TonyV

Ultimately, you have to decide as an individual whether or not being VIP or being premium is the best way to go.

Personally, I'm a VIP because of two reasons. The first one is the price point is actually very worthwhile when you subscribe during the holiday stea-- er, I mean, deal. Subscribing that way, the average monthly cost is just over $10, which is exceptional in my opinion.

The second one, and I know a bunch of people won't feel this way but oh well, I do, is showing loyalty to the game, its developers, and its publisher. I think they do a great job--much moreso than most game companies. I want them to keep doing so for a long, long time, and I know that to do so, they have to have a continuous stream of income.

I know this sounds corny, but I'd feel a bit guilty about enjoying the game as much as I do without shelling out something for it. That's how I roll. I'm also the guy who shelled out for shareware back in the day, even for (especially for) software that you could use indefinitely for "free" without nag screens and such. Even paying the bare minimum subscription fee I can get away with by taking advantage of the holiday deal, I still spend probably way more than my fair share in the Paragon Market. Not because I'm such an über-powergamer (if you saw me play, you'd know), but because I want to say, "Hey, this is cool, nice job!" And more selfishly, "Keep making more stuff!"

Now don't get me wrong, I don't feel like I throw money foolishly at the game. I do take advantage of any discounts I can get (like the aforementioned holiday discount, and sales on the market). On the other hand, I also spend what some might consider a crazy amount on hosting the Titan Network sites, which I'm doing semi-selfishly for the purpose of learning and hanging out with cool smart people, and some of which is offset by very cool people making donations.

At any rate, I can't imagine canceling my VIP subscription anytime soon. Yeah, the Incarnate stuff is nice, as well as the store stipend and Paragon Tokens and the bonus access to stuff I'd otherwise have to pay for. I really do feel that is reason enough to subscribe. If you don't, fair enough. But this is also a seven-plus-year hobby I've invested in that I like quite a bit, and that counts for a lot, too.

Here's an even dozen more to keep it rolling...

77. Have Ms. Liberty start dressing up as him and saying things in his voice, like, "No! I tell you no! I won't have you bringing some young guy in for supper!"

78. Have him show back up, acting like everything is normal... only to reveal that he's actually a monster made of black smoke.

79. When they spread his ashes, it accidentally creates a massive dust storm that destroys Talos Island.

80. When Halloween rolls back around, have one of the Statesman Masks be the real Statesman Mask. If you trade it in, you get as many damn costume slots as you want.

81. Turn him into a robot that uses the tag line, "Thank you for your cooperation" as he arrests villains. (I'd buy THAT for a dollar!)

82. Wait, States...who? (It turns out that "Statesman" was just a figment of Positron's imagination the whole time, never even real.)

83. Use Ouroboros to go back in time and kill his father. Now we don't have to worry about it.

84. What shall we do with a deceased Statesman? Put him in the scuppers with a hose-pipe on him.

85. Use him to make commercials.

86. Give him to Grant, Kari, and Tory. (Sorry Statesman fans, but Buster is still the headliner.)

87. Put him in a glass box on display in City Hall.

88. Have him all blue-and-glowy outlined with a voiceover telling certain Defenders, "Use the force... field."

The thing about Christopher Reeve is that even as he was completely debilitated, he was still doing awesomely noble stuff, supporting stem cell and spinal regeneration research. Hell, even as a completely paralyzed quadriplegic, he was still acting, with guest spots on The Practice and Smallville. Whenever I hear about some self-important actor twit complaining about how hard their job is or how much fame sucks, I want to shake them, point them at Christopher Reeve doing his thing from a wheelchair with zero mobility on his own, and say, "Nuh uh. You don't get to complain."

They can "reboot" the movies, get shiny pretty boys to put on tights, but Christopher Reeve will always be Superman to me. I'd rather watch The Quest for Peace than that horror that was released a few years ago any day. Not that I hate Brandon Routh, mind you; he did a great job in Chuck and seems like a nice guy. But Superman he ain't. Christopher Reeve, though, Superman he is.

Put me in the "me likey" column.

Great advice!

Hmm... Well, if no one else is staying a few days extra, I can do touristy stuff on my own, but I figure I might as well ask, any locals want to do anything? (Keeping in mind that I'm a pretty stereotypical geek, so by "anything," I'm referring to normal- to geeky- type stuff. Not much for the club scene, for example.)

Last time I was there, I did want to go up Coit Tower and walk down Lombard street and some of the stairs around there, but never got a chance to, and to go out to Alcatraz and take the tour. I did do a bay tour (which was AWESOME), but I didn't actually go to the island itself. I did make it out to Pier 39. I didn't have the mini-doughnuts, but I think I remember seeing the place you're talking about. I did have some hella tasty clam chowder in a bread bowl and bought a San Francisco 49ers shirt. (Which REALLY pissed off some of my Saints fan buddies when I wore it the day SF beat Atlanta's division rivals New Orleans in the playoffs back in January, but I digress...) I think there's a tour of Giants stadium offered, but I don't know if they'll be doing tours the week I'm there. I'm just a little tempted (about this much: ->||<-) to stay through May 4 and take the tour of the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

At some point, I need to also pop back out to the Apple store. It's supposedly the only place you can buy licensed Apple merchandise like t-shirts, hats, etc. I accidentally left some people off my list in getting souvenirs last time I was there.

Anyway, like I said, I'm thinking of making a vacation of it. If anybody else wants to do stuff, let me know. There are also some interesting things around Palo Alto and Mountain View that I saw and did. I would highly recommend doing the tour of the Computer History Museum if you have time. Also, some people might be a little bored by it, but going out to NASA Ames Discovery Center and seeing the moon rock was cool.

So since I'll be flying in from Atlanta, and I LOVE California--especially the bay area--I was wondering, is anyone coming in from out of town and will be staying longer than just Friday to Sunday? I'm considering either staying from April 23 (Monday) through April 29 (Sunday), or from April 27 (Friday) through May 3 (Thursday) or 4 (Friday).

I'm asking because if anyone is going to be there longer, and I'll be by myself, I was wondering if anyone might want to hang out and do some touristy type stuff. We wouldn't have to be together 24x7 or anything, but maybe pop up to San Francisco a couple of days, do dinner a couple of nights, that kind of thing.

I dreamed up a game mechanic the other day. It might be totally undoable, but I'll throw it out there anyway. I was thinking about how most of these big battles come down to one or two people doing the lion's share of the work while everyone else pitches in a little bit, but in reality, feel kind of unneeded. So here's what I came up with.

Each archetype should have some kind of "anti-archetype." For example, an anti-tanker has abilities and powers that pick on the weaknesses of a tanker; maybe something like a high regeneration rate and a killer high damage debuff. A anti-defender wouldn't have a lot of hit points (wouldn't need 'em), but would have things like, I dunno, slows, mild mezzes, etc. An anti-controller would have high levels of status protection. Anti-stalkers would have high perception. You get the idea.

Then in a mission, if there are, say, a tanker, a couple of scrappers, a corruptor, and a defender, the final battle would be an AV, an anti-tanker, a couple of anti-scrappers, an anti-corruptor, and an anti-defender. Now is where it gets interesting.

The tanker can only con the anti-tanker. Not the anti-scrappers, anti-defender, anti-corruptor, or the AV. Same with the other players. In other words, each teammate will have to fight their own personal nemesis. Once someone defeats their anti-archetype, they can now randomly con someone else's. Say the corruptor finishes off his anti-corruptor first. Now, he cons one of the anti-scrappers. Together, they make short work of it. Now, the corruptor cons the anti-tanker, and one of the scrappers cons the anti-defender.

Meanwhile while all of this is going on, the AV is untargetable and wreaking havoc on everyone. Maybe not directly through damage, but through debuffs, ally heals, etc. Once all of the anti-archetypes are defeated, the AV is connable by everyone and can be defeated to finish off the mission (or trial, or task force, or whatever).

Everyone one the team has a purpose. While it's not strictly necessary for everyone to participate in the battle, everyone can without everything just mindlessly being mowed down by the damage dealers. Of course, the bad thing is that it would likely require an overhaul of the whole enemy-or-ally conning system so that targets can dynamically be assigned.

But at least in how I envisioned it, it would be one hellova epic battle, and something clever other than just adding more hit points and/or more damage to an AV.

It does bring an interesting new dimension to the microtransaction store. Back when we were all just paying a flat $15 per month (with some one-off perk packs now and then that were all permanent), it wasn't a big deal just to tell someone, "Oh well, sorry about that, it's just the kind of bad luck that happens sometimes." It's not like if you got a purple drop that was rolled back you actually paid specifically for that drop and now it's lost.

In this case, though, it's altogether possible that someone did pay specifically for something that, after the rollback, was simply lost. "Eaten up" in the system, so to speak. I'd like to think that they have some system in place so that if there's a rollback (as there has been sometimes particularly after an unexpectedly buggy issue release), it would refund any Paragon Store items that were claimed during the rollback period. Realistically speaking, I don't know that there is.

For what it's worth, there's a project...

In the works...

Truth of the matter is that barring something weird happening, we're not going to be updating Suckerpunch's planner any more. But that's not to say that we'll never have an online planner.

Ah... Here it is!

I was working on some Titan Network stuff. Strangely enough, I wasn't affected at all...

Look at the bright side...

...



Hope CS gives you another

FINALLY! Okay Zwillinger, he's gone, change that setting back.

On a more serious note, two short comments.

First, this is why I get so frustrated when I hear the lame excuse, "...Because they'll provide official support!" as a rationale for paying for software for which there is a comparable and oftentimes even better open source equivalent. I suggested PHPBB back when they were looking at new software, and that was tossed out as one of the reasons not to use it. There are very few times when I haven't been able to post a message on an open source software's forums and get the support and help I need to fix whatever problems I'm having. Does this mean that PHPBB ultimately was a better answer? Maybe, maybe not, there may have been other good reasons not to use it. But lack of commercial support sure wasn't a good reason to count it out.

Second, I can tell you from firsthand experience that "just upgrade!" is usually not a viable solution. Upgrading was precisely why, for example, the Titan Network Faces site was down for over four months. (But having a site that was exploitable simply wasn't an option.) Also, keep in mind that this isn't out-of-the-box vBulletin. It's got a customized skin and it's got hooks into the back-end user database. There are probably other customizations as well.

Third (bonus comment), if you're mad, please make sure you're mad at the right people. Although the community reps can escalate issues like this, ultimately, it's the NCsoft techies in Austin that will have to fix it. I suspect that Paragon Studios has very little ability to do anything about this problem, and I'd be surprised if Zwillinger hasn't had some frustrated conversations with them about it already.

Grrr... Sorry if you saw a strange post from Belle, she was logged in on the forums when I made it. Anyway, as I said on the wrong account...

I do suggest saving up for next December. Once a year in that time frame, for just a few weeks, you can sign up for their bonus plan. Basically, this is how it works.

- First, you sign up for it. If you have time left on your existing plan (for example, you signed up for an annual plan in March), you do not pay anything at the time you do so.
- Once your existing time plan expires (for example, March of next year), you will be charged for another year of subscription. However, because you're on the bonus plan, you get an extra two month added.
- The following year, rinse and repeat if you want.

So for example, say you sign up for the annual plan today (March 9). Then in December they offer the bonus time plan:

- Between now and December, you're on your annual plan that you signed up.
- Let's say you sign up for the bonus time plan on December 9 to make things easy. You still have three months left on the existing plan you paid for, so it doesn't cost you anything. (And incidentally, you can change your mind any time between when you sign up for the bonus time and March 9. Cancel the plan, and you don't get charged, but of course, you don't get a chance to get the bonus time until the following December.)
- On March 9, your plan is up for renewal. Instead of your normal annual plan, you'll get charged for the bonus time plan. It's the same annual subscription fee, but now, instead of expiring the following March 9, it will expire the following May 9, giving you an extra two months.
- If you keep going, the following December, you sign up for the bonus time plan again. Now you won't be billed again until May 9, you'll pay the normal annual fee, but your time will be good through July 9.

If you work out the math, you end up paying just over $10 per month for VIP time, which is a steal. The only down side is that you have to pay it in lump sums every 14 months. Still, for a discount that significant, it's definitely worth saving up for.

If I recall correctly, the moon in game actually travels from south to north in the sky, which of course, is completely physically inaccurate. During the Halloween, the game clock is locked to midnight, so the moon doesn't move. (And it's always night.) The fixed moon in Dark Astoria, though, is not due to the game clock being locked. The game clock is running; I think it's probably just fixed to not move across the sky.