Grouchybeast

They've altered set bonuses in the past for balance reasons.

Just ignore the Twitter feed, which is what I did. I refreshed the url of the previous batch of codes about the half-hour mark, and then when an arrow showed up to go to a newer image, clicked through and got one. Admittedly, I was only trying for an EU code so there's less competition, but it's still going to be faster, even for a US code.

I have a Unicomp version of the ooooooold style Model M IBM keyboard, with a Logitech Trackman Marble trackball.

They really should. I have to admit that I assumed that was part of the thinking when AE was created in the first place -- get the players to do some work for free, creating good new content. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I'm sure most players would think that getting their work made part of the official world canon was payment enough.

TFs are a relatively poor sources of drops. Every defeat has a chance to drop a recipe, which is then given randomly to a member of the team. It can be offset by the faster defeat speeds on a team, but you'll still always get proportionately fewer drops on a team for the same total number of enemies defeated.

Turn on logging, and solo with that character for a while. I'll be very surprised if you still get a below average drop rate on it.

They do make an ambidextrous gaming mouse (G300), which is at least something for us lefties.

Again, personally, I do find it useful, because it's referring to a class of error that all have the same end result on the reader. It's class of technical error, just like spelling or grammar mistakes, if potentially more subtle and complex. It's also something that can have a major effect on the reader's experience, so it's one that writers need to understand.

Sure, you can make a list of different ways a story can fail to maintain internal consistency, and they can all be good examples for writers to consider. However, putting them in a framework that also explains why that type of error is harmful means you have a way of evaluating writing in a way that hopefully helps writers understand why 'oh, it doesn't matter, no one will care' is not a smart approach to these kinds of errors. They do matter, and people will care. (Or, worse, stop caring and stop giving you their money.)

From the point of view of a writer, though, it's pretty valuable criticism.

Internal consistency is important in selling writing, in all senses of the world. You have to build a level of faith on the part of the reader, and inconsistency undermines that faith. When something unexpected happens in the story, or a character does something unusual, you want the reader to follow along without question, not have half their mind wondering if it's just another ****-up on the part of the writer.

Inconsistency is the literary equivalent of having someone standing behind your reader, poking them in the back every so often. It's annoying. distracting, and it reduces their emotional engagement with the characters and world. And the more engaged you can get the reader, the more likely they are to keep reading, and then buy the next book in the series.

Awesome! I'm happy I could help :-)

Even normal IOs will sometimes go through a phase of the IO selling for less than the recipe. Sometimes if marketeers are trying hard to undercut one another, or have a lot of stock and start dumping it, then they can push the IO price down far enough that it's cheaper than the recipe (especially if you bid creep). I always check the IO v. recipe, just in case :-)

What Organica said, plus, for a long time the recipes sold at the cap, so there was no point at all in crafting the IO before selling, so virtually none passed through the market. I guess people just stopped looking at the crafted IOs.

This is the only time ever in the history of my time in the game that having an EU account has been advantageous. I even managed to click on the wrong link a couple of times, and still got a code to work.

To be fair, I think the US codes should be released in bigger batches. I'm sure there will be more US then EU codes over the day, but longer lists would give more of a chance to US players with slower connections.

I think it's on the hour and half hour, not at random times, so you don't really need to follow the feed at all. Refresh the page at the appropriate times, and you'll get the link faster than a notification.

One thing you can try is to log in with the character whenever you play, do a quick broadcast for a team, and if there's no one in the zone, move on to something else.

In a way, this is the core of the problem you have. A comic book is not a game. The writers can stack the events of the comic in favour of the hero, and make sure they come out on top. It doesn't matter how one-trick the pony is, because amazingly, it will always turn out to be the trick that's required for the pony to save the day.

Here, however, you're playing within the constraints of the game engine, and the basic assumptions of the gameplay. Assumptions like: people will take powers from both their secondaries and primaries, and use them in play. The game can't take account of your special circumstances when checking your participation score, because it doesn't know about your character backstory.

You're playing a niche concept build which limits your effectiveness in game. It says a lot for the forgiving nature of both the CoX game and players that, usually, you can still contribute to a team in a pretty okay way. Still not as well as if you had a more mainstream build that used all the tools available, but okay. However, sometimes you're going to run up against situations where your niche build shows its weaknesses. That's just the price for deliberately reducing the toolset available to you in the pursuit of concept.

It's just like Wentworth's, really, right down to having a crappy UI.

This makes no more sense than it does to say that because IO sets make it possible for Doms to perma Domination, or for characters to soft-cap defense, then the only possible course of action is for the devs to make IOs available to all. Something which, you might notice, hasn't happened. I'd further suggest that permadom or defense soft-capping is far more significant to gameplay than whether you can fast snipe or not.

IOs make a lot of things easier. They're powerful tools. The idea that 'the game is balanced around SOs' does not mean that SOs should be able to deliver the same performance as IOs. It means that most content should be do-able at normal difficulty with SOs.

Do you foresee that you will suddenly no longer be able to complete the Citadel TF you ran one day because the next day other characters can fast snipe but yours can't? Because that would be a little odd.