New efforts!

[RGladden]

To have the game back, I'd gladly spend an entire week without power and no computer.  That I'd call a bargain.  Matter of fact, I'd be thrilled even if I lost power for a week just as I was clicking the last button to start the tutorial after building my 1st toon.

I hear ya...

[Harpospoke]

Some interesting conversation happens here.   Thank god.   There has to be a reason to keep us talking and engaged since there is no "news".   But it does mean a person can miss a lot if you get busy for a week!   ;D


Alien life.    Great example of how we limit our thinking.   We haven't found extra terrestrial life yet.   We won't find it until we start actually looking for it.   All I hear in discussions on the subject is the search for "planets which can support life".   The search for planets (first assumption) with water (second assumption).   We even listen for radio transmissions from space!   Really?   w....t....f....   

I hope scientists don't actually think that way or we will never find it.  (the media doesn't seem to report what scientists really say at times so I'm hoping that is the case here)   That's not looking for life...that's looking for earth life.    Why would any logical person look out their window, assess "life", then look for that outside earth?

Life evolved on this planet....so of course the conditions here are "necessary for life to exist"!     I can't think of a bigger waste of time than looking for earth life in other places in the universe where any life obviously would evolve specific to conditions present where they exist.

Why would life in other parts of the universe have hands, brains, eyes, or thoughts?   We assume they would need to build spacecraft?   Radios?   Religion?   Motivations to conquer?  We assume they would be the same relative size as us? (even though physical size is one of the most variable things in the universe)   We assume they would have corporeal form.    Gas beings, energy beings...?

It's possible that life is more than an accident...it could be inevitable:
http://www.businessinsider.com/groundbreaking-idea-of-lifes-origin-2014-12

It probably says a lot about how far we have to go in science that we had to invent dark matter and dark energy to make our theories work.    Yeah...just 95% of the universe...that's all.    I'm sure our theories are dead-on.   :P

Politicians and their "the science is settled" stuff is probably the best example of our arrogance.   Meanwhile we keep changing what we think is "truth" and "facts".    Reading the debate in this thread between those in the sciences is how it really works when you get two scientists together in a room.   There is always debate.

Science settled on butter?  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2946617/Butter-ISN-T-bad-Major-study-says-80s-advice-dairy-fats-flawed.html

Cancer?  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11320497/Most-cancers-are-caused-by-bad-luck-not-genes-or-lifestyle-say-scientists.html

Eggs?  http://acsh.org/2014/11/egg-day-keep-doctor-away/

Salt?   http://time.com/3313332/salt-and-blood-pressure/

Fat?  http://www.sciencealert.com/features/20141306-25676.html

The speed of light?  http://phys.org/news/2014-06-physicist-slower-thought.html

The big bang?  http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html
http://mobile.news.com.au/technology/science/has-the-big-bang-theory-been-busted/story-fn5fsgyc-1226721187118

Reality?   https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/

[Noyjitat]

It'll be interesting to see how many people actually sub to a game that's been gone for a number years and will be in state of limbo.

since nobody has played if for over two years all of the content will be fresh and should keep people entertained for many more years even without updates.

[Ohioknight]

Alien life.    Great example of how we limit our thinking.   We haven't found extra terrestrial life yet.   We won't find it until we start actually looking for it.   All I hear in discussions on the subject is the search for "planets which can support life".   The search for planets (first assumption) with water (second assumption).   We even listen for radio transmissions from space!   Really?   w....t....f....   

I hope scientists don't actually think that way or we will never find it.  (the media doesn't seem to report what scientists really say at times so I'm hoping that is the case here)   That's not looking for life...that's looking for earth life.    Why would any logical person look out their window, assess "life", then look for that outside earth?

Life evolved on this planet....so of course the conditions here are "necessary for life to exist"!     I can't think of a bigger waste of time than looking for earth life in other places in the universe where any life obviously would evolve specific to conditions present where they exist.

We listen for radio transmissions because we CAN.  SETI began with Cocconi and Morrison observing, in the 1950's, that 1950's technology could send a radio signal detectable across the entire galaxy.  So if there's LOTS of life out there and LOTS of "people" doing LOTS of different things, some of them will be sending radio signals that we might detect. 

We look for life like Earth life because we know Earth life works and we only GUESS that there may be other types of life that MIGHT work -- and Earth life is a function of chemistry in water -- which means you need liquid water to get it started and make it work. 

We look for it outside Earth, because Mars appears to have been very close to Earth-like conditions (but too small, so couldn't keep it up) and Earth has Earth-like conditions (tautologically) which gives us 2 planets in the Solar liquid water range that are pretty close.  And we know there are a lot of stars with a lot of planets, so a good hunk of them are probably Earth-like.   We also know that we can see signs of life in the earliest rock in which it would be POSSIBLE to see signs of life, suggesting POSSIBLY that life is "easy" in Earth-like conditions.

If you have an alternative suggestion for a DIFFERENT way to look for Extraterrestrial life, it's probably been proposed already, but by all means share it.

In SETI we look how we can, when we can, any way we can. 

[Arcana]

It probably says a lot about how far we have to go in science that we had to invent dark matter and dark energy to make our theories work.    Yeah...just 95% of the universe...that's all.    I'm sure our theories are dead-on.   :P

Politicians and their "the science is settled" stuff is probably the best example of our arrogance.   Meanwhile we keep changing what we think is "truth" and "facts".    Reading the debate in this thread between those in the sciences is how it really works when you get two scientists together in a room.   There is always debate.

There's a huge difference between "is butter good for you" and "newtonian gravity."  "Is butter good for you" is an ill-defined question answered to the best of our knowledge, knowing our knowledge of dietary health is incomplete.  However, the notion that newtonian gravity is just a guess that keeps getting disproven is not how Science works (as previously discussed).

As to the first point about disparaging dark matter because we had to "invent" it just "to make our theories work" rather critically misunderstands how Science and in particular scientific theories work.  The whole *point* of scientific theories is to allow us to make predictions, to understand the parts of the universe we can't actually hold in our hands or witness directly.  I understand gravity, so I know that things fall to Earth: I don't have to witness them falling to know that.  That's how I and the rest of the human race can move on and not spend all our time reinventing the wheel, or reobserving the same things over and over again.

The theory of conservation laws tells us energy is conserved, that momentum is conserved, and when we combine the two when we observe particle collisions that don't add up, we trust those conservation laws enough that we don't just assume they are broken, we assume we are missing something in our observations.  We do so because those two laws have been confirmed and reconfirmed for literally centuries, to within the limits of our precision to measure.  So when we see an exception to them, we first presume our measurements are in error.  We "invent" things like the neutrino, which was hypothesized to exist because of observations for which the energy and momentum of the results did not add up.  We conjecture that something we did not observe carried away the extra energy and momentum. That conjecture gets reinforced when we make lots of related observations that also show conservation discrepancies.  We then become convinced the conjecture isn't just a fudge when we start to see that its the *same* conjectured particle that doesn't just account for one person's discrepancies, but a lot of different people's observations in different circumstances.  We start to see the neutrino conjecture as less of a guess, and more of a missing piece of a puzzle with a very well defined shape.  Eventually, we know so much about this hypothetical conjectured particle we can start to create a trap for it to catch it and observe it.  Technically, these observations are just more holes that the particle fits into, but when we start catching things within the neutrino-shaped traps, we become convinced the neutrino actually exists, even though no one has ever actually seen a neutrino with their own actual eyes.

This is critically important.  Dark matter and dark energy might not exist, and its possible some other explanation better fits observations than dark matter and dark energy does.  But dark matter and dark energy are not just guesses, and not just inventions designed to hide ignorance or save bad theories.  They are what our current scientific theories predict based on our best understanding of them.  And just like the neutrino, or the top quark, or the Higgs boson, or even more pedantic things like atoms and photons, dark matter and dark energy currently occupy a space that a lot of things we take completely for granted as being all but settled as existing once did.  In the meantime, either dark matter exists or gravity doesn't work the way we think it does.  Those are the only two real possibilities.  I trust our understanding of the laws of gravity more than I do our ability to observe all possible states of matter.  So I tend to believe dark matter exists, rather than our understanding of gravity is wrong.  I'm less certain about dark energy, because dark energy relies on scientific understanding of much more complex cosmology.  But I believe the case for dark energy is very strong - about as strong as the case for the existence of the neutrino was back in the 1930s.

Dark matter and dark energy are just guesses in the same sense quantum mechanics is.  And if you think quantum mechanics is just a guess, its worth noting that anyone that designs modern integrated circuits that doesn't believe in quantum mechanics precisely can't make a modern integrated circuit that works.  Its just not possible, because the material at current integrated circuit scales obeys exactly the laws of quantum mechanics.  More precisely, if you believe any other competing theory that makes different predictions, your circuits won't work.  That is basically as close to the truth as truth gets.

[Arcana]

The speed of light?  http://phys.org/news/2014-06-physicist-slower-thought.html

Also, this paper is technobabble.  Extremely opaque technobabble, but technobabble nonetheless.  That paper (which is not a peer-reviewed paper in the common sense of the term) hasn't changed "what we think is truth and facts."  Not given the fact that pretty much every scientist knowledgeable enough to properly comment on it seems to think something between "interesting, but almost certainly wrong" to "batshit nuts."

I can't explicitly speak authoritatively on the content, but some of it even I can tell is shaky at best, and some of it has been analyzed by field experts that have noted critical, impossible to address blatant errors on the part of the author in his understanding of general relativity.  He might be knowledgeable about quantum mechanics, but even qm experts are not exempt from being drawn over their heads in gr.

[Twisted Toon]

Tomorrow, I'll be going to the hospital for a hernia surgery. I have been waiting for the various approvals and insurance stuffs for about 5 months now. I am ready for the hernia to go away.

If I'm not back by tomorrow afternoon, just wait longer.  :)

[Remaugen]

If I'm not back by tomorrow afternoon, just wait longer.  :)

If it comes back tomorrow we will just have to start without you!  ;D

[Arcana]

Tomorrow, I'll be going to the hospital for a hernia surgery. I have been waiting for the various approvals and insurance stuffs for about 5 months now. I am ready for the hernia to go away.

If I'm not back by tomorrow afternoon, just wait longer.  :)

Mal: Zoe, ship is yours.  Remember, if anything happens to me or if you don't hear from me within the hour you take this ship...
...and you come and you rescue me.

Zoe: What? And risk my ship?

[Fable]

Mal: Zoe, ship is yours.  Remember, if anything happens to me or if you don't hear from me within the hour you take this ship...
...and you come and you rescue me.

Zoe: What? And risk my ship?

Best show ever made... I use to have a DVD player in my truck and would watch the season over and over on my way to work (hour drive down country roads) I use to be able to recite ever episode word for word.

[Sinistar]

Mal: Zoe, ship is yours.  Remember, if anything happens to me or if you don't hear from me within the hour you take this ship...
...and you come and you rescue me.

Zoe: What? And risk my ship?

"Did the primary buffer panel just pop off my gorram ship for no goo reason?"
"Looks like!"
"I thought kaylee said the couplings were still good"
"If we don't getsome extra from the engine room to offset the burn through this landing is going to get pretty interesting!"
"Define interesting"
"Uhm, Oh God, Oh God, we're all gonna die!"

[hurple]

Mal: Zoe, ship is yours.  Remember, if anything happens to me or if you don't hear from me within the hour you take this ship...
...and you come and you rescue me.

Zoe: What? And risk my ship?

Naw, if you're gonna quote a show, make it the *right* show

"Step up to red alert."
"Sir, are you sure? It does mean changing the bulb."

...

"Rude alert! Rude alert! An electrical fire has knocked out my voice recognition unicycle! Many Wurlitzers are missing from my database. Abandon shop! This is not a daffodil. Repeat: This is not a daffodil."

[Felderburg]

CoX can be a grindfest, but it feels like there is a purpose for the grind.

I left around Issue 19 / 20 because the Incarnate grind was too grindy for me. It didn't have a purpose, for me, other than "moar power!" Which is probably why I left. I mean, the rest of the game's grind at least had various story lines on the way from 1 to 50, and there was enough that even after hitting 50, you could get more story. Whereas with Incarnate stuff, it was the same exact Trial, over and over and over again, just for more power. No further story once you finished the trial, not really much purpose to getting said power either, since you could only use it on the trial you were doing so many times anyways. Yes, it would be nice for RP purposes, but the whole point of RP is make-believe, and I can make-believe my character is god-like without having to mindlessly grind through the same thing dozens of times to make it true in-game.

[Noyjitat]

I think I debated this with you before, but with logic like that you must not like taskforces either. Since an incarnate trial is just a giant multi team taskforce with one long mission. The other difference being you didn't have a contact and instead had cutscenes and npc dialogue. By the end of the game we had like 10 itrials and 30 or so tfs/sfs.

With upcoming issues I expect we would of had many more trials with battalion and beyond. Sadly it didn't happen...

[BadWolf]

Also, this paper is technobabble.  Extremely opaque technobabble, but technobabble nonetheless.  That paper (which is not a peer-reviewed paper in the common sense of the term) hasn't changed "what we think is truth and facts."  Not given the fact that pretty much every scientist knowledgeable enough to properly comment on it seems to think something between "interesting, but almost certainly wrong" to "batshit nuts."

I can't explicitly speak authoritatively on the content, but some of it even I can tell is shaky at best, and some of it has been analyzed by field experts that have noted critical, impossible to address blatant errors on the part of the author in his understanding of general relativity.  He might be knowledgeable about quantum mechanics, but even qm experts are not exempt from being drawn over their heads in gr.

I think it was Martin Gardner who said, "Remember, they may have laughed at the Wright Brothers...but they also laughed at the Marx Brothers." :)

[Felderburg]

I think I debated this with you before, but with logic like that you must not like taskforces either. Since an incarnate trial is just a giant multi team taskforce with one long mission. The other difference being you didn't have a contact and instead had cutscenes and npc dialogue. By the end of the game we had like 10 itrials and 30 or so tfs/sfs.

With upcoming issues I expect we would of had many more trials with battalion and beyond. Sadly it didn't happen...

Well, I didn't like Task Forces just because of the huge time commitment many of them had. The thing about TFs, as opposed to iTrials, though, is that once you do a Task Force, that's it. You're done. You have the badge, some sort of reward, and you can go on with your life. Yes, you can do a TF multiple times for more rewards, but there are other ways to get said rewards. With iTrials, they hugely incentivized the Trial path to incarnate hood - so much so that I wasn't even playing when the solo Dark Astoria path came out. iTrials were the only way to get iPower, and you had to grind them like crazy. Could TFs be "grindy"? Sure. But I don't think there's any denying that iTrials were the grindiest thing in CoH.

[FloatingFatMan]

CoX can be a grindfest, but it feels like there is a purpose for the grind.

CoH had grindy aspects, but they were only a small part of the overall game.  It wasn't the be all and end all, unlike most modern MMO's these days (and I've been playing lots of them, trying to find a new home!).

[Arcana]

Well, I didn't like Task Forces just because of the huge time commitment many of them had. The thing about TFs, as opposed to iTrials, though, is that once you do a Task Force, that's it. You're done. You have the badge, some sort of reward, and you can go on with your life. Yes, you can do a TF multiple times for more rewards, but there are other ways to get said rewards. With iTrials, they hugely incentivized the Trial path to incarnate hood - so much so that I wasn't even playing when the solo Dark Astoria path came out. iTrials were the only way to get iPower, and you had to grind them like crazy. Could TFs be "grindy"? Sure. But I don't think there's any denying that iTrials were the grindiest thing in CoH.

I think there's denying.  Which is to say, what's "grindy" is very subjective: it depends on a lot of factors because every player exempts things from being "part of the grind" for purely personalized reasons.  On a purely quantitative basis, it was far quicker to advance through the incarnate system through iTrials than it was to even level through normal levels.  *If* you enjoyed playing the standard content and you considered the different missions "different" you'd say that was still less grindy than running iTrials.  If you enjoyed running the iTrials then you'd think the opposite.

Averaging about a trial or two a day (but actually running many per day, not every day) I had three characters not only maxed out on Incarnate levels, but actually collecting Incarnate powers just to have them.  Tier 4 powers.  In fact, my main was trying to build up a complete set of Lore pets at the time of the shutdown.  I was nowhere near, of course, but that's how fast I was accumulating incarnate components that that was a not unreasonable long-term goal (I figured it would have taken about a year and a half to complete the set factoring in the occasional addition). 

Without resorting to leveling exploits I got a much higher return per minute of playing time from running iTrials than leveling for conventional XP.  So on a content-neutral basis the Incarnate system was not more grindy for me.  But that's because I genuinely felt completely neutral about running iTrials verses running any other content in the game.  Sometimes I felt like running story arcs, sometimes iTrials, but I had no specific global preference.

I'm not saying everyone was like me, or even that a majority of players were like me.  Only that it wasn't objectively true that the Incarnate system was the most grindy.  If you didn't like the content, it was probably one of the hardest to bypass and still achieve the same rewards.  That's not the same thing.

[Brigadine]

Tomorrow, I'll be going to the hospital for a hernia surgery. I have been waiting for the various approvals and insurance stuffs for about 5 months now. I am ready for the hernia to go away.

If I'm not back by tomorrow afternoon, just wait longer.  :)

As the weird Al song goes... Living with a herniaaaaaaa

[Vee]

I wasn't a huge fan of the itrials but i'll run anything at this point if it means we're playing coh again. hell i'd even agree to keyes.

that said i do think it's going to be all sorts of lulz when all of us show up with our SO'd toons for that first lambda run.