AmazingMOO

City of Heroes is, in my opinion, the best superhero simulator game available. There are other games that let you play in the superhero genre, but none that let you so fully enter the character of your own superhero. The game has generally gotten better since its inception despite occasional backtracks.

My vet reward badges tell me I've been playing for four and a half years. (I started playing regularly during i3). I also played a bit during beta. In that time, I've bought just about every pack and expansion that has come out, most of them twice.

In that same time, I've also built up some lingering, long-standing complaints -- problems that have been around since previous issues or even since launch. Addressing these complaints would, in my opinion, make the game even stronger and better at being a Superhero Simulator.

Color Picker Inadequacies and Mismatched Costume Pieces

My oldest complaint with the game is that the color picker sucks. (Both of them.) 16-odd MILLION colors in RGB space, and we get 170 choices for costume colors. Not only does this limit player creativity, it causes problems. For example, please look at the color change between 'Bottoms with Skin' and 'Tights' pieces. One is blended with the skin tone while the other is solid. This kind of mismatch is common between different costume pieces, especially with the newer costume pieces that include more detailed textures. With a better color picker, one not so restrictive, players could fix this issue with careful tweaking.

Players could also re-purpose more costume pieces. For example, it'd be very easy to recolor the various 'tights' pieces to appear sheer.

The real kicker for this problem is that we know from experimentation with the demo editor and with the costume save feature that the COH game engine supports any RGB color you throw at it. The limitations on color are imposed after the fact.

There are lots of ways to fix this-- everything from adding a new color picker, to merely changing the way validation works on the costume save feature. Rather than limiting color selection to the 170 or so 'acceptable' colors in any given picker menu, they could reject colors that were outside an acceptable range, such as colors that are too close to a skin tone, or in shades that make power effects invisible.

I continue to be infuriated by this, and will likely continue to refresh my irritation every time I try to match a textured top to an untextured bottom or vice-versa.


Flight orientation and physics

Many players consider that the most 'super' power in CoH is Flight. (For me, it's Knockback, but Flight is right up there.) Sadly, the orientations in which you can fly, and the camera to view those orientations are somewhat limited. You can't fly on your back, for example. Nor can you loop-de-loop.

You can also fall much faster than you can fly straight down, which has always bugged me. It'd be really nice to see Flight adjusted in the future to be more free from limitation.


UI Inconsistencies

The game UI is not terribly consistent. What works one place frequently does not work in others. For example, when mouse-based cut-and-paste was added to the client, it was NOT added to the various market windows. You can't paste a recipe name into the search window to look up its most recent bids.

Additionally, you can change the colors of player-created chat channels, but can't change the color of any of the other channels. The 'Enter' key doesn't work the same way in any two given windows. Many of the options that appear when you click on a character don't appear when you click on their name, or vice versa. Personal salvage storage doesn't work the same way base salvage storage does. There are lots more. God forbid I go into the AE interface.

As the game grows more complex and more features are added, these issues become more and more nagging. They take away from the flow of the game in a small, irritating, but entirely cumulative way. For a lot of players, they are individual straws on the camel's back.

The two biggest inconsistencies, however, lie in the...


Modality of the Costume and Enhancement Screens

While editing your costume or enhancements, you can't do anything else. You can't see chat. You can't tell if someone is attacking you (yet player powers still tend to 'leak' into the interface with screen shakes and the like). You can't activate or deactivate powers.

Many players feel like they 'miss out' when editing a costume and will tell everyone who can hear them via chat that they will be 'afk to edit a costume'.

This is a real shame. In my opinion, the costume editor is the crown feature of the game. It's what hooks the most players and what keeps them. When players don't access it because they're afraid they'll miss the rest of the game, there's something wrong.

Most of the other aspects of the game aside from these two allow the player to view the rest of their interface. Even the base editor will allow you to bring up your various interface windows.

It'd be very nice to be able to have the costume and enhancement screens come up windowed, like every other interface in the game.


IP Issues Confuse and Divide Players

A long time ago, I wrote a post that was entitled 'I Grouped with Supergirl'. It was about problems I saw with the way that copyright and trademark problems acted to the detriment of the game and its players. I feel like these problems have only grown worse with time. Even today, some players feel like they HAVE to police the rest of the game's populace for IP infringements lest bogeymen lawyers descend upon the game and shut it down.

The root of this issue is that there is no clear statement of NCSoft's policies for judging wether or not a player has crossed infringement lines, nor what the remedies for crossing those lines are.

I recently ran afoul of this myself. I created a character who bore a similar color scheme and appearance to a relatively obscure copyrighted character. Neither the name nor powers were the same. When a few players in game let me know that I looked like this other character, I had to do a Google image search to compare the two.

I looked once again for rules regarding 'Genericing' of characters, and couldnt' find anything other than the vague legalese in the various EULA documents. And these are VERY vague. They don't describe how NCSoft judges the characters, nor what you can do once you've been judged.

I eventually had to contact one of the board GMs for a judgment call. Even then, the GM didn't give me anything firmer than 'You'd probably be genericed if someone reported you.'

These policies needed to be accessible to players from day 1. Keeping them secret five years into the game's life is pretty darn inexcusable.


Teaming on flashbacks

Oroboros was a wonderful addition to the game. It allows players to extend the lives of their characters by allowing them to go back and experience content that was missed.

However, there's a pretty serious problem with the implementation. Oroboros forces you into 'Taskforce Mode' so that you cannot invite or group with other characters while you're doing content.

That's pretty darn annoying on taskforces, but it's excruciating on long story arcs. There's pretty much no way to complete the longer arcs other than solo or with a VERY dedicated friend.

From the AE teaming system, we know that there's an alternative. Is there no way to apply the solution from problem b to problem a to ease this burden?


Taskforces and Merit Sharing on Story Arcs

Speaking of task forces, it still continues to amaze me that a tiny fraction of the game's content is responsible for the vast majority of its rewards. This is the most serious problem facing the game, and the one that burns out the most players. I've heard more than one high-level player complain that there's 'nothing to do but ITF, LGTF, or solo'. This perception is a direct threat to the game's longevity.

Sadly, most of the taskforces are not terribly compelling. This is most true of the task forces that award the most rewards. People don't do Positron or Dr. Q because they like the story. They do them out of the sake of completeness, or because they award a huge number of merits. The challenge is not in completing a difficult fight, or for finishing a complicated trial, but for slogging lengthwise through completely forgettable missions. Most players speed through the repetitive chores in these taskforces as rapidly as possible simply for the reward at the end.

Meanwhile, the other story arcs in the game languish due to the fact that only one player can receive merits on any given arc. The only way to bypass that is to arrange a situation where multiple players can do the arc at the same time and share mission completion. It's just as difficult to try to find a group for anything but the shortest Oroboros arcs.

Any players invited along the way, however, still miss out on those 'Final' rewards, even if they complete most of the arc. This discourages normal teaming and causes more players to participate in 'aberrant' play, as our devs like to use, by doing something that's more boring for better rewards. Even if a player doesn't rely on taskforces to level, most will grind out newspaper missions or radio missions rather than bother trying to assemble groups for arc missions.

There are a few different ways this could be addressed. The most obvious solution of spending dev time on revamping those super-boring taskforces has been repeatedly countered against spending that same time developing new content. However, there are reward-based solutions that would work.

The most simple from the player's point of view is to award partial merit awards when an arc is completed by a player they grouped with. It's probably not nearly so simple on the development end, and would require quite a bit of new code to deal with keeping track of group history and the like.

A more simple option from the dev's end would be to award AE tickets to players who completed an arc mission they didn't own.

Either way, just about any change in the way players are rewarded for arc missions would be positive.


What are your oldest and most pressing complaints about the game?

I seem to recall posting a suggestion that a good way to increase interest in Hamidon was to create an accolade power that allowed you to summon minor buff pets similar to the DE emanators.

I hadn't considered the teleporter eventualities. In the case that a super group can accomdate members who want to travel to the rogue islands, it seems much more likely that mah teleporter bay will be expanding.

So, as I'm making plans for which of my characters I want to be rogue, vigiliante, hero, and villain, I find myself running into little issues where information is not terribly clear.

Firstus, Will supergroups be expanded so that members that go around the alignment curve remain in the super group?

For example, my chaotic good-type archery blaster fits very well into the 'Vigilante' picture painted by various Paragon Sources. Will she be able to stay in her supergroup?

Her sister, My fire-fire scrapper, was originally a fire/thermal corruptor before I hard-rerolled her. She's very much the "Rogue" type and is only in the United States in order to pull off part of what she imagines to be a grande scheme. However, to get her back around to the 'Rogue' status, which fits her so well, I have to have to have her fall and become vigilante, become villainous, and then become rogue.

During that cycle, will she be severed from her existing heroic supergroup? If she wins salvage, rewards, and prestige, will those spoils be available to her heroic fellows?

Secondus, what's going to happen to the rules about bases being faction only? If you try to hit a base during a coop taskforce, you get booted from the TF.

Lastly, and probably what most people will consider most importantly, we know that trading inspirations between heroes and villains are coming soon.Does this imply that other kinds of intra-base trading is in the works, such as a villain dropping off enhancements in a base and then having a hero agent sell them for him at wentworths?

A good in-game friend suggested a revamp for the 'Deadly Apocalypse' event that addresses many of the problems with the event.

His suggestion was as follows:

When the Deadly Apocalypse is triggered via whatever mechanism, it creates a totem in a random zone both red-side and blue-side rather than starting the event immediately. The totem works similarly to the 'Special Present' in the 'Lord of Winter' event. It acts as a zone door to take players to a co-op instance where the four totems and the Aspect GM spawn.

This addresses several problems:

- The totems are often so far apart in certain zones like the Hollows or Independence Port that it's rather difficult to get teams to all of them, let alone destroy them. In an instanced zone, the distance between totems can be much more easily controlled.

- It's often very difficult to get enough players together to run the event, especially after hours. If the players had a 'countdown' similar to that on the Special Present and a central location to gather prior to starting the event, it'd be much easier to get enough to run it.

- During the Halloween event, the Deadly Apocalypse happens so often that most totems go completely unchallenged. In this version of the event, the rate at which the event occurs could be lowered dramatically without significantly altering the number of players able to participate.

- When a large number of people show up, it's often difficult to participate fairly in attacking the totems. One team is often simply outdamaged to the point they're not eligible for the badge. However, in the revised event, a zone population cap could be implemented, as well as adjustments made to the hitpoints and spawn rates of the different totems, allowing for greater control and fairness of the event.

Thoughts or Further suggestions?

Let's hear why your server should be the destination of choice for character transfers.

Victory is a very active badging and taskforcing server. It has a large community of knowledgeable players and a relatively low idiot-to-signal ratio. Victory Badges and Victory Badges 2009 are very active channels for forming taskforces and groups. (Victory Badges is, sadly subject to the 'full channel' bug).

I actually don't have that many characters I'd like to move. I have one, maybe two that will be moving to Victory. Regardless, thank you, Paragon and NCSoft for this wonderful gift!

For those chatting about moving to Victory, Victory is indeed a very Taskforcey server. I've happened to have run TFs and other badge groups with Chad and Eric.

Sadly, Victory Badges is full and cannot accept new members. However, the Victory Badges 2009 channel is also very active. Most members who advertise for TFs, teams, and badge groups in Victory Badges will dual-broadcast in VB'09, so please feel free to join us and get some fun TFs and badges under your belt.

ITF is great, but overdone to the point of nausea. Even prime rib becomes unpalatable when you eat nothing but.

LGTF is great, but restricted to levels 45-50. It's also pretty darn overdone.

Sadly, the Oro TFs don't let you coop.

Dear Santa,

I've been a very good boy this year. On top of saving the world maybe 1200 times, I've supported NCSoft and Paragon studios by purchasing all the 'Super Booster' packs they've made available.

Here is a list of items I'd like for christmas. I know that the chance of getting any of them is pretty darn remote, but I thought I'd ask anyway. If any one can, it's Santa!

- A fixed Mary McComber that goes up in level after every wave of witches she leads against you in KHTF.

- A quadruped sekeleton with options for 'dog' and 'cat' animations, and some basic fur combinatorial patterns.

- An 'advanced' color picker.

- The ability to kick while falling for Martial Arts attacks.

- A Coop taskforce for levels 35-40

- Sound customization for powers.

- Left hand detail, right hand detail, left thigh detail, right thigh detail costume slots

- The ability to invite friends to Oro flashback missions in progress.

- Kneesocks.

- A theme for sonic blast that makes use of the Council sonic rifle

- Full body cloaks, coats, and panchos.

- Merit sharing for players who join you on for a story arc.

- A 'Fingers Only' theme for claws.

- A purple Knockback set. (If it were to be named something like 'Fury of the Flying Hamster', NCSoft'd have a customer for life!)

- Frozen lakes everywhere in town.

Santa, I know these are hard, hard things to come by, but even if you were only able to grant one, it'd make my Christmas day.



- Trying to stay on the 'Good' list,

AmazingMOO

With the increased speed of leveling, 1-20, the super-sidekick system, and the various 'earn XP' switches, paragon devs have done a good job putting control of the leveling curve into the hands of the players.

However, having adjusted my play schedule somewhat due to RL time issues, I've noticed some problems with it. I make extensive use of Oroboros and the 'Earn XP' switches to make my own leveling curve feel comfortable. This doesn't work all the time, nor does it work for all characters. I've had to curtail the amount of grouping and task-forcing I've been able to do recently, and that's had a major effect on the feel of the curve.

Problems I have with the leveling curve:

- If you group at all between level 2-10, you can get level 10 in about two hours, if not less. True, a lot of people don't care for the low levels, but these are the levels where you learn how to handle the interface on a character. For new players or for players who haven't played much on a certain AT, this can be brutal.

- Between level 10-15, slow soloers-- like tanks, and certain controllers-- go from very rapid experience to a pace I personally consider 'normal'. Bad soloers, like group-oriented defenders and controllers, hit a brick wall at this point. The experience earned in groups makes soloing pointless in terms of experience. Even if you have to struggle to build a group, it's still more worthwhile than soloing. Despite these speed changes for others, solo-friendly types like brutes, scrappers, blasters, etc..., go over it like a speed bump. They don't get that same slow-down that others get until about level 25 or so.

- Starting at level 10, players who use taskforce groups to level outstrip just about everyone else. A player who manages to do the Positron and Synapse taskforces the same day he creates his character can easily be level 20 in the space of about 6 hours. If he's really in for it and does Sister Psyche's TF, he can probably eke out 23-25 by the end of that TF, probably in under 12 hours.

- At level 25 or so, the experience curve slows somewhat for all players, but for soloers, it's a very dramatic slowdown. For the 'group only' types, the experience comes in huge bursts, especially if they're still primarily levelling via taskforces.

- At 35, the curve picks up again VERY rapidly for taskforce levelers, especially those who head to Cimerora.

This curve feels odd, but not is unmanageable for those who think it's too fast. For those who feel it's too slow, it's not quite as manageable.

In my opinion, it's a crying shame that the best experience in game (and therefore the quickest route for forming groups) comes from repeating the same content over and over again.

Most of the people who I hear comment about the new Ninja Run power are pleased because it's a 'free' travel power. That's nice and all, but I like it because it's FREAKIN' PERFECT for ninjas! It looks fantastic. The animation details are WONDERFUL. It is the perfect customization for ninja characters. It is acrobatic, stealthy, and wonderfully ninja-like. You can roofhop. You can sprint through tall grass to assassinate your enemies. (Shame you can't toss shuriken whilst running.)

BABs, did you animate this? If so you and whoever helped you deserve a big fat raise from NCSoft.

That said, it isn't the end-all-be-all of travel. While acrobatic, Ninja Run doesn't suit, say, a gymnast or a traditional acrobat, both of whom would have run stances more about balance and grace. They'd be more 'hoppy' and better able to stick landings, or manage secondary or tertiary leaps off the scenery.

Nor does it suit a sprinter, whose upright running stance is all about focusing raw power into speed.

Nor would it suit a variety of other character customization needs. Many of those can be approximated with combinations of Combat Jumping, Swift, Hurdle, or other movement powers.

Since you guys are willing to animate this sort of thing for cash... how about it? More running styles, emotes, or what have you. I'd pay for a Super Booster or mini expansion that was nothing but differently-themed run styles if they're as awesome as Ninja Run.

/em puts his money on the table.

I was in a conversation with a fellow player about the utility of Power Boost. I mentioned to him that it should boost his resists by quite a bit. He tested it, and it did not.

Sure enough, the detailed info for Power Boost does not mention it boosting resists. However, the defender version of Power Boost, Power Build Up, DOES boost resists.

It doesn't really make sense for Power Boost to not boost resist buffs, so I'm guessing that this is an oversight rather than an intentional omission.

During the weeks of the Halloween event, I personally lead around 20 successful zone efforts to defeat the event. I failed a few, saw a few different winning and many losing techniques, and learned a lot about how the game works.

I love the 'Trial'-type nature of the event. It's not something that's simply a 'beat it down, get badges' button. Players must learn how run and participate in the event, or they fail.

That said, there were some problems with the event, and with the way it was presented to players. I assume that this is not the last we'll see of it. It's likely that it'll continue to come up occasionally in place of the zombie invasions, and I'm certain it'll happen next year about this same time.

The biggest problem was with the frequency of the zone event. When it was first introduced, players complained that they would not have time to get all the badges they wanted due to the length of the Halloween event. Devs responded in two ways, first by increasing the length of the Halloween event, and then by dramatically increasing the frequency of the zone event.

This created a situation in which players were burned on the frequency of the event. It happened all the time, so was no longer 'special'. It frequently happened in many zones at once, so player attention was divided. Players began to avoid zones where it occurred so it would not interfere in their regular play once they'd gotten tired of the event.

There are a few things that could be done to address that. The most obvious change that could be made is to implement code that ensures that no matter how often the event happens, it only ever happens in one zone at a time. You might even go so far as to say it can happen simultaneously in a hero and villain zone, but I personally think that's too much.

Adding more time to the length of the Halloween event was a good move, but making the zone event happen so frequently was probably not. As I mentioned, it lost its 'specialness'. This happens to zone events in general. It's not uncommon for Lusca to hang out for days at the end of IP or for three Paladins to play hopscotch in the park in King's Row all night. The frequency of zone events in general needs to be cut. 'Special' events like this one can be more frequent, but the rate we saw was far, far too much.

Another problem with the event was the 'openness' of it. In an instanced trial, a team leader can work to educate his group on what they have to do. For example, in the abandoned sewer trial, He'll tell them to split up into specific groups to deal with the various generators around the Hydra's head.

In an open zone event trial like the Deadly Apocalypse event, that option goes out the window. He has to compete with other team leaders to lead the event. If you have someone in the zone operating on bad information, it can cause the event to fail despite otherwise good leadership.

Additionally, the event was also subject to zone population. A single team was not quite enough to run the event. Three teams could reasonably overpower it, and if they weren't careful, destroy the banners so quickly that a lower-damage team didn't quite get the 15% damage necessary to earn the badge, despite otherwise lending buffs or debuffs to the zone. Four teams would almost ensure that. (And if the frequency of the events is decreased like I suggested, this will happen more often.)

To make the event more tolerant to these factors a few changes could be made. The first is to slightly adjust the timer based on how the zone is doing during the event. Once the banners become vulnerable, add two minutes to the timer. Then, upon each banner defeat, add another minute. This gives slower, but well-coordinated teams more time to do their duty and gives slower, short-bus special-ed students more time to make the mental connections necessary to sing along.

Likewise, decrease the damage necessary to get the badge associated with each banner. The event GM only requires that the team engage it to get the badge. I wouldn't go quite that far with the banners but... yes. Yes I would. Change the banners so that if a team lands a hit on them after they become vulnerable, the team gets the badge when the banner is destroyed.

Like I said, this was a GOOD event. I enjoyed it. It wasn't perfect, but it was entertaining and engaging. Let's hope it's BETTER next year!

Most of my characters have 'Real' names. I find myself following the old alliterative patterns of Gold Age characters, even though my characters tend to be Bronze-age or Anime inspired.

Simon Star (later renamed to Star Whisper on a server move)
Mirror Maiden (Samantha Shane)
Iron Rose (Rebecca Rose)
Cynthia Corro
Roulette Roulette

In one case, I wanted to 'hard reroll' a fire corrupter on Guardian as a fire scrapper on Victory. However, her name, Nyo, was taken on Victory. I did a little research and found the global that the character belonged to. The person I contacted told me that he never played on Victory any more due to the server move functionality. He strictly played on Virtue and Freedom. Accordingly, he was quite willing to delete his old character so I could have mine.

Now, all that said, I think that tying character names to account is a great idea. There are many good ways to do this where it does not 'look bad'. However, there's no helping the situation where you end up with two of the same character name on one team, and I can see that turning people off.

One method of implementing non-unique character names would work like so:

Each character's 'Primary Key' is a alphanumeric string of some kind such as a standard GUID or an MD5 hash of the account name and creation date. The character name is a key-value pair and not used to uniquely identify anything. When the player interacts with the UI, he always sees the Character Name, but when the client interacts with the server, they deal solely with the unique ID. Thus there's no internal confusion when character 'Stonewall' trades with another character named 'Stonewall'. Instead, it's a character with a unique id 3A2504E0-4F89-10D3-930C-0305E2837301 trading with a character with a unique id 8E09382D-DD81-7218-6DC1-380165439361. Players would never see those IDs, but they'd behave something like a social security number for your character.

The character's global account name would be stored as another key/value pair simply for ease of personal authentication (A 'Foreign Key' for RDB types). You'd still be able to 'getglobalname' or do an 'Add Note' command to see the global account name of the character you're dealing with.

I have a solid lock on a serious breach of ethics taking place.

I dreamed of travel.

A friend and I were unloading our luggage at a small, regional airport and chatting about all the things that made travel uncomfortable.

I mentioned Oroborous as the perfect travel solution. It's quick, clean, requires no fee, and if you're running late, they can get you to your destination on time ANYWAY.

"So you fell for that?" my friend asked me.

What did he mean? Was he aware of something I was not?

"The thing that really bothers me about Oroborous is that there isn't anywhere private to use the bathroom. No stalls, no doors, nothing."

In horror, I woke. (And not because work just called me.)

After resetting various pieces of software, I logged into the game to check my nocturnal realization.

The tram stations all have bathrooms. Police Stations have bathrooms. Universities have bathrooms. City Hall has bathrooms. More than the normal compliment. Vanguard has bathrooms. There's one immediately behind Lady Grey in case she has to visit the smallest room between ordering various psychics rescued.

Oroborous has NO BATHROOMS. Where does Mender Lazarus go to crap?!

After my impromptu sanitation inspection, I stared at the crystal of Fire and Ice, not for the first time in trepidation, and realized the full, horrific implications of what I'd just discovered. Since the crystal could take you any where, any time, it was pretty obvious what was happening.

Oroborous was funneling the effluent of the future into the past and vice versa. Rather than deal with waste and sewage, Mender Silos is using his time traveling capabilities to force it upon the rest of history via Oroborous.

It's an almost minor detail when compared to the ability to edit history as you see fit, but typical of what we suspect of the man's work.

Oroborous must be stopped before we're all up to our eyes in whatsit!

High-depth reflections are usually only present in Ray-tracing renderers due to the obviously math-intensive work required. There are various work-arounds for environmental reflections that are fairly efficient for a single reflection -- the hero is reflected in the window pane but the window pane is not reflected back in the hero's mirrored glasses.

I would second the call for the 'standard' textures for most costumes. I get so irritated that I can't get the 'shiny latex' look on anything but a fortunata.

I personally don't do many TFs for experience. I'm pretty quick to hit my 'NoXP' button. (/macro NoXP "optionset noxp 1")

However, the bug that's causing TFs to spawn at -1 is seriously reducing the amount of exp than can be gained from a given TF. That's making it more difficult to fill out TFs and increasing the amount of time it takes to fill them.

Then, there's always at least one person on the TF who bemoans the amount of XP they're getting.

In general, I'm being pushed over the little margin that keep TFs from being un-fun.

Please prioritize this bug so that I'm not pulled over completely

Roleplay.


Roleplaying's not for everyone, but there are things that everyone can do to 'immerse' themselves in character:

Write fiction for your characters. Write dialogue for them as if they'd meet different NPCs in game. Sketch them. Spend time thinking about their motivations and how they'd act in different situations.

When creating new characters, create the character first on paper without regards to CoH's power system. Spend time on their origin and the mechanism by which their powers work. Then make the powers you select fit the character without worrying about min-maxing your build. Get GOOD at playing them, and then amaze everyone with your odd, but highly effective powers.

Waaaay back, just before i6 went live, the call went out for various costume-related requests. Most notably, only villains had access to the i6 costume pieces. It wasn't until i7 that there was an unofficial work-around for heroes to access those pieces, and not until i8 that there was an official way for players to obtain those costume pieces.

Someone (*cough*Jack*cough*) stated that Cryptic had NO IDEA that heroic players would want those costume pieces. (*cough*Horsepucky*cough*)

Before we ever reach that point with the new expansion, let me ASSURE all the Paragon devs that are working on Going Rogue content that YES, players will want access to the content they've paid for! Please make all GR content as widely available as possible to the player base, heroic, villainous, rogue, alien, spy, monster, pre-schooler, or what have you.


Personally, I feel that having mechanisms in place to earn that content similar to the Vanguard Merit system is okay... but not at level 35 plus. The costume makes the character, and if the character has to wait until level 35 to access the costume, then that costume CAN'T make the character. (see i9 'Fairy Wings')

However, if I have to wait a solid freaking YEAR to have access to the content, I'm going to scream bloody murder.

I see lots of costume pieces that I'm going to be really upset about not having because they're NPC-only.

Travel time can definitely make the 'gather on x' strategy not work well. IP is HORRIBLE for that.

In my opinion, having between 2 or 3 full teams is the best way to go. You have just enough to get everything started, but don't mow down the banners and/or GM before everyone gets enough shots in to count.

Babs, count me in with those who LOVE the new event. I've been jonesing for more trial-type content for a while, and this fits the bill perfectly. YOu've got to LEARN the encouter. Very, very awesome.

So... more in the future?