seebs

I have a 6950 and Windows 7 x64 also, and backing down to 11.4 did help for me.

Tough: AV.
Tougher: The same number of hit points of Sappers, without an aggro cap.

Now I want a warmace/time option. Also I want a peanut-butter-jelly primary for corruptors.

For sure:

grav/time troller -- I don't care whether it's good, I have a concept in mind
thugs/time MM -- again, pure concept

I was gonna do a necro/time but I think I have enough /time already.

I don't think I'm gonna do anything with beam rifle, though I'll probably buy the set anyway.

Might well make something else, dunno what.

Quick! Everyone jump on Zwillinger, as he was the one who kidnapped the dev who would otherwise have fixed this sooner. :P

We had to destroy the MA arc data files in order to save them.

Neat! I am glad they thought of it.

I still sorta dislike having them be the same power, but now it is a unique specialty of energy aura -- taunt aura works while mezzed.

Premium account, SG license.

But yeah, sorta need SG bases for that kind of thing.

Okay, so. I got bit by the "lose all globals on zoning" bug. Long map. Was chatting. Want to keep chatting.

I can't get out of the map. I am in the middle of a more-than-one-mission arc, I don't want to restart the arc, so I don't want to Quit Task Force. So... What do I do? There is a red box. Coming near the red box gets the standard warning. Then Nothing Happens. I have tried jumping into the box, flying into it, walking into it, etcetera (yay for /hc and its amazing variety of ideas). I have found nothing.

I eventually settled on a Pocket D pass, which even worked, but... It seems like exits ought to work somehow, right?

It's... I dunno. It's fun in a way that I am having trouble describing.

BTW, "Not Her Father's Oak Island" was fun. Really enjoyed it; good variety of maps and content, interesting scenery.

I think... Basically, in the normal game, I'm presumably playing-to-level. Levelling is the thing. There's not a whole lot of story continuity in a lot of stuff. There's travel time. There's stuff like paper missions, which can be amusing, but fundamentally it is Always The Same. The stories are limited to a fairly narrow range of kinds of stories the devs usually want to tell, and are usually stuck at single-mission length. There's a few exceptions (Midnighter arc, Welcome to Vanguard, etc.), but for the most part... A lot of mission content is sorta samey all the time.

MA arcs... I mean, they aren't always good writing, but they're nearly always new. Also, they tend to use more interesting maps. I remember the first time I did "Two Tickets to Westerly" (#374002). I had never seen the Oranbega map before, and was utterly amazed by it. And the writing was great. (Still one of my favorite arcs.)

So I get... More variety here. I don't know whether I'm going to see an adventure that might as well have been described as "What's in the closet of Fanservice Lass" or a really great piece of writing. I don't know whether I'll get something that compares unfavorably to some teenager's Ranma self-insert fanfic, or something that makes me wonder whether I've finally identified Jim Butcher's account.

Custom enemies are often interesting, although it's certainly possible for them to be too hard or too easy.

Mostly, though... I'm just loving the stories.

17.5. A ways to go yet before 18. This is... Not the high point if an ill/rad troller's speed at killing things and getting XP for them. PA and Lingering Radiation will help a ton -- lingering, especially, for the painfully slow rate at which I currently kill bosses and EBs. This build is looser than it might otherwise be for now, since I'm skipping powers like Mutation and Group Invisibility which are only usable on teams.

Edited to add: #23 will be "The Arc Flash Task Force" (#334251).

As I understand it:

1. "Offensive" toggles are detoggled when you are mezzed.
2. A toggle is offensive if it harms or disadvantages opponents, such as a taunt aura.

Doesn't that mean that the new Energy Aura taunt/antimez aura will be toggled off if something does briefly break it, leaving you with zero mez resist until you get demezzed and toggle it back on?

I propose the following simple and unambiguous test as to whether prices are too high:

Is any replaceable item worth more money than a player is allowed to carry at one time?

The reason I qualify that with "replaceable" is that unique items (say, badge-providing stuff that no longer gets created by the game engine) could in theory be outside the normal range. But for an item which can, in general, be obtained through play... The price should not be more than you can carry at once. If it is, the amount of money is too high with respect to the amount of stuff.

I have spent a long time arguing that there's no such thing as a price that is Clearly Too High, but I have realized that I was mistaken. If there are regular items that are part of the intended scope of play and which are saleable, but are worth more than the inf cap, then either the cap is too low or the prices are too high. Or both.

In general, I think the game is suffering from too much inf and not enough inf sinks. (Giant2005 proposed an alternative, which is a mode where inf is turned off and drop rates increased.) I am generally persuaded that the basic idea is correct; you get too much inf just from kicking stuff in the face, and not enough inf gets used up.

But the first thing, I think, is to come up with a measurable criterion for whether the problem is fixed. I think the above is one of the few things that would work, simply because it ties directly in to the question of why the game needs a monetary system at all, the answer being that things can be traded for money.

Cats kill 500 million slow and stupid birds a year. It's just like the market! If you want delicious birdfood at Peck It Nao prices, you pay more.

I dislike agreements like this, because:
1. They don't actually mean most of what they say.
2. Even if they did, it wouldn't be legal.
3. They know that.
4. They say it anyway.

Now, here's the thing. In practice, this means "we watch for cheating", and I'm fine with that. But as written, depending on which lawyers you ask and how much you paid the judge, it could easily be taken as meaning that they're allowed to monitor OTHER network traffic on your CoH machine. And if they have the ability to monitor it, then who's to say they won't keep an eye out for information they could use for other purposes?

Normally, you'd just say "but that would be stupid", but wait! Consider that this company spent several YEARS running an online store with absolutely no way to bundle multiple purchases into a single transaction. Look at the kinds of problems the new launcher has had. We have no information to tell us that ncsoft (as opposed to Paragon) is even basically lucid.

Okay, 22nd arc: Not Her Father's Oak Island (#75249). "Treasure hunt style story" it says.

Okay, that appears to be... Let's see. Bricked Electronics was #20. Got within a fraction of a bubble of 17, so I picked something short -- the Easter Basket (#35335), which claims to be the first in the "Marcone Playtime Bunnies" series. It was exactly what you'd expect -- a bunch of underdressed women with rabbit tails kicking things a lot. Made 17, off to play with WW for a bit.

Summary so far: 21 arcs, made it to level 17. Soloed all but about one and a half missions. Life is improving as I get a little tougher.

First two arcs were really fun and fairly awesome.

Third arc... Too hard, at least for me. Mission #3 has an elite boss with mez protection. Got someone to come help, managed to clear that, managed to clear another map with him and some stuff.

Last mission has three defensible objects which have a life expectancy of around 5 seconds from "when combat starts" to "when you must have gotten the aggro of everything". Can't do it unless/until I come back with PA.

Made 16th now. Next up: Bricked Electronics (#2180). At 17 I may take a brief break to Make Moar Money and also get some better enhancements.

I was once peripherally (very) involved in legal actions related to some people who did one of those predatory-lending sleazy bogus refinance scams and ripped a disabled guy off for $100k or so.

Well. I happened to find out about this, so I did the obvious thing:

I blogged about it.

With real names and everything for the perps. Who were unhappy and sent threatening legal notices. Well. Conveniently, I have a good relationship with my lawyer, so we politely asked them about any factual errors, and now the page has detailed corrections up at the top for the couple of numbers I got wrong... Which, indirectly, tells you that all the rest of it is right.

I am a big fan of naming names when people do sleazy stuff. Really, not much into vengeance as such, but I am a big fan of people living in the world they are creating.