Lothic

Based on my experience with this game I could practically guarantee you that they would -not- retroactively reward salvage to characters based on any badge change like this. For one thing how would they be able to tell how many times a person with such a badge has re-run the arc? Let's say I've already run a particular arc 10 times since Issue 22 lauched. Would I get 10 extra slavages or only 1? *shrugs*

Right, since they CAN'T prove that every winner get's hurt by lotteries then they probably WON'T stop them anytime soon.

This is EXACTLY what I guessed about this.

My guess is that if they could show that virtually every time someone wins a lottery it turns out horribly bad for them they would be stopped regardless of how much "good" the lottery was doing.

But to address your idea that they will never actually stop lotteries like this I happen to agree with you, precisely because there are examples of lottery winners who can handle it -without- going crazy.

Right there are plenty of stories of how people have gone totally crazy with it and had their lives completely ruined by it. And for all I know if someone actually threw $500 million at me I might go crazy with it too.

But for what it's worth I have enough faith in myself to think that I would invest enough of it wisely so that I wouldn't become one of "those" people. Think about it this way: If EVERY lottery winner was totally destroyed by the experience then I think they probably would have outlawed all lotteries by now. For every story of winners going crazy I'm sure there are other stories of winners who managed it well enough not to be noticed.

Ah OK thanks for the info. I guess that's as good a way to handle it as any but I suppose I just assumed that CiT would leave the original Gate Crasher in-place the way Badge-Hunter did. Whatever works I guess.

Yeah I was trying to figure out which ones CiT was missing last night.

It was pretty clear that one of the two was the Dilemma Diabolique iTrial badge that got renamed Gate Crasher. We're just going to have to wait until the Devs fix that one before sites like CiT can track it. But that leaves one other badge that CiT is still not accounting for. Maybe they are still tripping on the Brotherly Love badge?

Since I think most of us generally accept (for better or worse) that this new Burton/Depp movie is a bit of "vampire spoof" I think it would be funny to see a scene where Depp "sparkles" for some reason and then have him quickly stop whatever's causing it and have him comment that it's "dumb" for vampires to sparkle or some-such.

I'd like to think that my "benevolent dictatorship" over Paragon Studios would enrich the lives of everyone who'd enjoy playing -my- game.

I'm sure there are pros and cons to both ways. Personally I wouldn't really want to trust that the Lottery agency wouldn't go insolvent after a few years and screw me out of my remaining winnings. It may sound a bit paranoid but frankly I'd trust myself more with my money than to have to worry about someone "promising" to pay me decades into the future.

Well the cash option gives you the opportunity to invest the lump sum in a way that'll earn you better, permanent, long term interest. Sure you might start out with less total money than the annuity option might give you because of all the up-front taxes, but after 10 or 20 years it ought to be fairly easy to have surpassed that amount via good investing.

I'd much rather have $200 million in the bank and living off the annual interest I could get from that -forever- than to be worrying about getting $20 million paychecks that stop coming after 25 some-odd years.

Sure it was the recent bug fix that has us talking about Hami-Os again in this thread. And sure the remaining Hami-Os aren't strictly "broken" or worthless at their current values.

But it wasn't just recent changes/additions to the game that started to undercut the general participation in the Hami raids. One of the first true nails in the coffin that really turned most servers' Hami raids into ghost towns was the original nerfing of the Hami-Os from their starting 50% values down to their current values. In fact Hami raids became so non-existent after that nerfing that it pretty much led the Devs towards having to reorganize the way the raid worked back during Issue 9 just to entice people back into doing them at all.

So again my long-time suggestion to restore Hami-Os back to their 50% values is not in direct response to the bug fix, the new DA or Beast Mastery, although it's true those things could only be making things even worse now for Hami raid participation. Now more than ever we need some change that'll stem the tide and make Hami raids desirable again and I think restoring Hami-Os back to their original values would help with that. Hami-Os restored to 50% values would make them truly unique and special in a game where we now have many different kinds of IOs, purple IOs, PVP IOs, ATOs, enhancement converters and so on to choose from.

Yep I had to wait an extra couple of days because I pretty much refuse to let working on Day Badges keep me from playing the characters I want to play.
Now I just need to finish another MoITF and MoKuda to be done on my second badger...

I'm sorry Zwill, I think you and the rest of the folks who work at Paragon Studios are the greatest and I still love this game, but this classic excuse of "it would impact more important efforts" is just basically unacceptable.

Here's the "simple question" I would put to you: How much time does it take to run text through a spell-checker? One more time I am not asking for perfection here, but the few seconds it would take to, at the very least, SPELLCHECK your text would easily catch the vast majority of your problems here.

I'm a software engineer IRL with nearly 20 years of professional experience so I believe I have a good understanding of the kind of work environment you and your fellows work in. To suggest that you would have to "de-prioritize" other critical work just to let AUTOMATED editing tools check your spelling is borderline ridiculous.

If you need to come up with an excuse for why you can't handle simple proofreading of the text in your game at least come up with a -reasonable- excuse.

Yeah it doesn't really matter at this point how close these movies are to the short story. As you point out pretty much any movie version would probably have to "embellish" the story to have enough material to make it work as a movie regardless.

All I'll care about is if they can make an enjoyable movie with what they have to work with. It doesn't have to try to "replace" the Arnold movie, it just has to be worthwhile in its own right.

For what it's worth I was never really into the original Dark Shadows. I figure I'd probably enjoy it to some degree, but it's always been one of those shows that I just never "got around" to watching. From that point of view I can at least have some sympathy for the "true fans" who are considering this Burton/Depp version a travesty.

On the other hand I've enjoyed most of the Burton/Depp movies in general and even though I know on some level that this new movie will not be a faithful adaptation of the original I suspect I can (and will) enjoy it on its own merits. I like most of the other actors in this movie, and I suspect it can't possibly, all things considered, be -that- bad.

I would argue (along the lines of what Necrotech_Master and SmegHead were saying) that there was almost no serious motivation to do Hami raids -regardless- of people exploiting the Hami-O bug or not. There's only a very small subset of powers that Hami-Os are useful in, and for those it's been easier to get SHOs for years.

Again for what it's worth I've been suggesting that HOs get restored to their original 50% values pretty much since ED happened. The only reason they were nerfed in the first place was that they were too powerful -before- ED was in place to control them. I have always felt that if HOs were restored to their former glory that there would be far more interest in Hami raids to get them.

Or in summary these "comedic remakes" make enough money to make them worth Hollywood's effort regardless if particular individual movies fail or not.

For what it's worth I have never "whined" about this bug fix. In fact I've expected this fix for so long that I NEVER exploited this bug because I ALWAYS assumed that the fix for it was going to happen "any time now".

I realize there are plenty of people whining about the bug fix. I am NOT one of them and never have been.

My suggestion that the Hami-O values be restored back to their original 50% values has always been independent of the bug and its ramifications. I have felt that ever since ED was established there was no need for that nerf to remain and I've always felt that 50% Hami-Os would generally benefit everyone with greater interest in Hami raids.

Or in summary these "comedic remakes" make enough money to make them worth Hollywood's effort.
Sadly any notions about "staying true to the source material" does not guarantee money in the bank.

I still have a couple of alts who use multiple Hami-Os slotted in particular powers (most notably Enzymes in Radiation Infection).
I would absolutely hate any change that would limit us to only one Hami-O per power.

There's nothing wrong with these ideas but these things would involve a relatively large amount of code to implement. A suggestion like mine simply involves changing the enhancement values of existing Hami-Os back to their original values. If I were a Dev I know which solution I'd more likely be willing to do...

It's the classic K.I.S.S. principle - the easier the suggestion the more likely it is to happen.