Turgenev

*tugs at his collar* Did it just get steamy in here? I think it did.

*cues up the Barry Whites*

Regular enough to where I've been missing most of the runs by the time I login to check. I see them in mid-evening, around 9pm Eastern to around 11ish. There's no set schedule; it's a matter of one person saying "Hey, let's raid", and drumming up the interest to get the ball rolling. All it takes is someone to stand up to lead, and most people will come along to help.

Wow. I had no idea how bad that show was until I saw it on Veoh. Here's a link to some compiled vids if anyone's interested.

http://www.veoh.com/search/videos/q/publisher:servac

Thanks, the sig is courtesy of Weazel13, an IRON bud of mine for almost 7 years now. He also produced this sig for Aion for me:

I promise you this.

They'll have to peel the spandex off from my cold, dead skin.

...and now, for Saturday morning breakfast!

Fixed.

And, to the OP: Welcome aboard to Freedom. Sorry it took so long for my personal welcome wagon to come rolling into the thread, I'm usually more proactive...

*calls J-Man*

"Dude, have I got the best recruit for you, EVAR..."

Not ignoring it at all, it wasn't "who" was getting the PLs that was the problem; it was "where", and the fact that it interfered with people who were genuinely trying to get normal teams. At least in GV/PI, the farm culture's expected. Being a lowbie in a lowbie zone, and getting blitzed with "lvl 52 boss farm 45+ only" all over the place, it conflicted with normal gaming for that zone. Make sense?

I'm far more inclined to say it's Aion's pre-selection period today that everyone's off doing. The Aion servers are slammed right now with pre-purchase users trying to lock in certain names.

As far as your global being empty is concerned, make new friends. My global's jam-packed now since I16 was released, I have to scroll down 3 pages to read all of the active users.

Currently online on Freedom at 3:30pm Eastern:

447 heroes not hidden
240 villains not hidden

Assume 1/3 of all people are in /hide, and we'd add on another 200ish heads to that, for a total of around 950 players during a work/school day.

You also posted this what, fragments of a second after the servers came back online this morning?

Fail.

Totally agree. Simple and fast and furious. I loved Force Push and being on Bespin... or having a fast repeater rifle, and just Force Speed in Canyon Oasis...

Re: Aoshi. Oddly, the day I was accepted, he ended up leaving IRON. So a great experience, but when he dropped off, I was kinda left in a loop for a couple of days before Reptile (now Ravenous) took over the team helm. And then things just got fun from there.

(Just searched for "Aoshi Jedi Knight"... found a bunch of Youtube vids of him. Yeah, this is what I had to fight with back in the day... He's insane...)

My two cents here, so take it or leave it.

I think the whole anti-AE mentality is a kneejerk reaction to AE being immediately appropriated by the farming industry, and having the farm frenzy overshadow Architect as a vessel of creative and new storylines for the playerbase, which was its original intent by the Dev and by a significant portion of the playerbase.

Personally, am I mad at AE farming? Not really. I've done it plenty of times, and you're right, it's ridiculously easy to farm in the environment that existed previous to Issue 16. Before AE, I had 5 lvl 50 toons, leveled normally. For a period of farming for 40 days, I have another eight 45+'s that I've always wanted to build. I'll say it now, in public: My farmed toons made me happy. I know, heresy, right?

But having the farmers take overwhelming root in two already incredibly busy zones for low-level players is what built the animosity towards them. Previously, the "farm zones" were always PI and GV, which were remote enough from most of the playerbase that they only ticked off high level whiners who bemoaned farming spam without realizing that hey, you can /ignore and go on with your life. And yeah, from the farming perspective, it made sense: You go where the money is, and with AE doors in lowbie zones, that's where you'd go to. So you have a clash of the farming crowds maximizing their efforts, and having non-farm players getting constantly drowned out. And of course, this only served to feed the pro-Champions spam from players who would kick off scripted complaints in broadcast about the death of COH, how AE has ruined the game, yadda yadda yadda. (I say scripted because from three sets of instances, I had logs of people starting the same dialogue in different zones/sides. Hooray, the marketing and the politics of fear mongering.)

If I could rewind back to April when Issue 14 hit, I'd have removed the AEs in AP and Cap, and left them in Galaxy City and Port Oakes instead. (To keep with having it accessible by lowbies; going radical, I'd have scrapped the in-zone AE entirely and just have it as an entrance to a specific "AE" zone that players could go to, similar to how the Vanguard depots are peppered through the zones.)

I have no problems with farmers getting their groove on, so long as it doesn't impact the gaming experience of other players overall. But when a new player logs into AP and hits a wall of "LFM AE 52+ boss farm NEED KIN 40+ ONLY" regularly and constantly... yeah, I think that'd make any sane person more than a little irritated, don't you think?

And yet, there's no "talk like a ninja day", now IS there?

*blink* OMG I LOVE BEHOLDERS

Just showing off to people like J-Man that I can ID people by their posting style, months or even years later. Carry on, carry on.

My god. UniqueDragon was right all this time.