Search Results: 45 messages were found

Thanks for the info, Walrus. Much appreciated.

rorist wrote:
you came back with this idea
hope we are going to see real improvement, i would like to see
something different with the hotbars in particular

I
know that when SWG got its combat upgrade, they completely overhauled
the toolbar icons, etc. Wouldn't surprise me if SOE tries to do a
similar thing here; the Galaxies combat upgrade was pretty
well-received (except for the Jedi flood it caused.)

OK -- I've been out of the loop for about a week, and in the
intervening time it looks like this thread has gotten turned into the
"yay walrus" and "let's discuss random aspects of the patch" thread. I
realize I ain't the boss of anybody, but is there any way we can get
the thread back on-topic? There seems to be a lot of confusion
revolving around the new chat system and (more importantly to me) how
it ties in with Jabber.

I think people understanding how SOE ties in with Jabber and what
Jabber *IS* will go a long way to giving people back what they lost
when AIM was removed from the game, so I respectfully request that we focus the
thread back on the chat system.

That rant out of the way, the following comment tells me that there's
probably a lot of people who don't understand what Jabber's about:

minuend wrote:
I
miss AIM. It let me chat with my friends while in game. I could be
jacked in MXO and chat with my friend two states away on her cell
phone. Jabber offers what? The ability to chat with my brother and
mother while they are in EQ? Wow, if only I didnt live with them that
would be a neat feature. I don't know anyone that uses Jabber at all.
AIM is the only IM people use anymore. It's intergrated into so many
devices(fones!) that no one else can compete anymore, in my opinion.
Yahoo has a bit of exposure still, but ICQ(the one time standard) is
basically dead. MSN? Who ever used that? Ever? I think the switch to
Jabber is a mistake for MXO. One of the features that got me to pay for
this boring game was the AIM client. It offered better real world to
MXO uses.

Of course, I'll settle for any messenger service in game at this point. BAH FIX THIS GAME ITS MAKING ME DEPRESSED!

followed by...

cloudwol wrote:
*CENSORED*! soooo many people use msn, near enough every person i know has an msn account

Putting the squabbles about "my IM service is the best" aside, here's the deal:

Jabber is designed with exactly your complaint in mind. Jabber supports
what are called "gateways", which basically act as a compatibility
layer between normal Jabber servers and proprietary chat servers like
AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc. Anyone who's worried about "switching" to Jabber
because you have a huge coterie of friends on IM Service X, I strongly
suggest you read this bit of the user guide at Jabber's site.

Many of the clients that support Jabber
support other protocols as well (AIM, etc). This sort of eliminates the
"but my friends don't use Jabber" problem in and of itself. What many
people don't seem to realize, though, is that the Jabber system ITSELF can talk to
these other protocols anyway, thus removing the NEED for a
multi-protocol client. (Although, to be fair, I'm a big fan of gaim, Adium, and many of the other multi-protocol clients, and there's no particular reason *not* to use them... but you don't *have* to.)

If you're one of these people who's afraid to use Jabber
because you have a big base of friends on another service, try out
Jabber's ability to talk to your service via a gateway... or use a
multi-protocol client like the ones listed
above. The alternative methods of chatting with your friends (yes,
including the ones on AIM/MSN) may not have all the fun extraneous
bells
and whistles of the "official" clients, but they also tend to lack the
annoyances that come with the official package as well (noisy video
ads, pop-ups, stock tickers you don't care about, etc.)

As usual, if I'm overlooking anything here or have misrepresented things, please post a reply and correct me.

Update: Oh, and by the way, forgot to put this in the original post...
"YAY WALRUS." You da man, and it's nice havin' ya back on the boards.
Yeah, I know I said this shouldn't be a yay walrus thread. I'm a
hypocrite. Sue me. :robotvery-happy:

Message Edited by Friar on 09-14-2005 12:25 AM

The Exiles all agreed that things just hadn't been the same ever since Liu Kang took the Red Pill.

TheChanMan wrote:

lol did you even read the opening post? or the one above for that matter....

I
think the point here is that this thread is effectively spam unless you
created the thread to encourage actual discussion rather than telling
those who disagree with you to shove it.

TheChanMan wrote:

I
don't understand why anyone would be against the idea because if it
ever did happen it would'nt effect them at all unless they wanted to
use the server.

The reason it would affect the rest of the community (even those who
didn't use the non-hacker server) is because the development team has
very limited resources with which to update and maintain the game, and
they're already strained to get out what *seem* like easy fixes to
those of us who haven't seen the code this game runs on. The amount of
coding/testing time that would be necessary to do what you're proposing
would be HUGE, and every minute they spent on this non-hacker server
idea would be a minute that they're not fixing critical bugs or adding
new content. And yes, I realize that one of your ground rules that you
laid down was that we are to disregard the effort that would be
involved in implementing your plan. But if we're supposed to carry on
this discussion without discussing the relevant facts, then what's the
point of this thread in the first place?

TheChanMan wrote:
Please enlighten me,why are most of the replys hate filled?

The point at which you started referring to those who disagreed with you as "the other 2 idiots" was probably a good starting point.

But as for myself, I will apologize, I was a little vicious up there
and I seriously don't like getting into flamewars with people on
boards. I hope you do understand though why there's such an outcry
against the idea, and if you don't understand, I'm sure that there's
plenty of people who have replied here that will be more than willing
to discuss the idea with you as long as you allow them to tell their
side without telling them to "mind their own" or associating them with
the class of players you characterize as being "a pile of **bleep**
stinking up [your] game".

Wow. You can't be serious.

Look, normally I'm not one to call people out on forums (an old adage
about winning the special olympics comes to mind) but I'll make an
exception in this case.

A) This is a public forum for discussion. Don't believe me? Look up.
"Community Forums." "General Discussion." Why should I give a rat's @$$
about your little disclaimer at the top of your post? "IF J00 AGREE
WITH ME, YOU CAN TALK. EVERYONE ELSE SHUT UP." You're breathing *our*
air right now, and taking up space on *our* forum, so we will post what
we **bleep** well please. You can take your private parties elsewhere.

B) It doesn't help that your point is basically "Hackers make me angry"
and you "honestly can't be bothered at the moment" to come up with any
good reasons why or how SOE should take time away from fixing REAL bugs
to make people you don't like disappear from your sight. Heck, I'll
/sign if you expand the idea to having 50 different servers, one that
excludes every class of player in the game. Personally, I'm shooting
for a "BOYS ONLY, NO GIRL COOTIES ALLOWED" ~~treehouse~~
server. Sure, it'll be a sausage-fest, but at least you won't feel
weird not knowing if the female RSI that just hit on you is really a
50-year-old man in his tighty-whities.

C) And I quote...

"And as for the other 2 idiots,I said I didnt expect hackers to sign as
they are way too selfish and only too happy to make sure other people
have no fun even if said peoples fun doesnt effect them in anyway."

Believe it or not, not everyone who disagrees with you is a ~~witch~~... er, I mean ~~communist~~
Hacker. Personally, I think your idea is ridiculous, and I haven't
TOUCHED the hacker tree since about level 4, 'cuz I think the pretty
fireworks shows that accompany that class absolutely destroy the
immersion-factor of the game.

I'm sorry, I normally try to give people the benefit of the doubt on
forums like this, but I'm real tempted at the moment to just echo
UnholyFactions' response:

"you,sir, are an idiot."

...

...

eh, on second thought, I'm sold.

/sign

:robottongue:

Smike_ wrote:
2) This game takes place in the
Matrix. Nobody wants to be an operator sitting on a ship...even if we
had ships we could go to. Just think of hackers as mobile operators
inside the Matrix.

I dunno... I think as long as
there was enough stuff for the Operators to do to keep interactivity
sufficiently high, it would appeal to some people. (Can't speak for anyone but myself, but I'd be down for it.)
Some of the stuff Paragonith mentioned about being able to see things
that you can't see when you're jacked in, etc. would help with that.

If they were able to design it in such a way that you don't *need* an
Operator but they're very helpful to have around (a-la Patchers) then
it could be a fun way to jump in and play with your crewmates even if
you didn't feel like actually going and running missions. *shrug* Maybe
it's just me though.

And to Paragonith... after thinking about it for a while, I'm less
opposed to Operators taking over some of the Hacker-type functions.
That's easy for me to say, 'cuz I haven't TOUCHED the hacker tree since
about level 4, but the REASON I haven't touched it is because it
completely destroys the feeling of being in the Matrix... if I wanted
to see players running around casting big shiny spells, I'd be playing
WoW. In looking at the Hacker tree, it looks like there's a ton of
specializations in there, and I wonder if some of those wouldn't be
better served being part of this Operator tree of yours. To be fair
though, it's not just Hacker abilities that would fit well in Operator.
I play a lot of Spy, and the Mission Map skill definitely seems like an
Operator ability. I'm sure there's others. *shrug*

Man, the more I think about it, I want to be able to do this. Seems
like a good "downtime" way to chill but still play with your friends. I
just picture sitting there with a beer in my hand talking over a
headset on Ventrilo... watching my buddies run around in a mission area
like I'm watching an ant farm and occasionally yelling "I wouldn't go
through that door to your left if I were you".... :robotvery-happy:

Message Edited by Friar on 09-07-2005 01:18 PM

Just in case there's any confusion here, Jabber is an open protocol, and isn't in any way "part" of Trillian.

Trillian has a plugin that's able to talk the Jabber protocol, but
there's plenty of other (FREE) clients you can choose from, which is part of
the strength of the protocol. Personally, I use Gaim (for Windows and Linux) and AdiumX (for Mac... my old roommate's one of the lead developers on Adium, so I'm biased).

If you guys like Trillian and want to use it to connect, that's
perfectly fine. I just never have liked Trillian much and wanted to
make sure everyone understands that this isn't something for which you
specifically *need* Trillian.

Update: Oh, and almost forgot... if you don't like Trillian *OR* Gaim, Jabber has a big list of other compatible clients here.

Message Edited by Friar on 09-07-2005 01:00 PM

Message Edited by Friar on 09-07-2005 01:01 PM

DolalrBill wrote:
I've rethought the
original question. The answer is it will never be fixed. It
will never be fixed because someone will always have reason to post
two-page complains about how it's broken instead of just enjoying
themselves. It doesn't matter what SOE does now or
Monolith could have done in the past, there's always angst instead of
fun. These forums reek of angst. A reek strong enough to
drive people away.

Very true. But have you ever
seen SWG's forums? Now THAT's angst for ya. It's like somebody shook up
a Linkin Park concert and sprayed it all over the Intertron. Angst
EVERYWHERE.

Maybe those who are tired of the constant griping over at SWG will come
here? (That's what I did, I just did it a while before the SOE
switchover.)

Seriously. Copy-and-pasting that long of a post into 3 different places
on the forums is a little ridiculous. But my gripes about forum
etiquette aside...

I think the kind of class you're talking about would be a very cool
feature. I don't think it should take the place of hackers, or have
hackers somehow merge into Operators... if anything it seems like it
should be a Crew-specific type of role, where the player who's the team
Operator stays on the HvCFT rather than jacking in.

Somebody replied to this post elsewhere (you know, one of the other 500 times you posted it :robottongue:)
saying that a feature like this should be part of an expansion. I agree
with that. It seems like the sort of thing that would require a decent
chunk of coding/testing/balancing time, and isn't really the sort of
basic maintenance that would show up in a patch.

There's been various threads suggesting topics for expansions, some of
which suggested that an expansion should give crews some variety
of player "housing" through Hovercrafts, and I think now that we've
merged with the SWG crowd (which I used to be a part of) you'll see
more people wanting this feature. (Some have gone so far as to suggest
access to The Real, but I think it would make more sense to have
housing via in-ship constructs or something "jacked-in" like that. But
I digress.) But if such an expansion were to come out and focus on
making the HvCFT feel more like "home", it would make sense to play up
the role of Operator in the sort of manner you're suggesting, possibly
as an extra skill tree. (Again, I *don't* think it should replace
Hacker.)

In my head, the way I would see it playing out is like this: the crew
Operator can do for the team anything they would be able to do at a
hardline or satellite, such as swap out abilities, code/compile
anything that a currently-jacked-in team member knows how to code,
provide mission-map blips showing where mission targets and guards are
located, etc. Having this be a crew-specific ability might help boost
the team-play atmosphere a little more (personally, I'm a soloing
fiend, but I'd be all about running Op for my buddies). I think it
would probably require the addition of in-game voice chat to be really
effective and immersive (but hey, Ventrilo's just as good.)

Thoughts?

Went in with the last patch, same time as when they made the
satellites
actually boost Write Code. On a side note, does anyone else find it
strange that the new "Abilities" option on the satellites only lets you
*look* at your abilities, not change them? I mean, if the satellites
are able to send/receive data to/from your hovercraft (i.e. boost your
compile and upload) then why can't you use it to change loadouts like a
normal hardline? Not a huge deal, just struck me as an odd design
decision. (I do all my coding at the Guiness Lake East satellite
anyway, which is like 5 feet from the hardline... so no big deal.)

zorya wrote:
What's even better is that
Google Talk is out now; and since its a pure Jabber client, we should
be able to use it as our chat client out of game (instead of paying for
Trillian Pro).

That is about a million times better than AIM (if Station chat really is Jabber based.)

It's
a teensy bit of a stretch to say that Google Talk is a pure Jabber
client, for one main reason: it doesn't support server-to-server
communications right now, which is arguably the single best feature of
Jabber.

For those of you who don't know, Jabber works sort of like e-mail in
that anybody can run a Jabber server, and your Jabber id is in the form
of [email protected]. So you and I can both be running our own Jabber
servers (a-la an office intranet... or using public servers, or
whatever) and I'm [email protected] and you're [email protected], when I
send you a message, I send it to my server (first.com), my server looks
for a jabber server at second.com, and then the second.com server
handles routing the message to you (alice). This is handy for all sorts
of reasons I won't go into here, but if you're interested, check out
the tech overview at Jabber's site.

Google Talk, however, doesn't presently do server-to-server
communications; it only communicates with users on the GTalk server,
which means I can't use it to talk to other Jabber users unless they
specifically go sign up for a GTalk account. Google has made some comments
that make it sound like this may only be a temporary situation, but for
the time being Google Talk wouldn't be able to work with this gateway.

(If I'm completely wrong and overlooking/misunderstanding something here, let me know)

I had never heard that there was a Jabber->SOE gateway out there...
if that's the case, then AWESOME. That might solve a lot of my gripes
arising from the removal of AIM. (Jabber > AIM anywayz :robottongue:)

I love the shot where the two guys hyper jump up to that ledge and kneel next to ya. Good stuff.

I think ArchxAngel makes an excellent argument. I'm just now getting
high-enough level that I'm having to deal with the red-frag hunting and
I see how this can become a major pain.

And WyPhy, everything consumable I've written since the patch has been 10 charges. Dunno what people are getting 20 on...

Message Edited by Friar on 09-06-2005 11:28 AM

FriarDos...

My usual callsign in games is Friar, which stems from A) an inside joke
that started when my friends made a comparison between me and Friar
Tuck in the Disney cartoon version of Robin Hood and B) the fact that
right after highschool I had a brief stint as a traveling preacher.

Unfortunately, I'm REAL late in getting to the MxO party, so somebody
already had the Friar name when I got here. Hence Friar Dos... "Friar
Two" in Spanish. I figure worse comes to worse somebody will think it's
FriarDOS... some sort of operating system priest or somesuch. lol

Message Edited by Friar on 09-06-2005 11:11 AM

Just threw my first together this morning.

FriarDos on Syntax

This post is gonna look a little ridiculous until I change my sig ('cuz
of the duplication), but eh... I figure it won't be too long before I
get rifleman and sniper and I'll change out the icons or something.

Rocky -- as far as I can tell, we're not getting charged to code frags anymore. at least I'm not ATM.

Just found a site the other day called mxoclothing.com... basically
it's a place for Coders to go and list what clothes they can make so
that if you're looking for a new wardrobe of a specific look, color, or
buffs, you can search the database and see who to /tell in-game. Still
on the small side, but I've been adding clothes to it every day and I
know several other people have as well.

And now for the shameless plug part... although I don't have
duelist-boosting clothes available yet, if you're on Syntax and looking
for other types of clothes as well, check out my catalog. :robotvery-happy:

Hmm... just to follow up, I was messin' around in the chat
options
earlier and noticed they have a checkbox for "SOE Chat". So they *have*
at least put the GUI controls in there for it. Whether or not those
controls actually *do* anything yet is still anyone's guess though.

Haha -- so I guess the general consensus is there's no official documentation that matches what I'm describing. Oh well.

The astute observations of experienced players is just as good as
official word in my book anyway, given that whole situtation with
Twitch and the satellites. "No those totally work... you just can't SEE
it. It's like invisibly awesome." :robottongue:

(Nothin' but love Twitch, can't remember if you're still around somewhere, but if so, ah's just messin' with ya.)

Man. I totally thought your name said "Hitler" for a minute. I gotta get my eyes checked.

I agree with Hitle... uh... HiLiter in that maturity and age do not
necessarily coincide. A lot of the people that I'd like to call
13-year-old n00bs are, in fact, in their 20s and 30s and have been in
the game since beta. *shrug* Just a fact of life.

@ Primordia:

Where is that quote from? A critical mission or live event or something?

Awesome. You da man. Doesn't answer all my questions, but at least clears up some of them.

So it looks like Dazed, Off-Balance, and Staggered don't have any real
effects aside from opening you up to special attacks, which is what I
expected.

Where I'm still lost though (and still looking for links if anybody's
got 'em) is what some of the other effects do. The manual you linked to
has the following to say:

"If you are Confused, Enraged, Stunned, Held, Paralyzed or Prone, that will prevent you from withdrawing."

That's great, but there's more to those states than that or there wouldn't be 6 of them. :robotwink:

For example, let's look at Confuse. From looking around the forums, I see I'm not the only one who's confused
about Confuse (forgive the pun). The consensus over in that thread seems to be
that the Confuse state causes your target to choose randomly from his 4
attacks. That's great, but where the heck are we supposed to find this
information?

Do they not believe that the "One" will return?

Have they lost hope in the Oracle's predictions coming true?

Has the Oracle actually made any predictions (since the movies) that
the One will return? I know she predicted it before Neo showed up, but
has there been some element of game story I missed out on where she
says he's coming back again?

Are they thinking that they will rule the matrix and the zionists and mervs will fall?

I don't think the Machines are out to destroy Zion. There's a
truce, and we're going to stick by it. The only areas where we get
prickly is when Zion is doing things that will destabilize the Matrix,
and thus threaten the existence of the Machines and those living in the
pods. So if Zion falls, it won't be because of us. It will likely be
the result of some power-grab squabble between its leaders that leads
to civil war.

As far as Mervs go, there's very few actions they undertake that DON'T
threaten the stability of the Matrix, which is ironic since they're
even more dependent upon the Matrix than we Machines are (there are,
after all, "certain levels of survival we are prepared to accept"...
whereas the Exiles have nowhere left to go.) The Mervs seem to be
constantly "tweaking" the system for their own personal gain, and thus
putting the Matrix's complex and fragile algorithmic underpinnings at
constant risk. Frankly, we don't have a truce with THEM, they're a
thorn in our side, and shall be removed accordingly.

Do they wish to kill everyone that isn't machine?

See the previous answer.

What are your reasons?

You have to remember... Zion does not necessarily = Neo. Had Zion
succeeded in their vision of how to beat the Machine Civilization, they
would have effectively carried out mass genocide against the human
race. (See Morpheus' comments in cinematic 1.2... "millions would have
died in their pods.")

Neo found a way to create peace, rather than death. Even as a
Machinist, I have great respect for that. There's a reason he was
called The One... he was the exception to Zion's rule. Zion may (or may
not) have the best intentions at heart, but infighting and distrust
invariably lead to more death and more war.

The Machines, on the other hand, provide a comparatively happy life for
the human race. You can argue that truth is more important than
comfort, and I can understand that way of thinking. However, I'll still
take a bucket of KFC over that soy-mash crap we got on the hoverbarges
any day.

Zion is compelled to free all the human minds they can, in spite of the
fact that there are many who are not ready to be freed, and many who
will wish nothing more than to go back once they *are* freed. (Take a
look at our current problems with those Cypherite nutjobs, for
example.) Zion isn't concerned with the interests of the Bluepills. They're only interested in adding to their ranks so they can
fight off the "next" Machine invasion. The one that the Machines, as
part of the Truce, have told Zion will never come. And if you're
worried that the Machines are going to break their word, I think the
Architect put it best: "What do you think I am... human?"

Now if you were looking for a non-RP answer to that question...

You were close when you said "Are they thinking that zionists act
stupid?". I'm not going to stand here and say every single Zion player
is a moron, because that's not the case. But there are a large number
of players who either...

A) ... go "Zion are the good guys!" and stick with them. This annoys me
because part of what makes the Matrix storyline so great is that there
ARE NO GOOD GUYS. Everyone is fallible. Everyone is involved in some
sort of political intrigue. But for the love of pete, Zion != Good, and
Machines != Evil. Since a big part of the draw to this game for me is
the storyline, I reserve the right not to associate with those who
ignore it.

B) ... never bother to investigate the other sides of the story, and
just stick with what they know. By the time you get your seduction
missions, you've already got what, 10 Zion missions under your belt or
something like that? Surprisingly, many of the Zionites that I've
talked to didn't even realize that they could work with these other
organizations. (Yet again, I realize this is not the case with
everybody, just pointing out examples.) That says to me that they
probably haven't paid enough attention to how the game works to really
get into it.

None of this should be taken as me saying that I hate all the Zionites.
There's a bunch of good people in that organization, but unfortunately
they tend to get drowned out by all the chaff among their ranks.

I can probably sum up best by describing the reaction I have to the other two orgs...
when I see a cluster of Mervs, I sort of curse under my breath like "god
I hate those guys" (just RP, not actually hatin' on anybody.) But when I
see a pack of Zionites, my reaction is usually more like "oh noes, not
these guys again" as though it were the 3 Stooges running up to me. :robottongue:

Can anybody point me in the direction of a comprehensive list of what
the different combat status effects are and what they actually do?

Just to give an example, I've been playing for about a month now and
didn't figure out until today that "Enraged" keeps somebody in
interlock. Yay for being slow on the uptake. :robotwink:

By the way, if it's in the instruction manual, feel free to just laugh
at me and call me a n00b. Unfortunately, I don't have my instruction
manual anymore, as it was eaten by a Velociraptor.

Message Edited by Friar on 09-04-2005 08:17 AM

As far as I know, it's because they haven't put the inter-SOE chat into the game yet.

One of the first patches SOE released for MxO had something in the
patch notes along the lines of "We're replacing AIM chat in-game with
SOE chat. Only we're taking out AIM *NOW*, and we'll put SOE chat in in
a couple of months or whenever we feel like doing it."

So I imagine you've got a little while to wait before you'll be able to talk to your EQ and SWG buddies.

I think everyone else has mentioned my gripes, so I'll just reiterate here:

* The 1-bit return on decompiles.

* Bit-stacking only works if you have 3 or more of the same stack.

* Code bits tab

* The really low number of charges on coded items

I have a gut feeling none of these things are bugs, and that they were
all intentional for balancing issues... but if that's the case, could
we at least get a quick post from Walrus or patch notes or something to
explain the rationale behind some of them?

Griping aside, I've never coded stuff for the sake of leveling, so I
don't notice the XP change as much as the others who have posted here.
Working signal boosters and the new Coder ability has made crafting
more interesting for me. Having pertinent critical missions to run
helps too... I got the game after the previous story arcs had kinda
died off during the SOE transition.

And finally, although I realize it wasn't part of this patch, and thus
is slightly off-topic, I'm with Antcrist in that being able to talk
while coding would be a pretty major benefit, especially since those of
us who code as a side "business" need to be able to take orders while
coding.

Capehart: the failed mission will reappear after a little while, just run some more missions and it'll be back.

Message Edited by Friar on 09-03-2005 12:15 PM

Some of your details are off KC, but the spirit of it is basically
right. I'll try not to nitpick too much and just add some things to
what you said.

Jedi were already in the game prior to the combat upgrade. What caused
the Jedi problem after the combat upgrade is that they changed the
process you had to go through to become a jedi. Before the previous
path to Force sensitivity was sort of mysterious, it was very difficult
to just say "hey, I want to make my character a Jedi" and actually do
it.

Fast-foward to after the CU. Now there's a very fixed set of steps you
have to go through to get a Jedi, and as soon as someone figured out
the "guaranteed steps" to becoming a Jedi, every 12-year-old with waaay
too much grinding time on his hands had a Jedi character.

I've been in SWG on-and-off ever since its beta, and I'll
wholeheartedly agree with those who say the number of Jedi now breaks
the immersion. Before, if you ever saw a lightsaber get whipped out
(and it was rare) you'd stop and try to get a screenshot of you next to
the guy or something so you could show your buddies. My first day back
after the CU, I got off the shuttle and there were like 30 Jedi
slaughtering each other just to kill time while they waited for the
shuttle. "All but extinct" my @$$.

Jedi aside, the upgrades to the combat system itself were great, IMHO.
Whereas before combat was "I HAVE to get a doctor to buff me, and I
HAVE to have X armor, which is the hands-down best armor in the game,
and I need X profession 'cuz it does the most damage" now it's more
balanced. Only certain classes of characters can wear certain armor,
fixing the "best armor" problem. Each profession now has a very
specific role in combat, which helps team play. (Pistoleers as crowd
control, Combat medic as debuffers, etc.)

I've been getting this sort of behavior all the time with normal mobs,
ever since I started the game (about a month ago). I think the game has
some sort of fallback mechanism to keep you from ganking NPCs that're
stuck in a wall or something. If you ever run into an NPC that *is*
stuck in a wall, he'll have this perma-evade thing going on.

Now before the patch, I used to occasionally get NPCs that would "get
confused" toward the end of a fight and trigger the insta-heal
perma-evade thing and run back to their spawn point. Don't know if it's
a lag issue, or if there's only a certain range outside their spawn
point they're comfortable fighting in, or what, but it was only an
occasional problem. *Since* the patch, the problem seems to be much
more frequent. When I was in Yuki earlier, every other NPC I
fought would do this, effectively making me kill each of them twice.

OH NOES... when Walrus said he was going on vacation, I didn't realize
he meant he was going to Smith-possess Gothique! And here I was worried
that Agent Gray was turning into Smith, and it was Walrus all along! :robotvery-happy:

I've been in the game almost a month now, and since I came in right
around the time of the SOE switchover, this new patch is the first
chance I've had to actually participate in an active storyline. For
this reason, I hope you'll all forgive me a n00bish question:

Do the critical missions pile up? In other words, are the critical
missions I'm running at the moment relevant to the current story arc?
It seems that the critical missions are somewhat linear, or
at least have to take place in a certain order. So does that mean I'm
having to "clear out" the old missions before I get to the new content?
Since I'm still relatively early on in the criticals (just got
reputation 60 with the Machines) am I playing through old Hunt for
Morpheus missions, or do unrun criticals expire with their associated
arc? Do I need to be in the hundreds of reputation points before I'm
"caught up"?

Thanks for whatever illumination you all can provide.

Well, if it's any consolation to you, you didn't miss any dialogue, as
there was none. (Unless I myself am also bugged but in a different way.
Actually, I DO have a graphics glitch in all the cinematics now that I
think about it, but I digress.)

SPOILERS FOLLOW. I made the next paragraph a darker color so hopefully
people won't accidentally see this... highlight it if you actually want
to read it.

----------START-----------

This cinematic takes place on a trash barge out
in the water. A guy wearing a militaryish beret carrying the BFG of all
insecticide sprayers chases the Assassin around the barge. The Assassin
tries to cap him, but beret dude knocks Assy's pistol out of his hand
and sprays him with the insecticide(?). A bunch of the Assassin's fly
bits die, but he seems to be alive overall. Assasin runs to a
conveniently placed hardline (an old phone in the trash heap... yay for
deus ex machina) and warps elsewhere. Beret dude sort of does an
"oh well" shrug and uses the hardline to warp away as well.

-----------END--------------

Wonder if the dude with the hat is the "General" we've been hearing so much about. *shrug*

Edit: Oh yeah, and Persephone gets gangbanged. Almost forgot about that. :robotwink: dolalr

Message Edited by Friar on 09-01-2005 04:51 PM

Yeah, I CCR'd this about a week back as well. Got the usual "it doesn't
need a GM, so I'm forwarding it to QA and they don't email you back, so
don't wait up" message.

Good to see they jumped on it right away. :robotmad:

I haven't run into this particular problem with MxO, but in most cases
that would indicate that your CD drive itself hasn't mounted the CD
yet. Is your CD scratched up? That *might* cause it... you might also
need to give your CD drive a couple seconds after you put in the second
CD before you click the "OK" or whatever button to tell the install
process to proceed.

Hope that helps.

What brought me here was the Matrix storyline. That's still
a big sell
for me, I just wish I'd get to freakin' SEE it in action. I picked up
the game the day the server merge happened (by coincidence) so I
haven't been around long enough to see any events yet. I hope they bust
out a new Sentinel (talking about the paper, not big man-killing NPC
robots or anything) or something soon so I don't wind up losing
interest. :robotmad:

On a gameplay-related note though, were this any other MMO I've played, I would
be gone by now. I've played a couple MMOs before this (SWG since beta,
then dropped it and went to City of Heroes, dropped that and tried a
little WoW on a friend's account) and my
general tendency is this:

1. Pick up game and love it for it's particular unique features.

2. Get to a high-enough level (usually mid-teens) where the
grind-to-reward ratio drops too low and the missions seem too
repetitive in nature (read: kill-the-stump in SWG).

3. Lose interest and cancel account (usually within the first month of the subscription.)

This is partly because I tend to be more of a solo player than a social
one, so the player interaction and PVP isn't as big a draw for me.
<sarcasm>Makes a whole lot of sense for me to be playing MMOs,
huh?</sarcasm> But I've just gotten through what a lot of people
have told me are MxO's XP doldrums (the level 13-19 range) and never
had the slightest moment of boredom.

The key? The ability to effectively switch classes on the fly. CoH had
a little bit of instant character switchability, in that you could take
"enhancements" that mobs dropped and use them to put various
semi-permanent buffs on your powers (faster recharge time, longer
duration, power, cost, etc), but you can only change which
powers you had by going on a several-hour-long "task force" mission
with a big group of people (which doesn't jive with my solo-based modus
operandi). In MxO, when I was grinding my way through the teens, as
soon
as I got bored with doing the same old missions, I'd switch to a
completely different loadout. Then missioning was fun again for a
while since I had to change my tactics to compensate for my different
loadout. Having that ability to go from hand-to-hand guru to sneaky spy
to pet summoner to shotty-wielding gun nut on the fly is what has kept
me here.

On the downside, the only reason I was able to play around with so many
classes is because the $information required to level up new skills in
the teens isn't *that* bad. If I were to hit another XP slow spot in
the mid-twenties or higher, the slowdown from having to grind $info to
try out the new abilities might get on my nerves. I just hit level 20,
so I guess I'll find out soon enough.

But if I don't see some story progression soon, all the classes in the world may not keep me around. :robotsad:

If everyone will forgive me for being n00btastic for a moment (I just
got into the game a couple weeks ago) can somebody shed a little more
light on where we find out about this Sarah Edmonton character?

This is the first time I've heard anything about her, and a search on
the forums turns up squat aside from this thread. PBlade mentioned that
it was from a mission, but which one? Like are we talking about a
critical mission for one (or all) of the organizations, or a live
events thing, or what?

Not exactly deep or philosophical, but it's what just happened to me before I jacked out and started reading this thread...

Chillin' in Yuki

Got ninja-kicked in the face

Owwie... my pie-hole...

:robotsad:

Nisian wrote:
Just fix EVERYTHING, then release an expansion that fixes the bugs and adds content, BUT with 0 bugs! 0!

While I understand and appreciate your sentiment, Nisian, clearly you're not a programmer.

(BTW, devs, if you DO pull off the above, can you make candy rain from
the sky and give me the ability to shoot lightning out of my @$$? Thx.
You guys rule.) :robotwink:

WryTerra -- nope, it's definitely not stacking them. That's what I figured was going on at first, so I
didn't worry about it when I seemed to have less fragments. But then I started testing it and realized what
was going on, and now I'm completely without red code frags. Oh well, at least it's nothing a little farming won't get back.

I also thought it might have been the filter not updating the
listing... I had my main storage set to only list code fragments/bits
and then I moved the stuff over and it disappeared. So I changed the
filter to show everything, and they were still gone.

ElliMann... yeah, hopefully they'll get it fixed. But I didn't mean to
give the impression there's no way around it. Just in case anybody else
runs into this bug, let me clarify: double-clicking or using the
"<== Move" button will make your frags disappear, but if you DRAG
them from the right panel to the left, it seems to move them just fine.