SilverAgeFan

Devs,

Please for the love of peter paul and mary, do not introduce a new form of salvage or xp for the next sets of trials (and slots if they are released as part of the incarnate content)!

Why? Because though I'm really enjoying doing run after run of the two current trials, eventually I'm going to want a little variety in my endgame play. If whenever I want to work on getting salvage for these four slots, I really do not want to be limited to doing ONLY these two trials (or using the very prohibitive conversion rates).

It may seem early to some other players to start lobbying for this design decision, but based on past design decisions I believe we can't start voicing our pragmatic opinions on this topic soon enough:

For the next several trials and ideally next four slots, no new salvage (or at least root salvage: i.e. shards vs. threads) elements please!

I must say, after 4 failed BAFs and 7 or 8 failed Lambdas (each of which inches further along towards completion as folks slowly climb that learning curve) and despite all the problems with the LFG tool and the total lack of costume bits, I am actually having a blast with i20. So yeah, *thumbs up* devs.

I am critical of many parts and decisions when I post, but I hope it seen at worst as a form of fan based tough love.

Yes. Seeing the LFG tool in action in its current incarnation in a "boots on the ground" live server situation as opposed to an intensive brief test now or don't test at all window of a highly populated event focused beta reveals a number of problems.

Hopefully though now that the sub structure for the tool is in place, it can readily be tweaked and improved upon.

Till then, I suspect many people will ignore the tool (as you can't even get invited to a LEAGUE that is preparing to run the trial you've queued for while being queued!!!) and just team up socially in order to get close to full capacity leagues running these events.

One obvious improvement: when toggling the "league mode" for the player search tool, it should have options to display all character who are queued for various trials, indicating which trial (or the "first available" as that is an option) the player is lined up for. Maybe it should even list how long said player has been in the queue. Then a league master should be able to use this to invite players to form a full league more readily--and the invitees should ABSOLUTELY not have to unqueue themselves to get an invitation to the league.

Edit: And once some of the social engineering meets tool functionality kinks are worked out (if they do actually work at improving the tool and how it is accepted), the results should absolutely be ported over to the arena rolling matches queues. In fact, a sub menu on the LFG tab for Arena PVP queuing would be an excellent addition eventually IMO. (Yes I realize there are tons of problems with PVP still and I don't want to restart that discussion and debate here. I'm just asserting that an easy to use, well functioning tool would definitely help bring more bodies and casually PVP curious into the pipeline. Something that works better than the currently arcane arena tool where you sign up for rolling matches on most server never to see any actually happen.)

In practice on a lower population server, this tool is not working well at all.

The best case scenario for a soloist queued up is the following: a pocket D or RWZ league forms and leaves one or two slots open. These are then filled by soloists queued up. An attentive league leader will then need move these players over into one of the almost full teams so as to not hamper the team based buffs that the player may offer or the rate of experience and thread gain.

Another thing that seems off about this in the live setting are the times that the queues report are wildly inaccurate. It seems that the queue is maybe getting data from the server about how often any given trial is launching. Unfortunately, since most leagues are forming currently via social recruiting in the above stated zones and on server specific global channels, most trials are starting with full leagues. So a new trial maybe starting roughly every four or three minutes but that doesn't mean that someone queued up solo or on a small team will quickly find their way to an event. Instead, I've heard many people frustrated joining a league socially after queueing and waiting 15-20 minutes with no results even when estimated start times are ranging from 3-5 minutes.

Lastly, the toggle for "join event in progress" as well as the "rejoin your event" button after crashing out both seem to be doing nothing on the live setting.

I've had a blast today running the Lambda trial. Feels good doing it for keeps on a favorite character. And there's a lot of congeniality going around on Triumph so far with it being release day and many many people having never touched the beta.

At this point in development, based on the extensive quality libraries I've seen of costumes/armor/clothes other highly modded single player games have, I kind of wish they'd explore a management system for open sourcing some basic costume development to us players.

Chest emblems. Tights patterns. Bump and texture maps. Glow maps. New geometry would be great but obviously trickier due to inexperienced modders risking high poly count items. But the rest of those in technical terms are templated graphics files. I'm sure dozens if not hundreds of our very loyal fanbase have both the artistic and technical chops to help pitch in and bring some much needed growth and life to the whole CC system.

Yes there would need to be a submission system and vetting of costume items. Nobody wants their 5-6G CoH file to balloon to 12G, half of which are redundant, copyright infringing or vulgar skins and textures. And yes, I think ANY and ALL such items produced via players for players should be bundled into free content updates, never sold for profit by the studio. BUT at least such a system could help players finally realize certain concepts or open up new avenues of creativity that the dev team has (IMO) sometimes long neglected and underestimated the potential popularity of...

The one thing that fan creators would need is an offline version of the CC that draws from all live content and can also be used to test any new content visually before submitting it the Paragon approval pipeline.

Me, I'm tired of waiting for certain items and themes that I doubt will ever come. I'm personally ready to take matters into my own hands. My $.02 on the topic.

ugh. More bad news. Sounds like a containment area for spent fuel rods in the offlined reactor 4 building caught fire today. The fire is supposedly out. But several news agencies are reporting local radiation levels got fairly high during the incident.

Also looks like Japan's stock market is taking beating today in the wake of the three disasters. Admittedly, try as I might, I know even less about stocks than nuclear engineering. NPR's marketplace tonight had someone conveying an anecdote that for the moment some supply chains are breaking down as far south as Tokyo due to the overall disruption of infrastructure with grocers showing severe shortages of certain food staples. Hope some of the NGOs we are donating to can help alleviate these pressures soon. The radio program also had a brief comment regarding electricity rationing with some parts of the country being allotted only 8 hours of power a day, including power going to manufacturing plants.

Just saw on BBC that a third explosion has now taken place. This one at the containment building for core 2. They say likely another hydrogen explosion similar to the other two.

The disclaimer at the bottom of that image is pretty hilarious. As are the inaccuracies of even how many and where the meltdowns are occurring. According to that, four different sites are experiencing meltdown, with two on the west coast of the island.

Back to fact based stuff, sounds like core three is at significant risk of meltdown. There is more concern about this core reportedly because it is unique from the other three in that it uses plutonium and uranium at its core. As I understand it, plutonium degrades into much longer lived and more heavily radioactive elements.

I honestly didn't pay close attention to Chernobyl coverage as that disaster unfolded, but this is starting to sound more and more like similar results in that the immediate vicinity may have to be abandoned. From threads with industry experienced engineers, such as those at the oil drum, I'm getting the sense that the steps now being taken to cool cores 1 and 3, including pouring boron enriched sea water over them is essentially ruining the reactors. So the officials in charge have basically said "trash the equipment, prevent any further meltdown at all costs." Someone with better knowledge can fill in here, but what's the next step? Encase the reactor cores in tons of concrete after the process is cooled down? Or does stuff get salvaged and whatever is left of the fuel rods get reclaimed and then treated as one would any other solid nuclear plant waste?

Edit: there's a pretty good FAQ diary on daily Kos currently by a diarist claiming to have a nuclear engineering background. Pretty level headed and answers a number of my questions above and others I hadn't even thought of yet: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/0...e-Fukushima-QA

The detailed back and forth in the comments there is especially informative.