Flyman

I finally started properly testing the new market interface, as I had to buy IO's for my lvl 50 tank.

And I must say it's the worst new thing CoH has ever seen.

-Way too laggy and slow. When I enter a name for search, it takes up to 4 seconds after I finish typing for the word to apper. Argh, annoying beyond belief.
-Autofilling the price. Why?! I have never put two items up for sale in row that had the same price. It just causes mistakes. Remove it now.
-The vertical list is worse than the old horizontal one. Fits less items in one screenful.
-Can't filter searches by clicking the categories.
-Bidding is very unresponsive. Enter the price, click bid. Umm did it bid? I guess not. Click again. Oh now I'm bidding for two items. Arrgh.
-Asking me every single time if I really want to sell some white salvage is annoying. Make it an option that sticks.
-Asking me every single time if I really want to sell an expensive item is annoying too. Make it an option that sticks. Yeah I know there's a toggle for that but the game forgets it if you log out.

None of the updates have worked. It's worse in every single way than the previous one. And you can see it in item prices. Nobody uses the Market anymore, just too annoying. The lag alone is enough to drive us bonkers.

The best fix would be giving us the option to use the old system and scrap the new one. As of now, I'm sticking with vendors and SO's.

The registration of CoH2 was just announced, and I'm already at level cap!!11 Nothing to do!11 This is a rip-off!!11
I wans me monez bak nao!!1

But seriously, yup I think it's just a way to make sure nobody snaps the name or somesuch copyright nonsense.
The amount of new stuff coming to CoH is mind-boggling (GR, Incarnation system, Ultra Graphics etc). I don't think there is a need for CoH2, really.

I'm not that bothered that the box set is only sold in the US.

It includes nothing that we EU players woudln't get anyway.
The box includes City of Heroes/Villans. Well I got that already. It includes the GR expansion. Well we can buy it digitally (with the correct exchange rate I might add - a rare sight indeed!).
The Item Pack we can buy in July.

So do you really want the cardboard box that much? You CAN order it from US Amazon, for example, if it's that important.

This is nothing compared to other MMO's and their deals.
Star Trek Online special edition box included a metal commbadge in the US, but we Europeans were treated to an ugly L-size T-shirt.
(As the Comicbook Store Guy in Simpsons once said, what were they thinking. Size L won't fit the average trekker )

Not to mention CodeM and Lotro, who decided that a good pre-order bonus for Europeans would be no pre-order bonuses of any kind. Compare that to the US side...

Yeah, thanks for breaking the news just as I was about to go to bed (11pm here). Just try go to sleep with all these bits of info flying around in your brain. Sheesh, some people


Just one thing - I hope those pre-orders and box sets come to the European market at the same time as US, so we can get our pre-order perks and goodies too.

So please, don't forget that there's players on the right side of the Pond too!

Lots of things. But my top three would be:

- Sidekicking. Especially the new SSK. The best feature ever implemented in a MMO.

- The Speed. You can actually fly and superjump. For real! And you can just pop into the game for an hour or so and immediately jump into action.

- Customizability. Every hero and villain looks unique. And the power pools are so varied, that you can basically create any kind of hero you want.

Around the time of i13 or whatever issue it was, which gave Pain Domination to Masterminds, I was about to take an extended break from the game. I got pretty bored with the game, as you do eventually.

Then our small SG decided to all roll MM's just to try the new pools. Two of us took Paindom (with area heal on autofire), and we kitted the MM's to purely buff the pets.
It was the fastest run to lvl 50 I've ever done. No farming, difficulty on max. Enemies had no prayer, when our shooty pets mowed them down. And there were a LOT of mobs!
We were huddling together, multiple Maneuvers and Assaults, paindom boosts and heals. Basically enemies had to kill our pets with a single blow, or they immediately healed to full HP's.

It might sound a bit boring, but managing pets and trying to get endurance to last made it weirdly interesting. Completely different style of playing. It was also pretty hectic and the amount of action on screen was insane. And it was fun to curse the pets, as they decided to scamper after a running mob, didin't immediately respond to your heel commands, and succeeded in aggroing rooms full of mobs in the process.

After that MM run I've stayed in the game. We've found other weird team combos with our SG.

My point is finding a SG of like-minded players helps a lot.
The team dynamic is another dimension to the game. Try all rolling MM's, or melee-oriented AT's. Try playing without healers or fire/kins. Or try a team of all fire/kins.
And stick with it. A single mission or TF is fun and all, but sticking with the exact same group of heroes for lvl 1 to 50 is another thing.

Oh no, not the "art - not art" discussion..

The main thing about the graphics upgrade is that it'll bring lots of new players.
I recently wrote about CoH to a wargaming forum. There's been a lot of discussion about WoW and EVE there, but nothing about CoH.
I introduced the game, spoke about the the stuff which makes CoH unique (and in my mind the best MMO at the moment). I showed a few screenshots of my characters, to emphasize how varied the character creation process is.

Only responses I got were "lol those graphix are ugly!".

A game with 5-year-old gfx's will alienate a good portion of would-be players. They won't even try the trial of the game, because it "looks ugly".
But now we've got a superhero MMO that looks amazing AND is a great game. What's wrong with that?

I think they said you can change those on the fly.
And I think it just changes the damage type and adds additional effects to the powers. So the whole power tray doesn't change.

And yes, the pistol doves were just a joke they put in the HeroCon presentation.

I just uploaded a new webcomic to flymancomics.com. A little "Going Rogue" -themed piece in honor of the new info coming in from HeroCon.

And I fixed a typo in episode 7.

I'm completely sure Praetoria will have more content than lvl 1-20.
It'd be insane to create a whole expansion and world just for those couple of first levels, that you can breeze thru in a day. All that work in creating environments, maps, enemy groups, named bosses, missions etc etc, that you can experience for a couple of days max per character?
No, I don't think so.
Especially when they're doing high-level praetorian heroes and villains to battle against. Those are clearly meant to be dealt with in a lvl 40+ mission chain or a TF.

And about "why no more travel powers?"
What new travel powers are there left? Grappling. What others? Burrowing? Well, that'd be just an another form of teleport. Just a different animation.

Same goes for Archetypes. The basic ones (the archetypical ones, if you will) are already there. What is left is just combos or permutations of pre-existing AT's. Which doesn't sound that good. You can basically create whatever you want with the AT's available now, and new stuff devs can add as new power pools.

I'm pretty excited about GR. It's pretty much what I expected, plus stuff I considered "not very likely". Like the new graphics overhaul.
And there's bound to be much, much more interesting stuff not yet revealed.

First of all, sorry for no updates in the previous couple of weeks. I've been quite busy at work (plus other excuses). I hope I get the next issue out before weekend.

I've got a few comics shot already, waiting to be edited, and the first Villain-themed comicstrip almost ready.

And be sure to check out the upcoming City of Comic Creators Compilation #4, which will include the longest and most challenging comic I've attempted so far!

There's lots of stupid ones.

A completely failed pull-attempt carries the name of one of our friends. So everytime somebody succeeds in aggroing a whole room of enemies, when he only tried to pull a single mob, is called "a Jack-pull". (Jack's not his real name, I don't want to name-and-shame ).

In the Midnighter mission you got to defeat a Rikti, whose name somebody misread as Celine Dion. And in the same mission one of the players got confused with left and right, and decided to hide his mistake by saying "I meant Celine Dion's right, our left".
It's a running gag now. We say "Celine Dion's right" when we mean "left" and vice versa.

I told you they were stupid

With my villain characters I always take Fly. Always.
I've found that the maps are just impossible with superspeed (Grandville especially), and superjump can be really bad with those decorated houses and narrow alleyways. I always got stuck on some gargoyle, windowsill or fire escape.

And I just prefer Flight over Teleport, which can be a real pain in the lower levels. Having to rest after every jaunt or so...

And with heroes I usually go either with Superjump or Flight. Rarely I take TP, and never Superspeed.
My dislike of SS comes from a friend who had it with all of his toons. He never moved when he got to a map, just waited until everybody else were at the mission door, and started moaning for a TP. "It's too much of a hassle to run on the ground thru these complicated maps", he said.
Why would you take a supertravel that you never actually used?

I usually use SO's until about lvl 30, then I start looking at IO's. But mostly I start building them after lvl 40. I might get certain enhancements (like the anti-knockback one) as soon as possible. Or if my toon is constantly running out of endurance (even with Stamina), I might get some +recovery set bonuses.

But mostly It's just easier to buy SO's from a store, than bother with low-lvl IO's. I just don't like all the hassle of bidding for recipes and salvage, so I do it only when I know I don't have to do it again.

I re-upped yesterday's comic with higher resolution images.

And realized I've got a spelling error there. It isn't "heroes way", is it?
But is it "the hero way" or "the hero's way", I'm not sure. So... Any help?

Last time this happened was a month ago. Defiant was offline for about an hour or so.
They just don't take the maintenance of European Servers that seriously. They're laggy and buggy. Come on! Put our 13 euros per month to a good use, and buy some new hardware to replace those IBM 386's you have running there!

And I bet they don't have the support staff in-house on a saturday evening. So this might be a loooong wait...

If you figure about 3 months between issues, that puts i17 around November.
If the 2nd wave of beta invites comes after november *), i17 certainly isn't GR.

We don't even have a solid release date, pre-orders or anything yet for GR, so I'm guessin it'll come out early spring, maybe.

Remember, GR isn't just a free, fast issue. It's a complete Expansion, like CoV was. Expect a decent amount of time to drum up the release, advertise it properly and hype up those pre-orders.


(* Extrapolating what the devs have told us. 1st wave of beta invites is for 60 month vets, 2nd wave is those with an active account between August and November, and 3rd wave is the pre-orders.

For me, the Color Customization was a bit half-finished. The stuff I wanted to change (prestige sprints, Epics, MM pets) I couldn't. Devices was a bit of a let-down. I had planned on making blue drones, but they're still the ugly grey boxes they always were.
Sure, it's fun to fiddle with the main power pool colors, but that's just a part of stuff I would've wanted to change.
I hope this is just the part one of Color Customization.

Having MM pets zone with you is a wonderful addition - if it wasn't so buggy. You're better off dismissing all pets before exiting or entering a mission or zoning. Just to be sure they don't go rogue

The best thing for me is the Super-Sidekicking. Now I can choose whichever alt I feel like, and not bother about level restrictions for zones or SK spots. And recently our SG was joined by a WoW-refugee friend of ours, with a lvl 15 character. Now we can take him with us to Peregrine Island to beat up some archvillains!

(As a side note, he was really excited about the game. We played a couple of high-level missions, and he kept saying "wow, this really feels like a comic book!" and he was super-excited about how cool flying was. It was refreshing to play with someone with such excitement and appreciation of the game, and it made me look at the game with fresh eyes. We veterans tend to moan about every little thing, and forget how wonderful this game really is.)

The Difficulty settings were nice and all. But I would've wanted more difficulty!
We tried a mission with maxed out difficulty with 3 Masterminds. We just sailed thru, with no real challenge to us. +4 lvl enemies, 8-man team.
Maybe put a setting for "boost all enemies", which would grant enemies more hit points, more damage output, more defences? Just to make things more interesting.

And I'm qurious - Let's say you have a 4 man team, and you set the team size to match that. Then you get another player in your team. So now you'd have to revisit Field Analyst to put team size to five?
A setting for "match team size" would've been nice and cut down on the hassle.

All and all, a nice little issue with a lot room to improve.

Ok, Flymancomics.com is now up and running, with a steady stream weekly updates. I'm up to episode 5 at the moment.

Be sure to check it out every monday!

I've tried to make it as easy to use as possible. So there's no PDF's to download, just images to see. Safe for work and all that jazz.

First of all - great ideas! This game certainly needs more events like these. In the EU servers there certainly is WAY too few events. The weekly Mothership Raid, that's about it.
I've never ever seen a fake comp, though. The whole concept on faking a costume contest is pure insanity and evilness.

I think it doesn't matter how large the rewards are, or how you broadcast them. There's always the partypoopers and naysayers, who are there just to ruin the experience for everyone else.

I guess it just takes time. When people gets used to the fact, that Super AwesomeMan runs these fun little comps, I bet the negative comments fade away. It also helps to talk about it on these forums, spreading awareness.

Anyways, keep up the good work! This game certainly needs more players like you!

I've had similar problems with Vista. It started when I turned Aero on and off a couple of times. I think I've got it off at the moment.

Can't get to taskbar with the Win-button or alt-tab. The only way I get to desktop from the game is hitting ctrl-alt-del and choosing task manager TWICE. The first time doesn't do anything, but the second time it brings the desktop on.

But that's Vista for you. Sorry I can't be of any help... If you've got Vista, try the ctrl-alt-del way. Or install Win7 over Vista, that might help