Dr_Mechano

As pointed out above, it USE to be operated seperately in the EU under the NCsoftEU division when most of the EU players originally bought the game.

Actually the team are quite good on giving things to the EU when they get screwed over in situations like this, normally a double XP weekend/day to compensate but not always.

*cough*hinthint*cough*

Yup just tried running the updater and...

getting a message saying that a .pigg file is now corrupt

I happen to love a cup of Tea

But then...I am British.

Apple and pears...and various other fruit.

Don't get ye hopes up laddie.

It's mostly just backend database work in preperation for....something...

nobody knows what this something is yet, they're being awfully quiet.

Mechano looked at the monitor.

"Ok confirmed kill...phew...though I did like the design, very nice, seems that dusty looking fellow took everything worthwhile from it, though I'm not quite sure where he is pulling that stuff from."

A perky female voice came across the radio, "Ok within sight of Kings Row, tracking the police band...seems like we've got a crazed gunman...should I lend a hand?"

"Yes, no doubt it's where our extra-dimensional friends have gone, sending Drones to confirm visual..."

A few seconds passed, tapping his foot impatiently.

"Ok visual confirmed, ooh a big robot, ooh I like that, looks stylish, have words with him see if we can't borrow some of his tech."

"Will do.."

The giant pink Assault bot landed with a heavy thud, cutting off the jets a few feet from the ground. Scanning over Quicksilver.

"Well hello handsome!"

A voice could be heard from within.

"Hey, I said talk to him Elise, not flirt with him!"

The Assault bot sighed.

"You know you're just a bit too overprotective sometimes Dad.."

"Matter at hand thank you Elise, once this is dealt with, kindly explain the situation to them."

((all the radio chatter is also being picked up by DeviousMe's team))

Now looking at the situation of the endgame.

It is begining to look like it's slipping into the age old method of the gear grinding mechanic that is familiar to just above every other MMO out there besides Eve online (which has a 'skills waiting' mechanic instead).

First the Alpha slot, simple enough to unlock, a single story arc, unlike Eva or Venture, I'm not going to rail on the storyline, while I personally think the whole 'Well gone mad' storyline is a bit trite and could have been handled better, I'm frankly just as apt at being able to ignore it because of those reason.

Then the grind sets in, first you need components from various taskforces, now looking at this from a fresh faced person, just joining the game, it's not really a grind...until you get to the later ones, most of the Uncommon, Rare and Very Rare slots will require you to repeat the same taskforce atleast 3-4 times between those slots (the Musculture slot required the LGTF, Mother Ship Raid and STF/LRSF around 4 times each iirc).

However you're earning shards doing other things as well and you add spice to the weekly mixup by doing the WST.

Then you hit the two new trials. Whereas before you had the ITF, the LGTF, the STF/LRSF, Khan/Barracuda plus whatever was the WST, you're now down to just 2.

Not only are you going to have to run these two roughly six times each to unlock all four slots you've then got to run them over and over and over and over in order to unlock anything higher than the common thanks to the new 'lucky based reward' system. You could get lucky and in the runs it takes you to open all four slots, get all 4 very rares you need...or you could be like most of us and have dismal luck with such things and require pure Thread grinding to get there.

It looks like grind, the worst kind of grind but am I just percieving it that way.

Lets look at another MMOs endgame, the infamous big gorilla of the MMO world, when it started, yeah there was a set path and only 2 raids (single boss big Dragon raid and multiboss hugely massive instance raid which took serveral days even to complete it with a decent guild) but then things got added.

Nowadays you have the level capped 5 mans, heroic versions of previous instances, some of which are drastically different from their original versions and then into raiding. There are quite a few raid instances which gives people things to try our differently each week.

Currently not only do they have the big 25 man raids but they also offer the usually more challenging 10 man versions to cater to guilds both big and small.

The advantage that CoH current endgame has over the WoW endgame is speed. What it lacks in variety it makes up for in being slippery cheetah fast.

The 2 raids can be done within 20-30 minutes each, 45 minutes each tops. Compared to the 3 nights a week, 4 hours a night that WoW requires of the medium-core raiding guilds (hardcore professional guilds like Paragon are six nights a week deals).

So while we're not going to be bashing our heads against a brick wall learning the right dance for too long as you would do in WoW, which is a major bonus along with their speediness, we suffer a lack of variety and while both rely fairly heavily on grind, will the lack of it actually hamper CoH's endgame compared to that of other MMOs?

Time will tell at the moment but perhaps peoples thoughts on this wouldn't go amiss?

((been a bit busy, apologise about that))

The Crab promptly exploded, or it would have done if it hadn't had the magical net not contained the outward spraying of the explosion, however it did proceed to take a chunk of the street underneath it since the explosion was force downward.

All that was left was a smoldering crater and the burnt out wreckage of what remained of the Crab.
__________________________________________________ ________________________
((now for your epic lewts!
Ethan finds: a lot of scrap metal, several fission batteries, a large number of plasma cells and the unique names plasma gun 'Crab buster'.

Ineloo gain: One levels worth of XP and a magical ring that lets teleport.

Everyone else doesn't come from loot heavy universes so you just get the satisfaction of....

Yup I keep trying other MMOs but always end up back here.

Reminds me need to cancel my subscription to the latest fantasy based MMO, while it isn't bad...just not feeling it.

Out of my group of friends I am the designated MMO tester, I try all the new MMOs at they come on the market and provide my friends with feedback.

90% of the time I usually have a very hard time recommending them or I really like them but there's just something inherently wrong with it that stops it being enjoyable (APB looking at you...you could have been awesome...but you were meh).

That and I have Blood Bowl: Legendary Edition to be playing (single player and multiplayer) which draws me in.

Yup MoG never got changed for the Paragon Protectors

Heck go and beat up one now, it STILL fires off the 'full heal followed by crash to low HP but with stupidly high resistances and defense' old school MoG which makes them a real pain in the backside for anyone non-psi to deal with or trivially easy for people with Psi to deal with (as was the way with old MoG).

As mentioned Behemoths still have old school Invincibility and Nemesis Lts still have ye olde Vengeance (you could only fire it off when YOU died, not when someone else did).

The other problem is...'challenging for who?'

Team of 8 fire/Rads or the notorious Repeat Offenders team can usually crush absolutely anything in the game in short order.

Heck even in the new trials, stack enough of the big hitters and you'd still probably be able to walk them because in the end it all comes down to killing something big, very quickly.

Even the hardest stage, the escaped prisoner stage, requires you kill a lot of things quickly and once people have pegged down the entrance routes of the prisoners, you'll find the difficulty drops immeasurably.

Now secondary to this and mentioned in the above paragraph is 'Challenging for how long?'

Take Augustus at the end of the ITF, when first released to live servers he was quite a bit of a challenge but fairly sharpish, people worked out basic strategies for him to the point where everyone knows how to deal with that scenario now and he nolonger presents a challenge.

World of Warcraft for example, there are very few raid bosses that are constantly challenging, especially in vanilla, most of it is basically learning to do the right 'dance'. Do this now, now do this when the boss does X, move out of the fire. Once you both know and outgear the encounter it nolonger becomes challenging.

*coughs*

Hey some of us want more than just a couple of vanity pets.

Some of us want many!

((It is part of the plot and Synth is slowly setting the scene for it though I'm not entirely sure why it would be a seperate thread, the Crab boss is merely a means of herding people together))

The shot from Quicksilvers gun was powerful enough to actually force the crab to tip backwards, not part of the program it knew but even it could not argue with physics in this universe, it teetered for a moment on it's hind legs before collapsing onto it's back.

Now fully exposed to whatever was going to be thrown at it, legs wiggling in the air as it lay there.

For the Rogue Isles there's the Necrotech Toasty Dreams Factory and Hospital located in Sharkshead.

Run by one Dr Mechano, the premier creator in designer partners and leader in genetic manipulation!

((what it's the spiel! :P))

Noticed that Blip TV has been doing that a lot recently when looking at the comments.

For all those that get annoyed with Ads, I'd Recommend Adblock Plus for firefox, it kills both Youtube and Blip TV ads.

well IBTL but...

DCUO, as it stands, isn't a BAD game, infact the levelling content is really rather good, very good infact, it blows CoH/CO content out of the water. Some of the powersets are really good looking (oh how I long for a Staff set that looked and flowed together as well as the one in DCUO) and the action based gaming seperated it from its two nearest competitors.

However it's the endgame content that really, really didn't work, it's basically A) Repeating some of the instances you played while levelling up but for high level instead or B) Running WoW style Raids, of which there were a reasonable number and several were well designed (the Arkham Asylumn one for instance has points where you can actually see it's a direct copy from the game of the same name). It's all rather boring infact.

Also I really don't think locking almost ALL the costumes behind gearing did it any favours, its two nearest competitors were vastly more open with the character creation.

DCUO wasn't stunningly good but what it did well, it REALLY did well, what it did badly...was mostly just boring rather than terribly bad.

Hey it's a SHMUP boss...hammering it with high explosives is pretty much par for the course.

And it's a hardier enough creature that it survives long enough for the interdimensional heroes are able to gather in the right spot.

So there!

Alright, it was my fault, I probably should have mentioned that while the Crossing is a Unionverse, it's not THE Unionverse precisely for the reasons mentioned above. Mainly because people of the Unionverse were very worried about the impact of the plot would have on Union that it was agreed to shift it to a different Unionverse, the same but different if you will, whether it becomes personal canon for your characters that's fine by me, it will be personal canon for one of mine.

Precisely for the reason that I reckon alot of the forum and Ingame Unionverse regulars/veterans would be up in arms and complaining loudly that they didn't wish to be affected by it almost constantly, I'd have the wolves baying for my blood. To have it shifted to a different but same unionverse proved to be the lesser impact.

I probably should have restricted it to simply just Union/Virtue superheroes but instead I went for something a little bit bigger, in going for that wider 'bring whatever you feel' kind of approach which people seem to be liking (so far got a Transformer, a DnD Halfling, an Exalted, a small interdimensional/alien scouting force, a dimension hopping duo, one familar with Paragon, one not, a Necromancer of sorts, a Zombie that has access to all dimensions and lastly one Mad Scientist coordinating the heroes) I was restricted on just how it affected the normal Unionverse.

As far as Mechano goes, well he'll achknowledge stuff happening in that thread as Canon 'for him' because he is a mad scientist and I can easily imagine a group of Mechano's working together through the usage of dimensional contacting to try and bring the Portal Storm to a close.

So for a couple of people it will have happened in canon for that character, it would be an event in their past that led them to the current Unionverse.

However come the server merger there really isn't anything stopping people from making a dimension hopping alt on the Union server to come check us out.

Heck even making a trial EU account (remember not to name it the same as your US account and delete the characters by the time you finish) just to hop across and visit us ingame.