Captain_Photon

Well, to be fair, the sounds we hear cars making in the movies pretty much never came out of the actual cars we're seeing. (There's one of Jeremy Clarkson's videos where he demonstrates this by dubbing V8 sounds onto a Fiat 500 chase, with predictably amusing results.)

Come to think of it, why doesn't the Super Group Registrar have a phone number? I mean, it's a government agency. Stick it on one of the Contact tabs if you're in a Super Group, job done.

You know, I've noticed over the years that people around here are often strangely unwilling and/or unable to reach a little, which is slightly odd in a game whose setting is the softest sci-fi imaginable and strapped into the inherent limitations of a persistent-shared-world online game to boot.

"... and makes at least as much sense as finding a big, jagged piece of concrete in e.g. a tech lab."

Obviously a proper pickin'-something-up animation would be better? But playing the New Animation card makes the Baby New Year cry, so I decided to go with Suspend a Little More Disbelief instead.

Well, I guess I can't say Day Jobs never did anyone any good.

I know, but it seems a bit... lighthearted... as a motif for someone like Bane. Like an axe murderer deciding it'd be fun to adopt a Sgt. Slaughter motif. Besides, even if he wasn't dressed like a masked wrestler, there's the whole "super-steroids plus savantish strategic mastermind" thing. The character just... doesn't work for me. Mind you, he's not helped any by the fact that he was introduced as the centerpiece of a plot that made me want to slam someone's head into a cinderblock wall - my own if no one else's was available.

Heh, the Talos Island one used to be positioned so that it occasionally trapped emerging heroes in a bus shelter. ... For those buses Paragon City doesn't have. But I digress.

Bug or "feature", I agree with the OP that it's annoying. Being required to set to -1 just so you won't get mauled by a room arbitrarily full of orange lieutenants is like having to take a pay cut to get your office moved out of the boiler room.

Yeah, well, I didn't say you were stomping your foot, only that one was getting stomped. Relax, Colossus.

I'm having - as I do every time this comes up - a hard time believing that this would be any skin off my back (or yours, or anyone's who isn't that player who did that silly thing) even in the worst-case scenario where people are doing it. I mean, it isn't as if there aren't plenty of players who don't know what the buttons do anyway, and the Earth has not yet fallen into the Sun.

It just ends up being another one of those CoH standard foot-stompy "Because I don't want you to!" things. Like Inherent Fitness.

A level-5 possessed dude with a magic dagger is probably pretty damn mighty, elite, and terrifying to a normal person, which - bear in mind - player characters aren't. Even the really gimpy ones.

Fair enough, carry on.

Aw, the Jag rocked! Nothing else could do Tempest 2000 justice, or Defender 2000 at all.

What would it do? I mean, if it worked in parallel with the tier-4 blue one and restored all your hit points, well, in order to use 100% of that effect you'd have to be dead, right, and there's already another inspiration for that.

Yeah, sorry, slightly misstated. I'll fix that.

It does seem to happen to more costume parts on the female model than the male or huge ones, which is the main reason (apart from its longevity) why I suspect it's that way on purpose. Call me a cynic.

Just making the mask not-semi-transparent would probably be a good starting point, but don't go by me...

See, that's one of the things I like about them, though I'd rather they were vending machines or things like the old stats terminals as opposed to those hideous NPCs - or even if they were the old stats terminals, be nice for those to have a use again. Except I don't think there are any on red side, so we'd get the Devs Hate Villians people up in arms again...

Anyway. One of the things that has consistently annoyed me about the way City of Heroes is presented is the way the designers seem obsessed with explaining every obviously-metagame phenomenon with lore, no matter how tortuous and visibly unworkable. Power Proliferation is a great example, but not the only one. (The way the difficulty setting works is another. Or, for that matter, how about the way you can sell "training" enhancements back to the "trainers"? That's like un-using gasoline.) These things, and others like them, don't make the square root of a crumb of sense as in-story items. It actually draws more attention to them and makes them stand out more obviously as out-of-game mechanics for the designers to go to such absurd lengths to explain them inside the story.

I'll give you this: Your in-game explanation for the merit vendors is actually better than some of the official equivalents (I am once again looking at you, Proliferation). But since I don't hold with the whole policy you're trying to bring them into line with, well, none for me, thanks.

Yeah, I think you're right about that. The unusual gaming demographic the Wii is pulling in is people like my mom, who's 58 and opted out of home video gaming when, at 22, she didn't see the point of Pong.

Thanks for not understanding what I just said. HINT: It wasn't that.

Y'know, it's weird. I've been playing (with a few fairly long gaps) since the late spring of 2004; I play almost exclusively on Virtue; and I have a number of female characters - and yet I can't remember such a thing happening to me even once.

Looks like never teaming up with strangers is payin' off once again.

... Then you would hardly be likely to respec one of your existing characters into those power sets, would you?

Do pay attention, 007.