is their policy. To make it less confusing you have to simplify the explanation to the point it is no longer strictly accurate. Which I believe is what Game Support has been doing. I'll give it one more try to explain what I think they were trying to tell me...

1. At Head Start on Sept 13th they gave people with active accounts full credit for the current month on their account. So that for you, you would have gone from 79 months on Sept 12th to 80 months the very next day. I think I went from 87 months on Sept 1st to 88 on the 13th. Neither 80 or 88 months earns a token, of course. My aforementioned friend apparently went from 77 months on Aug 29th to 78 months on Sept 13th and so received 1 more token than expected based on the policy of ignoring or dropping of fractions of 3-month blocks and his actual Vet time on the 13th (77 months, 15 days).
2. They then did not start counting towards the next month of Vet time again until Sept 28th.

The result of A is that anyone due a VR under the old system as a result of the rounding up of the month got 1 more token at Head Start than those who wouldn't have been due a VR for the extra full month.

The result of B is that apparently no one was due a token between Head Start and Oct 28th (people receiving tokens starting on Oct 23rd makes no sense to me), except from account creation/reactivation or Paragon Market purchases.


I don't quite get how you conclude that. You would have to be 2 months and 1 day into the next 3-month block for it to round up to a full 3 months and earn another token. Anyone between 0 days and 2 months (inclusive) would not be due an extra token, just those between 2 months plus 1 day and 3 months minus 1 day (inclusive).

And this is consistent with every detailed report I'm aware of. For each of the 15 reports I have I can take the number of months and fractional months of Vet time on Sept 13th, round up to the next whole integer, divide that by 3, drop the fraction and use that (and the other pertinent info on years and retail account) to correctly account for all the tokens received at Head Start.

Either whoever told you that is wrong, they left something out, or the implementation of the system that gave rewards at Head Start was buggy and handed out 1 extra token to a large number of people. What I think is that they left out that the number of months of Vet time was rounded up on Sept 13th before anything else was done.

(Emphasis added)

That's the crux of the matter, the official statements simply don't explain why it appears no one was deemed due a token between launch and Oct 22nd.

Again, since credit for Sept as pre-launch doesn't get someone with either 79 or 80 months another Vet badge, it doesn't get you another token. That's why I was asking about the 81 month badge. I was trying to think of a way to confirm you were considered to be at 80 months, not 79, at Head Start. I simply forgot that there wasn't a 1-to-1 correspondence with the old Vet badges and the new ones.

Everyone I know who would have been expecting such a reward received one more token at Head Start than everyone I know who wasn't at an integer multiple of 3 months. It's only 4 and 11 respectively, and some of those are off-hand comments that have to be considered less than 100% reliable, but so far I haven't heard one report (reliable or otherwise) that contradicts the idea that they rounded Vet time up to the next full month at Head Start, and then didn't start counting again until Freedom launch.

Basically, what I'm saying they did is this (using your formula as a basis but adding the bolded parts):

If any retail code has been applied to the account then Paragon Reward Tokens = 1 + 1 + FLOOR(CEILING(Veteran Reward Months)/3) + FLOOR(CEILING(Veteran Reward Months)/12)

I think we can agree at least, that whatever they did, they didn't explain it well at all.

I wasn't clear enough. I was expanding on the idea that September was credited early but should have made it clearer.

I don't think we got credit for ALL of our paid time at the beginning of Head Start (I think that was their original plan, but it didn't work out). We just got early credit for the paid month encompassing the beginning of Head Start on Sept 13 (in your case Sept 7 to Oct 6).

So I think you should have gotten credit for 79 months on Sept 12 and 80 on Sept 13. Which unfortunately doesn't get you an additional token. Like me, it seems that you got a useless fraction of a token granted early on the Sept 13th instead of a full token on Oct 6th.

Out of curiosity, did you get your 81 month badge with your token on the 24th?

That's my point, he did indeed appear to get his Sept token early - which he was due because it was an integer multiple of 3 months. Snow Globe is saying he either can't count or his getting 34 was due to a "glitch". And yes, he got his 35th on the 23rd or 24th (he didn't log in on the 23rd).

I should have highlighted part I was referring to:

"1 Reward Token for every 3 months the game account was active with billing prior to the Freedom launch"

Here's an example of what I mean. 1 token for every Vet Reward badge right? One of my friends was due his 78 month badge on Sept 29th. He only had 25 Vet Reward badges at Head Start launch, so he should have had 25+6+1+1=33 tokens at launch right? But he says he received 34. Which is why I'm having to parse words to explain it. My conjecture is that they counted the full month from Aug 29 to Sept 29, because it was billed prior to launch, and he got his 78 month token 16 days early on the 13th.

Except your math doesn't add up for some of those posting here and you did make a guess as to why...

How is that not a guess?

Game Support has stated explicitly to me (and at least one other person I know) that Sept tokens were awarded early. That makes it not a glitch in the system but a "feature". My guess is about the first half of yours: why players' calculations aren't correct from NCSoft/PS's point-of-view. And that is simply that some of us expected Vet periods ending within a month after launch to be awarded as post-launch and earn tokens per the end-of-the-period policy, while the devs considered those periods to be pre-launch due to a billed-before-launch policy and awarded tokens early to those who had an extra 3-month block as a result.

The way they did this was remarkably opaque and inprecise, and justifiably engenders distrust. However, if you read up thread a bit a number of people reported receiving an "extra" token at the beginning of Head Start.

I'll run through what I think happened again. I'd be curious to hear if others find that it explains their situation, or if theirs contradicts it.

First, here is their article on what tokens are rewarded for. Note that third line which reads "1 Reward Token for every 3 months the game account was active with billing prior to the Freedom launch". That might be read to suggest that at the beginning of Head Start they awarded tokens based on the date you were billed, not at the end of the period as they consider "normal", and explains how someone in support might honestly say we got our Sept reward early. Unfortunately, for approximately 2/3rds of the player base this sort of "early" award would be a disadvantage, not an advantage, as months counted for 1/3rd of a token before I21 and 1 token after. (Note that this "early" award would give no one an extra token, just award one a few days early to roughly 1/3rd of the players and take away a token from the remainder.)

I believe I was counted as having 88 instead of 87 months of time at Head Start due to this sort of "early" credit for Sept (my 88th month normally would have completed Oct 1st, after launch). And I think since I'd already been given credit for Sept that's why I thought I was missing a month after Head Start. My next month of credit coming would then be Oct, not Sept, which had already been counted. It just so happens that the extra month before head start would then gain me, and anyone else for whom Sept wasn't an integer multiple of 3 months of Vet time, nothing at all. While having that month credited at its end, after launch, would yielded another token.

Let me reiterate that I'm just making an educated guess here based upon the evidence available to me.

In that case, Game Support is wrong about something and some of us are indeed short tokens or, as in my case, time accrued towards our next token.

If point (F) in my list above is indeed - as so many of us assumed - supposed to be "One token for every account" then I should have received my 39th token on my Vet Reward cycle date of Oct 1st and didn't get it until Oct 23rd. So in that case, not only did I fail to get my Sept token early, I've lost 22 days of Vet Time credit somehow.


Going back to what I was looking at when I opened my support ticket. If I do my accounting off the 87 months of Vet Time on Sept 1st, then I should have received 38 tokens at the beginning of Head Start on Sept 13th and been due the 39th Oct 1st. Which is what I did receive and what I was expecting to happen. When the points were delayed I assumed that was also the hold up with the token and didn't open a support ticket until the 17th. The possibilities that I felt could explain my 38 instead of expected 39 tokens as of that date were, in rough order of plausibility to me: (a) The token for my billing cycle starting in Sept hadn't yet been awarded, (b) they screwed up Vet Time credit somehow, (c) no token for the account, or (d) no token for the two boxed sets associated with the account.

Game Support crossed (a) and (b) off my list. You're crossing off (c). And (d) seems pretty doubtful given how straight-forward it should be to implement. So I'm back to believing (b). Time to contact Game Support again...