srmalloy

You can blame Disney and the Mickey Mouse Perpetual Protection Act Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. I don't know how the argument would hold up in court, but the way that changes to the term of copyright have been applied retroactively to works already created and under copyright would seem to me to be a violation of Article 1, § 9 and 10, which prohibit Congress and the states from passing any law that applies ex post facto. Under this reasoning, there is no impediment to passing a law extending the term of copyright, but the term of copyright for already published works wouldn't change -- if you publish a work when the copyright term is 28 years, extendible for another 28 years, then a year later Congress passes a law extending copyright to 1000 years, your work still enters the public domain a maximum of 56 years after publication.

@BEGIN(Sarcasm) Because, as we all know, there can only be one definition for a word, so the other usage "to pursue or approach stealthily", as when hunting, is completely irrelevant. "Run" has more than 600 definitions in the OED, but, like 'stalking', only one of those can be the real definition; all the others are improper use. @END(Sarcasm)

West side of the island, on the roofs, particularly the south warehouse complex (the building west of the triangle arena there); you can find a dozen or more snakes sleeping on the roofs in twos and threes.

The problem is that, when this happens, you're killing your accuracy, because you can't hold a consistent aim point. And since the snipe needs to be more accurate because of its longer range, having it jumping around works against the concept. I can see how you'd be pushing yourself in practice to be drawing more weight, but when actually out fighting villains, you don't want to be handicapping yourself.

The issue is that, if your arrow is wobbling that much when you're holding full draw, your nock hand is moving around, which means you have an inconsistent draw, either because you're drawing a bow with too much draw weight for you to hold, or your muscles aren't conditioned to the effort of the draw. And since this is presumably your primary activity, the latter should not be the case. The arrow should not be bouncing around as you aim. If that means the animation is mostly you standing there 'doing nothing', well, so is the AR animation for Snipe.

The problem is the order in which the prices drop. If the people doing IO conversion for sale can acquire the convertors they need easily from their own play, that tanks the value of convertors without putting any pressure on IO prices, so they have no incentive not to list them for the same prices they are now. Only after the rest of the player base, unable to make enough from convertor sales to pay the unchanged IO costs, turn to directly buying recipes from the merit vendors, leaving the people doing conversion sales with unsold inventory clogging their AH slots, will they have any reason to lower prices. And with the sunk cost of listing items in the AH, any general price decline will be sporadic until enough people get convinced that they're not going to sell at the current listed price, and take them back to relist, accepting the loss of the listing fee. So the decline in IO prices will be slow and extended, while the drop in income will be sharp and quick. Leaving the people with billions in inf sitting fat and happy while the rest of us scrape to get by in comparison.

And what do you expect that this will accomplish? With 10x the number of merits available, the people who use large numbers of convertors to change cheap IOs into the expensive ones will be able to acquire all the convertors they need from their own activities, tanking the value of convertors on the AH. So what you're looking for is making it easy for the farmers, while screwing over the players who don't farm. And with no longer being able to acquire the inf through convertor sales to buy the set IOs they need, players will take their increased stash of merits and turn to the merit vendors to buy the recipes for the sets they want, tanking the value of IOs on the AH, which means that the people doing IO conversion to put the desired sets up on the AH will see their income tank as well. In the long run, after an extended period of volatility in the AH, prices for IOs will stabilize at a lower level, with only the farmers coming out ahead in the changes.

Have to be four -- point of origin, direction of effect, angle in degrees, and radius. Back before the HC staff improved AoE knockback to have radial effects, the direction of effect would be used both for the centerline of a cone and, with the point of origin, determine which direction knockback occurred (since it was always away from the shooter, even if you landed a location AoE behind your targets).

It depends on the mob's reaction to your attack. As people have seen, mobs that get attacked have an 'instant' response controlled by the server that will go off unless you one-shot your target (and sometimes even that's not enough -- I've forgotten the number of times where I've sniped a mob and taken them down, only to have them shoot me with their pistol or whatever after they hit the ground; this may be due to a perception quirk, where the mob notices me before the snipe goes off, and starts to shoot back, then gets defeated by the snipe, but their attack completes). With the example of the DE above, if the mob's first response is to drop an emanator, the drop happens at the location of the mob when they get hit, before any knockback is applied. Summoning The Swarm, on the other hand, is a pet summons, and the pet doesn't appear until the end of the animation, so if their first response is to summon The Swarm, if they get knocked back, the summon will happen where they land.

I think that the "narrow cone" AoEs like Penetrating Shots were the devs' attempt to do this within the limits of the game engine -- if the game engine only supports single-target and sphere/cone AoEs, there may not have been a way to do it without rewriting part of the game engine.

During the beta for the invention system, the Touch of Lady Grey proc was bugged -- twice, in different ways. The first bug was that, instead of doing negative energy damage, it did negative damage, healing your target. This was fixed, but went too far the other way, becoming "chance to one-shot" -- I had a character with it slotted who did 4.184e+13 points of damage to Jurassik with his opening shot, and there were others in the beta who got bigger hits with it.

As well as all enhancement boosters, since all of the purple sets that could be bought under "crafted enhancements" and boosted are now, for some idiotic reason, slapped with an attunement that prevents them from being boosted. Also, with the removal of generic IOs, it's no longer possible in most cases to enhance a single-slot power for one aspect -- you can't just drop an Acc in a power and boost it, because sets don't have a naked Accuracy enhancement in them. On the whole, your suggestion looks to strip a great deal of flexibility out of slotting characters; while having SOs available from level 2 means that TOs and DOs can be removed, and IO scaling should be looked at, overall, a major change like this needs to be broken up and examined in detail before consideration of whether any part of it should be implemented.

Echo: Atlas Park still has the origin contacts downstairs in City Hall, and if you are within their level range, they will give you missions -- or will offer to complete or abandon a mission you already have from their later version in the regular Atlas Park zone. The other Echo zones, though, appear to have been stripped of contacts.

I think it's a database or network lag thing; I had the opposite problem today -- I was logging in characters to get the box of fireworks, and on one of them, when I logged them out, the character list showed the character with the same number of days since last played that they had before I'd logged them in, as if the client didn't get the update on how recently the character was played. So it may be something as simple as a dropped network packet containing the update that tells your client that the character is no longer flagged for possible name reclamation.

I would like to see the target cap increased for FA; there are a number of ways for you to increase the beaten zone of the attack, but no matter how big an area you sweep with fire, you're only hitting a more limited number of targets compared to the other AoE T9s, particularly with them all losing their end crash, taking away one of the advantages FA had back on Live.

Although more than 10^13 points of damage may be the biggest single hit in the game, it was the result of a gross bug during beta, not in the regular run of the game, so I will argue that while it shows the limits of what the game can be forced to do (and I was amused to see that the game would transition seamlessly into scientific notation if the numbers got big enough), it's not part of the game as released to the public, so it doesn't really count.

Back on Live during the beta for Inventions, the 'Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Energy Damage' proc was bugged. When it went off, it didn't do negative energy damage, it did negative damage, healing your target. The devs fixed this, but went a bit overboard in the other direction, turning the proc into "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot" -- when it went off, it did an absolutely absurd amount of damage. Curious, I took the character I'd slotted it into out to Crey's Folly when I saw the notification that Jurassik had spawned, and opened up with the attack that had it slotted... doing 6.481e+13 points of damage. Later discussion in /general and on the forums revealed that my hit wasn't the biggest that players had gotten from the rebugged proc, and I don't know what the maximum actually was.

I was parking a character in the Talos Island police station for the day job, and it suddenly occurred to me that there was a significant flaw with the offices. There's nothing urgent going on, yet there is a continuous loop of sirens blaring. How are the officers in the building going to know when something happens that genuinely requires their attention if there are alarms blaring 24/7? There should be a more subdued audio environment for the police stations -- perhaps the same loop that plays when you're near the police drones -- so that the police stations don't sound like they're in permanent crisis mode with no visible indication that there's anything wrong.

If the 'fix' consists of reworking the entire powerset to have different powers that work differently from the existing powers and reordered, I would rather see that as a completely new powerset -- "Gunnery" or some such. If you're going to 'fix' Assault Rifle, do it in a way that preserves the existing powers so that every AR character doesn't have to burn respecs to get their character back to even a semblance of what it was before the changes.

It's not the character of the missions; it's the fact that, playing redside, you start out as a legbreaker for street-level thugs, and work your way up to being a legbreaker for more important and more powerful thugs, and then to being a legbreaker for minor villains, and eventually become a legbreaker for Arachnos... but no matter how powerful you become, you're still someone else's flunky -- you never get to a point where it's you sending out flunkies to serve your ends. Admittedly, that would make for a much different game redside, with your acquiring increasing numbers of henchmen who can be sent out to carry out different types of missions, and how you assemble the teams you send out affects their chances of success, and the missions you complete give you access to gear to equip your henchmen to make them better at doing missions for you.

After noting, back on Live, that the plane of the Moon's orbit was shifted almost 90° (watch it -- it rises a little east of due south and sets a little west of due north, instead of rising and setting in the east and west like the sun), as well as the double-moon effect near rising and setting, I stopped being surprised by the handwaves the devs put into the sky.

Why should tanks be the only AT that can be instantly killed by an NPC doing this?

The problem is in more than your standing there after you loose; a more serious problem is in the' hold it' part, where you're standing there with your point of aim waving around like you're trying to hold too heavy a draw weight.

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." — Robert A. Heinlein

Ohhh. Let's create a mechanic that's exploitable right out of the box. Scenario 1: Use /holdback to lower your level until a contact talks to you. Get mission from contact. Enter mission. Use /letloose to revert to your normal level. Wipe out grey mobs. So we clearly can't allow /letloose to be used inside missions, only out in the world. Scenario 2: Use /holdback to lower your level until a contact talks to you. Get first mission of story arc from contact. Use /letloose to revert to your normal level. Steamroll the now-grey story arc, because once you have the first mission, the contact will keep giving you the arc missions, no matter how badly you outlevel them. Since the second scenario can be used even with my idea to have a contact in Ouroboros to scale you, the idea is unworkable due to exploitability. The only way to address that would be to have scaling hide your current missions, and be unable to 'unscale' while you have any missions open at your scaled level. Which is almost identical to the 'TF mode' that Ouro puts you in now, except that you can join teams or invite people to team.