Wing_Leader

Interesting. So I'm guessing that a large portion of redside play these days is little more than whatever it takes for a new SoA toon to get ten tips (followed by the morality mission) and turn Rogue?

I hear ya.

However, my initial impression of things upon returning after three years away from the game came from looking around Atlas Park with new toons, not from these forums (that came later when I tried to investigate Scrapper vs. Brute opinions).

What I observed was that "ordinary" L50s and those with "50 (+1)" seemed to outnumber the lowbies hanging out around City Hall and the Atlas statue. When I did an Info check on these toons (in the hopes of getting a clue as to what the +1 was referring to), the list of Set Bonuses was typically so long that I had to stretch the Info window to a surprisingly large size just to see it all. This wasn't an isolated incident, it was what I routinely saw every night (and weekend day) for the 2-3 weeks prior to Head Start.

I have since learned that the game is not dominated by 50s with most of the Incarnate slots filled and builds stocked fully with set IOs (purple or otherwise) after all, but one could be forgiven for getting that impression based on what I experienced those first couple of weeks.

Sometimes unusual is ideal.

I and four of my friends once created an all-Defender team. With all our buffs running on each other we all functioned like tank-scrapper-blasters. And we had more than enough crowd control to manage large (and/or multiple) mobs.

Want to build a team of tankmages? Create an all-Defender team. But for gadsakes don't have everyone take the same dang powerset. We had Kinetics, Sonic, Radiation, Empathy, and Dark on the team. We chewed through mobs like pirhanas and took down AVs in under two minutes usually (they were routinely running away from the fight after 30 seconds). And this was a team that never got past Lvl 40 (before everyone stopped playing the game all together) and ran strictly with SOs.

I try to never let an "unconventional" AT composition lure me into thinking a team will be hamstrung in some way. Most teams I find myself on don't seem to be looking for specific ATs, they are just looking for warm bodies, and it rarely seems to matter to our chances of success. On the other hand, I think it helps to pay attention to power set composition if any attempt at team tactics is going to take place (which it seems rarely does, unfortunately, but what can you do).

Me too please!

The odds seem pretty high, to me anyway, that by the time the set is released you'll have at least another 400 paragon points at your disposal.

There are plenty of YouTube videos out there demonstrating what the power set looks like in action.

Okay, I can see that. But to me that just turns TFs into something akin to track & field events. I never liked WoW BattleGrounds because nothing was really at stake in the larger game world; it was basically just a sporting event dressed up to look sort of like meaningful PvP action. Treating missions like a sport--as opposed to a heroic effort to stop supervillainy--is not my cup of tea, though I understand its appeal for others.

This philosophy is much appreciated!

I just hope that a clever way to maintain that goal and make ad-hoc teaming effortless (in the same way that /broadcast-/tell is, or was) for everyone alike can be found.

The whaaaaa?

Indeed.

In fact, I wasn't even aware there was such a thing as "speed runs". Imagine the dismay were I to inadvertantly join one, not realizing what is meant by "speed"! Every week I encounter another little bit of culture shock as I learn what is keeping the power gamers occupied these days.

LOL! Cuz we're only human, I guess?

I think our tremendous potential, as a species, is only surpassed by our profound frailty/inadequacy. Consequently, mercy/compassion (for our failures) needs to trump hope/faith (in our capacity to triumph).

Gawd, I really didn't mean to sound so dang preachy!

So I thought I was (finally) fairly fluent in all this IO terminology, but "regular set IO" is throwing me a bit. I know there are generic IOs and set IOs. What is a "regular" set IO? What is an irregular set IO? Is this just an informal way of distinguishing between Very Rare (purple) set IOs and "everything else" (i.e., regular = everything else)?

To an extent I agree. There is a mechanism already in place for tagging you are looking for a team to do missions/TFs/Trials/everything, but nobody seems to use it. Therefore, the associated search mechanism probably gets little use. Instead you just see zone announcements with instructions to "pst" if interested. Even when a team leader uses the search mechanism (which I always used to do when forming teams back in the day), the usual etiquette was to send a tell to anyone on the search list describing the team goals rather than sending blind invites. But if F2P players can't respond to those tells, all of these methods become useless.

I think Paragon needs to develop a team recruiting mechanism that is simple and effective enough that it doesn't drive players to come up with their own alternative recruiting conventions and methods. Right now, the almost universal reliance on /tell as half of the recruiting process is a failure mode. It needs to be replaced by something, and ideally something even better than /tell.

I admire those of you who actually take the time to organize your recruitment. Announcing where to go to be added to the team, etc. But most of the time teams are formed on the fly, especially as members drop and replacements are sought while everyone is on their way to the next mission door. The ease and convenience of /broadcast-/tell is just too strong to think it will go away; instead you'll just find F2P players left out of most ad-hoc teams, and therefore feeling left out of teaming in general.

Oh, and not everyone has the luxury of a group of friends on Skype. I used to play with a group of friends and we used Ventrilo. It was great, but they don't play COH anymore, so I'm pretty much left just joining ad-hoc teams as they pop up. Thankfully I'm VIP and don't have to deal with the unavailability of /tell.

What is "Freem"?

It isn't? Then why did RMTers effectively disappear from CoX?

Oh, good point!

What, btw, is an "equivalent purchase"? IOW, how much does an F2P customer have to spend in the Paragon Market in order to be upgraded to Premium? Surely it isn't enough to simply unlock a 50 cent beard to your costume piece list. Is it $5 (PP400)?

Okay, but what would happen to subscribers (in the West) faced with playing purely ala cart from now on? If they love the game play, I would expect them to keep playing, paying only for those features they really care about. Would the lack of a fixed-price "bundle" really be so psychologically devastating that former subscribers would just leave the game en masse? It's a little hard for me to believe.

I think that if there was no VIP tier, and that the Premium tier, as currently conceived, was changed in one small way: unlocking all previously available characters (rather than available slots being calculated based on previous playing time), that a cleverly priced ala cart menu would keep most previous subscribers around.

Haha. Fair enough.

Okay, s/Broadcast/Local/g