Hertz

Wilkommen zu WarCry, hier ist der Answergebacken von der Askengedingen mit der Gamendebuggencoder, Städtsmann.

Warcry: Was ist der estimated Playenreleasentimen für Issue Neun?

Städtsmann: Söön.

I was playing my Elec/Elec Blaster, around level 20. I was sidekick'd to a level 30 Energy/Energy Blaster, fighting Devouring Earth on the level 30's mission.

I took one shot at a Devoured Boss, and he chased me down and tried to eat me for lunch. I ran far away.

We came back to that room after a quick rest. This time I never fired a shot. The Devoured came right back for me, ignoring the other Blaster completely, even when the boss was 90% dead.

Something is broken about the way aggro works. I've had this happen while I was a Scrapper, mentoring for an Elec/Dev Blaster. Again, the Devoured Boss went straight for the sidekick and ignored me completely.

How could one reliably test for this to see if it's a bug? I thought the whole point of Scrappers having armor was because, according to Statesman, they "faced more risk." If a Scrapper can full-on attack a horde of bad guys and not attract any aggro while that horde is whaling the tar out of an AFK Blaster, then obviously the Scrapper's "risk" is overstated.

They really need to re-examine whether the game needs an all-offense, no-defense archetype. On paper, it's a nice baseline balance, but in practice there's too damn many mezzes and stuns and other effects to make Blasters any more than a theoretical exercise.

What we'll get instead is a secondary effect for Fire/* and */Fire that helps mitigate Fire's massive aggro. What we won't get is a legitimate 3rd attack for Electric/*, a decent set of utilitarian Blaster secondaries, or anything to differentiate us from a naked Scrapper.

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I'm sorry, but is this a sick joke? Seriously, are you listing this as a positive? I mean, anyone can slow down if they want to. I could stand around and chat, then sj, tp, or ss to my destination.

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Oh, that's right, I completely forgot that UBARRZZZ is the only reason to take any power, and nobody ever has the right to disagree with you for any reason. Right, UBARRZZZ, I'll make a note of it. How many Bs in UBARRZZZ?

Thanks for the PM, _BAS,_ I'll get to w—holy sheboygan! I didn't know you were an 11 foot tall alien monkey pirate!

Those won't be easy pictures to work with, but I'll see what I can do, probably with Pretty Johnny. It'd be easier if you had a picture taken from the same angle as the drawing you wanted, of course.

Yeah — I figure there are enough artists who can just do regular ol' drawings without me sticking my big nose into the field.

I don't think I'm all that keen on doing full comic pages or massive multi-hero action fight scenes. I'll stick to heroic (or villainous) portraiture. And by asking for a photo to work from, that reduces the number of portrait requests from "unlimited" to somewhere manageable, like a billion zillion.

But do you have a photo of your face to draw from? (I'm at work and can't get to your site from here.)

I'll finish the one of my own face first — maybe a couple, to see how it turns out.

I dunno yet. Depends on how well it comes out, how difficult it turns out to be, and what you wanted me to try.

And you're allowed to see if the end product is any good before you make up your mind. For all you know, I'm a horrible artist.

Did you have something particular in mind? (You can PM it to me if you'd rather.)

Going to try something new.

I'm going to do a couple pictures of some of my characters. I'm going to pick a variety of them, for the challenge. I'll draw them in a variety of heroic action poses.

The twist I'm going to try is to draw my face instead of my hero's face — changing my own face as appropriate if the Hero is female, male, robotic, stone, bio-organic, metallic, whatever.

If it comes out okay, and it isn't too difficult, I'll post them and let you know.

I love it.

Countdown before someone says, "You guys are idiots for believing this is real content."

Five... four...

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Here's your DOOM: Yet another issue will go by with no new content for level 50 characters it seems, as we know the Invention System isn't coming until Issue Nine. Issue Nine, well, we won't be seeing that until something like April of 2007.

All in all, I'm very dissapointed in this, and I know its going to influence some folks in my SG to suspend their accounts.

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A doom late and a dollar short.

We've known since the Positron radio announcement thingy that Inventions was coming out in Issue 9, haven't we? I mean, this isn't exactly news as of today and this very thread.

6. To generally bump up subscriptions, and to re-capture departed subscribers.

This isn't for us at all. They've already got our money.

The Issues had previously been released quickly enough in succession that players would leave and unsubscribe and only return for the Issue release. They'd stay for a week, check out all the content, and un-sub again.

Issue 7 took six months. There was nothing in between that really dragged back previous players — so they released that "free weekend!" thing and got back a few veterans who couldn't resist the temptation.

Double XP Weekend, if done every 2 months or so, might provide the impetus for subscribers to hang on, or at least to return periodically.

The people who read the boards know it's all about the journey and not the destination. The developers are smart enough to know that people will still pay through the nose for a free ticket to the end of the line.

Hey, it's the free market: if they're doing it to grab more subscribers, more power to 'em. I'll certainly be there.

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Indeed. Avoiding particular words because of their associated stigma means nothing to those who have issues with the actual changes and not the words.

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On the other hand, using a highly charged word when even people who use it can't agree on what it means is simply poor communication.

As we can see in this thread, "nerf" means so many things to so many people that it isn't particularly useful except as emotional invective. "Nerf" becomes a cipher word, a nothing, a syllable with no meaning other than "bad." It's gamer profanity.

To me, this is largely a function of the binary gamer mentality, that a power is either uber — the very best available — or gimp, that is, less than the best. Good or bad. One or zero. Take, or skip. Do or do not, there is no try, etc.

Nerf is the process where you go from uber to gimp, in symbolic logic. It's why so many people use it — and it's also why it's so meaningless, because as a word it says nothing about what the change was or how it works and simply assumes it was bad. Sometimes going from 1 to 0 is what you want.

I'm at work and haven't the access to check out your screenshots, but I'll look when I get home.

As far as the colors-by-power go, I stopped in the middle of doing Energy Melee because I'm going to have to think hard how I want to present those particular swatches, and what Energy Melee can match up to, and how to present the various combinations.

If I use the precise color of that power's aura as part of the costume — which is certainly a valid choice — I'm going to have to provide some very good descriptions on what effect you can expect from such a costume. All of the auras (saving only Dark) are pretty bright and not entirely appropriate for a whole costume by themselves.

If I use a color not identical to, but complementary to that power's aura, then I'm going to have to choose my colors very carefully.

Either way, I sort of need to re-do what I've got. Based on what I'm seeing in the swatches the developers themselves did, I think it'll be easier the second time around.

I'm back! The Colors by Enemy should now include the Nebula and Penumbra Council, as well as the Sky Raiders and the Family. The Tsoo Ink Men listings now give a suggestion what color to use for the tattoos (even though it won't quite be exactly the same as an Ink Man).

Other corrections were added here and there as I spotted errors.

Please do! And stick with new toons — don't buy a new costume for your old toons yet — there still may be some typos and revisions in the existing site.

I'm back!

I've been working some more on putting up color swatches for the various enemies around Paragon. Now included are most of the Tsoo minions, a good number of Freakshow palettes, and some Warrior colors.

Go to the color web page to check out the latest updates. Let me know what you think!

Also, there are some enemies who have been given links, but for whom there are not yet pages. Those are still being worked on.

I figured if any of the color-blind folks here wanted to help, they could help by taking screenshots, seeing as they wouldn't be much help in identifying the colors directly.

But you'd be able to identify those colors as well as anybody, right?

If you'd rather send the screenshots, I'll figure 'em out.

But wait! Now you can have something neat to look at.

Here's the color matching webpage!

Okay, it's just a start. And I can't figure out why Firefox and Mozilla will read the Cascading Style Sheets just fine when it's on my hard drive, but ignore the CSS when it's on the server.

I recommend using MSIE until I figure out why the CSS isn't working in Mozilla/Firefox.

How's about them apples (B17)? That's sort of what I had in mind. The basic HTML is just a series of tables with special <TD> tags identified by color, so all you gotta do is plug the colors into the table by their ID code and poof! You have a swatch.

Then you type in some smart-alec text to go with it, and next thing you know, Joan Rivers will be out of a job.

Why send the screenshots? Just send me the color IDs. Tell me who's who and what colors they're wearing and I'll put 'em in.

I've been taking my screenshots outdoors in daylight. I figure that has the best chance of showing me the correct colors — some missions, like in caves and abandoned warehouses, have special weird lighting that makes it hard to see.

I've already created my CSS on the basis of A1-10, B1-10, C1-10, etc.

As long as the row number is on there, I felt, the rightmost is the only significant digit. Besides, when creating 160 explicit color tags, copy-n-paste was easiest. Although the CSS doesn't explicitly mention your color names, I mention them in my text so there's no confusion. For instance:

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Most Galaxy soldiers appear in royal blue (L4). There is a dark V-shaped trim in navy blue (L2) down the front of the costume, with the Council insignia there in white (A10).

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It's me again. I'm still working on getting some web pages put together that will show the framework for what I'm doing, and I've begun naming some color swatches from some of the existing enemies.

I created a Cascading Style Sheet that names all the colors (A1 through A10, B1 through B10, etc) and assigns the proper color to a <TD> table background-color tag. All I have to do is insert the color reference and boom, I can create a swatch table in seconds with the colors listed as they appear on Altoholic Monkey's chart.

I've also gone through one or two zones and taken some screen shots of Council, Prisoners, Freakshow, Warriors, and Tsoo. The color swatches for Prisoners and Council have already been assembled. When I get some more done I'll put up what exists of the web page so you can see it, or so others can toss in their contributions.

I wasn't going to attempt to match a given skin tone to a race; I was going to go the other way and match a race to a skin tone.

Maybe that doesn't make sense.

<in my best Carl Sagan voice> Envision. If you will. Billyuns and billyuns of colors. </Carl Sagan voice>

Some of the human-based skin tones are pinkish, some are yellowish, and so don't go quite well with certain tones.

I'd give out several pictures: say, Samuel L Jackson, Halle Berry, Roberto Rodriquez, J Lo, Hugh Grant, Keira Knightly (or whomever — just in a range from dark to light in a mix of ethnicities). You pick what you wanna look like, I give you the colors to do it with.

Same with hair colors. Real human hair is almost never one single color throughout. The costume generator simulates this by layering one color over another with a semi-transparent channel. Along with a certain color scheme, I could say "pick a skin tone from the pinkish row, not the yellowish row," or "hair colors that go with this would be X, Y or Z."

My plan is something like this:

RED Costumes
...all-red scheme
...red + complementary color scheme (plus trim color)
...red + primary color scheme (that is, plus a matching yellow and blue*)
...red + clashing color
...red + 2 complementary colors

* Orange would be given a secondary color scheme (plus purple and green). Aqua would be given a tertiary color scheme (plus yellowy-orange and red-violet).

DEMONIC
...red demons
...purple demons
...blue demons, etc

TSOO
...sorcerer outfit
...crane enforcer outfit
...green ink man outfit

d) should I also suggest a skin color that goes with Red, or with Demonic?
e) should I start with skin color so people can make a hero of a certain color and then add matching fashions?
f) should I make a separate list for how to make hair colors? Hair is tricky to mix, even for the color-sighted... it doesn't do what you expect