Firefall Catch-All

Dimmerswitch wrote:
bigred wrote:

Also, I think Dimmer is avoiding me ingame because he knows what my Gunners are going to do to Everton today.

Given that you guys are second in the Premier League this season in second-half goals, and our side has conceded several keys goals in the final minutes of a match (including stoppage), I don't expect it to go well.

On topic, figured out a new way to gather melded critter parts without having to deal with diseased scavengers - hooray!

Um....you can't say this and then not explain...

Also had a few thoughts...

1) When thumping, I'm a little surprised we haven't ever discussed/employed defense strategies outside of recon positioning, engineer supply drop, etc. That is, if we have 5 people have someone cover north, someone cover east, etc and then the 5th player (healer?) provide auxiliary support while healing. This might help with controlling exploders.

2) When do we start posturing for positions in the GWJ army? Who is the general? I'm super awesome and this should be taken into account...

Dimmerswitch wrote:

On topic, figured out a new way to gather melded critter parts without having to deal with diseased scavengers - hooray!

And that method is what?

Phobos just announced in IRC that stretch founder's goals have been added.

* All unlocks go to all founders regardless of level.
* Unlock thresholds are based on total money, not total number of founders.
* Money spent on upgrading your package also counts towards the total.


Hate Diseased Scavengers but need the white melded critter parts? Melding Acolyte, as a Recluse. He spawns a constant steam of melded hissers, and you can hide behind cover, then hit him with Creeping Death every time it's off cool down. It's slow going (I'm not sure if his shield has a regen effect), but I got 200 or so white melded critter parts when I soloed one early this morning.

Phobos on the Firefall Forums wrote:

Last night I dropped a couple beta keys on everyone. For those of you new to the process, you can send out beta keys by going to...

http://beta.firefallthegame.com/invites

You can either e-mail an invite to someone you know, or you can leave the e-mail field blank to generate a key that you can give out however you wish.

Be sure to invite your friends especially for this weekend. We need to stress test these servers! Thanks everyone for being a part of the Firefall beta.

The bolded part is news to me.

[size=18]So anyone who wants beta access, just ask in here / PM someone listed on the spreadsheet in the OP and someone can hook you up.[/size]

Here's a higher res picture of the new thumper skin

IMAGE(http://production_firefall-blog-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/2012/11/tikithumper.jpg)

I'm hoping that's a purchase-able tiki skin, and not the default.

Fugly.

LtWarhound wrote:

I'm hoping that's a purchase-able tiki skin, and not the default.

Fugly.

No, that's a the level 3 unlock thumper skin. Founder stretch goal.
Dimmer put a link to it. http://beta.firefallthegame.com/foun...
I'm sure you'll be able to select the skin you want to use for the thumper if you don't like it.

Was super impressed with some publies(?) when we completed a 4 man (T1 x2, T2 x2) ADV meld thump... Only to be let down when I was unable to send it up as the melding swooped back in and destroyed it :(. Bright side is that it isn't so time consuming to build an ADV anymore with all the broken thumper missions around.

Psych wrote:
Eldon_of_Azure wrote:

Looks like the above patch has killed my ability to use Ventrillo in game :(. Any ideas about a work around?

Run as Administrator?

Worked like a charm, thanks.

Invites have been upgraded to 5 now. They really want to start stressing the servers now

Update: Stressing is going well already. People are stuck at 00% loading screen. Also buggy quests and other assorted stuff.
https://twitter.com/FirefallSupport/...

Update2: https://beta.firefallthegame.com/ died, can't login anymore

Heh, I can't even get to the loading screen.

Edit: Looks like they're in the middle of a fix. I suspect it will all be good shortly.

Edit2: I was able to get in, although the loading screen did hang around at 00% for a bit. This place is packed.

Edit3: The world is thick with new players. I mean THICK. I found a patch of Coralite/Brimstone on the beach, down from one of the quest points. I dropped an advanced thumper. There were so many people around that it killed 3 when it landed, but it was able to fill up to 100% and only down to 74% integrity.

Invited to a random attempt at downing Baneclaw, with only a dozen or so folks.

Lessons learned:

Even with someone outside the battle sitting on the melding repulsor to immediately re-set it, you have a fairly limited time to kill Baneclaw.

It looks like if you don't kill him quickly enough, he turns the entire ground within the battle area into instant death. Since nobody can get back in after getting killed, we wiped (and Baneclaw despawned) pretty quickly after that.

Think we had one assault still hopping around at this point (taken from on top of the dome after dying and hurrying back, trying to find a way inside).

IMAGE(http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/866078649050262216/9431A19C0A2C010A59893910385AA1830C696F62/)

I'm sorry, but does that say you have over 1 million XP?

Tonight, earn your place in the Book of Goodjerly Valor.

Begin gathering at 8pm Central - we'll summon Baneclaw at 8:30 Central.

I'd like to have as many Goodjers as possible, though we may have to have some other folks join to give us a better shot at succeeding (I'd like to try to have no more than two dozen total players regardless, though).

Crap. That's tonight. I completely forgot and something else came up. I'm gonna have to bail. Sorry!

Dimmerswitch wrote:

Tonight, earn your place in the Book of Goodjerly Valor.

Begin gathering at 8pm Central - we'll summon Baneclaw at 8:30 Central.

I'd like to have as many Goodjers as possible, though we may have to have some other folks join to give us a better shot at succeeding (I'd like to try to have no more than two dozen total players regardless, though).

*makes a note* I'll try to make this. Shouldn't have a scheduling conflict.

I'll do my best to be there.

This is a bummer but it seems I forgot tonight was movie night with the fiance. I'm sorry about that because I know how much time Dimmer has spent preparing for this. If you guys don't end up doing it tonight, I'm available the rest of the week. Good luck!

I'll want to try one of these but I'm going to need to do a lot of catching up I'm sure.

LiquidMantis wrote:

I'll want to try one of these but I'm going to need to do a lot of catching up I'm sure.

Happy to have any and all Goodjers, regardless of loadout or experience. You should join us tonight.

No new chapters were written tonight in the Book of Goodjerly Valor.

We need more DPS, and didn't have enough time on the clock to take him down. Detection for the destabilizer was bugged, and cost us precious seconds. That said, it wasn't close - think Baneclaw was still around 50% when the melding rolled in.

I think we got it down closer to 30%, was a nice game nonetheless.

My update is halfway done! Wait for me, guys!

IMAGE(http://gremlindog.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/chunk.jpg)

Aw sorry I missed it, had to work a bit this weekend.

Well, sorry about that guys. Took a "nap" on the couch around 7 watching TV that lasted until 1 in the morning. My bad. I'll catch you all on the next GWJ get together though.

So after the beta weekend I was hooked and I've popped for a founders pack. I've looked for some good starter guides to give me a better idea of what's going on but since this is still beta I've only found a couple of forums posts here and there that outline some of the basics. Any particular site or guides I should be looking at to get up to speed?

Kehama wrote:

So after the beta weekend I was hooked and I've popped for a founders pack. I've looked for some good starter guides to give me a better idea of what's going on but since this is still beta I've only found a couple of forums posts here and there that outline some of the basics. Any particular site or guides I should be looking at to get up to speed?

The games is still going through too many changes for much a guide to be of much use for long. I attempted to keep a running tab on stuff, but it all got outdated and fell apart really quickly. I would just look at the stickied threads on the official forum, then jump in and try to find a GWJ'er in game.

Oh, just noticed your location.... Well if you don't wanna group up I'm not too sure what to tell you. Ask any questions here and we can try to answer what we can.

Kehama wrote:

So after the beta weekend I was hooked and I've popped for a founders pack. I've looked for some good starter guides to give me a better idea of what's going on but since this is still beta I've only found a couple of forums posts here and there that outline some of the basics. Any particular site or guides I should be looking at to get up to speed?

The oracle known as the Dimmerswitch has a vast amount of Firefall knowledge and is always willing to help the rookies. Also a vast amount of XP. Like super duper vast...times a million.

I actually enjoy grouping up in Firefall as it's far, far more productive then running around thumping solo. Most MMO's have made soloing just as productive, if not more so, than grouping up until the end-game. With Firefall it's just flat-out more fun to get a group together run around reclaiming towers or just running from event to event. It also seems like it's better suited for short play sessions where you have to drop in and out of groups which is what I find myself doing far too often nowadays.

Great to have you, Kehama!

I definitely agree about it being easy to drop in/out for smaller portions of playtime. Some mornings I hop on for just long enough to run a thumper and swap out crafting recipes before heading to work.

In terms of pointers, you definitely seemed to be holding your own from what I've seen, but I'm happy to try to field questions.

The biggest stumbling block for new folks is often crafting. I'm not great at it (I think Psych has the best handle on it out of GWJ folk), but here's the sketch of how things work:

* Tier 1 has no crafting in current builds. This is done to minimize the complexity new users are exposed to, but often leads players to thinking that there is no crafting at all - which isn't the case.
* For Tier 2 and up, each tech you unlock will give you a basic (white-quality) version of that item or ability. For all tech except Accord (so Astrek, Omnidyne, or Kiuston), you also get a nano print to craft more-powerful versions.
* Minerals will raise some item characteristics while (generally) lowering others. Higher-quality minerals will increase the boost and minimize any negatives.
* So, what's preventing you from making all your gear out of purple ferrite? Apart from scarcity, all battle frames have power / CPU / weight constraints. All crafted items will "cost" varying amounts of all three constraints. Purple ferrite does give great stats, but it's extremely heavy, and you'd run into weight constraints pretty quickly.
* All this is extremely poorly explained in the UI, but does allow players to make interesting choices. Do you want to have a really badass gun? How about armor with good damage reduction and health regen? Maybe a really fast cool down on your favorite ability? You can't do them all, so you have to choose what's most important. (For example, my Tier 2 Mammoth frame runs with only two abilities, so I could boost the hell out of everything else).

One other quick note about resources:

The 'isotope' of a mineral reflects its quality - so Ferrite 768 will be better than Ferrite 549, which will be better than Ferrite 264. Quality is color-coded using the standard MMO scheme, from white (lowest quality) to purple (highest quality). I have seen resources coded as orange (which would be even higher than purple), but it was transient and I suspect was a bug (the same resource was coded as purple before and afterwards, and was the same isotope throughout).

In current builds, the resource server randomly determines the quality for all instances of a given resource for the next interval (I expect that the probabilities are weighted so that some resources are more likely to be blue quality than others, for example, though that's speculative on my part). This means that when Coralite is blue quality, it's blue quality on all server shards, for both thump able and above ground resource nodes.

It's not clear yet whether how frequent the "quality re-rolls" happen is simply a timer in current builds, but Red5 has said they will eventually have the resource server also roll for quantity - so maybe there's a really great quality mineral, but not that much of it. Depleting the pool of a given minerals will cause the resource server to do a new roll for quality and quantity for that mineral.

I'm still not sure how this wouldn't eventually lead to the world drowning in lower-quality ore (as players preferentially target higher-quality resources), but Red5 strike me as clever folks, and I expect they have a plan in mind for that, too.