Adeon Hawkwood

Awwww.... but I got the chloroform and everything

Technically yes, but I still wouldn't want to hold onto a grenade with the pin out in case I accidentally dropped it. Remember, once the pin is out mister grenade is not your friend.

They do change. So you can stack 5 Tiny Recharge Bonus and 5 Moderate Recharge bonuses for example.

As others have noted that's an RP reason. Even if you want to RP it it's easy enough to justify a merged market (assuming you're comfortable with the RP concept of a market in the first place). Heroes buying form Villains? Actually stolen good recovered by Longbow (with the BM paying the villain to avoid reprisals). Villains buying from Heroes? Spoils from a raid by Arachnos minions (and WW's insurance reimbursing the Heroes).

WARNING: This post contain rampant speculation.

I would guess that it is both WAI and not WAI. NCSoft did not write the forum software themselves so I assume that when the server admins (or whoever) made the changes to the rep system they simply changed it so that the comments are not displayed on your control panel rather than attempting to remove them entirely since that change is probably significantly easier. The fact that you can view comments on individual posts was presumably left in either because removing it was to complicated to do in the time available or because the person specifying the change was unaware that the feature existed (note that several people expressed surprise in this thread that you could still view comments that way.

As for why it is both WAI and not WAI. I expect that the mods ideally wanted to make it so that we could never see comment in which case the change is not WAI. However the primary goal of the mods with this change was to lower the number of complaints that they receive about abusive rep comments (since it distracts them from more important duties). From that point of view the change is pretty much WAI. As I noted earlier without an easily accessible summary very few people are going to spend time checking their posts on the off chance that someone left them negative feedback. So therefore even if people still go around leaving abusive feedback the original poster is very unlikely to see it and therefore complain about it to the mods.

To some extent it is unfortunately unavoidable. CoH has been running for 5 years and has received many updates during that time most of which have been released on a very tight schedule. Add in the fact that various programmers have come and gone over the years and it's not really surprising that the internal code is a bit messy. Over time any code base that is being maintained will be subject to entropy as new code is added, old code is removed, bugs are patched and programming methodologies change.

As for your statement that it's pretty easy to notice when variables aren't being initialized, in a large code base it really isn't. If you're lucky your compiler catches them but compilers can't always tell if a variable is being correctly initialized so might not catch it.

1. The soft cap applies to anything up to +6s with the exception being enemies with +ToHit buffs, for example custom MA critters with targeting drone.

2. In general no it isn't. Exceeding the soft cap will help against enemies with either defense debuffs and to hit buffs since it provides a margin before your effective defense drops below 95% but against other enemies defense over 45% is wasted.

3. There is a hard cap, but it's so high you'll never reach it (between 175% and 225% depending on AT). Regarding the rest of your 3rd comment, I suggest that you read this page:
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Attack_Mechanics

Conversely, would doubling the time it takes to hit 50 really help retain such a player? And would doing so be worth the potential loss of other players who find the leveling to slow?

I'm sorry, but this makes no sense. If I choose to crank up the difficulty on my character to give me a challenge then the fact that others are playing at a different level of difficulty has zero impact on my enjoyment. For example I like to play my blaster at +0x4 since at that level I can chew through hordes of minion/LTs at an enjoyable rate without to much chance of dying (unless I go in against Malta at that setting). The fact that others choose to solo at anything between -1x1 and +4x8 doesn't change the fact that for me +0x4 is the most enjoyable. Similarly if you want to turn off XP to experience more content without exemping because you enjoy it the fact that others choose not to shouldn't lessen your enjoyment.

So basically you're talking about the people who (at least subconsciously) decide that they are going to level X characters to 50 and then quit? Now there are some people like that (in fact I did this myself in WoW, I got my Dwarf Hunter to level 78 then quit to return to CoH due to a disinterest the in end game content). Besides the fact that these players probably comprise a small portion of the player base the fact is that they're players who are going to quit anyway. Yes slowing down leveling might retain them for a little longer but eventually they'll quit anyway and potentially slowing down leveling would make them quit sooner since they get fed up with the grind before reaching 50, not to mention that you're making things worse for all players just to try and retain people who are quitting anyway for a little bit longer.

Maybe people will level to quickly to truly appreciate the game and in fact we did see that somewhat with the AE babies but I don't see any proof that the current rate of leveling it to fast to allow people to appreciate the game.

Finally I'll note that people have been proclaiming DOOOOOOM!!!! for 5 years and CoH is still around so clearly the devs are doign something right.

I agree with that. Also given the rep farming that's going on the usefulness of rep as a judge of character is pretty much pointless anyway. When I see someone with a long row of green lights I have no clue if it's because they are a wonderful human being who regularly contributes well written insightful posts or if they've just been playing the rep farming game (this isn't directed at anyone in particular it's simply an observation).

Well first off, I'm not particularly surprised that you removed the comments since there were plenty of idiots abusing them. However as others have said without comments the whole rep system is pretty much pointless. The various rep farmers means that the numerical rep value has no meaning whatsoever and didn't pretty much from the start. On the other hand I used the comments as a means of signifying my approval of a particularly good post (or a cool looking avatar) without needing to clutter up the thread. If you're going to remove the comments you might as well remove the entire rep system anyway since all it doe sat the moment is add a touch of color to the boards (although I'll admit it is a nice shade of green).

Yes but really who does that? Having to check each post just in case I got a relevant comment is pointless.

No you can use it but you'll need to buy a timecard as well (effectively you'll need to pre-pay for one month after your free month ends). Most stores that sell the game also sell time cards.

And welcome to the game.

Or just add a map icon for TF/Trial contacts even when you aren't on the TF. It would be a nice QoL improvement even if they aren't running all over the place. I've pretty much learnt where they all are now but when I was new finding them was really annoying.

Sure there are advantages for Villains. Hero side has a much larger supply of items which means that prices tend to be more stable and for rarer items (i.e. some of the level 30 merit IOs) there is actually stock available for purchase.

As for your second point, I'm going to call BS on that one. I've yet to see any evidence that one side has a naturally greater earning power on a per character basis. Sure some particular sets (Fire/Kin Controllers and several Brute builds come to mind) have greater earning power due to being optimized for farming inf/drops but I don't think either side has a monopoly on good farming builds. Yes Heroes do have a higher overall earning rate due to the fact that there are more of them but for the purposes of a merged market all that really matters is the earning rates of individuals.

The one place that heroes might have a better earning rate is in merits due to the wider selection of TFs/Story Arcs available to them but even there I'd like some evidence that it actually makes a difference especially considering that the most popular TF is the ITF which is available to both Heroes and Villains.

QFT

Also a fascinating note, apparently if you write a post where all non-quoted text is in caps then the forum converts it to lower case, this sentence was added to prevent QFT from becoming qft.

I generally agree with that, although I'll note that Runescape has some very fun quests.

Fair enough in that case it does make sense.

I have my doubts about that (although I'd love to be proven wrong). The information released on side switching for Going Rogue included the extremely strong implication that they will not be merging the markets with Going Rogue (since they specifically stated that Vigilante's and Rogue's will have to use their side's market and won't get access to the other side's until they do the full switch). Under the circumstances if they're planning to merge the markets in the foreseeable future Going Rogue would seem to me the logical time to do it so if they aren't doing it then I don't think that they're planning to do it at all.