Lothic

The point here was that the Devs saw this as a "exploit" and their fix for that was to make a change that made it harder for people to use "disposable characters" as a workaround for the time limits. I think it's pretty clear anything that involves creating temporary characters to circumvent the way the game works would be considered an exploit.

It ultimately doesn't matter what we think are exploits or not. If the Devs think something is an exploit then it's going to be treated as one.

I thought we were talking about the Manti encoutner in the latest arc (#7). Apparently whether or not you have to fight him there is based on what you did in the previous arcs. *shrugs*

That might be one way to do it.

I think it would just be easy enough to add a new line to the Combat Attributes Window that would simply tell us "Alignment Status - [Confirmed] or [Unconfirmed]". They recently added a line like this for level shifts so it makes sense this kind of meta-info could be placed here as well.

Right. You can say that if you have no alignment power (or one of the "countdown to alignment" auto-powers) then you'd know for certain that you are also not confirmed. But if you've ever completed any morality mission then your alignment power status can no longer be used to tell you anything about being confirmed one way or the other.

It's true that Origins have very little effect on the current game. But I think the reason why we'll probably never get an "origin respec" option has everything to do with these leftover bits and pieces that are still scattered around in the code.

For instance some of the original low-level mission contacts were based on your Origin, at least blueside at any rate. This means that the core of the contact system probably has some origin-specific code that might be hard to deal with. Also you have the problem with handling DO and SO enhancements - these would probably force some kind of full respec regardless. And there's also the Origin Powers you'd have to account for as well.

Bottomline there are many more issues related to changing Origins than there are with something like changing a character's name. Seems like the Devs have decided it's simply more trouble than it's worth.

No it wouldn't have a Stealth power - it'd have an automatic Placate power.

Yes it's common knowledge that Hollywood tends to ruin "rebooted" properties. I'd say that 9 times out of 10 the "updated" version is somehow dumber and/or worse than the original. But if there's any saving grace to all this it's that we can usually get a hold of and hang onto our own copies of the originals regardless of what happens.

For what it's worth I fully expect that sometime in the future after the US military finally withdraws from Afghanistan there'll be a modernized version of M*A*S*H set in Afghanistan. We can only hope that when that happens the makers of that show will make it as socially relevant and thought-provoking as the original M*A*S*H. Either that or they'll portray the Taliban as zombie hordes and make some kind of Walking Dead crossover out of it.

The idea that the text of a game is a "low-priority" concern might have been almost justifiable back in the day when editors didn't routinely automatically check for errors of all kinds. But as Samuel_Tow pointed out there are now plenty of editors that'll do many things like this without adding any significant effort on the part of the writers/coders. Yes, a simple spell-checker will not catch every spelling or grammar error this game seems to generate, but something like that would have caught at least 85-90% of them.

For that reason alone there is literally NO good excuse the Devs of this game could come up for the vast majority of typos in this game's text. It pretty much makes the otherwise acceptable stories of this game look like they were scribbled by a 10 year old which frankly is not an acceptable level of quality for a game like this. I'm not asking for perfection here, I'm just asking for something that looks professional.

Sadly like others have mentioned I've pretty much stopped caring about most of the "story" behind this game almost for this reason alone. *shrugs*

So I guess that means as long as you've ever played any of the redside versions of those arcs, regardless of your current alignment, the game is going to let Manticore attack you as if you're still a redsider.

I suppose that makes some sense from a "why would Manticore attack you?" point of view because even if you're a reformed hero now you still did nasty things as a redsider at some point. This fits with what happened to my characters - I had a rogue and a vigilante both be attacked by Manticore, but like I mentioned in my last post that vigilante had played through all the previous SSAs as a redsider at some point as well so I guess she was still marked as a "bad guy" in Manti's eyes despite her current alignment.

No for the purposes of "confirming" your alignment the alignment powers don't matter. To confirm your alignment (any alignment) you have to complete a morality mission -as- that alignment. So for example to confirm being a hero you have to do 10 hero tip missions and a hero morality mission as a hero.

Yes you would have to reaffirm an alignment any time you change alignments or if you had a brand new hero or villain that has never changed alignments.

Well since they didn't have cable TV they had plenty of time to look up at night and track the stars. Sometimes having hundreds of years to look and think about things can overcome the general lack of basic technology we take for granted today. Ancient peoples didn't always need to rely on "extraterrestrials" to get some things right.

Sure the game may have made a promise of "exclusivity".
But the word "exlcusive" has absolutely no implied connotation of something being -permanently- exclusive.

Most people who buy things like that for games like this let themselves be fooled into thinking that the period of "exclusivity" is forever. But I'll task anyone to find any wording in these offers that make it unequivocally clear that any of these offers will ever remain exclusive FOREVER.

The fact that this Prestige Power Slide has been exclusive for a number of years more than satisfies any obligation Paragon Studios had for selling us "exclusive" items. They promised us exclusive things and that's exactly what we got, for a very reasonable period of time.

But as far as I'm concerned that time has long since passed for this...

It's a reasonable compromise. But since I see nothing "sacred" about this power I myself got years ago I have a hard time worrying about other people who might somehow be upset that their fun little toy is no longer an elite exclusive.

Frankly I think people need to get past this shortsighted idea that "exclusivity" always implies permanence. I think the only "win" here is to have this power be sold in the Paragon Market and let the tiny handful of people who might actually be upset by that get over it. This power has been exclusive for many -years- now. As far as I'm concerned if there are newer people who want to give this game more money for it then I see no good reason to prevent that.

To be clear I never said that this game would not benefit from more effort being put towards tracking down bugs. For instance you are right that there are some fairly serious memory leaks in this game and they do affect a number of people with less-than-optimal computers. But to be fair you could probably apply more bug-fixing towards just about -any- software application, not just this game.

The main point I was trying to make was that in the overall scheme of managing an online game/service like this there's is never going to be enough justification to refocus the entire development staff of the organization towards working on only bug-fixes.

For one thing marketing would never agree to it - the idea of a MMO offering absolutely -nothing- new to their customers for 3-4 months would be a virtual death sentence to any game. Second (and this was the point Aett_Thorn was alluding to) there's not only no guarantee that you'd be able to fix any significant bugs based on -any- set schedule but there's always the possibility that the changes made to fix some bugs might actually introduce new bugs that never existed before. Any code changes can introduce new bugs no matter what their purpose.

Basically the fight against bugs is a never ending battle that every set of developers out there face every day. It's something that needs to be dealt with, but there's a very real set of diminishing returns if you try to focus on it too much. I do not feel that asking for the Devs to focus 100% on bugs is a strictly "stupid" idea and I didn't intend to imply anyone was stupid for suggesting it because (as it's been pointed out) you are certainly not the first to suggest this over the years. But I will definitely stand by my presumption and profession experience that this kind of thing will never actually happen, again for many reasons both engineering and marketing related.

Bottomline it's a nice idea in theory, but one that's never going to happen in practice. *shrugs*

I suppose somebody might have had some kind of trouble like that, but I've never seen it myself. I've had two characters do all 7 arcs on both sides (to get all 14 unique red and blue souvenirs for them) and never had any trouble completing any of them. When I did them I was constantly switching back and forth between red and blueside (mostly for badges) so I never did all of them one side then all of them the other.

There has been some trouble with buginess with some of the individual arcs and some people have been confused by what it takes to be a "confirmed" hero or villain to get the alignment merits, but I don't think there's any problem with doing the arcs in any order with respect to being a red or bluesider.

I take it you don't remember how many stupid things people did back when everyone was worried about "Y2K" ending the world. Trust me when I say there will be people dumb enough to travel to Mexico for this, even if it only becomes a big hippy party event like Innovator said.

Yeah I'm sure there will be a big "party" of some kind there so it won't be a total loss. I'm just far enough in the "nothing's going to happen" category that I'm calling the -reason- people will go there a dumb one. Besides if I'm wrong and the world does end at least I won't have to be too upset about it for very long.

Hopefully enough people won't take this all -too- seriously. There was a popular belief in Europe that the world was going to end when the calendar clicked over to the year 1,000 AD. Apparently so many peasants were convinced that the world was ending that they didn't even bother to plant crops in the months leading up to it thinking it would be pointless. Of course when the world didn't end there were massive food shortages that next year.

Oh we all know there will be people who'll be dumb enough to travel to Mexico this December just to be in the "best place" to witness the End of the World. Sure it'll be an extra bunch of crazy/silly people for them to deal with, but if Mexico can make a few pasos off of them then I wish them all the luck with that.

As a software engineer with many years of professional experience I always have to smirk a little every time I see this kind of thing suggested in any context.

I understand the relatively naive desire behind the suggestion and in a perfect world it would be nice if it could work like that. Unfortunately in reality there will never be time when the Devs of a MMO will ever sit back and say "let's do nothing but bug hunt". The reason for that is very simple: there is no such thing as "bug-free" when it comes to applications of this size. You could have 100 programmers working on this code for 100 years and you still wouldn't eliminate every significant bug in the system.

Most people seem to think that software companies should only release software that is "done" or "bug-free". This is a collective pipe-dream. In reality software is always released when its "close" enough. It's always a tradeoff between schedules and finding enough of the bigger bugs to make it work most of the time for most of the users. There is no such thing as software perfection. If any Devs waited to release things only when they were "bug-free" then they would never get around to releasing anything.

So no, there will -never- be a time where the Devs of this game will put new development on hold to focus 100% on bugs. There are so many reasons why that will never happen that it literally amazes me that this idea keeps coming up over and over again.

Instead of Taskmaster Gabriel acting as an Ouro portal I'd settle for him acting as the "substitute contact" for the DA arcs that don't have contacts in DA already. It's very easy to get to Ouro via the Ouro portal temp power but for a few of the arcs (like Praetor Duncan's for instance) we can't use the "teleport to contact" feature to easily get back to DA.

I think I already acknowledged that humanity is far more likely going to be wiped out "apocalypse" wise by some variation of the Influenza virus. Scientists generally accept the idea that we are actually well overdue for a massive pandemic of that disease as it is.

I simply believe you're being a bit overly strict about what your definition of a real life zombie might be. I'm open to the -possibility- that there might be some kind of disease some day that will cause enough zombie-like symptoms that people will, accurately or not, call the victims of the disease "zombies" just because it's a close enough description in the popular culture of the time. A real life zombie wouldn't have to be all about "eating brainnns" to be otherwise considered zombie-like. In fact this so-called "nodding disease" would only need some kind of wasting/necrotic element to cause its victims bodies to rot away in its final stages to be a more reasonable likeness to most people's expectations of what a zombie might turn out to be like.

I realize that people probably went a bit too far in calling the victims of this particular disease zombies. But again I'll just point out that real life doesn't have to follow the exact blueprint established by the movies. If a disease ever comes along that's "close enough" to what the movies have suggested then people will in fact call its victims "zombies" as a simple convenience regardless if it's strictly legitimate to do so or not.