Egos_Shadow

I think we should be able to replace any long emote with a dance.

It would make waiting for Total Focus to finish animating so much better, in a "you're about to get served" kind of way.

You can totally see it, I'm sure. Some huge spiky demon mo-fo striding across the battlefield, hands aglow with spheres of power, doing an Air Guitar so awesome that people are stunned and then explode.

That was exactly my point.

Fitness, Tough and Hasten are numerically superior options, but nobody liked burning 3 power slots on a gym membership, just as nobody likes Rawr Smash or the Burning Hands of Shame, but we take them because it's numerically superior and endure it - and joy to those who are good enough they never need either power!

So now we don't have to burn 3 slots on the gym membership, and everyone is much happier. But we still endure the Burning Hands of Shame.

I mean, this is not exactly "omg stop the build" level problems here, but I'd like to know it's on someone's Quality of Life tweaks list, even if they're not going to get to it anytime Soon(tm).

Because I can totally endure a little shame for +70% recharge.

AE should probably have a "bugged?" state/flag which doesn't unpublish an arc (you lose all your ratings - though really losing the comment history would bother me a lot more) but which does hide it from normal searches until it's successfully republished. You could have it only show when searched for by arc ID specifically, or in the "my stuff" search; and slap a big red "FAIL" icon on it on in those cases so it's obvious that it needs to be looked at, without the writer having to keep reload-checking their arc all the time.

Anyone who has played the AE for very long has encountered the various crash/failure to load errors. Adding some kind of flagging that the arc is bugged into the error catching would help - I don't know if it would help a lot, but it's kind of wearing to keep stumbling across crashy arcs, knowing that they'll never go away. Some can't even load at all, so you can't even blind rate them to try and mark that you've encountered them before.

Farms we're just going to have to suck it up and deal with since moderation (apart from copyright enforcement) seems to have completely left the AE building. Were it me I would just smack the banstick (unpublish and arc lock) on any obvious farm that hit the front page of search, and otherwise not bother too much about it. You can come up with all kinds of ways to prune them out of search but it's pretty clear we're not getting any of them. It's not worth spending too much time worrying about. They may not be doing anything to stop "mechanically optimized content" besides the occasional flail of the nerf bat but I can't see them just straight up making a flag that outright condones it.

Well, that's part of the reason I was sticking to listing stuff that's non-player-created canon. Just considering the canon creatures that already exist and how they relate to the Well makes for weirdness (if the Well is indeed the source of potential - ie, if Prometheus' description of what happens to a race and their creations when the Battalion eats their Well is accurate; this doesn't rule out him doing a "well, you weren't ready for the whole truth" thing later). You don't even have to bring up whatever crazy stuff players have added on top in order to cause some "wait, what?" moments.

It's kind of like Titan Weapons. ... Okay, let me unpack that. Clearly you're not storing your titan weapon in your costume (is that an Atomic Hammer in your pocket or...), but you're free to come up with your own reason (or pretend not to notice) as to where it goes when you're not hitting people with it.

And then one day the word comes down, months hence, that Titan Weapons actually go somewhere specific. They go to Hammerspace. In fact everything that gets pulled out of nowhere comes from Hammerspace. You're just a normal guy with a katana and a lifetime supply of sharpening stones? Nope - you have an magic extradimensional connection to Hammerspace where your sword lives when you're not hitting people with it. All summonable items? Also Hammerspace. Mastermind henchmen, as summonable objects, go there too. Where are ninja henchmen dropping out of when they appear? Hammerspace.

And just in case you thought you could just kind of look past it, you start getting new task forces and missions that deal with Hammerspace. Stopping villains from stealing stuff from it. Traveling through it to get places. Stopping Rularuu from eating it.

Of course, the fact that this is deeply silly doesn't necessarily stop the Azuria Task Force mission where you go into Hammerspace and are surrounded by millions of floating weapons and the occasional set of Thug and Ninja henchmen playing cards, from being a lot of fun to play. But you do have to wonder whether the whole thing was a terribly good idea, and maybe you just shouldn't have asked where Titan Weapons go when you're not hitting people with them.

A fair amount of the Well stuff is actually kind of cool, on a large scale, but at the same time, the fact that everything is supposed to fit in this structure makes it hard to ignore that some things clearly don't fit well, in a way that didn't matter when we didn't have to think about the idea that they were supposed to.

If you think you're human, you're connected to the human Well (see: Twilight's Son). Since Merulina sourced power from the Well (IIRC) (also: arrrgh!) then the Coralax' power descends from it as well. The snakes could fit under either definition, as could the Devo.

The Arachnoids are a weird one. Technically they could fit under either definition, but remember Project Fury is trying to create non-Well-sourced metahumans...

What about demons? And demon descendants like Infernal?

At what point does a species become sufficiently divergent to 'fork' the Well? Or must they kill their progenitors in order to have the Well change to whatever their new idealized form of power is? Do Wells never fork, and no matter how divergent descendants become, they're still stuck sharing the same source, even if their ideals now vary widely? (If the last - no wonder the Well is bats*** insane considering all the weirdos connected to it!)

Sentient machines would fit under the same definition as Coralax - as empowered creations they (probably) draw from their progenitors' Well.

No transcendent Singularity for you, Mr. AI - if the Well never forks, you're always stuck supporting and anchored by the legacy architecture. Well, unless you kill all humans.

Lady Grey is everywhere. Lady Grey is everything.

Lady Grey gives you Vanguard Merit credit for beating dream Rikti in Malaise's nightmare world that only you, Malaise and Sister Psyche should know about.

Lady Grey is watching everything you do.

Everything.

Well, or maybe it's a job for Null the Gull. Tough (and Hasten) are the other two "meta-powers" like the Fitness tree, where you have a numerically superior option that requires an annoying compromise (in Fitness' case, burning 3 power slots, for Tough/Hasten, a brief to extended period of looking like a dork).

Tough and Hasten don't really require animations at all (activation time, sure) and we should get an option to turn them off entirely rather than having a menu of animation options.

...though the ;dance way of hiding Tough's animation is strangely hilarious. Behold! I express my increased toughness through INTERPRETIVE DANCE!

The cynic in me delights in this of course. Gosh - having gods shaped by belief turns out to be a terrible idea! Humanity believes in stupid things! Who knew?

I disagree, in the sense that this makes the intended progression more explicit; Alpha is the initial connection, Omega is surpassing. I don't see this as a course change or a 'fix'.

It's better. I'm a little surprised actually in that I kind of got the opposite impression from Prometheus' last reveal (after TPN/MoM release) but that was probably at least partially because he was being a vague vagarity of vagueness still.

For someone in the low tiers of the Paragon Rewards system, VIP vs Premium will be night and day. Specifically premium will be night, a terrifying and lonely forest full of grasping roots tripping you up at every step, as you're tormented by the afterimages of what you lost, fleeting phantasms your mind grasps at to fill the stifling and all-consuming dark.

VIP = awesome sauce.

What you want opinions about the Certain Other game?

Plummit then?

Well, to be fair, this would not exactly be the first time we've confused them with how we actually use the game, as opposed to how it's designed to be used.

On the other hand, we can't exactly argue that the Well wasn't in the backstory from a very long time ago, it just wasn't spelled out in detail. Look at the City of Heroes comic book - back in 2005! - where all superhuman powers are stripped. This is a direct logical step from the way the Well is decribed to work now - superhuman powers, regardless of "origin", come from the Well and are subject to revocation.

On the gripping hand, the reaction to that comic was kind of "ha ha ha, no really? ha ha, yeah, whatever man, talk to us when you're out of rehab" which they perhaps should have learned something from.

Yeah even given the Well exists in its current form - even if we don't retcon anything at all from the current Well lore (and this is a comic book universe, so anything and everything is subject to retcon) - I would have preferred to see more development of following Lord Recluse's route of gaining Well-like powers without having or requiring any connection to the Well at all. That's what I was really hoping for out of a "solo Incarnate path". And in lore, that's Lord Recluse's explicit goal in his powers research, Project Fury, etc, for exactly the reasons people in this thread are complaining about the Well.

The Force is a particularly amusing comparison here because, well, Midichlorians, which has to be the gold standard of taking an explanation a step too far.

There's a huge benefit, I think, to leaving something vague; namely that people will fill in their own details, which are possibly better than the ones that actually exist. I can't count how many stories I've read that seemed awesome until the author could no longer contain their desire to show us what the truth of their setting was, at which point nuuuuu why did you do that for $DIETY's sake stop explaining things!

I skipped Chain Induction too. I can't tell you wether this is a good idea or not since I never tried it to begin with.

And hey, more mileage for that "battle on a psychic plane" map from Minds of Mayhem/SSA1.4

Yeah, the less everything fits together perfectly, the more realistic it seems. Real life has odd wodgy bits poking out every which way. Imperfections improve the whole - provided you don't try and obsessively explain exactly what's really, truly going on. There's a certain level of agreed on truth that needs to be present to really get anywhere, but you eventually cross a line where it becomes stifling.

All I can think of is that they may not have tried to write a crossover (with another writer) before. You learn a lot from that kind of thing when you both bring your own characters and preconceptions with you, or, at least, when you have a Big Idea Which Will Be Totally Awesome You Guys Seriously. Specifically, you learn that Internet collaboration is the best, since this reduces the instances of writers stabbing each other.

It's one of those moods that affects authors every now and then - to have one over-arching thing that everything they previously did fits into, thus everything makes 'sense'. I almost never see this work well when it's introduced after the fact, in a "here's what was actually going on" kind of way. Particularly when you retcon things that clearly weren't part of the mythos into being part of it.

I mean, there's a reason why retcons elicit such a reaction from fans.

I would venture to say that this kind of thing is never, ever a good idea. I venture this opinion based on the human ability to recognize patterns in everyone who has ever tried this in the past.

I mean, unless where they're going with this is that the Omega slot is us transcending the Well, destroying it and scattering its power to all of humanity so that never again will entities like the Battalion be able to hold the threat of absolute dominion over our heads, and never again will people like Cole be randomly gifted with penultimate power by a lunatic puddle. That's the third option any true hero (well, or villain, once you remember that you should never attempt to eat a power source larger than your head) would take. The third option. Not rejecting power, or dancing for the Demiurge's amusement, but punching it in its fat metaphorical face.

I expect that'll be part of Issue 30: "Come Back, The Writers Are Out Of Rehab Now! We're So Sorry!"

When you hang out with altophiles, it can also mean that one of your SG mates is on an alt server, with a fresh character, and wants into whatever base setup you have (probably for the empowerment buffs or storage or whatever), but we can't send offline invites and nobody else from the (nebulous, inter-server 'super') group is on, and he's been waiting (im)patiently but dude, I'm in a mission on a different server and then suddenly you reach a stopping point, or something that may as well be a stopping point, and poof.

There are some things that it's difficult to get with 'normal' rewards that you can buy with Empyreans, like PvP IOs. And that's the only thing you should buy - for that, the effort is within a reasonable distance of the reward. Everything else is probably better obtained via another method.

The trading values range from not favorable to the player to downright silly. Emp->Astral is silly. Why would you even want to do that? I mean, maybe you're one Astral short of unlocking something, I guess? It's like a giant tax on impatience.

It's not a nerf, it's an Empathy buff. Membranes work great in Fortitude!

I do enjoy the sheer crazypants nature of having that many people in the same general vicinity all busting out wackiness.

Alternately you're calling forth shadow wolves from some... shadow wolf dimension or something. You tried to summon other shadow animals but nooooo, shadow wolves kept eating them. Damn shadow wolves.

On the plus side, if you ever wanted to have a justification for going Vigilante, the realization that everything would have been so much less failtastic if you'd just snapped that little *******'s neck the first time you infiltrate the Midnight Mansion...

Murder - sometimes it IS the answer.