Wintry

The single most important reason I like playing CoX more than many other MMOs is still the pure action itself especially in higher level teams.
The combat, the intensity - in some scenarios intwined with simple to moderately complex strategic team efforts and (also playing a major role in this) the awesome visually pleasing mixture of graphical effects.

At the same time, I have to add however, this on its own wouldn't have been quite enough to keep me around for as long as I have been.
A, to me, important aspect of the game that's responsible for keeping me around in addition to the before-mentioned is the wide variety of customization options available both for aesthetics and performance - although performance much more than aesthetics.
In one word: builds.

The whole in two words: action, builds.

Still one of the things I like playing most is my ill/storm troller.
Partly because all the visuals it comes with look mighty great and partly because of the INCREDIBLE versatility.

When in teams it can always fullfill a useful role, be it helping in aggro control with PA, intercepting ambushes with Spectral Terror and Freezing Rain until PA's recharged to do some real work, keeping mobs at bay from all casty blasty types with Lightning Storm and Hurricane or any of a million other imaginable things.
The build I'm using left plenty room for some goodies, like a Group Fly useful on STF (probably still my favorite TF which as a result I've always run regularly) Recall Friend, etc.
Recall Friend and Sup Invis make it a fine ghoster and perma-PA, Sup Invis and the OH-SHIZZLE-button known as Hibernate give it great survivability.

When dead it has a great comeback that works most of the time and just makes you feel cool to boot. Line up the insps properly, hit wakie -> breakie -> cab(by) -> Hibernate and giggle at all the mobs swinging their weapons at you while you recover. The moment Hiber ends drop a tornado point blank on your feet and away they go. Then the usual little stormie battlefield thing with Hurricane, Lightning Storm, Freezing Rain, Ice Storm, etc. Once you throw PA out there again you'll be fiiiiine.

Solo it's great fun too 'cause when your soft control isn't affected by others meddling in the affairs between you and the mobs you get greater control. It gets fun when you get corners in-door maps with a mob on both sides. Put PA as far in the corner as you can so both mobs draw to it, close the line behind them, unleash Hurricane, Snow Storm, Freezing Rain, Ice Storm, Lightning Storm, Tornado, Phantasm and watch them squirm.

I also like the versatility and situationality (Is this even a word? "the extent to which something is situational"? If not I hereby declare it one!) of particular powers such as Tornado and Lightning Storm. It really makes it a set you have to use your head with or it'll backfire.

Tornado for instance can potentially be great if you want to focus on an AV and not bother with all the minions around him. When minions appear it'll run around like a nutter to send them flying all over the place and when they're all out of range it'll happily sit guard on the AV again waiting for more. Additionally on the AV it works as a very good damage dealer to boot!

Lightning Storm I find to be one of the most awesome powers in the entire game even.

1. It LOOKS awesome.
2. I LOVE how you can use it for different purposes by tweaking the angle.

Honestly, I'm so in love with this set combo and have used it so much I could go on for hours about its borderless options, but I've probably already typed more than 5 times what's needed to keep half of this board's users from reading this post, so I won't.

I tend to just say things like "STF forming - blueside - 45+, /tell if interested." and it works fine for me.

At the time of writing I've heard from 49 people what their experience with this is.
Amongst those are 46 confirmed cases of no problem whatsoever, but also 3 people having issues I'm still looking into with them.
If people do choose to use this service for a properly coordinated TF or hami raid or simply to have a fun chat about everyday life with their friends from the game (- yes, that works too -) I want it to be accessible to as many people as possible whilst minimizing the risk of interference from outsiders - a realistic issue I've witnessed in practice as well in the past.

The website to accompany all this isn't up yet, the support is unstructured and the plugin - although working as intended for a vast majority - is suboptimal.

Why?

Well, I only have 2 hands, 10 fingers and I can only effectively use 1 keyboard at a time to its full potential.
The website and a new version of the plugin, which from a coding perspective won't really have anything in common with the current one, are supposed to be presented to you together once done.
However, this is still a little while away which is the whole reason I made the current plugin in the first place - to bridge that gap.

At the same time I would like to keep this thread tidy and have it serve both as a place for announcements to be posted from my side and feedback from your side.
Support inquiries I'd like to keep out of this and in addition it would be much more convenient and manageable to have them consolidated anyway.
Hence CoX Teamspeak : Support - registration is not required, for convenience sake you can post as a guest.

I may not be a spider (neither crab nor bane) and I may be working on a much better version of the 'product', but I'm still going to do anything I can to help people who do find themselves having a problem getting any of this to work.
So if you have an issue, please don't assume it's going to be too much hassle to do anything about it, but post it there and I'll do my best to get it sorted.

Personally I'm a huge fan of making content challenging rather than trying to steamroll everything, though it seems that's becoming increasingly hard to do these days.

I seem to recall a time (I'm thinking around i7-i8, along those lines) many AVs were a challenge. Doing Maria's arc was a challenge. Doing even something like a Crimson arc could be tough with the wrong team - the regular mobs on it, that is.
If it wasn't already you could often make it that with your rep setting. As such I ended up running everything on Invincible I think it was called at the time, and its blue side counterpart.

Now if I set my difficulty to +4x8, which already equates to a lot more than Invincible was back then, the average PUG still seems to have enough alphas, level shifts and hundreds of set bonusses to steamroll it with one hand tapping the controls and the other graciously tilting the beer bottle.

Note: This is all generally speaking.
Ofcourse there were simple things back then too and ofcourse there's the occasion challenge now. Yet somewhere underneath it all I can't help getting caught by the impression that somewhere the upping the content difficulty and adapting the available difficulty settings to rebalance this took a wrong turn.

This leads me to the big question: Is it all just my imagination?
Or is anyone else getting plagued by that dominant feeling of relative lack of challenge as well?

1. Carnies
2. Malta
3. KoA

Basically what it comes down to for me is this:
The visuals of each particular power are just one thing adding to looking cool, but there are more.
For instance: if you leap into a LARGE group of mobs and fight an epic battle, doesn't it look cooler to come out on top standing there possibly scratched but dominantly in the center of the group as the last few mobs fly off of you in their incapacitated state than it does to get owned in a visually pleasing manner and end up doing pro floor inspection with bored mobs stood around you?
Yet aesthetics as such aren't the fuel that gets you there.