RikOz

Earlier today I was on my level 45 fire/fire/fire blaster, doing some Tip missions in Steel Canyon. Everything was fine until I entered my fourth mission (the one where that depressed Polar Shift character was going to destroy Paragon and Jameson and his Freedom Corps crew were after her again - can't recall the mission name). Anyway, once I was in the mission, I suddenly couldn't use my attacks. I targeted the first mob, pressed my "4" key, and nothing happened. Pressed some other attack keys, and nothing happened. At first I thought I'd been mapserved and my client just hadn't gotten the message yet, but I figured out that hadn't happened when I wandered close enough to the mobs for them to aggro. They chased me back out of the cave, since I still couldn't fight back. Once outside, I logged out and back in, then I tested things on the outdoor Steel Canyon mobs, since they weren't likely to kill me. My attacks still wouldn't work by pressing the number keys. I discovered they worked just fine if I clicked the buttons, though. I also discovered that I could trigger the powers on trays 2 and 3 by combining the number keys with the appropriate modifier keys - alt+1, alt+2, etc. But the powers on Tray 1 still wouldn't work when I pressed the unmodified number keys. Further experimentation showed me that, strangely enough, this issue was confined to keys 1 through 8. Pressing 9 or 0 activated those powers just fine. Tried 1-8 again, and they still didn't work. Until, suddenly, they did. Just like that, with no apparent change to anything I was doing, or anything going on around me, they just started working again. Re-entered my mission, and everything proceeded as usual, and continued normally until I logged out for dinner a bit later. It was very strange. Has anybody else had something like this happen?

This has been literally the only game to make me quit WoW. Twice. The first time was in September 2011. I'd been playing WoW since 2008, starting during Wrath of the Lich King (I had wanted to play in 2004, as I had played and enjoyed all of the WarCraft RTS games previously, but I didn't get a computer capable of running it until '08, my shiny new iMac). Then the Cataclysm expansion came out, and it turned out they'd listened to all of the elitists and the "raid or die" mentality set into the game. Leveling through the expansion was great, but then I got to max level and, since I wasn't a raider, there was really nothing for me to do. So I leveled six more characters to max level, and then they had nothing to do either. I was left with running the exact same round of daily quests on seven alts, every day, and was bored out of my mind. I complained on a forum somewhere about my boredom, and mentioned that I'd love to try other MMOs, but they were all Windows-only. And somebody casually replied, "City of Heroes runs on Macs." Whoa, really? Why haven't I heard of this before? Downloaded the game, made an account, saw it had gone F2P, but I opted for the paid VIP subscription. Then after six months of paying subs for both games, I realized I was hardly ever logging into WoW, and cancelled that sub. Nothing but City of Heroes for me from now on! *sigh* And then, six months later, NCSoft pulled the rug out from under us. I reluctantly had no choice, still playing on a Mac, but to go back to WoW for my MMO fix. As luck would have it, this coincided with the release of the Mists of Pandaria expansion, which I absolutely loved. I was very happy with it, and it felt like Blizzard had learned something from their mistakes with Cataclysm. Then I played through Warlords of Draenor, where they made a whole new bunch of mistakes. Followed by Legion which was mostly awesome. And finally the current expansion, Battle for Azeroth, which is a weird combination of great and terrible, and of course the thing I liked a lot about it turned out to be something the elitists hated, so they decided to not take that thing any further. And so I was back to doing the same pointless grind every day. Ultimately, the best thing about BfA was that it forced me to upgrade to a new computer. I still had that same 2008 iMac, which still used OpenGL as its graphics API. It wasn't able to upgrade to the latest version of Mac OS X, and so couldn't use Apple's new "Metal" API. Blizzard had basically been holding their OpenGL support together with duct tape, and it showed. They warned us that BfA wouldn't support OpenGL, in fact wouldn't even launch with it. So I finally switched to Windows and bought a new gaming PC well before BfA launched. And then I played BfA. Of course, now that I was running Windows I decided to check out a bunch of those other MMOs I'd been missing out on. There wasn't a single one that could make me quit WoW. And then, Homecoming happened. This time it only took me three days to cancel my WoW sub. And it only took three days because I happened to get Homecoming installed three days before my WoW sub expired anyway. It was effectively instant WoW quit.

So, wow, thanks for pointing me at Endless Sky! Installed Steam, got the game up and running, and holy crap it felt just like the originals, but with better graphics. Played for a bit, and it was oh so familiar 🙂

Oooooooooooo!

FSAA is the only setting I can't max. If I go any higher than 8x I start seeing a performance hit. I have a GTX 1050 GPU.

Dang, if instances take a whole 20 minutes to despawn, I wish that would translate into letting me pick up where I left off, instead of having to start all over every time I get DC'd.

There was a single-player shareware game I used to love, called Escape Velocity (+ 2 sequels). Not too long ago I re-downloaded it to see if it was still as much fun as I remembered. Unfortunately, it wouldn't go above 1024x768, sat there in a little box in the middle of my 1920x1080 screen, and all of the non-scaling text was so tiny that my aging eyes could not read a word of it, even with my reading glasses. As it was a game where reading the text was pretty essential to gameplay, I had to sadly retire it to the "Fond Memories" folder 😞

Not to mention that "level up" sound is apparently unaffected by any volume setting I can find. Like, there's "Sound Effect Volume", "Music Volume" and "Voiceover Volume", but no "Master Volume". So I'll be cruising through a mission and sound levels are just where I like them, and then I'll level up and the noise blows my head off.

Speaking of multiboxing, back on live I got this idea to roll up a set of triplet sisters with superpowers. They had identical costumes except for the colors. To get a group photo, I rolled the first sister on my main account, then created two free accounts, one for each of the other sisters. I logged in the first one on my main account, on my Mac. Then I launched two instances of the game on my Windows laptop. Once I had all three sisters logged in, I got them positioned together and managed to snap a couple screenshots before the laptop locked up because it really couldn't handle running two instances of the game.

Hey, I have 1,000 slots, I'mma do my best to fill them up! Even made spreadsheets of the ATs I like to play - Primary PSs down the left, Secondaries across the top - so that I can keep track of which combinations I've already done so that I can get as far as possible without duplication 🙂

True enough. I generally only use the Turn L/R keys when I take my hand off the mouse to drink from my bottle of water and I don't want to stop moving. Keyboard turning otherwise doesn't have much use in this game, but in WoW there were places - like the overabundance of spiral staircases/ramps that force you to effectively run in a circle - were a lot easier if I used a combination of keys and mouse. Strafe keys ... I've never used them. Strafing looks to me like a holdover from FPS games. Back in WoW I'd see people who weren't even in combat, they were just running around in a city, and they're strafing instead of turning, and it just looked bizarre to me.

Amateur! I'm on my 64th alt and have started hitting AE XP farms! 😄

Okay, I'm puzzled by the people saying the default movement keys are WASD. On my install, both Homecoming and back on live, Q is "Turn Left" and E is "Turn Right", with A & D being the Strafe keys. I remember liking CoH's default setup so much that, after sunset when I went back to WoW, I changed my WoW settings to match. Anyway, the main keybind change I've made is rebinding the "Previous Tray" and "Next Tray" to the Numpad - & + keys. Because they're out of the way over there. When "Previous Tray" was bound by default to the "-" key next to the top-row zero, I kept accidentally tapping it because I have my travel power bound to "0", so my main power tray kept flipping from 1 to 9. Though I would prefer to be able to simply unbind those functions altogether.

I have no idea if this is even possible, but I'd love it if there was some way to smarten up some mission "ally" characters. Specifically, I'm talking about phase 3 of the Shining Stars (the ones available at level 15). In the mission, "Hell Hath More Fury That You Thought", we team up with Grym. Unfortunately, in this mission Grym is stupider than most enemy mobs, in that he insists upon standing in the fire and becoming too wounded to continue. Usually on the first pull. Even most enemy NPCs are clever enough to try to get out of AoE effects, but not Grym. Then, in the following mission, "If You Don't Mind", we meet up with No Mind, who wants to be our sidekick because he can't fight the Praetorian Clockwork by himself. And then he proceeds to charge, by himself, smack into the middle of the first pack of mobs. Not only that, he then runs around the room smacking robots until he's aggroed the entire room, whereupon he promptly dies, about 60 seconds after I rescued him. Honestly, I almost suspect that these two characters were deliberately "dumbed down", because ally NPCs that accompany me in Tip missions (Overdrive, etc.) aren't nearly that stupid and almost always survive to the end of the mission.

Chinese-Irish-Danish gunfighter redneck, Khan O'Copenhagen:

Ideal hostage escape route: not around, but directly through the middle of the fisticuffs!

A few more I don't think I've shared yet! Finally made a WoW "tribute" character. Well, sorta. Meet "Epic Gear": Dr. Frances Solana ... ... who transforms into Mother Sun! One of Mother Sun's proteges, Girl Mercury: Triple-N, the Nearly Naked Ninja: And Soul Candle - I like how this one turned out:

Seems I won't be moving to Boston any time soon! A couple months of those HOA fees would more than cover my current rent for a year!

Fair enough. Like I said, it's probably my living in a smaller town. I work right downtown, and across the street is the tallest building in the city, and it's 9 floors (former fancy hotel, now converted to low-income senior housing.

Yeah, but condos and apartments aren't quite the same thing.

I don't! I'm too busy leveling my 58 (so far) alts to spend time farming. The one costume editor change I would like to see is ... allow male characters to use the Venus symbol, and female characters to use the Mars symbol (chest details). Dang it, I have a team of female characters representing each planet, and all of them get to wear their planetary symbol except for Ms. Mars. I'd like to know why this silly restriction was there to begin with.

I dunno, maybe it's because I live in a smaller town, but I boggle at those Pinnacle Apartments that start at $399,999. Mostly because the practice of actually buying your apartment, as opposed to renting, is odd to me (though I'm aware it does happen in some places), but also that one can buy a house with property around here for less than that, 15 years after those billboards "went up".

I've always wondered if it was deliberate, or just an oversight, that there doesn't seem to be a single church of any kind in Paragon.

I got a chuckle a couple days ago. Couple Hellions in The Hollows, sitting on a wall directly across the street from the police barricades at the Atlas Park entrance. I don't recall the exact wording (didn't get a screenshot), but it was something like: "Oh, we could charge the barricades, but we could get injured, we could get caught. Let the Trolls do it. They're dumb."