DKellis

Quitting an AE arc partway while in the middle of a mission (the first mission, after I realized that it was apparently a Henchman Farm) might leave you stranded inside the pillar.

/stuck gets you out, but I admit it was fun in there.

When the devs first implemented auto-exemplaring on Task Forces, any character already in the middle of a TF (any TF, of any level) when it was pushed to Live would get auto-exemplared to level 1.

Guess how I and the rest of the Synapse TF team I was on found that one out.

The Desk From Hell.

This was back when CoV just launched. One early mission (involving Lost) had a desk objective which you were supposed to protect, preventing waves of enemies from attacking and destroying it. Fairly standard.

Except that for some reason, the objective was marked as an enemy. And the mission would not complete until you destroyed the desk. (It didn't help that the mission text was a little vague on whether you were supposed to destroy or save the desk.)

Even better: the desk had AV stats (although, thankfully, not AV regen). I forget how much HP it had (I do remember it had 700 Endurance), but it took my Brute something like twenty minutes just to whittle it down, bottoming on Endurance most of the way.

It was hilarious, in a "oh gods what is even happening here" kind of way.

Note the slotting on Summon Demons.

If the image doesn't load: I slotted three generic IO damage enhancements, level 20, in the power Summon Demons, and the numbers displayed say I now have not only 58.5 percent more damage, I also have 58.5 more damage resistance.

This appears to apply only to the Ember Shield power, rather than the inherent "Resistance" power. I don't know if it's really the case, or if the displayed numbers are just wrong, and the power works like it should.

I know that damage resistance and damage are basically the same thing codewise, just expressed in different ways, but I also thought that this was fixed due to issues with Hamidon Origins.

Is this a known bug? Is it working as intended? Or is it working as Too Much Trouble To Fix?

I'm fairly happy with the basic concept of social networking sites, except for Facebook and the like.

It's a weird sort of implied rule that if you use Facebook, you must use your real name. Now, in a practical sense, there's nothing stopping you from using an online handle or something, but then you get the sort of Look which makes you feel like you're missing the entire point.

It's a fascinating topic of study, at least in the Singaporean and East Asian context: when it comes to interacting with people in a forum context, most people here (according to surveys done on the subject, anyway) don't like to use their real names. But when it comes to Facebook specifically, not using your real name gets you that "you're missing the point" look.

And I'm just not comfortable with using my real name on a social networking site where everyone can see. There are horror stories, admittedly of unclear veracity, of employers checking through Facebook accounts (or MySpace or whatever) for embarrassing and potentially job-losing secrets. There's also an unfortunate bias in "mainstream society" (even if they're using a social networking service) against, well, deep geekdom. It shouldn't matter in social settings that I'm a huge anime fan and I love video games, but apparently it does, in a negative sense. (Tangentially, I'm actually in the middle of trying to find out why there's a bias. It's interesting going, so far.)

Having said that, I use Twitter and Livejournal (and Wordpress), so I'm perfectly fine with social networking per se. I stick with only those, because there's only so much content I can put out off the top of my head before I start repeating stuff across different networks.

I play and plan to play in a way that allows me to survive and have fun without relying on a pristine connection.

"Twitch" gameplay, where being perfectly (or close to perfect) synched with where the enemies are and where I am at all times, is highly vulnerable to sudden lag spikes. They don't even have to be big lag spikes; trying to fire off a power and finding out that the power has not fired off and now the enemies are all in different positions than I intended is not fun for me.

My view of knockback is if you knock an enemy away, getting that enemy back or defeated is not my problem, until they come back in range of the main group of enemies. If I have a debuff on them, I'll turn it off, wait for it to recharge, and re-apply it to an enemy closer to the group. If we're all fine with that, then I have no player-problems with knockback; all my problems turn into dev-problems with enemies being knocked through geometry, which despite disbelief on the forums happens surprisingly regularly to me.

The last time I mentioned this, I was called lazy, stupid, and a bad teammate. This is part of why I don't want to team anymore, even with people on the forums.

Yes, we are here.

Yes, we live in Asia, East or South or whatever.

No, not all of us are Australian or Kiwi.

No, we're not all RMT spammers. We hate them as much as you do.

Yes, we can speak English. Maybe not as a first language, but we can speak it.

No, not all of us can speak Korean. Yes, we've heard of City of Hero, which was in Korean.

Yes, we have friends we'd like to bring into the game.

No, we don't always play free-to-play/grindy/phat-lewtz Korean games.

No, we have seen nothing in recent times that makes us think we have any sort of presence in Marketing's eyes.

Yes, we have, on store shelves, boxes for the game. Specifically CoV boxes. Not Architect Edition, not GvE. CoV boxes.

Yes, we have timecards. No, timecards are not easy to find, and they are often mis-priced; WoW timecards are 60 days and priced accordingly, while NCSoft timecards are 30 days, but priced like WoW 60-day timecards. Yes, I have tried to correct the stores, despite being met with blank stares.

No, US-based advertising will probably not reach us.

No, conventions in the US do not matter to us. Not all of us can afford the time and money for plane tickets (and not the short hops from one US locale to another, but intercontinental, likely halfway across the world) to attend.

No, advertising on sites that are region-locked to the US for the most part (off the top of my head, Hulu and Pandora) will not reach us.

Yes, we know we're not as populous as the US playerbase. Yes, we are aware that we're usually just lumped in the US population, since we use the US client.

No, we have no idea if we're under any sort of consideration from Marketing, and if so, how much.

Yes, we'd like to know.

Out of interest, are there any plans for some sort of marketing presence that is not US and not EU? I know EU players are probably more deserving of marketing attention, but since I live in The Rest Of The World I have to ask.

I'll let the Australian and New Zealand players speak for themselves. I'd just like to know whether, in Paragon Marketing's eyes, the playerbase in Asia even exists.

I would not be surprised or angry if we don't; we're used to it. I just want to know if there will be any sort of outreach to us here, or if we are, as usual, on our own.

It's pretty easy to fail if you don't know what you're doing (in terms of discovering everything for the first time), so most of the team has to have run it before, or know what to expect.

Then again, the only time I tried the Sewer Trial was back before merits, and when the "accepted strategy" was to start the trial with level-appropriate heroes, then invite level 50s to use the glowie temp powers. I'm sure there were teams that ran it appropriately, but at the time I had to take what I could get.

I think I stopped listening to the in-game music about half a minute after I first managed to get the game in Windowed Mode, which was about a couple of minutes after I first started playing.

It's not bad, but I just like my own music collection better. And when I don't, silence is usually what I want.

My tastes run mainly towards anime J-pop, classical, and lots of 80s.

I used to be a troper, until I left due to disagreements with how admin were running the site.

For those tropers wondering, yes, it has to do with renames, the so-called "dominance of anime", and suchlike. Disagreements with other community members I can tolerate. Disagreements with admin who go "if you don't like how it's run you're free to leave" is not as easy.

There's still a Tropers global channel in-game.

To be honest, the more I see the advertising on this forum for Paragon Unleashed, the less I want to go there.

However, the more I hear user commentary of the serious sort about Paragon Unleashed, it starts sounding like a decent place.

It's like all the talk about "you can say what you want to without worrying about the rules!" and "we're real, we're uncensored!" and such actively push me away from even considering Paragon Unleashed. I like having rules to follow. I get enough of "real and uncensored" in Real Life.

The subtle implications that I am somehow deficient as a human being, or as a male human being, for not wanting to join, do not help.

But during the serious moments when I hear "actually, we're talking about this and this here, you're welcome to join" are far more compelling than the random images which I don't find especially funny (not offensive, just... not funny, in the "okay, now what? I don't get it" sense). Maybe I'm just not suited for the sort of advertising Paragon Unleashed believes is more effective.

I get the feeling there's some sort of background Drama to all of this.

So if I don't have many characters on the Unofficial Oceanic Servers (and thus probably won't benefit much from team planning and event organization), but I still want to talk about game stuff (eg build advice), which channel should I join?

(Never mind that going by names alone, I don't actually qualify to join the Australian global channel, but do qualify for "Oceanic".)