Ms. Mesmer

The one that jumps out is "grant you discount". It should be "grant you a discount", or, better yet, "each grant you a discount".

Edit: Clearer grammar, still!

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Verizon FOIS

How about 50Mbps down and 20 Mbps up? YUP! 50 DOWN! I think it is worth the measly $145 a month!

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Good thing that's available to everyone. Oh, wait!

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Well this old IGN video mentions that the Rogue Isle has a seat on the UN council: City of Villains Video

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Good find! That means that other nations do recognize the Isles as sovereign. Without some kind of UN mandate, no armies (or weird paramilitary forces, or whatever Longbow is considered) should be attacking them.

Sovereign country is a dicey term. The rules for countries being recognized as sovereign are much like the rules for who "belongs" in high society. You may have money, fame, respect in your field, etc., but that doesn't necessarily mean that you will be invited to the social functions where the elite in a society gather. By the same token, you may wield power over an area of land and all of the people who live there, collect taxes, defend it from any threats, etc., but that doesn't mean that anyone will recognize you as a nation.

An example given in my Political Science textbook from college was that the government of Libya once stated that they recognized the Black Panther Party, I think it was, as the legitimate sovereigns of the United States. It didn't catch on.

Is there any information that the United Nations, or any number of other governments of the world, even recognize the Rogue Isles as sovereign?

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Other than those, I'm not sure of any major storyarcs that aren't in the Flashback system.

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Major story arcs, no. Minor story arcs, there are many. Most villainside contacts have two arcs, a major one and a minor one, and the minor ones aren't accessible through Flashback.

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As far as I can see, the only story arcs of any size that villains don't have access to in Ouroboros are the Patron arcs. There are some standalone missions, or 2 part missions, but those aren't arcs. Arcs, whether major or minor, give souvenirs.

First off, this is a great thread, and Sister Flame just comes off as an adorable, inquisitive ball of sunshine. I'm sure that makes her daddy proud.

Secondly, get that girl pretty much anything in the Marvel Adventures line of comics. Those things are great, full of funny bits that children and adults will love.

/visscale

It should be followed by a number, I think from 0.1 to 4.0 where 0.1 = 10% and 4.0 = 400%.

I haven't tried it in a long time, but that was how it used to work.

Unless the download from the CoH/V servers is going considerably slower than downloads from other places do, you're going to run into the same problem with it from any source. 2.8 Gigs is 2.8 Gigs, after all. The only way that someone could help to avoid that would be to burn the thing and send it off to your friend on a DVD, but that would take even longer.

This:

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viola

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just kills me every time that I see it.

For reference:

Viola

Voila

At least one can say that the OP's version sounds good.

I am obviously very easily amused.

That would be my guess, too. Somewhere along the way, a Longbow mob got lost, or stuck, or ran away. This would be especially true with more teammates, since the groups coming after you are larger. There are a lot of objects on a Mayhem map for someone to get hung up on.

The basic data in this game has been transmitted via UDP since at least Issue 10, mid-2007. That was when Leandro ran tests using a packet sniffer to help find the root cause of what those of us unfortunate enough to live in rural areas where dial-up is the only option (satellite being absolutely horrible in reliability, and having a built-in latency problem that makes it difficult to even connect to the CoH servers) called the "Dark Astoria bug", an overwhelming lag to the point of being knocked off of the server around all of the large spawns in Dark Astoria, among other places. There may have been a little bit of TCP used to send the initial placement on each zone map during the loading process, but that was all.

The "Ghost Zone bug", which was the initial iteration of the out of sync with the zone issue, began to be reported by players using a wide range of connection speeds during 2007. It just took a good while before the command to resync was added to give the players a tool to combat it.

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Rial, the site for Going Rogue references i16 in the subscribe link, implying that i16 is the one to coincide with Rogue. I didn't say I knew for sure, and really the sources thing was more a figure of speech. Also I said that it would release simultaneously, not after. Not in so many words given, but that's regardless.

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So much for that speculation.

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They have made it faster already.

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I don't recall 2 buffs to Fly's speed, just the one in Issue 14.

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Hell some of the special stuff that comes with special boxed sets are now becomming Veteran rewards like the Arachnos Helmets. Anyone who allready had the helmets would then get nothing for their vet reward and will of paid for the helmets they could of got for free. Pluse spending the time to upgrade their account for each helmet. (as I recall the helmets were originally store exsclusives that would require you to buy 4 different pre order CoV games from 4 different stores to get all 4 helmets. which I never did and I'm glad for it.)

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Nobody paid any extra to get those helmets when they were initially offered. They were bonuses for pre-ordering. Also, you could only apply one of the codes to a single account, so buying all 4 would have been a serious waste of money. So, anyone who already had one of those helmets on their account still got all the others, just the same as the Prestige Sprint vet reward.

Oh, and GvE came out almost a year after CoV, and the change to allow all accounts that only had one or the other game to access both was another year later, so 2 years after CoV. If they do make the expansion available to all 2 years down the road, I'd still be happy to have paid up to $50 to get access to that stuff for those 2 years, but that's just me.

I doubt it, actually. We didn't really have much information on City of Villains when it was first announced, either. I'd go so far as to say that we have more information on Going Rogue now than we had at a similar stage of City of Villains, which would be coinciding with the initial trailer.

I think the initial e-mail did get out early, but that it was only by about 12 hours.

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Hi BattleClinic! Long time no see. I was pretty active there back in my Starfleet Command playing days. Nice to see you still going!

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Hi Daemodand! You too--I took a quick look at your blog then bookmarked it. Looks great!

Have you explained "the hand of bethke" to anyone here?

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OMG! SghnDubh! I also lurked at BattleClinic during the heady days of The Neutral Zone and beyond. Glad to see that you folks have taken an interest in this game, and I hope to see some innovative stuff over there.

For those who never played Starfleet Command. The Hand of Bethke (named after Taldren developer Erik Bethke) was when your ship would suddenly explode for no reason, usually right after loading into a mission or PvP match in a "hex". It was a particularly nasty bug that, to my knowledge, crept into the games with Starfleet Command II and remained right on through for the remaining releases in the series.

Are we going to be seeing Cueball here next?

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Just a question, wondering everyone's thoughts on this. If you feel you need every badge on one or more of your toons I'd like to know your thoughts as I don't quite understand the behavior.

Thanks in advance for your time,... and if you so desire flame on! ;P

Peace

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Anyone who is qualified to make that diagnosis would face some serious ethics charges for making it based on such flimsy evidence.

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And there wont be a praetorian Recluse. Tyrant killed him already.

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I've seen this statement a few times. Is there a link to something that confirms it?

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I don't know if anyone has mentioned it, but it looks like this game is heading toward another lawsuit.

Marvel Comics has the name Tyrant registered as a trasemark and copyright (which amzes me since CoH claims to hold the TM; which is impossible since Marvel has had Tyrant for years).

Before they even consider the release of this game update, they better strongly consider changing some things...because Marvel doesn't even care if they win a lawsuit...they'll sue just to do damage...and in this case they could possibly win.
http://www.marvel.com/universe/Tyrant

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If there was going to be an issue with Tyrant, it would've been handled a LONG time ago, Tyrant's been in the game since, I believe pre Issue 1. If there was a problem, it was probably settled as part of the previous Marvel/Cryptic lawsuit. I doubt it'll make a difference. Plus, it's a concept. DC may own the copyrights to the character "Terra" who looks like she does, has her powers, etc. but Marvel could just as easily have a totally different "Terra" because "Terra" is a generic word that means "Earth", and you can't copyright a generic word. No more than you can hold a copyright on the word "Tyrant". You can however hold the trademark on that particular VERSION of Tyrant. Marvel has theirs, CoH has theirs.

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Adding to this, trademarks are issued for a specific industry. Marvel may have the trademark for Tyrant as a name, logo and specific character design used to promote and sell comics while NCSoft/Paragon Studios holds a trademark for the name, logo and particular character design for Tyrant used to promote and sell video games.

That won't necessarily prevent a lawsuit, since one can sue over anything, but it will make it difficult to win, unless Marvel were to get lucky and get a judge that believes in a very broad interpretation of trademark exclusivity.

Have to make "The Boss" flee, since he was Born to Run.

Make him talk about his Glory Days as you approach.

I hear it dispenses candy! Yay for hearing things!

Not until 2017 at the earliest. That's the next Tuesday, March 14th.

This thing's been rezzed three times now. It's like the gung-ho Blaster on a bad Hollows PuG.

Cathulhu gets at the textual reasoning behind the Reformed change, but makes the conclusion that it's related to side-switching as an eventual reality in this game. There's another possibility that looks increasingly likely with the change to base crafting counting for the Artisan series. That reason is literalism.

Now, this is speculative and based on two whole data points, which really isn't enough to form a pattern, but can at least imply a direction. With the changes to the badge UI in Issue 13, we got more informative progress bars and hint texts. My speculation is that now, someone has decided to go through all of those hints, names and descriptions for badges and see if any were awarding in ways contrary to same in a very literal fashion. Hence, Reformed, with both name and description implying a villain that switched sides, and the Artisan series, with texts that explicitly state that they are for Invention crafting, get changed.

Those changes are logical and valid, from a literalist point of view. The question becomes whether or not they are really wise decisions. My opinion of that is that they aren't. They are reductive changes that are only going to serve to alienate members of the community. They are minor annoyances, to be sure, but those are often worse than painful changes. With a big, painful change, it happens and it's over, like a short, sharp headache. Minor annoyances, on the other hand, are like a long, dull discomfort at the base of the skull, they may not cause you to have to immediately stop what you're doing and address them, but they make it hard to focus on what you're doing over a longer term. At least, that what it's like for me. Those minor annoyances stick with me for a long time and add up. I've quit jobs and dropped classes over a build up of such little things in real life.

I would ask here that those in charge reconsider before continuing on this literalist path, even if there are very few more things in the game that need to be changed to reflect the literal meaning of the text. Instead, think about changing the text to something more ambiguous and just leave the methods of earning these things as they are. It will make for less headaches (Yes, I referenced my own metaphor from the previous paragraph. Wanna make something of it? ) for you and your customers in the future.

I'm still uncomfortable with the mean being used. Speed runners, by their nature, will complete the task more often, pushing their representation in that mean up very high.

It's like a hypothetical population that has half of the group being very short and the other half being very tall. If you count them all as individuals, the mean will split the difference between the average of the short peoples' heights and the average of the tall peoples' heights. Now imagine a quirk in the data gathering that had the short ones getting back in line to be counted again many more times than the tall ones. That would skew the mean far closer to the short peoples' average height.

Would you consider, if the data clumps into separate modes, taking the mean of the short time as a minimum bound, then taking the mean for the farther out clump for the maximum bound, and finally awarding 1 merit per every 5 minutes between those 2 bounds? Just a thought on how to accomodate a greater variety of the playerbase in the 5 minute formula.