Fanservice

"Oh sorry! Can't really filter between the two yet as we've not worked out which filters affect empathy and which are psychic although classification of the two can cross over anyway. My emotions are tied to my mind after all, so you're still reading it, you could always have just asked 'Hey Bunny, how are you?' " says Bunny in a rush, rather keen to clarify.

"We did ask for help with the study on this actually but weirdly no one wanted to help us track down an effective way to spot when people were poking around in heads. Still, I'd rather you kept out of my emotional set for now else I'm going to have to turn the beeper off and that'll stop the early warning for Lost. Although the thing went totally nuts a short while ago anyway, but it does that on occasion just some city sweep. We're thinking we should put the finding to someone in Office as its amazing how much unwarranted psychic scanning is going on in the city, really should crack down on it or install some psychic dampening overlays on key city points to prevent fourteenth amendment abuse, after all if you can't be private in your own head then how can..." she gets into before tailing off after realising who she was talking too.

"Well, um.. anyway. I'm installing some monitoring equipment" she says patting the half empty sports bag. "Just got the chameleon suit on to keep out of the way of anything nasty down here and the tracking band is getting a testing to help us spot things creeping up on us. What are you doing down here?"

A small bulky looking device on the figures arm starts to beep as a purple light flares up and Vix gets a feeling that the figure was both cheerful and a little surprised.

Lowering the drill gun she presses a button on the band that fades her trench coat into a much more visible dark green and pulls up the goggles. She has fair skin and blue eyes underneath and her short black hair is much more visible. "Hero ID RS 49021, Lab Bunny. Can I help Officer? Um.. and can people stop reading my mind? It's really rude." she calls out, fiddling with the wrist device to turn off the warning light.

A figure was not far into the sewers, wearing a small gas mask that covered the lower half of their face, they also had a pair of thick goggle and were carrying a sports bag in one hand and a large drill with what looked like a fat silencer on the other. They were a dark green leather trench coat which seemed to change pattern to match the wall behind it.

"Ten thousand, Eleven thousand, drill baby drill" and pressing a finger to the wall a small crack of hot light sparked up before they pressed the mechanical drill to it which did it's job with a greatly muffled 'vrmmmm' sound. Reaching into the sports bad, a long thin tube with a black, shiny dome on one end is pressed into the hole and a PDA is pulled out to check on something.

I've got far, far too many of these.

My first ever PnP game I played Mega traveller and broke the GM's giant, angry war machine boss with a grenade throw that can only be described as incredibly fluky. As the robot exploded the magnetised armour containers ruptured, spraying the entire room with rounds. I decided my character wouldn't dive for cover, but stand there looking awestruck, the dice were clearly feeling in a funny mood as everyone in the party is put down with multiple wounds... and my character didn't have a scratch on him. Not bad for a character with no combat skills.

Later on he killed the main plot hook NPC with a heavy machine gun, although in my defence there were ninjas and we weren't getting paid for ninja.

In DnD my gruff dwarf kicked a badger so hard it cleared the tree tops, he ran so far from a rust monster when we saw one that they had to send the elf to catch him, curse these short legs! I also have a Halfling Rogue who's a hanger on for the party, following them purely because she thinks they're awesome. She solved one trap using figure skating, which the GM simply hadn't accounted for and spends half her time writing down the groups legend, but greatly dramatized. We usually get free rooms in inns purely because they start telling tall stories and then never stop.

Oh and during this years student Nationals we were a Space Glam Rock band and I got to beat a T-Rex into unconsciousness with a pure gold guitar. The former year I was playing a Tarzan clone and wrestled a mind controlled Nazi T-Rex into submission and then dropped the end boss on a box of live hand grenades (Accidentally. Honest)

In a Paranoia game I GM'd at University, I had one group go into a near nervous breakdown when sent to guard an invisible train, which didn't exist. But they had to pretend it did. As soon as they started to cope with this an incredibly loud and unstealthy train arrived, and they then had to pretend this one was invisible, no matter how blatantly it wasn't. The whole thing was overseen by poor Molly-O their poor mission coordinator who was on her last clone and was desperately trying to get the group to succeed in the mission, nervous and terrified they were going to screw up.

As things got from bad to worse, a group of clones turned up to steal the train,another to defend it and some Indigos even came down to work out what the hell was going on with the players in the middle desperately trying to brook peace. After some amazing diplomacy, lying and flagrant use of Mutant Powers they had the situation diffused... and Molly burst out of the elevator, screaming "How did you screw up such a simple assignment!" and firing off her two illegal slug throwers. After a huge hail of bullets and lasers, with deaths and new clones all round, the group were assigned the project permanently and ended the session wondering if they couldn't just shoot themselves now and get it over with.

Practically every character gets to be a Phalanx Reservist at some point, so it's not that out of whack.

I don't see a problem with it. We don't see other groups doing this in game because... well we never really leave Paragon the rest of the world is very, very rarely referenced how would we see them?

Then again we've had heroes from the PPD, Hero Corp, Freedom Corp and the Midnighters and no one got hung out to dry for doing that. I don't really see it being a big problem, providing the group isn't claiming to be the A-List Dawn Patrol members. We've made a bunch of stuff up IC, from different wings of the PPD, to the entire Press and Media wing of Hero Corps and I don't think anyone ever really complained about those. So go for it!

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And as for exploiters, why dont banks lay their cash on the till because people aren't supposed to take it?
Or roads not have road signs cause people know to stick to the speed limit?


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Your metaphor falls down when you realize that even if they did it'd still be breaking the law to take the money/break the speed limit. Personally I'm capable of not breaking or abusing rules just because it is easy too.

Honestly people are behaving like kids caught out by their parents over this. "You didn't say I couldn't break the rules in THIS way, so it must have been okay to do it."

I mean which do you want? For the developers to treat us as if we don't have an ounce of common sense and can't tell right from wrong? Because i'd find it a little insulting to have the MMO equivalent of "Caution: Do not stick fingers in plug socket"

Farming, like anything in life. Is fine in moderation, but once taken to extremes can cause potentially serious problems for everyone.

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And how successful would the game be if no players played it? If everyone disagreed with the devs who would be right then?

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Still the Devs. Just they should probably consider changing it. Since CoH has lasted this long I'd say they're doing all right.

I'd love to see an issue where everyone disagreed. I'm not even sure such a thing could exist.

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And just because players are using a concept that was purposely designed in the game 'the concept of levelling' if they decide to maximise their output, they are not doing ANYTHING the devs did not intend them to do.

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They are when the devs outright come and TELL them they're doing something they did not intend them to do. If at that point you're still unwilling to admit it, then I think we're going to have another rather difficult discussion.

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@fanservice, just because the devs say they didn't intend you to do it, does not constitute an exploit.


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Yes it does. The devs did not intend for people to level using the maps they did. They expect farming, they do not expect maps specifically tailored to increase the efficiency of farming to ridiculous levels using a mob with tiny Hp and a large amount of Exp.

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An exploit is avulnerability in game mechanics or code that gives players an advantage over other players that negatively impacts their gameplay. Levelling does not do this.


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No, it's cheating the spirit of the game through some loophole or unforeseen flaw. Players hurt or not its still an exploit to do it. (And players are hurt, because currently WW is totally screw loopy on pricing due to a flooding of rewards and inf from those simple farming mishes. Good luck getting an epic set now >.&gt

If the devs come out (Like they have) and say "We didn't want or expect you to do this" then it's an exploit.

An exploit is taking advantage of a bug, or some other unexpected consequence to make the game do something unusual.Usually for your own benefit.

Why are we arguing Semantics? It's not hard to just google a word if you don't understand it.

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.....yay for free speech............

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Lets not have the "I have the right to say whatever I like on your private forums" argument because it's silly. If you feel Free Speech is being taken away, then there's plenty of places you can Blog and say anything you want.

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In a full team of RPers certainly there will be chatter going but entering one who is not people will pipe down (except Fanservice, but he's a loon). There is just no fun in trying to RP in teams with a casual-non-RP whose answer will range from 'lolwut?' to '[censored]?? gtfo!'.


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I find people actually get a kick out of the bad, spider man like combat quippage. Then again I personally find CoH combat fun to watch, but not especially difficult (Although Kinetic is proving a nice challenge with its short range buffs). So I liven it up by making bad jokes.

The farming though? Honestly... I don't really mind. If people want to farm, more power too them I hope they have a good time with it. No one is FORCING anyone to farm, honestly saying you can't get anything but a Farm team these days is a step up from the usual, 'I can't get any team at all'. If I want to play story arcs (And I do!) I haven't had any trouble finding them and there's still people who do the Hollows and the like.

I'm amazed that people think the MA is the reason there's players at 50 who are terrible. There's always been people like that, most PuG 50's are incapable of thinking that they're part of a team it's not something new.

Toxic Weaver would be interested in this. She's still loyal to Arachnos, but that doesn't mean she gets to have fun on the side and keep them out of the groups hair by giving assurances that Project Pompous Title will not be delayed due to the groups activities, oh no, far from it.

Picking through the rubble, Emily was busy grabbing mugshots of the downed gunmen and going over their equipment for Serial Numbers or other identifiers. She left the arrest of the Shape shifter to those with the strength to take it on, she could probably give it a hell of a punch but taking was another matter and cracked ribs were no fun at all.

"Going to assume you can handle a little CS Pious" shouts Emily as her suits air filtering software comes on-line. Emily had undergone a transfusion of blood for a nanite substitute some time ago and one of the many benefits was an almost reflexive access to data streams. The under slung grenade launcher on her customized rifle crackled as a gas grenade was teleported into the chute and she let it fly over the heads of the retreating police, setting it to air burst ten feet from the ground. It burst into a white cloud that quickly started to obscure a normal view of the interior.

Her heads up display quickly and efficiently marked friend from foe and taking a few snap shots on single fire with the high calibre rounds at anything still standing she waits for a better target recognition before moving in.

Emily One had suited up in her lightweight armour before leaving and picked up the modified rifle she used for heavy duty work. Taking chances in the Rogue Islands were a good way to get killed. Waiting until the Helicopter came to a stop she hops down onto the ground and has the suit start looking for passive radio channels, filtering out all the rubbish as she tried to narrow in on comm links and Arachnos squad bands.

She makes her way over to Pious, the suits muscles making the faintest of whines as she goes. "We're all set then, lets do this and be gone before trouble turns up."

"I think if he wants us to catch him we shouldn't disappoint. We expect a trap of course, but we shouldn't pass up a lead like this." says Emily matter of factly.

"Have you got transport arranged for us?" she asks Pious.

Emily could indeed with time tap into a mobile phone, but she wasn't keen to announce that fact inside a police station and so she shook her head at the question. When Hicks was roused once again she went with him to look over the tapes.

It took a while to pick out all the faces and only three were of any real clarity, the Hotel VCR's were cheap and poor quality and Emily's own recorder hadn't been activated during the fight. It took up power and she'd been hoping on the tracer being more useful. Eventually she managed to get a good shot of three of the gunmen, but running it through police records turned up nothing.

Returning to the investigation room Emily pinned the three pictures up and grabbed the rooms attention with a two fingered whistle. "Listen up, these three were flunkies for the incident. I was thinking anyone with contacts in the underside of the city try narrow down who they are, I'll be visiting a few myself. Don't give out the faces to anyone who'll blab, they go to ground we'll never dig them out."

"Emily is me, but I don't mind rather my name didn't precede me too much." says the athletic looking, black detective. "Thanks for backing me up in there. I just wish we didn't end up going the extra mile on our own so often."

Turning to Pious she gives him a smile "I've a partner who will get us back the results for DNA, we'll have to track down the CCTV hub and check the hotels cameras. Can you have someone badger the police into providing those tapes?"

My CoH runs fine (as do all my other games) but currently whenever I use a power the game freezes for the length of the animation and then continues as normal.

I can view other peoples fights without issue and moving about is no problem, it seems to be purely when I personally activate a power, even non graphic intensive ones like sprint.

Anyone else had this before?

"I'm trusting on the assumption that memories aren't translated when matter is consumed. If you'd like to give us some small facts only you could know Officer?" quickly adds on Emily to the raised voices concerns.

((Oh no! A brief loud noise has totally ruined all my characters FOREVER. Reality check people, at the very least take it to PM's so you don't drown out his thread with OOC comments before he even gets a chance to begin. If your character is permanently wounded by a loud noise then I really have to wonder how they make it as a hero. Guns are pretty loud. ))

Working in her small plot of land on the border between Steel Canyon and King's Row, Rhiannon was busy trying to negotiate with the carrots about water rights when the noise washed over the small garden. With no bones Rhiannon heard by the displaced air currents and once she'd jogged free of the vegetables she whipped up a quick maelstrom around herself, managing to block out most of piercing sound.

Rubbing her ears with muttered curses, she scans the skies for the signs of a war wall collapse and seeing none staggers over to the shed, rooting around in the junk littered around old gardening equipment for the large eye muffs that the old owner used when trimming the hedges. Someone was going to get it in the neck for this.

Edit: Nevermind then! Ah well, i'll leave the post up. Bad timing on my part.

Flipping through the case file, Emily had called her partner Beth to come pick up the samples she'd got and have her analyze them including skin from the dead victims for comparison. She wasn't as good as the Lab Bunnies but she was still a Sara Clone and she knew the buisness. Hopefully she'd get something useful back, even if it was just traces of unknown DNA.

"How is the case solved if we don't actually have anyone arrested for it? Or any indication of who or where they currently are?" Emily One asks simply. "It seems you're just giving up on it come the first complication."