corinna

I was into it up until near the end. But then... then Bond and M arrive at Skyfall and the production switches from James Bond to the A-Team. There's a montage sequence of them rigging up all sorts of cockeyed booby traps... okay, fine. But Kincaid... sawing off the end of that shot gun. And while indoors, with no hearing protection, turn and fires the shotgun... INDOORS... at the the side of the building, punching a basket-ball sized hole.

WHAT? Why would you ever, ever do such a thing? I really want to see the directors cut where Bond clutches his ears for five minutes and then demands an accounting from Kincaid. That might be the stupidest use of a firearm in any A-list movie from the past ten years. Monumental.

Firing a shotgun indoors. Destroying a wall. "Hey James, it worked!" How is Skyfall still standing with that dotty old man running it?

ARRRRGH.

BOOM... "Hey James, I can see out the wall!"

*head desk*

And it looks like Zwillinger landed at EA, aka the dark side.

Amazing and beautiful.

Will we have teamspeak or ventrillo for this event?

Less than six hours now!

No.

Yesterday Hit Streak was kind enough to answer one of my questions during his coffee talk. I asked, "Why haven't we heard anything from NCsoft yet?" His answer was nearly the same as Zwill's was weeks ago: "I think they said everything they wanted to say in the press release."

That is not the attitude of a company that cares about the people who use its products.

I think we're done. And I really, really hope my pessimism is misplaced.

I should bring my level 50 warshade, Neverlight Liberty, since it was with help from the forums that I was able to arrive at her current build.

Ukase,

For a good run there, I never felt like my weekend was finished until I'd been on one of your UGT runs.

I plan to be there tonight. It might be the last UGT I ever run on Liberty.

Thanks for running them over and over. The UGT is the most awe-inspiring trial in the game, and they always went smoothly under your leadership (even if a bug kept us from completing it!)


See you tonight.

I reached level 35 on my Fire/TA controller.

It's kind of living up to what I'd expected! The interaction between the fire imps and the oil slick arrow is disappointing. Get back into the fight, you lazy imps! Oh well.

The impressive thing about this combination is how things just melt around me without any direct targeting. Just walk in with hot feet, drop a disruption arrow, drop a bonfire, and let the fire imps do the rest of the work.

The downside is the amount of "prep work" necessary for each encounter. It goes: smoke, flash arrow, cinders, disruption arrow, bonfire (finally, damage!), acid arrow any boss, fire cages, char, char, char. And now I have oil slick to get into the mix!

The log window proves it works though. I've found I'm defeating more than my share of mobs even when teamed with damage ATs. Once I get my defenses up into the 20% range (35% ish with my smoke/flash arrows), this should become quite the formidable build. For however many days remain.

Arcanaville's ideas are pretty similar to what I've been thinking about lately. Seems like this problem definition is more or less this:

* Players need continuity between characters, environments, and relationships.
* Whoever builds the client and content tools needs compensation.
* Content providers need compensation for their creative assets.
* Service providers need some type of compensation for their computing time.

Arcanaville comes close to solving most of those, but I'd like to propose a few additions.

1) Players own their core characters. There is literally a file (no central clearinghouse, but maybe cloud storage) that contains the character's definition. In CoH terms this would be a character with all powers and slots picked out, with enhancements marked as slotted, but not actually slotted. More on that later. Characters would also have a baseline costume. More on that, too.

This is different from Arcanaville's idea in that the character's gear would not travel with the character, but only certificates of the gear. Everything the beyond the basic character would, in effect, be licensed.

2) The studio building the client, server, and content creation tools needs revenue. The client can be sold to players for a most fee. The content tools could be licensed to developers for very low (or zero) cost in return for a fat cut of content modules that could be distributed via an app store. Those modules could also be freely distributed, but the tool creators could offer extra incentives to use the app store, such as:

a) Digitally signed gear. This is solves the hacking/duping issue in a couple of ways. First, when a character joins a new server, all the gear can be authenticated with the app store. Second, only approved modules could award digitally signed gear. Third, service providers (mods, GMs) could not award digitally signed gear--it would have to be 'earned' in game. Fourth, digitally-signed gear could be traded/auctioned between players, preserving the 'loot' system. Fifth, players could have unbalanced, über builds on their home server (if they wished), using non-signed equipment, but then transfer their characters to other environments, with the characters mostly intact. Oh, and awesome costume pieces? Also digitally signed.

Thus, content creators and tool creators would be compensated for their work.

This is like Arcanaville's trust system, except that it is backed by some type of certificate issuer.

3) The service providers could also have access to the app store to sell modestly priced subscriptions to their server. Again, the client developer would get a share of the subscription.

I think it might work... the tricky part is having a critical mass to keep the revenues steady.

This is more appropriate here than in Crowning Moment of Awesome, and I'm sure this story isn't unique.

After rejoining CoH (drawn back by F2P), I accepted a blind invite and made my way to Croatoa. I was playing my level 50 ill/ff controller. Two newish players were leading a team of six at around level 25(?). The player with the star was clueless. The one who was his lieutenant was trying his best to keep the team moving forward despite the feckless leadership.

The vocal team leader continued to advise us on our strategies and even our builds ('tanks suck! make a brute!'), but after a while realized we were ignoring him.

He emote sat down in a cave and refused to budge, complaining the while about how we were a terrible team because we wouldn't follow commands.

I couldn't help what I did next. I hope he forgives me.

I broke away from the rest of the group and walked into one of the dead-end caves, into a group of reds and purples, and used Recall Friend to send the leader right into their midst. He was still sitting when he was immediately slaughtered. :grin:

Bad habit to get into, griefing like that. Muahahaa.

I've sent a few of my incarnate-level heroes from Liberty to Freedom, reserving a few in case something gets going on Liberty.

I've had a level 50 on Freedom for about six months and the quality of trials tends to have a lot more variance in quality than what I'm accustomed to on Liberty, but nowadays it seems like it's the best bet for being able to do trials on your own schedule.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ-bhM-xuec

It's no secret that Liberty's population has taken a major blow from the announcement. Last night's Magi Monday took over an hour to form, and that was just to get the minimum number to run the trial. Incarnate trials have essentially stopped.

Of my six level 50s on Liberty, I'm going to move four of them to Freedom. The Freedom population is also probably decaying, but there is still a semblance of normalcy there. Heck, even iTrials are running.

Liberty will always be home in my heart, and my main character (in my sig) will remain there until the end, but most of my hours now will be on Freedom. Hope to see other Liberty refugees there. I'll still follow LB and hop on Liberty if something fun is going on.

The sea level is rising. I'm moving to higher ground. What else can you do?

Oh gawd.

At lunch we were talking about technology obsolescence and I almost teared up talking about the day I gently delivered my Amiga 3000 into the recycling bin.

These days I use a Mac. It took almost ten years for a computer as cool as the Amiga to make it to market. Now I wouldn't give my Mac up for anything. Except, maybe for whatever cool things comes next. :-D

So I joined the only Wacky Wednesday team last night for a +4/x8 ITF. If I were smart, I'd take notes of who all was on the team. I have a notoriously poor short-term memory. Ack!

It was fun! Unlike the attempt a few weeks ago, we really tore through Romulus' crew, our blaster generously taking most of the incoming damage for us.

Several heroes leveled up, one dinging 50! If you joined last night, please speak up. I don't remember who all was on.

There are some Shadow Shard task forces I'd like to run before time runs out. So this is kind of a bucket-list idea. Hopefully there are others who'd like to do the same!

One is the Sarah Moore Task Force, the other is the Justin Augustine Task Force. Each requires 8 players to start! Coordinating this on the fly is always a problem, so how about scheduling it a few days ahead?

This Saturday, September 8th, at 8:00pm EDT:

Justin Augustine Task Force
Levels 44-50
42 Merits, about 15 missions
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Justin_Augustine_Task_Force

Sunday, September 9th, at 2:00pm EDT:

Sarah Moore Task Force
Levels 40-50
64 Merits, about 15 missions
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Sara_Moore_Task_Force

If these work out well, then I'll schedule a Dr. Quarterfield TF for next weekend.

Please reply and let me know that you're planning to join!

EDIT Changing the Friday event to Saturday! More people are on during the weekend, and something came up.

Torchlight 2 will be launching for PC first with Mac support later, and the player limit will probably be 8 or fewer players.

I'd like to know about other Mac-friendly MMO options. World of Warcraft is a given, but what else is there that's modern and fun for a casual gamer?

Adios, Voltz. I appreciated your generosity when you invited me to PCS. Thanks for asking me to join on task forces! And thanks for opening my eyes to the AE/ticket system. I'd already had a few 50s at that point, but learning about that system helped me to explore ATs and combinations I'd never have had the time to without it.

Good luck!

So a few days ago I was walking from home to the train station. The sun had a warm cast, and the air had a slight chill in it. The trees were starting to give off the smell I associate with the start of the school year.

I was thinking about City of Heroes, which I frequently do when I'm trying to pass time, and a though occurred that with the game being eight years old that it might not be around too much longer. "A year from now, " I thought, "it could be gone." It made me sad to think about not playing my favorite characters, or hanging out with my friends, or seeing new content. I put the thought behind me. When I got home that night, I joined just in time to be on the team that earned the Really Hard Way badge for Magey Monday.

Ah.

I joined City of Heroes the weekend Issue 1 launched. I stopped playing around Issue 5 so that I'd be able to concentrate on my studies in college. I rejoined after City of Heroes: Freedom launched, and while I only intended to buy a single 3-month subscription to play through the winter, the camaraderie and excellent new content and powers had me truly hooked.

Now what? I'll miss the game and I'll miss the community. I will miss the escapism. Yeah, there's some grinding in CoH, but I'll miss those moments where I felt heroic.

This is the way City of Heroes ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Even at level 50, mez protection for Human form isn't that great. I'm in the habit of converting inspirations to Break Frees. If I get mezzed, I can pop to Drawf quickly, fire a heal and a mire, pop a Break Free, then go back to Human form to do whatever I need to do.

Actually, Dwarf form provides kind of a nice breather in general. I tend to use it most when fighting EBs while soloing and there's aren't any more bodies around to Styg Circle from.