UberGuy

Wait, I don't remember there ever not being debt caps in the live game. I do remember when they were quite a bit higher, though.

Did I forget some early change?

Bear in mind, I never had a character at any debt cap except ones already at 50 who I very occasionally capped out on failed group activities like trying to fight through Yellow Dawns at old-school Hamidon raids. (And yes, I had a Blaster.) So my awareness of the caps was fairly theoretical.

ROFL.

Some of it has to do with a particular catgirl who has been in one of the global channels I've lived in for ages now, but I always read the Incarnate Salvage "Arcane Cantrip" as "Arcane Catnip".

Not that I actually misread it. That's how I say it out loud on Skype, etc., when saying it to other people. I think the best part is that everyone has always known what I meant.

I am surprised it took that long for him to show up in the list. And no, not because I concur, but I have seen that said often in game.

Apparently not at all levels, though. Now, we weren't shown all the data, but I'd be willing to bet that there are other ATs have variations in popularity with level. However, it was made clear that Blaster popularity decayed noticeably enough with higher level that the devs called it out. Since all characters gain levels, if the Blaster AT was the only one that showed appreciable abandonment as you went up levels, that still seems like an issue worth solving, even if the number of Blasters across all levels rated highly.

As Garent said, I think you can appeal to both. For example, I think the "glass cannon" aspect of Blasters is something a lot of players (including myself) did enjoy about them. I wanted changes to preserve that feeling, but I wanted them, say, to be made out sturdier glass. It's a weak analogy, but I think the changes to buff their regen were a good way to make them more survivable than they were, but still be fragile and subject to abrupt failure.

Dude. What Garent said.

"Fail to stop everyone," meaning everyone was not stopped. Which means one or more prisoners escaped. Letting twenty prisoners escape is certainly a subset of letting some prisoners escape, but it's not what I meant, and I am flummoxed that you concluded I meant what you insist I must have meant.

I would describe letting twenty prisoners escape as "failing the trial at the prisoner escape phase," or something like that.

There have been a number of cases where GMs were revealed to just sort of be chilling at old-school Justice Hami raids, often invisible. I do suspect it had to do with griefing, which was obviously far more achievable with the old raid.

I know we've had devs and community peeps hang out at post-I9 raids on occasion (especially when the I9 version was new) but I don't know about GMs.

In the context of this thread, the obvious answer is because this...

... explicitly does not apply to the OP because he's been gone for eight issues.

Well, I don't know what to tell you. Not to be rude, but I think it's ridiculously obvious.

I am not so sure. I think it's likely that players of other games heard about #SaveCoH it because it's made front-page news on some computer gaming sites. That's pretty good compared to a fairly obvious alternative - that those sites carried news the game was closing down and that was it.

I'm not sure how relevant it is in practice, but having #SaveCoH show up as a trending topic on Twitter, at least for a while, was a fairly big deal in web 2.0 terms. Whether or not one thinks being a blip on the radar in the web 2.0 universe is actually a big deal in terms of the wider wordl varies a lot, in my experience.

Without the same degree of tragedy, it is like that. No matter how much we love this game, we're never going to rate with headlines about civil war, worldwide economic crisis, or even Hollywood drama. There aren't enough people interested, and there's not enough reason to get them to be. We have to keep perspective about what is reasonable for us to achieve even if we are wildly successful. Even astronomical levels of success for getting the word out for CoH's plight is still not likely to appear on the main page of a world news site or the front page of a news paper.

That doesn't mean it's not worth doing. It just means we need perspective about what even "wild success" is likely to mean in practice.

How often does a story about sales at, say Cisco, hit the mainstream news? Compare that to Apple. How many companies who basically only run websites have been in the mainstream news in the past, oh, ten years other than Facebook? How often do you read an article about Bing or Yahoo, as opposed to Google?

Apple, Google, and Facebook all turn up in the news regularly because they have staggering user bases and are brand names immediately recognized world wide. (Well, actually Facebook and Google both struggle in some parts of the world, but then probably so do things like CNN and Fox. I see headlines about Apple, Google and Facebook all the time on the BBC World News, though.)

There's a chicken and egg thing here, where if you make it far enough, you pick up inertia from networking effects that can keep you in the collective consciousness of at least certain regions or cultures, and being in the collective conscious makes things going on with you "news worthy".

Almost no other game has achieved that besides WoW. I've never seen an mainstream news spot about subscriber counts for any other game but WoW, ever. I am not sure I've ever seen a television advertisement for any other MMO, either.

Who said anything about it failing? I consider it a weak showing if one gets out. Solid play there gets people a badge and/or an extra Astral Merit.

I regularly end up in leagues that practically leap for joy if no prisoners escape. I'm always appalled at that - I consider no escape BAFs standard and ones where one gets away sub-par. (I realize sometimes it just happens, but I don't think it should be normal.)

No. I said it showed skill. Really, can you have a conversation without twisting the conversation?

I know more than a couple of people who have played this game for eight years and never exhibited any these abilities. Some of them even like to tell other players how to play the game, which just kills me.

I'm not sure why you think that's relevant. You seem to be trying to make the stretch that because there may be nothing here that requires great training or tremendous innate ability that there's no skill involved at all. I don't think that's reasonable. Compared to golf, sure, the dynamic range of performance based on "skill" with the game is probably very compressed, but I don't think it means there's effectively no dynamic range at all. It's contrary to my own experience with other players.

Some other critters got taunt too, but I think most of them were new critters, such as the black knights in Night Ward. To be honest, I think some of the Incarnate Tsoo are supposed to be taunting us, but it doesn't seem to work. (They play the animation and we play the "hit" effect, but nothing else happens.)

It feels a bit like I'm forgetting some noticed AI change since I16, but I agree, even if that's true, it's not that noticeable in the scheme of things, or I'd probably remember it.

Hah! Did one of them actually say something like that? If so, that's awesome.

That's correct. The game was never updated to support the NVidia GPU-based PhysX drivers.

Edit: Particle effects like leaves, bullet casing and so forth have always worked without PhysX as far as I know. I have never had working PhysX support (I never owned a card) and these have been part of my game for ages. My possibly incorrect understanding was that having a PhysX card simply offloaded the costly calculations for these to that subsystem.

I'll freely admit in advance to it being something of a nit-pick, but they have gotten slightly harder, usually in indirect ways involving their AI, spawn rules or via fixing missing/broken powers.

As an example, Rikti Mentalists and Mezmerists did not always have Fear protection. They silently gained it at some point, I think around I11. I very much noticed this particular example because it significantly affected my ability to solo them on my Dark/Dark Defender - being unable to terrorize the mezzers caused a dramatic increase in how often they mezzed me.

An example of AI-based changes are the ones that "fixed" the ranged combat AI of Malta robots, who went from something I could casually save for last in Malta spawns to something I almost always want to defeat ASAP. They not only started dealing vastly more damage at range, they gained significant mezzing capabilities as well. (Something I hardly felt Malta needed, but that's an aside.)

Trolls with Integration used to never get any mez protection from it, and now they do.

I'm positive there are more examples like this, where critters got at least indirect powers upgrades, though I think I've forgotten some of them over the years. Many of them were probably like the Malta case, where broken AI or powers definitions meant something the critter was always supposed to do was missing for years.

Another indirect difficulty increase came from the fix to spawn rank randomization, which corrected the fact that LTs used to not spawn for small teams (including solo). It didn't get a huge amount of attention, but I thought was a really big deal when it was fixed. I forget when it was exactly, but I know it was after CoV (I6) and before Inventions (I9).

Finally, critter AI has evolved some over the years. Critters used to pile around corners as efficiently as their bounding boxes allowed (once they actually got bounding boxes), but this changed eventually so that some would swing wide around the corners and pelt you from afar with ranged attacks. Spawns used to sit statically in nice clumps, but were changed so that at least some of them would wander around as if on patrol. Even the static ones started spawning such that they were often less well-clumped for AoE beatdown.

I'm certainly not going to claim that critter powers kept pace with characters equipped with high-end IO builds or especially Incarnates. But they did grow somewhat, and that's not counting some of the factions which seemed designed explicitly to be harder than usual, such as Arachnos and Longbow.