Nethergoat

steam is "good" the way facebook is "good"- it makes a thing that used to require some effort very simple and easy, and all it asks in return is total access to a very valuable resource- your personal information.


Not my scene, but I can see why it's popular.

I love Manola Dhargis, she's been by far my favorite movie critic since her days at the LA Weekly and the only serious threat to someday unseat Pauline Kael at the top of my all-time list.

Still, I expect I'll like Avengers just fine.
Wheadon makes good nerd-porn.


/edit
also, Scott and Dhargis are both film, not literary, critics.

addition to my 'fun' list:


- Running short, modern TFs in the evening because the new LFG channel makes it really easy.



I've run more TFs in the past month than I did in the previous 7 years.
Part of it is that the new ones are mostly fun and short-ish, but the other part is that having an LFG tab means finding them is super easy. Instead of spending the evening soloing or messing around with bases or crafting or whatever (all of which I still enjoy), I can check my tab, say "oh, there's a Posi II starting up- that sounds fun!" and hop on a team.

Had a nice little run last night after my boy fell asleep. The wife was watching that two part Woody Allen documentary, so I had a solid few hours to myself- time for CoH!

First, one last DFB which got me to level 16.
Then it was off to the science store in Steel to pick up some add DO's- I didn't want to mess around with generics until I could slot 20's, and he only had a couple million from my comical foray into 'vendoring rare IO recipes' territory so I didn't want to overpay for level 15 generics, and I certainly didn't want to craft them myself....so, the store. Three level 15 DOs combined to make one green and didn't really make a dent in my bank account- weird to remember back in the day when you had to scrimp and save and intentionally go into debt and sell all your junk to the right store and rescue everyone you saw just to have enough inf to MAYBE buy enough accuracies for your main attacks.

Now, I can just fill up my tray over and over profligately combining enhancements and not even notice.

So while I'm doing this someone is advertising for a Posi II.
They were still asking around when I finished, so I signed up- I've only ever run the second part once, and even though that team was awful and horribly underpowered (I think we all started out below 20- no red shirt freshman 50's to help us out) it still didn't take us a tremendously long time to get it done.

So the team fills out and off we go.
As an omen of things to come one of our members drops during the first mission and is never seen again.

But the core of the team is pretty badass, so we soldier on. A fire/ss tank, some sort of brute, a couple of masterminds (mercs & bots), my elec/sonic controller and a stone/emp controller.

So we clear out the first mish and it's a breeze. Ditto for the second. Ambushes, adds from dumb MM pets getting carried away, no problem- we're mowing everything in sight without hitting so much as a speed bump. Bubbles, heals, plenty of damage, and even at this early point in his career The Almighty Dollar is pretty great at sapping endurance- I find if I can drop my cages on a big group and then jump in with my aura I can drain a crowd pretty fast, as long as somebody is around to hold the aggro (like a tank and a brute, for instance).

On our way to the third mission, trouble- the guy who started the TF has to bail out. I think he was a rad something.

And then partway through the next mission we lose our mercs MM.

By the time we get to the grand finale, we're down to 5 players. Bitter memories of taking forever to kill Doc V. while waves of zombies swarmed up the walkway welled up from the depths of my subconscious.

But, not to worry! Things actually went pretty well in spite of our depleted numbers. A couple of near-wipes, some deaths (we weren't handling those MM adds as well as earlier), but no total disasters. Plus the tank knew what he was doing, so we followed his lead.

By this time I had that halo that reduces enemy damage resistance and kept it up on him for pretty much the rest of the TF. Between that and Sonic Siphon Doc V went down so fast that we defeated him just as the first wave of zombie ambushers trundled up behind us- didn't even need to fight them, just exited out.

And while all this was going on I had an enlightening chat with Fulmens about using converters for fun and profit- sorry I kept getting distracted, Ful!



So, YET ANOTHER TF under my belt.
The more I think about it the more credit I give to the LFG channel for this.
It keeps you from missing stuff that's about to kick off, and if you have the time you can nearly always catch a team. Evenings I'd previously have spent happily soloing away or playing my own mini-games on the market or messing with my bases I instead spend running whatever short-ish TF is going on.

It's an interesting change of pace for this inveterate soloist.


/edit
also, forgot about a costume contest I hung around for after finishing the TF. 10m prize, but always good people watching so I logged in Mach 7 (one of my favorite costumes) and toddled over to Atlas. I must say, the general quality of entrant on Virtue is LIGHT YEARS better than the 'average' entrant on Freedom. A lot of people showed up, and only a couple of them were total eyesores. I saw a bunch, like more than five or six, that I thought had better costumes than me, which rarely happens. A lot of terrific characters that had obviously had a ton of time invested in them.

My favorite wasn't a tremendously complicated outfit, but conceptually it was hilarious- the Killer Carrot. Orange with tall, spikey green hair obviously. Great bio too- I tried to get a screenshot, but don't know if I remembered my UI toggle correctly. If I did I'll post it here. We didn't win, but it was a very entertaining way to spend 20 minutes.

I always loved his genre work.
Three roles stand out for me-

Dirty Dozen, The Wild Bunch & Escape from New York.

A versatile, talented performer.

RIP.

I don't like Praetoria because it is annoyingly hard for starting characters.

I'd actually like to play through and check out the storyline, but ever time I try frustration quickly sets in and I go back to Paragon or the Rogue Isles.

AGHK just remembered my favorite thing he said- this is why I need to alt-tab out and write stuff down as it happens, otherwise I forget.

r/e the sound effects of Electric Control:

"Dada, I like this song our Spark Friends are singing!"

defenders of broken Bonfire in this thread are reminding me strongly of defenders of broken Smoke Grenade back in the day.

Just waiting for someone to threaten to quit the game when they fix it, then all the prophecies will be in place!

<< excited

Some people rise early to surf or do yoga....I rise early to play CoH.

Logged in The Almighty Dollar intending to pick up some enhancements & get him ready for running missions or teaming or whatever, but....you guessed it, someone was forming a DFB.

I CAN'T RESIST THESE THINGS!

Off we went!

At the tail end my son woke up, toddled over to the computer and climbed up in my lap. He doesn't ask, he just sidles up, butts his head into the gap between the elbow of my mouse hand and my ribcage and then squirms through the resulting space.

He was fascinated by the Hydra heads.

"Dada, WHAT ARE THOSE UGLY THINGS?!?"

When describing game stuff to him I skip context and just give him names, to do with what he pleases.

"Those are Hydra Heads."

"Uh....Dada, what's INSIDE those things?"

"Huh, I'm not sure. Goop?"

"Dada," pointing at a couple of Spawn running around in the water, "I think those CREEPY LITTLE GUYS are inside of them!"

"Say, I think you're right!"


We finished off the Hydras (He loved it when the beams of light started shooting out of them) getting me to level 14, and hopped out.

Predictably, my son wanted to find a cave.

I checked my contacts, saw our old friend Montague Castellana in the list and headed over to Steel to get the Percy Winkley mish, guaranteed to satisfy his CAVE LUST.

So we ran around Oranbega for a bit, checking out all the fascinating torches and glowing green crystals. His favorite power on this guy is either Tesla Cage, which he calls "our Spark friend!", or the one that puts guys to sleep- he LOVED it when they fell asleep and made me wander up close so he could stare at the ZZZzzz's over their heads.
This makes him the only person I've ever met who likes sleep powers. =P


"Hey dada, stop that guy with our SPARK FRIEND!" he exclaimed as one of the cultists tried to scamper away down a corridor. He already has a better grasp of CoH power use than most of the people I've PUG'ed with over the years.

So we rescued Percy, then had to go defeat the last spawn, because they showed up in red on the ever-open mission map.

"Look Dada! More GUYS to zap!"

Finally exited the mish & he made me open the zone map. There was a fire going on, and the pulsing red spot was catnip for him. "Dada, let's go there- maybe it's ANOTHER CAVE!"

"I think it's a fire, but okay!"

Headed over, grabbed an extinguisher and joined the 4-5 other players doing battle with the flames. At one point I was standing by the front door when one of those HUGE waves of Hellions appeared, causing my son to comment

"Uh....dada, I THINK we're in trouble!"

He hasn't quite gotten the whole 'con' system down yet- he equates danger with volume, so sometimes he'll want me to go "look at" a couple of reds or purples, and wants to flee big piles of grays.

"We're okay, don't worry."
I zapped them with my AoE immobilize and one of the other players with a damage aura came over and cleaned them up.

"Hey, is that red girl our friend?"
"Yeah, she's another hero."
"She's HELPING us!"
"Yep! That's what heroes do."

He was disappointed after we put out the fire & everyone went their separate ways. I'd try and run a team with him sometime- I'm sure he'd love to see all the "friends" doing their stuff- but following his lead like I do isn't the safest or most efficient style of gameplay. Plus, I never know when he's going to suddenly decide it's time for us to do something else, or 'visit' another one of my characters.

Maybe in a few months he'll be more predictable.


On game topic, here's how out of it I am-

I ran 5 or 6 DFBs with this guy, and ONLY THIS MORNING did I finally catch on to the fact that his sonic bubbles were AoE. I'd been running around doing everyone individually like in the old days. I thought maybe they'd done something to the duration, because there were a few players it seemed like I *never* had to re-bubble. Then this morning everyone was hanging out inside the missions door, I did one guy and BOOM! EVERYONE was bubbled.

Man, what a huge improvement!
I'd heard that Speed Boost was AoE so that didn't surprise me on my mind/kin, but I didn't know they'd done it with bubbles too.
Wow!


Aside from that, I'm really liking electric control.
That contagious knockdown power is just about my favorite thing ever- doesn't do a lot of damage, but is super fun and has pretty good recharge. Overall, he's a little bit slow but still fun. I'm not usually one with the patience to solo anything but bigtime damage dealers, but I enjoyed this morning quite a bit.
and Sonic isn't bugging me so far, although it has limited synergy for soloing.

I may get this guy to 15 and then see if DIB's are as addictive as DFB's. =P

Okay, two notes this evening.

First, logged in The Almighty Dollar, one of my Crazy 88 alts who I got a sudden hankering to get a few levels in. The last time I logged him in I tried Organica's 'buy el cheapo rare recipes to vendor for a few bucks' trick. I filled up his inventory with insta-buys for 555 and got him a nice nest egg. But here's the thing, I was just going along throwing up 10 bids for 555 and grabbing the wins...but I forgot to cancel the rest.

So I logged in to a "99 Items Bought, 0 Items Sold" message- yep, 99 level 50 rare recipes.

Sigh.

I was tempted to just delete 'em all, but he's still fairly broke so I sold 'em. BARELY worth it, even with the handy /ah command making it so I could basically just claim them & sell them...a long cry from the VERY early days of the market, when I was doing the same thing with level 50 generic recipes in Steel, jumping over the wall to sell them at the Mutant store.

So there was one of those situations going where everyone was looking for DFBs but nobody was running one, so I took the initiative. Invited the 3 folks that were hanging around Ms Liberty, threw out a 'DFB has 4 spots left' and got about 15 tells in the next 30 seconds, invited the first 4 and off we went.

Pretty simple.

The great character from the run was named House Maid, with appropriate outfit. She was one of the ones hanging around Ms Liberty and I thought "heh, cute" and that was it. Until we got in the mish and it turned out she was a Staff scrapper using a broom- MAN it looked great! I had zero interest in Staff before that, but House Maid whipping that broom around and beating *** in the sewers was ridiculously cool.


Second is an idea for (yet another) alt I got on the drive home, a variation on an old character I made back when folk were up in arms about the costume stuff gated behind the vet rewards. So I made Vet Rewards Man, using every vet reward costume thingie I could fit.

This time around I'm rolling

Pay to Win

battle cry: My superpower is MONEY!

So the costume I can handle, but I need ideas for what the penultimate "omg pay to win!" power sets would be. What's the most overpowered thing I can get that you can't have unless you buy it?

Titan Weapons?

Taking suggestions, will post screens once I get it finalized.

I kinda like that this thread has turned into a 4th dimensional exploration of game balance in Magic: The Gathering.