Innigo

just felt like sharing a pet peeve; people who run back to base when things aren't going their way. And I'm not talking about a battle in the water outside the villains base, I'm talking about running from the monument to the base.
If you're going to do that you might as well just let me kill you as you'll get back to the base without all the hassle of running
Seriously though. This isn't about ppl not standing and fighting - running, flying, tping or SSing away is fair enough. I love a good chase, even if its me being chased but I never run back to base. What's the point?
Anyone else get irritated by this or is it just me?

That's almost ENTIRELY different from what you claimed in your first post; where you said you beat the villains time and again without losses and they coming back for more. As for your analogies, they're generally false as no one suffers in a PvP zone. Losing costs you nothing, it certainly doesn't leave you bleeding in the gutter, so what if someone gleefully announces they beat you? Again, not a drama. A lot of it I've noticed is just harmless banter and not indicative of darker motives.
Sometimes it is though, sometimes people don't see the funny side and start hurling personal insults that are reacted to and things take a turn for the mean - usually resulting in someone leaving the zone in a huff claiming something about the number of n00bs on being too much for them.
But that as far as I can tell is the exception.

As for the badge hunters who have no choice but to come into a PvP zone, of course they have a choice, they could choose not to get that badge. If they want the badge then they have to accept the hazards of the zone which in a PvP zone means other players. That's simply the nature of the beast.

Nothing you've described sounds particularly bad. You were trash talked at and some villains took you on while you were wanting to PvE in a PvP zone. Them's the breaks I'm afraid.
People generally don't leave you alone because you beat them once, they come back looking for revenge - that's kind of how it works. Calling you a coward is simply an attempt to drag you into a fight.
I do it in SC all the time to those players who insist on "base-hugging", something I personally sneer at
I don't think it's an "attitude" that is in any way surprising, people primarily go to PvPs to... PvP.

And if you do have one of the special items then I reckon there's a good chance you're going to be constantly raided. However often that actually is.
We've heard already that the generator is the linchpin to any defense and is going to be target number 1 and at 1.5 million to place lets hope you get that back.

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I cant agrea that destruction in any way is random.

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If an item is destroyed there's a random chance as to whether its permanently destroyed or comes back fully restored. How is that not in any way random?

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i rather loose 5% dmg boost for the SG, than the Turbine Generator that costs not only alot of pres, but also salvage.

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Its a 1% bonus per IoP

Gratz m8.

Slippers and smoking jacket time

It annoys me as well as does a lot of aspects of PvP, but then I remember I do exactly the same kind of thing and so my annoyance fades. I've stolen kills out of from underneath a team's nose just as I've had it done to me.
I've been attacked when I wasn't ready, just as I've done to others.
Etc, etc and so on and so forth.

I just can't help thinking if more people remembered that PvP would be an abuse-free zone.

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that is prolly the reason why IoP wont be passed around the SGs. Coz its hard to defend, and u can be sure that every1 is a soar looser and get back at u with a vengeance.. at the end u wont attack a base for the IoP, unless u feel confident that u can also fend of any invaders at minimum destruction cost lol

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How can you feel confident of that? Destruction cost is a partly random game element.

I can see it getting quite vindictive. If a VG smashed up a lot of expensive equipment and makes off with your IoP then there's a handy opportunity for quick revenge. Launch a counter-raid, smash as much as you can and LEAVE the IoP so they'll have to go through it all again 24 hours later.

Personally I'd drop absorb pain - I awlays find it makes me rather vulnerable and get recall friend as early as possible - 8th maybe. The early lvls are where it's worth its weight in gold.

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If i need revive regularly, IMHO i am playing the game wrong !!

But that is just my opinion after 50 lvls of being a regen scrapper.

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That depends. If you play with the same ppl regulary who all play well together then you maybe don't faceplant very often. I play on large pick up teams with the lvl of mobs at anywhere between +2 and +4 and in that situation faceplanting frequency goes through the roof.
And in that situation if your fighting an AV expect to be one-shotted if dull pain isn't running - its then that revive comes into its own.
Or you can lie face-down letting the rest of the team pull up the slack while you wait to be rezzed or until it's safe to pop an awaken.

And that's my opinion after forty-six levels of being a regen scrapper.

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I dont want to labour the point, but after having looked in both the coh manual and hero planner the following is described.

Oh and i forgot to add - you will be disoriented and unable to recover endurance for a while (from the coh planner explanation)

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Sorry to bring this back up but I was on with scrapper fighting some AVs today and he faceplanted NUMEROUS times and revive was called upon. I can confirm that I rezzed with 2/3rds my hps and 1/2 endurance and was unstunned (which may be due to resilience).
Waste of a power slot? Not today it wasn't.

Just wondered if anyone would be interested in doing a combined piece of fiction. Never done one before and thought it might be kind of interesting.
Would preferably like to work with someone who has some material on here.

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There's a very solid reason why the systems in the new BG are... archaic, it means the Cylons can't remotely take control of them and turn them against the humans. it's actually fully explained in the (very good) pilot episode.

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I disagree. The only episode where the BGs computers came under threat was when they networked them for faster FTL computations. In fact the rely quite heavily on computers throughout the show. And remember, at the time the war kicked off humans weren't very worried about the cyclons anymore.

I doubt seriously if an Ipod would represent any serious threat and consider that during the scene they WEREN'T on the the Galactica. It didn't fit although I understand the reasons for putting it there. They were just trying too hard imho.

Fair enough, then tell us the story based on the things Beet would find important. His brother's head is blown off and he doesn't give a monkeys. He shoots his killer and sets off without a backward glance. Why doesn't he care that his brother is dead? Don't androids feel anything? Surely his brothers rates more of a mention.

I could write a story featuring faster-than-light starships powered by steam engines. Complete with coal bunkers and people shovelling the stuff into furnaces. Hey, they is science fantasy, I can do anything I want and no one could argue right?
When writing sci-fi you need to be mindful of people preconceptions. Will people readily accept computers thousands of years more advanced than the ones we have now to be slower? Of COURSE they will, PROVIDING you explain the reasons behind that.

Present us with an android, tell us its from thousands of years in the future people will expect certain things from it.

I'll give an example. There's a scene in the new series of Battlestar Galactica where you see Lee Adama using a tape recorder. This jarred quite badly considering we'll see them relegated to the museum within a few years and yet we can't build gaint spaceships that can travel faster than light.

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other than that, spot on leif, with science fantasy you can make any assumuptions you like, becuse there is no basis for any of it, so it all can be true.

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You can if you're not worried about the quality of your story. Which I assume the OP is. A *good* story requires the reader to maintain suspension of disbelief. If you're going to have two notions that apparently run contrary to one another then you have to explain it rather than just rely of the reader accepting it.

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Manufacturing capacity is only one factor limiting the availability of goods. Raw resources and energy, transportation capacity, people's time and even waste disposal capacity are other limiting factors. No matter how advanced a society becomes there will always be limitations.

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Energy and raw materials are a subset of manufacturing capability and as for people's time... we are talking about a machine society. No people are actually involved. If we imagine sentient machines then we must imagine less advanced machines that handle production. For some reason i can't see these androids donning a hard hat and working an assembly line 40 hours a week or running a bin lorry?!?

Manufacturing doesn't have to be infinite to be effectively infinite. Think about it. If televisions were 10p each. How many would you have? One in each room in your house? Less? The point being that its not just possible but PROBABLE that production capabilities in almost everything will outstrip demand. And you may live long enough to see that in our human society.

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That's a bold statement to make about another person's imaginary society.

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The point being, is that we're told almost nothing about the society. We're told the androids have spent thousands of years evolving... and apparently srill use cash?!? There's a disparity and if its deliberate it nees explaining.

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Just consider all the things a stone-age man would recognise in our own society: "You still need to eat? To sleep? You're still using knives? You still use rope? I thought you were advanced!"

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False argument. Stone age man is
A) Biological
B) The same species.
C) Didn't have money

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A Roman citizen would probably say the same about our society.

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Our society ISN'T very advanced compared to Roman civilisation. They were the top civilisation of the time. Although we don't throw Christains to the lions anymore.

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Yes, but not in what ways. Technologically advanced? Philospohically advanced? Religiously? Political? Ethically?

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Correct. Why say it if you're not going to quantify it and then base you story on aspects that AREN'T advanced.

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Theoretically; in the same way that we can theoretically exchange text documents between computers without problems.

EBCDIC-ASCII conversion anyone? Ever tried opening an old Word document in a newer version? Latin-1 or Latin-8? Right-to-left or right-to-left? Carriage Return, Line Feed or both?

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Do I need to say the word "advanced" again? Thousands od years of machine evolution?!?

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Why? If a sentient robot brain is as complex as a human brain (which we can assume as it is sentient), training the robot brain might take just as much work as training the human brain. Just because it's artifical doesn't mean it's simple.

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No but it won't be limited by organic components. Simplicity is not an issue. The world's most powerful computers are arguably more complex than one human brain.

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I'm sure that after 1000 years of life a sentient robot would have come to the realisation that there is a difference between theory and practice. Simulations can only take you so far, after all.

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They were still simulating, just is a field.

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You're making a biiig unwarranted assumption there. Why must a sentient brain be greatly more efficent than a human brain? We don't know what limitations sentience and self-awareness operate under; nor is it a given that this robotic society had been formed around a form of robotic brain that was anywhere near optimal.

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Actually the limitations are well known; it's the materials used to make up our brain. First of all we're analog and chemical. Far inferior to digital and semi-conductors for shunting data (packets of electricity) around. Step that up to super-conductors, factor in a much higher evolutionary rate and 2000 years of development would suggest processing power many millions of times greater than a human. And remember, they overthrew humans in the first place. Whether they were optimal or not did they not tinker? Did they not advance themselves?

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No, but he was neither sentient nor free-willed, so I don't think it makes sense to talk about him being "motivated" at all.

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The terminator WAS sentient; that is implied by the shots from his PoV. Free will is illusionary. Humans have programmed limits as well. They're just as obvious or as pliable as the terminator's.

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(In the first movie, which I personally consider to be the only canon one, he couldn't even be said to be self-aware.)

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Of course he could. You got to see through his eyes. What more proof do you need?

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What about Bender's motivations?

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Touche.

Bottom line is this; we're tols these machine wer uber-advanced and yet we saw no evidence of this. So, what was the point in telling us in the first place? Why tell us they've been advancing for thousands of years? What does it get you other than a lot of preconceptions that you're not going to deal with.
If would be better if the author implied the parallel universe (or not, I wouldn't) and left it there. Who cares about the past couple thousand years? Does it have any bearing on the story? Doesn't seem to, so then a big old knife can be taken to it.

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Actually, most camera phones do have something that covers the lens, on mine, it's the back cover.

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Whether most do is debatable, but certainly some do, just as some don't. I'm amused by people latching onto the eyelid thing. The bigger question would be why do they have eyes?
Eyes as we understand them are only good for the visible range of the EM spectrum. Want to plumb further into the spectrum you need something else. Why would androids who clearly have combat capabilities want eyes? Surely they'd want something that offered more. Perhaps 360 degree vision, perhaps night vision, perhaps IR vision, the list goes on and on.

As I said, all of this is because we're TOLD they'd spent thousands of years evolving but we SEE no evidence of it.

I guess you don't have a camera-phone then.

Also I think you'll find that there's a lot of digital cameras nowadays that don't ship with a lens cap.

After thousands of years of technological advancement you'd think a machine society would come up with an unscratchable transparent material. Afterall, they exist today.

However, I did say I would accept this particular bit as perhaps the androids had decided to retain a human shape, but my point was simply that the author was setting his story thousands of years in the future, it was a machine-based society and yet aside from the androids themselves there was little in the way of ultra-tech and that even the androids themselves didn't seem very advanced. YET we were told they were advanced. I would argue it's not enough to TELL us they're advanced, you have to SHOW us they're advanced.

Gratz m8.

The proper response to the stalkers remarks is to find the offending party and splatter him all over the nearest wall. Then maybe petition him.
Warburg IS a free for all, but that's not to say you can't have private battles in any of the PvP zones you just have to think about where to have them (ideally somewhere out of the way) and not be too upset if someone turns up and ruins things.
The arena is available is you want to ENSURE you wont be disturbed.

Unfortunately I'm finding the PvP zones increasingly cliquey and as a result my interest is waning.

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Damaging taunt auras inflict damage which causes a mob to continue to have aggro on you after the actual taunt component has expired - if and only if you have inflicted the most damage to that mob. Since none of the damaging auras do much damage, this is rather unlikely in a teaming scenario.

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Sorry I don't buy that. Unless it has been changed since i6.
the reason I say this is because me and my fire-tank friend did a little experiment;
Could I pull agro with my katana/regen away from the tank if she had her fiery aura on. The answer was a resounding no.
I would strike. the mob would turn to me.
The aura would puff and the mob would, before hitting me, turn back to the tank. I find both fiery aura and mudputs to be extremely effective. Can't comment on the others.

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Actually, eyelids -- or equivalent protection for fragile optical sensors -- make a lot of sense. And why wouldn't sentient robots use money?

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Manmade optical sensors NOW don't use eyelids. Although I can accept it within the concept of the story - to preserve their human form.
This story is set thousands of years after the fall of an advanced human society. More advanced than we are and the story clearly states the android evolved far beyond what humans can imagine.
Money exists because shortages exists. Shortages exists because manufacturing capability is limited. If a machine society can't provide itself with a manufacutring infrastructure so good that shortages are almost unheard of then it's not very advanced.

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Even a robotic society needs goods and since they need goods they need an economic system to distribute the goods through. Money works, so why not use it?

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See above, but additionally, we're talking about senient machines with thousands of years behind them. No economic system we would recognise would be required because of the sophistication of the network.
We're talking machine intelligences here. We're talking communication capabilities that are thousands of orders of magnitude better than humans, we're talking about super-advanced mannufacturing techniques which may go as far as atomic manipulation.
If the society has these things but its citizens still have to go out an earn a crust then it's not a very advanced society. And remember, we're TOLD they'd advanced further than human imagined they would. This comes with certain implications imho.

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As for training, a lot of contemporary robot research is actually based on training robots to do tasks. A multi-purpose robot can't be programmed for all eventualities so it will need to be able to learn -- training is just another word for learning, after all.

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Humans train to build up and reinforce neural pathways. We do this because it's the only way to condition the human brain. A machine brain wouldn't suffer from that limitation.
Once one robot had learned a task it could instantly share that knowledge with any other robot it chose.
Robots would indeed still need to learn but they would do so at many thousands of times the speed of a human. What were these robots doing in a field. What was there for them to learn - especially after 1000 years of life. Remember to a sentient machine 1000 years could be the equivalent of many billions years worth of human experience.

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Not in four-colour comic books they're not!

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Hmmm, then you read different comics to me. Usually the quest involves finding the poison or whatever to bring back to the lab to create a cure from.

My point to the author is simply this; a good science fiction writer considers the implications of any technology he dreams up AND any preconceived notions hir readers might have about another technology. In this case; androids.
Do we expect super-advanced android to be motivated by money? Was Star-Trek's Data motivated by cash? Could the Terminator be bought off?
In short it's not enough to assume homoginising a piece of technology will be immediately accepted by the reader without explanation.

Just my opinion obviously.

There's so many points I'd like to raise, but lets stick with the logical points.

From the story, the narrator and his two companions safeguarded the city from thousands of these things. This would make them significantly less dangerous than wasps are to humans and we don't go about talking about the war with them.

Then can I point out that you've got these android who've been evolving for thousands of years. Yet aparently still have eyelids (I can forgive that one) money, (why would robots use cash?) and require "training". Why would any robot ever need to train?!?

Last point. Contrary to popular belief, when a new disease is identified today Doctors rarely don their packback and stalk off to far flung places in search of the cure. It's usually found in laboratories after much in the way of hard work and little in the way of adventuring.

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If we enter a mob first or attack any of the enemies, the mob's attention will go to us anyway, so really we don't need taunt.

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Right up to the moment where someone else hits the mob with an AoE at which point most of the mob will turn away from the tank and start on the offending and distinctly more fragile toon.

Punchvoke only works on the enemy you're currently hitting.

My blaster alt is a PvP build, and has no AoEs so I generally aim for the tank's target. Unfortunately my controller isn't a PvP specialist and I have AoE holds which I daren't use unless there's a handy corner I can hide behind right after I fire it off. Unless the tank has some means of holding all the agro - be it taunt or fiery aura or whatnot.

I'd like to point out I'm lvling a tank myself and am planning on taking taunt at 22nd lvl.