EarthWyrm

Thank you, Zwill.

I really don't know. The 3-hour fun-fests every Monday and Thursday for the past few years, where I've gotten together with the same core group of friends (some of whom I only met because of the game, others of whom I only keep regular contact with because of it), don't translate to other game environments. We tried to migrate over to another game (rhymes with "Sarah Schmonline") earlier this year for some variety, but no sidekicking system meant static teams, which meant we had to get the whole group together any time we wanted to play, and it's surprising how easy it was for people to miss sessions in CoH and still have everything WORK. And a lot of their systems weren't as player-friendly as what I'm used to. And their travel system stunk. And then their stupid summer event revealed something unpleasant about my elven priestess - when she put on a bikini, I learned that she had a tramp stamp.

Giving my dignified elven priestess a freaking sorority-girl tattoo was enough to get me to cancel my billing.

I get a lot of hours back when the CoH servers go dark that I'm really not sure what I'll do with, because there aren't other games out there that really appeal to me. I guess I'll look at The Secret World, since it keeps coming up, but I have a hard time believing any other game will match the experience I've had over the past 7 years.

These shared-world games are all about collaborative storytelling. The players and developers of CoH got that. I'm amazed at how rare that particular insight seems to be in the gaming industry.

I have a rad/sonic and a kin/sonic. They're both fun, but the kin/sonic holds a special place in my heart. Lots of +dam plus lots of -res makes for some crazy teaming.

I skipped Aim on the kin/sonic, because I spend so much time damage-capped in teams anyway, and IOs + leadership gives me all the to-hit and accuracy I ever need. I actually took the sleep, but mainly as a purple mule. Had I been building her more for +def, I'd probably have reversed that choice, since it's not like kin hurts for recharge.

Dammit. Now this thread is making me want to go home and inventory my characters/bases...

Although it's a useful analysis, I seem to recall that the chi-square test is pretty substantially affected by sample size (as in, more likely to return significant results when you have a large sample, even if the practical difference isn't very large). All this one tested was whether the entire distribution of drops was a consistent 1/6 per item. The weirdness of the a/d/e numbers makes that kind of a foregone conclusion, but if you look at the rest they do kind of cluster around the target value.

I think what people are likely to be more interested in is whether there were significantly fewer procs dropped than we'd expect. So 151/1004 vs. 1/6, rather than the entire distribution vs. 1/6. What would that be, a binomial test of 15% vs. an expected of 16.67%?

I'm sure there are some math majors around who'd be happy to help out with that.

Interesting... I was on a run where we got Johnny but not Ted, but never the reverse.

What I'm finding interesting/mildly disturbing is that for me, at least, this is having the exact opposite effect of what I suspect is intended.

Pulling me out of the game, off the forums, into other social media outlets where I may or may not already have a presence, encouraging me to either link my activities on those outlets to something I tend to keep to myself (I teach, I don't like my students knowing what video games I play in my spare time...) or create dummy-accounts just to get loot...

All of that makes me feel less connected to this game's community. Not more. And so I'm not participating in it.

If Marketing wants raw numbers of people showing up as being linked to CoX in social media, that's nice. It's not a metric of the game's actual community, though, which is awesome and helpful and way more prone to cooperation than competition, and it really doesn't seem to be doing that community any favors with non-game PvP-style activities for in-game rewards.

Mustard Master
Cherry Vinaigrette
Wasabi Witch
BBQ Bandit
Tabasco Tingle
Commander Ketchup

Yeah, not all the textures are perfect, but still - the Condiment Commandos are officially beginning their 50-plus-level faceroll on Virtue!

Up next: Drowning in (a lot of things that don't look much like) Blood. Poor Freaks and Shivans...

Thanks, all. I'm glad it's not just me. I'll do a respec to give a little more love to Web Grenade, at least for while I'm leveling.

I had the most frustrating experience in the summer blockbuster event tonight. Playing my traps/dp fender, every time I laid more than one debuffing trap, the AVs started running around like idiots. Sylvia painted every bit of the warehouse floor. Ted did the same. Gotterdammerung ran to the opposite end of the arena and back again. And almost every time, the running started as I knelt to put down an Acid Mortar.

Is this just part of playing a trapper? Do hard targets really run all over creation? I've played this character to level 37, but a lot of that has been in bigger teams/on TFs where, if there were runners, they weren't runners who regenerated 5% of their health every 10 seconds (freakin' Sylvia...) and made life miserable for the entire team, and it certainly didn't feel like I was actively making things harder for everybody around me. And that's what it felt like tonight. I was swearing by the time we were done that I would just delete the character, but I don't want to act in haste.

Is there any hope, or am I just going to see more of the same? Was *I* doing something wrong? I've played through this even dozens of times, on plenty of other characters with debuffs (rad, kin, time, etc.), and have never seen this kind of moronic AI behavior that seemed to trigger directly from something I did.

Any input would be much appreciated.