Talen Lee

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Hey, I got a better idea, how about giving us a damn option to turn off all incoming emails for each of our characters. Or better yet, eliminate the use of the email system on trial accounts!

[/ QUOTE ]Trial accounts can't send e-mail, actually. Or private tells.

Shield/SS is an endurance sucking monster especially if you take Hasten because the endurance crash on Rage can be an uncomfortable thing to manage. Also, the clicky mez protection can be a bugger on a bad internet connection like mine - I solo a lot because sometimes, what I click won't be clicked and I'll have to bail on a spawn I could otherwise handle.

Ice/Dark can hold all the aggro in the world. All of it.

Fire/Dark is very, very scranky, and is a great addition to team situations.

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As for you, Talen, I think I've shown already that I'm capable of forming ideas. I'm not going to dignify your comments with any further response.

[/ QUOTE ]After all, if you had to respond to criticism, you'd have to acknowledge how empty your statements are and paranoid your worldview is.

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Have you tried the Melbourne at Outback, 20.oz of succulence.

[/ QUOTE ]Weird thing, we don't have any Outbacks here. I keep being told they're bloody awesome, but I've never even seen one myself. Though, my now-brother-in-law did mention that the one he visited in LA was 'Australian food in American portions.'

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Well, it's okay to use slabs of text - I'm fine with that, because it means the story is unobtrusive to those people who don't really care. I've seen a lot of people frustrated by cut scenes because they interrupt combat flow. On the other hand, for those of us who do read the text there's this feeling of Why Bother.

[/ QUOTE ]And I agree with you, but there mindset is to deliver story arcs, then us people who just want to play and have fun are being left out a bit. I'll take new zones, powers, costumes, and gameplay mechanics over stories in this game any day.

[/ QUOTE ]The good news is, these things are not exclusive. As far as I know, the new zones, costumes, powers, and gameplay mechanics are not handled by the writing staff. Which is understandable, because the writing staff is four chimpanzees throwing poop at a wall. If they had to suffer the oversight method of the rating system, or had any incentive to produce anything that was good rather than filling in a word-count, we might not have this problem. But as it stands, they don't, and we do.

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Because I can THINK. I have a brain and the ability to use my imagination.

[/ QUOTE ]I really am not convinced you can prove that. I can imagine a hamburger in my hand right now but it won't make it so. You can imagine something is simple and that does not make it simple. You only claim it is because you don't want to admit your own ignorance and would prefer a world in which the devs are unreasonable, cruel, or stupid, rather than people doing something more complex than something that you could do. Like the armchair quarterback or the military commentator, you are one of the many people who can neither do, nor teach, but realises neither.

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There are many things the game doesn't do that it COULD do with a little effort.

[/ QUOTE ]How do you know?

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The problem is we don't have enough of a good faith in the writing team to believe they have the ability to conclude a plot at all, let alone conclude one well. It's especially frustrating since they have an amazing tool to do something relatively unprecedented in story-driven MMOs.

[/ QUOTE ]With the recent unclosed story arcs and the new tf/sf in i15, I don't have any faith in any of the writers to even pump out a half-good and finished storyline. I also think the new direction for storyline-driven content is absurd. It's just wall of texts to distract you from the next mission. All the story info I get is from the sight. If they want this to be a story driven game, they need to find a better way to deliver it.

[/ QUOTE ]Well, it's okay to use slabs of text - I'm fine with that, because it means the story is unobtrusive to those people who don't really care. I've seen a lot of people frustrated by cut scenes because they interrupt combat flow. On the other hand, for those of us who do read the text there's this feeling of Why Bother.

The problem is none of the suggestions you mention can wipe out a whole city with their mind, and are therefore insufficient ways to represent what Johnny wants nowwwwwwwwwwwww.

The problem is we don't have enough of a good faith in the writing team to believe they have the ability to conclude a plot at all, let alone conclude one well. It's especially frustrating since they have an amazing tool to do something relatively unprecedented in story-driven MMOs.

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Ever notice how all the alternate-universe versions of Statesman are evil?

[/ QUOTE ]What do you mean 'alternate'? Statesman is a gigantic swaggering bully masquerading under a veneer of respectability because he's the least of a large group of dickheads.

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Don't busy yourself with trying to disprove me, and use some objectivity.

[/ QUOTE ]You're objectively talking nonsense in this one sentence.

Warshades actually do something unique, Peacebringers tend to offer cut-back versions of existing powers.

Unfortunately, I don't watch The Soup. I am sorry, didn't mean to ruin the joke.

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Glad you liked it.

Seen or read any other time travel stories that you like? My standards aren't as strict as yours, but I do enjoy a good tale of time travel.

[/ QUOTE ]Wish I could remember the names now. I have actually mentioned these to friends in the past, but now the names are all escaping. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency did a very interesting job of it (but failed to handle the problem of replication). I think it's 'Eternal War' that handles a kind of time travel (only into the future), but damned if I can remember the title well enough to recommend it. And as much as I despise the show itself, the model of time travel in Lost as I've had it explained to me actually makes sense.

Also, and this might sound funny, I actually really enjoyed Back To The Future one and two. Not because it was good time travel or it made sense scientifically, but because the fantasy-style device of time travel was used to explore 'what if' scenarios. I assume three is also a decent movie due to star power and because there's no real relation to science for them to eff up.

We're now straying into the realm of my own very core beliefs, one of which being that we deserve and can have smart entertainment, and that science, in entertainment, has been largely stifled under black boxes or bad understandings of poor principles because 'people can't handle' or 'people don't want.' I think that raising consciousness by putting even just good science in stories is very important, so it can really ruin something for me when it pretends to be sciency but just drops the ball completely.

CSI is a show with a lot of science dressing. A lot of the time, when they touch on showing the viewer the methodology required for the application of the science, they tend to mess up. Things like DNA processing taking a few minutes (which it might do these days, but I know when the show first came out, it didn't), the absolute directive of evidence (a lot of the time in real police work, CSI are only part of a case - the rest tends to be done by beat cops and questioning), the way criminologists are called upon to do psych, interrogation and even arrests, etc. These things all diminish my enjoyment of the show. On the other hand, it does talk about real science topics - things like how DNA testing can be flummoxed, the way chemical testing can expound on what's going on at a scene, and a lot of very interesting things that remind me almost of an episode of QI. In CSI's case, I can forgive the mediocre execution because of the Interesting Sciencey Stuff.

Then let's consider the Transformers movie. In this movie, we have a supposed expert on communications talk about how 'we can't rely on fourier transforms' to the chagrin of my two engineer friends. This would be like the military advisor to the pentagon informing the president, 'We can't rely on throwing rocks at them.' It's a case of someone finding a sciencey word and throwing it into the pot and therefore, creating an illusion of understanding only to the ignorant. You might as well talk about your Arglebonks wearing Quinnips on their Blafoogas.

When you get to this point in a time travel story, you have left the realm of Science fiction and entered the realm of Science Fantasy. I'm okay with that. I just draw a clear distinction between one and the other in my mind. Quantum Leap, for example, is fantasy. If the whole thing was done with a magical ring, it'd make complete sense to me - and hell, didn't Satan appear as an alternative leaper at one point, with the implication that the protaganist was actually kind of like an angel? Many World theories unfortunately bug me too, because the vast, vast, vast majority of many worlds would be inhospitable smears of antimatter.

In the end, most science fiction has to rely on a black box. They have to say 'Here is the Unobtanium that makes the rest of the actual science work.' I can accept that. If you say there's a special pendulum composed of antimatter in your victorian clock that deforms time around it, okay, whatever. But, you don't get to keep inventing black boxes to cover your black boxes. There gets to be a point where you have to look back at what you're doing and realise that you've stepped into the same realm as 'a wizard did it.'

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I remember, in fact, a short story that had fun with the whole 'time travel' is cheap and easy in the future' premise: a time traveller travels back to witness an important event, but he can't get a hotel room because all the hotels are full of other time travellers who have gone back to witness the same event.

[/ QUOTE ]Splinter world theories are also interesting but they tend to get lost in themselves the second you involve a second time traveller. I've even tried to write this kind of thing.

Oh - and Braid is a wonderfully done story about time travel.

I've played this to 37 on a brute, and these things I must say:<ul type="square">[*]It's tight. Lots of great powers that want lots of slots.[*]It's versatile. You can be a solo buzzsaw and rip up boss spawns, or you can use your damage aura to hunt bosses and watch their minions melt. In teams you can manage aggro pretty well and protect squishies with burn, or you can use burn to melt opponents with an AoE immob backup.[*]It's recharge-dependent. Every good power you have is a click and more recharge brings it up faster. [*]It's lots and lots of fun, but it kinda does have the breaks off.[*]A single -knockback IO makes it a lot more palatable.[/list]

#1. No, I'm not. Jurassic park's understanding of DNA was idiotic even for the time it was made. Verne, Asimov and Wells were writing with good scientific understanding of their days, and extrapolated into interesting fields based on that. They didn't invent stuff and dress it up as 'sciencey.' No matter what time you're talking about, since we've found velociraptors, we have known that they are about the size of a basset hound.

#2. The engine that powers your car is much more efficient and much better than the engines that were being created in the 1900s. The pen you use is better designed than the pen your grandfather used. The toilet paper you use is better than the toilet paper that was used. The firearms being used today in common purchase are better than the best the military had to offer two hundred years ago.

As far as Primer goes, it's a story that keeps good control on its time travel mechanism, and actually complies with one common theory of time travel. It also uses the idea of duplicating degradation - which is to say, each new timeline involves copying someone and that involves further damage. It's not the wild, free-wheeling time travel presented in most cases, and is therefore, that 1% that fails to be bad.

Oh, and can the Atlas people kindly keep their junk in Atlas?

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Now, now . . . I know my title may have been a little provocactive, but keep that comment about where to put farmers to yourself please. You know what I mean.

[/ QUOTE ]Wouldn't it be nice if there was an official thread to discuss farming?

The markets are cross-server. And if people think GotA's expensive, they must think SOs are expensive. Seriously, whenever I get those +runspeed IOs it's like I didn't get a drop. D:

Good science fiction.

Edit: Okay, too easy a quip. I like science fiction that actually uses science well. I like science fiction where science is actually employed, and understood, by the person crafting it. I like science fiction where the science is an element that either expands my knowledge of how something works, or, if I already knew it, doesn't fly in the face of it and say something really stupid.

Jurassic Park, for example? Terrible. Because I know how big a velociraptor is and how DNA works. I know how fossilization works. On the other hand, I can see ways for them to reach the same end point, just using different science that also happens to actually be real. The funny thing is, I have a hard time seeing any problems in badly-done racing movies and stories because I don't know how to drive.

Edit 2: Again, look at your computer. Such a piece of hardware was simply unfeasible to be distributed to consumers twenty years ago. How much better do you think they will get?

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2 rech, 1 achilles heel def/rech, 1 achilles heel proc, one lady grey proc, one positron proc.

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I've never had high accuracy in FR, but is 0% accuracy viable? I mean, im sure you can get by with it, but am I the only one that puts a lil acc in FR?

[/ QUOTE ]Yeah. Even against +millions, FR generates enough chances to hit that you'll hit anything, thanks to the streakbreaker. Love that power.

Note that the -def/rech piece there? Entirely because I wanted the 1.5% damage buff. The -def enhancement is meaningless.

Oh, yes. A Sound Of Thunder. The story, not the movie.

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Have you tried the fire grilled quesadillas at Chili's, they're pretty good. The steak and portobello is still my favorite.

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Chicken Tetrazzini!

[/ QUOTE ]We used to have Chilli's out here, then one day, poof, they just vanished. Like, no major news, no 'Oh, the business is in trouble,' just poof, the signs were pulled down and the restaurants emptied. It was really quite surreal.

IO builds of other sets can become significantly as survivable as a stone tank with SOs. I do not see this as a particular problem, myself.