Posts made by Arkandel

Teaser trailer for Luke Cage.

@Swaggot said in Making a MU* of your own:

@surreality Just out of curiosity: do you actually believe that if enough people believe something, it becomes true? Or was that just a useful rhetorical device in the moment?

Do you think because a minority (or even one person) believes in something its chances of being true are similarly increased? Not every special, unique opinion is true on the merit of it being special and unique.

sigh. Central Park stampede.

For me it's just a matter of theme. You know how in some TV shows throwing a punch can land you into serious trouble because Law - some episodes of The Good Wife involved the threat of long-time imprisonment and repercussions for relatively minor problems. Similarly in The Preacher he gets to be in a fight in public and snap someone's arm until the bone shows in front of everyone but there's never a question of whether charges will be pressed or that there might be consequences; it's just not that type of show.

Cops and criminals in a nWoD should just be treated thematically. No, you can't really try to play the big by-the-book cop who arrests everyone for smoking pot or being in a bar fight, that's dumb. It's not that kind of game, and staff should just tell him all the charges were dropped the same night if he tries. If the baddies eat a baby in front of the character then yes, I'd say 'consequences' are in order though, yes.

It's just a matter of consistent and common sense. There's no need to have rules like "no cop can ever go after a PC" - nor the opposite.

@surreality said in Making a MU* of your own:

I'd love to know what kind of examples we're talking about.

• Are they people asking to play an LOTR elf on a Game of Thrones game? (Heard about it, didn't see it personally. Have seen someone come to a WoD game and ask to play a Strix, though, that was... special.)

I'll come to your game and app a Demogorgon.

I'm loving Stranger Things.

Double post: PvP changes.

@bored said in World of Warcraft: Legion:

This is actually kind of why I gave it up! There was making everyone useful, and making everyone more or less identical (about when Mastery came in), and as someone who had always maintained a variety of tank/mdps alts, it became much less interesting when the nuance and difference between them vanished.

Yes, that's a valid concern. I share it partially, as for example balance concerns were the reason so many builds had to vanish so that what talents you pick barely matter any more - as opposed to always seeking that sweet combo that catered to your playstyle - and worse, made leveling less exciting since the vast majority of dings mean almost nothing other than getting one number closer to your max.

But.

It still beats what we had before. I remember playing a dwarf Priest in vanilla and talking to other non-dwarves who were so annoyed - they picked the 'wrong' race so they didn't have Fear Ward which at the time was extremely useful in PvE, or when Chain Heal was by far the best AoE heal so if your guild was progressing in Sunwell all you needed was Shamans and maybe Paladins for the tanks. That, frankly, sucked.

Or! It used to be the game had zero ways of catching up to the power curve. Was your guild doing the third tier of raids in the expansion when you started playing or returned to the game after a hiatus? Hah-hah you were fucked, just fucked, because where would you find the gear to do tier 3 when tiers 1-2 were useless to everyone else at that point, and it was damn hard to talk 39 people into grouping up just to give you a chance of getting items. So either you were carried hard or you didn't raid at all.

WoW has evolved and it's solved big systemic issues on the way. The developers have made (in my opinion) mistakes as well but no one has done it for longer, or as successfully, as Blizzard has.

Some Legion developer notes. Kinda neat, I like a lot of this stuff.

@Jaded I dunno. I live/work in a major city and the image of pedestrians walking around glued to their phones, oblivious to the world at large, is hardly new to me. I guess P:Go might have made more of that happen but it's not new, you know?

If I was a parent of a young child though I'd absolutely want to supervise where they get to play and limit it to pedestrian-only areas, yes.

@Insomnia One of the things I never quite liked on WoW until fairly recently was the absolute focus on raiding - not that there's anything wrong with it of course but I no longer have the luxury of just dedicating my time in blocks of 4-5 hours for wipes and progress. I can still play a lot but the playstyle of having to explicitly state you're taking a bathroom break or waiting for one just isn't something I can do.

On the other hand Rated Battlegrounds have been fun with the right group - you focus for 10-20 minutes, it's over, then you can take a break or do another. Or... 5-mans, I always loved those too because you skip the entire part of logistics -- maintaining a guild, leading a raid (which I've had to do so many times, it's like herding cats), maintaining loot order, settling loot drama... meh. With 5-mans you grab a couple of friends and off you go. Since I always play healers one of the 'rare' spots is covered, too.

And I hear you on transmogs! It's one of the things I'm looking forward the most in Legion.

@silentsophia said in World of Warcraft: Legion:

I don't honestly know. I keep debating, but my favorites are BM Hunter and Ice Mage, so I don't know how useful I would be.

For starters these days all classes' usefulness is normalized... given equal skill they won't fall too far from each other in effectiveness, and no one spec has anything no one else does. Blizzard's philosophy has been 'bring the player, not the class' for a few years now.

For another the idea is to group up and have some fun, not to go do Mythic raiding and world firsts, so who cares?

@Insomnia She was very bland pre-Theramore... she was associated with Arthas, then kinda with Thrall, what was she? A generic good-guy mage.

She's a whiny bitch now but at least she's got a personality.

@HorrorHound Be aware there is a sad flipside to this; the passport/driver license thing is being looked at by poorly trained, highly overworked people which makes them prone to social engineering attempts.

For example a year or so I temporarily lost control of my Blizzard account. All someone had to do was get their hands on my real name knowing I also play WoW (which isn't hard since I'm posting on social media about the game), then they took an image of a random driver's license from a province I've never even been to let alone issued any government papers in, photoshopped the name on there and added an equally random picture of some guy on it then sent it in as 'proof' that I wanted my password changed. Blamo!

I restored it easily enough afterwards but you get the point. Imagine if it was something more serious or critical than a game account?

(I love how many game threads end up in the "Tastes Less Game'y" forum!)

So... Legion, the next expansion in World of Warcraft is coming out next month.

Given how easy it is to group up for PvE or PvP across servers these days it should be trivial for any MSBites to do so if there are any folks here who're going to be spending their evenings slaying demons anyway!

I'm probably going to go Horde for my main (currently I'm leaning toward a restoration Druid or Mistweaver) and my battle tag is Arkandel#2399 so... find me if you wanna do stuff.

Hey folks, strap on your tinfoil hats and get ready for a ride through conspiracy theory land!

We're all tools for the CIA. Long live the pokeluminati.

@Coin As long as they don't call them 'toons'. Please don't call them 'toons'.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Interest Check: Single Sphere VtR Game:

But will there be shocking racism?!

I've seen way more hideous crime on MU* (murders, disembowelments, ritual sacrifice, mind control, you name it) than I've seen common real life douchebaggery. No one minds playing a vicious serial killer but they won't play a racist white supremacist or wife beater.

It probably means something but I don't pretend to know what.

Word of mouth is so important to actually get players to give your game a try.

Most MU* players are very conservative, they'll stay where their friends are, so in a way they anchor each other down by not being the first to go. Your best bet to change that is to create some hype - why is your Vampire game set in NYC different than all that came before it? What makes it so damn cool? What are you gonna give me to come over and play, man?