AkhOsiris

I liked "Help! My captors are discriminating against me on the basis of sex, race, or national origin!" in arc 268235

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Sorry to come off all EMO and sour but it´s damn annoying to be left with the feeling that the double XP weekends is only being catered to those in school and people who can change their schedule with a moments (as 2 weeks is in real life time) notice.

*sigh*

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I'm sorry that this timing didn't work out for you. Any time they choose will work well for some (hopefully many or most) but not for everyone.

I don't think the statement about who the devs are "cater[ing] to" is fair, though. It's true that not everyone is in the same life situation, but the standard expectation in the U.S. is that most people will have all or at least large parts of the weekend free from work to spend in recreation or fulfilling familial responsibilities.

Between people who have weekends off from work, students, and others who can nudge their schedules around when given weeks worth of notice, that's a pretty substantial portion of the people who have the time to subscribe to an MMO like CoH.

Again, I apologize if this comes off as cold, I really don't mean it that way. I wish that all the players could enjoy this event without interference from work or pre-existing recreational commitments. But the devs likely have some of their own reasons for the timing of the event and the announcement thereof, and the cost/benefit tradeoffs of changing their plans don't work out in everyone's favor every time.

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... the devs said that while adding toxic damage and toxic resistance was easy, adding a toxic_defense type ... would have been much more difficult.

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While I have no knowledge of the code whatsoever, this seems like a plausible excuse, and not just a way they decided to present it.

As attacking is probably the most common calculation that has to be done, I'd bet that they tried to optimize the bejeezus out of this code. It seems like no coincidence that if you group together the two damage types that have no associated defense, untyped and toxic (which originally was designed as untyped), you end up with 8 types:

smash, lethal, fire, cold, energy, negative, psi, untyped/toxic

If you can fit all these flags into a single byte, then you can use a bunch of bit-wise operators to do some math and comparisons. Not only are those operators computationally "cheap" to perform, but it becomes very easy to do more things in parallel.

One could add another bit for toxic, but then you'd need to use a 16-bit value instead and waste a lot of bits, probably also reducing the number of computations that can run in parallel.

The alternative would be to have a form of defense that applied to both the original untyped and the "new" toxic, but that may be unrealistic either because it could imply a significant Hamidon nerf, or because that bit was used to detect certain special cases (by taking intermediate computed values and byte-wise checking if they are equal or not equal to zero).


Then again, maybe they aren't pulling any tricks like this at all. My background is in chip design, and instinctively I feel that growing from 6->7, and 7->8 are cheap, while growing from 8->9 is very expensive; likewise with 16->17 and 32->33. I'm out of my element with software, so my instincts could be completely off base.

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Wow...

I look through the window of my cubicle at Lighthouse and say, "I'm going to post for a collection for I9 guides since we have so many in the TR boards we might as well pull them together in one location."


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Wow... your cubicle has a window? I'm so jealous. My cubicle has no window.

No, I don't like PvP, and think the game would be better today if it were never added midway through.

Just as one more data point to add:

With my latest toon, I had done no missions in Cap at all until I hit level 15. After doing a Mayhem for Boris, he offered me Marshall Brass as a contact right away, without having to go through Shelley.

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When you speak to your broker, choose Dr. Shelly Percey as your contact. Go through her missions, though I'm not certain if you have to do all of them, just some, or none at all. Someone can correct me on that.

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I just picked up the Goldbricker jetpack a moment ago. I can verify that doing Dr Percey's missions is NOT required. I never even spoke to her once before I hit 15 to get a referral to Brass.

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Damn you, Statesman!! DAMN YOU!! Even your official announcements are an enigma. (What's the plural of "enigma" anyway? Enigmi?)

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Enigmas--that's the plural.

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Well, yes and no. "Enigmas" has become accepted since so few people pay attention to the specifics of language nowadays, but the more correct pluralization is "enigmata."