Samuel_Tow

I've been calling the Arachnos black metal forts "Combine architecture" since the day the game launched. I went into CoV shortly after replaying Half-Life 2, and was immediately struck by the Combine citadel I was dropped in the middle of as I went out of Breakout.

I wouldn't say the Combine are similar to the Council. The "Galactic Alliance that small minds call the 'Combine'" is an organisation of extra-dimensional aliens who took over the Earth, enslaved humanity and use our own people as puppet soldiers. The Council, by comparison, is a purely human organisation led by an old man who became allies with space aliens and have only a handful of modified humans to serve as reinforcements for their largely purely human or enhanced human soldiers.

If anything, the Combine are a lot more similar to the Rikti than they are to the Council.

Forget Broadcast altogether. That is by far the WORST way to find teams (short of doing nothing at all). Set your LFT flag and use Search to pull people from your entire level range regardless of where they are. Ask even people in missions. Occasionally, think about asking people lower level than you that you can SK. Give it another week and the Super SK feature will be in the game, where everyone will be auto-SKd/EXd to the mission level and you'll be able to pick from everything up to your level eange +5.

There is truth to this. I have to agree that we lose people and we gain people, and undoubtedly we lose people of mountains out of a mole hill. How people can cite that as THE reason we're losing people as opposed to basic attrition, other games, Test server absences and all the other possible reasons I will never know, but I guess when someone is bothered by someone, it's natural to extend that to others not content and assert their discontent is caused by the same thing.

And I am SICK AND TIRED of listening about ghost towns. The servers are not ghost towns, and I'm on Pinnacle right now. Let's stop with the exaggerations. That is, by the way, in agreement with you, Bubba.

Ah, we have another one of these imaginary facts. Guess what, Mr. Doom. NONE of the people I see and know farm, nor have they ever, and all of them, in one way or another, have quite convincing reasons why they don't. Unless you want to quote actual statistics about how many farm and how many do not, then kindly AVOID inventing facts out of pure fiction.

And besides, suggesting that farming be viewed as a feature of the game and designed around is absurd in the extreme. Whether or not many people do something is in no way a measuring stick about how good for the game that thing is.

And I don't even agree with the Freakshow experience reduction! But, like I've said before, if one frankly insignificant (albeit overzealous) change is enough to make people quit in droves... Let me just say there are deeper problems than Freakshow farms.

And, you know what? Before the Architect, there was farming, yes. That has always been there. But before the architect, this subculture of audacious farmers who DEMAND the game be made such that they can far as much as they like didn't exist. People kept things to themselves, their friends and a closed circle of other people. A lot of these farms were ignored because, while there WERE people farming away, it was never a wide-spread epidemic like it is now. History has shown, time and again, that changes targeted against powerlevelling, farming and so forth don't really happen until these things become glaringly obvious and a major factor.

Guess what the Architect did.

It'd hit at his Greek Mythology origins a lot better if it had a Greek hoplite HELMET, rather than a Greek hoplite replica Halloween mask. Seriously, I could forgive the gaudy tights if his head wasn't as absurd, but that mask is just... Ugh!

Really? What mez, then, does a Broadsword/Shield Defence Scrapper get? Or a Katana/Super Reflexes Scrapper? Or a Fire/Fire Scrapper? Or, for that matter, a Fire/Fire Blaster?

Sorry, I don't mean to be a jerk, but this is taking me back to the days when arguments were continuously being made how running bosses were the best thing ever because EVERYONE had access to a slow or a hold.

Which is why I've been trying to get you to branch out a little for years Really, the costume editor is good for a lot of things, and you've seen my plethora of weird designs and inhuman characters. I understand your like for natural outfits, but in a game that offers everything from alien robots to ninja wizard zombies (which isn't as absurd as it sounds), there's a whole other world of opportunities. Like... Male characters

Either way, I really like your final design. On this one, I wouldn't change the gloves and boots to orange. You already have enough brightness and sunset themes in the rest of the costume, and so the black boots and gloves provide a very good contrast to the whole design. I don't know if they "should" match the dress or not, but in this case I believe they're better off not matching. I'd still be interested to see how they look with pure black bats, though.

As for the Bridal skirt feeling odd if you're not colouring it, I have to mention something on the subject. I, myself, always used to feel that if an object can take multiple colours, it should be multi-coloured because it adds detail. I have since changed my mind, however, because sometimes too much detail is detrimental to the costume, and always trying to fit patterns and colours and extras everywhere can do more harm than good. As such, I make it a point to occasionally stand back and wonder if abolishing these little details altogether and splitting the colour in larger sections won't be better. Oftentimes it is, as simpler designs have a power all of their own.

In essence, what you have here is bad player perception in that if something hasn't been changed it must therefore be intended to be this way, when it is quite highly obvious to anyone who stops to think about it that it is either a very serious loophole, or the developers are morons for having designed something to be so exploitable. Because this is gameplay that is within the rules in a very technical sense, it doesn't mean it is intended. And you can't fault the development team for not fixing all such problems that ever existed instantly, because it comes down to resources. You can't fix everything, and some things don't even have a readily available fix to begin with.

This is Smoke Grenade all over again. You say "It's been like this so they should have changed it in another way." and I say "I saw this coming a mile away and I'm not in the least bit surprised it happened." In case you haven't notices, problems get fixed only when they become real problems. The potential for people to exploit the system within the rules isn't as pressing of a problem when people aren't actually exploiting it, but when they start to exploit it en masse, a fix becomes required. Bridging and powerlevelling have always been present, but they have never been so omni-present as they are now, hence why a fix for them now is higher priority than a fix for it was than.

[/quote]I base my evidence off of the quantity of players that farm and powerlevel. Are you suggesting this doesn't occur? Not everyone that farms or powerlevels are going to leave obviously. I'm sure they will even find new ways to accomplish this. There will, however, be a number of people who will always feel that it's just not worth it, and quit. What is opinion is the size of the people who leave. So until they actually leave, yes it's opinion. But I base my opinions off sound facts. A large population of Co* farm. They are now nerfing farming. Combine that with the multiple, albeit ridcuolous "AE is ruining the game" threads, and you have alot of unhappy people.[/quote]

You base your opinion and your evidence on anecdotes and you claim them to be facts. This is a fallacy. If you want to cite the "quantity" of players who farm and would leave if they couldn't, then I'd expect you to have some hard data. If you don't, it's anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence, in fact, that contradicts mine completely. I've not noticed a lot of people farming, nor have seen many requests for farms. In fact, I got more invitations to farm teams in the I2-I4 days than I have ever gotten since the Architect launched. I've teamed with people and not had much trouble finding teams. Teams for regular TFs and just regular teams are constantly being formed in the global channels I am a member of. If you want to claim a quantity, you're going to have to get some actual evidence of what that quantity actually is, because it doesn't seem nearly as big to me as it does to you.

Besides, the whole argument is absurd. A change was made and people will leave. That's not news. People leave over every change that is made to the game, even over something as simple as swapping how Thigh-High Boots look in the costume editor. People will leave, obviously. You can't really claim how many unless we see NC's quarterly report, and even then you can't claim why they left, what with Champions Online being the new MMO everyone wants to try. You base your argument on nothing more than anecdote and conjecture, rather than actual fact and evidence, and you are certainly not objective.

You may need to recheck the meaning of the word "righteousness." Specifically "self-righteousness." If this were stated as merely an opinion, as "I think" or "I feel," I wouldn't have anything against it. Everyone is welcome to their opinions. But when you start manufacturing evidence to make yourself look justified and morally superior because you can see the truth behind the lies while we fools keep buying low-brow propaganda, that is the very definition of self-righteousness. You are inventing your own righteousness and based on it claiming the moral high ground, and that simply doesn't work on me, specifically since you have nothing to back it up but conjecture, supposition and, frankly, a fair bit of arrogance. Your is a malicious argument if ever I saw one, because you trade truth and opinion for manufactured fact to force your position true. At this point, you corrupt whatever truth there may have been in your statement to begin with.

You are welcome to your opinion, and I might have even agreed with it if it weren't presented as the objective truth it quite clearly isn't.

I gotta' agree with the zombie. Both his spandex mask and his shovelhead mask are ridiculous. Just one would have been enough to make him look silly, but he has two. Eh!

I remember a thread from ages past, where someone asked "If you could be Statesman for a day, what would you do?" Of course, a lot of people gave stupid answers, like "I'd roll back ED!" "I'd make world PvP" and so forth, but those weren't interesting. The one I really liked was the answer "Get a helmet that covers my entire head."

To me, his whole design is absurd. I mean, I know it's a throwback to the old age of spandex-clad super heroes where even women wore bald-head-like hair-concealing full masks and being dressed in the American flag was the best thing ever, but there has to be a way to achieve this without making his whole visage without making him both silly and campy. Showing hair might have helped, as was mentioned.

But I still think the best thing I'll take back from this thread is the mask's true purpose - protecting him from extreme facepalming

For a solid damage dealer, a resurrecting minion is two extra swings with no travel time. Resurrecting enemies also means more enemies per map without a very significant increase in time taken to complete. It's rare you'll see full-spawn resurrects, and that CAN drag things on significantly, but the occasional resser is still only a mild roadbump for a lot of extra experience.

What the hell does that even mean? It's like one sentence was fired out of a cannon and smashed into another sentence, forming a sort of mangled mess. I can sort of parse some of it, but what is the overall meaning an intention behind this?

Your argument holds no substance. Because that's the way it has been is no argument that that's the way it should be. If the developers perceive it as a problem, they WILL attempt to fix it, or at the very least ignore it when planning future changes. Unless you're of the opinion that no problem is ever worth working towards solving unless a solution is guaranteed and absolute, this is simply empty, and that notion itself is a farce.

Statistics about "many veterans" made on the fly with nothing but sparse anecdotal evidence and biassed predictions for the future have no meaning in an argument, because anyone can invent these things to serve his purpose. As an example, if I were so inclined, I could claim that you are wrong and most veterans do not care anything about these changes, and are going to stay with the game until hell freezes over. And it'll be just as based in fiction.

You want to preach doom. Go ahead. You have an agenda. That's fine. But please don't try to hide behind a this absurd mask of righteousness. Feel free to believe whatever you want to believe and share any opinions you feel like, but don't try to invent arguments to back them up.

And if you actually look at the different faces, you'll note that the SHAPE of each face is unique to the face in question. The shapes of the noses ARE different, and different faces are not just texture swaps. Some may be, yes, but that's not true for all of them. Specifically, the one I mean IS of a very different shape.

Noses are part of the individual faces. If you want more noses, you're better off heading over to Jay's costume request thread and suggesting a few more faces that fit the bill.

For what it's worth, there is at least one male face that seems to have been designed for a black man specifically, so you may be able to make do with that.

By the way, there's a little trick you can do. If you go to Atlas Park and enter the Abandoned Sewers from there, you only have to go past around two-three spawns of level 36 Hydra before you run into fairly low-level Rikti, I think 36-37. They're still tough with two bosses per spawn, but at -1 to -2, not impossible.

Ugh... I remember back in the day, around I4 or I5 or some such. I had a run-in with someone who was convinced I should powerlevel him, and wouldn't take no for an answer. He wasn't so much demanding or even begging as he was just insistent. "Come on!" "Oh, come one!" It's been years and I don't remember how that went, but I did not appreciate his sense of entitlement in believed I was supposed to just powerlevel him because that's what everyone did.

Luckily, I haven't had many encounters like that.

I have a certain skill that has paid off in real life a lot more than you can possibly imagine. This is the skill to make myself seem a LOT smarter than I actually am. Combine this with the fact that while I am often book smart, I can be very life-dumb in very, very pronounced ways, and this is a very common occurrence for me. I seem like a smart man the majority of the time, but every so often I find, see or do something that makes me feel and look completely stupid.

This isn't an Architect rant, because my Architect rants are constrained to "I don't like the stories in there" that I got reamed for by Nether Goat last time (is cool). I suppose you could see this as picking on a slow newb, but I did not at the time, and indeed hardly can now, see this guy as a newb so much so as a badly inarticulate player, and heavens knows I've seen a LOT of those even with plenty of veteran badges. People just seem to think that as long as THEY understand what they're saying, I should, too.

It IS probably option C in this case, because I really am not all that smart when it comes to things I'm not well familiar with, specifically when people do something I've gone out of my way to avoid doing, myself. I know well enough what could make a man NOT do something like this, being that I make a point to not do it. I can't quite put my finger on what would possess a man to do so, however. Call it a limited mind on my part, I don't know.

To end, yes, the explanations you give me do sound reasonable, but I just don't see why one would still pick begging over going back doing what he had been doing up until this point. Well... Unless what he has been doing up until this point was being given handouts, but by strangers? Do we really have that cool a community that someone could get used to and subsist on handouts from strangers? If this really is someone who levelled up only in the Architect and blew all of his money on a mistake, why not simply go back to the Architect, is all I'm saying.