Lothic
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:The Ultimate Computer was a great TOS episode, but sadly I think too many people would somehow think a new movie based on it today would be some kind of rip-off of the HAL 9000 idea from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The only way the Star Trek episode got away with it was that it aired about a month before 2001 hit the theaters back in 1968.Originally Posted by Nericus
Hm, perhaps the M5 computer?
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I think Roddenberry himself said that Balance of Terror was basically the space version of those old classic WWII movies where you had the surface destroyer playing out a cat-n-mouse duel with a submarine. While it's a good dramatic scenario I agree it would be kind of hard to make that work for two hours in a movie made in 2012. I don't think general audiences today have enough attention span to accept the inherent slow/silent periods in that situation.
If I were borrowing from an old TOS episode I'd personally go with The Enterprise Incident. You could have some Mission Impossible styled futuristic spy action and some intrigue when you got Uhura jealous over Spock making some mission related sexy-time with a hot Romulan Commander. This might not be the best idea for the very next movie (especially considering what PRAF68_EU said about overdosing on Romulans lately) but maybe this would work for another movie a few years from now. -
Quote:It might be funny if they did a movie sort of like Austin Powers where Cruise plays not only the Van Helsing type character but also the Lestat-styled vampire and we find out by the end that they are actually related to each other. Yes, I'm basically saying this would only work as a spoof-comedy. Any attempt at a "serious" Van Helsing reboot would probably just be dumb.Originally Posted by Nericus
Reboot not required.
Tom Cruise = fail -
Quote:You actually bring up a good point here. It's hard to imagine a new Trek movie being made where the "main bad guy" is not an actual person.Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU
You still need a strong villain to sell a movie. Star Wars needed Darth Vader as well as the Death Star.
Put the Enterprise on a mission to intercept the Doomsday Machine, but picks up Kahn on the way. Then, as you would expect, KAAAAAAAAAHN!!!! gains control of the Doomsday Machine, and you have a plot.
As cool as it might be to see a new movie where they have to defeat a Doomsday Machine or some other non-human sci-fi threat I don't think today's movie makers would risk making a movie without an actual "evil villain" that Kirk and company can face eye-to-eye. That's probably why the first Star Trek movie didn't do so well because it was hard for general audiences to accept an "enemy" they couldn't really see as a clearly defined bad guy. -
Quote:You're not Herbert. We reach...Originally Posted by Lord_Nightblade
No no no, we're all wrong. Clearly it's those most terrifying of villains, the space hippies!!!!
Of course to bring it up to date they'll probably turn the "space hippies" into "99% percenters" upset that the fat-cat dilithium mine owners horde all the credits from their space commerce leaving everyone else unable to pay off their space mortgages or space college tuitions. -
Quote:Anything like that is possible. Still I have to go back to the fact that virtually no one (OV_ohms being the only real exception I know about at the moment) has gotten their expected annual vet badges since CoH:Freedom launched last year. I think it's safe to say that we are dealing with something far more problematic than a few people having their dates being shifted by a few months here or there.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Ah. I see. I'm not sure exactly when I'm supposed to get my 8 year vet badge cuz active time has been thrown off schedule from the free months I got each time I bought a newly released edition of the game.
Is it possible your vet schedule was thrown off balance the same way? -
Quote:Yeah that's been an unfortunate truth about the way badges work for years and as an example I got hit pretty bad by it last year.Originally Posted by OV_ohms
That's the problem with these event badges that require teams, after the first couple of days trying to get a team together is like pulling teeth.
Turns out I was away on some overseas business that kept me from doing any serious playing for the few months right around the time the Keyes iTrial was originally released. Because I missed the main "rush" of people working on all the badges for the MoKeyes it took me many months to luck into some leagues that were finally able to pull off badges like Avoids the Green Stuff and Loves a Challenge. Even the other easier badges for that trial (Anti-Anti Matter and Bunker Buster) were relatively hard to get because it was somewhat difficult to encourage an entire league to actually -want- to get them. As a result I only just got MoKeyes on my main badgers a few months ago. -
Quote:I think the confusion here is that people who've been here fully subscribed since the beginning of the game (like myself) should be getting the annual vet badges at just about the same time as the game anniversary badges, give or take a few days.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
I was under the impression that the # year vet badges were completely separate items from the anniversary badges as I have both up to 7. The anniversary badges are awarded for participating in the anniversary celebration, and the # year vet badges are awarded for every 12 months you subscribe.
Or am I mistaken and have been given 7 badges in error?
To be perfectly clear I just logged in and got the 8th Anniversary badge (Rhapsodic) for my characters but I'm overdue for my 8th year Vet badge by a few days now (should have had it on April 28th). -
Quote:I simply find it highly questionable that Abrams went through all this trouble to setup a new Star Trek timeline to play with and the first serious thing he does with that nearly infinite sandbox is to go back and pull something out of the original series that'll have to be "hand-waved" for it to even be possible in his new "vision" of the Trek universe. *sigh*Originally Posted by Lord_Nightblade
I've always been in favor of killing Khan completely in JJTrek.
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Quote:Sure the ATOs/Reward Merits you'll get from the Super Packs may be random. But I can't really think of any other better "first step" towards turning Paragon Points into something you can eventually convert into INF.Originally Posted by Starmor
I'd actually considered doing that. I bought quite a few on test and I seemed to get a lot of good ATIO's when I did it. It's a little bit chancey for me, however.
Basically what the others have said on this thread are the kinds of things you want to do. -
Quote:OK, so not only do you seem to be one of the only cases I've heard of of ANYONE getting these badges since CoH:Freedom launched but you also got it earlier than it should have been possible for ANYONE to have gotten it given that April, 28 2012 was the "official" 8th anniversary according to the rules laid out by the original Vet Award system.Originally Posted by OV_ohms
Not true, I got my 8 Year Vet badge towards the beginning of April. Strange but true.
Don't you feel special?
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Quote:This will be great if this "upcoming patch" is some time in the reasonably near future. But to be honest I've seen responses to this issue using the exact same words word-for-word that were given to us six months ago.Originally Posted by TsumijuZero
I contacted support and I got a reply suggesting a fix is in the works for a future publish...
"Thanks for taking the time to contact us with this report. We are currently aware of this issue and hope to have a fix implemented in an upcoming patch."
I suppose like everything else time will tell... -
Quote:To be fair even back before CoH:Freedom launched there were problems with how the Vet badges were awarded. There were random people getting them either months too early or months too late. Apparently the Devs have never really figured out how to handle jumping through all the hoops of their convoluted time accounting system.Originally Posted by Necrotech_Master
lothics reasoning for wanting the badges be made for all accounts creation date is fine, technically the badges just say 1 year vet, it doesnt exactly discriminate between VIP and non VIP. and i think most vets have learned that vet reward badges != skill level
Now we're faced with a system that's not just sort of broken but one that is -completely- broken. I understand what the Devs were trying to accomplish with their "vision" of Vet badges only counting for subscribed time, but that vision no longer applies when Vet badges can't be awarded to anyone for any reason.
It's time for the Devs to cut their losses and reassign these badges to denote time since account creation. It may not be exactly what the Devs intended, but at least it'd be relatively simple to implement and declare "fixed" so they can move on to other things. -
Quote:Yes but of course something like that could only be understood by someone who actually cared about the franchise he's running now. I'd be surprised if we didn't see "laser swords" and "X-wing" fighters show up in the next Trek.Originally Posted by Nericus
Frankly in this new timeline I'd be more interested in Spock-Prime telling them about the Doomsday Machine. That device is a greater menace then Khan and should be intercepted and neutralized immediately. Also we never learned its origins or if others are out there, so that may make for an interesting movie.
Then again maybe if somebody convinced him that the Doomsday Machine was something like Star Trek's version of a Death Star then maybe he'd be willing to go for it.
See this is why we can't have nice, mindless movies like the good old days - people have to have the audacity to remember that actions have consequences even in a fictional universe...Quote:Originally Posted by Nericus
Khan did study as many files as he could in Space Seed. It is possible that he saw the roster of the crew and studied it to determine potential threats and allies and that Chekov was on the Enterprise but not part of the bridge crew yet.
I've always been more curious about just why Starfleet didn't impose a quarantine of the Ceti Alpha star system after Khan was planted in Ceti Alpha 5, why Starfleet didn't have some automated monitoring station setup to monitor the planet in case Khan escaped, and just HOW the crew of the Reliant upon entering the star system didn't happen to notice that a planet was missing from the system that should have been on their maps of the star system. -
Quote:The irony of the Abrams "alternate timeline" reboot is that it should be relatively easy to explain why Nu-Kirk and company would never be in the right place at the right time to ever run across Kahn's sleeper ship in the first place. The destruction of Vulcan has likely changed where the Enterprise would be in the galaxy at any point -after- that. An encounter with Nu-Kahn should realistically never happen in AbramsTrek.Originally Posted by Nericus
I'd rather see new menaces arise in this new Trek and not a rehashed Khan.
Regardless I'm not going to assume that this new movie with Nu-Khan is automatically going to be good or bad. But clearly Abrams' naivety with the franchise is leading him think that bringing back Khan (arguably the best Star Trek movie villain) is a safe bet for his new movie. I suppose time will tell if it blows up in his face or not. -
Quote:Thanks. It really does seem like the quickest and easiest way to handle this otherwise ever-lingering problem.Originally Posted by Necrotech_Master
i would be in agreement with that suggestion, Lothic
One thing I just thought of would be how to handle people who've actually had accounts longer than the game has been live. Many beta testers created accounts long before April, 28 2004. But even that "problem" is fairly trivial to solve. For the purposes of these annual vet badges the system can simply assume that the oldest possible "seniority date" is April, 28 2004 regardless of your actual account date. This would be in keeping with the original Vet Award system which by definition never considered any date before April, 28 2004 to be a valid anniversary date regardless. -
Quote:So you're saying it's time for speculations to run amok for this new movie... a sort of Amok Time if you will.Originally Posted by Nericus
I take anything from Aint It Cool with a large truckload of salt. These are rumors only, so let speculation run amok.
There have been rumors about the "big villain" in this movie for months now. I'm probably going to see it regardless, but I really do hope they move past the whole "reboot/origin" concept and make a good solid movie. Part or what made Abrams' first Trek movie vaguely annoying was his need to "reinvent/reintroduce" the characters. Love them or hate them they are the new cast of the franchise so we should just get over it and have a movie that's actually worthy of being considered a Trek movie - even if that has to be some kind of rehash of Khan. -
I think the problem stems from the fact that the Devs no longer have an easy way to tell how long a given player has been VIP versus premium. Whatever changes they did for CoH:Freedom made it hard/impossible for them to figure it out anymore.
I have proposed a very simple alternative that should be fairly obvious and straightforward. Instead of worrying about the whole VIP/premium issue they should just base these badges off of the "account creation" date that everyone has on their account. The idea is to simply award people a badge for every year their account has existed, period. Now obviously this solution would no longer account for whether people have been subscribed for such-n-such time or not, but really when you think about it who really cares about that?
I'd much rather have a few people get a few extra new badges under this new requirement than to have the Devs waste any more time trying to figure out how to get their account database system to do something they apparently can't get it to do. It should be simple enough to figure out how many years has passed since an account was created and move past this whole embarrassing situation. -
Quote:Sure but that would mean the Devs would have to hate the blueside because they would be forcing bluesiders to do more for a particular badge. But as we all know the Devs will always and forever hate the redside so we know this would never happen.Originally Posted by Cold_Bob
[Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if we have to fight off the Nemesis Invasion in ALL the city zones where they occur? Like, blue-side, Atlas Park, Steel Canyon, Skyway City, Independence Port, Talos Island, Founder's Falls, AND Peregrine Island?]
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I'm in the same boat and it's a boat I expected to be in months ago. As far as I'm aware no one has gotten any annual vet badge since CoH:Freedom launched. People have been mentioning not getting them for many months now.
Basically I believe the Devs are at the point where they either need to radically redefine what these badges are for or remove them from the game completely. It's clear that they either can't fix them or haven't seriously bothered to try at this point. I understand this is not the most critical thing that needs to be fixed in this game. But how many months (or even years) does this have to linger before something is done about it? -
Quote:So why haven't we gotten our Bit vanity pets yet? With the new pop-up power tray it could have three click powers to make it change forms between 'yes', 'no' and 'neutral'.Originally Posted by Nericus
Yes, having fun on their light cycles and engaging in disc combat
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Quote:Yeah laughing at the negative reviews is probably appropriate for this film. But I often find it fascinating to read the "minority report" reviews whenever a movie is either strongly positive or negative. Sometimes their points of view on why they disagree with everyone else is surreal.Originally Posted by Nericus
Makes you want to laugh at any negative reviews, doesn't it?
One of the classic ones I remember was this reviewer who absolutely hated the first Matrix movie because they didn't like the "imaginary" parts when Neo was on the ship as a normal human but loved the "real" parts when Neo was in the city flying around and dodging bullets while fighting the agents. Somehow this reviewer had completely reversed which parts of the movie were supposed to be in the "real world" versus which parts were in the Matrix. And somehow that person had a "job" as a movie reviewer.
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Quote:Even before Thursdays became the "normal" maintenance day Tuesdays were traditionally one of the days of the week where you could almost always count on some kind of maintenance period and/or patch regardless of announcement.Originally Posted by Minotaur
Thursday = normal maint
Tuesday = patch day, most weeks after a big release
Basically it's far, far easier to assume that BOTH Tuesdays and Thursdays could be days when the game is brought down for any reason and plan accordingly. -
Quote:Yeah people have been saying this kind of thing every year for the last 8 years in a row.Originally Posted by Nericus
Rhapsodic should be account based. just log in once during May and all your alts get it.
My guess is the Devs probably aren't going to change how this works anytime soon. *shrugs*
Maybe this is the Devs' way of forcing us to log on every character at least once a year to justify the disk space they're taking up.
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Quote:Originally Posted by Golden Girl
That still looks rather silly - they don't really flatter anyone's shape
Only Golden Girl would worry about whether or not Patton worried about wearing clothing that would "flatter his shape".Quote:Originally Posted by Golden Girl
They kinda go together with the fat thigh look
Thanks, I needed a good lol there...