Messages posted by: cribbage

I'm currently 36 of 48, but I also have Syracuse going to the championship game, so we'll see how that works out for me.

Here's who I had winning for the rest of the dance:
Michigan State, Marquette, Kentucky, Baylor, Syracuse, Florida State, North Carolina, Kansas
Michigan State, Kentucky, Syracuse, Kansas
Kentucky, Syracuse
Kentucky

So far I am 25 of 32. Luckily didn't have Missouri making it into the sweet 16. But I had Duke going to the great 8.

It's an added layer of difficulty. It's only a bit less difficult than staying alive as the last man standing in the wave while you are a 1000+ medic.

It's best to max out experienced healing before you mess with monsters.

Even with intelligence maxed out, monsters are always dumber than any sentinal an eng can make. They will walk off space platforms, get stuck in wading pools, get stuck behind eng blocks, feed red flies, etc. And, as you discovered, they waste tons of adren. All the while you will be wasting your time trying to heal them (for no xp) when you should be healing your teammates.

Some people like the warlord or titan, but I think three skaarjs are better than either of those. A long time ago (before subclasses) I used to have pretty good luck with 3 brutes, but I think things have changed since then. The monsters seem weaker both offensively and defensively, and somehow stupider, if that's possible. And if I'm the last one alive, they are totally useless. I almost always play my extreme medic because even extreme monsters are so useless now.

We have a collection of classic works and we've been working through it book by book. In the last few months, we've gone through several, including:

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson

The kids are learning how good these books are, too, since I read to them aloud. If you have only read things published since the mid 20th century, I recommend grabbing a dictionary and reading the classics. There is history and vocabulary to be learned. Not to mention the thousands of references in contemporary literature that spring from Twain, Poe, Voltaire, Homer, etc. that are best understood by reading the source.

When it comes to 20th century and beyond, two of my favorites (being a nerd) are "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman": Adventures of a Curious Character and its sequel "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character. I am also a fan of science fiction and have recently re-read the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. In fact, most of my sf favorites I discovered by reading the Anthology and Analog books edited by John W Campbell (Astounding Science Fiction magazine).

More recently, the kids also introduced me to a couple series that are worthy of mention. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events are well done and quite entertaining. Also Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry(!) and Ridley Pearson. When I saw Dave's name on the jacket, I had to find out if it was the Dave Barry, and sure enough Dave's own brand of humor is sprinkled through the pages. The Peter books are fun prequel-style stories to the J.M. Barrie novel and play.

I was messing around and thought I would try to see how many retaliation kills I could rack up. Not sure if it's a record, but I send a challenge out there to top 62.

I think he is referring to those larger, mostly beige colored sliths.

As far as crashes go, I have noticed the server still crashes under certain conditions. On of them being when I am hit so hard with a rock that I ghost out of bounds. Not sure if the out of bounds thing is a coincidence, or simply a side-effect of the crash, but the last two times I've seen a crash it was due to being rocked into oblivion. Sorry, I'm not very good at recording maps/times. I'll try to make a note of it next time.

Two more crashes in a row. Between 5:12 and 5:14 PM pacific.
Both times it seemed to be me getting damaged by a nali with a grenade launcher.

Perhaps retaliation is involved somehow.

Now that I was looking for it, I have noticed the shield gun nalis as well. The last time I got on and played (between 12PM and 1PM Pacific) at least two of the crashes I saw happened right as shield gun nalis were hitting something. One was another monster, and one was me. But I didn't have countershove at all.

However, I have a theory.

I believe this situation is similar to that of firing off a shell from my medic flak and then switching weapons. The properties of the shell in mid air are no longer of a healing nature to myself or teammates.

I have been aware of what may or may not be a bug for quite a while now. If there are residual titan rocks around when healing myself against the ground with my medic flak, it will most of the time agitate those rocks so they deal out enough damage to either ghost or kill me. I've been around long enough to know when rocks are normally inert and harmless to run over. I figure in this case that there is just enough of the rock left over to be reanimated, as it were, by a splash weapon and deal out damage to anyone standing on top of them. I will even attest that sometimes the rocks themselves have been idle long enough to disappear from view but are still lurking there in the code waiting to become phantom rocks that kill from beyond the garbage collection grave, with ironic help from a medic weapon.

Now I have no idea if non-medic splash damage weapons work in the same way - it isn't common to go around shooting yourself in the feet with non-medic weapons. What I am saying is, it seems possible that if a nali with a shield gun hitting me at the very same time I am hitting them with a splash damage medic gun could induce the same code circumstances as if I had countershove turned on, and if the non-medic splash damage weapons work the same way (which I see no reason why they wouldn't with respect to monsters) then anyone could set off this unintentional booby trap in the code if they happen to be close enough to a nali holding a shield gun.

Is it possible to just remove shield gun from the list of weapons a nali can hold?

After talking to Dragon7350 online about it a few days ago, I also tried Extreme Medic(LM3).

For about 35 seconds. It was totally not worth it. Doing without the poison blast alone was enough to convince me. Add to that the full adren cost for the heal blast and reduced speed in healing oneself and others with the medic gun and you've simply crippled yourself by not going to LM4.

If someone wants to play the Extreme Medic with just LM3, I say let 'em. It's a trade-off, not an exploit. The xp scored could not possibly be better than a maxed out Extreme Monsters or maxed out Extreme Medic. Or at least not in my case.

Yes, thank you. Much appreciated.

Is there any word on what went haywire?

It's true. No hurry. It took, what, 5 or 6 years to get there? A few more days (or weeks) won't matter. I appreciate the time taken. Thank you.

Was playing today 2011-09-12 at about 1:27PM Pacific and a strange thing happened. Hall of Anubis came up and nobody could grab weapons. And existing weapons disappeared until all that was left was the translocator.

So we all died. Then the next map all our levels were reset. I quit, fearing that staying on too long would solidify the reset, but I checked the board and I am off the list. (Congrats, TON, you're in second place now.)

Is there a way to restore our characters? I know how many points I had, as I have a screen shot of the board right after I quit.

No matter how much coding is done, I am quite confident that Szlat would find it extremely hard to configure courtesy.

Unfortunately its the newer, typically discourteous players that start the votes after about wave 4 because they realize that they wont be living very long throughout the rest of the map anyhow. Its the players that are in the middle of a crowd of titans that get irritated at the inconveniently timed pop up.

I do not wish to rehash the debate on when and when not to start a vote, but lets just say that there is a time and a season for it. In my opinion, if you find yourself voting more than about once a week, I would say you are abusing it. Less than that if you are not voting immediately after a server crash.

I take umbrage at the suggestion that I can score 5kxp on a map by simply letting monsters do all the killing.

You will rarely see me bragging about my skill set. Quite the opposite, I have said before that the reason I play the medic is because I have no skills and need to be able to shove a flak cannon into the chest of the monsters to kill them.

But what I lack in aiming ability, I make up for in strategy. I know where to be on a map. I know when to berserk. There are many more things to consider over and above just spawning monsters. You have to keep them healed, be ready to respawn when one dies, and you have to move about in such a way so as to keep them interested in killing rather than simply following you. You have to keep the killing constant to achieve the multiple holy crap kills - which is really where the points rack up.

Prove me wrong. I invite any one of you to with a MM to sit in a base and let your monsters do all the killing and score 5k per map. You will find that to do it, there are other skills to master besides being able to aim a shock rifle from half a mile away.

As a vanilla MM, and before the advent of the subclasses, I used to be able to regularly score 4-5k xp per map. At least half of that was in healing xp. (Again, you have to know when to heal and when to kill in order to maximize xp from healing.) Once the subclasses were in full swing, I noticed that as a vanilla MM I could no longer keep a holy crap kill string going. In fact, it became a rarity that I would get even one HC on a map. My points per map dropped while it seemed that even low-level characters were able to score more than me. The standard monsters are simply not potent or durable enough to get 4-5k xp anymore. In order to compete at a level I am used to, I switched to extreme monsters. The way I figure it, I was scoring at this rate before subclasses and a few hundred levels lower. (Note this topic: http://www.disastrousconsequences.com/dcforum/posts/list/3760.page where I mention in March of 2008 that I was able to score 3kxp per map on healing alone.) So my current scoring rate is just about where it ought to be seeing as I've now maxed out my attributes and have had a couple more years practice at aiming.