Cybercel

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There is no RISK in farming. There, for by your account the xp should be zero.

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Not sure what your point is when I'm not defending farming here. But no, that's not the case anyway - there are two things we know the devs care about; risk/reward and time/reward (look at the way merits are decided). Farming easy and high XP mobs with auto-SK certainly is broken on both of those points, but it shouldn't give nothing.

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Sensible amount? How about what you can earn in a normal 8 member team doing varied missions per hour set at mid level difficulty? Still fast, but hitting lvl 50 in 6 hours should be a bit harder.

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And that's exactly what I'm worried about with a cap. What you, or the average person/team gets in XP/hour, not all of us do. You put in a cap like that, you'd impact a lot of people not farming - people who run at higher difficulties, people who run through things very quickly, people who are very good at the game, people who've spent time to really optimise their builds, etc. Or, as I said above, people doing things in MA that have intentionally made to be a real challenge, but give appropriate rewards.

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I personally bet NCs gonna do some data digging and kick people back to level 1 or harsher for this, which would of course be stupid since they're not cheating, just using what's there. I still bet they're gonna do something evil like that.

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What makes you think that? Did they do anything like that with Winter Lords, or other past too-fast XP problems?

They don't like PLing, I would assume, because people get bored and stop playing sooner. You know pretty much anyone they did that to would stop subscribing, so it'd be very counter-productive.

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How about putting a sensible cap on xp per hour game wide?

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That gets an even bigger no.

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Why?

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It completely flies in the face of risk vs. reward to have any kind of flat cap. As someone posted above, there are very difficult arcs in the MA that net you a lot of XP - and rightly so. If you put the effort in, you should get the rewards, and a cap ruins that.

The issue isn't people getting a lot of XP, it's people getting a lot of XP for very minimal effort. Again, the issue is that the risk vs. reward is completely out of whack. That's what people want fixed - so a cap is very counter-productive. You're just breaking it in a different way.

Edit: Oh, and also, who is going to judge what constitutes a "sensible" amount?

That's true, it does make farming very easy - but you already know that, and so does... probably everyone reading this thread. So why put yourself through doing something you dislike, probably deepening your dissatisfaction with the game, rather than getting on with canon story arcs?

Not that I want to tell people how to play - which is, after all, a fairly big part of the farming vs. MA vs. canon vs. whatever issue... it just strikes me as very odd. But if masochism's your thing, go for it.

Rather than disabling auto-SK, change it. Have it SK people to the same level as the highest-level member on the team. As it stands now, it's perfect for PLing.

Not a complete fix for everything going on, but it would help.

I thought the complaint was that too many people already are doing it.

Can I just ask why you're choosing to do something you've said you dislike?

I think you'll find most teams aren't too picky about what they do, as long as it's the right sort of level. If you're stuck with old stuff... just finish one of the missions (or auto-complete it, as people have mentioned), speak to the contact to clear it, and then don't accept another mission from them. You aren't automatically given the next mission in an arc, you have to accept it.

I'm Cybercel, and I'm not leaving; I'm looking forward to the new TFs (especially as we've been told they include new maps), new costume options, and an improved MA search. I'm also hoping those hints about Dual Pistols and Power Customisation materialise into more than just hints.

If they don't though, I'm still not leaving.

I agree with this. I do wonder how bad the old zones look to new players, especially if they start out villain-side, which doesn't suffer from the dated, older hero-side zones. Especially for someone not knowing the history and how old some zones are, I'd think it'd look really shoddy.

I can see the benefits to both, and I know opinion will be split, but it'd be nice if they maybe looked at alternating between new zones and revamps.

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Just for the record, I don't think this is a matter of CoH being doomed. I rather suspect that CoH will still be here a year from now, probably about as busy as it is now.

All I'm saying is that I've been disappointed by the last few issues, and I am not likely to be here a year from now.

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And there's nothing wrong with that, or with saying that. However, there have been an awful lot of posts lately that read like they're speaking for everyone, like they're the absolute truth. As much as anything, I'd just like to note that these kinds of post certainly don't reflect my opinion.

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Listening and even doing that which has been requested won't stop those that used to like the game, are now sick of it but don't want to admit it to themselves, and know where the forums are.

"I love the game (but I'm going to complain constantly)", seems awfully close to "I loved the game, but I'm tired of it and don't recognise the fact".

Another thing that would help would be if everyone was banned from the forums at work (including me, no exceptions). Constant access erodes the enthusiasm, and seems to add to the ennui that will inevitably arrive with anything if you are exposed to it for long enough.

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I'm quoting all that because it really needs repeating. Nothing sapped my will to play and enjoy this game like using these forums too much. I vanished from both the game and the forums for a while - then I came back to the game, but I've never returned to heavily using the forums.

And you know what? I'm enjoying the game more than ever, despite being a veteran. And I'm far from being the only veteran who's still enjoying this game - funny thing is, to find these people, you tend to need to look in-game, not on the forums.

I do think all the complaints here are putting people off, too. There was an argument recently where someone said they complained precisely because they loved the game and wanted to see it succeed... and then a few days later, a post from a new player terrified the game was about to shut down. Don't you see what you're all doing? Plenty of people, new and old alike, still love this game and are having a lot of fun, but a small (really, start counting the people who are complaining) percentage of veteran players are filling an area very visible to new players with all kinds of doom and gloom. I doubt it's helping anything.

Obviously things aren't perfect, and I'm worried about CO etc. coming out, too. But I don't think things are anywhere near as bad as some people here make out. I think a lot of you are just bored of the game and don't want to see it. Nothing is going to entertain someone forever. Maybe you'd be doing the game you claim to love a favour by moving on for a bit, rather than poisoning the atmosphere. I'm almost certain you'd be doing yourselves a favour.

Thanks for the replies, but I know about the Mids recipe viewer. My problem is that I'm not interested (in this case) in recipes planned into a build, but just a random list of recipes that I own. I can't see any way in Mids to get a shopping list for anything other than a planned build.

Is it really worth getting worked up about the wording of something when you don't even know what it is, yet?

Personally, I hope it's fun news... this is a game, after all, which I play for fun.

I know Mids will create a salvage "shopping list" based on a build, but I could really do with something that would give me such a list just based on a list of recipes.

I have a whole load of mixed recipes I want to craft, and I really don't want to have to sit and work out how many pieces of each type of salvage I need to do it. Ideally, I'd like some sort of application where I can just select which recipes I have (and number of each), and have it return me a list of salvage.

Considering making one myself, but don't want to go to the trouble if it already exists.

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You mean the capability to make an architect for themselves is new?

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Of course not - but any project has its limits. There are never unlimited resources. For whatever reasons, those resources didn't get put into this idea in the past; we know the team was smaller before, and run by a different company - these could be factors. Whatever the reasoning though, it just didn't happen earlier... are you trying to say that because it wasn't done earlier, it shouldn't have been done now?

Likewise on your comment about saying they should have had better tools, because they have developers... small team, limited resources, and they've been taken up elsewhere, for whatever reason. I don't really see how it's relevant; I'm glad they've produced better tools now, regardless of whether they should or shouldn't have done it earlier.

It just seems mad to me (and this isn't aimed just at you, as I know you've not said all these things) to complain that the devs should be concentrating on making the game better in some way, or that they should be concentrating on making dev-made canon missions/arcs/whatever when it's clear they've been spending time upgrading their own tools so that they can do these things.

Also seems silly to get too worked up over whether this issue will save the game or whatever when we know how their development cycle works, and we know that I15 and probably I16 are well under way. And also that different people do very different jobs, and I doubt the people not involved in MA have just been sat twiddling their thumbs.

Basically, I just think it's premature to start complaining. If nothing good materialises in I15, then fair enough. In the mean time, the game's received a fair amount of publicity, and my SG's global channel is busy for the first time in a good long while. Something's working.

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Burt the devs do not have our limitations. they have far more resources at their disposal and, if they wanted to could add more.

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You keep saying things along these lines, and that the devs resources would have been better left elsewhere, but seem to be ignoring the fact that the devs were doing a lot of the work of this anyway, for themselves. Previously, they were using spreadsheets to make missions.

Now, while they obviously still have a little more flexibility than we do at this point (given there are some things in dev missions we can't do yet), I'm guessing this method was probably a lot more time-consuming, possibly more error-prone, and perhaps meant not everyone on the team could just easily throw something together. So no, they haven't really had amazing tools.

Not only that, but given they were intending to make the MA before they came up with the idea of releasing it to the players, that suggests to me that they wanted a better mission builder so they could make more/better missions. I think it's a safe assumption that we are going to be seeing more dev-created content, and this is the first step towards that. It might be we'll see more new mob groups if this has made them a lot easier for the devs to create, it might free up time to come up with new missions objectives and ideas we've not seen before.

So between that, the fact that a lot of people love it and are using it heavily, and the fact that it's brought an ageing game an awful lot of publicity... how exactly has this been a waste, even if you don't like using it personally?

There was a mapserver a few minutes ago, on Union - seems everyone on my SG's global got kicked. One of my friends lost several bars of XP (I think 4 or 5) and a badge she'd picked up a few minutes before. Another related that they'd lost tickets.

Anyone else had this happen? On a server other than Union? Be interested to know how wide-spread it was. I'm a little concerned as to whether we're going to keep losing things. Not sure how best to report this, as it's not really a bug, as such, and I don't expect to get anything back - I just want to make sure it's known about and doesn't keep happening.

Adding to a number of good villain-side arcs already mentioned, I'd say the Slot Machine's arc and Doc Buzzsaw's arc, of the top of my head. Quite like Jonny Sonata, too.

I'd probably give pretty decent ratings for at least some of the RWZ stuff and Faultline, but there are some tricks used in those we don't have access to.

Well, of course the one-minute jobs dominate it right now... it's not been out long enough for a lot of people who intend to put time into their arcs to publish, yet. Obviously there are the ones that were complete in test, but not everyone bothers until live, and I've certainly not had the time to complete an arc yet.

I do agree that the search facility needs work, and hopefully the dev team will see this and work on it. I think they should be comparing it to how various web-based user-content systems work. It's very easy to find lots of stuff you might want to look at on YouTube, for instance - we need tags, similar arcs displays, maybe lists of good arcs like you can make lists on Amazon, etc.

Note that with I14 this has been changed, and no longer affects active accounts. If you intend to let your subscription lapse though, empty the market out first.

There are in-game warnings, but only if you talk to the people stood near the market. Having two accounts and a ton of alts, I've always found this a real pain (and I lost a fair bit before I knew about it). Really glad it now only affects inactive accounts.

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More to the point tho, I was concerned about how lackluster and downbeat his response to the question was. As tho the Dev team are really excited by the product but not expecting it to drive new revenue. That's a borked business model if ever I've seen one.

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Didn't the dev team say some time ago that their drive at this point was to retain subscribers over gaining new ones? I thought it just sounded like a repeat of that, rather than doom and gloom.

And Fluffy. Spam heal + pets works well. Certainly has survivability, and a ton of -regen.

I'd like to hear more on people's thoughts as far as villain-side. I don't solo much, and even more rarely solo AVs, as I have a near permanent team mate.

That said, I did recently solo an unexpected AV on my Fire/Rad Corr, despite it stunning if I got into melee for Power Sink, and the fact that my Corr is very much built for teams. Fire/Rad, Ice/Rad, and Sonic/Rad all seem good bets.

On a non-Corruptor front, DM/Willpower Brutes rock. Not got mine to 50 set but a duo of them handles most things. We've had a few problems with specific AVs that hit some weak spots - any -recharge makes self-healing impossible, for instance, and -regen is bad too, so Positron was a bit painful. I'm sure once levelled and actually slotted up with IOs, it'd be able to solo a fair bit, but I have a hard time seeing it being faster than a /Rad Corr. This is my first high-levelled melee toon though, so I may be way off the mark.

Have to wonder about a Robots/Dark MM. Would be safer than a Corr, not sure how quick though. I have seen one tear through AVs solo, but having checked, it was exemped down, so not at 50.

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I think unlimited respecs or allowing more than 10 enhancements to be removed from alts would flood the market with enhancements. While I can see an advantage in this for my 50s as they'd be able to buy those enhancements my lowbies would suffer as anything good that they find that effectively sets them up for many levels would likely become very cheap and very useless.

/Unsigned

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I think Standoff's pretty well covered my thoughts on this. Right now, if anything, the market it suffering from a real lack of enhancements/recipes for sale. If allowing some way of removing more IOs had any effect, I think it would be a positive one. And as Standoff says, the low-level good IOs (like KB protection) are still going to be needed in a lot of builds, so probably won't go back on the market. And when respeccing, for every set someone takes out, they'll probably be buying a new one to put in, levelling things out.

The thing to keep in mind is that those people with tons of inf don't have a huge issue here. They can just rebuy IOs - taking more off the market for the rest of us - or buy respec recipes. Or if they just have real money to spare, they can buy more respecs, or even buy inf.

Meanwhile, those of us who play more casually, or more for fun than power-gaming, or don't have real-life money to spare, suffer. I don't have the inf or the money to buy 10 respec recipes so I can empty a toon's set IOs out. I also don't really have the time - I work full time, and repeat respeccing feels like more work, not fun.

The respec system was put in place long before IOs existed. It worked fine when all you needed to do with it was move powers and slots, and when enhancements were worth very little. Also, as new sets come out you can spend a lot of inf only to find something better comes out, requiring a respec and more inf spent to re-slot. The game design has changed very significantly, while this hasn't been looked at.

That said, I don't agree with the original idea that we need more respecs. I don't see massive harm in there being more available, but don't feel I really need more of the things - not if we can have a better method for just moving set IOs around, or some kind of slots & enhancements only respec as some have suggested.