Grouchybeast

Happy birthday! And here's a cake!

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But yeah it would be good to see PP around various zones of Paragon (even defending Portal Corp?) but I think the difficulty is that we get to encounter them at reasonably high level and they'd munch Hellions and Skulls for brekkie

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I'd like to have Crey in general only being targettable bad guys in hazard/trial zones. It's always seemed very odd to me that, judging by most story arcs, Crey Corporation is apparently supposed to be well-regarded by citizens at large, yet whenever we see Crey employees around Paragon City people are cowering in terror and running from them. Surely it would make more sense for them to be carrying out their evil plans out of sight of the general populace?

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Would be nice just to have one mission in which PP are trapped and you have to rescue them or something to that degree.

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It's there one of those already?

...yep. According to paragonwiki, it's given by Cadao Kestral. I remember doing it, and how weird it felt to be saving PPs instead of beating them up.

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although how would Jurrasik get from Crey's to Brickstown without killing / removing the guards protecting the War Wall entrance to the zone?

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He would say, "I'm coming through here to do a spot of landscape gardening, anyone have a problem with that?" And the guards would say, "No problem at all, Mr Jurassik, sir. Step right this way, please."

On Friday we dinged 50 with our fire blaster + stone tank duo, starting from 48. Most of the rest of the weekend was spent levelling our dark/dark defender + fire/kin controller duo from 16-32, including make one late-20s level in a really fun rikti invasion on Talos. We finally finished levelling them around 4am on Monday -- Archie really, really wanted his fire imps. :-)

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That's one way of dealing with things. Though I am not sure if people like being hung out clueless all the time. I find that I like to have a clue if I am able to deal with my opponents or that it is time to start running hard. Finding out the hard way all the time is not something I really can appreciate.

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In one way I agree. I remember very well that the first time I played Darklands it was frustrating, because of an expectation that if the game let me do something, I ought to at least have some kind of a chance at it. Leaving the city was dangerous, doing anything which lead to a fight with the city guards was dangerous, people offered me missions my poor hapless characters would definitely die trying to complete... So I gave up for a while. When I eventually tried again, though, and figured out how the world worked, I ended up loving it more than practically any other game I've ever played.

So, on the one hand, the steep learning curve and the lack of structure made it harder for me to get into the game. But on the other hand, it was a part of what ultimately made the game so enjoyable, because it made the world feel a lot more real. If I knew what the perfect solution was to balancing those two things, I'd be designing games :-)

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PnP games manage fine and have been doing so for years. Traveller, a game that goes back about 30 years, had no levels, but was just as challenging as any other.

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Heck, even in computer games, Darklands, which came out in 1992, had a levelless system, where abilities simply improved with practice and training. In fact, there weren't even any classes, although it was more efficient to specialise different party members that to try to make everyone great at everything.

Darklands didn't worry overmuch about matching encounters to characters, mind. That was the player's job. If you tried to travel overland without gaining enough experience, the *&$#ing gargoyles would just eat the whole party until you learned to save up for a boat trip instead.

What I'd really like is an option at the end of the tutorial zone to pop back into the costume creator and fix anything I don't like before I go on to the game proper. By the time I've run around the tutorial, I've usually figured out if and how I want to tweak the costume and the sliders to get it just right.

When I heard there was a Pocket D teleport beacon bing introduced, I was hoping that instead of a teleport screen in the base, it would be a Pocket D flyer to stick on the wall by the teleporter.

Thank you, your Awesomness!

1600x1200. I rarely maximise windows, though, so the current size is okay. The smallest fonts are little bit on the squinty side, but not enough to really impact using the programme.

Re-built your base yet?
Yes. Or, well, not me personally. But I did change the colour of the walls after someone else rebuilt it all. Now we actually have more than three rooms, and I get lost every time I try to find the teleporters.

Made a Captain America Clone yet?
No, but I went and hung around near Ms Liberty for a while and admired all the shiny new shield toons.

Converted your salvage to brainstorms yet?
Nope.

Lost a crafted item behind a base wall yet?
Not unless toons count as crafted items. Someone deleted the room Grouchybeast was standing in, and then she fell off the edge of the base plot, plummeted, hit bottom rather hard, and had to be teleported out again from the endless grey limbo.

Petitioned a Captain America Clone yet?
No, but I did laugh at a Captain Iraq.

Converted your brainstorms to salvage yet?
Nope.

Earnt a merit yet?
Yes! And sadly, I really was excited. I suspect I will end up collecting them and never spending any.

Done a boring TF just for the merits yet?
None of them are boring to me yet, as I've only done a handful at all. One of the nice side-effects of I13 is how many TFs are being organised.

Done a dual build yet?
I haven't even found the button to do it.

Done a respec yet?
Yes. I was planning one anyway, so I waited for the freebie.

Realised you should have done the dual build after the respec yet?
Heh.

Decide to not play a character just for the day job yet?
I haven't even got round to finding the list of locations, yet. I suspect all my toons will just end up with Wentworth's badges.

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this is the best i could find it just says early 09 which i guess is Q1 but i did read something else that said Q1 so there could be another interview out there

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I think you're misreading the interview slightly. When Positron mentions next year, he's talking about when I13 WOULD have been released if the Mission Architect had been kept in the issue.

This is the part which mentions dates:

We had always wanted to do this, but the development time needed to accomplish this would have pushed the entire Issue 13 into 2009, which we didn't want to do. In the end we took everything else that was in Issue 13 (and added a few new features) and are releasing that this Fall, and in early 2009 we will release an issue devoted to Mission Architect, complete with "customize the boss" and other features that the players felt so passionate about.

@Crimson_Archer:

An hour? Wow :-) Now it seems like even more of a bargain. And all the tweaking was definitely worth it.

I wish I'd stayed to watch Jason doing the picture, but I didn't want him to feel like we were hovering over him. I know I hate it when people watch me working.


@Winterflare:

Those are gorgeous sketches, too.

We made it to Memorabilia, despite the truly awful weather which almost put me off leaving the house at all (the sky was throwing lumps of ice at me!) Most importantly, we made it there early enough to get our names down for the character sketches. We decided to have our duo done together on one piece of paper. Jason drew and coloured it for us, and it's so cool I wanted to share it with everyone:

Pitchblende and Ellie Mintaal

I'd love to see other people's sketches, too.


ETA: I forgot to say, big thanks to Jason, who did such a great job despite telling us several times that it was his first ever show session actually drawing the character sketches.

/signed.

And 40 sounds like a good level to get something spiffy like this.

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There were 124939 instances of unique accounts logged in during September now if we say that these are regular players (they are not but for this we will assume that these players log in every night). This shows that in September (30 days) the average number of players logged in at Server Peak Times to be 4165 (124939/30 Rounded up).

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I'm afraid I don't understand the logic behind your assumptions here. Surely, if you divide the total number of unique accounts which logged in during a month by the number of days in the month, what you're actually assuming is that each account logged in only *once* during the month?

If your assumption is that each unique account is a regular player who logs in every day during the month, then the number of unique accounts which log in on any one day would be 124939, right?

The first step for guesstimating average players on-line per server from these figures has to be knowing how many hours a month, on average, each unique account is logged in. If you don't have a reliable figure for that, then I don't see how you can make any meaningful estimates for server populations. To take a couple of random examples, switching from 'players log in on average for five hours a month' to 'players log in for five hours a day' gives you a potential 30-fold difference!

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a. Believe me, immediate responses are very rare in online RP.

b. That very disjointedness you like about USENET RP is why I find forum RP to be a total waste of time.

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Oh! Suddenly, many things make sense. I was thinking about the idea of RPing in-game via chat, not of RP-ing in the forums. {is newb}

Back when I did tabletop roleplaying, I never bothered trying to hide it. I used to put it on my CV, because it was something to talk about in interviews, and it helps weed out the kind of employer you don't want to work for anyway. I've never had much problem with bad reactions, in interviews or with friends and family. I think a lot of it really is how you explain it. If you sounds like you expect someone to think you're a geeky loser, than that's what you'll get.

The only on-line roleplaying I've ever done was years ago on Usenet, in the various White Wolf threads on rec.games.frp.storyteller. (Now *that* was an unlikely collection of different characters who all ought to have been trying to kill one another. I think we had representative from just about every group in the World of Darkness.) I don't really remember if I used to tell non-roleplayers about that. I can't imagine it came up much, but if it did I probably just lumped it all together with the tabletop games.

For some reason, I can't really imagine RPing in an on-line game like CoH. Maybe it's the immediacy of it. One thing I loved about Usenet was being able to take time over the replies, and how conversations would wait until you had time to deal with them.

Ah, right. Thank you.

Does this proc only subtract endurance from the opponent, or does it subtract from the opponent and add endurance to the caster?

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What's next, then?

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I've been going on a bit of an alt spree. :-) The only RPGs I've played before are DiabloII and Hellgate and I didn't get a character up to the top level in either of them, so I really wanted to stick with Grouchybeast until 50. Now that's done, I'm experimenting.

So far, I've done a blaster, a controller and a scrapper (see sig), and it's cool seeing how differently they play. I played the controller up to...7, I think, waiting around while vines slowly strangled things to death. (Then my other half exemplared down with his blaster and helped with the killing part.) After that, I tried the scrapper, and wow! Stuff just dies! On the other hand, I *love* the vines animations, Seeds of Confusion is endlessly entertaining, and I'm already eyeing up level 32 and the Venus Flytrap, so I think I'll keep playing both of them. And I might try a few more alts, just to look at the different power sets.

Plus, although I don't do much teaming because I'm mostly duoing with my other half, it's been a really nice playing experience. I've heard horror stories about abuse from other players from various friends who play other MMOs, and archie_gremlin used to play Battlefield online, where about 50% of the ingame comments seemed to be 'U R [censored]!!!' But everyone I've run into so far in CoH has been great. And very tolerant of my newbishness. :-)

I'm definitely feeling like I'm going to stick around in CoH for a while.

Thank you! It was a fun way to get the 50, too.

I even managed to get a screenshot, but it isn't very good -- just a massive glow of power effects around the door, piles of dead witches and streng everywhere, and a 'LEVEL UP' buried in the middle.