RikOz

It is also odd, with the skyscrapers, that nothing ever happens higher than the 5th floor of those buildings.

Just yesterday, while doing radio missions in IP, I got a mission to rescue somebody who had been kidnapped by the Circle of Thorns. This led me to a door on Admiral Sutter's ship, and after clicking on the door I found myself in the blue caves. I also got sent to the front door of the bar right next to the police station in Atlas Park. Upon entering, I found myself on the 5th floor of that 3-story building, had to work my way down to the 1st floor, occasionally rescuing a hostage whom I had to lead back up to the 5th floor so that they could exit onto the street.

So the name I came up with for Alt #125 requires some explanation, as I'm fairly certain that absolutely nobody will get the reference. Waaay back when I was a wee lad, some time in the 1970s, I was watching some now-forgotten "variety show" on TV. One the bits involved a small choir singing a rendition of the patriotic (USA) song, "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" ... except that they had replaced nearly every word of the song with a similar-sounding name from the phone book. The result was amusing, but it was so long ago that I only remember the opening line. "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" became "Elmer Janke Toutle Dundee". And so ... Meet Janke Toutle Dundee (TW/SR brute)!

Heh. I just noticed yesterday that my stalker who uses ninja stance "hits the ground running" when I turn off flight. Click off flight, and her legs start running before she hits the ground. Looks pretty comical.

Right? I have it on all of my alts. I've used it to completely fill up my base Insp collectors (sorted by type!)

I got Psychologist on all of my alts just as part of exploring First Ward and getting all of the other day jobs there. It's time consuming, but with over 100 alts it wasn't a big deal leaving characters parked there for extended periods. My "system" went something like this: 1 - Zone into Eltentown via base teleporter, zip over to the outside of the north wall to read the plaque there, then go back inside and log out. The next time I log in that character, I've earned the Survivalist day job badge. 2 - Go east and collect all the badges and plaques in the Free Fire Zone. Log out on top of the tram station or the D.U.S.T. building. When logged back in, I've got the D.U.S.T. Ranger badge. 3 - Move away from the D.U.S.T. buildings, log out atop most any other building. Log back in a few days later, and earn the Scavenger badge. 4 - Fly down and get the plaques and exploration badges around the church/cemetery. If I don't already have Mortician from Striga or Sharkhead, log out there. Receive Mortician the next time I log in. 5 - Grab the "mid-town" badges - the plaque on a standalone broken wall, a badge at the sunken Cole statue, and a badge at the top of the tallest building in the center. From the top of that building, fly down to the badge inside the dead Hami seed, fly south to get the one in the rocky hills, the fly west to the hospital. Read the plaque, grab the badge, log out. Receive Psychologist upon login. Note that there will need to be about 5 days between logging out and logging back in, for the day job badges to be awarded. Again, not a problem for me, with 100+ alts - I had multiple alts all doing this at the same time. I would also, after logging back in to get Psychologist, teleport back to my SG base and immediately take a portal to Night Ward to grab all of the exploration badges there. (Fun: With no plaques* to read, I could grab the House Hunter badge inside the mansion, and after exiting the mansion I could fly a route that let me hit every remaining badge without stopping.) *There are a couple plaques in NW, but they don't count toward any badges, so I didn't bother stopping to read them after the first time.

I've been told I've played a character for several thousand hours a few times.

Thanks, I missed your post initially. It looks like the whole thing just needed some straightening out that never got to happen.

Zone maps are actually my main use for Reveal. I use it once I've collected all of the exploration badges, as seeing the fully-Revealed map gives me a quick way to determine, "Has this character fully explored this zone yet?" (opening the map is a lot quicker than digging through badges). There are only two situations where I use Reveal in an instanced mission map: I can't find that last hostage after extensive retracing of my steps, and I want to determine if, by some unlikely chance, there is a side passage that I've somehow missed. I'm in one of those Dark Astoria caves that are so wide that, when running through them normally, the mapping function doesn't extend far enough from my character to detect the actual walls. Without seeing where the walls are on the map, I end up completely missing some side passages, or I keep finding myself repeatedly running through sections I've already been through. The trail on the map just looks like I'm running around an open-world "board transit" map. As for things I enjoy that some others don't ... I enjoy completely clearing missions of enemies, even when the mission doesn't require it. (I don't see the appeal of stealthing to the end of the mission to punch just the named guy at the end.) Also, clicking every glowie whether I have to or not, even after the mission has been completed. Particularly when said glowie was listed as a mission objective, but the game sees that I've defeated the last enemy and decides to consider the mission "complete" even though I haven't clicked that glowie that was explicitly listed as an objective. I mean, I see the logic of considering the mission "complete" at that point, since there are no enemies remaining to stop me from, say, destroying that last computer, but dammit, I want to destroy that last computer!

Heh. That's something that drove me absolutely nuts when the live game shut down and I had to go back to WoW. I had gotten used to a level 2 character being able to clear a 10-foot wall, and now suddenly my max-level paladin's horse can't leap over a picket fence or a small boulder.

I decline Mystic Fortune every time somebody tries to put it on me, mostly due to a bad first experience with it. Back on live, on only my second day playing the game, I accepted a Mystic Fortune, and ended up with a massive speed buff. It had me moving so fast that I literally could not control my character, could not do anything without slamming into walls or overshooting my intended target. And, making it worse, since I was brand new to the game I had absolutely no idea how to get rid of it. I tried right-clicking on the buff icon and selected an option that looked like it should cancel the effect, but all that did was make the icon disappear without removing the buff, and now I was completely lost on how to get rid of it. I think I ended up just waiting it out. I mean, there's a reason why, even today, only one of my alts out of (currently) 124 has Super Speed for a travel power, and she only has it because her character concept pretty much required it. And I dislike auto powers that combine a speed buff with a more desirable effect, that force me to more or less sprint constantly if I want the defense bonus. Sprinting through blue caves and Council/5th bases is super unpleasant.

w00t! Heer Oranje (Energy/Energy Sentinel) becomes my most recent 50, and finally gives me a full page of them: I was getting really annoyed while trying to get that first screenshot, because there was one guy putting those bubbles on everybody (you can see one on Ms. Liberty). I didn't want it on me, since it wasn't part of my character, so I'd dismiss it and he'd just reapply it. I had to ... use my words. EDIT: Also, Atlas Park lighting really messes with costume colors. Made this guy look like a Denver Broncos fan or something.

That doesn't sound like the same entity.

So, Crey scientists create AI Executable Number 6. The particular Crey employees who created it seem to be reasonably decent people, at least compared to most of the other Crey we encounter, and they give you the information you need to help the AI escape onto the internet. The AI is self-aware, and wants to do good. You turn it loose to do its own thing. It ends up being mentioned here and there in a couple later missions, but that's about it. You don't really hear much of anything about what it's doing. I'm thinking that AI Executable Number 6 should have become a contact. It seems to me that a self-aware AI that wants to "do good" would be the ideal NPC character to spend its time correlating information and unraveling the various conspiracies and plots of groups like Crey, Nemesis, and Malta, and come up with ways to disrupt these plots and conspiracies. All it needs is a human agent (you, the hero) to be "disruptive" at the appropriate times and places. Of course, it would need to be a contact like Max from the Dark Astoria storyline - you can only contact it remotely (though this would be because it doesn't have a physical form, rather than Max's desire for ... privacy). Or rather, it would contact you. I'm thinking that this could work something like the Tips system - you would occasionally receive a message on your phone to contact Number 6, and it would point you in the direction of a mission that will cause trouble for some plot or other. On the other hand, in a possible "head canon" scenario, it is doing exactly what I've suggested, re: correlating information and untangling plots, but it passes this information to the existing contacts we talk to. I've noticed that some of these contacts seem to have way more detailed information than you'd expect. Things like knowing that such-and-such group has the incriminating evidence stored on some specific number of computers, or that you and a teammate will need to disarm multiple bombs simultaneously (in the original forms of those missions, anyway). What say you? Could AI Executable Number 6 have been used more effectively?

Real life comparison (from my job): 1. We are short-staffed. 2. Without enough staff, we cannot create enough product. 3. We cannot sell product we don't have. 4. Lack of product = less sales 5. Corporate bean counter looks at numbers, sees sales are down. 6. Corporate bean counter solution: WE NEED TO CUT LABOR HOURS.

That was my initial problem with Death Knights in WoW. You'd be starting with, effectively, a level 60 character, with all the powers a level 60 character would have. I had a really difficult time figuring out, all at once, how they were all supposed to work together.

As I entered a mission to stop Crey from terrorizing a bank, the mission pop-up upon entry said something to the effect of, "Does Crey think they're above the law?" After I dismissed the pop-up, I noticed the dialog box: [NPC] Field Agent: Working for Crey, you know, sometimes I just feel kind of above the law. A bit later, doing a safeguard mission, I encountered Double Tap robbing the bank. He had this to say: "You're not a REAL hero! A REAL hero, like me, would have killed me by now!

Latest costume design for Gamma Time (rad/rad scrapper). Starting to really enjoy this guy.

As I was flying past an AE building: Architect Patron [#1]: Architect Entertainment spans multiple dimensions. We could be playing a mission built by someone from another universe! Architect Patron [#2]: It's not even possible to describe how dumb you are.

I used to do something similar for my writing. The (USA) Social Security web site has a feature that lets you search for the most popular baby names for any given year. So I'd decide what year a character was born, pull up the top 100 male or female names for that year, and either peruse it until I found one I liked, or just roll a percentage die (or 2d10) to pick one randomly. https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ (Scroll down to "Items of Interest")

One of my rare tankers (Stone Armor/Super Strength) The Real Ziggursky! I tend to gravitate toward that Alpha costume set a bit too often, and I typically use a high-contrast color pairing. But in this case, I really like how the low-contrast color scheme worked out. The two colors are from the extreme left and right swatches of the same row of the color picker (7th row from the bottom). I think this is also the first time I've used that "High Tech Helmet", which I normally find kind of goofy-looking, but it somehow fit this character to a T.

I'm not sure why it took me until now to notice that the Phoenix Wings would work great with this costume.

In Night Ward: [NPC] Disgruntled Spirit: Pfft... nice costume.

Erm, the Silent Blade mission was a hero alignment mission that I've done dozens of times (I have a lot of alts), and she always helps with combat after she's rescued. This last time, she didn't.

So I encountered the strangest thing in this mission. I'm not entirely certain that it's a bug, but the Wiki article for the mission mentions nothing about it. This is a "board transit" mission. I encountered multiple groups of level 1 civilians, all huddled together, cowering in fear. They were all labeled "Citizen", and showed the group membership, "<Paragon Citizens>". The odd part was that they were all hostile, i.e. I could have attacked them had I chosen to do so, despite this being a blueside mission. When I would approach to within a certain distance, they would all run away as a group. And when I followed them, I discovered they were all making their way to the mission exit: Like I said, I'm not certain that this is a bug, as I don't believe I've ever done this mission before now, and I'm sure I would remember it if I'd seen this before. Regardless, it was extremely strange.