FourSpeed

Ya Know...

Considering there's a thread out there arguing about "Spoilers", with the loose
consensus that it's mostly unwelcome if not outright rude and inconsiderate,
I can't help but wonder at the irony of you guys spilling the beans 2/3 the way
through the arc.

Epic Move.


/em facepalm



4

A ViP character can have a maximum of 2 Billion inf on hand.

That said, you can effectively *store* inf in the market using transaction slots
to hold bids on A: Items that don't actually exist in-game (ie. L53 IOs) or
B: Bids on existing bids that are unlikely to fill (eg. 500M on a Glad Armor Proc
that normally goes for 2B)

I forget the max number of marketing slots a toon can have, but I have seen
a .jpg from one of our marketeers that had 16B stored up that way.

Finally, you can also store 999M on a single gleemail, and you have a limit of
20 gleemails, so there's another ~20B you could have available to any of your
toons.


Regards,
4

I've often thought that "Game News" would be a useful thing to repurpose
the old info kiosks for, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

Some of us old-school folks don't give a rat's patootie about all that social
media crap, but an In-Game place to find news might be helpful.

That said, I just read the forums...


Regards,
4

I can also confirm having character(s) that are still in the original Outbreak.


Regards,
4

My PB Guide back in I4 was aimed at Nova/Dwarf.

It's definitely viable, and one sideline benefit is that you minimize the slot crunch.

Most of the powers that help forms don't need very many slots compared to
builds that utilize the human attacks.

With IO's / sets, you can make those forms pretty effective.

The wrinkle these days, is the recent changes and perma Light Form really devalued
the forms in many player's minds, and that is leading to more and more human-centric
builds these days.

That said, Dwarf/Nova is still a viable choice, and it's even more effective these
days than it was when I wrote that I4 Guide.


Regards,
4

An amusing idea - I'm all for the 88's annual Solstice gathering.

I don't particularly care whether we re-take first place again or not, but I'm
sure Granny would willingly contribute a billion or two for eggnog and some additional
heat in the base...


Cheers,
4

Some very interesting commentary in here - I appreciate all the responses.

There are a couple points that I want to speak to, and I'm trying to be as non-acerbic
as possible although this issue bothers me a lot on both a customer level and
on a professional level.

I have been an applications programmer (primarily in the corporate financial
sector) with companies (who shall remain unnamed, but would be definitely recognized)
for ~34 years now (longer, I'd wager than many of our posters have been alive).

I'm not saying that to brag, but merely to point out that I'm quite familiar with
software, design/development paradigms, and large company software production.

I think the thing that is bothering me most lately is NOT that there are bugs,
that is truly inevitable in any sufficiently complex application, which CoH definitely
qualifies as.

It is rather, the kinds of bugs we're seeing lately.

The kinds of bugs lately, have been very simple, very obvious, and extremely
simple to detect had their been ANY testing at all.

The Fog of War is about as obvious as it gets. There is no way to NOT see
that one in the first 5 minutes of running a character, any character.

To be sure, it is not game-breaking, but the point I'm making is that it should
never have got out of Unit Testing.

Let's try the age-old car analogy.

There have been many car recalls over the years for some rather dangerous
issues - but how many new cars come off the lot with, say non functional headlamps,
or missing sections of paint, or missing mirrors, or glove boxes, doors and trunks
that don't open or close properly?

Can you drive the car with those problems? Probably.
Would you BUY a new car with those problems? I wouldn't.

If X Motors invited you to test drive the latest model (before it was available
to the public) and you saw these things, would you reasonably expect them
to be fixed before being sold to the public?

This is the caliber of "quality" we're seeing lately, and there's no other way
for me to categorize it as anything other than substandard and shoddy.
It reflects an attitude that is uncaring about either the quality of the product,
or the customer that is using and paying for it.

Getting back to software.

What would your opinion be if these issues were occurring with an ATM, or your
checking account?

What if this software was written for aircraft flight control and management?

I'm on record (in prior post) as saying I'm glad these devs work in the gaming
and entertainment industry, because quite frankly, if the lack of testing and
quality I see here was carried over to other industries, they'd very possibly
cost their companies millions in fines/penalties, or in the aircraft case, wind up
killing somebody.

These bugs aren't "critical", but they're simple, obvious, and should never have
left the coder's desk in the first place, let alone ended up in a live release.
On top of it, they certainly raise the question in my mind regarding what worse
bugs are lurking in the software, given that they can't be bothered to fix the
simple and obvious ones. Not exactly confidence inspiring in my book.

As a paying customer, I am calling for a higher quality product.
As a long-time programmer, I question their procedures.
As a player, I'm grateful to be invited to a beta, and I try to contribute useful
information, but I also have the expectation that it matters, and raised issues
will be addressed in something resembling a timely matter.

Once again, thanks all for your commentary. Obviously, it's a topic I feel strongly
about, and I'm very interested to see how the community views it as well.


Regards,
4

PS> I like cute puppies too!