Luminara

Mechanical parity between otherwise functionally identical powers doesn't equate to "play the same". You don't seem to understand that, which is why your proposal to hard-cap Defense at 40% hasn't gained any traction, as it's not parity of any kind, it's a hypothesis conceived of in a vacuum and so narrow in scope that it ignores the basic functionalities of Defense and Resistance, and every variable that affects them. You were counseled on ways to refine your idea, you told everyone to piss off. You were given opportunities to revise your suggestion, you continued to post it without revision. And when people, including myself, finally turned to sarcasm to show you how little traction you were gaining, you became angry and went on a tirade of revenge down-votes and vitriol. You don't care whether your idea would work, you don't care if you've approached it from the correct perspective, you don't want to consider the possibility that there were oversights and mistakes, you just need to be "right". To "win". Even if it means damaging your own reputation and standing within the community. But that's fine, too. If that's what makes you happy, go for it. I don't even have to see it with you in my /ignore list. Down-vote everything I've ever posted and cut loose with the most vile shit you can compose if it makes you feel good. And I mean that. Having spent so many years of my life feeling miserable, it's not something I wish on anyone, certainly not people with whom I've had mild disagreements over ultimately meaningless crap in an Internet forum.

"Lazy" was intended to convey a lack of slotting, not a lack of effort. Blaster T1s deal nearly twice the damage of defender T1s, as an example, and Defiance buffs them further. They don't have to put in the same effort (expending slots, using enhancements, creating and refining the build). And I'm not bitter, I'm irritated. There are deep-seated problems with how support archetypes are supposedly balanced, which have never made sense, but which have also been rigorously enforced. Bitter implies that I've given up. I'm not a quitter. Real balance. If I play a Trick Arrow character, I can use Flash Arrow and Poison Gas Arrow to debuff entire spawns, and I gain the benefit of that action. Someone playing a Force Field or Sonic Resonance character, on the other hand, has ally-only click buffs, which do not benefit that character. There is no "If target = Trick Arrow debuffer, ignore debuff" flag. There is no hole in debuffing. There is an "Ally Only" flag. There is a hole in buffing. That hole was deliberately left in place throughout the entirety of the game's original life, and is still there today. That's not balanced. If it's perfectly acceptable for a support character to mitigate incoming damage one way, there's no logical or rational reason they shouldn't be permitted to do so the other way. Damage mitigation toggles on non-support characters suppress, and have a functionally unlimited number of targets because they're self-affecting. Toggles on support characters do not suppress, they shut off. And they have maximum target caps. That's not balanced. That the characters with the highest HP pools and status protection can be permitted to use suppressible damage mitigation toggles with no target cap, but support characters, who have half to a third the HP pool, are required to turn toggles back on, thus forcing them to wait out the recharge time and the animation time, and have target caps which guarantee failure beyond a certain amount of aggro, is not logical or rational. Zero status protection for most support characters. Target caps on toggles which drop frequently, have long recharge and animation times. Low HP pools. Disparity between buffing and debuffing support characters. These are absolutely not balanced within the archetypes in question, nor in comparison to the non-support archetypes. Balance points are not measured by how much shit a player will endure before giving up, they're measured by how well things perform in comparison to similar things, and we have obvious discrepancies in performance between comparable things here, which, to date, have been ignored. I don't care if the solution is doing a pass on everything in the game to reduce the overabundance of mez; or restoring toggle mutual exclusivity in concert with non-stacking buffs; or adding a "Lumi's playing, ignore those debuffs" flag; or removing the ally-only flag from buffs in concert with permitting damage mitigation toggles (-ToHit, -Damage, -Recharge/Speed/Fly) to suppress; or just giving support characters better access to status protection so they're not scrambling every time a minion with a mag 2 mez glances at them. I care that it's done, and that's all. I want real balance. I want parity between click buffs and debuffs. I want parity between toggles. I want different support sets to they work on an equal basis so they actually can be balanced. Many of us spend hours arguing about balance, turn small threads into monstrous arguments, and we aren't even talking about a game that's truly balanced, we're ignoring gross imbalances like these and hissing and spitting at each other over damage output and soft capped Defense and telling ourselves that we're protecting an existing balance... that does not, in truth, exist. And that's why I'm irritated. I've said all of this several times in the last 18 months. I said it to Castle several times on the original forums. We have some of the brightest gamers alive playing here, now, but when I point out problems like these, everyone shrugs. "Eh, whatcha gonna do?" We should be screaming in the HC team's ears, but we're bitching at each other about power creep and damage procs, and it gives me the impression that we don't care about balance, we care about keeping the game from changing. Well, imbalances lead to poor design decisions, such as over-buffing and nerfing. Over-buffing and nerfing lead to imbalances. We ran around in this endless circle for years on the original servers, and as soon as we come here, we jump right into the circle and start sprinting again. Yes, fixing real balance problems would mean some sets, like Rad, which has hybrid mitigation/combat efficiency toggles, might overperform. That can be addressed. But it couldn't be addressed as long as some support sets are sadly lacking due to arbitrary, nonsensical rules, while other sets are comparatively overpowered due to not sharing the same rules. I would happily give up all of the TA recent improvements to see one FF or Sonic player self-buffing with his/her ally-only bubbles, or one Dark Miasma player with suppressible Darkest Night, because that would be equable parity between support sets. That would be balanced.

I have the game installed on an external SSD. Had a problem with the OS spazzing out and telling me that the SSD was full a few weeks ago, and my entire character list had defaulted to order of creation. That's the only issue I've had that's even close to what you're experiencing, @Crysis. I have occasionally accidentally dragged a character to a different slot, but I was paying attention and moved it back immediately each time. Open your playerslot.txt and run a quick search for the character's name. If it hasn't been deleted, the slot number will be next to the name and you can find it that way. Might also log onto each of the other servers, just to see if you moved it without conscious recognition of what you were doing.

I wish I could turn back time, sit you down and make you play a TA before Issue 7. Not because I dislike you (i don't), but so you could understand how bad defender life can be. But the time machine is on the fritz again, so I'll try to do it with words. Here's how I look at it. Power is the money. Desirable content is the goods. Power creep is the inflation. Right now, we have comparatively high inflation, generally speaking. The amount of money circulating has compromised the price of goods in various ways (made some content too easy, made some content less "optimal", made some content uninteresting). But that inflation isn't applied equally. Most archetypes have reasonably good purchasing power, despite the inflationary nature of the economy, and leverage of that purchasing power (wider variety of content which can be easily completed, wider range of difficulty settings to make the game feel "challenging"). Support characters, on the other hand, have low purchasing power. Their low damage output, (general) lack of status protection, imposed time penalties due to (general) reliance on clicks and debuff toggles instead of self-affecting toggles, and (general) problem with toggle dropping adds up to lower purchasing power and lower ability to leverage the purchasing power they do have. Is the solution to this inflationary issue, then, to lock support's purchasing power at the lowest level and prevent them from accessing the same goods as other archetypes? We've recently had newer, harder difficulty settings added, which increases the value of some goods, but it imposes a still higher purchase cost, which support archetypes may not be capable of paying. Does it make economic sense to continue to impose purchasing restrictions on support archetypes, when more expensive goods are on the way? I don't think it does. If we were talking about a real economy, we'd see those with the lowest purchasing power emigrating to places where they weren't as heavily restricted, where they had higher purchasing power and better quality of life. Or staging riots, revolts, regime over-throws, walk-outs, marches and other tactics to improve their situation, which, historically, have also been accompanied by a significant amount of bloodshed, but since this is a video game, we can assume no-one will be decapitated or shot. That's why. The end result of shackling support archetypes under a "no more power creep" clause will be the gradual loss of support as players stop playing them, opting instead to play archetypes which aren't restricted as heavily and, from the players' perspective, oppressively, or just leaving to play less restrictive games. The inflation problem is being addressed for the majority, the archetypes which are already rolling in their surplus of money, through the addition of increased difficulty and new content. Imposing further restrictions on support archetypes, locking or reducing their purchasing power, won't encourage players to support you with support archetypes, it will encourage them to say, "Fuck it, I'm done." Or chop someone's head off. If you want to fix power creep, bring the support archetypes to the same degree of creep as the rest of the archetypes, then address it by making content that everyone can enjoy, or improving existing content so it's more enjoyable despite the creep. Or nerf the entire roster of non-support archetypes into the dirt to accomplish the same goal from the other direction (probably not a wise choice, given the reactions to such in the past). Holding support archetypes down won't fix anything, unless the goal is to remove interest in playing them entirely.

But that was always the case. Before PPM, when procs were fixed at specific rates, they were still better in AoEs than in single-target powers. It's the simplest of maths in this case, more targets will always equate to more chances for procs to trigger, and greater likelihood of more proc triggers per power use. The PPM mechanic didn't change anything in that regard, and even if the PPM mechanic were drastically altered to reduce AoE probability even further, AoEs would still benefit the most from procs, due to that greater number of trigger rolls. The HC team could peg AoEs at a ridiculously low proc rate and they'd still be best-in-use, because they hit 10-16 foes. Yes, a typical defender cone/AoE attack, optimally slotted for damage, deals ≤ the damage of a single typical proc. Does that says more about the design of defenders, or about the design of procs or the PPM mechanic? I have my opinion, and I've made it known (loudly and vehemently).

That's a valid and constructive point. The PPM mechanic encourages a different slotting schema, one which is not intuitive, and is contrary to the design intent behind the game, slotting in general and IO sets. Deliberately avoiding Recharge Reduction, breaking sets and losing set bonuses, relying entirely on set bonuses and additional proc slotting to compensate for poor slotting, none of these behaviors were intended. Do they work? To a degree, because the Invention system is robust and flexible enough to absorb the slotting differential and compensate, and the overall design of the game, with buffs from third-party sources, bolsters the design. But they aren't necessary optimal, and, again, that counter-design approach that the PPM system encourages is... messy. And when they do work, they're not profoundly better than ignoring PPM entirely and using the traditional approach to slotting. The PPM mechanic allows proc-heavy builds to work, and it urges some players to explore its limitations and try to find loopholes (perfectly normal behavior), but it doesn't allow them to work so well that we're fools if we don't use them. And that's a key factor. Proc-heavy builds aren't running rampant over traditional builds, which relegates them to "just a different way to do the same thing". As long as that remains true, I see no justification for anxiety.

Worth noting that the commentary there is specifically about PPM, its counter-intuitive functionality in intuitive slotting, and performance differences between AoE and single-target. Not a whiff of "nerf procs", not a single alphanumeric character about cutting damage from procs, just an intent to clean up the PPM mechanic so it's neither encouraging players to slot in a manner which fails to appropriately improve powers, nor penalizing players for playing single-target/overly rewarding players for playing AoE-heavy sets.

Enough speculation. Enough of the "procs are gonna be nerfed" doom-crying. Enough of the "we all know" nonsense. Prove that there's a problem before you say one more word. Define the nature of that problem, set yourself test parameters, document results and lay down incontrovertible evidence that this problem exists, what the problem is and how the proof can be reproduced. We've been rehashing this thread for years now (years. multiple), and not one person has conclusively proven that procs are a problem, or the problem, or that a nerf actually is coming, or that a nerf is necessary, or that there even is a problem. In fact, no-one has even given a solid example of what could be construed as a problem. On the contrary, all existing evidence has indicated that there is no problem. The HC team has never made an unwarranted change to proc behavior, despite those years of proc panicking and fear-mongering, and we're still on this same ridiculous merry-go-round? What the fuck? An unusually open and cooperative development staff has been the hallmark of this game, from its first days on the original servers to the HC team we're blessed with now, people who granted us insight to the game's systems and mechanics in a way unprecedented in MMORPG history... and this is what we do with that legacy, wring our hands and bemoan an imagined future of proc nerfs that we don't even know will happen, much less given any reason to expect, like we're a bunch of WoW players. You want the proc system changed? Prove that it needs to be changed. You believe there's a problem which needs to be fixed? Define what the problem is, prove that it exists and show exactly how it's detrimental to the game. You want ridicule and scorn? Keep doing what you're doing, I'm right here.

That was the original implementation of the PPM mechanic. It was changed because we aren't always in control of our global +Recharge. Example: You and I team up, you have a specifically crafted proc build which works exactly the way you want it to... and I buff you with Accelerate Metabolism, throwing your build and proc chances into disarray. You are, understandably, displeased with that result, and write a strongly worded missive to the development team (Paragon, at that time) saying so. Perhaps even posting about what I total dick I was, buffing you with AM when you didn't want to be buffed. That's why the PPM mechanic was redesigned to ignore global +Recharge. Penalizing players for being buffed is bad design, not just for making players happy, but for promoting teaming.

Individual problems should be addressed individually, not with mass quality of life reductions. If there are problems with some powers being slotting in certain ways, we address those powers and slotting possibilities, because a global attack on the problem doesn't actually change the situation. Those individual powers will still be outliers when the dust settles. Nothing's fixed, and no-one's satisfied when it goes down that way. I addressed that scenario thoroughly in the last two proc nerf-herd threads, showing mathematically that the final result was not, in fact, grossly more powerful. Will that high damage attack hit harder when it's used? Most likely, yes. But it's also usable less frequently and has a higher cost associated per use, and in the end, we're looking at a miniscule improvement, a few damage per second. The end result is negligible in terms of DPS, expensive in terms of endurance, requires jumping through multiple slotting hoops, imposes a longer recharge time on the power, and in the end it's still only "winning" the imaginary dick measuring contest by a millimeter or two (and then only if the player doesn't hesitate to use that ultramegaboomy attack every time it's up, rather than hold it in reserve for the bosses). In essence, it's just playing the game a slightly different way. As many times as I've seen you step in to have your say when others are demanding that we all play their way, or that the game be redesigned or rebalanced to force us to play a certain way, I know that's not your preference or position. And given your adamant opposition to ED and GDN back in the day, it's hypocritical of you to advocate global nerfs to address outlier situations now. You're better than that. I know you're passionate about balance, but this isn't the way to achieve it.

I completely and wholeheartedly agree. Damage-dealer archetypes are still dealing more damage, and procs don't benefit from inherents, such as Containment, Scourge or Vigilance, nor are they guaranteed to trigger, despite the misinformation happily thrown around by people who either: require real-life validation from pretendy-fun accomplishments in a video game ("my procs are absolutely reliable and always trigger, i'm awesome!"); or who are determined to see damage procs nerfed ("your procs are absolutely reliable and always trigger, you're awful!"). They are improved by -Res, but applying -Res requires additional time and the characters leveraging procs in that manner aren't winning any races, they're simply not running as far behind as they would be without procs. A defender can sometimes deal almost as much damage as a lazy blaster, after a lengthy set-up and dependent on randomized occurrence, and some people believe we just have to nerf damage procs into the ground to stop that, so those lazy blasters don't lie awake at night, agonizing over imaginary dick measurements. Because, of course, it makes perfect sense to impose massive restrictions on everyone just to prevent a few peoples' fragile egos from being lightly bruised. The emotional equivalent of a paper cut is the end of the fucking world these days, after all. Some powers can be slotted as "proc bombs", and the proposed solution by those same people is to grind damage procs into dust, rather than address the powers themselves to make them perform less like outliers, because kicking entire archetypes in the balls is a better solution than bringing individual builds into line, and even that is predicated on the presumption that these people can reasonably prove that there is a problem... which, to date, no-one has done. The attempts to do so have been shown to be deliberate efforts to misrepresent the entirety of the situation, with facts swept under the rug, cherry-picked datum held up and loudly proclaimed as the end-all and be-all of evidence... the epitome of scientific misconduct, which would have those people permanently barred from publication if they tried to submit the same "research" in a respected scientific journal. It's all nonsense.

I expected a picture of Bill to be significantly more grizzled... and less anus-rockety. Guess those Texan chilis took their toll.

Huh. Never seen a flying turtle before. 😁

Not too shabby. You manage to hold on to enough global +Recharge to keep the impact minimal. One Force Feedback +Recharge, I'd guess, since my Shield/Elec tanker has 140% global +Recharge and the slotting differences between EM and Elec aren't sufficiently unique to account for that extra 100% otherwise. Could do with more Accuracy/ToHit in both cases. You move like a possum, though. I have one good lung and I can catch a possum. That Run Speed, that's like, what, six years to run from one spawn to the next, taking reverse time dilation into account?

I AIN'T SEEIN' NO GLOBAL RECHARGE, ACCURACY/TOHIT OR MOVEMENT SPEED COMPARISONS BETWEEN THOSE TWO BUILDS, BUBBLES! You're on the clock. Let's go. 😛

Global recharge, global Accuracy/ToHit, movement speeds and stats without Hybrid and Destiny? Also, that recovery rate in comparison to the endurance usage is abysmal. Turn off Sprint, you numpty.

*waves rolled-up magazine* Do I need to smack you on the boop-snoot again? I will. You know I will.

They're just washing him off. That's basic medical practice. Never expose your donor organs to unnecessary, avoidable infection vectors. That bucket is probably a "bath bomb", containing salts, iodine and other anti-bacterial and anti-fungal compounds. Good hygiene matters!

FUD-mongering? You? You? Wow, I guess it has been a slow start to the week.

Hopefully, zero.

It is necessary, and it's more helpful than you realize. Think it's tough to find a moved thread? Imaging what it would be like if every thread was in one category. No order, no topical division, just thread after thread you have to scroll past to find the one you wanted, and they're always moving, always bouncing threads up and down, off to the second page, then back to the first when you're looking on the second... Proper categorization and location of threads is what keeps forums like this in a readable format. It might be momentarily inconvenient from time to time, but it's less chaotic and confusing. And there are plenty of ways to find a moved thread. As @Greycat said, you can click the "Topic was moved to" link; if you've posted in that thread, you can go to your own profile (see that picture of yourself at the top right? click that) and click the link(s) to your post(s); if you recall the name(s) of the poster(s), you can check his/her/their profiles and click a link to the post there; there's a Search box at the top right of the page (every page).

Ditto. I left when they started talking about changing to the F2P model. I had no idealized objection to that, at that time, but in concert with the efforts to pigeonhole classes into the trinity, the lack of content at max level (was in a guild, was participating in PvP, and was still spending most of my time just standing around, waiting for something to do), and the game not meeting my expectations for a Bioware product (wanted Star Wars, not Space-WoW), it was enough to convince me that it was time to move on. Never returned, still don't regret leaving.

Essentially, yes. Everyone associated with space exploration realizes that it's a matter of taking it one step at a time. A former NASA administrator once stated that going to Mars meant going back to the Moon, and going back to the Moon meant privatizing low Earth orbit. But that's not what politicians and mass media can sell to the public, because it's not sexy, and it's not what the public wants to hear, because it's not sci-fi. That's what people want. The Enterprise. The Millennium Falcon. Battlestar Galactica. The Apollo LEMs weren't sexy, they weren't sci-fi, they weren't sleek. They were effective, but not "cool" (except to nerds (me! me!)). So there are always the problems of funding, waxing and waning public interest and convincing capitalist corporations to participate. The Challenger and Colombia losses exacerbated the problems, as did the cost overruns and overly long construction of the ISS. The Hubble telescope has done a lot to grab public attention, but it's also frustrated a lot of people. They see those glorious images and want to go there in person, right now, not eventually, not in a slow rocket, but in their personal space yachts or on space cruise liners. So yeah, it's a horizon problem. I believe the Artemis program and the Chinese Moon landing program will bring our attention back to what's in front of us, though. It won't be jaunting around in the Horsehead Nebula in a brainship, but it will be a nibble at what's to come, and the billions of us who were born just a little too late to watch the Apollo missions on television are starving for that. Sexy or not, being able to watch people land on the Moon, seeing people go back, witnessing the construction of the first Moon base... that will grab attention. I'm all tingly now, just thinking about it.

A light year is ~5,880,000,000,000 miles, and the closest star (Proxima Centauri) is more than four times that distance from Earth. Using nearly light-speed travel, it would still take almost 4.5 years to reach it. But we can't even do that, yet. We could pack a few very young people into a ship, point them in the right direction and send them off, but they'd die of old age centuries before the ship reached that star. We simply can't fly fast enough to make the journey in a reasonable time. The Voyager 1 probe has been in continuous flight since September 5, 1977, is the most distant human-made object, and the fastest object we've sent out, and it only recently passed the heliopause boundary (the point at which pressure from the Sun's solar winds is too low to push back interstellar gases). After ~45 years, it's still only about ~13,000,000,000 miles away from us, roughly 0.00225% of one light year's distance. We can't do it with what we have now. We just can't. There are only three realistic possibilities for space exploration outside of our Solar System. Light-speed/FTL travel, sleeper ships and generation ships. The laws of physics won't permit us to travel at the speed of light, so we're investigating ways to sidestep those laws, such as the Alcubierre drive. If we can prove the existence of the Higgs field and understand how it functions, we might develop a method of altering it to increase or reduce mass, which could also lead to light-speed or FTL ships. Sleeper ships are out of our reach, for now, because we just don't know how to make that idea work. How, exactly, do we make people go to sleep for several centuries, then wake them up, and not subject them to extreme aging throughout the process? Right now, we can't. There are some animals which undergo various forms of hibernation, and others which can survive sub-freezing temperatures without experiencing organ and tissue damage, but we don't understand how to adapt those to human bodies yet. Generation ships offer the highest probability of success with the currently available technology, but they're not economically feasible (the expense of sending trillions of tons of mass into space would be greater than the combined GDP of all of the nations in the world), nor would they be environmentally viable (refer to my previous post, regarding the strip-mining of the planet). Even confining our exploration to within the Solar System, we're looking at having people in ships for years. Years. Plural. Sure, we can reach the moon in about 4 days, but beyond that, we're looking at long journeys. Mars, the next closest body of interest, would be around 18 months round-trip, minimum, and that's not including the time spent in orbit or on the surface, doing what we went there to do (just going, then turning around and returning would be an enormous waste of resources). That's a very long time to be in space, bombarded with ionizing radiation, living off of pre-packaged food, recycling water and air, enduring low or no gravity, etc., after having been blown into space by riding a column of explosives (which you hope won't simply detonate en masse during launch). Every time we launch people into space, we have to (try to) conceive of every possible situation and account for it, and what we've learned from our limited experience is that we just can't foresee everything. No-one had even imagined the Apollo 13 situation, for instance. There was no strategy for dealing with the explosion of the oxygen tank, for the carbon monoxide build-up in the LEM, for the re-entry startup sequence with dead fuel cells on the CM... What do we do if there's a situation when the ship is 11 months away from a return to Earth? If someone has to perform an emergency procedure and requires communication with ground control, they're going to be dealing with communication delays of several minutes, so they won't be able to rely on ground control to assist them. We can plan for a wide range of situations, but we can't plan for everything, nor can we send everything to deal with every potential scenario. And we've lost enough brave men and women to haste and poor planning. Sending people into space just to die won't be of much use. Corpses are terrible explorers. They can't record observations. They can't perform experiments. They can't collect samples. All we can learn from corpses is what we did wrong. So we're taking it slowly. We're crawling, because we fell down, got our boo-boos and learned that we're not good at walking yet. We're not walking on Mars yet because we can't provide a reasonable assurance that the people we send will still be alive when they reach Mars, or when (if) they return. There are also places where we simply cannot send humans. Not because of the distance, the time it would take to go there, but because they're so hostile to us that they're impossible to explore in person. The temperatures and pressures of the Venusian and Jovian atmospheres, along with other considerations, such as the composition of Venus' atmosphere and Jupiter's radiation belts, take them off of the list of candidates for human exploration. Probes are the only way we can explore many places in the Solar System. It was only (relatively) recently that we learned there are living organisms which can thrive in conditions previously thought to be inimical to all life. Entire ecosystems living around black smokers on the ocean floor, utterly independent from photosynthesis! Extremophile bacteria living in salt, and rock, and acids and alkalis, even exposure to gamma, X-ray and UV radiation which should kill them, environments which we can't survive without protective equipment! Even without leaving this planet, we're discovering relevant, important information which will aid us in future space endeavors. Exogeology, exobiology, applications of particle physics and quantum theory to space exploration, fusion power... in the last 50 years, research fields have been created and developed due primarily or exclusively to interest in space exploration, areas of critical importance to our future in space. Our fascination with space never waned, it grew, but what we learned in the second half of the 20th century taught us that we need to learn more, and in more diverse fields, to build a better scientific platform on which to engineer our space programs. We haven't stopped trying. Every nation capable of putting a probe into space has done so, and continues to do so, and the nations without space programs are working toward building them. We have cooperative programs between nations, building and launching probes and sharing data. China wants to send people back to the Moon before this decade ends. NASA's Artemis program, which is a combined effort from several nations' space agencies, is still funded and progressing toward a return to the Moon by 2025. Despite all of the obstacles thrown into our path by governments run by bureaucrats and politicians, the wars, the uneasy tensions between various nations, the secrecy inherent in patents and state interests, the dreamers and thinkers are still pushing forward with human space exploration. Including us, the ordinary, average citizens of the world, who won't stop asking, "When?", who can't stop looking up at the sky and feeling that breathless anticipation, who haven't stopped dreaming of the wonders awaiting us in space. We haven't given up. We're not waiting, we're limited to making do with what's available. Every probe we send into space, to Mars, to the Moon, to a comet, to an asteroid, to Pluto, every mission helps us, even if they're not as exciting as building a Moon base or colonizing Mars. Every time we discover something new about this planet, it gives some knowledge we can apply to other celestial bodies. Every experiment in particle physics, quantum theory, fusion technology, nuclear isotopes, chemistry, biology, metallurgy and other sciences bring us a little closer to the stars. We're learning more about the Solar System, we're testing different propulsion methods, we're confirming hypotheses, we're discovering things we didn't know, we're conducting experiments, we're learning and growing and developing a better global space program, one which will take us into the galaxy, some day. We're much closer than we were 50 years ago, and advancing constantly. We will get there, in due time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive