RemusShepherd

Folks, this is by design. You're not going to get clarification on when the reward tokens are received. Confusion and worry means that it's working as intended.

The entire point of microtransaction systems in MMO games is to make the player spend money. That goal is much easier if the player doesn't receive a stipend, like VIPs do in CoH. But when the player does receive a monthly stipend, the best strategy is for it to arrive at random times. That way the player never knows when they are going to be able to afford the microtransaction they have in mind, so they resort to the 'buy' button.

Multiple currencies exist in order to confuse players and make them spend money. Monthly stipends are delayed and randomized in order to confuse players and make them spend money. Microtransaction systems are designed with these tricks in order to make the players spend money. They want the players to be confused and cut off from communication with the devs because it makes you spend money.

This is the new City of Heroes. Get used to it.

Being an atheist or a skeptic means that you don't believe in supernatural forces. We're not talking about anything supernatural. We're talking about thought constructs within groups of human beings, whose effect on those beings mimics the effect that a living, sentient creature would have on that group.

Did Han Solo shoot first? Despite what Lucas thinks, the overwhelming opinion among the public is that he did. That's the same effect as if Han Solo was out in public contradicting Lucas himself. The character has entered public thoughtspace and now exerts some control over its own destiny.

Look up the definition of the tibetan word 'Tulpa'.

Thoughts can become alive. They inhabit human beings, like symbiotes or parasites. They can take on forms that their creator did not expect, because of the cross-pollination of ideas from other people.

They also fight, because there are a limited number of human beings in the world. Memes, Tulpas, and Gods are in a constant war for human attention. Or in words I've used before:

If you're interested in the interaction between thoughts and human culture, you might enjoy the webcomic that quote came from.

None of them are isolated, because they exist inside the communal thoughtspace of human culture. There are walls between them, because there are different groups involved in creating them in different subcultures. The movie-going populace is not exactly the same as the comic-reading populace. But they intermingle, and intermix. The only way to isolate a thought is for the human being who holds it to never speak of it.

I feel like going back and forth, actually.

The problem with Starfire is that DC is just doing bad business. The 'waifu' Starfire was popular with over a million viewers. The original Starfire was in a book that sold maybe 10,000 copies. If DC wants readers, they should do things that people *like*. The waifu Starfire was such an obvious success, why not reboot the character into *that*?

All of DC's work lately seems to have the same problem -- they're just using bad business sense. It's like someone in the boardroom is making choices based on how badly they can screw up their brand. Power Girl is another example. If you have a character known for her sexuality, you *play that up*, not down, if you want to sell books. DC is just being stupid.

(Personally, I think Power Girl should get her abilities from 'girl power', and be a sexual vamp on par with Catwoman. Whereas Catwoman, coming from a hard childhood, should be much more demure and skittish than her 'New 52' outrageousness. Ah, if only they'd let me write those comics...)

The difference, to me, is that Marvel seems to be having fun in their quest for money.

"Let's turn everyone into spiders! Hell yeah! Give a bunch of heroes giant friggin' hammers! Push out even more films! Make Spider-man, I dunno, hispanic! Have the X-men fight the Avengers! Bring some more tequila in here, let's see what other freaky crap we can think up!"

In contrast, DC just seems to be cynical and joyless right now. I hope they break out of their funk.

Okay, so I'm hearing '#3' is the criteria. In other words, I'm not wanted. Not a problem. Best of luck with your club.

Ponies, mostly.

I believe that's changed back and forth with different incarnations of Batman. In Batman TAS, at least, his parents were killed on Christmas Eve.

Long past time. But someone in management decided long ago not to do that. Instead, they want to see how far they can take CoH 1 by extending and adding onto it. Unfortunately they've glommed so much detritus onto the old system that the base game isn't any fun anymore.

There won't be a CoH 2. Ever. NCSoft's business plan is to drive this one into the ground, while developing new MMOs to attract and retain players (such as WildStar).

Note that The Hobbit is being split into two films. If they handle Smaug in the first film, then the Battle of Five Armies will probably be the climax of the second. So you won't see it until December 2013.

This series of movies has become a part of my -- middle-age-hood? -- far more than the books were part of my childhood. I'm excited to see Middle Earth on screen again.

Now I want to see a film titled, The Three Stooges vs. The Marx Brothers.

Although that's a lopsided fight. The Marx brothers would wipe the floor with everybody except Curly.

If it helps any, the animation artwork is of excellent quality. Easily as good as any modern anime. The voice dubbing on the English version is very good also.

The story, on the other hand, is a bit bizarre, and I'm not surprised to see it be mangled in an Americanized version. Of course everybody knew this was going to happen.

I'm not. It's reaaaaaallly crazy.

There's an easier solution, you know, if we focus on the fact that we can only take four power pools. And if we simplify a lot.

Let's start by agreeing on some terminology. I'm going to use {x y} as shorthand for the binomial coefficient (= x!/(y!(x-y)!)), because I can't write the over/under notation on this forum.

Before inherent stamina, we had 10 power pools and four possible power pools we could take. Add one power pool as the 'no pool' option. But the binomial coefficient is exclusive, meaning that you can't take an item twice, and we have to disallow the 'zero pools' option because it isn't possible. I think it's valid to treat that as 10 power pools + 3 'empty' pools, or 13 choices for the four pool slots. That gives us { 13 4 } = 715 permutations.

If we assume that *everyone* had stamina (which was not true) then that condenses into { 12 3 } = 220 permutations. (9 remaining power pools, + 3 'empty' possible choices, into 3 slots, with the fourth slot filled by Fitness.)

After inherent stamina, we have 9 power pools and four possible pools to take. Still can't build a character with zero power pools. So the number of permutations is { 12 4 } = 495.

There's a lot to tweak in here. We're allowing the possibility of taking all four travel powers or none at all, and we're assuming Presence is taken as often as all the other pools. I think players gravitate toward the same pools (Leadership, Fighting, and Leaping for Combat Jumping) so often that there are far fewer options than we've calcuated here. And of course we're ignoring slotting. But it's a good rough cut.

I'm not sure it solves the argument, though. If you considered Stamina mandatory, then making Stamina inherent gave you a great many new combinations. If you didn't consider Stamina absolutely mandatory, then making it inherent cut the number of possibilities by a fairly drastic amount.

Personally, I had two characters out of about twenty that didn't have stamina. So I didn't exactly consider it mandatory. On the other hand, I don't think staminaless builds were very prevalent. Is the ability to be unique useful if nobody ever does it? (That brings up an uncomfortable corrollary: Am I nobody? )

I think we can say for certain that options were lost. Whether they were meaningful options is still up for debate. Regardless, they should give us more power pools, for those of us for whom uniqueness in gameplay is more important than uniqueness in costume.

My main complaint about the incarnate system is not that it's gimmicky. I like that you need strategy to defeat some of the trials. I just hate that the strategy is reserved for large teams, which I have no desire to organize and lead. I also think the system is an extreme grind, and grinds are bad.

I would love for some of the strategic incarnate content to become solo or single-team missions. In fact, I suggested exactly that earlier in this thread.

How about dividing by the number of builds that are functionally equivalent? That would be a fair definition.

Remember my scraptroller? I wanted a scraptroller, but after inherent fitness I found myself with all my AT powers. In gameplay terms, she's now functionally equivalent to any other Plant/TA...and that's pretty much the same as any other controller.

I want a diversity of gameplay options. Running into melee, staying at range, controlling everything, stun and gun, working the terrain while healing, AoE gambling, knockdown juggling...etc. These are all different tactics you can plan a character around. I know, people nowadays only know how to zerg rush, but I like being a little more strategic when I play.

The more builds are functionally equivalent, the more generalized gameplay options are, until the most efficient -- apparently that's the zerg rush -- is all that's worth doing. No content is any more challenging than any other. There becomes no point in making characters with rare abilities, because no abilities are rare anymore.

Examples: I once built a dark tank with the presence pool to create a fear tanker. (Respeced out of that, eventually.) I have an AR/Storm corruptor who is the knockback king, with something like eight powers slotted for knockback. There are things he can't solo, but there are also things that he can do that no other character can, like solo AVs that aren't KB-immune. My plant/TA used to be a scraptroller. My Mind/Rad used to be all about recharge (the incarnate buffs killed that concept).

I want to be unique. Doesn't everyone? Isn't that what all the fuss about costumes is about? I want unique gameplay, a unique character that plays in a way that I designed. Now, complete uniqueness isn't possible. But the more people there are who who share my exact same build the less fun that character is for me. And with inherent stamina and optional travel powers it has become harder and harder to build characters in unique directions.

Let's say that power #11 is a control power. It's the only control power in the game and anyone who takes it assumes the controller's role. Of your original 15504 permutations, 3,876 will have that role -- exactly 25% of the playerbase, assuming power choices are essentially random. (If they're not random and people optimize -- as I believe they do -- that works in my argument's favor.)

After your power giveaway, 1820 of your 6188 permutations take the controller's role -- about 29%. There are more controllers than ever before, and more people that can be a controller on demand. The ability to control is less rare. The controller version of gameplay is more common. This is true for every unique power in your list. Diversity has been lost across the board.

Expanding the opportunity to choose is bad if the options available to choose are not expanded. If such a trend is established, it will lead to homogenization. That's the problem.

That was our first attempt at quantifying the number of possible builds and what has been lost. In it I discarded the notion of multiple travel powers and some nonsensical choices like one-slotted maneuvers. So it's not as bad as that.

But even if it were, there are a lot of builds still possible. One-third of a very large number is still a very large number. So it could be that dramatic and not visible because the set of builds is still uncountable.

[/quote]And you haven't been claiming the reduction is small, but severe even in the general case: (...) Unless by "decimated" you mean in the original sense of the word: to remove one out of ten. If by "decimated diversity" you meant that diversity has been reduced by perhaps 10%, that's theoretically possible, although I think not likely. Not many people would have interpreted that statement in exactly that way, however.[/QUOTE]

Yes, I'm a writer and I use words carefully.

The only way to make this analogy work is if the devs also gave us three more power slots at the same time. (Or five, considering that travel powers are easier or optional these days.) The additional passives causes no change. But having more power slots, but with only a few options available to put in them, drives the population of players to share powers more often.

I can almost agree with this. I agree that the loss in diversity isn't large -- I'm more worried that it's an ongoing trend. But I don't think there is a counterbalancing effect caused by freeing up power pools. If a character already has three power pools and inherent stamina, their choices for what to put in that last pool is even smaller. I believe that almost all characters of the same AT are going to take the same power pools, especially the ones who plan to take four.

There just aren't many options. There are only 9 power pools, four of which are travel powers. One of which (Presence) is universally shunned except by concept characters. If you only take one travel pool then you are taking four power pools out of only five options. There isn't much diversity in that.

Now, it's not quite that bad because players may dabble in the travel pools for powers like Combat Jumping and Air Superiority. I also admit that I may be wrong about how popular multiple travel powers are among the playerbase. I've never taken more than one, myself -- character concept is important to me, and I've yet to see a concept beyond Taxibot that justifies more than one way to travel.

But I maintain that there has been a loss in character diversity. More generally, they're allowing us to make fewer options that have real consequences. That is the problem.

Because you didn't trade. You added. You both originally had stamina, and you both now have stamina and fighting. You used to share 3 powers from pools in common, now you share 6-8 (I've lost track of the travel powers by this point.)

You lost a difference in gameplay. Not so much in the example of your two blasters because they made identical choices, but let's compare them to a blaster that had Fighting before inherent stamina. That blaster could last longer in melee and had exceptional staying power against certain opponents. Now your blaster has those same characteristics.

I agree. Unfortunately for you, we're not talking about a trade -- we're talking about additional powers. You can't deny that adding identical powers makes the builds more similar.

Not if they're different power pools. Stamina was ubiquitous and is still. Other power pools are near ubiquitous now when they weren't before. Stating that this is more diverse is either dishonest or ignorant.

Try to calm down and think before you post, please.

I feel the same way about you.

You don't understand that people used to have at least three powers in common, but they now have at least 6 to 8 powers in common. That's a loss in character diversity across the playerbase.

Maybe you're confusing 'diversity' with 'diversity of powers in a single character'. That's not what I've been talking about. I'm talking about the population becoming more like each other. The more powers people have out of a limited set of options, the less diversity there is. When everyone can do everything, nobody will be special.

That's so simple that I'm at a loss why you can't comprehend it.

I did not say 'near identical'. I said there was a loss of diversity. I stand behind that.

Yea, Banshee could brawl. No, Psylocke with her original powers could not attack at range unless she picked up a gun. The fact that they both now fly and both now have fighting skill *does* make them much more similar. The fact that they still perform different functions is beside the point -- they are now more capable at each others' roles, if they should choose to do them.

'Choice'. Funny word. You have more power slots -- more opportunity to make choices. But you have less options -- less choices that you could actually make.

No, because the suggestions I gave are all geared to giving players choices that are meaningful.

No, it's saying that I don't care about costume options, especially during discussions of gameplay.

I swear, you people are putting so many words in my mouth you may as well argue with a straw mannequin of me.

The loss of diversity in characters is small. I said that at the start, and I've never taken any of the extreme stands you're painting me with. But there is a small loss of diversity, and it's part of a disturbing trend. That's all I've been saying. Let's not put anything else in my mouth unless you buy me dinner first, okay?