Tyger

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Yeah, Loup got it pretty much right, but i'll clarify how i do it:

I write down each player in order that they are sat around the table.
I deal out as if the people were there, but face up to me, to each person.
I then send a tell to each person in order informing them of their hand. Short hand i use is [Number][Suit], i.e. King of Clubs = Kc, 9 of hearts = 9h, etc.
We then play the first round of betting; this is where the fun maths starts for me. I note down the magnitude of the bet, so $5 to start, but then someone raises to $10, so i change to $10. At the end of the round i times this by the players who have called to give the pot at that point. Anyone who has folded, but betted, i will note a -$5 or whatever under their name.
Then the flop is done, out of principal i burn one (even though not necessary), and turn 3. New round of betting, same idea as before. If someone folds here, i note the cumulative bet from this round and the first and put it as - under their name. Bets are added for this round, and total added to the pot.
Same as above for the turn and the river.
Ok, so now the showdown. By this point i have already worked out (as i have the cards infront of me) who has won the hand and can get on with working out the math whilst people RP the showdown with little prompts from me.

The loser(s) obviously get -$their_total_bet below their name.
The winner gets the total pot minus their total bet ($500 pot, player bet $150, so they get +$350) - noted below their name.

Rinse and repeat for as many hands as you care to do.

At the end, add up all the +$ and all the -$ and see who is the most up, or most down (most likely Dave or Ed for this one lol)

Enjoy. IF you ain't got a head for maths, i will pray for thee, or suggest you don't deal :P

[/ QUOTE ]Carol Vorderman, eat your heart out.

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Clarification

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I stand corrected.

I checked with our Engineering team to make sure that this is accurate. I didn't want to state something and then have to correct myself again.

1) If a player logs in during the two free character slot "gift" window, then those slots are placed in player's character slot inventories. Character Slots within your inventories can never be removed, even after the gift window closes.

2) If a player NEVER logs in during the character slot "gift" window, the window closes, then any new or re-activated player will never get the two free slots.

Please note that the free two slots are only being given to "active" accounts that Log into the game during this gift window. If your account is active, but you've never logged in, you're not getting your two free slots when the window closes.

3) Once a character slot (via Veteran Reward, free gift or purchased slot) is placed within a Player's Inventory, then the order in which they redeemed is irrelevant.

When we decide to end the two free character slot window, we will give advance notice.

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[/ QUOTE ]That's how I thought it was - getting two free slots would be for a limited time but once they were credited they are yours.

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cos u wouldnt need to upload it as if u have put time and effet into a cossie you rember most parts of it so u could just jump ingame n make it quickly before ppl start sending you tells or invites to teams

[/ QUOTE ]Which is how it works anyway when you first start and now with the new hide menu you can hide from invites, search, and tells when you are in the tailor.

Rapier Helicarrier, Medibay

He could hear them, he could see them, he'd helped design the training program... well he'd said about three or four words about it not being hot enough or the Igneous was a bit larger than that before Director Trenz ordered the programmer to make changes accordingly.. but for now he was dealing with a different problem; he'd been grounded.

The med tech was working him over with some scanner and Dr. Elttoc was saying some complicated medical jargon but he couldn't hear it over the constant ringing in his ears. A snap of the Doc's fingers focused his hearing somewhat painfully.

"Well, we've checked several times but as far as we can see there is nothing wrong with your ears or the bits inbetween. The headaches don't appear to have any physical factor that might be causing them so I'd imagine it's something psychological, possibly just stress. Have you noticed any changes in your current lifestyle?"

Tyger smirked as he thought about it.

"You mean besides joining a pan-dimensional police force, sponsored by the US army, flying aboard what can be described as a heli-carrier, juggling life aboard ship with that of my numerous family members and having a sudden craving for barbeque... no, not really"

A few moments of silence passed as the Doc looked slightly bewildered.

"I'm just going to assume that's what you cat-people eat and recommend that you take time off or at least cut back"
"But.."
"..CUT back at least. I know you aren't officially a soldier but you are putting your life on the line for this institution and I will not have your poor health putting others at risk. Nor, I think, will Director Trenz."

Tyger sighed and slipped off the examination table realising he had somewhat deliberately left out a big something but not something he could tell anyone. He had to be careful though; Trenz was a psychic like him. That familiar vibe kept sweeping over when they were in the same room and he was sure she picked that up from the glances she gave him.

I would like to see a few more random animations for moves - Brawl is particularly poingant when used with dual blades powerset you get a foot in face instead of left/right hook; that's something I'd like instituted to the power for everyone

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Expanding an all ready under used zone seems like a waste of dev time to me, aside from RPlayers the zone is not used unless its for an event, short cut or to stock up on insps

[/ QUOTE ]While I'd like to see expansion like the OP I would also have to agree with this.

The ski lodge is already enough expansion for now unless they find some spare time to piece together some counterpart which can be open for the counterpart summer holidays like a nice beachfront.

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Well You Could Have A Male That turns Into A Huge... So Like The Hulk? Maybe? From An Ordinary Man Into A Huge Green Killing Machine!

I agree With the Male Into Female Thing Is A Bit Creepy....

[/ QUOTE ]I think that's one of the (but not the main) reasons why they don't allow it. If you would allow male-to-huge then you would have to allow all variations of form change like say a female villain who turns into a rather large werewolf.

There's some technical reason to do with animations or something but that's irrelevant as it invalidates my arguement too much.

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Force Bubble's power description:
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Creates a large bubble which protects all allies inside. While active, this power keeps all foes at bay, protecting all allies inside from melee or short ranged attacks. More powerful foes may be able to penetrate the Force Bubble, but may slip and get knocked down and forced back if they try.

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[/ QUOTE ]Which it actually doesn't do very well once you take into account players that can have travel powers and knockback protection in the form of acrobatics or a set-IO (Kismet, I think).

I'd like to see it made stronger in that regard but only when villains have more than MMs-only access to the FF powerset.

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No, the modem I use is just not working. We'll have to reschedule this mission to another day, sorry guys.

[/ QUOTE ]Well:

1) My reliable PC is out
2) Star-Tyger is not yet in range
3) I had a show to go to for 8pm ; Paul Merton and it was hilarious

Take your pick of any as to why I could not attend. Hopefully I'll make it next time.

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The comments about The Hollows being worked on jumped out at me in particular on a skim read. The Hollows revamp was a tiny amount of work by comparison with revamping the PvP system. Whether that got done or not had zero impact on PvP work in the grand scheme of things. It was something War Witch got to do because there was an amount of time available in her schedule in which she could get that work done. There was a clear reason why Hollows was generally avoided, and the work done was to address that and was addressable with a clearly defined amount of work fit into a small window in a tight schedule. Any belief that working on updating The Hollows was resources "wasted" by not being allocated to PvP is really misleading.

[/ QUOTE ]I think that was time well spent along with the other warning system and we were warned that i12 would be smaller than most other issues content wise.

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There are many problems with PvP.

I am a casual PvPer, I tend to use the zones to 'stress test' now powers, what better way to test a new power than against a thinking opponent.

As with the topic in the US of a similar nature (entitled 'why does CoX pvp suck?') there were a lot of problems raised in the topic, I shall voice several raised.

Stalkers and blasters are simply unfun to fight against, I for one don't care about losing, heck I expect with a toon built for PvE primarily than PvP but being 1 or 2-slotted by someone is simply not fun, I love a stand up fight, hell even if I get mezzed (and forgot to bring breakfrees >.&gt and I last longer than 10 seconds, it's still a tad more fun than just being defeated with no possible chance of getting any shots in on the enemy whatsoever because I know it was my own stupidity that cost me the fight and not a game mechanic.

Base raids, while they may be fun, the cost of creating stuff only for it to be trashed while fighting simply means a lot of SGs wont open up to base raiding because it simply risks months (sometimes years) of work on their base to be trashed in under 20 minutes.

Melee classes (besides Stalkers) in PvP are under-represented, what we could do to really boost their PvP Viability is a tough one. Having melee attacks supress travel suppresion, while good, does bring up the problem of that, to quote:

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A flying Broadsword Scrapper doing a Brian Blessed and diving into attack an unsuspecting defender who, while trying to run like Stone Cold Steve Austin through Molasses, has no chance as the Scrapper wheels around for another attack before the supression wears off

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It's a hard problem to solve and I honestly can't think of a decent, no overpowered way, of solving it, better minds than I should be at work at solving the problem though.

FoTM builds are always going to be a problem, there really is no way of dealing with it, some set combos simply will outpreform others, however, perhaps making it so that the other sets aren't outpreformed by such a wide margin (buffing certain sets for PvP situations only) as to make them atleast a viable, if not alternative, choice where someone new could atleast succeed decently in PvP instead of being dropped every time like a dead weight simply because they made the wrong powerset choices.

No tangible rewards, for one, up the rep for kills gained, for gods sake get rid of the current decay rate, allow people to earn that 400 rep badge over time and increase the rep from a measly 1.00 upto a 10, that's still 40 PvPers you have to kill to gain that badge and you DON'T have to actually resort to rep farming to do it for a change.

The problem is that you end up going the WoW Arena route. Make PvP rewards completely outshadow 90% of the PvE rewards and it kills a large percentage simply because the PvP rewards are better (large raiding guilds suffered massively thanks to Arena simply because people could get perfectly viable PvE gear, not only with less effort but far easier than attending tier 4-5 PvE dungeon raids).

[/ QUOTE ]Doc makes some very good points, the main ones which jump out are the rep, blasters/stalkers, base raids and tangible rewards (as did a few others before him).

The rep points one would make me play a little more for starters mainly because the second rep badge grants a very useful gladiator badge which I can try and gain my healing badges on. I'm also told by certain rednames (possibly Bridger but can't clearly remember) that City PvP is geared towards team-based PvP, that we should band together to fight against these kind of malicious opponents but when we do the rep is usually shared in pitiful amounts between team-mates. One time I got 0.25 in a team which meant it would take about 1600 PvP opponents to defeat in order to get the 400 rep badge discounting the decay rate which would push that number even higher. Unless I was prepared to devote weeks and weeks of my life to getting it with a group of fun-loving people who could kick [censored] where I fell then it would just feel like time wasted (much like my one and only EU hami raid, i9 edition).

Tangible rewards - not so tricky, grant common recipes as rewards for PvP kills. The system can tell who you killed last anyway within a certain time limit so why not use it.

Blasters/stalkers - I agree with Doc in that it's not fun to be two-shotted to death by either something you can't see or something that can't be stopped. Doms got a boost to their mez strength which I think is underminded by the new blaster defiance and stalkers can have up to 3 layers of stealth before Bloody Bay and a move that does almost as much damage as an AV.

The only other problem I have with PvP is something that no amount of dev time short of employing full-time observers to each of the PvP zones is over-the-top trash-talking. I'm already feeling down about an under-performing (ie non PvP galvanized) build getting wiped out; the last thing I wanna hear is some mouthy player bragging about how he got me with his uber-kill-all build that he spent X billion inf on enhancements for. I now operate on a 'one-death, I leave' rule; if I die, I'm done, gone, out of there. This would probably fall under the category of power balancing as my main is FF and most of his powers really fall apart in PvP including Force Bubble (which is supposed to repel opponents but usually doesn't in PvP because players have higher mag resists than NPCs). But then that all leads back to teaming in PvP with my support class aiding the heavy hitters.

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If you're not having fun, then you're not playing properly

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I can't believe I'm saying this but GG is right.

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You were just in denial

[/ QUOTE ]I think it was the Ganges actually.

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The game is supposed to be played with free-flowing hair - as yet, it's not possible to play it properly

[/ QUOTE ]You said that about necklines... just give them a few years

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How is the game SUPPOSED to be played?

[/ QUOTE ] However way you want to play it.

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They explained it, eh? I'll try to hunt that down and see what on earth the reason was, as I can't for the life of me see how the power system a (100% virtual, game based) base would go "stale" if it's left unused for a while.

[/ QUOTE ]To save space. If a base goes unused then resources can be diverted elsewhere to compensate for more active groups' higher demands. It might also be an indication that the base gets archived since it's stored server-side to save on disk space.

From what I've experienced lapsing can occur even on a zero-rent plot but once any one person logs in the base gets restored to full working status about 24 hours later, perhaps during the daily maintenance window.

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Or it could trigger an area event. For example killing enough trolls in Skyway seling superadine might trigger the skyway Raving Supertrolls.

[/ QUOTE ]Not when they've just fixed the damn thing after nearly 3 years.

Maybe if the villains get beat on enough they attack the PPD instead...



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You know a thing like this IS allready implemented in the game. Every time a hero saves someones purse that person gives his or her thanks and the hero gets some influence for the effort.



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Unfortunatly, this thing isn't on Villians

[/ QUOTE ]"Thanks, you just saved me from that Skull guy"
"No problem"
<villain punches the citizen and whistles whilst stealing his wallet>

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Sorry I missed it, g/f was demanding of my attention....women!

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Tell me about it! They don't seem to understand that physical intimacy isn't as important as pretending to be a Super-Hero sometimes.

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If only you could combine the two without getting the oddest of looks.

[/ QUOTE ]You mean you haven't done that already?

- Revised Hamidon

Hami plays like his new i9 incarnation except that he will only spawn one full set of mitocondria. At 75%, 50% and 25% health he will spawn 3 Reviving Mitochondria at each level that will restore 1 to 5 of the missing Mitos (each one is responsible for a different colour; blue, green or yellow). If the 3 are defeated before they can restore any Mitos then teams can beat on the Hamidon until the next level. At 0% health Hami will explode and several underling Hami-buds will pop out to grow into the next Hamidon.

< Paragon City History >

One thing I can add to Hatesman's very elequant post is that the City universe has been the subject of a dimensinal incursion before: Reichsman. In the game history, Brian Webb announced to the world that he had broken the dimensional barrier and it brought Reichsman from the Axis universe. So people have been pretty freaked out about it since 1988.

As for members: Tyger is representing Vanguard (or at least one representative), he's had experience with interdimensional travel and he's not politically motivated or directly under the command of the Army. He's been fighting in Paragon for several years and has been a dedicated member of the Power Corps supergroup.

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Was thinking....

Are all of R.A.P.I.E.R from Military backgrounds? Or are some of them from civilian backgrounds? Just I was thinking, there are quite a few Psychics, so I had a rethink and might use my little used Archery/Devices missing persons specialist "Trace", but he wasn't Military, he was more like an advisor to the police. Would that be ok? He's lvl 24 too.

[/ QUOTE ]No. Tyger is definitely non-military. I've yet to run the full idea past Pious and co but I was hoping that he would be a non-com ataché from Vanguard. He is definitely not military trained but he did serve Vanguard for a short time during the first invasion.

From what I understand the group is military commissioned and can accomodate several backgrounds, civilian or otherwise.

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Tyger & Damsel in uniform and also, Pious.

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Slightly more tan than the version me and hates went for easily changeable ^_^

[/ QUOTE ]Actually Tyger's uniform color is black and white; that picture is him in supergroup colors. His uniform is more urban combat and I considered other camo patterns like desert (yellow/brown) and jungle (green/dark brown).

Considering some of these members can come from other worlds you could even have one from some Arachnos dominated world where their camo is red/black.

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So - again, I ask - what counts? Does it matter *WHAT* table/workbench you use? Does converting salvage count? Does creating temp powers count? Is it just base items and enhancements that count?

[/ QUOTE ]Crafting anything into anything else counts for the badge - base salvage refinement, invention to base conversion, enhancement creation (common or sets) even costume part crafting and temp powers.

Several people actually got the crafting badges the day issue 9 went live and I myself got the 1000 crafted items badge long before I started on the Invention (memory) badges.

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Ah, you'd be surprised. He isn't quite as mindless as you'd think - quick to anger, quick to punish, quick to kill...but he's sharp of mind and will use/abuse anything he can if it benefits him.

[/ QUOTE ]One thing I do note is that he has a tremendous sense of humour as represented by the Heat Seeker badge. He is amused by the fact you destroy one of his fliers, hero or villain.


Also, I wouldn't say you were sounding 'tarty' just strongly opinioned. This has been quite an interesting discussion.

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I'm going to side with Syra on this one, because there is a good point in there.
It's not so much you HAVE to be an Arachnos employee, its that if you are not, you should think about the consequences of that.

If you are not an arachnos soldier, you would have to be ...
a) a former Arachnos soldier (but stay out of uniform)
b) a thief (and therefore should be a lot more secretive. no standing in Grandvil hall saying you stole your armour for the lulz)
c) publicly paying lip-service to Arachnos to gain the benefits (like arbiter Sand's "hail arachnos, blah blah blah" stuff)


the point syra is making is that if a character is publicly flaunting impersonating an Arachnos officer, or stealing from them, then the IC consequences of such would likely be being shot by Arachnos, or Arachnos supporters.

If you want to fudge the backstory, don't yell from the rooftops that you're stabbing the spiders in the back

[/ QUOTE ]Well you see in that regard I'm not against Syra about idiots who go round shouting about the rooftops that they kill Spiders or Widows, etc. as it is very similar to so-called heroes who claim to kill other heroes without considering the consequences. But that's moving into good or bad roleplaying territory and it's up to you who you accept and ignore.

What I'm against is the idea that I can't fudge the origin because it would go against the in-game canon for the AT; because it's not allowed.

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But that aside, I guess my plea mainly comes down to a question of why more than anything. I just don't understand why someone would use Arachnos powers IC, use Arachnos equipment IC...but not be attached to Arachnos. The VEAT just doesn't really strike me as the sort that's open to the same kind of fudging as, say, a Fire/Fire Blaster. Plus I guess I'm a little wary of the inevitable "haw haw I stole Arachnos tech and you can't get it back ;D" concepts they'll fly around.

[/ QUOTE ]We have comfirmed knowledge that there is a thousand worlds out there (at least, given the name of the story arc), each with its own version of Nemesis as there is a Statesman in our verse and Tyrant in the Praetorian one. There'll be at least one which has Arachnos ruling the world just like there's the Family dimension, Pantheon world, Rikti Earth, etc.

I know at least one of mine will be from a verse which uses Arachnos equipment because they have it and why would anyone apart from Arachnos themselves question that, especially given that most likely we'll be butting heads with them or other factions on a near-constant basis from Mercy to Grandville. Half the contacts you encounter give out some form of defeat Archnos mission and with little to no consequence.

There is a basis for fudging given that at least 3 arcs I've done have involved pitting factions against each other: Burke's book mission where you steal one of Ghost Widow's prized books and you recieve no more consequence than if you'd been working for Kalindra because the Patrons end up accusing each other. No one Patron believes any of the others wouldn't do it to further their own ends.

Where trust fails, suspicion and paranoia prevail.

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Alrightey, I know this is going to be an unpopular thread, but I have something to ask...

...if you're going to roll a Soldier of Arachnos in issue 12, please, please, please, please, please respect the basic storyline behind them if you're going to use the powers ICly. That is to say you're a part of Arachnos (at least "officially"), you're only part of Project Destiny due to your own interference with the list (not that Kalinda and company know...), and that you're not a god-like spirit of the dead possessing a suit of Crab Spider armour to bring salvation to the Rogue Isles.

[/ QUOTE ]Don't tell me what to do

But seriously (and more respectfullyless jokingly) I don't think it's right for anyone to tell anyone else how they should run their character. I already have a plan for one of mine which already fudges the story and I don't even know what the story is to begin with.

Let people have fun doing what makes them happy. Then when the shine wears off things will continue as they once did; just like Trenchcoats and Wings and Peacebringers before them.

Just so you know I have a PB who isn't a full-fledged PB and several toons who bear the Arachnos symbol who aren't part of Arachnos.