Peregrine_Falcon

1) Accepting a Magic Fortune causes every one of my characters, and all of the characters of my friends that I team with, to do the Martial Arts Powerset Dragon's Tail animation every single time. Always. We thought that it was an intentional change.

2) It would be a very nice change if the store Travel Powers (Ninja Run, Beast Run, Rocket Board, Magic Carpet) simply suppressed your toggles instead of turning them off. It's not a big deal on my Blasters, but I just can't stand using the store Travel Powers on my Tanks. I kept forgetting to turn all of my toggles back on.

Yeah, I just completely lost interest in this podcast today.

The last couple of episodes have been like 80% tangent and 20% actually talking about the game. But this week they didn't even waste their time pretending they were actually going to talk about the game. And they pretty much didn't.

For those of you that do decide to keep watching I hope that you enjoy listening to Zwil talk about pretty much everything except the game.

Was there ever any response from the dev team on this?

Did that "Base Committee" ever accomplish anything?

Or are improvements to bases as dead and buried as they appear to be?

So basically Hollywood has finally realized that they're full of idiots. But instead of giving good writers a chance they're just going to remake every single good movie from the 60's and 80's.

I hate Hollywood.

I'm a paying customer. Courteously offering a list of complaints that I have about a service that I'm paying for is not whining.

For those of you that are tired of reading forum posts complaining about the MA I can only say: I'm not going to apologize if you're annoyed by people who don't agree with you that everything is Happy Happy Joy Joy with the MA.

Dr. Aeon,

I have to agree with some of the other negative posters here. I understand that you're trying to improve and increase traffic to/in the AE, but I believe that the AE and its customers would be better served by your taking a number of other actions instead.

1) Running a script to delete the copious amount of plainly titled farm arcs.

2) Look through and fix the DC arcs that your previous patches have broken.

3) Lower the number of plays necessary to get into the Hall of Fame, and once there, have the arc remain locked in the HoF for a minimum amount of time so as to prevent griefers from bouncing it right back out.

4) STOP BREAKING ARCS every time you guys patch the AE to fix yet another one of the exploits that we warned you about in beta but you refused to listen to us and fix back then.

While I do have a free AE slot, I also will not be entering this contest. I am not interested in participating in this until the devs listen to us and start fixing the AE the way we've been asking you to since it first went live.

Take care doctor.

- Peregrine Falcon

Forbidden Planet (1956) 98 minutes

or my personal favorite

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) 103 minutes

Both are good stories with well developed characters, and your students have probably never seen either of them.

The character that I've always thought was an obvious Mary Sue is Statesman.

Jack even said that Statesman was a character that he created years before CoH/V in his table top RPG Champions game.

Statesman is supposed to be an Invuln/SS Tanker and yet he has a higher damage output than most Scrappers. In game, our characters might be able to take a Rikti dropship if there are 50 or more of us with a select combination of powers, but according to game lore, Statesman knocked a Rikti mothership out of the sky by himself with his bare hands.

So yeah. Maybe it's just me. Obvious Mary Sue.

The Hidden Hand #374410 (level range 30-54), is my first attempt at a serious story arc. After getting feedback from a couple of friends, and a review by Police Woman, I've updated it quite a bit. But it still needs help.

This arc has two things about it that I think are unusual.

First is that I've tried to construct a story arc about Nemesis that has him acting as the unbelievably intelligent, competent and dangerous individual that our contacts keep claiming that he is. I say this because in the actual dev written arcs about him that I've played (which I think is all of them) he comes off as an incompetent, mustache-twirling, megalomaniac whose overly complex plans keep getting quashed by every random super hero that stumbles across them. In my arc he has a simple goal and has set up a plan that's as simple as possible, that also takes the existence of super powers into account. And in my arc he feels no ego-driven impulse to intentionally leave silly clues to let the heroes know who's actually behind it all.

The second unusual aspect of my arc is that I use the mission exit pop-ups to tell the story of what's really happening to the audience (the players). Unless your character concept is one of total omniscience there's no way that the character could possibly find out this information, but it shows the players what's actually happening. I think this is where the major problem lies.

I've received some criticism that this second storyline makes the players feel like they've been played for chumps. That's why I need help with this arc. I'm really looking for a better way to show Nemesis as he's supposed to be without making the players feel like they've caught the idiot ball (to use someone else's favorite phrase).

I'm not asking for full blown reviews, but I would most certainly appreciate any help and advice and criticism that anyone has to give on improving The Hidden Hand.

For me it depends on the genre of the movie.

I loved Die Hard (the first one). In that movie an ordinary guy spends most of his time running from the bad guys because they outnumber him. Sure there's some stuff blowing up, but the fight scenes and firefights are pretty realistic for Hollywood.

Now if it's a super hero movie then I expect flying and cars flipping and exploding. A super hero movie without those is boring, what's the point of even making that type of movie without those things.

I really dislike movies where otherwise normal people are able to do crazy unrealistic stuff. Like fall from great heights, shoot down helicopters with a pistol, and cause cars to explode with a cigarette.

As long as the logic of the story or movie is internally consistent I'm usually ok with it.

It looks like Castle may already be working on this. See this thread:

Question: What powers do you want Alternate animations for?

So we're both in agreement that ETs DPS was out of wack and that PvP had probably somewhere between very little and nothing to do with why ET was nerfed. So this just leaves us with two questions.

1) The Timing - Why did Castle choose to nerf ET at that particular moment in time?

2) The Method - Why did Castle nerf ET in that specific manner?


So here's how my brain arrived at my conclusion to this.

1) He had the time. This was probably the biggest factor. Castle happened to have the time at that particular moment and he probably knew that he wasn't likely to have much free time in the future. But then that brings up the next question: Why did Castle choose to spend his time at that particular moment on ET instead of any of a dozen other things?

2) Why didn't Castle simply go into the chart and change some numbers? Recharge and/or damage? That's what they did when they nerfed Ignite. Why did he bring Back Alley Brawler into it and change the animation time? Something that's (to my knowledge, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) only been done once before, with Flares. And with Flares we know that the animation was changed only because they were standardizing all of the Blaster Tier 1 and 2 attacks. Unlike the other animations, where BaB was just able to shave a bit of time off of the animations here and there, they simply couldn't do it with the old Flares animation.

So why didn't they do it that way with ET? Why did Castle choose the one route that most certainly took the most time and effort? And also just happened to be the one way that players couldn't do anything about with IOs?


So that's why I believe that Scrappers are the reason that Castle nerfed ET. Scrappers base damage modifier, the timing of the change, and the manner in which he changed it. You may not agree with me, but at least you can't honestly say that I haven't arrived by my belief in a logical manner.

Yes, ETs DPS was always out of wack. But the entire set depended on that particular power in order to keep a decent DPS. As you know Bill, by nerfing that one power it dropped EMs DPS considerably.

Look, I'm not part of some tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theory. I'm not and do not ascribe any type of sinister motivations to Castle or to his actions. ET needed to be nerfed, you and I both know this. I just think that prior to IOs and power proliferation Castle didn't see it as it important or game-breaking.

I think that the devs probably thought EM was fine for PvE. Sure ETs DPA was out of line, but EM paid for it by having almost no AoE ability. And as we've seen, in PvE AoE is king.

Now maybe PvP factored into it, and maybe not. The timing of the PvP changes makes me think that it probably didn't have much to do with it.

But then along came IOs and Super Scrappers soloing everything in the game. EBs, AVs, Rikti Pylons, Monsters, GMs, God, etc. Castle knew that EM was going to get ported to Scrappers. It's my belief that's what made Castle finally decide that he had to nerf ET. I'm guessing that EM probably hasn't been ported yet because the devs have been busy doing other stuff - like Going Rogue.

Sure Brutes can solo AVs, but because of the Brute AT damage base, neither Build Up nor Against All Odds has the huge effect for Brutes that it does for Scrappers. Also, believe it or not, some people had a hard time (even before the changes) keeping the Fury bar filled. With Scrappers that's simply not an issue. They do full damage 100% of the time!

I read and posted in more than one thread back then about the ET nerf. I remember Castle saying that it was being nerfed because its DPS was too high. I'm not disputing that. What I do dispute is the opinion, that seems to be held by many people, that it was nerfed because of PvP. The timing of the PvP changes, which Castle had to have been aware of when he nerfed ET, just makes it seem very unlikely to me.