Blancmanche

@Patrick Mackey It's a little easier to make Touhou characters in CoH, but not by much. My main there was a blaster based on Reisen, using dual pistols and mental manipulation. The costume was relatively simple, which is why I went with her; all the parts were there, including the bunny ears and tail. For an alt, I had a fairly recognizable Meiling scrapper (martial arts + super reflexes). Also tried to make a Tewi corrupter, but there was no dress big and frilly enough.

@(Unverified)

Another great piece is this lecture explaining radioactivity, nuclear reactors, and what's going on in Japan in layman's terms:

http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/plecture/bmonreal11/rm/flashtv.html

The video is about 80 minutes long, but very informative. (Careful with pausing it - I paused it around the 60 minute mark but wasn't able to unpause it.)

The short of it is that that what is going on in Fukushima will be in no way as bad as Chernobyl. Chernobyl's reactors had no containment, the fuel itself was on fire, and they kept the thing producing power up until the very end. Add to that, they didn't start evacuating people until they knew they were screwed, and didn't really bother to explain what was going on to anyone.

Although I can't really blame the general public for not understanding what is going on. Unless you are proactive in digging up the facts, you need to rely on the news media, and the media is doing a piss-poor job of explaining things; it's much easier to sell papers/airtime with alarmist nonsense than careful explanations of the science involved.

To be honest, I was one of the people hoping the game would be FFXI 2.0. One of the first things I said on this site was that if they could take what worked in FFXI and enhance it, while reworking what didn't, they would have a winner of a game. Instead, we got a completely different game, for better or worse. I can understand the marketing decisions behind it (make it too like the old game, no one will play the old game), but in their effort to be different they made a number of bonehead moves. There is a lot of room for originality, but not all new ideas are good ideas, and some old ideas are worth keeping.

That being said, there's a LOT they can take from FFXI that can enhance FFXIV and not make it FFXI 2.0: auction houses; campaign / besieged like events, with real consequences for losing; actual quests (as far as I can see, there are no quests in FFXIV: only missions and directed grinding); personal space, like mog houses; transportation options (airships and chocobos when?); and a client side UI, like, you know, every other game in existence.

Guildleves as the primary grinding mechanic can work, but they need to add more, reduce the cooldown, and increase the variety and complexity. And make it so you can receive them (or at least a subset of them) from camps. I like what they did with crafting and gathering, but they need to make it less of an artificial time sink (5 clicks for one action!), and add variety to the “mini-games.” The class system is hands down the best in any MMO I've seen, so I sorely hope they don't touch that. The copy-and-paste world they are stuck with, unless they go with a Cataclysm-like complete overhaul.

A lot of other broken things (UI design, SP balance, etc.) they were already working on before the shuffle. In a few month's time, the game will likely be in a presentable state. By that point, though, it may be too late. There is already a terrible stigma associated with the game, so SE has their work cut out for them if they want to compete with the next-gen MMOs coming out next year.

Music to my ears. I had hoped to "tough it out," but I stopped playing a few weeks ago and just canceled last week. There are simply too many things broken in the game to find it enjoyable. If SE can actually deliver on all these promises, I'll give the game another shot in the springtime. I REALLY want to enjoy this game. I can see the good in it; it's just buried under so much fail.

What bothers me, though, is why they're taking so long to implement these changes. And these are things that have been requested by just about everyone since the alpha stage. Either the game code is a mangled mess of spaghetti code that's near impossible to worth with, or they're dragging it out to bleed as much money from their subscribers as possible. My guess it's both.

Proud ocelot fanboi here. Ya'll hating cause you can't handle the cuteness. Go back to your carebare cities and leave the forests and brushlands to the adorable carnivores.

The RNG hates me so much in this game, I can't really tell if the rank10 abilities are doing anything. Actually, they do seem to do things, mostly negatively. I use Tender Touch and Fulfillment, mostly, and both seem to increase chance of failure, though that may just be the twin terrors of Murphy's Law and Azathoth ensuring that I don't get any silly ideas about living in a sane universe governed by proper statistical laws.

I foresee a time when saying you play TERA for the gameplay is like saying you read Playboy for the articles.

Was at Gamestop to pick up my copy of the CE when the doors opened at 10am. Maybe at some point today I'll be able to pull myself away from everything else I have to do to actually play it.

No launch is perfect. There will be problems. The only questions are of which variety and severity, and how quickly will they be resolved?

I, for one, am psyched. Being there on day 1, warts and all, is going to be a thrill. And six months from now when the game is glistening with a polished sheen and the PS3 people are jumping on board, I can whip out my crotchety old man routine and let em all know how it was back in my day. Damn youngins have it too good, I tells ya.

The graphics code in the Beta isn't optimized at all. For one, it doesn't utilize SLI by default; you need to set that manually in the Nvidea control panel. After I figured out to do that my FPS literally doubled. A lot of people even with higher end systems are having trouble, and after much tweaking and experimentation it appears that the problems lie with the game code and the video drivers. Here's hoping all these issues will be ironed out before release. Also, keep in mind the game is capped at 60 fps for the moment.