Lothic

Hasn't Minecraft been in "open beta" for like a year already and doesn't it have millions of third-party mods you could tinker with at any time? It just seems like the launch of Issue 21 would take priority in any case.

Well clearly Lucas' deal has always been motivated by making that much more money. I actually understand why he'll never "finish" the movies because that'd be tantamount to killing his only real cash-cow. I've always figured his "explanations" that he just wanted his movies to match his artistic vision with the latest technology was roughly 98% BS.

For the record I've bought hundreds of VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-rays in my lifetime but I have never ONCE bought any version of the original Star Wars trilogy which is in and of itself kind of amazing considering I've loved those movies for decades now.

Lucas has sadly become the quintessential example of what happens when an artist forgets the meaning of the word "done".

The sad thing about continually tweaking his past works is that sooner or later he's going to die and the question's going to be was his last "re-tweaking" really the final version of what he intended to last for eternity or would he have just redone it again assuming he lived a bit longer. Were I him I'd prefer to have absolute control over what I considered to be the definitive "finished" version rather than to let the world wonder if he wouldn't have just kept re-mixing it forever.

Sy Fy isn't typically the "reshow fan-favorite shows that got cancelled too soon" network. It's more often the "show 3rd rate shows that aren't good enough to be released/made anyway where else" network. Hopefully this new network would be smart enough to know the difference.

As far as a name for this new network it could be something as simple as "ReeVue" or somesuch.

Those rewards you speak of are BADGING rewards. If you don't like to badge then you don't deserve the things badging will provide. It's really just that simple. It's like saying I want to play with a level 50 Tank but I don't want to do things it takes to level up a Tank to level 50. It's the exact same argument. *shrugs*

As I said before I can begrudgingly tolerate a few account-wide badges. I don't like them but I know the Anniversary badges sort of served a purpose before the Vet badges were introduced.

But indeed beyond that there's no logical argument for any others to be account-wide unless you're willing to ignore the fundamental character-based nature of this game. The Devs' should have come up with the concept of "player badges" that would not be directly attached to any character. That would have served as a workable compromise for those people who like to see this game as being player-centric.

I can't say for certain that after 7.5 years of playing this game that badges were the top #1 reason that kept me playing this long. But I know for a fact that they definitely helped keep my interest during the times that I might have otherwise considered taking breaks between Issues. For that reason alone I think they served the Devs' purpose well enough.

Yes I'm not exactly deluded enough to think that my hypothetical Captain Amazing is an actual person living in the game or that the badges he "earns" are "his" without my involvement as a player. On the other hand this game is built on the fundamental RPG character based model that has existed in games (both table top and computer based) for close to 40 years now so it's very easy for me to accept the idea that my characters are virtual individuals with their own unique assets.

Let me use a simple D&D analogy to highlight my point here: Let's say you had a Ranger in one campaign and a Paladin in another. Let's also say the Ranger finds a +5 sword. Now just because both of those characters have you (the player) in common doesn't mean it makes any sense that the Paladin playing in the other campaign automatically gets to use the sword. Likewise when one of your CoH characters gets a badge it makes no real sense that another character would automatically have the benefits of that badge as well.

Like it or not we play this game THROUGH characters we create. Characters here are not interchangeable Pacman sprites on the screen. They exist as separate "things" in the game world so even though they may share the same player driving them they really can't (nor shouldn't) share anything else.

I actually did not see the NECESSITY of exploiting the system to earn those high level epic badges in question to be very desirable myself.

But back when many of us were working on badges like the one billion HP version of Empath the Devs (Positron specifically) were constantly telling us badgers "we the Devs SPECIFICALLY INTENDED those badges to be that high". Ironically after a few years the Devs changed their tune and sheepishly tried to rewrite history with excuses like "we made a decimal point error mistake and we ALWAYS intended Empath to be much less semi-impossible to get". Sure, whatever.

Clearly in the long run the Devs realized that it was a serious mistake for those badges to be set that high in the first place. People like me who actually went through the motions to prove that they were ridiculously too high helped pave the way to making badges like Empath ACTUALLY EARNABLE via normal play today. A character now has a reasonable chance to earn those badges the way YOU think they ought to be earned.

So you can remain stubborn in your idea that we badgers played "against the intentions" of the Devs. But if it wasn't for us then you wouldn't be able to earn those badges the supposedly proper way yourself.

I have several dozen characters but only three serious badging characters. What this means is that the vast majority of my characters only have the badges they earned by stumbling over whatever they did while I was playing them. Most of them don't even have the passive accolades most people find acceptable to farm for. From your point of view it seems I've been playing "correctly" quite often. Many of those are role played to be that way and to them what they have earned is "significant" to them the way you'd want them to be.

I fundamentally dismiss your notion that there's a "right" way to earn badges and a "wrong" way out of hand. If you want to self-impose your own view that characters should never actively go out of their way to earn badges then that's your deal, but it's not everyone's. When I see someone who has more than 1,000 badges then I see someone who shares the same type of enjoyment of this game that I do. I know full well what that person likely did to get those badges via metagaming or not, and it warms my heart to see someone who loves this game enough to be willing to put in the time and effort to achieve them. Them's the real breaks.

P.S. Whenever Positron himself appears in the game his character has ALWAYS had pretty much every badge in the game. He even had redside badges before crossover was allowed. I could very easily make the case that if the Devs never intended for players to earn "every badge in the game" then he made a pretty poor example for that point of view.

I honestly don't think it would be a balance issue. I don't even totally buy the idea that it would be prohibitively hard to code. But I do think the main reason is that the Devs don't want people leveling up a single level 50 character then using that one character to effectively have respec access to multiple level 50 powersets.

I believe the Devs are "encouraging" the idea that you need to make multiple alts and have fun leveling up new characters. They don't really want us to be able to have access to all the powers of all the powersets of an AT without putting in the time and effort to "deserve" access to everything.

It's not a software limitation. It's a "the Devs want us to play the game the way they intended us to" issue.

Well as one of those "insane" multi-character badgers I'd just like to say that even though I understand your desire to make badges be more account/player oriented in this game I have to pretty much stand completely against the idea.

I happen to like the fact that badges are mostly character-oriented and actually unhappily tolerate the few account-based badges we do have already. The example I always use for this is the anniversary badges: Why on earth would Captain Awesome, a character who lives in Paragon City, even own a badge that commemorates the anniversary of a real world MMO game? Why should anything in our real life actually apply to a character in a fictional game world? That kind of badge should not be related to Captain Awesome at all. At best those ought to be special "player badges" that aren't connected directly to any character. Likewise the idea that the accompishments of one character should "rub off" onto another is equally silly. Should I have billions of dollars today because Bill Gates earned billions of dollars via Microsoft? Of course not.

It's kind of hard to say the badge system "failed" in this game when you consider there was a time when the only way ANYONE could get some of badges in this game was to "exploit" loopholes, create third party tools and cheat sheets.

Now granted over the years many of the badges that required those extreme measures have been fixed. But I would argue that those badges were fixed only because the people who had to do the relatively silly things to get them were able to report those problems to the Devs and provide the evidence to prove that those badge requirements needed to be fixed in the first place. You shouldn't be blaming us for "breaking" the system - if anything you should be thanking us for helping the Devs fix it.

I think the key thing to understand about real life battleships is that while they may still (even in 2011) have some specialized tactical functionality they ceased to serve their ORIGINAL purpose of being the premiere core capital ships of any navy pretty much by the end of WWII. Even during WWII it was clear their importance was waning. The central role that battleships used to play in naval strategy is squarely in the hands of the aircraft carriers today.

Based on changes in technology battleships have be relegated to being used as coastal bombardment support ships and/or cruise missile launch platforms. No modern navy would ever expect them to be used toe-to-toe against other navies as "frontline flag ships" the way they were used 100 years ago.

I suppose that makes this upcoming movie that much sillier because the role battleships play today is completely mismatched to anything this movie is going to try to show us.

There have been so many shows that have been cancelled over the years for bad/unfortunate reasons that I bet you could start a "Second Chance" network that just re-showed the existing episodes of these doomed series without even having to create any new episodes of any of them.

I think even if you could excuse Janeway's actions as those of a rookie captain who played fast and loose with the rules because she simultaneously could get away with it and was forced to get away with it due to Voyager's isolation I still think she never quite lived up to the well-rounded ideal established by the other Trek captains.

Accepting that she had her own problems interpreting the Prime Directive I still think the greater fault with her fundamental characterization was setting her up as a "scientist captain" as opposed to the captain types portrayed in the other shows. Now I have nothing against science itself and it obviously has always played a huge part of Star Trek. But what I'm getting at is that establishing her as approaching everything from a narrow science point of view led the writers of the show to get comfortable (lazy?) with the idea that pretty much everything could be solved by the Deus ex machina technobabble gizmo of the week. Now again I understand a certain level of technobabble has always been part of Star Trek. But somehow I eventually got the vibe that Voyager painted itself into a corner by focusing far too much on the "futuristic technology" aspects of the show instead of the "clever poker diplomacy" used in other Treks. The technology of the setting became the story instead of being an element that served the story. I feel this seriously constricted the series to a set of plotlines which from a literary point of view quickly became stale and monotonous.

To put this idea into a "viewer appreciation" perspective I've seen just about every episode of every Star Trek series -except- Voyager. I estimate I've only seen maybe half of the total number of Voyager episodes and to this day, even as a devoted Star Trek fan, I have no overwhelming desire to see the rest of them. To those keeping score this means I technically liked Enterprise more than Voyager! Again I attribute this mostly to the overall sense of "sameness" of the plotlines and their over-reliance on using science/technology tricks to solve every problem imaginable.

I just hope that whatever direction the next series takes it stays flexible enough to allow for a wide range of story types. I think the metaphorical lesson learned from Voyager is that if you think too much like a hammer you're going to see every problem as if it were a nail.

Although I'm reasonably sure such a show will never be produced I must admit that if by some miracle it got made I'd probably want to watch it.

Then again giving a human-raised Klingon the keys to a Federation "pocket battleship" is not exactly thinking outside the box as far as novel characterization goes.

But I'd grant that "alien" in this context could mean really almost anything that's not a pure 100% pure-blooded H. sapiens.

I'd concede the "alien-as-captain" premise might be risky as far as a network TV show that relies on ratings goes. There's no argument that the average viewer would more easily accept another random generic human in such a role.

But part of what made Star Trek great back in the beginning was its willingness to defy convention and do things that were unexpected. Few people remember that there was some flak in the 1960s about Spock being the "first officer" of the ship in TOS because they didn't think it was appropriate for a "non-human" to be in -any- command position on a ship full of humans. Clearly that worry was proven to be quaintly silly in the long run.

I actually believe it's a only a matter of time before we see an alien captain as a main character in a Star Trek show. Trek has always been about shattering stereotypes like this. Having a non-human in the captain's chair is just about the only "glass ceiling" left for the franchise.

Since this might technically be the second time he gets to play the character maybe he'll get to do the "kinky stuff" this time.

It'd be funny if Nathan ends up being a selfish, arrogant guy playing some over-the-top knight/paladin type character who uses a big warhammer in the game.

Yeah when I read that post by BrandX (re: post-fall Federation setting) I also thought it sounded quite a bit like the premise of that "A-word" show. But years ago I took a personal oath to pretend that show never existed so I resisted the urge to point this out.

For what it's worth I'm not exactly against the generic idea of a Trek show being based in some far distant future where all the galactic civilizations we know and love are in decline. I just think the particular show that we're talking about which already used this idea as its premise was handled so badly that comparisons between such a new show and that "A-word" show would be bound to happen. And that would not likely be a good thing by any measure...

Based on the announced end of the sale of the Booster Packs in the NCsoft store as of yesterday I seriously believe that they had hoped to launch 21 today. That was probably going to be the PAX announcement Posi was talking about. Obviously the problems they recently discovered put those plans on hold for a bit.

There have been plenty of times in the past when an Issue being tested in open beta has been pushed to the live servers with just a few days "warning" about it. Although due to the nature of this particular Issue (with the launch of CoH:Freedom) I'd agree that we'll probably get a more proper official announcement about it well in advance of the actual release date.

I was under the impression that the new launcher made those old "pre-release downloads" a thing of the past. Obviously we'll see how it goes once Issue 21 finally does go live.