BadWolf

The thought of a 'Family Guy'-based MMO existing makes me weep uncontrollable tears and despair for the human race in a way that the cancellation of CoH never could.

Sappers.

Night Widows.

That room in the laboratory map where you turn a corner and run into two groups standing side by side.

That other room in the laboratory map where you can aggro as many as five groups at once due to their spawn locations.

The "Fight 100 Destroyers" mission. Any mission that has simul-click glowies.

Getting hit just as I placate someone due to obscure timing issues.

Placating someone, hitting assassin strike, and finding out the game doesn't realize I'm hidden yet.

The lack of a southern tram in IP, when freaking Skyway and Steel have them.

That's actually pretty good, for a game this big and this old.

That was genuinely awesome. Thanks very much, Positron, and if that miracle you spoke of happens...let's just skip the moonbase. Clearly, the universe has a karmic mad-on for that particular project.

(In fact, logically speaking, just the fact that you no longer think the moonbase is feasible because the game is gone means that it's coming back! Woo! )

I was sitting at my desk, staring at a pile of unread bills and a bottle of bourbon and wondering which would kill my brain cells quicker, when she walked in. She was the kind of dame that you'll never forget no matter how long you live or how many cold showers you take--legs that curved like an Italian sports car, and a face that could make angels sin. She walked over to my desk and said, "I hear you're a detective."

I shot her my best 'who, me?' stare. It's saved me once or twice from an angry wife who didn't like some of the pictures I took. Although if I'd taken pictures of this woman in the altogether, I'd never have given them away. "People say a lot of things. Who's asking?"

"A client," she said, eyeing the stack of bills on my desk. "I'm a gamer, gumshoe. An inhabitant of a virtual world. Two weeks ago, it was killed stone dead, even if the body hasn't stopped twitching yet." She leaned over the desk, giving me a view men would crawl over their own grandmothers for. "And I want to know who did it."

Had a dream last night where one of my characters was fighting the monster from Cloverfield, and as I started to wake up, I realized that this would be a totally awesome thing to do in CoH. Do a new map that's Steel Canyon (or Atlas, or King's Row...) reduced to 1/10th size, with all the buildings replaced by destructible objects (probably ally objects, if it's a hero mission, but you could do a villain version where you're smashing stuff.)

Then have a "board transit" mission where you're supposedly given a "growth serum", so that when you enter the mission the introduction text explains that you grew to ten times normal size in order to fight the giant monsters on their own terms! Populate the mission with enemies of a new faction, and BAM! You're re-enacting "Godzilla vs. (Insert Name Here)".

Of course, I would have to come up with this idea after the game goes onto Death Row, but hey...maybe a miracle will happen. If it does, devs...keep this idea in mind, okay?

Just finished backing up 152 characters (including all the ones my six-year old daughter made over the last two years when playing with the character creator, which have sentimental value even if the game never returns in any capacity.) Thank you so much to everyone who made this. I know it's only the first step, but just having that information on my hard drive, on my computer, where nobody can take it away...that means a lot. Thank you.

(On the technical end, did you know that it won't save any character with a question mark in their name? Had to do some clever stuff to get around that. Not complaining, but I know programmers love their feedback. )

I don't necessarily need this specific event to keep going, but I want something that had the things I loved about this event. Specifically:

• Very little wait time once queued. I liked the fact that it was four people, so you could just queue, maybe run a mission or two while you waited, and then go.
• Open to lots of levels. The thing I hate about DFB, otherwise a great "pick-up" event, is that once you get past about level 10 you never get to use any of the shiny new powers you get.
• Not too long. I don't really want to deal with the commitment required for a TF; trials are nice, quick, and brief.
• Good rewards. I don't need to powerlevel, but the fact that I could usually log in a level 20 character, run one or two BBs, and pick up a level was a nice way of getting some characters that I play infrequently into their SOs.

So if the Devs could keep this in mind while designing non-Summer trials, I'd be happy even without endless summer.

I blame Mark Waid.

(Actually, that's a pretty good all-purpose statement of intent. But I kid Mark Waid!) Seriously, though, I think if you want to look at the point at which the Freedom Phalanx stopped being "the premier super-heroes, which we all look up to but who aren't around in large enough numbers to make a difference after the Rikti War and so must train us to be their equals" and started being "a bunch of bickering children who are too busy sniping at each other to actually fight worth a plugged nickel and have to be bailed out", look no further than Mark Waid's first storyline for the CoH comic. That characterization was terrible, it made them look ineffectual, and it stuck.

I don't mind it when it's Arachnos, though. Ending the Arachnos storyline with literally handing Recluse his head is just freaking awesome.

I think part of the problem with this thread is that people might be talking at cross-purposes; it sounds to me like Dug is saying, "Why not power-level up to 24 or 25 (whatever the minimum level is to do Ouro content) and then spend the rest of your way to 50 doing missions solely through Ouro, where you get teleports and don't have to spam through random 'hey, run a patrol of Peregrine' missions to get to the arcs?"

Whereas what a lof of people seem to be answering is, "Why not let yourself be power-leveled to 50 and then play the whole game through flashback?" These are two very different questions.

To answer the question I think Dug asked, as a frequent soloer, I enjoy teaming just enough to be irked by having to quit an arc midway through instead of just leaving it (this is even more obnoxious when you hit 50 and are doing the DA content to get Empy's...) Also, I like the sense of achievement I get from doing things, and imagining it all as flashbacks breaks immersion just that tiny bit. (As does seeing greyed out power icons of cool stuff I just earned but can't use.) Hope that helps!

I agree with those people! DFB is terrible, the way it encourages powerleveling! They should go back to the good old days, when the only way to level up was to farm AE--

...um, no, wait. The only way to level up was to find a level 45 willing to bridge and double-box through level 54 Family missions--

...sorry, what I meant to say was that back in the good old days, you'd know a level 50 had earned their levels honestly, through repeated Winter Lord kills--

...er, that is, back in the days where honest players played honestly, and got onto Werewolf Farms and killed the whole mission with stacked Trip Mines, then reset--

...basically, what I'm really trying to say is that at least powerleveling wasn't a problem in Beta.

...um, except for the times that the Devs would literally just hand out levels to people to test stuff. That was a bit of an issue.

My very first character (Nowhere Woman, energy/energy blaster) explained that as an entity from outside time, created out of pure mathematics and inserted into the timestream by the (**redacted for copyright purposes, but it was totally the Time Lords**), she was capable of perceiving that Paragon City (and later the Rogue Isles) was the center of a massive temporal anomaly. Time was disjointed, and individuals' timestreams were running in loose parallel instead of properly synchronized.

Those five muggers that a superhero just ran past as if they didn't matter? To you, they're a real threat, but to him, they're mere echoes of a long-forgotten past. They don't see him, he doesn't care about them...although he could disperse them with a single punch, if he wanted. Exemplaring and sidekicking were just more examples of this temporal weirdness.

It's an explanation that's served me well over the years.

For me, the Wall usually hits when I can't see the screen because of this reddish-pink stuff in the way. That's when I realize my eyes are closed and it's time to go to bed.

In all seriousness, I usually try to keep pushing with characters I have a hard time getting the hang of, even if it's just enough to get the next level. I found a lot of my improvements in overall skill level (such as they are, of course; I'd say I'm "fair-ta-middlin'" at the game) came from playing powersets and archetypes that weren't working for me, and trying to figure out how to not eat floor. That said, when creating new characters, I tend to stick to what I love (I don't think I've made a new Stalker or Dominator in months.)

Dang. I was really looking forward to running another BAF instead of the new trial. Guess I'll just have to run BAF instead of Magisterium for a while longer.

As a long-time lurker, I do have to say that I understand where the OP is coming from, here; at times, it seems that some people have a keyword search running for "lore" at all times, just so that they can jump into the thread and turn it into a complaint thread about the writing. (See the "The ONE Thing You Want To Know..." thread for a perfect example.)

I don't think that the answer should be, "Stop complaining, it's just a game," but I don't think that an occasional reminder that expressing your complaints in every single thread remotely related to the topic of the in-game story, ceaselessly and to the point of derailing the thread topic, is, um...sort of yellow-tinted Water Blasting in other people's Cheerios.

Passion is good, criticism is not bad, but perspective and politeness are awesome.

I snagged "Time and Tide" for my Time Manipulation/Water Blast Defender. It's actually two characters that form a team; "Tide" is a little girl with water-controlling abilities, and "Time" is the little black cat that sits on her shoulder and uses its power to warp reality.

Watery Grave. Water/dark blaster that made heavy use of the zombie costume parts, with his origin being someone who was killed by the Family and dumped in a swamp, only to emerge seeking revenge. The water and dark effects are both tinted brownish-green.

He'll be going vigilante at 20.

This thread grabbed my attention because I have a level 17 character that I don't want to have to make a final morality decision on. She's part of a themed set--one is a hero who is destined to be a hero and can't change it if she tries (if she goes out to a desert island in the middle of nowhere, it turns out that there's an evil cult there trying to resurrect a dead god. If she sits in her room and does nothing, someone will come running in fleeing supervillains. She's stuck being good.)

The other, natch, is someone whose every action is fated to further the goals of evil (she was a high school science teacher...every single one of her students became a mad scientist. The people in her apartment started a cult dedicated to worshipping forbidden gods. And so on...)

And this character, being in Praetoria, is free to choose her own destiny for good or evil. And her choice will decide the fate of the entire Praetorian universe. The problem is, she's terribly indecisive. So as a result, I really don't want to have her ever do a final morality mission. Please, keep those suggestions coming!

I try to formalize my altitis a bit by rotating the characters I play, so that everyone gets at least one level before I get heavily into a character for a while. So I level someone up to 50, then level all my alts up a level, then level someone up to 50, then level all my alts up a level...I usually find that by the time I've gotten one character up to 50, I'm ready for a change, and by the time I've leveled everyone up a level, I'm usually craving to go back to a particular character I enjoyed playing a lot.

That said, I'm now experiencing a craving to go back and get all my 50s kitted out with Incarnate powers, which is probably a Bad Idea.

To Whom It May Concern:

The last few days seem to have been marked by a serious uptick in the number of "staff meetings". The personnel reporting for these staff meetings have frequently been both unauthorized and belligerent. Is there a procedure in place to handle this? Also, where should the staff be stored when not required for the meetings? The advice of the personnel in question has been most unhelpful.

My only issue is that Broadsword and Katana are basically the same powerset with different animations, something that power and weapon customization has now pretty much made unnecessary. It'd be nice if one or the other was tweaked a little to play up their differences, with the animations and weapons being ported over to each other.

Unless that was already done and I missed it.

I would love it if this game was more like 'City of Death'! Story arcs written by Douglas Adams! Cutscenes voiced by Tom Baker and Julian Glover! Epic Paris maps! Time travel to Renaissance Italy and primordial Earth! And a cameo appearance by John Cleese!

**sees blank stares**

...um...nevermind.