Chad Gulzow-Man

My vet reward dates are generally listed as being off by a month, and it seems to be a pretty common problem these days. I've had to petition my last two Vet badges--even after they corrected my reward calendar the first time, it automatically reverted to being a month late again at some point over the next three months. I have no doubts I'll have to petition them again come early February.

However, in your case, I'd wait to petition it until after January 16--they're likely to ignore your petition since you're not actually due for any further rewards at this time. At the very least, wait until after Jan 1st, because tech support is probably going to be limited to a skeleton crew for the rest of the year.

There are two major reasons that seem to come up on the boards as to why more people aren't PVPing: 1) The majority of CoH players aren't interested in competing, but in cooperating towards a task; 2) the current PVP system just isn't fair.

There's nothing you can do--rather, there's nothing to be done about the first group. Just leave them alone, and they'll leave you alone. Pick on them, and you'll get Issue 13 all over again.

As far as group 2 goes, the current PVP system rewards people for choosing specific builds and slotting them out with expensive IO enhancements. This makes entry into competitive PVP a steep cliff to climb. And for every player who wants people to come join the PVP club and will offer you help and advice, there are ten that just want faces to punch in and don't care if you ever come back. (Note: made up statistics are made up.)

Unless they do some more serious modifications to PVP (which is going to further disrupt the balance between PVE and PVP), there will always be a cliff there that some people, no matter how interested they are in PVP, will never be able to climb simply because they don't have the time required to climb it. This is why games like Counterstrike and Team Fortress are so appealing--everybody starts out on equal footing in a match, and even if you earn better weapons or armor during said match, you're still never more than a couple lucky hits away from losing a fight; effectively, skill and practice are rewarded over gear and grinding in these games.

Anyway, let's take a look at your list:

0) Special PVP money: We've already got influence/infamy, Vanguard Merits, Candy Canes, Reward Merits and Architect Tickets to cash in for items, and every time they add more "money" it messes up the market and the balance of what's available in it. And if you're guaranteed some sort of "money" for doing a task, that task will get farmed to maximize rewards. And being considered a farmable commodity isn't going to make non-PVPers any more interested in learning, either.

1) Badges: I'm a badger. I'm also firmly in group #1 of non-PVPers. I hated having to get the PVP badges, not because I couldn't compete but because I didn't want to compete. A friend and I spent several quiet, late evenings trading kills in a PVP zone so we could get the badges and never have to go back.

2) Temp Powers: these already exist. There's the Shivans in Bloody Bay, Nukes in Warburg and the Longbow and Arachnos mechs from Recluse's Victory. I'm actually not against adding more, and this is probably the best thing on your list. However, there is another thread that's been going on for over a week about why PVPers won't leave PVEers alone in Bloody Bay so they can get their Shivans in peace, so keep in mind that there will be plenty of people annoyed if they add more.

3) Powers you can keep: Seriously? You think that PVPing should give a permanent in-game reward? I think that PVP should give you experience points towards your levels, thus allowing you an alternate route for learning new powers and enhancing your character to the PVE experience... but other than the PVP recipes there shouldn't be any sort of permanent rewards for characters that are PVP-only.

4) PVP Recipes: I'm assuming you already know they have these (I saw another post of yours stating that you've been in the game for awhile and are generally pretty knowledgable). I agree that they should probably have more total PVP recipes, and they should quite possibly drop more often. I'm personally of the opinion that some of the existing ones are very overpowered in PVE (the procs from Panacea, Shield Wall and Gladiator's Armor in particular), but given the current system they have for rewarding PVP players for having tons of time and money to spend on their characters, the PVP benefits for these IOs seem to be more or less in line with the amount of effort required to earn them.

5) Special Enhancements: No. We have Training Enhancements for lowbies, then Dual Origin, then Single Origin, then Hamidon and Inventions. There's even special PVP Inventions. There's no reason to add any new "special enhancements."

6) Free Respecs: I would not be opposed if this were added to the list of random PVP recipe drops, but there is absolutely no reason you should be able to earn a respec for smacking down X number of players, for two reasons--if you earned it legitimately, then you don't need it; if you farmed for it, you don't deserve it.

The developers don't "give" away respecs willy-nilly. Yes, you'll usually get one with an issue launch, because they do a lot of power rebalancing in between issues. You get one a year with your veteran rewards. You can earn three (or four if you're a Widow or Soldier) by playing the existing game content. You can earn a respec recipe as a random drop, or buy someone else's off the market.

((Then again... they did just add the "Holiday Respec" to things you could buy with Candy Canes, so maybe they're rethinking their position on this?))

7) Costume Pieces: again, this would bring PVEer rage down upon your heads like never before. Inevitably SOMEONE will say they ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE the "#1 PVPer" chest logo for a character concept they want to realize, but they refuse to PVP for it.

8) Unlockable Emotes: ... why? There's little reason to have any sort of emotes that aren't available when you first start playing (the Villains' "listenstolenpoliceband" one being the only one with any concrete reasoning behind it). Adding the ability to dry hump your defeated opponent's face as an emote is going to do LESS for incentivizing PVP than not putting it in at all.

9) Costume Tokens: Again, why? These last two suggested "PVP rewards" are generally thought of as roleplaying items in the game. And if you try to roleplay in a PVP zone, you'll be called an "lolfiteclubber." Not a good incentive.

-----

I guess maybe someone needs to explain to me why there needs to be "special rewards" for winning at PVP to begin with. Why should someone who is better than average get special gear that improves his performance, thus increasing the discrepancy between his level and that of an entry-level PVPer? I'd think that regular rewards--experience, influence/infamy and inspirations--would suffice. (I know, you don't earn exp for PVP in CoH, and even as a strict PVEer, I think you certainly should.)

Seriously, isn't the point of competing in PVP to be able to say, "I beat you, so-and-so. Good game," or, "Oh man, you really kicked my butt mister PVP guy, but I learned from it!" before looking for the next challenge? Why does it have to be, "I beat you, so-and-so, and now I get Item X to make it even easier to do next time!"?

I'm out of town Thursday evening, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I still definitely want to get this on my Villain badger.

Any time tomorrow, Thursday early afternoon, or next week works for me, as I'm off work for the holidays.

As Dirt mentioned, I tried getting a group together for this on a few occassions, but everybody seems to be running it in Atlas over and over again with Heroes. I managed to get a whopping 6 people together yesterday, and only one of them other than myself was a 50.

Not everyone's a badger. I am, obviously, and will be switching sides almost entirely for an excuse to grab some sweet, delicious badges. Collecting badges makes my OCD demons quiet down.

The rewards for not switching include a new "power up" system that they've given us absolutely zero confirmed information for, other than the fact that it exists and is associated with staying loyal to your faction. If the old marketting survey is even partially correct, the best we can assume is that it will include global enhancement slots, allowing you to boost some global stat for your character...

...while simultaneously nerfing Accuracy, Defense and Regen.

Note that a red name commented in the now-deleted Issue 16 Beta forums that switching sides will NOT exclude you from earning these rewards, but that you will earn them at a slower rate than someone who does not switch. (My guess is that switching sides also resets your progress on this "power up" system to zero, but that's just a hypothesis.)

I'd rather they NOT make Fire and Ice powers cancel each other out. That would lead to unnecessary griefing ("harhar, i melt ur ice u noobz!"), players being discriminated against on teams ("Sorry, you can't team with us. Your fire powers will break my ice powers."), and players building borked characters ("WTF, my Fire/Ice Blaster can't do anything!!!").

Given the short duration of our power effects, it's unlikely that extreme heat would mess with the ice powers or extreme cold with the fire powers anyway. Seriously, do you know how cold it would have to be for a human being to be flash-frozen in a block of ice?

It's so cute that Beyaj thinks he's getting a first wave invite with an account regged in May 2009.

First wave of invites are going to be "friends and family." So if you aren't close to someone working for Paragon Studios and aren't someone like Arcanaville (hint: unless your name is Arcanaville, you're not), you're not getting invited here.

Second wave will probably be 60+ month veterans. It could be previous beta testers with a good track record, bumping vets down to the third wave. I expect wave two to go out one or two weeks (or 5-10 play sessions, if the test server isn't up 24/7) after the first wave.

Wave three will most likely be HeroCon attendees. Again, it's entirely possible that they'll get invited before the vets, but then I'll have to scream "devs hate east coasters!" since I live (you guessed it!) on the east coast. Regardless, tier 3 will probably hit another 1-2 weeks (5-10 play sessions) after the second wave.

Wave four will then probably be those who earned the badges for customer loyalty. It will probably hit 3-4 weeks (15-20 test sessions) after wave three.

Wave five will likely be anyone who gets a preorder code for Going Rogue. They'll likely only get 1-2 weeks in the closed beta before it becomes open beta and they let anyone with an active CoH account play. Open beta will likely last three weeks to a month.

This is of course based off of my previous experience with tiered beta invites. It could be completely wrong... wait, no it couldn't, the first wave is definitely correct. A lot has to do with how much the testers are actually accomplishing, how much control they want to exercise over the testers (some people won't like that "test x" means that y, z and q aren't available and will simply give up on testing at all), and of course how bad marketting wants to pump up the hype for those who aren't in the test yet.

Also, you absolutely need to know: beta tests are just that--tests of incomplete products. Yes, it's cool to say you got to see all the shiny new features before anyone else, but it also means putting up with ridiculous amounts of lag, crashing, bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs, and sometimes even bugs.

I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that it'll go much smoother than those for the other super hero MMO this past summer, but it's still going to be a work in progress right up until it's officially released (and then in all likelihood, another few weeks beyond).

I understood way too much of Westley's last post. And I don't even speak Spani--er, "Cheese Samurai."

I wouldn't really consider this a technical issue or a bug, since they did announce that they were marking the cape mission as uncompleted for every Hero in the patch before the holiday event started.

Of course, that was to correct another bug, in which players could access the new cape mission via Ouroboros (as intended) and take characters who had not yet hit level 20 with them, allowing them early access to capes (an unintended consequence).

We got some nice snow flurries in Raleigh, NC on Friday, but none of it stuck. And then it rained all night, so even if it did stick it would have gotten melted (or at the very least broken up) by the rain.

I had to walk my dog in 35 degree weather (Fahrenheit, which is like 1-2 Celcius) in the pouring rain. It's probably the only time in my life I've ever wished I owned an umbrella.

Epic thread just got epic-er.

"I like saving the world, and clicking on bombs." Good times.

As Master-Blade mentioned, the "maxinactivefps" command is a lifesaver when dual boxing. The command tells the game that, if it loses focus as the active window, then it shouldn't use as many system resources. Once you return to the game screen, it will then play exactly like you're used to.

If you don't want to edit your CoH shortcut for whatever reason, the command can be activated ingame by typing "/maxinactivefps #" in the chat bar. The # is how many frames you want it to render every second when it's not the active window. I usually use 1.

Typing "/maxinactivefps 0" will disable the command, and it will continue to render fully even when in the background... which is, again, not recommended while dual boxing.

If you're looking to do AFK farming, such as a heal farm or a damage farm overnight for the badges, you can also open up a browser window on top of the game windows, causing all of them to use much fewer resources when you're not actually playing.

Happy day-late birthday, Sarrate. Obviously if people are still saying it, that means you get to keep celebrating!

Also, thanks again for tanking on my MSTF a few months ago.

Devs hate fliers, even more than Villains.

If you're a flying Villain... well my friend, prepare to be whomped by the Nerf Bat.

ActiveSpeech can also be used for things like Defendable Objects or Hostages.

Do you have any weird special characters in any ActiveSpeech fields? Particularly, things like quotation marks, < > or { } brackets... stuff like that? That could potentially cause a speech field to think the line hasn't ended and continue reading on past where your text ends.

Best. Question. EVER.