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Street Justice/Willpower scrapper. Street Justice hits hard, so you'll have to attack less frequently, and Willpower's only two click powers are the self rez (which you shouldn't need if you build well) and the T9 (which you can skip if you build well), so you're free to concentrate on punching and kicking.

It's not just the launcher, though, it's everything. The point I was making, which might've been lost in my vituperative condemnation of EA's crapware, is that you all approach this like it's your job. Not a hobby, not a project. You do this like it's your living, and bring a level of professionalism that some "real" development teams don't, or can't, deliver, even though there's no money in it. I knew you cared about the game, but until last month, I hadn't realized that you were coming at it like a real development studio. I do now. I don't think of you as enthusiasts any more, you guys are the real deal.

I recently had the misfortune of using EA's launcher app. I'm astounded by how bad it is. Seriously, it's atrocious. It's ridiculously bloated, badly coded, and hammers your network connection like it's a sex toy. The interface is dull and uninspired, and throws a pop-up on the screen that pins itself to the foreground. It forgets login information at random. It uses almost a gigabyte of storage. A gig, with no textures, no flashy graphics, no massive database, just the base launcher. I had to wait three hours for it to finish downloading when I was forced to install it to access that game, and then another three hours when it updated itself. That brings me to the worst offence it commits - it doesn't even work half the time. I've had to force-kill and restart it up to a dozen times to get it to work, and that's a regular thing. Every time I want to play the game linked to it, I go through that. When it does work, it takes several minutes to launch the game, and it's always with a panic notification about not being able to load cloud data (that notification exists purely to manipulate the user into turning on cloud storage by playing on his/her fear of losing data... and that pisses me off). By contrast, a game using the same engine and many of the same assets launches in seconds through Steam. Without the drama queen tactics. EA is a multi-billion dollar company, it could've afforded the best programmers and designers in the world... and it puts out a launcher that looks and functions like it was created by a 9 year old using a WYSIWYG program to piece it together. Practically unlimited funds, and they shit that thing out. They can't even blame their framework, Qt, because I have other programs that use it and they work. No, they somehow found a way to take something functional and fuck it up in every way they could... and still published it, like they were proud of their origami ashtray soaked in kerosene. "Here, we made this! Use it!" Actually, I apologize, that was a bit over the top. 9 year olds aren't that incompetent. Sorry, kids, my bad. Yes, I'm fully aware that their launcher is actually a marketplace they're desperately hoping people will use so they don't have to give Valve a dime when someone buys their software on Steam. And that it's supposed to "prevent" piracy... by making their games harder to access, bombarding the user with invasive marketing and selling their telemetry to spambotters... or just leaving their databases wide open to hackers... Irony: Palpable. Contrast that with the HC Launcher. 3.66 megabytes. Simple, clean interface. Gives access to all of the HC shards, delivers news and updates, doesn't devour resources... oh, and it works. It just works. No hoops to jump through, no frustration, no annoyance, it just fucking works. And this is something cobbled together by our guys and girls in their spare time because they wanted to make logging into Co* faster and easier. This freeware launcher outperforms the multi-billion dollar company launcher in every way, without even trying. I don't know what the HC crew does for their day jobs, I don't know how much other experience they have as game developers, but this experience with EA's software refreshed my perspective of our team. I appreciated them for bringing Co* back to the public, and I lauded their efforts to keep the game free and doing everything on a volunteer basis, but now... now I respect their skill. Granted, it's not hard to set a bar higher than EA's, but looking at everything the HC team has done over the years (untangling the spaghetti code, removing hard-coded limitations like mandatory T1 secondary powers, creating the HC launcher), they're clearly a cut above anything we had any right to expect from a bunch of freelancers working on this game as a hobby. Yeah, I'm definitely liking our crew even more after that eye-opening experience.

LET YOMO BANG YOU UP!

Do you have any idea how unappealing troll is when it's starved? It's not even good for sausage. Too salty and always comes out undercooked because it wasn't properly seared beforehand.

I nominate @eldriyth to fund the new hires. His idea, he can pay for it. I'd also be willing to assume the role of developer, for $250,000/yr. salaried. It'll be a hardship, but one I'll endure if necessity dictates.

One down, Firefly, Fringe, DS9 and my sex life to go.

This game? The game which people played for eight years on the original servers and seven years in the shadows, and are still playing five years after it went public again? Yeah...

We know you aren't. Vampires are undev.

Whadafuck? There's supposed to be something there? Huh. You know... I'll bet it was my ad blocker. Though, why it suddenly decided to only do half the job of hiding that, after five years, I can't guess. But if it was, I can just kill the whole sidebar thing with it. ... It was. I did.

That thing pops in, then is automatically removed... at least, it was, until last night. Now it appears to be permanent. Regardless of how many times I refresh the page, it's still there. Almost a third of the available space, just... wasted.

Really not enthused by the idea of dodging +10-20 spawns to reach a mission.

ZOMBIES ARE RUNNING THE SERVERS! /e civilian_panic_run

I left my clothes on the clothesline because it's raining.

Back Alley Brawler.

My first character here was a Grav/TA/Stone controller. Built it to pick up an entire spawn, drop them right in front of me and beat them to death. About a year later, I decided to try a Grav/Fire dominator, expecting that it would be even better. Leveled it to 50 the slow way (wasn't using 2XP then), went all the way to the 4th tier Alpha slot, and finally gave up. Single-target damage was fantastic, but I don't play single-target characters, I'm an AoE whore, and this lagged so far behind the controller that it was excruciating. After a dozen respecs, I couldn't drag it up to my expectations. I'm done with it. Also about to give up on a 50+2 Elec/Fire sentinel. The survivability is where I want it to be, the damage is more than acceptable, but I have to chase runners far more often with this character because of the endurance drain. It annoys me. I'm not playing to be annoyed, I'm playing to be entertained.

Amputate his legs (3' shorter) or decapitate him (1' shorter).

Not as big as mine. Come at me, bro!

🔪

Oh, so you didn't climb into the bowels of the forum to dredge up this thread so you could complain about a preferred play style being nerfed, you did it just to accuse the HC team of egotistically driven sadism. Yeah, that's so much better.

One of the more interesting approaches to paradox resolution in time travel is the Many Worlds Interpretation, which posits that there are no paradoxes because all possibilities can be true if they occur in different universes. Using the grandfather paradox example, murdering your grandfather before your father was conceived would cause you to be moved into a universe. In your original universe, that man is dead and you never existed, but you now exist in a different universe, one in which killing that man doesn't create a paradox. Applying this theory to your observation, a paradoxical situation was created at some point during the SF, shunting you into a different universe. The real question you should be asking is whether you returned to the correct universe.

Aggro overrides -Perception... but if it created a pseudo-pet which taunted, then applied -Perception, it might be functional for masking player character presence. Maybe.