GuyPerfect

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  1. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    The devs use rand().
    I don't think C++ has any particular algorithm specified for rand(), which would make it compiler-dependent. However, the most common algorithm behind compiler-based pseudo-random generators would be the Linear Congruential Generatior. That article lists the parameters used in various compilers.
  2. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Leandro View Post
    The thing is, I've been in leagues where I was on autopilot and barely doing anything, and I got a Very Rare out of it; while in other leagues I was going crazy trying to do thirty things at once, and I got commons. Whatever way participation is being weighted, it doesn't seem to do all that much.
    It's been said multiple times in the posts following this, but I want to go on record and say that the likelihood of qualifying for specific Component rarities depends more heavily on League participation than individual participation. I'm not sure how narcissistic someone would have to be to think that they could single-handedly award themselves a Very Rare in a League full of other people.

    Having said that, individual participation is a factor, and if you just squat by the door you'll only have yourself 10 shiny new Incarnate Threads to play with afterward.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Leandro View Post
    This could be just random being random, but... yeah. Keyes dropped a Very Rare on me 1/3 of the time. It really bugs me.
    The most obvious explanation that comes to mind is that each trial has different participation thresholds for better rewards. They may have increased the likelihood of Very Rare for Keyes because it's so long, difficult and otherwise not as rewarding as the others.

    So your data... well... If it's a lump of all drops for all trials, I'm gonna have to say it's an incorrect conclusion.
  3. GuyPerfect

    Funny Mids' bug

    If you have a bug report for Mids, a better place for it would be the Mids Tech Support board over at Titan Network.
  4. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Leandro View Post
    Assuming that there's only one threshold (you either get threads, or a component of random quality), we can gather drop rates from it.
    I don't think we can make that assumption. Remember what they said a while back:

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Baryonyx View Post
    After evaluating the data since the launch of Issue 20 we’ve found that players are being rewarded with the Uncommon table more frequently than we anticipated.
    Just Uncommon? And it's more frequently than the flat-rate, weighted distribution they were anticipating?

    I don't buy it. Participation plays a factor in what Components are rolled.
  5. Can only be shot with LRM Rocket and Boost Range
  6. Blue Ring = Notoriety adjuster, vendor
    Purple Ring = Delivery contact (war zone liaison, security chief, The Can Man)
    Pink Ring = Tailor

    The one in the picture looks like it's probably a faded blue, so I'm going to go with an Enhancement vendor (Carnival of Light).

    Most of the Praetorian vendors are Clockwork, so if those aren't present in First Ward, the other two blobs may not be Clockwork either. They appear to be men dressed in dark/black, which would make them either Resistance or Arachnos.
  7. Quote:
    Originally Posted by DumpleBerry View Post
    I won't pretend to understand how PS marketing works.
    NCsoft Employee Records

    Subsidiary: Paragon Studios
    Name: Jimmy Henderson
    Position: Custodial Intern

    Current Project: City of Heroes Marketing
    Greatest Failure: Issue 13
    Accuracy: 30%
    Timeliness: -480%

    Worst Habit: Rushing the devs to release schedules
    Greatest Rivals: Statesman
  8. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Golden Girl View Post
    Another recent comic book MMO that released this year had an equal amount of hero and villain content, but the majority of the players chose to play the hero stuff
    And if you think 20,000 people can't be wrong, just look at no-carb dieting!
  9. Wouldn't redside have to be dead in order to be revived?
  10. GuyPerfect

    Thrill me

    They'll be saving "release day" week for the day it goes live.
  11. Pastels, huh? That's how you knew it was me?

    *Grumble*
  12. Quote:
    Originally Posted by BaronZealot View Post
    Along with this could we get the No XP Option to work like exemplaring used to? With double Inf? Right now it appears to cancel the XP instead of shifting it into Inf like I expected it to.
  13. I've got 90% psi resist on my Tanker thanks to Cardiac and two or three Impervium Armor globals, but I haven't any Smethal resistance above that granted by Dark Embrace.

    Even with Tough, I don't think you're going to get those anywhere close to the hard cap.
  14. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Winterminal View Post
    To the artist who designed the Pocket D windows, I give mad props for bringing the Something Awful meme to the game.
    That was actually an edit I made with MS Paint. Who knew that junk software could be so creepy?


    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Aggelakis View Post
    I like that all of these are your own characters. Nice demoedit/Photoshop.
    I wanted to avoid the royalties issue. (-:

    Though how did you--... have you been stalking my CIT page or something? D-:

    EDIT:
    Oh... duh.


    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Beastyle View Post
    Sorry guys, that was just me. I was dancing out there. Hope I didn't alarm anyone!
    Children can't see you either? This just keeps getting weirder and weirder!


    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Zaloopa View Post
    Or you can add a dash and he becomes the super hero: Slender-Man!
    Once it's a hit at the box office, you bet your belt buckle we'll all be introduced to the adventures of Slender-Dog!
  15. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Golden Girl View Post
    I have good eyesight - but I can't see any monster in the picture
    The grainy/blurry image was intentional, but the edit became a bit hard to see. This is what it was before I put it through the distortion filters:

  16. Ours is a city plagued by crime, mysticism, brute force and the occasional jaywalker. The sheer bulk of would-be wrongdoers is second only to the innumerable quantity of super powered bringers of justice. This modest town has seen its fair share of invasions, corruption, near extinction, nano-terrorism and bad dancing. But something new and perplexing has begun putting our heroes in the tight spot, and no one has ever been capable enough to figure out what's going on. No one, that is, except for private investigator Guy Perfect.

    The day started like any other: I grabbed some leftover pizza out of the fridge for breakfast, tossed the unsolicited driveway-newspaper into the recycling, and headed down to the office to look for a new case to undertake. I didn't even get a chance to do any browsing around, since there was a message on my answering machine from DJ Zero from some ten minutes before I arrived. He said he had some strange business going on in his Pocket D club, and it was disturbing on deeply psychological levels.

    I took a moment to look at the daily comic strips before returning his call. Turns out Mr. Zero has been losing customers suddenly, and mysteriously. That's not something I hadn't heard before: I'm a P.I.; I make a living on the mysterious stuff. But this was no Scooby Doo bakery heist. Scientific investigation, mystical observation and even psychic precognition weren't able to track down what was going on. This, my friend, was something from the realm of the paranormal. That's why the DJ had to call in a specialist.

    The dance floor in his club serves many uses. The most recent of which is as a staging ground for those new Incarnate Trial parties the super guys like to have nowadays. They'd gather together in groups of about 10 to 20, brief themselves on their activities and then teleport out of the club and into some hot spot in Praetoria. That's nothing out of the ordinary for a guy who set up shop in his home-made miniature universe, but something never quite seemed right when the Trial groups were getting ready to go. They'd always seem distraught, looking around as if something was missing, then they'd all vanish to their destination with worried looks on their faces. Something was happening to these groups just as things were getting started. Something unsettling and bizarre.

    It didn't take much work to hunt down someone who had experienced the strangeness for an interview. I cornered a shady type on the way off the dance floor and loaded him up with question marks. His story was that the group leader activated the event teleporter and everyone got themselves queued for transport. Everyone, that is, except for one person. Just one. Every time. They'd all get ready to go, but one of them would never make it in. I got the same story from a number of other individuals. The person who got left out was never identified, and was not left standing on the dance floor after everyone else teleported away. Something strange really was going on, and everyone who came before me failed to pinpoint what it was. I took it on myself to get to the bottom of the situation, even if I never did learn why the newspaper guys think I deserve to read their publication when I don't even want it.

    Pocket D recently acquired a new resident who specializes in the surreal and freaky aspects of reality. You can't make this up: it's a talking bird named Null the Gull. He showed up after the disappearances began, so he's not a suspect, but he definitely sounds like the kind of person who can help get this sorted out. At least, that's how it sounded in theory. Kid's got a room for rent upstairs, and was about as absent-minded as Dean MacArthur visiting a bikini photo shoot. The seagull admits he might know every detail of what's going on, except he has no idea what to expect when it comes to the way things are supposed to work, and told me I'd need to learn some more to be able to ask him more specific questions about the weird stuff. Yes, you heard me correctly: a guy who may very well know how these people are disappearing needs me to be more specific about their disappearances.

    It's hard to say which of the two of us was more confused after the interview. I figured I could probably cover more ground and faster if I do some observations myself. I installed, with permission, some cheapo surveillance cameras around the dance floor and had them watch every time an Incarnate Trial group took off. Most of the time it was just the same old story, but one clip in particular was able to spot something intriguing. Here's a still image of the footage:


    Seems perfectly normal, right? Just a group of kids gathered around, waiting for the teleport sequence to fire up, and one of them appears to be bored out of her skull waiting for it to happen. Pretty typical. But at that particular instant, it seems there's more waiting for the event to begin than the people in the foreground. Take a look outside the window, at the metal platforms jutting out from the club's architecture:


    It's a vaguely humanoid figure with what appears to be inhumanly-long arms and legs. It also happens to be lurking in the shadows. I knew right away that something was fishy about that character, but I had no idea what it was.

    My research landed me on a particularly shocking mythical beast called the Slender Man. It's a tall, skinny guy in a suit and tie with no face and who can stretch his limbs like spaghetti. You can even kinda make out in the image the spindly tentacles that come from his back, so I figured that's probably who it was. The man usually haunts and abducts children, but he appears to have a different appetite in the DJ's pocket dimension.

    One of the odd facts about the Slender Man is that only children tend to be able to see him. They complain to nearby adults that there's a tall scary guy staring at them from the trees, but the adults are never able to spot him. That being the case, most of these Incarnate Trial raiders never see him coming. The only way grown men like me have ever even been able to get a look at the guy is through the use of photography (possibly 'young' cameras?), like those cameras I put up around the dance floor. Looks like we got another win from the cheap goods at Cooke's Electronics.

    I took the picture back to Null the Gull and asked him if he'd ever seen that guy before. As before, he wasn't too helpful, but he did tell me what I needed to know: "I guess I might have seen him, yeah. Sort of using his long limbs to crawl around under the club or something, I don't know. I thought maybe he was the guy who cleaned up the bugs or whatever. Is that not normal? Heck, I mean, maybe it's not even the same guy. What kind of body type did you say this 'Slender Man' had?"

    The seagull definitely saw the Slender Man, and that still of the surveillance footage places him at the scene of a disappearance. Of course, the bird's testimony may be questionable, and the quality of the video was regrettably inferior, but it's good enough for me. If you're keen and paying attention to your surroundings, you'll be perfectly safe, but the Slender Man will still be after you if you let your mind wander. That's my story.

    So the next time you're in an Incarnate Trial and that one last person never joins the teleportation queue, don't go looking for him. Just remind yourself of what happened: Slender Man got 'em.

    Special thanks to Victor Surge for the Slender Man character. More information can be found here.
  17. GuyPerfect

    A not real rant!

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Bronze Knight View Post
    Mercenaries.
    Oh, thanks for reminding me! I wasn't even aware I was repressing memories of that particular powerset. It must be so bad that it was set to auto-repress.
  18. GuyPerfect

    A not real rant!

    The worst part about it is that we will no longer have to suffer through the terrible, pathetic less-than-an-excuse for a powerset that Energy Aura is because of all the sweet, long-desired and super cool improvements they're making to it.

    Just when I thought there was ONE last set I could still hate on, the devs had to come along and ruin it.
  19. Proliferation shmroliferation. Everyone knows that the real bonus here is that Energy Aura is going to be worth more than half a crap. (-:

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Lazarillo View Post
    Okay, I admit, it's nice to be wrong sometimes.
    I'm still going to hold it against you. It's the least I could do.
  20. Warshades can no longer receive any story content.

    *Snicker*
  21. Like StrykerX mentioned, the recharge calculation is Base / (1.0 + Boost). That means +100% recharge reduction in a power will make it recharge in 1 / 2 the time; +200% recharge will make it come back in 1 / 3 the time; +300% in 1 /4 the time, etc. As you can see, the benefit is logarithmic and drops off pretty quick after that first +100%. A power's recharge can be boosted in two ways: with Enhancements (and the Spiritual Alpha Abilities) or with global buffs to your character. These bonuses are added: if you have +50% reduction with Enhancements and have +50% recharge bonus to your character, the net result will be 50% + 50% = +100%, resulting in 1 / 2 the normal recharge time.

    It takes a fair amount of effort to get a power's recharge reduction bonus to +100% in order to cut its recharge time in half. With Enhancements, you can use three Single Origin Enhancements to bring it up to right around 95%, after which point Enhancements won't give much of a benefit. This means Enhancements alone can get a power's recharge time to just over half. What that means to you is that if you have a power with a very low recharge, like 2 to 4 seconds, allocating Enhancements to recharge will reduce it to 1 to 2 seconds. In the grand scheme of things, that's three Single Origin Enhancements that probably could have gone elsewhere... The longer the power's base recharge, the more benefit you'll get from the same Enhancements.

    Sources of recharge reduction in addition to Enhancements will come from powers (Mental Training, Frenzy, Lightning Reflexes, Hasten), from Invention set bonuses or from ally buffs. How much you need highly depends on the way you play and how fast you want your powers to come back. The poster child for high recharge bonuses is the "permadom," a Dominator with enough recharge to cause the Domination power to recharge before its effects wear off from the previous activation; allowing it to be in use constantly. It's also possible to get perma-Hasten, and I've heard legends of perma-Elude (which implies the possibility of perma-Power Surge).

    Of the tools available to players for boosting Recharge, the most common are Hasten and the Luck of the Gambler global. With Gambler, you can have up to 5 copies of +7.5% global recharge, which is +37.5% total constantly, along with +70% from Hasten for 120 seconds every time it's activated. This means with just Luck of the Gambler and Hasten together, you can reduce the recharge time of all powers by over half. With Enhancements in the mix, this means powers recharge in 1 / 3 their base time. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that's way overkill for most players, but again, it depends on how you play and what you want to accomplish with Recharge.
  22. Brutes get a lot of AoEs in the epics, so procs in those can be quite handy.

    Scrappers have procs built into all their attacks to begin with, so it can get pretty nifty pretty quickly.
  23. That's actually a pretty good question... I don't think pets or patches inherit any Accuracy or ToHit buffs that your character happens to have. However, they DO benefit from the Nerve line of Alpha Abilities, since those work on the same technical principle as Enhancements.
  24. *Keeps wishing for Spines/Fiery/Mu Brutes*
  25. Though it doesn't say "F2P" on it anywhere, this is the first thing I thought: