Chad Gulzow-Man

This is just a suggestion, not necessarily a complaint about difficulty, but I would change the following two badges for the Keyes Trial:

CURRENTLY:
Loves A Challenge - earned by having no one die during the last round of the trial, the fight with Antimatter.

SUGGESTED CHANGE:
Close Call - earned when the league stops a player from being killed by Antimatter's Disintegration power.

CURRENTLY:
Bunker Buster - Destroy all three entrance doors to one of the bunkers within 3 seconds of each other, then repeat the process for the other two bunkers as well.

SUGGESTED CHANGE:
Make the badge require only ONE of the bunkers have all three doors destroyed within 3 seconds.

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I would leave Anti-Anti-Matter and Avoids the Green Stuff alone conceptually, once the latter has the bug with pets counting against you fixed.

Bunker Buster just... isn't fun. The requirement to take down all three bunkers that way reeks of artificial difficulty. It's arbitrary, and it feels like it was made this way specifically to keep people from earning it. It's not even hard as it stands now, it's just a lot of sitting around and waiting for everyone to line up before the league leader says "Go!"

As for my suggested change to Loves A Challenge, well, there are two things that kill people in this round of the trial with any regularity: 1) Obliteration Beam, and 2) Disintegration. The former is already covered under Avoids the Green Stuff, so the badge already pretty much feels like it's meant to reward a team's ability to stop Antimatter's Disintegration power as it stands. In this case, I figure, why not just tip the scale further in the direction it's already leaning?

I sincerely doubt that either of these suggestions will actually be implemented since they've already gone live, but I also don't see any harm in saying "If I designed this, I would have done it this way," especially not on the Suggestion boards.

Blargh. It seems like every time I get on a team to run this, some jackwagon stands there and gets stuck in THE VERY FIRST PATCH. Had I had the star tonight, I actually would have kicked the guy who got caught in our second attempt.

I'm also thinking the badges for Keyes weren't planned out very well, or maybe that they were rushed; I've seen a couple other possibilities during my runs that would make for great badges, but aren't quite so painful to obtain. I think a badge for the league saving someone once from Disintegration would have worked nicely, and been on par with the Synchronized badge from Lambda -- you wouldn't get it every run, and it'd fall to either luck or really good communication to get, but you could expect to get it with reasonable certainty within 5 or so runs.

... Yeah yeah, suggestion forums are down there, I know...

I think rather than Hero/Villain themed Mastermind sets, they need to focus on fulfilling the origins. As has been mentioned, a Robotics, Mercenary or Ninja Mastermind wouldn't have any trouble fitting in blueside, and arguments can be made for Demons, Necromancy and Thugs towards the same...

But by my count, they've got Magic (Demons, Necromancy), Technology (Robotics) and Natural (Ninjas, Thugs, Mercs) covered with obvious sets, but there's nothing that's specifically Mutant or Science. Sure, you could say that your mutant/science abilities lie in your secondary powers (as I did with my Science origin Thugs/Poison MM)... but I'd really like to see something that would work well for those two origins, like maybe some sort of "Abomination Summoning" or something.

Looking at things from a different way, we've got different damage types covered: Lethal (Mercs, Thugs), Smashing (various), Fire/Cold (Demons), Energy (Robotics), Negative (Necromancy)... and Demon Summoners even do a bit of Toxic damage with their Hellfire powers. We're obviously missing Psionic damage from that list. If the OP's suggested Angelic set covers that with some sort of Energy/Psionic hybrid set, I could see that fitting in pretty well.

(I also really think Masterminds need one more completely free primary set--one that all users, including Free players, would get access to with no additional charges.)

Sweet, Tuesdays are my free night.

I've already got Well Stocked and Synchronized on my Stalker, and need the other two for doing just Acids and just Grenades (with no temps used). He's +3 with Seer pets, so I'm not trying to sponge or anything.

When buying a new video card, remember to take into account how much power your power supply can give to it. A lot of recent cards require a 600-700W PSU.

Again, THE ONLY content you can't make a one-off purchase and have access to forever is the Incarnate content. It is the only content that is permanently locked behind a subscription.

You want Masterminds, Controllers and EATs? Buy them once and they're part of your account forever.

You want access to Going Rogue's side-switching features, mission content and powersets? Buy those suckers! Heck, you don't even have to buy them all as a package in CoH Freedom--you can buy JUST Dual Pistols and Praetorian mission content if that's all you want.

Missions in the new First Ward zone (included in VIP subscription)? Pay the fee, and you can do those on your Premium account just like all the VIPs can.

The "Freedom" isn't about you getting everything for free. It's about you choosing exactly how much content you want access to and how much you pay every month. That choice can be 80% of the game for free, or you can creep that up to about 95% with a series of one-time transactions.

You complain that their "plan is to suck the money out of as much as they can?" They're a business. They don't get to keep their jobs if the game doesn't stay profitable.

And as for whomever was saying that City of Heroes was NCSoft's most financially poorly-performing game? Have you seen what NCSoft does with games they don't feel are bringing in money? Google "Auto Assault" and "Tabula Rasa" sometime. I see no reason to fear for CoH's future anytime soon.

Signed times infinity bajillion.

There are a few things wrong with the above.

1) Badgers aren't discriminatory. Absolutely zero of the badgers I know would turn down a request to help someone get a badge. The badge community is largely built of people in "friendly competition." Yes, we all want the most badges, but we also want everybody else to be close.

2) I'm pretty sure you're saying "i9 would have been the time to go free" because... that's when you left. Far more people would say that the time was i13, because virtually no one liked that issue. But the time to do it is when they're ready to do it right, and that's in Issue 21--they've been working on this for over a year, and they'll still be working on it for at least a couple more months before release.

3) 50 per zone isn't a measure of how many concurrent players the servers can handle. In fact, at this point, it's more of a kindness to the players on low-end systems or with slow internet connections who wouldn't be able to handle the added traffic. Have you ever seen what happens when more than 50 people enter a zone? A copy of the zone is created, which can hold 50 people, upon which another copy is created, and so on. During events, Freedom has seen (I think) 12 or 14 different copies of Atlas Park. I'm not saying there wasn't lag... but it was playable for most people.

Also, if a server does fill up, free players will be kicked in preference for VIPs. I'm not entirely sure that that's a good thing, but I agree that they do need to give priority to those who are paying a subscription.

4) I don't want my supergroup on a bigger server, and I wager that 90% or more of the SG feels the same way. We're happy on Victory--we're not a big server, but we're not a small one either.

I'd further wager that the new VIP server you're so up in arms against will certainly NOT be more populated than either Freedom or Virtue, even after the uppity players transfer away. I'd be extremely surprised if the VIP server even became #3 in terms of traffic.

Finally, there's nothing saying where you have to put your characters. I may make one or two characters on the VIP server, but I'm not transferring anyone away from Victory. Not permanently, at any rate. Most people are just viewing the VIP server as an additional 12 character slots being added to the subscription and have no real plans to migrate.

5) I don't really disagree with you having issues about them taking Controllers and Masterminds away from existing customers who have less than 3 years of veteran status, especially those who purchased the boxed versions. I admit that I'm not terribly familiar with how LotRO's swap to F2P went with regards to what players had purchased beforehand, either... but are you sure that if a new player had signed up the day before they went F2P, they'd maintain access to those 2 additional classes after dropping their subscription 30 days later?

There's also the fact that you don't actually "own" anything on their servers, aside from any microtransaction items you may have picked up. Everything you've done up until now has been to pay for access to the game.

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Look, you can think and say whatever you want, and again, I'm not totally disagreeing with you on some of the big issues. However, you're going to garner more sympathy and more consideration from the developers if you post in a little more thoughtful and respectful way. Instead of shouting in ALL CAPS, think about what you want to say and the reaction you want to get, and limit your finger pointing and comparisons to other games, because 1) it's technically against the forum rules, and 2) this isn't those other games--what maybe worked for them might not work here, and vice versa.

I've found that Shadowy Presence works pretty well if you find yourself needing to use Rest in a dangerous area.

But yeah, it's otherwise completely useless. >_>

One cool thing that did get posted... the current incarnation of Blaster's Dark Manipulation contains the following powers:

Penumbral Grasp, Smite, Death Shroud, Shadow Maul, Soul Drain, Touch of Fear, Dark Consumption, Dark Pit and Midnight Grasp.

(Of course, the order or even the powers themselves may be changed prior to open beta.)

I dunno. I didn't see a lot of negativity in this one. There were quite a few repeats/variations of "why no Dom love?" which were answered with the standard "we've got plans for Doms that will come after the launch of i21."

Mostly it was people wishing that Brutes and Scrappers got Ice/Ice or Scrappers got Super Strength. I'd kind of hoped there would be more people talking about builds they'd like to make using the proliferated sets, as per the suggestion in the thread title, but it is what it is.

I DO think that proliferation might have been too narrow a field for questions this week, though... especially since next week, the majority of the team (that can post, anyway) will be busy with Comic Con.

Lots of things like purchasable jetboard travel powers. <3

Not an official redname post, but the recent Massively.com article here said:

You sure about that?



Man, it's hard to write text... I'm left handed, but use a mouse with my right.