Shadowe

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freak farms from lvl 1 to 50

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I doubt Freaks scale that low. If they want to try to farm Freak maps full of level 20s at level 1, then good luck to them.

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I take it you have't done hollows arcs or visited the sewers or Perez in a long time then - certainly down to lvl 5.

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Have to say that I've never seen a Freakshow in Perez or the Hollows... maybe that's just me.

And here's some old data (Issue 7) about Freak spawn levels.

<ul type="square"> Faction Name Min Max

Freakshow Bile 40 44
Freakshow Blahpunk 25 34
Freakshow Champion Smasher 32 54
Freakshow Champion Swiper 32 54
Freakshow Chief Smasher 22 26
Freakshow Chief Swiper 22 26
Freakshow Clamor 20 25
Freakshow Dreck 45 54
Freakshow Enforcer Smasher 22 32
Freakshow Enforcer Swiper 22 32
Freakshow Freak Buckshot 20 26
Freakshow Freak Chopper 20 26
Freakshow Freak Gunner 20 26
Freakshow Freak Slammer 20 26
Freakshow Juicer Chief 20 45
Freakshow Juicer Freak 27 54
Freakshow Mad Freak Buckshot 21 33
Freakshow Mad Freak Chopper 21 33
Freakshow Mad Freak Gunner 21 33
Freakshow Mad Freak Slammer 21 33
Freakshow Metal Smasher 28 54
Freakshow Metal Swiper 28 54
Freakshow Noise Tanks 25 39
Freakshow Shadow Freak 30 39
Freakshow Shadow Juicer 30 39
Freakshow Shadow Tank Freak 30 39
Freakshow Sonic Bomb 1 54
Freakshow Stunner Chief 20 45
Freakshow Stunner Freak 27 54
Freakshow Tank Smasher 20 54
Freakshow Tank Swiper 20 54[/list]

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Leave him - he's harmless

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Hey... sounds to me like GG's a bit sweet on him.

Khorak, old chap! Your prayers are answered!

While I'm pretty certain we're not meant to be using the forum to draw attention to things that have already been raised, I have to agree.

A while ago I lost my base (crashed out to desktop while inside it, and when I got back into the game it was gone), and I know how painful it is to lose them like this. It is something that they can fix, but I don't think it's particularly easy. The only thing I can suggest is patience... and perhaps emailing GR (ghostraptor AT ncsoft DOT com) and asking him, nicely, to chase support.

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Over-exaggeration much? Plus it's not like your main is easy to talk to on a male character, as he's normally busy with women. There are plenty of women at GG who aren't 'horny lesbian alien catgirls' or whatever, Zortel, Cerridwyn, Penumbral Pulsar, Arachidamia, to name 4, well, 3 including one of my characters off the top of my head.

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Well, maybe if he stopped talking primarily to the girls and inviting them on to his lap, he might have other things to discuss?

Oh, and thanks for perpetuating the false stereotype that GG is made up of nothing but catgirls and lesbians btw. Really encourages people to visit GG that does, yeah.

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I'm declining to get drawn into this as a) this is neither the time nor the place and b) I can feel myself spoiling for an argument, and I really don't want one, least of all with either of you, Z or FFM.

If either or both of you (or anyone else, for that matter) would care to discuss the point, I will be happy to oblige once I am in a more reasonable state of mind.

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RPing at Galaxy Girl when the choice of characters to RP with extended beyond "horny lesbians" (catgirls or otherwise).


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Probably in response to Dicky the Gigolo.

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Hehehe. Okay, so Shad evens out the testosterone quotient somewhat... except due to a smidgeon of boredom with the statue recently, I've not been taking him along.

I miss...

The sense of wonder at seeing different mobs for the first time.

The sheer terror of my first Frostfire mish.

Hopping onto the forum and being overwhelmed by the number of posts I had to read.

RPing at Galaxy Girl when the choice of characters to RP with extended beyond "horny lesbians" (catgirls or otherwise).

RPing my character being in danger because someone other than me decided to see what would happen.

Being asked to join non-farming teams when I'm flitting through PI.

Best case scenario: Nothing will happen. It will swear at you and tell you that you can't add a trial account to a retail account.

Worst case scenario: You will be trial-account limited for 14 days, which will be free, but you won't be able to play any characters over L13, or get any new characters above that level.

The Best Case is more likely.

Samantha Jane Huntington was buried up to her armpits in the bowels of Huntington Manor's central communications array. She had a pair of willing assistants in the form of Marie, one of the trainee Knives of Artemis that Richard had taken in, and Avatar Two-point-One, who was functioning like a robotic drone.

Two-hundred million dollars. That was the ultimate upshot of Edward's foolhardy and pointless attack on the manor. He'd managed to ruin years of work, and it was up to Sam to fix it all. She'd started by ordering fabrication of a huge number of EMP-hardened control circuits, the first batch of which were due for delivery in a few hours. She'd already worked out how to ensure such an attack would be useless in the future, but it was a brute force approach when she vastly prefered elegance. A hard-wired autonomous comms array, placed outside the bunker that housed Helena herself, massively redundant systems, all wrapped up in a defensive shell that was programmed for automatic shielding using an independant heuristic processor. The shields were a simplified version of Richard's proprietory Singularity Containment Units - if they could prevent the escape of the X-ray output of an artificial black hole, they should be able to protect their contents from an EMP. They ran to something like fifty million dollars each, and she had three of them. She cursed again at the expense. It wasn't as if she had an infinite supply of money, but the need to protect the manor was an overiding priority. If Richard had been here, he could have smoothed things for her, managed the problem, dealt with all the supply firms and probably shaved five percent off the total costs, but Sam didn't have that luxury. She was under pressure to get this done, because there were some disturbing outputs coming from Helena's core processors. Which probably helped explain why Two-point-One seemed more like a zombie than normal.

Leaning out of the comms array, she grabbed a screwdriver, trying to ignore the motionless and prone bodies of Avatars Two and Four, which were lying nearby. Four was an experimental unit, designed for independent operation without a direct link to Helena, and had possessed a distinct personality, though data was frequently shared, and she was now a useless hunk of ruined electronics. It was such a waste! Sure, they'd be able to salvage the chassis, but the person inside? She simply didn't know.

Turning to face Marie and Two-point-One, now that she had managed to restore partial comms - though it was about as primitive as she could conceive, piggy-backing the phone line for a single Broadband access point - she grimaced. "Okay, that's stage one. Helena can at least get access to the internet. Right, next job is to freeze processing from the secondary unit, and prepare a data-transfer... which we'll do by hand. Shouldn't take more than, oh, six or seven hours to do that."

Marie groaned, and Sam gave her a sympathetic smile. "You're in the big leagues, now, sugar. Welcome to life with the Huntingtons. Not as glamorous as it seems, huh?"

Helena Huntington was blind.

Secure in her underground containment chamber, designed to withstand a nuclear blast, the fifty-foot tall computer core was still alive and awake after the EMP, but she had lost her external communication arrays. She had no idea if the core memory dump she had initialised had been successful - without a verification, she calculated there was a 52.8% probability that it had failed. Only one of her avatars was still functional - Mark Two-point-One - as the infiltration unit spent most of her time in the basement alongside the main unit that was actually her brain. Unfortunately for her, the egress hatches were electronic, and it would take Two-point-One an estimated five hours and thirteen minutes to break the door down.

Patience was an Artificial Intelligence's watchword, though, and the avatar was currently engaged in that mind-numbing task. There was an urgency that she had never felt before. She couldn't contact Master Richard or Mistress Samantha, and she was close to panic. All she could perceive was darkness and, oddly for a computer that was housed underground, she seemed to be afraid of the dark.

* * * * *

Samantha jolted as the computer link in her office flickered for a moment, and the screen blanked. An instant later, it returned, but the telltale symbol of a solid connection to Huntington Manor was gone.

"Helena? Report, please."

No response.

"Helena Huntington, override control Sierra-Hotel-Three-Two, authorisation Lima-Mike-Whisky-Two-Eight-Four-Kappa."

No response.

Sam glanced at her wristwatch, twisting the dial with frantic haste, but nothing happened.

Grabbing her jacket, she ran for the door, sending a quick telepathic message to her brother, wherever he was... and stopped dead as she saw the television screen in the outer office. Her receptionist looked at Sam in horror.

"M-Miss Huntington? Have you seen th-" her voice cut off as Sam waved frantically at her to be silent.

"If Helena's hurt, I'm going to kill him. Damned if I don't. I will kill him."

Fair warning, Edward, she thought, her mind flashing through the city, seeking, prying. If you've killed Helena, your life won't be worth living.

"Secondary control unit initialising." The clear, familiar voice, lacking the perky sprightliness of the original, rang through the room, and a sigh of relief broke from Sam's lips.

"Secondary Control unit activated. System check... testing... testing... Central core inaccessible. Rerouting control. Downloading personality profile."

There was a long, drawn-out pause, and Sam found that she was holding her breath.

"Good afternoon, Mistress Samantha. Where am I?"

Let me make something clear, I think, mrxxxx. Most people play with "Not Looking" as their search option. It's a rarity to see anything other than that and the red-out of auto-decline. If you don't believe me, go and take a quick look - most players will have a grey circle with a line through it. That's "Not Looking".

Because this is the default setting, a number of players - most people on this board, as far as I can tell - put an additional comment in their search message box, regarding how they feel about certain types of missions or invites. This will be their default feelings about those sorts of things, and it is common courtesy to pay attention to what it says, given that they've gone to the trouble of letting you know, regardless of which type of "Looking for" they have up, how they feel about requests.

If someone has said "No blinds", they are not rejecting teams. It just means that they want a little bit of a heads-up about the fact that they'll be getting an invite, most of the time - teleporters are a prime example, because a team invite in the middle of a zone-crossing is potentially lethal. Or me pointing out on my second account that I will not answer requests sent to it, because I'm not actually playing that account at the time.

I don't want blind invites from farmers. I don't want blind-fill-requests. Quite often I don't want to team with anyone outside my friends list. This does not mean that I do not want to team, however. So I leave myself open to invites - people who know me, know that they can invite me. Everyone else is asked to send me a message, first. I'm not putting barriers in the way - I'm asking for a little consideration of my feelings about being invited to a team. And for the price of a two second "Are you interested in a team?", you'll get a rapid response from me saying yes or no. Courtesy for courtesy. If you send me a blind invite, I will automatically reject it. Courtesy for courtesy.

Well, I find it moderately interesting that GR's job title has changed this year.

Territory Franchise Coordinator sounds fancy, doesn't it?

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Of course you can say that it is mine and their problem to begin with and that might be true. However, too many players have this problem. I dare say that most of the players have this problem. So I am most definitely not the only one. Therefore the ways of inviting we are forced to use now do not work well enough. Hence the frustration of the OP who is one of the few daring to say a thing about it.

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Yes, because there haven't been numerous suggestions made about changes we'd like to see to the teaming search function over the last year, have there?

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Sorry to come off the grumpy, there, but that last sentence is, in my opinion, a load of twaddle. As I recall, a large section of the QoL thread that GR started a few months back became about proposed changes to the teaming system and search function. There were literally dozens of people here on the forums expressing their opinions about it, and proposing ideas, using the best bits from other games, and with a few unique ideas thrown in. To hear all of those ideas and posters belittled as "the few" seems, to me, quite insulting to them.

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tantamount...since without your consent it couldn't work.

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Surely you mean paramount? Tantamount roughly means "equivalent to". Paramount means "of the utmost".

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*nods enthusiastically* Team Squishy, as we named ourselves when we were at 7 players (Controller, 4 Defenders, 2 Blasters), were on FINE form once we snagged Ultimate Stone to tank for us.

The highlight of the TF for me was undoubtedly facing off against Ghost Widow and Scirroco at the same time, and then doing the same with Black Scorpion and Cap'n Mako. There was one tiny moment of doubt in the first fight when half the team suddenly went RED after a particularly vicious AoE, but the healing was all good, and everyone was back up to full in an instant, and after that there was actually zero doubt in my mind that we would be able to take down the AVs, even in pairs. It may not have been blindingly fast, but it was fast enough, and they really didn't stand a chance.

Another amusing moment was after the scrap with Arbiter Sands at the end of the first mission, when someone (I think it was White Warlock, but my memory's pathetic) said "Wait, he was an AV?" That quote sums it up for me.

In-game email doesn't work sending to global names, only local names. I'd recommend sending them a /tell to their global pointing out an email to their main character.

I don't mind defeat alls, to be honest. Sure, when I'm Ouroborosing a story arc on my badge-hunter, I'll compare the number of defalls in the arc to pick the one with the least, but I don't particularly mind them, as such. What does get my goat is, as several other people have said, the "Defeat All, with added conditions" missions. Okay, not so bad when the added conditions are glowie clicks, especially if it's in context (say... Go into the council base, nick the experimental whatsit doodah, and wipe the base off the face of the Earth so that no one knows it's missing), but WHAT THE HELL is the point of a "Rescue the kidnapped whosits" under a "Defeat all enemies in base"? Every time I see one of those, I groan. There is NO reason for them. None whatsoever.

What I would like to see for those missions is a new piece of tech, actually. Primary and Secondary objectives, with the option of completing the mission without having fulfilled the secondary objectives.

So, the mission is "Rescue the kidnapped models", with a secondary objective "Defeat all of the fashion victims" (so that none of the fashion victims who were outside the mission know it was you that did it). Once you have rescued all of the models, you are given a dialogue box asking if you wish to complete the mission or if you would like to complete the secondary objective. Completion of the secondary objective will grant a further (not full) bonus amount of XP/Inf/Prestige.

Further tech that could be brought in would be branching story arcs, which would then adjust future missions in the arc depending on completed secondary objectives earlier on in the arc.

My main's search comment is "No blinds, fills, farms or PLing, please send a tell with details" - he's currently on Search-hide because I'm so sick of the pointless tells from people who have ignored that (Oh, and he's typically flagged as Not Looking when he's not hidden, just like most people are). My secondary character has "Dual-boxing. This toon will NOT answer tells", though perhaps that should say 'invites' - she's on my second account and I make a point of not answering any messages that get sent to her, because when she's online I have precisely NO interest in reaching across to my second PC and clicking on anything I don't have to. If someone can't be bothered to take the two seconds it takes to read search comments, then I have no interest in teaming with them. That may be arrogant and selfish of me, but... well, it's my money and I can play the game how I like, as long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else's enjoyment. On the very rare times when I'm playing that character on my main PC, I don't bother to change the search comment, because I'm usually roleplaying, though I will generally reply to /tells, as politely as the /tell itself comes in, usually with a smidgeon of annoyance that the player hasn't bothered to read the comment.

Last night is a prime example of this, actually:

Other Player: [Tell] farm?
Me: [Tell] read?
Other Player: [Tell] Sorry, I'm Spanish, my English is not so good.
Me: [Tell] No problem. In that case, thank you for asking, but not right now. Have fun!

I know there was - it was retracted, later, once it had been clarified. To completely clear this up, though, let's take a look at my main account on Union.

12 Normal character slots. All used.
2 Bonus free slots. 1 Used. 1 Floating
3 for 3+ Years subscribed. 0 Used. 3 Floating
0 from purchases. 0 Used. 0 Floating

I got my 39 month Vet reward on 3 December.

I have 4 spare slots available to me, which I can apply to any server. I'm going to end up putting them on Union, certainly. But they're still floating slots. I have only applied one of the slots I've been given for free. There is no way to explain the continued existence of those slots if they are time-limited.

Oh, I know how it came about - there was a lot of speculation, because the wording was originally ambiguous. In fact, it was so bad that a Redname did confirm that they would drop away if they weren't used quickly. However, a stink was kicked up about this - those players without chronic altitis or who didn't want the hassle of creating placeholder characters, mostly - that it was verified with the Devs, who confirmed that once the slots are on the account, they can't be removed, and a definitive statement was issued to clarify.

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The vet spec free slots are only on a limited time period before they vanish.

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Utterly and categorically untrue! Ghostraptor has confirmed it, Lighthouse has confirmed it. Once a character slot is on your account NC have no way of knowing how it got there (purchase, bonus per year, or the initial two freebies that were granted for logging on within a particular period of time), and there is no way for them to be removed once they are on your account.

That's exactly what I expect.

It counts subscribed time, not paid for time, just as vet rewards do. You will always get the bonus slots on the same day that you get your 12, 24, 36, 48, 60 etc... Vet Reward. But it is not actually a Vet Reward itself, it just uses the same timing. I mentioned this in another thread - Vet Rewards are a bonus available to your characters. Character slots are a bonus available to your Account. Otherwise, each of your characters would have a "12 - Bonus Character slot. Click to gain a bonus character slot applied to your account" option in the Veteran badge window and everyone with a 12 month account would have 24 characters.

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You get a free new char slot each Year, not each badge. When they began with the program they gave us 2 free ones, which we had to use as quickly as possible or they would be forfeit. Also they gave at the time 1 for each year.

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Time to clear up a few misconceptions.

Firstly, the bonus character slots applied to your account are not a Vet Reward. They are a gift from NCSoft to you, the player, for being a longstanding subscriber. You get one every full year you have subscribed to the game. These were retroactively applied to everyone's accounts when extra character slots were added to the game.

Secondly, the two bonus slots were never time limited for use. The statement was somewhat ambiguous, granted, but it was cleared up by Ghostraptor at one point, and it read something like this:

For a limited time only, we are granting all players with an active retail account who log into CoX two free extra character slots, which may be applied to any server the account has access to.

The plain English translation of this is that, during a limited window of opportunity, if you logged into CoX, you were automatically granted two bonus character slots. Once those slots were on your account, they could not be removed.

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I find the security guards getting beat up highly offensive and demand nc to change every npc in the tutorial into pink fluffy bunnys hugging each other.

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Excuse me...

Mr. Deathbot 9000 here disagrees with you, would you like to take your point up against him or change your opinion.

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DEATHBOT 9000 WOULD RATHER AVOID INTERNET DRAMA.

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The selection screen may tell you want zone you currently occupy but some zones have multiple day jobs but a progress bar of the current day job would be nice but can't see it happening anytime soon.

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Given the way day job time is calculated, it's impossible, in the current itteration of the feature. It takes the time the character has been logged out, and then checks that against the location when you log in - if this location is a day-job location, it applies time to that day job. This is done at the time you zone into the game, not before, and so the character select screen simply doesn't know if you were in a day job location when you logged out.

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You see, most of the objections could be thrown out of the window by setting the level range at 35+, rather than 40+.

But there are enough 35+ zones out there, and LOTS of other reasons not to do this at all.

I like the sniper idea, though.