riari

New preliminary issue announcement on City of Heroes' 5th year anniversary:

Issue 15: Anniversary

Looks like Reichsman might be coming back. Definitely the 5th Column in more than just an Ouroboros Task Force.

Anniversary event's going on today. So far I've seen the Kronos Titan giant monster in Steel Canyon. There's been reports on the global channel I'm on about Ghost Widow and Lord Recluse in Atlas Park. Back Alley Brawler in Sharkhead. There's also been Rikti and zombie invasions ongoing. More than normal anyways. Other giant monsters have been showing up too like Lattice, a Devouring Earth GM and the Winter Lord. So that's been interesting. The Ski Lodge has been opened back up too, which is a winter only area.

I'll post pics later. I redid two or three characters' costumes since buying the Architect Edition box gave me another costume pack. :D

Huh. So first off this post is probably all City of Heroes. Just to warn ya.

And second off, I have to admit but they're doing a much, much better way of handling the noise to signal ratio this open beta. For past open betas, there were two forum boards: the bugs and the feedback & discussion forum. This time the mods are on top of it and opened up another forum called chatter & discussion along with the other two forums. Ex Libris, the main community mod, also put up a bunch of pinned and unpinned threads in the feedback one, including a negative feedback thread. The chatter board is perfect as people are discussing more in this forum, which is exactly what they should be doing.

I'm just amazed and thankful that she did that. When the PVP changes went in last issue, all hell broke loose on the open beta boards by a small amount of people. It got to the point where if it even mentioned PVP in the title or looked like it would discuss it, I wouldn't read it. It just annoyed me way too much. And sadly the pissed off PVPers lost the support of many who would support them normally due to their methods of complaining.

But that's the past.

So I've been reading the open beta boards (if you could't tell :>). And man this issue may make me come back to playing. Mission Architect is the main component of Issue 14 and they did a lot of work for custom critters. You can't place where you want to the spawns to happen, but I've been reading threads that they've made them tough! Apparently they're using the player scale for damage and I'm hearing it hurts.

And you can make just about any combination. People are combining power sets that normally aren't in game together because the custom critters do not have our AT restrictions. And different maps make for different spawn points so I heard try a different map if you dislike the spawn placement. You can have helpers. You can have escorts. You can have escorts betray you.

Dunno if non-subscribers can see these boards, but I'll post links to interesting topics anyway:
Advertising arcs I hope some of these arcs go to Live. I'm wanting to run some of them.
Holy Crap (the power of Custom AVs/EBs) Best quote: "It's a little jarring the first time you come up against an enemy that has all the player powers and more, instead of just being a bag of hit points."
Open beta: Mission arc creation tutorial

Happy Year of the Ox!

Well, my weekend, when I wasn't out with friends, was definitely spent playing City of Heroes for the Double XP Weekend event. Somehow I managed to get that 80mb patch down part of the day and overnight on Thursday and so I spent a lot of time playing.

My characters level totals for this weekend:

-Warshade from 16 to 20
-Peacebringer from 18 to 20
-Blaster from 10 to 14
-Dominator from 22 to 23.5

My god was my connection giving me troubles. Anything and everything was flooding my connection and knocking me off. CoH crashed 3 times yesterday alone from being unable to process the dataflooding and had to be forcibly process stopped each time.

I was definitely horribly frustrated by a Longbow mission Villain-side where it was timed and a battle was occuring. Thanks. My connection just really, really likes NPC battles going on. </sarcasm> I almost took out that Longbow Ballista (which was the mission objective), but the timer ran out. Had him down to a 1/4 of health, inherent Domination was on and I was spamming Domination and Confuse and all my ice attacks. But wasn't to be. Too much of the mission timer was wasted by being repeated knocked offline, or load times and yeah. Sucked.

Definitely taking a break from CoH for a week. Now, to get my taxes done. I realized that I was waiting for a mailed report from my loan provider that was easy to get online. And only online unless I ask for a paper version. So that was one of those "duh" moments.

Yup, the Christmas event is going on in City of Heroes right now. (And in any MMO that wants to run it I'm sure. :> )

And of course I had to dress one of my characters up in Christmas colors. She also has red bracelets on, but you can't see it in the picture very well because of the Ice Sword.



Interestingly enough, there's been two Mystery Gifts given to her while I'm standing at the consignment house. They must like her costume. ^_^

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Okay, first up: Issue 13 is Live on the City of Heroes servers. Yay for that one. Also, can't wait to mess with the new costumes.

Buuuut, it was crashing quite a few people and so they shutdown the servers for 45mins to push an emergency hotfix. So now everybody and their cousin is trying to connect to the patching server and the servers themselves and yeah, not that many are going to get through.

Annoying thing about it, and yeah I'm one of those trying to get the hotfix patch downloaded so I can go play, I spent five to six hours today downloading the 52MB patch I needed before logging on. I'm hearing it's an 8MB patch. So about a hour more. IF I can connect and actually get it tonight. So I guess I'll just have to wait until tomorrow to play. Bugger. I at least got 20 minutes of I13 played. And filed two bug reports while playing. Heh.

In a positive point, I finished watching E's Otherwise. My open ending, let me show it to you. It's rather neat. Though I'm not sure if I would buy the DVDs. Maybe if it's a fantastic sale or something. But I did like it. Now if Yen Press or someone can finish up the E's manga now that Broccoli's US side is shutting down. And I can see how the manga went versus the anime. Because the manga just ended.

Also, to annoy me muchly before my birthday, I'm sick with a cold. Go me. Thanks, body. The sinus part is really, really annoying.

Yeesh, if there was anything I could second-guess myself on, or be late to, yeah, that was today. I did however end up with two more shirts today. I'm weak sometimes.

*headdesk*

However, there was a delicious (late!) Japanese lunch and an oatmeal raisin cupcake involved today. More days should have cupcakes involved.

One application was turned in today. I will be applying online to Costco and Microcenter very soon. The next part is on Friday when I visit the explosion of commerce to look. Not tomorrow because I only have a little over a quarter of a tank of fuel and I'm saving it for Friday.

Also! Oh yay GameStop wasn't teasing me. Kingdom Hearts Re: CoM. Yaaaaaaaaaaaay! I highly, highly doubt we will see KHII Final Mix but at least this was different enough that they brought it over.

And now: Booklists! Because I don't believe I posted Septembers (I'll check later) and here's October's. Which I think there are more there in October that I'm not listing, because I read a bunch in a rush and now I don't remember if I put them on the list.

September Books:

Aquarian Age: Juvenile Orion Vol. 02-03
Kingdom Hearts Vol. 03-04
Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories Vol. 01-02
Kingdom Hearts II Vol. 01-02 (yay, now I'm all caught up!)
Loveless Vol. 08 (Seimei, you manipulative bastard. And that was a horrible tease for the next volume, that we'll probably not see until late late next year.)

October Books:

Blank Slate Vol. 01
Aquarian Age: Juvenile Orion Vol. 04-05 (Aww, what a rather neat story. I may have to purchase this myself.)
Elemental Gelade Vol. 02
DNAngel Vol. 02
Black Sun, Silver Moon Vol. 01
Blood+ Vol. 02
Soul Rescue Vol. 01-02
Mugen Spiral Vol. 01-02

Hmm, looks like Issue 13 of CoH has hit open beta. This should be interesting. *goes to read forums*

Hahaha! Apparently, the Halloween event got started early for City of Heroes. It was supposed to start on Monday the 20th.

Zombie Apocalypse! Now to see just how eerie that music is and whether I want my headphones on when I see those zone alert messages.

ETA: No, I do not want headphones on during zombie invasions. *shiver* I didn't get to hear the music because I had to go to another zone while the invasion was running to even see an invasion. But man, the climbing out of the ground sound literally made me jump while I was at the tram. I think I'm going to be hearing that in my nightmares.

So! Here's a few pics I took. I brought out Sirian since he's my strongest character at level 49 to see how this invasion was happening. And like the green skies that happens during Rikti invasions, red skies reign while zombies rise.

Halloween 2008 invasion

By the way, this invasion hit EVERY single zone. The Rikti invasions only hit so many zones on either side, but I saw messages for this invasion for The Shadow Shard, Crey's Folly, and awesomely perfect: Dark Astoria.

Must go Trick or Treating later.

ETA2: Yeah, I can spell.

Here are the images for my characters I'm considering for the contest. There's four in the running right now, but I think its more like two that's really the only ones to choose from. I'd post them into the post itself but I'm annoyed with it so I'm just going to link you to the gallery. Feel free to comment on them.

My CoH picture gallery's recent additions

Just the costume pictures

The first link has the new pictures starting with "Introducing Millennium Dream" and they're in order for Sirian's costumes. The second link is just the character pictures. I'll get Sirian's background on there soon, like Shelke's is. None of the pictures I was trying took correctly.

Weird thing is, I would have thought at the beginning of the year I wouldn't have so many costumes of my characters. Sirian's got five costumes now and Shelke has two. Varen, Millennium Dream, and Snow Line have only the one, as they are all too low level for the first costume mission.

Figured I wouldn't be posting another day yet, but eh, that's how it happens. Things pop up and I want to share.

This post is going to cover many things. So many things. Okay, not really, but there's a few topics. :>

First up, City of Heroes. Guess what? According to Position, the lead dev, re: the Mission Architect in a post today:

( Excerpt from Positron's letter )

So the news for today? The Mission Architect is moving to Issue 14: Architect, releasing 1st Quarter 2009, and now Issue 13 will be called: Power and Responsibility, releasing Fall 2008. Current tally for Issue 13:

( Issue 13's listings )

I'm sadly looking forward to the boards' reaction to this. Should be awesome.

Second up, I just found out today that Lynn Flewelling, one of my favorite authors, will be signing at Yaoi-con this weekend. *arrrrrrrgh* Yeah, lets drive the whole "haha you can't go to your favorite convention this year" thing a little further yeah? *headdesk* (Sadly if I had the plane tickets already, I may have been able to go, because Dad offered to pay some of it while I was in the midst of cancelling the hotel rooms. *sigh*)

*checks calendar* Oh hey, Rikti attack tomorrow till the end of September on CoH. That's fun.

Third up, power went out for a little while this afternoon. While not bad, and it did come back up after an hour thankfully, it was a flashback to those days without just recently and I was definitely not pleased. On the other hand, it's getting me a bit further in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. I just defeated Maleficent (after three tries) and now I'm at Vexen. Man, I need to get my card deck and HP better or Axel is going to kick my ass.

Fourth, progress is slow but starting on my Renfest outfit. I have hopes of a new one finished this year because I don't want to wear the dress again...unless I have to. I picked up a fall garland thing that might work well as a hair ornament. Or even an outfit ornament.

Fifth, I did get Steam downloaded finally. Did the overnight download method and it was ready to go the next morning. *kicks internet connection* I have Half-Life 2 and Portal installed now. Didn't much feel like it yesterday. Maybe Sunday I'll try out Portal and see how much this machine chugs on it. :>

City of Heroes Issue 13: Architect preliminary issue features announced. Woah, there's a lot of good stuff there. All the dev talk about good things happening in I13 looks to be true. And Positron being a tease about this issue with a haiku...

Positron's Letter to the Players about Issue 13.

And the discussion thread about the new announcement, which will grow in leaps and bounds as the day progresses.

In character news, I did make a new Dominator that's been pretty fun to play. Ran her up to level 6 yesterday, still not out of Mercy Island. Almost! I've been having neat ideas for characters lately I've been trying out, while also trying to get my main character up to level 50. I was going to play that one yesterday but the Dominator ended up being too much fun.

In other, not CoH news, Hurricane Gustav is predicted to move into the gulf by this weekend. This is not good. As always, long range tracks are harder to predict, but it worries me a bit.