seebs

So far as I know, there is no reason to care about parodies, and little if any to care about homages. Basically, parodies and homages are generally fine. Yes, people feel the need to freak out anyway, but so far as I can tell it's over nothing -- there isn't an actual liability/risk issue.

Overall, I liked it. Too hard at first -- interestingly, while some of my vet friends thought it was fine, others said it was too hard. Too many chained ambushes, especially brutal on a stalker.

I liked the deeper quest chains, and the morality choices, and I liked a lot of the world building. It was a pretty good bit of MMO writing, compared to a lot of stuff I've played. I don't blame them for using it as the starting area, because it was a much better starting area than the existing ones, which were... Not nearly as good, anyway.

I do not see anything to suggest that Praetoria was ever intended to be more than 1-20 levels. They'd been saying that all along, so far as I can tell.

I love the morality/alignment system, I think they did a great job with tips and the related stuff. Much fun, I enjoy it. Liked the new sets.

So overall, I thought GR was a great deal. It had flaws, but they did a good job of fixing them, and the basic ideas were sound and pretty well done.

I am experimenting with dual-boxing; dark/mace tanker, emp/psy defender. The defender can contribute with /follow and occasional button pressing, and makes up for the tanker's key weaknesses quite well. We'll see.

Maybe your friend was confused, and thought the decision was made by "Bliz"zard Entertainment, the makers of WoW?

I'm sort of leaning towards trying to dual-box for this, since dual-boxing sounds fun.

I am probably screwing myself by mentioning that the names "I'm With Stupid" and "l'm With Stupid" came to mind.

Yeah, that was about what I thought.

So I'm back to "trying to find ways to kill a lot of things in AE, which are at least vaguely sort of tolerably efficient, but which are also actually fun". I know in theory that stuff like claws/elec brute is amazing, but I would love a bit of variety in how I go about killing stuff. In theory the damage output from blasters and the like should be significant, but in practice if I try to kill lots of things on blaster/defender/corruptor, mostly I just die.

Is that really comparable to the rate of ticket return on AE? 48 tickets, on average, for one silver. I haven't come CLOSE to that rate of common salvage dropping anywhere else.

Forgive me friend, I would not harm thee for all the world, but thou standest in my taunt aura.

As some of you are doubtless aware, Zombie_Man recently challenged marketeer types to try to fill all the outstanding bids for alchemical silver.

I am totally up for abusing game mechanics for humorous ends, but I have a problem: I tend to find farming sorta dull. I managed to get a solid day of fun out of an axe/fire brute, just because axe/fire is so amusing -- all that knockdown makes for giggles. Sure, it's no CEBR, but I killed stuff and got tickets and all.

So here's the question. If you need a ton of tickets or salvage or whatever, what's your go-to build if you want to actually enjoy the process? What's fun before 50 and a ton of IOs, for that matter?

The way I see it, there's too ways to optimize farming. One is straight efficiency, where the optimization comes from needing as little time as possible spent farming to get Lots Of Stuff. The other is to have as much fun as possible while farming. So what's fun?

I'd count that as a misfortune.

I antiflip Rubies all the time. Leave up stacks of bids at 123 inf, list them all at 1 inf. I have gotten upwards of 600k for a stack.

Note that there can be an hour or two during which there is a supply listed at 1 inf and this still happens.

Sold 346 alchemical silver. Levelled a brute to 24 doing this (not a super-optimized farming build, just a map tuned to reward axe/fire, which I actually enjoy playing). About halfway through, I sold one and a half stacks for 165k each, netting me several million. Which helps, because the only contribution this character has gotten from my others was a force feedback proc for whirling axe. The rest is all self-funded... And that entirely from selling alchemical silvers and a few recipes I picked up while rolling bronze to get a kismet proc.

Still, progress! It looks like it usually takes me about 188 rolls to get 30 alchemical silver -- a little high, but not unbelievably so. (Interestingly, I've never yet gotten 30 alchemical silver in UNDER 180 rolls. Total is 346 alchemical silver out of 2,152 rolls.)

I love how the ability of one or two people to force hugely expensive items down to 10 inf is taken as evidence that there is nothing individual buyers can do to avoid paying too much, because marketeers set prices.

You can always LOWER prices by ADDING stuff. You can make stuff by punching people.

Only that money wouldn't be devalued if you sat on it. It would increase in value at an insane rate.

Okay, quick history lesson.

Humans did not always live in cities.

When we lived in jungles, big animals ate us.

Because of this, humans have a 40k year history of learning to run away from something that MIGHT be a panther, because of the following chart:

Run away, panther: Maybe live
Run away, no panther: Live
Don't run away, no panther: Live
Don't run away, panther: Die

What this means is that, if you're human, you will jump at shadows. You will perceive life and intent where there is only coincidence.

This includes the surreal paranoia about the market we keep hearing.

eryq... You don't get it.

Of COURSE people can, in the short term, flood the market with an item or buy a ton of them up.

That doesn't mean that the prices in the general market are the result of such manipulation, or that it could be sustained. In particular, it absolutely doesn't mean that you could profit from doing it for any length of time.

Please think this through. The ability of a single person to drop the price for an item to effectively zero temporarily means what about the ability of players to set arbitrarily high prices? It means that said ability does not and cannot exist, because anyone can just come along and floor that price.

You mean backlog of bids, or backlog of supply?

Are you talking "buy the most expensive alchemical silvers" or "satisfy even the cheapest bids"?

CoH crashed while running.

Symptoms:

1. A window titled "Fatal Error" appeared in front of the game window. This window flickered its title bar if I tried to touch the game window in any way. It had two unlabled buttons and no other text or information.
2. Nothing in that window did anything when clicked on or interacted at.
3. The game continued running as though nothing was happening, except for the complete lack of any sort of input.
4. Eventually the game hung.

I couldn't find any evidence of another process running or anything, and End Task on CoH made the window go away.

Origin is indeed mostly superficial, you can use that build.

Also... You can use any build you want. They're not magical or special, you can tweak it however you want to alter the things that made them special and replace them with other things which are differently-special. You might end up with something less effective, but if you enjoy it more, who cares?

Also, be sure to compare prices between crafted and recipe, it may be worth crafting.

Okay, it took a while, but I found a thing I could nitpick!

You don't define "mezzed" but you use it a fair bit.

... Apart from that, really amazing. This is very close to the thing I wish I'd read when I started playing.

The one other thing is... People coming from other MMOs may be really confused by the notion that buff/debuff is not mostly about healing. Mentioning that regeneration continues normally in combat, so reducing incoming damage is Good Enough, might help deconfuse some of the people coming from games where combat stops health recovery.

Still an excellent guide; I think this does a really good job of helping people understand how to pick their archetype in terms of play style rather than some notion of "best" sets.

Oooh! I was not aware of the defensive goto part of that, so my options were to have them stop being useful, or run up and start clubbing things.

... Admittedly, on bots/traps, it really doesn't matter a whole lot what I do. Either the fight is bad enough that all the bots will be dead too fast for me to win, or I can polish my nails the whole fight and win.