Eisenzahn

That's a good idea. I'll add to it some functions that could easily be tied to the Base Computer.

- Arena Terminal
- Auction House/Black Market Interface
- Contact a Trainer
- Contact a Hero Corps Rep/Fortunata Fateweaver
- Basic enhancement stores
- Merit Vendor
- Tailor
- Task Force/Strike Force/Trial Contact (imagine if you could use it to initiate any of the above, not just Silver Mantis, provided all teammates were in your base. It would likely save a lot of travel time on Hero TFs)
- Super Group Registration Contact (pay your base rent online!)
- Respec Contact (I know I get nervous redside visiting Arbiter Lupin, with that many Longbow spawns wandering so close)

Obviously, not all of these functions should be moved to the base computer, but even a couple would make it a lot more worthwhile, especially to Villains who already feel kind of cheated having to buy it to enable the Silver Mantis Strike Force.

My heavily IOed Elec/Elec/Mu can handle everything I've tested her against at 8 Man spawn sizes, at level 50. With some of those, I can crank it all the way to +4 Levels, With Bosses (Rikti, Maps full of Mu). She can handle Malta and Carnies at +2, but only with Bosses turned off (and even then, I need to keep an eye out for the scaled down lieutenant versions). CoT are less of a hassle than I'd expected for her, but still get only a hesitant +1, Bosses on or off depending on how happy I am with my inspiration tray going into the mission. Council gets +2 with Bosses On, and I only get nervous if I spot three or more Vampire bosses in close proximity. Nemesis, I can handle at x8/+0 or even +1/Bosses On, but it's slow going, because I'm so wary of too many lieutenants dropping vengeance at once. KoA, only even level, bosses on. It's not that I'm having that hard a time defeating them, it's that all those stacked caltrops are really murdering my ability to move from foe to foe and keep Fury up. Those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

My much lower level new Elec/Elec, who's getting built for Going Rogue, so I can have one of my favorite AT stay Villain Side and another try the side switching content, just got her SOs and bumped things up to +2/x2/Bosses On/AVs Off, or the old 4th difficulty setting. I may drop the level by one and bump the spawn sizes up by two, but she hasn't got Lightning Rod yet, or been able to fit in Lightning Field, so I wouldn't be able to exploit the AoE potential quite enough to make it comparable in speed to her current leveling.

In addition to the level scaling bug, Villain Strike Forces have the following problems.

- There are 6 of them. This isn't counting Co-op Task Forces, which are unambiguously heroic, and the three Ouroboros "Task Forces" per side, which can be started solo, have no Accomplishment badges, and scale AVs down to EBs. This also isn't counting Trials (where the split is Villains 3, Heroes 6). By similar reckoning, Heroes have 15 Task Forces.
- Strike Forces don't cover the following level gaps: 10-15, 30-35 and 40-45. Task Forces cover 10-50 seamlessly, and overlap at 23-34 (with triple overlap at 23-25), and 40-50 (with quadruple overlap from 45-50).
- Additionally, with Silver Mantis' Strike Force being attached to the base computer, I still occasionally encounter multiple-year veterans who don't even know there's a 20-25 Strike Force.
- Only one of the six Strike Forces features a Hero as the final enemy. All the other 5 feature villains or monsters as the final encounter.
- None of the six Strike Forces fails to have you fight other Villains. I may need to double check this, but as a Hero I don't recall ever fighting other Heroes at all in Task Forces. Certainly the rivalries between Villains are an important part of the setting, but they're definitely over-emphasised in this specific set of content.
- Two Strike Forces don't even bother to have you fight Heroes at all (Silver Mantis and Ice Mistral).
- Of the four Strike Forces featuring Heroes? All of them feature Longbow. Virgil Tarikoss does focus heavily on the Legacy Chain as well, and Barracuda has you up against the PPD briefly. The Freedom Phalanx and Vindicators, as they always spawn in the company of Longbow (exception: Infernal has Legacy Chain backing him up in Virgil Tarikoss, but not for Lord Recluse), can effectively be considered Longbow High Command.

So what we need?
- Move Silver Mantis outside somewhere. But let the Base Computer now talk to ALL Strike Force, Trial and Task Force contacts, on both sides. Make the reward for the Mission Computer be that you don't have to figure out where guys like the Respec contacts are, and that you can save time running back for instructions. Exceptions would include Imperious and Lady Grey, who are easy to spot anyway, and require the whole team to be in the zone because of the Co-op teaming rules.
- Add at least 3 more Villain Strike Forces. I'm not going to worry about Trials here, as they're not really popular on the side that has them. Cover the remaining three level gaps in Villain Strike Force content.
- Have those three Strike Forces focus on Heroic threats, including Heroic Final Enemies (no bait-and-switch, like Tarikoss). If they could avoid Villains as antagonists entirely, that'd be great. Best case scenario, they all manage that AND don't feature Longbow at all. Maybe even use them to introduce some new Hero Factions?

I kind of feel for the OP, but there are RP workarounds. The implied lethality of a lot of Hero powers is pretty easy to overlook, compared to the overwhelming heroic bias to all co-op content and a great deal of Villain content. I could level a character from 1-50 redside easily on standard non-AE content, without visiting newspapers any more often than is necessary to get new contacts, and never face a Hero except for the hugely overused Longbow faction in Mayhem Missions.

If I get a recipe drop that the character I'm currently playing would actually like to slot, odds are overhwelming that I'm playing on the Test Server.

I haunted the forums and waited for it to end.

More genuinely villainous villain content... which hopefully some of the stuff we get for continuing to advance in our original factions instead of switching sides will qualify for. New Hero NPC groups to fight? New Villain Strike Forces? New Villain-only zones? Yeah. I'm... not holding my breath.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm really excited for this expansion. But its description is sadly incompatable with the hopes and dreams at the very top of my list.

Also, the next time someone suggests to me that side-swapping a villain and playing all the Hero content counts as New Villain Content, I'm going to dedicate my life to their downfall and misery, Dr. Doom style.

Server popularity is a very valid question. Not all of us will be lucky enough to meet a solid core of compatable players who we can have fun with regardless of the rest of the server's population. Some of us are going to have to rely on pick up groups, and would like them to be plentiful. Some of us, in fact, enjoy pickup groups, constantly adapting to new people with different sorts of characters and styles of playing those characters.

Some of us however find certain characteristics to be prominent among many players on the two most popular servers, and may find those traits incompatable with out own playstyles. When Freedom was constantly busy during the AE Farm craze for example, going by population alone the server appealed to me... but logging in to find it mostly empty, except multiple instances of Atlas Park and Cap Au Diable convinced me to finally delete my last Freedom baby (the legendary TOGGLE MAN now resides only in screenshots and memories). I play on Virtue, but freely admit that there are just as many potential irritants there, depending on your tastes, as Freedom on its worst day.

On the other end of the scale, I've played on Triumph, Champion, Pinnacle and Protector, and found them all far too empty for my tastes. Are there good players on those servers? Probably, yeah. Am I likely to befriend them, and become integrated into their community? Knowing how slowly I make friends, and how little patience I have for general purpose chatter channels, probably not.

And thus, I came to Justice. Justice is busy enough that I can find PUGs pretty easily. Justice has players who are interested in working the system to avoid most of the gameplay that I actually enjoy, but they are nowhere near as numerous and intrusive as they are on Freedom. Justice has players who like stirring up trouble and making drama so they can draw attention to themselves, but again, they are far less prominent than on Virtue. Justice doesn't have many Roleplayers, which is why I still mostly play on Virtue, but it has enough of what I'm looking for (the 3rd or 4th highest average population) that more than 1/3rd of my current active characters are located there.

These sorts of threads always wind up full of people getting defensive about their lower population servers, and that bothers the hell out of me. It's obvious that the OP meant general popularity and daily use, because those are the traits in which Freedom and Virtue are unambiguously 1 & 2.

Either the player in question had sufficient justification to report your character for copyright violation, or they didn't. After handing the matter over to the GMs to determine (again, if there was actually sufficient cause), that should have been the end of it. If they found your character too offensive to endure, they should have just left the team. Harassing people in chat accomplishes little, except possibly earning one's own private discussion with customer support.

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I've dated people with fashion tastes not that far off from Clamour, actually. I was very serious with someone who actually had fishnet stocking tattoos. Tattooed garters, then tattooed crisscrossing lines all the way down her legs, even between her toes and on the bottoms of her feet. In retrospect, it was not nearly as hot as it might sound. Especially when she would wear actual fishnets over top (frequently), giving this screwy double-layered off-patern effect that just didn't quite work. She had some absolutely gorgeous ink on her back and shoulders though, so I forgave her that particular bit of poor judgment.

And then I stopped indulging in recreational self-medication, and suddenly people like her weren't all that interested in spending time with me. Funny how these things work.

93.93%. I guessed wrong on the one about which power doesn't debuff defense.

Ice/Ice for other Melee ATs, especially Stalkers. Now that my Scrappers and Tankers have Electricity, Ice for everybody is the only wish left that doesn't drift from proliferation into totally new powersets (like an Electrical control set, or an elemental MM primary).

My.. I think 4th, maybe 5th now Elec/Elec Brute (I'd have to double check a couple servers where one of the old versions may still be hiding) is going with more of a traditional white/gold to light blue style of lightning, since he's meant to be a Frankenstien's Monster style flesh golem rather than having ties to Mu, like all my others so far. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll hit the 40's with him before power customization hits the epic pools, so he'll be stuck with old fashioned red mu blasts.