srmalloy

Not to mention that if you outlevel him before talking to him, he'll just stay in your 'active' contacts forever -- but if you've hit 27 before talking to him, you have to run the entire length of Faultline, because he'll say he doesn't have anything for you and introduce you to Penelope Yin... who will say she doesn't have anything for you and introduce you to Doc Delilah... who will say she doesn't have anything for you and introduce you to Agent G... who will say that you're too powerful, and it would be too dangerous for him to give you any of his missions. And stopping partway through the list just leaves the last contact you were sent to in your active list forever. If a contact line ends before 50 (i.e., contact A introduces you to contact B, but contact B doesn't introduce you to anyone), then if you outlevel contact B before talking to contact A, they should just say something like "I don't know anyone whose problems are difficult enough to be worth your time" and become inactive, rather than passing you down a line of contacts that you have to talk to and get the same brushoff. It may not be possible for some contact lines, because of the way they merge at the higher levels (A —> B —> C —> D, but you may have been introduced to D by another contact before talking to A, so if you have outleveled C before talking to A, C is now a dead end). Still, it would be nice if the contacts were more aware of who they know and their level ranges.

...which is also scaled by exemplar to be doing less damage than a comparable attack by the lowbie. Straw man fallacy. Attributing an extreme position and then attacking it. "Let's panic and scream that everyone asking for the developers to look at how examplar scaling works because the floor was raised for low-level characters without considering that this change scales exemplared characters below that floor, because they have the absolute fucking temerity to ask that it be put into consideration for a future change, instead of blindly accepting that what is is the One True Fucking Way and cannot be questioned." See, I can do it, too. It's clear at this point that there is no further ability for rational discourse on this topic, and it needs to be closed. Both sides have presented their arguments, and the HC staff can look at everything that was presented and decide whether the issue warrants examination for a possible change.

Or, on the other hand, you can argue that, since the exemplar enhancement scaling was designed to scale high-level characters to a reasonable approximation of low-level characters slotting TOs, while leaving the exemplared characters somewhat more powerful than the low-level characters, giving the low-level characters a 4x increase in the effectiveness of the enhancements they can slot without looking at what effect this has on the intended advantage exemplared characters would have over low-level characters, the scaling factors when exemplared should be looked at to preserve the relative position of an exemplared character as something that the low-level character can aspire to, rather than being able to look at them and laugh at how their damage is gimped compared to themselves.

And how is this not "I want to be able to level a character with powersets that make it easy for me to get them to 50, then 'super respec' into powersets that don't develop until late in the game, so I don't have to play through the hard part of leveling them"?

You can document the progression of fried potatoes in French cooking; the earliest recipes describe the potatoes cut in disks and pan-fried, through dipping the disks in a batter made with potato flour, but it was seen as a lower-class food, and would not have been served at a formal function. It took potatoes becoming a food acceptable to the upper classes for the French fry as we know it to be created; the lower classes would not have been able to afford to have that amount of lard just sitting around to be used for deep-frying.

Would it be possible to get two checkboxes in Options -- probably under General/Miscellaneous -- that enable/disable whether the First Ward and Night Ward contacts are shown when using "Find Contact"? If you aren't interested in running those contacts, having to step through them each time you look for contacts can become tedious.

Actually, they are French. Thomas Jefferson had "potatoes served in the French manner" at a White House dinner in 1802, and the expression "French fried potatoes" first appeared in print in English in an 1856 cookbook, while the first recipe for what is clearly modern French fries is in the 1795 French cookbook La Cuisinière Républicaine.

A level-9 character is still getting part of the low-level to-hit boost, and taking a power two-slotted with even-level Damage, that's a 66% damage boost. A level-50 character exemped to 9 has the same power five-slotted with a damage set giving 96% damage boost; factoring in the exemplar scaling, it gets reduced to 21%.They will likely have an extra attack or two, but assuming that they have 96% damage boost for their attacks, they're doing 73% the damage of a native level-9 character. Exemp down to 2, and your level-2 character with a nice shiny level-5 damage SO is getting a 38% damage boost, while a 50 exemped to 2 (using the same values as above) is getting 4% — doing just 53% of the damage the level-2 character does. The exemplar enhancement scaling worked more or less okay for balancing when sub-level-10 characters were running around with TOs, but now that characters can slot SOs straight out of the tutorial, exemping down to low levels gimps the exemped character in comparison. Analyzing the scaling and deciding how the scaling factors should change will be complicated, but I think that it does need to be looked at -- how much the other enhancement values associated with slotting most of a set (for the level-9 example, ca. 12% Acc and 8% Recharge and End) affect the balance complicates the determination -- but the point of exemplar is for the higher-level character to be somewhat more powerful than the low-level one, not the other way around.

Just remember that radians are cursed. A unit circle has a radius of 1. One radian is the arc subtended by a distance along a circle's circumference equal to the radius. One radian is about 57.3° A unit circle therefore has a radius of about 57.3°

No, because it does the same thing to every ability the character has, as long as it can be affected by the type of enhancement the particular Alpha boost gives. This would allow improving individual abilities. I'm not convinced that it's a viable option, but it's not replicating the functionality of the Alpha slot.

If something like this was going to be implemented, I'd want to see the touchpoints go geometrically - 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, etc. -- to reduce the number of extra slots, and probably cut them off around five, to prevent them from getting hugely out of control.

"99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs. Take one down, patch and rebuild, 125 little bugs in the code."

You're also guaranteed to get a dropship spawn in the instanced raid, whereas it's possible to complete an open-zone MSR between spawns of the dropship.

You misunderstand. If we're going to revert influence/infamy/information to the original concept of what it represents, instead of being just an abstract currency, then AE missions should award only XP and tickets; defeating mobs inside AE missions, and AE mission completion, award no inf at all. You can defeat millions of opponents inside AE missions, and it won't affect your reputation in the 'real world' one bit.

If, and only if, crawling into your electronic navel to destroy thousands of enemies that exist only inside the AE simulation system gives no inf regardless of the character settings. Someone who disappears into the AE building at level 1 and doesn't come out until level 50 is completely unknown to the populace around them; they should have neither clout nor resources. Spending time defeating virtual opponents will teach you how to use your abilities better, so there's no problem with gaining XP, but you're not doing anything to help your reputation, so you get no inf from it.

Oh, it's pretty, all right, and so are the other images I've got, but they're all predicated on the premise that you're never going to change your network configuration and never going to have a switch go out. Oh, sure, you start with everything laid out neatly... And then, after some switch replacements and a complete reorganization of the network architecture, you wind up with

And tanks don't do that any more, mostly because the Controller(s), Defender(s), Corrupter(s), and Dominator(s) on the team fling out their AoE immobilize or hold the instant a new spawn is encountered, at which point there's diddly and/or squat the tank can do to group up the scattered mobs for AoEs from the rest of the team.

He's hiring the wrong people, then..

The one I recall hearing about after the fact was the two-minute Hami raid. It exploited a quirk in the "Find source of Freaks' weapons" mission that gave the Nemesis Staff temp power to the character that opened the appropriate crate, rather than being awarded to the mission holder on completion. So an assembly line of 'enter mission, find crate for temp power, exit, reset' was run until there were enough people with the Nemesis Staff temp power -- and this was back when it was AoE and recharged faster -- to fill the Hive, and they just ran in and blew Hami down with a hail of NemStaff fire.

She can be selected, you just don't get her as a contact. I suspect that she gets put into the 'possible contacts' list if your character does the Night Ward exploration badge trick to get access to the Midnighter Club early, without doing Montague Castaneda's arc, because you don't seem to get offered her as a contact if you don't have access to the Midnighter Club.

This was the route that people took who hadn't learned the trick of going to Kings Row and running to the tunnel to Independence Port, then making the short run from there to the IP tailor. The run across KR was much lower risk, and the short section in IP was usually clear.

Wes Schnabel will give you missions as long as you're level 10 when you approach him. The moment you ding 11, though, he cuts you off.

If they do that, I want to see the default landing spot for Team Teleport to the 'Rescue Robert Alderman' mission of the Penelope Yin TF changed -- right now it drops you on top of the tail of the helicopter that's the entrance to the mission, right in the middle of the rotor blade circle.

This is a design feature of virtually every MMO; increasing travel time means that you spend more time in game not actively earning XP, which stretches out the time you spend getting a character to level cap. For subscription games, this means that you are paying more. This was something that drove me up the wall in SWTOR, where the world maps were designed so that you could be sent somewhere literally a hundred feet from where you were, but because there was an unclimbable barrier in your way, you had to go a mile or more around out of your way to get there. And the Jedi classes that had a Force Leap ability could leap across a hundred-foot gap or straight up... but only if there was an enemy at the other side to attack with the jump.

What makes it hard to understand is that you get the "You have defeated X" message, and you get the XP and inf for the defeat, all the way out to the maximum range you can attack from... but the badge credit cuts off at 212 feet. It should all be triggered by the defeat of your target, and if you're being told you defeated them, and getting XP and influence for the defeat, you should be getting badge credit, too.