Judgement_Dave

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In order to combat PLing and farming further, how about a mandatory arc?

Of course there are already tailor/cape/aura missions, but these are not mandatory. But I was thinking more along the lines of an arc or mission that must be completed in order to attain a certain level. This would ensure that players have to experience some of the game outside of MA.

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The best ways to combat any perceived PLing/farming within MA are:
[*] Run your own non-MA teams.
If the game is still good outside MA then you'll gain converts by showing them the good time and fun that's to be had.
[*] New and absorbing/exciting/unusual dev-content at a variety of levels.
If there's much more fun/exciting things to do outside MA then even the long-timers who just want to blitz a few levels may be more inclined to play the dev-content than any MA farm.

Any limits/penalties/mandatory arcs imposed upon players aren't going to make someone who wants to play MA farms stop playing them - they'll just annoy them and act as an irritant that could help drive them from the game.

Fine if that's your objective - but if it's to get more players experiencing non-MA content you're better running teams doing non-MA content. Or if it's just to avoid players doing nothing but MA farms run your own MA teams that don't do farms.

Enough people object to this perceived problem that I'm fairly sure you'd have a succesful team going before long. Invite a few newbies and have a fun time and that'll do more good than any amount of upset and suggestions on the forums.

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Ok...
Just drop the following from the MA:
1. Inf. / Prestige (It is a training simulator)
2. Salvage / Recipe Drops (Players get MA tickets)

Additionally they could limit the MA to a maximum gain of five levels, prior to gaining at least one in the city/missions. (This would only allow an additional single level in the MA though.)

Example for the above:
Level 16 player enters AE
Trains up to level 21 (AE count +5)
Has to go and play the normal game for at least one level... 22 (AE count now +4)
Now they can either:
a. Gain four more levels outside the MA (AE count 0)
b. Gain another level via the MA (AE count +5)

Capping the AE count won't stop them playing in the MA but would stop them gaining any Exp from it.

This way a player can still reach Level 50 in the MA, but they are persuaded to partake of the real game too.

This would also be useful to all players at times when they have to level solo too.

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Now a sarcastic poster may be inclined to agree with you. Luckily I'm not going to use sarcasm here, but would just ask:
* How much development time do you expect on this?
* Is this really the simplest, most elegant solution to the perceived problem that you can envisage?

And beyond that: Why do you feel a need to force your play style upon others?

I'd object to any system telling me that every X levels I need to change what I'm doing and do some mandatory activity.

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Another option would be to have to go to a real contact not the hologram, at least then there'd be some travel time. At the moment with no travel time why have travel powers? Plus lack of travel means you can get through far more MA missions in a night than you can normal missions and with no risk, making them that much more attractive.


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I'd love the opportunity to place contacts outside the MA - but forcing just to get people out of the MA building it is, IMO, a ridiculous idea. It sounds like you want to get people having to physically leave the MA building and cross the city to contact X in zone X just so that they have to leave the MA building and visit contact X in zone X. You're effectively suggesting that all MA arcs need to include lots of the type of running to/from contacts that many players dislike in CoH.

If the rewards are balanced properly, and farming made less attractive by altering the mechanisms that allow farms with a skewed risk/reward ratio, then running MA arcs should get you about the same reward as running regular missions - i.e. the mission reward would be slightly lower than regular missions to allow for the absence of travel time.


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Actually Dave we are saying the same thing. My suggestion was a way of slowing down how much XP MAing players can earn by making them travel.

However your solution works too, reduce the rewards to take into account zero travel time. Though it does make travel power redundent and probably makes MA only alts more powerful because of that (as they can take other powers). So you'd have to reduce the rewards further still to take that into account IMO.

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Equates to about the same thing xp-wise - but people get somewhat miffed by all the pointless running about in several CoH arcs, so I objected to the suggestion that running about should be imposed upon all MA arcs.

As it stands, with paper/radio missions, the abundance of travel/tp temps and TF specialists who are speedy ghosts with tp friend there is already little need for a travel power for many characters.

The devs have shown many times that they try to balance various activities using a fairly straightforward activity A gets X rewards per hour (e.g. TF/SF is, iirc, 20 merits per hour). I'd hope that normal dev-created missions, MA arcs and paper missions could all be adjusted to provide similar rewards per hour for sustained periods (so that travel time, or lack of, was taken into account).

BTW - if you wanted to seriously reduce rewards to 'compensate' for not needing a travel power (and for having extra powerpicks in their stead) then:
* Do you think superspeeders should get a reward penalty for being able to spend less time between missions? (And they even get to pick a useful prerequisite in hasten!)
* Should 60 (?) month vets who take a travel power without a prerequisite get a penalty for having that 1 extra powerpick available to them?

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be nice if another invasion event of some sort happened from time to time as well , maybe a diffrent faction in the game, is plenty mobs they could have doing spontaionus attacks on zones


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They do. Rikti raids get triggered by a mothership raid, and the Zombie attacks get triggered by... hmm.. Was that ever worked out?

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Thought Rikti invasion was triggered by completion of the LGTF not by MS raid...

It's amazing how many complex ways people are trying to think up to snafu teams farming MA arcs. Most amazing as they all seem to be more undesirable than the perceived problem of MA farming or they have obvious holes that make them a waste of time.

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Might be better if the MA contact only opened when you entered an MA building for the first time so as to not draw new players into the building.


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As GG pointed out, this (or any limit to starting MA arcs yourself) would still leave you open to invites to MA farming teams and so is pointless by itself. It also, possibly, starts acting contrary to the devs wish to make 1-50 in MA a possible course for charcaters.

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Block Broadcasts from leaving the MA building...


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OMG - you mean farm teams LFM would need to step outside the building for 20 seconds to send a broadcast when the team loses a member? Sounds like a waste of time implementing this when it would be so easy to work around.

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Another option would be to have to go to a real contact not the hologram, at least then there'd be some travel time. At the moment with no travel time why have travel powers? Plus lack of travel means you can get through far more MA missions in a night than you can normal missions and with no risk, making them that much more attractive.


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I'd love the opportunity to place contacts outside the MA - but forcing just to get people out of the MA building it is, IMO, a ridiculous idea. It sounds like you want to get people having to physically leave the MA building and cross the city to contact X in zone X just so that they have to leave the MA building and visit contact X in zone X. You're effectively suggesting that all MA arcs need to include lots of the type of running to/from contacts that many players dislike in CoH.

If the rewards are balanced properly, and farming made less attractive by altering the mechanisms that allow farms with a skewed risk/reward ratio, then running MA arcs should get you about the same reward as running regular missions - i.e. the mission reward would be slightly lower than regular missions to allow for the absence of travel time.

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how about a mandatory arc?


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No.
How about no mandatory arcs.
Heck - it's bad enough that the CoV tutorial is mandatory for the base 5 villain ATs.

I'm all for players experiencing content outside of MA. I don't particularly like meeting lvl50s who seem to be very opinionated yet don't know the basics of the game. But forcing all players to do certain arcs is not a good way to get people really doing content outside of MA in a meaningful way.

You know what would happen if you placed a mandatory arc every 10th level?

People would play however they play now (whether in MA or elsewhere) and then they'd hit the mandatory arc and would all be pee'd of by being forced to do this arc and would begrudgingly go and blitz the arc as fast as they could and then return to playing how they want to play (and how they were playing before the mandatory arc).

And what if you have 3 missions open? Do you stop gaining xp/rewards?

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Thin edge of the wedge, folks. It used to be that the free issue updates were massive things absolutely loaded with content and new mechanics; but that seems to be dropping off very sharply of late...

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OK some drop in output due to the shift to PS. But I suspect most is becuase the new resources are being poured into GR - which whilst most look forward to it will be a little more than a mere 'micro' transaction.

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I've done the Khan TF a couple of times now, and I've got to say I am suprised it's been so universally slated.
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All in all, although I15 is small and as others have mentioned isn't worthy of being called an "Issue" in its own right, it's not bad content for all that. Stupid Paragon Marketing team could've called it I14.5 or simply "Anniversary Celebration" and everyone would've been happy.


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Said this a few times - if it had been a birthday extra or a patch then it would have been almost universally lauded.

As it is being called an issue, with the TF and SF being virtually the entire issue and coming after a relative drought of dev-created content, it's been almost universally slated.

It also came with some disappointment for some at the big birthday present was that everyone had a chance to beta test the new patch... errr I mean issue... This, especially with the size of the issue, managed to feel anticlimactic.

The TF itself, IMO, is a very decent TF - quite fun, although annoying if you have trouble with the final AV and it takes over an hour of constant battle... I've not actually done the final version of the SF yet - but an earlier version on test was much more fun than the TF, so hopefully I'll get chance to do that soon (or as soon as it's been tweaked and the MM temp repaired).

If only PS had handled the release/naming better it could have had a much better reception from many.


Of course it's so obvious that the devs decided to do a paired hero TF and villain SF after playing the exceptional MA arcs Marketing Opportunity (#83747) and To Save A Single World (#83744) - if only I could remember who wrote them...

Rooks wrote:
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Swatting an annoying fly isn't the kind of thing you brag about to your mates.


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FFM wrote:
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Exactly, so you of all people know full well that the US operate under different rules to us. What's a "no no" here is often a "yes yes" over there.

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These two posts so close together made me think of the US president's recent display of fly-striking prowess...

OK - I doubt Obama bragged personally, but he didn't need to with the news networks making bad puns about a new SWAT team at the whitehouse.

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Make it a death chase!

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For some reason makes me wonder if player tag could be done... would need buffs/heals I guess to tag other players with. Maybe lvl 10 tag in Brixton after the Hide & Seek is completed?

EDIT: Guess the mystic fortune could be used to tag other players... then the player being tagged gets a popup box telling them they've been tagged as well.

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...and if I could teleport, I'd want to customize it. I like the AV that turns into a clay'ish blob before disappearing.

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Vague memories of a kids' TV programme... Was it 'Trapdoor' that had something like this or am I just thinking of Morph?

Want more claymation AVs.

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And it sounds like fun actually! Start in Atlas.. You see the level 50 you have to find.. He heads off to Bricks to get hidden, and everyone else (max level 10?) starts 2 mins later. You have to make it TO Brickstown before you can begin the hunt!


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Why a whole 2 min delay? Get the 50 to zone and let the lowbies start straight away - they're not catching up to the 50 til he's in his hiding place in Brixton.

I'd rather hold off and see what happens when GR hits - given that there'll be a way to make lvl 50s even stronger and so extra slots or universal slots seem very possible.

It's probably unlikley that the devs would entertain using respecs to grant extra slots for lowby characters if some form of extra slots is a feature of GR for over-50s.

But an additional reward option would be welcome. Personally, I'd prefer the much requested idea of an enhancement-only respec (the chance to change enhancements without changing slots/powerpicks - so you can extract expensive IOs to sell when you want to replace them without using a full respec).

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I think they're already on the game, inf badges, mez badges, veteran badges and the acollades, show you somehow all that

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I think you're quite wrong on the above.

Some of these can just show whether you've farmed or not. Most non-Day Job CoH Accolades can be gained in a single weekend if you really want them and don't mind farming for them. Veteran badges show how long an account has paid for, and are no indicator of character (or even account) playtime.

I'd thought before that character patrol/prowl/play-time badges would be a good addition (and more so since JD passed 1000 hrs some months back) so...

/Signed

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Who would ever pay for a tailor session again? New tokens are given out whenever JLove sneezes, there are day jobs that reduce how much sessions cost, anyone with less than a years Vet rewards has tokens up the backside... I don't think we need yet another method to cheat the poor Icon out of our money. Think of the livelyhood of the tailors who work there!

Also, if tailor recipes were cheap, everyone would use them. If they were expensive, nobody would use them.

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It's a pretty harmless request - but my thoughts on this are similar to Necroton.

If it takes a single dev 5-10 minutes to add the recipe then fine, anything more would seem a waste of dev resources when very few people pay for tailor sessions these days. And most of those that do pay get a discount. And the few that pay full price can usually make the INF in a very, very short time.

C'mon we know the match just finished 15 seconds ago - where are you???

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MA isn't a success. All the farming and PL just makes it look that way.

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Actually I'd say that all the farming and PL is seen as a minor failure by virtually everyone (players and devs) who doesn't use it for farming/PLing.

The devs stated that it wasn't to be a tool for farming and many players object to farming (or at least to unending farm broadcast and tells for fillers).

And whilst I don't think it's quite as bad as some people seem to say, there are definitely more high-level newbs about these days... But that just brings back some of the fun of playing with people and being surprised by what they do.


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If it was a success it'll be played for the creativity.

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And by many it is. And by many others it's a success for the chance to be creative.

I'd actually guess that by most measures MA has been a success. It's just a shame that the places it can be seen to be an annoyance or potentially destructive to the game are the most vocal/visible ones.

And also a shame that the counter-measures to misuse (from intended use) that were promised never seemed to appear in a visibly effective form. And that the devs have resorted to alternate approaches that can wreck legitimate creative use - possibly turning people who didn't misuse the system away from it.

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While it's nice with another DXP event, the calendar seems rather emtpy. Are we getting any 2009 calendars at all this year, or have you decided to stick to the "it happens when it happens" formula?


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The odd minor event like dxp could be used as a small incentive to play CoH. Maybe there's no calendar as PS/NC wanted to remain flexible with these in light of a certain other competing product that's meant to launch sometime soon.

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Can't find a link now, but I'm fairly sure (95%) that a developer posted somewhere that the Rikti invasions was what they meant.

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Into very hazy memory territory here, but I think that there was a dev post that pointed out that the war walls do come down for rikti invasions - though I don't think that they stated that this was what the original comments about war walls were referring to.

As such I've always suspected that the rikti invasion was more a handy get-out and that it was not the development that was originally hinted at.

IIRC There was a series of posts that went something like this:
Player: The devs said that the war walls would be coming down.
Dev: They do come down during rikti invasions. It's how the dropships get in.

This did point out that the walls do come down, but it didn't state that the original intention was merely to drop war walls for invasion raids. It may well be that the original intention was to develop much larger zones without war walls and game-jarring zoning, but in the continued presence of zones and war walls the invasions made a handy get-out that would get the players off the devs backs about this. In this case (and I'm not stating that it is the case, just that it is still a possibility as the dev comments retained some ambiguity) it's possible that larger zones without war walls are still being developed - possibly in the Praetorian Earth of GR.

Like I say, hazy memory territory for me, but I certainly recall this being one of the occasions when people were uniformly reading something into comments that wasn't explicitly stated - and I wasn't 100% convinced that it was the correct interpretation gaining weight.

Of course, having a reasonable eye for ambiguity may mean that the devs meant to confirm that war walls comments had always referred to the rikti invasions, but that slight unintentional ambiguity in their comments was picked up by myself and few others (who posted). Being pedantic can lead to some communications problems when interpreting statements from non-pedants...

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in a normal party would my friend (level 9) be faster leveling on his own or with me (21)

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A full answer would be quite complicated answer for such a simple looking question...

Following from my hazy memory:

It depends on lots of things, but generally playing in a team will gain you xp/levels faster than not being in a team unless the team seriously overstretches itself.

Larger teams can generally cover each other (to deal with more) and also get an xp bonus, so if an 8 man team takes down a minion the minion is actually worth 2.5 times the usual xp if they were tackled solo. But then that xp is split between the team - with each players slice of xp depending upon the relative levels.

Lower levels effectively get more (so that if teams play together and one person misses a session they can slowly catch up).

So playing in a normal team as a sidekick to you should let your friend slowly catch up to you, and gain faster than being solo.

But, if a team takes on challenges that are too far beyond them then debt and taking forever to defeat foes can slow levelling (whether your friend's with you or not).

Most importantly though, IMO, is that playing in a team with friends (or even friendly 'strangers') is a lot more fun than solo or playing with silent, standoff-ish strangers - and so even if levelling was slightly slower it would possibly feel quicker as it's more fun!

If you're friends I'd say play in the same team - whether it's on new characters in a pact or with your friend sidekicked to you.

Welcome to the game & forums.

Afraid that a pact won't work for you and your friend on those characters, ElitePinki.

You can only start a level pact whilst both your characters are level 5 or lower.

Maybe it's worth starting a new character each to pact with, or you could team together but you sidekick them (so they'd play at an effective level of 1 less than you - e.g. if you're lvl30 they'd be effectively lvl29).

[ QUOTE ][*]Addressed several bugs that were causing stability issues.


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Any idea if this caught whatever kept crashing people at the end of TFs recently?

'Recently' as in for the past few weeks, or possibly as long as a couple of months.

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Do seriously think a part time mod for our forums would be an ideal situation for all parties though.

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Or they could merge the forums with the US and use the set of mods that keep the US in order.

Oh - they are.

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weekends/our day time?

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I think the US gets modded more during their night and at weekends than the EU boards do.

Pretty sure that Moderator08 for one has popped up outside of their usual business hours before - He's deleted some threads that seem that seem to be continuing the tradition of UniqueDragon.

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My favourite was when someone said that "they shud learn english"...

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English-speaking native says that seriously: unacceptable yet funny.
French- or German-speaker says that ironically: comedy gold.

Sadly I fear that a non-native English speaker would have speled it all rite and so it must have been a UK-resident english-speaker.

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I politely requested ("would the French speakers mind terribly...") that they revert to English, team, /tells or a private channel, since public channels are, under the EULA, server-language specific, and while none of them acknowledged my request, they did cease broadcasting in French.

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Be interesting to get GM confirmation on this point as the circumstances are unusual.

I imagine that the EULA dictates that server-language is used as the GMs are language-based and can't be expected to moderate in languages that they don't understand.

So the EULA stops someone going onto a server and unleashing a torrent of swearing in Russian or Portugeuse or whatever. Or rather - it means that they can be reprimanded for breach of EULA if they do.

However with the French/German servers unavailable I'd hope that the French/German GMs are available on Union/Defiant and so moderation/assistance in French and German should be available on those servers.

Under these circumstances, I'd hope that the GMs were allowing the French/German to use broadcast without fear of reprimand.

Not everyone uses the forums. So even if new French/German private channels are created, broadcast may be the easiest way to alert players to its existence.

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Now you see, as an ex table-top and LARPer I would say that (OOC) that's what's believed by the public (it would make sense from a random in the street) but that it really doesn't actually exist.

I used to throw a few things like that into my games, blatant lies to the players but they had to act as if they were true because they didn't have the knowledge as their character!

Yay for evil GMs!!!

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Agree fully in general, for randoms in the street or as misdirection to seed an adventure.

But this is from the recon officer - presumably feeding us the best intelligence the authorities (bit hazy about who they work for) have about the Hazard Zone.

It's also odd that, iirc, this is:
* the only reference to Igneous being related to DE;
* the only piece of misinformation in the Hazard zone briefings (if it is misinformation).

As such it looks more like true information that isn't realised anywhere else in the game.

BTW - I also wonder why, given no new info, people would imagine the Igneous are related to the DE. The DE may have some rock-based creatures, but are visually and geographically quite distinct. It's also almost unheard of to find the rock-based DE without their more obviously biological comrades - something the Igneous lack.

Also: Why mention the DE at all?? People tend to enter the Hollows c.lvl 5-10. They've probably never seen/heard of the Devouring Earth by then... so what use does this misdirection serve if it is misdirection? It effectively says These rockmen that you've not yet met seem to be related to another group of things that you haven't met yet.

Now I could believe that it was added by a mischeivious dev just to see how many forum posts they could generate just by popping in a starnge connection...