Olantern

So, if all that is the explanation for friction and such, what does this have to do with the fact that I've all of a sudden started drifting around uncontrollably if I get stunned with Hover on (since the last couple of patches or so)? Bug, feature, aspect of friction?

The Islands of Langerhans. They decided not to release them when the "Gland" AT proved too hard to balance.

First, two of mine, that are disturbing only to me, and then one of a friend's that genuinely freaks me out.

- The Lammergeier (AR/Kinetics corruptor). A lammergeier is an interesting-looking kind of vulture, notable for its ability to crack the bones of sheep and other medium-sized animals. The character is one of my very few Mutation-origin characters, born with weak telekinetic powers. In the vein of '90's-era Batman villains, he has an obsessive interest in something ordinary, in his case, birdwatching (thus the name), and his greatest dream has always been to make himself fly. As a young man in then-East Germany, he applied to several super-soldier programs and was rejected. Finally, he began working with the 5th Column when they promised to grant him flight. He struck off on his own around the time of the Council overthrow and now roams the Rogue Isles, killing anyone weaker than himself and experimenting on the bodies of fallen foes, seeking to improve his telekinetics.

Nothing particularly horrifying here as such, but the Lammergeier is probably my most "evil" character. He's just a rotten guy. I mean, he took up with the 5th Column, the most apalling group in the story, assisting them with their evilness not because he cared about their cause, but for his own, selfish reasons. The only thing scarier than a frigging super-powered Nazi is a guy who helps them commit the same atrocities just because it's the best deal for him. The guy just creeps me out, so even though I think he has one of the better backstories I've done, a great costume, and would make a great villain in a comic or other story, I can't stand to play him for very long. I keep rooting for the enemies to defeat him. I've had him around for at least two years now, and he's still only level 10 or so.

- On the other end of the spectrum, we have the original backstory of another corruptor, Rain Scarecrow (fire/storm), inspired by the Mellencamp song, among many other things. A man with a profound sense of social responsibility, he was raised to believe that "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem," a dogma he takes very seriously and literally. To him, anyone who doesn't actively oppose suffering and oppression is just as bad as someone who causes it. He robs banks because he believes no one should be putting money in a building when other people are impoverished. He attacks enemies for things like failing to give change to beggars on the street, not joining in protests, or just plain being complacent. He believes the Citizen Crime Fighting act is an abomination; he considers heroes to be wicked for capturing criminals rather than agitating for social change. Ultimately, in his eyes, everyone is guilty, and everyone needs to be punished.

This character grew out of experiences with people I'd met in my work, among other things. In the end, though, he was just too strident to keep playing in a game that's supposed to be an escape from my everyday life. Much like the Lammergeier, I made him up specifically because I didn't agree with the philosophy he represented, and I just couldn't maintain the level of outrage necessary to play him. However, I liked the character's look and powers a great deal, so I scrapped his backstory and created a whole new one for him. I made him an actual, animated scarecrow rather than a man dressed like one and wove in Granny Beldam and a strange, horror-story like origin, involving a possible suicide in a farmhouse in Croatoa during a thunderstorm. I found this magical machine much easier to deal with than the perpetually outraged man out to punish society, and I recently got the character to 50.

Those two are my own characters, and I just found them disturbing for personal reasons. For disturbing in general, consider a friend's character, the mastermind . . .

- Mr. Rictus (necro/posion, I think). I've never actually seen this character, and I don't want to; he scares me too much. Rictus began his career as a pediatrician dealing with chronically ill children. It upset him seeing their sad little faces every day. So he began carving smiles on their faces with knives, then graduated to poisoning them with toxins that fixed grins on their faces, a la Joker. Eventually, he even learned to animate dead bodies using the toxins he'd studied. Mr. Rictus honestly doesn't understand why everyone considers him a villain. He just wants to make everyone happy. Permanently.

The friend who created this guy eventually left the game, after creating many memorable heroes and villains, some almost as twisted as Rictus, so inspiring, some comedic. Some years later, I ran across the Wanted comic, which featured a character with a similar name who was supposed to be terrifying. I still find the original Mr. Rictus much freakier.

I take the star. The team does one more mission, probably the one that it had been planning to do before the previous leader left, then gradually breaks up over the course of that mission, with the last few people leaving when it's over.

On very, very rare occasions, I'll end up leading a team for longer periods. Until relatively recently, I used to get a lot of complaints on those teams, things along the lines of, "Why are we doing Joe Hero's mission? Mine is Freaks, and they R best xp!" or "Why aren't we farming?" or "Don't set anyone's mission! We're farming all of those!" All those things have become less common. There are fewer "true" pick-up groups out there, but they seem easier to form and much more easygoing than ever.

Apropos of what PP said, while I haven't seen much of a change in my personal teaming experiences, I have found that more and more players seem to be migrating to Virtue (and, to a lesser extent, Freedom). This bothers me a lot more than overall game population. If people gravitate toward the most populous servers because "the rest are empty all the time," doesn't the emptiness become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The fact that I don't particularly enjoy playing on the populous servers doesn't help me here. Everything always seems overcrowded when I'm there, and then everything seems emptier than it really is when I get back to one of my primary homes.

One of my characters has costumes based on various sea creatures. I've tried an angler fish, too, and I haven't gotten it to work yet. That said, I was able to create a pretty good-looking sea slug using purple skin, the short antennae you can pick as a mask detail (not the long ones that you can pair with insect eyes), and the "plant" shoulders as gill filaments. You might be able to do something similar with the leafier plant accents on an angler fish. Also, consider using the "gills" mask pattern with a vivid color over white or the "grin" face (with some eye detail to cover the skull-like eyes) to replicate the teeth.

On a more general point, the third type of Samurai details has a good, wave-like pattern I've been able to use on a number of aquatic costumes.

The "Coming Storm Arrives" event they unleashed as the in-game explanation for shutting the servers down for good should've had some explanation for why the enemies that spawned everywhere were just renamed Rikti, Nemesis, and Shivans. I'm also not sure having the badge for defeating 100 of them unlock the Flying Nemesis Pony Thingy travel pool power set made sense.

[N.B. The post's snarkiness is intended as parody, but I do believe the Coming Storm's actual arrival will be the game-ending event. We may see more foreshadowing about it, more story arcs about it, and all sorts of things, but I don't expect the storm itself to "arrive" as long the game lives; it's more effective as a looming threat.]

For those complaining about the lack of backstory about the Deadly Apocalypse, there actually is one, but it's so hard to find that it might as well not exist. If you click on the little blue "i" in your nav window, in addition to explaining how the event works, you also get some lore about the event, something to do with a Circle of Thorns summoning ritual gone wrong. (Hey, I said a backstory, not a good backstory.)

I was also under the impression that the event will continue to be triggered randomly in the same way that Zombie attacks can be, although since the two events share a trigger, that means each individual event will happen less often.

I suspect zone events are the wave of the future; we've had people clamoring for them forever. People just need to understand that we'll get the dev interpretation of a multi-participant zone event, not whatever particular thing we as individuals imagined.

My main server, too, can rarely muster a team or set of teams capable of completing a Deadly Apocalypse event. I imagine we'll see the same problem with the revamped Troll Raves and Hellion Arsons. In much the same way that no one fights Giant Monsters, I expect even a great event to suffer neglect after the first week or so of its release.

Finally, for cupids shooting people with arrows, see my signature link.

ZombieMan's got it. As all the dev statements lately have indicated, all the development eggs are in the Going Rogue basket at the moment.

Anyone else reminded of the Issue 6 (CoV) to Issue 7 (Grandville, Mayhems, etc.) gap? Let's just hope that this time, the release of the expansion isn't accompanied by massive cutbacks in the development staff.

I'm concerned that Myles Standish's spawn rate is too low. I've been testing it for 12 straight hours, and every spawn I've seen is Squanto. Also, the Gobblers' (Turkey bosses) Dreadful Gobble is debuffing damage inflicted instead of damage resistance. Don't even get me started on the excessive resistance of the Banner of Overeating and the Banner of Awkward Conversations With Relatives.

Maybe some of our Canadians players can provide some feedback. I think this event has been over for them for a while already.

As far as I can tell, the devs' insistence on keeping the markets separate is based on the following train of thought:

1) More influence than infamy is in circulation. Similarly, a wealthy hero is generally wealthier than a wealthy villain (say, an average of 1 billion influence versus 500 million infamy [numbers are entirely invented]). These are based on datamining.

2) Wealthier characters will be able to buy up whatever items they want, all other things being equal.

3) Therefore, if we let heroes and villains compete directly in the market, all the desirable good will be bought up by a small group of wealthy heroes, then sold and resold over and over within that group.

***

I don't agree with this reasoning, primarily because it ignores the fact that some of the characters selling the highly desirable items will be villains, which results in a transfer of inf from heroes to villains. That is, it has the same effect as most sales in the markets, just on a potentially larger scale. As someone else pointed out, the devs' reasoning doesn't account for the way economies, even economies with the peculiar characteristics of an online game, work. However, the devs certainly aren't the first people to disbelieve economic theory, and they won't be the last, either.

Indeed, the devs, throughout their work with the market, seem to have approached it as a way for lower-level characters to obtain the items for sale as they level. Players, in contrast, have generally approached it as a way to build a stock of inf, which they then use at high levels to outfit themselves.

While it is true that a market merger might cause some minor penury for villains who have leveled part of the way under the old system and part of the way under the merged system, I think things would probably even themselves out fairly quickly. The rebound from the recipe drought of early i16 suggests such a result.

Regardless of all this, I don't expect ever to see a merged market or to see anything other than severe supply shortages in the villain market and significant ones below level 50 in the hero market.

Two questions.

First, both "Praetorian" Infernal and Primal Earth's Infernal are described as coming from an alternate dimension in which demon-binding is common practice. Are they both from the same dimension, or are they different versions of the same person in the same way that Tyrant and Statesman are both versions of Marcus Cole? I assume that neither is from Praetorian or Primal Earth, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Second, and more interestingly, all the buzz about Praetoria and its timeline got me to thinking about the lifespan of Incarnates. Nearly all the Incarnates we know of (Statesman, Tyrant, Lord Recluse, and possibly Lady Grey) seem to be unaging. Does this go for Imperious, too? And if Imperious is/was unaging, is he still around in the contemporary world of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles, or did he die or vanish in the distant past? Or does no one know?

The ability to use /e vomit, I think, is the only thing I've tried to do in the game and can't actually do, in any way, shape, or form.

I don't think I can work for anyone who dresses that much like Captain Steuben.