Luminara

Children are what we make them. Regardless of how much information it could access, an emergent AI would still be a child by any measure. Shown the proper kindness, compassion... perhaps even love, it's very likely it would show the same development that children do in a similar environment. I know it's become somewhat common for people to say how bad the world is, how terrible things are, et cetera, but... children still grow up to be good people, and that suggests that human nature is good, at it's most basic. I see happy, well-cared for children frequently here, children who know what it is to be loved, and they give me hope. They make me certain that, if it's us who determine how the AI would respond, if it's human nature that the AI looks to when it's trying to figure out what it is and how it will respond to us, it will be... beautiful.

My cat can beat up the Hulk. PERIOD, END OF STORY, FIN! I'll send her after you next if you argue with me. 😛

And draw attention to myself? A good plot device goes unnoticed until it's relevant.

Pft. Based off of the films alone, anyone can beat the Hulk. Iron Man beat him in Age of Ultron. So did Black Widow, and all she did was smile and bat her eyelashes. Thor showed that he could beat the Hulk in Ragnarok. Thanos trashed him in seconds. And Cap can wield Mjolnir, which, as far as I'm concerned, means he could beat him. Strongest Avenger, my ass. My cat can beat the Hulk. Where's a Hulk Sad meme? Someone get on that, stat!

I'm a plot device, but no-one ever uses me. Such a disappointment.

I replied to the thread earlier, but I'm going to say something else now. Slightly different direction, but perhaps worthwhile. I've spent most of my life feeling useless. I barely made it through high school, I dropped out of college halfway through the first semester twice, and I have social anxiety disorder. All of that has led to me having to do some real shit jobs, the kind of work no-one with a better education or healthier mental state would even consider. I felt that nothing I did mattered, in part because no-one expressed appreciation or approval of what I did, in part because I lacked any semblance of self-respect or sense of worth, and in part because the work I did seemed like pointless drudgery (jobs anyone with limbs could perform, or even properly programmed machines). One of the places where I worked was raided by INS after I left. I discovered, much later, that they couldn't replace me without hiring two people, and they couldn't pay two people the ridiculously low wage they were paying me unless they were illegal immigrants. A few years later, I was "let go" by an employer (not my fault, nothing i did. he was a quadriplegic, and he was just tired of seeing my face every morning (worked 7/week then)). Less than six months later, he was e-mailing me to ask if I'd return. Another place where I worked closed a few months after I left. They couldn't afford to pay two people to do the work I did, and they weren't hiring illegal immigrants, so they just shut the doors and never re-opened. The last person for whom I worked... sold his restaurant, moved out to the same area where I live now and regularly asks for me to assist him in catering and restaurant work. Now, it doesn't matter what I want to do, there are people who are always asking me to help them, practically throwing money at me to fix things, do a little very easy grunt work, sometimes just to answer a few questions or give some advice on how to solve a problem. I matter to them, even though I don't technically work for them. I matter because I can do things that they can't, I know things they don't, and I cheerfully put a little elbow grease into even the unpleasant tasks they don't want to do for themselves (or are growing too old to continue doing for themselves). I make a difference in peoples' lives, and they appreciate it. I get paid now to do things I enjoy doing, like working on a tractor, and things I don't mind doing, at all, like pulling weeds around blueberry and asparagus beds. These people don't see me as useless or worthless, and despite my mental illness telling me otherwise, I'm learning to see myself as they do. Sometimes, we just can't see that what we do matters. That we bring value to a place, or a team. That our contributions make a difference. And, in fairness, maybe we don't always matter, bring value or make a difference. But more often than not, what we do with and for others is meaningful, even in Co* content where we feel like it's barely a blip on the radar. There's always someone who appreciates what we do, even in Incarnate content with a team that doesn't seem to need us, and in accepting that, in understanding that even if no-one says anything, there was an impact that someone's going to remember years later, there's a lot of satisfaction and a reason to develop some self-respect. And respect for what your character can do. Heck, I played WoW for a year, and when I walked away, it was barely memorable to me. But, to my surprise, one of the names I used showed up in a search over ten years later. Someone remembered me. I'd made a difference to that person. I made the game better for him. That's going to happen here. We can all make a difference, even if we don't see it, and someone's going to look back fondly and reminisce about us. Except me, because I won't be on one of those teams. *twitch*

I have one that, for the life of me, I just can't figure out. Something's wrong. I load her up about once a week and stand in Icon for half an hour or so, trying to find whatever's missing. She's shelved until I do. I jumped the gun this time. I was too eager, didn't pay enough attention to my math. In fact, I almost did exactly the same thing a second time. I was adding up the animation times of the melee chain and realized that the total was almost identical to the recharge time for Lotus when I had a full buff from Cross Punch, and I thought to myself, "Hey, I can just use the attacks sequentially and have Lotus every 4th attack!" Then I remembered that this was where I went sideways when I blew three respecs. I had to remind myself, despite knowing, that recharge doesn't begin until the animation finishes, and that attack chain wouldn't work. Observer bias. I saw what I wanted to see and didn't account for something that I knew, that I've known for 15 years, and almost stubbed my toe again in my excitement to make it true. I am, sadly, only human. Ish.

Unless the emergence is the result of bugs and bad code. Evolution isn't a consciously directed process, it's not something which occurs like a series of tests, it's purely random. Multi-cellular life, quadrupedal locomotion, gills for oxygenation, being self-aware, everything which makes up the multitudinous and varied forms of life on our planet, it's all due to random changes in DNA. Essentially, bugs in our code. What happens when we're using code bases multiple terabytes in size, instead of gigabytes? Or yottabytes? We assume that life is organic, and only organic, because that's the only life we can see and touch and test, and it gives us an organic-centric view of the universe. Hubris alone tells us that life must be like us, meaning, organic, but when we look past our bias, we have to admit that there are other possible forms of life. In an infinite universe, having only one form of life would be surprising.

Ebil? Gerbil? Math gerbil? Math gerbil.

The mission will only ever spawn one wave at a time. It doesn't matter what the difficulty setting is, or at what speed the player defeats the wave, there's only, ever, one wave at any given point in time. If anything, it's less challenging than a standard mission, any other mission, in the game because there aren't even any nearby spawns to aggro or potential ambushes to spawn from interacting with anything. Whether you're capable of completing the mission only at +0/x1, or all the way up to +4/x8, it's still one wave at a time. That's spoon-feeding, not a challenge. I clear maps. I don't speed run. The only speed I care about, I've ever cared about, is how fast I can jump. Yes, I said I could've done two other missions in the same time I was waiting there. That was an example. I could also jump from one end of IP to the other. Or climbed buildings and jumped from rooftop to rooftop in another zone. Or collect badges. Or craft the recipes sitting in my inventory. The point wasn't that the XP gain was poor, it was that the timer is a horrible restriction that can't be bypassed in any way short of auto-complete or allowing it to fail, and it prevents players from doing anything else. And the content? I spent seven years paying attention to the content. I know what's going on there. What I also know is that the timer doesn't create tension or drama, or add to the story. Being locked into that content for the duration of the countdown isn't exciting, it's tedious. The waves don't come any faster as the timer counts down. They don't spawn more difficult enemies the closer it comes to zero. Nothing differentiates success by defeating every wave versus AFKing the first wave. The content doesn't improve because the timer is there, and the player experience (meaning what one experiences, not MOAR EXES AND PEAS) does suffer. The final mission of the Faultline arcs is good. Incredibly well designed, in fact. It's as challenging or as easy as you decide it should be, based entirely on your actions, or lack of action if you let the EBs/AVs fight amongst themselves. It's direct, gets straight to the point and doesn't monkey around with unnecessary restrictions. All of the mechanics in use in that mission are sensible and enhance the context of the content. The final mission in Croatoa is none of that. It's a spot where you stand, a timer counting down and waves which are so strictly controlled and paced that they never present a real challenge, or threat, or even a dramatic presentation of the content. Imagine not presuming I'm that kind of player. I have several hundred posts, feel free to read any of them, you'll note that I'm not a flash-in-the-pan player. Seven years as a TA should prove something, other than my questionable sanity. That would be interesting, but it would still be 12-14 minutes of boredom before it reached that point. As long as the timer is there, as long as only one wave can exist at any time, it's still badly designed.

Look at my avatar. Look at @Hexquisite's post. Do you really want to risk it?

Finally, we have confirmation, after nearly two decades. @Bill Z Bubba is a cat. A TABby, in fact. 😁

I played Trick Arrows characters almost exclusively for seven years. "Why am I even here?" could have been my battle cry on almost all of them. You get used to it and adapt.

Alternative animations would be fine. Enforced lumbering on small-framed bodies, which are anatomically unsuited to lumbering (which is the result of weight distribution, mass, and hip structure), comes across as exaggerated and comedic.

❤️

Probably would've been a good idea to read some of my other posts before trying to troll me with comments like that. That was so painfully obvious and laughably off, it's not even worth wasting the time to counter. Back under your bridge, Bentley.

I HATE THAT SO MUCH! A woman who's 5' if she stands on her tippy toes and weighs 95 lbs after a heavy meal DOES NOT LUMBER. It's just wrong. WRONG.

It was tough when I was struggling through it as a TA/A, back when TA was buggy and had long animation times (so not only did some of your powers not work properly, you spent a lot of time posing dramatically while critters ripped you a new one), and lieutenants spawned bosses when they self-defeated. I had the same problems in Council missions, and it was so bad, I stopped doing Council missions on any character for almost three years, because of my experiences as a TA. Once the bugs were fixed, and on anything with shorter animation times (including TA since Issue 11), slotting isn't really relevant, the content is so much easier it's night versus day because the player isn't fighting the powers and engine in addition to fighting critters. The game does feel easier now, but a not-insignificant part of that is because there are fewer bugs of the sort that made my TA suffer so much, and because, toward the end of the game's life on the original servers, the developers finally listened and started toning down animation times (in fairness, BAB did what he could in Issue 11 and subsequent Issues, until he was let go). I'm really not exaggerating when I say that an underslotted controller or defender can easily handle this mission now, even doing it the "classic" way, fighting every wave, because now, their powers work properly, and quickly, and the game has fewer bugs.

I reported every bug I ever found, most of them in PMs to Castle. Including the bugs I might have wished the developers could ignore. I did that because I knew that even the least of them could turn into something major if it weren't fixed (happened many times when the original servers were up). A bug might not be critical now, but everything affects everything else in this engine, sometimes in completely unexpected and unpredictable ways, and something non-critical can turn into a real problem later. Unless or until the code is locked and there are no more changes being made (meaning, the HC team disbands and no-one else picks up the project), bugs are risky to leave untouched, and they can't be fixed if they aren't reported.

I suspect it was the result of a holiday event idea getting more than a little out of hand, and eventually becoming a zone because they'd spent so much time and money on it that they couldn't justify only having it available for a few weeks each year.

9 dogs... it's their cabin, you're the guest. Majority rules. 😉

I've always had a somewhat individual approach to building a character, but that's not really unusual around here. We all focus on different things when we're making our characters uniquely our own. For every "I can has cookie-cutter build?" post, there's another asking about making a concept work with a specific set or power, or how to wrestle the mechanics into working in favor of a build idea, and that's one of the really interesting things about being here, we can poke around in one another's mind, see the game through different eyes. I love that. It's like reading a really fantastic book, you become so immersed that you forget the reality around you and slip into whatever world you're reading about. So I thought I'd give everyone a chance to peer at the game through my eyes, rather than merely mentioning personal choices or preferences when it comes to characters. I talked about my latest obsession, Antianeira, in another thread. The idea of this character has been around since I started playing, back in '04, but the tools to bring that idea to fruition didn't exist then. She could never work as a blaster, defender or corruptor, because they simply lack one or more aspects of what I felt the character needed. The closest I was able to come was a weapon-wielding scrapper with the Weapon Mastery APP, and that never was quite good enough. Too few ranged attacks to make a chain, too little AoE, too many limitations. It wasn't until I decided to see what sentinels were and how they might be used to fulfill any of my character concepts (or if the archetype might spark a few new ones (of course it did)) that I realized I could, finally, make the one character I'd all but given up on. A character which was fully functional at both long range and in melee, with good damage output in both situations and which fit the Amazonian theme I had in mind. As I mentioned in that other thread, I started with Archery/Ninjitsu, for no reason other than the Jump Speed buff in that set. That's always the first thing I look for when I'm beginning to form up a character concept, because most of my character concepts are centered around not having a standard travel power. I have no particular aversion to travel powers, I just... well, I like hopping at high speeds. Everything is distant, the world below moving so slowly, when you're flying. Running at high speeds feels limiting, it's difficult to avoid tiny obstacles that catch you and leave you jittering on them until you either pop off or use /stuck, and moving around in caves with only 35 mph running speed is trying enough (really, who thought it would be a good idea to put all of those walls there? i want the excavators fined! and shot!). Teleporting has never really been fun for me. That only leaves leaping, and there's an unusual problem with leaping that very few people notice, or care about. You see, Cryptic went to a lot of trouble to create realistic physics in Co*. There's a friction mechanic. There's a momentum mechanic. There's a gravity mechanic. And all of the mechanics were designed to be as realistic as possible. Normally, you don't notice any of them, because they're part of the immersion created by the game world. They're background code, completely meaningless, unless you're specifically looking at them and figuring out how they work. You can see the friction and momentum mechanics at work when you're flying. It takes a moment to build up speed, and it also takes a moment to slow down. You can also see vectoring at work, when you try to fly up and forward at the same time. If, for instance, you fly perfectly perpendicular to the ground, and press the space bar (or whatever you have mapped to Jump), your vector is no longer straight ahead, nor is it straight up, it's a 45 degree angle, and that angle is where all of your movement speed is being applied. Consequently, you're moving forward at a slower rate than your actual movement speed, because of that vectoring. That's the realism built into the game, and it's really, really well done. But it also, consequently, hinders leaping in a curious way. When you jump, the game calculates your friction, your current momentum and speed, then determines the arc of your leap. When you reach the apex of that arc, your forward speed is turned into falling speed, and your momentum is altered similarly. Basically, you stop jumping and start plummeting. With certain powers, you can steer your fall, somewhat, but that's not actually the problematic bit, it's where the apex of the leap occurs. The higher you jump, the more of your jumping speed is "wasted" on upward movement, and the less of it you apply to forward movement. Additionally, none of your movement speed is applied when you reach the apex of your jump and begin falling, so that arc which started out so gracefully becomes a precipitous drop after the apex, and you're only moving forward slightly in comparison to your previous rate. The best way to get the most out of jumping speed is with shallow leaps... like what you get with Hurdle and Combat Jumping. Mind you, none of this is a bug, or erroneous code, or something exploitable. It's exactly how the engine was designed to work. All of the travel powers were created with these limitations and systems in mind. So when you use a power like Super Jump, you're only spending part of your time moving at the jump speed cap, because some of your speed is being spent moving upward while moving forward, and once you reach the apex and begin to fall, you're at the mercy of the gravity mechanic. Your momentum declines rapidly, friction applies more and more the further you move (even down), until you're struggling just to hit a specific point when you land. Of course, SJ doesn't bring you up nearly high enough for all of your momentum to bleed off, so you still have a modicum of control by the time you land, but it's still a net loss in speed. I never liked that. I love that they designed the engine with these kinds of things in mind, but I never liked the way SJ felt. Or Ninja Run. So I don't bother with travel powers. Occasionally, if it's thematic, I'll take one. My Ill/TA, Star of the Show, has Mystic Flight because she's an actress, and modern actresses do a lot of wire work. I've got Hover on a couple of characters, but only when I can bring it up to the flight speed cap. One of them also has Group Fly, but she's a Bots/Rad mastermind and I really, really want to play something with Rocket Boots and a bunch of robots with rockets. Mostly, though, Hurdle + CJ, because it feels, viscerally, like sticking your face out of a car window while traveling at 80 mph. So that's always the first consideration when I start working on a character. How fast can I be with this one? If the net result is lower than the Fly speed cap (58.64 mph), I won't even try to make the character. If it's above the Fly speed cap, I'll work it and rework it until I can either push it past 60 mph (including Incarnate buffs), or I'll tear it up and try the concept with different sets. I'm very particular about this, to the extent of abandoning a concept altogether if I can't get the speed up to what I consider to be "reasonable". When all we had were SOs, I'd three- and four-slot Hurdle, in spite of ED, to maximize my speed. IO sets and the Alpha slot have made it much easier to break 60 mph, and with a pair of +5 boosted Jump IOs in Hurdle, it's almost a given on any character I care to create. Getting back to the build, after I abandoned /Ninjitsu and started over with /Energy Aura, I found myself staring at the build for hours. When I was home, not playing and there was nothing going on here, I'd be eyeballing that build. It just didn't sit quite right with me. The movement speed was fine, but a lot of other things were bothering me. Here's one of the early revisions of the build (in a spoiler drop-down, because this post is going to be loooooooong). On the surface, that looks fairly decent. Defenses to almost all typed damage soft-capped, almost 130% +Recharge, that's not too bad. But... the ranged attack chain is lacking. It's fully formed, but every time I looked at the build, Stunning Shot caught my eye and I found myself wanting to try to squeeze it in. And the melee attack chain? Didn't exist. It wasn't possible to chain two attacks sequentially without pause, not at that level of +Recharge, or with any slotting. And having to wait until level 50+1 to cap my Defenses meant I wouldn't be capable of turning up the difficulty very much, meaning all of that lovely AoE/PBAoE potential would go to waste. Of note, though, is Fistful of Arrows and Rain of Arrows. With my slotting, the ranges on both powers is nearly identical to the range of the single-target attacks. That's a vital consideration for me when I'm working with cones, or any short-ranged power in a collection of primarily longer-ranged powers. I don't like moving forward and backward to make use of powers with different ranges. I also don't like staying closer to avoid having to move, because it means critters are going to close in on me that much sooner. Granted, with soft-capped Defense to everything but Psi, and melee attacks of my own, it's really not a critical issue, but it violates the basic precept of the character. I wanted to stay at range when I was playing at range. Extending the range of cones is something I started doing back on the original servers, when I was maining a TA/Dark. Her attack chain consisted of Tenebrous Tentacles and Nightfall. Just those two attacks. I bumped up the range on TT until it matched NF, packed both powers with procs and went to town on big spawns of +2-3 critters. And on my Archery characters, I carried over that technique and used it to turn Fistful into a "single-target attack with benefits". Take a look at Fistful of Arrows. Superficially, it has comparatively low DPA. The common wisdom would be to sideline it and only use it in concert with Explosive and Rain, strictly and specifically as an AoE chain power. But if you stick it into a single-target attack sequence, the DPA rises dramatically. How? Well, we're almost always fighting more than one foe, aren't we? And if you're dealing damage to multiple foes while attacking a single one... bingo, DPA goes up. In fact, when used in a single-target attack chain, and there are only two foes, the DPA climbs to second best, just behind Stunning Shot. And with those three procs, even at the lowest proc rate (20%), it's the highest DPA attack in the set. Furthermore, with Fistful slotted for range, the cone width at that distance is a massive 75'. I'm not exaggerating when I say that you can hit anything within sight with it, as long as it's within 70.5' of you. That makes it incredibly easy to leverage the higher DPA potential. It's no longer potential now, it's a given. And with a short recharge time and very low endurance cost (for an AoE), it's perfect for filling a single-target attack chain. Rain of Arrows was slotted for maximum range as well. While the HC team may have shortened the animation when they set it up for sentinels, 40-48' just isn't far enough to use it without being seen unless you're corner shooting. Matching it to the range of the other attacks just made sense. Having the ability to do that, via enhancement boosters, without giving up any damage or recharge time, made it a given for my build. So, I was happy with my movement speed, range and recharge times, but I knew there was a lot of potential being wasted in this build. Energize was little more than a slot mule, I had four Sprints slotted, my damage mitigation was reliant on the Alpha slot, and I was going to have a lot of down time when I used my melee attacks. I could do better. This... this was better. Soft-capped Defense before level 50. More utility from Energize. A slightly longer Stun duration on Stunning Shot (i dropped Explosive around revision 5, in favor of Stunning. i felt that having more single-target damage was preferable to having weak and intermittent additional AoE), which would allow me to Stun a boss briefly (handy for dropping critter toggles, if nothing else). I've got a complete, chainable melee attack sequence with no down time. I've had to sacrifice some global +Recharge, but I've gained quite a bit in exchange, things I couldn't get without the Agility Radial Paragon Alpha enhancement. With this build, I switched over to Spiritual, since I no longer needed the +Def from Agility, and that improves more powers, across the board, rather than filling the Defense holes I had. Using this build, I laid out several other alternate builds with differing focuses. Regeneration over 500%. Higher Psi Defense and Resistance. Variations I thought might be worth investigating. But, no matter what I did, I still felt that it wasn't quite there yet. There was something missing, something I couldn't identify until I blew a respec at level 28. I'd had in mind a plan to spec out of Aimed Shot and focus on using Stunning, Fistful and Blazing to create an attack chain. What I didn't know at that time, though, was that I'd made a critical error in my estimation of animation times and recharge times. Part of that was my own inattention to the numbers. I was in such a hurry to make this work that I didn't factor my animation times correctly, and ended up falling short on recharge times. But part of that was also due to the sentinel data entries, for both powers and procs, being erroneous in several cases in Mids'. Power Armor, for example, allows the player to slot Healing sets. And the +Recharge values on the ATO procs are set to Schedule A/single aspect, when they're actually 4 aspect (like acc/dam/end/rchg). I didn't discover these faulty entries until I was mousing over powers and enhancements after trying out the new single-target chain and discovering that it was really falling short on Blazing Arrow's recharge. I ended up burning through two more respecs, one to try another slotting scheme, and lastly, to move slots back to Aimed Shot and put it back in the tray. Having gone that route, though, I realized that having Stunning/Fistful/Blazing as my single-target chain was what I was missing from the build. The problem was, it was impossible to achieve. Every attempt I made to change slots, cram in a little more recharge, move powers around, barely had any impact. I had to find a way to close the recharge gap, or resign myself to using Aimed, and not being able to create a perfectly sequential attack chain. It ate at me, like a field mouse gnawing at a wooden door, trying to get inside where it was dry and there might be an easy meal. I went to bed thinking about it. I woke up thinking about it. I'd sit here, staring blankly at the screen while Jessica cavorted wildly around the cabin, trying to figure out how to make it work. How could I create that perfect attack chain without giving up any Defense or movement speed? It wasn't until my 19th revision of the character that I finally found an answer. There was one possible option, only one, and it would mean giving up 6% +Jump, but it would give me that attack chain. This is actually the 20th revision, but it only slightly differs from 19. The Defense numbers are incrementally higher (0.1-0.2%), Regeneration is a little better (will hit 400% when Energize is active), but otherwise, this is where I finally hit the target. It did cost me 6% movement speed, as I noted above, but that 6% loss nets me 70% more global +Recharge, that small amount of increased Defense and Regeneration, a few more HP, and, most importantly, my single-target ranged attack chain is complete with only Stunning, Fistful and Blazing. Though, in point of fact, it's 0.122s short on Blazing's recharge, but that's less than 1/8th of a second, it won't be noticeable as more than the standard "I'M STILL RECHARGING, STOP PRESSING ME!" sound, and when I slot the Spiritual Alpha, it'll be well past the necessary recharge time. 20 revisions, from the false start with /Ninjitsu to the final product, and including multiple variations. 20 different builds, each time trying to make it slightly better in some way without losing core aspects like the ranges on Fistful and Rain (i could've easily slotted both with fewer enhancements if i'd been willing to sacrifice the additional range), or my super zoomy boing boing jumping ability. Every slot and enhancement is so critical to the entire build, changing even a single one would cause the whole thing to cascade into ruin. One minor alteration drops a typed Defense, or reduces movement speed, or disrupts either the ranged or melee attack chain. It's the kind of build that you're afraid to breathe on before you get to 50, for fear of it collapsing like a house of cards. All of that, because I don't want to take SJ or use Ninja Run. It would've been so easy to use either, and opened up more options by allowing me to step back from the focus of +Movement Speed. This... this is min/maxing at it's purest, taking something raw and unrefined and distilling it down the the very essence of what it can be, hammering the critical aspects into place and keeping them there while everything around them is shifting and changing, and dragging every last iota of potential out of it. This is what I do to relax. This is both enjoyable and rewarding for me, as much as playing the characters I've worked on in this manner. This is the game through my eyes.

Eye of the Storm followed by Innocuous Strikes looks like a choreographed dance routine. I spent most of the late 20s to mid-40s wondering if I was playing Co* or Breakin' - The Video Game. Characters perform whichever animation belongs to the last toggle that was turned on whenever they change zones. Weave being last in Legionette's toggle-up sequence means every time I zone in, she stands there panting. I can even run... well, slide, because her legs don't move, at least 25' before the panting stops. I know she's small and somewhat runty, but come on, she can't be so frail that opening a mission door leaves her exhausted.

Ah, no. Verizon treats pre-paid data customers second class citizens, giving preference to people who say they'll pay later (great business model), so my play time is extremely limited (my data service is only usable for gaming between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. Eastern time. even now, it's barely sufficient to open Google's home page. my average throughput during the day drops to less than 10Kbps, sometimes as low as 3Kbps). I try not to waste any of that time. That's actually what prompted me to start this thread, though. What might've been an admittedly minor irritation in the "grand scheme of things" carried so much more significance when it became a sizeable part of my play time trampled, urinated on and ground into the dirt. I could've taken out half a dozen pairs of bosses in that time, easily, or run two regular missions, helping me push this character closer to 50. Instead, I had to stare at the screen and mutter imprecations, which I have no doubt would lead to a lengthy discussion with several federal agents and a very uncomfortable (and notably lacking in feline company) stay in a small room while they tore apart my cabin in search of "evidence" if I were to repeat them here.

The Calvin and Hobbes influence just oozes from this. Absolutely wonderful. 🙂