RikOz

Now you've reminded me of NPCs in WoW putting out fires by hitting the burning thing with axes and hammers.

And mobs that are guarding a hostage, because the hostage can't be rescued until that last mob goes down. So you have to chase him across the map, or wait and wait for him to come back.

My sister, too - RN at a local nursing home.

I'm wondering if new quotes have been added. I've started seeing Skulls Girlfriends in the Hollows complaining about, "When do things start getting real fun? So far all they do is rip off purses and fight each other."

You too, huh? My whole job revolves around large gatherings (conventions), so my last day of work was March 14, and I haven't left my apartment since, except to take out the trash and check the mail. I've got my wife's caregiver to run errands for us 😄

Stepping into Praetor Duncan's body for her "Personal Story" mission in Dark Astoria, it would seem that my own character's aura (Bio Plasma, Body+Eyes, in this case) remained active on Praetor Duncan's body:

Well, I had this idea for a character name, "Ant Overlord" (Simpson's reference!). I settled on a Savage Melee/Energy Aura scrapper, and got to work fooling with the Insect Armor and Insectoid pieces, but couldn't really come up with anything I felt said "ant". So I started adding pieces that only seemed to get me further away from the "ant" concept, until I decided it made sense to switch from Savage Melee to Katana. The result is this guy, "Katanamushi".

As somebody who is a trained musician and prefers complex, melodic music like prog and metal, it's a nightmare for me at work when it's a coworker's turn to choose the music and he insists on late-90s techno/dance music. You know, the stuff with a kick drum that goes THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP without variation, synths repeating the exact same riff over and over, and a female singer repeating the same four-word phrase over and over and over. It's music that's meant for dancing, and it's perfect for that. It's not designed for listening outside of that context. Unfortunately, as a trained musician and lifelong music fan, it's literally impossible for me to "tune out" music. My ears detect even the faintest music and my brain wants to focus on it, and when it's utterly mindless and repetitive it drives me insane.

Clicked on a random pedestrian the other day and he said, "You'd think that with that gigantic police station in Kings Row, they'd reduce crime. You'd think."

In the Advanced Control window, clicking the Pause button and then clicking the Fold button seems to accomplish the same thing.

Johnson was effectively fired, at least from performing live. Def Leppard responded by noting, "Geez, our drummer lost an arm, and we kept him in the band!" Last I heard, though, the band was back in the studio, with Johnson.

I use Firefox, and the problem I'm having is that it keeps timing out while trying to connect to the app. I'm starting to suspect some Windows security feature is blocking things up. When I set up on my Mac, the Web Control connected immediately on the first try (though it did start going whacko later).

Me, I don't start plugging in basic IOs until level 26, ever since I noticed that the bonus on a level 25 IO is lower than a 25 SO right up to character level 25, but the IO is better as soon as you hit level 26.

A-ha! I hadn't actually played this particular character in a while, but I had her XP turned off at level 22 so that she wouldn't outlevel Agent G before getting to him. When I logged her in, she was holding Doc Delilah's first mission in her mission log, so I assumed that she had already completed Temblor's and Penny's arcs. Looks like she didn't! I've done the whole thing so many times, it can be hard to keep track!

I've only done the Provost Marchand stuff once, on my fire/fire blaster, at around level 35. I recall completing it over the course of several days. It took a very long time to get all the way to the ending, solo.

Maybe I'm thinking of Giant Monsters. I think I got 6 merits for participating in a Frost Lord (?) kill back in December.

I do the complete Faultline story arc, Jim Temblor -> Penelope Yin -> Doc Delilah -> Agent G, on nearly every character. The end rewards for Agent G's portion have always been 25 merits awarded after Penelope Yin destroys the PCM, and then another 20 merits when I do the final turn-in to Agent G. Last night, however, my character "Mother Sun" on the Everlasting server did not receive those last 20 merits. I thought I took a screenshot of my log, but apparently not. Did the reward change, or did something glitch?

I dunno, wasn't 6 merits supposed to be just the standard reward for beating an EB? The Protean arc that starts in Talos (with your mysterious double) is quite long and convoluted, and finishes up with a extremely-difficult-to-solo fight against Protean, all for a measly 6 merits. Meanwhile, Montague Castanella's arc, the last half of which is a series of non-combat, "go talk to this person" missions, awards 13 merits. I've been skipping Protean, and certain other storylines, just because they're not worth the effort. I mean, they're worth doing once, just to see the story, and perhaps the 6 merits were worth it on live when merits were more scarce, but now, with merit rewards greatly boosted for most things, arcs like that one just aren't worth the time and effort.

I had to consult ParagonWiki to finish that mission. I didn't even know that sphere was there! That should have been refunded to you. They refunded any cash purchases made in the 30 days prior to the announcement, though I can't recall if you had to specifically request it. I remember that NCSoft sent me an e-mail about it, and I did indeed receive a refund.

I sure does seem like it takes a while. My #2 computer has made 17 attempts to fetch a new work order since finishing the last one. I guess this is more of that server overload.

It took hours and hours, but mine was in my inbox this morning.

Well, I think it's pretty much a problem unique to Sky Raiders (and perhaps Tsoo) in that these mobs will literally teleport themselves clear across the map. Absent the teleporting, the worst you have to deal with is your "partner" dashing across the room, not the entire map.

LOL, you've reminded me of the most epic moment I personally experienced in WoW. Back in 2009, during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, I was playing my fire mage and joined a random group to run one of the newish 5-man dungeons, "Forge of Souls". I can't recall the classes of the tank and healer, but the DPS were my fire mage, a balance druid (both ranged DPS), and a rogue (melee DPS). As I said, this dungeon had opened fairly recently, so none of us outgeared it yet, and it was a challenge. We struggled through to the end, and then the final boss gave us the smackdown. When the boss was at about 25% health, the healer got killed, and without the healer, down went the rogue, followed quickly by the tank. The druid and I, being ranged, were still standing, but I knew that wouldn't last long. The usual protocol in that kind of situation was to just take the wipe and try again. Well, not this time. For those who haven't played WoW, druids can fill any of the three roles (actually four - in addition to tanking and healing, they can do both ranged and melee DPS), though of course, each role requires different gearing and usually a different spec, and this druid was geared and specced for ranged DPS. But that didn't stop him. As soon as he saw the tank was dead, he shapeshifted into Bear Form, taunted the boss, and proceeded to tank (wearing, as I said, ranged spellcasting gear). And while he tanked, he simultaneously kept casting healing spells on my mage. So I just poured it on with my fire spells, and before much longer the boss was down. The credit goes to that druid - he went above and beyond.

Man, I'm almost 54 and still can't grow a beard outside of a goatee. And ... I just shaved my head. Well anyway, getting this thing set up is becoming annoying, and I hope it's just the server load that is causing it and it will eventually work. I got the client installed on this Windows gaming rig, but it keeps "timing out" every time I try to open the Web Control. So, I set up my username, HC_RikOz, and team number in the client itself (from the Advanced Control menu option). I requested a Passkey, which they still haven't sent me, despite two requests sent ~four hours apart. Looking at the Protein Viewer, after several hours the Status window still shows "Connection: Trying" and it's just displaying the Demo protein. Meanwhile, my old iMac has been sitting here doing absolutely nothing, so I fired it up and installed the client there. the Web Control connected on the first try, so I was able to enter my username and team number there and get things started. Firing up the Protein Viewer, the Status window already shows "Connection: Connected", though it seems to be still loading the protein. That's only been a few minutes at this point, though. So I have no idea why my 2-year-old Windows 10 machine can't connect, but my 11-year-old iMac hooked right up. EDIT: Looking closer, it seems my Windows machine is indeed doing its thing. It's just the viewer not wanting to work.

First mission of the "The Mysterious General Z" arc, "Stop the Sky Raider assassination". I'm running into an issue where the hostages I rescue, when fighting a Sky Raider Porter, and the Porter decides to teleport halfway across the map, think it's a good idea to go chasing after them. This seems to result in them aggroing everything along the way, and these aggro'd mobs all descend on me for some reason. In my current attempt at this mission, I had rescued two of the hostages and engaged a spawn of three Sky Raiders that included a Porter. Next thing I know, the Porter was gone, my two hostage pets were nowhere in sight, and out of nowhere I now have six more Sky Raiders beating on me. Even worse, since they were already aggro'd before they got to me, their respective Engineers had their forcefields up and running. So now I'm hemmed inside a circle of Sky Raiders with stacked forcefields. I can't land a blow, and I can't even move to try to take out the FF generators. So ... is there anything you can do to prevent pets from chasing after Porters? This is kind of ridiculous. ADDED: I'll note that I have done this mission successfully on other alts. It was just "bad luck" this time that the first two hostages spawned very near the front of the mission, so there were still a whole lot of Sky Raiders remaining once I'd rescued them. When I've done this mission before, they've tended to spawn much further in, so I had already cleared out most of the mobs, and increased the odds that any Porters would teleport to an already-cleared area and not cause this aggro problem.