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*reloads catapult* FIRE IN THE HOLE!

I beaned her with a pineapple. Just loot the corpse. 😉

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/59-finances-donations/ They aren't hiding anything from anyone, they aren't taking money and laundering it through some obscure off-shore bank, they aren't doing anything shady. They set a hard limit on the amount which they'll take in donations, cut it off the instant the goal is reached, and tell everyone exactly what they spent the money on every month. They very clearly lay out where the money goes, breaking it down by different expenses, explain why something might change from the previous month, they even point out any overages in donations and apply it directly to the next month. They not only list where the money goes, they say why it went there, why spending it there was better than spending it elsewhere, what we're all getting out of that expenditure, etc. They're open and honest about the finances coming in or going out, in every way possible.

*loads a catapult with pudding* ... *throws a pineapple into the middle* INCOMING!

All of the content that was on the original servers was balanced around SOs. The changes and additions made since the HC team started their server... I don't know. BUT, my experiences leveling characters over the last couple of months (i started with absolutely nothing, a functionally new player, when i bought this laptop), coupled with my experiences on the original servers and what I know about the game, suggest to me that the SO balance point has not moved. SOs are still the gold standard, and IOs, at any level, even frankenslotted and common IOs, put us well above that standard. The goalpost is still where it was, but the much greater availability and accessibility of IO sets, for those who make use of them, gives the impression of the goalpost falling over and disappearing into an oubliette. IOs open up so much freedom with builds, even if it's just allowing us to improve powers more efficiently while spending fewer slots. It used to take months, up to a year, to fully kit out a build with IOs and set bonuses. It can be done in a day now, by someone starting fresh and just leveling for the first time. That changes perspectives, creates the impression of ease where it didn't exist before, and probably wouldn't exist today if set IOs were more difficult to acquire, the merit system were more restricted, etc. For me, no, though I do believe everyone can be wealthy and have IOs from level 10 onward, based on having done just that on my first (and every subsequent) character. Balance isn't what IOs can do, it's what Set/Set can do, and can't do, in normal content. Balanced is my TA/Dark being capable of leveling without leaning on inspirations just to survive every mission. Slotted with DOs or IOs doesn't matter because the game provides options like the difficulty settings to adjust the balance for my personal experience. Unbalanced is my TA/Dark not bringing anywhere near as much to a team as a Rad/* or Storm/*, despite being the same level and providing similar tools. There are no tools in place to address that. Even IOs don't really address it. The imbalance isn't caused by what type of enhancements are slotted, but by the stats for TA's powers. Even with fantastic IO set bonuses and Hasten, TA has a lot of powers with recharge times which prohibit them from being used on every spawn, and the powers themselves have sufficiently low debuff strength that the player needs to use multiple powers on every spawn to provide half of the mitigation that other sets provide. The concert of power inavailability, and the necessity to use every power, creates a set at odds with itself. It's not balanced, in comparison to other sets or even within itself. That's where I'm coming from in a discussion about balance. It's not what enhancements do, but what the powers do, what the sets do and what players can do. IOs can change some aspects of balance management by allowing under-performing sets or combinations to do well, but they don't change the powers themselves, and that's where balance should be targeted, whether it's for idle conversation on the forums, or under the scrutiny of whoever's got Castle's hat now.

I wanted Castle to make the Omega ability summon an army of ducks, with little wiggly tails and with laser beam eyes. I don't know why, but I suspect he may not have taken my request as seriously as it was tendered.

Failure to live up to some internal expectation, poor rank on a DPS meter, lack of satisfaction with a class or set which couldn't accomplish the goal of clearing a difficult map solo when seeing first-hand that someone else can? Why are you asking me how other people determine whether or not their level of contribution is satisfactory? Isn't that for the person to decide? Or are you asking me to rate your specific contributions and determine whether or not you're dead weight? I'm not going to do that. I wouldn't do that even if we were playing together, because I'm not you, and only you can decide whether what you brought to the party was enough or not.

I'm not. You are, as the teammate in question. If you feel like you're contributing, then you're not likely to label yourself as dead weight. If you're making certain the floor doesn't go anywhere while one person solos the entire mission, and you aren't assisting because you can't, then you're probably not feeling terribly useful (since the floor doesn't have a tendency to go walkabout). If I were in that latter situation, I'd feel like dead weight, and not be happy playing that way. And if that represented the game experience in general, I wouldn't be happy with that game.

Something else of importance to note... We are talking about MMORPGs. Massively Multiplayer. Not single-player games, multiplayer games. Games in which people are expected to group up and play together. When people play together, no-one likes to feel like dead weight, and that's one of the things that occurs when you have over-performing classes or sets. If you have one class or set capable of soloing the content, and others without the same capability, you have a group with a lot of dead weight, and disgruntled players who don't want to be dead weight. You can't ignore that, it has to be addressed, and you can't address it by buffing everyone and the content due to time constraints. You have to nerf. It's the only feasible option. Yes, you piss off some players, but you make a lot more happy because they're not standing around with their thumbs in the nether plumbing, feeling useless. And the unhappy players, if they're intelligent and patient, will understand that balance isn't always achieved by giving everyone a bump, sometimes it has to go the other way. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one. Cliche, trite, but true.

My left lung collapsed back in '09. The surgery to stick it back where it was supposed to be left me with nerve damage. The musculature and nerves on the left side of my abdomen are... wonky now. Including that region of my chest. It is!

You're preaching to the pastor of the church in regard to playing less than optimal sets. 7 years of Trick Arrows. My first level 50 TA before the Issue 7 bug fixes. But that also emphasizes the point I made previously. There was a time when a lot of the game was challenging. No difficulty slider. No guaranteed lieutenants instead of bosses to help solo players with under-performing sets. No IOs. What we have today is different from what we had yesterday. Co* in it's current, modern incarnation isn't an accurate model for balance, because, as you note, every development team who's ever worked on the game has gone the distance to make it easier, because that's what the fans specific to this game wanted. We do have some over-performing sets, and some under-performing sets, but all sets can solo capably and rapidly, and the people with the over-performing characters aren't lacking challenge, they're either creating challenge for themselves (trying to beat pylon times, or limiting themselves to SOs, or never using the market), or avoiding content which would present a challenge (First/Night Wards). Challenge doesn't necessarily mean bigger bags of hit points, either. There's more to challenge than hitting and being hit (or soft-capping Defense to avoid being hit). Challenge in Co* comes in a variety of forms, and what helps keep players coming back is that a surprising amount of it is self-created. We make many of our own challenges, and we can do that because the developers gave us that option by making the game easier across the board. And, again, you're correct, Co* is balanced enough, from that perspective. Nothing under-performs to any degree that makes the game "impossible", so anything we can imagine within the confines of the engine and mechanics, we can do. One of the biggest reasons players stay here is because they've been able to create characters they love. They love the way they look, they love the powers, they love, as you said, feeling super. This is one of the challenges we've made for ourselves, exercising our creativity and watching what we create grow, flourish, become powerful and reveling in that. But that doesn't mean it's truly balanced. If it were, there wouldn't be under-performing sets, there'd be sets which simply do different things, or do similar things in different ways. And there wouldn't be over-performing sets, there'd be sets which might excel in one way, but not in others. We do still, absolutely, have balance issues here, but those balance issues have become less relevant because the game is easy enough for anyone to level anything without struggling. If a patch were implemented today, and set all content at x4/+8, I guarantee you there'd be a massive outcry. Not because the game became more difficult, but because it became nearly impossible for players using certain sets, and practically unchanged for players using other sets. That's not balanced. Not remotely. We ignore the lack of balance, but it's still there, and it threatens to come back and bite us on the ass some day. And this is why balance is necessary, even if it means making some players unhappy. Yes, we have it easy here. Now. What happens when we don't have it easy? If we buff everything that's not performing up to the new standard, the older content becomes even easier, and less appealing. We already have a sizable portion of players power leveling characters because they're no longer interested in older content. Do we throw away the older content, replace it all with new content? That's a few years of development, at minimum. A decade, at least, with volunteer, unpaid developers working on the game as a side project. The only reasonable and fair solution, then, is to nerf the over-performers and reduce the difficulty of the content to a point where everyone can experience it equally. Additionally, it's often the case that imbalances aren't evident until new content is delivered. A previously under-used power may suddenly gain favor with players because it makes that new content so easy that they can roll through it on autopilot. A class or set which was considered good, but not the best, may have a minor tweak which has an unintended effect, improving it beyond what testing showed (and this is especially applicable in this game, because we all have two sets, up to four pools, a *PP and Incarnate abilities). When PvP was added to Co*, the developers discovered that there were a lot of ways powers were over-performing, unexpectedly, and had to fix them. There were a lot of bugs which had never shown up in testing before, because critters can't give feedback. Every change to a game alters the balance. Balance is equality. Yes, you are absolutely right, we have equality in abundance right now. But "now" is ephemeral. It's not forever. In any game. And every game has to have balance to ensure the equality is maintained. When something is over-performing, it's better to rein it in than to redesign the game from the ground up, to make it equal for everyone, so everyone can enjoy it equally. If you're not balancing your game, you're doing a disservice to your entire player base, treating some as favored children and others as unwanted orphans. That's really what's it's all about, trying to treat all players equally, even if it means hurt feelings occasionally. You can't please all of the people all of the time, not even in video games.

My good nipple just went erect.

The focus of balancing a game is to ensure that everyone can have fun regardless of how they approach it, not to ensure that the game itself is fun, or more fun. This is a notable and worthwhile distinction. An MMORPG has to be fun for players in every class, not the one class which over-performs in every aspect. It has to have content which is equally challenging for all classes, and equally rewarding in accordance to the challenge. When there's an imbalance, players naturally gravitate to the over-performing class. This leaves fewer players in the under-performing classes, which makes the content even more difficult for them, which, in turn, drives them to either move to the over-performing class or leave to find a more balanced game. Additionally, if the game is "too easy" with the over-performing class, there's a risk of high turnover as players leave in search of something more challenging. Sometimes balance adjustments are always necessary. I'm not a fan of nerfing, I think every development team should start with content which is too difficult for everyone, then adjust it downwards until they achieve a good middle ground, and all classes should be designed to be under-powered from the outset, and adjusted incrementally until a good balance is achieved with them, too. But every new bit of content added, every improvement to classes, means an adjustment may be necessary later. MMORPGs aren't static, despite the appearance of being so. They continue to grow and change over time, and, objectively, nerfs are part of that cycle. If the game isn't balanced, people who aren't playing the over-performing class aren't having fun, people playing the over-performing class are becoming bored, and the game suffers. A nerf can be a good thing for the health of a game, even if it's unpleasant to experience it on your favorite <whatever>.

No, it'd be perfect. Reskinned Gang War with a 3 minute cast time and an animation of the clowns driving up in a tiny car, getting out and tripping all over themselves for the full duration. The recharge time could be set to 1 second, just to throw the clown players a bone. All of the powers could work in strange ways, like the lead clown accidentally hitting minion clowns and defeating them, and the mastermind's attacks could all be making different kinds of balloon animals... none of the clown mastermind powers or pets would actually do anything, no damage, no debuffs... but every power would have a mag 50 Placate with a special "stare in disbelief" or "scratch head and look around in confusion" animation forced onto every critter and player within 100 yards. And then the entire zone aggros onto the mastermind and beats him/her to bloody giblets. Twice. See? Perfect! 🙂

We all have the capability to suppress or settle certain emotions, but actually shutting them off isn't something anyone can do. What we experience as emotion is transmitted from the brain through chemical compounds like serotonin and oxytocin. No-one can turn the body's production of these compounds on or off at will, that's only possible through physical trauma, biological defects, medicinal moderation, etc. But, as you note... Indeed. Brain damage, underproduction of emotion compounds and other things can cause people to lose the ability to feel some emotions, or to be born without the ability to feel them. Like being blind, emotionally. Other emotions still exist and function normally for these people, like blind people still hear, taste, feel physical sensations, etc. Many people on the autism spectrum lack a capacity to feel certain emotions, but feel other emotions more strongly. It's extremely rare for a person to feel nothing, at all, ever, and it's almost always a result of severe brain damage, and in those cases, they typically know how to respond "appropriately" because they recognize key cues, like laughter or frowns. To date, I've never read of an extremely young child developing without any emotional capability and learning to respond to social situations the same way an older child or adult could. Yes, they do, but that's because they still have emotions, or can remember what their lost emotions were like and can respond accordingly when the situation calls for it. A person with no emotions, no empathy, no love, no rage, no disappointment, no contentment, isn't displaying emotion, they're displaying biological function coupled with intelligence. Emotion is a cornerstone of preference, to highlight one possible example. You can't decide you prefer something if nothing moves you in any way. A cat, a sausage, a cactus, all would be valid as pets for a person with no ability to feel preference for one thing. That's not personality, it's absence of personality, if we're abiding by the definition of what a personality is. Our feelings create a basis for our personalities to develop. Without them, we're organic machines with self-awareness and no appreciation of what it means to be alive. There are medications which can simulate this, in fact. As long as they're in a person's system, that person displays little emotional awareness or response, and their personality fades away. They don't show interest in conversation. They don't pursue hobbies. They don't watch television or listen to music. Staring at a wall is as good a way for time to pass as any when you're affected by these medications, because you feel nothing. Scaling back the dosage, or changing medications, has a profound effect, restoring the missing personality through restoring the capability to feel emotions. With extra pineapple. 😉

It's only been a couple of months for me, but a similar situation has begun to occur. I was on the way to completing Legionette, and quite satisfied to do so at the expense of the other eight characters waiting for attention, when I made the mistake of poking around in the sentinel options in Mids'. Now Legionette is giving me displeased glances when I log in (i moved her to the top of the list when i became enraptured with her, before she was even level 20), knowing that I'm going to click Antianeira and log into her instead, leaving her with unfinished Incarnate abilities. But I will finish these two before I start, or return to, something else. Really, I will! Pinky swear!

Cognitive behavioral therapy and limbic system therapy. They are valid treatments, but they're also not effective for everyone. Case in point, me.

Personality isn't based exclusively on our actions, it also stems from our thoughts and our emotions. Thought, behavior and emotion all collectively define our personality. Emotion is the basest aspect, the part we don't actively control, and the part which drives our thought processes and behavioral responses. We can exhibit awareness of our emotions and choose to act contrary to them, such as deciding to take a deep breath and try to calm down when we're angered, but we can't actually control the emotions we feel. So emotion constitutes the most fundamental part of personality, the rawest and most honest part, with thought and behavior, whether actively chosen (awareness of our emotional state and conscious choice to react in a specific way) or subconsciously determined (we act without thought), collectively working with emotion to create the personality as a whole. Without emotion, we have no personality. No feelings to be aware of, to contemplate, to determine our actions one way or another. It's the foundation on which personality is built. All of that is true. In the same vein, though, being generous doesn't make you an altruistic person if you're resentful and bitchy about giving. Being forgiving doesn't mean you don't feel anger, hate or jealousy, it means you try not to let it determine your response to the situation. Being gentle doesn't mean you don't have a short temper, it means you try not to express it. We still feel these things, even if we act in a manner opposite to what they make us want to do. Maybe prescription medication could've made him Lord Bunnybutt. It seems to work for people who can afford it, from what I've seen. Neither am I. 😉

Yes, it's a button. It's ergonomically located to make it easy for the pilot to fire the missiles immediately after arming them.

It's the top of a yoke (the thing you steer jets and drones with), or a racing steering wheel (butterfly/H configuration). Why would there be a toggle on a steering wheel? Nitrous oxide. Why would there be a toggle on a yoke, instead of a button? Missile arming control. It has to be flipped before the missile can be armed and fired, and unless it is flipped, the missile can't detonate if the aircraft is struck by enemy fire. Safety features are pretty important when you're capable of reducing an entire city block to rubble with one oopsie, or in a dogfight.

Did he? Do any of us truly have a choice when emotion is involved? We can choose whether or not to be magnanimous, or forgiving, or petty, we can decide to act in a specific manner in spite of our emotional state, but the underlying emotion is still there. It doesn't cease to exist because we will it... if that were the case, there would be no grief when a loved one dies, no bad marriages or messy divorces, no resentment in the work place, no familial bonds or sense of tribal unity. The world would be a much different kind of place if we could turn emotions on or off like turning a light on or off. I can't. I don't believe anyone can. We can, certainly, choose how we respond to things which affect us emotionally, but we can't choose the emotions we feel. Whatever behavior we might display externally, however logically we might choose to approach or react to any given situation, emotion is still there, and it's never truly something we can control. Recluse couldn't decide not to hate the Well for taking away his control of his life. He couldn't choose not to be angry, or resentful. Yes, he could have opted to use his "gift" for the betterment of all of humanity, but if he didn't view it as a gift, but as a curse, the Well still would've caused him to change in the same way because it's driven by what's in the heart, not in the head or the words spoken. Even if he'd become the greatest humanitarian and philanthropist in history, the Well still would've responded to what he felt, not what he did. Please note, though, that I'm speaking from the perspective of a mentally ill person. I fought, viciously, for over 40 years to control my fear of people, and never succeeded. I've pushed past my fear, I've sidestepped and ignored it, but I've never once been able to make it stop existing, for a single second. My emotional state is no more under my control than the wind or tides. I've learned to accept that and live with it, but that still doesn't give me control of my emotions, and all of the mature behaviors and responses in the world don't change my underlying emotional state. I can smile when I meet someone, but that doesn't mean I'm not screaming in terror inside. And my understanding of Recluse comes from that, my own inability to control the emotions that I feel. I am... flawed, as a human being, as a person, and that affects how I see the world and other people. So I could be wrong. If the rest of you do have the capacity to alter your emotional state on a whim, my take on Recluse is clearly way off. I don't believe that's the case, though. There's far too much empirical evidence that emotion isn't something anyone can control, in any way. We're all at the mercy of our hearts. We can behave like adults in spite of what we feel, but we still feel it. Recluse felt resentment, hatred, rage at being bound to the Well. Choosing to put on tights and a cape and stop muggings wouldn't have changed his progression into a hideous monstrosity, because the Well was in his heart, where the darkness was, and responded to that.

So many times. So many. I'd think, hey, I've never tried this power, or tried slotting in this way on this character, and spend everything rebuilding around the idea, then *FREEM!*, disappointment. The power I was interested in wasn't what I wanted. The slots I shuffled around turned out to be unimpressive, or worse, caused problems I didn't foresee. I respeced my Kin/Elec melee-only defender until I ran completely out of respecs (back before they could be crafted), trying different things with no appreciable improvement. My TA/Dark went through more respecs than I could count before I settled on one build. I even did it recently, on a Widow, trying out different combinations of powers. It took four respecs on her, plus using the secondary build, before I settled for something. I've been poking and prodding Mids' for over a week, trying to decide exactly what I want, and still think, "It could be better". I already know I'm going to use at least one respec, to replace a power, and potentially another later to test a power, and one after that if the test power doesn't meet my expectations, to test yet another power... it could turn ugly after that. But... this is the sort of thing I enjoy. It's the kind of puzzle that interests me. It's relaxing to comb through powers and slots and enhancements, changing this, moving that, seeing how each alteration modifies the whole build. It's worth the risk of disappointment, or having to burn/buy extra respecs to discover whether my hunches and hopes pay off. It's one of the reasons I kept looking for Co* after it went under, it's one of the reasons I bought a laptop to play it now that it's back, it's one of the reasons I'll probably be here until these servers are shut off.

NO PENSION FOR YOU.

All of this sounds suspiciously like a metaphoric reference to slicing up that deep dish pizza, with it's thick, crunchy, golden brown crust and piles of toppings, and then distributing it to everyone except me and pretending there was no pizza in the first place. Don't toy with my emotions like that.

That's a lot of words to describe Tuesday.