Ironik

Why can't I have it? I'd love to get all Incarnate-y and take on the big bads on Monster Island solo. That would be freakin' awesome.

If it takes a team of 8 an hour to get the reward, then work it so it takes a Han Solo-er 8 hours to get it. 100 million and 88 shards isn't 8 hours worth of work, that's more like 8 months' worth. That's flipping soloers -- who do it either by choice or are forced to by circumstance* -- the bird. Digitus impudicus. "You know, the finger?" - Goose, Top Gun

And for the umpteenth time, I don't solo all the time. I am an excellent team player. People praise my abilities and they love my jokes. Because I am both competent and hilarious. I'm generous; I share drops without expecting anything in return. But I *like* to solo. I enjoy being able to go at my own pace and I actually enjoy -- gasp! -- reading what the writers have spent months working on. The story is my favorite part of this game and you get only a sliver of it if you are teamed. Why should I pass up my all-time favorite aspect of this game just because you and your kind want to deny me that?




* We've already gone over the "computer can't handle it" issue (which mine often can't -- ship raids are completely beyond my PC's ability to deal with and even large invasions crash me) and the time issue, as well as touched on the having-kids thing. I have another one: I rescue dogs and often have temporary fosters. My own dogs all have behavioral or physical issues because I am trained and experienced to deal with that. Very often a team will see me type "dog emergency" and I will have to deal with something. When one of my Pugs was having seizures, I would simply disappear so I could give her injections and sit with her until the episode was over. Soloing allows me to do something I consider extremely important while still play this game that I enjoy.

So explain to me again why it must be made to totally suck to solo every last bit of the endgame content? I just want to play and get the same things everyone else gets, and not have it be something that takes forever. I can understand some of it being team-only and I'm fine with that. But why do you guys insist it should *all* be team-only?

I'd like to hear how and what you play. You must be doing some version of farming or blitzing and using a PBAoE or AoE machine. You may not technically be "farming" but I find it hard to believe a mostly-single-target Blaster or Scrapper could get anywhere near that kind of Inf/hour.

It's like PvP -- only specialized builds built specifically for that task are really good at it. In this case, rushing from specific high-reward mission to high-reward mission with zero regard for the game's story. A Fire/Kin Controller perhaps or whatever the MM version of that is.

That's not true. You can see it on NCSoft's earnings statements over the years. CoV actually made zero long-term difference overall except perhaps to balance out the ED ragequits. After the initial sales spike of CoV, subs decreased to less than what they'd been before its release.

Jack later admitted in an interview there was a huge loss of players after ED, calling it their greatest blunder. If SSOCS or the current Invention system had been in place when ED hit, the population would've gone far beyond the 150k of CoV's release and probably beyond the 225-250k of CoH's release. Based on the sheer anger that was felt at the time (demean it by calling it "nerdrage" if you will, but the damaging impact on the company's bottom line was very real), I'm surprised more people didn't quit. I left the game for over a year and a half and only one of my 11 friends in my formed-in-beta SG has come back for temporary visits.

The anger really was that intense and the forums actually imploded because of it. As in "totally offline and broken." One Dev-started ED discussion thread went from zero to epic in the space of two days. They added another thread which did the same thing and kablooey, the forums were gone. When they came back up, there was a lot of stuff missing. By the end of that year, so were numerous SGs. I'm sure there are still threads out there on the intarwebs somewhere detailing why and how so many large and well-known SGs simply disintegrated due to GDN/ED/Issue 6.

Smoochen mine hinder, fraulein!

I always thought she look like a Lhasa Apso mix.

Okay, sheepdogs are on the list!

I don't do nudes, sorry.

I'm with you. Maybe Magneto is keeping it in place. Also, I've seen the Blackbird in real life and the cockpit is teeny tiny. The whole plane is actually quite small. No way people are walking around in it. (They're slightly larger than the F-14 featured in Top Gun.)

I don't really care about X-Men canon since the books have screwed it up plenty. It's a little odd they pushed it back to 1962-ish, but maybe it's because the books have locked Magneto's origin in with the Holocaust so early 30s means early 1960s. I think Grant Morrison actually hates Marvel and the X-Men based on the stuff he wrote, so basic changes like that are no big deal to me.

The fixed cost of real life is in hours. So if a team is earning something in an hour, it is unreasonable to demand that a soloer earn it in 100 times that. They should determine in hours how long it takes the average player to earn something and adjust earning that same thing while teamed accordingly. If that ends up making each enemy worth 5 Inf while on a team, so be it.

How do you think that would fly? Based on her current attitude of "Nyah nyah, sucks to be you," I would expect Atomic Woman would have a screaming fit and everyone like her would follow suit. That's kind of what's going on here, but I'm trying quite rigorously not to let it go past "annoyed."

Anyway, I've got to get to take the dogs out and then get to bed, so I'm out.

All of this is irrelevant because I rarely get those drops. As I just sold a Doctored Wounds for a whopping 500k (which I consider an awesome night, frankly), I suspect your other numbers are totally out of whack, as well. I got 22 million for the purple I got last week, but I haven't had a purple in months and months, with about 7 or so since they were added to the game. So it's not like I can count on those as a source of Influence.

So what are you guys doing Saturday? Playing CoH? At 10 I'm taking a partially crippled homebound woman to get her medicine and then shopping at Wal-Mart and the grocery store, then out to lunch. Takes about 5 hours, all told. After that I have to stop at the animal shelter for a couple hours to help with an event. Sunday morning I have to do some pick-ups at the TV station, then I'm heading to NYC for a few days. (Westminster.) When I get back, I have a volunteer luncheon at the library to attend, then, of course, back to the day job. Hope you all earn your 200 gajillion bucks while I'm out. Maybe send me a couple billion, hey?

Did that come across as annoyed? Well, good, because you sent me there. Grats.

Yeah, I'm going to have to resort to farming to be at all competitive.

WTF indeed. That guarantees I'd never get it.

I don't have a problem with that in and of itself, except that we're not looking at soloers in a vacuum but compared against people who have computers capable of teaming and earning these same things in under an hour.

Do you really see 100 hours solo as equal to 1 hour teamed?

I used to play with a bunch of parents who rarely had an entire hour to play at one go. The times they did were few and far between, on the order of once a month when their spouses had the kids, so that's another group of people who ought to be considered. To a one, they all left because of the leveling grind. (In fact, one asked me recently if that had been fixed. I assured him it had, but he hasn't returned to the game.)

I just got a purple about a week ago. I think that was my 6th or 7th one ever.

That hour I posted I earned:

Sleep Duration 41,115k @ WW
Snare Duration 32,005k @ WW
Endurance Reduction 61,500k @ WW
Recharge Reduction 64k @ WW
Hold Duration 41,115k @ WW

Doctored Wounds End/Heal 500k @ WW
Perplex Confuse/recharge 0 @ WW, 5k @ store

Temp Power: Plasmatic Taser 0 @ WW, 1k @ store

5 pieces of salvage, all of them common, no bidders. 4 enhancements, about 20k each. This is a typical haul, with the Doctored Wounds being an exception. I'm much more used to getting things similar to the Perplex that are worth more at the store and then only for a few thousand.

So that's around 850k Influence more. Okay, total take is 1.85 million per hour.

That 1 million an hour is me playing at a brisk pace the way I prefer to, including dropping a radio mission for 35k finish bonus. There's no way I'm going to earn 10 million an hour without it being a grind. Hell, there's no way I can earn 10 million an hour solo period, and I rather doubt anyone else can, either. If I'm playing missions that are new to me or I've only played once before, I slow down and read the text, because that's the whole *point* of the game, not grinding like a gerbil on a wheel and blowing past the story.

I'm a casual gamer and you're a power gamer. I'm also unlucky when it comes to drops, always have been. For instance, I never got one of the cool costume drops until after the Devs significantly increased the drop rate. By that time they were no longer going for 100 to 200 million but rather 10 or 20 k. Now most of them have zero bidders. Only Draconic Wings and Rocket Boots have bidders, at 50 and 120 k respectively. I've never gotten Rocket Boots and one Draconic Wings. Lots of Piston Boots, though, for nothing.

Yeah, but ED actually destroyed the forums. Now *that* was an epic fail on the Devs' part, not seeing that fiasco coming. We even told them it was going to and they still did it.

Sure they can. Make it a little less steep of an incline for soloers.

As I just posted, I can make about 1 million Influence an hour. So that's 100 hours to earn the money to buy one of these Notice dealies, whatever they are. I'm not 15 without a life outside school, I can't play 60 hours a week. Some weeks I'm lucky to get 3 hours. That level 50 character I just posted pictures of has 295 hours on patrol as of 1 minute ago.

I think I have two characters who have earned over 100 million, and just barely at that. I look at some of the prices on the market and realize how much I hate farmers.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the work of the great Ben Edlund. Edlund is one of the few guys who can take a dark situation and make it hilarious -- as you can see in that clip -- and then stop, pivot and swan dive deep into the darkness again.

That episode is about a "lucky' rabbit's foot which gives you incredible luck... until you lose it, give it away or someone takes it from you. Then you die horribly. And both brothers get it then lose it in that episode, which made it both hysterically funny and really scary.

This isn't the case.

Despite much of the same names and similar branding on "in-house" and "out-house" (see what I did there?) movies, the difference between the two sets of franchises is significant, moving from a passive to an active role. Primarily it's that Marvel finances the latter properties themselves (which will continue as a division of Disney) bringing on associate studios and investors as needs be. Those associates have a limited stake in the bottom-line financing as they are relegated primarily to distribution duties.

What this means is that before they took control of the films, Marvel Studios *might* have been consulted as a courtesy when it came time for production -- and from all reports their input was solicited but largely ignored on both the Spider-man and X-Men movie series (despite what they politely state publicly) -- but now they have control over every aspect of the films, from script to hiring the filmmakers to casting. And that's because they write the checks. So no, this isn't just a pro forma change, but rather a significant difference between what has gone before and what's happening from now on.

This is pure opinion and mine differs on the last two. Except for the weak spot of Liv Tyler's casting, I thought The Incredible Hulk was terrific, a genuine comic book come to life. It was spare, efficient and had really awesome action scenes. That truly was the Hulk of my youth. Iron Man 2 was perhaps not as good as the first one simply because we knew what to expect, but on repeated viewings it completely holds up. Unlike the Dark Knight where I fast forward through everything not involving the Joker, IM2 is solid start to finish.

In any case, all three of these movies are superior to all the Marvel films made outside their umbrella with the possible exceptions of X-Men 2 and Fantastic Four 2.

Only if he posts pics, too.