Ironik

Never see a movie because of the actor. They make bad choices, sometimes just for the paycheck. Always follow the writer and/or director whose work you admire.

Does look like it takes a bit of doing to get the pieces necessary.

Freakin' A.

With back up from the kittens what have lost they's mittens, right-right.

Times like these makes me wish they still published subscriber numbers.

I didn't know merits could be exchanged like that.

That's kind of the point. A Natural Jackie Chan is far different from a Natural Ironik. I have to go Tech to compete with him. Tech Matermind, honestly.

I just don't see the point of making an "inhuman" origin, since the current crop cover most of the possibilities just fine. Superman has spectacular abilities, sure, but he's still Natural. Now, if he trains to hone those abilities, then he's just a well-trained Natural. That's no different from The Punisher becoming more proficient with firearms. Iron Man got better at using his armor through training, so he's just a well-trained Technology. The Human Torch got better at using his abilities, so he's just a well-trained Science. And so on. Basically training and experience just moves you from amateur to professional status. It doesn't change your inherent Origin.

I get the revenue-neutral argument, but there's also no denying we've seen a lot of new players in the game (I look at people's badges and have seen many who have zero Vet badges) and the servers are much more active than they were over the summer. At this point, some of those people who purchased GR must be subscribing past their free month, because it beggars belief we'd have an exact exchange of a new group of people buying GR just as the previous group let their accounts lapse after the first month in order to maintain the server loads.

Granted, the servers aren't *as* full as in September and October, but they still seem far more populated than the entire rest of the year. I can't even recall the last time I saw Virtue and Freedom constantly red for weeks on end. Usually it's just during 2xp weekends and free reactivation weekends.

All to say I think NCSoft made *some* money from GR.

I should do that, too. It never occurred to me to play the game other than straight through, as I assume the arcs (especially in Praetoria) were designed for you to do one after the other with no lockouts. I certainly never noticed any arcs going unfinished. It also never occurred to me to see if someone had made a list of which arcs gave more merits since I assumed they all rewarded the same -- or at least similar. I vaguely recall some Dev (Positron?) saying that arcs gave X amount and TFs gave a bonus of 2X or whatever, so I figured outside of big story arcs like Envoy of Shadow or Freakalympics we just received 0 to 2 per arc based on a random roll.

Okay, screenshots of 3 of my 4 Praetorians. 2 of them have been out in Paragon City for a while and they've managed to cross over the 100-merit threshold, which actually surprises me a bit. Not much of a difference between the L26 and L30 guy, though. The L16 guy has the typical number of merits I generally get. I can't recall ever getting 20 merits at a pop, though, not even in a TF. With rare IO recipes being in the 150-300 range and merit drops increased recently, you can see why I don't really pay attention to them. Even at these accelerated rates, by the time these guys are 50, I'll only be able to buy 4 or 5 rolls... if I'm lucky.

I disagree. Superman's abilities are a natural part of him. The appropriate analogy isn't the FF but rather Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin -- they could jump higher and run faster on the moon because the conditions are different there. THEY were still the same men.

Also disagree. My aliens are all over the place. I have Nat, Tech and Science off the top of my head. I don't think I have a Magic one simply because that's not how I view aliens, but they aren't all Nats.

Agree. There are a number of things wrong with the OoPs arc and this is a big one.

See, 187 merits sounds fake to me, because I never get anything remotely like that. I don't really pay attention to merits, so I'd have to go look. If one of my guys has triple digits, I'd be stunned.

Like I said, I'm patient.

I guess you guys think I'm lying or something, but I've never had good luck with drops in this game. I never got a single costume recipe drop until *after* they changed the drop rate, so I missed out on all the nice 100 million Influence gains people had in the early days. As for buying a rare IO recipe, I recall it cost something like 175 merits or thereabouts, maybe even more. It's been a while so I don't recall exactly, but it was definitely in the triple digits. When you get a couple merits at a time, it takes a while to build up enough in order to afford a roll like that.

I played my 38 Dual Blades/Willpower Scrapper solo for about 3 hours (on and off) last night. Early in the evening I decided to buy a full set of Analyze Weakness (Def DeBuff) just because I felt like it. At first I didn't think I'd be able to get the special "Chance for +ToHit" because there didn't seem to be any for sale at any level, so I checked the merit vendor and the cost was 220 merits. No way THAT was going to happen. Fortunately someone decided to sell one at level 34 or 36 or something, so I snatched it up for a million+. (I had 9 million on hand.)

I did 5 tip missions, a FedEx, dropped a radio, did another radio, plus 3 or 4 regular missions from my contacts. Through all of that I got about 9 merits, what I consider a really good night, merit-wise. All told, I think I got about 11 SOs and 2 DOs. I got a few minor recipes. Jet Pack temp power, a Calibrated Accuracy, a Positron's Blast and a bunch of level 40 Common IOs (Defense Buff, Accuracy, Damage, Snare, etc.).

One interesting thing of note: After I bought all those Analyze Weakness, I either had a string of uncharacteristic good luck or they've reprogrammed the Salvage drops significantly to target what you need. I made a list of the salvage I didn't have, and was able to buy a few of them. I figured once I was done playing, I'd log on my 50 and email whichever ones she had, then have her buy the others since she can afford the 1 to 1.5 million some of them were going for. Surprisingly, I was actually getting a lot of the items the recipes needed. I've never noticed that happening before, but I've never, ever bought a full rack of the same kind of recipes before, either.

Here's the list. The ones with the red checkmarks are the drops I received.



And this has nothing to do with that, but I took this a couple minutes ago to show why I'm having a difficult time typing at the moment.

If we can get unlimited KB like the old days, that ALONE would be worth the Incarnate system. One of our favorite pastimes was trying to knock someone over the globe. Never did quite manage that.

Mea culpa. I completely dropped the ball on that, as I meant to restrict it solely to Cole and not guys like Imperious. Scythus is right in calling me on that.

Reminder to self: post, *then* take meds, not vice versa.

Anyone remember back in the late '80s and early '90s how TV shows would try to up the ante on their drama by announcing "next week ONE OF THEIR OWN DIES!" And viewers would tune it to see which cast member gets whacked... until you realized there was suddenly an extra person in all the commercials and ads you'd never seen before. It was especially egregious on the original 90210, because the new guy looked like he'd been pasted into an old mimeograph of the regular cast.

That's what these "events" in the comics remind me of.

We're ready for the zombie apocalypse because we've *practiced* it.

In this case, I suspect it is as presented: strike while the iron is hot and make hay while the sun shines.

Statesmonkey
Possumtron
Back Alley Meower
Preying Mantiscore
Citadelephant
Mynx ...oh wait.

I never got the impression that Imperious is supposed to be Statesman but rather a Statesman analogue. We're talking about alternate Marcus Coles, not other people who are the Incarnates of Zeus. That's an entirely different category.

What the hell are you talking about? That never happened.

I can give an example from my own life which might help illustrate this (and I use it in my own writing, as well):

My mom is very smart, as in genius-level IQ. She recently retired as a nurse with a number of accolades to her credit. She was head of the ER and set up nursing facilities for a number of corporations before moving over to ICU and Recovery to finish out her career. In the heat of the moment she somehow recalls voluminous amounts of information about drugs and their interactions and how they affect the body and potentiate each other. When I volunteered in the ER, I actually saw her put her hands into someone's abdomen and save his life, something most doctors would be hard-pressed to duplicate. After 40-plus years in this profession, she's seen it all from gunshot wounds to car accidents to explosion victims to race riots to taking care of Sugar Ray Leonard after he got injured in a fight.

A couple of years ago my dad overworked himself to the point of exhaustion. My mother, the experienced, flinty-eyed, combat-tested professional caregiver who's been there, done that, and bagged the bloody tee shirt in a hazardous biowaste bag before calling lunch, COMPLETELY freaked out when he passed out cold. I mean, she lost her **** in a massive way that stunned me to silence.

Later she said that it's different when it's your own family members in trouble; she couldn't be dispassionate despite decades of experience and training.

So yeah, I think a lot of this, "I woulda done it better" stuff is just armchair quarterbacking.

I'm just curious if you live in America. Because if you do, then surely you know better than to say anyone can get valid information via the news. More like innuendo and rumor, with precious little fact.

Even if Denver was overrun first, some news organizations might very well downplay it at the request of the government, and some would actually fabricate stories from whole cloth to fit their narrative. CBS' 60 Minutes has been guilty of this in the past, and Fox News seems to have it as their guiding principle.

If you'll recall after 9/11 there was a lockdown on everything from airline travel to information for nearly two weeks. Even months later there was precious little "official" information. Same thing with the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. How many Americans even *know* about hurricane Rita? Rita was the 4th most powerful hurricane ever recorded, yet Katrina (the 6th most powerful) gets all the press because it wrecked New Orleans. If hurricane after hurricane hammered all the way across the US, actual information would be harder and harder to come by with each passing day. Heck, I've seen arguments break out between people who completely disagreed with what they had both just witnessed right before their eyes, nevermind just getting information second- and third-hand.

In the first episode they said it's been about a month since the initial outbreak. One month to go from everything's hunky-dory to complete devastation of at least one major metropolis, with the implication that it's everywhere. So the military involvement and government intervention failed utterly in just a couple weeks. That's not a lot of time to collate and disseminate factual information. Official news blackout, rumors abounding, people caught up in the outbreak scrambling to survive... yeah, I'm totally fine with these characters not knowing very much at all.

Plus, when we see them, they are actively trying to survive. I've been in two tornado outbreaks and a major ice storm and I have to say during those occasions there was not a lot of discussion not pertaining to the matter at hand. During the ice storm a couple years ago, no one here had power, cable or internet, so we had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world for a number of days. Everything on the radio was information about where to get food or shelter if you needed it, repeated for days. The closer you are to the epicenter of something like that, the less you know. Only distance and time allow you to sort out what you've heard and get some semblance of truth. Maybe once they get to a resting spot Rick can ask questions, but to not hear anything so far is not a big deal. Even once he does get to ask those questions, people not really knowing what happened is completely understandable.

And all the evidence we have points to the fact that Statesman is the only Incarnate of Zeus who didn't go bad.

So Incarnate stuff will be "super-duper rare"? I'm just saying, it's hard to come by, is all.