CoX_Starblaydia

Love 'em.

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HEATS (cos of the possablities of what u can do with them)

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High Explosive Anti Tank warheads?

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Oh and since you have a 50 already how about a Warshade?

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I can understand why so many dislike Kheldians - they're like Marmite - love 'em or hate 'em

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MMMMmarmite. First thing I'm doing when I get to 50 (apart from cheering) is rolling a Warshade as a story extention of my Blaster.

Blasters have no need to ever get into melee, and they are very squishy but very shooty. Lots of fun, just watch that health bar. Oh and the Endurance. Apart from when you're watching the carnage.

Glass cannons all the way!

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Though there are also some great English names and surnames with wild and wacky pronunciation - IIRC this is part of the reason why English names get a whole chapter to themselves in Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue.

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Notes From A Small Island is one of the few books that makes me chuckle away out loud while I'm reading it.

Which causes odd situations on the train.

They will not* pull the AE system (That most people here refer to as MA, Mission Architect), as they've put so much into it that it would be akin to saying "we were totally wrong with this ground-breaking feature that we've invested pretty much everything in", so you're safe on that point.

Positron has said that anyone who's been exceptionally abusing MA to powerlevel their character may lose access to them for some undetermined time. He hasn't said anything about what constitutes the abuse, so from everyone who's ever played 1 farming map with Rikti Comms Officers up to everyone who's taken a toon from level 1 - 50 in X number of hours/days could conceivably be in trouble.

I'd say carry on for a month - perhaps try a regular levelling for a new toon - and see what happens. 24 levels may count as abusive powerlevelling, or the cap may be anything over 25, 30, or 50: we just don't know.

Which is part of the problem.




*: Prediction only, never underestimate the unpredictability of stupidity rearing its head (whether it is in this post or a Dev action).

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Yeah I bet we'd all be surprised how much churn there is every month between new players joining and other players leaving.

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Apparently they retain about 90% of their playerbase, in terms of pure account numbers, which is about 140k at the last count. Can't remember where I read that 90% figure, but I think it was from a Posi post/interview.

For 'actual' numbers: "For NCSoft’s titles, the number I track is the “monthly access” number for each game as reported in the company’s quarterly reports. According to their documents, this number is the “number of unique users that log on at least once in the given month.” <snip> For games like City of Heroes and Tabula Rasa, this number is probably somewhat less than the total number of active subscribers, unless NCSoft is just reporting the number of subscriptions in that field for those games."

Source. (CoH is the black line on the chart)

After having played SWG first, I got to WoW and marvelled at the graphics (SWG was, totally, [censored]) and upon walking from the starting zone of Elwynn Forest to neighbouring Westfall over a rather picturesque bridge into its autumnal fields, it was a revelation.

It was almost like I'd expected the world to end and come crashing down around my ears with a 'Loading Westfall' screen, but nothing happened. I just carried on walking, it was great. SWG was different in that each planet required loading, but the planet zones themselves were fairly massive.

But CoH - War Walls?

Enormous, graphics hogging, game slowing-down, zone-buffering, loading screen WALLS? Oh dear god. Get rid of them. Make me download a half-gig update file, I don't care, just find some way to get rid of them.

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i still think dual guns is the thing to have, simply because we don't have that without minions to spoil the fun.

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Only if one of the powers is a John Woo esque leaping to the side, firing both barrels like there's no tomorrow and sliding to a halt on the floor twenty yards away.

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Recluse is laying claim to a new archipelago, mysteriously surfaced after centuries underwater... (Yes I nicked that specifically from Jingo by Terry Pratchett ) - what's Lusca doing here? And are those...Atlanteans?! Is Lusca, in fact, a remnant of an ancient civilisation?! Gadzooks!

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His questing finger moved slowly down the page, and stopped. Good old International Maritime Codes. They'd been devised eighty years before, but the men in those days had really thought hard about the kind of perils that might possibly be encountered on the deep. He picked up his pen and wrote down:

"XXXV QVVX." Translated, it meant: "Have just found Lost Continent of Atlantis. High Priest has just won quoits contest."

I'm also putting my thanks in, as now my redside stalker won't have to get blisters running four miles to get back to Mercy.

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Paragon have already 'biged up' the MA's ability to allow a player to play from 1-50 on player created content alone.

Removing that ability would be a PR disaster.

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But just don't do it too fast - naughty naughty!

To be fair, any MA levelling - even on story arcs - would be at a higher pace than regular content levelling as there's no travelling involved from contact to contact, and every five missions or so you get an arc-ending boss.

My point/starting point was that the general agreement on this forum has to be that they've got things wrong, they just differ on why:

1) It's wrong because they created the MA in the first place which allows powerlevelling, farming and grinding at a pace never seen before (what is street sweeping if on grinding, farming or even power levelling when on a double XP weekend)? It also allows them to get out of creating new mission content, as we can do it just fine ourselves now

or

2) It's wrong because they give us a tool, knowing the problems that would arise with it, then wait an entire month before announcing vague threats over 'abusers' of the system.


MA itself is the pandora's box. I think it's a brilliant feature, one that I had no idea would ever happen in an MMO. Proper user-created content is like our own, global yet personal, mission-generating holodeck. In itself it's given me the idea for my main's backstory as well as the Peacebringer I'll create when he finally hits 50.

MA made it fun to team and blast things in the face until it stopped being funny, but it's also created real powerlevellers with little to no understanding of the game itself, never mind their own toons. The effects on the Invention/Enhancement/Salvage market economy has yet to be seen, though is suggested one way or the other.

Somewhere between the two is the way to keep the best of both worlds and not totally lose the people who hate PLing and not alienate the people who have found a new enjoyment of the game because of it.


My thoughts on how to fix it, addressing most of the problems would be:

1) Move the AE buildings away from the starting zones - don't expose toons to it until at least level ten, not an auto-contact at level, what, five? Shouldn't even enter people's minds, as the opening missions and a decent sewer run can get any toon to at least level six.
2) Lower the XP and particularly the Inf from the MA. It's fake fighting, and in that world any hero who boasted 'I've defeated a virtual Lord Recluse' would be laughed out of Pocket D. Why do you get full influence for beating up holograms? Do someone explain that to me. Risk/reward? Rubbish.
3) The ticket reward issues such as recipes, salvage and DOs, SOs and TOs that can be gained in huge numbers also needs addressing. For solo and team play, it's not much of an issue, but for PvPing and the billion-influence recipe market (that I have no knowledge or intention to use thereof) there are evidently some problems.

Proper way: Eeth-ear-ee-al
My original way: Eth-er-real.

Keep up, man, this was in the Culture forum hours ago!

Browsing the US boards, you see the evident love for BaB, Castle and the rest as they're accessible and just like us except that they had their characters in the game before there was a game.

By the time it gets filtered down to us, War Witch notwithstanding, we get the ilk of Positron's fairly pointless 'Global Address' - a Community Liason Manager role would be able to say the same thing in PR-ese without causing such a fracas (partly because we wouldn't take much notice).

They're programmers, animators, technicians, art developers and story writers. Bar the story writers, I'd only expect about quarter of the animators and art developers to be able to put a flowery PR-friendly statement together (I say that based on the experience of having done a degree in Computer Animation).

Rubbish hype, generally poorly thought-out statements to the community and time constraints with the Anniversary have not added up to a particularly good time for NC/PS.

I hope they can fix it, for sure, and I think they can. It can bring the I14 "We hate MA/the future" leavers back, treat the I14 grind/farm/exploiters the right way and we can all be one happy family again.

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Also, consider the word "Shardenfreude"

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Sorry to pick holes in use of another language, but: Schadenfreude. Kudos on the phonetic spelling, however.

Now, to lighten the mood with a related Simpsons quote: "Boy, those Germans have a word for everything! "

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Thats what I get for never seeing the word written down

Usually it's the oposit that gets me (seeing the written word, then trying to use it in conversation and pronouce it incorrectly, like effigy )

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Have to hold my hands up to that one in days gone by presuming 'Ethereal' was Ether-real.

At what point did "Posi on Abusing Mission Architect" become "Re: Posi is Abusing Mission Architect"?

(italic emphasis my own)

I had the exact same problem, as detailed over in the Player Questions forum here. The answer is, yes, we did quite stupidly purchase the US version, which can't be applied to EU accounts (I'm even fairly sure I linked to purchase it via the NCSoft main site, which didn't help).

I also managed to get mine solved at zero cost (It did require a slightly snotty message to support after two days of not hearing anything back, but other than that, it was well handled).

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Apart from that we're all just arguing for the sake of arguing, and that's fine.

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No we're not!


Wait...




Nevermind

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Also, consider the word "Shardenfreude"

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Sorry to pick holes in use of another language, but: Schadenfreude. Kudos on the phonetic spelling, however.

Now, to lighten the mood with a related Simpsons quote: "Boy, those Germans have a word for everything! "

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By the way, BAB has said they're working on getting them costume change ones to work while flying or hovering.

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They work for me while flying - you just halt in mid air to change and have to manually move off again.

The annoying thing is when I hit one of the binds (standing, running, flying, whatever) and the emote either doesn't fire or half-fires without the pyrotechnics, then the character's costume change catches up about 5 seconds later with no animation to match.

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US posts in response : 3384
EU posts in response : 468

We seem to be very poor at whinging in comparison.

I'm proud of us .

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Weeell, if you weight that by the relative sizes of the communities we make up a bit of ground...

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We're outnumbered, what, 10-1? If so, then equal nerdrage

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Couldn't we start the 'Dumb' line of badges then?

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Aww nuts. Postal region one for me, then.

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Position's ... read's ... they're ... thing's like Comic's ... , They're

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Proofreader? I physically winced at "thing's like Comic's".

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As long as whoever wrote that is not on the writing team, they'll be fine.