Arcanaville

Just my opinion, but I don't even see all of the pre-Abrams Trek as coming from the same school either. ST:TMP is more of a grandiose high concept space adventure. II, III, and UC are more conventional dramas. IV and V are more off-beat. The TNG movies look like they were attempts by the Voyager writing team to make TNG look bad. Generations is Generations. There's no question in my mind that not only is Abrams Trek better in terms of overall production value, but its a better Trek movie than every TNG movie besides First Contact including Generations, and a better Trek movie unambiguously than at least III and V. The rest are more debatable, specifically on the basis of being good Trek movies, not just good movies in general.

Ignoring production and general entertainment value, I think in terms of "conventional trekiness" I see Abrams Trek existing on the same rough tier with Undiscovered Country, First Contact, and Search for Spock; with TMP, Wrath of Khan, and Voyage Home probably higher, and everything else lying slightly to significantly lower.

Most of them were actually more severe in overall effect in many respects. For example, Pilcrow's ED-like suggestion actually topped out close to where ED's actual softcap is, but his version had a gentler curve. The consequence of that was a smoother decrease in power rather than the more abrupt one ED has, but conversely it also meant virtually every possible slotting configuration would end up lower under his version of ED than the actual one.

The reductions being suggested for melee defenses were even more draconian in many cases, and it was certainly true that buff/debuff strength was also seen as vastly too high, something that wasn't even seriously addressed by GDN per se.

I'm sure you can find people who were suggesting tiny inconsequential tweaks back then: you can find them at any time. But the players actually asking for consequential changes were asking for changes on the order of magnitude of ED and GDN or higher. Amauros once told me there was a significant contingent of players from beta that were directly telling the devs that player powers were so ridiculously overpowered that there was a real threat of people getting bored and quitting before the game made it to a year old, and asking for extremely deep cuts to make the game interesting.

I didn't say you'd agree, just that I myself wasn't saying that the "evolution" of Trek to something completely different wasn't reasonable, rather I was saying I don't see the reboot as substantively radical in difference from the series relative to the other movies were.

I remember that variations on ED and variations of the GDN were suggested by players long before they were implemented by the devs to address what were perceived at the time to be nearly fatal flaws in the game's PvE balance.

I have no idea how either statement disproves the existence of the cottage rule, so I have to assume that even though I seem to recall your presence in threads where its definition has been discussed, you are still unaware of what the actual rule is.

But sometimes I think it should be an option.

Wait, which stores are we talking about here?

Probably because he isn't seen as "one-note." He has a particular vision, but that's not the same thing. His dedication to it, at the potential expense of commercial success, gives him additional respect beyond the fact that what he finds cool a lot of geekdom finds at least pretty cool as well.

He's also not overrated, at least by most of his fans. He's well loved, but the majority of his fanbase with half a brain or more don't think he's the world greatest writer/director. They think he's a skilled director that produces content you don't get from very many other places. That's worth a lot of respect.

It also helps that he engages his fanbase directly, and a lot.

He's also not universally loved, which means he doesn't suffer from the "everyone loves him so something must be wrong with him" attitude.

I'm not saying it was merely financially successful. I'm saying it was also a good enough movie for the bulk of the fans, and I found it perfectly acceptable as well. I believe that its only as divergent from "traditional Star Trek" as Star Trek II was, and only revisionist history about that particular movie makes it seem less so.

Actually, the mental image of the original is better.

Its not?

While I agree the number of "unforced errors" in Abrams Star Trek were higher than they should be, I don't think they were higher than that produced by people who really should have known better for past movies, and I will trade that level of error for a good movie that revitalizes the series than a movie that the hardcore nit pickers give the thumbs up to that ends up being watched by nobody.

When I consider what gets nit-picked about the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter series, I think Abrams did far better with Star Trek than anyone had any reason to hope for.

There's no evidence the Guardian of Forever is capable of transporting people to alternate timelines or even viewing them directly. When Kirk and Spock go back in time to undo McCoy's changes, they ask the Guardian to replay Earth's history. The Guardian did not ask "which one?"

Moreover, if the Guardian was aware of alternate timelines, Kirk and Spock could have simply asked it to transport them to the unchanged one instead. They could have asked it to simply return McCoy before he changed anything, as it was obviously able to return Kirk and Spock without them traveling back to the Guardian.


The Guardian is obviously an extremely high risk system to use to tamper with the past. In their first encounter with it they couldn't even get it to slow down its review of time to where they could time their entry into the past accurately: their level of accuracy was days or weeks from the intended point in time (even that level of accuracy is remarkable for Spock given the rate of playback the Guardian exhibits).

The best tool for that job is obviously Spock's brain, given the events of The Voyage Home.

I suspect it may be because zone events use a technology similar to, but incompatible with, phasing tech to spawn the event critters into the zone. I do know that invasion-type zone events are and have always spawning things in phase-like ways, vis-a-vis the here-then-gone "flickers" of spawned critters. At least since the very first such invasions where the problem/exploit of players AoE-killing spawns before they could even fully spawn was addressed.

True story: a while back I had a level 18ish brute broadcast for help with the Paladin so I logged in my Ill/Rad and joined him. He asked me if I could find more people to help him and I said "with what?" He seemed to be under the impression we needed a full team for the Paladin but I just told him to go attack, and I would back him up. I then locked my toggles on him, spammed LR, spammed heals and AM on the brute, and pretty much stood back and let him kill it. He thought it was awesome. I had no problem letting him make the kill sort of by himself, kinda. I don't think I even used the PA.

Here in Hawaii, ate is a number. One, two, tree, for, five, six, seven, ate, nine, ten.

The past tense of eat is "went eat" as in I went eat the ham on Christmas.

Not to be confused with the past perfect version of "went go eat" as in I went go eat the ham was leftovers.

The completion version is "pau eat" as in I pau eat the ham, no more already.

The present tense is "stay eating." I stay eating the ham. Like I make you one plate?

I tend to think of Cold Domination as the second cousin once removed of Sonic.

Actually, not to take sides on this very important issue, but while the older brother is, obviously, older, the "big brother" equally connotes older and in some other way higher ranked brother. The term "big brother" even in American english often is used to indicate a mentorship relationship, and in other cultures (Japanese in particular and many asian cultures in general) the term which translates into "big brother" also indicates mentorship, seniority, or veteran status.

Seeing as how I've been saying that (or at least something that sounds kinda like that) for eight years, I'm inclined to agree in general. However, I don't see where its relevant to a specific line of discussion surrounding the damage output of the set.

Its... its green.

In terms of the devs acccepting a calculation-only analysis (perhaps with some additional accepted knowledge of the existence of a problem) to prompt revision of a powerset the strongest cases can be made for:

1. Circeus' (plus others) analysis of Ice tanker performance. Statesman flat out admitted incorporating Circeus' spreadsheets into the devs' internal analysis of the set.

2. Stupid_Fanboy's proof that Claws did not follow the reductions specified by Geko. Since this wasn't a performance issue but rather a case where a dev actually stated the math that went into a set, the math could be proven definitively wrong.


Directly, I can't take credit for getting an entire powerset changed on numerical analysis alone. But indirectly, I can take some credit for probably all the melee weapon sets. Those were all sped up and the redraw gap removed in large part because BaB realized how strongly powerset offense was affected by cast time, and that happened almost certainly because of conversations I had with him much earlier in which I laid out the principles of DPA vs DPS.

It helped my credibility greatly when the devs were adjusting Claws and BaB asserted on the forums the changes would increase Claws output by 7%, I claimed 50%-75%, and then BillZBubba decided to solo a pylon with it in Beta, demonstrating ~80% increase in damage.

I'm sorry but that quip was an exclusive feature of the Arcanaville May 3th 2012 post pack and will be replaced with a generic joke after the next forum maintenance.

Sometimes, when I'm on PUGs, I pretend I'm playing Call of Cthulhu and see how long it takes for the team to cause me to fail a sanity check. The last Underground trial I was on managed to zero out my sanity in one instantaneous jump.

I said convincing arguments had been made. Convincing to me, and to a majority of the quantitative analysts on the forums, but it has been rare that the devs have accepted a quantitative analysis alone as proof of underperformance specifically. Particularly because the devs have an explicit and very specific definition of "underperformance" and it can't be calculated as such: it can only be measured.

Quantitative analysis combined with other evidence has been convincing. But the quantitative analysis has tended to have a very high hurdle to overcome. The devs do not like, and do not trust, aggressive quantitative analysis. And that's probably for the best. Conservative analysis places all or nearly all the margin for error against the desired conclusion and still leads to the targeted conclusion. Analysis that *can* maybe possibly suggest a conclusion might be possible sometimes normally carries little weight. Analysis that reaches for conclusions tends to carry no weight at all.

The devs are actually pretty accessible, so its also not a practical question to ask any player if they contact the devs regularly. Some probably contact the devs more often than I usually do.