Chyll

random number generator is random

Illusion goes with anything...

Ill/Rad is probably king, though I really enjoy my Ill/Sonic.

If it had been me, I would have said "There you go. tank him." He either would have, and I'd get to look like a contributing, effective player, who is also considerate OR he would have fallen on his face because (as his activity throughout the TF displayed) his ability may have been suspect. If the latter, then I would have gotten to leap in and save the TF and look like a contributing, effective player who got to be the hero.

He should have said something before using the hook so fast, no doubt there, so -10 player points for him.
On the other hand, -5 player points to you for jumping in on Rommy at the end when you knew the deal.


Largo is unaminously voted Chyll's Favorite Player of the Day.

My first character and namesake that got me hooked on the game was an Ice/Ice/Cold Blaster.

Now the funny thing is, I still play him fairly regularly and love every minute of it. But after 33+ months, I've created a grand total of 3 other blasters. 1 was deleted, and 2 are parked below level 5 and have never been played since.

Stick with grav at least until Singularity. That made a huge difference for mine.
I also really got a boost in fun/performance with Wormhole, but Sing was the tipping point.

Justice
===
defender 43>>>46
dominator 42>>>44
controller 46>>>50
peacebringer 31>>>34
brute 32>>>34?


Virtue
===
scrapper 48>>>50

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Dominator = Controller + Defender


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Dominator=Controller + Blaster

Dom do Blaster damage now.

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their melee attacks have a higher base dmg point, right?

Dominator=Controller + Scrapper

Geek_Boy is unanimously elected 'Chyll's Favorite Player of the Day'.

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I've been doing this since MA launched. Made over 100 million selling common and uncommon salvage.

People still pay me 50k for them when they could get them for 50.

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Sad but true. I've made an awful lot of money listing common salvage for give-away prices, only to find that someone wanted to give me tens of thousands of INF for something that was listed for 5. C'est la vie.

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This statement (and the one you are replying to) are not exactly true.

If you list something for 5, and it sells for 50k, that doesn't mean the buyer "could have gotten it for 5" or "wanted to give you tens of thousands of inf". *If* there were no other bids, then sure - but if there are a hundred or a thousand other bids, even the hypothetical buyer who knew you were going to come along and list it for 5 would still have to consider the fact that there were probably other bids for significantly more than 5, and if he bid 5 he might never get the item.

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True, which indirectly proves the point that increasing supply is not going to equate pulling prices down. I also have been running non-AE missions for weeks and dumping the common salvage at the same price point I sold it at before this recent pricing silliness. I continue to make money - and all the new players now think these prices are normal. It is going to take some time to pull them down.

Uncommons are even worse.

Oddly enough, I am finding that rare salvage is generally pretty reasonably priced.

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Rate based on its fun.

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For many players (myself included), the quality of a mission's story can and does affect how much fun it is to play. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with rating an arc poorly because you think its story sucks.

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Agreed, agreed. Your definition of fun is your own. I would never recommend restricting that. My point is, recognizing that everyone's idea of fun is different makes it hard to criticize another player's idea of fun. We can make critical comments about an arc, but... Well, the OP was a player's thank you for what they found fun and 20+ pages later we tearing into review styles, personal attacks, etc. It misses the point.


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Use your own personally biased concepts of perfection to evaluate and shift it from 5 stars to 4 or 3. Anything more is even less meaningful than the activity within the game.

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Hang on...what makes 3 the minimum? How is it that a one-star or two-star rating is somehow "less meaningful" than a higher one?

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Apologies. I did not imply a minimum. Or did not intend to. I just quit there. Certainly, knock it down to a two, or one, or quit and don't finish.

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Really the trick is if you are going to post reviews - post them. And move on, I rarely see profession critics engaging in any discussion of their comments.

In my most recent review thread, I posted at the start that I would no longer respond to or even read responses to my reviews posted to my own thread, that if people wanted to follow up on a review they were to direct discussion to their own threads.

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I admit that I quit reading your reviews some time ago. But I applaud this step on your part. Well done.

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Almost every review in that thread has a reply in the thread posted by its author, most of them a wall of text offering a point by point reply to the review.

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Which, if that is contrary to your request, is unfortunate, but I hope it sits there unanswered.

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A lot of artists, for whatever reason, cannot accept criticism on any level. Worse still are their fans who seem to be infinitely more rabid when it comes to defending what they like.

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You're right, but it goes both ways. Some critics cannot accept criticism of their style of criticism, as it were, and they too have their fans who will rush to their defense.

Eco.

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Upon further reflection (while staining the fence) I think it fundamentally comes down the to difference between being critical versus criticizing .

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Real criticism is hard to come by a lot of the time. People often feel that if they criticise someone's work that they may upset or offend them.

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True enough. Yet, it still comes down to context and method of the criticism in many cases. The same message can be delivered more than one way and the reaction varies accordingly.

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I think a somewhat softer touch would actually further your own cause in some cases.

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The funny thing is that people say this and yet, like Simon Cowell, Venture's reviews are still insanely popular in comparison to everyone else's.

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The way car accidents or house fires are popular.

Really the trick is if you are going to post reviews - post them. And move on, I rarely see profession critics engaging in any discussion of their comments. Also, once recognized as a 'critic' I rarely see them offering their opinion outside their established venue. We are getting extended back-and-forth discussion and opinions offered outside 'defined' review threads by reviewers regarding AE arcs. I think (perhaps reading too much into the OP) these activities generate the flak.

(edited to substitute 'venue' for 'forum' to avoid any confusion within a forum discussion.)

The purpose, through and through, of AE was to give us as players the opportunity to write fun little comic book hero stories. It was not intended to provide the next great American novel, not an elaborate tied together perfect canon bundle of credibilty, not to wrestle with the meta-physical reality of the stories setting, and not to make any one person happy or not.

fun.

Rate based on its fun. Use your own personally biased concepts of perfection to evaluate and shift it from 5 stars to 4 or 3. Anything more is even less meaningful than the activity within the game.

And all this because one player did have fun, and said thank you publicly for that fun...

bAEbies make me laugh. and cry.

I wasn't at the M&G, but as part of the Justice crowd I accept your greetings and return them (though with less hugs and sweat).

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If I may deconstruct this a little, you seem to be ignoring a lot of things here.

Pet peeve: this is reductionism, not deconstructionism. Deconstructionism is taking a text (which doesn't have to be an actual text) and re-interpreting it so that it says the opposite of what it was intended to say (or, really, anything the interpreter wants it to say).


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How many pet peeves can one person have?

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This was done specifically with this contact, and for this reason, because there is precident in the actual game for the exact same thing happening with this exact same sort of anagram, and, it hints that something is wrong to the observant right away.

The devs do not have papal infallibility. It's not right just because they did it. It is not a "hint" that something is wrong, it is a flat-out declaration, and it mocks the player because there is nothing he can do about it other than refuse to play the arc.

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An anagram is a declaration? of what? even if I had noticed it, I would not have leapt to conclusions based on its presence.



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Quoting Arcanaville from my first review thread:

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By the way, this is what makes contact betrayal so dangerous. The one thing the player - the human behind the screen - and the game make a silent pact to honor is that the player will play the game, and the game will encourage the player to play the game. When the player *must* do mission five of an arc, but the contact does something that makes it absolutely bat-[censored] stupid to do mission five of the arc, the game violates that pact with the player, and that's what makes that so generally annoying. The game is never supposed to tell the player that the only winning move is not to play.

The player is supposed to agree to play your work, and your work is supposed to always give the player objectives they want to complete. Tampering with this contract is something that requires massive skill to pull off successfully across the vast range of possible players. Exploiting this contract is what makes it possible to hide the railroad tracks.

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I generally respect Arcanaville, I will assume that this quote is somewhat out of context... more along the lines of perspective from the fact that I didn't feel betrayed by this arc at all (and again, the indicated quote has nothing to do with anagrams).

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Rubbing the player's nose in an obvious Nemesis plot (or any other type of screw-the-player plot) constitutes terminating that contract with extreme prejudice.

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The only contract I have with the mission writers out there is: They have offered a story, I have entered it. If I am somehow offended by it... I can click 'quit' and go try another story. For me, the presence of an anagram and the sudden presentation of Lord Nemesis hardly constitute anything rising to the level of 'quit' - for me. Its a type of story that clearly isn't everyone's cup of tea. But by all means, , click 'quit' and let it lie.


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If you actually read the mission dialog, the clues state you very carefully incinerate the canister, anything it came in contact with, AND the surrounding area. And then when you leave, you and the contact send in biohazard clean up crews in case you missed anything. It's right there in the mission text.

Yes, I read it the first time, and it is completely wrong. If those cannisters contained biohazardous materials and one was found to be leaking, the response would not be to blithely assume incinerating a few things would fix the problem. It would be more like OMFG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE RED ALERT ALL HANDS ON DECK BATTLESTATIONS DEFCON ONE! The cannister could have been leaking all the way from the Rogue Islands, it could have infected any number of people, including the player, the bioagent could have leaked over any amount of terrain and if it is an airborne agent it is already too late for the city. All of Atlas Park, if not the entire city, would have been quarantined on the spot until CDC, SERAPH, whoever, had figured out what they were dealing with.


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It couldn't have developed a leak upon arrival? It had to have been leaking "all the way from the Rogue Islands"? Let the author write his story. Not yours.

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This is literally the entire point of the arc. If you don't like it, that's fine, but giving 1 star for personal bias is a little extreme. The whole arc was deconstructing and pointing out the insanity of the entire superhero mythos and how absurd it would sound to a 'normal' person.

Which is kind of like complaining that ships in Star Trek travel faster than light. We already know it doesn't work, that's why it's taken as a genre convention.

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Its a classic - classic - story technique whether you like or not. Been mentioned in the thread with more than one example so far and I can think of as many more on top of that. The fact that it may not be an original idea in that respect does not detract from its execution with the toolset within AE. Its well done.



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In an architect completely overwhelmed with farms, impossible to read grammar, broken enemies, and worse, this is really the unforgivable sin of arcs?

Yes.

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The problem, from my perspective based a couple of threads now, is you can't review and let it lie. You get into an extended discussion and argument on how your conclusions and advice are the only solution. That is never true. For anyone.

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Alright, I need to find a server where people still team up to do regular missions.
The three servers I play on...Protector, Justice and Guardian...all seem to just be AE servers now.

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I play on Justice regularly. While I solo quite a bit that's as much choice as anything. When I want a team, I generally get one pretty easily. And almost never AE.

Good luck, but me thinks the problem will not be sorted by a server hop.