Ravenswing

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Or just one of those little old men in a scruffy jacket with a wooden plackard around their necks that says "THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH" in beg red letters.

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They only need to be right once, you know.

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True, but rarely do they get to say "I told you so."

Also: Girl Genius Rules!

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The regeneration set has the same issue. Somewhat worse, in fact, since it has less +DEF and +RES to help reduce all that Alpha damage.

[/ QUOTE ]Uh. This is pretty much exactly what MoG is for.

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So you said elsewhere. Hadn't worked that out (even though I was using it that way) at the time I posted.

You're absolutely right about my levelling, though I think spending most of the evening roleplaying rather than levelling had more to do with the slowness of my levelling than not teaming.

However, levelling has got easier since Crow hit 50. They changed the XP curves, and put in things like the AV/EB swap system. They added radio missions, which let you have a travel power many levels earlier than the usual mechanism.

Seems like levelling in the 35-40 range is just as awesomely boring, tedious, and slow as it ever was, mind you.

(As an aside, it took me about 15 months to get Crow to 50, but that did include a break when he hit 38 and totally ran out of missions until Warburg saved him. It took me about 4 months to hit level cap in LotRO and about 3 to do it in WoW, though that was influenced by my being unemployed. While people complain about the easy levelling in CoH, it's not half as easy as a lot of other MMOs.)

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War Crow: Steel Canyon.
Jason Caine: Croatoa.
Operative Seven: King's Row.
Nitoichi: Galaxy City.
Velvet: Founder's Falls.

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Everyone supplied way more detail than I 'needed' (which is fine, I expected it really ) so I figure I'll expand a little.

War Crow: has a farmhouse in Wales which he shares with the love of his life, Stargazer. He also has a rented apartment in Steel Canyon which he uses when business brings him to Paragon. Running Paragon Secure Couriers now has him travelling the world, so he also has places to sleep in various cities around the globe.

Jason Caine: has a job teaching magical theory and history at the University in Salamanca, and so has taken a flat in the town. He doesn't actually need to sleep much, but prefers to under normal circumstances.

Operative Seven: occupies a service bay in a room on the second floor of the King's Row precinct building. She doesn't sleep, but does shut down for maintenance periodically.

Nitoichi: has a flat above the Junk Depot in the south east corner of Galaxy City. She works in the Wizard's Well down the road.

Velvet: was once an internationally famous glamour model (appearing in both the UK and US editions of Playboy), but she married a photographer and 'retired' to Founders' Falls. After her daughter and husband were killed in a bombing, she set out to get revenge against the Family for their deaths, but events conspired to have those emotional wounds healed rather faster than expected. While she still has the flat in FF, she spends a lot of time in exotic locations having her photograph taken and rarely goes out on the streets with her katana.


And I forgot Glory: who thinks she may have been a goddess at some time and appeared in Galaxy City, fully formed and dressed for no apparent reason. She doesn't have any requirement to sleep, being a coalesced energy form, but she 'lives' in the MAGI laboratories in GC where she helps the lab technicians by providing a readily available source of Netherworld energies. (She used to turn up at GG with wires sticking out of her bodice having forgotten to get them all removed before she left the lab.)

No one goes to the cinema in Paragon City. Why would they? The films haven't changed in 4 or 5 years!

Okay...

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The Rikti invasions are a work of genius and are used sparingly they are fine, particularly since players aren't usually in the city zones doing the PvE levelling you mention, rather they are in the instances.

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Over the weekend of Rikti raids they had recently, raids disrupted my normal PvE activities in PI at least twice. Now, of course, that's a special weekend of heavy raids, so a little unusual. Except that I also had disruption from them the weekend after when there was no special event, just a lot of people doing the mission in the RWZ.

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Although I mentioned a possible "denial of service" mechanic, I've also stated that the whole idea is flexible and this doesn't necessarily have to be implemented

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Well then, fine. If there is no disruption to services then there's no objection to a cosmetic change to the way the zone looks. Personally, I don't see the point, but if that's what you want, sure.

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I don't understand this. Does it mean anything? Of course, there will always be room for improvement, if that's what you're implying.

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What it meant was that I have suggested at least one mechanism which meets all your requirements for destruction, repeatability and loss of services in a zone, but you want it in a City Zone, so it's not good enough. Apparently, what you want is the ability to have a city zone trashed and aren't interested in the other aspects of the concept, so I was wrong.

I repeat: your original idea is great for 'rebuilding' a Hazard Zone. I don't know why you feel it must be a City Zone that this is done to, but if you're happy that most of your idea is tossed out to make a cosmetic change only, well then I haven't any practical objection.

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I agree, though this disappoints me somewhat

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Doesn't dissapoint me.

Liz, the problem is ot whether we think it's a good idea, because even I think it would be kind of cool (even though I generally think AoC sucks).

The problem is that it would require a total re-engineering of the game engine to make it work, so let's face facts, this isn't happening any time soon. CO seems to have this kind of mechanism, however, and CoH may get updated to that engine (maybe, possibly, sometime, hedge, hedge, imply uncertainty...), perhaps as part of some paid for expansion, maybe.

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But how many of these are returning players who will leave at the end of that month? I bet theres more of them than people joining.

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I did a highly unscientific survey by accident yesterday. I was looking at people's profiles while standing around in the CH in Steel Canyon. Of course, one of the things in there is your badges and a lot of the characters in the CH had no Verteran Badges. We aren't talking level 10-20 characters here either.

This says to me:

1. Yeah, they may have made levelling a little easy. If vet badges had been around originally, I'd have had quite a few before I got my first 50.

2. There are plenty of new players about. Real new players, not returning ones.

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What I'd like to see is something better than a "Hazard Zone". It seems to me that these are intended as old school farming areas which repop periodically to keep players busy.

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Whatever the Hazard Zones were intended for, they are slowly being altered to be more useful. The Hollows has had two revamps, Faultline got its revamp, the Rikti Crash Site has become the Rikti War Zone. Doing more interesting things than having big, empty, pointless, hated expanses of real-estate is a good way to go with Boomtown and maybe DA. (I really would like to see something done with DA, but then I've always felt that the BP are a dead loss and could have been so much better. There's a story there in DA and we haven't been told it.)

City Zones, on the other hand, are there for mainline PvE levelling activities. I dislike anything that disrupts that, but at least things like Rikti Invasion events only last a short time. What you are proposing would make entire zones unusable for days. I can't think of a way to improve that aside from doing it as a way to slowly turn Hazard Zones into something with some character.

That said, I'm not claiming to be any form of creative genius, so someone else might come up with a way to make it work in a City Zone. I just doubt anything that work work would satisfy your desires.


Oh, another advantage of using a Hazard Zone is that they are already level limited and controled access. This would likely make allowing villains in far easier and deny them further progress into the city. I don't actually believe NCNC are likely to create another PvP Zone, but Cooperative Zones seem to be flavour of the month.

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I like the idea, but I've yet to make it to RV so I didn't even know that was the case there. Its not something I'd like to see in every zone, but maybe doing it in another one or 2 could be interesting.

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If you have never seen RV, the basic idea is that it is in some form of temoral flux. By winning and holding the area, heroes or villains can push the zone to their side for a few minutes before it resets to its neutral position and you start again. Mostly what happens when it changes is that the flags change on the twon hall.

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Boomtown isn't really used for much is it?

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Boomtown and Dark Astoria are almost totally unused. Both have mission doors and getting a mission in them is generally viewed upon as "oh hell, I've got to go all the way out there."

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You'll see 10% of em, if that arent part of an SG.

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That is totally irrelevent. All of my toons (I think) are in an SG. Most of them are in the same SG, mine, the one I created because there was no mechanism for blocking SG invites and I wanted to play with SG bases.

If you're going to say "that's not what most people do" then I'm going to reply with "you don't know that" followed by "I know a number of people who set up one player SGs so they can have a little one room base."

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The best way? Absolutely yes.

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I'm sorry, but you have no information which backs that up. You're simply stating your preferences as facts.

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This is a team centric game.

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It used to be. Very. It's now a casual-centric game. Teaming is optional.

I solo very happily, and have done since the game hit the EU, but it is now easier to solo by a considerable degree. There are specific ATs which benefit massively from teaming, and always have been, but it is quite possible to solo to 50 missing very little content.

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There are bus-stops but where are the buses?

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A long running comment. We believe that Statesman got rid of them.

Or maybe the bus system got abandoned because there is a well functioning monorail system with good coverage of the city. Which may explain the lack of cars...

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There are no school, post office, restaurant, cafe, cinema, shopping mall, ... and so on.

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There are any number of restaurants, especially fast food and sushi. There are street restaurants/cafes in Founder's Falls. No cinemas? There's on near a contact in Galaxy City, one near the King's Row police building, and quite a few more dotted about (probably not many people go though, since they've been showing the same films since 2004). American shopping malls look a lot like office buildings, just about any of those tower blocks could have a mall in it.

You won't find an churches to any religion in the city. It's probably one of the few MMOs with no religion what-so-ever.

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There are Giant Monsters but when are they going to tear the cities apart like they should be doing instead of sitting around in a cornner waiting to be killed.

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Probably when the technology exists to do this on a regular basis, though, personally, I'd prefer not to 'adventure' in a city more or less permanently reduced to rubble. So, it's likely, if that technology were to exist, that building-trashing monsters would be so rare as to be seen by too few players to make them worth coding.

It's a game and you're asking for 'realistic' details which would make the game unplayable. Example: if the streets were really as crowded as you want, no one without a travel power would be able to go anywhere.

Yeah, have a good holiday, mate. Operative Seven will be around to keep a watchful eye on 'trouble' when you get back.

Take that back! No one has ever called me 'wise' before.

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just to confirm in my mind , what we found as a derivative of this ergotamine , not a natural product , some thing manufactured ? y/n

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Not necessarily a derivative, possibly a mutation, or even a modified version of an original mutation. Remember that we haven't found any 'original material' mostly just fragments banging through mass spectrometers. Piecing the exact structure together isn't easy.

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however we can find no history of any group making use of it or and derivative for criminal reasons ? y/n

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Technically, it can be used to derive LSD and some people have used it for that in the past. Certain sections of The Family have used it to create bulk precursor agents for LSD production.

However, with the proliferation of the various interesting designer drugs (such as Superadine) into the US market, demand for stuff as hard as LSD, but not as hard as the designer drugs has dropped to the point where it isn't economic to produce anything. (Besides which, if you had TV adverts on BAB standing there smacking his fist into his palm and saying "Just say No to drugs, kids" would you be doing anything?)


However, while hunting down data on possible variants, you do come across a couple of references to one rather odd case linked to ergot poisoning in 13th Century Italy. It seems that a small village named Valdoriso, fairly isolated but not hugely far from Polermo, was utterly destroyed in "a huge firestorm, such as might be conjured by the Devil himself, which laid waste to the village and all surrounding fields." About a week later, one survivor appeared at a neighbouring village, raving about demons with red eyes and dark servants. He died of heart failure after a day and scientists have later guessed that this was ergotamine poisoning.

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Would be lovely when you've scheduled a STF run for the next day and happen to get assigned the arc when running a few missions.

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Fine. Back to just tidying up the mission so it actually makes any sense and you don't think Maria Jenkins has just lost it.

Yeah, but the easiest way I can think of to handle that is simply to implement some form of Achievement badge for Arena Ratings.

The scheduling system would need to handle communicating to people who they need to fight at each stage, asynchronously handle collation of results, assign matches for the next round, etc. Over a multi-stage match system which could include hundreds of players. Then it has to handle drop-outs, it needs to have a mechanism for handling uneven numbers... I'm just coming up with this stuff in a couple of minutes of thinking as it comes out of my brain.

None of that is insurmountable, but also doing it so enough people actually take part to justify all that coding... I'd say some form of Rating badge would be a lot easier to do.

I think that, if they were actually going to implement the code needed to pull this off, then many people would be happy, and many would be unhappy.

1. I think we would lose the ability to shoot around corners (but so would the mobs).
2. I think what would actually happen is that you would hit the first thing the 'bolt' comes across instead of your actual target.

There are already powers, melee mostly, which act the way you are suggesting. The one I'm familiar with is Golden Dragonfly, which has an attack pattern which is a 10 foot long, very thin cone. Since there are already attacks like that, and it's a special feature of them, I don't think they would go with turning all ranged attacks into 80 foot melee cones.

Also, the current engine isn't up to this kind of tracking. If they were going to go to the trouble of upgrading it to allow it, they might as well do it properly and hit the first thing the attack cmes across.

For whatever reason, I prefer the one of Liberty Girl. Can't put my finger on why. Still nice.

Aha! So that's what she looks like in the bodysuit.

Nice work.

I find it hard (very hard) to believe that is a valid tactic, but if you say so.

Nope. Scheduling the matches and ensuring that the results are recorded is likely to be a much greater challenge. Any and all games have mechnisms for handing out rewards, that's a given, and without the existing Arena system there would be no option.

Producing a workable system to automate match scheduling... I can think of where to start, and I can think of all the complaints about it. I wouldn't want the job (and I need a job right now ).

( Quick reply, not specifically to anyone. )

Trial limits were introduced into LotRO after a couple of months due to the excessive amount of spam caused by gold-sellers. They were denied some forms of communication, not dissimilar to those outlined above.

Now, personally, I got very few gold-seller mails, and broadcast stuff didn't bother me since I totally ignored the broadcast traffic, it was a sewer. So I did not see the need for it. Others, however, thought it was a brilliant idea and said that the amount of spam they were getting had reduced to almost nothing. Of course, the gold-sellers just came up with another way of getting their message out...

So, one person's experience doesn't really count for much. The real situation could be terrible, but you're lucky. Or it could be Inf-pedlars just love sending you messages. The only people with a hope of knowing for sure are NCSoft, and they would need to datamine it heavily to find out.

The situation with level limits is another matter, and the communications blackout seems to be a little hamfisted. Level limits have nothing to do with gold-farming or gold-selling. The LotRO (and WoW) solution on communication is that people can only receive tells and such from trial accounts if the receiver has that character on their friends list. Not perfect, but fairly workable.

But it already happens in RV, so it has been implemented in one area. And implementing it significantly delayed production of that Issue.

And you just totally ignored the rest of my post to pick the one bit you could use to accuse me of dismissing your suggestion 'out of hand.' I am not dismissing it out of hand, I'm dismissing it after some careful thought and experience of comparable behaviour in other games.

Want something I could agree with? Well, everyone is always saying that Boomtown needs to be rebuilt. How about doing it Ahn'Quiraj-style? Set up a set of repeatable/non-repeatable missions which are based around clearing the area out and setting up a forward base. Then another set to further push into the area, regaining ground and rebuilding buildings. Slowly the place turns into a city zone.

However, let's go further and suggest that it's a two way street. The villains of the piece (perhaps aided by hired Villains out of the Rogue Isles) can push back. (I'm not proposing turning it into a PvP Zone, not in any way.)

Advantage: Boomtown has no shops or contacts, so you can't disrupt the normal flow of PvE if it falls back into chaos.

Call it a Competitive PvE Zone.

(( Okay, the history of erogtamine, City of Heroes style. Not too different from the real version, actually. ))

Ergot is a form of fungus which parasitizes certain grains and grasses, including rye wheat. It contains as about 2% of its mass an alkaloid called ergotamine. For non-checmists, alkaloids are bad no matter what they are called, ergotamine is no better.

Normal ergotamine results in constriction of the vascular system causing a burning sensation in the limbs, halucination, irrational behaviour, convulsions and death. The loss of blood to some limbs can be severe enough to result in gangrene and loss of the affected limb(s). It is wonderful stuff.

All the famous stories in history revolve around people arriving in towns to discover the population wandering around and watching the pretty colours after their flour has been contaminated with ergotamine during the milling process. The basic mechanism for this is that ergotamine can act as a precursor for the production on lysergic acid, which is a primary component of LSD. Contaminate the food supply and you end up with a village full of happy, hippy, tripping peasants.

Such cases have, of course, died out (mostly, you still see the odd case) because people have learned to identify the fungus infection and reject the affected rye, because rye bread itself is less popular, and because there are fungicides able to deal with ergot before it becomes too prolific.