CaleWestmarch

Summary of Liberty's "Captain Mako Week" event on the red side.

So the admin notice about Sharkhead goes up, and my signature Stalker is the first black-mask on the beach. So what greets me as I head into the fray? Lusca's in the water and a trio of level 40 Arachnos Fliers are sucking sand into their intakes as they meander around. And that's it.

The fliers last two minutes, and a handful of my evil brethren show up to take on Lusca. That lasted five minutes, after which it got real quiet for a stretch (presumably as event-attention was focused on the blue side). Then a trio of Lusca clones show up, all glommed together. Nine villains against three overgrown octopi.

Twenty minutes later, we're all chewing on sushi and wondering what's next. Well, then it starts literally raining octopus tentacles without notice, warning, or fanfire. A league of thirteen villains, and we're suddenly on the wrong side of 3:1 odds. Halfway through the fray we start seeing admin notices from Cap'n Mako trash-talking us, so we start breaking out the KY Jelly we had been saving up until that point and get ready to rumble.

'Cept he never showed up. And once we finished with the last of the tentacles, we're being told to hop on over to Pocket D for our Dev-sanctioned pat on the head.

Let me summarize this in case I lost someone. Red-side fight of Captain Mako week, and the champion of the arena was a no-show. Aside from the trio of chewable fliers at the very onset, Arachnos was also a no-show. Sharks were a no-show, since all we got were recycled octopus from Independence Port, but we still got "Swimming With Sharks" titles. And I didn't see Corolax one in the mix.*

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this event "potato" for a lack of variety and a major disappointment to everyone ready to take on a signature villain. Granted this is the "first run" of the week, so maybe there are a few bugs to iron out, but still.... if the event hasn't hit your server yet, I wouldn't get too excited. "Your mileage may vary" and all that.


(* In defense of the community staff, I got to speak with NCsoft_Freitag in Pocket D afterwards and he swore he spawned a few pods of Corolax for us. I went through my logs and couldn't find any defeated Corolax at all, so maybe he hit the wrong button or spawned them in the wrong location or something. All I'm saying is I personally did not see them.)

I was running missions for the Television in Grandville the other day and hit that end-of-arc mission where you defeat the Radio, the one where it gets set up to look like a music video being recorded. That got me thinking, how would such a setup work out for other toons? Long story short, it ended up being formatted like this:

Toon name/archetype - Attack/Style (Info related to your toon).

Personal examples:

Amman Tobin - Drop It Like It's Hot (Flaming Tanker Mix)
Energy Blaster - Concrete Dancing (Sniper Go Boom Mix)
Stone Tanker - All Out of Granite (Sisterhood Remix)
Ghost Thief - Behind Your Back (Echoes of Garrett Remix)


So, Liberty, what's your toon's music video like?

Even a simple one-line patch note release that says "We fixed a few exploits" would be sufficient. No, we don't need to know which exploits, but it would still go a fairly long way at reassuring the playerbase that they still have a functional QA process that includes proper documentation.

IBTL +1 :P

No.

<crawls out from under rock>

Positron, do you have any comment on the state of the PhysX engine? The last I heard was that the Co* implementation of it was still in a beta-status, and I have heard a behind-the-scenes rumor that Cryptic decided to go with a software-based model on the client-side (the cheap option that trades performance for 'shiney') rather than a hardware-based model on the server-side (expensive for Cryptic/NCsoft, but would not sacrifice performance). If this is indeed the case, could a glitch or two be in the PhysX software Cryptic tweaked that is causing these performance and crashing issues as it tries to render particles?

<fluffs moss and crawls back under rock>

[ QUOTE ]
SPIN ROOM POWERS ACTIVATE!

SHAPE OF: HORSE!
FORM OF: D00Ky!

[/ QUOTE ]

Dude, I damn near fell out of my chair laughing at that one. Stars for.... <long, awkward pause> So, umm.... hear about these new inspirations we're getting?