Lothic

I'll entertain the idea that the helicopter we saw at the beginning of the last episode was in fact the exact same helicopter that Rick saw way back during the first season. It's certainly possible that a -single- appearance of a helicopter like that might have set in motion a multi-week stampede that just by coincidence finally caught back up to Hershel's farm.

I guess my only "problem" with that idea is what Aett_Thorn said in that the show did not make it 100% clear that these two "appearances" of the helicopter was supposed to have been the same exact helicopter on the same day from two different points of view. The show could have cleared that up by simply throwing up a caption at the bottom of the screen saying something like "4 weeks ago" when showing the "second" helicopter to give us a sense that that shot was supposed to be a flashback to a prior episode.

I suppose we'll have to wait until season 3 to get any follow-up on that.

I simply believe you guys may be over-thinking this from the point of view of having "audience/genre knowledge" that might not actually apply to the unique situation in this particular story. Besides I'm not really sure you can count on having "general zombie apocalypse" guidelines that are going to work during -every- zombie apocalypse that turns up anyway. We aren't talking about something that's strictly predictable like a hurricane might be. I'm pretty sure that if a ZA ever happened IRL the particular circumstances behind it would be absolutely unique and unprecedented.

For instance why exactly would you ALWAYS want to stay away from high population areas? What rule in the rulebook states that there could -never- be major cities that have managed to remain intact against the zombies? Even looking at what happened in the comic we see that a small group of survivors managed to wall off the town that the Governor was controlling. Why couldn't the Army have managed to do that to other towns that Mr. Philadelphia and his cohorts never saw in their travels?

Bottomline is that no one in this story has any real idea about what's happening in most of the rest of the world. Sure it might initially seem smart to run off to somewhere out in the middle of Texas to "ride it out" but for all you know there might be a hundred random towns in Florida or Maine that are completely safe and secure that you might never hear about if you do that.

Again the idea of "just heading east" might not make much sense all by itself. But it would seem to me that the opposite concept of "just finding a hole to live in for the rest of your life" is probably an equally dumb plan for your long term future in such a hopeless environment.


*** possible TV/comic spoilers warning***


Perhaps this is why we see that trying to stay in the Prison ultimately failed in the comic because this small group of survivors are trying to live without help from other survivors that we -already- know exist.

Things like alignment merits or alignment powers have -never- been a factor in motivating me to maintain any particular alignment over any other. I have characters who are sprinkled across all four alignments for various reasons that revolve around either character RP backgrounds or need to access red and/or blueside content.

Basically I need see no need to make any of the current alignments any "better" to play than they are now.

That was a challenging one. Take a look at this little trick for making that badge much easier to get.

Well there's really only one of two reasons they are currently limited for purchase to only RMs: 1) Either the ability to purchase them any other way is currently buggy and/or nonfunctional or 2) They limited them to RMs on propose as a means to do a final phase of "in-game testing" just to see how much impact they are going to have on the game before they released the flood gates on the entire feature.

Yet they survived to make it to that bar didn't they?

Even if we can believe anything Mr. Philadelphia said and everything north of Atlanta is bad there's nothing stopping the group from making it to I-95 and heading south...

No as I said before the "system" wasn't poorly implemented. You simply hit the perfect storm of finishing off the DA arcs at the precise time (yesterday) that caused you to lose out on this new reward. The system didn't fail you - at best your timing was just coincidentally bad.

I realize that your scenario might be a tad bit annoying. But this kind of thing happens ALL the time whenever a MMO adds a new feature like this. As you point out we are only talking about 2 Emp merits - a reward that you can earn doing -many- different things within an hour or so. In the grand scheme of things this is not the worst problem you are ever going to have to deal with or get over.

Actually there are very, very few instances of things being retroactively rewarded like that. Your example of Task Force Commander (an accolade badge being added later in the game) being one of the few.

I understand your attempt to equate the TF Commander badge to something like this but you are talking apples and oranges. As I pointed out a given character may have already run the new DA arcs ANY number of times prior to today. That information was not kept anywhere in the game so no "retroactive" reward can be given for that. Checking to see if a given character has the new DA arc badges can't be used for this - sorry.

Here's the problem with your idea: What if for the sake of argument you had a character who since the start of Issue 22 has already run all those arcs three times, not just once. How is the game supposed to know you were supposedly "owed" six Emp merits instead of just two? The answer is that there is -no- way for the game to know that.

I think you need to accept the idea that you didn't bother to check the Beta server last week and realize that this new contact was going to be added to the game. You're like a guy who just bought an iPad2 a few weeks ago without realizing Apple was just about to release a new one. Sure it sucks that your timing was bad but that in no way entitles you to get some reward that didn't even exist in the live game until today. *shrugs*

Let's be be clear about it: At least T-Dog had a "plan". I'm not necessarily saying his plan was the best possible one, but when pretty much every other character on the show was mindlessly panicing after they had to run from Hershel's farm I have to give T-Dog at least a few points for being a little more level-headed than most of the others.

To get back to the "post apocalyptic situation" at hand I'll again point out that no one on this show knows ANYTHING about what's going on ANYWHERE beyond the immediate Atlanta area. Sure Jenner at the CDC painted a pretty bad picture but even he had lost contact with the rest of the world. He had no real idea if there were pockets of survivors or not.

I suppose it boils down to what would make sense: if you want to try to find other LIVING survivors in a ZA then your best best is to go where the most people are, which again would be much more easily accessible via I-95. On the other hand if Rick and company decide to avoid any possible contact with actual survivors friendly or not then I guess it'd make more sense to stay away from populated areas.

We already know there are in fact -plenty- of living survivors. Between the nursing home they found in Atlanta and Randall's group there appear to be pockets of non-zombie people all over the place. The chances of finding any remnants of a functioning government (who may be the ones flying the black helicopters we've seen) increases if they head toward HEAVILY POPULATED areas.

Ultimately we all know Rick's group is going to get bogged down with the Prison next season. I'm just saying that T-Dog's plan, while probably not perfect, was also far from being completely ridiculous either. *shrugs*

There's at least the Panther Stealth Power and the Lion Vanity Pet on Beta now.
I'd say get used to it for at least a while longer. *shrugs*

It's weird that even though people have been regularly suggesting this for years it seems that in the last few weeks I've seen an up-tick in the number of people asking for jet pack costume items while at the very same time NOT realizing that the Sci-Fi costume set is actually on its way.

Who said anything about getting a boat to anywhere?

Obviously we don't exactly know for sure what T-Dog was thinking about other than "going east" but as we were talking about earlier once you reach the Atlantic coast it's much easier to travel north or south from there. I-95 would give them relatively easy access to any destination from Key West up to Maine.

And for what it's worth I still don't buy the "I-95 would be too dangerous" argument. We've already seen that herds of zombies seem to be -everywhere- already. How do we know for certain that any location is any more dangerous than anywhere else? And for all they know there are cities on the coast that are still intact and/or zombie-free. *shrugs*

Capt. Zwill: If I only had some phasers (to blast these overly-whiny players).
Scott: Phasers? You've got 'em. I have one bank recharged.
Capt. Zwill: Scotty, you just earned your pay for the week.

Yes this is the most obvious explaination based directly from the comic book. Problem is why have we seen helicopter(s) on the TV show twice now?

If you'll remember the only reason the news helicopter took off from Atlanta in the comic was that they were trying to make a break for somewhere else before it crashed. This sort of implies it was a one-way trip that went horribly wrong. On the other hand we've now seen the TV helicopter twice now and both times it looked very much like a classic cliche 'black' government type helicopter, not a civilian one.

Sure it's always possible that this helicopter (or helicopters) will serve the same purpose the news helicopter did in the comic (which was to get Rick and company involved with the Governor) but then again it's always possible that the TV show is going to take this in another direction.

Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
Socialite: My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course…
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Socialite: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!
Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

As fun as it is to think about it seems fairly unlikely that the helicopter was intentionally trying to lure zombies towards anything in particular. If the people in the helicopter specifically wanted to "drive" a herd of zombies there'd probably be a more direct way to do it than to fly a single helicopter hundreds of feet above Atlanta. Besides you have to think it's only been a few months since the ZA happened - what "army of enemies" would there be left that an organized force flying a helicopter would want to stampede a herd of zombies against?

I just took it as a sign that the zombies are at least "smart" enough (if that's the right word) to understand that the sound/motion of the helicopter would probably lead them towards something that might be worth eating in the direction that the helicopter is moving. Basically I think it was just a bad coincidence that the zombies were "stampeded" towards Hershel's farm.

Pretty sure Rick saw it the first time. But clearly this was supposed to imply that someone out there is still organized enough to be flying helicopters on a semi-regular basis.

Again I sympathize with what happened to Steele_Magnolia. Not claiming the Devs didn't screw up here.

All I'm saying is that everything else being equal it's probably easier for the game to handle that a given person bought an "entire pack" of something rather than random piece-parts. The fact that people who bought this entire pack didn't get affected by this problem seems to lend credence to that theory.

Well for what it's worth I thought they were already east and/or south of Atlanta. The land we've seen around Hershel's farm is pretty flat - the land north and west of Atlanta tends to be much more hilly. *shrugs*

You do make valid points that heading east would mean going towards more populated areas. But would we know for sure that zombies would actually care that I-95 is a major human roadway? As we've seen it looks like herds of zombies are just roaming anywhere regardless if it's on major highways or not.

Bottomline if you wanted to have a chance to find LIVE people then your chances are improved if you go where there were more people to begin with. Sure heading to Nebraska might be fine if you know for sure that there's no hope of finding any organized enclaves of live people. But as people on this thread have pointed out these characters supposedly have no idea if there's any large groups of live people left or not. All things being equal I'd probably want to know if there was any civilization left, and lord knows you're not going to find that in Nebraska regardless of a ZA or not.

The ultimate problem here is that you think we are ENTITLED to something the Devs mentioned as a "working plan" for additional improvements several years ago. You are holding their feet to the fire over this and are getting upset that the Devs' priorities have changed. Sorry but sometimes life happens. *shrugs*

The Devs never outright promised/guaranteed that we would get any extra Power Customization at all and even if they delivered this supposed mythical upgrade that would supposedly "finish" this task (whatever that means) they never promised us that they would not charge for it. Think about it logically: if it was going to be a "sure thing" then why didn't it all happen a few years ago when they were actually working on this in general? Sure it would be NICE if they did these things for us like you envision, but wishing for it will not make it come true.

At the very least your expectations in this matter are highly skewed towards getting everything you want for nothing. Sadly the world doesn't usually work that way.

I hope you get this all sorted out. Sounds like something they can eventually fix if you present them with enough info. It does indeed suck that they let these things become that confused like this.

For what it's worth this is why I'll never "take advantage" of buying things piecemeal. I realize that by continuing to buy things as complete packs that there are probably going to be things that I'm paying for that I'll never use. Still I'd rather give the company an extra few dollars here or there if it'll help me avoid the kinds of trouble you ran into. *shrugs*

I figure the Devs originally made the costume editor "numberless" for the same reason that the Devs tried their best to keep all the powers numberless as well. I suppose they thought people wouldn't want to micro-manage numbers and just accept playing the game based on "feel" and/or "abstractness". Clearly that was a silly idea.

I don't know if the Devs will ever add numbers to the costume editor the same way they expanded access to the number "info" of the powers in this game. It'd be very cool to see it happen regardless.

It seems weird that they are exploring this "caveman" idea that the women just want to have their man become the Alpha Male of the group. We've been seeing this with Lori for awhile but we also saw this with Carol again last night where she told Daryl he should be leading the group and that he shouldn't just be Rick's "henchman".

I suppose we're seeing this happen because this group is becoming more and more tribal and primitive after the collapse of the world. It's like they've become a pack of apes dealing with each other in very primitive social terms. I guess this is what happens when the group loses its democratic values and becomes a "Rictatorship".

Not really sure exactly how dumb it was - at least it was a plan of some sort. Considering where they are in Georgia they are probably relatively close to Savannah and from there they might be able to travel up or down I-95 to get to somewhere more significant like Jacksonville or even Washington DC.

Oh well, I hadn't heard they already cast someone for the Governor. *shrugs*

Still I agree that it seems likely that Merle will be involved in the Governor's crew in some form or fashion.
He'd be a perfect fit to fall into that group.

I guess that leaves one vaguely lingering question: Was Randall's group related to the Governor or was that a completely separate group? I suppose the writers could have that go either way depending on if it's important or not.

Well I suppose it does help to know where to leave him. Glad it worked out for you regardless.
IIRC, that mission is like the 2nd mission in that arc so even if you had to try for it again it'd be pretty easy to get to via Ouro.