Mr_Grey

Happy birthday!

I would like to get involved in this, but I can't imagine which trope to dress as.

I don't know...

We've tried stuff like this before, setting up little SGs outside the Protector environment, usually with a little theme. They've typically ended in failure.

Also, we're not exactly the tight-knit group we once were. Real Life has interfered, there have been arguments that have damaged friendships, and the economy has been pretty painful for the past few years.

For my part, I've put a lot of effort into putting characters on this server. A lot of them, too, and I intend to bring more when I-21 hits. I'm too exhausted to start all over on a new server.

I don't particularly care for the VIP server, anyway. I don't see what would be so "extra special" about it. I feel Freedom and Virtue will still wind up the heaviest populated servers, and if a VIP server will ease the load off of the people who frequent those two, then so be it.

So... There's my two cents on the subject. Others will probably be more upbeat about it, though, so don't let my opinion on matters deter you. I wish you the best of luck to get a following for this idea. If there's one thing I like, it's the sense of community this server usually exudes, and if we were to export that to the VIP server, then I would be quite pleased.

People, people, please!

You don't understand what the Server Maintenance process entails!

Usually, they can just change out the newspaper and sawdust for all the hamsters, maybe grease some of the squeaky hamster wheels and such.

Every so often, though, the servers need a massive overhaul! That involves going in to remove the old and dead hamsters and replace them with new and fresh ones. They might have found a little nest in the back where the weasels they use for the Freedom and Virtue servers have met and started interbreeding.

They had to break up the slave pens the weasels constructed, where they kept some of the hamster young for future consumption. This involved staging a guerilla war, as a nasty fisher had snuck into one of the weasel shipments and had organized the weasels into a mean, imperialist force.

As I understand it, War Witch led the charge, backed up by a weasel who understood who the true power players were in this game. They were assisted by a rag-tag band of the toughest, hardiest hamsters to operate the servers. Armed with pointy sticks and utilizing a cavalry of cat riders, they did smite the rebellious weasels, but at a heavy cost of life.

War Witch was fine, despite the fisher savagely latching onto her upper arm. It's still there... Gnawing away... Getting tired. And when it's exhausted, she'll be sure to make an example of it.

Then somebody had to drive across town to get more hamsters from the pet store. And some more weasels from animal control. The task fell to the developer who lost a long, and exhausting rock-paper-scissors tournament, which took hours in and of itself. Then everybody had to deal with Positron complaints that the competition was rigged, that he shouldn't have to go anywhere because, hey, he's the bossman.

This only tacked a doughnut run to his task as well.

So. There you have it. The server maintenance.

Oh, and while he was out, they pulled out a few circuit boards, dusted them, and put them back in. No biggie.

Thanks, Hyper!

SCARFLE!

*munch-munch-munch*

Keep it up, folks. Something's gotta keep my attention while I wait for the servers to come back up.

Popcorn...

NEED POPCORN!

Dominators. I can't stand how they work, even with the improvements made to them.

Don't let the naysayers fool you, the changes the developers made to Dominators are improvements. They made the archetype tolerable for players who don't obsess over number crunching and min-maxing. Still... For how the archetype performs...

It seems like it can't decide whether it wants to deal out damage or commit crowd control, and it doesn't really have the strength to perform the former and all too infrequently has the power to do the latter. Now, when Domination is running, it performs better than the Controllers. But when Domination's not running... Good Lord... Good luck trying to survive against the odds thrown against you.

Typically, you'll find yourself sucking wind because you don't have enough damage output to outrun the endurance consumption of the powers you're hurling against the enemies hounding you. Maybe your Domination will be back to full, but usually it will still be on recharge. Plus, you attract as much attention as a Blaster with all those low-damage AOE attacks. It's worse than being a Glass Cannon. You're a freaking Glass Pony.

Now, I used to have problems with the Kheldians, but I've since found that the two archetypes can be better tailored for each player's particular styles. There are still issues I have with them (chiefly being their ludicrously low damage output and inability to resist "Mesmerization"), but I've found ways to stop-gap them.

Dominators have few counters to the issues I've explained. Without their attacks and control powers, they're just about hamstrung, so you have very little room to mess around with their builds. Then they have heavy endurance usage, need to constantly sling attacks and burn themselves out, fight-to-fight, often enemy-to-enemy.

It's definitely not casual-friendly.

Happy birthday, Elric.

Because the consolidated costume pieces thread seems to have vanished...

I'd like a Storm Cloud Aura... of a Storm Cloud that sits over your head.

Maybe it could be raining on you, too, but it should at least look like a tiny Lightning Storm cloud.

In-game: knockouts.

Roleplaying/Writing: Rarely.

Death is a very final way to end a situation. For me, when the character dies, it dies. There's no bringing it back.

However... I have to say the person's actually dead, on-page.

I'm not going to pull the cheesy "Word of God" crap other authors pull for stuff like TV shows or movies, and when a character disappears offscreen and other characters say the person is dead, they're dead. I go for the Fletcher reaction (The Outlaw Josey Wales): "I don't want to hear Wales dead. I want to see Wales dead." So, yes, if you didn't see it, chances are it didn't happen.

Happy birthday, Red!

Vaya con Dios.

Guys, even with Nostalgia Goggles on, the old Tutorial Missions are vastly inferior to the new one.

One assumes you will always be a criminal breaking out of the Zig, the other assumes that the First Rikti War ended a couple years ago. They're outdated and I could have sworn people have been complaining about getting railroaded into the story...

Still, I guess those "Beat up a bunch of Infected" and "Hey, you looked in this cell!" badges are important enough to start raising Hell about the new Tutorial...

I'm thinking that Mender Ramiel is the Letter Writer.

He's there with you when Ouroboros falls into the sea. He has a tense relationship with Silos (as evidenced with his discussion with Silos at the end of the Incarnate Arc). He's the ONE Mender who sends you to the future to show you at least SOMETHING of what the Coming Storm will be like. He's also the one who is giving you access to what is going to be a huge boost to your abilities, rather than putting you through a massive "troubleshooting experiment."

Finally, you have to wonder about a Mender who takes the name "Thunder of God." Since the Menders tend to have been other people prior, and we've often wondered at the identities of the other Menders, though it seems the only one we've gotten confirmation on has been Silos/Nemesis (Ramiel hammers the last nail in that coffin). It wouldn't surprise me that Lazarus is Aeon (a Mender who has been said to take paradoxical copies of himself and fling them beyond his limits "just to see what happens?" I know somebody who both routinely makes paradoxical copies of himself AND does experiments just to see what happens!), and Tesseract is Silver Mantis (under her heel, indeed; she's even got that same intense glare Silver Mantis has). Just about the only one we don't really know is Twilight's Son (Yeah yeah, ha ha, the son of Twilight; funny, but has anybody met Twilight? Maybe we should focus on who in the game universe would be willing to sell out a whole lot of people to save his own skin).

It would be simply awful if the Letter Writer was some character who wasn't in the game until the reveal. It would be far more interesting if the Writer were somebody who was already in the game when they introduced the Menders, Ouroboros and the Letters.

Claiming that it's the Center or Requiem or a dozen other characters is interesting and all... But they just don't seem terribly interested. Requiem is obsessed with conquering the world. The Center is apparently obsessed with the same, only with him at the reigns, nobody else... In the end, the interested parties (and those who would know the most about them) are the Menders themselves. The Letter Writer knows deep, dark and intimate details about the Menders, and who else would know these things... But another Mender?

I'm thinking my Trick Arrow Defender will be making the switch to Street Justice.

Two 50s.

Yeah, I get that idea, too.

Mmm... Sounds fun... I want in on THAT!

I didn't know you guys were going for another attempt.