Oliin

Wait so ... four more auras than what we were shown on the I20.5 announcement page?

Well you know, it stands to reason. I mean I've heard their chief weapon is surprise.

It's been free since they released the nook. You can also read any e-book free for an hour per day when you're in the store on any model of the nook. Which is nice since it allows you to get more of a feel for the book than those sample bits usually do. Though it's not much use for those people who just sit in the store all day several days a week, read whole books, never buy anything and only drink the free water in the cafe (and occasionally fill up a water bottle with the milk from the milk pitchers) ...... Not that they bother me or anything ....

B&N also acquired Fictionwise a couple years ago. Not sure how big of a chunk of the e-book market it has though.

Wait wait wait .... Where are you getting $5 paperbacks nowadays? I guess maybe used or off of Amazon (I visit a local store so I'm not up on Amazon's general pricing), but the cheapest 'list' price for paperbacks I've seen lately is $7.99 (let's just say $8). I've even seen mass markets as high as $10.

The cost near you is per-month? The books for rent at the community college nearby are per-semester. Not sure about the UVA bookstore though, I don't get near there often.

Personally I'm going to hope that means we're going to get them free in an upcoming patch/issue/whatever. Since that hairstyle isn't exactly steampunk specific.

Either that or it's just an oversight.


I did notice something. I went to go try and put the classic steampunk belt on one of my characters who has a trenchcoat on and noticed that none of the pack's belts or chest options were available for use with that costume piece. If it's a clipping issue at least one of the belts should have no problems (classic steampunk 02).

You forgot the most important one of all. You reeeealy need to let them know before they get bitten by the zombie. The before part is key really. You can tell them afterwards, but you're just setting yourself up for failure at that point.

I would imagine that first bit we saw was actually the steam jump power.

Other than that ... it would have been nice to see the clockwork wings in action (though I might have missed that). I'm certainly buying the pack though, lots of fun stuff it looks like.

Where in the world are you going to the moives? The increase in movie ticket prices (even aside from the gouging you get when you watch in 3D) has even been mentioned in the news several times over the last couple of years. It's not even all that bad here where I live and the price of a matinee has gone up from $5.50 to $7.50 in the last two years.

Also it hasn't happened all that often yet, but I've noticed a chunk of newer video games have had PC price points of $59.99. Most notably it's the games that are expected to sell well (the more 'big' games). It kind of makes me sad since the prices there have been stable for so long. I'd mention about console games making that shift, but I don't recall when that happened exactly, though I wouldn't be surprised if it happened with the shift from the PS to the PS2 or thereabouts.


So, according to the yearly Game Developer Salary Survey salaries are up last year. This year's report shows average salary up an average of seven percent. The numbers from last year's report were down four percent though. Aside from that year the couple summaries I looked at showed a general trend toward incremental growth in salaries.

Funny post count story (sorta).

I got into some silly debate about blaster mechanics on these forums a few years ago with one particular individual. Not really sure what it was about now, but it's not terribly pertinent (probably something about old defiance really). Anyhoo, I found the same sort of debate going on over at one of the MMO news site's forums and chimed in there too.

Apparently the same guy was up in arms both here and there and figured out it was me in both places (not terribly hard, I use the same avatar on most 'gaming' boards). Rather than actually debating the matter over there though they tell me how I obviously don't know how to play since I spend all my time on the forums and cited my post count over here.

I was kind of confused by that. Partly because I really have a fairly miniscule post count given how long I've been playing this game, but mostly because their post count on the other boards was considerably higher than what I had here combined with my nearly single-digit post count there ... in far less the amount of time.

It still boggles me that I was accused of spending too much time posting on the forums because of my 'high' post count ... by someone who had a higher post count.

Moral of the story: Sometimes people make absolutely zero sense.

Well, maybe not Thor, but Loki on the other hand. He's the one who spent time as a woman and was accused of having borne children.

Ok so yea, I get the joke and the reference (and I rather like the song honestly), but this one would be nice for it too I think.

Ok, I can't really say much about it since I don't have TV have never watched most of the shows on their network, but the CW is the channel that puts out; Hellcats, The Vampire Diaries, One Tree Hill, Gossip Girl, and that new 90210 show right?

I mean I watch Supernatural via (legal) downloads and it's rather awesome, and I didn't much care for the first several seasons of Smallville but things can certainly pick up ... but are all the rest of those shows actually well done or is it a case of a couple reeealy good shows making up for a bunch of lousy ones?

As I mentioned earlier, Thor is quite possibly already profitable. Sure it's only made 76.5 million here stateside, but at the same time it's also made 189 million in foreign ticket sales. So at the moment its ticket sales have made over 100 million beyond its stated budget.

Now I don't know what percentage of a film's reported totals go back to the studio and what percentage goes to other things (like the theater), but I'd be surprised if it wasn't already profitable at this point.

Source: Box Office Mojo

Ahh, here we go. It was during the whole anniversary celebration.

I believe they have said that we're going to be getting new powers to slot in the currently unlocked slots before we get any new slot unlocks. I don't off hand remember where I saw them say that though. Probably in one of the recent u-stream chats.

Well, according to Box Office Mojo Thor's worldwide ticket sales have exceeded its budget already. Not exactly a smashing success, but if it continues to even do 'ok' for the next little bit I'd say a sequel is looking fairly good.

Really? At my showing we got a couple of upcoming generic action movie trailers and one really bad one (for Conan). I was really hoping for a Green Lantern trailer though.

As much as I would personally love to see a robust 'sidekick' style pet in CoH ... have you taken a look at just how horrible the pet/npc AI is in CoH?

Also as much as I like their implementation of the henchmen and all that over in GW there have also been many quests there where I absolutely had to join up with other players because my ability to micromanage my pets just wouldn't cut it. Completely impossible for me to solo missions that required me to group in order to get past.

Wait ... were you the person who commented about how the Zelda games weren't all that memorable?



Mostly I think since they were focusing on specific art and gameplay styles of the various generations of video games Zelda makes a good amount of sense. There have been a lot of Zelda clones over the years and the series itself has gone through a very interesting visual progression over that time as well.

Most of the recent ones I've played seem to be set up like CoH honestly. Very much solo-friendly but also having group-required content (dungeons and the like) which provides look/rewards superior to what you can reasonably be assumed to acquire through soloing. Either that or it provides that sort of reward faster than soloing would.

Most end-games I've seen likewise involve group-based content.

I've never really thought that the IO system was the best 'end-game' system out there. It does work as a nice time-extender to be sure, but it also happens incidentally to regular game play and then on top of that there's no challenges in the game currently that are really designed so that you need to have participated in the system in order to succede either.

So you have a nice time sink, but it's also a time sink that you neither do anything special to do nor is there any real reason to participate in it unless you personally want to. I'm generally of the opinion that effective end games (meaning end-games with broad appeal) are the ones that both provide a benefit as well as a reason for participating.

Once they eventually (hopefully) get some solo and small group content tied into the incarnate system I kind of think it might end up being one of the better ones out there. Accessible time wise, providing clear and obvious boost to your characters and involving content that really encourages taking part in the system.

Well the thing with dying more often than anyone else is that it means you also have more debt than anyone else. It never happened to me, but I knew rather a few people who played blasters who played permanently in xp debt back in the day and even with debt reductions over time that sort of playing would drastically reduce a character's leveling speed I would expect.

That was really the biggest problem with the old defiance. It's not so much that it didn't provide a boost, but unless the player was either very skilled or very lucky ( ... or just both) its use actually increased the blaster's likelihood of picking up XP debt.


Admittedly my blasters never really die all that more often than any of my other characters (and actually less than some of my more 'hardy' characters ... but I get overconfident on them sometimes), but then when I play with PUG TFs I see a LOT of poorly played ones too. I was on an ITF the last time it was the WST and there was a blaster on the team who died pretty much every other encounter.

You may think I'm exaggerating that one, but I'm seriously not. Never seen someone die so often before on that TF. Pretty much every time a rez power was recharged he was needing it ... and the team had an emp defender, a rad controller and a pain MM on the thing. The guy would run into spawns and then die before heals even be used half the time.