Adeon Hawkwood

Another Virtue channel (Virtue TFs) opened up an overflow channel and it seems to have worked out well. The overflow is not full and there are people using it.

What Virtue TFs did is open up a new channel and encourage people who regularly form teams to subscribe to both channels but for people who are mostly looking to join teams to only subscribe to one. Since the number of people forming teams is less than the number looking for teams if it's done that way you effectively increase the available channel space without setting up to many situations where someone who is forming a team and someone who is looking for a team cannot see each other. You also generally get the more active team former as a seed population for the new channel.

It's not a perfect solution but until the devs increase global channel capacity it's the most practical solution.

With the old launcher it was possible to do a fast install (whether of the game or the test sever) by starting the install, stopping, copying over the pigg files and then restarting the install. This would allow the install to complete with only relatively small downloads. However I can't seem to make this trick work with the NCSoft launcher. Is it possible?

I shall assume that while you have removed Adeon's power armor it is stored on the premises.

In that case he would use his implanted radio to establish communications with the suit on the premises and use the more powerful radio in it to call in his two spare suits of power armor and his own bot squad as a divisionary assault (ok, the AI is somewhat limited in automatic mode, but it will suffice for a diversion). While you're distracted he'll order the suit on the premises to use it's emergency teleportation system to relocate to his location. At that point he is armed and armored and your base is under attack. All three suits have access to some combination of weapons sufficient to blow a hole in the wall with the window at which point it's a simple matter of linking up with the bots and automated suits and getting out of there.

... ran it again.

The second one is preparation. CoX is migrating to the NCSoft launcher at which point we will no longer have to click through the one int he launcher. So once you switch to the launcher you will be back to clicking through it once but it will be in a different position.

But if this was implemented what would people complain about?

Ok, more seriously I think the basic idea makes sense but I'm not a fan of the timing. I personally HATE daily quests because it gates me based on which days I have time to do it.

My suggestion would be to make it so that like tips you are limited to some number of preparatory missions each day (maybe 5) but the finale mission is limited to once a week. In addition doing the finale would count as your WST for the week (and doing a WST would lock out the possibility of doing the finale. Finally I would say give the finale mission an EB/AV (based on team size/difficulty settings).

The general idea here is to make the WST slightly more rewarding (since you get merits as well and can do it in a single day) to compensate for the fact that getting a team does complicate doing it somewhat.

Now rewards, I see what you're doing but I think tying it to difficulty is not the way to go. Most characters can solo a mission set to +4/x1 without to much difficulty (especially once you get a level shift) so I think doing it that way makes it way to attractive.

So for an alternative, how about this. A NotW currently breaks down into 4-6 shards. In I20 it will be possible to convert 10 shards to 6 threads. So, how about having the reward table for the finale allow you to chose one of:
1. NotW
2. 10 Shards
3. 6 Threads

It would also be necessary to increase the breakdown value of the Notice to 10 shards to provide incentive to do the WST for shards/threads instead (yes there is the 10 million inf cost the WST gives you get a bunch of merits you can use to get the inf).

The remaining issue is the Incarnate exp. The simple option is to add it to the Finale reward table but I'm not sure how good of an idea that is. I can't really say how best to do that since I don't yet have a feel for the XP rates in the trials.

Finally one thing I would think worth considering is allowing enemies in the missions to drop threads instead of shards but only under certain circumstances (maybe if the difficulty is set to +4?)

Overall I think something like this is probably the best solution. If the devs do decide to implement a real solo path (as opposed to the ridiculous one they have now) then I think the primary requirements are that is should:
1. Require at least a bit more personal time/effort than the team method (since you don't have the difficulty of getting a team together)
2. Not allow faster progression than the team method (if the 'solo' method is the fastest people will simply form teams to do that instead of the actual team content).
3. Not allow someone to do both the solo method and the team method for really fast progression (for obvious reasons).

You're not the only one. According to the devs there are some complications with implementing pool customization so it's unclear if or when it will happen. They do know that it is desired though.