White Hot Flash

Sell that stuff for a loss and free up your slots. You'll make your money on set IOs anyway.

I craft generics for badges. I don't expect to make money on them.

When I ran it today, I noticed that the Shards were awarded before everything else, and there were several lines of text between the Shard notification in chat and the Merits notification. Perhaps you were just looking in the wrong place. I could see how it would be overlooked. I almost didn't find it myself.

And all the coders, artists, etc., were all sitting around thinking that the game was totally fine....

Get back to work, you slackers! (I keed...I keed)

Those are villain arc missions where you have to go fight a Hero like Backalley Brawler inside the ship. There are several of those missions with different Heroes to fight in each one, but I'm forgetting who the contacts are. Probably someone in Grandville.

Corrupted files, methinks. Verifying you files should fix the broken stuff, but if not, you might have to reinstall. If you've got the physical copy of GR, that shouldn't be such a chore (though still a pain).

Hard-to-read font alert! Hard-to-read font alert! Avert your eyes!

It's a nice sentiment, but I doubt NCSoft is doing it without the means to. They'd probably rather you just donate money directly to a relief fund than try to help them get by. Continuing your subscription at the normal pace is support enough for them, or maybe buying a booster pack or two that you don't have, if you really want to throw some extra money at them. Then you get something out of it as well.

Not sure why people are asking to lose the lipstick. She's usually drawn with red lips. Those ain't natural.

Darker blue, some red on the boots (not totally red), and she looks just fine. Still way better than the rubber looking Smallville-stripper version of WW's outfit.

If she's supposed to be a young adult version of Diana, they got a good actress for the role.

And finally, at least they didn't give her a Members Only jacket.

They might also play up the 'DJ Zero is an Incarnate' angle they mentioned at PAX East and actually give us an arc or two about how he became so. You never know.

They leave their characters the way they are because:

a) They don't see any powers they'd want over what they already have

b) The respec process is a PITA, especially when you're a 50

c) RP/concept reasons

d) See letter b , when you've got a stable of characters.

e) They don't care what other people think of their builds, and if they were viable before the change, they're still viable now.


Any of these, as well as any I've missed, are perfectly acceptable reasons, because they want to play the game their way. It's usually best to keep one's nose out of other people's builds. They're doing it for a reason.

Thank you for posting these, Avatea, and thank you to NCSoft for their generosity.

Hearts and prayers are with Japan, and those that are trying to deal with the reactors especially.

As much as I like Michael Caine in the role, I always thought Mr. Gough made a better Alfred.

Happy Birthday, Talon

Another disconnect I'm seeing in this thread is forgetting that there are different degrees of discomfort a game can inflict.

Are we talking about changes that blur the boundaries we've already known and followed, but those boundaries are still visible? Are we talking about fundamental shifts in game-play where instead of just erasing the chalkboard lines, you ripped the board off the wall and threw it away?

In this game, if all you want to do is run story arcs solo, if you're asking for more and newer arcs to run, you're asking for change. It might not be a large shift, but you're moving from your stagnate world into something that will be unknown for x amount of time, until you've memorized the new maps, found where all the contacts are hiding, and gotten bored with the story.

If the Devs say "OK, I'll give you new story arcs to run, but they'll have some new mechanics in them, so they won't be more of the same formula," that's a larger shift from stagnant. It's not just a new skin on the walls of the map, or a new enemy group. Now you have to think about what you're doing to accomplish the goals of the mission. Praetoria is a good example of this. The Morality missions have two choices, with very different outcomes. They chain objectives to follow one after the other, instead of laying them all out at once so you can complete them in any order. Sometimes the new mechanics feel a bit more constricting, or railroading, and that introduces a new level of discomfort for those that aren't necessarily looking for content that different. This is where people start deciding whether to continue playing this new content or not, when you can't totally play the way you used to to accomplish the task.

Then there's the chestnut some folks are fond of pulling out: "This game has never been about X, and now the Devs are starting to put it in." First it was Inventions, then the Mission Architect, and now Incarnates. None of these have ripped the chalkboard off the wall. The core game that you're comfortable with is still there, waiting to be played. There might be a few less people willing to join you there, but there's a lot of reasons that's happening that have nothing to do with the newest system in the game. I think so much negativity is being presented about Incarnates in particular because it's the newest thing to focus on. That's understandable, but flawed. Incarnates will no more change the fabric of the game than any of the previous shifting moments have. RP will still go on. People will still PvP. Some folks will still feed on the tears of those that cry about the market. There'll still be people that just wanna solo, and there will still be those that don't wanna play something unless they've got a full team with a hundred AVs to fight.

Any new system the Devs put in, if it's a good one, can be woven into your level of game involvement as little or as much as you want. You can dabble, you can get interested, or you can get fanatical. You can completely ignore it, or find a way to make it work for you and the amount of time you're willing to invest in it.

I'll repeat what I said earlier: There's no way for new content to NOT take people out of their comfort zones. There's only the degree to which it does so. For some it's negligible. For others it hurts. Devs shoot for the middle whenever they can. It's the only thing they can do.

Trying to think of a technical limitation for our current number of slots. Are the extra costumes stored as part of the information of the character (I.E. when you enter a zone, all the information about you, like powers, current costume, as well as position are loaded into the zone for everyone elses computer to draw you correctly) or are they stored in a separate database somewhere on the server? If those costumes are part of the character's info that has to be regenerated every time you zone, doubling the amount of information that has to be sent for every character that's in the zone would be non-trivial towards overall performance. If all those costumes also had customized powers, that's even more info to send.

There just has to be a reason for why we only have 5 besides "The Devs just threw a dart at the board and it came up 5." With all the new costumes they've tossed at us over the years, you'd think if they could reasonably do it, they'd have added more costume slots as well.

Random drops are random.

Give it time and you'll start seeing more and think the drop rate increased.