Lothic

This was a fun surprise. I'd been kind of wondering what happened to him after the Godric incident.
Apparently a vampire finally got a hold of him.

The fact that they didn't kill him outright almost guaranteed that he was available to make a comeback.

She was a contant threat to Bill throughout the whole season.
She was going to have to be "handled" one way or the other.

This was probably the most shocking shock of the episode. While it's true Tara was never much of a character in the books they had made her basically one of the core characters of the TV show. At this point it'd just be cheesy if they just "saved" her at the beginning of next season so they pretty much have to let her be dead for real. I'm guessing she'll make at least several ghost appearances via Lafayette.

I thought it was interesting that, just like Sookie's Gran said, at the final moment of death Sookie was all alone with Tara.

This was the -least- surprising shock of the episode since putting a shotgun to Debbie's face was pretty much exactly how Sookie killed Debbie in the books. For me I was never really wondering -if- that was going to happen but -when- it was going to happen.

Yeah Jesus dying was sad. But it provides some tragic drama for Lafayette and like Tara he'll probably be back fairly often as a ghost.

I continue to be impressed with how "right on the mark" Kristin Bauer has played Pam on the show.
She's still one of my favorite characters in either the books or the TV show.

Yeah that wasn't Debbie. I figure it'll be someone who was an ally of Marcus. I imagine part of next season's storyline will deal with Alcide being the new packmaster and this was probably some part of that.

Yes we all know Rene was a bad serial killer. But I think he honestly cared for Arlene and the kids. Arlene hates Rene and is scared of him, but it'll be interesting if it turns out that his -actual- ghost becomes a sort of guardian angel for Arlene if Terry does turn out to be bad for her. Remember that they've already established that Arlene always ends up getting involved with the "wrong" man - maybe Terry will turn out to be another "wrong" man.

The Fairy and Panther plots were both fairly big ones in the books. It does seem strange that the TV show sort of dropped both of them. I think Andy's Fairy "hook-up" last episode will help revive the Fairy plot in the next season but it's hard to say if Jason's Panther thing will be coming back. Clearly Jason will have his hands full with Jessica so that might be enough for him to deal with.

One could probably argue the point that a season of TOS, even 45 years later, is actually WORTH more than several combined seasons of many other shows. I'm not knocking Chuck specifically, but it's pretty obvious the existance of TOS laid the groundwork for most space-based sci-fi that that has come since it first aired.

Let me put it this way: I've seen just about every episode of every Star Trek series ever produced but the only DVD box sets of those series I've bothered to buy so far have been the TOS sets.

Count me in with the "adding tailor shops to Atlas/Mercy made sense but making trainers double as tailors as overkill" camp. My main worry (like Aneko said) is that the over-crowding around the trainers may cancel out any benefit we gained from them doubling as tailors.

It's hard to imagine why CoH wouldn't be "compatible" with such a feature. We're just talking about a specific set of game files that would have to be patched in a similar way for -any- game. Regardless I've noticed that the current NCSoft Launcher is so many times quicker than the original one for any download that I'm not sure how important the whole pre-downloading concept would be with it.

I suppose after next week we'll know for sure one way or the other.

I'm quite sure the problems with the Mac client will affect a statistically significant number of people. That is a "bad" thing in general. I just don't think (given today's announcement of Issue 21's launch as evidence) that those problems are going to affect enough people to continue to justify any further delays.

It's an unfortunate situation but I suspect the Devs have taken into account the possible impacts and have determined what their "lesser evil" is, at least from their point of view.

It's not that no one cares about you and your fellow Mac players. I'm quite sure if the Devs of this game had a magic wand and could fix all the Mac problems instantly they'd do it.

The fundamental problem you're dealing with is that the Mac client users only represent a minority of the total population of players. I'm not going to pretend I know the exact percentages, but I can comfortably guesstimate it's far less than 50%. Being the minority in something like this is bad enough from a "Dev attention" point of view. Now couple that with the fact that the recent Mac client problems have probably taken up a hugely inordinate amount of the Devs' time and effort over the past few weeks. It is quite literally the "squeaky wheel" of this game which has siphoned away far more of the Devs' energies than it could ever reasonably justify from a cost/benefit point of view.

Long story short: It was taking far too much time to fix given the relatively few number of players who actually use it. From an engineering point of view it became the obvious candidate to de-prioritize in order to get the rest of the show on the road.

Now I'm fairly sure the Devs are going to continue to do their best to get this "problem child" up and working ASAP. But to be perfectly blunt despite what Zwillinger said it seems pretty straightforward to me why they couldn't afford to waste any more time on it prior to Issue 21's launch. Hopefully it won't take too long...

I've tried to make this point several times over the last few weeks on other threads. I think it's just going to take a few Issues before everyone realizes that the NCSoft Launcher has changed how the whole download thing works.

Darn I really thought I had a chance to win it this time.
Maybe we'll -both- have better luck next time...

As a relatively "old" person it's times like these when I'm actually glad it's been years (many years...) since I had to worry about things like chemistry tests. Good luck coping with the temptation of playing this game instead of studying.

Well as fun as the "heavily fudged" rationalizations for these widely differing predictions have been I'll maintain a mature stance about all this and simply say I'm glad the Devs were able to organize a solution for the release of this long-awaited Issue that did -not- include having to wait all the way until October.

If it actually ends up taking that long I'll try to make a mental note to come back here and congratulate you on your ability to predict just how badly the Devs had managed to screw up this situation. Let's just say up until now I had a bit more faith in their skills to plan for and mitigate these scenarios. *shrugs*

That would probably be bad for me - I'd probably try to figure a way to kill those pesky muggles keeping me from leaving.

There was related thing like that where, IIRC, you had to read a sentence but you only had a few seconds to read it. Afterwards you had to say what you thought the sentence said. The trick was that nearly every word in the sentence was misspelled (with a few letters in the middle of the words like you said). As it turned out something like 80-90% of the people still managed to understand the overall meaning of the sentence regardless.

You're forgetting that this Issue isn't just like every other Issue. There are ramifications for the NCsoft store and the new Paragon Market microtransaction system. Unlike other Issues that had no direct financial connections to the real world this one has some very serious business repercussions. They made some critically timed plans and commitments related to budgets, marketing and other outside forces that have nothing with software development all set for last week which they had to scrap. I highly doubt they can just afford to tinker with it until they make it as perfect as they would like.

I agree that I would like the Devs to take all the reasonable time necessary to dust this Issue off and do what they can to get it out the door. But I simply can't see how they can let this drag on for multiple extra weeks taking everything else into account. *shrugs*

P.S. You mentioned the release of Going Rogue. Imagine what it would have been like if a few days before the retail boxes went on the shelves they had found some kind of game-breaking bug that caused them to change their plans and stop those boxes. This is effectively what just happened last week with Issue 21. The level of commitment they made to launching last week could not have been a trivial enough thing to just say "Whoops, we're kidding". Thankfully retail boxes were not involved this time, but the chaos of having to replan/reschedule everything is not something businesses can afford to do on a whim.

It could be for some kind of new Fungoid defeat badge.

Since we already know (and had very good indicators beforehand) that they had every intention of launching Issue 21 last week I would think that if this delay drags on much past September 20th then it'd have to be considered a significant failure on their part.

The only way I could see any of these October predictions being reasonable is if you're willing to accept and/or account for the Devs making a gross miscalculation about their overall readiness to launch this Issue. At best that could only be a Pyrrhic victory for those who predicted such a late release.

It could also mean that the launch of Issue 21 to the Live servers is imminent. *shrugs*

Obviously whenever Issue 21 finally goes live they WILL update the Test server to it. I wasn't trying to imply that the Test server would NEVER be updated to Issue 21 to match all the other servers eventually.

Functionally speaking there is NO DIFFERENCE between the Beta server(s) and the Test server. The Test server is not any more "like" a live environment than the Beta server is. The notion that every Issue must take a spin on the Test server before it can be certified to go to the Live servers is just plain weird. Remember that the Devs had every intention to launch Issue 21 back on September 1st before it ever touched the Test server.

Various words being filtered like this will always suffer double standards. Things like context and political correctness are always going to factor into it. I'll bet you could review the "banned word list" and make a legitimate case for why 90% of them should NOT be on that list as standalone words. Most of the time the problem comes with how those individual innocent words can be combined to create offensive names.

In any event as long as this is a Teen rated game you can pretty much expect a relatively large amount of censorship to protect the "kiddies" from us foul-mouthed adults.

The OP's idea seems fair because it would be a player choice to use that new drop setting. The problem with the 100,000 INF cutoff idea (or any idea that's based on arbitrary INF totals like that) is that it's far too easy to email INF back and forth to different characters or store it on the market to get around things like that.

Yeah I can't really see a hypothetical Potter MMO being confined to just Hogwarts. The Hogwarts portion of the game could be like an extended tutorial and the area could always serve as a central social hub of the game for higher level players. A Potter MMO might work, but of course there's a million ways it could fail too. I guess we'll see if it ever happens.

I suspect that's at least part of the reason why we're still talking about Star Trek 45 years later.

Yeah I sort of figured that'd be the kind of response you'd get. There are 12 PPD you have to find and I remember it taking me a few tries before I could relibably get that badge. I never knew that part about being able to "mess up the counter" if you click on them more than once - that's a bit crummy. I'll bet that's how a lot of people mess it up because when you're rushing around it's easy to get excited and double click them. Well good luck with it regardless.

P.S. I'd definitely take advantage of this keybind tip from Master-Blade. It proved to be very helpful with this.