Heraclea
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Posts
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Joined
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But Shelta is a secret language used by the Irish gypsies.
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Quote:I added up mine and it came to around 6.2 billion blueside; much less redside. I only marketeered on a single character, and that one briefly, just to get a billion inf on one character so that I could say I had done it.Originally Posted by Lobster
3.5 billion, and I've been here since launch! With 2-3 accounts...
Man, I suck at making inf.
<.<
Watching this forum over the years has always impressed upon me what a knack I JUST DO NOT HAVE for making inf in this game
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I always tried to avoid accumulating inf, though, and worked on converting it to useful things as soon as enough of it got into my hand. The prices of recipes, enhancements, and salvage might vary, but their value was fixed. Inf struck me first and foremost as a poor store of value, just because of all of these billions people are talking about.
My characters were communists anyways. From each according to her luck, to each according to her needs. Got my set bonuses anyway. -
Glad to have been there. Thanks for setting this up. Good to get on Yansan one last time; she always was one of my favorite tanks.
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Just wanted to put up a brief note saying that it's been my pleasure to have been a part of Victory these past eight years.
I wasn't in game from beta; I began in Dec. 1984. I rolled my first character on Victory, probably because it wasn't red when I started playing, or I liked the name. In any case, it's been my main and home server since. I have a couple odd level 50s on other servers (Champion, Virtue, Freedom, Pinnacle) but 19 on Victory, and that's after transferring out a couple tankers to participate in the last rounds of Tanker Tuesday.
Heraclea was the first character I made. She was a character originally made for a Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures module, a game I love as much as this one, one that no one can take away from me. She will live on in Age of Conan. She has also visited World of Warcraft (inactive), Champions (inactive), DCUO (not very active), and SW:TOR (never got very far). I play Age of Conan and Secret World (not nearly as much) and am Heraclea on Steam as well, if you want to keep in touch.
Thank you all for tolerating my several eccentricities over the years. -
Like Pengie.
These two were in-game rivals. Grandma Gnosis was my second earliest hero after Heraclea, though it took a long time to get her to 50.
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Nice one.
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Here's a screenshot from immediately after the last ITF on the last Tanker Tuesday.
Thank you all for starting this. Thank you more for keeping it going to the end. I haven't always been in attendance. Over the last year or so, I haven't been on much, foolishly thinking that the game would always be there for me. But since the bombshell hit, it's one of the few things that's been able to motivate me to play, and my final level 50 dinged on a Tanker Tuesday on Champion.
When purple drops and incarnate shards don't matter any more, and really they never did. It's the people. Thanks for being there, and thanks for being tanks. -
This was my original scranker (fire/EM). I revised her concept after she was the first of my characters to earn the 'Intellectual' badge. She has binds talking about Schopenhauer and Debussy now.
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This is my Arachnos Widow.
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Quote:This.... and I thought the system was especially daunting to players in my situation, who as the result of long time membership had a couple dozen level 50s (at one time, more than 15 on Victory alone.) Grinding them all to the Alpha slot was enough of a pain. And I had all these characters so I could simply bring whatever was in demand for what people wanted to run. With the addition of content that was locked to incarnate levels, this was no longer true.Originally Posted by Father Xmas
They were doing so well moving away from required team content only to introduce a path to grow our level 50 characters that required teaming. And not just teaming, grinding. But grinding "is bad" so the devs put a timer on the rewards. So even if you didn't mind grinding it would still take you days or weeks to earn enough whatevers to craft your first whatchamacallit but that's only a 1st level whatchamacallit so you have to grind for weeks more to improve upon it. I get a headache thinking about it.
So I figured, all that can wait for another day. Until it happened that it couldn't. -
When I pretend, I am a master of disguise.
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I suppose the easiest way to address the OP's question is to study on my periods of waxing and waning interest in the game. I've been subscribed continuously since Dec '04. I haven't always logged in equally frequently.
The first major round of disaffection came with GDN followed by ED. This sent me over to Warcraft for the better part of a year. Since most of my characters were and still are tankers and scrappers, it gutted them worse than it did others. The game got a lot less fun then; more importantly, it got a bad reputation for drastic nerfs that it didn't shake for a long time. I still have people on my global friends list whose accounts went dark around that time.
I got sick of Warcraft, though maybe not fast enough. Inventions piqued my interest, but what really brought me back was Cimerora, which became a must to unlock for dozens of my ancient themed characters. I began playing daily for a period of several years around that time.
The second and much less vigorous falling off of interest came with Incarnate Trials. I had planned on mostly ignoring that stuff, and concentrating as I always had on new alts and new powerset combinations and character concepts. All of a sudden everybody wanted to grind max level raid content instead of running the TFs that were my levelling standbys. Fortunately I got most of my level 50 tankers and scrappers through Trapdoor before that encounter was broken and they had to go look for a controller to solo it for them. But endgame grind was what I came back to CoH to get away from.
I never quite shook the sneaking suspicion that the dev team never fully grasped what they had created. Over and over again, I got the impression that they considered the game too easy and wanted to make it harder. Villains gave that impression; I never enjoyed levelling redside as much as I did blueside, because I thought it was harder.
Going Rogue certainly gave that impression. I got maybe two characters through Praetoria. One timed mission full of Seers at level 15 is enough. The superior craft of the Praetoria stories was lost because the zone and missions were so hard. It was much more fun for me to just run radios in KR until you get level 10 and TF your way to 50 with plenty of merits. And missions like that are decidedly team unfriendly. Blueside, it was just simpler to pick the enemy groups that were fun and easy to fight.
There are plenty of game mechanic issues that were addressed far too late in the game's lifetime. I will admit that I powerlevelled my own characters and helped powerlevel others. Mandatory Stamina, and earlier, 22 for SOs were the engines that drove all of my powerlevelling. I don't think I ever powerlevelled a character from 1 to 50 but I powerlevelled plenty from 1 to 25. The invention system fixed part of the enhancement problem, but inherent Fitness came way too late to do much good. All of my old guides were written before inherent Stamina. Reading them is telling. "You do want this toggle, but you can postpone taking it until level 22, when you can get SOs and have Stamina to sustain it." This is why I powerlevelled.
And the same mechanics that motivated powerlevelling past the early game also meant that the game showed its worst face to new players. Especially since nothing ever explicitly told them that they had to postpone taking the powersets they chose so they could have Stamina by 20, even if they had to in order to keep up with players who did. -
Quote:This is historically called peonage. You ain't free to quit so you take what the Man is offering.Originally Posted by Primantiss
Not saying that Hostess isn't totally infallible here either. It just seems like opting for no job, instead of a pay cut, in an economy where people are having problems finding jobs in the first place, is pretty stupid.
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I see I rank a '3'. I gather this means I finished all the TFs I joined with you, and never kicked you from a team.
I only think I ever rated any player 1, and that was Sai Avereonica (sp?) for some ugly political rant, and because I think he was one of the complainers about my Monstrous Regiment of Lesbian Hellions MA arc. But even I had to upgrade him to a 2 after his epic mistell. I teamed with him a few times after that, and never mentioned it. -
Hostess Brands closing for good
Quote:Bad enough that City of Heroes is closing. But this..... this will let the villains run on a rampage.NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Hostess Brands -- the maker of such iconic baked goods as Twinkies, Devil Dogs and Wonder Bread -- announced Friday that it is asking a federal bankruptcy court for permission to close its operations, blaming a strike by bakers protesting a new contract imposed on them.
The closing will result in Hostess' nearly 18,500 workers losing their jobs as the company shuts 33 bakeries and 565 distribution centers nationwide, as well as 570 outlet stores. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union represents around 5,000 Hostess employees.
"We deeply regret the necessity of today's decision, but we do not have the financial resources to weather an extended nationwide strike," said CEO Gregory Rayburn in a statement.
Hostess will move to sell its assets to the highest bidder. That could mean new life for some of its most popular products, which could be scooped up at auction and attached to products from other companies.
A letter that Hostess sent to its network of stores that carry its product said it expects "there will be great interest in our brands." But it said it could not give a time frame for when the sales would take place and its products would be available again.
But even if those brands are bought and restarted, the Hostess workers will not get their jobs back.
"The industry has overcapacity. We're overcapacity. Our rivals are overcapacity," said Rayburn in an interview on CNBC. Asked if the shutdown decision could be reversed if the Bakers' union agreed to immediately return to work, he responded, "Too late."
While approval of the bankruptcy court is needed before the company can start selling its assets in liquidation, the company said production at all of its bakeries has ceased effective Friday, and that stores will no longer receive products from Hostess Brands after the final round of deliveries of products that were made Thursday night.
But products that are already in stores can be sold, and the outlet stores will remain open for about a week to sell the products they already have.
(more at link)
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But what's fabulous can also be legendary
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Had a good time on the Sutter team, which I had never run before. As always an honor and a privilege.
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Congratulations!
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Oppose? La Resistance lives on!
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But the Bulge was General Patton's greatest battle.
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And what is gall, if not a bladder?
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Why be an aster when you can be Asterix, the Gaul?
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But Ceres is also one of the asteroids.
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Quote:For me, the invention system was the end game. It was something that all of my characters could assist each other in, pooling their drops for planning builds. Because this game (another of its excellences) lacked the nonsense of character binding, I never felt like I was wasting time playing a max level character; or for that matter bringing a high level character to a lowbie task force. I always had an alt that could use that purple recipe. I could always use another piece of rare salvage, especially the first and second tiers. I could always use some more merits for random rolls. It gave purpose to super groups and bases.Originally Posted by Starsman
Not having access to an IO build, with pure SO, reminded me of the same deal all over again. With IOs it's easy to have 95% damage, +30% accuracy, +40% recharge and +40%-90% endurance discount on all attacks. Especially if you are willing to do some frankenslotting.
So even with "dual stamina" on a WP tank, I felt endurance was lacking drastically.
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I think the biggest reason for players to not stick around long was lack of content. No high end content forced players to re-roll new characters to have something to do, and that forced them into a much harsher experience than they remembered, not to mention before free-to-play, the low level content was spread all over the world making travel powers nearly a requirement.
I was rather disappointed that most of the recent new content relates to progression raiding. That was always the sort of thing I came back to this game to get away from. -
Zeus reports that he is pleased that dark/ice Ekphobippe ("She who Spooks the Horses") hit level 50 this evening.
This makes her my second level 50 on Champion (Damage Cushion was the first) and my fifteenth level 50 tanker.
She was based on a character from a favorite webcomic, which seems to be on indefinite hiatus.