Arcanaville

If I was going to bribe someone for a name, I would bribe a support person to generic them instead.

There are some players that appear to be "slaves to numbers" but in my experience most of the good min/maxers that know what they are talking about are not snobs about it: I've seen few people actually good at number crunching tell people you *have* to in order to be good at the game. In fact, I consider that a warning sign the person you're talking to *isn't* good at min/maxing in this game because a good min/maxer would know just how little effort it takes to become competent at most or all of the content.

Its designed so you can, but not so you must. You can step off that treadmill at any time.

Thank you subset of devs?

The correct question to ask is "what are the advantages and disadvantages of Brutes and Scrappers while leveling?" And the answer basically is that Brutes have a distinct advantage during leveling because of Fury which improves both your DPS and your DPE in the early levels when you are not fully slotted for damage (damage slotting "dilutes" the advantage of Fury somewhat).

Once you get to the end game the two start to become close analogs for each other although the Brute still has some small numerical advantages in most cases. But now you get to a point of religion and pride, which makes the discussion of which one is better at level 50 hazardous.

If you like Scrappers, I would suggest trying a Brute. You will likely find that when it comes to leveling, Brutes are very much like Scrappers with free damage buffs once they get going (it takes a little time to build up fury from a standing start).

My favorite episode was the Slaver Weapon one. If you watch it now as a jaded adult, its kind of simplistic. But if you're watching it as a not-so-jaded seven year old (I think that's how old I was when I first saw it) Spock's speech at the end makes you go "oh...OHHH!"


UHURA: We can't let them have that weapon.
SPOCK: They are not about to get it, Lieutenant.
UHURA: Why not?
SPOCK: Assume you are a Slaver war computer. You've been turned off. You do not know for how long. But when you were turned off, there was a war on. Now you are awakened by aliens you never saw before. They do not know any of the military passwords. They ask you so many questions it is obvious they know little about you. Your owner is nowhere about. What would you think?
UHURA: I'd think I'd been captured by the enemy. Or an enemy, at least.
SULU: And when they ask you how to find your most powerful weapon setting, what would you give them?

The Scrapper forums are ground zero for discussions of the most esoteric and maximal situations. So discussions often gravitate to those areas even when that wasn't the original issue. That is not typical of the attitudes of most players in-game. Its not even the typical attitude of most participants of the Scrapper forum. It just looks that way sometimes, because historically speaking that's where such discussions tend to occur.

In any case, if you jump into a "what's better, X or Y?" thread, expect the discussion to devolve to min/maxing sometimes to absurd extremes. That's just the nature of the beast.

I did it just because I could, and its fun. Only three of my alts are really "purpled out." I had one goal each for those three alts. My Ill/Rad I wanted perma-PA, period. I wanted my MA/SR to be as indestructible as possible.

My main: an energy/energy blaster, I spend billions of inf to crank as much recharge as humanly possible without breaking something badly. Was that to maximize damage? Not really: energy blast has pretty flat DPA so recharge doesn't actually help damage all that much. Was it to give me better survivability? Not really: I don't even have aid self: recharge doesn't help with many things that make me more survivable. So why did I spend all those billions for all-out recharge?

'Cause its fun. I did the Freem mission in I19 and got hooked on blasting at the recharge cap. That's really it: I could have made a ranged soft-capped blaster, I could have spent the money on a blaster that would have done massive damage with that recharge, I could have done lots of things that would have made me extremely powerful on paper.

But no: I just wanted to attack at Freem speed on my main, or as close as I could get. Its fun, and I had or could get the cash, so I did it. I even slot the Force Feedback proc in every single energy blast attack I have to increase the probability of getting that +100% recharge kick. I *feel* like a blaster: my character can shoot almost as fast as I can push buttons.

If you're not having fun, what's the point?

Sure. You can do the trials with SOs if you want: things like BAF won't penalize a player that is slotted with SOs much. Lambda will to an extent if you are on a team of lots of very powerful characters because they tend to split up a lot and its hard to go it alone, but if you pack reasonable inspirations even that can be done with SOs. In many ways Keyes might be less harsh on suboptimal builds than Lambda, but it pays to have a heal or pack greens.

You will, of course, tend to be performing under the level of players with incarnate powers and slotted inventions, but the next step from SOs isn't "purpled out." You can get a lot of benefit out of the invention system without paying a ton of influence. Many invention sets are relatively inexpensive and you can slot them over time. Crushing Impacts, for example, have swung around wildly in price over time but currently they are not very expensive. A full set gives very good slotted benefits to melee attacks and it has decent bonuses, including +5% global recharge. Decimation is also a decent ranged set that isn't too expensive and again, you can slot a piece here and a piece there over time.

My Invuln scrapper actually slots Pounding Slugfests and Pulverizing Fisticuffs into Gambler's Cut and Sting of the Wasp. Those are sets that cap out a level 25 and level 30, and yet they are actually not bad. I slot everything except the stun proc for Pounding Slugfest and all three Pulverizing IOs, and I end up with a power that is slotted 71.58% accuracy, 97.29% damage, 35.75% end reduce, and 51.75% recharge. That is for enhancements I could have slotted at level 27. And I end up with +8% regen and +2.5% defense to energy/negative. Honestly, I think the salvage to craft them cost more than the recipes when I bought those way back when.

A lot of people resort to frankenslotting, of which that is a simplified version. But there are decent builds you can put together for ten million, twenty million, fifty million inf. They don't have to be all billion-inf builds to get pretty good results: certainly good enough to solo, to run level 50 content, and to play in the end game without being a liability to your league.

The important thing is to realize you do not have to have the absolute best performance just to be good. And no matter what you do you won't have the absolute best performance anyway. What you have to have is a build you can be happy playing. I have some really extreme builds that cost a ton, and I also have builds that are barely slotted with common IOs. I don't feel pressured to purple out everything. Of course, forum discussion is going to revolve around top performance and maximal builds: a lot of it is purely paper discussions anyway. But if you really want to make a decent build within a budget, if you ask I'm sure the same people that can make an insanely strong build for ten billion inf can make a good one for thirty million inf. And tens of millions of inf is something any level 50 can generate in a relatively short while, even if you are not farming.

Bottom line is this, though. You unslot my incarnate powers, and you replace all my enhancements with common IOs, and you throw my main - a blaster - into an incarnate trial, and I will make it work. I won't be a detriment to the league, and I won't be kicked for not having enough purples.

The last BAF my blaster was on, I pulled both Nightstar *and* Siege when the tank died both times (nothing wrong with the tank, it just seemed to be an unlucky day for him). Was that because of my billion dollar build, my purples, my PvPIOs, my 170% recharge? No, it was because I popped a bunch of lucks and used boost range to tag both AVs, and I moved quickly enough to prevent the towers from sniping me. I could have done that with SOs.

Insps and brains beat purples and procs every time. And that's why I don't worry about getting kicked from leagues no matter what character I play. Inspirations and brains don't cost much influence.

Pretty sure it is.

It wasn't perfect, but I have fond memories of watching it as a kid.



Okay, it was a little goofy.



Okay, it was a lot goofy.



Alright already, it was insanely goofy.

The devs know what my position is on that one. But I won't derail a general discussion of the topic by repeating it.

Before you start laughing, tell me at what point they would lose money, or do you think that because it doesn't cost them anything to increment a point counter, no amount of points given away would cost them money.

Its the difference between unrealistic, and ignorant, but that's a material difference.

If people feel they have grounds to petition, I'm not going to say not to. However, I personally do not feel I have appropriate grounds to petition this particular activity. If I felt the people using my global or main name were using either in unethical ways I would, but I have no direct evidence they aren't either playing the characters or camping the names, both of which fall within their rights as players as I believe them to be.

Everyone else has to decide that one for themselves, though.

Not him specifically, but I've found myself hunting for spawns like that in Graves' arcs. Sometimes it took me three laps to find the guy. I chalked it up to being tired, but maybe there is something about those spawns that sometimes delays them or makes them otherwise hard to find at times.

In this case they had a theoretical way to test it under real world conditions without testing it intensely in closed beta: they could have fed MARTy live server logs and checked to see what it flagged.

That's at least in theory. If I was writing MARTy, I would have explicitly included the ability to test it in that manner. I don't know if it is designed that way.

I would have also designed MARTy to be adjustable without a complete code publish, because otherwise that would somewhat defeat the intended purpose of MARTy. It might take a server patch to adjust MARTy, but I would hope it could be done without recompiling the entire game.

It occurred to them to log when you spend points. It just didn't seem to occur to them to have a way to show what you spent the points on. Which to be honest seems more retarded than completely forgetting to log it.

Honestly, I have to be frank here. The last time I saw something like the Paragon Store's implementation someone outsourced development to a sweatshop in India. I bet I could write something better in PHP in a weekend. I don't even know why its written in an Ajax toolkit when the store pages seem almost completely static. Coding a store in Ajax and having back buttons not work right is like chartering a 747 to take just two people from San Francisco to Los Angeles and then driving it down the interstate to get there.

The problem is that this game's attacks are directly balanced around recharge, and implicitly balanced around cast time. But if every attack was an AoE (or had an AoE analog you could take) recharge balancing becomes ineffective: it doesn't matter if AoEs have long recharge if you have a lot of them.

That then places all the burden of balancing onto cast times, which would force AoEs to have potentially very high and very un-entertaining cast times.

What we want are for players to be able to quickly and easily make full single target attack chains but make it very difficult to have full or nearly full AoE attack chains. We do not want to replicate the Gigabolt** problem here.



That Other Game uses a momentum-like mechanic to balance stronger powers, rather like domination: attacking increases the meter, and when the meter is high enough you can use your higher tier powers. Using higher tier powers burns this momentum bar forcing you to earn more of it by using lighter attacks. So what do you think happens when you make a powerful AoE attack which requires momentum but *which adds to your momentum bar* when it hits a target?

Yes it is.

Also, one name I thought to try for but was taken was OFFLINE. Long ago, I made a character called OFFLINE all caps on a server I normally didn't play on. In the days before global hide I would sometimes want to chat with a few people but not show up on global lists. So I decided to make a character called OFFLINE so that in all global lists while I was logged into that character I would show up as OFFLINE.

I thought it was clever at the time.

I wouldn't say its meaningless. For example, it shows how many character slots I've purchased total, and how many were used. I could compare that to how many the game thinks I have left to verify I have the correct number of slots. I could also verify the number it thinks I used corresponds to the number of extra slots I've deployed on other servers. If I wanted to know if I purchased something and I wasn't sure, I could text search that data to see if it showed up anywhere. Its not the best organized data, but I could see some use for it for people checking up on Freedom.

If you have the inclination, you could write a script to reparse that data as CSV and stick it into Excel. I might do that this weekend if I have some time. You could then do things like sort it looking for similar or duplicate items.

The OSI definition of "network layer" doesn't definitively define "network" to being exclusively the domains between layer 3. Its important to note that OSI was created as a government standard to standardize networking terminology at a time when such language standards didn't exist, and it is necessarily fudged in many ways. Nobody uses it except in academic settings very much.


I'm saying as someone who works in the industry, and explicitly instructs in the industry, that terminology is not adhered to in any appreciable manner except in pockets of jargon. You are far more likely to find people correcting you on it than agreeing with you in it. Specifically because unless your networking experience is restricted to nothing but ethernet, the terminology is blatantly wrong.

You can point to the OSI chart and a book definition somewhere and say "a network is all the systems within a broadcast domain" and I'll pull out my type 3 stuff from the box and say "what's a broadcast domain?"

The definition you are using above "networks are things separated by routing" uses the word "network" in a very specific context: the things requiring layer 3 identifiers. More specifically, they are layer 2 networks. However, layer 2 networks are not the only networks that exist. There are layer 3 networks which cross layer 2 boundaries. And I've never heard of anyone, anywhere, in any professional capacity, not use the term "layer 2 network" in some form as disambiguation, to distinguish from layer 3 networks, rather than assuming all networks were layer 2. You're actually the first in 25 years.


Not true. I have a cable modem that does NAT, and it has a routing table. Anything that forwards traffic between two different network segments which have different IP networks in use is going to have a routing table of some kind.

There's no such thing as a "NAT switch." NAT implies routing in essentially all cases. That is *definitely* vendor-specific jargon, and far enough outside the norm that I would authoritatively correct anyone using it.


If you don't have a unique ASN, as this situation would, you're not an autonomous system. If you do, you are.

You're never going to balance a conventional powerset power around +4 anything. Ever ever ever ever. Ever ever? Ever.

Good luck finding me to blame me: I am also Nowhere on Exalted.