Samuel_Tow

Thank you, Zombie man. Let me see if I'm reading this correctly - what we see currently in Real Numbers AND Combat Attributes is wrong and unreliable, and we should wait for the mess to be cleared up? Is that it?

Additionally, the components we are seeing quadrupled are just a breakdown of buffs to make flight speed suppress when held, as well as make it not fully enhanceable. That is to say, the two primary flight speed buffs are one part enhanceable and one part unenhanceable similar to what Dull Pain has, where as the other two buffs (or rather, the buff/debuff combo) are there to handle flight speed reduction while held. Do I have that right?

That makes sense, I guess, but I'll wan to wait for flight speed numbers to be tightened up in Combat Attributes before I make any changes to my Fly or Hover slotting. Ideally, I'd like to see the final numbers in mph before I make a decision, and ideally without the jitter in final flight speed that we see now. Incidentally, do you have any idea what causes that jitter?

Personally, I'll struggle to make any of my villains into rogues because I worked to fit my characters well within the framework we used to be given, so now that we have elbow room, I find that I don't need it. Back in the day, I had a small questionnaire about whether I should make a character a hero or a villain, and whether I should make a character AT ALL, and one of the major points that I had to find an answer to was why that character is a villain.

All of my villains are villains by choice, by action and by will. That's not to say all villains are, but those that weren't I simply never made. Some are after power, some are after (messed-up) ideology, some are followers devoted to their masters (who are other characters of mine) and so on and so forth. I have no "misunderstood" characters, no "confused" characters and not really any outright insane characters who are doing it all for the evulz. Evil by choice is what they are, and evil in such a way that they can make a decent argument for why they're right.

In fact, having written a speech by a specific villain of mine and shown it to my friends, many of them went "Well, that was entirely reasonable. Doesn't sound like a villain to me." Considering I know what he really is, I consider that reaction to be a smashing success. If only all of my villains could be like this.

OK, I give up. I am completely stumped. I've tried wrapping my head around the Flight Speed changes, and I just fail at it so completely. It's not the math that's confounding me, however little there is of it, but rather the more practical side of things - system application and actual impact. Here's what I mean.

I know base flight speed used to be 14.somethign mph, and is now 19.something mph. OK, so let's check and see how Hover is affecting those and... What the hell am I supposed to do with THIS:



Why is Hover listed three times? I checked the power's Real Numbers, as real as those are, and all it lists is a single 98.69% flight speed buff. To what? To base flight speed? Doesn't seem like it's doing that, because it means Hover should be showing a single 19.something mph flight speed increase, and it ain't. Even if I ignored the flight speed debuff (and what purpose does that serve?) and added together the two buffs, it still comes up to around 21.something mph, which is 100+% buff, which I don't have.

Am I supposed to ignore the buff numbers and just focus on total speed, then? Because that doesn't seem right, either. I clocked this very same character doing I think 27 or 28 mph of flight speed before I18, and she's clocking in at 31.something now, which is an increase of only around 3 or 4 mph, which is less than just the BASE flight speed increase, and the flight speed buff is supposed to be based off that.

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Confounding "real" numbers aside, this change doesn't... Feel as drastic as I was led to believe it was. Certainly flight speed is faster, though flying around with old characters doesn't really make me feel like it has suddenly gotten TOO fast, which is what I expected to see. By "too fast," I don't mean too fast to control, but rather fast enough to where I can feel comfortable in removing slots. Fact of the matter is, I don't. Not on my non-swift characters, anyway. On the one with Swift, it does feel a bit "too fast," but that's hardly what I expected.

Maybe I haven't played a slow flier recently, or maybe I got used the the Ludicrous Speed of the new Sprint... I don't know. But Hover doesn't "feel" like it got much faster. In fact, truth be told, it doesn't "feel" like it got ANY faster. And it did, which should show you how subjective that "feel" is. But again, it doesn't convince me that it's fast enough to where I can pinch slots for something else. I guess one-slot Hover isn't too bad by itself. I mean, I've played it, I've run it. It's good for a Mastermind, say. But I play Scrappers with this. I play Blasters. I can't afford to be slow, and "slow" is what it feels like this will be if I remove any speed slots.

Well, it seems someone already solved the title problem for me, so no need to change that any more. Sorry about that, guys.

As for the RP reasons, I kind of wanted to go with something more than just "She's resistance! Hiss! It burns!!!" Doesn't really work for me as the author of that character. With Monroe it was an easy choice (not sure if there WAS a choice, but the dialogue tree implied it), in that the guy doesn't have a leg to stand on. He's a cutthroat criminal who'd, to quote White, "strangle his own mother" for the sake of power, control and most probably money. Those suits aren't cheap. Even with the Crusader blockheads it was interesting because they kept saying things like "Why would we NOT blow up a hospital?" and "We should have started working with murdering criminals earlier!" and "Who's on dog-kicking duty today?" and so forth, so it was clear they were the bad guys.

But with Cleo... She did look like she was trying to do good and I'm not sure how many people she hurt directly. Well, that dead PPD guy she sold out, obviously and... Well, me, can't forget me. But that's not quite the "hospital blowing up, works with murderers" kind of problematic that has an easy solution.

I guess I could default to the old standby of "I want peace and security, but I want it the right way!" which is what I used to justify saving the Council in Mass Effect, and indeed, sending honest-to-god hard-working citizens to their deaths seems like the wrong way. Who are we really protecting here if we sacrifice civilians without a second thought? Even if it's one civilian, it's still one civilian too many. But then how do I justify taking HER out in return without being a hypocrite? Can I really argue that the cop was innocent in that he was doing his job but Cleo wasn't because she did this on purpose?

And I guess a Chief Interrogator's decision - even if it's a death sentences Judge Dread would be proud of - is final. But that seems like more of an excuse.

OK, if you get past the spoilers tag, you probably know what I'm talking about. The Nova Praetoria Responsibility storyline ends with an unpleasant revalation: Cleopatra - Praetor White's cheerful girlfriend - is a resistance Warden who just betrayed you and set you up to be killed like a dog. Oops! But Interrogator Washington has a solution to this - kill her, instead!

Ugh...

Here's the thing, though - I did. I'm determined to get this character all the way through as a Loyalist so I'm basically set into taking the Loyalist options when presented, but I'm also set on making her a hero, which means I need to try and avoid jerkass options wherever I can. The problem is that the jerkass option and the Loyalist option coincided in this case. And that ain't good.

So here's my question - how can I justify this for my character. Now, I know what you're thinking, o Golden Girl: "You can't!" Well, since this is written fiction where anything is possible with enough spin, I'd like to avoid the fact that, no, I really can't justify it and try to come up with a way to spin this into something that's at least somewhat nonjerkass.

The character I'm working with so far is... Well, she's a robotic construct who gained sentience basically on her own and she feels responsible for people in general, but rarely any specific person in particular. So I was kind of working off "You helped me save a hospital, but how many people did you sent to be murdered by Crusaders?" but the thing is... I don't know. She may not have at all. So I'm stumped on this, and I could really use some help.

Didn't use 'em, didn't need 'em.

I saw Fort Trident yesterday, and it is embarrassing. A cave near a pond in Atlas Park takes me to a submarine pen in the world's most boring Longbow base? That's unacceptable. And why a Longbow base? Why is everything Longbow? Why can't we have at least one more prominent hero group so that Freedom Corps paraphernalia doesn't clutter the whole game? Even in another dimension, I'm still meeting Longbow!

You say they're placeholders. I say it's unacceptable to leave placeholders in a finished, launched product. I had thought that pulling the Incarnates placeholder Alpha slot meant this was obvious. And even if it IS a placeholder, then frikkin' put a little more effort into it! Don't just slap it on a cave somewhere on the butt end of nowhere.

And what do we have inside? Why, a collection of NPCs standing next to SG portals that lead to them in their zones. I'm kind of reminded of that line of five Crey dudes selling SOs in Fort Darwin in CoV Beta. Only those were taken out before the game went Live.

Guys, fix this, and before the next Issue.

I really hate in-jokes, ESPECIALLY the ones I can catch.