Lothic

It had nothing to do with price. The decision to release this pack without all the weapons is probably just about the best compromise we should have expected from this. It makes the people who wanted the costume items at level 1 happy while keeping something that still needs to be earned via playing through the appropriate content intact. I know some people probably won't agree with me but I consider this a win-win for us.

I have no problem with things being exclusive in MMOs as long as they don't become -permanently- exclusive. Most people (Devs and players alike) mistakenly assume exclusivity implies permanence right or wrong.

So letting things like the Power Slide be exclusive for a year or two was plenty of time for it to be "exclusive". The reasonable time period for that has long since passed.

When the game first launched we actually only had 2 power trays. The first upgrade to this gave us a third tray and I distinctly remember thinking at the time "they should have gone ahead and given us a bunch more because if 2 wasn't enough then 3 wouldn't be enough either". Eventually they got around to the 9 tray scheme we have now.

The only real problem I have with the current situation is that I would love to have more than just 3 trays in the main power tray GUI. Sure I can place individual trays around but I'd love to have more than 3 locked together in one place instead of having them floating around separately.

Like MentalMaden said the definition of a "main character" in a MMO can probably mean just about anything you want it to mean.

For example even if you have 100 different alts my guess is that there's probably at least one of them that has more total hours played on it than any other, even if it's just by a few hours here or there. That alt could easily be defined as your "main" just based on total hours alone.

It's not really -that- big a deal.

I might be willing to agree that the 15 or 20 minutes of action in Sucker Punch was overall cooler than the action in this latest Underworld movie. But having to sit through roughly an hour of monotonous, sappy story designed to try to get me to sympathize with totally unsympathetic cookie-cutter characters was enough to kill the whole movie for me. To me it was almost like a porn film at least as far as having to put up with some pretense of a cheesy tacked-on "story" just to get to the good parts. This is why I'd rate this Underworld better overall - at least the boring parts that led up to the action didn't annoy me as much as they did in Sucker Punch.

For what it's worth I'd happily rewatch an edited version of Sucker Punch that only showed the action sequences any day of the week. *shrugs*

This movie was much better than Sucker Punch because it didn't even really try to have some kind of deep philosophical storyline. Sucker Punch failed mostly because it tried to mix a significant story in amongst the action. Mixing a story with action wasn't the bad part - the bad part was that the story part itself was god-awful. With a crummy story the whole thing devolved into a series of MTV-styled music videos separated by boring talky-talk.

This movie probably would have been better if they had just shown a scene of Micheal getting killed taking the proverbial bullet for Selene and just cleanly cut him out of the story completely. The whole idea of showing him just long enough to tease the idea that he might show up in another movie was just silly. Why have him appear in a possible future movie when you didn't even really bother having him in this one?

This has been a source of constant annoyance for years.

Effectively EVERY time they add new badges to the game they (for some reason) wedge them somewhere in the middle of the overall badge list. For example if they add a new badge "XYZ" they might decide to make it badge number 500. The problem is that every current badge above 500 gets its /settitle number shifted up by one. This means if there was a badge that used to be set with "/settitle 800" you now have to use "/settitle 801" to set it. This basically screws up any keybinds using the /settitle command.

I just wish they could add badges to the game without shifting any preexisting /settitle numbers.

I'm basically in the same situation - I have far too many badges to ever delete/reroll my main.

But that's never really stopped me from rolling up an "evil twin" or a younger sibling of an existing character to try a new version of them. If these new Dark powersets are cool enough I might roll up a new character to try them out.

The fate of TV Carol could actually be almost identical to the comic if they eventually introduce a character on the TV show that's like the comic book's Michonne. I could see where Daryl and Carol get close for the next few episodes then all of a sudden the new Michonne-like character shows up and drives the unstable Carol over the edge.

Sure that'd work too. Anything along these lines would be good.

I've mentioned before that I created a character about seven years ago now that I envisioned used tech like this to fly around. I (apparently naively) believed that it would not take this long for them to actually create a costume option like that. At any rate it would be nice if I could finally complete the character idea I came up with so long ago.

If they ever made a backpack costume item that worked something like Buzz Lightyear's pack (with wings that folded in while on the ground and snapped out when in the air) I could die happy.

On some level it would have been cool if Paragon Studios had somehow been able to licence the Futurama Mom as a character for this game. She could have been designed as a Mastermind with Igner, Larry and Walt as high level henchman and robots as low level henchmen.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hube02 Or is it? Am I wrong? Are these events so important that they demand my immediate attention and something I must be notified of at all cost?

This "problem" you're talking about with the Devs spamming us with event chatter happens on average maybe once every YEAR per server, if that much. I could barely think of something LESS important to worry about as far as this game goes. *shrugs*

When I said "black and white" I was trying to make the distinction of how Hollywood seems to have a bias towards traditional acting because it's, well, traditional and perhaps easier for them to conceptualize. They deal with everything in binary absolutes without taking the effort to realize there are some examples of voice/performance acting which actually rely so -little- on merged technology that there are shades of grey that they fail to consider. I attributed the "black and white" idea to the backward thinking of Hollywood - it's not the way I personally feel about it.

Case in point Hollywood seems to look at ALL motion capture the same regardless of how much of the actor's individual performance you can glean from a specific example of it. That would be the black compared to the white of traditional live acting. The true reality is that SOME motion capture does merit individual Ocsar consideration while SOME motion capture does not based on the overall degree of technology's involvement. I accept that Hollywood still operates under an outmoded binary thought process of marginalizing any tech-based performances but I do -not- accept that that's a reasonable way to handle things based on the evolution of the media.

There's no contraction in what I'm saying here. I believe your confusion over my position stems from the lack of your acceptance that there's a full greyish spectrum that spans between performances that are almost completely morphed by the involvement of technology to other performances that are influenced so little by technology that it's hard to argue they are significantly different than just having some lights and cameras like they had 50 years ago. This inability to accept that these things should not be all lumped together as equally dependant on merged technology is the crux of Hollywood's blind-spot here.

No one said it was ever going to be easy for anyone to judge these blended performances case-by-case regardless if the Academy comes up with dedicated awards for them or not. It may be easier for them to create new awards than to overload the current categories, but I'm not going to claim that I know that would be the perfect solution for this. Whatever the ultimate solution I think it's clear that the Academy's approach to this is currently outdated in some form or fashion.

Yes, but I still consider the "disadvantage" to be institutionalized when it comes to how the Academy stubbornly pigeon-hole these things.

I don't dismiss the idea that voice/performance actors may have to be "more exceptional" than traditional actors in order to be considered for these awards. But I think the reason they have to work harder has as much to do with outmoded mindsets biased against their forms of expression as it does some kind of "lack of bandwidth". Do you accuse the guys nominated for Sound Mixing to be unable to win for their Writing ability because they "lack the bandwidth" to express their full expertise or is it because what they do has nothing specifically to do with Writing?

I'd submit that the current categorization of the Academy Awards is simply becoming insufficient to express the overall range of awardable expressions in the artform.

Again it just seemed that you were endorsing the dismissive concept that "if there is -any- technological involvement with an actor's performance it must automatically be marginalized". Hollywood seems to favor that as a binary absolute, unwilling to accept there is a grey area to this.

I think you and I both agree that Hollywood does in fact have a bias against such performances. That was never in question. I simply felt that your take on this was that they were justified in maintaining that arbitrary bias regardless of how the medium is evolving over time. I consider it backward-thinking to accept the current status quo of the award criteria. Either the awards are going to have to change to accept the evolving reality of the artform or risk becoming that much more inconsequential themselves.

You seemed hard fixed on your blanket "2>1" concept and didn't appear willing to acknowledge that certain performances like these rely on varying degrees of technological involvement. Again in some cases the amount of "technological merging" between actor and machine is relatively minimal. At the very least these things should be more obviously judged on a case-by-case basis for Oscar merit worthiness.

I see this apparent tendency to dismiss non-traditional and/or technology based performances as lessor caliber or unworthy of full consideration a fundamental failing on the Academy's part to adapt to the future of the medium they are supposedly still in authority to judge. I simply question an authoritative body which displays overt biases such as this. *shrugs*

It's the kind of thing that might be alright for a character which already generates a bunch of tohit debuff and/or regeneration debuff via other means to increase the overall effect but probably not so good just as an "extra" proc all by itself for any random character.

There's no rule that requires the Devs to make sure everyone absolutely loves every new item for sale.
They couldn't satisfy everyone with everything even if they wanted to.

Don't like this power? Don't buy it. The people who do like it will buy it despite you. *shrugs*

That's cool. I knew they were getting relatively close to I96 of the comic so I figured I'd just catch up in a few months when the second compendium (presumably issues 49-96) comes out. There's no way the TV show will get past the story presented by the first compendium any time soon anyway so I can wait. IIRC, the TV show has only gotten up to maybe around I20 of the comic give or take.

Probably explains things like why they spent so much time at Hershel's farm. Easier to film in one set location.

I already said voice actors and motion capture actors are at a "severe handicap" for these kinds of awards. I'm not arguing the reality of that point.

I simply believe you (and by extension the folks in Hollywood) are drawing far too much of a black and white distinction between traditional live acting and all the other forms of "technologically assisted" acting. There are some variants of these performances which are far more "individual contributor" oriented than others, and I submit that the additive technological aspects are so minor in those cases that your full "2>1" characterization barely applies.

In any event the mere fact that Hollywood apparently tends to live in the past and devalue these kinds of non-traditional performances (or at the very least marginalizes them) is part of the reason why I personally pay awards such as these very little attention in general. I think I've seen maybe a total of 10 minutes worth of Academy Awards shows in the last few decades. *shrugs*