UberGuy
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Posts
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Quote:Been going on since around I18.Originally Posted by ShadowMoka
I never experienced this either. Is this a new issue? -
Well... The L10 Pulverizing Fisticuffs is rare because very few people want to produce it, not because very few people can do so. The Gladiator's Armor unique (of any level) was originally rare because very few people could produce it. Nowadays, it's less rare but still rare because more people can produce it, but still rare because you can only (intentionally) produce one per character every so many days, no matter how many you might want (or people might want them).
Of course, it has to be both desirable and rare to be as expensive as it is. If you could get a Gladiator's Armor as easily as you can get a Steadfast Protection, it would remain equally desirable, but probably only cost about as much as the Steadfast Protection. Last I checked them, it's about 10,000 times more expensive. I do believe most of that price difference is down to rarity - as far as I know most folks consider the exemplar-friendly behavior a nice perk and not much else, especially now that we actually have ways to produce them at any level we want. -
I don't turn my computer off. I leave by browser open for days, sometimes weeks without exiting the program. I have no reason to close it. I leave a few sites I frequently visit open in separate tabs, and simply refresh them when I get back to my PC.
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Quote:It's actually 2500 Brute and 3000 Scrapper. However, in practice this ends up being a wash from a certain perspective - level 50 Brute base HP is 1.2 times as high as Scrapper HP, and 3000 is 1.2 times 2500. So a Brute at the regen cap is regenerating the same number of HP/sec that a Scrapper is at their regen cap, assuming the same +HP buffs on each character. The Brute, of course, has a much higher +HP cap, and so can exceed the HP/sec regenerated by a Scrapper with enough external +HP buffs. I concede that's not all that common, however.Originally Posted by Ultimus
I believe its 2500 Brute vs 3500 Scrapper
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Quote:Agreed, and I actually mention that in a couple of my posts here. I guess I'm specifcally referring to the "WiR Syndrome" outlined in reference to the actually more broad idea of WiR outlined on the WiR website.Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
This is not the interpretation I get from the original author. It's possible I'm reading the wrong source material, but the list provided here simply lists every bad thing that happened to any female character ever: http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/women.html . The full explanation of the intentions behind the term are here: http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/r-gsimone.html .
Agreed. This all originated in my reply to Smersh's post, which was specifically describing the "syndrome" version of the meme.Quote:I see that there are some internet materials for a WiR "Syndrome" which does seem to speak to relationships with men, but the original incarnation doesn't have that requirement.
The eponymous Green Lantern issue (like the SSA) qualifies as both. Perhaps that name for the meme has taken a life of its own as the "syndrome" sub-version.
As I already mentioned in prior posts, whether the broader "non-syndrome" WiR is indicidive of societal misogyny I am less willing to argue. That comes down to whether female characters as a whole are more likely to have bad things happen to them, as well as what the nature of those bad things are, and whether or not they tend to be inflicted by men. I do think, however, that's complicated to separate from what I'll call the "syndrome" version's "fair use" and the tendency for lead characters to be male. While both indicate disparity in gender representation, and therefore may be related, they have rather different undertones. -
Quote:You could always try and engineer the process to able to divide the build space into discrete sections, and then spread option analysis among distributed application nodes. Then you could load it up on something like Amazon's EC2 and finish execution much faster, for a nominal fee.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The numbers are increasing so rapidly I'm now wondering if I will have to reoptimize for the search to complete in a reasonable amount of time. I did not expect to be searching fifty million build sequences just to get to level 16. Its entirely possible the explosive growth levels off as the number of options begins to fill the build space, but I doubt that's happening before level 30. By which time I might be searching billions of sequences and tens of millions of possible distinct builds.
But that would be really crazy.
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Quote:Citation required. I'd like some evidence that this is actually an accepted understanding of it, rather than simply some people's interpretation of it.Originally Posted by Lothic
The only reason the WIR meme exists as meme which has been debated for decades at all has been because there has always been an undercurrent of misogyny associated with how it's been applied to various stories.
Um, I seriously don't see that following logically at all. Without context, the name is actually pretty damn confusing. They picked a particularly striking example of the meme and named it after that. There was nothing sexual about the example, unless you hold that every act of bare-handed violence by a man against a woman is sexual - a notion that I reject. If, lacking context, someone thinks the name of the meme is sexually charged, I think that's because they imagined it meant something it didn't.Quote:If we were just talking about a meme that had no loaded sexual connotations to it it would not be (rather dramatically) called the "woman in refrigerator" meme. Even the name of the meme itself is full of shock value designed to spur in exactly this kind of dissent and debate. 
Apparently only because you say so. Sorry, not buying into that.Quote:Your attempt to disassociate the sexual undercurrents from the meme itself is admirable but ultimately futile. -
Quote:I've only gotten into this discussion because of how people were applying the whole WiR thing. Whether or not I think the meme applies shouldn't be taken as an indication of whether I think the SSA story is well done. I'm laid back about it, but I don't think it was great. The WiR discussion just doesn't factor into that for me.Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
Frankly I don't know, and don't particularly care (since I don't actually read superhero comics). The view from where I sit is that the devs wrote an arc killing off a a minor character and expect me to care. The gender of the character is largely irrelevant to that, I'm just irritated by them killing someone off and expecting me to care when they've given me no reason to care about the character in question. The emotional impact of the arc is roughly equivalent to Red Shirt #5 dieing in an episode of Star Trek.
Edit: It's OT for this thread, but some folks are of the opinion that because the SSAs are "paid for" content, that they should be a step above in fiction. I can't say this view is wrong, but that's not the only mark of something that, in theory, had money "set aside" for its development. Time was clearly invested in these arcs in terms of creating contacts, mission environments, applying unusual mechanics, and yes, writing a story that's (for better or worse) more complex than normal. I think it's completely fair that we should expect that time to be invested well, but the balance is going to be all over the map in what each of us thinks should have gotten most of the investment. Should it be the writing? The mission map tilesets? The critters and their powersets? I am not jumping out of my seat about what we got here, but I don't hate it, and I don't expect great shakes from its fiction. There are things I'd like done differently in the future. Hopefully the creators are reading these threads and will improve them over time. If not, well ... I guess VIPs will probably still play them and gripe, and Premiums won't buy them. -
Quote:That's obviously false. It is a death (generally, other bad things might apply) that happens to a female character for the express purpose of providing character development or plot action by a male character. The reason for why something bad happened to the female is expressly because she has a relationship to the male.Originally Posted by Lothic
I think your definition of the WIR meme is so vaguely defined that it could literally apply to any story that has both males and females in it and one of those females is killed for any reason. A meme only really has meaning when it's used to describe something that's uniquely distinct from some other aspect of a story. If you let it apply to effectively every story imaginable then it fails to serve any purpose as a point of distinction.
That is not vaguely defined, and it does not apply to females killed "for any reason".
No, only how it relates to the development of the story defines whether the meme applies. How the story handles it is a separate question.Quote:How the death is "handled" is an intrinsic part of the meme.
Show me a quote from the people who have assembled documentation on the meme showing something to the contrary if you want to debate that. I am taking that as one of two major categories of the meme from online sources about the meme, including the WiR website. -
Quote:They're doing it because they were asked to. CoV was cartoon villainy. This is dark villainy. Everything is going to lie somewhere on the spectrum. Could they have chosen some other spot in the spectrum? Yeah. Could they give us (more of) a choice? Yeah. To me, that about execution, and less about the goal they were shooting for. I don't think this had great execution. But I think the target was where people have been asking them to shoot for a long time. I get that it might not appeal to you, but I also think that might just be unavoidable.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I don't need fiction to depress me. I actually do have a life outside this game, and that's plenty good enough to depress me and to give me people I hate. I don't know why Paragon Stuidos writing has been in the emo mode gutter since Going Rogue, but I'm simply not interested, and I never will be. That's not dramatic, it's just mean. So much for new content.
For what it's worth, I don't play bloodthirsty villains either. I'm far more of a Rogue-centric player. I like the way they portray Rogues. I think this needed a more Rogue-ish story branch option. -
Quote:I just don't buy into the idea that how their deaths are handled is a part of the meme. I believe the meme describes any case where a female character is killed to trigger a developmental shift in a male character. How well it's handled simply doesn't apply. You can have a case of WiR that's well written into the story, a case where it's not, and everything in between.Originally Posted by TrueGentleman
In fact, I've made a special effort to note examples in this thread of when female characters' deaths are handled well and thus avoid the WIR Syndrome.
Similarly, while I believe the "movement" (such as it might be) behind this meme are concerned that the prevalence of this meme may indicate misogyny, I believe whether it's handled in a misogynistic way is also separate from the meme itself, particularly in cases of supporting characters, like those we've been focusing on. What's done to lead female characters, independent of their relationship to a male character, is perhaps worthy of separate debate. (This from the Wikipedia quote about the meme applying to "depowering" or eliminating female characters.) -
Quote:Clearly, you rail against this sort of thing. I, on the other hand, appreciate it. Things like this make me hate villains. I like hating the villain, and I enjoy it more when they get their *** kicked if I hate them. The worst thing a story can do is make me not feel the antagonist is very villainous, in which case I will care less if they are defeated, and ultimately be less invested in a story which revolves around that goal.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
That's precisely WHY it's exploitative. They introduced this woman into the game proper, did what they could to make her sympathetic, all with the sole reason of killing her off as a shock (or obvious, as the case may be) death. This is not good storytelling. It's little more than emotional blackmail. It strikes with me a similar cord to the young children in Soldier being forced to watch I think it was dogs beaten to death for no reason other than because it was gruesome and likely to sock them, which was something they were intended to become desensitised to.
I don't mind this element missing if the story is about something else. I don't need a monster that I want to hate in every story. But if the story is about a confrontation with a villain, I want to hate the villain, and not just their goals.
I'm not saying the SSA was a good story, or that it achieved what I'm talking about in a meaningful way. I'm just saying that I find it interesting that you would rail against it so for even trying, when I would appreciate if it did so successfully. -
I just think think this makes it absolutely clear that the meme applies. To me, the meme is what it is. Having a character who exists solely to facilitate the meme doesn't make the meme any more applicable. It just makes the meme the only thing that character had going on.
In broad, sweeping terms, I do think that approach to writing a story is not as good as it could be. I think it's a mark of a good writer to make us care about the death of a character on grounds deeper than some tribal/societal/genetic level of distaste. But if they fail to do that, I don't think they applied the meme "harder". -
Quote:This fear is unfounded. Other powersets already provide the survival benefit and far more of having enough HP headroom to benefit fully from slotted Dull Pain. Effects which provide +HP to allies are few and far between compared to those which provide other forms of survival, meaning that those who already have strong mitigation tools in-powerset are not likely to be made significantly more durable in general due to widespread availability of +HP buffs. The main beneficiaries would be Regen and to a lesser extent Willpower.Originally Posted by Jibikao
Well, at this point, we need to pick our "poison". I am know I am one of the few that is against increasing HP Cap and mostly because I don't want Stalker to become another Scrapper with higher HP cap and survival.
On the other hand, the "traditional design" doesn't fit very well into how people seem to play CoH. The problem the devs were trying to fix was that Stalkers were outclassed by pretty much everyone on teams, so there was little motivation to invite one. I think a lot of peeple can argue convincingly that's still the case, but the crit chance change at least reduced how big the gap was for single-target damage.Quote:Of course any buff for Stalker is welcome but I want more damage with less restriction on the Team Critical Buffs. It makes no sense that the truly "Stealthy Assassin" class in this game needs teammates to do good damage. That is just so against the traditional design. -
Quote:That's preposterous. A character is only that. All characters that are not protagonists within all stories exist to set tone and context. Many, many characters are introduced into stories only so that they can die, setting tone and context. Labeling their death "misogynist" solely because they were both an example of this and a female character is an extremist interpretation of what constitutes misogyny. What determines whether something is misogynistic is how it depicts the events that befall a female character, and, perhaps more importantly, how it depicts the thoughts and actions of the male characters around these events. Simply killing off a female character because she's the significant other of a male hero is not misogyny. Depicting the killing in gruesome detail, and/or portraying the killer's approach and/or motiviations as clearly misogynistic (I'm trying to stay in the game's rating here) would make it misogynistic.Originally Posted by TrueGentleman
And that's where the misogynistic bias lies, not simply with the character's death. If a female character's purpose in a plot is merely to be killed suddenly and dramatically without properly establishing either the character's depth and roundness or her death within the story's themes (except maybe to provide other characters with some motivation or pathos), then the writer has a potential problem with misogyny.
Giving a Caucasian lead character an East-Asian or African supporting character who exists solely to die is not intrinsically racist. It all depends on how it's handled in the story. -
Quote:I agree with all of this. What I was disagreeing with was what I perceived as your describing how this being her seemingly sole reason for appearing in the story as making it an even stronger example of WiR.Originally Posted by Smersh
Why must Alexis Cole-Duncan die? To screw with Statesman and Manticore. No other reason. Not to mention that she's a depowered former superhero who can't fight back and spends the entire arc cowering.
Let me drill in very narrowly.
You seem to me to be linking that her lack of other role made this a classic case of WiR. I'm not saying it's not a case of WiR, just that whether or not she had any other story role doesn't affect that. This may be a stark example of it, because it's not supported by any other plot elements, but it doesn't make it more of an example, from what I can see.Quote:As it is, she shows up in the game once to be established and once to die providing pathos and motivation to our protagonists (which are not our player characters mind, but the signature heroes.)
It's pretty much the definition of WIR. -
Quote:Actually, that's not correct. I won't disagree that it's an example of WiR, but it's not for the specific reasons you argue it is. The meme is neither focused on or heightened by the characters being "stuffed in fridge" having a lack of depth or other role in the story.Originally Posted by Smersh
To have her show up a second time with no fanfare, and to be killed solely to provide motivation to our signature heroes? Yeah, that's stuffing her in a refrigerator.
Had the negotiations with Marshall Blitz and Miss Liberty been a B plot withing the SSAs, had the character any sort of presence in the game... there were ways that could have avoided WIR. As it is, she shows up in the game once to be established and once to die providing pathos and motivation to our protagonists (which are not our player characters mind, but the signature heroes.)
It's pretty much the definition of WIR.
The meme is described thusly on the Wikipedia article on the topic.
Emphasis is mine. Notice that this does not say that a defining characteristic of this meme has anything to do whether the character is well-developed or has any other role.Quote:'Women in Refrigerators Syndrome' describes the use of the death or injury of a female comic book character as a plot device in a story starring a male comic book character. It is also used to note the depowerment or elimination of a female comic book character within a comic book universe. Cases of 'Women in Refrigerators Syndrome' deal with a gruesome injury or murder of a female character at the hands of a supervillain, usually as a motivating personal tragedy for a male superhero to whom the victim is connected. The death or injury of the female character then helps cement the hatred between the hero and the villain responsible. Kyle Rayner is a particularly cited example of this case, due to the common tragedies that befall women in his life.[16]
The WiR website actually goes beyond this, listing examples of perceived misogyny against female characters, including main ones.
What I think there's a good case for is that the SSA provides an example of a character who was there almost specifically to serve as a WiR.
I want to mention that, for reasons I gave in my post on how I view the overall notion of a male character losing a female partner, I do not feel that this plot element is misogynous. I do not even feel that its prevalence as a plot element is misogynous, when viewed across many stories. Where I would contend it risks become misogynous is when it becomes a regular element in a given setting. Having it come up a lot across settings or stories seems perfectly reasonable to me, for reasons given earlier, but having a single story or series revisit it repeatedly risks crossing a line for me. -
Quote:I want them to increase the HP cap. I don't buy the arguments against it. I buy that they could be a problem in PvP, but I honestly don't give a damn.Originally Posted by Jibikao
Now, I don't want them to increase Stalker's HP Cap but they can at least increase or add some +resistance or +defense to make up the fact that the regeneration effect is not potent for Stalkers.
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Quote:I don't want to derail the thread, but i'm curious which part you found wrong. Do you mean that the compromises required were more acceptable on a Tanker? Or that you weren't able to "suck it up" as a Tanker and get by?Originally Posted by Obitus
I used to feel that way too, but I've since proven myself very wrong at least with respect to Tanker Invulnerability.
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I think you did a good job selling why it's not a great replacement for what we have.
Sadly, I think this is true of most of the new additions. I like what they're doing with the new Reactive-like Interface powers - I think there's a good case for diversifying into some of them, at least on future incarnates. (None are so good I would change out someone who already has a high-end Reactive.) But I'm not very impressed with most of the rest of them, including the Alphas, compared to what I got picking the earlier powers. (The new Judgment doesn't seem bad, just mechanically weird, and thematically, it's not a better match than anything I've done so far.) -
Quote:This is normally when I get it too. Lately, however, I have started to get it when dragging things onto the market. I have had this happen even when it's my very first market interaction, meaning I cannot personally have created a backlog of market activities. I have to be suffering from someone else's backlog, or a general backlog of the entire system.Originally Posted by Warkupo
This only happens to me when I hit the 'get all inf' button as well. My solution is to just not hit that button.
I have always been able to induce it by claiming a number of things individually, if I still do it rapidly. At this point I just hit "claim all" because it's faster to do and I just do it 2-3 times over the course of a few minutes. It's annoying to have to do that, though. -
I can't look at your build right now, so for the time being I'll just answer generically. Along the theme of the replies given...
- Shoot for the S/L softcap. I actually am not desperately worried about hitting this with one target, but I want to be within a few percent of it. If I explicitly set out to solo or even just tank AVs, I might try harder to cap it. The reasons I might be willing to skimp on it are that while S/L defense does end up fending off lots of damage of other types, an awful lot of what is delivered is S/L, and Invul can hit the Scrapper resist cap for S/L damage. Also, Parry can cover the Lethal defense part, leaving only a Smashing defense "hole".
- As close to the E/N softcap as I can get, possibly trading that last few percent on S/L to do it. (I don't know that this specific tradeoff is actually possible in general, but I would at least look at doing it if I could.) An awful lot of ranged attacks have these damage types and nothing else.
- At least 35% F/C defense with one foe around. There's not a ton of fire damage in the end game so far, but I don't want to be the one guy who can't solo lots of Circle of Thorns.
- Enough recharge to perma Dull Pain, even though I don't keep it on auto or anything.
- To get the defense numbers above, I would be willing sacrifice the levels of recharge I have on things like Regen and FA characters, because while a good BS attack chain still wants high recharge, its long animations mean I can get close to an optimal attack chain with a lot less total +rech. This is guidance on my build, not a hard constraint.
- My philosophy has been to suck up the Psi mitigation hole. When it's bad, it's very bad. (I soloed a Safeguard mish with my BS/Inv yesterday on +4/x8 and all the Arachnos bank robbers were Tarantual Queens and Fortunata Mistresses. I lived, but it sucked.) Despite that, I'm not satisfied with the compromises I would have to make to get what I consider even moderate total mitigation to Psi. On the upside, high E/N defense gets you moderate ranged defense, which helps with Psi damage derived from Psychic Blast powers (as opposed to Mind Control or Illusion Control), so that's helps some.
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Well, if we think the tanks seen tooling around require midget drivers, we shouldn't be too surprised. Have you seen the cars recently?
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I'll be honest, here. The idea of a woman being murdered bothers me more than the idea of a guy being murdered. Don't misread that. I think the idea of anyone being murdered is terrible. Anyone's death ends all their goals an aspirations, and it deprives all their friends, loved ones and family of that person's place in their lives. (Clearly I'm assuming here that the person lost wasn't themselves some monster people would be glad to be rid of.) But given that anyone's murder bothers me a lot, assuming people I don't know personally, the idea of the murder of a even a woman I don't know bothers me more than the murder of a man that I don't know.
Hopefully unsurprisingly, given my forum handle, I'm a guy. I'm a heterosexual guy; if I want a relationship, it's going to be with a woman. I'm also pretty into the idea of monogamy. Every relationship with a woman isn't a serious, deep commitment, but if I do enter a serious relationship with a woman, I don't plan to get a replacement somewhere. Therefore I aim to invest deeply in that. The idea of doing that and having it stripped from me by the death (by any means) of that partner is an awful prospect, but the idea that they could be taken from me by another person's deliberate acts is a situation I can barely put my mind around, and that's not even considering the dark details this could entail of how the murder happened.
I believe that I project that onto others. I know that if any woman is murdered, somewhere out there she might have had a guy like me in her life, who now is left feeling like I would.
Therefore, if I were a writer, because of my feelings, outlined above, one of the most horrible pains I could imagine inflicting on a male characters is the murder of their female loved one. I read the eponymous comic, Green Lantern #54, back when it came out. I definitely wanted Kyle to kill Major Force.
Let's face it, right now the majority of our iconic comic heroes are male. There are plenty of female characters out there, but especially the golden and silver age icons that form something of a backbone of our current "mainstream" superhero comics culture are dominated by male figures. Completely aside from the question of whether our stable of comic book icons should be predominantly male, given that they are predominantly male, and given that the are predominantly portrayed as heterosexual, I think this then leads naturally to the seeming prevalence of this purported meme.
I don't think it's creepy. I think it's actually an outgrowth of a variation on chivalrous views - that good men think the idea of bad things happening to women is heinous. Depicting bad things happening to women is then a way to depict a heinous foe.
It becomes weird if it's nonsensically applied outside the boundaries I've given. If our protagonist is a heterosexual female, does it make sense for one of her female friends to end up in a fridge? Unfortunately, I could see it being done solely because the writers/publishers might think their readers are mostly male, since it could still tap into those male readers' potential loathing for this outcome and thus of the murderer. That's not creating empathy with the protagonist in this case, though. Were I to come to know that was done, though, I would think less of the author, because that comes across to me targeted advertising more than good writing, and while the two can be related, I view them as separate.
If anything about this deserves discussion, I think it might be to wonder why men like me are less bothered (even if certainly bothered) by the idea of the murder of their fellow males. -
According to redname posts on the 21.5 beta boards, there is some sort of storage upgrade coming to the market. This is apparently a non-functional change, meaning how we use the market isn't changing. It's some sort of infrastructure thing. I am hopeful that this will include some sort of performance enhancements, which will then reduce how much this lockout thing happens.