fuulishone

Limiting such super hulks to a single zone, even if the location randomly rotates within the zone, is poor design to be sure and makes it easy to camp. Expanding to an entire large scale system (such the whole of Aragoth or Beta Hydri for example) would be much better and give a lot more diversity. Ideally if every hulk field has a random and rare chance to spawn a super hulk once in a blue moon, that would help a lot in making the "explorer" part of the miner classes fun. It also needs to be said that these super hulks should *never* contain things that aren't obtainable in other in game ways. For example... allowing various DT only drops to be extracted from hulks is poor game balance. But allowing devices that are farmable from RDs would be okay for most folks as it's not game-breaking. It allows miners to obtain things that are otherwise only obtainable by stronger combat types.

I know they're manu. Just curious about the inconsistency between the lines and wondering if it's intended that way.

On a related note... DA6 and DA9 comps aren't listed in any station. They are sporadically found in hulks though. Is this working as intended or should they be available at vendors like the DA3 comps?

Exponentially increasing spawn times? Umm... ok.

Heh, gotta feed the addiction somehow ya know.

The 141 ppl online isn't accurate. It's including those attempting to log in that are stuck on the blue screen.

Great demand? No, was just a random question while sitting at work and noticing that I wasn't able to log in during lunch time. More specifically, the launcher does indeed work and bring up the appropriate status page, but it cannot determine if the server is online, nor can net7proxy secure a hookup.

1. BBW could remain open but impose a trade tariff on non-friendlies for gate use. Approaching gate with trade goods in cargo activate an NPC dialog. Either depart peacefully, take a quality hit commensurate with standing, or pay a pure credit tariff. Could be instituted on the four gates. No charge on gate to Paramis. Gate from Odin's to Paramis closed to non-friendlies. 2. Prefer hybrid solution. Gating into FB send you the current zone with "normal" fb mobs only, no bosses. If you activate the "lose on use" mission item from either within the zone, or within 10km of the gate in Cooper, it starts the mass zone-in timer that would take everyone within 10km of the gate inside of the zone and lock the zone from further entry. At this point there's a countdown where existing mobs slowly despawn and switch to raid mode with escalated boss spawning. This would allow small groups to do stuff in the "FB Lobby" to obtain ammo components, build components, xp, etc. This would also be the staging area for obtaining the mission components needed for the mission item. Obviously this would need to fleshed out some more to deal with potential pitfalls, exploits, etc. 3. Love/Hate relationship with Progens. Some you wanna stick in front of you as meatshields, some you wanna take home with you for ***CENSORED CONTENT*** 4. Overall leveling seems okay though there are some rough spots which is due less to leveling speed and more to being dead zones when you're trying to drum up enough skill points to handle the level appropriate content.

Hello, I was wondering if the net7 launcher (and subsequently the net7proxy) would ever support communications through a SOCKS5 proxy server. Also, would it ever support the automatic proxy configuration file that's available to browsers (proxy.pac)? Thanks

Looks like the lag monster is having a nip at the server. Sun, Oct 17 @ 753pm EST.

I'm pretty sure adding any kind of new graphic like that would require modifying the client. As far as I know, modifying the client is a no-no.

If you're truly using a lvl 5 shield, then 1200 cap is way too low. Consider finding yourself a lvl 5 waterloo shield and use the shunt on it to help you reactor regen. Also if your devices are at lvl 3, then you're only choice there is to get a lowbie guardian device (to help with your shield recharge) and a blood device for reactor recharge. You'll pick up 6 more skill points on your way to OL75. If you can wait til OL76, then I'd say do that. That gives you 8 skill points total, so you can choose to up either engine to 5 or device to 5. Engine opens up Puk's Wing for you, Devices opens up the Ward of Living Stone as well as Taniwha/Tatsu's pride which will give you a nice boost to your dps. IIRC, the bayonets at level 4 chew through a bit of reactor so you could consider scaling down to a lower dps gun that's higher reactor efficiency. Right now your goal isn't to burn stuff down fast, but to outlive them.

Well Parallels is particularly for Mac OS, so it should be better integrated than the other choices. I like VBox because it is cross-platform, open source (available) and the VMs have some really neat features that Parallels doesn't offer me in my professional life.

Parallels not free though whereas VirtualBox is. =)

My personal opinion... relying on tweaking of items/gear to deal with class balance is not very scaleable and not a healthy strategy in the long run. It may be quick and easy in the short term, but long term it just causes more work and headache for content development. With each new generation of gear, special consideration will need to be applied to handle all the special cases. With each new raid encounter all the drops will need to be reviewed much more carefully to maintain class balance. In addition there will be a need to balance a raid versus a parallel raid in the same generation in terms of drops to make both encounters interesting and worthwhile to pursue by all classes. As it is, there's already a lot of that going on, do we really want more?

I forgot to say that my idea would be predicated on the "return fire while fleeing" mechanic to be removed. The damage immunity while fleeing was meant to prevent potential exploits and to give a little something back to the mob if their return fire was removed. I wanted to try to make it so that kiting took skill since you had to jockey a mob into the right range for it to work. Go too far and you have to start over. Optimal would be keeping the mob in a circle kite just short of the flee range.

Minor question, are the mobs attackable during their "flee" phase? If they're immune, then the return fire mechanic wouldn't need to be so severe or even in place. That may simplify things so that it's a matter of fixing the flee behavior and the tether spot/range. I'm not sure exactly how it's coded, but if tether was handled as a zone within a zone and not a single start point, you might be able to do something like this: P------>|<--flee->|<----------------edge of tether zone---------------->|<--flee->| <--10km->|<--10km-><---20km---patrol|patrol---20km---><--10km->|<--10km-> ^ Ostarae Harvest So the mob is normally within the patrol zone area. This would correspond to the area defined within the sector editor for a given mob spawn location. This would be sized according to whatever the sector designer had in mind. So for example, this would keep all those CL40-43 Shrooms in VG within 20km (made this number up, I don't know what the actual patrol range is in game for these mobs) of their primary location (Ostarae Harvest nav point.) The 10km past the patrol range is their normal engage range. They can be engaged and will return fire in this range. If you circle kite in this range, then everything should be fine. It's a big enough range that circle kites should be effective as a tactic, but small enough to prevent issues. The flee range is the edge of their kite zone. If you pull them into this range, they can still be engaged and will take damage, but they will increase their travel speed by 50%, effectively making them reach their flee boundary sooner (and thus harder to control.) Once they get pulled past the flee zone, they will enter a fleeing state. They will disengage and drop primary aggro rules and return to the edge of the patrol zone. They maintain their +50% travel speed until they've reached safety, at which point they revert back to normal behavior. They cannot be engaged and will not take any damage while traveling through the flee zone with the flee state on. Once they reach the edge of tether zone, they return to normal speed and can take damage again. At this point they can be re-engaged by firing upon them and combat proceeds normally. If you pull them past the edge of flee, they will once again turn around, become immune and return to their safe zone. The aggro drop mentioned earlier is to prevent rubber-banding of the mobs. Regular aggro should kick in once flee state has dropped. If the mob is non-aggressive then it will ignore you. If the mob is cautious, then it *may* remember you and choose to attack you if you get too close to it. If the mob is aggressive, then it will remember you and chase you down per normal aggression rules. Scan range and visibility needs to be working properly for all this to make sense. Anyways, it's just an idea/suggestion. Not fully baked, so I'm sure there's holes/problems with it.

But isn't there currently a problem of a missing middle? (i.e. Vrix, Mordana, etc)

Shhhhh.... my JE and JT would thank you to not draw too much attention to this. The range actually makes them useful in a group with Terrans/Progens.

Reading back you said that the performance test on the configurator wouldn't run... If this is the case, then the game won't run either. You however said that you had it running on this same machine at one point, so that leads me to believe there's something wrong with your graphics drivers. I had a similar problem until I refreshed my DirectX and graphics drivers. Prior to this, running dxdiag would indicate that Direct3D was not enabled, after the fresh, dxdiag would be fine and the performance test would work. Perhaps you could give this a try? If you can't get the performance test to run, then it's most definitely a graphics related problem.

Currently there seems to be some kind of functionality that indicates if an item was GM created. Can you extend this custom marking ability to show when an item is marked no-sale? I'm gonna guess that the GM created one is simply marking a builder on an item (even though it might not have actually been "built") and letting the client do it's normal thing.

If it's 120 secs, what's the auto-despawn timer on corpse in space?

Seems this one's derailing a bit... On the subject of an explorer class having level 8/9 shields, don't the PS have level 9 shields? Saying that the TS should be restricted to level 8 shields for being an explorer class is probably too general a statement. The question is, does it matter if a TS has L8 vs L9 shields? Under what conditions will this even be an issue? If the argument is that a TS, like many Terrans, end up kiting and therefore shouldn't be hit all that much, then what's the core problem with TS survivability? For a JE, it's the combination problem of paper hull + low shield + weak guns. To solve that, JEs were given a super low sig and cloak. Shield leech helps a lot as well to compensate for the weak guns and short range. For a PS, the problem was slow engines and shorter gun range, so kiting wasn't exactly the right combat style, so they were given level 9 shields and Menace. They're expected to tank a bit and blow things up like a good little Progen, while being able to manage the mobs with Menace. For a TS (and I don't have one, so feel free to ignore or correct me), it seems like the issue is shields are too weak, sig is too high and no viable CC ability (except for a minimally useful Hacking skill). How to fix this? Well IMHO there's a couple different ways one could approach this... - Give TS the L9 shield skill and call it a day. They are still restricted to L8 reactors, so the extra 60k or so of survivability really isn't that big an issue. The sig is still high enough that a careless TS will still get themselves killed. Without HDC, there's little danger of a balance issue coming from a TS tanking things they aren't supposed to. Their speed is still fast, so kiting remains viable (so long as mob ranges are fixed to be reasonable when compared to missile ranges at the appropriate combat levels). - Alternatively, fix the base sig to be much lower so that it's comparable to the other explorer classes without being too small. By reducing visibility this should naturally improve survivability and risk. - Keep shields at L8, but give a new skill that's a temporary increase in damage mitigation, sort of like a cross between Rally and Psi Shield. It's not the TT Shield Charging skill since it doesn't add to base shield and isn't a long lasting buff, but instead could have a separate meter like Psi Shield that causes it to drop after certain amount of damage has been mitigated. It would temporarily increase the deflect cap and add a certain amount of deflect across the board depend on the TS' skill level. Something like this perhaps: --- L1: Increase a player's maximum deflects to 60 and provide +15 points of protection against impact and explosive damage. Self only --- L2: Increase the protection provided to +20 points of protection against energy, impact and explosive. --- L3: Increase a player's maximum deflects to 65 and provide +20 points of protection against plasma, chemical, energy, impact, and explosive damage. May be used on group members. --- L4: Increase the protection provided to +25 points of protection against plasma, chemical, energy, impact and explosive damage. --- L5: Increase all group member's (within 2.5km range) maximum deflects to 75 and provide +25 points of protection against psi, plasma, chemical, energy, impact and explosive damage. No target needed, AoE buff. - Lastly... you *could* give TS the Befriend skill, but make it actually work in a way that's reasonable. Make it scale in range appropriately as a TS increases in levels (say 10km range at max), it's single target (at low levels, at high levels it could be social target), non-aggro (so the act of debuffing a non-engaged mob with Befriend doesn't cause aggro as a side effect), and many other options. This idea is last because I haven't thought it through all that much, so I'm sure folks will hate this one.

Have you tried to force updates today?

+1 to this. Seems like a pretty simple way to make TS desirable for combat groups, without the potential balance issues that may be caused by something like Critical Targeting. If the range boost was percentage based and stacking, then you wouldn't need to have different ranges for different weapon types, just a simple 15-20% increase would already be huge. A different approach which might be interesting is to allow the TS to choose a lore specialty. In essence giving the TS the ability to unlock either Jenquai-only or Progen-only devices. The goal/purpose for unlocking is so that a TS could bring more device options to any combat group they might find themselves in. For example, a Jenq aligned TS might be allowed to use the Musca line of devices which are currently Jenq only and provide an activated reduce sig buff. Or the TS might be Progen aligned and be allowed to use the Basilisk line of chem debuffers, or the Burden line of speed debuffers. Folks need to think on this one a bit and look for potential issues.