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Anyway, I updated the links section a bit (notice one thing in the pimpage section ?) and finally added that link I said I was going to… a few months back. Apart from that, not much going on, bouncing between both my characters as of late and have finally taken the plunge and picked up X-Perl, my interface is significantly prettier now.

Oh, and planned Druid talents, although the points in Imp LotP and Nuturing Instinct are basically preference (although I really like Imp LotP). +Healing is more of an endurance stat versus a power stat, so getting +300 on a nearly full heal isn’t that great sounding. Survival of the Fittest is nice, but I may end up swapping the points to Primal Tenacity and either Brutal Impact or Shredding Attacks. It really depends on how useful those talents become, but they’re all quite nice.

A certain someone doesn’t look like she’ll be on tonight, so I’ll probably continue the Druid stuff… next month or so?

Anyway, Happy Birthday Kyo (I’d say which, but she’d probably murder me when she got back )!

… and like… America too I guess. Hopefully you all go to sleep with the same number of fingers as you woke up with. Happy Forth of July !

Abalieno (original comment):

“And in PvP you need immobility. You can have unexpected situations coming out of a proper use of the pieces, but you cannot have new pieces showing up and coming into play.”

Brask Mumei (original comment):

“It is a poor kind of PvP that demands immobility. PvP with fixed, immobile, well understood rules and playgrounds is merely a sport.”

Abalieno (original comment):

“The point is: any other possibility would be simply an exploit. Just the players racing to find the I-Win button and the devs chasing them to patch the holes.

If PvP isn’t “static” then your game will be doomed and completely inaccessible for new players that don’t know how to defend themselves from the “legitimate” exploits.”

Now this of course comes into play with Legion’s experience in MxO. Are CrashKill, or Zero or I exploiting by pushing our skills to their (what we feel to be legal) limits? Clearly some things we thought were kosher like style-switching mid-attack can now be considered an exploit (precedent here, just replace “Buffs do not dynamically update” with “Abilities”).

Still, these are things being clarified just now, two months after the release of CR2.0. Are these what Abalineo would call “legitimate” exploits, things that are deemed legal, but… well, the very essence of the “TankMageGod” (Lum’s arguement against skill-based systems sounds like a normal loadout-building session between Zero and I after all ). After all, being a Duelist and staying in Grab for Y period of time, and doing +20% damage with the Accuracy/Defense bonuses of Grab (and without the -35% damage) is quite overpowering after all.

Now, how do you fix that? Do you force these grey-area issues into common use so they must be addressed. I tried that with the Sidekick Combo thing, and well, besides almost getting me the boot from the guild (slight exageration, but not by much…), it wasn’t fixed until CR2.0. Well, the Developers are only going to publish rules through negation (you can’t do this, that, and that other thing with your tongue, etc.), so then is it not up to the player base to make a set of “rules” (as close as possible, meaning what the community accepts as “kosher”, like the uber-DoTed weapons in pre-CU SWG and how there was a soft boycott of them, on Gorath at least).

Still, wouldn’t that mean breaking the lovely information embargo? Yeah it would… wouldn’t it. And of course the guild stands little to gain from a community drive to understand the new combat system, I’m pretty confident we’re on the bleeding edge of that.

Then again, this is bigger then the guild, this is a whole game that could be aided by turning PvP in a codefied sport, not some weirdo hack-rampant Diablo II server.

Embargos not withstanding, the only way for this not to be another Sidekick Combo is that a) the Developers fix things that are obviously broken (and judging from their responses on Dynamic Buffs, this could be another one of those things that takes forever to fix), b) the community to take their ball and go home if things go to shit. Both of these are terrible options…

so apart from pure scientifc purposes, there’s just about no upside. Works for me since the research is what I care about, but that would hardly suade the guild(s). Funnily enough, issue of releasing information (in MxO specifically) has been near the forefront of my mind for the better part of a year (the Sidekick Combo post is a year-old in a week)…

So, MxO’s already inaccessable to those outside the PvP elite, and it’s pretty obvious it’s doomed. FTW!

On the WoW front, got my shiny Idol of Ferocity yesterday, so I’m now “complete”. In news that won’t get me to 60 any faster, Dragn got us to make Hordies on Wildhammer, just claimed the names and logged off for now (Elecktrofyre = Troll Shammy and Candar = Troll Hunter)… for those paying attention, yes I did just steal my old guild leader Aenene’s other name for my Shaman.

(My excuse is officially, “Shamans = elements, and well, elecktrofire’s a fine name, just a tweak there, and done.” That and Antara will probably be making an apparence as a Blood Elf Priest, Psychic Scream + Mana Tap Racial = fun.) Might be playing on them after I get 60 on Antara, since I’m all of 3 levels away.

Also, TMBG’s She’s an Angel popped up on my playlist and… “When you’re following an angel / Does it mean you have to throw your body off a building?” Yes Thera, bad I do have it…

Anyway, good song by the own band, so aquire!

duke it out in the forums, with special Asian (non-schoolgirl ) guests

We’ve had a sort of long-running discussion of “what’s next” in the guild (the sort of culmination of round 1, Lost and Finding) that sort of petered out after a few of us got into WoW and then Matrix got its combat revamp on, but it picked up in the past couple of days thanks to 40.

Got to play a little Tomb Raider: Legend today after I got done with MxO (stopped at a shade over 200mil). So far I’m liking it. Running it at my desktop res and just turned off FSAA and it was running really nice. For the brief bit I’ve played (about a level and a half), the controls really feel tight which is something I’ve never felt a game’s gotten right with the mouse and keyboard. My one gripe though is that when going to aim, my cursor could be right over the dude, but it wouldn’t be connecting, especially when I was shooting through a doorway. That’s really minor though as running in and shooting people in the face with the pistols feels awesome.

In MxO news, we’ve got a thread in the private section of our boards going on right now about our RP stance/position/whatever. Basically, just going over what we feel our role as Cypherites is, how we approach things (from the RP POV, which we rarely use to be honest, we’re very pragmatic 99% of the time). Should be an interesting read after we get some people in it. (We’ll be moving it down to the DMZ in a bit.)

Outside of that, I decided to give the Lightning extension for T-bird a whirl. It really does feel like a 0.1 release, but it does what I need it to do (really rare and minor calendaring). Hopefully it’ll get more tightly integrated with T-bird later on, but like I said, it’s good for basic stuff right now. If you use Thunderbird and don’t really need a full-out calendar, you might want to give it a whirl. Sunbird’s the standalone version that has a couple more features at the moment if you prefer that.

Off to the dentist in a bit, yay!

Their whole spell weaving system sounds interesting, actually most of it does. It’s a ways off, with no beta announcement and they’re saying a launch window of this year. Yeah, that’s gonna slip.

On the MxO front, tons of bullshit because some people are CCR’ing left and right accusing people of using the /attack exploit. Of course, since no single person has any faith in the game’s CSR staff, it makes us actually worry about getting banned for absolute shit.

Oh, and we don’t know why Prim3 got banned (at least from the forums).

On the other hand, Thunderbird is getting a workout as I get my nerd on with MMO blogs.

Awaaaaaaaaaay!