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notebene

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  1. Mine is nearly 40 gig. Does that seem a bit steep?
  2. I took something very different away from the comic. While not laughter, nor a smile, a completely different message than you got out of it.
  3. There were lots of "I don't want to see a lot of people around" comments, but I'll just pick yours to quote. I covered that in my suggested idea. They have the instancing in place. When you come to a new planet, you are dropped in whatever instance they want to put you in. If there are too many people there, you can join a lower pop instance. If the 'lowest' pop instance has at least 30 people in it, you can spin up a new one! Now, I have played a lot on planets where there are 30 people, and I see maybe 5 of them, if it's a planet where there are 50 dailies. So that would seem to cover it pretty well. You'd need to have the ability to either be only in your instance general, or in a global general, or both (same with all the other channels, trade, lfg, whatever). So there would have to a be a huge server (now, we know when we say 'server' we are talking about a virtual thing that is made up of lots of pieces of hardware, yada yada, we're all on the same page...clearly when we say 'everyone is on the same server', we're not saying it's some old Dell Mom doesn't use any more, right? Good) to handle that. I would imagine you could even have some instancing preferences you could set in options. Size of instance I'd 'like' to join when I visit: A planet: high, med, low The fleet: high, med, low Chat channel preferences (for each type): universe fleet planet instance All sorts of ways you could cut that up. As far as community, this is a 'bit' tougher, but some things to note: Most folks these days think of their guild as their community. If you read a lot of 'why is chat so quiet' posts, lamenting over the good ol' days whenever everyone chatted in general, the responses are usually 3 things: a. I play with a few friends and we hook up on headset chat. b. My guild is my community, I only chat in guild chat, and sometimes use their chat server to talk. c. I shut off general because "Mankirk's Wife" killed general for me. Odd for me, this is a sore spot. I'm usually guildless. The idea of chatting on a guild Ventrillo, TS (forget the name of the new one...starts with an M?) doesn't appeal to me. I guess I'm kinda a jerk socially. But I do friend people, a lot. People I play with. That kinda becomes my community. I'll friend someone, make a note about them. If they are online and I happen to see them, I'll throw a wave at them. So how do we 'see' those friends, at least, in a sea of people? I vote for some sort of indicator, or a message or sound, like when a friend comes online, that pops when a friend is nearby. A little 'help' that you noticed them walking down the street. What you do with that is up to you. Even an option setting to set a color for the names of friends. An additional thing that might help with community is Alliances. Allow guilds to have alliances. Allow people to join an alliance without being in a guild. Allow people to put percentage discounts on things sold in the GTN for alliance members. Add alliance benefits (like legacy). Tie Alliances into PvP! AvAvAvAv...nv! Again, an option to set the color for names of people in your alliance. There would have to be a hierarchy of which color you see, and 'that' hierarchy, again, can be configurable by player. Maybe you want to see your friend colors over guild? Lots of fun options there I think to solve these things...but I do feel it's the next big mechanic.
  4. I suggested that idea as well. I'm baffled that this isn't the next big technological 'thing' with MMOs, quite frankly.
  5. I actually really enjoy GW2. It's not a replacement for SWTOR, just different. As with all games, there are some things I wish each had from the other. What is funny is the only time I get sad about the games I'm playing is when I come out to the forums. These days, it seems it's can be either the forum that goes with the game or in the case of GW2 (as I'm reading and writing now), someone else's forum. Everyone just seems really, really mad...about everything. Nothing is good. Two things: Area Events I really like these. Yes, I suppose they might get repetitive, but so do dungeons (flashpoints) right? Anything you play, if you do something more than once, it is bound to feel repetitive. That condition pre-dates MMOs, sorry about that. To me, as in Rift, I 'really' enjoy these because it's a way to interact with the world in a really fun and social way, with others, without having to feel the pressure of filling a specific role, and being yelled at because I'm not wearing the right gear or casting the right spell when my energy is at 13. 'Heart' Questing It's actually a nice idea. Rather than having a list of things to do, and they make you go to each place, it does spread it out. You can do none of them or all of them before moving on. In one area, there are multiple options for given levels as well. I'm choosing to go off in one direction and I'm missing a few areas. I may come back to do them, or save them for another character. It's not very linear at all. And, do fulfill each heart, you can do one of 3-4 different things. I did a castle one and primarily did nothing but straighten up the area a bit. I ran over a bridge and helped some people in trouble from time to time, and did a few events, but mostly just tidied up. On another, I did a 'lot' of fighting and heavy events. Plus, there was no 'n', per se. There is a progress bar that fills a little each time you do something to help them, but when there are so many different things to do, you aren't even really aware of it, you are just running around doing things, alone or with other people, and before you know it you're done. Lots of other things. The world seems huge, I like the way it unfolds. Divinity's Reach is giant! I could teleport around town, but I rather enjoy walking around and learning the streets. I like how there are no healers, per se. Now, I chose an elementatlist as my 2nd (my first was the Ranger...uhm...Hunter...well....I had a bow and a bear! Still love the character, but I also started digging the Elementalist. Playing it as I type this (well I hear things blowing up in the background, hopefully I'm still alive). One of the attunements I can flip to is water, and it's 'more' supportive and has more 'help your friends with things that do damage and heal', but really it's not a healer, but makes for a decent substitute without a dedicated one. Everyone has something that can heal themselves. You can spend skill points to expand on your personal healing as well. Like SWTOR everyone rezes, though they have a neat mechanic with it. It takes time to rez someone, but the more people that help, the faster it goes. I like that I can move freely while I use my abilities. Hmm...well, lots of things to like. Doesn't mean I think that game is 'better' than SWTOR, just different. There are a lot of things I enjoy about SWTOR as well. I won't bother listing them, you could probably generate a list looking at my responses to other's posts (of course, you have to discount any of my 'harmless' fun replies to people from time to time, and silly posts to ragers that sneak in before their posts are eventually closed, and my questions...but there out there. The OJ (orange) armor concept, the story, big fan of the RPG dialog system...and frankly, it's nice to have a sci-fi in my MMO tool belt right now. So there. That's wasn't so hard to do. No one got hurt. Didn't make any hyperbolic rage statements about how all games are dying except the one that I'm playing right now (remember, anyone who says someone else is in 'Denial' may be in the 'Bargaining' stage themselves ). Had a good time playing Tera, signed up to play it, probably 'tinker' with that one. For me, I don't think that will last more than a month or two. Really like the armor, scenery, combat system. The crafting is a bit steep financially for me and I have a feeling that the grand design for end game really revolves more around PvP than PvE - but not in a way that will be entertaining to me. GW2, hard to say, only one beta weekend. Might need a few more. I'm in the 'Shock and Awe' stage right now, so everything looks like chocolate enemas ()! Might change my mind. Now, you might think after my PvP vs PvE comment for Tera, that I'd be doomed in GW2, but, well...I 'might' PvP in that game. I don't usually PvP in a game, takes something special for me to get excited about it. DAoC had it's RvR and 'Darkness Falls'. WoW had Wintergrasp (that was nice because it was very impersonal and anyone could do it, even a dunce like me). I think GW2 might have it, just haven't tried it yet. I wanted my first weekend to be about exploring the unique PvE features, and getting my feet wet with crafting. SWTOR will be with me for a while. Can't say I'll be here a year from now, but these days, that's asking a lot, and I don't think it should be expected. WoW was an enigma. Not so much it's success level, but that people somehow got to this place where they kept going back to it. They didn't want to 'level up' through a whole new game, that somehow if they stopped playing, then all their time was wasted. I don't much get that. Fun is about the journey, not the end. Well, there you go. TLDR: Hmm. I guess nothing. It was really long, and I don't ever say much of anything useful anyway. Sorry about wearing out the scroll wheel on your mouse, at any rate.
  6. I had this image of you dropping the mic and spreading your arms and strutting off a stage.
  7. All things being equal (whether I'm still having fun, puritans, all the stuff below), I'd be more inclined to play the game longer if it was subscription based. The F2P stuff wears on my soul over time. I never have a knee-jerk reaction like "omgzors bad playrz come community suffrz kek kek!", I continue along, because I'm having fun, but there is definitely something that is psychologically depressing, to me, about F2P, and eventually I just wander away. LotRO was a good example. I'm a lifer there (could pick up again at any time). I'm pretty sure I would still be playing today if it wasn't for the F2P there. I did for a long time (fell off more or less around Oct/Nov of last year), and played roughly a year after the conversion. Spiritually, it just changed. It was noticeable to me right away, but over time, all the 'buy this' and 'buy that' buttons and points and such just wore at the soul. Makes you feel like you need a shower, and just generally saddened by the whole thing. It's a bit like cable TV. When you think about it, it's all very sad. TV used to be free, paid for by advertisements. Taking the DVR out of the equation, and thinking about the period between when cable TV started and the DVR, we were then 'paying' for our free TV, and 'still' subjected to advertisements. Agreedycorporateamericasayswhat? What? Exactly. So I would suspect I wouldn't notice much at first, but then it'd be a problem, and eventually make me meander away. If the model were more like the original GW (which, ironically, I didn't play beyond a few weeks), where they figure out a way to pay their developers and server upkeep out of game and expansion purchases alone. Or, if what you could buy was 'so' benign as to barely be noticeable, and took place 'entirely' outside of the game (unlike LotROs implementation), then maybe. I think the only way I would is if the paradigm completed shifted to the point where old monikers didn't exist anymore. You buy the game, you buy expansions, there's no monthly charges, there are some things you can buy for the game 'outside' of the game, that doesn't give you any sort of advantage over anyone, low visibility, and those things are just called MMOs. They still have all the servers and infrastructure for the persistent worlds, but no sub. They just 'start' that way, all of them, and there's no longer names like P2P, F2P, F2W, W2P (Win to play? Win to pay?), W2W (parallel universe enterprise web integration business solution?). Then that might work for me.
  8. Awww dang...well played. Now all I got is "Real Men Eat Quesh", which doesn't even make any sense.
  9. Writing something outside of the game that parses that file and gives you useful information is fine. It's possible they might get grumpy if you then make a UI for that that hooks itself on the UI so it appears as though it's a display that's part of the game. I suppose if I were playing in windowed or fullscreen (windowed) mode, I could run something that hooks itself to that window, and moves around relative to the dimension of that window, and makes itself modal relative to that window. If that is the case, and they have something running that is looking to see if anything is trying to 'talk' to them like that, question them about where they are, for that purpose, they might take exception to that level of program relative to their own. So just pulling a quote like that out as support isn't terribly supportive. I can go write a parser that I can alt-tab over to every so often, that doesn't try to interact with the game window in any way, and only reads that file. That's probably fine, I did something similar with Rift, joining all the level chat channels and parsed it for events starting, sending me emails when events started, so I could stop work and jump in for a bit. They eventually made that moot, which is awesome (after all, one would have thought with all that social media crap in there they would have thought of that from the start, but I digress). Now, if I then wrote a HUD that globbed itself on to the game window so it would look like it was part of the UI? Not entirely sure how they feel about that. But the statement "we encourage parsers" doesn't exactly condone that later technique. I'm not saying 'how' they feel, I have no idea how they feel. But I can see them taking completely polar stands on the difference.
  10. Thanks. Just went and checked and the days went up and my end sub date pushed out a month. Nice.
  11. I wouldn't mind it so much (and sitting) if I didn't have such freakishly long and awkward legs. So I prefer to stand. I just hit space bar and jump when I come in, or a quick dubya.
  12. Cost doesn't bother me. Only thing that will bother me is if I am sitting around minding my own business and someone either moves to my server through a paid service or they merge servers, and any of my characters are renamed. On any of the servers I created them, even if they are level .000001. I reserved 5 servers worth of 8 character names each and while I'm sure someone will tell me why, how it's not fair, and sacrifice and whatever else. I'll fire back that no company ever again should even put us in these situations and make every character be unique by a first 'and' a last name. You'll come back and say how much sand accumulates in uncomfortable places having to type in long names. I'll offer some pretty easy solutions to allow people to still 'start' sending tells only use a first name, etc, etc. I'm very happy with the game, having a good time. My list is below, doesn't have much in it, pretty straight forward. Everyone has to have something; this is my something. I will meander off and dissolve into the tiniest or particles like the incredibly shrinking man.
  13. While it would be nice to have some different types of things to do, the problem is people like me. I'm just not that good. I drag down how quick and awesome you want to do the heroic, and I bet you'd laugh at me in a flashpoint. So either they come up with a level 'between' dailies and operations where you can do heroics and flashpoints that I wouldn't do to get better gear from mine, but maybe not as good as operations...or they just get rid of me. Which I guess is fine too. Would be a bit sad, though only for me, so probably not worth that much.
  14. I have little investment in this thread, and wasn't particularly interested in reading 48 pages of Jedi's butts, but on the 'off' chance this has not been said: "You other Jedi can't deny!" Ok, I'll move on.
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