....

I don't know what I just watched, but I must have more of it!!!!

Seen Attack on Titan, even went with my wife to the live action movie (ow, ow, ow,painful)... it was the second one I'd not seen before

Dark Ether wrote:

I think that if Harry Dresden can ride a reanimated T-Rex skeleton through Chicago, then we need at least a taste of something like that.

Don't make me dig out the.... FAT UNICORN!!!

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/fat-unicorn

Redlynne wrote:

... because ...

Without a doubt, Kanna is the cutest character I've ever seen in anime. Where did you find that AoT parady!? sugoi! awesome!

This is sort of like a T. Rex:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/little-yellow-duck

Perhaps more scary, too.

Potato-Girl wrote:

I'd like to see an invasion of flying enemies (demons, dragons, jet-pack storm-troopers, etc.) sweeping into the city from the horizon. I'm thinking Wizard of Oz flying monkeys or Apocalypse Now helicopter assault. As the enemies get closer, the heroes would be able to determine the main target(s) of the assault, and would need to move to head them off.

Well, this is how the Rikti Invasion events played out at the end:

[youtube=560x315]0by9VHOZYvM[/youtube]

Note the spaceships flying in from a distance, dropping bombs and firing big yellow-green bolts of doom they fire from overhead blasting any hero in reach.

Yeah, I remember that. Worked, what, a couple times before the devs buffed up the ships so much you couldn't do it any more.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Yeah, I remember that. Worked, what, a couple times before the devs buffed up the ships so much you couldn't do it any more.

Why would they do that? It's awesome that with enough high-level heroes you could actually take down a ship. I wonder what their thinking was?

If memory serves, it was because they were never intended, by the devs, to be one of the objectives. Which, I'm pretty sure, drove the players to want it more.

And yes, it was pretty amazing.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

I just hadn't heard of enough folks getting together to take down a dropship by brute force.

Did any one manage to bring one down some other way, like hacking their autopilot or jamming their radar altimeters? ^_^

*is "not" writing a short story where heroes take down the fully armed and operational Rikti mothership flying into Titan City after having destroyed Paragon.*

Curious about an event like this. IF there were a large dynamic entity flying in over the bay (did anyone else read that in Serg Tankian's voice?) Would anyone with a clear line of sight be able to see it? IE is the draw distance for a significantly large object greater such that it could be seen from farther away?

If not could you use a ominous cloud or fog effect which was visible at substantial range to disguise the instancing of such a large event? IE there wouldn't be a "event bulletin" in chat but you could look out and see..."sh*t getting real over there"

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

I just hadn't heard of enough folks getting together to take down a dropship by brute force.

At least it wasn't a trivial task during the short period of time that it was possible and that short period was ONLY during the beta of the event. I saw around a dozen of those ships get popped during several different encounters. As mentioned the main trick was to slow them down enough so that the slow-pokes of the group could catch up to the ships and collectively damage them enough to crash them.

To be clear they were only killable via that slowing exploit during the BETA of the event. By the time the event was officially "live" they had already nerfed them. So technically I'm not sure anyone actually killed a dropship "for real" during live play.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Bringing down the drop ships didn't get you a badge or more than a token amount of prestige and inf. They were completely flavor.

Posi did say at one point he specifically did not want the dropships to award a badge for killing them. Based on what Redlynne said about Posi's belief that they were ALWAYS unkillable seems to match up with that. ;)

Lothic wrote:

To be clear they were only killable via that slowing exploit during the BETA of the event. By the time the event was officially "live" they had already nerfed them. So technically I'm not sure anyone actually killed a dropship "for real" during live play.

As posted previously.
Not just once (dated 8 Sep 2012 in Kings Row),
[youtube]lbfNBsQJB-4[/youtube]

But twice (dated 8 Sep 2012 in Steel Canyon)!
[youtube]a2kv2gXIO6Q[/youtube]

Cobalt Azurean wrote:

As posted previously.
Not just once (dated 8 Sep 2012 in Kings Row),
But twice (dated 8 Sep 2012 in Steel Canyon)!

Right... but during the beta period of that event (where they tested it for several days on the Test Server before it officially went live) we killed like 7 or 8 of them in maybe 15 minutes. Based on that specific beta testing alone the Dropships were severely nerfed before they went live.

So as I said I was NOT SURE anyone managed to kill one after they were nerfed but of course I'm not omnipresent so I suppose it could have happened. I played on Virtue so obviously I don't know what happened on Champion. I also don't remember the specific dates the beta testing took place but I'll take your word on it that the vids you posted (dated 8 Sep 2012) were NOT taken during the beta testing.

P.S. Funny story - There were several players who made a huge deal out of killing all those Dropships during the beta. For literally years after it happened they praised themselves on the old CoH forums like they were the "Kings of the Game" for killing a bunch of what were effectively "broken" critters during a beta test like it was a real accomplishment. For what it's worth I'd only consider it a "real" accomplishment if you were a part of killing one on the live servers. *shrugs*

Grimfox wrote:

*is "not" writing a short story where heroes take down the fully armed and operational Rikti mothership flying into Titan City after having destroyed Paragon.*
Curious about an event like this. IF there were a large dynamic entity flying in over the bay (did anyone else read that in Serg Tankian's voice?) Would anyone with a clear line of sight be able to see it? IE is the draw distance for a significantly large object greater such that it could be seen from farther away?
If not could you use a ominous cloud or fog effect which was visible at substantial range to disguise the instancing of such a large event? IE there wouldn't be a "event bulletin" in chat but you could look out and see..."sh*t getting real over there"

Should be able to.

Honestly, a big problem we have currently is being able to disguise the edge of the world, that's how far the draw distance is.

Cobalt Azurean wrote:

Per Paragon Wiki, Closed Beta started 13 June 2007, Open Beta started 27 June 2007, and it went live 24 July 2007.
Those videos were from Sep 2012, as stated previously, so it's safe to say that it was accomplished after. Honestly, sitting on two separate videos for five years to upload them to try and make it seem like it happened not in Beta seems a bit of a stretch. That's not to say some people haven't gone to certain and even extreme lengths to mislead people, but c'mon now.

I'm not really suggesting anyone was deliberately trying to be sneaky about this. But if you actually want to go down the "conspiracy theorist" path I would point out that Sept 2012 was just a few weeks after the announcement that the game was being shut down by NCsoft. For all we know the person who posted these vids might have made them years earlier (during the event beta?) and was only motivated to post them when they did (in 2012) as part of a "memorial" for a game that was getting shut down.

Simply put there is no proof that the vids were MADE in Sept 2012. We only have proof that they were POSTED in Sept 2012.

Doctor Tyche wrote:

There is, however, proof that the vids were made after the beta, however. The videos demonstrate Ultra Mode, which was not introduced until Issue 17, on April 28, 2010.

Ha... made'ya look. ;)

But seriously I never categorically said with absolute certainty (or proof) that no one killed a Dropship after the beta. I just said I wasn't SURE anyone had simply based on how relatively easy they were to kill during the beta versus after they were nerfed.

To be hyper-honest I played so many thousands of hours of CoH that for all I know I was involved with killing a few Dropships AFTER the beta myself but I simply don't remember it as being significant. The whole laughable scenario of people thinking that killing a bunch of them during the beta was a "big deal" basically soured my entire experience with whether or not ANYONE had ever killed ANY of them at ANY time.

Posi said it was essentially a "mistake" that the game allowed people to kill them at all. I suspect that like Lin Chiao Feng most people never even knew they were killable in the first place. I'm willing to take all that into consideration for what it's worth. *shrugs*

I recall the whole discussion over dropship kills and my attitude is:

If it has a hit-point bar, it should be killable.

I, for one, will be looking forward to seeing how soon before an Aether Pirate Cloud Cruiser is brought down.

Scott Jackson wrote:

As some measure of proof, I participated in an event on Virtue server in which we destroyed 41 dropships, in Talos and PI, in 2008. The event was demorecorded by Samuraiko and appears on her Youtube archive channel (you're probably familiar with her CoH-promoting videos). We coordinated enough group-flyers so that everyone could maintain damage (since the dropships could not be slowed), and if I recall correctly, actually had two team-clusters so we could cover both dropship routes and boost our kill count.
Good times...

Again I said I wasn't SURE it had happened after massive nerfing that occurred during beta testing. Clearly it did. Like I said my omnipresence isn't perfect. ;)

But frankly after I was involved in several gatherings where it was possible to kill a Dropship every 60 to 90 seconds by simply mashing buttons with a few dozen random strangers who's only collective tactic was being able to fly fast enough made the very concept of "Dropship Popping" something I never thought was all that impressive, worth recording or worth bothering to do after the beta.

The fact that I truly seriously didn't recall that anybody ever bothered to try to kill Dropships AFTER the beta is testament to the fact that it was not something I considered a cool/memorable thing to do. Get back to me if you managed to do something genuinely praiseworthy like earn all the "Master" Trial/TF badges on TWO different characters - now that's something I'd pat you on the head and give you a cookie for.

Lothic wrote:

Doctor Tyche wrote:
I recall the whole discussion over dropship kills and my attitude is:
If it has a hit-point bar, it should be killable.
I, for one, will be looking forward to seeing how soon before an Aether Pirate Cloud Cruiser is brought down.
All things considered if the CoH Devs seriously did not want Dropships to ever be killable they should have made them literally unkillable. The idea of attaching a "hit-point bar" to a thing that is not supposed to die is at the very least counterintuitive and at worst a "tease" to tempt players into wasting their time trying to beat an element of the game that's simply badly designed.
Hopefully the CoT Devs will learn this lesson in CoT. If something is supposed to be unkillable don't give it any hit points. ;)

[youtube]7DyRxlvM9VM[/youtube]

Cobalt Azurean wrote:

41? Jebus. That is impressive. I think the most we on Champion took down was 18, but that was based off someone's comment on one of our YouTube videos posted directly after an earlier Dropship Challenge on 18 July 2009 (two years after Issue 10 beta).

I still contend that getting a few dozen people to shoot at a flying moving target for a minute or two and then rinse/repeat a few dozen times was not -that- impressive by the standards of "truly difficult things to accomplish in CoH".

But I will concede one point that's interesting in light of Posi's apparent claim that he never wanted/intended Dropships to be killable in CoH: If the Dropships were supposedly meant to be unkillable why did the CoH Devs bother to include a relatively cool looking "nuclear fireball" type explosion effect after a Dropship was popped? If you think about it there shouldn't be any kind of fancy unique "death animation" attached to something that was never supposed to die in the first place. ;)

Scott Jackson wrote:

I'd give you folks on the Champion server equal credit. We really only hit 41 on Virtue because the whole organizing team stayed around for a second zone (PI) invasion, which just happened to occur almost immediately after the first.
The fact that it was coordinated in Talos zone chat with plenty of volunteering strangers, before we'd really been "taught" to cooperate on that scale via incarnate trials and leagues is, to me, impressive in its own right.

Agreed. And I've reached out to some people for confirmation of our number, mostly out of curiosity. @Fanged Knight and @Cherry Cupcakes and their Stoned Templars SG led the Dropship Challenge on Champion, and they were in our SG alliance. They're good people and we've stayed in touch with them since the shutdown. @Jonnie Neutron, one of their members who was also there, contends that the number was closer to the thirties, but can't remember the exact number through the years.

Scott Jackson wrote:

Here's to hoping we have several similar PUG-able zone-wide challenges of varying difficulties, with at least one in the lower levels so newbies can witness the firepower of our fully-armed and operational ba...uh...super power lightshow. It's a sneak peek at how awesome a character's endgame powers will be, and is oddly missing from most MMOs as a treat to entice new players - especially those on a free trial.
Not sure if the Atlas Park invasions that hit right at the zone-in point from the tutorial were a bit over the top, but that must have been a unique experience to new players when it did happen. I'd love to see occasional things like that, to draw max-level players together with players level 5-and-up. Skyway's troll rave and KR paladin construction almost qualified, as they caused strange activity around the zone, but sadly offered little motivation for higher-level players to join (or even know that the event was occurring).

Again, agreed. Drama aside (we had a lot on Champ), I always enjoyed Hami Raids or really any organized event in the game, mostly in that I enjoyed the social element of players coming together to overcome a task or objective that they normally couldn't do alone. So when Invasions came along, be they from the Riki Homeworld, or more traditional raids like the Incarnate Trials, I was all about them. And I definitely hope some measure of advanced teaming or raiding makes it into CoT.
Additionally, I was a hardcore monster hunter. If I wasn't mildly involved in something else, I would almost certainly help out other players with giant monsters and their badges. It was actually one of the motivations for me to roll my first debuffer, a rad/rad defender. Ironically, it was also the reason that I [i]deleted[/i] my first debuffer, but that's a story for another time. It was more personal motivation than anything else that kept me, a higher level player, going to KR or Skyway or Perez Park or wherever. I would still like to see similar events in CoT that happen in lower level zones. Now, do I think every zone needs an event of some sort? Not so much, but if there is, it should be something along the lines that enhances the lore and fits into the flavor of the zone.

Doctor tyche wrote:

I, for one, will be looking forward to seeing how soon before an Aether Pirate Cloud Cruiser is brought down.

*picks up the gauntlet*

You dropped this, Sir.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

You don't have any favorite characters, right?

Savage. Are you running the Wendy's Twitter account too?

Grimfox wrote:

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
You don't have any favorite characters, right?
Savage. Are you running the Wendy's Twitter account too?

LOL we were saying that about the first season of the anime, long before Wendy figured out how to tweet. And the manga volumes have the cadets in a line on the back covers, backs toward the camera. As the story goes on, that line gets [i]sparse.[/i] The Japanese love their attrition grind stories, and the author is only too happy to dish it up.