Arcanaville

My current system has 16 gb. My next will have at least 32 gb. There's no such thing as too much RAM.

I had to veto that because that would steal my energy blaster's shtick.

EvilRyu is right one time in thirty.


This is not one of those times.

No, that train's right on time.

True story: I was bugging Synapse about Blasters from like last year. Then one day he says "look, I gave it to Arbiter Hawk, go bother him."

And then I go talk to Arbiter Hawk and he says "yep, Synapse said I can do whatever I want as long as I shut you up, mu hu ha ha ha!"

Ok, the first half is basically true. The second half is sort of implied.

Arbiter Hawk is not going to be announcing +4 boss kryptonite tomorrow. But he was thinking about both sides of the ledger: offense and defense.

Actually, behind the scenes Arbiter Hawk likes Blasters and is completely crazy. He'd make nukes into toggles if he wasn't contractually obligated to not break the game.

Just kidding. Arbiter Hawk is a completely reasonable, highly conservative, and very handed developer and I'm sure whatever he's cooked up for Blasters there will be room for at least 200% improvement. Even that thing that AR/Dev blasters are going to go "oh... Oooh... HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!" at.

Yeah, I'd tune in for this one.

My guess is that its gone from Not Yet to approaching Soon.

I wouldn't miss that.

That should be interesting. I might actually drag myself out of bed for that. I'm most interested to see what players' reaction will be to adding [redacted], [redacted], and especially [redacted] to [redacted]. Although making [redacted] into something like [redacted] when your [redacted] is [redacted] will also be interesting. Especially for /devices. And even I don't know what Arbiter Hawk is thinking about adding to [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted] since they don't [redacted].

If you then add in slotted suppressed Hide which should be about 3.24% defense with three level 50 IOs (actually, it occurs to me now that Hide's suppressed defense will be a little higher than that because of Agility Core Paragon), and then add in the *minimum* defense you'd get from Barrier Core Epiphany which is 5% to all, you'd end up with at least 59% to melee, ranged, and AoE.

Whether it compromises too much in other areas depends on what else you intend to do with the build. I stuck in six slots into Kuji-in Sha, Spinning Strike, Shin Breaker, and Crushing Uppercut but didn't slot the powers. You could slot-shuffle to add slots to epic powers. The big question is whether you're willing to use Barrier to get there.

Compared to running the game off of a fast SSD, I don't think a ramdrive is going to make that big of a difference. It will only speed up loading local files, and only by a little. The delays you see in things like zoning are due to the time it takes to load the zone files, and the time it takes for the game servers to download to you all the initial zone information. You can speed up the first half theoretically all the way to zero, but you can't speed up the other half at all: there's a diminishing returns to trying to speed up zoning by accelerating the disk performance of your computer.

Why is that ironic? The operators of the game can do all sorts of things we aren't allowed to do. That would be like saying its ironic that Paragon Studios encourages players to pay for subscriptions when all its employees get one for free.

Its ironic that irony is the word most ironically misused.

When playing solo, or with a group of friends that know each other well, that sort of approach is completely reasonable. But iTrials are often community efforts, with different people that don't necessarily all expect to stumble around during the trials. They are organized affairs, and trials are combat combined with metagames that cannot always be simply guessed around. Sometimes guessing badly doesn't just kill you, it can impact other players' by either eliminating potential rewards or increasing the chances for the entire trial to fail. And unlike normal missions, you don't get to just jump in and continue where you left off. All iTrials are either timed or have failure conditions, and either running out of time or triggering the failure condition causes the entire trial to fail, forcing everyone to start over from the very beginning.

Click on the wrong thing and you can cost other players something. Shoot the wrong thing and you can cost the other players. Stand in the wrong place, use the wrong power, fail to use the right power, fail to move, fail to stand still, go the wrong way, go to the hospital at the wrong time - all these things can, in the right trial at the wrong time, either cost the entire league rewards or possibly cause the trial to fail.

The thing is: every single trial can, with almost any random assemblage of players,** be beaten if every single player follows directions, and those directions are given in a clear, unambiguous manner, and those directions follow the very general strategies that have already been formulated for those trials by the player community. And the instructions players have to follow are significantly less complicated than the ones that they had to follow to install the game on their computer in the first place.

And yet many trials fail.


** that meet the generally recognized minimum requirements of the trial, which are to the game-enforced limits what the minimum requirements for Windows are to what you're actually supposed to run it on.

I ... err ... well the thing is ...

You might want to duck now.

Not with absolute certainty, but from what I've heard about the skills system it bears no resemblance to invention system in any early iteration I'm aware of. And Castle once suggested to me that an early draft of the invention system existed long before he was involved with it, long enough for me to believe the design of the invention system may have been contemporary with the skills system.

Good point. Also, in the Primal dimension the Menders follow Mender Silos, and Mender Silos probably doesn't exist in the Praetorian dimension for obvious reasons. If the Menders exist at all, it would have to be in a significantly altered state. That could have significantly altered or eliminated much of the effects of Ouroboros in Praetoria.

Me too, especially as the Seed of the Hamidon suggests the risk is minimal. I don't see any reason why the Seed can't be hollow and have Nemesis defending it and beaming down invasion groups and be like, yellow and have whirring gears and have engines we can blow up and have it go crashing into Paragon City like kaboom! crash! bshhh, screech, kerblam! and then all these Nemesis come pouring out on fire and then it splits open at the top and a giant Nemesis mole-tank shoots out flanked by EB class Warhulks and Lord Nemesis is riding the mole tank with a zero-recharge nemesis staff going baboosh! baboosh! baboosh! in all directions...

Well, they can always upgrade the servers.

Stefan Richter and Gerhardt Eisenstadt would disagree with the notion that every individual followed the same path with minor variation.

Praetoria seems to have a problem in this area.

Quite frankly, those heal procs suck, although in Siren's Song it might be at least halfway decent. Synapse stated during the PPM discussions that looking at edge case procs was on his todo list at some point: I believe this is one of those edge cases.

Its not that the effects are completely unnoticeable, but rather that they are not worth the slot cost in attacks. Devastation chance for hold would probably offer more mitigation.

Putting my physics hat on, that statement has a lot of issues with it. But let me suggest one possible, if very speculative way around it. First of all, Praetoria does not seem to be an alternate timeline of our reality, but rather an alternate dimension with a parallel timeline. Its a completely different universe, in other words.

However, suppose we imagine that our universe and all parallel dimensions exist in a phase space in which each point in this phase space represents the entire state of the universe at that moment in time. Our universe would then trace out a path in this phase space parametrically over time.

If we assume travel between dimensions is comparable to travel between points in phase space, its logical to assume that the universes "closest" to us would be the ones with the most similar state. And those would be universes in which their current configuration happens to be similar to ours, even if their past state was significantly different. Universes with wildly divergent pasts from us can proceed in lots of different ways: they can continue to diverge from us, or they can evolve back towards us. It might be incredibly improbable that they evolve back towards us, but that probability would be irrelevant because the most likely trajectories send them off far enough away from us to be extremely difficult to reach in phase space. The only ones we can easily reach are the highly improbable, but nevertheless existing ones that are similar enough to us to be close enough to be easy to travel to.

In other words, if all possible universes exist, then probability doesn't matter, only distance. Extremely improbable universes will be the ones we tend to see, because the most probable ones end up radically different, and thus radically far away, from our own.

Yes, that doesn't explain goatee universes because the most likely divergences would be totally unnoticeable: a different configuration of air molecules in a room, for example**. But then again, all the superpowers in the game violate the laws of physics also: they have a certain plausibility, but not realism. I would not expect the physics of alternate dimensions to be any less plausible, but also no more realistic either.


** A modification of the theory suggests that travel in phase space is quantized, and its impossible to travel to universes that are too similar, and therefore too close, to your own.