_Story_

Did interest in this channel peter out already? Looks like I'll have to try something new to renew peoples interest.

Sounds good. I'll be there. I think I'll bring the guy I named my new creative community channel after.

Here is a bit of information on the character that I created who's name was the inspiration for this channel (taken from his in-game character description):

There are never too many heroes. Paragon City must be kept safe from the clutches
of evil. It must never fall!

Everything in the universe has an inherant amount of psychokinetic energy. Humans often use this energy unknowingly throughout their lives, often manifesting phenomenon such as 'ghosts' which are often mistaken for the spirits of the deceased (although sometimes they are as a persons last moments are etched into reality). The city of Paragon has an extraordinary amount of this energy focused here, located amidst a thick cluster of multiple nexus connecting lines of energy from all over the planet. As well there is a flood of powerful entities here, human and otherwise all gathered. The collective will of Paragon City has pooled and manifest itself in the form of Paragon One. He is the hopes and dreams of the citizens for a better world. The fighting spirit of the heroes of Paragon are strong within him. The city itself made flesh and blood.

I hope to write more up on Paragon One and share it here in the forums sometime.

Well, I'm still trying to get everyone invited. In the meantime I've decided to leave the channel public and see how that goes. That means you can add yourself to the channel in the meantime.

Hmmm... I guess I'm going to just have to make it a public channel and see how well that goes.

Invites that were successfully sent out:

Rowr, Yumii, donnchadh, NewEden.

I'll try the others again. I'm not sure if it's the names themselves, or if I have to wait for the accounts to be logged in.

I'm sending the channel invites out now.

I wanted to gather together a lot of the creative types playing together in CoX into a global channel to discuss various ideas and anything related to our creativity and imagination. I created for this the global channel Paragon One. I've added a few people to the channel already, and hope to add more. If you would like to be added to the channel then please post your global here (or if you prefer, send me a private message).

New channel: Heroes and Villains
Purpose: Roleplaying, events and general chatter

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All kidding aside, it baffles me every time I see someone refer to their character as their "toon"... Maybe it's because I'm a P&P RPGer and not a video gamer, but where in the heck did that originate? I think it sounds pretty silly.

Thanks

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The first place I heard 'Toon' used was on The Realm many years back, where it was common. Apparently, the 'toon' vs. 'character' thing largely depends on what your introduction to online gaming culture was. There isn't really much of a difference.

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I find most people I've encountered use the word 'toon' because it's simply shorter to type than 'character'. Those lazy people. :P

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That the game used to be a whole lot more fun to play than it is now, before nerfing became the dev solution to every single problem?

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Purely subjective. Some of us enjoy the experience a whole lot more now than we did before the changes. Try keeping this to facts and not to personal perception.

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It makes me think that they thought of only 8 powers, but had to fill in 9 tiers. So... let's subtract DEF here (UY) and put it over here (TH), to tone down the potential DEF provided by Invinc. Viola! 9 powers!

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Unyielding was originally Unyielding Stance and it had no -DEF component. It did, however, make you immobile. This was incredibly unpopular and it was decided to remove that penalty. At that point, the -DEF was added to replace the Immobilize penalty.

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How about changing the -DEF for +Slow? Any other ideas anyone?

Happy birthday Positron!

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Posts like this always make me feel so horrible! In my 11 thousand + posts I haven't done anything productive.

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Being productive has its disadvantages. While I was off testing things, Pilcrow used 7,241 CoH eval keys to steal the "most helpful poster" title from me, I just know he did.

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I got nominated for it by a few posters and I am just a dumb blond

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Well, at least you aren't being ignored most of the time. The few exceptions to when I'm getting ignored are those times when I'm being flamed to a crispy crunchy core. Sometime because I hit the nail on the head and the truth hurts, and others because I have a tendancy to either misrepresent my intentions or I get overemotional and post something stupid to which I have to either restate myself more clearly or appoligize for being a temporary idiot.

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You succeed to YOUR expectations.

Look at the GM and AV change thread - your PLAYERS do not agree. You steal the FUN out of the game for Risk vs Reward mantra you Devs constantly spew.

STOP balancing the game against the Uber builds and balance it for the CASUAL gamer. I was in a mission at level 21 with my controller where I had to tell the tank to stop leading and let me do it because he was repeatedly getting killed and required full time healing because his Fire tank did not know to take Tough.

Yeah, how fun was it for him? It sucked having only the tank die 3 times and having my controller take over the tank job - in fact the tank could have turned his armor off after that because he no longer served his function.

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The AVs and GMs needed the buffs. As for how much they were buffed, I have seen that the developers now appear to be overdoing things rather than underdoing things, and doing so intentionally. I think they would rather put the player in a situation where they are underperforming and tweak from there to find a more balanced solution, rather than introduce a situation where the player is overperforming and have to introduce another change where the players will most undoubtably view it as a negative change.

You can see these things in the prestige costs of the bases when they were first introduced. You can see it in how the Global Defense Nerf and Enhancement Diversification were introduced. The problem however is in being patient while waiting for the other shoe to drop in the form of the follow up changes to start introducing the rest of the changes to bring us closer to that baseline that the developers are working towards.

So far we have seen the new Defense changes introduces in Issue 7 which are the other side of the coin for some of the Global Defense changes. We're still waiting for new enhancements, tweaks to prestige costs and a lot of other things in the game. As far as that it's all about resources. Some things are easier to change, while others take more resources in the form of time, manpower, technical prowess in relation to the technical limitations imposed by the game and cost.

So rather than get over emotional about this I recommend you be patient and enjoy the games as best you can while waiting for that other shoe. It may be a matter of alterig your perception to help yourself enjoy the game, maybe even changing how you approach the game in general.

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I think there are red names that would listen to anyone who:

* is respectful, even if angry

* is patient, even if anxious

* knows what the heck they are talking about, and is willing to learn to speak their language when they talk about it

* Knows and respects the difference between reporting something is broken, and complaining about something that you don't approve of.

* Checks first, reports second; not the other way around.

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This is the kind of stuff I approve of and have absolutely no problems with. I'd do more of it myself but it seems that most people beat me to these kinds of issues and look into them with far more skill and understanding than I might be willing to with my limited play time. Why add my lesser insights to the discussion if there isn't going to be said anything that hasn't already been said, and probably much better than I could have said it? I tend to reserve my posting for those places where I perceive my insights to have value, and occassionally those times when I post without thinking and then have to appologize later for being a temporary idiot.

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This isn't complaining, this is QA testing to make the game better.

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Foo, do you ever get the odd feeling that a certain number of people who play the game and post to the forums don't want the game to get better? It seems inconceivable to me that this would be so (if you play the game, and pay for it, why would you not want the best you can have for your money?), and yet it seems to be. Almost any time someone dares point out that accuracy seems not to be working right, or damage is off from what one would expect, or anything like that -- frequently even when there ARE good numbers to back it up -- there is no shortage of people coming out of the woodwork to gainsay them.

And I just don't really understand it. If there really is a bug that's making the streak-breaker not work, for example, and the streak-breaker is SUPPOSED to work, then why would you try to shout down someone who had posted evidence that the streak-breaker is broken? If Luck is supposed to be a +25% buff and has been for 2+ years, and you find out that it isn't, why in the world would someone flame you for posting it?

Don't we WANT the devs to find the bugs and exterminate them? Do people really prefer playing a BUGGED game?

And yet, apparently some people do. I just don't get it.

F

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Hey, I don't mind people posting about problems with the game. Find a problem, test it out, post you finding in the form of facts and details. Sure, I'm all for that. Reminding the developes that the problem still needs attention, keeping them up to date and providing a gentle reminder in case they've forgotten. Sure I'm fine with that too.

Jumping on the boards and spouting venom just because something in the game irks them is something altogether different. If people can't see the difference than I may finally understand why they are so confused as to why the developers don't respond immediately and why other players will react by posting their own overemotional replies.

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How many "alarms" can we check per day, while also generating and testing new content? I can guarantee we get more "alarms" than we have time to look at properly.

An easy reply to that is 'Hire more people.' Ok, so who do we let go to keep this in our budget, and isn't that just robbing Peter to pay Paul? Increasing the budget means either Cryptic or NCSoft loses income OR we increase the monthly charge for the game. None of these are really good ideas or feasible.

There is an old engineering adage to the effect of "You can have it Fast, Good, or Cheap -- pick two." It basically refers to the fact that time, money and quality are all inter-related. Time and Money are often fixed quantities ("We need this in three weeks! No, we aren't increasing your budget for it.") which means features are designed to, or cut to those parameters.

One last thing to consider, you as players represent thousands of times more manpower than we have here. No matter what, you will almost always find bugs that we miss here. Statistically, that is almost a certainty.

None of this is meant as an excuse. We have a lot of bugs, and as many get introduced each new patch as get fixed. So long as new content is being added, that will likely remain the case (although, since we have had a QA dept. here at Cryptic for the last 10 months or so, things are improving in that regard.)

We are trying to make CoH/CoV the best game possible -- we work on it every day, and constantly discuss ways to improve the various systems we have and how to prioritize changes and/or fixes. Sometimes, we screw up, but most of the time, we succeed.

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I understand this completely. I've discussed this several times in the forums and tend to be ignored. Aside from that however I'd like to congratulate you and the others at Cryptic for all the hard work you've put into making this a great game. It's a shame that rather than enjoy the game that many players would rather complain. One can point out problems with the game without complaining and in general stirring things up and making people miserable. I often get called a fanboi for pointing out my observations, probably because I tend not to include many negative comments or criticism about the developers or their work. I see most of the subjects I would comment on, when I do notice some flaw in the game, already being discussed to the point that there is no need to add any further comment. Especially when my comments would most likely be lost amidst the outpour of venom I see here in the forums daily. As for something that matter to me though, I'd like to ask if there is any ETA for costume fixes (especially the readdition of older costume options to the newer more flexible system)? I'd be willing to pay for an expansion that deals with only costume updates/additions to get this in the pipeline.

I'm sorry if you don't like it, but my experiences with mastermind have been very favorable. I'm even thinking of getting the Presence power pool so I can 'tank' with my mastermind.

For everything listed for Issue 7 and everything mentioned as being planned for Issue 8 and beyond I've seen a ton of players respond with a simple, "Meh, whatever."

You people suddenly get excited over a big red ball?

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There are many stories of GMs appearing in unusual guises.

Did you know... there was a GM who always appeared as a PINK policebot. I forget her name but she was said to appear as a beautiful PINK Bot.

Did you know... a GM appeared once as Countess Crey. According to the story I heard, a player used the Countess Crey name or some variety of it and didn't want to change it. The GM appeared as the genuine Countess Crey to deal with the issue.

The most likely story of unusual appearances was...

All the signature heroes left their respective pedestals and appeared in Atlas Park to honor the recently deceased Christopher Reeve. They all lined up and briefly saluted the real life Hero.

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It would be a nice tribute to add an NPC called Christopher Reeve or something similar to the game (with the family's permission of course).

I'm wondering if the reason my character was excluded was because I mistakenly forgot to submit some of the required information, even though I did resubmit everything later in full (albiet just the day after the deadline as I realized my mistake too late)? I had sent a PM to _Awry_ and posted in the forums but I never recieved a reply on this. If I wasn't selected for this reason I'd like to know. If they did accept my entry and it just didn't get chosen then I'd like to know that as well. Hanging in limbo like this is kind of frustrating. Just so you know, I sent in the brute Inferno Hammer.

The developers also stated that while the free issues wouldn't be as frequent they would be much larger issues. So much larger issues that won't feel rushed or hacked together. I myself prefer this approach if it's going to bring higher quality additions and fixes with each issue.

As for the expansions, I believe the kind of content they intend to relase with the expansion is going to be a sort of a super-issue as mentioned in one of the above posts. I also think that for what they are intending to do that having the extra resources provided by the expansion will almost be a requirement. The additional draw of new players by having a product on the shelves is also something important to consider as has been mentioned previously as well.

Congratulations on the 2 years running! It's a shame I couldn't be here for both of them (as I didn't have a computer capable of running 3d until after the first year). I look forward to all the new content, while you can look forward to lots of ideas submitted by me. I assume that the release of a retail expansion will be due to the fact that it will be crammed full of enough new content to warrant a pricetag instead of being a free issue. I expect it to be well worth the cost of everything I've seen so far is any indication. I'm hoping that there is a beta for the upcomming expansion and I make it onto the list. I had to wait until the pre-order beta invite to get in on the City of Villains action. Anyway, keep up the good work and I'll keep enjoying the game.

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Found a neat little cricket on the web, but I can't figure out which background I like the best:

grassy cricket

leafy cricket

lightbeam cricket

zoom cricket

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Greetings Cricket!

I'd have to say of all the avatars presented here in this thread this batch have to be my favorite. I'm hoping that you'll be picking one of these, or taking the first one and adding your own background.