Monkey_King

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There is an Accolade power for getting all three Invasion badges. (Rikti, Heavies, and Bombs)

Do the Heavies or Bombs appear anywhere but in the Rikti raids?

If not, is there any plan to make them available somewhere more accessible than the post-TF raids?

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The UXBs appear solely during the zone invasions. My brother claims to have gotten Chief during a saucer raid from putting down the Heavy Assault Suits that appear with the master-at-arms, though.

Guess I'd better hurry up and get my bomb badge on my last two badge mules, then. I think I'm halfway there, though, so no stress.

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Eh, the most annoying thing is that it shows up in every chat tab. I have 3 windows and 8 tabs, so it's hard to keep track of when there is a new message from a person on an alternate tab when the Admin alerts cause the tab to "light up".

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Agreed. This is the only thing that really bugs me about the alerts. I moved the consignment house channel over into its own tab, and when I have a bunch of outstanding bids/sales, I glance at the tab periodically to see when it's active, meaning I've bought/sold something. I've had to start ignoring the tab entirely because it's constantly full of ADMIN spam.

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Or you could, you know, think of something original instead of proposing an increasingly elaborate and unnecessary system so you (and who knows how many others) can grab at all the patently unoriginal names someone else got before you.

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You would be amazed how many people can independently come up with the same reasonably unique name. As I've discovered, I'm not the only person who hits the thesaurus when I'm trying to name a character after a thing or concept. Heck, my tanker is named after a rarely used punctuation mark, and she turns into Tilde1 when she visits the training room.

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Dang, this means I have to activate my 3 other accounts that I am saving names on, just to make sure they arent free'd up for someone else to use?

3 active accts x $15.00 = $45.00

3 inactive name saving accts x $15.00 = $45.00

$45.00 + $45.00 = $90.00 for month of August!!!

Dang, Dev's making me go broke!!!

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11 US servers x 12 character slots per server x 3 accounts = 396 names.

That is almost 400 names that you're squatting, not counting your active accounts. Why in the world do you need to reserve four hundred names? If you're not going to use those names, give them up to someone who will.

I thought "Rikti" was pronounced with two long Is?

So that's why Lineage II is so popular in Korea.

Well, they said the new zone and content would address a level range that people have complained about for a long time. I would have considered the level 39 speedbump and level 50 to be two separate level ranges, but it looks like we get to eat our cake and have it too.

And hey, look: An endgame taskforce that's not of the beat-you-over-the-head-with-stupidly-large-numbers variety! Hero/villain co-op teams are going to be hell to coordinate, but it should still be a ton of fun.

However, for this introductory I10 event, please please please spread it out over multiple zones. I should hope you learned your lesson from Statesman's Strike, trying to cram an entire server's worth of people into Mercy Island. Trust us players to keep full zone coverage.

I'm iffy on the Rikti armor redesign, but I'll reserve judgement until I see them in action. They did kinda need a revamp one way or the other, and franky it seemed silly to me for Rikti soldiers to all be traipsing around starkers.

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What precisely is a kill volume?

And yeah, I'm asking this beacuse I want to make a case that depending on what they are, the game could possibly use a few more of them.

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I'd wager that it's the same kill field surrounding Wentworths and the Black Market. I would have thought that measures were already in place to keep Tsoo Sorcerers and the like from going where they shouldn't, though. You rarely see Sorcerer ambushes in the hospital or stores these days.

And yes, there's a few more places where such fields would be handy, although I'd be happier if they just put up an anti-power field around the consignment houses. Wentworth's is not the place to be running your Sonic toggles!

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You are certainly entitled to post your opinions. Equally we are entitled to point and laugh when you post arrant nonsense simply because you can.

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That's 'errant'. >_>

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Not allowing player created content in fear of things that are buggy or inappropriate is ridiculous. Other games have PCC and they are just fine.

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Could you name some examples? The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Ultima Online and Second Life. UO has in fact had issues with innappropriate content (arranging buildings to form swear words, for example), and Second Life sidesteps the issue by having separate R rated sections of the game - something that's not such an option here.

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1) Powers currently point to one animation and one set of FX scripts. There's no way in the our engine at this time to have them reference a different animation or different FX without just changing it in the power definition (which changes it for everyone). This isn't a small or insignificant change and without it we literally can't even begin to do costumized FX or animation.

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This is the big one right here, I'm guessing. From a programming standpoint, I can see two ways to change this, and both of them would open the door to Bug City. It couldn't possibly be as bad as the Invention system, but this'd be another one that would demand at least a month of beta testing.

That said, I think you'll find a large portion of the player base would be very happy if you devoted an entire issue to just power customization. This would be no small game feature, and pretty much everybody would be enjoying this new content. Devoting a whole issue to just that would also solve the problem of needing every department involved.

Custom animations would be a bigger draw for me than custom coloration, but one step at a time. -_o

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I too ended up with duplicate sets. I think that was because sometime after 10pm that evening I decided they weren't selling and removed them from the Wentworth's. After the rollback, tada, the recipes appeared back up for sale as well as in my recipe inventory.

They still aren't selling. Nobody wants level 29 IO set recipes.

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That's most likely what happened. My brother got a free 5 million influence when he took down his 5 mil bid for the tech wings recipie, only to find out the next day that his bid had magically "returned".

If recipies and salvage can safely overflow, then I probably won't even need much advance warning. Wish I didn't have to put my mercantilism on hold while I wait for my money to come back, but that's the way it goes, I guess. At least I've got my villainous push to 50 to keep me busy.

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I mean probably one of the biggest screw ups in the last year in any major MMO I'd say if not the biggest...the entire heroside loses large amounts of rare items and inf...

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World of Warcraft made a lot of people mad when, during their transition to Burning Crusade, many people's banks got emptied out. Customer service was extremely sluggish in returning people's items, if they even did so at all. Some people never did get their stuff back.

By contrast, we have a swift apology, and a plan to reimburse every affected character. You can't really ask for much more than that. I'm really not sure what all the doom is about; they screwed up big time, but they're going to make it right. You can't really ask for more than that.

That's for keeping us up to speed, Lighthouse.

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Could you maybe post a list with all the files that this patch modified?

I need to have a friend send them to me since my updater doesn't work correctly.

I'm not looking for help on the updater, just the file list.

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You're probably going to need the whole works. Patches often will make minor changes to nearly every data file in the game. The updater might even get pershnickety if an unchanged file has a different 'modified on' date than the rest of the files.

Me, I'm not going to miss howl's noise, and in fact I wish they'd go one step further and get rid of slap/smack while they're at it. Emote abuse drives me up the wall.

Ick. I had a lot of money sitting out for bulk salvage bids - was right in the middle of working on the endurance IO memorization badges. The way people are scalping for common salvage, that's a lot of lost influence on my end. I feel really sorry for the people who put up 15 million influence bids for costume pieces last night.

I sure hope it's feasible to recompense people for their lost transactions in some way. The scalping going on is bad enough without a lot of money disappearing into the void entirely.

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I'm not a fan of that either.

People have found ways to avoid them, but they're not easy.

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I think that's the point.

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Well I can't think of a bad movie that Tom Hanks was the star in. Maybe I didn't like some as much as others but non where bad.

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Bachelor Party isn't exactly what I'd call a cinema classic, either. There are a lot of movies from Hanks' early career that he probably does not put on his resume. Most of them end up watchable only because of his performances.

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No offense to anyone but is it me or is Stateman's speech sounding something along the lines of what President Bush gave to the public before invading Iraq.

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Statesman's methods have always been a little questionable. He used his influence to keep the city from rebuilding the Siren's Call war walls, endangering the entire city just for the sake of one little honey pot, for example.

While I'm amused at the idea of Paragon's biggest and brightest hero being uncomfortably objectivist, I'm not sure I like the idea that the rest of the city's heroes should be endorsing his methods without question. Especially when States is being awfully vague about what this doomsday device actually is; it would be quite embarassing to fly into the Rogue Isles guns blazing only to find out that Recluse was just working on a really big ice cream machine.

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My problems with this game are very specific; How is it fun to do that same damn thing 100 times, when it's an automated process overlaying rolling dice? It's not. It's something I, and most people, can certainly be sucked into doing, but that's not why we play this game. Nobody, I think, would argue that pressing the same 2-5 buttons repeatedly when soloing or playing on a small team, is really what they're looking for in a game. It's not a game at all, it's a cash register with pretty lights. The innovative parts of this game have been consistently hemmed in; like freedom of movement, truely heroic battles against masses of enemies, and treadmill shortening methods. Games with gameplay that people *like* don't need to railroad people into long, slow, upgrade processes. Leveling up is not a journey, or a game. The *game* is the game. And the designers consistently screw with the game for the sake of keeping the mindless leveling up in place.

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Is this all basically shorthand for "The devs closed my favorite exploit"? Because every time I hear this argument, it's from somebody who wants their I4 tanker back, or their pre-nerf Regen scrapper, or the old broken Smoke Grenade.

I've occasionally gotten bored with CoX and went over to Blizzard's playground for a change. Every time I come back to CoX inside a month, simply because this game does so many things right that no other MMO does. I'd argue that it's because Cryptic doesn't have a fixed mindset about The Way Things Are.

Monster grinding, camping, long travel times, mounts being restricted to the elite players; this stuff all exists because That's The Way Things Are in an MMO, and nobody's willing to break the mold because that's what everyone expects. It's a veritible heresy for a game to let you be flying inside a week of playing.

Me, I hope that more people see what CoX did, being fairly successful despite throwing out nearly every MMO preconception. More developers need to approach games without that sort of baggage. Recycle what works, but don't include the stuff that doesn't just because every other game has it.

"Avoid" type powers might not be so much of an issue. There's a patch note specifically referring to AVs and GMs being "more courageous" when dealing with Avoid powers.

As for tankers, with the right support any set should be just fine. My Invul tanker is just fine fighting lots of psy using enemies even without much defender support as long as the team is smart about prioritizing targets. Versus AVs, as long as the defenders and controllers are doing their job buffing up the tanker and trashing the AV's offensive output, psy damage should be no concern.

Much as I hate to make a post with just one recipie:

Harmonized Healing (Heal/Recharge) - Pool A

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Have escortees have a large +Perception aura around them that affects them and possibly (probably?) enemies as well. (This is my secondary preferred option, particularly if the aura affects enemies. Reason being hostages aren't exactly known to be stealthy, so they can easily give away your position.)

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Rather than this, give escortees a large -stealth aura power. You can have stealth auras on, but they're debuffed into non-functionality simply by being in proximity to the hostage - and therefore they'll be able to see and follow you.

The only problem with either solution is that such auras will affect you even before you save the hostage, which might make fighting the boss and guards problematic. This should only be a really big issue for stalkers, and there's ways to deal with enemies that can see through your stealth anyway.

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Solo the Shadow Shard TFs in under 30 minutes... then you'll have MY respect.

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been there done that

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Screenshots or it didn't happen. The travel times alone would make that impossible - the Shadow Shard is BIG.

The Statesman TF looks like nine kinds of awesome (although isn't it going to break a certain story arc to have Statesy physically handing out this TF?) Still, I'd like to echo everyone's question: will we be seeing a revamp of the Recluse SF in the near future? I don't want it easier, just changed to a form where dominators, stalkers, and masterminds feel a little less like fifth wheels.

Are you sure he's not just trying to flag a fairly significant point of exploit? Fire/Fire isn't exactly the most optimal powerset combination in terms of sheer min/max crunch. It's always seemed like his point was that anybody could be doing this - and probably are. Well, and bragging too, although I've seen less of that once it became clear that it's the Shivan doing most of the work.

But in this particular case, Ultimus presents it explicitly as a warning about a possible hole in the recipie system. And he's compeltely right: if anybody can just pick up a Shivan and swiftly solo their TF of choice, any concept of recipie rarity is going to go out the window, because people will farm them.

Warburg nukes are so time-intensive to get, even without player interference, I don't think they really count. I estimate around 20-30 minutes to get the chem and bio nukes for a seasoned player, plus time spent shooing away stalkers. But in Bloody Bay, so long as you stay away from the flight path between hero and villain bases, you never ever see a hostile player who's not themselves on a Shivan run or badge hunting.

The meteor run is likely easy on purpose, because it's catering to CoX newbies. As well it should. The main problem I'm seeing is the disproportionate reward for such an easy task - five elite bosses. I know some people disagree, but I really wouldn't be sad if they got downgraded to mere bosses, simply because dropping a Shivan makes a mockery of any task in the game.

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Currently the only content available for 50s is...
Killing stuff on the street.
News/Scanner, Mayhem/Safeguard. (and Shard stuff is similar.) = repeatable 1-off missions.
Trials
TFs

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Am I the only person in the entire game whose level 50 character still has missions left? Amalgamate hasn't even touched Harvey Maylor yet. Nor have I completely run through all the Shadow Shard missions, repeatable or otherwise. Did I accidentally do something special?