srmalloy

The Procs per Minute Information Guide is a good place to start.

May he go forth in the sunrise boat May he come to port in the sunset boat May he go among the imperishable stars May he journey in the Boat of a Million Years

That change was what drove me to recycle a level 47 Katana/Regen Scrapper; between the way the entire play of the set changed, and the devs' assertion that their internal testing showed that a Claws/Regen Scrapper could solo +8/x8 content (yes, that's an eight-level bump to opponents), despite bullshit calls from the players (and this was before IOs), leading them to go ahead with all the changes, and only afterwards coming out and admitting that the internal test server they'd used to make this determination didn't have the 'purple patch' incorporated, meaning that their test scrapper was doing roughly 10x the damage and taking 1/10th of the damage that it would on the live servers... but the testing was not redone on a server with the purple patch, and the changes were kept despite the faulty testing.

McWhorter's assertion was that, given the relative difficulty of adults picking up new languages, that the Norse invaders would have acquired a degree of facility in bad Old English, picking it up solely by ear, with the grammatical constructs that paralleled their own language readily acquired while the ones that didn't make sense got dropped, and their kids grew up hearing bad Old English, spreading it further. McWhorter has one of his pieces about English online — "English is Not Normal" — where he covers this and other oddities of English, and where they may have come from.

Please detail how "simplified languages that develop as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common" fails to fit. Or is it only a pidgin when one of the cultures involved is significantly less advanced than the other?

John McWhorter, in his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, contends that English grammar is the result of a pidgin between Old English and the language spoken by the Norse invaders, who acquired enough of Old English to conduct day-to-day business, with the grammatical structures and tenses that survived being the ones that had cognates in the invaders' language; they continued to use the ones they were already familiar with, and elided the tenses and constructs that didn't fit their existing notions of grammar.

'Epicaricacy' would like to take exception to your declaration. It’s recorded in several old works, including Nathan Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721, though in the spelling epicharikaky. It is recorded even earlier in the original Greek spelling in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621.

Backpfeifengesicht. Much more evocative.

And because the last-spawn marker refreshes at odd intervals, and doesn't always remove the old marker(s) when it updates, you can get two, three, or more markers that were correct at the time the marker was created, but which the mobs have since wandered away from.

IIRC, if you can slot damage enhancements in the power, or it's one of the small number of powers that have unenhanceable damage in the power description, it's a 'damaging power'.

It's inconvenient for the Peregrine-to-Independence run, because it's well to the south in Peregrine and in the far NW corner of IP where Lusca spawns. But it is there if you want to use it.

If I'm remembering the specifics correctly, the wide grey caves end chamber with the crossed 'bridges', and one pool on the beach on the west side of Grandville are the two places in the game where you can get underwater.

The Champions computer game, from the Games That Weren't website. And Hero Games is still selling the Hero Designer program (and the source code).

This is a known problem with the various 'cape-oid' costume pieces - the ones that animate using the cape code but aren't under the cape costume choices. They all have an interior color slot, but the only way to access it is to use the process you describe — link colors, change a different costume piece to make the interior change, unlink colors, and fix what that altered in the rest of your costume.

I disagree. Where the limits bend is in the effect of the limitation/disadvantage — in a PnP game, the GM can ensure that the limitation or disadvantage affects the character with a frequency appropriate for the value of the limitation or disadvantage; in an online game, the content has to be aware of them and be capable of exploiting them — taking away a character's OAF, for example. And the player has more agency to minimize disadvantages in an online game — if a character takes extra damage from magic-based attacks, a GM can ensure that magic-based opponents appear periodically, while in an online game, the player can simply choose not to accept missions that would pit the character against magic-based opponents; it's much more complicated for an online system to make alterations in the game progress reactively to be responsive, particularly when working with groups. Look at CoH, and the problem, after the introduction of Kheldians, of the 'infectious' Void spawns, where a team with Kheldians would see Voids spawn, and after leaving the team, the other characters would still get void spawns, and they could pass them on to new teammates, until you logged out to reset the flag.

" Wait — what time is it? Are we getting overtime for this? If we're not getting overtime, I'm out; base pay isn't worth missing my kid's Little League game."

SG mode no longer has the effect of diverting inf into your SG's prestige, since prestige is no longer a currency for base building, but it still performs the visual transformation of replacing costume colors with the SG colors. If it was configurable on a costume-by-costume basis, instead of being a character-based setting, it would let you make a sort of 'home' and 'away' version of each of a character's costumes, but with the way it's likely stored internally, it would take a character database structure change to modify, which would involve a lot of coding for not much benefit.

I'm sorry; I can't hear you over the sound of my posting a recommendation that the OP exit SG mode.

Champions, as a PnP RPG, relied heavily on having a human GM to sanity-check character builds. With an online game, you either accept the fact that you're going to get characters that... bend... the limits of the character design rules, or you block off the ability to even get close to the limits of the design mechanics. Cryptic took the second route with Champions Online and, in my opinion, did it badly, and then tried to patch over the holes and pushed it out to the players.

Virtually all of the Asian-style MMOs, particularly the mobile games, are F2P, and make their entire revenue from the cash shop. MMOs in Asia had a fundamental difference from Western MMOs; the average home computer in Asia didn't have the graphics capability to run MMOs (if there was a home computer at all, and one with an internet connection), so the MMO publishers made deals with the PC baangs (internet cafes) to supply systems if they'd install their games. So where a typical Western MMO player would go home, log into the MMO from their computer, and either join their friends online to group, or play solo, the typical Asian MMO player would get together with their friends, go down to the bang, and play together as a group. Anything done solo in an Asian-style MMO is virtually always peripheral to the progress of any questline and is extremely grindy, with almost all quest content requiring a group for completion. Into this goes the cash shop; when you're already paying for the time on the computer at the baang, paying a subscription fee on top won't fly. So the basic game is free, and the publisher sets up a cash shop where the players can buy bits and pieces of upgrades as they decide they want them; this is seen as commonplace because of the many Asian countries where people have low incomes, and you see micro-transaction sales in RL -- the sachet, for example, where you could buy 5ml of shampoo for ~10¢, instead of buying a whole bottle of shampoo -- selling low-cost, low-profit-margin merchandise in large amounts. And Asian MMOs have gone in on this fully, from selling wide varieties of character customization items to items that 'eat' the XP loss from character death and even, in some games, raw materials for the people who don't want to take the time to gather them. And because of the churn rate in F2P MMOs -- in most F2P MMOs, a player who joins a game in the first month after launch has only a 6.2% likelihood of still playing a year later, and players who join a game a year after launch have only a 35% chance of logging in the next day, with only 3% logging in a month later -- the publisher has only a relatively small window to get the average player to interact with the cash shop, so it is in their interest to put a wide variety of shinies in the cash shop, both to attract an initial purchase and to encourage the player to continue with the game to use or show off the shiny. Now, contrast this with City of Heroes. According to the player data that was reported by Matt Miller and other sources, CoH had a one-year retention rate in excess of 90%; you can see where nickel-and-diming the player for each little cosmetic item would rapidly become unsustainable in terms of player satisfaction.

Oh, not at all. You should look at NCsoft's Asian-style MMOs if you want to see a microtransaction-driven game. I'm convinced that one of the reasons NCsoft killed CoH was because it couldn't be turned into the cash-shop-centric games everything else they ran were without huge amounts of rewrite that would destroy a core part of the game. Back on Live, you could buy costume packs, unlocking new costume pieces that you could use from that point forward with any character and costume slot, as many times as you wanted; the pieces in the pack were unlocked permanently across your account. Now imagine, in the NCsoft cash shop, you have to pay for each costume piece individually, and buying the piece lets you use it on one character once — you want to use it for a different costume slot, you have to buy it again, and if you change the costume so it's no longer using that piece, you have to buy it again if you want to change back. You want to use the piece on a different character, you have to buy it again, too. Buying the unlock for a new AT, or a new powerset? You get a single-use token and can make one character using it; you want to make more, buy it again. That's the kind of cash-shop monetization NCsoft wants, with you buying 'NCcoin' directly from NCsoft, so NCsoft gets the money, and then you use the NCcoin in the game-specific store — that way, NCsoft gets all the money up front and can control what fraction (if any) the game development studios get, as another tool to keep them subordinate to their corporate masters.

And declaring that, for him, 'fun' was throwing your character at the end boss again and again and again, being defeated each time, until you discovered the one tactic that let you beat them. And displaying a complete and utter ignorance of the way the internet worked by failing to realize that, no matter how complicated he made the end boss defeat technique, that fifteen minutes after someone figured it out, it would be up on the internet and read by the entire playerbase, completely defeating his intent to make each player figure it out for themselves.

There is an anecdote I've never been able to confirm about the F-16 fighter that illustrates this. Supposedly, when the Air Force got the first F-16s for its flight testing, the first test pilot had gone out, done the full pre-flight, and got into the cockpit. He was looking around, and decided to do something stupid, just to see what would happen. He hit the 'gear retract' switch. The landing gear retracted, dropping the plane onto the concrete. General Dynamics hurriedly modified the planes to add a 'squat switch', so the landing gear wouldn't retract if there was weight on them. Nobody in the design team had thought someone would do something that stupid. This caused a secondary problem, one of pilot behavior. Knowing that the gear wouldn't retract with the plane on the ground, pilots would hit the gear retract switch as they started their takeoff run, so the gear would retract as the plane lifted off the ground; a snappy retraction so quickly after liftoff being 'strack'. Unfortunately, if a gust of wind comes down the runway, it can create enough additional lift for the plane to lift off before it has actually reached flying speed, so when the gust passes, the plane is below stall speed, and the gear having retracted when it lifted off, the pilot bends the bird as it settles back onto its belly. The use of the gear retract switch before the plane was actually in the air was formally prohibited (although I'm certain that it didn't stop entirely). The developers are often the worst group for finding bugs that exist in the odd corners of a project, because they're so close to it, knowing how it should work, that it's hard to get out of that mindset and try the stupid and ridiculous things that 'nobody would ever do'.

On one of my characters, I remember doing a mission that was like that; the mission goal in the nav window was to "defeat all thugs" or the like, and I happened to be playing a character with invisibility and a gonzo range, and I went through the mission map defeating all the thugs, leaving the mobs they were fighting (Crey, IIRC). When I was done, the mission wouldn't complete until I went back and defeated all the Crey, too.

There is insufficient time before the heat death of the universe to iterate the full list... 😁