CuppaJo_NA

Senior Times Correspondent Jackson Turner comments on the role heroes play in our society and the price they are sometimes asked to pay for their dedication to protect the citizens of Paragon City. Read the special Times commentary here.

Special thanks to Visceral for this post - many of the common solutions to tech problems with CoH can be found in this thread.

Alderac Entertainment Group has announced the winner and honorable mentions of their City of Heroes “You are the Hero” Collectible Card Game contest. For complete details please visit the official contest site. Congratulations!

Just a reminder that PIGG viewer programs and / or pigg file modifications are against the EULA. This is why posts that discuss these programs/hacks are removed.

Could there be a more perfect pairing than City of Villains on Alcatraz Island? GameSpot doesn't think so, which is why they are proud to offer their paying subscribers the City of Villains Premier Event Sweepstakes! GameSpot subscribers can enter for a chance to attend the City of Villains Premier Event to be held on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, CA on October 5, 2005. One lucky person (and their guest) will win a trip to San Francisco which will include passes to this exclusive event!

Not only will the winner be the first to hear some exciting announcements about CoV, but he or she will also get to meet some of the creative minds behind City of Villains. All entries must be in by 9/26/05 so those eligible should hurry to GameSpot and check out the details!

This Sweepstakes is not being thrown by NCsoft. If you have any questions or issues, please make sure to contact GameSpot directly and NOT NCsoft's Customer Service Department.

G4’s Cinematech is featuring five of the winners from our recently concluded 2nd Annual Paragon City Film Festival. The next airing of the Film Festival episode will be today at 2:30pm CDT. Repeats will be aired 9/24/2005 - 8:00pm CDT, 9/25/2005 - 1:30pm CDT and 10/1/2005 - 1:00pm CDT. For more details, please visit Cinematech.

In celebration of the much anticipated release of City of Villains™, and as a follow-up to our hugely successful hero contest of the same sort last year...we proudly present the City of Archvillains Halloween Costume Contest!

Every hero has a nemesis, an archvillain that complicates and threatens his world. And what better time than Halloween to indulge in some wicked fun! We want you to reach into the dark side of the mirror and come up with that perfect evil counter-part to your hero. The malicious yin to your heroic yang. Winners will be awarded exciting prizes, including a Sony 32-inch HD TV, Apple iPod 4GB Nanos 4GB, Tivo® DVR's and more!

For complete contest information, please visit our official City of Archvillains Costume Contest Page.

Good luck!

While some heroes operate alone and others form large alliances, for many no crime fighting is more rewarding than as hero and sidekick. A perfect paring of strengths balancing weaknesses, the hero and sidekick relationship is the yin/yang of the comic universe. The writers and artists of the City of Heroes comic book want to hear your duo’s story and pick one lucky pair to be in the comic!

Submit your duo between today and Sunday, September 18th at 5 pm CDT by posting your names, server, picture, and 100 word bio in this thread (click here). Winners will be in either Issue 10 or 11 of the City of Heroes comic book. Only one entry per account please. Good luck!

We will be conducting scheduled maintenance on City of Villains today, Sept 14, from 4:00PM to 5:00PM CDT. New beta testers will not be able to create accounts during this period. Please wait until the maintenance has ended to create your accounts. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding!

Want your hero immortalized by City of Heroes comic book artist David Nakayama? Bring your screenshots to the Bayside Expo Center during Wizard World Boston, September 30 – October 2, and Mr. Nakayama will draw up your character in his inimitable comic-style! For more info, check out The Art of David Nakayama. See you there!

Almost a year after a massive explosion devastated parts of Siren's Call, the district has been given the official okay to allow limited access to heroes. What really happened in Siren's Call? And what does the future hold for this once thriving part of Paragon City? Read the complete Paragon Times article here.

Excited about City of Villlains? Want more in-depth info on the rise of villainy in the CoH universe? Here’s your chance to ask Zeb "Lord Recluse" Cook, Cryptic Studios’ CoV Lead Designer, all about CoV. Zeb will be front and center in Stratics IRC chat on Wednesday, September 14th (3pm PDT/5pm CDT/6pm EDT) to entertain your questions.

Just tune into #StraticsHoC on Stratics IRC. For those with Java installed, Stratics’ IRC HoC Java Chat applet will allow you to automatically join #StraticsHoC by entering a nickname and clicking on the Chat! button. Otherwise, you can connect to the servers by using either mIRC, pirch, Ircle, one of your favorite Linux chat clients, or one of the Java applets listed on the Stratics site and entering one of the following servers:

Stratics.frws.com 6668 (USA Colorado)
irc.glowfish.de 6668 (EU Germany)
Stratics.afraidyet.net 6668 (USA Atlanta)
irc.stratics.com 6668 (re-routing to one of the above servers)

The WarCry Network has an interview with Robert Weinberg, author of the first City of Heroes novel, The Web of Arachnos.

From the interview: “The Web of Arachnos is Statesman's story. It tells how he obtained his powers, what his connection is with Paragon City, and how he became the city's first super-powered crime fighter. It also describes his relationship with Lord Recluse, the leader of Arachnos, and the reasons they hate each other so much.”

To read the complete interview, please visit the WarCry Network.

You strutted your fashionable selves down Icon’s runway and you were Oh So Hot! Not only that, you were featured in Issue 5 of the comic book, where thousands of fans could be dazzled by your beauty. You were fabulous. Sexy. Daring. The epitome of a stylish hero. Congratulations!
Click Here to see the Winners!

The contents of the City of Villains Collector’s Edition were announced to the press today. Highlighting the City of Villains Collector’s Edition package is a set of seven limited edition HeroClix® figures from WizKids®, composed of three hero figures and four villain figures, including a Lord Recluse HeroClix which is only available in the Collector's Edition. The City of Villains Collector’s Edition will also contain a DVD version of the game giving players access to an exclusive in-game cape and chest emblem from Arachnos™, the game’s top villain group, as well as a map of The Rogue Isles™, the chain of islands that make up City of Villains. The Collector’s Edition also includes a book featuring art from City of Villains and City of Heroes®, a preview deck of the City of Heroes collectible card game designed by the Alderac Entertainment Group™ as well as a single limited edition City of Heroes collector’s card. The City of Villains Collector’s Edition will sell at an anticipated retail price of $79.99. Subscription pricing for the game will be announced in the fall. For more information about the City of Villains, go to www.cityofvillains.com.

**edited yet again because they still were not happy with it - I will change the patch note page in the morning**

The Controller and Defender versions of Enervating Field debuff Resistance less than they did before Issue 5.


Dev Note:
This power has always been very strong and easy to use, despite its high endurance cost. With the overall decrease in the power of defensive buffs, this power had to be weakened or Radiation would be too strong compared to other Defender primaries and Controller secondaries.

Original Post edited to add "but not" - Tar Patch and Freezing Rain are classified as differently.

**edited yet again because they still were not happy with it - I will change the patch note page in the morning**

The Controller and Defender versions of Enervating Field debuff Resistance less than they did before Issue 5.


Dev Note:
This power has always been very strong and easy to use, despite its high endurance cost. With the overall decrease in the power of defensive buffs, this power had to be weakened or Radiation would be too strong compared to other Defender primaries and Controller secondaries.

From the digital world to the real, Alderac Entertainment Group wants to immortalize your Super! It’s easy; enter and tell them how your hero came to be in 200 words or less and one lucky contestant will get his or her hero printed on a Hero card in the next City of Heroes CCG card set! The winner will also receive dozen of his or her cards sent to their address.

Rules:

• Entries must be submitted by September 12th, 2005 11:59PM (PDT)

• Submitted Hero must cape eligible (Level 20) on any server.

• Contest begins September 6th, 2005

• Winner will be announced by September 26th, 2005.

• Employees of NCsoft, Cryptic, & AEG are ineligible to enter/win.

• All prizes are non-transferable and void where prohibited by law. No cash substitution of prizes allowed.

• In the event that a winner chooses not to accept a prize, he or she forfeits all claim to that prize. AEG then has the right, at its discretion, to award that prize to a contest runner-up.


The contest will be held at www.cohccg.com

This contest is not sponsored by NCsoft. If you have issues of any sort, please make sure to contact Alderac Entertainment Group and not NCsoft's Customer Service Organization.

Labor Day 14 Day Buddy Codes have been sent! You should get yours soon if you are a subscriber to City of Heroes.

If you did not get one, fear not! You can view the details of the email here and you can go here to retrieve your buddy code. Remember - only one code per household!

Writer Tracy Spaight and photographer Robbie Cooper will be interviewing and photographing MMO players for the Alter Ego Exhibition and book in the coming weeks. Alter Ego takes viewers on a journey into the frontiers of cyberspace to explore community, identity, love, and loss within virtual worlds. Alter Ego will:

· Document the growing culture of video games and online worlds in an intelligent, witty, and accessible way

· Explore how gamers use technology to create novel forms of community and identity in cyberspace

· Provide a visually arresting and entertaining journalistic record of life on the cyber frontier

Alter Ego juxtaposes photographs of real people with their avatars and documents life on the screen with player stories, interviews, and screen grabs. The exhibition opens in Amsterdam this November and will visit other cities across Europe, the U.S., and the Far East beginning next year. The book will be published sometime next summer. You can read about the original exhibit at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3683260.stm

Robbie and Tracy are looking for players who:

- Look like their avatars

- Play a different gender than their real world gender

- Met their significant other online

- Have a colorful, off-the-wall, or unusual story about their online experiences


The authors have not finalized their itinerary, but plan to begin their trip in South Carolina on September 10th and work their way up the East coast. From there they'll travel to selected cities in the Mid-West before heading out to California. If you'd like to be a part of the project, please send an email to Tracy at tspaight@gmail.com. Tell where you live, how to contact you, and why you would make a good interview subject for the book / exhibit.

Alter Ego is an independent project that is not sponsored, approved, or endorsed by NCsoft Corporation, NC Interactive, Inc., Cryptic Studios, Inc., NetDevil Ltd, or ArenaNet Inc. This notice is presented as a courtesy to members of our community who may wish to voluntarily participate. Please direct all inquiries about Alter Ego to the creators at tspaight@gmail.com.

With this morning's (Sept. 1) maintenance we are distributing a free respec and a free costume change token to all characters on all live servers.

The free respec will overwrite any existing free (not earned) respecs a character might currently have and can be accessed by typing /respec

The free costume change can be accessed by going to any Icon Tailor in Paragon City and clicking on a tailor. The tailor will automatically apply your discount to any costume change to one costume slot. This change will remain available until you use it or another free costume token overwrites it.

Heroes -

Issue 5 is here! Tomorrow morning (Sept 1) we will be distributing one free respec and one free costume change to all characters. This gives you time to use any current free respec you have since tomorrow's respec will overwrite any unused free respec.

Again, that is tomorrow - Sept 1 that these will be distributed.

Some people asked me to post this as well -

You will not be able to /petition to get these badges if you completed the TF before I5. So please do not flood the GMs with /petitions trying to get the badges. They can NOT award them.

Clarification - Monsters in TF's do not count towards the badges for those monsters (Adamastor or Jurrassic for ex). It has been this way for some time.

Also - after much pushing and shoving - we were told that there will NOT be data mining for TF badges. So if you did a TF before I5 - when I5 goes live you will not get a badge for it auto-magically.

I know - it stinks - I'm sorry about that.

**edited to read correctly - note on top of all that - Babbage that is in the TF will give you the badge - IF your group does the most damage to it - if someone helps you defeat Babbage - you may not get it if your team does not do the majority of the damage**