I'm not going to say anything more than I was not retained for Vanguard. It was, indeed, a fun ride these past two years. I have a lot of respect for my co-workers and SOE in general, so I won't sugar-coat the fact that I am no longer with the project. It's not my place to speak of other devs, though I'm sure you'll find a list soon enough.

I learned a lot, and I love this community more than I can say - we proved once again that devs and community can communicate meaningfully and well. I will miss you all, and wish you and the sphere well.

for the last time:
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(a halo over an A )

I think I answered this one in the "Where's Waldo" thread. :P

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My involvement with this site is going to wane slightly as I take care of the new tasks I'm assigned to.

I haven't forgotten ya - this remains the best player community I've encountered yet!

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As an underdog my entire life, I love underdogs. Even when they aren't underdogs.

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I apologize guys for my part in any confusion this has brought. They'll put me and/or Linear_Core back on Diplomacy as soon as we're done with our critical tasks.

As Hasium said, I'm implementing our new "optimized NPC" assets. Basically, Art has created some ultra-efficient attachments for our NPCs that greatly decreases the number of render passes your video card takes when it draws the NPCs. In some cases we're talking going from 25+ passes to like, 6. It's sweet spawning a bunch of these and watching my framerate stay steady.

My job is to select and apply these assets to our existing NPCs across Telon. You'll see some clothing changes here and there, though "special" NPCs will still look special.

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I like the idea, and I kicked it upstairs for my bosses to look at.

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Yes, most are Demand based. The Reason, Inspire, and Flattery split are about even, however. I based the cards on the "racial expression" of each race. Obviously that's a lot of Demand races!

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Fix should be on Test now.

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Oh, Bhaal, I was so impressed by your accomplishment I decided to do some calculation:

The theoretical maximum Presence with all top-end tier 5 clothing and 4500 naked Presence is 10091 Presence.

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I won't comment on that idea (it's not a bad one though).

But I do want to talk a little bit about how you get gear. It is deliberately designed to give you items that you likely wouldn't use. The concept behind it is to increase the social aspect of the Sphere by having you, the player, needing other players to complete your desired gear. While you may have an extra Academic item, the guy with the extra Domestic gear NEEDS an Academic item, and thus there is a built-in incentive to trade items. The Auction House is the friend of the Diplomat.

That being said, we haven't done as good a job on this as we had hoped, and are tweaking things to address this.

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