Umbral

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And of course, that immediately makes me think of this...

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Erfworld are teh awesome. I lubs it. Though, on that note, a dancefighting set would be awesome, especially if it were done a la West Side Story. Utter awesome.

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Salvage prices are mostly going up due to AE. People are running lots of architect stuff, and they're not trading tickets in for salvage. Therefore supply goes down.

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Definitely. I've been using 'Luck Charms' as an example because most people think of 'Luck Charms' when they are getting expensive common salvage. But look at all the other common salvage that is becoming ridiculously priced. Just today I logged on an Alchemical Silver is selling for 55,000 to 100,000 and Scientific Theory which is selling for 100,000 to 150,000.

Obviously the Developers don't mind selling you common and uncommon salvage, they already do it through the architect missions through tickets. So, why not sell common and uncommon salvage through the university for influence for those people who like playing the game, instead of forcing people to farm AE missions?

[/ QUOTE ]False analogy. The devs allow you to buy salvage, enhancements, and recipes with tickets because while you're on AE, you get tickets *instead* of salvage, enhancements, and recipes.

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Why is that a false analogy? The devs let you buy salvage? Just because they are letting you buy salvage with tickets instead of influence doesn't mean you aren't buying them?

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They replaced the random drops that you normally get with a secondary currency, and, since there is no direct ticket>inf conversion, it isn't an easy analogy to imply directly buying salvage with influence.

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Hehe

He leaps, like most of my other characters with wings... The one I didn't give wings to was the porcupine girl, for the obvious reason that while one *can* imagine a bear with wings... a porcupine is not really so easy to have hovering....

[/ QUOTE ]This still doesn't explain why the panda has wings...

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Because it was possible.

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How is a Free market (ruled only by greed and limitless resources) supposed to avoid an eventual crash or eventually become so bloated with monies as to be pointless...?

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The basic idea behind a Free Market is that it will be more chaotic than an uncontrolled market but, thanks to that chaos, the economy itself will become strong and more robust. You'll have periods of intense boom and bust, but, on average, it will generate more economic growth than with a controlled system.

It's actually pretty common for people to get angry about a Free Market during a bust period and laud it's potential during a boom. It's simply human nature. The big problem with it though is that, thanks to the highly chaotic nature of the Free Market, it's hard to gauge the actual growth to see if the theory is correct.

Personally, I agree with you Rachel (on the topic of the Free Market) but only concerning real life. Nothing we have in game is going to affect us in our real lives (outside of the enjoyment we derive from having fancy stuff on a server that we pay monthly upkeep for). A pure, uncontrolled Free Market works great for online games. Of course, it's a bit tough to break into it (just like it is in real life), but it works just fine, especially since there is, functionally, an infinite supply of everything.

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250K a year is upper middle class? That sounds like lower upper class to me. Once your income gets into the 6 digits (to the left of the decimal point) range, you are no longer a part of the middle class.

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Middle class america

$250k would classify as upper middle class under most of the definitions on the wiki. I would personally consider middle class to be no higher than 100k a year at the most though.

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Honestly, how much you make per year and how well off you are depends on where you live. In some places (re: San Fransisco or New York), 250k would probably be considered upper middle class thanks to the high cost of living. In other places, 100k could easily be considered the border of upper middle class and upper class, thanks to low cost of living.

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Considering the recent passing of David Arneson this month and Gary Gygax last year, along with the 5th Anniversary of CoX coming around the corner, I'd like to request a mostly useless info post about the history of RPGs, from the 70s to today.

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I did do a couple posts when Gary Gygax died:

Mr E-Man's semi-regular & mostly useless information post #360

Gary Gygax and Origins of Dungeons & Dragons – Part One

Mr E-Man’s semi-regular & mostly useless information post #361

Gary Gygax and Origins of Dungeons & Dragons – Part Two

A post about the history of RPGs, from the 70s to today will need to be a multi-part epic.

I will look into it after I get the use of my left hand back in a couple weeks.

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Well yes, that's because Gary Gygax did D&D. But David Arneson is is generally unknown reason we don't just have RTS games. He was the person that provided the generally strange suggestion of switching players from commanding large armies (with the various large scale historical combat games) to commanding a single individual. We wouldn't have any of the RPGs many of us have come to cherish without him.

Considering the recent passing of David Arneson this month and Gary Gygax last year, along with the 5th Anniversary of CoX coming around the corner, I'd like to request a mostly useless info post about the history of RPGs, from the 70s to today.

Arc Name: Freedom Forum Frenzy
Arc ID: 113237
Faction: Forum Functions and Freedom Forumites
Your global/forum name: @Umbral Fist
Difficulty Level: Solo it's hard/challenging; on a group, it gets easier (6 ~hard/~hard EBs)
Recommended Team Size: Any
Typical duration: 1 Moderately long mission; Open space so...
Arc Synopsis: The Freedom Forumites are running amok! They've stolen a barrel of Pinnacle's finest booze and have destroyed Atlas Park in their drunken fury! Go take 'em out along with the rabid forum functions accompanying them. Completely obliterates the fourth wall.

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The reason Super Jump and Combat Jumping can slide up walls has to do with Jump Speed.

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Actually, I believe it has to do with Jump Height more than it does with Jump Speed. I've done the wall crawl a number of times with just Combat Jumping.

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I think there is a middle ground that is...

When someone uses super jump near a non-vertical (sheer) wall, you can continue to rise well above your jump height...in fact, it is possible to reach the ceiling by "sliding" up leaning buildings.

so...

why not allow this mechanic for super speeders? if they are near a surface that is even slightly angled, it allows them to slide up it...it makes sense thematically and it IS possible to do with the current game engine.

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That's actually an issue with jumping. In order to allow SS to do that, it would have to have a decent bit of +jump incorporated into it which means that, in order to balance it out, it would need to have its speed reduced. That's not actually an intentional ability. It's a weird little side effect of how jumping and collision work.

The orange is making me curious... I can't really recall any particular orange themed anything in the game, color or theme wise, with the exception of the Prisoners (and that would just be strange).

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I'd be content w/ them adding salvage drops to MA missions.

I've never ever ever seen any invention salvage be at 0 availability till today.

Didn't think I'd see the day when Conspiritorial Evidence would go for 1 mill

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You can buy salvage with tickets. You don't need salvage drops in AE mishes. They're there in the form of tickets.

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I know there've been calls for an offline character creator that would allow players to create characters without logging onto the servers, but I'd like to call for an offline MA editor.

Lately I've been logging on one character, dealing with horrendous lag times due to heavy traffic, sometimes getting disconnected because I lost my server connection, just to play with the MA Critter Creator or to try tweaking my mission.

I can understand needing to be logged on to upload a mission or to accept a new mission, but I'd like to be able to access the mission design aspects without being online.

Anyone with me?

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I believe that Leandro (or one of the other incredible tech gurus of the forums) posted soon after I14 released that he was working on an offline MA editor and, possibly, a link to where it was listed.

The primary reason why it's possible is because the MA files don't exist on the CoX servers until you publish and the local files are, for all intents and purposes, word documents. If you're curious about this, just go and open up one of them with Notepad (or whatever basic word processor you want). It all makes sense (though some of it is obfuscated behind codespeak).

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The mystique and black catsuits in the night are a bastardization of what ninja really were. The closes thing to 'all black' a real ninja might wear would be during a play.

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Actually, the black suit and mask was the traditional "night mission" outfit for a ninja, though it wasn't generally stark black. Almost always, it was an incredibly dark (but still discernable) blue, red, , brown, or green with a similar color of make up (or dirt) to cover the areas of skin left visible from the eye slit (including the eye lids). The mask itself was actually 2 pieces of cloth tied in such a way that one covered the lower half of the head and the other covered the upper half (with the knots in the back of the head stabilizing the both of them).

Of course, this "ninja outfit" was only used whenever the specific mission didn't require long term infiltration. If the objective was just to steal plans or assassinate an individual (and yes, there were missions such as this), then the "ninja suit" would be worn by every member of the team much as modern day armed forces wear camoflauge. If a modern soldier was sent to infiltrate civilians for a long term mission, of course s/he wouldn't wear his/her BDUs. They would wear their civvies. But if they were going in for a single, short term mission, they would wear clothes camoflauge more suited to blending in with their environment rather than blending in with the people around them.

The only possible issue have with it is that Malaise wouldn't be standing beside Sister Psyche and, according to the story of CoH, (but not CoV strangely enough) Malaise is supposed to be in hiding (and supposed to have reverted to villainy) only after the Calvin Scott TF's place in the timeline (though according to CoV, he's still working with the Vindicators).

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Though I'm sure there's more than a few IO enthusiasts that would argue we have enough money sinks already

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IOs work as a decent enough Inf sink for when builds are changed, whether by tweaking numbers or altering/adding IOs, which doesn't really happen all that often. The point of inf sinks generally not to give everyone something fancy, nice, but mostly pointless for a crazy huge price. It's to give those people that already have everything they want on that one character something fancy, nice, but mostly pointless for a crazy huge price.

(Also, the big problem with white elephants was that you couldn't have them do any work because they were sacred. All elephants had incredibly high upkeep costs, but non-sacred elephants were more than capable of making up for their costs by being able to do incredible amounts of work. The only thing you could do with a white elephant was to give it to someone else that you thought deserved the dubious honor, generally after a period of expensive waiting. This semi-vindictive regifting is the reason why some families have White Elephant Christmas traditions. At least, that's how I've always had it explained to me.)

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QR

A true White Elephant wouldn't confer any benefits. The term originates from Southeast Asia where a monarch would grant a white elephant as a gift - a great sign of honor from the monarch, but since the animal was sacred you couldn't do anything with it except pay for its care.

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I think the intention of the OP was to have the devs create some interesting functions in the game that had hefty upkeep costs associated with them. I doubt they'd really be popular except with the marketeers who are actively looking for ways to spend their money.

A better term to use for the discussion would be the term "inf sink", which has already been used for a decent portion of this discussion anyway. I do strongly believe that the game needs some, if not only to slow down the continual inflation of the market, but also to provide things to spend money on aside from costume changes and more enhancements.

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No way. Too many people would abuse cutscenes by making an hour and a half long list of text for the scene itself. which, short of ctrl+alt+del locks you into the mish without any escape.

-Rachel-

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To prevent this, the devs would put a limit on the number of actions that can take place and the delay between each action that takes place in the cut scene, along with a limit of 1 cut scene per "event", just as they did with ambushes. If you sense that the arc is going to be one long series of cut scenes, you can leave after the next cut scene. I doubt the devs would ever put cut scenes in without considerations for cut scene duration.

Well, to make them truly inf sinks, the price would need to be prohibitively high. Personally, I think that it would make more sense to have them as in-game single character benefits rather than costume options.

Examples could be paying 100 million inf to expand your Vault size by 10, increases the number of slots for Wentworths, and another costume slot. None of them actually affect the game in any appreciable way. All they do is provide the super wealthy with a way to dump some of their super wealth for an invisible benefit (at least, it's invisible to everyone else).

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-Res is almost definitely a no-go. =-( It's just too powerful against common foes.

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The idea with -res would be to make the set the "sonic blast" of melee powersets. This means that all of the attacks' base damage would be reasonably low damage (~20% lower than the equivalent attacks), which is accounted for by the powerset being able to maintain roughly 30-40% -res with an attack string. It's still going to be lower damage than Fire/*, but it contributes more to the team than other melee powersets.

The problem that has always come up with -regen as a secondary effect is that it's not particularly useful against anything that isn't an EB or AV, and, even then, it's got to stack up a boatload to affect them at all. The best way to describe the affects of it would be to say that it's a highly resistable DoT that scales with the health of the target. If it were used, I could see the numbers being balanced around maintaining ~100% -regen. It would still be felt by hard targets, while not completely obliterating any defensive set that is based around pure regen (it wouldn't allow you to cancel the IH that the custom EB just threw down).

The other idea would be for -regen to be paired up with other -special effects, most likely similar to the Cold Domination.Benumb suite (-status effects, -buffs, -dam), though, now that I look at it, it would either be overpowered or pointless. In order to not be overpowered, the numbers would simply be too small to have much of an effect without multiple users stacking.

-Dam would probably be the single easiest secondary effect to implement because it can be roughly aligned with -tohit. The goal number for a full attack string would probably be in the realm of -30%.

Also, to account for some of the people that want a DoT effect, to account for that, I think that at least 2 of the attacks in the set should either be full DoTs like Incinerate or 50/50 direct/DoT splits like Combustion and MG. It would give the set a flavor of "killing you slowly over time" while not borrowing another set's secondary effect.

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I dunno... -Def or a Minor Toxic DoT wouldn't be out of the question? Perhaps some powers offering -def and others giving DoTs? Or just a higher level of DoT than Spines would normally have, since Rad would lack the -spd. And it would be different from fire based on the amount of fire resistance in the game compared to toxic res.

So yea. WANT Rad Melee and Rad Defense! =-3

-Rachel-

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I'm personally pushing for something closer to -res or a suite of uncommon debuff effects (like -regen, -powerboost) that are insignificant on their own but can add up when you stack them up with a full attack string. Something else to consider might be -dam. Any of those could be explained as the radiation weakening their bodies and wouldn't be stealing from other melee sets' secondary effects.

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Wouldn't a Toxic addition be added? or a dot since radiation is generally a length not an instant MELT? Just a thought...

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Those are both already used by Spines/* and Fire/*, respectively, and I doubt a new set it going to have a secondary that already exists for the powerset type elsewhere.

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-def exists in Katana and Broadsword.

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I also said "new set". Dual Blades doesn't have -def even though it would make some sense to have it (since every other sword in game that deals lethal damage has -def).

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Wouldn't a Toxic addition be added? or a dot since radiation is generally a length not an instant MELT? Just a thought...

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Those are both already used by Spines/* and Fire/*, respectively, and I doubt a new set it going to have a secondary that already exists for the powerset type elsewhere.

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Some of us missed the Calvin Scott TF. Is there anyway that this could be added to the Ouroboros mission list?

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No! I'm the only person I know allowed to have a Soul Orb! Mine!

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No

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Prices should be set supply and demand rather than by the arbitrary determinations of the devs.

The only fixing that I think needs to happen is some weighting of the drop database to prevent so many recipes that are only slottable by a very small subset of the characters possible from dropping.