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Fashions come and go. A week from now who knows where the pendulum will swing?

Well, heavy farming does a valuable public service, It provides endless fodder for inane complaints by nosy parkers whose idea of big fun is constant whining about how others play, and allows some to seek that most gratifying of modern cachets: The Martyr Card, when they manage to frame a argument proving that framing does them harm in some way.

One done, one fiddling (depends if I can get old favorite opponents from my paper and pencil game modelled to my satisfaction in CoX terms).

Last September, just before I turned 58, I weighed 250 and had a 44" waist. My workday and favorite pursuits both involved constant computer time. I was prone to bad back muscle spasms and some other issues related to my weight and sedentary lifestyle.

I now weight just under 190 and found my waist has snuck down to 38 1/2". My back hasn't so much as twinged in months, and other issues are also in much better shape.

However, it took a diagnosis of type II diabetes last September to scare me off my behind and onto a healthier diet and exercise regimen. Fortunately, no lasting system damage was done (incipient retinopathy has cleared up completely, heart, liver, kidneys, extremities all check out fine, and my A1C has been under 6 since at least January).

So don't wait for the bad news...if you think you are in dodgy shape, you probably are. It doesn't take much to fix it. And it is infinitely preferable to tackle it before a doctor says, in essence, get in better shape or risk dying by inches.

I had to get religion about diet and exercise pretty thoroughly to get my condition under control this quickly. Head it off before your pancreas decides it is tired of you, or your system starts deciding to be "meh" over insulin, and you can be more moderate.

And I still game lots :-)

I assume teams that invite me aren't farming. If they are I usually bow out after the first go-round.

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Done before - Robin Hood comes to mind.

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When was the last time the government were the GOOD guys?

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Hmmm - King Arthur comes to mind, and prior to that the state (or one's favored faction in the state) tended to be writing - or at least funding - the legends (Homer, the Song of Gilgamesh, Livy's History of Rome, etc). But with more recent legends, government's role tends to be more questionable, even when it is not the flat out bad guy.

May be one reason Plato argued for outlawing poetry ;-)

I have a number of Magic origin characters.

Several are incarnate deities or archangelic level beings from various mythologies, exercising powers like super strength or broadsword or energy melee or dark melee, etc.

One learned the power of bears from an Ainu shaman in the interior of Hokkaido, and was also raised in the wild by actual bears - he's my Tarzan hommage, loincloth, fractured grammar, and all. The claws fighting (claws courtesy of a notable Japanese swordsmith who had retired to the northern island to meditate and work in solitude) and bear-like strength, etc. would make him "natural" on a par with Tarzan, Ka-zar, et al. But magic seemed the right flavor for the shamanic regen powers (bear being a potent healing totem in most cultures that recognize Him).

One uses a magic bow that was first carried at the battle of Agincourt.

One or two are even spellcasters of one variety or another.

Where is the unfying image or concept that would make one, single, inherent "magical" look right for all of them?

I will not go into the same detail on armored vs gadgeteer vs nanotech background in my tech characters, but the same objection applies.

So more visuals all round, but for pity's sake why try to ram everyone's vision of a given origin or more to the point, a given character) into some cookie cutter notion that "Magic looks like THIS" or "All tech looks like THAT"? Or conversely, why make an option that might suit someone's look-and-feel down to the ground limited to a given origin?

It seems to me like saying one cannot use the red crayons if drawing one way, or the green ones if drawing another.

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all Im saying is for the Devs to somehow add something else to the origin, so theres more behind choosing that certain one.


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As origins have been a purely RP (if that) based feature since go-live, changing that now seems counterproductive. I really must disagree and suggest that they stay the way they are.

Old idea, actually.

For my part, more choices for power visuals? Excellent. The faster they can do it the better.

Restricting certain graphics to origin? Terrible - leave decisions in players' hands.

There is simply no reason to decree that all tech-based heroes throw fire one way, and all magic-based heroes do it another way.

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In an old TV series called Blakes 7, the "bad guys" were actually the good guys and the "good guys", the government, were the evil doers.


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Done before - Robin Hood comes to mind.

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My whole idea here is to add a sort of open world PvP element ...

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If it were limited to one server, perhaps. Open PvP of any description on a general basis would be a pity, as I have no wish to cancel my subscription ot this game.

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And where is fishing in all this?

I see trolling is rampant in the forums, but I want real fishing!

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Waiting on the long-expected skill system, since you need Mining Skill for fish, as all men know.

PvP social networking - expanding the arena model perhaps - whereby players can meet in a pre-arranged mission on this basis (one to achieve X, to the other to thwart him) would be well worth implementing. An open challenge kind of thing, where a player can "register" to carry out one side of the mission and wait for someone else to sign on to thwart him would also be a good thing.

Not sure of the desirability or feasability of building an ongoing relationship into the system - whereas with mutual signup the archenemies could meet anytime they want to set it up.

Sidebar: I always thought a nice, if paranoid, variant, would be a cooperative mission where one side or the other gets a system message that they can double-cross the other faction now. They don't HAVE to, and rewards for the mission should be the same regardless (so as not to incentivize the decision one way or another). But it would add a nice twist to the either/or model (either opposed from the get go or co-op to the end).

The more common term hereabouts is kill-stealing. It is considered impolite, though there is no formal rule against it. If another player follows you around doing it constantly, there may be grounds for a petition claiming harassment.

I usually feel that a single instance of it is not worth fretting about. Usually, if someone else jumps a spawn I am fighting, I simply leave the scene. Yes, I will admit, sometimes in the hope that they may have been counting on my presence to keep some of the mobs off their neck, and will in turn be defeated.

Do be aware that experience and body count are shared in CoX. That is - you put a hit (I think it is 25% of their total hp) on an enemy and then someone else delivers the killing blow. You both get a proportional amount of the experience and if in a defeat X scenario, you both get credit for the kill. I don't know if that takes some of the sting out of the sitution for you.

I am afraid I pretty much reject the notion of anything, anything at all, being exclusive to an Origin.

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Don't you have to own the land for it to be ranching, while herding implies the animals are wandering over terra communis or terra nullius?

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And would that make kill-stealing a form of rustling? Or the cattle and sheep raids so beloved of almost everyone's ancestors (notably the Celts, but popular the world over).

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"A bunch of guys with guns just walked through our yard."


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I think I was soloing the night it would have been "Gotta go! Armed police officers and a K9 dog charging through the back yard."

Especially since shots had been fired down the block about 10 minutes earlier.

Not to mention my 15 pound mutt deciding he needed to go ape about the 100 pound police German Shepherd running around in HIS yard. I told him "Buzz, you are picking a fight out of your weight class," which one officer, even in the tense situation, thought was funnier'n heck.

About 4 years ago, around 0100 EDT, playing to take my mind off my troubles, I entered:

Gotta go team...my cat who ran away a week ago just scratched at the door to be let in! Need to check him over!

I would say it is more primal. Before MA it was a hunter-gatherer economy.

Having introduced agriculture, can writing and wall building be far behind?

PS - drat! Scooped, I see.

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A surprising number of my contacts redside, I would rather kill than work for. And the game won't let me. I can't even double-cross them.

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A nice twist the developers should keep in mind as they design more PvE missions would be the chance to double-cross/disappoint a contact (perhaps for the last mission in an arc?). Options on how to resolve the mission, that sort of thing...even deliberate fails (letting a kidnap target go, that sort of thing).

Just a sidebar thought that arose reading the thread.

On the wider question - any server is a roleplay server. I have some characters I play in character most of the time, some on Virtue, some not. I don't use (()) conventions, or other external tags of "RP" - I just play the character. In a modern setting game of mostly unrelieved combat, there is not that much overt RP unless one has a character with distinctive speech patterns or behaviors. If I have a "bloodthirsty, code-against-leaving-enemies-alive" antihero or flat out villain, not sure how delivering a coup de grace and saying "That's what you get" is recognizable as roleplay, of course. It is pretty typical player, rather than player-character, response, after all :-)

Satch - something is wrong. I was running a nice lady with the long cape this very morning.

Capes, with certain exceptions like the off-one-shoulder model, aren't available at design time to any of our three genders (male, female, and huge). We still have to slog to 20 and do the cape mission to unlock them.

I don't recall running into different cape options at character creation based on gender, but haven't done a new character with one of the limited cape options for awhile. Also not sure how buyable cape options fit into the mix these days. But it seems to me what you describe, as you describe it, would be a bug.

Watches to see if someone else has a more hands on explanation.

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Why are you guys getting so worked up about a suggestion that has no chance in hell of ever happening?

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Some suggestions are so repugnant they really do not only invite but almost require the most vigorous repudiation.

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I am so sorry to hear you have never encountered a literary passage that plunges itself so deeply into your soul that you feel compelled to read it again - perhaps even again and again.

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If you are suggesting that running farming the same mission is anything akin to reading a particularly vivid piece of literature, then I think it's you I'm sorry for.


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Ah - I should have put this at the top of my post, the only part you read, apparently, rather than the end:

"Mind you, nothing in this game comes close to literature on that plane. But then very little does. But your analogy is really inane when referring to the art of the novel, so I felt I had to go on this little digression. "

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If you're reading a book, and you come to a page that you really like, and you choose to read that page over and over again, that's fine. It's a little banal, but it's fine.

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I am so sorry to hear you have never encountered a literary passage that plunges itself so deeply into your soul that you feel compelled to read it again - perhaps even again and again.

I would feel bereft if I could not savor, oh any of dozens of passages over again, either in the same reading or a later re-reading.

The end of The Count of Monte Cristo ("Wait, and hope"). A good deal of material by a man named Shakespeare. Or Blake. Or Heinlein. Most of Cyrano. Zelazny at his best. Pratchett. Twain (oh Gods, the smallpox hut or the scene with the young mother at the scaffold in Connecticut Yankee, or Huck's epiphany that it would be better to go to hell for stealing a valuable slave than to betray his friendship with Jim).

In performance art I assume you are not saying hearing something once is to hear all the rest. When the Brannagh Henvy V came out on videotape, I spun the Olivier and Brannagh "St. Crispin's Day" speech from both, back to back, much as I might play - I dunno - Callas and de los Angeles both doing Carmen's seguidille on the same day. I realize this must violate what Shakespeare and Bizet had in mind, of course.

If you are fortunate, you will encounter some passage which so compels your admiration and profound response that you cannot do anything but read it again, right away.

Even at the risk of being banal.

Mind you, nothing in this game comes close to literature on that plane. But then very little does. But your analogy is really inane when referring to the art of the novel, so I felt I had to go on this little digression.

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I'm not familiar with the possibility of turning off XP. How's this achieved, and for what reason?

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How: An Options Menu choice.
Why: Any reason the player wishes.

Are you seeing a theme to the design philosophy here? The reason to use a feature or play in a given way is: any reason the player wishes, within very broad limits.

Do you see any lack of congruence between the notion that there is a one-true-way philosophy of play and the much more free one that is apparent in the design of the game?

I dunno. I have been gaming since D&D first edition - brown paper covers. I have been on the design team for several sets of RPG rules over the years, when there was still more of a paper and pencil market out there. And one sees one's "child" led in very strange directions indeed when you release the manuscript to the printer and the customers get their hands on it, let me say.

I have seen Monty Haul gamers, storyteller gamers, tactical gamers, grand story arc gamers, ruffling street bravoes in backwater cities and Heroes of the Age, number crunchers, munchki9ns, rules lawyers, minmaxers, roleplayers, you name it, depending on their tastes, and with variants within the campaign, the rules set, and the GM.

I have never found much use in that "past life" for one true way interpretations of adventure gaming. I don't see it as any more admirable or desirable a stance in this medium.