Soul Train

They already tanked poster 'ratings' because people were using them to engage in forum PvP.

What's left? Hide the names, make us all clones of that Anon guy?

With the build I have on Dame Demolition, there's not much I won't take on. And there are ways to manage aggro (seeker drones make great 'fishing lures' to pull spawns) so that you don't get in too deep.

Even after they nerfed PGT, I saw little to no change in my strategy. The nice part about MM Bots is, unlike Battletech, you can alpha strike and NOT worry about your mechs overheating.

Plus if something is about to die, Detonate it and resummon.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I actually ran a LRSF while high on ecstasy and mushrooms.

[/ QUOTE ]
One of my friends told me he had watched Star Trek - The Voyage Home while on mushrooms. When they traveled back in time, during the sequence with the odd sounds and the floating heads, he started screaming and the other people there had to talk him down.

Drugs are bad, m'kay?

[/ QUOTE ]

Watched Jumanji with a roomate who was flying. When the monkeys started coming out of the cabinets he was a basket case for an hour. Other than that the movie wasn't that interesting.

[/ QUOTE ]

In college I discovered that one of my friends had never seen the movie of Pink Floyd: the Wall.

So me and my circle of geek friends, cruel and sick as we were, found a copy on laserdisk (this was pre-DVD, you see), got this guy a couple tabs of blotter acid... and then acted out the movie like it was Rocky Horror while his mind was in the blender.

... talking him down afterward took a LOOOONG time.

So far I've had to AFk for....

... dog vomit...

... cockroaches in the sink (actually they're junebugs, but they still freak everyone out)...

... "I want a massage!"... for those, I usually just log out, heh...

... tornado/storm sirens...

... and once, when my foster son was 'taken for questioning' and his girlfriend freaked out and came by the house, completely hysterical.

Oo! *snagged*


... altho' I already had the V4 and V4.2 stuffs... the rest is cool stuff.

Indeed you do. And not just research for a thesis.

MARKET research often calls for getting permission where applicable, otherwise your data collection is crippled.

I once had a job working for Buena Vista (Disney's media distribution company, back in the '80's). They hired me to count people attending specific movie screenings, and comparing them to the tickets sold. In order to do so, I had to get the cooperation of the movie theatre... but if I wasn't able to? they told me to buy a ticket, watch the movie like any other patron, and press the counter clicker for every person I saw walk in... and they'd do without the ticket sales data cos there was no legal way of getting it.

Was I telling my friends to watch the movie? Was I bugging people who did watch it? No. That wasn't the point, to influence the people I was measuring.

ANY kind of research is rendered invalid when the researcher becomes an active participant, without a 'control group' that they leave strictly alone to do their thing. This man set out to prove something in an MMO that he could have proven on a street corner.

It's been true for ages. Act like an [censored], and get spit upon, if not worse.

The fact that it's virtual ups the ante a bit, but with no control group, no 'nice' behavior to contrast, his conclusions are moot.

I would love to see Loyola's administrative take on this, especially in light of the legal issues brought up by this so-called 'study'.

Is it too much to ask, that you EXTEND the time you keep this in closed beta (and also open beta) so that the bugs that get trapped get addressed before it goes Live?

cos there was a LOT of stuff in I14 that got flagged by the testers and yet the issue was rushed to market; then we had a devs-vs-players meltdown that lasted for well over two months and scared off a LOT of people, all because of MA exploits getting press / blog / game reviewer coverage.

You folks cannot afford to do that again, so soon after. So please, keep the emphasis on TESTING and not "check out the new shiny early".

And it is awesome.

...shoot, if that was the thesis, I could have wrote it for him.

... how much did he get paid, again?

Actually... the Drones put out a perception bonus... why couldn't they put out an anti-TP field as well? One that extends far enough out that TP Foe would just burn endurance if triggered another 5-10 yards beyond the range of the drone's zap-gun?

I mean, come on, they put one in the D and they've been set up in the jail cells on certain maps... how friggin' hard would it be?

I know, technical solution to a societal problem. back on topic... yeah, college prof or not, the guy's a tool.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Positron - Single male seeks female for long, involved, seemingly endless date that will take us to several distant locales. Let me introduce you to a multitude of enem... er... interesting people. A date with me will seem to last forever. I promise!

[/ QUOTE ]

Y'know, Steelclaw, leave it to you to enlighten me as to just how much like his TF that my Positron story actually IS.

Because not unlike his Task Force, in my story he finds himself on a long, involved, not-quite-seemingly-endless date (or several), that takes him to several distant locales, introduces him to a multitude of enem... err, interesting people, and seems to last forever.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

[/ QUOTE ]

Big diff between his TF and your story... the story is actually FUN to waste several nights on.

I would think the blues could be taken by a team of end-drain-resistant types (elec armor, anyone?), can't recall what they're vulnerable to right offhand.

The yellows are quite weak against melee. Fighting them at range will get you facedown, but a bunch of scrappers/brutes hitting them up close will make them go poppity.

The combination of blue and yellow would lock the mish out to pretty much elec brutes and stalkers.

I may, however, be mistaken on the details or the implementation... which I've only presented in a general sense. I'll leave it up to the players/AE designers to find out the answer as an exercise.

*facepalm*

Yanno... that's the one thing I'm NOT looking forward to... the power effects that get put on other people being recolored in ways that just offend one's sense of aesthetics.

I do hope they put in a setting to 'disable color effects' on specific characters, so the client just goes with the defaults from them.

[ QUOTE ]
I think it will have become obvious looking at the last few pictures Ive submitted on DA, I have been working on my coloring skills.

My Latest Adventure in color! This took a little while. but im pretty proud of it, really working on my color matching, saturation and temperature to turn the figure.

Just a side thought, does anyone know of a place where i can find line art to practice on? i know there are ton's of artist's on DA but most of them only have a small file size. I'd love to find some bigger stuff to work on. preferably nice clean professional inks.

[/ QUOTE ]

Russ Platt has always been willing to have people color his work, and will send hi-rez inks on request.

Of course, his stuff tends to be NSFW, so... *cough* Yeah.

Yes, by gaming the market itself ... which is something else I don't consider 'fun' probably because I'm not an economist and at 42 years old it's something I don't have the patience to learn.

All I see are the effects, which are WAY inflated prices, both on recipes and the salvage needed to create them. I've had some success with some of the lesser-desired sets, but at this point I've pretty much given up with it.

What ticks me off are the people who say "well you're doing it wrong" rather than have an iota of understanding of my position here.

I don't MIND people farming, or playing the market, or PL'ing their friends, or whatnot.

But when what THEY do changes what I can do, yeah, it's off-putting, and then the "eff off, I pay $15 a month, I'll play how I want" answer just makes it worse.

I suppose it's a bit much to expect the majority of this community to care an iota about anything other than themselves in this day and age.... but this IS a 'superhero' game after all, and even the redsiders get altruistic on occasion.

Which is why I'm not playing at the moment, and haven't been for the past month. I still love the game, it's the players I can't stand to be around for more than five minutes.

And I don't suppose I16 or any future installment will change that, so I suppose I should just give up gaming altogether.


You may now commence with the "lol cry moar" posts.

The game was not made harder, no.

However... that still does not address the fact that people who do NOT 'farm' (for inf or for drops, if not both) are effectively locked out of the market because their return rate is much much less.

It's not a matter of 'working for it more'. It's a matter of 'working' period. Because that's what farming maps feels like to me - repetitious drudgery, in the company of strangers who all too often have the conversational capacity of a pet rock. Guess what? I get enough of that at my day job.

However... if I want to get anything 'cool' or 'spiffy', then I have to punch a clock in this game.

This is not what I consider 'fun' and frankly, it bothers me that the game mechanics and 'economy' not only support this progression, but actively promote it.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Underwater zone.

Since we can now swim underwater (the pool in Grandville showed this was possible).

[/ QUOTE ]

Befix't.

[/ QUOTE ]

*blink blink* what pool? Damnit, Recluse built a pool and he didn't tell ME? That bum! I'll hand him his ... helmet!!

Wow.

I may have to arrange some funding to slide this person's way.

Underwater zone.

Since we can now swim underwater (the Cim caves showed this to be possible).

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Just to make a point about the Golf/Baseball analogy; the problem as I see it with the current situation (though less now that the Mito-farms have been nixed) is that the 'pay' for playing 'Baseball' is much, much greater than the 'pay' for playing 'Golf'. This has a multipul effect of concentrating the playerbase in 'Baseball' (making it harder (to a degree) for Golfers to find other Golfers), encoraging people who dont like 'Baseball' to play it (because they do like to get payed), and making the poeple who love 'Golf', and simply will not play 'Baseball' to feel that they are getting the short end of the stick.

[/ QUOTE ]

Exactly.

And, here's the market impact.

Yes, more 'stuff' is being dropped. However, availability of Item A is not what determines Item A's price.

The DEMAND for Item A is what determines price, and with people raking in inf from their farm of choice, they can easily afford to pay a lot more for Item A than the folks who find farming boring.

This means that people SELLING their Item A's will set the price higher, knowing full well some schmuck who "wants it NAO" will pay that price. This nudges the aggregate price point for Item A upwards. Another person gets an Item A, decides to sell it cos they can 'make a mint selling these things' and they price it even HIGHER... and again, it's snapped up by someone swimming in inf and short on patience.

Meanwhile, back at the non-farm (would that be a ranch? I have no idea)... those people who are also wanting an Item A, but aren't raking in the inf because they're not farming, begin to lament that they can't afford an Item A because the price is ridiculously overinflated AND because they're soloing or running lower difficulty, Item A never drops for them... nor do they see a lot of tickets with which to buy an Item A from the AE vendor (if it's even available.)

It's not a supply/demand economy, it's a Gold Rush economy, and if you're not one of the people bringing in gold by the bucketload, you're priced out.

[/ QUOTE ]

You do realize you dont have to farm to get those drops right?

I mean seriously everyone is acting like they have no choice but to farm to earn the money to buy someone elses drops. Why not earn the drop for yourself? Or something better that you can then sell, and NO it doesnt require farming to do it.

Keep in mind the MA does provide you the ability to choose from many different missions and arcs. And all those will earn you tickets, which is what the farmers are using to get their random drops that you are complaining you cant afford to buy from them. So run MA missions, you dont have to farm the same one over and over, but what is the difference between a kill all from a radio in PI and a kill all from the MA?

Then find out what you want, what level ranges it drops in, and find the best level range to request it in for the best odds and roll away like the rest of us. Granted im a SG of 1, but in my base i have 3 storage tables that are all about 2/3 full mostly from just random rolls of peices i am holding until i have the sets or most of what i want to slot them or i might need someday for some toon or whatever. I figure it cost me what 100 prestige a month to have a table thats like 15 minutes of work a month to pay my rent and be my own supply for most of what i want.

Its alot easier to decide to pay 15-20 million for one peice of a set, when you know you already have 4-5 other peices that you didnt spend money on at all.

Now i will admit that running a farm over and over the same mission is boring. But ultimately a farm is invoking the same mechanic as any other mission, get flashies, kill all, rescue schmuck etc. What i think is funny is that people complain they get a mission in the MA that is an obvious farm, yet will go run the dreck mission and complain that the MA is all farms. Well even if you run it only once dreck was a mission to farm for sure at one time. So pick one mission MAs and run them once, earn some tickets, roll the dice see what happens. With the MA its possible for even a solo player to earn enough tickets to take a good random roll within like and hour. Its like the old days of the katie tfs and you get a random recipie instead of merits. But now you dont even need a team if you dont want one.

I swear people are complaining just on the principle of "its a farm mission" well wake up before the MA the farm missions were those you were running out in the real city zones. If farming is broken for MA it will be so again.

[/ QUOTE ]

Let me reiterate this:

...they're soloing or running lower difficulty, Item A never drops for them...

When the AE is the easiest source for A) money and/or B) saleable goods, and when large teams on 'farmable' maps pull in the most of both, then the people who prefer NOT to run the same map with the same mob over and over get edged out... they make less inf, their drops are random and a lot fewer and further in between.

The choice is "Farm" or "Get Lucky at the Drop Lottery". And lately the lottery odds have been trash.

But, oh yeah, you don't have to use the Invention system or the Market, the AE is optional, you can level up and build a powerful character 'normally'... let's not all forget that...
</sarcasm>

I have no issue with farmING.

It's the farmERS that put me off my feed.

Think about that for a moment.

... oooh. That's a good way to start things off.

One of the last truly objective journalists. He said that while everyone had their opinions and biases, "we knew how to put all that aside to do our jobs."

[ QUOTE ]
...you'd care if it was your checking account that somebody pilfered damn near 3 grand from.

This thread is now about the new Dodge Challenger...

AWWWWWWWE YEEAAAAAAAAH!

[/ QUOTE ]

Dodge Challenger?

Dude.

I'd think you'd be more enthused about the new custom-designed-for-cops Carbon E7 police car.

AWWWWWW YEEEAA...


... wait, I'm not a cop, I'm a sportbiker.... ah who cares it's still cool!! AWWWWWWW YEEEEAAAAAHHHH!!!!

Very nice artwork, there.