Lothic

I watched the whole thing last night and it looked like the first minute or so was still working for me just now.
Hope you get to see it...

I highly suspect the reason why they can't fix this is that they've simply lost track of most (or all) of the account data that would've told them the exact difference between how much time a person's been subscribed/VIP versus how much time they haven't since CoH:Freedom launched. No amount of clever coding will help them deal with a situation where they don't have the data needed to implement what they want from this. That's probably why Posi has just given up without considering reasonable alternatives.

As we all know the Devs never had the whole "account time" thing completely under control even before CoH:Freedom. Ever since the beginning of the Vet program there were semi-random people getting Vet badges many MONTHS earlier than they should have even been able to given the "rules" of the system. I submit that whatever this "3rd party" accounting system is/was that it's been screwing things up for many years now.

I sincerely hope Posi and the other Devs will be willing to stop beating their collective heads against the wall and come up with a simpler solution to this that does not involve all those faulty and convoluted account gyrations. That's probably been a coding nightmare for them for years anyway. This issue deserves a real alternative, not just a bunch of Devs sticking their heads in the sand and giving up. Surely almost any course of action would be better than the "nothing" we have now at this point.

Yep, but according to this latest news apparently Posi doesn't really care about it anymore.

Shouldn't events like in this pic cause some kind of recursive space-time paradox thingy that destroys the universe or something?

[EDIT] At least I haven't seen a pic of Richard Hatch and Jamie Bamber at the Apollo Theater in New York yet...

I thought it was a cool little character moment. Kind of helped to reinforce the idea that the Hulk is a "loose cannon" even at the best of times. It also led into the Hulk's final chaotic ragdoll moment with Loki and made that little "outburst" seem that much more realistic coming from this huge green dude who we now know is randomly willing to punch even his own friends around much less the bad guys.

I don't really have a problem with this new KB to KD converter proc being in the game.

But it's pretty clear to me that the only people who really "hate" Knockback are the people who like to play the few AT/powersets that really lose effectiveness when critters are scattered around. I tend to hate built-in weaknesses in my characters like that so I don't usually bother to play those gimped powersets that encourage you to have silly fears about Knockback. *shrugs*

Yeah I like the look of this as well. If they're smart they'll figure out a clever way to have the eventual "death" of Beck lead into what we saw in TRON Legacy so there will be some kind of overall continuity.

Maybe Beck will be important in finding Flynn and helping him escape from Clu so that he'll be around for TRON Legacy to happen. Maybe Tron sacrifices himself to Clu's reprogramming so that Beck and Flynn can get free and then Beck follows in his mentor's footsteps to sacrifice himself for Flynn. Would be a cool way to end this animated series.

Wow, I'm surprised to hear Posi make such an absolute personal statement about this issue without making that kind of thing a public announcement. It's unfortunate to think that not only have they apparently given up on dealing with this problem altogether but that they've even decided to pretend it doesn't exist. Frankly I would have had more respect for the Devs if they had just owned up to the failure six months ago and been done with it than to just let it drag on this long.

Despite my best efforts to maintain my optimism it was becoming fairly clear that there was a serious problem that wasn't getting dealt with here. But of all the possible ways to handle this situation I think Posi has picked the worst possible one. Just letting it go off into the weeds when we know that so many people are left hanging with various badges that should be awarded, especially considering there have been at least a handful of people who have actually gotten these badges lately REGARDLESS of what Posi's trying to claim, is very sad on several levels.

There are at least two better "Plan B" options that would be more acceptable than the current scenario:

1) I still believe my idea to have these annual Vet badges trigger off of a person's account creation date would be a viable alternative to the way the Devs have been trying to make these work. Apparently the Devs have become so narrow mindedly focused on trying to make their original idea work that they've become numb to the possibility that they should just step back and accept that they need to do something radically different. Again I totally understand that basing these badges on a person's account creation date will no longer reflect how much actual time that person has been subscribed or not. But clearly that detail doesn't really matter to Posi anymore anyway based on the fact that he's willing to just let these badges fall off the proverbial edge of the map. If he's truly given up on the type of badge he wants we might as will get a type of badge that actually WORKS consistently.

2) If for some reason the Devs can't or won't give my above idea a try then the only acceptable "final solution" should be for the Devs to remove these badges from the game the same way they removed the AE badges. It would make absolutely no sense for the Devs to leave a broken set of badges in the game that people will no longer be able to count on standing for anything, especially once again if a few random people are just going to get a handful of these things without any rhyme or reason. It's completely unfair and infuriating to think that some few people might simply "get lucky" and get the badges they are supposed to get when most other people won't.

My characters have their 7th year Vet badges and should have had their 8th a few weeks ago. But like you I would be willing to have them all removed from the game if the Devs can't find a more reasonable solution. Everyone should be working from the same "starting position" as far as that goes. It would not be fair for some people to have more badges than others just because the system randomly decided to work correctly for few people and not others. We deserve a 100% deterministic system for getting badges. I need to have total confidence that if I do X I know with complete certainty I will always get Y. Allowing any badge to exist on a character just because of some uncontrollable arbitrary chance is unacceptable (this is also why Bug Hunter is a uniquely broken badge but I'll refrain from that tangent here).

The only way a badge system like this can work is if we have trust and confidence in the system. If Posi's willing to just hand-wave and pretend this will not be a lingering problem then I think he's chosen the shortsighted cop-out as opposed to making a hard but respectable command decision. I hope that he and the other Devs will consider my alternatives and make a better choice here. Posi has the opportunity to do the right thing, he only needs to be willing to see that he needs to act. Sweeping something like this under the rug is simply -not- the right thing to do.

If I could get dollars for seeing MM pets running amok I'd be a millionaire by now. I can't count the number of times I've seen MMs with worse control over their pets than I have with my Fire Imps.

MM players who actually know what they're doing with their pets can be awesome - sadly I don't often see many good examples of that.

Yeah Charles Dance has got that "noble king/general" command presence about him. If Lucas were to decide to remake Star Wars Ep. IV today (and who says he's not actually considering that lol) I would probably name Charles Dance a shoe-in for Grand Moff Tarkin.

Thanks but I'll just watch how it plays out in the show. From what you imply there seems to be enough book-divergent parts that it'll be something everyone ought to watch regardless of prior book knowledge. And if there's stuff I guessed wrong we'll all know soon enough.

That's kind of interesting - I hadn't really thought to compare Hunger Games and Avengers directly but I guess it's worthwhile since they both made a ton of money recently.

To my mind neither film was absolutely perfect, but strangely enough they missed that mark almost for opposite reasons. The Hunger Games needed about 10 more minutes of action where the Avengers needed about 10 minutes -less- action. The Hunger Games dragged a bit in a few places and the final arena fight scenes were a bit lacking. On the other hand Avengers sort of glossed over the relevance of invading army a bit too much. It almost didn't matter who they were just like it doesn't matter in most video games and while that's fine for your average video game I would have liked a few more minutes to fully understand why they'd bother to invade Earth in the first place. As someone who hasn't read the Avengers for decades like other fans out there it would filled in the backstory a bit more for me.

All in all I'd give both movies 8/10. Since we're guaranteed to get sequels to both we'll just have to see if they can both shore up their minor failings in their pacing next time around.

I wouldn't argue that you are wrong about this point. But I do believe that their original plan to structure Praetoria around a strict level 1-20 setting was fundamentally flawed to begin with and yielded this unfortunate vibe that all we got was a "level 1-20 tutorial" out if it.

In fact I believe the only reason we got First Ward and Night Ward was that the Devs decided to make an attempt to "correct" the original level 1-20 design flaw and give players the higher level Praetorian content they wanted from the beginning.

Let's just say I think you're going to become more knowledgeable about how binds/marcos work in this game. For what's it's worth I've been using hundreds of different binds for years and they have proven to be useful for all sorts of things.

Sure I don't directly "speak" for the Devs. But I have been playing this game since CoH beta so I'm pretty confident that my "opinion" is based on the sound history and precedent the Devs have established.

Can you explain to me why ALL forms of flight in this game either have travel suppression or toggle suppression? Sure I might be willing to agree with you that "forcing us account for retoggling powers" might actually be a more annoying form of game balance than basic travel suppression. But I would have to posit that as far as the Devs are concerned they are both accomplishing the same thing - they prevent us from kitting into MOBs without negative consequences.

You are fighting an uphill battle with this regardless of whatever I say about it. You are basically asking the Devs to make it easier for you to do something (specifically to fight without consequences while using these travel powers) that they've already gone out of their way to strictly DISCOURAGE via travel suppression. To put it bluntly I think you're spitting into the wind with this suggestion.

I wish you all the luck but please don't hold your breath for this...

Right the simplest answer is most often correct. We have Travel suppression in this game for a reason. We have Toggle suppression in this game for a similar reason.

Jet Packs are not permanent travel powers. Apparently that makes a difference to the Devs.
Coyote Run includes a Stealth component. Apparently that makes a difference to the Devs as well.

It's actually probably safe to say that everyone would prefer it to work this way.
Doesn't mean it's going to happen.
No one really likes travel suppression either yet we've had it in this game for years.

It's a game balance mechanic. The Devs could have easily made this thing work in a way that would have allowed toggles to automatically reactivate after shutting off the travel power yet they DIDN'T make it work like that. The reason for that almost couldn't be more obvious to me. *shrugs*

I'm not 'trying' to argue with you either. I'm actually well aware of the "animation issues" concerning these powers. But I'll point out that if the Devs weren't at least secondarily happy with the idea that toggle suppression prevents abuses then why are most of the traditional travel powers subjected to travel suppression where there is no question there is no issue with animations in those cases? I realize it may be a little tricky to understand what's going on here but toggle suppression is actually serving at least TWO purposes, not just one. The need to manually re-toggle is a game balance mechanic.

Bottomline there are MANY reasons why the Devs will likely never remove toggle suppression from these powers or make it easier to re-toggle afterwards, not the least of which is that they'll probably not want to waste the development time on it. The animation issue is a big one in this mix, but it's not really any more important than overall game balance which will always trump everything else.

As I said before I'm perfectly willing to accept the idea that the implementation of GR was handled badly.
I just refute the idea that its fundamental setting was its main shortcoming.

My only serious problem with it was that it was originally only designed for levels 1-20 instead of 1-50.

I suppose we can simply agree to disagree on this point.
Don't worry, the world will continue to spin even though someone out there thinks you're wrong on this. *shrugs*

If you could use Flying Carpet or Rocket Board to zoom in over MOBs and dive bomb into them by simply shutting off the travel power and have all your toggles back up instantly I could see how that could be borderline abusive, especially if you could do that with a "temp" travel power that didn't take up one of your other power slots like Fly or SS do.

Remember the Devs gave us Ninja Run and Beast Run which DON'T have the toggle suppression on them. This tells me that they specifically wanted to have toggle suppression on things like Flying Carpet or the Rocket Board on purpose. I seriously don't think it was merely "an accident" that those powers got saddled with toggle suppression.

And as far as the "if the Devs did X, Y or Z they would sell a bunch more of them" argument goes it's pretty clear that they make things work the way they want them to REGARDLESS of how it might impact sales. For example if they really wanted to sell a whole bunch of Server Transfer tokens they could easily make them cost only like 50 points each. Sometimes it's not really about how much money they might make or lose - sometimes they simply want to maintain game balance regardless.

Even easy things to code take -some- amount of time to implement. And the big hurdle you'd have to overcome is convincing the Devs there's enough of a need or desire for this.

Sure I agree it would be nice if the vanity travel powers worked the way you suggest. But for all we know the Devs actually -want- these powers to be somewhat annoying to use because they don't want people using them to rush into MOBs too easily. The fact that these powers force people to manually retoggle keeps them from being abused in combat situations.

Except of course that the vanity pets and those "wacky" travel powers are relatively high-ticket items that many people have already paid real points for. More than likely the only things that will ever be "freebie" items will be relatively low-cost consumable items. *shrugs*

It's always possible that the Devs will simply make a list of all the possible things they will allow to be freebies and -randomly- pick one item from that list every week to be the freebie of the week. That's probably where the "random" element in this is going to come from. *shrugs*