Mind Forever Burning

I'm willing to pay in principle but so far nothing has occurred to me.

qr

Redside prices on purples may well drop in i14 when doms suddenly benefit more from slotting damage and less from recharge (than they did previously).

I'm assuming there's a hidden reserve.

*facepalm*

Every time I think about how this dialog was designed, it makes me cringe.

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I run farms on a 3 man team, myself, and 2 others. I could care less if the other 2 people participate or not, so essentially, they are getting a free ride.

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Out of curiosity, what are you farming for? And I'd be interested in seeing your technique (willing to pay, of course) - what server are you on?

The quoted numbers still seem low. OP, are you using allies? Allies steal XP.

The description of the mission tells you what the level range is. You're auto-sidekicked to the lowest level.

Gaussian's end/rech totally dried up with the i14 changes. They used to be vendor fodder, now they're 10M and you're lucky if you can find one at all.

Gaussian's end/rech is one reason I'm (still) parking a toon in the mid-30s for rolls.

The auction interface is 5 kinds of bizarre. So is the MA interface, really. The devs need to train up a few levels in 2D UI design.

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Do you think that each arc in a multi-arc story HAS to work as a standalone story as well as contribute to the overall piece?

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I believe every arc has to stand alone in some way. Think of them like movie trilogies - even though not every plot element may be resolved at the end, each movie has a definite beginning, middle, and end.

Heh. Check out missions 1, 2, and 5 of arc 232235, "Power Progression"... Council radio, Battle Maiden map, and a mash-up of AE farms, all in one arc. (And germaine to the plot.)

Before you even try a real run I think you should test out what fighting a level 53 Statesman feels like. He's no pushover even at even-con - for most builds he will regenerate so much when Unstoppable is on that you basically make no progress, even if you can survive the Zeus Lightning etc.

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Is there any chance of me being able to single pull the heroes in the final mission on a Brute or Mastermind or any other non-Dominator AT?

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There were people who could do it back in the day, but I confess I never saw it done.

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I'm hearing talk from several people that Confused Heroes on the Recluse Strike Force, specifically, will not damage each other.

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I know for a fact this was true when the FP was level 54. I'm not 100% sure now that they're 53 but I'd be really really surprised if it had changed.

I've probably gone completely insane. What I'm attempting is not reasonable, but I had to do it anyway. Once the story was in my head it had to be told.

The Storm's Edge saga is an ambitious attempt to weave together the hanging threads from i11 and i14 into a prequel to the Coming Storm event. To the best of my ability, it incorporates known canon material and extends it in the direction that I believe the devs were hinting towards. In the course of events, two canon origin stories are told, a secret identity is disclosed, and a bold plot is uncovered that could change the course of Paragon City forever.

I fully realize that the meta-story I present here could be subverted at any moment by canon developments. But the ideas that came to me seemed so inevitable from existing canon hints, and the stories spoke to me so stronly, that I had to give them voice. In a sense, too, I am throwing the dev writing staff a dare: prove me wrong, by resolving the Coming Storm storyline, and I'll happily discard my work to enjoy the closure.

The Storm's Edge saga consists of four arcs, one of which is unlockable:

67277 :: Signal to Noise (neutral/high level)
232253 :: The Plumber (heroic/mid level)
232235 :: Power Progression (villainous/mid level)
XXXYYY :: ???? (the finale)

The stories each stand on their own and can be played in any order. Put together, they paint a dark picture of conspiracy with one hell of a punchline. The first three are soloable; the unlockable arc is of TF difficulty, though very short.

The arc ID of the unlockable arc is broken into two pieces, one of which is found in an end clue of "The Plumber", and the other of which is found in an end clue of "Power Progression". "Signal to Noise" is not necessary for unlocking the hidden arc, though it is set against the same underlying events and gives a lot of the back story for the finale.

Since I have no DC nor HoF arcs, the 4th and final mission is published via a second account. In order to realize this vision, I sacrificed the 2nd account's global name and bought all the costume-enabling expansion packs. You won't be able to find the unlockable arc by global name, nor by guessing the arc ID (it wasn't published at the same time as any of the others), nor most likely by searching new arcs (I gave it a few manual ratings to deliberately bury it).

Here are the teasers for each of the stories:

67277 :: Signal to Noise

Neutral :: high-level :: challenging to solo

A seemingly innocuous training exercise goes horribly awry, spiraling ever more deeply into a mystery involving imprisonment, mind control, and the fate of the Architect Entertainment System itself... Or does it? (Note: now playable again, finally, after two of its maps were unceremoniously removed.)

Written and published first; chronologically second in the series**

232253 :: The Plumber

Heroic :: mid-level :: should be solo-friendly

Josh, a young man employed by Architect Entertainment, takes you behind the scenes to show you what really makes missions tick. The "plumbers" are there when players get stuck - will you return the favor in their time of need?

Written second, published last; chronologically first in the series**

232235 :: Power Progression

Villainous :: mid-level :: may be challenging to solo

Like any powerful tool, the Architect System can be harnessed for the cause of righteousness and justice - or twisted to suit selfish, evil purposes. Let's face it, the former is for suckers. And with a newly "recruited" Arachnos technician at your side, how can you lose?

Written last, published second; chronologically last in the series**

** - Note that the stories can be played in any order; chronology is given to satisfy curiosity.

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Signal to Noise has a promotional poster; I'll see if I can get Niviene to inline it. I'm probably going to develop a teaser trailer for the saga as a whole.

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Influence was originally a reward for doing good things and gaining notability as a good character. It is still related to that.
Infamy was originally a reward for doing evil things and gaining a reputation as a evil character. It is still related to that.

Why should a currency based on alignment be usable by both sides in this kind of relation?
It shouldn't be.

The situation is black-and-white. There is no gray.


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Leaving aside the rest of the discussion for a moment, it seems to me that the devs made this argument obsolete when they decided to stop doing any significant faction-specific content develoment. Even before Going Rogue, every issue since i9 served to blur the line between Heroside and Villainside (with the single exception of VEATs, which IMHO were more like a late fulfillment than new development).

Allies don't work either. The AI just can't seem to find the exit on those maps.

Allies also have the problem that they only do the thing you tell them to do ("flee", "wander", etc) when some player character is in range. Out of range they just stand there.

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From an evil farmer here. We would use spawn point placement to jam pack a map full of mobs.

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I think what people mean when they say this is to assign details more specifically to existing spawn locations than the current "front, middle, back" categorizations, not to add spawns that aren't already there.

Captives are supposed to flee to the nearest exit when rescued, always - that's why there are no options to control what they do.

However, they don't seem to know how to find the door on outside maps. I could have sworn there were canon arcs that did this, though I haven't actually played through one since the MA was released. Regardless, I've been assuming this was a (low priority) bug.

#119228: hero therapy (TM)
tl;dr: 3 stars
Pros: Original idea, well written, some thought provoking ideas
Cons: Gameplay issues, repetitive mission structure, unsatisfying ending, and I just didn't have fun

Reviewed: 6/18/2009
Level range: scaling
Character used: lvl 32 fire/fire blaster (yes, yes, I know)

Telling me not to run the arc on a fire blaster made me want to haul my fire/fire blaster Hoht out of the storage bin. So I did. Don't worry, I didn't downgrade for the problem, though it does point to something I think should be fixed.

The arc is a series of four missions that all follow the same formula. Your contact is a therapist, and he hypnotizes you to help you work through buried issues by sending you to combat them in your mind. Each mission is set up the same way: you enter the map and rescue the Therapist (a non-combat ally), which then triggers a boss you need to defeat. Along the way you have the option to rescue "The Steel You Lack" and (after the 1st mission) the boss you defeated in the previous map, who will fight as your allies.

And... that's pretty much it. The bosses are, in order, a Librarian, your Vanity, a Hidden Shame, and "The Door" (who looked a lot like the Dark Watcher - not sure if that was intentional). The therapist never turns out to be anything other than a therapist, which was a let down for me. The arc never really produces any surprises, and although the combat does increase in difficulty throughout the arc, the plot doesn't seem to get any deeper or more complex to support that ramp-up.

There are some reasonably interesting optional glowies in each mission, but they suffer from the same problem as the rest of the arc - namely, it tells you what your character's psychological history is, i.e. it's all powerposing. I was hoping the therapist was a sham partly so that I could RP my way out of this, but no dice. The author seems to have tried to make all this less obtrusive by making the psychology general, but as a result it feels sort of psycho-babble-ish.

I also have a big problem with the way the arc is structured. The levels ramp up in such a way that lowbies are never going to make it through to the end (the final boss is an AV) but high-level characters will be forced to exemplar down. That means I'll never be tempted to run this arc again on any character I'm playing. Maybe some will find this an appealing time sink for a 50, but that group would not include me.

The boss in the 3rd mission is a fire armor EB. Fire armor has the distinction of having nearly capped resistances against one damage type, fire, and mediocre resists against most everything else. So anything fire-wielding is going to have problems. The allies help, but you have to be a buffer to keep them alive - they're not all that tough. I'm not downgrading for this, but I think the author should play around with custom settings in i15 to tone down the fire resist somehow.

I was really torn on how to rate this arc. On the one hand, it's well executed. On the other, I simply didn't have any fun in it (even prior to the EB I couldn't dent) and I was left feeling like there wasn't really a story there - no beginning, middle and end, just a series of metaphorical combats. In-game I didn't leave a rating at all. For the purposes of this review I'd rate it a 5 for execution, 2 for gameplay and 2 for enjoyability, which even out to a 3.

I've been toying with different diet and exercise plans since high school. As far as I can tell the best rule of thumb is "calories in, calories out" - but there does seem to be a trick to consuming fewer calories without feeling like you're starving yourself. The trick is, "Eat low calorie density foods".

I have a mental spectrum going from zero calories/gram (water) to six calories per gram (candy). The zero-to-two segment is the "green zone" and I can eat pretty much as much of that as I can stuff in my mouth. The two-to-four segment is the "yellow zone", where I need to eat things in moderation, and the four-to-six segment is the "red zone" which I try to avoid (with a few exceptions). (There are 28 grams per ounce, so the zones in ounces is 0-50 cal/oz, 50-100 cal/oz, and 100-150 cal/oz, roughly speaking. It's all approximate anyway.)

The green zone includes pretty much all fruits and vegetables (except maybe avocados - not sure), cottage cheese and yogurt, lean meats, and some roots and tubers (potatoes). The yellow zone includes unsweetened bread products, fatty meats, low fat cheeses, and some roots and tubers (I think sweet potatoes are in here). The red zone is nearly all processed foods - chips, cookies, crackers, candy, fried foods, fatty cheeses - though strangely nuts are here too.

Evaluating most of the fad diets out there, they generally end up causing people to stick to green zone foods, or at least significantly reduce the red zone intake and increase green zone intake. If you look at Atkins, for example, it lines up almost exactly with the calorie density recommendations, except for potatoes (which Atkins tells you to avoid) and nuts (which it tells you are OK). Raw diets avoid almost everything in the red zone except nuts, and a fair percentage of the yellow zone. The caveman diet is similar to raw except you can eat meat, which again is mostly green and yellow zone.

Because nuts seem to be OK in every diet I've looked at closely, I make an exception for them, though even there I try to eat them in moderation. Other than that I try as hard as possible to stay towards the "green" size of the spectrum. I also try to eat unsweetened versions of things rather than sweetened (for example, yogurt) when possible, and avoid hydrogenated vegetable oils when possible.

Anyway, if someone's looking for a simple and reasonable general plan, I would say green-zone food plus 30 minutes of cardio exercise per day is enough to lose probably a pound a week. If you're starting out cold, I'd recommend taking the exercise part easy for the first few days to get a feel for it - no use burning yourself out and quitting after a week.

I wish I had put all these thoughts in order and convinced my friend to give it a try three years ago, but at least I'm doing it now.

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Anything less than full and equal access to the same market for both factions is a pointless half-measure that won't get my support.

[/ QUOTE ]what he said.

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Nethergoat and EvilRyu... in agreement... about something market-related.

I want to print this out, frame it, and hang it on the wall.

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the constant influx of inf is making inf more and more worthless by the second

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Hm. Is the constant influx of items making items more and more worthless by the second? If not what's the difference between that and inf?

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Lately, I've been exercising more and eating a little better. Nothing earth-shattering yet, just a half hour or so on the treadmill and buying decent meats, cheeses, and breads at the grocery store instead of making Wendy's runs, but it's a start.

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I'm really glad to hear you're making a change. That's really the reason I posted at all - if even one person decides to change their habits because of this, or a few people stick with a program they were wavering on, it makes the loss more tolerable to bear.

- KD

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Now, of course, if this is your rating, then it was my mistake.

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That's my rating.

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But I have an even bigger question for you based on your original post: If you read things in Venture's review that made his poorly rated arcs sound interesting to you, why didn't you just play a few and find out if you agreed with his reviews or not?

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That's what I did at first, but why not share my thoughts with the author? While I've found that Venture's analysis has some merit, I have another perspective to offer and, often enough, specific suggestions as to how to correct the flaws in the arcs. Sometimes people take issue with Venture's reviews throwing tropes around, with the implication that using those tropes is necessarily bad; and while that may be true in some cases, in many others the flaws are more general and you can label them with more than one trope. So hearing the problems described twice can give a better picture of what the flaws really are.

In short, I felt that authors receiving poor reviews from Venture (or others - one of the arcs was originally reviewed by LaserJesus) would benefit from a second analysis, not just a second rating. Authors who agree with me can submit their arcs here. But if it's not your cup of tea, feel free to focus on other review threads instead.