Nethergoat

I give posts all the respect they deserve.
Which makes me quite popular in certain circles, less so in others.

There are fewer things less relevant to my game experience than financial post-mortems from people who are confused by how to interpret server load indicators.

I log in, I see as many players as ever, finding teams is so easy I've played more TFs in the last few weeks than in the previous 8 years combined, and the game is getting more development attention than it *ever* has in the entire time I've been playing.

If this is death and failure, I'll take a second helping TYVM.

all of them charging into melee all the time bugs me.
their profound inability to navigate stairs or sloped surfaces (hills outside for instance) is amazingly annoying.
their occasional brainfreeze at mission doors is a minor irritation- annoying, but I remember when you had to re-summon them every time, so I can live with it.

And while it isn't a pet AI issue per se, the way ambushes COMPLETELY IGNORE your pets to focus 100% of their attention on you, the mastermind, drives me crazy.

Individually minor but collectively aggravating stuff.

Your semantic hair splitting is nearly as tedious as it is inaccurate.

Enjoy not having the Elemental Order set!

In the sense that a roulette wheel that paid off 3/4ths of the time is 'random', sure.

Its predictable payoff of "the good stuff" undermines the complaints of those using "random" in a pejorative sense. It isn't completely deterministic, but it is far from capricious.

Wrong, for reasons explained previously.

I don't know anyone who has quit the game or severely cut down their game time, but I know at least 50-60 people who have switched servers.

See, I can whip up baseless anecdotal evidence just as well as the next guy!

good lord, not this again.

one: they've upgraded the server system many times over the past few years. Dots do *not* measure population, they measure server load. More powerful servers = less server load.

two: there have been periods of mass free server transfers in the not to distant past and these days server transfers are available on the market as well as being a free perk for VIPs. While my oldest characters are still on Triumph, I did shuffle a bunch of alts on various servers to Freedom & Virtue for increased teaming opportunities. It isn't crazy to suppose other players have done the same.

as are you, me, this planet and the entire universe.

But your penetrating insight is greatly appreciated.

Jack never actually bothered me much- on my cold/ice dom I'd just arrange him on a corner then pull the spawn.

Kludgy, but it worked.

These days I'd just get her a stealth IO and run past them- that's mostly what I do with Gun Drone.

I use it as a descriptor meaning "in game stuffs of various types" that accumulate as you play. Because none of it's worth anything outside the context of the game- thus, junk.

I don't recall "touting" them as anything- it's just junk I got while collecting costume parts. Reportage, not promotion.

It's a way awesome costume.
*shrug*
Don't like it, don't buy it.

You have your timeline confused.
I bought a handful of packs from the store on spec shortly after re-installing the game- I had no idea how they worked, what they were or what sort of prizes they had. Popped those open, found the costume stuff, nosed around the forums a bit and then later popped for the big bundle.


I do like the game and the company, and if they want to sell me cool stuff I like then yes, I'm inclined to buy it.

Why this bothers you is a mystery.

I picked them up for same reason I do a lot of things in video games- curiosity.

Knowing you're out there somewhere coveting it makes me enjoy it even more. =)

It's way to deterministic to be considered "gambling".
Once again, with the seeming exception of the black wolf pet.

The way they weighted this thing, you ARE going to get ALL the costume junk without a massive expenditure.

If it were really random, okay you'd be taking an actual chance.
But it's not- the whole thing is weighted fairly heavily in the player's favor.

'word on the street' seems to confirm my personal findings- 30-odd packs, a full set of costume bits. Some folk got it all in fewer, some in a bit more. the impression is that if you buy the 24 pack you're a fair bet to get the entire set, or only be a bit short.

They don't provide a guarantee, but the weighting provides a STRONG LIKELIHOOD. In this context, that's a pretty good deal.

I don't use 'junk' in a pejorative sense- the costume stuff is why I bought the packs in the first place. I picked up a couple not knowing anything about them and was pleasantly surprised to get some costume parts- a gun, I think, and a belt. That inspired my continued purchases.

I'm not really interested in merits & certainly don't need the inf.

I dunno, you're cheap and I'm not?

I was a premium player at the time but still like supporting the game so I dropped $$$ on whatever the biggest 'bundle' of super packs is. That plus the handful I'd grabbed before I found out there were costume bits in there filled out the set.

Plus I guess you can use tokens on them, although that strikes me as hunting for rabbits with a bazooka.

You're really going way off the highway here.
I mean, I have a couple of tricked out characters, but it was mostly just to see what they could do. My *most* tricked out, most expensive build is a character I didn't like and hardly play that I spent roughly 5 billion inf on to get to the mythic Ranged Defense Cap hoping it would make him fun to play again. It didn't really, but I'm hopeful that combined with the impending blaster changes he'll get back in my regular rotation.

But I digress.

Again, the reason I bought 30-ish packs instead of two or three was for the costume set.

Which I'm sure was the intent of having a costume set in there in the first place- well played, Paragon Studios!

/edit
and also LOL @ the notion there's any sort of MORAL IMPERATIVE at play here.
I thought Communism was buried in the rubble when the Berlin Wall fell, but you'd never know from some of the "logic" that always crops up in threads like this.

sort of, except that in the case of the packs if you buy a small pile you're pretty much guaranteed to get that cool sticker, along with a bunch of other stuff you can turn into a small mountain of game currencies.

I'm all for the sledgehammer approach, providing it squashes the roach in question.

oh, don't I know it- the issues with stalker stealth have inspired me to delete more characters than anything else in the game besides mastermind pet AI. =P

speaking for myself, I don't mind stuff like those Ragnaroks ending up on the market that much. Why? Because it's augmenting an in-game system.

Now I enjoy the market mini game, to the point where a purple set would be a trivial expense and I goggle at people paying *real physical cash* for stuff I get for "free". But I don't resent it- some people just dislike the market, I get that. And if those people want to buy that kind of in-game 'energy' with out of game cash, I'm pretty much okay with it even though it results in lower prices & that erodes some of the "fun" I get out of the market.

The things that trigger my alarm bells are stuff like the amplifiers, the xp boosts, stuff that has a direct impact on gameplay without having a corresponding in-game system of supply.

Not that the xp buffs and amplifiers are currently so superduper wonderful you can't get along without them, but it's setting a bad precedent, one that could lead somewhere I don't want the game going.

pre-defense cap build my ar/dev made hay with caltrops three slotted with Slow + ignite.

It was the highlight of an otherwise unappealing build.

Yes indeed.

One thing I continually struggle to keep in mind is that the game is 8 years old.

Now, 8 years is a decent chunk of time, but in the "real world" you can still keep it in focus when you're my age- 8 years ago I was basically doing the same things and hanging around with the same people I am now.

In game terms, 8 years is an INSANE span of time. Game time might not be as accelerated as internet time, but it's in the ballpark. I mean, I lapsed for a year and when I came back I barely recognized the place.

Legacy content here is like if you got in a time machine and went back to the 1800's. Things would be vaguely familiar, but very little of it would be applicable to your life in the future.

We're all living in the future now, but with all these locations and systems that carbon date to the 1800's. I understand that some folks like those places and systems, but chances are they're going to change fairly drastically as the devs get around to it.

I read the whole shebang Sam- you know me! =P

I can usually get where you're coming from even if it's not my deal, but my grudge against Faultline is as deep and inescapable as one of its original chasms.

Now new Faultline I love- it gets the same point across as the original, minus all the awful nonsense.

But they could make it an echo, like DA.

I'd install the TP plaque in my base just so I could stand in front making rude emotes.

that's great, but it doesn't help the person who zoomed into one of those bottomless pits with character-grabbing geometry at the bottom and needed TP Friend to get free.

It was an awful, terribly designed zone.

It doesn't evoke a single nostalgic memory for me- it was never anything but a huge PITA with no redeeming features.

And I'm a guy who has fond memories of traipsing through the Perez Park maze looking for the hidden cave door to the Fortune Teller mission.

The Shadow Shard at least had AWESOMENESS to wash down its ridiculous navigational impositions with.

There was nothing cool about Faultline- good riddance to it.

I'd support it as an installation in a Museum of Terrible Zone Design.

As would anyone else who tried completing one of those ridiculous 'hunt' missions on a super speedster...