SlickRiptide

Did You Know? - Ascendant's Phone Calls

Have you ever been hanging around a tram, and seen one of the "cell phone chat" NPC's spit out something like this:

"[NPC] Brice: Ascendant who? Sorry, you have the wrong number"

This is a nod to a particular player whose Hero made a running gag out of standing at the tram, using his own cell phone emote and others as well and having phone conversations for the entertainment of anyone who happened to be in hearing distance. They were pretty universally recognized as being darn funny. heh.

Ascendant eventually posted the scripts to the phone calls in the Roleplaying forum. Have a look. Just reading the scripts and imagining them being acted out is worth a bunch of laughs. Enough so that Ascendant found himself forever immortalized in the game chatter.

Did You Know -- You can find some of the best threads on the forums (including the link to the "If one of my heroes was on Omega Team" letters thread) at Best Threads Over the Last 6 Years

That is the most inspired powerset I've seen in a long time.

I think there's only one thing to say:

Did You know -- City Hall

In this age of Ultra Mode and honest to goodness reflective windows and armor, it may not be obvious that we still have an example of old school ingenuity in the game.

The floor of the City Hall foyer appears to be reflective but this is an illusion. When the game launched nearly eight years ago there was no Ultra Mode and no video cards that could have handled reflections so well as they do now.

That didn't faze the world designers of Paragon Studios (which was Cryptic Studios at the time). They came up with a simple and clever trick to simulate reflection - The floor is actually transparent. The "reflection" is an exact mirror duplicate of the building above the floor. This is why your characters don't cast shadows on it and why you don't see your own reflections. It's because there aren't any.

If you take the time to examine the "reflection" closely, you can spot minor differences between the lower image and the structure above that it is duplicating. Mostly, I'd guess that's just the passage of time and a bit of dressing up of the "real" building in comparison to the reflected building.

Greetings, Citizens of Paragon City and even you less savory citizens of the Rogue Isles and beyond.

In March of 2006, I started up a thread that I called Did You Know - The Unofficial History Thread. It's purpose was to make a place where the players could record the bits of trivia and history that they knew about the game that were slowly vanishing into the mists of the internet.

The original thread had a pretty good run and it was still being added to occasionally as late as last year, when forum moderation finally caught up with it and it was closed under suspicion of being a zombie.

At its launch, I had encouraged contributors to document not just the past, but also the present as "Something significant that happened yesterday will be ancient history when it's read by someone playing Galaxy of Heroes five years from now".

Well, here it is, five years later, all of that stuff really IS ancient history, and we're now standing at the threshold of the biggest change ever in the history of the game.

The Hellions and the Lost were right all along. The New World Order is here. The Change has arrived.

A lot of things are going to be changing around here, immediately and into the future. It falls upon us at the threshold to spend some effort to preserve some measure of the knowledge of our game, its history, its trivia, its stories and the stories of its developers.

If you know a factoid about the game or have a story or a bit of lore that you think that other players, vets or Freems, would find interesting, then take a few minutes and post it here. With Freedom looming, the caveat of five years ago is even more applicable - Namely, if it's recent that's no reason to hold it back. In five years, there'll be players who never even heard of it.

Oh, and on a related note - TonyV and the Titan Network have done an admirable job of not only documenting the state of the game but of preserving web-based resources that were in danger of disappearing forever, like RedTomax's Guides, The Paragon Times, and Mantid's old emote guide, now improved upon. The current Atlas Park and Galaxy City mission content is going the way of the dodo except for possibly Ouroboros missions. If you have an interest in lore and you have a bit of time, you might run a newbie through one or two of the low level missions and make sure that Paragon Wiki is updated with the latest and greatest before it becomes the recently deceased.

Wow, Freedom really is bringing out the old-timers. I'm pretty sure I saw a post by LadySadako sometime in the last month and Mr. Samoa is hanging around again. It's going to be Old Home Week pretty soon.

ObNameAdvice

Thesaurus.com is your friend. Even if your first choice is taken, there's a good chance that you can find something just as colorful by picking a word or phrase with a similar meaning as your preferred phrase.

I think it goes without saying that LW can't be trusted either. Especially if he's becoming overt instead of covert. I want to know what HIS agenda is. Even if he really is some alternate version of myself. My future self theoretically already judged things screwed up enough in the future that he sent Ramiel back to re-jigger things. If LW is me, then he automatically is untrustworthy because he's behind the times.

The fact is that we're having this discussion because there's no way to verify anybody's stories from a game mechanics perspective. I tend to operate on the assumption that LW is telling the truth insomuch as what he says about the menders is all stuff that can be verified. Twilight's Son might hem and haw about his past, but Tess wouldn't bother with that; she'd brag about her past glory even if she was secretive about the particulars of what led her to become a Mender and subject herself to semi-permanent quantum scaline. I have the impression that Lazarus considers himself your good buddy and would be amenable to opening up about himself given the right persuasion.

From a story perspective, it ought to be possible to approach the Menders and hear their sides of the story. LW even says that they know he exists, so if you are willing to take the risk of being associated with LW, you could take the approach of being completely open about the letters and seeing what truth or lies you learn from that strategy.

Whether his agenda is intrinsically better than Silos' agenda is an open question. I'd rather be pursuing MY agenda, so for the moment I do Silos' bidding but I reserve judgement on whether either of them is worth trusting.

It's mildly amusing to leap from the top of a skyscraper and summon your rocket board just before you hit the ground.

I typically spend a half-hour or more on the costume, but sometimes I like to just roll the dice and see what happens. I have several heroes who had no concept at all until some random costume appeared, and after tweaking it for an hour, I had a uniform, a concept and a backstory, all pulled out of thin air, as it were.

Despite all of the weird and wrong combos that come out, there are a whole bunch of "right" or almost "right" combos that show up. I think it speaks to the strength of the art design of the game that we can have this huge variety that actually works together instead of it just being a hodge podge of clashing parts when you use them outside of their designated sets.

Mind you I've had enough armor to last another 8 years but all in all, I'm pretty happy with the amazing wardrobe that we have available.

I've played a number of Controllers and a smaller number of Defenders over the years, with only one ever being Empathy; an Empathy/Trick Arrow. I knew the basics of Empathy but hadn't found that it was a particularly attractive option for me. (Ill/Rad's more my speed and controllers in general.)

Tonight I tried out an Empathy/Rad and it was, well, rad!

I love the speed of Defender Rad Blast and combined with the constant healing (Death from Below trial on beta) I was always doing something; never standing around waiting for something to recharge. I can see where this combo has a lot of potential to be a decent blaster as well as a healer/buffer.

Any tips? I've had a Rad/Rad defender since the game launched so I've got some experience with the blast part already. I've got some basic experience with the empathy part. I guess I could use some build advice. I'm not really the "stand around and heal people" type. I want some offense along with my defense.

Thanks.

Based on the prices currently listed in the Beta store, the values of GvE versus Going Rogue are as follows:

Good vs Evil
Justice Armor - 280 pts
Sinister Armor - 300 pts
Pocket D Gold Card -- 500 pts
Jump Jet - 300 pts
-----------------------
1380 pts

Going Rogue
Alpha Armor - 400 pts
Omega Armor - 360 pts
Alignment System - 1200 pts
Create a Praetorian - 1200 pts
Praetorian Costume bits - 720 pts
Dual Pistols - 800 pts
Kinetic Melee - 800 pts
Electric Control - 800 pts
Demon Summoning - 800 pts
----------------------------------------
7080 pts

Based on those comparison, even if you remove Electric Control and Demon Summoning (because he won't have access to those archetypes w/o purchasing them) He'll still get a lot more value from the Going Rogue IF he'll actually use either Praetoria or the Alignment System.

If his son is on the youngish side and won't be interested in either Praetoria or side-switching, then I would recommend GvE just because the armors are cool and the jump jet and the Pocket D Gold Card are both very useful in their own rights.

However -- all that said - I'd say your friend should check out Amazon and Ebay because he's paying too much for GvE at that price. Heck, I bought Architect edition on eBay for a friend for $1. That's not common, but $9.99 IS common. $20 for box that's several years old is way too much, especially now that you have the option to buy the special bits piecemeal from the store. The only reason to spend $20 on GvE is that it's currently the only way to get those goodies.

This is still the only game anywhere where a play session can go like this:

"Hmm... I want something new. I haven't tried Street Justice Yet."

*Opens character creator*

*Click* *Click*

"Energy Aura is new. I should give that a try."

*Click* *Click* *Click*

"Pffft. I don't have the energy to make a whole costume right now."

*Random*
*Random*
*Random*

"Hmmm.... That looks interesting. What if I get rid of the tail?"

*Random*
*Random*
*Random*
"Hey, that actually looks good..."
*Random*
"Doh!"
*fume*
"Okay, fine."
*Random*
*Random*
*Random*
*Random*

"Hmm..."

"I never would have thought of putting those pieces together like that. Do I care about pointed ears?"

"Get rid of the tail, again... Tweak the colors a bit..."

"Hmm... Let's fix the patterns to the right ones for those pieces..."

"Well, that's not half bad."

*click*

*Set power colors to match the costume*

"Name? Ah - The Justiciar of Streets - Sometimes I amaze myself at my creativity!"

*Click* *Click*

"And awaaaaayyyy we go!"

Gotta love it!

I don't see a cake icon. How do we know it's his birthday?

If it IS his birthday, well, congrats to Dave on surviving yet another circuit of the Sun.