Depravitor

He's right, trailing your sentence off with an ellipsis does imply negativity. Don't believe me?

"Congratulations Mrs Smith," the doctor said, "it's a boy..."

I'd be happy to see it swapped out for a random large inspiration, a +4 Boss-level influence drop or a random common pool A recipe. If you're in SG mode it'd be nice to have it grant maybe 1,000 prestige.

My fallen angel is a SS/WP Brute. SuperStrength is a good thematic fit, since I imagine angels would be incredibly strong and the glow of Rage looks good as some kind of visual demonstration of their angelic nature. Willpower works because you're not relying on artificial (Shield) means for your protection, and neither do you deviate from the traditional view of an angel by being covered in stone, fire, ice etc.

Yes but Golden Girl, you are hardly an example of an average player. I have no doubt someone like you with so many connections to the most active players and supergroups has little trouble finding taskforces. That's not really the issue - ANY problem can be overcome by having a lot of in-game friends and access to supergroups and chat channels where these things are organised frequently. The problem of course is that it's not sane to designate that as the norm or minimum required to get the same experience that is on offer to everyone in the US pool.

I played for 18 months on the EU servers and only ever managed to get on 2 PuG taskforces: Synapse and the TV respec. My experience is not atypical and judging by others from the EU that've migrated to the US servers the situation has continued and worsened.

It doesn't seem unlikely that the EU servers will be merged into perhaps two (Union merged with Defiant, Zefunkt merged with Vigilant) then added to the US pool. Not only are they now on the same forums but European trials were "suspended indefinately" recently.

Going Rogue might be the time that action is taken, and honestly it'll be a benefit for all because the EU servers were very very quiet when I left them a couple of years ago and obviously that means two years of slow decline. Better to have the entire community united - no fun on Defiant trying to run TFs, for example.

I just wanted to comment on "why don't scrappers get ranged if blasters get melee?" - blasters have melee to balance them. It's a negative for them because melee attacks pose such a huge risk thanks to their low HP and lack of defences, if blasters had two ranged sets or a ranged and full utility set then they'd probably be too powerful.

The ranged attacks on scrappers aren't balance, they're bonuses. Scrappers with decent ranged capability early on would be "tank mages" - classes with good offensive ranged capability that also have good survivability.

I don't know about it being desirable for the new AoE upgrades, but I do think that it's balanced for them to cost a lot. And I certainly don't want to go back to three minute setups.

Pets zoning means they'll always be out, not that they'll rarely be summoned. Try running across a zone appropriate to your level with your pets trailing behind and see how many survive to make it to the other side.

Excellent change though. I dislike masterminds only ever having their henchmen in missions.

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in this thread. I was irritated at first because I disapprove of closed beta in this game as I feel it hasn't improved release quality, release speed or release stability. However, they haven't done this to lock closed beta down even harder...

According to Castle, this is a side effect of them implementing a queue feature. Previously, you were only checked for access to the specific servers when you tried to enter them. Now as soon as you pass the login screen you're being put on a new login server which facilitates server queues.
The access check is happening there now, when you first pass the login and join the server handling queues. That's why the change has taken away the ability to go beyond that first login screen - they haven't tackled it as a specific way to deny access in closed beta, it's just something that's possibly an inevitable side effect of their new server queue feature.

Though, please go back to the old beta system, where interested parties could participate. Closed betas might be preferred in terms of letting you minimise pre-release drama, but open betas offer so much more with word-of-mouth marketing and player excitement.

My suspicion is that you're slowing the critter's recharge sufficiently that it isn't attacking you very often. If a critter doesn't attack for a certain amount of time your pets will lose aggro on it and resume simply following you.

Mercs/Traps, without doubt. Traps meshes really well with a ranged primary set, and with that resistance debuff in Acid Mortar it won't matter that your pets do Lethal damage. Not to mention the PBAoE mez protection in the FFG, the reliable hold of Poison Gas Trap and the alpha-soaking Seeker Drones.

Problems are that damage is slow to kick in (because T2 are control-oriented, there's no real damage until the Commando in T3), that the Spec Ops don't ever do much controlling (slow recharges on their powers and they lack the intelligence to use them in a meaningful way), useless power in Serum and awful uniforms for T1.

Fixes:
1) Halve the recharge on the SpecOps controls or give them Stealth Strike
2) Drastically reduce the recharge on Serum so it remains a medium-strength buff but is available much more often
3) Go over the T1 Soldiers and give them an improved look, even if it was just newer textures of the quality we're seeing in new costume items.

Please make the text-matching smarter. "Agent Xerxes" is banned because it contains the string "Agent X". There's no reason to filter *copyrightedword* - filter * copyrightedword * instead.

Thanks Positron. We appreciate you guys make mistakes sometimes. In the other sense of the word appreciate, we also appreciate it when you admit when a poor decision's been made and reverse it.

Thanks again for listening to us Posi and Synapse.

Objective:
The high requirements for every item that candy canes (CC) can be exchanged for mean that high levels are opting to speed around in low level zones opening presents. Because there is no reward for defeating the snow beasts, this results in large or high-level mobs being spawned and left hanging around to defeat the zone-appropriate characters with ease.
I suggest that the snow beasts that spawn with the presents be given a 5% chance to drop a candy cane, as this would encourage them to be defeated instead of being just left.

The luge slide in Pocket D has several places where the geometry is slightly misaligned, and hitting those certain places in the track will bring your character to a halt or at least slow them down drastically.

The geyser on the luge slide does not work properly if you are using speed buffs or have superjump active. This is a problem because you are all but required to have SJ or SS active in order to win a medal.

There are gates on the ski run that are extremely difficult or impossible to get without SJ or SS active.

Subjective:
It is impossible to earn any of the major CC rewards without farming of some kind; either 'speed runs' of the Baby New Year mission or spending hours and hours hopping from present to present. I find both of these behaviours very boring.

The Baby New Year mission had to be done at least five times last year, and this year it's being done over and over again. If there were another mission that granted the same rewards in addition to BNY it would allievate the boredom and frustration somewhat.

There needs to be some way to earn CCs during the rest of the year, because it now has a lot of stuff tied to it that is of real use for the rest of the year (for example, the auras and IO sets) and having those items restricted to one month out of twelve seems unnecessarily harsh.

Yeah, Mook Hitmen are supposed to run away. They fire their rifle, then run to maximum sniper range, where they attempt to remain, firing whenever their attack is recharged.

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The AI in this game is seriously broken with regard to fleeing behaviour. There seems to be no logical reason for them running away sometimes. Sometimes they'll run away because they've simply been attacked by somebody to whom they con green/blue/white/yellow/orange/red/purple, sometimes they'll run away when hit with a debuff, sometimes they'll run away when hit with a toggle debuff, sometimes they'll run away when their friend dies, sometimes they'll run after they rez themselves...

I don't mind mobs running when I can see a good reason for them to be running. Grey-conning critters should take to the hills when a significantly powerful character gets their attention. They should try and escape the rains, caltrops, burn patches etc that get deployed against them.

The drug dealers that run? Fine, good - it's believable and fun design. The Sorcerors that teleport away? Again, it's what they do. The Cimeroran healers? Good, it makes sense for them as non-combat troops.

But at no point should a friggin' huge electrical daemon start fleeing in terror just because it's involved in a fight. Neither should any giant monster, or arch-villain. Sure they should obey the standard "I am stood in a fire, I need to move out of it" AI, but they're supposed to be the big-bad. It's bad for gameplay reasons too - having had their regeneration bumped up, if they decide to take a jog around the map they'll usually end up healing back to full health, which is frustrating rather than fun for the team that has to do it all over again.

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I think we've reached the point where new rewards should stop being added. At this stage, it's unlikely that the game will even be around for long enough that a player joining now could earn the 54 month reward.

Instead, how about introducing the 57 month reward as "every three months from now on, you'll earn a costume token and vet respec"?

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My suggestions:

1) Keep the two resistance passives, but give them scaling defense - an exact copy of the SR passives, but with the defence and resistance swapped over. That would allow for continued slotting of resistance sets, it would give the continual benefit of some resistance, and it would also help the set as a whole.

OR

2) Give the mez protection shield a Fast Healing level of regeneration.

AND

3) As well as doing one of the above, on the exotic damage protection toggle, give +Res(Toxic), on the S/L protection toggle give +Def(Psi)

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where heroes would assist the allies by fighting the Axis, and Villains would assist the Axis by fighting the Allies

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And that's the biggest problem the developers will face, of course. They have three options - 1) force heroes and villains to both unite against the Nazis, which will irritate some villains as they receive yet another zone where they have to behave heroically. 2) Heroes aid the Allies, villains aid Axis - and a million complaints are made on the forums as people want to help the other side. 3) Using the branching dialogue system, players can choose who they help, but I can't help but think they'd worry about having people helping out the Nazis.

Also consider costumes. If you unlock military costumes, then do you unlock Allied-style costumes by defeating Axis forces? If so, then you must unlock Axis-style costumes by defeating Allies... do we want people running around dressed as Nazis?

I'm not saying the issues are insurmountable, just that I think there are problems with that time period and I believe we'll see easier to design periods first.

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Wasn't really a great interview. The developers seemed to be asking themselves questions in lieu of being asked by the interviewer.

Jules, next time maybe have a list of questions before-hand, so you've already got a basic structure written down. You can then follow on to any answers you get if you want to, but you at least have another question.

Re the mission creator being a 'mad libs' affair... I doubt it. Positron said that players could play your missions, so if it was just Defeat All <mob type> in <map type> why have the sharing at all? It's not going to be absolute control, but I bet there's more to it than just setting some of the parameters for the already extant random mission generator.

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Similar in concept to our character creator, it allows you, the players, to create missions and story arcs for your characters and others to participate in. You’ll be able to pick the map, villain group, and objectives, as well as write the dialog and any clues needed for the missions. When you are satisfied with it, you can upload it and have other players across all servers play it and rate it. Fame will come to the players whose stories rate the best overall. It is features like these that we never dreamed of including when we first shipped, but are excited to be able to offer players very soon.

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That took my breath away when I read it. Without a shadow of a doubt, this will be the coolest feature ever added to the City of franchise.

Thanks to all the developers, the community staff and everyone else that works hard to make this the best MMO that exists.