DKellis

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Addressing the "contamination". The third one had a theme. Crosswords reuse words and clues frequently, especially narrow focus ones.

I am not sure people's expectations that each crossword should be entirely unique is appropriate.

I designed the last two puzzles and clues. I don't work at Cryptic or NCSoft. I am trying to appeal to the "hard-core"/jaded/experienced as well as the newcomer. I know I can't always succeed, nor do I think anyone can.

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"Contaminated" is perhaps an inappropriate word, but I can't think of another one (English third language, yadda yadda). What I meant was that I can't fairly judge the difficulty of that crossword because I was already "thinking along those lines" from the previous crossword I did. Therefore, "contaminated" by previous experience.

As mentioned, everyone will have different impressions on the difficulties of the various crosswords, and that was mine. 9 down (which gave me problems) and 2 across (which would give many others problems) are examples of "hard clues"; 9 down in particular is "hard but good", and I'd like to see a sprinkling of more of them, but not for the entire puzzle. For what it's worth, 2 down is perfect in terms of difficulty level, while 12 across may be a bit too easy. Again, others may have different opinions.

I'm not unappreciative of the work put into the puzzle. This is pretty much just feedback, perhaps poorly-worded but well-meaning.

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I have to add that I am still stuck on 9 down.

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cough, I've got a COLD. It's like my nose is a carrot.

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The one thought that clue gave to me was "but those aren't Giant Monsters, are they?"

However, I've never farmed them, so I don't know.

I have to add that I am still stuck on 9 down.

Well, different people will obviously have different preferences.

Using that scale of 1 to 10, I would personally rate this one as a 2.5 (needs a bit of obscure knowledge, but nothing a veteran of the games/forums won't think of within a second or two), and the first one as about 7 or 8. (I missed the second one, and the third one was "contaminated" by the duplicate answers.) I would personally like about a 5 or 6; some obscure knowledge (like Cryptic staff names), but the clues will be thoroughly unambiguous when applied to the answer (ie no cases of "it could mean almost anything"). I'm not sure if this is possible.

Having said that, well done on another issue of the Scoop.

The crossword is relatively easier this time around.

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You were misinformed

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Wiki isn't the answer to everything Seems like there's two versions. This was just the one I was familiar with is all.

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For what it's worth, Wikipedia is correct on the part that there's no actual phrase in Chinese (that a Chinese like myself knows of, anyway) that goes like that.

So I suppose it doesn't really matter that much.

Wasn't the answer for 18 across of the crossword used before?

Are we running out of rednames here?

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Oh I know what PWNZ is.

You may not have been active on the forums prior to the inception of Forum Games. Trust me, we've got the patent on lunatic threads.

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Aha. I remember seeing "Ask A Stupid Question" and "Showdown At The Litter Box", and after a few months, I saw them again and thought: "wait, why are they still here?"

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so you could actually end up at the end of a fight with -2000 HP and live just long enough give a thumbs up?

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Hey, I'd play that.

"Team... out of danger?"

"Dude, you're supposed to be dead."

"Just a flesh wound."

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I need some insights on what those suggested Defensive sets are about. Can anyone more imaginative than me care to elaborate or speculate?

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I figure that the Force Fields one would be like the Defender Force Fields, but for personal use.

Shields and Growth should be obvious.

Willpower I think is a more "natural" feel for Tankers: a kind of "okay, I'm refusing to get hurt", rather than "I am unspeakably invulnerable" or "I dodge everything".

Density Control or Vibration I'm not sure of.

Part of the problem in choosing just two is that I can't decide between "this will be so cool" and "this isn't as cool as the other choice, but it does seem more feasible (and thus may possibly see the light of day)".

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As of this moment I'm still having issues with 19 across (She who bore the wings) because I can't think of a redname that fits (_ R _ C _ _ T - or do I have something wrong there? I'm going to feel totally dumb when I figure this out, aren't I..) and 8 down (Dead, Alive, and Dev. All at once)

Any hints are appreciated!!

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For 19 across, think about what has wings. Birds, bats, and...

For 8 down, the hints I can come up with offhand are "Pocket D" and "Dialogue".

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My take on this:

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Potential drama off the top of my head: "why did you endorse his missions and not mine?" Also: "all my friends endorsed this, there's over a hundred names here, why did the devs veto it?"

I realize that this is trivial and petty, but a lot of drama is created via trivial and petty things.

Besides, I don't think it's really going to impact it that much. It's a well-thought idea.

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Cameos begin!

Cameos conclude!

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That was awesome.

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3 down - Crey's Regret
S _ _ A _ S _
I guess I missed a storyline somewhere or something

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I just got this one. Came to me in a "oh, that's right!" moment. (Which is like a Eureka moment, except that the feeling is more of chagrin than accomplishment.) I'm not sure that the answer really is Crey's regret, any more than any number of others.

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9 across - Izzy, to her friends
_ _ _ _ _ _ I _
Not a clue

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Still stuck on this one, but now I have an extra letter to work with.

The crossword is harder than I expected.

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It should be pointed out that players say a LOT of things, and say them a lot. It's a little hard to pick what answer is "being given by the players" when they are giving conflicting answers. So trying to infer developer standing from a bunch of people posting their opinion is just bad practice.

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Also, there's the occasions where "the devs have denied it" got turned into "the devs are lying". See: removal of the 5th Column.

(QR)

I'm expecting the STF to be at least marginally easier to do on Live than it is on Test even if there are no changes.

There is something happening on Test that causes loading times of over five minutes for certain people on our STF runs. Most of them have never had it before, so this is a bit suspicious (in terms of I9 code).

This also means that I've been on three STF runs (out of four) so far where the team had to stop (mostly at the Thorn Tree) because our numbers got cut in half thanks to disconnects. It's a bit hard to test the final AVs if we can't even get there, and through no fault of player skill either.

Sorry, just a bit ticked off at the last failed run.

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Ah, you just reminded me.

Are all controllers having issues in the first mission with their pets not attacking inanimate objects? My controller felt pretty damn worthless in the first mission since she is built for control and support. Rocky is her only damage and he was just standing around.

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Now that you mention it, I think my Phantasm ignored the cables unless they were in the way of his Energy Torrent or something. I can't be sure, though; didn't pay attention to that.

Ran it with a crew from the Livejournal community on Saturday. Ran it and succeeded, despite Murphy's Law being out in force that day. Whole thing took five hours, most of which was due to waiting for people to zone or come back from AFK (like fire alarms). Something was up with the load times that day; some of us had very short and stable loads, and others had to wait five minutes at a time.

In any case, we didn't have any actual gameplay problems through most of the TF. Our team was as such:

Fire/Fire Tanker
Dark/Dark Scrapper
Dark/Regen Scrapper
MA/Regen Scrapper
Ice/Ice Blaster
Ill/Rad Controller (me)
Ill/FF Controller
Rad/Elec Defender

Everyone set themselves on Heroic. We didn't have many problems, although the Thorn Tree was a pain to beat (as usual). Whenever we got it down to just two more vines, the counter sprang back up to twelve. This happened about four times before we finally wiped them all out.

On the last mission, we made much use of the Defender's Vengeance and Recall Friend abilities. We let the Dark/Regen Scrapper suicide, Recall him back, Vengeance everyone, and then tried to pull the AVs one by one.

We managed to pull Ghost Widow alone for about a minute, and then Scirocco came running up. This resulted in a fair number of deaths, as the melee tried to stay away from GW. I know Scirocco managed to hit me twice (one-shot code saved me the first time) through two stacked Large Lucks, with two Rad Infections on him, but that could be just bad luck. The lack of huge damage meant that we were whittling down on the AVs' HPs for a while.

Also, lots of Shivans and War Wolves were pulled out. I believe Scirocco one-shotted a Shivan.

After that battle, we pulled Black Scorpion, and managed to beat him without the use of temp pets. We were expecting Mako to come along, but he apparently decided to let Scorpion go off to his defeat.

Mako was also fairly easy. I don't think he managed to pull off his Elude, or perhaps it didn't make much of a difference, since he went down as easily as Black Scorpion. I'm not sure what we did right. (Phantom Army spam with Psionic damage, perhaps?)

The flier went down a lot quicker than Recluse's Inner Circle. I suppose the level-less Giant Monster code works both ways.

The final rush towards the towers was interesting; the towers seemed to take a while to whittle down, but the main problem (as intended, I believe) was that Lord Recluse was hitting us for over three thousand damage a pop. I also certainly didn't expect the flier to respawn, although I'm not sure whether the other players on the team did. It was mostly a minor annoyance by that time anyway.

After the towers went down, the final battle with Recluse felt like just another (Mastermind-style) AV beatdown, although again, it took a while for us to pare down his HP. I agree that buffs would probably have made things quicker.

Overall, I'd say that it's a fairly well-designed TF. The major problem we had were tech-related, and I know I was worried during Aeon's cutscene in the second mission when the "camera" cuts away to the various other AVs, and my computer started making "okay, this might be a challenge to render" sounds.

Why are there what seems to be Q-rifles in most of the screenshots?

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You don't think it was a personal attack? A statement to the effect of "You could have had my money but now you won't, nyah!" is about as close to personal attack as it gets without using insults, in my opinion. There are ways to express displeasure with sevice providers that don't include taunting them. Personally, I find your wording insulting, but that's just me.

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Would you be happier with the following:

Statesman, due to the high volume of bugs the past few months and the poor communications (see removal of Holiday temp powers as but one example), I chose to cancel my yearly subscriptions on my two accounts. I may decide to go month to month when my time expires or not.

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Far, far happier, yes.

Sometimes it's really the way it's said.

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People may be complaing more because they may be genuinely dissatisfied with the game.

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I haven't personally really seen a whole lot of complaining about the game recently, compared to some time periods (like, say, around Issue 4's release, both before and after, and obviously Issue 5's GDF and Issue 6's ED).

I have seen quite a bit of people-bashing. The difference, in my eyes, is that complaining about the game is saying something like "I don't like the decisions made here, and I don't think they are good for the game", while complaining about the people is saying something like "So-and-so is (insert insult that would likely get me word-filtered)".

I don't think many people have that much of a problem with complaints about the game, but when there's a direct and personal attack against a developer, mod, or player, that's when it crosses the line.

Variables usable are:

$name
$level
$archetype
$origin
$battlecry
$target

Sadly, we appear to have no variable for server name. Some people put the server name in their battle cry, and use that.

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You live in the UK? generally speaking we've often rejected more "elaborate" calls for laws over issues like this, hell this subject came up again last September and was quickly ignored into oblivion.

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I'm currently in the US for studies, but "home" (and citizenship) is in Singapore.

Videogames and such are usually not important enough to warrant actual government debates, but if a "global trend" (read: US legislation) has such things being labelled as "morally bad", then it's likely (not a given, I admit, but still likely) that Singapore will pass legislation stating the same.