Shadowe

Okay, I got halfway through a long post at work, got on my lunch break, and found that two more pages of text had appeared.

And I just realised on reading one of the posts here that everyone is actually arguing the same thing, and it's hilarious.

Allow me to explain: Incarnate, even in the context of canon material, is not a noun. It is an adjective.

Here's the thing:

Opening Pandora's Box is what allowed superpowers to become prevalent. If it had remained closed, you'd pretty much have our world. The few super-powered individuals would keep quiet and not get up to much and that would be that.

The five so-called Origins are labels. They are a part of humanity's attempts to codify and classify the source of powers. They're pretty broad, so we, as RPers, find it relatively easy to squeeze our homebrewed character concepts into one or another of them.

Now comes the hilarious part. There is actually no such thing as "An Incarnate". Anywhere. Not in canon, not in Mender Ramiel's arc, nowhere.

Statesman is not described as "An Incarnate". Sorry, folks, but he's not.

Recluse is not described as "An Incarnate", either.

Statesman is "Zeus Incarnate" (usually written as "Incarnate of Zeus" in a demonstration of truly abominable English - it should be "Incarnation of Zeus"), and it really does mean what it says on the tin. He is a real-world embodiment of the power of Zeus.

On its own "An Incarnate" is completely meaningless. It is impossible to create a character in CoH that is just "An Incarnate". They will always have an origin, too.
The effect is "unlocked Alpha (or whatever) slot and slotted a boost (or whatever) into it". The cause for that, in the context of the CoH universe, is that the character is an Incarnate of their origin - a hyper-powered example of that origin, if you will.

This does not have to have anything at all to do with The Well of The Furies.

Prior to issue 19, the Well was assumed to just be the "energy field" that allows super-empowerment to exist, and that opening Pandora's box allowed that "energy field" to encompass the world. With Issue 19 we have instead learned that The Well is some sort of semi-intelligent entity that is able to empower characters to levels that are currently only seen in the likes of Statesman and Lord Recluse.

I could be wrong, but I don't strictly recall if canon says that The Well is the only way to become an Incarnate of your origin, but for the purposes of this discussion, EVERYONE is saying that it shouldn't be.

If "Incarnatedom" is divorced from The Well, then it doesn't matter. Unlocking the Incarnate Slot theoretically means that your character is an "Incarnate of their Origin", even if they never use that label for themselves. Even if the player behind it says "Nope, she does not exemplify the levels of power that her Origin can achieve"... yes, they do. There's nothing mystical about it. Techbot Alpha can have those levels of power because he's just an awesome robot (he's Technology Incarnate). Shadowe can have those powers because he works out how to access more of the energy that surrounds the black hole in his head (he's Science Incarnate).

Saying, IC, that your character is or is not an Incarnate is ultimately meaningless, because at the end of the day simple access to the levels of power that the Incarnate slots have actually defines if the character is an incarnate. But it's a purely OOC label, in this context. IC, I expect most people to only say that they are "An Incarnate" if they have treated Ramiel's arc as an IC event.

I am not forcing anyone to accept my viewpoint. In fact, I couldn't care less if anyone thinks what I've written is a load of tosh. The only thing that actually "matters" is what the characters believe.

And if anyone says that they think I'm somehow trying to "force" their character into being an Incarnate powered by some weird mystical being, then you really didn't read what I wrote.

tl;dr: Incarnate is a label to describe extreme cases of a particular Origin. Nothing more.

There's a suggestion for our US brethren who want to avoid AE and RMT spam: get an EU account!

We also have cookies.

And perhaps pie.

Well, let's see...

Every single argument, on both sides of the divide, can be boiled down to one simple (hah!) factor:

Cause and Effect.

As Roleplayers, we constantly strive for individuality in our toons, and we effectively demand the right to define our own "Cause". The "Effect" is best written as "whatever the game mechanics say happens".

This happens with Origins, which are sufficiently broad that we can usually fudge one of the five "Causes" into the "Effect" of our powers.

The discussion here is essentially "do all characters that take advantage of the Incarnate System have to be empowered by The Well in character?"

The answer to that question, in the interests of the freedom of expression that RPers strive for, has to be a resounding "NO".

I might choose to define my character's (Alpha-slot) Accuracy boost as better aiming, homing spells, faster mutated reactions, whatever I feel like. It does not mean that I am accepting a link to The Well has occured for my character.

Alternatively, a character may quite happily say that they are empowered by The Well, and not have any Incarnate Boosts slotted, in which case that link is doing precisely nothing for that character, IC or OOC, but no one can argue that they're not on the Incarnate path.

The means by which an individual character is (or is not) empowered by The Well is very much up to the individual player. The only thing that I think is required is that every player accepts what the Lore regarding Incarnates now says. This does not mean that every character must believe it, of course, but players need to agree that if someone says "I am an Incarnate", then that someone is receiving some form of empowerment from an as-yet poorly defined intelligence known as The Well of the Furies.

It becomes important as we move forward and characters who have unlocked Incarnatedom become more and more powerful - the levels of power that Incarnates are able to achieve are supposed to exceed those that any non-Incarnate is capable of, in the Paragon Universe. So someone with a toon who has Omega Incarnate powers slotted up to the gills will either have an incredibly good explanation for their utterly non-Incarnate character (and I have to admit, it would have to be a doozy, OOC), or they will admit to being an Incarnate, or they will be an incarnate but the character might not know it.

I am a great believer in allowing people to define their own "Cause", as long as it is plausible in the wider context of the game world, to satisfy the "Effect" they are able to achieve. In all honesty, I think the most broadly acceptable and applicable explanation is that anyone who has unlocked and slotted Incarnate powers is an Incarnate (the game lore says that those powers are not accessible without being one). They may have been manipulated without their knowledge by The Well, they may have stumbled upon some Incarnate-granting device, spell, technique, whatever. But that doesn't mean I think this should be forced on people.

The important thing, to me, is what the individual character believes. If Joe Public S-Hero (L50 Tanker slotted with a Cardiac Alpha boost) thinks he's just extraordinarily fit, who can argue with him? Just because the game rules say that he cannot possibly be that fit unless he is an Incarnate, that does not mean that he understands/accepts/knows this.

To avoid the argument "You're an incarnate", "No, I'm not" that will inevitably crop up, a consensus decision needs to be achieved. Trying not to turn this into an EU issue, but I have the following proposal for the Unionverse at large:

Incarnatedom is undetectable IC.

If that is acceptable (and I think it's quite reasonable), then it falls down to the RP that occurs to find out if a given character "is" an incarnate. This allows the player to make their own decision as to whether their character's power level is actually linked to The Well or not, and whether their character is aware of such a link if it exists.

Updater seems to be causing a bit of pain at the moment.

If you have an up-to-date install of CoH (which I know most of us do) you can bypass the updater in the EU by running the cityofheroes executable from the command prompt with the -project eucoh argument.

(So, a default install in Windows 7 (which is what I'm running on), click Start and in the "search programs and files" box input:

c:\Program Files (x86)\City of Heroes\cityofheroes -project eucoh

)

Okay, but if XP is turned off, that patrol XP you've racked up doesn't do anything, does it? A 50% increase to nothing is still nothing.

I'm getting a clean certificate - here's something I found with a bit of browsing, though - Thawte CA (who issue the secure.ncsoft.com cert) made some changes a few months back:

Linkeh!

Techbot, Jaijot's contention is that this plotline is not to take place in the USA, but somewhere else in the world (presumably a country where English is not the first language, since all of the countries I can think of where it is the first language would suffer basically the same problem as the USA).

As such, the intention is to remove a number of superheroes from the Unionverse Paragon City to undertake vigilante action against members of the government of a country where the heroes probably don't speak the language, and have had to rely on a translation of the original radio interview to even know why they're going there.

Plot hook is non-existent for me. My characters are vested in Paragon City, and trust the heroes of other countries to look out for their own.

Nice to know about people trying to get on the EU servers!

Anyway, the only thing I can think of, off the top of my head, is that you've recently made more than one purchase on the NCStore (within the last couple of days) - it sometimes throws a hissy-fit if you do that.

Oh, the other option is that it's saying "Hey? Someone in the US trying to purchase an EU copy of the game? Say WHAT? Nuh uh."

As said before, try support - they're probably in the best position to help you.

Yeeeeeeeeeeah...

Okay, as a roleplayer, I'm not sure whether to feel offended or to just laugh at the OP's attempts to describe what he thinks roleplaying is like, and how far from the reality of it he is...

Another shout out for seasonal differences to zone appearance - snow on the ground during the winter event, maybe some of the lakes freeze over; little flowers on the grass in spring; brighter sunshine and NPC's moaning about how hot it is in summer; trees turning a different colour in autumn (that's "fall" to our American brethren). It really would make a difference and make the world feel more "real".

However, I would prefer that the older zones got a huge makeover, first.

I love this discussion. Allow me to rephrase Patrol XP in a way that might make it seem a little more pallatable:

"We're introducing an increase to the amount of XP that every mob gives out on defeat. After a character has earned a certain amount of XP at that rate, though, their XP gets nerfed to 66% of the new normal value. The normal rate of XP lasts for a number of XP-bars on the game's UI equal to 1-bar per real day that the character is not logged into the game. Previously accrued full-XP credit will remain if it is not used up, and any character may not have more than 1 level's worth of accrued full-XP credit."

In other words: Patrol XP is not a bonus. NOT having Patrol XP is a nerf to your XP rate.

I really am Shadowe and yes, I'm simultaneously dating Swan, Ms. Liberty and Sister Psyche.

On a serious note regarding the thread: As far as I am aware, The Legend That Is Zombie Man is just a fan of the game who takes the time and effort to compile patch notes and player-recorded details in an easy to read fashion. He does so during Closed Beta testing, as quickly as he can (thanks to a dedicated and selfless team of his fellow Beta Testers who by now know what he wants to know to put in his guides), so that the rest of us have the most complete and player-friendly notes available to us.

In short - a player, but a legend.

I'm with Birdy - OP seems to have some sort of political agenda by the statement that he (the OP) "knows" that this sort of political chicanery can and does happen in real life.

A few factors that I feel are worth pointing out, though:

An insane number of proposed bills pass through every country's government system every year. A relatively small proportion of them result in legislation being passed in the original form. There is almost always some give and take.

Now, I'm not going to suggest that political corruption doesn't exist, since I believe it does. But there is something important that the OP seems to have missed out of the proposed plotline. It requires a little bit of background, so bear with me.

We are abundantly aware that hot-button topics (such as the murder of large numbers of children, to cite a recent example, but there are plenty of others) cause OOC strife in the Unionverse.

(See, it was short background.)

As I see it, the OP has entered into one of those hot-button topics, but has elected to avoid answering a vital question (among others, and for reasons I'm not quite sure of): Is it the OP's intention for this proposed legislation to actually become law?

Other questions that spring immediately to mind are that if an organisation (such a proposal will not have originated in the US government) intends to undertake experimentation without permission, why would they not just go ahead and do it, rather than spending all the money on bribing politicians? And if it was the US government that decided to make it happen, why would they even bother passing it through the legal system? They could just quietly start an experiment without anyone being any the wiser.

Now comes the real question, because this is the thing that will make or break this plot as an idea:

Is it actually a proposal for compulsory medical testing? There's a huge difference between "we will take your child away from you and perform experiments on them whenever we want, you have no right to know what we're doing nor do you have any right to expect your child to be returned" and "if you do not bring your child along to take these tests (we'll let you sit in with them and you can see the results, too), you are breaking the law".

I'm currently crafting my memorised recipes and dropping the results on the market for 5 inf... since when did a Level 40 jump IO (not a set one, just the generic IO) go for 800,000 inf?

Wentworths is a dream to use (no more "has it placed? has it? Oops, no, drag it again... has it placed...").

Ping is elevated to the 220-250 region (where before I would typically see 150-180), and I defy anyone to actually notice an extra 70ms on signal return, but packet loss has been almost completely eliminated.

For my wife's computer, which as seen some utterly AWFUL lag at times (it's an older machine and gets hammered in high-population areas), there are still some punches when she hits somewhere with a lot of people, but they're shorter than before, and (oddly) "cleaner" (previously she would frame-lock for a couple of seconds, then stutter, before rubberbanding - now it just pauses for that same couple of seconds, no stuttering, and doesn't seem to rubberband as much).

An extra 70ms of ping is essentially meaningless until you get into things like full-on attack chaining for optimum DPS, and even then chaining attacks effectively eliminates the difference - so the fight starts and ends 70ms later than it did before? Ow. The pain.

All in all, for me, a service improvement.

My name is Shadowe, and I approve of this move.

Now, the whole server list merge thing has reared its head once more (it's not an ugly head - I'd love to see it!), I see.

I do not believe that free server merges would serve any useful purpose... immediately.

Should a server list merge take place, then it makes sense to me to wait a month, maybe two, three, four, six... because the EU players would suddenly have a shed-load more servers to roll new toons on, and the US players interested in interacting with us EUers would be able to roll new toons on the (currently) EU servers. Once everyone has had a chance to settle down, get to know people on the suddenly broader global base of players, then you allow a short spate of server transfers. If someone was desperate to move earlier than that, they could buy a server transfer.

Anyway, personally, I'd welcome a server list merge in the main part.

Well, nothing to complain about, here. I finish work at 18.00 tomorrow, it takes me 30-45 minutes to get home, I'll sit down, eat dinner, and load up CoH just in time for the servers to come back up, assuming they're on schedule.

I will just say 1pm to 7pm is NOT peak playing time. It is not prime-time. Also, servers are generally available 98.8% of the time. That is an ungodly rate of service. This week they're only going to be up for 96.4% of the time. Assuming I19 goes live next week (*crosses fingers*) with a 5 hour downtime, then from 4th November, through to November 16th, NCSoft will have maintained service for 95.8% of the time.

Really, honestly, that is an utterly ungodly level of service to maintain.

On the basis of those figures, there's probably a target of 95% service. That means that you can lose 3 minutes out of every hour. If there is anyone who plays this game in such a way that for every 4 hour playing session, they begrudge 12 minutes in which they cannot do anything in the game, then they really do need to take a good long hard look at themselves.

Auto power? 2.00 accuracy? Yes, please.

Yep, WAI.

Here's what happened:

First attack, 95% hit chance. Failed. Current Streak allowed: 1. Register miss 1. 1 < 1, miss stands.

Second Attack, 75% hit chance. Failed. Lower hit number adjusts Streak allowed to 3 misses. Register miss 2. 2 < 3, miss stands.

Third Attack, 95% hit chance. Failed. Hit number higher than 75%, so Streak max is still 3. Register miss 3. 3 < 3, miss stands.

If we were to introduce a 4th attack into this, with a hypothetical 75% hit chance that ALSO misses, it would do this:

Fourth attack, 75% chance. Failed. Current hit number equals 75%, so Streak max is 3. Register miss 4. 4 > 3. Activate Streakbreaker.

It is worth noting, perhaps, that if, between attacks 3 and 4, you got hit by something that floored your to hit to 5%, the Fourth attack detail would look like this:

Fourth attack, 5% chance. Failed. Lower hit number adjusts Streak max to 100. Register miss 4. 4 < 100, miss stands.

Another call for Video and Windows updates to be run - those drivers are ancient in computing terms, and Windows XP Service Pack 3 came out in May 2008, so your OS is 2 and a half years old and has probably had none of the security updates since at least then, either.

Also, your video card is fairly feeble in today's terms, but it shouldn't prevent you from actually playing the game.

Looks like my inf and purples are safe (did I mention I knew they would be?) - news from the M&G is that we're getting two freespecs in I19, one on release, one a week later.

So, sorry @Pix, you're not going to be able to nab your husband's inf and enhancements that easily...

Dr Richard Huntington III will attend wearing a smart black suit and a plain tie, though will have added a natty black cane with a silver head in the shape of a swan. He will be unfailingly and scrupulously polite to those he doesn't know, and smilingly cheerful with those he does.

He might be persuaded to dance - once - by Shanna, if she's persistent. Anyone who watches will realise why he's not too enthusiastic about dancing with anyone else.

At the meal, he will eat lightly, except for dessert ("second helpings? don't mind if I do...").

Despite the insistence on no presents, he will be delivering his gift for the happy couple to Toppa sometime over the next couple of days. He will not, under any circumstance, mention that he's getting them anything.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HA!

*wheeeeeeeeze*

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HA!

Okay, now that my manic laugh is out of the way, let me put it this way:

If no freespec is granted within a reasonable timeframe* of Issue 19 going live, I will do the following:

Respec all of my characters using earned respecs and vetspecs, to free up my purple IO's (not many, but a few).

Pool all of my influence across both of my accounts (maybe a billion, certainly at least 750 million).

Email all of the above to the EU player who first posts their global name beneath mine in this thread.

* In this context, a reasonable timeframe is defined as: Within 14 days of Issue 19 being released on the live servers, barring technical issues that the rednames on the forums notify the player-base of within those 14 days. Should NCSoft/Paragon Studios state prior to the release of Issue 19 that a freespec is intended, they are considered to have met their obligation to grant a freespec within a reasonable timeframe, and this offer is rendered null and void. Should NCSoft announce the closure of the game between the time of this post and 14 days after the release of Issue 19, then said pending closure of the game renders this offer null and void.

I'm afraid that I am 100% confident that I will not lose any of my inf or purples.

No freespec with Issue 19... heh. Good one.