AmazingMOO

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Fansy is like a definition of "antisocial behavior."

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Having played EQ for a while and having known people in real life who played on Sullon Zek, I think that it's a lot more fair to say that Fansy was flagging problems in the only way the Sony dev team would listen to: making a big enough stink out of it that they had to fix issues or risk losing customers.

Sullon Zek was a 'no rules' PVP server. Anything went. Trains, charm kiting, corpse camping... the whole shebang. The rationale was that players could always 'get help' from allies to self-police griefers.

Of course 80%+ of the server was 'evil team', making it unfeasible or impossible for 'good team' players to actually do that. The people I knew in RL (evils and 1 neutral) who played there were there to grief and nothing more. They were not interested in fair combat of any kind. They wanted to lord their power over weaker players.

Sony's dev team was infamous for refusing to fix problems that didn't affect the bottom line, be they game imbalances, mechanics bugs, or social problems. By making a big enough stink and making life difficult for enough people, Fansy single-handedly did what years of message board ranting could not: He forced Sony to fix game problems.

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Not going to comment on the controversy surrounding any of this (not my place, at all) other than to say the following:

Twixt was a rank amateur compared to Fansy the bard.

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Fansy is, simply put, a master among masters.

Not only did he entertain, but he skewered entire playerbases and rulesets. The MMO world, both PVP- and PVE-oriented, is a better place for having Fansy.

I wanna cast Magic Missile!

At least until I'm out of mana.

Yea!

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Jump Kick has numbers comparable to Air Superiority, and everyone keeps raving about how AS is one of the best Pool Powers you can get.

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Air Superiority is great because it knocks down every single time. Jump Kick's knockback isn't nearly so frequent. Still, it's got a fun animation and takes KB sets, which makes is VASTLY more useful than before IOs.

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I've done an ITF with a stalker who had no status protection and used jump kick in his attack chain and kept my mouth shut.

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What's wrong with Jump Kick?

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I have a fire/fire scrapper who uses jump kick as part of her chain. It's subbed in for the t1 fire punch attack and slotted with Kinetic Crash to give her extra knockback protection. You lose a smidge of damage that way, but gain a lot of mitigation. It's a pretty good trade-off.

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Does Surveillance force you to draw the stupid Gun?

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No. You get an interruptable animation of your character looking into a screen over their wrist that emanates targeting lasers towards your target. It's pretty nifty and, as I said, interruptable, so you often just have the laser parts if you use it in sequence with other powers.

I tend to think about origins and power mechanisms very thoroughly. I'll even write about why I chose the powers that I did.

For example, Holly Star is the eldest of 5 siblings. She's a mutant, with the ability to teleport energy into her body via tiny wormholes. She can release the energy, but not controllably.

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One of the most useful parts of our research together was something Holly dubbed the 'Showering Teen Experiment'. Holly would stand or sit in a sealed shower stall, exerting her 'explosion' power on the water around her. Using laser range finding and atomic clock measurements, I and my assistants began to detect minor temporal-spatial distortions in and around my daughter's body.

Holly mentioned at the time that she had the, quote, 'lamest super power ever-- the ability to have nerdy scientists peek on my showers'.

(Yes, Veronica, she was wearing a swimsuit at the time.)

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Her father, a research scientist, built a pair of guantlets for her that allow her to harness the energy, giving her blast powers.

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5. The Blackstar Prosthetics

The primary problems Holly encounters when purposefully expending energy she has gathered are energy polarization and physical control. In other words, Holly has very little conscious control over how, when, or in what direction the energy leaves her body. It requires a great deal of exertion and concentration for Holly to direct the energy she has gathered in any other direction than 'everywhere at once'.

The immediate solution that presents itself (at least to me) is to construct a polarizing filter of some kind to help restrict and focus the release.

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The rest of her power choices are all about teleportation and manipulation of various kinds of energy via that micro-scale teleportation. Her stealth powers work because she literally teleports the light through her body. PFF works because she teleports projectiles and stuff away from her.

That's a very straight-forward power selection setup. Energy/energy/Force Mastery blasters are actually pretty common, rationalized or not.

One of her good friends, Cynthia Corro, is a 'Gennie', a girl who was genetically engineered and gestated in a tank by a corrupt company intent on selling her and girls like her as slaves. Corro Company's genetic engineering process has a very serious flaw, however, that introduces mutant powers into genomes they create. Accordingly, Cynthia is a strong telepath, and telempath-- a psychometry type.

She was rescued from Corro's lab by pirate-themed vigilantes who work to break up human trafficking rings. The leader of the group, Pirate Queen Yui (a natural Archery/Devices blaster) was severely injured in the attack, so Cynthia leeched her knowledge of Archery, took Yui's equipment as the others escorted the injured vigilante out, and covered their retreat by dropping all kind of archery nastiness.

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When we opened the capsule, Cynthia came up swinging. She was extremely aggressive. Lala and Ramone Shelly had to hold her down, and I had to explain what was happening and who we were before she finally calmed down.

After I made my explanations, Cynthia's behavior reversed 180 degrees. The very first thing she did was offer to help us kill the base administrator.

Later, after I nearly got my leg blown off, I very clearly remember feeding explosive-headed arrows to Cynthia as she covered our retreat. Looking back on it, I'm *certain* she had leached at least some of my archery skill telepathically. She's held on to it, and has her own bow now.

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Despite the fact that Cynthia is a psi-type, her primary and epic are Archery and Munitions Mastery. Even though you don't often see weapons and psi together, they fit in the context of Cynthia's story.

I've re-rolled Cynthia several times, first as an Archery/Dev blaster with the presence pool, then as Trick Archery/Psi, a Mind/TA, and after power proliferation, finally as an Archery/Mental Manipulation. I understand that Archery/Psi has actually become a rather popular combo. Since rolling Cynthia as an Arch/Psi I've also recently found a popular Japanese comic that features characters who aim weapons by telepathy

So, depending on the story that a player sets up, power choices that seem 'off-theme' can actually become an integral part of the character's backstory.

Step 1: Locate a good arc.

This can be difficult, but is by no means undoable for anyone willing to invest 15-20 minutes. Now that the new AE tags are in place it's much easier than before to find arcs that don't have stupidly difficult custom enemies or ridiculous requirements.

Once you've found a good arc, remember to record the number and/or title for future reference.

I use a 'Favorites' macro to keep track of good arcs:

/macro Favs "playernote Favorites"

This will open up a playernote window that you can paste the arc information into.

For those who aren't quite sure about how to deal with custom enemies yet, stick to arcs that use only standard enemy groups.


Step 2: Pick a Good AE Location

Once you have an arc that you'd like to lead a team through, pick a good Mission Architect location that everyone in the team can find and navigate to relatively easily. I suggest avoiding Atlas Park and Cap au Diable

My suggestions for picking good AE locations are as follows:

Paragon City -
1-20: King's Row
20-50: Talos Island

Rogue Isles -
1-20: Port Oakes
20-50: Sharkhead Isle

Or -
35-50: Rikti War Zone for cross-faction teaming fun!


Part 3: Recruit Teammates

The best way to find good teammates for AE arc fun is to select from your friends, supergroup members, or members of a global channel geared towards team-finding. However, that's not always an option, especially if you're on a new server.

When that happens, use the 'Find Teammate' button and search for players who are 'Looking for Missions' or 'Looking for Any'. Send them a tell before inviting them and let them know exactly what you're intending to do:

"/tell LowbieTank, Hi. I'm doing a level 10 AE story arc against Skulls and Council. Would you care to join me?"

"/tell Defender, Hi. I'm about to start a level 40 AE story arc against a custom group. Would you care to join me?"

Some players will ask which arc you're doing. Be sure to keep the arc number and name on hand (or even on your clipboard to copy/paste) to send them.


Part 4: Lead the Group

Once everyone is assembled in the AE building, start the story arc.

Many groups appreciate a firm leadership role when going through content they've never done before. Take your time to tell the group which way to go. If you happen to know of a particular trap or ambush the author has set up, be sure to let your group have a little warning:

'We may get an ambush for this glowie.'

'Watch out for this lieutenant. She stuns.'

'This boss has a lifedrain heal. Pop purples if you have them.'

Be sure to give everyone time to read the clues and story introductions. The reason people tend to rush through content so fast is because they've already done it a time or two. I've found that many players want a bit to read through the story that comes with new arcs.


Part 5: Have a plan 'B'

Sometimes the arc just doesn't work right, even if you've been through it solo before. Sometimes the upgrade from boss to EB or EB to AV makes an enemy unbeatable. Sometimes your group will just start becoming frustrated.

When this occurs, have a backup plan ready to keep your group happy. This can be as simple as offering to switch the group to doing radio, newspaper, or Borea's missions in RWZ.


Part 6: Thank your group

This may seem obvious, but a lot of players can be nervous or apprehensive going into new content, especially when it's not 'officially endorsed' by the developer staff. Succeed or fail, be sure to thank your group for teaming with you and having patience enough to do something they haven't experienced before.



AE Arcs can be a LOT of fun if you're careful to approach them correctly. I hope that these guidelines help you and your teammates get as much fun out of the system as I do.

I'm personally rather concerned that we seem to be drawing out all the 'you must be a pervert because you do x' types lately. Not only are they showing up in the forums a lot, but they're also being very vocal in-game ever since the Super-Tailor feature was announced.

The G.I.R.L.-types have been taking a much more severe verbal beating than they usually do.

I'm very sad to see that we have such an active population of bigots and haters.

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I'd also like to see more revealing and 'pretty' costumes for males. Ruffles and lace can be used to very good effect in male costumes.

You can really tell that all the new folks at Paragon Studios are getting settled in their jobs. i15 is chock full of 'unmentioned' QOL updates like Enemies that perform new animations while idling.

There are other touches, such as markedly different writing flavors in newer missions. I'm also noticing a few new radio missions. Or new mcguffins and enemy groups added to the magic list that builds radio missions.

We're also seeing concrete evidence of future goodies that have always been declared 'too time intensive'.

A little feature I noticed while typing up this post also made me very happy:

"You have earned 25 tickets from a storyarc. Click Here or visit an architect vendor to claim them."

The new staffers are obviously hard at work adding lots of code and great new features to the game. Keep it up, new Paragon Heroes!

New NPCs' default animations are super-awesome. I walked into a lowbie Vhaz mission and saw a reaper working on animating a couple zombies before they attacked me.

Kudos!

It's worth noting that impersonating a dev or other NCSoft staff on the forums or in game is something that the CS staff takes pretty seriously.

Don't do it.

Something I've found that can be frustrating for new players is the difficulty spikes in the leveling curve. There are certain points in the curve that are much rougher than others.

As you approach 15, enemies start being geared towards players who have DO-level enhancements. They're pretty rough against players who are ONLY slotting what drops and not buying or crafting any enhancements.

Again, as you approach 25, enemies start being geared towards players who have SO-level enhancements.

As you start to climb the levels between 35-39, they start seeming interminably long. 39-40 is a crawl compared to 40-41.

Something else that sometimes affects new players is not understanding how the difficulty/notoriety system works. It's better now that players are explicitly told by Hero Corps Field Analysts and Fateweavers that they're altering the difficulty of their missions, but some players manage to pick 'Invincible' because it sounds like another super-hero title.

I played in beta and then picked up again in mid-i3. On my first character, I started feeling like giving up around level 14 or so because I'd managed to pick Notoriety level 4 because I thought it was a title and everything in my missions was orange, red, and purple.

CoH handles team vs. solo right... the way every other game ought to. You can always solo, but teaming is far more fun!

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While I like the costume pieces, I was kind of hoping for more than just scientist stuff. Like various implants with liquid filled tubes or limbs/torso options that look malformed/monstrous and stitched up. Stuff for the experimented on, rather than the experimenter.

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You'll probably get a kick out of the 'ccsuperserum' emote then.

Gender is... buggy... right now.

Castle was on the Training Room just now and kept complaining that he was getting error popups any time someone changed their costume.

The costume pieces and emotes are, frankly, fantastic. You will love them. No, even you, that guy who's complaining about microtransactions. You'll love them too, so hush.

When cancelling out of the new 'experiment' emote by hopping forward or backwards, the flasks created by the emote remain embedded in the player's hands, protruding out from the body at a 90 degree angle.

Broken seems more likely than reported for some of the arcs I've seen this happen on, so I'm certainly willing to believe it. Thanks for the explanations!

I was up early this morning for work purposes, but got stuck waiting on server reboot, so I decided to log in and kill some time looking through AE missions.

I usually never do a mission that's not tagged (SFMA or HFMA) simply to avoid wading through the endless mountains of crap. ('Auto SK L54 Demon lt fm mission gives you quick xpez!') However a global chat acquaintance pointed out to me that there are lots of people who simply don't know to tag.

I picked '4 Stars' and started on about the 9th page. Quite a few missions do something strange. The appear as normal in the list, but then fail to put you in AE mode when you click the 'Play' button.

Its possible, I guess, that these are arcs that have been reported for one reason or another. Why would they still be in the list if they're not available to play, however?


It also occurs that a 'hide all arcs by this author' button would help eliminate a small measure the farm spam in the search window. Thoughts?


I did finally happen across a fun, short arc about weaponized salsa:

A Tex-Mex Mess by @Renderboy Arc ID: 127677

It's very funny, but not tagged. Go check it out.

Issue 15 is in the latter stages of Beta. Issue 16 has had an amazing 'We couldn't do that at Cryptic' sneak-peek displayed by Positron. 'Going Rogue' has been announced, but has been confirmed NOT to be I16.

I was chatting with some global friends last night and came up with the following schedule:

Issue 15 is released to live possibly this week, but probably next week. Devs spend a few more weeks hammering out bugs.

Comic-con International and a few other cons are in July. During one of these, probably one that Paragon Studios staffers are attending, we get the lowdown on Issue 16. Until this point, none of us mention the 'P---- C-------------' words because we're too nervous to mention them. We've been hurt before.

Closed Beta for Issue 16 begins mid-late August. As the work involved for P---- C-------------'s been portrayed as a metric butt-load of work that's only now possible due to Paragon's increased development staff, it probably doesn't go live until late October or later.

On Halloween? A perfect time for it, considering that P---- C------------- might allow many heroes and villains to completely change their look.

However, dev work and internal testing for Going Rogue has been going on since spring. GR is announced as Issue 17 and closed beta begins very early November. Shippers start to announce mid-December as the launch date in order to cash in on the Christmas Rush.

Both Open Beta and the predownload for i17/Going Rogue begins on about December 1st. The RTM version of Going Rogue begins pressing with the predownload version of the game. It hits store shelves about December 15th.

Issue 18 doesn't get talked about until February 2010.

-- Edit: I DID mean 'uninformed'. Although ladies love a man in uniform, so I'm told. --
-- Edit, Edit: I was NOT wearing a uniform while I typed this. I was wearing my MOOBoxers. Sorry, Ladies. --

As the Story Slot purchase feature is being added to the game, can we also get a few slots tied to Vet Rewards, especially some of the leaner periods?

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Moo, what you're asking for is a brand new powerset, not just customization. Changing Necromancy from controlling the undead to controlling puppets is very much akin to changing Assault Rifle to use a bow, instead. I mean, I don't dislike your idea, but I would put it squarely outside the realm of customization.

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Do you think it would still be a new powerset even if they still had the same AI and attacks? I can certainly see where you're coming from, but it seems like the logical upgrade path would be:

- Necromancy summons zombies a with powers b
- Change Necromancy so that it can summon models in pool c with powers b
- Change Necromancy so that it can summon custom models and models in pool c with powers b

Certainly still a metric butte-load of work, but it seems like you could keep the same basic powers and just provide different henchies to do it. The biggest area I see trouble with along the upgrade patch are the summon animations. You might have to provide a generic appearance animation if you were going to allow players to sub in custom models for their default henchies.

On the subject of MM pets, one of the first MMs I made was a magically animated marionette who was supposed to be able to control other marionettes. I settled for zombies because they were close enough in theme. Eventually I deleted her because she got so far off theme I wasn't enjoying playing her any more.

If I could have changed out the zombie and ghost models for some kind of very simple wooden figurines, I would have. I'd have preferred something along the lines of puppets or dolls, even with the same shambling animation and intentionally stupid AI of zombies.

Imagine a horde of 'Loligoth'-themed dolls shambling and lurching at you like zombies. No animation change-- just a model change. Creepy, no? That's what I was aiming for and missed.

Customization is all about roleplay value to me.

For example, let's look at two of Marvel's heroes, Cyclops and Havok. Ignoring copyright issues, both would basically be implemented in the game as Energy/Energy blasters. Since the two characters are siblings, their powers are designed to be similar. However, both characters have very unique power usage details and very unique visual appearances.

Cyclops' powers are expressed entirely via his eyes. This ties into his backstory and his visual appearance. Cyclops is never seen without his protective visor or goggles of some sort. The red 'optic blasts' have been immortalized in comic, game, and film format.

Havok's powers are emanated from his torso. The plasma blasts have a distinct 'negative' look, which his costumes always mirror and again tie into his backstory and characterization.

These are the two most common requests for non-weapon power customization-- color and emanation location control. If provided, you'd see... well a few more clones. You'd also see a greater variety of characters with more specific backstories and appearances.

For example, my energy blaster, Holly, has the ability to siphon any kind of realized energy into her body via microscopic wormholes. She can't control the release of the energy without the aid of special gloves. Accordingly, I'd like to match the color tone of her powers so they all matched rather than the blue/red/green of Energy/Energy/Force Mastery. I'd probably go with either a monochromatic effect or a 'negative' effect if it were provided. Since energy blasts and energy melee all emanate from the hands, Holly wouldn't have much reason to use location control.

Her sister, Ivy, on the other hand, is an apprentice lightning mage who controls electricity via program-like spells. Rather than having her elec/elec/elec lightning blasts erupt from her hands, I'd VASTLY rather they originate from her feet or body and arc across to her enemies rather than be 'ray' blasts. She wouldn't have much reason to change from the bluish-white lightning effects offered to heroes (I *might* consider turning it green), she would make much more use out of location control.