Chase_Arcanum

On the other hand, "if you're creative enough and put thought into your character, the name will be clear, concise, recognizable, relevant to your character, and instantly communicate a great deal about your character. It'll also probably be taken."

Probably best to avoid phrases like "if you're creative enough" as it turns into a condescending insult to people that put a different value in what a name should be able to do than you do.

For what it's worth: I'd buy them- even if priced close to a new powerset ( animation time is a sizable chunk of development time for new sets).

Right now, many of the "magical" explanations kinda assume an innate magical element at play. I like the idea of magical power that is granted through an item. Right now, I'm kinda limited to that item being gloves/bracers/armor (we don't even have many good neck-chain "amulets" in costume creator to use) because the powers appear to come from the body. Handheld items would add a welcome change.

I think that may be a limitation with how they wedged alternate animations and alternate weapons into the game. They were able to vary the art/animation asset that appears when the action is played, but not the audio element that accompanies it.

rassin frassin.

I knew I picked the wrong week to stop drinking coffee.

Friendly Fire does too.

Perhaps our characters should all get 'entrusted with the secret' badge and ouroboros access just for logging in? Its about the only way to make sense of it all...

eh, use some 550 cord to stabilize the dash, wear some shin guards to take any potential collapse in stride, liberally apply duct tape across the whole thing and turn up the radio loud enough to mask the rattling. That ought to get you an additional 20,000 miles or so.*


*assuming your odometer still works.

...don't forget Duct tape & coat hangars.

You're right, though it's hard to do anything BIG without hammering at the engine's limitations.

We've known, for example, the engine's limitation on displaying more than x actors (PC and NPC) at once- its something you'll see if you "leap" to a safe "empty" spot in a high-population rikti raid that you find is full of crap once you get there.

We can look at the mothership raids and see where the "power latency" creeps in- and by the way items that have recharged on your tray don't match the recharge measured on the server, and we know that the server's clock is "slowing" to address either load or excessive traffic management.

(We (as players) may not know whether the issue is server cpu time or the server naturally throttling down time 'ticks' to address a thoroughput threshold (if the amount of data needed to keep displays current exceeds x, throttle down the timescale to reduce the data thoroughput) but we see the issue the same- powers that look like they're back show 'recharging' when clicked and objects that should be in range give "not in range" errors when attacked.)

Without getting any more technical than that, you can probably see that both of these issues wouldn't appear on smaller Leagues with fewer mobs. Or, if you're gonna have large leagues, do things to encourage spreading out:

- the "two team, two path approach" like everyone's least favorite section of Lambda (preferrably with additional mechanics that don't encourage the squishies be abandoned by the tanks). This breaks up the team, putting them on separate maps with their own groups to interact with. team "a" only needs the data for team a's foes, "b" only needs their own.

- Discourage clustering. In the BAF, everyone groups at the tennis courts on my server and foes are pulled to there. What if Seige and Nightstar buffed one another based on proximity. What if they buffed their reinforcements in a similar way? If these buffs are more effective than the "buff everyone to the cap in every stat" that you get from the whole league sitting on top of one another then maybe people start to spread out and take on the foes before they get too close to one another... even if it means that they're not buffed to the max cap the game can handle anymore.

...and, as a bonus... if we have people NOT constantly overbuffed to max thresholds because we're not stacking on top of one another, then we can back away from some of the gimmicks the devs have resorted to to bring a "challenge" to the uberbuffed game. When you bring the game mechanics themselves down from their defined top limits, you open up possibilites within them.

So, I think there are a few tricks that can be done to eke a little life outta this engine without pushing too hard on the toothpicks or blaspheme the prayers that hold things together.


...Then again, I kept my last car until the real axle rusted off the body (well, after getting some encouragement from a pothole at 65mph...) so I might not be the best judge of when its time to retire something.

I'll test tonight when I roll up the game, but given how they do other contacts, I wouldn't be surprised to see the alpha baked into one asset and not the other.


To be honest, I wrote my initial explanation of the challenges in swapping assets without even looking at the 'who are we talking about."-- thinking along the lines of swapping out, say... Back Alley Brawler for miss liberty in Atlas. War Witch v1 with war witch v2 would be much easier.

However, note that the existence of the Pocket D war witch for so long kinda works against the argument for changing Croatoa's contact. The disconnect existed this long, after all. It's even hinted that her appearance/presence in Pocket D is a result of the unexplained. Heck It can be argued that War Witch is alive only AFTER Night Ward is complete, and the events Croatoa are meant to occur prior to this (it IS older content AND it is at a (very slighly) lower level range), so it would be OK to portray her as such... at least until phasing tech could be used to alternate the contact appearance.

...I might've missed it, but are people calling for an update of Faultline's Penny Yin to look more like the Penny Yin Task Force? Its a similar timeline-disconnect issue that we handwave away...

Again, you're assuming too much, in particular, that this could be a power that makes her tangible/intangible. Most contacts are separate art assets with locked in appearances including, of all things, the yellow ring at their base. I recall several demorecord videos that showed them whenever the asset was used. There's no reason to expect that the alphaisn't similarly "baked in" to the asset.

Someone with demorecord could check that easily enough.

It could be that they'd perfer she remain intangible in one place to indicate a state in a "past" event. We've already seen that they consider Faultline to have occurred several years in the past, so why not Croatoa?

I'd prefer it if they did do it as phasing tech-- tangible if the teamleader completes first ward, intangible if not... but it isn't a big enough deal to warrant too much effort on it.

It isn't the code of the zone:

"Find every reference of X across all the story arcs of the game- any instance where user is sent to X as a mission, any instance where X is referred to in the text, and any instance where X gives dialogue options. Then modify them."

That sounds like a reasonable action on the surface, but history suggests otherwise:

Well over 4 years ago, when the devs realized their experiment with missions to "simultaneously disable bombs" (causing a minimum team need) was received badly, they relied more on their own memory and player /bug reports because they all but admitted they lacked the tools to reliably search through the missions for that mechanic. In another instance it came out that they couldn't use their existing upgraded toolset on some legacy content without breaking it, inferring that relatively minor changes were harder because of it.

From what I've seen in my tangential approach to the game industry, such statements aren't surprising nor unbelievable. Even in an MMO, there's not a good history of reverse-compatibility development time for in-house tools. Its all very forward-looking and budget lean.

So, while it might not be difficult via code, it can still be challenging to identify all legacy areas impacted reliably and modify them safely without investing even more into the tools or labor than is reasonable.

This.

The salvage costs for this level range is already rather skewered in the market. They probably were concerned that the flood of play through this level range with JUST one type of salvage would skewer things even more.

The missions should be balanced against other missions within that level range, though. If that's too easy, then people that are concerned about a challenge will have already adjusted their difficulty settings.

Here's hoping.

I haven't seen anything yet, so I'm not sure if they're going "IP under seige from alien/extradimensional invaders" or the good ol' pulp crime that IP's dockside seems perfect for.

I had several issues with this one:

1) That part of the map is the only part that taxes my system on ultra-mode. I'd suffered through the low-fps without downgrading my settings beforehand, but this was the first combat required in that area... and all those combat effects made the issue much worse.

2) Once I set the settings down (dramatically overshooting down to the lowest setting) and rezzed my blaster, many of the animus become tougher to see (particularly the ice-based ones). The sense of urgency given to the mission encouraged me to race from place to place, unaware of the nearly-invisible mobs that were trailing behind me until they joined the mobs at my destination for a much trickier fight.

3) IIRC, the game even suggests you pull the foes close to the house for additional support from the NPC's there. That's fine, but the zigzag path up to the house poses a problem to non-flyers. One navigational overshot (easy to do on lagging PC's) lands you in areas potentially full of other mobs. If your issue was that you needed reinforcements... it doesn't help.

4) If the issue is that you need the house's reinforcements and you mess up enough with #3, you find that those reinforcements aren't available much anymore, compounding the issue as the battle progresses.

5) When Clarity arrives, you don't get a cutscene to announce it. You don't get a pause in battle to give you the luxury of looking for other cues or instructions. You get mid-battle on-screen dialogue text that almost invariably appears behind my chat or map window, easily going unnoticed or disappearing before I can move things to read what's changed.


Sure, most of these are things that don't affect you the second or third time you go through the arc-- you've got the benefit of knowing what's coming so you can prepare for it, downgrade your settings, etc.-- but if they make the arc so unpleasant that you don't want a second or third time all that experience is for naught.

My vote goes here, too.

...but a Regen scrapper still gets both.

man, nostalgia trip.

I had to go look find that the video on Youtube after being reminded of that.