AmazingMOO

Beam Rifle, Dark Blast, Dark Manipulation: Hot dog! New blaster sets! I have my first Beam Rifle character planned and am also planning on rerolling a 46ish vampiric fire/psi blaster as dark/dark.

Time Manipulation: While not quite as excited about Time as I am about the other blast sets, I'm looking forward to it. I've got a 35ish Illusion/Kin controller that's going to get rerolled as an Illusion/Time because it fits his concept more closely. He's supposed to be a Zen Master of Time Badassery and Kin was as close as we got to that before Time came along.

New Tutorial: Eh... I like the tutorial, but you spend 5, maybe 10 minutes of your career there. The big thing for me is being able to roll what you like as far as AT, and choose your alignment in the Tutorial. I'm planning on heroic Dark/Dark and Archery/TA corrupters.

F2P Characters: Despite being a pretty firmly dedicated to my subscription, I'm REALLY looking forward to this. I'm burned out on incarnate content, but the most group action these days is for iTrials and level 50+ taskforces. I'm really looking forward to playing with a lot of fresh blood and returnees.

The scheduling of various cut-off dates for the NCSoft store makes it looks like that issue 21 will launch on or shortly after Labor Day.

So here we are with a slew of hopefully new and excited players about to join us... and they won't have a clue what hit them when the Paragon train runs them over.

CoH is NOT yer average MMO. We aren't beholden to holy trinity tactics, nor is the game all about maxing out your HP. Fights last seconds rather than minutes and getting a swarm of 17 enemies at once is common place... something that would wipe all but the most powerful of teams in some other MMOs I could name.

Players who spend time in /help and who wear the 'Helper' tag probably need to spend some time over the next few days thinking about what genuinely new players are not going to know about the game... and might make it suck for them if they don't.

My thoughts... please feel free to add your own:

- Debuffs in this game are EXTREMELY powerful when compared to some other games. They shouldn't be skipped just because they don't come with damage.

- You can PL to get to the end game... but the CONTENT of the game is still spread all across it in the form of mission arcs and taskforces

- Content scales to your team. It may not be in your best interest to take a full team, especially at lower levels.

- When in doubt, take more purples (Luck Inspirations).


Remember, these should be things that existing and even returning players won't think much of, but that new players might get confused by.

I can't imagine that this important aspect of CoH Freedom has been accidentally left off the testing menu.

That said, the VIP beta seems to be for only active subscribers. Will there be any way for an active subscriber to beta with a 'F2P' account?

I personally plan to keep my VIP subscription going for the foreseeable future. However, since I don't care much for trials, it occurs that I'm going to spend a lot of time grouping with F2P players in the next little bit. I want these folks to be as happy, comfortable, and at ease as possible so that they stick around and become regulars. If there are lots of issues griefing f2p accounts, that's not going to be the case.

This sounds pretty awesome, actually.

In the not too distant future, we're going to start hearing more about the new t5 powers in the pools. For the power pools, these seem to all be 'Cap Breakers' of some kind, such as intra-zone teleport or a speed boost that ignores given arbitrary caps.

But, let's look at this situation for a bit before and ask what needs to be done to make these powers enjoyable.

In particular, let's examine flight, widely considered the weakest, slowest travel power. It comes with a huge tactical advantage in that enemies who cannot jump or fly up to meet you cannot melee you.

The speed cap for flight is 58.63 mph. As of issue 18, simply taking flight will place you at this cap without any kind of enhancement whatsoever. You cannot enhance fly to make it any faster. Despite this, it still happily accepts flight enhancements and sets.

The t5 power has been reported a few places as 'Afterburners'-- a way to temporarily boost your flight speed over the cap.

So if I want to go faster than 58.63 flying, I have to take this power. I can enhance fly all I want, but it will never go faster.

Let's look at the other speed caps in the game:

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Limits

Super Jump caps out at its apex speed with 3 SOs at 78.18 mph
Super Speed caps out with 2 SOs at 92.5
By comparison, flight comes pre-capped at 58.63

This curve is not terribly intuitive and should be revisited, I think, especially if we're about to put in powers that will alter this mucked-up balance even further.

First of all, something that I think we could all use to know is, the global speed limit-- is it still around 96 MPH? Can it be moved further out with the new improvements to the game server engine?

Second, Fly has, right now, little opportunity for enhancement. I'd personally like to do some slotting with it before buying another power to make it work faster. Can the caps be readjusted so that they're a a hair more linear than +20mpg, +20 mph, +16mp


I'd personally like to recommend a curve that went something like the following

Hard speed cap is 120 MPH

Speed's unenhanced speed is 60mph. With 3 SOs, it just the 120mp cap.

Jump's unehanced speed is 55mph. With 3 SOs, it lands somewhat short of the cap at 110mph. Futher enhancements such as swift or travel bonuses could take it to the cap.

Flight's unenhanced fly is 50mph. With 3 SOs, it lands at about 100mph. Then other enhancements, such as swift, travel bonuses, or the new Afterburners power could take it all the way up to the 120MPH global cap.


How doable is this? If something like this is completely off the wall, can you guys give us a little more info on how Afterburners or any other movement power is going to work?

Of all the developments I hoped to see with 'Freeem^H^H^H^H^H^H^H 'Freedom', this is the one I that was really pinning my hopes on. This is the one that's keeping me playing.

Thank you for renewing your focus on costumes, Paragon, and making them more widely available. This is the most important thing you can do to keep people playing the game.

Good job. Keep it up.

Don't neglect the pony.

Right now, the most profitable thing a non-50 team can do outside of taskforces is alignment tips missions. That's great. I love alignment missions. There's a problem, however, in that there are relatively few of them. They get repetitive QUICKLY. Also, it means that players are getting the most award from doing a miniscule fraction of the game's content over and over again. That's bad. I won't say the 'F' word, but repeating content means that the game gets stale and older faster than it needs to.

There have been a few suggestions for making arc missions more rewarding, especially to team members other than the mission holder. However, none of these have ever really been implemented by the devs. Accordingly, it's VASTLY more profitable to solo your own arc missions than it is to team with another player since you get reward merits at the end that other players do not get.

Let's talk about what can be done to make arc missions more attractive to teams. Since the most obvious solution... allowing players to share in merit rewards at the end of an arc has been suggested many times and not acted upon, let's assume that it is, for some reason, unworkable and concentrate on different solution.

My suggestions:

1. Award reward merits at the end of missions based on map size.

We already know that maps are flagged as 'short', 'medium', and 'long'. Use this data to award extra merits to all players who team on an arc mission.

When a team, rather than a solo player finishes a mission, award the players 1 reward merit for a small map, 2 reward merits for a medium map, and 3 reward merits for a large map.

Make this award have a timeout on it... 20 minutes or so, or whatever number is necessary to discourage same mission farming. This way both the team leader gets a bonus of award merits for finishing an arc, he's encourage to have teammates join him, and they have good incentive, in the same basic ballpark as Morality awards, for joining arc mission teams, even if they're not able to complete the whole arc.


2. Award alignment credit for completing 'Villain' or 'Hero' marked missions.

Arc missions are usually marked for which alignment they're supposed to fall for, in a way that predates the current tip alignment system. However, if a player completes a villainous mission with a team, allow him to apply a tick of 'Villainy' on his alignment meter so that he can continue to build credit to the thrice-weekly morality mission. You could even go so far as to award 'partial' ticks so that, say, 2 regular arc missions would grant the same alignment shift as 1 tip alignment missions.


3. Up the rate of after-mission recipe awards so that with more people on the team, players are much more likely to get a 'Silver' class recipe.

Allow a small chance of 'Gold recipes' to drop in this roll as well... again only when a mission is completed by a team.

Right now, I think it's a 1 in 8 chance for a silver class recipe. I'd suggest dropping that to 1in6 for 2 players, 1 in 4 for 3 players, 1 in 3 for 4 players, and then 1 in 2 for any larger teams.


I'm certain that you guys have lots more suggestions, some of them even more easily workable than these. Share?

Synapse's post on the new wave of Power Proliferation was pretty awesome. I'm really looking forward to dark/dark blasting. My 40ish vampiric Fire/Psi blaster may well get rerolled, especially if Drain Life is still in the mix.

That said, I find myself being ambivalent about the changes Synapse is talking about for Energy Armor:

I've been pretty down on the game, its developers, and NCSoft marketing due to my frustrations with the incarnate system.

However, it's terribly unfair to characterize any of the above as anything less than excellent when it comes to creating a great game. More often than not, they listen to the players and demonstrate that they care about the playerbase's concerns.

With that in mind, I'd like to suggest some things that should not cause a lot of contention or, hopefully trolling:


- Tourist Alignment Supergroups

Currently, Supergroups must be either hero alignment, allowing Heroes and Vigilantes to join, or villain alignment, allowing Villains and Rogues to join. Each one can only have teleporters to the hero or villainous zones. I'd love to see supergroups that were on the vigilante alignment, allowing vigilantes and villains to join and rogue alignment, allowing Rogues and Heroes to join. Currently, the big balance between being on a 'Tourist' alignment and being a pure alignment is access to content versus alignment rewards. A few extra teleporters in 'tourist' bases, accessible only to people who can visit those zones anyway doesn't initially seem like a significant modification to that balance.

Another request in the same vein would be:


- Coalitions Between Adjacent-faction Supergroups

This would allow a hero supergroup to make a coalition with Rogue and Vigilante supergroups, but not with a Villainous supergroup. Again, any services in the base not available to a given player, such as teleporters to restricted zones, would still be unavailable.


- A F2P Server Channel for when 'Freedom' hits.

Currently, a lot of triallers end up using the /help channel to look for groups since it's the only semi-global channel they can access. My understanding (and I'm perfectly willing to be corrected on more current info) is that this is going to be the same when 'Freedom' drops. Instead, I'd like to suggest opening a 'F2P' channel so that /help can remain helpful and both F2P and VIP players can recruit for teams on a channel designed for it. Those who weren't interested could simply ignore it like they currently do the /help channel.


- Aliases for commands and chat channels

I'm not part of the 'Mouse is unnecessary' faction, but when chatting, I do tend to have more errors when I switch back and forth between the mouse and keyboard to change channels. Keybinding channel access causes me more mistells than using the mouse, however, so I stick to using it to switch channels. This is especially true when the keybinded command causes a channel name to scroll off the side of the display.

I'd love an intermediate step where you could alias your own slash commands. Something like the following would be very cool:

/alias bdg "send BadgeChannel"

This would allow you to type '/bdg' to chat in the channel of your choice the same way /g allows you to chat in teams and /lc allows you to chat in League Chat. The visual representation on the screen would still give you the confirmation to avoid mistells-- or at least it would for me.

Since commands are already limited by the functionality of the '$$' operator to avoid easy macroing or botting, this doesn't immediately seem like it would cause any harm in that direction.


- Place All Window Toggles in the Main Menu

I've complained before that the UI is growing very cluttered. There are a few suggestions for helping players to deal with this on their own, such as creating macro buttons for toggling certain windows or editing the Quick Chat menu to include macros for opening and closing those windows.

However, it seems like the ideal solution for this issue would be to list all the window toggles that are not already in the main menu there. If necessary, create a submenu like:

Menu -> Windows -> Incarnate Abilities
Menu -> Windows -> Salvage
Menu -> Windows -> Recipes


Thank you for your great work and effort on the game, Paragon and NCSoft. I hope you continue to create a great experience.

Some time ago, NCsoft made the statement that a major goal of Paragon Studios was to give the players what they wanted, within reason.

Right now, there is a significant demand for solo Incarnate Content that can be completed on a schedule that at least gives a fraction of the progression offered by trials.

Right now, that is not in the game, despite the fact that it has been repeatedly requested by a wide array of players from before day one of the introduction of the incarnate system.

It's been six, nearly seven MONTHS since the live introduction of the Incarnate system. This request has not been fulfilled in any meaningful way despite the HUGE development timeframe. The only available solo path can leave a player grinding for literally years for what a trial player can achieve in days. Right now it serves mostly as an arguing point rather than being any kind of utility for the players.

Is NCSoft no longer in the business of giving the players what they want?

If not, why has there been such a huge delay on this? A number of fairly simple solutions requiring minimal development work have been suggested. Are any of these under consideration? Is there any consideration at all being given to this very common player want?

As Ascension Armor has been earmarked solely as for Incarnate players and designed with that in mind from the start, I'm willing to give on that.

The other items, the auras, emotes, emblems, and costume change emotes should ABSOLUTELY be available through the PP store.

I've already bought most of them with merits, but would buy the whole shebang for Mrs. Moo's account the second its available.

Vote: +1

This needs a fix, and soon.

This is not something to leave for next issue, as the price drops were.

The data mining has to have been done by now. Solo progress is not going to get any faster. Single team progress has been boosted very slightly by adding Tin Mage and Apex to the list that can earn Astrals.

Meanwhile, trial progress has been sped up 30% for those who care to farm it.


Devs, PLEASE don't let this rot like it has been. This is not a good situation. It's a bad situation and it'll get worse.

So about the wonderful headgear the Carnival of Light folks are wearing:

http://www.cityofheroes.com/images/i...l_of_light.jpg

These are going to be available for players to wear, right, David and Jay? Right?

I know you guys wouldn't go repeating the situations where you made all kinds of flowing robes and dresses and then never let players wear them.

Right?

Please reassure me.