TheOtherTed

Nope. The published Silmarillion is a "cliff notes" version of his father's work on the early history of Middle-Earth, and Christopher has since published book after book that fleshed out those notes more fully. The Professor himself never finished the work to his own satisfaction.

Yep - Amazon only has the rights to material in the LotR books and the appendices therein (and maybe the Hobbit, but not sure about that one). The appendices do have a list of Numenorean kings and a quick run-down of the big events of the First and Second Age, but not really enough to "ground" any stories Amazon wants to tell. I doubt anyone will ever get rights to the Silmarillion directly. The published version is an abridged "snapshot" of Tolkien's writings on ME history, which were constantly evolving until his death. In short, there's no final work that anyone can point to and say "that's the definitive Silmarillion."

Not currently playing, but I poked my head in a month or two ago for a nostalgia fix. Here's my take, but some of this information may be outdated. The good: Most of the class quests are well written and engaging. My personal favorite was the Imperial Agent series. Lightsabers! The ambient artwork and music is pretty good IMO, considering its age. Two forms of player housing - a ship you get as part of a class quest, and your own "dollhouse" in a city that you can decorate. Companions are a lot of fun (or, at least, I've never had one I hated), and add an extra dimension to your class quests. The bad: It's "powered by WoW." What I mean by that is the developers seem to have deliberately reverse-engineered every aspect of the WoW engine. It's changed a bit over the years, but under the hood it still feels like a WoW clone made by die-hard WoW fans. A side-effect of point 1, it's very much built around the classic MMO "trinity" of roles (tank, healer, DPS). Of the 8 classes on each side, 6 have an explicit tank or healer spec, and they don't necessarily make much sense. For example, Operatives, the stealthy, vibroknife-wielding advanced class of the Imperial Agent base class, have a "medicine" spec. Because doctors use knives, to heal people, right? So, you know, totally natural fit. You rise through levels very quickly. If you do the zone quests as well as the class quests, you're pretty much guaranteed to outlevel the zone in short order. As a result, I stopped doing zone quests almost as soon as the game was launched, just so fights could be at least kind of interesting. It feels like a single-player game. There's almost no reason to team up for ordinary questing. There are Flashpoints (similar to TFs, I guess), but the structure is very much WoW-ish (see point 1) with all the potential drama that entails. Costume customization isn't great. You can define an overall outfit according to bits and pieces of costume you pick up, and you can match colors across costume pieces, but the latter feature often doesn't work the way you'd expect it to. Even though there is fast travel in each zone, expect to walk. A lot. I used to call WoW "World of Walking" until I played SWTOR. The game has gone through multiple server crunches, and to my knowledge, names have never been freed up. If you think getting a good name on CoH is tough, you ain't seen nothing yet. With one exception, all the fun, cool, unique names I came up with for the dozens of characters I've made are irrevocably gone. The indifferent: Classes are "mirrored" across the two factions. Meaning, for instance, that a Republic Gunslinger has the same abilities "by the numbers" as an Imperial Sniper but with different animations, weapon models, and special effects. Lots of microtransactions. Lots and lots of 'em. If you're not a subscriber and want to play a Mirialan or a Twi'lek, for example, you'll have to buy it, per server, per faction. The silver lining is that if you pay a sub, you'll get a monthly allotment of "cartel coins" (or whatever they're called) that you can spend on those microtransactions. The game has an alignment mechanic, where certain decisions or dialogue choices can score you "light side" or "dark side" points. Get enough dark side points, and your character pick up scars or other marks of their evilness. I personally like it, but I put this in the "indifferent" column because it's not everyone's thing. There's also a social mechanic, where if you're teamed up with others, you can get "social points" when you get to choose dialogue options for the group. Get enough points and the game will throw little neato-keen rewards, ranging from a handful of cartel coins to unique costume pieces. However, it depends on teaming, which points to #4 under the "bad" column. It's also another source of potential drama - I got all kinds of flak for making the "wrong" dialogue choices in Flashpoints. All in all, I think it's worth playing, at least for the class quests. It may also be worth making one character on each side to do the zone quests as well, just to see if that's your thing. Just be aware that you can't advance to the next zone until you've completed your class quests there (unless that's changed).

I can't find my copy of the Silmarillion, but from what I recall, she fought in defense of her relatives against Feanor at the Kinslaying of Alqualonde. Also, when she finally arrived in Middle-Earth, her group was immediately attacked by Morgoth (IIRC). Whether that means she personally fought in that battle, I have no idea. Before all that, Feanor's words inspired in her the desire to claim a realm of her own in Middle-Earth. So, all in all, I always envisioned her as being headstrong in her "youth" and more than capable of wielding a sword if it came down to it. 6000+ years do have a way of mellowing one, however, so by the time we see her in LOTR, she seems to have taken a more behind-the-scenes role in world affairs. Also, I put Mopery on ignore, and I apologize to everyone for my earlier dance with him/her/it earlier.

Promise?

Nah, just keeping you busy.

I suppose some baiters are just better than others also.

Nope. I don't want to see the story butchered the way it was in the Hobbit trilogy.

Sorry. I pretty much dropped out of STO when they "streamlined" the skill point system. No luck on the STO or Steam forums?

Nope, I never give unsolicited advice. 1) Because I'm the last person you should take advice from, for many, many reasons, and 2) because different people prioritize different things for different reasons. As an example of the latter, back when I still had the energy to run a Kinetics defender, I slotted Transfusion with 1 Acc, 2 Heal, 2 Recharge, and (I think) 1 End Red. All SOs (well before IOs), and the character was in the early-mid 20's. I was also heavily invested in the Leadership pool partly for RP reasons, and partly because it was fun, end drain notwithstanding. My goal with Transfusion was to focus on end-sustainable heals-over-time, then swap out the End Red for another Heal once I got Transference. A "very helpful" person on a team remarked to me that his Kin could put out much more healing per activation and asked me how I was slotted. I told him, at which point he "helpfully" pointed out exactly how he thought I was gimping myself (yep, he used the G-word). I said, "I was going for HOT, but thanks for the tip." Said person decided to be more "helpful" by pointing out how his slotting could save more lives (though no one had come close to faceplanting in the 3 missions we ran together) and a few other things that suggested he really, really liked to talk about his own understanding of the game. I shrugged my shoulders, stuck with my plan, and had no complaints about healing for the next 20+ levels. I don't know if I teamed with that guy again, but, much as your eyes glaze over when someone talks at you about something you're just not interested in, I think my brain may have glazed over any subsequent interactions with him. Short story - don't give unsolicited advice unless you want the recipient to completely forget about you.

(...ignore everything after the 38s mark - couldn't find a shorter clip)

It's spelled 1337. 1337. Spelling it any other way just suxXORz. OG. Mad respect.

...we're supposed to be wearing pants?

Seriously. Why aren't the wholesome, educational shows that we grew up with good enough?

Wow. That hit me right in the nostalgia. My doctor isn't sure if I'll recover...

Back on live, my Kinetics / Archery defender couldn't solo a bank mission at default settings... Granted, though, I wasn't IO'ed out to the hilt, either. In general, I am not and never will be the go-to guy for optimized builds, but I can tell you what I find fun and why. Archery, in all its forms, matches Robin Hood visual appeal with "Swiss army knife" utility Dark anything has built-in damage mitigation in the form -ToHit debuffs (among many, many other things), plus SOUL NOIR spookiness Controllers of all types are very nearly untouchable once you get the hang of your controls (doms too, I suppose, but all my doms end up becoming controllers somehow). That said, controllers require some, shall we say, patience... I haven't played Energy Manipulation (a blaster secondary) much since Live, but it's like the aforementioned Martial Combat, with more of a "Hulk SMASH" thing going on. With either of these sets, knock-back is part of your personal defense - use it wisly I'll also throw out a couple of my personal rules-of-thumb certain types of builds: Blappers: Take what you want, but eat what you take. Controllers with heals: If you're healing more than controlling, it's time to let people die. It's the only way to save them. Current squishy builds that I'm loving: Archery / Martial Combat blaster, Dark / Dark corruptor, Dark / Nature Affinity controller, and Radiation / Storm corruptor.

Either: ...or: On a side note, I looked up "ruttiger" and "rudiger" on the internet years ago, and "ruttiger" turned out to be a synonym for "scamp" or "rapscallion." Now, strangely, possibly due to a world-wide all-pervasive soccer conspiracy, all trace of such a meaning is gone. We're through the looking glass here, people.

Totes jelly. Do the kids still say that? Did they ever say it?

I don't do Hami raids either - never saw the point of 'em. But on Everlasting I can't remember seeing a Hami raid announcement. If it's not announced on General or LFG, I definitely wouldn't see it. If it's a one-off system blurb, I probably wouldn't notice it. If, as PG claims, he hadn't done Hami on Homecoming before that one attempt, there's no reason to believe he'd automatically see or know about such announcements. A quick PSA to everyone in this thread, then I'll bow out of it. There is a difference between hearsay, anecdotal evidence, and actual, you know, evidence. Again, I'm not out to defend PG - never heard of him before today - but I can see that this thread has already started to slip down the self-righteous witch-hunt path.

Is there a sign-up sheet for Hami raids somewhere? His claim was that he was invited to stream by the CoH team. The purpose of the video was to answer the people who asked him why he wasn't streaming (or playing) CoH any more. As far as reasons go, burnout is a pretty solid one.

That... actually looks pretty cool. Will have to snoop around it cautiously like a stray dog sniffing a Milkbone that's been tossed its way. In other news, I did my holiday thing of picking an old MMO and signing on again for nostalgia's sake. This year's pick - SWTOR. Had a little fun with a new character, but quickly got hit with the one-two punch of failing to recover old names irrevocably lost to multiple server merges, and all the freaking walking. Not the shortest nostalgia visit ever, but pretty close.

Disclaimer - I don't know PG from Atom Ant, and I don't get the whole streaming thing at all. That said, here are the bullet points I took away from it: 4:49 His group accidentally crashed a regular Hami raid and he, personally, got a lot of harrassment from it for a long period of time. 8:37 A lot of his SG officers were kicking people for political beliefs and/or "not being good enough." After trying (and failing) to get those officers to stop, he basically stripped all officer privileges except one. Harrassment ensued, almost to the point of doxxing. 16:30 Some alleged fallout with the CoH team about streaming a beta server event or something. I don't really want to say more, because it sounds fuzzy and circumstantial to me. 21:52 Personal burn-out. We've all been there. I have no idea if any of his specific claims are true, nor, frankly, do I really care. I'm mainly posting for the benefit of people whose lives are so very, very busy. However, the first two claims ring a little too true with my experiences in MMOs. People lose perspective easily, invest themselves in MMOs too much, and start to translate "play" as "work." And if their "work" is interrupted or otherwise hampered, too many players get too righteous and angry about it. Unfortunately this is as true for CoH (both Live and on private servers) as it is for any other MMO.

I'm sorry, I didn't see any Nemesis. I was too focused on how much your orange resistance icons looked like Queen singing Bohemian Rhapsody.

To get kind of serious, only two of my characters have a vaguely "superhero" name - one of which is kind of a parody-slash-pun name, and the other of which is tied to the character's powersets. All the others use actual names, code-names, or semi-random words from semi-random languages, all of which make sense given the characters' personalities or back-stories. So, to add to Marshal_General's statement about thinking outside the box, maybe a little RP and a little bit of Wikipedia would help jump-start some random creativity circuits. As a for-instance, I wanted to play a super-secret spy-turned-rogue type character in one of those other MMOs a while back, but I was stumped for a name. I then recalled that the name "James Bond" was supposedly a British variation of the American "John Doe." So, I googled the phrase "John Doe in other languages" and found a Wikipedia page that claimed, among other things, that one way Chinese law enforcement generates placeholders is by using common surname with a number for the given name. And BAM, the name "Lee Three"* hit me like a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick. Yes, I know it should be "Li San." Yes, I have no doubt that it has a colloquial meaning that would ruin the name. No, I don't want to hear it. The point is that thinking about who your character is instead of what your character does may help. You don't have to go full-on RP; a two-sentence "elevator pitch" may be enough to get the job done.

Just because I'm bored out of my ever loving mind, I used Google Translate to see what the word "enemy" translated to in Japanese. I got "Teki" (敵), swapped the translation (i.e., Japanese to English), and hilighted 敵 in the Japanese window to check synonyms. I clicked the last synonym (仇同氏), which gave me the pronounciation "Kyū dōshi." However, Google translated it to English as "Mr. Ido." And now I'm asking myself if I want to know why. Anyway, so, there you go - does "Mr. Ido" work for you?