Lothic

Looks like someone just adapted a regular paintball gun for this thing. Although the article says it can use plastic or brass pellets so it sounds a little more like a specialized automatic BB gun. Either way as long as the "robot" part of this thing works well it wouldn't take much to replace the "toy" gun with a much more deadly one.

Somewhere the first Skynet prototypes must be snickering at our suicidal stupidity.

Yep that "relationship" looks like a near-exact rip-off of the brainy Judy Robinson with soldier Don West thing from the 1998 Lost in Space movie. The guy, who does seem too old for the girl in this show, even almost looks a little like Matt LeBlanc did in the movie. BTW "Wangst" is a great name for the older son.

This show devolving into a thinly-veiled Survivor rip-off wouldn't surprise me in the least. Either behind the "fourth wall" or not.

I was groaning too much at the "dramatic tension" that was supposed to be going on in that scene to notice.

Of my two side-switching badgers one of them was always what this game would call a "Vigilante" when it came to questions of Good and Evil long before switching alignments was possible. Justifying her trips back and forth are therefore pretty easy.

My other side-switcher was always supposed to be a hero but I just came up with this idea that one of her science experiments backfired on her and caused her to become temporarily evil like what happens to Superman when he gets exposed to whatever flavor of kryptonite turns him evil. I even came up with a "bizarro" version of one of her main costumes used while she's busy being evil on the redside.

Whatever works, whether you need a "reason" for doing it or not.

Not only are they not in a parallel universe but we'll probably learn there's some secret way for people to go -both- ways through the portal. That's probably why Commander Taylor needs the "meteoric iron" from the Sixers because it'll be used to build the portal machinery on the Terra Nova side of the portal.

I loved how we saw that touching scene with his 2149 girlfriend and how he was all upset he would never see her again then 10 minutes later (almost literally in real time) we see him getting "involved" with a new girl in Terra Nova. I guess the only thing that doesn't make it totally laughable is that I suppose today's typical teen-aged boy only has about a 3 second attention span anyway.

The extra special funny thing about this nauseating teen angst is that we already know that in about 4 or 5 more episodes we'll find out his old girlfriend won the Terra Nova lottery and ends up there to be the awkward third member of teen love triangle. God the idea of it just makes my stomach turn.

It's certainly possible Nolan will try something "unexpected" with their relationship. I simply have enough faith, based on his track record with the last two Batman movies, that whatever form Hathaway's Catwoman takes it'll be entertaining.

Eh, the only problem I had with Maggie was that she wasn't Katie. Not that I think Katie was a perfect/beautiful actress for the role either but I just don't like it when a different person plays a role after only one movie. I can accept when an actor is swapped after a long run (like many of the guys who've played James Bond for instance). But it's annoying to have to accept a new person in a role after only one movie. The same thing irked me when Don Cheadle replaced Terrence Howard in the Iron Man movies. I don't really love or hate either one of them - it's just annoying to have to accept that change.

But to respond to the main point you're making I'd agree that an actor has to bring at least something "innate" to the table to pull off a believable role. I just think that a good actor can play a huge range of roles, even ones that would seem unusual or against type. I'm simply giving Anne the benefit of the doubt for this.

MMO elitism rarely has anything to do with logic or common sense.

There are people out there who love to jump into situations which involve "restricted membership" or "exclusive awards" and blow them completely out of proportion. I never had any doubt that a few of those people would pop up on Exalted and show themselves for the idiots they are - it's just going to have to be a semi-constant annoyance to deal with there.

Hopefully the player community of this game is mature enough in general to keep much of that to a bare minimum.

As an alternative you could always just send your friend things that the email system will actually allow you to send.

Again I think it'll boil down to her ability to -act- the part even if she doesn't automatically -look- the part. Much of what you described as far as the way Catwoman is supposed to be is based on her attitude and mannerisms. Those things can be "acted" by anyone skillful enough.

The basic question really is whether Hathaway can pull it off acting wise, even given she's not normally associated with this kind of role. I'd say the "look" part is ultimately somewhat secondary to the overall presentation of the character.

Eh, I never really said "increasing sharding" wouldn't help. Based on the scant few words the Rednames have said about what they are doing with trying to better "load manage" their players may mean something along those lines anyway. It'll be as transparent to us as possible in any event - ongoing changes to something like that might not even make it to the patch notes.

If you're interested is some of the "under the hood" stuff you could always sniff into the messaging that goes on with some of the third party apps like HeroStats and Titan Sentinel. Those things would give you some hints without having to do anything remotely reverse-engineery against the EULA. Beyond that I've never tried to "look behind the curtain" on this game too much myself because I'm mostly content to play it without wondering about the details. I try to keep work and play as separate as possible if you know what I mean.

The current realities of this game are always going to be complicated by its relative age. Not only are they reworking the overall game for the F2P changes but they are doing it to a system that probably has some elements to it that are approaching being 10+ years old (depending on just how far back before April 2004 they were laying the groundwork for the game). Having to work in changes to the account databases and the new Paragon Market transaction servers into the existing rat's nest of code must be a semi-nightmare for them no matter how disciplined they've been.

I honestly couldn't tell you much more about their hardware setup beyond what they've told us. We do know that as recently as a week or two ago they were "physically moving server hardware to a new location" so it's likely that quite a bit more is going on than how they are handling their high level server instance applications.

Once again I can totally sympathize that any downtime is bad for a game like this. But given everything they are trying to accomplish I almost think it's amazing they've managed to do what they've done with so -little- overall downtime.

I'm certainly open to the idea that they could do more to stress test things. But then again there's never been a team of people working on a software application that couldn't stand to spend more time stress testing things. Like I implied before that's one of those things you can never do enough of.

The Devs do their best to encourage people to go try things out during the closed and open betas. They even generate "live stress tests" as best they can - basically every time they do things like the Praetorian Invasion that's a stress test or sorts.

But as SolarSentai said there's always things that crop up in a live environment that'll never show up during a beta no matter how much testing you do beforehand. Are there things they might be able to do to further reduce the downtimes we're seeing now? Sure there's always room for improvement. But my guess, for what it's worth, is that they are doing the best they can given the limitations of time, staff, budgets, etc. No situation is going to be perfect - it's how they balance juggle all the factors at once that matters most.

And for the record I never ONCE thought you ever said the current build needed to be completely unloaded from the live servers. Why you thought I jumped to that assumption is anyone's guess. *shrugs*

Telling the Devs to do this is like telling them they need to breath to stay alive. You're not saying ANYTHING they aren't already doing. My guess is that they are always "aggressively" trying to fix the problems ASAP. They aren't bringing the live servers down just to test fixes - the idea that they would avoid some of this latest downtime if they spent more time "aggressively" testing the build is not a reasonable leap of logic here.

You know I've actually understood the point quickfire's been making all along.

It's just that the idea that the Devs would NOT be working on bug fixes on other Test/Beta servers while the build on the live servers is left up and running so completely counter to every reasonable engineering practice that I've almost dismissed it out of hand on purpose.

Cherrypicking? hardly...

I think the reason your suggestion seems strange to me is that what you're suggesting is what the Devs are ALREADY doing and what they've ALWAYS done.

The Devs are always working on the latest builds on both the public Test and Beta servers as well as their private internal servers. They always do their best to minimise the required time they need to install new builds on the live servers. Do you think they are just whimsically bringing the live servers down whenever they want to test a single new line of code? Be rest assured that they only bring the servers down when they are VERY SURE they have something worth publishing which includes anything they announce in the patch notes as well as the dozens/hundreds of other things they never tell us about.

So your semi-strange suggestion that the Devs should do MORE to reduce the downtimes is just that, very strange to me given that I'm quite sure the Devs ALREADY do everything they can to minimize that.

My experience does not "justify" what you call a bad opinion. It only makes me understand that given the situation at hand what the Devs appear to be doing to handle it seems much more realistic from an engineering and business point of view than the relatively extreme and unjustifiable suggestions you're offering.

I understand downtime of any kind is bad and annoying. But suggesting they should essentially stop doing anything other than to "overwork" the current build and re-release CoH:Freedom at a later date when it's finally "finished" is both practically and effectively impossible. No software application of this size is ever technically "done" nor is it ever held back until ALL the bugs are fixed. If Devs in general tried to do that then nothing would ever be released.

Yes I agree yours is an opinion. It just doesn't mesh well with the realities of this software application/maintenance situation. And I'm only saying that as a Software Engineer with nearly 20 years of professional experience... for whatever that's worth.

You do realize that they are ALWAYS testing/fixing bugs on both the Test and Beta servers all the time right? Why would you think that's not happening already? And as far as implying the idea of "trying to fix it as they go" is a bad thing can you actually name me any MMO that doesn't constantly work on bug fixes while a live build is running on their servers?

These things are "Software Operation and Maintenance" 101 things here...

I suspect part of the reason we had increased maintenance periods in the last few weeks BEFORE CoH:Freedom officially launched was to make sure they'd be able to keep downtime to a minimum AFTER the launch. And as Aett_Thorn implied I'm quite sure they always endeavor to keep any downtime to a minimum regardless.

P.S. Just to provide some historical perspective the amount of maintenance downtime we've had here in the last month is far from what the "average" has been over the last 7.5 years. Clearly the changes for CoH:Freedom are pretty huge, but I have faith that things will settle back down eventually.

There's nothing wrong with working on a single-side badger. I consciously made the decision to keep my third badger blueside only for the same "hardcore hero" character reasons as much as anything else. Besides I figured having two other badgers keeping up with all the side-switching was enough.

Yeah I guess when I was quickly coming up with a hypothetical hero name for my post I unconsciously remembered Mystery Men. A funny movie, but not one I intended to reference here.

Spam is a three-edged sword...

Clearly -something's- not working as they intended. Maybe the new email system messed up the old token delivery script.

Just because there are still examples of legacy things that don't fully use the email system does not mean that it isn't their ultimate goal to do that. Again from a software engineering maintenance point of view it would definitely be easy for them to have ONE main system to deliver all rewards to players rather than to try to maintain several various individual older systems/scripts for it.

For what it's worth I never said I thought the email delivery system is perfect. I'm just pointing out that the Devs are clearly relying on it for a wide range of awards. And the fact that we have not gotten the latest round of freebie tokens yet may in fact be because they are trying to switch them over to use the new email system and it's not working yet. Just saying.

I've ALWAYS known what you were talking about regardless of Snow Globe's inputs here. lol

I'm just making the point, once again, that the Devs' fancy new email system OUGHT to be handling these free tokens the same way it's now handling everything else. If it isn't that'd be semi-ridiculous.