Luminara

Merit prices aren't intended to mimic player-set inf* prices on the AH, they're reflective of arc/*F/Trial/GM rewards and average earning potential. Nor could merit prices ever be changed to match pricing on the AH because that pricing is set by players and subject to high volatility. Merit pricing is a control on the market, not a reflection of market values, and the costs were specifically set to ensure that players can't create inflationary spirals. ATO pricing on the AH is a sum of the cost of purchasing Hero/Villain packs, the expected of salability and whatever profit the lister hopes to generate, not merit prices. Winter enhancements follow the same pricing structure, but Winter packs are 2.5x the cost, so players list the enhancements for accordingly higher prices. Of particular importance, lowering merit prices on ATOs would reduce the amount of inf* destroyed by encouraging players to purchase ATOs with merits instead of on the AH, further reduce the amount of inf* destroyed by removing the market fees from the purchasing equation. The less inf* removed from the economy, the greater the chance for inflationary effects to take hold. If for no other reason, the developers aren't going to do it because of that. Merit costs are what they are for reasons, and AH costs are what they are for other reasons, and while there are indirect links between them, they're not directly comparable. Nor should they be. Pricing on the AH being generally lower than merit costs is indicative of a healthy economy, not a problem.

Most of the ~300 DVDs and BluRays I own have unskippable anti-piracy nag ads before the menu will even come up, so I'm not the least bit surprised that Hollywood has decided to make entire films nag ads about other shit. Nor am I surprised that people don't want to sit through them, especially when they're riddled with bad writing, poorly timed attempts at comedy and endless reboots and rehashes of stories. Fuck 'em. The whole industry can eat a bag of dicks. Or would that be cannibalism?

Kinetics is already so strong that a player can solo the toughest enemies with it, with no Defense or Resistance, no status protection, or even Damage enhancements. Hell, it's so over the top that you can skip the secondary entirely and still make a ridiculously strong character with pool melee attacks. With intelligent selection of a complementary secondary and IOs, a Kin defender is just plain unbalanced now, and corruptors with a complementary primary are even further into banana balls territory. Even */Kin controllers, with fewer real attacks and more limited debuffing options (if they take /Kin, they can't take something with high -Res, like /Sonic or /TA) are brokenly good. I loathe ally-only powers, but your continual use of Kinetics as an example of why they should be changed... well, it implies that the problem is on your end, not the game's. Perhaps it would be wise to take a step back and review your data and conclusions.

Still waiting to expose Janet Kellum as a double agent who conned Crey into starting the Revenant Hero project for the Malta Group's benefit, then falsified evidence against the Countess to get her arrested when her cover was nearly blown. She needs my boot up her ass, and not in the funsexytime way.

Tested on a Storm/Storm corruptor, level 50+, no.

If you make it look like me, I'm gonna smack you.

Of course not. Russel Crowe looks like the guy who killed Commodus. DUH.

That's a neighsayer, not a naysayer.

Nay. NAY. NAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! Nay. 😛

Prior art/works, if it can be proven. Still can't make monetize it, since someone else trademarked it before you did, but it's safe to use under that aspect of the law.

Good game design? Absolutely not, but since Co* wasn't built around procs, we're good. Good build design? Also no. Procs are useful additions to powers, but building entirely around them is building a house of cards. Proc-intensive builds (six-slotting multiple powers with procs) sacrifice slotted Recharge Reduction, Endurance Reduction and Accuracy in exchange for more procs, so attack cycle times are always longer than they would be if slotted with sets/frankenslotted, use more endurance and are more likely to miss. Cycling additional powers into the attack chain to compensate reduces DPS by adding animation time without damage output, increases endurance usage further, and adds failure points where the player may miss the timing on activating the powers required to keep everything rolling. Relying on more procs to compensate just increases the potential for failure, as no proc is guaranteed to trigger, and spends more slots that the build may not be able to spare without compromising other aspects. And the builds are dependent on Incarnate abilities for viability, which restricts them to a very narrow range of content. They're high maintenance, low return for the investment. Good build design creates a basic framework of strength and survivability, then adds procs as bonuses.

Overreliance on net.cops. It used to be that someone starting shit would be verbally murdered in a heartbeat, but the Internet culture evolved toward moderation instead of repercussion. A consequence of that change is that fewer people will step up to deal with someone if they're crossing the line, because they expect an authority figure to handle it, or because they've been punished for taking action. Another consequence is that offenders have trained to believe that lack of immediate action by said authority figure equates to permissibility. The social contract, that unwritten and unspoken agreement on which civilized behavior is founded, was amended in the digital medium, and people extending their elbow until they make violent contact with other peoples' noses feel free to continue, whereas the people with the bloodied noses believe they have to endure it until GM_Nana comes over to scold the elbowers.

Okay, here's an example of jaggies. This is one of the power lines in PI. Note the stairstep pattern. You can see it on the side of the building, too. Same power line and building with FSAA (don't remember if i set it to 4x or 8x, and doesn't matter because this is just to show what FSAA is doing, not to what degree at what setting). Both of these are scaled up 300% from the original resolution in order to clearly show the difference, so it's not quite that dramatic in the game, but it is visible. 2x FSAA reduces, but doesn't remove, the jaggies. 4x FSAA reduces the jaggies enough that they're not noticeable unless you're actively trying to find them. 8x FSAA makes the jaggies go away even if you're hunting for them. Now, earlier, I said that FSAA renders every frame at 2x/4x/8x and scales it down. There are actually half a dozen methods of FSAA, with different approaches to the problem, but this is an old game, and even when it was officially supported by the people who created the engine, they weren't exactly doing their utmost to push the limits of modern (at that time) graphics card capabilities, so the FSAA used here is almost certain to be that basic over-rendering and downscaling. Unfortunately, while AMD's GPUs run OpenGL applications, most of the user-accessible driver settings don't work for OpenGL, only DirectX and Vulkan, so I can't test how different FSAA methods impact performance. I also can't get any screenshots of different anisotropic filtering settings in action. There's no visual alteration when I adjust the setting, despite it saying that it updates on the fly, nor does it change after /reloadgfx. It might be a driver bug, it might be that another setting in AMD's Adrenalin control panel overrides AF or sets it to max at all times (the control panel setting says it only affects DX9 games, and there's no change when i turn it on/off), or it might be that it only changes if the game is exited and restarted. I don't know. But I can show you what anisotropic filtering does. At the top, you can see the double yellow divider line just disappear. That's where the textures become blurry and indistinct. I doubled the size of this picture so it would be easier to see, but you'll have to open it outside of the browser window to get the full effect. Anisotropic filtering is why that blurry band isn't closer. If I could turn it off, that blurry region would appear roughly where the white lines start. Each step up, from Off to 2x to 4x and so on, would push the blur farther back, and at 16x it would be waaaaaaaaaaaaay off in the distance like it is here.

A random stranger just jumped into one of the reflection pools in PI, /ccpoofed into a bikini and spent ten minutes splashing around next to me while I was testing graphics settings. And then followed me for another five minutes while I was trying to get a good screenshot of anisotropic filtering in action. I'm assuming that the player was trying to talk to me, but I don't have /local in any of my tabs, and he/she didn't /tell me, so I don't know what the hell was going on. And this post is still weirder than that. Well done. I'm as proud of you as if you were my own crotch larva.

I'm imagining you in a sundress, high heels and lipstick, complaining about how much your boobs make your back hurt. And now everyone else is imagining it, too. You're all welcome!

Kill shit. Make shit not kill others. Basically the same as every other archetype in the game, with different WAHWAHWOOSH and OOOOFLASHYLIGHTS.

Why didn't anyone tell me about this before I turned into a recluse living in the woods? I could've been playing moms instead! Bunch of jerks. I HATE ALL OF YOU.

FSAA is full screen anti-aliasing. Because pixels are square or rectangular, whenever a line isn't perfectly vertical or horizontal, the individual pixels used to draw the lines create little saw blade edges, FSAA renders each frame at 2x, 4x, 8x or 16x the resolution, then scales it back down so the jaggies become less noticeable, or disappear entirely (settings above 4x). How visible the jaggies are depends partially on display size and resolution. The higher the resolution, the finer the pixels and the less noticeable the jaggies... but extremely large monitors counter that. On my laptop with a 15" display, running at 1920x1080, jaggies aren't so distinct that they catch my eye, so I can use 2x FSAA. If I had a 50" external display, they'd be very distinct and I'd want to use 4x or 8x, maybe even 16x, or run the 50" display at a much higher resolution. FSAA isn't related to anisotropic filtering. Anisotropic filtering improves texture rendering when viewed at a sharp angle, to make textures sharper and clearer . If you disable anisotropic filtering, you'll see a band of blurriness on the ground a short distance away from your character. With each level of anisotropic filtering applied, that band of blurriness is pushed farther away, and with enough anisotropic filtering, it's too far away to differentiate the blurriness from normal gradience (level of detail).

Bug Hunter is generally awarded for finding exploits or game-stoppers, and showing the steps to reproduce the problem. And the reason it's less likely to be given to people who ask for it is to avoid accusations of favoritism or prejudice. They'd either spend every waking moment trying to explain why Player A got the badge but Player B didn't, or they'd be forced to hand it out for the most trivial things to prevent infighting and hostility.

I'm definitely going to have some "hold my beer" moments in there.

Turn off SG mode.

I thought this was going to be about a clown named Stitches who felt that the only people who understood his humor were snitches.

That name sounds familiar. Was he the horribly misused and blandly written Maxwell Lord in Wonder Woman 1984? *does the Goog* He was. Eeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhh...