Demona

"That's for every single power you have, and best of all, it stacks with enhancements without that pesky little "enhancement diversification" bugbear rearing its head. A good portion of the buffs will stick around with no regard for how many other enhancements you've stacked in that category."

Wrong. Just...wrong. For a common boost, only 1/6 of the boost is unaffected by ED. That's 5.5%. For an uncommon boost, only 1/3 of the boost is unaffected by ED. That's 11% for the primary attribute, 6.667% for the secondary. These are not "a good portion", just "a small portion". You will not be able to reach the proposed perma-Hasten off the Alpha slot alone. Ever. You will need to get quite a few +Recharge bonuses from IO sets.

Rare and Ultra Rare boosts (for which 1/2 and 2/3 ignore ED, respectively) will not be in Issue 19 and even when they do get added, I would hazard a guess that only a minority of players will take the time to grind those out.

I

Since my last post, he has updated his status to: Artist/Animator in the Game Industry (Currently Seeking Employment)

Indeed, his LinkedIn profile now lists him as a Senior Animator/VFX at Cryptic Studios.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/christopher-bruce/3/157/465

If BAB was one, I wonder if he said something to Marketing about the lackluster "Party Pack" booster....

Regardless, I wish those affected the best of luck finding a new employer.

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THANK GOD!

"And 1,6 Biliion subs - 1/4 of the human race, are you sure about that?"

How many of those subs are multiple account holders? A majority of the people I play CoX with have at least two accounts, if not three.... I'd imagine some of those gold sellers out there have a dozen accounts, if not several dozen....

While not features per se, these are the things I would like to see STO acquire....

Age of Conan's dedication to its IP. STO might look like Star Trek, but it doesn't feel like Star Trek (in my opinion). Say what you want about AoC's systems/bugs/whatever, but at least you feel like you're in that universe as you ran around the zones. Going hand-in-hand with IP is....

The Matrix Online's story writing. While some of the story in STO is good (the truth behind the goateed Klingon's of TOS stands out as the best), most of it is utter rubbish. As with AoC, say what you want about the systems/bugs in MxO, at least they wrote their stories well. More MMOs developed from existing IPs should work closely with the people involved with that IP (The Wachowski Brothers gave their input to the story up until at least Chapter 9 of MxO). STO writers could do something similar with the more influential series writers, like Ronald D. Moore, Brannon Braga, and René Echevarria.

City of Heroes/Villains character customization. During my short time with STO (a few weeks before and after Season 2's launch), I noticed that unless you make a strikingly inhuman character, your face's structure and look is almost exactly the same as every other character in the game. I also noticed nearly every NPC looked like every other NPC. With only two options for face/eye structure and the sliders not really affecting things a whole lot, the universe just seemed overpopulated with twins. This would also apply to ship customization; each tier only has 3 choices, which if mixed and matched, generally only came out looking "decent" with one combination (that I kept seeing over and over again).

Final Fantasy XI's class uniqueness. My first STO character was a Science officer in an Escort vessel. My second character was an Engineering officer in a Science vessel. These two setups seemed like two rather extreme choices, yet as I played my Eng/Sci toon, I quickly got bored. Playing it felt no different than playing the Sci/Esc, which more or less ruined the re-playability of the game for me. While FFXI might be the king of grind, at least playing a Blue Mage is an entirely different experience than playing say, a Summoner.

Mabinogi's payment structure. I will be honest. The only reason I bought STO was because it was on sale at Wal-Mart for $20, which included a free month of play (thus I played STO for a month for $5) and all the Wally World pre-order bonuses (not sure why they were still included, but whatever). When it came time to re-up my subscription, I canceled. In my opinion, STO is not worth its subscription price. If it were to become F2P with additional C-Store goodies a la Mabinogi, I would probably pick it up again.

Yeah, Issue 19 (the next one, currently scheduled for Fall 2010) will have Fitness as an inherent unlocking at level 2 (like Rest) instead of a Power Pool at level 6. All 4 powers unlock and are enhanceable, but you get no extra slots to put in the 3 "replacement" powers.

8 emotes for $7.99.... I do hope this isn't a preview of the future of Paragon Studios' marketing....