srmalloy

Or Raúl Juliá.

Thank you for recalling a reply Straczynski made on the old Babylon 5 newsgroup to me, a bit of humor to brighten the morning...

The NCSoft store has a 'European version also available' link that may work for you. Barring that, let's see if sticking the links in here work... They're still to secure.ncsoft.com, so you might still get blocked.

Bring It emote
Push Up emote
Smoke Bomb costume-change emote
Ninja Leap costume-change emote
Ninja Run power

Perhaps because 'Sunken Road' may also refer to the Battle of Fredricksburg, where Confederate artillery and infantry were set up behind a sunken road and wall facing a 400-yard open plain that the Union Army had to cross, or more likely to the Battle of Shiloh, where Benjamin Prentiss' and W.H.L. Wallace's divisions of the Union Army established and held a position called the "Hornet's Nest" in a field along a road referred to as the "Sunken Road" (now in Shiloh Military Park):

Obersturmbannführer, the SS rank corresponding to the Heer rank of Oberstleutnant (Colonel-lieutenant). Skorzeny commanded SS Special Unit Friedenthal, an 'unconventional special warfare unit', which Hitler chose over five other units to rescue Mussolini. After his successful completion of that operation, Hitler promoted him to Sturmbannführer and awarded him the Knight's Cross to the Iron Cross. In 1944, he expanded his unit, and also gradually received control over other German special units, including the Navy's underwater sabotage divers and midget submarine units, and since May 1944 also of the Air Force's suicide ground attack unit, the German equivalent of the Japanese Kamikaze, called the Leonidas squadron. In October of 1944 he led a mission into Hungary to stop Miklos Horthy, the dictator of Hungary, from negotiating a surrender to Russia, and was promoted to Obersturmbannführer by Hitler. Hitler assigned him a new mission; Skorzeny commanded his unit in the infiltration of English-speaking soldiers from his unit dressed as American soldiers to create confusion during the Ardennes offensive, but not in a field position. Interestingly, his troops had a multi-layer deception, answering when captured that their commander was Skorzeny and their assignment was to infiltrate Paris and assassinate Eisenhower; because of Skorzeny's record with enemy commanders, this was readily believed, causing Eisenhower to be confined to his office under massive guard for a time. His last military action was successfully holding a German defense line on the Oder river, 50mi East of Berlin, for a critical period, for which Hitler awarded him the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves.

I can beat that; on Sharkhead, there's a building near the middle of the map with a burger-joint billboard on it and a door underneath; east of it is another door into the adjacent building. That door has an unusually high chance of being picked as a 'random' mission door -- I've gotten nine missions in a row to that door, the string being broken by one mission to a sewer entrance, then got three more back at the first door -- thirteen missions, all but one at the same door. Made me wonder after the streak broke what I'd done during the mission before the one in the sewer that made them shunt me off to another mission door so they could have extra time to repair and paint the interior and move in the new tenant; they were obviously good enough to do it all via the back door while I was standing out front picking up a new mission for all the others.

Actually, if I correctly remember what started the glowie nerfs, it was the bug/feature that allowed team members to receive XP for glowies even if they weren't in the mission. By itself, this wasn't a bad thing; however, it was quickly discovered that 'not in the mission' extended to 'not in the zone', so you could have a team farming a glowie mission in Talos, IP, or Founders, and a couple of fresh-from-the-intro-zone characters back in Atlas Park getting XP for the glowies -- which, unlike mob XP, didn't get filtered through the "within four levels of team average level" XP limiter, so these lowbies would be getting the 300XP or so for each glowie, which was pushed through the "25+ levels higher than you are" XP modifier to give them 5,000 or more XP for each glowie. (Akin to the early Winter Lord XP fiasco).

This is done in order to have an invasion for the players. Stand in the plaza in front of the tram between Bastion and Luminary to fight, and the police drones take out everything they can; there's little that will destroy your enjoyment of an invasion more than the third or fourth time you get a Rikti/zombie down to about 5% and have a police drone defeat it, swallowing all the XP and rewards in the process.

Based on last year's experience, the 'treat' drops are biased toward inspirations, so if your insp tray is full, you may not see anything. I did about twenty minutes of ToTing last night, and came out with a common recipe, an invention (snipe set, meh), two costumes, and an SO; my inspiration tray was full, so I didn't see any of them.

Although doing that is a viable maneuver once if the team's tactical IQ dead-ends at "everybody run in" so that you, as the tank, have to scramble to try to grab aggro back before all the squishies get faceplanted. Generally followed by quitting the team; if they don't learn from your asking them not to rush in and grab aggro, and don't learn from your showing them that rushing in and grabbing aggro is a fast ticket to the hospital, they're not going to learn.

From the comments of my roommate, who plays that game, Blizzard hasn't revamped the original content so much as troweled new content on top. I remember him observing that 'greens' from the original game are, comparatively, junk when matched against equivalent-level 'greens' from the recent expansions.

It would be a step up if the devs could have their art team take the time to go back and clean up the way that maps work. If you've played the game for any length of time, you've become intimately familiar with the 'tiles' that make up the maps (and can probably match most of the 5th/Council tiles to the cave tiles they were adapted from). Unfortunately, from talking to Positron, the process of linking tiles together to create maps is not as easy as just lining adjacent tiles up so the pathways match (as anyone who played the early CoV maps can remember from all of the 'black wall' maps).

If the map tiles were cleaned up so that building a map could be a matter of placing tiles together so their open paths fitted together, it would alleviate some of the 'same old map' problem by allowing a relatively simple program to dynamically link tiles together into a map the first time a player enters, so that instead of being able to memorize all the maps over time, all the maps for radio/paper missions (and all the others that don't use specific maps) could have maps generated on the fly for each mission.

But this depends on the art department having almost the same kind of time dedicated to cleaning up the map as they did for Power Customization. Not Any Time Soon, in other words.

Or the 'random civilian comment' feature that really needs to have a completely separate choice list for Cimerora, so you don't get things like random Cimeroran citizens wandering by and commenting on how [insert name here] saved them all from the Rikti invasions...

On the other hand, trying to tell me that if I stand next to a car facing it, and swing a huge stone mallet over my head, I'm going to have any chance of not hitting the car fails the real-world sanity check.

Of course, breaking things out behind the scenes so that evasion from being dextrous is separate from deflection from a force field, and that being immobilized halves your evasion but doesn't affect your deflection, would take a lot more programming on the part of the devs and make balancing a game a lot uglier.

To be fair, the prequels sucked because of both -- the availability of cheap FX let Lucas fall back on special effects rather than tightening up the script, and then fell into the special-effects version of the "font-in-mouth disease" you used to see in the early years of the personal computer after the original Macintosh came out (most noticeable in college term papers, where papers written on Macs were more creatively formatted and often used six or more different type faces... and averaged a writing level two grades lower than papers written on IBM PCs, which were more prosaically formatted) -- "If I can show a space battle with five or six spacecraft zooming around, and it's good, then showing a space battle with fifty or sixty spacecraft zooming around is ten times as good!"

Granite's a special case, because -- as with all of the 'Halloween costume' powers and con-swag costume unlocks -- the Granite model replaces your character model; it's not a power effect, it's a completely separate mesh, which is why every Tanker running Granite looks the same. For the same reason, there's no customization for Mastermind pets, because the meshes for the pets are not connected to the player. At least, Positron agreed with me when I surmised that 'replacing character model' instead of 'applying visible power effect to player model' was why Granite couldn't be customized when I spoke with him about power customization at SDCC this summer.

It depends on the ambush group; Rikti are particularly susceptible to this. If you take off rapidly after exiting a mission that triggers an ambush (or accept a mission that triggers one), the ambush spawn can be a mix of fliers and non-fliers, and the non-fliers will get bogged down on the streets while the fliers just come straight after you, so you can wind up getting an ambush of a Rikti Drone, or a Stunner Freak, etc. -- the rest of the ambush is still there, you just outran them, and you'll have to look for them (or stand there and wait for them to catch up) if you want to take them all out.

Last I looked, the map patches/etc. were done by making copies of the game data, modifying them, and then "placing specifically named files in a specific location such that the game will read them in preference to the normal data". It's the first two steps that make it a EULA violation, not the third. If you hand-drew maps of all the zones, converted them to the game's file types, and put them in the directories to be read by the game, that would not be a EULA violation. NCSoft is willing, so far, to let the matter slide as long as no attempt is made to put altered data back into the pigg files, but no one would be in a position to complain if the devs released a client update that made it stop checking that directory for replacement data.

Having the AE die back in popularity -- particularly with regard to the AEtards who disappear into the AE building at level 1 and are only seen outside to train until they hit 50 -- is far from a drawback to me...

That doesn't help when you're going to be putting your hands on things other people have handled all day, before you get back to your room; influenza viri are tough to kill, and there are quite a few ways that it can be passed around from physical contact.. There are reports that some mosques in the US are considering amending traditions of Islam to put in abeyance the ritual of attendees shaking each other's hands as a symbol of meeting in peace (the Islamic duty to protect life being considered to excuse failing to perform required religious ritual), synagogues are asking people not to kiss the Torah as it is passed around during services, and Catholic churches are looking at emptying the holy water font and amending the ritual of Communion if H1N1 becomes a pandemic. In comparison, a convention is a veritable breeding ground for opportunistic infections.

I believe that 'con crud' is the older usage for the malady, going back to the early SF conventions.

Only if you can stay out of the goo to shoot; the goo effect interrupts snipes.

If I remember the color choices and the way they affected the resultant powers from beta, and even back to the demos at SDCC, while you could pick yellow as the tint color, it gave only a hint of yellow shading if you looked close, instead of the screaming-yellow effect people were dreading.

Lag bolts.

At least stop giving away the mission objectives as soon as you take the mission. I'm sure everyone has gotten one of them where the contact's briefing tells you one thing -- deliver a necklace to a safehouse, be guest-of-honor at a science-fiction convention, etc. -- but as soon as you take the mission, you see "defeat all enemies in warehouse" or the like. Come on -- we know it's not going to go down the way the contact told us, but at least keep the fiction going until we actually enter the mission and 'find out' what the real situation is.