Catharctic

Originally Posted by Positron

I am pleased to tell you that in Issue 16: Power Spectrum we have two new features that are made to better facilitate the game experience by streamlining many processes that players spend time setting up.

The first of these is the new difficulty settings. A lot of in-game Broadcasts are powerful characters looking for “pads” so they can artificially increase their team-size to provide more of a challenge for greater rewards. With the new difficulty settings, these players can set their team size without having to bother other players with their Broadcasts. If they want to be treated as a team of 8, even when solo, they can.

The second feature is what we have come to call “Super-Sidekicking” but actually applies to all types of Sidekicking: Exemplaring, Lackeying, and Malefactoring as well. With this system, everyone in the team will find themselves automatically level adjusted to the level of the owner of the Mission that is currently selected. If there is no mission that is currently active, then the level is set to the leader of the Team.

If you are below the level you are getting set to, you are automatically sidekicked up to one level below the owner’s level, just as if you had sidekicked to them. If you are above the level, then you will be lowered to the level of the owner, just as if you exemplared down.

The players don’t need to do anything for this to happen, it all happens automatically. This means that no matter what level ranges you have in your group, you can ALWAYS play together and you can ALWAYS get XP. Yes, we are even changing the way exemplaring works so that you get XP while you are fighting at a lower level. There will be an option of having the “old way” of exemplaring, and earning extra Inf. instead, for those players who want to earn some more Inf. instead of levels.

Gone are the days of having to play “Mentor Tetris” (as we’ve come to call it) to make sure everyone in the team is SK’ed/EX’ed to the right person so that everyone is receiving XP, or having to tell your friend that they can’t join your team because you don’t have enough people to make sure everyone is SK’ed and earning rewards.

One of the other advantages to this system is that the level adjustments take place no matter where you are in the game. No more “My sidekick is out of range” messages. If you are about to undergo a large level shift, you will have a dialog box pop-up giving you warning and the ability to leave the team (handy if you are in combat at the time and don’t want to suddenly be fighting at a lower level). The range of levels that this dialog pops up is adjustable in the Options screen.

Now we are aware of a couple things that this system doesn’t do so well, and we are attempting to address most of them in the coming weeks. The first of this is the fact that you lose access to powers, especially the most-recently earned ones, when you Exemplar down. We are looking into some sort of fix for this.

Next is the fact that sometimes you just want to un-exemplar and kick some butt, especially when things look bad for the team. If you leave the team you will automatically start fighting at your superior level. This will enable you to save your team’s bacon at the cost of eating up any of the rewards they might have earned for those guys you defeat.

Badge hunters in the closed beta have pointed out that some badges are simply favorable to get once you outlevel the content where they are given. Since Super-Sidekicking makes manipulating the levels more difficult, we’re going to re-examine the requirements on some badges, and lower them where appropriate. Mentor badge credit is still given whenever you are the Mission Owner, and someone is auto-sidekicked to you.

Now one thing that is getting removed by this new system that is not going to be fixed is the ability to “bridge”. Bridging is the practice of sidekicking a low level character to JUST the right level to cap their XP earning on each entity defeated by the group. This was a side effect of how the Sidekicking system worked. While we have made adjustments to the Sidekicking system many times over the course of the life of the game to combat this, Super-Sidekicking eliminates bridging completely, since all rewards will be in parity.

Before we went and removed this playstyle completely from City of Heroes we wanted to make sure we were doing the right thing. We did extensive datamines to see how many accounts were actually participating in a “bridge” team, and were surprised to see just how low of a percentage it actually was. This may be a case where it is possible that the “advertising” in /broadcasts for bridge teams actually made the practice seem more pervasive than it really was.

With the ability to bridge removed, we should see an end to those Broadcasts, in addition to /tells to characters who are in the right level range for being a bridge. To us cutting down on annoying spam only makes your game experience better. (Which reminds me, we’ve added new features to the in-game Email system to either shut it off entirely, or only receive emails from people on your friends list and/or people in your Supergroup. Another step in the battle against annoying in-game spam.)

With both the new difficulty levels and Super-Sidekicking, players can use the difficulty slider to increase the level of the entities in the mission so that they can earn more rewards. But this, at least, comes with the risk inherent with fighting higher level entities and larger spawns. As for low level characters missing out on accelerated leveling speeds, we are increasing the rewards they earn from level 1 to 20 (about 20% across the board) so that every player can get through the lower levels faster, not just those that know “the tricks”.

(These changes are currently being tested in the Closed Beta for Issue 16, and may be changed/modified by the time they reach the Live servers)

Originally Posted by IanTheM1

Just to clarify, do you mean you only get one forever per character, or you just have to earn them individually?

I have a shape-shifter character who would die for the option to work towards the whole collection...

Originally Posted by MrPlayskool

The Pocket D VIP power snaps back to the starting animation repeatedly instead of maintaining the channeled animation through the cast

Originally Posted by Turbo_Starr

SLAP! Meaning any time!

Originally Posted by Turbo_Starr

Any time Saterday works for me.

Originally Posted by Black_Marrow

AE XP. Nerf It. Hard.

I used to form teams almost every day, using /search, sending out waves of messages for people to join, etc. But now... now even that doesnt work. This new generation of players has no clue how to play, some of them have never left Atlas Park. It was depressing to get a 5 man team together at level 28ish the other day and have someone leave because there wasnt a /kin on the team. We had a /Dark and a /Cold. Apparently that wasnt enough for him.

Originally Posted by Turbo_Ski

Also of course fix the inherent or completely revamp it to add more distinct flavor to the defender AT.

Originally Posted by Turgenev

IMO, it's a subversion of the community to sow dissent for when CO is released, as they hope to get people

into that game. I wouldn't be half surprised to see the complaints disappear a month after CO goes live, and our population

remains about the same.

And three months later, we get the CO refugees as they realize what a mistake they've done.

Originally Posted by TheBruteSquad

Dark Melee just makes every set better. All of them.

One of my most fun brutes is a Dark Melee/Energy Aura. The to hit debuff in Dark Melee really helps out energy aura's lower than SR numbers, and with two endurance drains available as early at 28 you're never out of endurance (in fact, I've considered dropping dark consumption because it never gets used).

It's a single target brute, but with a small purple insp from time to time you can easily take alpha from an 8 man team. If you use IOs you can probably soft cap the most common damage types.

Originally Posted by Tatmia

Saw a screenie that looks like doms will have stone melee, but the giant poo hands will be replaced with stone spears.

Originally Posted by Bionic_Flea

You could always make a video of a character walking out of AE and getting on the train and then send them a link to that.

Subtle AND helpful.

Originally Posted by KelpPlankton

Fun movie. Great kids flick. If someone had told me this was a live-action adaption of an unused pilot episode or something for a revival of the cartoon, I'd totally believe them.

It feels like a live-action saturday morning cartoon. And it doesn't take itself as seriously as Transformers does, which is one of the main flaws of TF.

There's a kung-fu grip mention, knowing ends up being half the battle, and all other sorts of goofy goodness.

Worth seeing. Not worth rushing to see, but worth seeing. Ignore the plot holes(there's a lot of silly ones), become 9 years old in your mind, and you'll love it.

(and on a side-note, I loved them turning a grey goo scenario into a controllable weapon. It's so... supervillain.)

Originally Posted by Beldoman

Sorry if I missed this in the sea of other posts, but here's a question:

While the boards were down there was a news item stating that players who had 60+ months paid would get a chance to get into the first wave of closed beta. Now, a timeframe of August 15 - November 15 is mentioned (expected time the game will be in beta?) According to PlayNC, I'm due to tick over to 60 months on August 18th. Would I still be eligible to get into that first wave of beta invites?

Originally Posted by PC_guy

Originally Posted by Lothic

I do. And I just mentioned the related skintone color nerf that went with it in the post just above yours.
Did you have a point beyond that?

Originally Posted by Turbo_Starr

Also, look forward to some new epic sets.