Sardan

You can certainly roleplay it that way, but the idea that inf is just a proxy for reputation died a long time ago. I can give a level 1 player who has zero XP 2 billion inf. He can now buy the finest gear in the game, yet has no reputation due to accomplishments. When you do a transaction at Wentworth's, you're paying for an item through an intermediary that then exacts a fee for conducting the transaction. Care to explain how that works as an exchange of reputation?

It's game money, pure and simple.

Well, I hope this is just what it seems on the surface: that Melissa is being promoted because she's earned it, and Posi is going back to something he loves doing, which is more of the hands-on design.

Or (I hope this isn't the case) it could be that the Posi move was a vote of no confidence by the game's producers. Or it could be that it's a vote of extremely high confidence by getting him to work on a critical area of the game for now, then freeing him up to work on a next-gen MMO after he's done with this project. We just can't know, nor should we.

EDIT: I don't read anything suspicious into BaBs's shutting off PMs. He's far and away the most accessible dev with the biggest presence on the forums. He probably constantly had a full PM inbox and he, like the rest of the team, is under a lot of pressure to do a ton of GR stuff right now so he's trying to focus.

Are there really that many recovery buffs from sets? I know you can do things like that the Numina and Miracle specials and the Performance Shifter +End proc.... you also should pick up the End-boosting accolades (Force of Nature, Marshal, Born in Battle). That plus frankenslotting for strong End reduction has always been enough for me.

With my Fire/Dark I focused on getting lots of +recharge. Having stuff like Tar Patch and Rain of Fire come up faster is awesome; I can always mitigate End issues by eating a blue.

Well, I think the key here is that you were ramping up Fury by fighting the minion first. The downside of brutes is that if you just start a fight cold with an empty fury bar, you're doing less than tank level damage. But once you have enemies pounding on you for a while and you've been spamming attacks, that Fury bar climbs and it's SMASH time. Downtime is a brute's enemy. People talk about scrapperlock but honestly nothing in the game has made me do more stupid pushing of the limits of survival than seeing I've got a full Fury bar.

Eh, it gets spread around. I've seen posts complaining to BaBs that he wasn't working on fixing base raids.

Actually I'd say the MA is a stellar success compared to the PVP revamp that Posi headed up. I think that qualifies as "unmitigated disaster".

GG, I know that animated hair is like a holy quest for you, but given that BaBs recently reported testing with multiple capes and the news wasn't good, I think you can lay that to rest. Animated hair would be the performance equivalent of a second cape, and the framerate hit would be unacceptable. At least that's what I read into BaBs's comments.

Any new influence sink would simply increase the demand for game currency. There will always be a certain percentage of players that turn to RMT if the perceived risk of using the service is low.

Personally I'd like to see scaling Wentworth's fees. For new players without much money, they'd just have the current fee schedule. But if you're buying a Luck of the Gambler global recharge proc for 100M, you'd get socked with a significantly larger fee. Buying a PVP 3% defense IO for 2 Billion? A special Hoover animation will play over your character's head as the fee is collected.

I used to have long load times on an older computer. I upgraded its RAM (nothing else, just RAM) and it made a HUGE difference.

Just to be fair, since I'm in software development myself, I didn't say it'd be easy to add a DPS calculator to Mids, or say something like "Mids is teh suxxor without it!" I just said it'd be nice to have, because while calculating DPS isn't hard, it isn't' something most people bother with. I'm well aware that functions that look like they should be easy to add to an app are sometimes exceedingly difficult for reasons that can't be intuited when you're on the outside looking in.
I couldn't agree with you more! All the volunteers of the Titan Network are offering an invaluable service for the players of this game. In fact, I just hit the Paragon Wiki home page and donated to support them.

Haha, well said.

I think what they did was associate the new dingle dingle dingle sound only with the caster so it only plays once. One reason why the old sound was so intense and awesome was that every affected target triggered the sound, so 12 enemies hit equaled 12 copies of the sound f/x played.

Agreed. For quite a while I was upset that level pacts didn't allow for 3 characters because I have 2 kids and it seemed like the perfect mechanism for teaming with both of them and not having to find a 4th teammate just to SK one of them. But with SSK I can easily SK both of them and not be penalized when they're not online. It's a far better solution for me than SSK, frankly. I don't want to PL them while they're playing Rock Band.

That'd be a nice feature to add to Mids at some point. Before IOs and Mids, there was another hero planner that had a feature where you could assemble attack chains in the GUI and compare DPS and End cost, wasn't there?

I think pretty much everyone who heard it the old way would agree it was a lot more impressive. It was a nearly tactile event when you hit a ton of enemies with FS, the sound effect was so intense. But once it was identified as the villain causing so many crashes, folks understood it needed to be changed. Still, I'd love a somewhat more intense sound effect than the underwhelming one we now have.

Hmm, a GR question that hasn't been asked yet.... Okay here's one: what does Tyrant eat for breakfast? I mean, I know it isn't Wheaties because that's the.....



.... wait for it.....




.... breakfast of Champions!

Right, but the point Sam and I were trying to make is that it was extremely artificial. Normally separate games are truly distinct even when built on the same engine. Oddly, Arcana used the example of Champions and Star Trek; those games share a lot of tech and probably use the same engine but they're truly separate games. They couldn't possibly be merged no matter how much underlying tech they share.

CoV was what any objective observer would call an expansion, but it was sold in a novel way that didn't require you to buy the earlier bits of the game. After it failed as a separate SKU in retail it was folded in with CoH. EDIT: I shouldn't say it failed. I'm sure it had decent short term sales. But it didn't build a lasting following as a separate purchase. At best it probably had 1/4 to 1/3 the sales of CoH. Not enough to command shelf space once the new wore off.

This whole little sub-debate came about because it was asserted that new ATs were included with COV because it was a separate game, but since GR is an expansion it is fundamentally different and we shouldn't expect new ATs. I disagreed; it's not that I expect or demand new ATs in an expansion, but were any to be introduced it's the logical way to introduce them.

It mentioned Universal Expansion Slots. It said that the level cap would not be raised, but that the UES's would allow you to reach the power level equivalent of level 60.

*RIMSHOT*

Interesting. That's the first I'd heard that this was directly asked and answered unequivocally. I had hoped that they'd introduce at least one new AT and its existence was being saved for a "big reveal" by marketing.

The only thing that made COV a "separate game" as opposed to an expansion was the way it was marketed. It used the same engine, same servers, and a ton of shared assets. In fact, it's not a separate game any more and that was not accomplished via exotic technology, just by changing the way the game is marketed.

But that's beside the point. It's not like only new games get new ATs but expansions don't. There are plenty of other MMOs that have introduced new ATs via expansions.

Ultimately the bottom line is value for money. Players will just look at the mix of goodies in GR and decide if it's worth it. The value is subjective and different for every player; the goal is to include enough new goodies that the majority of the playerbase decides it's a must-have purchase.

The latter number is the largest positive signed number you can store in a 4 byte integer value, i.e. it's 2^31 - 1 since the last bit is a sign bit. When computer scientists refer to 2 gigabytes they mean this number rather than a nice even 2 billion.

I just love Dr. Aeon.

Speaking for blasters everywhere, I'd have to say: yes, we do. Quite enthusiastically, in many cases.

I've seen that a time or two. But I always assumed it the characters were controlled by low wage workers at some Chinese gold farming outfit. I didn't even realize true software controlled bots were in CoH.