Ardrea

I don't think changing the mechanical abilities of character to reflect origins will go over well, for many of the reasons noted here, and probably more.

I wouldn't mind if powersets had additional alternate animations reflecting the various origins. That's a huge amount of dev work though -- so much I couldn't bring myself to actually advocate for it.

*crackle, static, buzzzt*

*Over a radio frequency from the Rogue Isles, a news report starts up*

*pop, sqweeel, snap!* ... Good evening, this is the Paragon Review; bringing local news to the region through collaboration of WSPDR Impact Report and Crey Technology Consulting Associates.

I am Kherianda, reporting. Today is February 2st. Now for the updates you've been waiting for.

Headlines across the region today are occupied with reports of grisly deaths of several office workers connected to the strange office supplies thefts from several weeks ago.

Bodies of seven men and women of varying backgrounds were found strewn along the eastern end of the Argo Highway, mutilated by what may have been stone tools.

Police investigators are acting on assumption that the Banished Pantheon are abducting lay citizens for some unknown purpose. Caution is advised.

And now for a word from our sponsor.

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WSPDR Impact report has learned that MAGI officials are scrambling to keep pieces of an item improbably called The Wheel of Destruction secure.

Listeners may recall the numerous times security at MAGI vaults has been compromised. A MAGI spokesperson would only say that they were aware their prior security record was not exemplary.

Vanguard issued a Gold Alert yesterday to extend to the end of this month.

Under the low level Gold Alert, citizens of Paragon and the Etoiles are cautioned to keep power outage supplies and test their fire and evacuation drills.

No reason was provided for this change in alert status.

In lighter news, yesterday the faculty and students of Industrial Blvd Elementary #208 in King's Row held their annual Hero's Day.

Local heroes were invited into the school and participated in arts, crafts, and athletic activities.

Hero Day began the school year following the July 2006 event when students at #208 school were held hostage by The Killer Toy.

Rapid response from Paragon's Hero community resulted in forty-five school children being rescued. The Killer Toy, a.k.a., Jeanette Robins of the Etoile Islands, was killed during the rescue.

The forecast for tonight is warm with a low of 39 and with clear skies until morning. Windy tomorrow with falling temperatures through the day and a chance of snow flurries and an afternoon high expected in the mid 30's.

This has been Kherianda and the Paragon Review, brought to you by WSPRD sponsored by Crey Technology Consulting Associates; serving all your computational bioinformatics needs since 2012.

WSPDR Impact is broadcast worldwide on SH frequencies and on Radio Free Etoile at a power of one-hundred ninety thousand watts from our Cap Au Diable transmitter complex. WSPDR official time is 20:17.

*screeetch, pop, fizz .. static*

There are a number of global channels you could join to help connect you up with roleplayers; such as joining roleplay pick-up teams and getting to know some of the players behind the characters. Here's a short list of the ones I'm aware of:

RP Virtue -- General RP discussion, teaming, and social chat. The talk there can wander widely. It's active and has a large population, and did I mention the talk there can wander? Yeah.

Virtue RP Revival -- More focused on organizing open RP. It's newer and has a lower population, but the chat can be more focused and purposeful. I'm one of the organizers on this channel (though not a mod) and we're working to develop more open RP on Virtue by running larger meet-ups, zone events, and themed stories.

Roleplayers -- a large channel I'm not a member of. Its description reads: "RP plots/storylines, discussions about characters etc. RP teams and players events "

Roleplayers LFT -- another fairly large one. "A channel for Virtue RP'ers to put together teams/TFs/SFs/events."

Joining global channels is easy (though you must be a VIP or a Tier-3 Premium player or above), just type in /chan_join "name of channel" into your chat bar. If you don't like the style or way a channel is run, just leave it and try another. It's a wide community and you'll find a way into it that works for you.

A number of us are trying to get more open RP going on Virtue. If you watch this forum and the possibly (I know they're not everyone's thing) the RP global channels you may find opportunities to get into some of those open events, and meet some new people/characters through them.

It normally has a range of 70', would you see any operational benefit to slotting for range?

Maybe I should rephrase my question. If you had to six-slot Fulcrum Shift, and had unlimited influence, what would you put in it, and why? It doesn't matter if you think those slots would be better elsewhere, that's not my question.

I try to use it on every spawn group; so faster recharge is useful. It also stacks with itself sequentially, so having a short recharge makes it easier to boost the team to their damage caps.

Basically, how would one slot Fulcrum Shift for maximum performance? Maximum meaning no expense limit and up to six slots in the power in a level 50 team environment.

It accepts accuracy, endurance cost, range, and increase attack rate enhancements, but no sets. I find accuracy and recharge are good, but past putting in two of each of those and maybe a third to hit ED hard, are there ways to get more out of it? Range seems kind of pointless, since being far away from the targets being hit reduces the buff effectiveness. And end; it's just not that expensive. Are there any Hami's that make sense in the power? (and aren't exploits?)

A reply quickly arrives in Baron Von Bloom's email.

I'm the "OP" in the two other threads, and I approve of cooperation, shared credit, and shared community building -- a little coordination goes a long ways. Press onward!

"Yes, sir; I'll get a team right on it."

The handset clicks down into its cradle, and the secure mode light blinks off. Undersecretary Murphy hadn't called her directly over the secure grey phone in over a week. After the reports of Banished, Tsoo and Thorns increased activity the Undersecretary for Special Projects had called in some personal favors; one in particular to an former student of his; now a post-doc at Paragon University. He should tell me these things -before- he has them done. He has no instinct for counterintelligence. Of -course- his pet's research was stolen just as he finished it. Now I have to clean this awful mess up. Talitha would send a team out to handle this. Heroes, villains, whomever. Whatever relic this was and its specific power is irrelevant; so long as the Directorate learned what that magical aspect was and what it meant to the Banished.

Sitting down at her comm, Talitha messaged the Strike Team leaders with the particulars. See Dr. Warren Osgood, Department of Archaeology, Paragon University. Help him recover his notes, complete his research, and find out what the Banished are digging for. And if they succeed, then this might even give her some weight to use dealing with "Mister Undersecretary Murphy" in the future.

(( AE Arc this time: "The Shard of Ta'ka-Re", Arc ID # 536152. It is three missions, level 15-40, 15-40, and 40-50. These are roleplay missions, and aren't too challenging. The bosses may say things with clues in them. If multiple groups decide to run these, in roleplay assume it was run once, with a fairly large group of heroes and villains working together against correspondingly larger/tougher groups of enemies. Feel free to write up and post your in-character experience with it. This continues our prelude storyline regarding Dark Astoria.))

Another way to put a wild guess to the amount of inf could go like this:

1000 people playing actively in combat 24/7
1000 Inf per Second earned, sustained average rate
86400 Seconds per Day
365 Days per year
7.5 Years of CoH operations

-- Multiplication Occurs --

= 236,520 Billion.

I pulled my first two numbers out of thin air, but this speaks to the huge potential Inf production the game can have.

For a while now, much of the roleplay on Virtue has been harder to find, and perhaps, harder to get involved with. Some of the better known RPSG's have been less active, and much of the roleplay of others is more in semi-private events, their own internal storylines, and is conducted inside instance missions and SG bases than in the past. None of this is bad, but the need for open server roleplay that builds the community and lends it cohesiveness is still present.

A few players from one of the roleplay global channels have decided to work to build up that part of the roleplay environment again. This is the Virtue RP Revival Project.

This project is not a Super-group or Villain-group, it's an opportunity to build and participate in server-wide open RP storylines and events suitable for roleplayers of all alignments and levels. Events will include forum posts and stories, in-game discussion meetups, AE missions, canon story-arcs, TFs, Trials, and large-scale zone events. This effort is "open server" in the sense that any and all in-game walk-up RP'ers will be worked into stories and events as they occur. Stories will be general, and leverage both in-game lore and new game additions -- it's to provide a common backdrop as a framework to help promote open RP on the entire server.

This isn't meant and won't replace the existing roleplay that individuals and groups currently have; but we would hope it might help those various groups find common themes and events to help interact in roleplay in wider venues than inside bases, instanced missions, and other private gatherings.

The project will work to initiate and press broad-based storylines and associated events and materials to foster that wider community.

We will make use of some existing in-game roleplay oriented global channels, forums posts (such as The Special Council's Special Project, in-game in-character broadcasts on roleplay channels and select zones, AE missions, and even zone-events tied together with. We'll also use this thread here in the forums to discuss non-spoiler parts of our plans and efforts and to solicit feedback on them. Finally, we've created a public global channel for the express purpose of gathering those interested in this project to ease reviving, organizing, and coordinating RP and RP events -- that channel is Virtue RP Revival and any Virtue roleplayer is welcome to join; just type "/chan_join Virtue RP Revival" in at your chat prompt in-game.

Our first Theme:

We are slowly starting up a storyline related to the official zone makeover coming in Issue 22 (on Beta right now) for Dark Astoria. What we're hoping to promote are players discussing some of the early clues regarding the upcoming events in Dark Astoria, in-zone in-character teams exploring and investigating the unusual activity of the Banished, Tsoo, and Circle of Thorns. These groups are active in many zones and on both Red and Blue sides. Some material on that is available in the "Special Project" thread already mentioned.

What you can do to help:

• Pick up on our themes and use them to add to your own roleplay.
• Use your creativity to build on our themes in open roleplay
• Write stories and posts about your own characters and supergroups and their activities that relate to the Revival Project themes in open forums, here on the Virtue board or on the Roleplay board
• Join our global OOC channel to help plan, schedule, or run related open events
• Have your SG, VG, or circle of friends organize and run related open events
• Gather, meet and discuss in-game events and issues or any kind in-character in public, and bring new people into those discussions.

The Revival Project is about building up the entire Virtue roleplaying community, and it will take a lot of effort from not only the present handful of core organizers, but also the work of volunteers, participants, and especially, you, to succeed.

He's also posted this thread asking for help on the same problem.

I think he's saying that he started playing, and got to the character creation screen. A message came up that it was doing the Stage 2 download (which I think is the download of the tutorial while you make a character) and he skipped it, cancelled it, or quit, or such, by mistake, before it finished. Now he's looking for help on how to put things to rights again so he can play.

A lot of the trouble with interpreting the speed vs shard, and etc., scenarios is that the game's NPC AI is very poor. Imagine if all your opponents in the ITF were individually run by reasonably skilled players, and imagine they had some time to plan and practice.

In-game missions are easy not just because we have mechanical advantages against the NPC mobs, but because individually they have very simple control heuristics, and as a mission group they have virtually none at all.

I'm not a fan of speed runs. That being said, I do go on them now and then. Most of the time, the speed-run isn't very speedy, and is marked with a lot of confusion and chain deaths, and players behaving badly. IMO, not very fun. Perhaps these aren't "real" speed runs, but they do seem to be the norm for PUG-style speed runs. Often, they're not even recruited as speed runs, and most of the team only discovers that plan halfway into the first or second mission. I'm at the point where I have to directly ask after joining "is this a speed run, because if it is, I'll bow out and find another team."

In this case, I'm considering a concept build for flight speed; and getting more than is ordinarily practical out of Afterburner is a goal.

Obviously ED's going to affect Afterburner's enhancement from multiple +flight common IOs; my question is whether it is increased by Alpha slot abilities as well -- it wasn't a given to me, since Afterburner's effect does not increase from IO set bonuses for either +Flight Speed or +Movement Speed.

Does the flight speed cap raising effect of Afterburner increase with a Tier-4 Nerve Alpha boost (+33% Flight Speed, 2/3 bypassing ED) or with a Tier-4 Agility Alpha boost (+33 Move Speed, 2/3 bypassing ED)?

Honestly, I think they should get a human interface design consultant in to scrub their store interface for a day.

The store interface is going to be the source of a large portion of their sales; there's absolutely no reason it should be this clunky. I'll claim that's a Rule: It must not be hard to buy your stuff.