srmalloy

Based on what I saw when I was playing it, what was in that video may have been generated with in-game content (i.e., the same way that cutscenes are in CoX), but parts of it misrepresent the actual gameplay unless you've got an absolute bleeding-edge system. For example, the mass battle scenes; from my experience with fort raids in the Abyss, rather than having mass battles with thirty or forty players on each side fighting as shown in the trailer, what you have is a massive lag slideshow where the render limit keeps you from seeing more than about 20% of the participants (I was reminded unpleasantly of the old Hami raids with 240 people in zone). And they're proposing to do an 'ultra mode' makeover of the Aion graphics, which will increase the lag further.

One of the things the devs have to consider when adding features to the game is how the changes are going to affect people with varying degrees of system power; I think that with CoH, the devs have picked a good range of steps from bare minimum to full ultra mode that lets players pick a good balance between graphics quality and render speed. But from what I saw in Aion, the required graphics levels push too close to the capacity of the average system. It's pretty, but sacking playability for chrome is a bad tradeoff.

Red side should see a reduction in prices. And I've got some land for you; guaranteed to have water on at least one side.

I recently got a character to 12 redside and converted her to level-15 IOs; I bought the recipes and most of the Luck Charms on the Black Market, paying 5,000 inf each for them. During the same period blueside while I had the bids in on redside, the market for Luck Charms never dropped below 50,000. Explain to me how 100,000 potential buyers blueside willing to pay 50,000 and up for a Luck Charm will, when the redside supply of Luck Charms gets merged into the blueside supply, are going to reduce prices redside.

Just as an inconvenient detail, it's mentioned several times during the Moonfire TF that Arakhn is female. It may be simply that Arakhn's current host is female -- there's no good evidence that a Nictus wouldn't just leap from host to host as they age or they find one with better connections that it would be advantageous to become.

The powerset name looks like Eurostile Extended using small caps instead of lowercase.

Моё судно на воздушной подушке полно угрей
Tá m'árthach foluaineach lán d'eascainn
Τὸ πλοῖόν μου τὸ μετεωριζόμενον ἐστι πλῆρες ἐγχελέων
Mein Luftkissenfahrzeug ist voller Aale
Mia kusenveturilo estas plena je angiloj

And don't forget "May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?"

For non-set slotting, it's worth considering that a level-15 IO is better than a +2 DO, and a level 35 IO is about a +2 SO. What I've been doing is to collect recipes and salvage to build IOs to fill slots at level 12, and keep them until 22, at which point I burn a vetspec to get back ten of them -- generally Accuracy, since the luck charms are a pain to get -- cashing in the rest (and with the new email attachments, mailing them down to a character closing on 12), and buying SOs, upgrading them at 28 while buying recipes and salvage for level 35 IOs, which I'll swap in once I hit 32. Because the IOs don't expire, I can keep adding level 35+ SOs up until I get high enough to make replacing them with sets worthwhile, and slowly go through that upgrade. It's perhaps more expensive, but it seems to work for me.

Depends on what his plan is; if he got the Numina as a drop, he could be saving up merits to replace the Doctored Wounds with the Numina +Regen/+Recovery, which combines with the Numina Heal to give you +10% Regen as a set bonus.

I still have a screenshot I took during the first winter event (the Winter Lord fiasco), because of the message "You receive 1337 experience" it shows in the chat window.

The 'snipe the healer' tactic works, but that's a pretty boring grind without the right powersets. It is, though, a much lower bar to reach than attempting to grind him down through the heals.

I do remember the 'what did we do right?' ITF where, out of utter random chance, someone had pulled the two non-healing Nictus Essence darkballs out of range right before Rommy went down, so the healer got eaten first. Without the healer. the other two couldn't keep Romulus from dropping like a rock.

Making dimensional coordinates map to real rather than ordinal numbers, thereby making the number of alternate dimensions uncountable, does allow a handwave to explain why every hero gets sent off to solve the same problems in the same alternate dimensions (of course, it doesn't explain why we're all doing identical missions here in Paragon City, but that's for other people to explain) -- each time a portal is tuned to a particular set of dimensional coordinates, variations in the actual coordinates below the limits of our accuracy cause the portal to open into different alternate universes, which, by the infinitesimal difference in their coordinates, differ from the 'original' found alternate dimension in an infinitesimal way, so everyone gets a 'brand new' alternate dimension to enter; only the portals that are kept continuously open -- to Recluse's Victory, for example -- link to a single dimension that you can return to again and again.

It's complicated. Territorial waters are defined from the 'baseline, which is the coastline defined as either continuously-exposed land or the MLW (mean low water) point, with straight lines connecting indentations resulting from fringing islands or bays (with limits on bays, this being why the US denies Libya's claim to the whole Gulf of Sidra); waters within this line are 'inland waters' or 'archipelagic waters' (dark blue in this map of the Phillippines). The 'Territorial sea' is an area extending 12 miles from the baseline; on this is a further 12-mile 'contiguous zone' where a country can restrict traffic only to enforce compliance with 'customs, fiscal, immigration, and sanitary laws and regulations), and an 'exclusive economic zone' extending 200 miles out from the coastline, where a country has exclusive rights to the resources in and under the water but cannot restrict traffic. There is also the 'continental shelf', which extends at least 200 miles from the baseline, but no more than 350 miles or a maximum of 100 miles beyond the 2,500-meter isobath. Collectively, these are all 'territorial waters'. These lines are supposed to be cut off at the midpoint between coastal or island nations, but as this map of the EEZ claims of Eastern Asian nations shows, it can be ugly. So what 'outside territorial waters' means is open to a variety of interpretations.

That's not proved; it depends on how the universes differentiate. If you posit that all cosmoi are identical until something occurs to differentiate them, then quantum fluctuations are sufficient to create 'adjacent' cosmoi that are, at a level observable to us, indistinguishable -- consider two universes that differ only in the energy state (position and/or velocity) of an electron in the Andromeda Galaxy. As far as it is observable from Earth, the two universes are identical; the implication is therefore that the cardinality of the infinity of universes is more appropriately that of the cardinality of the infinity of real numbers than the cardinality of the infinity of ordinal numbers, rendering the infinity of universes uncountable.

Yes, "range is a Blaster's defense", all the while making sure that, with few exceptions (XXX Buckshot, for example), the only actual 'defense' that a Blaster got from staying at range was that mobs' ranged attacks generally did less damage than their melee attacks, because the mobs' chance to hit with their attack was just as high at 100' as it was at 10' -- not to mention all the mobs whose attack ranges exceed those of a Blaster's (i.e., getting tagged by return fire from a Malta Gunslinger's pistols while it takes a Range Boosted Snipe attack for you to hit them). If range is a Blaster's defense, then give them something like 2% Defence in PvE for every 10' between them and the mob shooting at them (possibly up to half that for PvP).

I wonder how much we'll have lost when it comes back; it may be possible to resume the raid.

It appears to be all the west-coast servers, though, so it may be their main switch, rather than the server farm.

Reading this, I was reminded amusingly of the first bugged version of the "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Damage" proc (later having its name tweaked to 'Chance for Negative Energy Damage'); the name was appropriate, in that when the proc went off, it really did do a negative amount of damage on your target, healing them. This was fixed with an even more broken version, which I nicknamed "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot", the proc doing about 10x the target's base HP when it went off. When I discovered this in the beta on Test, I hied the character off after a convenient GM and was lucky enough to literally one-shot Jurassik, doing (IIRC) "4.08611 e+006" points of damage to him -- and discovering that the numeration rolls over into scientific notation when the numbers get too big.

I can just see the consternation that would arise if the devs gave out a Kronos Titan costume code...

At least with Wonder Woman, it's been demonstrated a number of times that she's just as vulnerable to bullets as normal humans if she doesn't block them with her bracelets, which were originally (like those worn by the other Amazons) forged from 'amazonium', which is magically indestructible, and later (the other Amazons being downgraded to wearing ordinary steel bracelets) having been forged from Zeus' aegis. There was at least one depiction in her comic series where she injured herself by 'blocking' bullets while not wearing her bracelets, and injuring her wrists in the process.

I wonder whether it might not be possible to take the Assault Rifle animations, designate the end of the weapon as the power-visual start point, and create weapon-origin versions of the other powersets. It would likely still require some creative art rework (Radiation Blast, for example, with its eye beams) to translate, but it would be easier than building the animations from scratch. Still, that's up to the devs.

Other than branding and the sound, you've described a wireless key finder. The technology exists.

I believe the original quote was "English doesn't borrow words from other languages; English follows other languages into dark alleys, knocks them over the head, then rifles their pockets for spare grammar."

The big difference between a plantigrade gait and a digitigrade one is that, for plantigrades, there is relatively little flexion of the ankle during the stride, while for digitigrades, there is a range of about -30° during the forward movement of the leg to +90° at full extension behind. While adding the rotation itself isn't difficult, it changes the length of the stride, throwing off the way various attack animations integrate with body movements.

Is is leeching or griefing to go through the whole raid along with everyone else, then steal HOs from other players by killing the Hamidon Buds before they can? The Wikipedia article for 'Griefer' would suggest that it's griefing, with the reference to "Repeatedly trying to steal another player's kills so that their time is wasted" as one of the characteristic activities.

Unfortunately, a digitigrade gait, particularly when running and leaping, is sufficiently different from a plantigrade gait that it would take completely redoing the lower-body skeleton and the associated animation. If you watch the Muybridge race horse photographs collected into an animation:


you can see the amount of flexion at both the tarsal and phalangeal joints, where the current animations just have a fixed ankle joint, keeping all the plantigrade leg animations but replacing the calf with the bent calf+tarsal segments of the digitigrade leg. Unfortunately, the number of large bipedal digitigrades is limited, and are all flightless birds, who have a greatly shortened femur compared to the classical satyr/faun proportions, so their gait is not as readily usable as a reference, and I don't think the devs are interested in putting in the amount of work that was done for this Pan animation just to make a small set of leg options look right.

Another victim of the aggro-limit code; you used to be able to drag a dozen or more civilians around behind you all over the map.

If that's the spot where I think it is, you've got the identification wrong. Look at what's there, and think 'InGen' instead of Crey Industries.

"...Clever girl..."