Mister Rik

One of my favorite things in this game is glancing down at my chat window and seeing some funny thing a nearby NPC said, so I thought I'd share some of my favorites. How about sharing yours?

Random gang member in the Hollows (probably an Outcast or Skull): "No, I didn't call you stupid. I said your comment was an oxymoron. It's a rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are put together. Am I the only one who reads the books we swipe around here?"

Hellion Girlfriend: "My mom, like, said I wouldn't do anything with my life. She was soooo wrong."

Wolf Spider Enforcer, in Faultline: "What say we go grab a hero later and toss him off a cliff? Just make sure it's a super speeder."

Bone Daddy: "I'm gonna do a B&E on your face! Wait, that sounded wrong."

Panhandler outside AE building: "Help a guy get into college so I can work here and do cool stuff, too."

Another panhandler outside AE building: "What? You got enough money to hang out here all day not working, but you can't spare a buck?"

Wolf Spider Enforcer: "I already told you. When you're me, you can use the walkie talkie."

Wolf Spider TacOps, fashion consultant: "So now you've committed two crimes, hero. Tresspassing on Arachnos space and that outfit!"

The Invincible Axios: "The scene was horrific. The city burning, meteors streaking through the sky. Bodies everywhere. Luckily, I've got a strong stomach."

Out-of-place chatter in Cimerora from Servius Abericus: "Whoa, freaky. I heard the Council took some guys off the street and turned 'em into vampires or somethin'!"

This kind of thing has been an issue with pretty much every game I've ever played on a Mac, at least the ones that have an option to switch between "full screen" and "windowed" modes. I'm fairly certain it's a gamma issue - the game uses its own gamma setting when playing "full screen", but in "windowed" mode it switches to your Mac's default gamma setting.

Mountain Lion definitely seems to have made some odd changes to how windowing is handled. The NCLauncher isn't the only app that's experiencing this trouble; I have a shareware image-cataloging app (QPict) that I've been using for years and years, since Mac OS 9 days, and it's always worked flawlessly. Now, under 10.8, it insta-crashes just like NCLauncher if I try to view an image "full screen". The author informs me he's working to resolve the issue, but it's been a month or more since I contacted him about it.

I support this idea.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic.

Ah, okay, I see where my confusion came from. I was interpreting "free respec" to mean "you can respec without running a respec trial", and "earned respec" to mean "respec earned by running a respec trial". So by that interpretation, I assumed that any respec token that arrived in my mailbox was "free".

Though it's odd that it still tells me to type /respec to use the ones I have left.

Thanks

I've accumulated several free respecs via Veteran Rewards, but only used one a couple weeks ago. A few days ago I noticed that the respec recipe we got in the mail a while back was suddenly "available" to use, which puzzled me. The recipe says it can't be used if I still have unused free respecs available, and knowing that I have several of them "stocked up", I thought the recipe shouldn't have been activated.

So I logged in my main character (the one I recently respecced), and typed "/respec" in the chat box, and got this:



As you can see, upon logging in it says I have 5 unclaimed respecs available and instructs me to type "/respec" in the chat box ... but doing so returns the message that I don't have any free respecs remaining.

So do I or don't I have 5 free respecs remaining? I've only used one, and all of my other characters still get the "6 remaining" message when they log in. Is there some glitch here, or am I misunderstanding how these free respecs work?

This is fairly minor, and I suppose it's kind of late in the game to implement something like this, but it would sure make me and my melee characters happy:

I'd like to see a minor modification to the targeting reticle to visually indicate the targeted mob's "personal space" through, say, a circle on the floor. By "personal space", I mean that currently-invisible line that determines collision detection.

I suggest this simply because I'm getting really tired of running in a straight line toward an enemy only to suddenly bounce off the invisible wall around him and find myself facing a completely different direction. The problem is that the "invisible wall" usually has a diameter a good bit larger than the actual space the model occupies, meaning that I bounce off the enemy when my character is still a few virtual feet away, i.e. without my character's model actually coming into "physical" contact with the enemy character's model. There are some models I'm able to punch in the face while standing 5 virtual feet away from them because their hitbox seems to have a 5-foot radius.

This is a "problem" because bouncing off an enemy, particularly in corridors or other limited spaces means that, though I started running directly down the center of the corridor, the "bounce" shunted me to one side and suddenly I'm wedged in between the enemy and the wall (or pillar, or other object), with the virtual camera jammed into the back of my head so that I'm suddenly fighting in 1st-person perspective, and all I can see is that one enemy's head and shoulders filling my screen. I'm unable to see where the other enemies are.

In other cases, the "bounce" shunts me right into the middle of the crowd of enemies. My intent was to make a frontal assault on the nearest enemy, but through a quirk of game mechanics I ended up surrounded. It's one thing to have enemy AI set up so that the other enemies strategically move to surround me; it's another (unrealistic) thing to keep accidentally getting myself surrounded purely because I didn't know when to stop moving forward.

I assume that there's little that could be done with the game engine itself at this point to tighten up the hitboxes to make them conform more closely to the actual dimensions of the models, but it may be easier to simply put a circle at their feet to provide a collision warning.

Mezzes are one thing; losing control of my character purely because of a mechanical quirk, even for a moment, is another thing altogether. It's like my car deciding on it's own to apply the brakes or turn the steering wheel at random, unexpected times.

The one thing I'd like to see is getting rid of the 15-second waiting period between sending e-mails to my own global. I understand the waiting period is there as a spam-fighting tool, but c'mon, I'm not gonna spam myself.

Either get rid of the delay or let us attach more than one item per mail. It takes a stupid long time when I want to e-mail a stack of salvage or enhancements from one character to another.

I busted out my low-level Psychic Blast/Kinetics corruptor yesterday, and while I got her bumped up to level 10, it was a horribly frustrating experience:

• Inability to hit - It was appalling how difficult it was to actually hit my enemies with ... anything. I've harped on this before, about ToHit/Accuracy issues in the low-level game, but based on the constant denial of the problem I get back from other players, I'm starting to suspect that there is a problem with the "Beginner's Luck" bonus in the Mac version of the game not functioning properly, because what I see in the game does not match up with what other people seem to see (and it's safe to assume that everybody responding to my complaints is playing on a Windows machine, not a Mac). But in any case, the problem is even worse on this particular character.

• Low damage - her attacks, when they hit, seemed to do little damage to enemies, particularly in comparison to my Psychic Blast blasters. It was taking forever to defeat anything, even with the help of possessing a Blackwand and a Nemesis Staff to provide additional attacks.

• Ineffectiveness of non-damage effects: Subdue, when it hit, frequently failed to immobilize even same-level minions. I'm aware of the need to apply mezzes 2-3 times before they'll fully affect lieutenants and higher-level enemies; I've very rarely had to repeatedly apply mezzes to same-level minions on other characters. Similarly, while doing a Kings Row safeguard, Martial Gloom walked right through my Repel shield, stunned me into complete helplessness, and kicked me to death while I could do nothing. Twice. This was exacerbated by the fact that he got to me in the bank lobby while I was still trying and failing to defeat the entire group of Skulls there. So when I rezzed at the hospital and ran to the escape point to try to stop him there, he arrived with the entire group of Skulls in tow and proceeded to stunlock/kick me to death again.

• Endurance issues - I realize this is largely due to the way Repel works, but I kept finding myself running completely out of Endurance while attempting to take out a single group of three same-level minions. Of course, in addition to Repel, the previously-stated problems with ToHit, damage, and ineffective other powers contribute to running out of endurance before the enemies are down, purely because it just takes way too long to put them down.

Now, I can solo effectively on pretty much all of my other characters, which include other corruptors, even at low levels. But trying to solo on this particular character has proven to be nothing but an exercise in frustration. So I have to wonder, did I just have the misfortune of running into a ridiculously bad RNG streak (that went on for more than an hour), or is Psychic Blast/Kinetics just a really bad combination? Will it get better at higher levels, or should I just reroll with a different secondary?

I created a team of superheroes on Virtue that I call "Solar Angels":

http://misterrik.deviantart.com/gall...et=48#/d4t7vyo

The premise of the group is that their leader, Dr. Margaret Sanderson, aka "Mother Sun" is a brilliant scientist who developed a procedure for bestowing super powers on ordinary humans. The results of the procedure are unpredictable, granting powers randomly - nobody knows what powers the subject will end up with.

Bio for the character, "Neptune's Niece":

"24-year-old Candace Lee was one of the successful candidates chosen to undergo Dr. Margaret Sanderson's superpower-imbuement process. Though she was born and raised in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, Candace claims to be an actual descendant of the Roman god of the sea, Neptune. While few believe that claim, Solar Angels leader Mother Sun (Margaret Sanderson) finds it interesting that Candace was making her claim before she underwent the process, and that the process granted her water-based powers. Candace insists that the process didn't "give" her powers, it simply unlocked the abilities that were already in her due to her lineage.

"Neptune's Niece represents the planet Neptune in the Solar Angels super group."

I will also mention that I actually created this character and her bio long before I even heard about the Water Blast PS. She was originally created as an Ice/Ice blaster, and I had gotten her to level 10 before I heard about the then-upcoming Water Blast set. When I heard about the set I thought, "That would really fit the concept better than Ice", and stopped leveling her until Water Blast went live. When it went live, I deleted the character and rerolled her with Water in place of Ice Blast.

Can somebody explain, for us relative newcomers, the comments about griefers and building interiors?