Organica

I already have enough trouble when I want to get a good in-game picture of one of my characters. Extra long night would A) make getting a nicely lit picture even harder for me, and B) not add anything to my gameplay or enjoyment of the game.

Gandalf, as the balrog drags him down: Fly, you fools! Without pants!

Yep. Works. ^_^

For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman the Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours! Without pants!

Actually Uniquedragon eventually came back to the forums and read the entire thread about him and responded... he was mostly amused by it, I think. You can search the forum for his posts.

So I don't think he felt matyrised.

Here's the altoholic's dilemma in a nutshell:

1. I've been trying to play my dark/arrow defender Valentine Candy on Freedom to 50. I'm nearly 45 now. But Saturday I had a hard time finding teams, and I'm getting kind of bored with Freedom. So today I went back to Virtue and decided to play a level 27 stone/superstrength tanker of mine, Onyx Butterfly.

2. My primary goal is to get to 30. New costumes! I'm already nearly 28, and I find a good team in the morning and get to 30 very quickly -- 2 hours or less, I think. I enhance, run my costume missions, make the new costume, and log off.

3. In the afternoon I decide to play the same character again, and hook up with the same team leader. Another excellent team! I'm somewhat dismayed that a fully-enhanced stone tanker is still very squishy below 32, but in no time I make it to 32. And... granite is everything I hoped and feared. I'm much, much tougher, even with just one enhancement in place. I laugh at smashing/lethal damage from enemies 4 levels above me. But I'm a giant rock. Luckily we have a kin on the team, but caves are trickier because of my height. I can't jump over anything, I have to use teleport to get around enemies once in a while, I can't see my costumes, and I've essentially undergone a sex change -- at least, I look vaguely like a guy and my voice when I taunt is a deep man's voice.

So... I've already decided that one stone tanker is all I'll ever need. Squishy to 32, Godly afterwards but with a unique set of conditions that I wouldn't want to deal with on a second character. No problem, right? It's not like I habitually play the same sets over and over anyway.

Except...

4. When I'm getting ready to leave, someone else on the team extends a public thanks "to our rock girl tank". And I immediately think Oh! A stone armor tanker named Rocker Girl!

Creative Voice: Yes! A leather skirt, cropped shirt top, kind of trashy... laced up leather platform boots... jeans for a second costume... I see it all!

Voice of Reason: No. Not another stone tanker. You made a new character just yesterday. Plus there are no free slots on the 4-5 servers you regularly play on. Anyway, a simple name like that is certainly already taken.

Creative Voice: Oh, but I have open slots on other servers. I at least have to make the character once, because I like the concept so much. And if "Rocker Girl" isn't available then maybe "Rocker Grrl" is. That would work splendidly too.

So off I go to... Guardian I think it was. The name was available! And... hey, I can do a brute! That way I'm not playing a second stone tanker. Yeah! Oh, and we can do mace and swing a baseball bat!

No sooner have I made this character than I decide that I need a more goth look... and I forgot to fix the mace. Plus, I really like the character concept, enough to play her. That means I should make her on Virtue where most of my villains are. I could buy more slots... that is, if the name's available...

It was. And I did.

Long story short... I made 3 new characters this weekend, one of which I plan to actually play. And I bought 5 new slots so I have 4 more left for the next few bouts of inspiration.

"Mob" is depreciated! Use "Group"!

If you pay attention to the market, for some odd reason a lot of uncommon salvage right now is downright rare, and going for upwards of 50,000 or 100,000 per piece.

You can buy specific uncommon salvage items, for like... 50 tickets each, I think? IE, buy 10 or so of the one that seems to be selling for 100,000 per piece at the current moment. Put them up for sale at, say, 65,000 each. Come back tomorrow.

Just sayin'.

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In your opinion, what makes an Altaholic different from just having several characters?

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I'd explain it, but I have this great idea right now for a new character that I need to make....

(Seriously... I do... I'm trying to ignore it... )

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More Costume Pieces? You Look Fabulous in DOOOOOOOM!!

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Jay needs to make a costume set called Doom. Seriously. He does.

I just want to say that I was playing my dark/arrow defender the other night, and I'd recently picked up Temp Invulnerability (epic power pool). I don't think it was even slotted yet, or might have had one lvl 40 resist damage in it. I was getting 30% resist on smashing/lethal from that power alone.

Anyway, I went to check was my damager resist was... all told, 72.5% vs smashing/lethal and several other types of damage. Woo! defender can tank!

(Seriously... dark defenders can tank, after a fashion...)

See... we had two fire shielders on our team. ^_^ Double fire shields + temp invul FTW!

Point is, that was not a team in need of a lot of healing...

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They arent customized, they are standard mobs in standard proportions.

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Same is true for Comm Officers...

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which were not in the standard proportions. A ma freak mission is no different than some of the missions in the manti tf. or numerous radio missions. no exploit there.

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I've seen a freak MA mission where there were A) only Lts. for mobs, and where there were B) lots of buffing helper npcs to rescue.

Other than that it was a Dreck map. Both of those things could probably be considered exploits or attempts at exploits. On the other hand, someone was dying on our team every 2-3 spawns, so it's not as if there was no challenge... and while the exp was good, I don't think anyone was likely to reach level 50 in 4 or 8 hours or even a full day.

To me it was a freak farm, slightly modified. As noted, people have been farming freaks for just about forever.

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I have somewhat softened my stance on SB lately and usually keep my mouth shut about it when on an outdoor map, on a non-melee character. Melee people still hate it as much as they ever did.

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Which melee people are these?

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Ones with junky computers and ones that don't know how to play.

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I am playing on a new computer, thanks, and I've been here for three years. You have never teamed with me. You know nothing of my playstyle.

I find your post unnecessarily combative and, frankly, rude. This type of post is one thing that makes these forums a lot less fun than they could be.

Pollice verso.

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I was saying that a bit tongue in cheek, but really, I almost never encounter people that don't want speed boost. I know some people don't like it but I don't think it's that common myself. It doesn't bother me if people don't want certain buffs, I respect their wishes of course... but I've never had any problems with it, and it always kind of strikes me (no matter what buff we're talking about -- some people don't like ice or fire shields, etc.) as not wanting to be as effective as you could be.

But then, I took Repel on my fire/kin, soley because it's fun to play with.

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I have somewhat softened my stance on SB lately and usually keep my mouth shut about it when on an outdoor map, on a non-melee character. Melee people still hate it as much as they ever did.

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Which melee people are these?

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Ones with junky computers and ones that don't know how to play.

I suck at playing a fire/kin. And my fire kin is so old that nobody realized a fire/kin was a good set, nobody had heard of vet attack powers to help you deal damage at level 3 yet, and I only got to level 32 with a big boost from winter lords, who were far less stingy with exp the first year they appeared.

And I've managed to get to 33 or 34 since then. I should get to 50 someday I suppose... just seems like fire/kin is not my favorite set, not one I'm very good at. Although I've been playing a kin defender recently and I just have to say, I love speedboost but not when I'm the one doing the speed boosting. Excessive buffing every other spawn is annoying.

I think that's why I like dark as a defender set. I'm not big on too much buffing, too many debuff toggles (although I did play an illusion/rad to 50) or dealing with other people's expectations of an empathy defender. My arrow/dark defender is now 36 (yay! Highest defender ever for me and climbing!) and my 43 MM is bots/dark. Dark is a fun set. All the bad guys cower when they see me.

I probably need to roll a trick arrow defender, then.

The Hooters -- All You Zombies (kind of a warning about the end)
Orphaned Land -- Halo Dies (The Wrath of God)

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When was the last time you posted something that wasn't a veiled mockery?

Just sayin'.

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That was veiled? What kind of crap are they selling for veils these days?

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Lead-lined canvas veils, very useful if you've used massacre makeup lately....

Rouge Spy on Virtue is up to level 20. ^_^ She was a member of an elite espionage organization, but after going rouge they kicked her out because of policies on excessive makeup.

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ooh! Ooh! I can field that one.

You know how humans and sometimes cats become heroes? Plenty of catgirls out there right? Obviously the glow is regen or willpower from those fungi and mosses that grow under ground. DUH. We live in Paragon City! If you've ever messed with the devouring earth, you KNOW that the fungus is powered!

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Is that the Humongous Fungus among us?

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Please tell me someone has made an MA arc with this name.

Dear caves,

I don't understand why people are writing to you, when the thread is titled "An open letter to cave missions". Why aren't they addressing the missions themselves then?

Dear cave missions,

You need to leave the caves behind. Seriously. Go outside, find a nicer place to have your mission.

I made a playlist for my iPod recently on this theme (and I'll have to borrow more ideas from this thread). This is sort of a working list for me anyway, I may decide that not all of these song fit, and a couple of the songs I have are obscure and you probably wouldn't be able to find them, but for what it's worth, I currently have the following:

American Pie -- Don Maclean
Gasoline -- Sheryl Crow
Minutes to Midnight -- Midnight Oil
Seconds -- U2
Red Alert -- Malcolm and the Mirrors
The Big Guns -- Swirling Eddies
It's the End of the World As We Know It -- REM
Eve of Destruction -- Barry MacGuire
Dust in the Wind -- Kansas
Preaching the End of the World -- Chris Cornell
Jubilee -- Alison Krauss

also possibly Earth Crisis by Steel Pulse?

There are probably a lot of good apocalyptic reggae songs actually.

Here's one downside to AE:

I played a dark/arrow defender over the weekend. Monday evening I was 28 and I wanted to make 30 (extra costume slot!) When I didn't find a team right away, I figured I'd go to Atlas and find an AE team. (Oh yeah, this is on Freedom... boy is Atlas Park a zoo on that server especially).

Anyway, someone I'd teamed with in Talos before asks if I want to join an AE team. Perfect, right? I know he's not just running a PL farm.

Then he assembles a team of varying levels, and picks a mission that doesn't auto-sidekick everyone up. Oh, and he doesn't have mentors/sidekicks figured out, and the math doesn't work, and anyway I'm five levels above the level of the mobs.

So we finish the mission quickly and he picks something better, although now we're facing high level Nemesis on a mostly 20's team and it hardly matters that we're auto-sk'd up, it's still a very difficult mission for a relatively low level team to handle. It takes a lot of time and I finish the evening without having gained even half a level.

Last night I logged in, and after a bit decided to try AE in Atlas again (I don't learn quick do I?) The spam is ridiculous. I join one team but the leader drops almost immediately, apparently due to dc issues because of massive lag. About five minutes later the same guy invites me again. He gets a full team, then asks if anyone knows a good mission to run.

>.>

Things do not go well, he picks a mission that does not auto-sk everyone, the level spreads are impossible, and the team falls apart. He's supposed to reform the team but I never hear from him again.

Another team forms. Guy goes to pick a mission and finds out it no longer exists. He was apparently looking for his favorite exploitable farm mission anyway, although he hadn't warned anyone of his intentions. He asks if anyone else knows a good mission... silence.

So yeah, he picks something at random that has level 54 bosses and we're auto-sk'd to 50, but with low levels not prepared for what we're facing. That team fell apart too.

After that I had an epiphany. Even though I had my lft flag up and comments in search saying I like mission teams, no mission team was probably going to add me if they saw I was hanging out in Atlas. I moved on to Brickstown, found a team immediately, and gained 2 levels before the night was over. Sure it was just running radio missions, but I had fun and gained exp, and that's all I wanted. ^_^

Moral of the story is, one of the downsides to AE is all the people who don't know how to form a proper team or find an appropriate mission. The auto-sidekick feature is a big boon to teams with varying levels if you know what you're doing, but a lot of people don't, and a lot of people just stand around in Atlas spamming in broadcast, which gets VERY old after a while.

I haven't tried forming my own mission teams via AE, so I'm unsure how easy it is to find people who A) want to do AE and B) aren't just looking for a farm.

They should revisit those I'm a Hero/I'm a Villain commercials when Rogue comes out.

"I'm a hero."
"And I'm a villain."
"No wait! I'm a villain too! I'm on your team now, buddy!"
"I'm... er... suddenly thinking about becoming a hero...."

As a side note, I think if there's one thing just about everybody can agree on, any City of Rogues starting zone (if there is one) needs to have the open, no-war-walls feel of red side and the pristine, hasn't-been-trashed, doesn't-have-slums-around-every-corner feel of blue side. Only with much better textures courtesy of new design.

They do that, and I guarantee that a HUGE portion of the game will choose to start out in the new rogue zone, regardless of moral compass.

Tough on crime


Lotta robots

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In an old tabletop supers campaign, we had one hero whose handicap was that he didn't have a mouth. Gagged all the time. Also supervillains kept phoning the base to torment him.

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And... now I have to tell one of my old table top Superhero game stories.

Our team went back in time, where a player-controlled villain was trying to help the Nazis out during world war II. I forget the specifics, but we captured the player villain and brought him back to the present day.

He argued that we couldn't imprison him because there were no laws against going back in time, and any crimes he'd committed were either past statue of limitations, didn't really happen, or couldn't be proven in a court of law.

One of our previous adventures had happened in Parador (from the old Richard Dreyfuss movie Moon over Parador), so we happened to know a friendly dictator who had recently built a prison to house supers. He didn't need a reason to lock the villain up, just our say-so that he was bad.

This did not go over well with our friend the villain, but there wasn't a lot he could do about it. He wanted to hire an assassin to kill our SG leader, but he only had a few thousand dollars, not nearly enough. Instead, he put an open bounty on the leader's head.

For the next year or so of gaming, random low-level (and frequently incompetent) villains would appear out of nowhere to make an attempt on our leader's life. They were more of an annoyance than a threat, but it was a lot of fun. Your line about villains calling up to torment the silent hero made me think of that. ^_^

This other one eventually made some sort of sense -- not really an idiot moment, but anyway, here's the story:

A new guy joins the team. We zone into the mission. The new guy says, "Can you type something in team chat?" While we're waiting around for him to zone in, the leader says, "What? I don't understand what you mean." Then she calls him by name. I point out that he can't answer because he's zoning... and zoning... and maybe dc'ing. So the leader says, "Well let's start, he can catch up or get a reinvite later."

New guy eventually zones in, and all goes well. Except that he has that extreme form of scrapperlock that means running off and taking on entire spawns on his own, and occasionally dying. At one point in another mission, I teleported him to the main group just as he died. He then complained that he'd been at the location of the glowy, before I'd teleported him. And? You died as I teleported you. Should I have left you to lie dead beside the glowy then?

Anyway, at every subsequent mission he says something to the effect of "Can type something in team chat?" before zoning. I figured out quickly that with his 2-plus minute load times (no joke), he merely wanted to hear the beep of team chat going on to reassure himself that he hadn't dc'd yet. It took him about five missions to explain this to everyone else though.

Anyway after two missions he tells us that he has a bank mission. This is right after the leader explained in team chat that she was skipping a bank mission because she didn't want to do it, so no bonus points for paying attention. He asks if we can do it, and everyone else pretty much doesn't care either way, so the leader says we'll do it next.

Instead, the leader forgets, switches to a different character and has me grab a mission, and we do that. Note that a lot of these decisions are being made in the 2-plus minutes the guy takes to zone back out of the last mission.

He keeps bugging us. Someone asks if he needs the temp rez power. He was running off on his own and dying at least twice a mission, so I said that yes, he does! But I reminded the leader that we'd promised, so after the current mission we set his bank mission.

We zone in. And wait. And wait. We had never actually waited for him to zone before, since it took so long. People make jokes about what kind of computer he has. Someone says we're already on the clock once we zone in, I said no that''s only villain side, but someone else noted that eventually the bank robbery will start even if we stand still.

And... so it does. We run to the bank. As we enter, our slow-loading scrapper friend finally disconnects for the first time all evening.

/em sigh. Some of us tried to talk the group into exiting the mission and waiting for our friend to come back online, since he desperately wanted the temp power... but we had three other scrappers on our team. You might as well tell the tide to not come back in. ^_^

Anyway, I kept checking and he hadn't returned even ten minutes later. Ah, well.