Arcanaville

Actually, I would consider the invention of shards themselves to be the bigger change driven by feedback. The original incarnate system did not have shards, nor any way to generate incarnate progress outside of the iTrials except for running high level task forces for components for the Alpha slot.

That's a pretty big change in lots of ways: shards synergize with WSTs to promote running task forces. Threads probably exist only because shards do. And the existence of both set the precedent for conversion recipes. Shards had a pretty big impact overall.

I kind of like at least some aspects of the exclusivity properties of the packs. If they decide to make them non-exclusive, would that be a case of them deciding not to care about me, and care about someone else?

Its easy to portray this as the devs choosing between some arbitrary or calculated business decision and caring about their players, but as I said consensus is illusory (bah!). When the players don't all unanimously agree, either you choose to believe the devs pick who they care about and who they don't care about, or you choose to believe the devs do what they believe is the best all around, even if that's contradictory to what you believe is best all around.

That's a choice, and a choice I can't dictate, but I will say the devs do not decide *when* to care about the players and when not to; they don't decide *which* players to care about and which not to. They simply don't make decisions that way.

Its possible to advocate strongly for a change without having to portray the devs as either caring about, or not caring about that advocacy based solely upon whether they do what you demand. I've advocated for many changes, sometimes very strongly, without once saying that the fact the devs didn't do them at that moment proved they didn't care at all. I've called them illiterate, possessing the math skills of a gerbil, inarticulate, forgetful, stubborn, illogical, inconsistent, incompetent... err, what was I saying again? Oh yeah: they can sometimes be inexplicable, but I know for a fact they are not uncaring or deliberately uninformed about player preferences. They do the best they can with what they have, and they are neither capricious nor any more irrational than human beings tend to be. They don't always agree that what some of the players ask for is best for the game, but that is the prerogative of pretty much everyone including the other players.

Typos are evidence the devs aren't always precise. Clipping problems are evidence the devs aren't always complete in their testing. But not doing what I want is not evidence the devs don't know what I want, don't care what I want, or don't care about me at all.

They always have been.

Now take out all your defense enhancements completely and go fight a +3 boss. Welcome to Super Reflexes, circa May 2004.

That's why money doesn't exist in the 24th century. Once your house has solar panels, a replicator, and a holosuite, currency becomes somewhat superfluous.

Heck: the outdoors becomes somewhat superfluous.

Increasingly unlikely now. But before the protests and boycotts started? No bet.

Except that isn't even close to what's happening with the super packs. First, the exclusive items in the packs aren't presented to the players intermixed with other items, and only upon the player asking about it is it then revealed its not for sale directly. That item isn't presented for sale at all. Your example presents the situation as the player being totally surprised by the store's refusal to sell the item just like all others.

Second, Paragon Studios isn't saying the offer is or is not gambling in the colloquial sense. They are not arguing with the customer. You're presented with an opportunity to participate or not. If you choose not to, you choose not to. If you demand to see someone to argue with them about the system, all the store officially tells you is they will explain again how it works.

This sort of thing happens all the time: raffles, for example. And yes, some people flip out at raffles also. And when that happens, the people who run the raffles tend to politely explain that the raffle is there for the people who enjoy raffles, and they are not required to participate.

If you do not want to participate, the option to not participate is there. Its not there accidentally. The entire purpose of the store is to present *optional* features to the players to purchase or not purchase voluntarily. They do not expect people to buy everything, and they do not expect the only reason for players to not buy everything is that they run out of money. They expect some players will not like some of the things offered. When that happens, they *want* you to not buy them.


As to demanding to buy the item when its only offered in the raffle? If you believe your depiction is fair, I would say its equally fair to say your demand is comparable to going into a store and demanding that the store open a box and sell you the one thing in it you want, and leave the rest behind, because you feel you should decide the precise manner in which things are sold. Bundling is, after all, just another way for stores to get you to spend more than you need to.


Its one thing to comment on the details: I think the Black Wolf is too rare a card myself. But to say the superpacks are bad *in principle* because the specific principle being violated is "not letting me buy what I want the way I want, directly, without spending more than the minimum possible amount of money" I wonder sometimes to what degree those principles exist outside of this setting. Taken to their logical conclusion, that would make someone almost non-functional in most of the industrialized world.

You don't need to know that specifically, although it can help. Although specific knowledge of basic combinatorial math and discrete statistics would be a good idea for most games. Knowing what your reward tables ultimately do in this game, for example, is a combinatorial problem. Knowing how performance can affect your reward system in this game is a discrete statistics problem.

To also be impossible to rez:

I'm sorry. This was the best I could do.


Edit: also, her tombstone is one of the best triple entendres in all of webcomics.

Although I'd like to see this also, my understanding of how the models work implies this might be more complicated than just doing more work. Things with actual geometry tend to "float" slightly above the model to prevent strange clipping when the models move or are scaled. Making a separate tights top that is actual geometry and not texture, but that follows the contours of the female body exactly *except* at that one spot might be beyond the ability for the editors to manufacture. I'm not sure of that, but neither can I think of how they would do it. A "done right" stretch top might have to be a "shirt" rather than a "tight."

Jury is still out. The scrapper proc might be tweaked slightly (upward, maybe), but the brute one was basically over-gimped by fury mechanics, so the devs changed it. But the version being tested now is too strong: it caps out fury almost immediately. The final brute version is likely to be a little weaker than the scrapper version, but only under conditions where brutes normally outdamage scrappers due to high fury in the first place (all damage buffs have that affect on brutes: they have proportionately stronger effect when fury is lower than when its higher, but when fury is higher brutes tend to have an advantage over other damage dealers in the first place).

edit: in other words, don't pick an archetype based on the ATIOs, even if you plan on using them

Its the base model, before upgrades are added.

You love me, so you have to criticize me? But... why? I don't understand.

My main badge hunter is a blaster. I've soloed a lot, but I don't think I could literally solo everything with that. Its virtually impossible to solo the RV AVs because the PvP asymptotic cap for defense in RV is 21%. I don't think any blaster can solo +3 AVs with 21% defense (you can dual them with an Illusion controller I found out, though). I've soloed lots of task forces and trials, although it often involves temps and tons of insps.

One thing to consider is that if you allow for dual boxing, a lot more things become possible and it opens your options a bit. And its helpful to be able to dual box or multibox in any case, because it makes it easier to fill for task forces.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have made my Ill/Rad my primary badge hunter. But its still been a fun ride doing it on a blaster. At the moment, all I'm missing is some Underground, MoM, and TPN badges, four Master Of task force badges (STF, both 5th, and LG), and Partner.

The "beginner's luck" tohit bonus keys off of combat level if I recall correctly. That means you'll have the bonus someone of your current fighting level would have, not your "intrinsic" level earned through XP. If you team with a 30, and you are superSked up to 30, and you fight as 30, you'll have the tohit bonus of a 30 - i.e. none.

Beats the heck out of ma'am, though.

Honestly, its one of my larger unanswered questions about the games industry. There are those that believe that since its a "game" and games are about "fun" that since math isn't fun, math isn't necessary to design a game. However, I'd like to see them make that argument with programming: just because C++ isn't "fun" to write, doesn't mean its a good idea to implement your game in Logo.

Which is not to say that good math skills are sufficient. I believe they are necessary, but not sufficient, to make a good designer. A good designer uses artistic skills to aim at a good spot, and math skills to hit it once they fire. Without a good artistic vision, you're shooting wildly and randomly. Without good math skills, it doesn't matter what your artistic vision is, because you won't hit it.

When I was at the museum of glass in Seattle a few years ago, there was a sentence painted on the wall I really liked and occasionally quote. My recollection of it is:

There is no art without craftsmanship, and no craft without artistry.

Words to live by.

That's not actually what would happen. What would happen would be more insidious. SOPA would allow content creators to send a take-down for that icon, even though its not even here, its only linked here. NCSoft would have to notify the user and request a counter-claim. In the absence of the counter-claim, NCSoft would have to then remove the offending link. If NCSoft doesn't comply in a timely manner, the one making the complaint would then be allowed to notify businesses that themselves do business with NCSoft, such as advertisers and financial processors, to stop doing business with them. The safe harbors that currently exist for this would be significantly curtailed.

When presented with that possibility, the logical thing for NCSoft to do is to simply ban linking on the forums, to eliminate all that work and hassle. It could decide to more quickly ban players that otherwise violate SOPA's requirements. It would definitely place more strict limits on what could and could not be discussed, and in what ways.

Whether any specific content creator would invoke SOPA in a particular way is hypothetical. But what internet operators would do to protect themselves from SOPA is less hypothetical, because those actions would likely take place proactively. And that illustrates the chilling effect of SOPA and its relatives.

They like getting complaints. It indicates the internet is still functioning, which is a prerequisite for the game to be playable.

Protests have caused a lot of businesses to retract their original support for the two bills - see GoDaddy for the canonical example.

When these bills first came out, it wasn't at all clear they would not pass until protests and opposition began to pick up momentum. Its not at all clear to me now that this thing is dead: it is still being lobbied heavily by content companies and sometimes these things slip by when no one is looking. The important thing is to make sure Congress knows everyone is looking. SOPA is exactly the kind of legislation people try to pass quietly and without a lot of attention focused on it. Its only now less likely to pass because of attention. That attention cannot be perceived to be temporary or fleeting, or the lobby for these laws will simply wait out the attention.

Wait till he sees the component costs of that power.

Even, and especially within the context of this thread, you still go farther than stating that taunt is useful:

Within the context of this thread, that seems to suggest every tanker should take it. If you were only interested in making sure it wasn't removed from the game completely, it would be more proper to say that it should be available to be taken, not available to use.

Conversely, if that's not what you meant, explain how you believe what you said is distinguishable from what's been echoed many times in the thread already, and therefore why its unfair to make the direct interpretation.

If you intended to respond to only one sentence of a post and not the entire post, you should either only quote that part, or if the rest is quoted for context, state so.