srmalloy

If it's completely immersive, I can understand your getting XP, because you're learning how to use your powers better. Tickets, those are AE's reward mechanism. Salvage, recipes, enhancement, and other drops? You're in a virtual-reality environment; nothing you pick up in there exists in the real world. Inf? NWIFH; regardless of what side you're on -- blue, red, or gold -- Inf is supposed to represent your ability to use your reputation as to get people to supply you with stuff, whether it's out of respect for your actions as a hero (blue), fear of what you might do to them (red), or information about them or others to leverage their actions (gold). I don't care how many or how complex the electronic ghosts you've defeated are; crawling into your electronic navel does nothing to increase your reputation in the real world. If you show up in Paragon City, immediately crawl into the AE building, and don't come out until you're level 50, no one in the city is going to have any idea who you are; you'll have zero influence.

It's been explained several times already why this isn't going to happen. In order to have the AH available in a base -- or in any other instance -- the entire AH database has to be loaded in the instance's data space. One copy of the complete AH database for each separate SG base that has a character in it. You think the AH has synch and response time problems now, with the AH accessible in each normal zone, and a new copy of the database gets loaded only when a zone fills up and spawns another (i.e., RWZ2 when a MSR is going on)? Imagine what it would be like with the AH database being loaded each time someone enters a base. The database server running the AH data does not have the bandwidth to be able to serve several thousand separate instances at once. Think about the performance of your net connection when streaming high-resolution video. Now imagine that there are a couple of hundred other people sharing your net connection, all trying to stream high-resolution video at the same time.

This leads to the amusing thought of someone tweaking the forum title entries for April 1 to change all occurrences of 'Game Master' to 'Giant Monster' and see how long it takes someone to notice.

Once you have the book in her contact entry, you will be able to finish the arc that ends with you defeating Heracles, even though her missions cap at 25; she'll pass you off to Long Jack, Tobias Hansen, or Lars Hansen depending on what level you are when you talk to her after either completing her arc or outleveling her as a contact. But if you are level 30 or higher when you defeat Heracles to finish her arc, you don't get the temp power reward, even though her dialog implies that you do. Since Lars caps out at 30, and you need to complete his arc to be introduced to Ernesto Hess, if you don't want to have to go back through Ouro to do it, you'll want to go to Striga and talk to Stephanie at 21, and either not be running an XP boost or be willing to turn off XP while you run the Striga storyline to the exclusion of everything else; it's far too easy to outlevel the zone.

All the way to the Supreme Court -- Nix v. Hedden, 149 U. S. 304 (1893), a unanimous opinion upholding the terms used in the Tariff Act of 1883.

It gets easier to get names like that if you use a foreign language -- for example, 'Yaderniy Ogon' (Nuclear Fire, a Fire/Rad Controller).

I've remade about a third of the characters I had on live, including Pakfront, the AR/EM Blaster that was the first character I created, on May 8, 2004, and who was in the bowl in the middle of a msr when the servers were shut down, part of a group that were going to go out as if the shutdown wasn't going to happen. Most of them are somewhat different in build, mainly due to the greater availability of enhancement sets, which changed some of the priorities for slotting and power picks, but I've tried to keep them visually the same.

And finish her arc before you hit 30; if you don't, you don't get the temporary power that is part of the rewards for completing the arc -- the version you get doing it as an Ouro flashback is inferior.

That's due to an legal case over import duties. Vegetables were assessed import duties, fruit was not. Tomatoes had historically been taxed as vegetables, but a lawsuit was brought by an importer wanting to avoid paying the duty claiming that, because they were botanically fruit, the duty didn't apply. The court ruled that, because tomatoes were used culinarily as vegetables, they were legally vegetables for import purposes.

Not mob abilities, mechanics; the aspects of fighting a mob that affected your overall strategy for the fight. The AoE blasts that drop while you are fighting Battle Maiden. Reichsman freeing captured AVs while you're fighting him. The empowerment towers buffing Lord Recluse and the droids that try to repair them. How the original Hami raid had the 'golden sunrise' if you let the holds on the nucleus slip.

As am I. I've done some investigating, and it's one of the chemicals they use in commercial cigarette paper -- cigar smoke and pipe smoke don't bother me (unless it's crap tobacco, or it gets thick), and neither do hand-rolled cigarettes, while if I strip a commercial cigarette to burn just the paper, it makes me nauseous.

They didn't have the code to do it that way from the beginning. That only appeared when they changed the RCS to the RWZ and instituted the Rikti invasions. And making the entire game world functionally levelless eliminates one of the easiest ways to scale difficulty -- if you can't beat a mission, go get a level or two and come back. There won't be any variation in the mobs in a mission; they're all at your level, no ±1 level in different spawns. The devs can't make missions more difficult by using higher-level mobs; they need to create additional tiers of 'super boss' mobs, and create additional mob mechanics so that they're not just a huge sack of HP.

Remembering the early Hami raids I was on, that was the way it went -- the taunt tank and two healers kept the nucleus distracted, then the rest of us went around in a group under a healspam bubble taking out mitos, then spam holds on the nucleus until it stopped shooting at the taunt tank, then everyone piles on the nucleus while the holds continued. At the mito respawn, everyone backed frantically out of the goo and behind a rock to break LoS, then we'd reform and do it twice more. After the pop at 25%, we'd be taking Hami down all the way, but if he broke free of the holds, he'd spawn an Antibody for each character in the goo (the 'golden sunrise')... After which the entire raid faceplanted, and at that point it was generally given up on as a bad job.

One character I've created is a multi-level visual joke. Her name is Xiao Guo. This is the name of Hexagram 62 of the I Ching -- ䷽ --'Preponderance of the Small'; in that hexagram, the lower trigram is Kên, 'Keeping Still, Mountain', and the upper trigram is Chên, 'The Arousing, Thunder', making the imagery for the hexagram 'thunder over the mountain', and she is an Earth/Storm Controller.

The wolf farm that was one of Unai Kemen's "close the dimensional breaches" arc, taking place in what can be mapped to the NE corner of Boomtown, using the /Dev Blaster 'spammed trip mines' tactic would, if you were too close to the dumpster when the mines went off, throw up a game-engine error window saying "Too many effects to render".

It can be a little rough getting to the location without Flight, but SJ is almost as good, and a little care with SS addresses the problems there. I generally park characters on top of the portico above the exploration badge there. The tram in Echo:GC will take you to Ouroboros as well as all the other Echo zones, as do the Ouro portals in the Echo zones (the Echo:GC 'portal' is the only one that actually uses the tram). Generally, after I pick up the travel power on a new character, I'll go to Echo:GC, do the badge/plaque tour, tram to Echo:AP, do the same thing there, then go to Ouroboros and get the badge for the portal, then return to AP.

While mine back on Live was a lot of fun, and I could see the difference in clear speed and survival in teams, the one thing that drove me up the wall was how useless Rain of Arrows was during a fight. Unless all the mobs were locked down, by the time the animation, then the 'flight time', finished, the entire fight had moved out of the AoE. On Homecoming, that's been addressed, but at the cost of my fully invisible character activating Rain of Arrows... and immediately pulling aggro from everyone in the target area, even before the arrows fire.

Or tzatziki sauce.

The clever people went to Kings Row, exited on the west side to Independence Port, and made the relatively short run to the Icon there. A somewhat higher level range, but a much shorter run. Sidekick/mentor wasn't where the screw was -- it was exemping, where you had the same one-to-one relationship to an 'aspirant' to lower your level to be able to run TFs you'd outleveled, and if the aspirant DC'd, and didn't reconnect quick enough, you'd revert to your 'natural' level and be kicked from the TF for being outside the level range, then were unable to rejoin even if your aspirant came back; if this happened on the last mission of the TF, you'd have to do it all over and hope your aspirant stayed connected this time.

The live market was one of the reasons I was bent out of shape over the redesign of the Hollows -- before the redesign, going to the south end of the Hollows to mug green-icon Madness Mages was one of the few viable ways to get the Luck Charms you needed for low-level Accuracy IOs, with them often going for 30k each on the AH. After the redesign made the Hollows a 'kinder, gentler' zone, finding Madness Mages there became virtually impossible.

My programmer nitpick is that doubling the space is 2047 characters, not 2046. Going from 2^10 - 1 to 2^11 - 1 — one more bit in the maximum array index.

I don't remember the details well enough from Live to say for certain, but that location reminds me of an inherent screw if you're playing a mixed-loyalty character in Pretoria -- that character is the first Resistance contact in Neutropolis, and you have complete his arc to get passed to the second Resistance contact. Meanwhile, there is a Loyalist mission where completing the mission results in him being taken into custody, at which point he disappears from his spot in Neutropolis. If you haven't already completed his arc and been passed on to the next contact, you're stuck with the Resistance story line -- there's no way to advance. This may have been fixed since the last time I leveled a Praetorian back on Live, but if you're playing a character that started in Praetoria, and you did the Loyalist mission that removed him, it could be that the Ouro arc is inheriting your personal history, and 'showing' him as being in Loyalist custody, rather than on the street.

The Circle of Thorns shoulder piece that has the high collar and the capelet in back has the same problem; the only way to color the inside of the capelet is to link colors, change the colors globally to what you want the inside to be, then unlink colors and go around the rest of the character putting the colors back the way you had them.

Friends, heroes, villains, lend me your IMs. I come to nerf Regen, not to buff it. The OP aspects of a set live on for issues; The weaknesses are oft ignored in updates. So let it lay with Regen. The noble Posi Hath told you that Regen was unbalanced. If it were so, it were a grievous fault, And grievously hath Regen answered it.

It's not a typographic error per se, but in Harvey Maylor's story arc 'Upon the Psychic Plane', when you take the Bands of Shu to Penelope Yin to perform the empowerment ritual, she says "The Bands of Shu are now empowered with the essence of the Egyptian goddess, Shu. She's the one who who kept the sky and the Earth separate." Shu is male in the Egyptian pantheon. His sister and consort Tefnut is the goddess of moisture and the lower atmosphere, as Shu is the god of the upper atmosphere. Getting Shu's gender wrong makes her last sentence in the dialog, "You're seeing a college education at work here, Yadernaya Ten'!", a little ironic.