Uruare

I'd have scrapped everything to do with the Incarnate lore in favor of putting the choices in the players' hands as to if and how a given character wound up breaking through the conventional limitations of the strictly mortal-tier super powered beings. I would have very much liked to have seen concept choices presented to players about how their character could continue to advance in ways that went beyond level 50 without necessarily raising the level cap to do it. Story arcs could have been written that forced player characters into situations that forced them to choose between seeking greater personal power, perhaps at some sort of risk or implied cost (present or future) and foregoing greater personal power in favor of calling in allies to help gang up on a problem. What I would have liked to have seen leveraged would have been the central theme of power always coming at some sort of cost without strongarming anyone into feeling like their character was being pigeon-holed as a villain for pursuing personal power. Honestly, I would have liked to have seen those that kept choosing to grow their personal power as being more and more required to solo various challenges and story arcs that those preferring to rely instead on allies and teamwork could tackle in small to full groups instead. The cost of immense, nigh-unfathomable power seems to me to be well engendered in the concept of Doctor Manhattan. Utterly unspeakable power the like of which is difficult to comprehend in terms of his true limitations, but he's lonely as crap, has lost nearly all ability to relate to others and he has nothing to look forward to beyond more of the same for eternity. I would encourage players to have to make the kinds of choices for their characters that might absolutely lead them down the path of having the power to solo entire Task Force-grade challenges...but at the cost of not being able to count on NPC allies to be able to help them anymore even if they'd like to. I'd put a lot of story and fluff down such paths that really dug into how more and more of the NPC's they once knew and maybe even considered good friends just couldn't keep up with them anymore, maybe got hurt or even killed for trying to do so, maybe grew alienated, jealous or even agrieved at seeing their friend the PC become something they couldn't understand anymore. There's an infinite sea of personal drama that can and should be involved in pursuit of that kind of power that is completely trivialized and mostly ignored by everything involved with the Incarnate lore. As for the game mechanics providing the framework for that kind of power, I'd have disallowed people with someone going down whatever one might wish to call the Incarnate path from teaming with others that weren't on the Incarnate path. I would have explicitly wanted the players to understand that -their- experience of playing a character with that sort of power would be a lonelier path, just like it would be for their character. They wouldn't be able to team up for things with normal supers as freely, and during things like holiday events and for world bosses, I'd have let them team up but not able to use their Incarnate powers or benefit from Incarnate perks while doing so. But for general content, the choice to go Incarnate would have been made to feel a bit isolating just like immense, truly god-tier power would absolutely do. Look at how Homelander in the show 'The Boys' is depicted. He's a psychopath, sure, but part of why is because he's been so powerful all his life and he's never truly needed anyone. He wipes the floor with most lesser supers like they're made out of tissue paper, but what good does all that power actually do him? He's an excellent example of a really bad hero/villain Incarnate in my line of thought here - a serious problem for even top-tier 'normal' supers to face as a group. But he's alone. And he will always be alone because his power has made him arrogant and emotionally stunted, which has in turn made him utterly insufferable and violently unstable. I would see the nature of such a path for a character also making the player choose about a favored playstyle with a given character. They'd be welcome to take their character down the path of the unspeakably overpowered badass, but they wouldn't be able to ruin the game for everyone preferring to accept mortal limits and rely instead on alliances, friendship and teamwork to get things done. I'd be very sure to make the incentives for staying mortal very present as well. It's a lovely sentiment to say that friendship is its own reward, but gamers like carrots to chase and, if they're looking for group content, challenges to overcome through superior coordination and gumption. Those choosing to go the path of the solo god-level ultra-badass would get solo content to test themselves against and earn their character's way up through the ranks of lowly demigod-tier badassery all the way up to cosmic tier Superman vs Darkseid grade challenges that would really require the player to put some serious effort into playing well, building their character well and actually having the chance to feel like the god-tier megasuper they wanted to be playing right then. For the mere mortals at level 50? Group content requiring more and more coordination, larger and larger groups doing more things at once and ultimately leading up to things as crazy and desperate as things comparable to Marvel's Infinity War versus Thanos or DC's Crisis of Infinite Earths grade of total fuckery to have to team up, coordinate and roll out to do something about. The rewards for the folks staying at level 50 and sticking to mortal-grade superpower capabilities would not be power creep, but probably power diversification. I'd have come up with some way for the mortal-tier supers to, through their continuing struggles and trials, to gain access to a third and fourth and fifth power pool, but only able to have two active at any one time. Diversification and flexibility through picking things up from the people they regularly fight alongside and through advanced training to expand upon their abilities within the scope and scale of their overall potential for power would be what I would offer to the characters whose players chose to go the route of the Everyone Else that isn't some kind of Superman or Doctor Manhattan. I think both playstyles being rewarded and encouraged would make it very easy for players to, character by character, explore the full breadth and scope of what the Super Hero genre has to offer. As for actually making a game that worked like that...I don't see it as any more or less difficult than it is to make the types of games that already exist. No less so either. Most of it is completely unreasonable and likely impossible in the engine of THIS game, but if we're tossing coins into the wishing well, there's a rough outline of mine and what I'd like to see done with Incarnate-like power and the dramatic tales that can and should be involved, and not to the exclusion of characters that aren't Superman.

I ain't gonna bother quoting all the quotable babble. If you're so vain that you think this song is about you, it probably is. The 'You're Having Fun Wrong!' attitude that some live in is an old relic of this and pretty much every MMO or shared gaming space, and it's every bit as much a cancer as it always was and always will be. It's also just as boring and dull as it ever was.

Did you miss all the parts where I said that it was how I feel, not how it objectively is? And also the parts where I specifically stated that there's nothing objectively wrong here? Flew right by those, eh. You were so eager to attack that I suspect you didn't read much of anything beyond the words you didn't like. It's ok. I've got very thick skin and I know how it is when one is so fixated on winning that they run the ball into their own endzone. That said, I can't apologize for how I feel because I'd just be lying if I did. I can say how I feel and what I think. I don't think you're going to get a lot of mileage out of running any kind of campaign with 'Bad ol' Uruare over here feels some way I don't like and isn't that just terrible' though.

Due to the increased costs of shipping and the long-term effects of political unrest, Regen will be nerfed.

I like active farming. I never got into AFK farming because I was rarely farming purely for maximum resources, but I certainly like having resources with which to pay for new toons and their builds. Beyond that, I care nothing for INF or merits or anything comparable. Every time something changes with farming, it's always a nerf that makes it take more Time to get the same stuff as prior. There's nothing about that to make me pleased about such changes. I like lots of other changes that get made in general, but it's never a happy thing to see that it's going to take even more time to get the things now. 100% do not like that. That said, it's not my server. I don't make any of the rules. If I did, I'd be handling all things economy-related a whole lot differently, but eh. C'est la vie. Personally, I don't play much anymore. I farm very little because I accumulated so many resources long ago that, because I don't play much anymore, I don't have tons of toons to outfit and I've got nothing to spend it all on. I plink around and enjoy the game as it is, but I used to be able to earn 8-11m per run of a farm map and now I'm lucky if I make 4m after selling the standard junk that drops. Feels bad man. Farming hasn't objectively been ruined, but it feels like I'm perfectly welcome to spend the same Time to get far less for bothering. That domino fell and knocked over my motivation to make new characters. I don't wanna spend twice as much time as before to outfit new toons. Time cost got too high; stops being fun when it starts to feel like work. And so I stopped almost completely and I've just been coasting on my billions ever since, which has been easy because I haven't leveled anything new since the 0XP/2xINF toggle got removed. I already had all the 50's I actually wanted anyway. I very much enjoyed playing with builds and build-testing for various use cases, but eh. I've got a busy life and no shortage of things I very much enjoy doing that are completely outside of CoX too. As said long ago, none of these farm nerfs have destroyed the game somehow. None of them were wild or crazy changes that blew a load-bearing wall out in some fashion; not even close. But, they changed the recipe of my favorite food here. Tastes completely inferior to what it used to be. I liked a lot of things on the menu, but now My Favorite Thing tastes like the equivalent of gas station sushi. Are you happy with that? Do you think that's great? If so, that's nice. There's nothing objectively wrong here. It's just that I used to be able to get this super tasty sushi here and I'd sometimes sneak on over here when I should've been doing other things to have a quick bite just because I enjoyed it so much. The recipe changed though. I don't like it because I remember when it tasted a lot better and, as much as I'm certain that a newer player wouldn't have any reason to start farming and think its been gutted, ignorance is bliss as they say. Across my accounts, I've got something like 800ish billion INF. I never spent nearly as much as I made on builds and I'll never spend all of that on anything. It was never about the INF for me. I've had more than I'll ever need for a long time. I don't need more and getting less nowadays is in no way objectively problematic for me. I feel like I've been gently told that I'm having fun wrong and that I'm tolerated here but not exactly welcome. I feel like my favorite casual activity in CoX is regarded as a borderline exploit that will persistently and ceaselessly be alienated. I find it increasingly difficult not to feel like the general consensus of the devs and the majority playerbase is that my kind will be uncomfortably tolerated to a point, but that we would do well to be out of this town after dark if we know what's good for us. I was never the kind of gal that liked to be where I wasn't wanted. It's such an ugly feeling.

Everything comes full circle eventually. Get a two good story missions worth farming in your quest log and flip-flop between them. Never finish either, but exit and reset to preserve them. Not as convenient as AE was, but hey, it was how we did things pre-AE and it still works. Now, if only we could aggro entire maps on tanks again...

I like characters with relatively serious-toned concepts and backstories. I don't concern myself overmuch with pigeonholes such as 'edgelord'; frankly, I'm only vaguely confident that I know what one is by definition. Suffice to say that I vastly prefer X-Men to Power Puff Girls. I like grit in my fantasy and I like realistic topics, and takes on topics, rather than cartoonified unrealism. I prefer content that is made for mature audiences, and I don't mean porny. No punches pulled, no censorship given, no apologies made stuff happening and no hiding from the full-fat consequences that follow. That doesn't, in my mind at least, mean 'edgy' at all. I just really hate saturday morning cartoon motifs where there aren't any real consequences for anything, nobody's ever seriously affected, nothing meaningful ever changes and none of the characters are ever at risk of being changed by their experiences. Avatar: The Last Airbender = good, in my book. The characters change, grow, learn things, get scared, overcome fears and are heavily affected in very plausible ways by their experiences. Overall, still very light-hearted and not what I'd call edgy/edgelordy fiction on the whole, but very much ticking all the most important boxes for characterization and development. So, I really don't mind an edgelord character... provided that's part of their development and not the static be-all, end-all never-changes state of that character. It seems like a transitional state to me; a character that's having a tough time dealing or understanding or whatever is facing internal struggles, isn't coping well, behaves in a manner I'd call edgy. People don't usually stay in that mode forever. Might be there for years or for an otherwise long while, but not forever. I want to see characters be affected by their own choices. I want to see the consequences of their circumstances have a lasting effect on them whether those effects are positive, negative or circumstantial mixes thereof. That's the realism and verisimilitude I value and desire. I'm not interested in characters, for myself or otherwise, that seem to me like they belong in a saturday morning cartoon that basically resets at the end of every episode.

Try to help others have fun. Chances are, you'll have fun with them if you do.

I think it's all about who you're playing with, really. From my point of view, I've never had any problem with the characters people play. I've often had problems with the ego projecting that some people do through the vehicle of their characters, whether that character is objectively weak or OP or something in between. The most OP character could still be a lot of fun to interact with if the person playing that character is considerate of others, responds to communication in a manner conducive to everyone involved having a good time and is basically just respectful of everyone else involved on the OOC side.

They're coming to take you away!

I have no horse in this race, but I have the following thought on it. While I understand the interest some have in playing a rip or some kind of homage character, I personally find it unappealing, uninteresting and more than a little...perhaps unintentionally...arrogant. I don't want to RP with someone's random interpretation of Superman or Wolverine or Batman, and I'm not interested in their fanfiction. For my RP interests, which include my willing exposure to peoples' bios and other creative expressions to-do with their characters, I want to interact with original characters. Moreover, I don't at all like the idea of anyone deciding that Superman is theirs now on this server/game/whatever, and now they get to be the self-appointed arbiter of what that character is, does and means in ways that simply aren't true. Homecoming isn't a for-profit endeavor, so I'm not seriously concerned about Marvel or DC and their litigations having any road to travel in trying to sue the Homecoming staff over any parodies or ripoffs anyone's using, though now that streaming is allowed, individual streamers that are streaming for profit could get nuked from litigious orbit that way, and the Homecoming staff could...at least hypothetically...be harassed in ways nobody needs over it by the Pit Fiends serving as legal counsel for Marvel, DC, etcetera. I don't realistically think that'd be the problem these years on account of that this is a not-for-profit interest, but I will never underestimate the greed or asinine assholery of DC or Marvel when it comes to pursuing litigation. Never, ever underestimate their willingness to find new and intriguing ways to break new ground in being twisted mockeries of everything good and decent about the human race. So, if anyone thinks the fearmongering about lawsuits is overblown...weeeeeeeeell. Maybe it is. Probably it is a little bit. But lets just stay on the safe side and not give Marvel, DC's or any of the other zealously litigious IP-owning nerdcorps half an excuse to beat us up and take our lunch money, because that's like, all five of their top five favorite things to do in life. All five. Doing coke off the tits of dead hookers and hiding the bodies in the path of forest fires started by gender reveal parties is a close #6 though. So don't do it. And if that weren't reason enough, it's arrogant and tacky as all hell. If you want to play some kind of homage character that takes concept inspiration but is endowed with your own creative work for their personality, backstory and so on, that's fine. That should probably be recognized as the furthest into that lake anyone should ever go, for the reason unrepentantly belabored above. There are so many fertile fields to cultivate our nerd-rage in. Even if we completely ignore the probably-remote possibility of attracting the attention of Dewy-Screwum and Howe Law Firm, do we REALLY want to see what kind of arguments will turn up the first time someone's playing Batman wrong™, or when thirty eight variants of Deadpool, Dedpül, Dead.Pool, .Deadpool, .Deadpool., D-Pool, Dreadpool, Wadepool, Wade Wilson and Deadwade all ascend to the 33rd level of Nerdvana arguing about who amongst them is being The Truest To The Source Material and who amongst them Is Doing It All Wrong? I mean, we could just light the servers on actual fire and at least get some neat pyrotechnics out of the deal if we're going to go that way, because we most assuredly wouldn't be getting anything good, reasonable or fit for public consumption out of all the rip-offs and interpretations of copyrighted characters that would otherwise occur. Even without the vague-but-terrible possibility of litigious behavior from the offices of Hell Incorporated, that's a door we should keep shut at all costs, forever. Lets padlock it, then put shit in front of it so nobody even sees it.

I don't generally ignore people. The things I would ignore someone for range from racism to blatant sexism to assorted forms of bigotry and unnecessary cruelty, but then I just report them.

Got two computer setups in my library/game room. Setup one has a 55" Sony X90J 4k 120hz display we recently got as a replacement for the 55" Samsung KS8500 that used to sit there. The Samsung's backlight said goodbye, so, new game rig screen time. The gaming rig has an i9 10900k, 32gb Viper Patriot RAM @ 4000mhz, an AMD 6800xt GPU, a 512gb m.2 NVME boot drive and a 4tb m.2 NVME game drive, with a 10tb WD Black external drive attached behind it for the digital library's front-end. The gaming rig's keyboard is a HyperX Alloy Elite 2 paired with a Red Dragon m908 gaming mouse, a chest ottoman and the ugliest cozychair in existence so the spouse and I can, at our leisure and game like the 40 year old kids we are. There's a spiffy Xbox controller on the ratty old Ikea cornerdesk as well, and it's a PowerA brand with reprogrammable keys and four extra rear triggerkeys for doing whatever with. Then there's the workstation and the work laptop strung together through a 4x2 KVM. A Razer keyboard and gaming mouse are hooked up to it. The work craptop is a piece of work-issued drek that sits in the cubby and gets used for work emails and skype meetings, but the main tower has an R9 3950x cpu, an nVidia 1080ti and 128gb RAM @ 3200mhz in it. The dual monitors are both 32" AOC 75hz 1440p displays that do a great job of offering lots of screen real estate for dem werkin' times as well as for gaming purposes when both the spouse and I want to faff about with PC shenanigans. The workstation has a 1tb m.2 NVME boot drive and a 10gb ethernet connection to the household NAS, which has four 8tb WD Red drives in it. Most of the work I do from home gets done either through the work-issued craptop or on the workstation, and the gaming rig with the giant TV for a display is used almost exclusively for gaming and other forms of faffing about on the internet, writing and watching stuff when me or my spouse is hogging the living room TV. The case for the gaming rig is a Corsair Carbide 540 Air case that's all double-wide and allows for both a 360mm AIO radiator for the CPU as well as a 280mm radiator for the eventual GPU watercooling project we're going to embark upon. The workstation's case is some ten year old thing we had lying around that works just fine. It's white and is a full tower ATX, offers easy cable management and its white. Did I mention it's white? My spouse feels that this is very important. Oh. The headset for the gaming rig is a Razer Kraken 7.1 v.2, and it's alright. Not what I prefer to use for listening to music, though it does ok for music in a pinch. Both the gaming rig and the workstation otherwise run sound through a pair of Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 setups that we bought years ago. Pretty great gaming rig speakers. I've been through many 2.1 setups and I've never ever found one that was even half as good as this anywhere near the absurdly low price range. I highly recommend these speakers if you're looking to upgrade from a crappy soundbar solution.

Bingo. My scrapper was toodling around with Zapp. I'm not even vaguely fussed up over it being bug fixed either. Isn't like it's had a serious effect on anything I do anyway even if it were an intentional nerf rather than a bug fix. S'all good as far as I'm concerned.

Bingo, but it's such a trivial issue that I can't see it as something to pout over. It seems to be working as it should now in point of fact, and to have been malfunctioning before. I honestly haven't been able to feel a difference on my scrapper yet anyway since the snipe isn't part of her standard attack chain. It's an opener or a parting shot at something that's trying to run as I use it. I immediately noticed that the crit numbers were smaller off of it, and then I proceeded directly into not worrying about it because it's supposed to crit more often now anyway, plus be fixed on the back-end to run the numbers it was supposed to in the first place. It superficially feels like a small nerf because moar numbers moar better, but it isn't. It's a molehill in a mountain of goodies.