Lothic

I know I made the half-joking case yesterday that Terra Nova could have copied Land of the Lost enough to have their own version of the Sleestak. But we all know if they had actually done that then some people would simply dismiss it and claim Terra Nova was directly "ripping off" Land of the Lost.

But having said that I'll bring up the point that Land of the Lost already basically explored the "Bermuda Triangle" angle as well. There were many Land of the Lost episodes that involved the Marshall family meeting pirates, Civil War vets and even fun mythological critters like Medusa. All of these "guest stars" of the week had supposedly gotten sucked into the Land of the Lost via random portals just like the Marshalls did.

So all I'm saying is if they were setting Terra Nova up to be based on running into random historical people via Bermuda Triangle style portals then that would have been anything except an original idea for a show.

They've made this "reused existing name" mistake at least a dozen times or so since the beginning of the game.
Did anyone seriously think they wouldn't do it again at some point?

I might have some sympathy for you if it wasn't for the fact that pretty much every single one of those new DA "personal missions" can be sped through in about a minute or less. Sure you don't have to like them, but they are hardly earth-shatteringly horrible or make me want to die because "OMG! I'm not in control of my OWN character ALL the time!"

If this is one of the main things you have to complain about then this game is treating you pretty good all things considered.

There's also the lingering (albeit silly) idea that the Devs never really intended people to go out and get -all- the badges on one character anyway. They always just wanted us to more or less stumble over any badge we got as part of our characters' "journey" through the game. How quaint.

My guess is that they would not be specifically inclined or motivated to make it any easier to track -all- unearned badges in-game regardless. The third party badge tracking websites exist primarily because all of us evil badgers are playing the game "wrong" to begin with.

There could be other factors like level/difficulty differences. I noticed in the two log examples that the INF values were different. Another thing is that one person got both the kill credits in the successful example. Could be almost anything.

Awww Boo! Just when I thought I could talk a few people into trying it.

Apparently whatever's wrong with the badge is not strictly a badly set timer - there must be something making it semi-random as well.

This is good news at least from the point of view of not having to wait for the patch. I know some people who didn't even want to try the DiB until the badge was "fixed". Now at least we know it's still possible.

I wonder if this is similar to the "decimal place error" that supposedly forced the Empath badge to require the ridiculous 1 billion HPs healed for several years. Positron actually tried to get us to believe that the original 1 billion value was a decimal error before it was finally reduced.

lol

Zeroth rule of software programming: give users -no- option and then it'll be very easy to code with a minimum of effort or risk of bugs. Sure a few users may whine about it, but our jobs will be easier.

For what it's worth I don't think your idea is a bad one.
I just don't expect it to happen anytime soon.

All joking aside I seriously thought, when I first heard of this show, that one of the "big reveals" of it was that they were going to find some kind of Sleestak-like civilization that would have become a main focus of the show.

Think of how interesting it would have been if they had to deal with some kind of "first contact" scenario and then deal with why those critters are there but yet we had no idea they existed before. Did we start fighting with them and wipe them out or would there be some other cool twist to it? Maybe we would learn that these "dinosaur men" were actually the first technologically advanced species on the planet and it was the actions of the Terra Novans (either on purpose or by accident) that caused evolution to turn towards mammals taking their place in the future. I just came up with that in a few minutes. *shrugs*

This kind of thing would have made the show 100x more interesting than it turned out to be.

Whenever I consider/criticize shows like this I try my hardest to empathize with what the "target audience" might be for it.
I'm willing to accept the idea that this particular show was simply not geared towards me.

Still as TrueGentleman said there are alternatives to this kind of thing, and arguably many of them are better shows anyway.

I have a "system" of sorts that works pretty well on my main badger - I simply make sure I've earned every badge possible.
The "collect" area of the badge window doesn't really need too much organization when it's kept empty.

In all seriousness I'm not necessarily against your idea and wouldn't mind if they ever figured out a way to make it more useful.

I think you pretty much answered your own question here.

Yeah I guess I'd agree that Dollhouse had enough of its own problems to justify an early cancellation as well. It was too complicated and/or convoluted for its own good and got bogged down with too much backstory for most people to chew on or put up with.

I'd argue that Terra Nova had the opposite problem - it was so vapid and pointless that I very quickly gave up caring about where the story might be going. There was nothing to hook into and none of the characters resonated as being worthwhile to care about.

I suppose in the end Terra Nova was simply MORE deserving of the two.

Yes I totally agree that Terra Nova failed mostly because it was shaping up to be a directionless, consequence-free show.

I guess my main point was that the core premise of "future people go back to dinosaur-land" could have been made really interesting if it had been given a "rudder" to work with. It wasn't a failure because the subject matter was inherently bad - it was a failure because the writers of the show didn't know what to make of the story concept they had to work with. For instance I would have loved to have seen more political intrigue between the factions of the past and future rather than a suburban family drama with a couple of dinosaurs thrown in.

Basically trying to combine a pseudo-modern Swiss Family Robinson with dinosaurs into the framework of badly rehashed ST-DS9 episodes was doomed from the get-go.

Even with all The Cape's faults it was Shakespeare compared to Terra Nova. *shrugs*

That's fine... but it ultimately doesn't matter what values like this were set at on beta while they were TESTING the game. Just because they chose to test something with ridiculous numbers doesn't mean they are required to keep those ridiculous numbers on the live servers.

The people making the show threw several sci-fi plot ideas against the wall to see what would stick and one could argue that a few of these ideas might have been interesting if they had been formulated properly into a workable show. Unfortunately too many of those ideas fell on the floor and the godawful dialogue coupled with the heavily rehashed Star Trek DS9-like storylines made the show literally cringe-worthy to sit through.

It's funny that you mention American Idol in reference to this show because while it's obvious Terra Nova didn't have the same ratings as Idol I considered it just about as mind-numbingly vapid and hollow as that supposed mega-hit. This was the kind of sci-fi that the SyFy network would have made - you know, that network run by people who have actually said during interviews that they don't have a clue what "sci-fi" is. Yeah, those people.

If it was 25 Super Packs for each Reward Token I could rack up 775 Super Packs right now without spending another dime on this game.

I agree that 25 packs per token probably won't happen and I doubt that was ever going to happen. If what venombeyond82 was saying about beta was true I'm sure they just set it at 25 temporarily to test the system and encourage beta testers to test a bunch of packs.

I think one could make the case that 5 packs per token might not be enough. 10 packs per token might have been a better compromise. *shrugs*