ZachsMind

My favorite statue in the game. Sometimes I stop and salute it as I pass it by just for grins. Anyone who has read the comic books would know why. Great story. One of my toons is a grandson of Cyrus Thompson. Very proud of that one. He's fun to roleplay.

I've only seen this self destruct power happen a few times in person, EVERY time it's been used in my presence, it was annoying. Even one time the guy used it as a panic button and it actually took out one of the enemies that was kicking our butts. Still, the battle was lost already and his explosive sacrifice only added to the absurdity of the moment.

I do not see a time when it would be feasible to use this power. Whether it's taking yourself out as a bomb in the first skirmish, when things get dicey, halfway through a mish, even when up against the big bad at the end, there's never a strategically sound reason for using this power, when there's always another, better option. It's the dumbest power in the entire game. Yes that includes the snowball, cuz the snowball is just stupid fun and never gets old. Or seeing someone accidently hit the fire extinguisher in the middle of a fight cuz he was just mashing buttons as fast as he could and would there went control 6 or whatever and we all see the fire extinguisher. We've all done it. Blowing yourself up is dumber than that.

And the self destruction power is not just any kind of annoying. Half the time I don't even realize that's what transpired until seconds after it occurred, and I'm like, "..oh. ...that. whatevs." It's annoying in a 'chewing gum on the sole of your shoe' kind of way. It's not till you take a few steps away that you realize hey! that was annoying! If people actually use this to grief others? That's just sad. That's going into a gun fight with a small bowl of rotting fruit.

You're taking the time to macro this? Wow. Can't just point & click, eh? Wow.

All the above is excellent advice. I'd especially underline getting the Fitness Pool ASAP. I have gotten into the habit of grabbing what's available as soon as they become available. If you add Combat Jumping as well, and slot both swift & hurdle properly, you're already almost as fast as some travel powers. Both Stamina & Health grant a noticeable improvement soon as you get it, and in later levels if you don't have them your toon will behave as if its already past its prime.

If you find yourself on a team w/power players who are only interested in leveling up, don't try to convince them that it's not about the destination it's the journey. They know all that and they don't care. Just hang w/them awhile and try to look at the game from their perspective. Barrelling through a map of nothing but Freakshow or Council is actually pretty fun, even if there's zero roleplay involved.

If you find yourself on a team of players more interested in acting out some preconceived drama as if they're a really twisted and disturbing puppet show for kids on quaaludes, don't make fun of them and tell them how stupid they're being. Hang out and walk in their shoes for awhile. See if you can join in a bit and follow along with what they're doing. Different people come into this game for different reasons, and it's always the people themselves who make this game really interesting. Otherwise, we'd all still be playing Quake 3.

At your earliest convenience, if you notice you can't get on a team and the missions you currently have don't interest you, I strongly recommend this challenge as a new player. Take a character that is under level ten, and starting at either Atlas Park or Galaxy City, try to figure out how to get him to Peregrine Island and back without asking for direct help like teleporting or whatever. This is harder than it sounds for ppl first starting out but once you get the hang of how to do this, you will come to understand the geography of Paragon City more clearly so later when you have a point A and a point B and less than five minutes you won't sweat it. Another thing you'll learn, all baddies in the game have an invisible zone around them which is what some vets call Agro, and if you're careful you can run around them without triggering them off and dying. I'll give you a clue, if you run down the middle of a street and follow the yellow line, you can sometimes use the yellow line to help you gauge where the agro bubbles are around each baddie. I didn't really understand how this works the first four months or so playing this game. Somebody stranded me once on Peregrine Island after SKing me, and at like level 9 I had to figure out how to get BACK to Galaxy City on my own. So I learned these travel tricks the hard way, but they later became indispensible. You can also experiment with this in The Hollows or Faultline before you hit your teens but it's not as rewarding when you accomplish it.

Of course nowadays you young whippersnappers get temp travel powers via police scanner missions and stuff, so the days of trying to do Positron with just Sprint are mostly over. Consider yourselves lucky.

There's a couple problems with investing energy into revamps versus focusing on new content.

First off it's a marketing thing. NCSoft is gonna get a lot of mileage out of Going Rogue. It's an entire new set of zones that didn't exist before, new baddies, new power sets. New kinda character you can play. New everything, while still keeping the original game. So it's both releasing a new game AND expanding the old one.

When they put all that energy into revamping Faultline, it was great for we fans because it was a long time coming, and the results were awesome at first but after awhile the novelty wore off, and for all that effort, the PTB couldn't go to the general public and say "look what we did! We took this part of our game that wasn't as good as it coulda been when we first introduced the game, and we cleaned it up and made it better! Come take a look!" From a marketing standpoint, it's a much harder sell to anyone not already playing the game.

Even a 'mini-vamp' like The Hollows which didn't involve dramatic changes to the zone did still mean a lot of manpower and time. Every corner and crevice of Hollows was looked at and stuff we probably don't even notice was done to it. It still cost, and the end result in the big picture was the same as before. Hollows is still where you go when your toon hits its preteens. I pretty much try to get on someone else's Frost Fire arc for every toon I have if I can, but aside from that I try not to hang too long at Hollows. Even though the facelift was in my opinion necessary, it doesn't make me wanna hang there.

So if you were the developers and you're looking at your finite resources and you can either focus your next project on making Boomtown what it shoulda been five years ago, or creating City of SpaceTime the next expansion, Boomtown's not gonna win. UNLESS you completely revamp Boomtown to make it the zone players now use to access space. That way you kill two birds w/one stone. But of course then you're gonna tick off all the players who have fond memories of Boomtown as is, so you might as well just leave Boomtown alone and create an entirely new zone that'd represent the CoH universe's equivalent of NASA.

I'm saying this and I disagree w/it. I want the Devs to focus on the zones that already exist and make them better. I think adding more zones spreads the player base too thin and the community that used to make this game so cool is kinda dying, unless you have built up a complex network for yourself. I never did. I was too lazy. So now if there's anybody who still plays the game that I know? We're both like twenty characters later and wouldn't recognize one another. I want a new Boomtown. I want a new Perez Park. I never go into Galaxy City to start a hero I always use Atlas Park. Why? Cuz I can never get a team together in GC. Everybody's over at Atlas, except for ppl who don't seem to want to team. I think GC should get more reasons why ppl would wanna go there. I think Independence Port is built the way it is for a reason but it's annoying as all get out to traverse, even with decent travel powers. It's very unfun. KR is getting better, but could still use some tweaking. Steel, Sky, Talos, and Peregrine are pretty much perfect far as I can tell. I like em fine. I'm sure there's others who could see fault where I don't.

The real problem is the developers could waste all their resources on what's already there, and we'd never be satisfied. We'd always want something better. And then the Devs would have nothing significant to show off to potential new players but what they already had with a new paint job.

Sometimes you just gotta let the past go and move on. New content over old just wins out. Cuz when you make the old stuff new, it just turns back into old faster for some strange reason, and in some ways it never stops being old no matter how new you try to make it. Don't look back. Ever forward.

The mission in question may not have been removed by The Powers That Be.

I'm not saying that I would ever do anything remotely like that, but IF I were to do anything remotely like this, I'd do it in this order.

Create the mission but not publish it. Send a chat to my seven buddies saying "meet me at FF AE I got farm ready." Wait for them all to show. Publish the arc. Farm to our hearts' content. Then after everybody's gone, I'd unpublish it, thus taking it out of public circulation. If I was extra paranoid for some reason, I'd delete the thing. I could always recreate it later.

I also wouldn't name it something that involves any appealing word that other people might be searching on cuz they're bored, like Samurai, or Dinosaur, or Awesome. I'd probably name it something like "very boring mish don't even look at this you'll just be bored and stuff." Or I'd name it something that'd be boring to other people but it'd be like a codeword among me and my seven farming buddies cuz that'd make it even more fun and cool, like "Boring Healthbar Mish" Then I'd tell my friends to do a search for "boring healthbar" and they'd be like "Oh, I see..." and we'd all smile & nod at each other though none of us would see it cuz our avatars would just stand there.

And I wouldn't use the same AE every time. We'd all meet up at a different AE each time. We wouldn't announce it early ahead of time. Maybe we'd all agree to meet on Tuesday evenings but no one would know where until like an hour before we started.

Y'know, if I were into this sort of thing. Of course if I were into this sorta thing, I certainly wouldn't come in here and tell you guys. For every farm that gets caught and shut down? There's ten doing it and no one will ever know. It's like speeding on the highways of America. The cop sees twelve people speeding, turns on his lights and siren, you know who he's gonna give the ticket to? The one that slows down and stops first. The others are gonna just keep on going.

I found an AE about playboy bunnies with Hugh Hefner as the big bad. I five starred it cuz it made me laugh. May not be everyone's cup of tea though.

I just got done doing the Lady Grey Task Force with my bubble troller again. Hadn't done that in a year so it was a lotta fun but when we got to Infernia I was like oh great. I remembered she was the talkative one. Already that's getting old. The Hero1 story though? That's awesome. That's some great work there. Fine writing. Well executed. Always challenging.

I dunno. I still enjoy City of Heroes and yet it's kinda like getting to the end of MYST, y'know? You've done everything and the guy says you're welcome to wander around all the worlds now to your heart's content and take in the sights but what's the point? You already been there. Go back through it for the sake of posterity? Only, at the end of MYST you couldn't still beat up on Rikti aliens.

...oh, and no i haven't seen the GR Con video yet. Doesn't appear to be on CoH website. I'll check youtube.

I gotta admit, having only recently returned after a year hiatus, and not sure if I'm gonna renew or not a month from now, the only real thing that I wanna see is something I don't think they're interested in doing. More post Level 50 content.

Power customization? Awesome! Wanted to see that years ago and it's GREAT they figured out how to do it. Outstanding! However, pulling out the crayons on my old toons doesn't really encourage me to stick around. Kinda too little too late I'm sorry to say.

This Going Rogue thing doesn't interest me at all cuz I don't do CoV. I've tried but I just find the backstory and the environment kinda boring. Paragon City is simply more inviting than Rogue Isles. I'm sure Masterminds must be a blast to play and Dominators look like Controllers on acid. That's all well and good but I'd just like to do something with my fifty that didn't make me feel like I was wasting my time.

The Statesman TF is great. Don't get me wrong. Always fun to run through that again. And the stuff through the Midnighter's Club where you go back in time for some reason and ..I don't really understand it that much but they got Cyclopses! That's always fun to pound on multiple Cyclopses! ..Cyclopsi? What's the plural of that.. oh it doesn't matter.

Then there's the Shadow Shard.. meh.

Then there's the AE content but (and yeah i know its JUST a game and all that but still) wouldn't the idea of having AE keep heroes off the streets combating real criminals? It's awesome that players get to generate their own stories, but these stories are not integral to the events of the game itself, so it's really just more pointless than betting on those monkey things in Pocket D's basement.

I do enjoy making new alts. Spending more time doing that now that I've returned than playing my fifties, but you can only do the Hellions/Skulls thing so many times, and the sewers are a great way to hop to ten kinda quick but only if there's enough people online to do it with ya. And Positron desperately needs a face lift. Really, he does. I mean okay so his face is out of the suit, but the task force itself is still ...dang.

I miss my fifties. It's kinda why I left. I rerolled my fifties and tried playing them again on different servers, but its somehow not the same. It's like reading bronze age stories of the same characters after having experienced them in the golden and silver ages. It's fun but the magic is ..off.

It's not about the destination. It's the journey. There shouldn't even BE a destination. Fifty shouldn't be the end cap. Never shoulda been. I fear if CoX doesn't ever figure that out, well Champions Online isn't going to usurp it, but the first hero-oriented multiplayer game that DOES figure out how to have endless content regardless of a character's past accomplishments and experience? Guess where everyone's gonna fly?

I'd like to see a major rehash of Dark Astoria, where the Banished Pantheon & the Fir Bolg join forces against the witches & redcaps (who are also still fighting amongst each other) to call forth chaos and mayhem and allow Adamastor & Snaptooth (Okay maybe not Snaptooth. Let's let him sit this one out.) to rule supreme and blah blah blah. You get the drill.

{yes i know DA is not Croatoa. Patience! All will be explained! (turtles!)}

During the day, the fog would disappear, the animated dead would retreat to the cemetery, and normal people would walk the streets again, but they'd talk of living a nightmare all these years and while temporarily tangible and coherent, they would all behave strangely, warning the heroes to turn back and not try to save them, because they risk all of Paragon City & perhaps the world to Astoria's fate. A newly minted mission arc would reveal that the people of Astoria themselves are holding the forces of evil at bay by their own accumulative will, focused nightly by the spirits of dead heroes of legend who work in consort with rogue villains and heroes alike who realize this threat is bigger than all of them.

For Adamastor lied to the Banished Pantheon. He told them if they worshipped him he would lay waste to their enemies and smite Mother Earth herself, and force her to the Banished's Bidding. However, he is only the harbinger. Adamastor long ago was banished himself from the oceans, and he has made a pact with beings far greater and powerful than he. They want to flood the lands of the Earth and make the entire planet palatable only to their kind, and Adamastor The Trickster is fooling forces of evil to assist him in that task.

Of course this won't happen until Paragon & NCSoft figure out how to make water powers work, but in the mean time, GIANT TURTLES HIDING IN THE FOG! Think of it!

At night the fog would roll in and the tortured souls of Dark Astoria would again retreat into the corners of our sensory perception. The Banished Pantheon would once again reign supreme, and would be even more powerful than before. Some are more coherent, and speak of an impending apocalypse that living heroes & villains will band together in a feeble attempt to thwart, but that their energies will inadvertently help to usher in The Cleansing.

At their side would be the Fir Bolg who also cherish this Cleansing and wish to see it smite their enemies. The Witches & The RedCaps will each attempt in their own ways to stop this menace, but their efforts only make things worse. In the mean time, GIANT TURTLES HIDING IN THE FOG show up and lash out at the streets and anything in them, good or bad, dead or living or undead alike, the turtles don't care! And they're BIG! They dwarf Adamastor who cheers them on, and... dry heaves in their general direction for some reason. Anyway. GIANT TURTLES! THINK OF IT! IN FOG! ALL BIG AND ..TURTLEY!

And none of this 'maybe they'll spawn if you wait around long enough' IT'S EVERY NIGHT! TURTLES! ALL BIG AND EVERYTHING! A BUNCH OF EM! ALL OVER DARK ASTORIA!

After the mission arc is completed, those who succeed would do their part to help the people of Astoria keep the forces of evil at bay, and you'd also get access to a special portal that Croatoan villains were using to get from there to Astoria, but with your help it's now in the hands of Portal Corp who think it's really nifty to tinker with but they promise they'll be very careful. And after you're done with that mission arc? MORE BIG TURTLES TO POUND ON AND GET POUNDED ON AND COMPLAIN ABOUT GETTING POUNDED ON AND THEN YOU POUND ON EM SOME MORE! AND MAYBE ONE BIG IGUANA JUST FOR KICKS! WHAT!? WHY ARE THERE MEN IN LAB COATS WITH TRANQUILIZER GUNS CHASING ME AROUND MY COMPUTER!? CAN'T THEY SEE I'M TRYING TO TYPE!? HELP! MORE TURTLES! POUND! POUND!

Awesome suggestions and a great thread read. Thanks everybody! =)

Agreed that this is mostly a PUG issue, where some prefer to focus more on leveling and less on playing the game. Destination versus journey. Some have to actually get a few fifties under their belt before they realize the game is more fun in the 20s & 30s then it is after your toon hits the ceiling cap. I remember when my Willpower scrapper hit 50 I was disappointed because it pretty much meant I wasn't gonna be playing him anymore. And when my electric blaster hit fifty on one server, I just rebuilt him on another server and that one's in the late teens currently. Destination versus journey.

Based on some of the above suggestions, I guess in hindsight my magic ill/ff controller was after all a good bet against the CoT. I was hoping there would be something more ideally suited to build a character with a "CoT vengeance" backstory to it. but you're right. Most anything could work if strategy over mindless pounding is put into play.

I find fun in creating characters that are somehow connected to the mythos of City of Heroes itself. As others have pointed out in the thread, you can't be in violation of copyright infringement if you're using Cryptic/NCSoft's own properties.

For example, one of my scrappers is a grandson of BreakNeck. I have a blaster who's trapped inside a suit made by defective Crey technology. One of my tanks is my take on what would happen if a woman took Superadine. I've since learned that's not canon. Oh well. She's still fun to play. I got a toon that's as close as I could get to the statue of Talos. He's like a mini Talos statue.

I'd like to see who are the other 89 of the Nuclear 90. Fusionette is one of the people born in 1990 with a magnetic nuclear fusion reactor for a heart. She can be found in Faultline and the Rikti War Zone. The game doesn't say who the other Nuclear 90 are, so one of your toons could be one. Maybe there's actually more than 90, but only 90 known publically to exist. My point is, the game is a treasure trove of creative possibilities. Why would anyone playing City of Heroes want to waste their time rehashing Wolverine or Bwana Beast? I'd like to see more Statesmens, Valkyries, Miss Libertys, Positrons in the game, and no Superman or Spider-Man clones.

In my experience, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. I don't recall ever getting in trouble yet w/a name choice. As I understand it the worst that happens is your character's name gets genericized and you're given an option to choose an alternate name, but that's only if someone reports your name as a violation, and the people running the game actually agree w/that assessment. If no one notices or cares, no harm no foul.

I've seen toons that are obvious visual ripoffs of copyrighted material, but the name is a spoof of the original. Like say a big green guy called The Inedible Stalk. That's probably a violation, but it's also stupid funny.

This question is CoH specific. I don't do CoV. So if the answer to this question is a Dominator or Mastermind or Brute or Stalker, sorry but that doesn't help me.

From years ago to even still today (happened to me just yesterday) a pick up group of heroes goes into a new mish and either gets laid to waste after the first corner or at the first sight of them the vets will turn tail and just head for the exit door saying thanks but no thanks. I'm talking of course, of the Circle of Thorns.

Let's say you wanted to create a character that could specifically survive Circle of Thorns' mezzes and all the other things that make people generally avoid CoT mishes if they can at all help it. What would be the most ideal archetype, power set, and overall character design to withstand the Circle of Thorns and then late in the game the Carnival of Shadows? Would this same character design also withstand the other villain types just as well? What if you wanted to make a troller or fender that could help an entire team take on Circle of Thorns without batting an eye? I imagine there may be more than one answer to this question. I'd like to hear multiple schools of thought on the idea.

Yeah. Okay. I know. Hear me out, pls.

This issue has been around since the first Really Cool Name got picked by someone who then logged off and never got back on. Why am I revisiting it? Well, I was listening to the recent convention podcasts here at cityofheroes.com and during the "What If" panel, one of the developers suggested what if you never had to worry about your hero name being taken? What if when you create your character and pick the name Super Dude you get to be Super Dude even though there's already twenty-five other Super Dudes on the server? What if you never had to get that annoying pop up saying to try something else because someone before you already has it? This game is supposed to be fun! It's not supposed to annoy you before you even get into Outbreak/Breakout!

But of course, it's impossible, right? I mean every hero character name has to be unique, otherwise you'd have a hundred Caped Crusaders running around at the same time. I'm not even sure if what I'm about to suggest is even codable, but that's for the developers to figure out. I imagine one of them wouldn't suggest it if there weren't at least one way to pull this off, and I think I have a way that would become digestible to the community so long as you guys don't dismiss it out of hand.

We already have two different names for each of us. There's the Global Name which is unique to each account, and then whatever hero you personally choose to play at the time. Say you create two heroes you've already made. One is called "Popular Name Lady" and the other is called "Unique Name Guy". Your Global Name is "Fu Man Chu".

When you created Unique Name Guy, the game did check the server to see if another Unique Name Guy has ever been created. It determined one never was, but even so, it ascribes a large random number to your character. You never see this number, it's just there for coding purposes. For all I know, every character already has its own unique number or other identifier aside from the name. If not, the coding guys could add it. Again, I'm not a coder myself so if programmers couldn't do that, I'm sure I'll hear about it. This whole idea kinda hinges on every character having an unique identifier aside from the character name.

Now while the game checked and found no one else ever in the history of the game has made a character called Unique Name Guy, it also checked to see if there's currently anyone playing the game with that name and again got a zero. This is just a redundancy check at this point cuz you already know and the game already knows, but it will do this every time you log in with any character. Why? Just cuz. So you go into the game and play around with Unique Name Guy and everything is peachy. You don't see anyone else with your name. Everybody sees your name. The sun rises and sets and all is right with the world.

Then you log out and you come back to create Popular Name Lady. Just before you finish up and end up in Outbreak or Breakout or wherever, the game checks the server to see if there's ever been another Popular Name Lady character out there and it turns out there's two hundred and seventy-three. So again, the first time you log in with this character, the server assigns a unique number to your character that you never see, and you go into the game. The game also checks every time you log in with this character to see if anyone else is playing their character named Popular Name Lady. Turns out at this very moment there's twelve other Popular Name Ladies on the server. One of them is in Atlas Park at the same time you show up there. You skipped the Outbreak thing cuz you're tired of trying to get the Isolator badge and who isn't?

So you're standing there in front of That Liberty Chick and you're face to face with someone who wore the same proverbial dress as you to the party. You're Popular Name Lady and she's Popular Name Lady. What'll they say at the country club?

Remember that Global Name we always have? In this example, I said your Global Name is Fu Man Chu. By the way, I was gonna call the Global Name Fu Bar Chu but for some reason the forum software censored "*****." WTF? I didn't know that was a dirty word. The military uses it, how bad could it be? Anyway, by default, if a Character Name matches one already on the server, then the game will amend your Global Name to your Character Name, but this will only be the case so long as there's more than one of you on the server at the same time. If you're the only Popular Lady Name on the server, you'll be just Popular Lady Name. However, if more than one Popular Lady Name is online at the same time, then over your head it would read your Global Name before your Character Name. It would go where we currently have "titles" for upper level characters. In this case the Title Line would read Fu Man Chu's and then below that Popular Lady Name. So everyone around you would see you as "Fu Man Chu's Popular Name Lady" and nine game sessions out of ten you probably wouldn't even notice.

Now, if you actually team up with someone else who has the same name you have, then there would be the numeric thing that happens now on the Test Server. You know. When you transfer a character from any other server to the Test Server, it automatically adds a 1 to your name if someone before you already has that name. At least, that's what happened to me when I transferred Elusive over there ages ago.

Let's say inside the team up window on the left there above the chat bubble you'd be Popular Name Lady 1 and the other player would be Popular Name Lady 2, or vice versa depending on who joined the team first. That would be for chat purposes & stuff. When you disbanded from the team, you'd go back to the way things were before.

There's a number of benefits to this. For one thing, we'd no longer see people trying to trick the game into letting them have ".Popular_Naem*Ladee" which can really stink if you're trying to text them. Also, most of the time if you pick an unique enough name this won't be a bother. Even if you picked a relatively popular name, the odds of you running into another player with your name are not all that high, so you'd be able to enjoy having a character named Popular Name Lady and 90% of the time you won't have to even think about it. You'll just be able to be that and so will anybody else. Also, it'd open up the possibilities that are currently weighed down in the game with several years of really good name choices already being taken. It would no longer matter, because the unique identifier would apply to previously generated characters too. They'd all get assigned numbers, and all this is backend stuff that no one is supposed to notice, so if someone has been gone from the game four years and they come back and log in with their Popular Name Lady, they might not even notice that a dozen people since them have used the same name.

I understand there's some areas this doesn't address. For example, you wouldn't be able to create eight toons with the same name. You'd still have to have each hero unique to your own account, but you can now create the same toon name on multiple servers. I have one Elusive and two Elusivers. I would have had three Elusives, but someone already took the name Elusive on the other servers. I also have a Benny Edison on both Pinnacle and Triumph. He's a fifty on Triumph but I still wanted to play him so I remade him on Pinnacle.

Global chat might be a problem. If you wanted to send a message to Popular Name Lady 27 and not have the other two hundred plus Popular Name Ladies see it, there'd have to be a way to do that. I think again the Global Name would come into play here, or the game would be smart enough to know with the unique numeric hidden in the game which Popular Name Lady you've fraternized with and would only want to talk with that one. I dunno. That's for programmers to hammer out the kinks. I'm sure it's workable, but if the programmers don't think ppl would want to BE ANY CHARACTER NAME YOU WANT REGARDLESS WHO CAME BEFORE YOU DID AND PICKED THE REALLY COOL NAMES YEARS BEFORE YOU EVEN BOUGHT THE STUPID GAME well they're just gonna continue spending their time and effort elsewhere. The Global Name would still have to be unique. That can't change, but whatever character you currently are shouldn't have to be unique. So what if "Masked Avenger" turns out to be really really popular? Maybe you guys could start a club! Maybe there'd be Super Groups where the only requirement is that you create a toon called Parallel Illusion... oh wait. That already happened, didn't it?

Okay. I'm gonna go hide behind the couch now while you guys shoot down my idea. =)

Holy crap! You guys are a tough audience.

Everyone's a critic. If I'd been the one who made that video, I'd certainly never step foot in these forums. You're all being unnecessarily harsh.

The guy (or gal) who was in charge of getting this video done, had a tall order to deliver. Take every new feature in issue 13 and describe it within a three or four minute video, with only three new characters that the audience is largely unfamiliar with and oh by the way you have NO time to get the audience familiar with them. Hit all the talking points and you're done. We also want characterization and a resemblance of plot structure but you have NO time in which to actually do any of that, because it's more important to get ALL the talking points in. Utilize machinima tactics and try to be hip. You have until two weeks ago last Thursday to finish this. Good luck. This tape will self-destruct yadda yadda yadda.

Things like the use of "my user" were shortcuts because the people behind this did not have an hour of exposition to explain these characters' intricate back stories. They did not have time to explain to new players the difference between character and player, or the intracultural intricacies of ICly vs OOCly speak. You say that's breaking the fourth wall. Hate to break it to you diehard roleplayers who insist on ((putting everything inside parentheses)) but to the rest of us? You're pounding your heads on the fourth wall. Your heads are bloody stumps with that fourth wall ((I'm not kidding. Get over yourselves)).

The people behind this vid needed the audience to understand the three characters are toons that players like the viewer play. Tron or no, it was a good choice in terms of conveying to an audience what's going on. This speaks to newcomer to the concept as well as veteran to the game. It's reaching a wide audience that way in a VERY short period of time.

More shortcuts were in developing a love triangle of sorts between the three characters. Trite and cliche and forced, but pretty much all the creative minds had to work with. You can't have intimate friendships with different multiple levels. You gotta talk about how Day Jobs work, multiple builds, leveling pacts, shields, pain domination and new Cimerora missions. We don't have time to know how these three characters are related, so shorthand character development is necessary.

Two guys vying for a lady's affections and she's mostly oblivious or uninterested, then the two guys do that male bonding thing over vomit in a sewer. This coulda been a beer commercial! In fact, in some countries it already is! I'm sure you think you could do better but either put up or shut up. Whoever you are, standing on your lofty perch telling everyone how lame you think this video was, do me a favor and admit you're full of hot air and got nothing to back up your claims.

You're full of it. Don't like hearing me say that? Make a better video and PROVE ME WRONG.

I have been wanting someone to take CoH and create a series that puts Red Vs Blue to shame. Talk about breaking the fourth wall - that's ALL RVB did and they were AWESOME! If you can't or are too lazy to try, shut the funk up. Considering what the people behind this thing had to work with? Excellent job. Will this become a viral video that gets two million hits on YouTube? Don't hold your breath. Five stars on the video. Joe Bob says check it out.

I tried deleting every message in my inbox, but it's like personal history in there. Pointless history that means nothing to anyone but me but there it is. And copypasting every message to notepad is not only time consuming but the end result loses something.

This is silly I know. I should be able to just delete them without a second thought. I mean some of these messages I haven't looked at in years, but then I read it and I'm like, I can't delete that.

How much time do we have before we need to have our inboxes totally wiped?

Would this work if they made it an Arena thing? Up to eight people can join a team, go to the Arena, to a special BRB dais, they get transported to a random map with the BRB in the middle.

Or is the point of this to have something in an actual City Zone that we can affect? Maybe they can't get it to code right? I mean if we could get a Big Red Ball in the middle of Skyway City, then we could pick up cars and rip light posts out of the ground or throw trolls through a billboard sign.

I still want a Big Red Ball. It's just that I don't honestly know: is it impossible to do the BRB thing with the current game engine?

Now that we've had this Day Jobs thing for awhile, is anyone else getting the feeling that the real reason why they did this was to get people to stop logging just anywhere? Anyone know if maybe there's a server resources reason to be doing this? Most of the locations for Day Job badges involve leaving the major city zones for a store or hospital or other place out of the way of where mobs spawn.

Granted, logging near trains is still in a city zone, but not in a place where mobs are going to be on top of you the second you log back in. Other possible exceptions to this include PvP zones, the Arena, and the Shadow Shard. However, these are all locales where I imagine the Devs must actively encourage more players to go. I imagine this, because I purposefully avoid them, whereas zones I will go much more regularly are not DayJobbed. You can't just stand anywhere in Faultline, log out, and expect a badge upon return.

Maybe the Devs discovered that if a lot of players log out just anywhere, sometimes that causes lag issues, or otherwise creates problems either as the 30 second timer counts down or upon the player's return in that toon. Maybe if someone's standing in the middle of Steel Canyon next to Positron and they log out there, there's twenty other players in line of sight of that player that have to get from the server a message that Joe Schmoe is leaving and there's a thirty second countdown before he fades away. This could cause unnecessary lag for everyone involved. I don't need to know Joe Schmoe's leaving. Maybe just one guy doing it's no big deal, but what if several are doing that in several city zones at roughly the same time, during peak period of activity..? Was it an issue that the Devs addressed by way of inventing Day Jobs?

Has anyone else noticed this? Has there actually been a drop of people logging off immediately after a mish? Do people leave the PUG they're on, fly or run to the nearest hospital or university, go into a doorway and log out, out of eyeshot of players in city zones? Does this have a positive affect on the gameplay for others? Did the Devs really need to get players off the streets before they logged, or were Devs honestly just making up superfluous reasons to give away more badges for no reason than cuz it's silly fun? And it has NO further bearing beyond that?

Not that it matters one way or the other. I'm just curious.

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I feel I should add here that I find this "Day Jobs" idea mildly disturbing. It seems a precursor to incorporating "Secret Identities" to this game. If you look at the way this game is structured, the backstory behind it requires that everyone must register to be a superhero. You have to register. This means your identity is known to the government. There are no secret identities in Paragon City.

[/ QUOTE ]Now where did you get THAT idea? While, yes, heroes do register, there is nothing I've seen that indicates that they are required to register with their real identity, or any identity other than their superhero name.

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Then what's the point of registering? Do you honestly believe a government would ever require people register without knowing who they are? That makes no sense.

When you register for anything anywhere, you give your name and location and essentially let the entity you are registering with know how to contact you in case they ever need to contact you. Sometimes that even includes next of kin, which in the case of hazardous activities would be appropriate to this situation.

If someone commits acts of vigilanteism but is NOT registered, what is the punishment in Paragon City? Nothing? So then, why would anyone bother to register at all? Even if the gov't promises to keep this information secret, it's out there, and someone like Recluse would want that information so they could use it to find your character's innermost secrets and use them against you. All that info is out there somewhere in one place and a bad guy can get it and mess with everyone (yes I can feel at least one Mission Architect arc brewing on this).

I'm telling you there's been until now a serious blindside to all this identity stuff in-game, that something like "Day Jobs" worked into this game will illuminate once in practice. Like I said: I find this development mildly disturbing.

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Gargoyle - for parking yourself on the top of most tall buildings.

I'm not sure who would use that though... >.>

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I have a tank now on Virtue named Talos Tiny who is fashioned after the Talos Island statue. I like putting him on corners of rooftops in The Hallows and making him crouch while I wait for the rest of the team to arrive, cuz he looks awesome in the crouch emote. So a Gargoyle Badge would really rock. =)

...

I feel I should add here that I find this "Day Jobs" idea mildly disturbing. It seems a precursor to incorporating "Secret Identities" to this game. If you look at the way this game is structured, the backstory behind it requires that everyone must register to be a superhero. You have to register. This means your identity is known to the government. There are no secret identities in Paragon City.

Being a superhero IS a full time job. Nothing would stop a person from moonlighting or occasionally inventing a temporary secret identity in order to glean information from bad guys or be more inconspicuous while working a beat, but the classic concept of a permanent secret ID like Clark Kent to Superman or Peter Parker to Spider-Man doesn't really make sense in City of Heroes. In Paragon City, a person like Peter Parker would have an ID card, and both the gov't and the public would know he was really Spider-Man. Anyone who's been reading comics the past few years knows how impossible that scenario would be.

There have been times in his early career when Batman would pretend to be a beggar, or would take up a blue collar job at the docks or in a warehouse in order to get closer to the bad guys and learn enough to later go in as Batman and bust heads. That would make sense in the context of this world, but the idea of Batman being Bruce Wayne, and not even Statesman knowing who he really is? Not likely.

When I play this game, I always write up the character bio with the presumption that my character's identity is public and his real name is common knowledge to anyone who cares to know. I get a little chuckle when I read other people's bios and they describe their character as if their identity is secret. It can't work in the context of the game.