Mandur12

Originally Posted by SteelDominator

Might need to open the wallet again and burn influence into the Prestige Pit, our favorite guy is back

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

There's another thought I've had for some time now, and that is that another way to ensure that power choices are less quantitative and more qualitative is to simply decouple combat from rewards. Or to put it more simply, design your reward system so it rewards accomplishments more and kills less. Its almost MMO heresy to suggest that the majority of your rewards come from anything other than killing things, but it was also MMO heresy to make a game that is mostly instanced. If we are spending most of our time running instanced missions as opposed to street sweeping, our time is mostly spent running highly controlled mission environments with a much higher diversity of possible objectives. As far back as CoV beta I questioned why it was that a stalker stealthing to the end of a mission and clicking on the blinkie at the end was considered an exploit. Isn't that what stalkers do? Perhaps the reward was too high for that specific behavior, but why is it essentially *disallowed* in this game? Because it seems to be an obvious rule that if you don't have to kill anything, you're somehow cheating, because this game is balanced on the premise that your performance should be related to the speed at which you kill things.

But if rewards came from a much more diverse set of objectives by design and intent not only would that make for a more interesting game in my opinion, it would lessen the advantage of quantifying the precise offense and defense of every power. When all is said and done, all of those calculations would have to somehow be compared to the potentially large qualitative but difficult to quantify benefits of stealth, fast movement, object manipulating powers, alternate damage types, etc. That would be like figuring out the optimal way to slot Combat Jumping without knowing how to determine the relative strengths of Dark Armor and Invulnerability.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

Most choices would be either equitable or qualitatively obviously explained. If you deliberately choose to take little or no offensive options and load up on defensive ones, you would be a more defensive and less offensive character. You may kill a lot slower, which would affect your performance relative to more balanced characters. But it would be a blatantly obvious decision on the player's part.

Similarly, if there was an ability that increased your frontloaded damage but did little for sustained damage, and another ability that increased your sustained damage by a lot but didn't frontload that damage, those abilities would say, specifically, that they did those two things. This one increases your immediate damage by a lot, but averages out to a low overall damage. Your kill speed only goes up a little, but you kill more stuff faster at the start of combat. The other increases kill speed a lot over time and you will kill more stuff faster, but you won't kill very many things up front so you will have to deal with more punishment at the start of a fight. You get to choose, but the choice is presented in an obvious manner. What's better: increased kill speed or increased frontloaded kills? Depends on what you want, not on what's "intrinsically better."

Originally Posted by Liquid

I'm glad you reconsidered the 1-time, 3-hour, Freedom-only badge. I'm pretty shocked that it was ever considered, given the server performance issues and the tiny, tiny window of opportunity for a badge.

Originally Posted by Organica

Was there really a party? I burned some influence, but I didn't see anyone or see any chatter about it.

Originally Posted by DumpleBerry

Oh I need to find something that makes money again.

Originally Posted by Fulmens

Anyone else have any rash promises to make?

Originally Posted by Enyalios

I assume MnV has multiple allies in his quest to get his VG to #1 on Freedom. Other than the fact he's openly insulted the '88's I'm happy he's blowing up so much inf. I am curious how he's done it, but, I doubt he's bought inf from China cause that would actually be a decent amount of RL money and I doubt someone would pay $7-$9 per billion just to blow it up.

I made 17B over x2 exp weekend so I KNOW that inf can flow like water in this game now. I am curious of his inf making methods (PvPIO AFK farming, Purple farming, what kinds of marketeering, charging for PL, etc). Perhaps after his group has passed he will divulge some of the techniques at least if not the specifics. I'd like to see his data honestly as long as he's honest.

Originally Posted by Fulmens

3 billion inf kicked in. We're up to 564 million prestige. Still getting WHOMPED by the ladies and gentlemen of PsychotiX. (687 million-ish.)

I'm looking for a date of renown to get another bonfire going. Hmm, May day's too far out... Lenin's birthday, Trotsky's birthday, Proudhon's birthday, no, no, no.

Ah. February 21. First publication of the Communist Manifesto.

Any better dates?

Originally Posted by MeanNVicious

*Pops on helmet, and pulls on driving gloves. Rev's throttle tauntingly*

Originally Posted by seebs

This way, we can increase the burn rate, and help quell any complaints that the 88s only made #1 because the biggest SGs are really coalitions of multiple SGs.

Originally Posted by Chaos Creator

I know at one point there was a marketeer who commented they were close to a trillion. A single person. I think we're off by an order of magnitude.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat

Ok, sent 2.5b to Mandur with the suggestion to hold off burning it until the 21st.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat

Mandur's helping me out with the PvP IO situation, so that's a cool 2.5b for the furnace.