Vorac

For those of you that want to see the Video of Robot Rampage V:

Robot Rampage V!!

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Did somebody say Kronos?


Kronos vs. Babbage


Robot Rampage IV



Soon to be Robot Rampage V

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....and here it is!!! : Robot Rampage V

Works for me as well, running Firefox.

/e stumped

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Now how are we supposed to believe these brownies are so good without you sending all of us some to test for ourselves??

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QFT!!!!

I'll even pay the shipping to me!!

Actually there have been a few.

Not sure if they were in here or in the magic desk thread.

Did somebody say Kronos?


Kronos vs. Babbage


Robot Rampage IV



Soon to be Robot Rampage V

Ok, since Posi wouldn't post his reply in the thread that was actually talking about it, and chose to post in the "For Fun" Section...... here goes:

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Ok, I have been watching the boards and a lot of people are confused as to why we changed the spawn behavior in Task/Strike Forces to work for a minimum team size.

CoH was never designed to have a "Raid" in the original game. However, we saw a desire for a group of friends to get together and do some hard, lengthy content for good rewards. This is how Task Forces were born. They are the "casual" raid, something you can plan with your buddies that you are going to do on a certain day and for a certain amount of time, but you didn't need 30 or 60 people to pull it off.

That said, TF's (and SF's) have grown into their own. They are no longer the casual raid, but are run by pick up groups and nearly every character wants to get them done during their career. Personally I have no problem with the difference between how they were designed and how they are actually being played.

Where the problem comes in is where players are using our spawning system to reduce the challenge to trivial levels. When you load a map it places spawns on the map appropriate to your team size. If you have a team of 8, you will get huge spawns, if you have a team of 1, you will get a couple minions and the occassional lieutenant. Some of the "back end" spawns may not be spawned as soon as the map is loaded, it's a proximity thing. As you move through the map more and more spawns are loaded. If you ever wondered what the "trigger" for a cut-scene was it was simply "that is when that spawn was created."

Now TFs and SFs were made for the casual group of friends. This means that the group could persist over several game sessions. To do this we made it so that when you logged off, or lost connection, you didn't drop out of the group. Coming back into the game you would find that your character was still on the TF. This way you could run a TF "every Friday night from 8 to 9" and if all the participants agreed, you could progress the TF a little bit every week.

Now when you combine the spawn size system with the "you don't drop from team on logout" system, you have a system that is ripe for abuse. Players can start a TF with a team of 8 (or whatever the minimum number is for that TF), and right before entering every map, have all but one player log off. This single player can then stealth through the map (or simply run through it as a superspeed or high damage mitigating AT), and, when all the spawns have triggered for a team size of 1, tell everyone else they can log in now.

Suddenly the team of (x) is blowing through the map and its tiny spawns, getting the badge and Task Force reward at the end! Is this fair to those players who play the TF without using this trick? Those that have paid in time and debt fighting through the larger size spawns? I didn't think so either.

So we went back to the drawing board. We didn't want to change how TFs worked intrinsicly, but we did want to have a challenge remain. So we looked at minimum team size to start. Since you needed that many players to "commit" to starting the TF in the first place this was an excellent point at which to set the Minimum Spawn Size in the TF maps. So if you ran a TF with a minimum team size of 5 and you had 8 players, you would find that, when all 8 players were on line, you would get 8 person spawns. When one dropped out, it would fall to 7, another would go to 6, but if the team size dropped below 5, it would still spawn as if 5 people were on the map.

Now that said there are probably some "8 person" TFs that do not need to be spawning for 8 people all the time. The Shadow Shard comes to mind, and those will get looked at in a reduction of how many players it takes to start (and therefore how small the spawns will be at a minimum).

I hope this better explains why the change was made.


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I was VERY irritated that this was not in the patch notes. Our patch notes were a mess a couple years ago and I spearheaded a new check-in system that essentially forced someone checking in a change to write a patch note for that change. The developer would literally need to "opt-out" of writing a patch note when they checked in something.

However, this change was entirely a code change and didn't get checked in through the normal check-in process, and thus no patch note was written. This is the first time in 2 years that this has caused a problem for us and we are now correcting that check-in process so it doesn't happen again.

As for the other "stealth" fixes that we have made that have had missing patch notes: It has been explained that when we fix an exploit, there is NO patch note when it goes to training room. This is done on purpose and will not be changing. The TR patch notes are read by everyone, and if we explain an exploit we are fixing there, it could be anywhere from 2 days to 6 weeks before the fix gets to the Live servers where the exploit still exists. We would basically be advertising the exploit to all the live users, and that is something we don't want to do.

Although when the patch went to live the "hidden" notes should have been revealed, but in this case were not. Primarily because it had been so long since the changes were done (December 4th in one case) that it simply wasn't noticed that the final version of the patch notes were missing the exploit fix notes.

We will be re-examining the check-in and patch note process yet again in light of these recent failures.

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All Pool C recipes have the same weighting in the table, they should all drop equally over time.

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Yes there are.

Do a search for City of Heroes books.

Web of Arachnos is a full novel, there are also a couple graphic novels as well.

Well, ended up quiting the Synapse tf. It just got too labor intensive, instead of fun like I usually have when running both accounts. Guess I will have to figure out something else to make this game fun.

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"Risk vs Reward". The risk of TF's just became to great for the reward you get, in most cases.

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I'll agree with this and compare it to the "New and Improved Hami Raids"


We on Protector went from doing a hami raid at least once a week, now...... I think we have done a total of 8 raids hero, and about the same red side. Half of which have been "Themed Raids" just kinda for fun.

I'm sure on the higher pop servers, it won't affect it too much to get teams together. But on a low pop server (like Protector) it becomes a problem, especially on off times, where you can only find one or two people that are on that actually want to run one when you're in the mood for it. A lot of the time, I just get some help to start it so I can take my time, read the story lines, take breaks whenever I need to.

Unless it's a pre-arranged get together with your SG, Coalition, friends (that's if your not a small SG with one or two active memebers) I know that runs are going to drop quite a bit on "lol Protector" Unless of course, everyone just runs the TF/SF's on only their Uber/FotM builds, where's the fun in that?

Well, anyway, I already got a couple toons set up on a Synapse run, guess I'll log them back in and see how it goes.

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Ok, running through the mish's now, and it's kinda turning into a Posi. Even with 2 on the team (so if you start with 4, and 2 drop) I'm back to resting between each room, spawns are all +1, usually 2 lt's and 2-3 minions. This is gonna take a while.

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"Risk vs Reward". The risk of TF's just became to great for the reward you get, in most cases.

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I'll agree with this and compare it to the "New and Improved Hami Raids"


We on Protector went from doing a hami raid at least once a week, now...... I think we have done a total of 8 raids hero, and about the same red side. Half of which have been "Themed Raids" just kinda for fun.

I'm sure on the higher pop servers, it won't affect it too much to get teams together. But on a low pop server (like Protector) it becomes a problem, especially on off times, where you can only find one or two people that are on that actually want to run one when you're in the mood for it. A lot of the time, I just get some help to start it so I can take my time, read the story lines, take breaks whenever I need to.

Unless it's a pre-arranged get together with your SG, Coalition, friends (that's if your not a small SG with one or two active memebers) I know that runs are going to drop quite a bit on "lol Protector" Unless of course, everyone just runs the TF/SF's on only their Uber/FotM builds, where's the fun in that?

Well, anyway, I already got a couple toons set up on a Synapse run, guess I'll log them back in and see how it goes.

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I don't include links to Air Guard and Grey's Army because they're already in my sig. I'd include the BWO, too, but there's no room in the signature, even when I remove "My Major Fanfiction:" and Air Guard wins out because it's a far more serious group than the Brutal Warriors.



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Head over to Tinyurl , enter in the full addy of your link and you get a much smaller one to link through. That's how I got those 4 links and a quote in my sig

Thanks all!!

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Out of curiosity how long did it take to do all that stacking?

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Like I said, 60 hours and counting. The first half took the longest, it sped up a lot when I found out from ya'll how to keep the desk magic'd. And once they are perma magic'd, I would log out every 30 min or so to keep the lag down while editing.

Ok, I know that I've been talking about this forever... so here it comes:


The Coliseum!

Overhead

Overhead angle

The Emporers Seating/Podium

View from the Emporers POV

East Stairs

East stairs II

East Stairs III

NW Stairs

NW Stairs II

NW stair III

North entrance

West entrance


Not quite done with the whole thing, still got all the stuff under the bleachers to do. Holding cells, concession stands etc.

60 hours and counting

Done.

Ok, finally finished my Hospital/detention center.

Overview

Two story hosp

Lifeflight, ready to go!

Other side of hosp
*stole some of the design from Warface*

Detention Block

Jail of Doom!
Inside, Jail of Doom

I could do it!!

I'm REALLLLLY good with a Nail Gun.....

*grabs roll of duct tape, swiss army knife, spring loaded pen, chewing gum wrapper, and Carmex.*

*folds gum wrapper into pterodactyl origami, dips in Carmex.
Opens pen, takes out spring, cuts in half with swiss army knife.
Duct tapes springs to bottom of thread, tapes wrapper to top of thread.
Spreads remaining carmex on back of thread.
Pushes down on thread compressing springs.
Lets go.
When thread reaches apex and wrappers wings start flapping, pushes firmly against forum.*


And that's how we make a MacGyver Sticky Thread!!!

I think, Cuppa or Cricket explained it as 2 kinds of sticky threads.

Priority ones: Active

Non Priority: Inactive

If it sits as non priority for too long then the glue comes off.

More than likely what happened is that this was inactive for so long (maybe 2 forum wipes) that it got auto dropped from the stickies.

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I know most if not all of you probably do not know me (General Devastation/Pure Devastation/Leathal PMS/ and several others on many different servers.

I just booked my room, just live 240 miles south of San Jose, anyways. I will be there with one of the younger ones in tow, really looking forward to this.

ANy Plans to get together earlier in the day Friday?

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I have no plans other than to try and get there early enough to get to my room, eat some dinner, and maybe take a nap before the fun begins.

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Well, my train comes in at midnight Thursday, so, I'll be there all day.

got mine for 2 nights!

Gonna need that extra night for the hangover

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I'll compromise with ya. If they can make the 3 end game raids remotely fun, I'll back future new raids. Fair enough?

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Agreed!

On our little server of Protector, with the old hami raid, we had weekly/bi-weekly raids.
Now, we've had less than 10 organized raids since release, half of which were in the first month.

Thanks everybody for the Great stories!!

Keep em coming!

Also, I would ask if you could check out the website to make sure that I haven't missed anything.

Thanks again everybody.

on the Protector Fiction site, on the home page, you can add your stories there. Think its second box down in the middle.

Or PM it to me

Or email info@shekyshow.com