Ravenswing

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AS is unresisted in PvP, and unfortunately WP's defence values aren't really worth much in PvP, given that everyone has +accuracy slotting and set bonuses up the whazoo. Scrapper WP just doesn't have the HP to be able to recover from a (Build Up + AS) in time to avoid being two or three shot.

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'kay, seems fair. I used to have my finger on the Dull Pain key whenever I was standing still.

What used to really irritate me was not the initial AS, it was Placate. "Okay, you've hit Placate and gone Hidden again. Well I can still see you I'll just hit you and break the Hide... So Placate means I can't target you, even though I can see you?!! Stupid game."

Xemulas gets it.

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Man... no matter how i turn and spin the moral compass it still reads "Naughty"... i think it's borked!

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It's probably like that thing in Pirates of the Caribbean... it points you where you want to go.

Looked at that way, it's a bit daft. Average character lifespan is maybe a year. Even teenagers don't age that much in that time.

There are special cases, but the roleplayers who have done it have usually put the effort into recreating the character over and over again as they change, plus you can get a couple of inches height difference out of leg length, which works well for girls at least.

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Simplify this kind of thing to the point where a computer can judge it and you trivialise it to the point where it's just a game mechanic allowing people to switch sides when they want to.

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Erm, that's exactly what it is. Don't get me wrong, I love a good shades of grey story, but this isn't exactly Tolstoy here. It's a comic book game with values of right and wrong. Besides, they did mention a 3rd choice too.

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Never mind. When you've played a game set up like this and got hacked off with the mechanism you'll understand what I'm getting at.

Maybe if you read my post instead of the last sentence...

Probably not.

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The Scrap book suggestion is to make a book with special pictures that are saved when you use the Print screen key, and can be seen in your Info window, so that others can see your screenshots.

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I can feel my internet connection wincing from here.

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You are ofcouse able to edit the scrap book, so that you can choose wich pictures you want displayed with a maximum of 50 pictures.

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Checking my screenshots folder for an average, 50 screenshots is about 14MB of data. So you're looking at downloading a medium-sized patch when you view someone's scrapbook. Where are the files kept? Presumably the owner's PC, which means they can be edited, which means NCSoft have a potential sitaution of distributing porn, aside from the bandwidth involved in transfering all those files from PC to server to PC.

It isn't practical.

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Also a little side thing you can activate, is if you're using Age system, the game will automaticaly take a picture when you level up.

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Now, I could see a lot of people thinging this was a pretty cool idea as a standalone concept. Plenty of folks try to snap their 50 Ding and automating that would likely be a well thought of idea.

Road to Hell (it's paved with good intentions, you know).

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I suspect the morality will be based on the outcome of missions. Perhaps you have a choice of rescuing or kidnapping, robbing or recovering, saving or killing? Seems the easiest way to do it.. You have an alignment meter which swings based on the outcome of missions.

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Yeah, I reckon that'll be it, nice and simple.

Hopefully it won't be too abusable in the mission generator. It would suck if, for example, some nefarious mission maker made their "good" mission outcome give an "evil" swing.

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That's exactly my point. If you make it simple, it's not just less than adequate, it sucks.

In the example I gave, you can let someone go, or kill them. Letting them go swings the metre to good, killing them swings it to evil. Now, if they can't resist then it's a basic moral choice and can be judged by a machine, but the guy is trying to escape, so it's not that simple. If he escapes because you aren't good enough to catch him, that doesn't make you a good guy, it makes you an incompetent bad guy.

Now, in the eyes of your superior, that may amount to the same thing and you get booted out of the bad guy club, but that isn't likely to get you voted into the good guy club either.

Simplify this kind of thing to the point where a computer can judge it and you trivialise it to the point where it's just a game mechanic allowing people to switch sides when they want to.

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(And who's morals would it be based on anyway?)

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Oh, don't start that one again, please!

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It is actually a valid point. One of the things I basically hated about the NWN2 default campaign was their application of alignment shift. Their view of alignment simply wasn't mine and it was next to impossible to do anything even vaguely good without massively shifting toward Lawful and Good. They had two points on their alignment scale, LG and CE, and everything tended to push you towards one of those.

I'm not a great fan of 'Morality Meters'. For starters, they tend to be broken. I know of villain missions where you have the option of letting someone escape or killing them. Now, the morality scale will likely get adjusted to good if you let them escape, or evil if you kill them, but that's just plain wrong. I get my morality adjusted to good because I'm incompetent? The game can't know my intentions, it can only adjust the scale based on the results of the mission.

Equally, there are going to be heroes falling to the dark side because they messed up a few missions. I guess it means there would actually be consequences to failing some missions for a change, which would be nice, but a system like this doesn't reward heroic failure unless it is massively complex, which means long term development, and we won't see the results for a long time.

I'm okay to wait a bit for PCC, but if the choice is some half-baked morality system and PCC in a couple of months, or something which the devs think is great and I'll think sucks in a year, I'd rather they just forgot the morality system entirely.

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What's to discuss anyway? Everything mentioned sounds good. Do they want to know how much we would pay for it?

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Actually, I think that's exactly the point. The two options being:

a) nothing more than our subs, or
b) some.

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We have been given the full reassurance of NorCal that we do have an impact on what is going to happen to the game. They want to hear our feedback.

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Hey, Kerensky, I have this bridge in Brooklyn I heard you might be interested in buying...

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Out of interest, why /regen. I agree I stopped having trouble with Stalkers a while back when I can be bothered to go near a PvP zone, but that's mostly down to FA making them visible before they can AS me and the Alpha itself not being able to waste me.

What's so great about /regen as adverse to /wp, for example?

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WP can't heal back to full in under one second right after an AS, nor can they sit permanently at the Scrapper HP Cap like a well-slotted IOed Regen. Only bad stalkers are going to be visible via just FA. You'd need Tactics and FA and a powerset +Perc power running to see stalkers within 10 feet when they're at the stealth cap, and even then you'll never ever want to stand still when there's a GOOD stalker about.

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Clearly, I've never met a good Stalker.

WP has resistances and defence, which means they shouldn't ever have to heal as much from an AS... unless AS ignores resistances. Bare in mind I haven't been in game for well over a year, and IOs barely existed last time I was. I really only just started researching what can be done with them, never mind actually slotting any of them.

Impervium is too heavy. Kevlar is the way forward.

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And given that the minority (ie the forumgoers) killed the paid expansion last time, it's probably a good idea not to speak to them about it again

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Good point. I know I wouldn't listen to anyone on a forum.

D'Oh!

Anyway, I'm depressed. I was looking forward to those player missions sooner rather than later.

Thanks. Okay, engaging analytical part of brain for a bit... (It's Saturday, my brain was hoping for the day off.)

Unless that's a mock-up, that looks massively developed. What's the point in the survey if they've gone that far down the line of production?

The questions quoted in the survey seem a bit... well, obvious. I mean, who doesn't want power customisation? However, adding it would require a pretty extensive engine modification - the CoH2/CO engine perhaps. The new suggested archetype seems a bit odd, presumably aimed at the 'ambigous' starting zone, but there are no details so it's very hard to figure out what that AT would do. The suggested titles and that new AT seem like something that was suggested by players a year or two ago. It all seems a bit odd. A new engine with that kind of content would lock out people who did not buy it in a way which CoV's differentiation did not do (about the only thing you lost not buying CoV was SG bases, hardly a great loss at the time).

Now, given that Cryptic wanted to do another paid expansion after CoV and this was roundly rejected by the tightwads on the US forums ("we pays our subs we don't want a good game by you getting more money off us poor shlubs"), this could be another attempt to sound out a paid expansion given the upcoming CO/DCUO and the possibilities that the playerbase remaining does not contain the people who have left to play games where they have to pay for expansions (which they do happily despite saying they didn't want it in CoX).

But I still think it seems mighty odd.

Not currently, but there's no reason why not. I'd prefer that to having it as a vet reward (which is what the OP was suggesting for his slides).

I can't view the picture, and thanks, I'm now depressed. I was looking forward to that.

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For example if a magic, or mutation AT picks fly then theres nothing with the current fly animaton, but surely for a natural or science AT a more permanent form of the Raptor pack would be more appropriate...?



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Yes, but could easily be done with costume recipies.

That's Player Created Content, which is already slated for an upcoming free expansion, maybe even I13.

'Going Rogue' has been suggested as a potential mechanism since CoV came out Aardy (I'd imagine you're aware of that). I think it was largely rejected in favour of co-op zones. It's popular among badge collectors since it would let them get all the villain badges as well as the hero ones, and I think that's the only real advantage it has.

Edit: And, yes, this was a survey of what one SG would like in an expansion, not a new expansion idea from NCNC.

(( Hey, I'm having a bad week, give me a break. ))

I know this is an oft-stated anti-suggestion comment, but the vet reward sprints and slides were already existing animations checked in as something easy to unlock without doing any real work. If the devs have to spend time creating new animations for slides, then I'd kind of rather they spent that time doing something 90% of the game populace would care about, like a nosepicking animation.

Besides, handing out slide animations to a 5 year vet of the game is likely to result in them all leaving in disgust.

Love it. It's something of a more complex version of the systems used in other games where a mob drop spawns a quest/mission.

It could have almost enumerable potential sources of this salvage. What about random glowies on missions or in the street which drop a clue and then vanish. Static clickies in some places, similar to those 'secret' clickies in the Midnighter Clubs which give out a random clue every so often, like a slot machine.

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This thread got silly very quickly

And if you're going to run around in tights in RL, then make them black - they go with anything, formal or informal.

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You mean they do other colours apart from black


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Well, yeah - but they don't go so well with everything - which is why I recommended black

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White is okay too, but it makes you look fat. Black is very slimming on the legs.

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Only if its a matte black... other wise you look like an ageing aerobics instructor.

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Just go with Wolford. You can't go wrong with Wolford. (Actually, I sometimes think Jay has been at the Wolford back catalog when designing costumes.)

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i don't think they give out exter xp more then the rest, it just that they can all rez' alot more then other mob with make them seem to give out more

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I haven't checked recently, but prior to my break I checked. Freaks give more XP than other mobs of the same level. Basic fact.

The argument would be over whether it takes longer to kill them than other mobs, so it evens out overall. Personally, it's the XP/min rate I look at, not the value per mob, but some folks probably just look at the raw figures.

Best XP in the game is level range dependent and may have changed. Warburg PvE missions were awesome XP and I was massively happy to discover them. My main had been stuck at level 38 for months with no missions to do until Warburg came out and I did those two levels in about 2 days.