Lothic

I'll be diplomatic enough to say that Natasha could likely beat Buffy before she had any serious training. But Buffy, once she became the Slayer, literally had superhuman superpowers which included super strength and resistance. Slayers, as envisioned by Whedon, are almost like a version of Wonder Woman - at best Natasha is a very skilled "normal" human.

On average Natasha might get a few lucky shots in on Buffy but I would bet a win for Buffy pretty much every time these two matched up.

A "happy accident" is obviously one explanation. Maybe this was an unexpected benefit from some other change or bug fix.

Zortel's explanation is another valid one: a Dev might have been looking around at the power toggling code and realized that the toggle-off timer (which may have served a valid purpose in the past) could now be removed without adverse effects.

Another explanation is that the Devs probably maintain a list of "suggested QoL improvements" and this idea just happened to be on it. Maybe some random Dev reviewed the list a few weeks ago and realized that implementing this change wouldn't be all that difficult.

Of course the explaination in this particular case could be some combination of these or something completely different. In an ongoing development and maintenance environment like this one these kinds of things always just find a way of sneaking in. For all we know this particular feature was a pet desire of one of the Devs themselves and he/she finally got a few minutes to work on it after months or years of doing other things.

As cool as the Sybil outfits are I could see where the Devs would want to keep them "NPC only" even if there wasn't an issue with waist-cape network bandwidth. Having said that I obviously wouldn't mind if we could eventually get some variant Sybil outfit parts that would be similar to the NPC one but not identical so that we could have something to play with.

It's obvious that some of the prices for some of the items (like alignment tokens) are artificially high because they are serving as a soft control to keep people from from over-using them. At least that's obvious to some people at any rate.

I was just attempting (in my last post) to explain why other things (like the vanity pets) are priced the way they are. Many of those prices are driven by simple economics.

Did it ever occur to you that people -are- buying these things even at these so-called ludicrous prices? Why would Paragon Studios willingly want to charge less for these things when plenty of people are paying the current prices? Or conversely: Do you think that if no one was buying these "high-priced" items right now that they wouldn't have already slashed their prices?

Let me use a real world example that might help you understand this situation: There are plenty of people out there who think it's foolish to pay like $5 or more for a cup of coffee yet somehow there are literally thousands of Starbucks coffee shops in business around the world. Apparently there are in fact plenty of people out there willing to spend a ton of money for that. Same seems to be holding true for this game... *shrugs*

This QoL feature was part of today's patch. I'm not sure if it was "worth" solving but I suspect many people will like it regardless. That's the whole point of "QoL improvement".

There's been a long (sad) history of things that have needed several patches to finally get them fixed.
This is just another one of those things. *shrugs*

As I implied this patch has been established and patch noted on the Test server for a while now.

This patch has been out on the Test server for a week so there's not that much "mystery" to it.

And as far as the size of the patch goes there's really almost nothing you can read into that one way or the other. Sometimes a 147mb patch contains 147mb worth of changes but other times there might just be a few one-liner code changes that affect enough files that require entire .piggs to be updated.

The "last" patch did actually come out today...

At least you can earn most of these through "normal play" now. A few of the epic badges (especially Empath) were originally impossible to earn without farming before the requirements were reduced to sane levels. Sadly it took the Devs a few years to realize the need for the reductions, but eventually they saw the light and fixed the problems.

With Incarnate level shifts earning "No Death" Master badges have become much easier and less nerve-racking. Good luck to you.

The fix for this rolled out in the last patch.

I'm actually suggesting the reverse. It's far easier to pre-assume that Tuesdays and Thursdays are going to be "possible" maintenance days (since those are the usual days for that to happen) so you might as well plan to -not- do anything during those times that requires any scheduling or large periods of time like that. That way these things will never catch you off guard. *shrugs*

Exactly. I had no problem doing the farm-work to get these badges but the thought of traditional "gold farming" or "power leveling" characters bores me to tears. I think the fact that different people can play this game in so many different ways makes this game great.

Congrats GuyPerfect.

Then perhaps this wouldn't be the place to mention that I literally (just a few days ago) finished off my -second- badger.
What kind of straightjacket does that kind of dedication get me?

They might have only made the call for the patch that's been on the Test server since last week to go live like 12 or 24 hours ago. No real time to make a super-formal announcement about it. It's not really a major patch, and since Tuesdays and Thursdays are the "traditional" days for patches/maintenance anyway I almost see no real need to "inform" us about it any more than they already did. I've never really understood why downtimes like this surprise/shock anyone anymore. *shrugs*

There have been other fantasy stories where a girl like Arya tries to pretend to be a boy but I've never seen one where a male friend like Gendry blindly confronts her with her ruse and bluntly challenges her to "prove" her manhood the way he did. I thought it was a very funny scene and well acted by both of them.

I love how even though Tyrion is sly and devious he's still probably one of the most moral and empathic characters in the show. It's clear that he draws the line at things like killing babies, and it seemed like when Bronn gave him a less than "nice" answer about that subject he realized that Bronn was not exactly the most "like-minded" associate he could have.

For what it's worth the I23 build was on the Beta server from April 6th to April 13th in a "closed" state. Apparently whoever had access to the server during that week either didn't see this leak or already reported it long before it went "live" to us.

Never fool yourself into thinking these Issues are no longer tested in some form of "closed beta" before we get to see it.

That's the key right there - you need to have a critical, relatively large, number of people to pull this off. In reality that's the only "hard" part about this.

I'm certainly not saying it's impossible to do even now. I just tend to understand Positron's reasons for not making a badge out of this. It's the same basic reason we don't have standard defeat badges for GMs in general. *shrugs*

It might turn out that the only way the Devs can keep us from getting hyper-overpowerful is to make the last few Incarnate powers be somewhat fluff-oriented like special auras or power customizations. Anything like adding many more combat-oriented powers or level shifts will just make it that much harder for them to balance the game at this point.