UberGuy

I thought this was a lot of fun, despite it being held for a sad reason. It was a great celebration of someone we will miss, even if some only knew him in passing.

As expected, as there were too many to fit in a single instance of the Hive, we had two raids. Since there weren't enough people to start them simultaneously, they were basically back-to-back. The initial Hive completed its raid first, and completed it at a fairly typical pace for Justice Hami raids. I suspect it got the bulk of "regulars", with attendant tricked-out characters and folks so familiar with the modern raid they could do it in their sleep. (Some probably dream about attending it.)

Raid 2 was a bit more sedate in pace, both in forming and in execution. I think because it was more heavily composed of folks who weren't as familiar with the modern raid, who weren't as tricked out (due to long absence, lack of access to their goodies, etc.), or both. In practice, while some stuff went "wrong", the raid really went fine. It just had a bit more chaos.

As a regular at Hami raids, I found the 2nd raid very enjoyable. Don't get me wrong - my personality is such that I love seeing how fast we can plow content to get to the shiny at the end, but that wasn't the point last night. This was about community and communal activity with people we haven't seen in a long time. Taking a bit longer and having to work maybe a little more vigorously to complete the task at hand (while still completing it quite successfully) felt right for more of a bonding experience.

I really want to thank the CoH Community team, and Zwillinger specifically, for taking part in this. Showing up in the form of the Titan was not only a great work-around for not being able to spawn him usefully in the Hive, it was, in my opinion, more effective by a huge amount. Zwil acted hilariously, and at one point channeled Lucas' AFK-ranger behavior, which I thought was fantastically awesome. He also helped with the raids, which probably didn't make that huge of a difference, but was damn cool looking.

I like to think that Lucas would have really enjoyed what we did last night. I hope he got a laugh out of it, wherever he is now.

If your stance is that being a VIP means "they implement my suggestions", then there are not many places that will make you feel you're a VIP. I earnestly wish you luck finding one, but I have very little faith in your chances of success.

It seems to me that your problem is as if you have a VIP membership at a Brazilian steakhouse when you're a vegetarian. As part of your membership you're offered all these neat steak offerings that others have to pay out-of-pocket to get, but you don't like steak.

Don't complain that you don't think the proprietors are running a bad VIP system. They aren't. You just happen to need to go somewhere that actually serves the food you want.

It's great to see all these long-time/old-time players popping in. I'm sure we all wish it was for a different reason, but I do think it's a great tribute.

You know, I figured you were gone too, Arwen, given that I knew Brax was leaving. I poke my nose in the server boards so infrequently, it never occurred to me to look for a departure post. I know from FB that you're still reading this, at least occasionally, so I'll leave here my belated best wishes and sadness at your departure from the game. We didn't hang out a lot, but I enjoyed when we did, appreciate your contributions to Justice's community, and generally thought you are a cool person.

Best of luck wherever you wander to.

Probably the most telling thing in my opinion about how this change has provided increased funding to the game is the rate of non-critical, QoL and/or requested feature changes have been coming in. It seems that the devs have more manpower to work on things that have been on the back burner for ages. Some of this may simply be a different focus by new staff in the drivers' seats, but I suspect it's more than that, because the rate of delivery seems much higher to me - especially when you consider we're also getting new stuff in parallel.

I'm sure I'm hardly a representative player, but I spent a lot of money on CoH when we went to the new model. I bought a bunch of points on my main account to buy things I wanted, and I also bought a bunch of points on my second account to push it to Tier 9. I'm now less likely to buy points again because I have Tier 9 stipends coming in each month, but I do still maintain two VIP accounts, so while "bursty", my big initial spend was nothing but profit relative to my prior outlay on the game.

For a lot of the things they sell at the prices they sell them for, sale prices of 25% off is tempting, but 50% off is often a "no-brainer", meaning I'll buy most of the stuff they sell at half the usual price, assuming I want it at all. (I won't blink much at things with a base price of 400 points or less - those things don't need to be on sale for me to buy them, if I want them.) Ironically, if they put enough stuff on sale for half off at the same time, I would probably have to buy points in order to buy all the things I was interested in.

I was so blown away when Flea mentioned this in game. I used to hang in Con's chat channel in which Lucas was a regular fixture pre-I13 and for a while after. He was a really fun guy that I always enjoyed playing and chatting with. It's hard to wrap my head around him being gone. I am deeply sorry for his family and friends closer than I.

Rest in peace, Lucas. The rest of us didn't get enough time with you.

Very interesting thread.

Setting aside the racism themes for a moment, I always found something interesting about Lovecraft's horror. It was apparent to me that he considered the concept of great age to hold a quality of horror. It's frequent in his works to directly tie ancientness with negative adjectives, implying that things that are old are intrinsically terrible.

It might be that for truly epic time scales, hundreds of thousands or millions of years, he meant for this to convey a sort of alien horror - gulfs of time so large might imply that anything so old is automatically alien to mankind. However, I'm not sure this is really what he was going for, as he presented it on much smaller time scales as well. For example, I remember him once describing houses so old they had thick layers of shingles on the roofs from generations of re-roofing, and this was written in a way that suggested to me that this great age made this place awful, even though it represented very approachable human time scales.

On the topic of his racism, I always believed he was intensely racist long before I read any analysis of his works. I enjoyed what he wrote, but not all the messages therein.

And I didn't always find scary at all things he seemed to think were the pinnacle of horror, even though I liked how he wrote about them.

Among the characters who benefited from multi-summons of pets, I fondly recall being able to get as many as three Dark Servants out on my Dark/Dark Defender. Admittedly, though, that was one of the only awesome things about a Dark Miasma in the early days. Old DM was nothing like it is now - it is vastly more effective now. (Many of its powers actually changed for the better in I4, and it was the significant beneficiary of buffs aimed squarely at making it functional in Arena PvP - something I consider deeply ironic, since it has never been good for PvP, but the buffs made it excellent in PvE.)

I still own a Vectrex. It's been a few years since I turned it on, but as of relatively recently, it still worked.

Heh. Amusingly, I was motivated to find this thread thanks to Quatermain telling me head heard about the self-outing ... in IRC chat for a completely different (and long-gone) game.

Good to see you Tic/BaBs. (Yes, I knew )

Oh, man, we are going to have an invasion of DP/MC Blasters in trench coats.

Seriously, though, these sound quite nice.