Arctic Man

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The Halloween event is now completed. Paragon City and the Rogue Isles can now rest easy ... or can they?

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In a way, the Halloween event ended after the maintenance yesterday, at least half-way. I was on for most of the day and didn't see a single zombie invasion alert. I guess it broke again, but at that point most people either didn't know they were meant to keep going, or didn't care that they were gone. Gave me time to work on the badges from trick or treating though.

* This was on Defiant

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Well, a proper witch hat would be nice - the one we have right now is way too big, and the general shape is just weird

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Plus I think it makes you bald - so zero chance of animated hair there

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Way back at the beginning of October we were told that there would be new EU forums for City of Heroes by Kerensky in an Announcement. More recently with the release of the new US Site Kerensky then said we'd be getting access to the new Beta Forums very soon.

I was wondering if there was any updates or Estimated times of when this would happen?

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Kerensky? Kerensky hasn't said anything since he, Aero and Rockjaw lost their jobs in the sudden staff cutback in mid-September. I think you mean GhostRaptor.

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1. TEST THE BLEEPING THING PROPERLY BEFORE STARTING IT ON LIVE!!!

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I completely agree here. It was run for 1.5 hours back in July (and on US side only) which isn't near enough time to see if it's working properly since:

A) The cycle between invasions is longer than that, making it impossible to see if new ones are starting correctly

B) With the zombie invasions going on, I bet not a lot of people went knocking on doors to notice the spirit spawn rate problem

C) Limiting it to such a short period of time probably meant that over half of the players that wanted to test this never got the chance, thereby reducing the feedback from it

It really should have been run for 2-3 days, preferably over a weekend. Then they could have had lots of time to fix the problems instead of just saying "thanks in advance for your understanding"

P.S. I hope the new forums go in soon - I had to type this twice

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maybe you can add the requierment to pick up some exploration badges on route cant think of any of the top of my head.

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I thought that already was the plan.

The race sounds fun, but I wont take part myself because A) All my slots on Union are already full with level 14-18 villains and B) I tend to lag a lot more red-side than I do in CoH (related to the higher level of detail in graphics there).

My characters are all logged out at the unversity in Cap au Diable though, so I just might log in and watch as the racers run up there...

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All of which require me to remember to GO somewhere safe when I log off! Assuming I have TIME to wander off somewhere safe to log off!

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You'll have to go places when Day Jobs are implemented (unless of course that doesn't interest you) so see this as practice for I13 .

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Am also getting fed up with logging in to find I'm already at 5% health thanks to a damned invasion going on!

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There are plenty of safe areas in each zone to log out in - the parking garage in Brickstown, tunnels in Atlas, Steel and Talos, under bridges in Founders' Falls, inside shops - and of course inside train stations.

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Just a quick update on this. The fix we have works, in that it restores the Apocalypse to correct functionality, however the actual cause of the original problem remains. What this means is that the Apocalypse may, at random, stop functioning. We're monitoring and the vast majority of the time the event should be fixed again before you even notice it's been broken. If the Apocalypse does stop working for longer than a few hours, however, please don't hesitate to let us know.

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Any chance the event could be extended for another week? The MOTD says "As a special thank you to all City of Heroes and City of Villains players we've begun this year's Halloween Event early!" - however, given the problems with the invasions and such initially, it really kicked off late instead .

Add to that the problems with the spawn rate of spirits and such (which I think could have been avoided if the test in the US back in July had been run for longer than an hour and a half) and I think it's only fair to extend it if you want to really thank the players.

There might be a scheduled Rikti invasion week in the way, but that could always be postponed.

Please?

I agree. The video was nice, but it wasn't all that much related to I13. The actual I13 content seemed limited to a few seconds at the end (quick flashthrough of the shields, and someone at a day job).

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Union Lore?

I thought he was referring to the US Taxibots? Nice article though

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I thought so too, since I didn't see any direct reference to Union, or even Europe. The article mentions good communication with the developers, and while they might be listening to us, they sure don't talk to us a lot.

Anyway, I think taxibots is a fairly widespread thing. There were some on defiant too a couple of years back when I first started.

Hm. Did the downtime break them again? Been logged in for over 2 hours now (on Defiant), and nothing. Last night they were happening near constantly in one zone or another. Unless there was a wave in all zones right before I logged in and/or things take a while to get up to speed after a downtime, I think something's not right and the fix needs to be re-applied.

Edit: A mass attack in all zones now (1:55 CET, 12:55 in England).

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I think we're supposed to be getting something else this week aren't we? According to the article in the OP:

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With Alex 'Lighthouse' Von Minden alluding to new announcements in the pipeline - 'we have some other news this week besides Issue 13, but you'll have to wait to find out' - and now this prestigious new hire, City of Heroes players will be wondering just what their development team is planning.

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Can't wait!

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Maybe it's finally some news about City Vault?

Given the problems with the invasions, is there a chance that the event could be extended for another week? There seems to be problems with them in the US too, as Lighthouse posted a message about it there. I think there's a rikti invasion week in early November, but that could always be moved (they have been before, I think).

So has anyone seen an invasion today since the servers came back? I've been waiting around for close to two hours now, and haven't seen anything - not even messages about the invasions ending.

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1) I don't think the zone mobs scarper like they do in rikti raids, so there are a lot more entities in the zone.

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Well, I went to an invasion in Perez Park and Hell's Highway was completely empty of Hellions as far as I could see.

Having finally gotten to try them out, I too will have to say "well done". Even when solo (on fire/fire blaster), the zombies kept coming after me non-stop (unlike rikti attacks, where there's sometimes pauses to breathe) and really kept me on my toes trying to stay alive. I love how they come out of the ground too.

Tomorrow I'll try a character that has a self-heal, and some resistances/defenses.

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If you can't deal with the spawns solo then get into a ToT team, they're not hard to find.

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Where did I said that I couldn't handle the spawns? I just need a little distance between myself and them. I thought that was the common practice when playing a blaster?

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Whenever someone clicks on the door they should either be snared in place or slowed to a crawl for 10 seconds so they can't just run away.

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Because it's soooo fun for blasters to be slapped around by werewolves...

I do my best to clean up my spawns (the xp is nice, and there's a chance for enhancements and salvage), but I sure don't want to be slapped around like a dummy amd burn through my green inspirations every time I click on a door.

If it's anything like how it worked in past year (or 2006 anyway - didn't really take part much last year) the enemies will die by themselves after a few minutes anyway.

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confused...the what isn't in?

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Proliferation.
Basically where they take a powerset exclusively available to one side's ATs (Heroes or Villains) and make it available to the other side. Like when they made several previously Hero-only and Villain-only powersets available to their respective other sides in Issue 12.

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Close, but they also took sets already available to hero ATs and gave them to other hero ATs (not sure about villains). For example firey aura + firey melee (tanker powersets) to scrappers, dark armor + dark melee (scrapper powersets) to tankers and ice blast (blaster powerset) to defenders.

In any case, I had hoped they would give cold domination to controllers (to match up with ice control), but it looks like that wont be for at least around 9 months now (depending on how long they take with I15).

The developers have said several times that there are no plans to raise the level cap. And last I heard, one of them said that even *if* they were to do it there would still not be more powers or enhancement slots to pick from.

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Seems a bit odd to have the same power in two pools

[/ QUOTE ]You don't play Villains much, do you?

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My highest villain is level 18...

Anyway, I don't quite see what focused accuracy has to do with weapons. Scrappers are a bit short-changed when it comes to APPs as it is (only three of them, while the other ATs have 4-5) and breaking the theme for one of them and duplicate powers isn't going to help the diversity.

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4. As one example of the Epic/Patron changes, Castle mentions that Weapon Mastery for Scrappers will now include Focused Accuracy. If his memory is correct.

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I wonder what power in that pool that got axed then. Was kind of planning to take that to round out my ninja concepts (with caltrops, shurikens etc). Seems a bit odd to have the same power in two pools (Focused Accuracy is already in Body Mastery for scrappers) unless they changed the other one too.

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How on earth they considered this worthwhile is beyond me. I'm not hugely impressed with the Cyborg pack but at least its useful to those that want it.

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I too have to agree that this is disappointing. I've been waiting for a permanent jetpack *costume piece* for ages now, or at least since Issue 8 when veteran rewards first appeared. Only wings then, but when I read about costume piece recipes in I9, I got my hopes up. Sadly, only stupid rocket boots etc there. Then I10, I11 and I12 came and went, and still no real jetpack.

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It's at times like this that I do actually believe the US may get preferential treatment from the devs.

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You only need to look at the post counts to see that. The US boards get weekly (most often even daily) replies from the devs in direct response to player posts. We're lucky to get monthly...

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the main thing I want to see is the questions asked by us that you were going to ask the Devs on our behalf...

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I agree, and in particular the one asking for more direct dev communication over here, something a lot of players wanted (and most likely still want).