Canine

I use macros on my 50 Bots/Traps/Mace MM.

Alt-2 "Follow me on aggressive."

Alt-3 "Follow me on Passive."

Alt-4 "Go to that spot over there on aggressive."

And I've got "Kill that thing over there." bound to the forward button on my mouse.

I've never needed anything else, and the default control macros didn't have the exact options I wanted (and bodyguard mode didn't exist when I made the toon back in I6, So I've never bothered to learn to use it as I've never needed it.) so I made those macros about a week after I made the toon.

I do very occasionally use the advanced pet controls when I need to set an ambush - "Go over there on Aggressive" macro to place the firing squad, followed by manually setting them all to passive until the victims arrive.

You don't NEED to use the whole plethora of available control setups, but if it floats your boat, go for it. My playstyle on my Bots/Traps MM is now set in Basalt after so many years, and evolved to suit the sets/control setup and power choices I made, so I see no need to try anything newfangled and fancy.

Now I do really hate to be negative (in this thread at least, it's my natural state <points to .sig>), but in the middle of all the 'Ooh, Shiny!' bits, this popped up a warning flag.

Am I alone in expecting begging emails to start appearing in my (unused) inbox?


<ding!>

<You have new email from GenericNotAtAllAWolverineCloneScrapper>

<open email, y/n>

<y>

yo m8 lol. i c u in ww lol. ur a lvl50 lol. i want a numina lol. mail me 200mill inf lol!!!

</ignore GenericNotAtAllAWolverineCloneScrapper>

<You cannot ignore GenericNotAtAllAWolverineCloneScrapper, your ignore list is full.>

</condemntofierydeath GenericNotAtAllAWolverineCloneScrapper>

<Command /condemntofierydeath is not recognised.>

</feedtopohsyb GenericNotAtAllAWolverineCloneScrapper>

<Burp!>

<ding!>

<ding!>

<ding!>

<ding!>

<ding!>

<ding!>

<ding!>

<ding!>


AAARGH!!!!!!

OK, so it's highly unlikely to pan out anything like that, but I had to vent on the possibility of giving over-entitlement syndrome sufferers a route to beg from other players

Overall, it's looking good to me, although my old fashioned preference for long arcs makes me think '4 missions in an arc? That's nowt.', but I think I'm almost alone in enjoying arcs like Indigo's or Madeleine Casey's where you actually *feel* like you're investigating a situation and involved in bringing it to resolution.

<cough>

You know, sometimes I feel like I'm just muttering to myself.

It happens if you're not paying 100% full attention to what you're doing in the market window.

There's nothing you can do about it, move on. You could have had to absorb a 50 million listing fee for listing something when tired and not paying attention to making sure previous entries had cleared from the price entry box. Or accidentally listed a crafted Numina +regen/+recovery IO among a load of Generic Heal IO's and for the same price (hey, it was another green IO and I was tired :P)

Just pay attention next time, that's all you can get out of it, and it's not as if inf is hard to come by, even just playing the game the 'old fashioned' way.

Umm no?

Physical media let you reinstall your copy of the game after various levels of catastrophe (PC died, HDD died, Windows went gibberingly crazy and tried to eat its own gall bladder, whatever) without taking a dirty great bite out of your bandwidth.

I don't know about others on this board, but I'm still on a monthly bandwidth cap (40Gb peak, 120Gb off-peak) and I'd personally rather NOT take a bite out of that if I could avoid most of it by shoving a disc of polycarbonate and aluminium into my DVD-RW drive.

(BTW, I'm making an assumption here, which may be misplaced, that the expansion is going to be of significant size, since we'll be getting all new assets for mobs, maps and what have you. I could be wrong. I'd almost like to be wrong, but I'm a pessimist (see .sig))

Not everyone lives in the big city with all the cool cats and all the super high speed uncapped ultra-wide-broadband for £3 per month, some of us live in more rural environs and bandwidth is a limited resource. Physical media still has a very definite use, IMO.

This is why I'm not overly impressed by the lack of hardcopy release in Europe, but I'm not surprised after they gutted the Brighton offices.


Sorry guys, but honestly, I don't think we *are* a large client base. We're *a* client base certainly, but compared to the rest of the US servers, we're a relative drop in the ocean, which has to be colouring their marketing assessments.

Sat at the big round table in the 'inner' section of the Club. North from the Crystal to Cimerora.

So then, how would a dishonourable - and known for it, villain find anyone willing to work with them when their schemes require additional backup of a professional and not hired goon level?

A personal code of honour doesn't imply any level of personal morality.

If your villains are all totally amoral baby eating scumbags, then I can see where you may get irritated by the name of the badge, however, there's the same solution to this issue as there is to all the other badge titles that don't fit with a given character concept - Don't use it.

'Camel Snot' for example. Who in the name of the Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish is going to use that as a badge title?

I've got 15 seconds left? In that case, the panic button is a universal one - "RUN AWAY!!!!!"

All of my toons have 4 universal panic buttons. F1, F2, F3, and F4. Column 5 of my inspirations starts with an Awaken and Break Free at the bottom, so is no use in combat. Pop F3 once or twice to grab 25-66% more defence, depending on what I'm carrying in the slots, F2 if I need endurance, and F1 to refill health. F4's either more purples or a purple/orange mixture. Once the situation stabilises (and yes, face down counts as stabilised) then carry on as required.

As a little experiment, try this - Designate two slots at the top of Column 5 in your insp tray as 'insta-burn'. Any insps that appear there get activated immediately. Not saved for a rainy day, not hoarded because they 'look so pretty' just burn them (unless they'd upgrade your 'stock' of insps to a higher tier, i.e. you just got a Phenomenal Luck dropped off a boss, swap it with a Good Luck in your 'stock' and pop the Good Luck). Right Click and hit 'D' on any awakens you get. It's sometimes astounding how much easier this can make things in the general flow of combat. Can add a little variety to combat, too

Hmm, that reminds me.

<wibbly fade to semi-senile reminiscence>

I've done one successful Hami Raid, the old version.

I was the idiot who got to be Hami-Tank on Union's First successful Hami Raid, (which IIRC, was the first English server success, the Germans got the European first I think, but that memory's a little vague now, any French players who wish to contradict that, feel free ) back when a Regen Scrapper was first choice for Hami tanking duty when backed up by a couple of Empaths.

<Fade back to what passes for reality around here>

Their previous posting on the boards hasn't clued you in?

We don't KNOW.

If you check Positrons post, you'll see that all the info there was a best estimate at the time he posted (early-mid December) and potentially subject to change. Best estimates are NOT the same as knowing for certain. We also don't know at what point on the development cycle they were when that was posted, so we don't know how likely it is that things will or won't change.

We have some information, but not enough (IMO) to make guaranteed decisions. And all the frantic fanbase 'SQUEE'ing in the world won't change that.

I consider it to be slightly irresponsible to misrepresent 'best estimate' info as 'this is 100% guaranteed' info, so I couched my post in conservative tones.

*Especially* when you're dealing with a situation where people are going to have to spend money on hardware, and not everyone out there has unlimited funds to spend on PC guts.

Calm down a little, GR and Ultra mode will arrive when they arrive. And there's not a thing any of us can do to change that.

:edit:

This is a little disingenuous, in that it's entirely possible that Ultra Mode with everything cranked up to 11 won't necessarily run completely smoothly on a current generation Video Card. Crysis with everything cranked up to max, anyone? Oh, and at what screen resolution are you thinking of? Antialiasing? Depth of Field too? Too many variables for any certainty.

It's not something that Cryptic/Paragon are known for, admittedly. They generally do a good job of making sure 'legacy' hardware runs their new stuff fine, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility that it'll take another year for hardware to become completely comfortable with Ultra Mode.

Going Rogue =/= Ultra Mode

For Going Rogue, anything that will run the game currently will almost certainly run Going Rogue.

Ultra Mode is a different question entirely.

Nobody really knows what will or won't be a good card for Ultra Mode.

However, the most recent info we've got is from Positron, here.

Other than that, so far as I'm aware, everything is speculation. Go for the biggest baddest, shiniest video card you can get/afford, cross your fingers, wait and hope.

Hang on. Did you just suggest that Ultra Mode *won't* require a huge amount of stability and compatibility testing?

Okayyy... I've got a bridge you might want to buy. It's real cheap, too

I'm waiting to see what happens, and playing the game as I have done for (very nearly) the last 5 years.

I see no point in getting massively over worked up about it, since even if the beta process goes 100% smooth with no glitches at all (I can hear the programmers and previous beta testers laughing maniacally from here), we're still looking at (at a very rough guess) 2-3 months at LEAST after the game goes Closed Beta until release.

Until then, I'll be selling generic IO's on the auctions, pulling in a small but steady profit on my two mains, and playing some of my other alts since I finally finished the last push to the Leader badge on my original toon.

That's as maybe, but it's bouncing off my Vista64 install and refusing to run, even in XP compatibility mode.

Other people may have more luck, but at the moment, I can't get it to run.

<cough> You're a little late

My link was to the home page of the Mandelbulb, with lots more background and a lot more shiny pictures.

For those wanting to play with fractals in the safetly of their own home, the old stalwart, Fractint is apparently still going. Which is worrying, as I remember faffing around with Fractint when I was at university... 19 years ago

<slouches off, having successfully made himself feel old...>

:edit:

Damn, Fractint's 32bit only on the windows version. If you're running Vista/Win7 64bit, then it's not going to work

Not quite, it was made from Statesman's Cape.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Freedom_Badge

And the main reason that it's a US flag is that Paragon City, regardless of which country you're playing the game from, is set in Rhode Island, on the Continental United States of America. Which means it would be nonsensical to have the flag of any other nation up there.

I think you meant 'clique', Damz.

As far as the notification goes, the only reason I got to Founders(Union) on time was because a) I was spodding around the boards and saw the thread by coincidence and b) I had my Sals tab open (I don't have it up most of the time, I'm usually too busy concentrating on other things to split my attention like that) so I saw that most of the action was in Founders, not Atlas where I first arrived (and planted a couple of times being suicidal )

Now, I *do* appreciate the limited notification for RP reasons, making it feel more like an emergency response to a sudden Rikti probing attack in force.

I can also see that people who missed out on it due to the limited comms would be irritated.

Overall, I liked the event. It was different and far more hectic than most in game situations. The post invasion 'Operation Vengeance' Mothership raid that we ran was a bonus (even if it did prove to me that at the end of a 'trying' week at work, I'm really too knackered to try and scrap on my DB/WP whilst also trying to coordinate a mothership raid. Thanks to TsumijiZero for taking over once we got the pylons down)

The problem I've got is that ^.

It's possible I'm being stupid and have missed something obvious, but I was under the impression that we have no choice but to use the same password for both the game forums and game account...

Not true. Robotics makes heavy use of defence, through the Protector Bot bubbles.

Also, you can really look at MM Primary sets in isolation, you've got to factor in the potential effects of the MM's secondary set, and that includes all sorts of balance nightmares, like FF, Thermal, Dark, Poison. All of which can up your pets survivability is different ways in different situations.

Mind you, I'm not saying that ninja aren't squishy when things go pear shaped, but IMO there are other MM pet sets more in need of help than Ninja (Mercs, anyone? Anyone? No? Oh dear.)