Android_5Point9

They were all lumped together, so I didn't get the impression that they'd settled on one before hand, or that they were going to do more than one. The IP one just seemed really half there and the panelists sort of filled in the blanks for him and then went with it.

Eh. Personally, I think that seemed like the weakest case. The Striga revamp sounded great, Protean sounded on board for it, and Posi even wanted to make it co-op or a full on villain zone. The pitches for Shadow Shard and Eden/Hive going co-op were great too. But I guess more hero only stuff works too.

You roleplay in an MMORPG? A massively multiplayer online role playing game?!

What sick and twisted individual would even think of that!

Which is actually very handy. I've found that the CoH twitter account isn't too bad without getting bombed by 5 or so "OMG I LOVE CITY OF HEROES" retweets in a row every now and again.

And as a sidenote, I don't think Twitter was/is supposed to be used a medium for news. I blame companies using it as such and not having an actual outlet on their own website for that one.

They've said as much that it was done in order to "leave the nest." I don't think it really matters when it was done, but the fact that Jack's characters are gone. The leader figure was replaced by Positron, and the group's psychic was replaced by... a psychic. With flashier powers.


One of which he was retconned into, the next where there were all the other heroes present, and the final one not making much sense at all. In the villain task force, it's 8 people beating up on him as he shows off his shiny god powers, and uses it to free Numina. Admittedly they do sort of win, but he's whisked away at the last second anyway. All we ever did to Statesman was run a Task Force for him, rescue him, and beat him up a bunch as villains (doubly so if you were a Soldier of Arachnos). I'd argue that's far from overshadowing the players with achievements too.

I think it's more of a slippery slope argument than anything else, really. Choice (admittedly slightly paraphrased) quotes like, "We'd rather develop a new powerset than update visuals for an old one," and, "We'd rather make a new character than update the appearance of an old one," make me question a lot of the direction that's occuring over there.

Obviously nobody's pointing figures at Matt and blaming him for everything, but if you don't see the ridiculous amount of grooming his in-game representation has gotten by now (not locked in a suit yet kept his powers, has a girlfriend, taking Statesman's old job, now being retro-actively inserted into old content), and the pure spite that killed off the two characters Jack Emmert made, it's reeeeeeal tough to not make this look like a one sided slap fight.

For as much as everyone at Paragon allegedly thought I was always in Statesman's shadow thus he needed to die, I never once felt that way. Positron, though, is trying his best to get to that status.

Given that i22 was released at the same time as Mass Effect 3, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to counter another big-name release and go up against Diablo 3 on May 15th.

I'm not suggesting it was done any earlier than it has been (though obviously, neither of us know that for sure). Bugs are unreliable though, and as it's been shown, even things that are fine on beta manage to break on live. Releasing Staff at i22's launch or shortly thereafter before any patches were implemented purely by judging progress on beta would have been as bad as releasing Darkness Control or Dark Affinity - both of which had their own share of issues at launch. Just because a set is in the wings doesn't mean it's undergoing constant tweaking, especially if it's in a mostly done state. There are plenty of other things in development to soak up that time.

No, I don't think you understand. This post right here? The one that looks really simple and easily done? This took eleventy billion dollars to make, years of development time and man-hours, and at least twelve human sacrifices (we lost count after the 12th). You can't just throw these things together in 5 minutes and call it done.

I understand the analogy, but it's a bit different in comparing a physical product with a street date to a digital one. Knowing that Staff's literally been on Live since i22's release (and even before it, at least in some capacity) and could have been given to you at the flip of a switch is around 1000x more frustrating in that regard. Or in some cases like Titan Weapons, where it was oh so very briefly leaked, and people had it a few weeks before it was supposed to be out. That's levels of frustration I'd like to see UPS try to mimic.

What I meant was that people in my mindset are a very unique minority of the overall playerbase. There's a ton of people who are obviously very excited for the upcoming release, and I doubt it matters at all that they've burned out such a small portion of people who just happen to be privy to an above-average amount of information. In fact, I doubt it bothers them in the slightest. It's a melee set, it'll sell like hotcakes (or iPads, if you want a current analogy) regardless of the situation behind it all. They're going to release double xp boosters and the Hecatomb set along with it and rake in a ridiculous amount of money. That's not going to change. Obviously so, that's marketing's job, and they've done a fine job of it. In fact, they're doing a fine job now on Twitter, posting pictures of the set and retweeting comments from people who are excited over it.

So, no, I don't actually think my opinion is a shared one or that it means crap in the grand scale of things. And maybe it shouldn't. I've disagreed with a large number of Paragon's decisions since the turnover to Freedom and voiced a few of those disagreements, but it's not going to stop them from doing whatever they like, or really do anything that affects the one metric they really care about (money). We've all seen how hilariously poorly the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott went, with a large number of people who joined the Steam group for it playing it on day 1.

So, yeah. Depressing is fairly accurate to describe the situation. We're so far past the time where anything that isn't stamping your feet and making as loud of a noise as possible, gathering up other people to do the same and making yourself look a group of entitled selfish children will get you noticed in a meaningful way.

edit: And the dismissive behaviors exhibited by everyone else cements my belief. Rational complaints and concerns are "weeping" now. Outstanding.

Yep. Alignment merits as well. Glad that "fix" was finally rolled out.

Sounds like it's just you. I'm just seeing the new travel IO sets and the pets from last week.

I can only imagine that being horribly taxing as far as server resources go. Paraphrasing developer statements here, but apparently solo SGs and bases are frowned upon because they eat up server resources. I can't imagine potentially doubling the base count, even if the second half were on a new and far more efficient system.

Mind you, I do agree that it needs to happen, and that a lot of the game's core systems need overhauls. But I figured I'd just take the honor away from a redname of tossing up the generic response of why it's not feasible (and then they do it anyway).

It's exactly that, and stacks wonderfully with Eagle's Claw's boost as well.