SingStar

Wow, does STF take that long?
RSF's been done well under that!

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Elitists? Naaaaah, not around here mate.

You're completely and utterly wrong, get off my forums.

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With or without smiley, OP point proven!

Well put A!
If you invite people you don't know, don't expect them all to be experts, but possible future experts. If you can't handle that, then do not invite unknown people even if they're lvl 50.

I've stayed away from PUGs for quite some time, but lately I've started playing some random ITFs and even heroside stuff. Even with a couple of failed ITFs I've still enjoyed it. Yes, I was a bit put off by people not caring to get/collect purple insps for the last fight and not listening even when I brought in a second account to fill up their trays, but even without the 25 merits I still enjoyed it and hope they all learned something from it.

Yes, I too have made fun of people that doesn't quite know the game, but that's what private chat is for, advise to the new ppl and random LMAO's to other team mates to keep the spirit up without trashing the poor dude we're mentoring.

I do understand people blowing a fuse when they end up in an epic TF fight never finishing due to people not listening, repeating the same team whipe over and over again because some people just never ever learn or listens, not to mention repeated blind invites, ignoring the tells you send them, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with new/old players or language barriers. Still, better just ignore that go berserk.

As for the forum... stay away during weekends!
It's better now, with Bridger gone, and the BFA (Bridger fanboy association, also known as the for..(cencored) a bit quieter)
Now, if we could just get animated hair, even GG might cool down a bit.

I think people in general have a VERY wrong idea about random rolls and statistics in general. Let me give you one example:

Here in Sweden we have a game that's called TRISS. It's supposedly giving a "win" on every 4th ticket made.

So, does that mean you win at least once if you buy 4 tickets? No of course not. There's a looooot of tickets and pure coincidense then states:

on every single ticket you buy there's a 25% chance of winning. It doesn't matter if you buy 200 tickets. It's still only 25% chance of winning on each ticket.

If you do buy 200 tickets you should statistically get pretty close to winning on 25% of the tickets, but it will not be every 4th ticket. You may win on 10 tickets in a row, and you might, theroetically, not win anything even if you buy 200 tickets.

So even if it's statistically smart to do random rolls, I'd personally still not take the "chance" of ending up with 20 pacing of the shiii...smurfer...

Now, the randomness doesn't seem to be random at all though. Doing a lot of LRSFs back in the days, I noticed two things:
1. Doing it often on same alts usually generated a pacing of the shii...
2. When I hadn't done a SF for ages on an alt I always seemed to end up with something really nice like numina, stealth recipe etc.

If it's just simple stupid, jolly good luck or intended code, well, I have no idea, but it sure seemed like it happened waaayyy too often to be pure coincidense.

12 minutes til 6 and I'm not sure I'll make it, but I'll try to be there on sunday at least.
If there's people on this evening I probably won't be on for long anyway. Been a baaaaad week and will be a baaad weekend full of work!

Edit: trying to get on, but updater just keeps trying to connect without success. Internet working fine, so guiessing something's wrong server side.

The reason is, there's not really a superteambuild for villains, unlike the fire/rad trollers.

That said, it's still fun to play, say 8 ice corrs, raining nukes on every single mob due to multiple speedboost.

I think someone US side tried fire/dark, thinking it would be the best stacking combo, but really, any fairly balanced mixed 8 man team villain side is fun.

A few others did try 8 man bot MM team. Botjam killed it faster than my farts kills canary's.

Too busy with fire/rad hero team and/or too bored to play the game for a run at this, but wish ya'll good luck. Redside is more fun!

...and as usual, no official comment?'
Never is, so can't be bothered to actually check!

The VEAT was sort of a disappointment because we where hoping for something similar to heroes, but what we got was something completely different.

What makes them good imho?
1. It's arachnos. It's fun to be able to play the actual baaa-aad guys with a nice storyline for them if you bother with it.
2. They are totally oh-sooh team oriented with team buffs and nice AoE/Cone attacks. Yes, once higher level you can solo well on them too, but for me this was a winning point. Get 8 crabs together and let the slaughter commence.

The addition of dual builds also makes us able to have two very, very different builds, so I've kept my crab and working a liiittle bit on my widow every now and then. They ARE good killers and the extra storyline and lvl 50 pretty-ok'ness makes them worth the effort.

What did disappoint me was the lack of inherent greatness (kheldian fly/tp) since the added "leadership" is [censored], you still need stamina. The team buffs wasn't too impressive either, so compared to the kheldians that have several wow-factors it felt very MEEEEEEH...

I still wouldn't mind a nictus villain, but it was still nice to see actual villain-only content since we're not treated like an important part otherwise.

I personally thing anything that rewards team play should be encouraged GREATLY, so I really liked the idea of team-buffing VEATs (and the non-crashing nuke was sort of fun) but in the end I still think they slapped it on to the game just to get it out of the way instead of taking the opportunity to do something truly spectacular. I mean, honestly, everything was already in the game, graphics (except babe soldiers/hunk widows), attacks etc.

I'm still hoping and waiting for that really good, villain-only "It's aliiive" high level content stuff and every issue without it, no matter how much co-op stuff etc they put in is likely to disappoint me and bore me fast enough to make people whine and tell me to quit the game "if you're so annoyed about it".

Now get to work devs, prove me wrong!

If anything the game should change to even MORE promote teaming. Yes, it's nice to be able to solo, but at times this game was getting plain silly with about 100 people online not teaming at all.

For me, the whole idea of an MMO is to play with others and that's reflected in most of my characters and their builds. The success of villain corrs also reflect it imho, being pretty ok solo, but nearly necessary for serious team play (AVs etc).

Also, I've never found it impossible to solo, even on my empath/ice defender that from the start focused on the empath job. Yes it took AGES to complete even a simple mission, but it wasn't hard. Tankers? You're kidding, right? My axe/inv tanker was my first alt, a cool solo alt I still keep for nostalgic reasons even if it's still about lvl 30.

With 2 builds for every alt and the possibility to respec once higher level as well, I really don't see the problem. As I said, ANY incentive to make people team even more is a god given prezzie imho. The last thing we need is more vigilante "heroes" working in the dark!

We've been through this plenty of times:

1. game shops do have the right to put whatever they want on the shelves, so why would they put a five year old game there when there's no marketting to back it? The (cough) other MMOs do have that backing.
2. When (cough, cough) another superhero soon makes it to the stores, game mags etc... Who would buy a five year old MMO that not many players know about anymore? Ok, so I almost bought Star Wars Galaxies instead of CoH years ago, but...

In any case, not having at least a Mac box is sad, and for the love of the game, it's sad to see it handled poorly. I was hoping for some changes when NC took it all over, but I guess my expectations of NC was more right than my hopes.

They just keep chuuurning out a multitude of non-marketted semi-good, could-be-good-if-handled-properly, games. The failure of AA and TR was truly sad and the fact they went belly-up so fast just shows there doesn't seem to be any long term planning. Shoot from the hip and hope for a hit, yeah, that usually works... erhm...

Ok, now I'm annoyed for real!
I just noticed my storm MMs 'Gale' roots me the same way when I'm out of range. Old bug returning?

No one is left behind, we're evil redside-turned-blue, but we're still better than US marines, ROOOHAAAh!

Mr. B will catch up due to amazing xp when he falls behind, so shouldn't be a problem really, but I guess we'll bring a bru..tanker for ITF after all!

Enjoy India!

...and OMG I do enjoy the death room!

Indeed!

I'm more interested in I15 really... If it's gonna go live for the 5 year anniversary it's... well....

...I might have a happy birthday this year! (12 april btw)

My limited skills might provide a sort-of shivan/snowbeast wannabee! With some luck and help from the Nemesis art department...

...it is, after all, a Nemesis plot!

I've never been bothered by debt, by the lack of debt does bother me. I'm glad not to hear PUGs whine about it, but not caring about dying is bad for the game. In any 8 man team there's usually one or more rez'ers, some people have the ability to rez themselves (long lasting mayhem temp included) and dying just becomes a 3 second slowdown.

Sure, grinding for a year to get to lvl 30 was rather boring when I first started playing (I really read all the story arcs etc) and in many ways I have no problem with the speed levelling because I immensely enjoy playing my lvl 50s.

Once lvl 50 though, there's not much to do and there's absolutely no penalty for dying. having lower level alts usually now means there's a lot of patrol xp to shew off, so no worries there either and when it's gone, in-mission debt is hardly noticed. It's actually hard to get the debt badges now.

With the addition of new powersets and the ability to buy new character slots it does make sense and I guess it's a reward for sticking to the game, but there's another downside:

Sure, we don't get many new players, but the ones we get hardly have time to get to know the game before they're high lvl. I've meet several 50s that basically don't know anything about the game and seen some really wonky builds. So... it's a good laugh, but I also notice people treating them very badly because they lack "skill" (knowledge about the game, that is, because skill has very little to do with it).

To go back to the original subject: No matter how you twist and turn it, being able to solo a relentless mission, spawned for four people with simple SOs, not eating any insps - and we're not talking skills in any sort of way here - is a problem imho.

I have no great solution for it really. Giving us yet more diff levels with more bosses/liuts isn't really a fix, it just bumps up the grind attraction, and that would just increase market prices even more.

The same goes for the ghosting problem. Any alt with a travel power can usually run to the mission objective and finish it without bothering about the rest of the map, except the horrible defeat-all ones.

For that, there IS a fix: Diversify the missions, adventure-style (not sure I'd like myself to be honest): get key for door x, click computer y, then defeat mr z etc. That's already in the game and we're still expecting the multiple choise missions (very quiet about them lately???).

For those that do want a challenge:
Efficiency Expert Pither, villain-side...
Bump the diff up, treat all mishs as kill-alls...
No running indoors, kids!

...yes.... That was a joke!

Good idea ML!
Think the south of Sweden has had it's share of smow for this year though!

If those posts where a stab at me, I guess you didn't actually read my post....
....sigh, what a surprise! ,)

Defiant loading missions, near-crash experience pretty common lately, yup!

Though it was just some missions that was worse than others. Market has been acting up too lately... took 10 minutes last time, surprising me I wasn't kicked from the server while waiting with a completely frozen computer.

Still haven't seen anything in this thread that makes the game actually harder, just more boring, and annoying by making yourself crappier. That's not making the game harder, it's making yourself more useless. There's a difference.

Personally I don't mind the easiness anymore, I like total mayhem, fast inf and good drops. It's the total lack of content and me knowing every little quirk in the game not ever getting surprised and not even bothering about 20 team whipes because it doesn't matter the slightest (No, I would never have 20 team whipes actually, but you get the point...)

With the current nem staff bug, targetting bug etc (and a bad case of hang over today) I find it hard to motivate myself to level characters. I still get a laugh from occational ITFs and I'm even beginning to enjoy PUG ITFs because they do provide some small elements of surprises, but I sure hope there's some biiig, huuge surprises in I15.

Yes, it's a d0000m post. We're all gonna diiiiieee if there's no real content in I15. Period!

Basically I think the community managers need to kick in and arrange a few good bashes, like the sirens invasion for pvp to take off.

If they did it on a regular basis, people would soon be expecting it and basically arrange it themselves if the CMs doesn't show up. I can't say I was much of a Bridger fan, but he did take part of the actual game, even of 'stone' will always win in my little world!

What annoys me greatly is that I used to be able to use print screen when logging on, character selection screen and when I'm at the tailor, to get really good screenshots of my alts.

..and, boo, hoooh, can't do that anymore...

Seems the tartgetting has reverted back to weird state as well. Used to target nearest enemy first, then "move up" the ladder. Now I'm constantly getting targets as far away as possible when I hit 'Tab'. In general it seems the "boxes" have changed too, because I'm finding it really hard to "mouse-target" enemies.

I just noticed NONE of my slow powers work on shivans either, but that may well be as it's supposed to be, but they also seem to be on some mini-speedboost because they're moving faster than old AMd fire imps. Not that I care, they still go down easy!

Ok, I'm grumpy, but it's killing the game fast for me now. I log on, do a mission get annoyed, log off. It amazes me how often old bugs seem to pop back in to the game.

Thing is, what causes the problem with the nem staff is exacly how it's usually used: Target something, get back/down. Hit activate power, jump up, everyone cheers 'Great pull". If it's now a sniper power, give us the range of it!

well, still... getting that first badge with the help of a 50 (hero side) would speed things up. Come to think of it, it would be nice with a lvl 10 or something. It woudl really be hillarious to see the map sawrming with AMd/SBd pets running wild...

Also, I always find it amuzing to see what people can come up with, so no matter how pointless this might be, it did give me the first laugh of the day. Thanks man!

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not many CoH/V servers have 4000 plus on line at once

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Animated hair are purely cosmetic thingie, so I bet they're calculated mostly clientside. CoX is 90% bassed on instances, so, unless we're talking about Hamidon or RWZ, we need to animate 8 haircuts top. Of course, there might be problems with say, biggier cossie competitions and such, but well, no one expects ANY engine work well on older hardwartre in situations like that.

And, well, NWN servers are usually run like mini-MMOs, persistence, dozens of simultaneous players (up to 64 IIRC), GMs, etc. In fact, again, IIRC, you could clusterize/federate servers to make it even more like MMO.

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Would you deny the lovely carnies a good hair blow? Ok, no point keeping my storm alt then!