Firefall Catch-All

Dimmerswitch wrote:

Heads-up for folks who are used to soloing thumpers:

Spawn patterns have been tweaked so that you may now end up with more than one Terrorclaw spawning at the same time. Over the weekend, saw as many as three showing up in a single wave while two-manning advanced thumpers with Psych.

Hopefully knowing this ahead of time doesn't cost you an advanced thumper, when two Terrorclaws roll up behind you and pound you flat. Not that such a thing would ever happen.

Spoiler:

It did. :(

Ouch. Yeah, I moved on into more T2 gear on my Dreadnaught frame and found a fairly defensible spot to try out the 3 thumpers with a new engineer frame this weekend. I noticed a change in the waves, but the only time I lost anything was with the T2 Dread frame trying a stock thumper at the melding when some chosen warped in and started firing beyond sight / targeting range inside the melding and then a bunch more flanked me as I was trying to find the ones in the melding.

They also made some big changes to the separation of thumper levels where the advanced now takes 10,000 crystite to build and has much more HP but also a much longer duration each time it's called down.

EDIT:

New patch coming today. Hoping its not 3GB, but pretty sure it will be.

EDIT 2: You can now go here to reserve army names and send out your gift tiki masks. Click on the orange text links lined up in the middle of the page.

So, this happened tonight while I was solo thumping for XP ahead of the patch:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/iXNcW.jpg)

It. Was. Glorious.

Not laggy at all, even with most of the folks on the server rallying to Copa for the defense.

Spoiler:

You better believe we held that line, soldier.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

So, this happened tonight while I was solo thumping for XP ahead of the patch:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/iXNcW.jpg)

It. Was. Glorious.

Not laggy at all, even with most of the folks on the server rallying to Copa for the defense.

Spoiler:

You better believe we held that line, soldier.

And there's a reason it happened:

Grummz, Red 5 CEO[/url]]Invasions are currently isolated tests on Copa, and occur every 3 days if the servers stay up long enough. Current performance leaks on servers means that we have to reset them, usually before the 3 day timer, so invasions are rare right now.

Sad I missed it. I spent a bunch of time throwing down thumpers while no enemies were spawning and then once they spawned, they would steadily spawn in everything that was supposed to be there over the time they weren't spawning. I had up to 5 going at once.

Hey, can you point me to a place where you got that resource display mod?

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Sad I missed it. I spent a bunch of time throwing down thumpers while no enemies were spawning and then once they spawned, they would steadily spawn in everything that was supposed to be there over the time they weren't spawning. I had up to 5 going at once.

Hey, can you point me to a place where you got that resource display mod?

I'm impressed that you managed to get five thumpers rolling at the same time, even with wonky spawns. Was this solo?

The upper-right corner in my screenshot is the default resource monitor, added in the last patch. If you enable it via UI settings, that's where it should show up for you, too.

Eldon_of_Azure wrote:

What is the official decision of the army name: "Stanley's Strikers" or "Stanley's Strikers [GWJ]." Tag could go either before or after, if at all. Then I'll get it reserved (if someone else hasn't already).

My preference would be for "Stanley's Strikers [GWJ]" if Red5 allows brackets in Army names. Otherwise, "Stanley's Strikers" sounds great.

(Semi-relatedly: do folks think we need to eventually migrate to the MMO forum? If so, is there a point it makes sense to do that - like launch, maybe?)

Edit to add: founders' masks are in.
IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/902101368949791027/68F754528CF9A10D43B45AE0497DA6D89E5CDE4D/)

IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/902101368949789349/4D10C401DA969B68A5EFAA88FB717BFE5B4FF37D/)

IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/902101368949792926/1D30E76CA91E0DA15B67FF6A71CB7231262D9BEC/)

As are the founders' LGVs. Naturally, I immediately decided to take mine off a sweet jump.

I got 5 thumpers going only because there were absolutely NO spawns happening for like 5 minutes at a time and then the enemies would spawn for a about a minute and act almost normal long enough to be a threat to the thumpers and then go brain dead and sometimes despawn right in front of me. So basically I called down the thumpers and stood around waiting for the respawn and then frantically rushed to send all of them up and then did clean up on the bugs and repeated a few times. I still have only like 1/10 of the resources you do.

I also finally got in and saw the new resource thing and messed around with the interface options for the first time in almost 6 months. They've come a long way. It's nice to have the option to display resources all the time, or just some of the time and then disappear (with adjustable 1-10 second time on that).

Also, they've posted threads and such about their Light Ground Vehicles (known as LGVs), but do not google image search LGV as it will return results for an STD. Thankfully I only read enough text to know barely more than that.

What is the official decision of the army name: "Stanley's Strikers" or "Stanley's Strikers [GWJ]." Tag could go either before or after, if at all. Then I'll get it reserved (if someone else hasn't already).

@Dimmerswitch: Quite envious of your luck, hope those will update officially into the BETA soon.

EDIT: Reserved!
Army Name: Stanley's Strikers
Army Tag: [GWJ]

Founders Program wrote:

Army Tags
Once an army is founded, all members of the army will have the army's tag attached to their name automatically - either to the left or the right, depending on the army settings.

Firefall is in the process of releasing an official "manga" (coughgraphicnovelcough), for those that didn't know (4 full releases, 5th in partial). The extra surprise, to me, are the authors:
IMAGE(http://production_firefall-blog-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/2012/05/Firefall_chp1_Cover.jpg)
So I'll be reading that tomorrow.
----
In stumbling across the above information, I ran across some information that I was previously unaware. 1) Another species of creature, and 2) Another region + Hub.
1)
IMAGE(http://production_firefall-blog-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/2011/12/creature-brontodon.png)
[Brontodon]
2.1)
IMAGE(http://production_firefall-blog-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/2011/12/smokestack1.png)
[Smokestack Desert]
2.2)
IMAGE(http://production_firefall-blog-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/2011/12/dredge-large.png)
[Dredge]

With luck, they will show up in the next milestone update.

Eldon_of_Azure wrote:

In stumbling across the above information, I ran across some information that I was previously unaware. 1) Another species of creature, and 2) Another region + Hub.

With luck, they will show up in the next milestone update.

Smokestack Desert and Dredge have been done (well, "done" in a beta sense) for some time. They're in the first gameplay video - at right about the five-minute mark, they hop in a dropship and ride up that way.

Brontodons were also revealed a while back - in fact, brontodon.com is a Firefall fan site. They'd also been given a sneak peek at unannounced beasties back in May - reposting the images here because they're worth revisiting, with PVE being the next milestone patch.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/uLNTt.png)
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/ZMbNd.png)
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/0plua.png)

Had a good time running 3 thumpers at the melding last night. It's a shame the spawns and resources were a bit low.

Is anyone else reserving any army names? I wonder if you'll be allowed to be a part of multiple armies.

Also, everyone should have +1 more invite to hand out to all those people not asking for invites around here.

Did a writeup for one of the ideas I've been talking through with folks: add different 'levels' to large creatures like the Terrorclaw.

Would appreciate upvotes if you like it.

le vote!

Voted. Glad you didn't use badass for the top level.

Voted!

Invited by dimmer - I'll probably not get a chance to play until early next week, but be gentle

Tanglebones wrote:

Invited by dimmer - I'll probably not get a chance to play until early next week, but be gentle :)

I'm also out of contention this weekend, but would like to reiterate my offer - always happy to hop on and shoot stuff with folks. Especially newer folks since, though the game has some good fun to offer, there is effectively no tutorial or orientation effort in place yet.

Voted Dimm, hope we see that soon. I haven't played anything in a while, would like to go back soon, missing all the thumping and exploration.

EDIT: I still have those 2 invites available BTW

Apparently I have the Midas touch for Chosen invasions.

Hopped on today for my lunch break while food was cooking, and rode my bike up into Copa from the southern part of the map - only to run smack into a large group of Chosen.

Copa was under attack again.

This time, we did a much poorer job of coordinating the defense (for instance, I had no idea the attack was underway until I was hip-deep in Chosen already). I swapped out to a BioTech frame and did my best to keep friendlies alive while fighting off the invasion.

Badly outnumbered and with no coordination, we slowly lost ground as the Chosen advanced. Ultimately, Copacabana fell.

Here's where it gets interesting.

Everyone in Copa was killed in the final Chosen push, only to respawn at the nearest tower (down on the beach). Copa, meanwhile, had been enshrouded in Melding.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/Woj4m.jpg)

We fought our way up from the beach, and found that a series of Melding generators had been set up all around town, with tons of Chosen all over the place. The generators were shielded and not taking any damage, so we were all pretty confused about how to re-take the city.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/nYrWp.jpg)

[Note: there are no voiceovers or orientation text at all for the re-taking phase, so this is all stuff I've figured out as best I can between getting shot at.]

Eventually I discovered there was a "Resonator Bomb" down by the beach. It appears that re-taking Copa (for now, at least) is a Payload-style event. The bomb slowly advances, and players have to fight off huge numbers of Chosen (and melded Hissers) to keep the bomb from getting damaged.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/vnYvR.jpg)

The bomb advances along a predetermined path, counter-clockwise after rolling up the beach. Each time it gets close to a Chosen generator, it knocks out the shield and players can destroy the generator, allowing the bomb to advance again.

Damage done to the bomb appears permanent - though I wasn't an Engineer, so I couldn't try repairing it.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/wAHw4.jpg)

In the end, the bomb got almost all the way back to the central plaza before getting destroyed. It appeared that this "reset" the payload challenge to the beginning - I had to drop and deal with food at this point, so I didn't get to see whether the players managed to re-take Copa before the server reset (my understanding is that right now the Chosen invasions are only happening when the servers have been up long enough that they need to be re-set).

Other thoughts:

* Lack of coordination was definitely a killer. Unlike the last invasion I was on, nobody was calling stuff out with any regularity. It would be nice to have a global notification for players when an invasion is happening, at a minimum.
* This time seemed a lot more laggy, even though there were fewer players around. It may simply be a factor of server instability that was independent of the invasion, and I trust Red5 has good logging in place so they can spot what was causing the latency.
* Our communication problems were compounded somewhat by a lack of UI or voiceover direction for the re-taking phase. I think a decent percentage of our team was trickling into town in ones and twos, and getting killed before making an impact.
* In spite of those issues, it was great fun. I really would have liked to stick it out to see how things ended.
* Also, the defense and then assault was very lucrative. I racked up about 20k XP in the fairly brief time I played, and that's without whatever the event bonus for "winning" would have been.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

(my understanding is that right now the Chosen invasions are only happening when the servers have been up long enough that they need to be re-set).

Yeah, CEO said invasions are currently set to run once every 3 days that the servers stay up.

And it seems you are the only one around here that's been able to catch these events. This makes me wonder how hard it will be to catch these events as time goes on.

Well, as time goes on (maybe in the PVE milestone?) Chosen assaults will happen at the tail end of a series of in-game events, not on a schedule because a server instance needs to be cycled.

Look forward to catching one of these sometime with other Goodjers, though.

Bet we would have held.

New patch is up. Some real changes to the thumper manufacturing process, and there this is posted by one of the devs in the patch thread:

Just as a heads up. Internally, we haven't had a group of 5 complete an Advanced Thumper by the melding. Chosen hurt real bad. Good luck!

There's also some patching issue for some people. It doesn't seem like they got it fixed before they left last night as the last dev post on the topic seems to come just before 2AM Eastern (11PM Pacific).

Pulling it down now - This update looks like 313MB.

Looks like either Red 5 finally improved their patch size problem, or I'm going to be hit by whatever the patching issue is.

[Edit to add: hopped on briefly during lunch. Thumper spawns are much better now. I got cocky after soloing a couple of improved thumpers at my usual solo spot, and called down an advanced thumper. Got it filled to 50%, then somewhere between fifteen and twenty rageclaws showed up. I managed to get the thumper sent back up before dying, but it was a close thing. Love that it's so possible to get in way over your head in this game.]

Alright, someone on here please tell me you already reserved the Sparkle Ponies army name, and it wasn't a non-goodjer.

Also, tons of fun with Psych and Dimmer and a couple random pubbies for a bit last night. The new thumper events are a good challenge and great fun.

EDIT: Nevermind, you can't have overlapping tags so since [GWJ] was taken it was giving me an error. Sparkle Ponies with the tag GWJSP reserved.

It's amazing to me that, even though I've put plenty of time into this game, there are corners of the map I've barely seen.

The thumping we did up by Thump Dump was great, and I hadn't really seen any of that area.

I also loved that little valley we closed the night out at, even if it was a little ambitious to try to three-man those advanced thumpers.

IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/902102437567814368/7A325DE0B8C9FFFF06829942F017E70FE330F32F/)

Anyone who wants to stockpile a mass of XP, I'll be around this afternoon. It's a little crazy how quickly you can get XP right now (I'm most of the way through the tech tree for a Tier 2 frame I unlocked less than two days ago).

Since there won't be any XP wipes moving forward, I'm banking what I can before they retune the spawns.

For anyone in the beta and didn't pick up a founders pack, here's a contest to win a founders pack, if you didn't already spend the money. The low level contest is just post a screenshot, the high level is a video.

Red 5 announces a week of in-game special events and giveaways, starting next Monday.

Epic items and warpaints mentioned as giveaways, in addition to hardware like graphics cards (or a full PC).

Looks like I'll be trying to get out of work early on Monday.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

Red 5 announces a week of in-game special events and giveaways, starting next Monday.

Epic items and warpaints mentioned as giveaways, in addition to hardware like graphics cards (or a full PC).

Looks like I'll be trying to get out of work early on Monday. :)

Also appears that founders get free stuff daily too:

Phobos (A Firefall Dev)[/url]]Firefall Founders Members will also have access to some exclusive in-game items during the event. These items will change each day, so be sure to check back daily for your chance to grab all of them.

Super bummed that I wont get to see Nathan Fillion (Oct 27) as a guest host because of work :(.

Eldon_of_Azure wrote:

Also appears that founders get free stuff daily too

Oh neat - hadn't noticed that. The Firefall Fest page has been updated with a "Founders, click here to redeem your item for the day" button, so it looks like that'll be the mechanism for getting the in-game unlocks.

If they require some other hoop jumping (like a secret word from the Livestream) I'll be sure to post that here so anyone interested can get their stuff.

BTW, no PVE milestone patch until the week after next, and even then, it'll be only some of the content due to some 'snags'.

As you can imagine, some people aren't patient enough for that kind of news.

Caught a tiny porition of this morning's Firefall Fest stream.

Mentioned in passing: upcoming PVE milestone will include instanced PVE content, with what sounded like their take on 5-man dungeons.

Fingers crossed for Aranha lairs...

(Also: first of the daily in-game Founder items is available)

Dimmerswitch wrote:

Caught a tiny porition of this morning's Firefall Fest stream.

Mentioned in passing: upcoming PVE milestone will include instanced PVE content, with what sounded like their take on 5-man dungeons.

Fingers crossed for Aranha lairs...

(Also: first of the daily in-game Founder items is available)

After they announced that Fallen could hunt down an Aranha queen for resources, I hope for lair raids too.

...I'm rather curious why the word "Soon" is trademarked in the message following receiving the first Founder's item.