Creole Ned

It would be nice if they added a column to the e-mail to show number of days until mail with attachments expired. Have the text with the number of days change color as the mail gets closer to deletion (something like green/yellow/orange/red):

30 days
15 days
5 days
1 day

While they're at it, it would also be nice if the e-mail window remembered its size/position when you opened it, too!

This is not an auspicious occasion for the marketing of Going Rogue.

I like blasters and dominators for the same reasons -- both ATs have a good mix of ranged and melee attacks. I like the variety. I also like that even though both are squishy, you have some means to get around mezzing attacks even if you don't have a break-free handy.

The changes to how music is classified were done with good intent but a bit overzealous, in my view.

The Good:

- tying in-mission music (typically when you enter a mission) to the actual music volume. Having music automatically play (in a constant loop) when you had music set to OFF was counter-intuitive.

The Bad:

- tying emote music to the music slider is unnecessary. Emotes only loop if a player doesn't stop doing them. There are already solutions to this if it bothers you: tell the player to stop or move away.
- tying the tiny musical fanfare that plays at the end of a mission to the music volume is just silly. I have to turn on ALL music just to get that little reward fanfare now? The one that's literally been playing unchanged after every mission for six years?

What I would have preferred:

- tie in-mission music to music volume (which was done)
- leave the musical fanfare for mission complete as-is
- put in a separate music control for player-made music (this would cover the boombox emote as well as the drums and others that produce 'music')

In relation to the OP, after today's patch the markets are now back up. Yay!

It's called City of Heroes, not Paragon City of Heroes.

Sam, you seem to approach the game as a kind of 'comfort food'. I like a little more variety, so I'm willing to try something spicy, even if it means it may not agree with me.

To each his own.

This is interesting, as rumors of a sequel have circulated for awhile. I actually think it would be a good idea, but this might be NCsoft just taking precautionary steps without necessarily having something concrete planned.

There is a difference to me between playing in an instanced map and doing a mission/quest in a zone map that makes the zone map seem less repetitive. In the case of CoH it may be that there are so few zone missions that they retain some sense of novelty. You know that mission in Sharkhead to defeat 10 Scrapyarders in The Pit? Before the XP curve was smoothed, you often faced off against enemies that were +2 or +3 when doing the mission. You'd have to move about The Pit carefully because it was, for your character, a literal death trap. I *love* that mission, even though most seem to hate it. You get to explore an actual environment, you get to choose your targets and apply a little bit of tactics instead of walking into an area where every enemy placement has long-since been memorized (and yes, I know most zone spawns have fixed locations, as well). You can use the environment to your advantage -- knock a pesky demolitionist off a ledge to get him out of your hair for awhile. If one group is too tough, you can move on and try another (hospital visit optional).

Compare that to a typical instanced mission where it plays out the same way every time because it *is* the same every time -- same layout (within a set of minor variations), same spawn placement, predictable level range, etc.

I'm also one of the nuts who enjoys the mission in Warburg to launch the rocket.

If we could get more dynamic spawns in instanced missions (have them moving more, not just standing in clumps, add more variety to the groupings) and more missions that took place in zones (hopefully with the thought of the PvP zone missions, not necessarily more "Defeat X") that would go a long way toward reducing the potential monotony of missions overall.

New maps with more logical layouts would also be a huge plus for me. Yeah, you get used to anything after awhile, but the game really does hurt for variety as a whole when the vast amount of player time is spent in slight variations of only a half dozen or so locations (warehouse, sewer, office, cave, lab). I think the devs will continue to tweak the existing game and do more with GR since it's essentially a new palette for them, but overall we're probably not going to see much change in terms of instanced missions because the game is what it is.

Nice work, Leandro.