ShadowsBetween

And it looks like the mods have deleted the thread, rather than allow people to continue pointing out what a horrible idea it is.

The email is a bad example of "communication." I've been signed up for CoH newsletters since forever, and I don't think I've *ever* gotten any of them. Changing, toggling, and otherwise fiddling with the settings makes no difference. Neither did changing to a different address from a totally different provider.

Part of the reason common salvage does crazy every once in a while is simple supply and demand. The salvage is still needed for IOs that high level characters want to craft, but it doesn't drop from high level content. And what are lots of people doing right now? Right. High level content. The supply will naturally bias towards whatever drops at the level most people are playing. So, if they add a new round of powerset proliferation, or lots of new low-level missions, you can expect to see a surge in low level drops.

In the meantime, you have a couple simple options. First, run low level content and get the salvage from drops. You can either play an alt, or use Ouroboros. Second, use AE tickets and buy common salvage rolls. Third, place bids at what you consider a reasonable price, and go do something else. This works especially well if you do it before you log off for the night. (Or even the weekend.) In fact, if you place a bid for a stack or two of the "problem" salvage, you might come back to find that you even have extra.

And if the problem salvage is uncommon or rare, even better. You can spend AE tickets to buy exactly the salvage you want at those levels. If the salvage is *really* in demand, buy a few stacks of it with tickets and sell it yourself. You'll make a huge profit (in some cases whether you want to or not, if the item is really scarce) and other people get a chance to get the item "right now!"

So, CoH was the first story ever to have the idea of an evil mirror universe... Oh, wait, it wasn't. Since the term "Mirror Universe" comes from that old Star Trek episode, which is decades old. And I have a "best of Sci-Fi" book with a story about someone hopping across dimensions and ending up in a "Nazi America" which is even older than the Star Trek episode.

I don't know anything about the pen and paper version of that game. But given that it's been around forever, I'd be surprised if there had never been a book about that as a setting or campaign idea. At best, Going Rogue might have inspired them to put it online sooner. I think it's a little much to claim that they stole the entire concept from here.

If the game throws a crippling death penalty at a player, the player doesn't necessarily learn *anything* from being defeated, other than that it is frustrating and perhaps they'd rather spend their time doing something else. (And that's assuming that they died in a situation where there's anything to learn, as opposed to being killed because the RNG went a bit evil or because the server allowed an NPC to beat on them for an extra twenty seconds during a lag spike.)

And if they're doing something that simply annoys you but has no direct effect on you (such as the example of players in another game throwing themselves onto swords as a quick way back to town) then honestly, what business is it of yours? In that specific example, I'd argue that the flawed game mechanic is the needlessly long walk back to town. If players are doing it a lot, the devs should seriously consider adding a Town Portal scroll, or some other item that allows people to simply zap back to town once in a while. And in fantasy MMOs specifically, you're usually slogging back to town with a full backpack, which means that any additional combat is just extra frustration on top of the tedium of trudging. Anything they drop is either that much "wasted" vendor trash. Or if they drop something half decent, you'll have to spend even more time sorting through your pack for another item to throw out. And that's assuming you're walking back through a relatively "safe" area. Add extra annoyance points if you have to walk through anywhere that the critters are a genuine threat, especially if finishing the instance means you're out of potions and/or encumbered.

Adding a harsh "Game Over" to defeats does *not* make people play better. Not unless it also includes some tools to show them what they did wrong, and how to overcome it. XP loss, de-leveling, and item loss are game mechanics that exist for the sole purpose of wasting the player's time, based on some absurd idea that they'll play the game longer because they have to spend X amount of time replacing whatever was taken. In my opinion, it's a badly conceived idea. As evidence, I present the fact that very few newer games do that to the player, and none that I know of could be called "heavily populated." (Just EVE, and I'd argue that EVE is consuming most of the player population that actually enjoys that kind of thing.)

I've just been making the "heroic" villain ATs as villains, and then sideswitching them. Yes, I know that the badges they tend to accumulate say that they're villains, but none of that ever happened as far as I'm concerned. And honestly, the side switching is a lot less irritating to me than Goldside at this point. (The broken ambushes and Destroyers mainly, although it also really annoys me that it's so easy to outlevel story contacts or otherwise completely break story arcs Goldside.)

Or it could be that whoever is writing that little sidestory sort of forgot that Numina is supposed to be a ghost.

So, they're calling it that in the sense that it's a "prime nexus" sort of thing?

As long as we're wishing for ponies, I'd like a version of the Taunt powers with *NO* sound effect. Honestly, I don't care for any of them. Not that it's a big deal in my case, as I don't play Tankers at all and generally ignore Taunt powers on any other characters.

Realistically? Probably never. PVP isn't a development priority for this game. At the moment all indications are that only a tiny fraction of the total paying customers interact with PVP at all. When the PVP population was much larger, it was *still* small enough that when the devs announced the planned PVP changes, many of the more outspoken PVP players said "The entire PVP playerbase will quit if you do this." And the devs more or less answered "We'll risk it."

Since only a tiny part of the population uses PVP, it's almost certainly pretty difficult to get funding to do anything else with it. (Suit: "So, we can spend X amount of money, and add PVP features that less than 5% of the playerbase might possibly use. Or we can spend X money on this other feature, which 30% of the playerbase might actually use. We're going with this other feature.")

The fact is that the Cathedral of Pain was finally re-added to the game, but with any hint of PVP stripped out. At this point, I think it would be highly unlikely that the devs would add a second PVP version of the CoP, and probably even *less* likely that they would mess around with the current version to make it back into a PvP event.

That won't matter. The problem is that parts of their database were apparently stolen. Whether your individual client "remembers" your password is irrelevant. The system you're logging into has your account information stored, and your password is in there somewhere. When you type a password on your end, the system needs to check it against something to verify that it's actually correct. And it was that stored information that may have been compromised.

Out of curiosity, do you have any idea which episode of Sliders that might be? I looked over the list of episodes, and didn't see any obvious "it's this one!" points in the plot summaries. (So whatever the main plot was, the creepy conversions apparently weren't it.)

That's probably at least partly because the base system has a learning curve that's nearly vertical. And up until fairly recently, bases had prestige costs so high that only the most intensely dedicated player could hope to have a solo base. Even with the cost reductions, the prestige cost for more than a basic base (entry portal, maybe a medbay, a teleporter or two, and some storage racks) is still a lot even for a small SG. Toss in the fact that the base editor is somewhere between difficult and insanely difficult to use, and I'd be willing to bet that the datamining shows that many players never use bases at all.

I'd bet there at least a small portion of the playerbase that has never even *entered* a base, or has only run through one because the team leader insisted that it would actually work as a shortcut. I usually don't do this, because it's surprising how often "my base is a good shortcut" actually means "the teleporters are way in the back, and probably arranged in an order that only makes sense to me. Maybe."

As far as the inverted Y axis: I'm not sure, but I think it's just "natural" for some people, in exactly the same way that it's totally unnatural for you. I know that I *need* the camera inverted to play a game. I've tried playing games that don't have the option to invert it. I spend the first ten minutes of *every* play session fighting with the camera. After that, I "sort of" get used to it, but if I stop playing for any length of time (even just to make a sandwich) I'll be right back to fighting with the camera when I start again. As a result, I usually don't play games that don't allow y-axis flipping for the camera.


*Edit*
(And by flipping, I mean that pushing the mouse forward/away from me causes the camera to tilt down. In most games, mouse forward = camera up, thus I tend to think of the way I prefer it as "inverted," even if it is one of the few games where that is the default behavior.)

As far as the Free Camera option, that good to know. I'd seen the option, but didn't have any idea what it did. I might experiment with it later.

Do be aware though, that some people have hit an issue with Story Arcs like the Patron ones. If you side switch with an active story arc, it still counts against the total that a character is allowed to have open at once. So, if you do the first few Patron missions, and then switch back, it'll permanently reduce your Major Story Arc allowance by one. Some people have had trouble with this when they go to do the Alpha slot story arc, since the game won't allow them to take the mission, but offers no explanation for why.