Deadly_Buzz

SOs as a reward were desirable, but in the way a Chomp is desirable, not in the way that a Ferrari is desirable. They were attainable and easy to get. Sure, early on it was worth doing the respec trial just so you could sell off your current set to finance your next loadout when you levelled into the next band but once you were in your 30-40s, they weren't much of a big deal.

One way of getting around the teaming issue would be to slightly rejig the way contacts and missions work so that it's easier to synch with a PUG. Say, if you complete a mission from a story arc as part of a team you get the end-of-mish clue that points you to the next mish, same as the leader. Get X of these clues (say 3 or 4?) and you get "introduced" to the contact for the mishes so you can now join the active investigation and take on the missions. You can now synch with the team so you're all working towards a common goal ; if you finish the arc you can collect your merits ; if you leave the team, all that work wasn't for nothing - you can finish the arc on your own ; if you just breeze in to the group for the last couple of missions you get nothing barring the XP.

I;m worried what impact the merit system will have on getting people to help you out if you hit an EB/AV-shaped wall at the end of an arc that you can't solo-fender your way through. Will you still get the odd benign offer of help from an exemped 50 or will you be shunned as a merit-[censored]?

it seems to me that the rewards/refunds are getting disproportionately larger the bigger your SG base gets (and therefore presumably the bigger the SG gets, hence the less you actually need any sort of cash-back). While adjusted room pricing goes some way to breaking down the massive barrier between the bog standard base-line functionality you can buy with 15 members and buying your first proper control and power generators, it's still a substantial problem. Add to that the rent that even the smallest one-room one-man operation can generate if they put a single useful device in their base and you're basically slamming the base door shut on the fingers of all the small SGs. It doesn't make much sense - Surely each milestone should be slightly harder to achieve rather than getting progressively easier, so as to coax you along and keep you playing without ever giving you a task so insurmountable that you give up and leave the base system behind?

That's a brilliant idea Psiphon - how about on the first tuesday evening after I13 launches (there's nothing good on TV on a tuesday, trust me) everyone brings a Lvl 1-5 toon to Atlas and we hold a mass moonie-style wedding ceremony? Get a red-name to bless the union using the Atlas plaque as an altar, take your vows and then it's off to the sewers for a power-leveling honeymoon!
(Ideally, participants should have the wedding pack and a halloween costume slot unlocked so they can have their ceremonial formal wear and honeymoon beach-wear set up)
/em confetti for everyone!

On the bright side, you can offload all your ToT enhancements in one shop without losing any money. Result!

It is bad luck to drop knives in the house - especially if you take your shoes off at the door.

If you get Shadowhunter into the water it doubles the effect of electrical attacks on him - FACT! I tested it on my neighbours kitten.

There were shag-all spirits, I think I saw one door spawn them in about 2 hours of TorTing yesterday and one more this morning when I was on for about 40 minutes. It's mostly 3 zombies, or two zombies with a Streng or a Witch. And the amount of times a sorceress and a werewolf come haring out the door with hurtin' on the minds is worrying - am I interrupting something?

Treats seem thinner on the ground than last year too - unless there's some trick to it that I'm missing? Does it make any difference if you're wearing a costume?

I've got a few. There are 3 key things you need to do :
1. Pad it out to 15+ members using alts, friends, random strangers etc. This will help you get started. If you're using random strangers, they're bound to leave or delete that toon at some point if you don't intend to run the SG as an SG (ie with events, teaming etc) but the key is to get your base up and running asap, with a bit of luck by the time enough toons are lost you'll be up and running and can absorb the loss of prestige.

2. Either get a second account (if you refer yourself as a trial member, it's entirely not money wasted, you get credited a month on your main account for the month you pay for on the upgraded trial account) or get an assistant to get your toons into your SG as soon as possible so you're always earning. It's usually easy enough to get a team mate to do it if you've just rolled a new toon.

3. Figure out what you want and what order you want them in. 15 new members nets you 20K a pop, 300,000 prestige. You can have a functioning Med bay and 1-destination TP room with an Oversight center for your starter power, base storage and crafting table. This is plenty to get started with. If you expect to be playing extensively with SG toons though (ie earning lots fast), hold off on the TP till you've earned another 50K or so, get the 2x2 room. (If you build the 1x2 room first, you can't delete and replace your TP, so you either lose the TP or you have to have enough money in the bank to own both the 1x2 and 2x2 rooms, 200K, simultaneously to move the TP from one to the other.)

4. Be aware that the jump from the above config to the next level of functionality costs a MASSIVE amount. If you add a second TP to your TP room, you will run out of power or control (I forget which ) - This means you now need to upgrade to an Energy and Control room with the basic energy and control generators. When you add these to the placement costs for an extra TP and the 3 extra beacons you can now support, you need to earn 660K on top of your 15-man bonus. (you'll be keeping your starter power/control generator for the moment as it's more cost-effective than control auxes).

I don't play that often, no more than about 1.5-2 hours, 3-4 times a week, I've lots of low level toons and I'm not a power leveller or anything so it took me a long time to get my main Union base going - about a year off and on to go from nothing to having 2 TPs, base storage, med bay, vault, crafting table and enough power and control to keep it all going. If you're focused and have regular teaming buddies, it'll be far faster than that, but don't expect miracles.

If you need a hand getting toons into the SG or want a coalition partner for TP access (Steel, Faultline, Striga and PI at the mo) until your base is on it's feet, send a tell to me @robocyberbot.

Holy cow you're right - it's a fix! I turned up about 9pm. At the time I thought I was an idiot but now I see that it was the original poster's fault and I was an innocent in all of this. It seems only fair that they give a Hardsuit code to everyone who complains about it in this thread.
*gets in line*

If they were evil, you'd be able to buy costume slots and the ability to skip levels 1-20 from the NCSoft shop!

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Rather than start a new topic to ask about more names I was wondering what names people have up their sleeves for the new Pain and Shields sets?

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I've got Maid of Iron booked on Union for my shield and Bloodwork on Defiant for my pain dom, although I'm toying with recreating Goldrush, my drug-fueled corruptor, explaining Pain dom as her transferring her crash hangover to others so she can continue her binge. Also, Wafflemaker over on Defiant would look a lot more like a wafflemaker if he had a waffle-shaped shield.....

Hey, I'm an innocent in all of this - I've never made a single Keanu-based toon, unless you count Straylite, who was only based on a book that heavily influenced a Keanu movie. I will not have my brain impuned!

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Isnt it funny the names that you want that are taken you NEVER see them around ingame

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On the other hand, there's no thrill like flying past a level 5 with a garbled version of your own toon's name 'cause you know you got there first. Makes me feel better about the extra slots I bought on union that only have place-holder toons on them!

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Apparently "You killed the anchor, deal with it" isn't the response people want when they demand heals. Turns out I don't have all the answers after all

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Ain't that the truth. And when you point out that they keep doing it, do you get an apology? Yet they expect you to feel shame because you let their shield drop or your heal missed. By the way, one thing I'm not clear on : are you approaching this from the "You killed my anchor, so you can whistle for your heal" angle or is it more "If you didn't keep killing the anchor first you wouldn't *need* the heal, you spa"? Either way, I approve!

On my bubbler I don't mind so much being reminded to bubble on the odd occasions where I don't notice the bubbles have dropped, but on my dark and kin fenders when people don't understand that I am healing, I just keep missing because they insisted on bringing a level 46 defender with a hit-check heal on a 52/53 mob mission, I get a tiny bit irate.

That said, I've played a handful of scrappers, on a big team if I don't ask for the heal or a bubble I tend to get left to my own devices, whether I like it or not - by the time someone notices I'm in trouble it's too late. And they're on the other side of the map You play like you're soloing, people let you solo.

I'm disappointed there isn't a giant fore-arm shield type. Or a giant fist melee powerset. Looks like the future's pretty grim for fans of Nightfist.

Gratz BB! I think I might have been there to see it too ( I was the bloodstain on the ground who's heal kept missing )

In fairness, the TP network in even a small 4-destination setup can be very handy for filling the gaps that the trains, Ourob and PD leave for minimsing your maximum hops to 2. In a larger base with 4 or 8 TPs it can be brilliant, especially on older contacts who tend to send you to different zones for mishes without giving you their number. Throw in a med bay and most hazard zones are a little bit less of a pain. Having an invention table, Vault and enhancement storage within a few steps of eachother can really speed up the offloading of recipes and salvage. They're not entirely useless, and unless you're a very dedicated player you're unlikely to be able to set up even a very small base on your own (let alone maintain it, if you upgrade the plot), so your best shot at getting to play with all the base editor toys is to rise in the ranks of a big SG and keep your fingers crossed.

If your only beef is that you've been cut off from your mod-cons, it's no great loss - there's tonnes of sgs out there that'll have comparable bases with better comeraderie, so you'll probably look back on this as a positive experience over all.

I was in a PUG last night and it had forum celeb Judgement Dave on it. That's him, Myopic Aardvark, Mother's Love and Damz ticked - how many do I need to get my first badge?

Deadly Buzz - a dublin skanger who had an unfortunate accident while fitting luminous blue lights to the bottom of his fiat Punto. Now an Elec/Elec blaster ("deadly buzz" was a dub phrase for "that's great")

The Cuckold - he had the power to control the minds of all men (ill/kin troller) - but not the woman he loved (Slattern, a thugs MM). Cue the messy divorce.

Robocyberbot - an expensive beverage dispensing unit that's achieved sentience and now strives to be human, much to the chagrin of Manborg, a brute now more machine than man.

Priory - a warrior-nun who was last in line when they handed out the elemental powers so missed out on the cool ones like fire and ice, and got stuck with Forgiveness, which was a bit of a gyp until she realised you can literally throw someone's sins back in their face (Dark defender, inspired by one of those pub discussions about how [censored] off the kid from Captain Planet who got the Heart ring must be on a daily basis). Her arch-nemesis Malady has similar powers garnered when she came home drunk one night after being dumped by her boyfriend and had a rebound-fling with the bogeyman who lived in her wardrobe.

Lots of terrible puntastic names - Bone Idol, a spines scrapper ; Brady O'Active, a Radfender; Chilliam Tell a TA/ice fender;Minuet Maid, a sonic fender; Psyclone, a psi/storm fender; Thundress, a brute who's destructive powers hurt her clothes as much as her adversaries; Maid of Iron, who'll be my shield tank when I13 comes... the list goes on and on, getting worse and worse...

Gutted that some of my favourite villain names - The Foot Scalder - the villain who heats baths up so you burn your toes when you get in, Lint Master - lord of under the bed and behind the sofa; and Swamp Donkey - the patron saint of fat ugly country women were throw-aways in trial accounts that I can never get back

Given that you have to craft them from Salvage and pay extortionate amounts of money to place them, what really boils my blood is that if you then delete the item, for example a teleport pad because you're moving from the 2-square to 4-square room but don't have enough money or space for both at the same time (so you've nowhere to put your TP Pad while deleting one room and creating the other) you lose the item completely and have to start from scratch. You couldn't discourage people from using Salvage-crafted base items more if you gave them some sort of Herpesesque team-debuff aura for using them.

I'd prefer to see something that's a bit more in-keeping with the theme of the game than Disco. Given that I'm currently hunting 60-odd Carnival of Shadows, how about a Circus set :

Unicycle - toggle, while active makes you prone to knockdown from any hit however for every second that it's active while you are in melee range of any mob, you earn a small amount of prestige for each enemy (they throw it into your hat)

Juggle - toggle ranged defence with a difference : for every ranged damage attack that comes your way you have a 30 percent chance of catching it and juggling it. When you reach 7 projectiles or deactivate the toggle, you throw them all at your current target's face.

Cannon - Click - you point your cannon in the direction you want to go, strap on your helmet and climb in. A combination of Fly and TP, except you can't steer in the air and if you hit a building you get logged out, unable to log back in for 2 months while your toon is scrapped off the window and into a hospital bucket.

Clown Car - Clicky with very long recharge. A clown car pulls up at the designated spot, and until someone destroys it, clowns will constantly stream out and spray them with water, throw buckets of glitter at them and brandish giant rubber mallets, before running off around the zone, all to the tune of some crazy circus music. To prevent a server failure, when the threshold for max number of clowns has been reached, it might be best if they all turn and wave sadly, then inexplicably wade off into the sea while the music from the end of the Hulk TV show plays.

Alternatively, I'd like to see a dance-themed villain group to legitimise the disco travel power. Possibly a splinter of Malta Group - the Ibiza group?

That Dalek idea has me torn - on the one hand, you could customise your AR blaster's weapon to look like a plunger sellotaped to a large stapler. Hurray! On the other, You'd look like a dork using Super Jump in the full Dalek costume.

yeah, but where are you getting the money to put them up for auction for the big amounts? You have to risk levelling up from 2 to 3 to get your 800 quid together to sell the big greenie - anyone role-playing a wiley merchant with no superpowers is scuppered!

...And leave post-it notes for other characters who share the appartment so you can invite your alts to your SG without needing friends. Friends are over-rated.

An Eve-like training system where your toons can be set to learn a specific skill while you're not logged in to the game : such as temp powers (handguns, baseball bats, collecting stones), brawl/sprint improvement (inherent-only enhancement slots to represent keeping yourself in shape?); non-game QoL skills such as Sewing so you don't need the tailor but costume alterations require a set amount of off-line time to make the costume;

Off-line minigames to simulate your toon's alter-ego - going to work, dating, choosing between tracker and fixed rate mortgages - Super sims!

How about at 12 months vet time, on the last monday of every month you get a margherita pizza delivered to your house and some sort of girlie video / gossip mag / spanish pool cleaner to keep the wife out of your hair for a few hours? And then for every other 12 month milestone you can add two toppings or a side order?

Hmmmm - it could be a reshuffle, the toons could be getting shuffled off the visible 36 slots into slots that technically don't exist but are maybe waiting in the wings for when the two servers merge? Conspiracy!

Man, I was chuffed to bits with myself getting my main from 37 to 40 1/2 over the weekend after months of stagnation. And now I'm not weeping, I'm just moistening my cheeks to ward off the parching effects of global warming. Sniff.

Well I have this repeatedly happening on 2 toons, both the most recently created ones on Union. The slot(s) show as "Unavailable", I've checked all three pages, the toons aren't there but they're still in the SG so they haven't been deleted. Logging in and out sometimes brings one or other back, then again that sometimes triggers a crash logging in to the server, but that's a whole other thread!

This is really annoying me now since I was going to level one of them up over the DoubleXP weekend. Naturally, I expect that Support will make the toon a level 50 once they've fixed the issue, by way of making amends. Right? Ah come on!

Edit - Actually, while I'm moaning about this, I've noticed that I only have 17 extra slots showing (including the 2 that flicker in and out of existance) but that only covers my initial 2 bonus slots, plus the 3 goes of 5 extra slots that I've purchased. Given that I've been playing for just under 2 years, doesn't that mean I'm missing a slot? And that I have more money and alts than sense?

Edit 2 - no wait, I have an amazing disappearing toon on Defiant too - in the same postion as the one on Union, funnily enough (5th from top on 2nd page). Having logged out and in a few times, I've noticed that if the one on Defiant is visible and I go from defiant to union, the on on union is unavailable, and vice versa. Logging out and then back in to the same server without going to the other server in between brings back the toon on that server but causes it the corresponding one on the other server to disappear. If you follow me