GlaziusF

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Too many assumptions to be in any shape or form to be an accurate hypothesis.

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Well, yes. I'm assuming these people are "accidentally" taking the route from 10 to 20 where they fight the least number of enemies and consequently get the least amount of salvage.

So if it happens more "organically" - different people on different nights, smaller teams, the entire time from 10 to 20 not spent in rest XP, some people actually die so they have to work off debt - they'll have more salvage at 20, not less. About the only thing that could bring this total down is if these complete newbies can somehow fight 8-man spawns on invincible starting at level 10 and nobody ever dies. Which I think is stretching it.

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Yes, it is more than possible to have a new level 20 character with 10 million if you understand the Market even a little bit, but it's also possible to have one that's broke because they messed up their market sales badly or just sold all their salvage to the vendors and spent their Inf on buying their first SO's. Especially redside where you can't make as much Inf selling stuff to the Market (although I suspect that buying Invention Salvage for a telepad is somewhat less there, I haven't tested it.)

P.S. Oh, and actually with the addition of a beacon for Pocket D, isn't the number now 12 telepads? And I am going to guess that there will be new zones added in the future as well. Just saying.


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I've got 5 mil on a level 20ish character of mine who might have got a bit lucky here and there but mostly didn't.

Lemme toss out some rough numbers here.

Let's assume an SG of 8 people is getting to level 20 from level 10, where they established their SG.

There's about 100,000 XP between level 10 and level 20. This is 2,000 level 20 minions worth.

But let's assume they always team up. This effectively doubles XP relative to other measures of advancement, so that's 1,000 approximate minions per character.

And let's assume they always play with rested XP on. 500 approximate minions per character.

Salvage drops at a rate of 8% per minion. So, by level 20, each member of this SG will have acquired 40 salvage, for a total of 320 salvage. Of this about 11 pieces will be rare, 56 uncommon, and the remainder (253) common.

Now let's look heroside at all the places a level 20 character could go. Remember, to get a beacon you need to explore the heck out of a zone, which means being able to survive in it.

Atlas Park, Galaxy City, Perez Park, The Hollows, Kings Row, Steel Canyon, Skyway City, Talos Island, Independence Port, Striga Isle, Boomtown, Faultline. And Pocket D, I guess. That's 7 teleporters' worth of locations. What the heck, round it up to 8.

Assuming they care about what kind of telepad they have, and that salvage winds up evenly distributed among the types, they will have 1 piece of their desired rare salvage, 4 of their desired uncommon salvage, and 20 of each needed common salvage.

The question then becomes, how much of the unneeded 10 rare, 52 uncommon, and 221 common salvage will they need to cash in to get 7 rares and 4 uncommons?

Villainside a level 20 only has to worry about going to maybe 4 places, potentially 5, so they're only looking at cashing that giant chunk of commons in for another couple rares.

Of course, this all assumes they've got enough prestige to buy and power 4 rooms, 8 teleporters, and 13 beacons, which I don't have numbers for but which I believe may not be a very reasonable assumption.

What I am saying in so many numbers is that these terrible oppressed newbies you make up cannot actually exist, barring the largest dump an RNG has ever taken on anyone.

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80k is a lot. It doesn't look like a lot when people sit and farm and farm and flip and flip and farm some more. When characters don't participate in that sort of thing, those 80k tickets start adding up.


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No base needs more than 11 teleporters.

880K is, what, 3 SOs for a level 50 character?

I don't know what game you're playing, but I've got characters in their 30s sitting on 10 mill just from selling all the stuff they pick up for 1 inf on the market.

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The weird thing lately is that, on these radio missions, when I click on a glowie it tells me I have a clue, but there’s nothing there. When did that bug start? Maybe I’ll send a bug report next time I’m on. Gah, who knows when that will be? Sooner, I mentally vow. Sooner!

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The clue auto-vanishes on mission complete. If you want to look at the item, leave some guys alive in the room if possible.

I suppose it really should vanish when you hit the street, but maybe that's not possible with the current radio/paper coding.

In the spirit of current contact disclosures I'd like to make a couple requests about the dialogue trees.

First, make it clear what each choice will lead to.

Second, add some sort of confirmation to the dialog so you can never pick a choice from a single errant click.

Third and optionally, explicitly indicate intention in the dialogue, maybe with a tag in brackets at the beginning, so people don't do the wrong thing for them due to misinterpretation.

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Having poinged around the Shadow Shard checking, all the TFs in there still require 8.

I'm not opposed to this change, as long as the maximum for everything that's not Statesman or Lord Recluse comes down to 4.

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Heck, I remember some mech game in which failure to press the eject button before you get defeated means your game save is erased.

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Ah, the Nethack model.

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I think it is called Steel Battalion. You get a massive controller with it that lloks like a mech dashboard with all the approrpiate buttons (except the combined Megas XLR "Missiles!", "More Missiles!" and "Didn't you just press this button 10 seconds ago?" button). When the Eject button lights up, hit it. NOW! Or you're dead, save erased, welcome to level 1.

There's hardcore games, and there's Steel Battalion. It's not even a contest.

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My favorite Megas XLR button was "You heard the man, kids! SUPER-DESTRUCTO-MODE!"

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TPull has fallen into the whirlwind of a girlfriend. Whether he will return or survive remains to be seen.

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Well, the girlfriend is great, but my computer was taken over by viruses and such for the past three to four months, so that's the big reason why I've been away. Now I've got an upgrade, so look for some updated action coming soon to a forum near you!

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Ah, viruses.

Advice for TPull and everyone else who's interested.

Antivirus can fail.

Firewalls can fail.

Even routers can fail.

Don't run with admin privileges. Use the "run as..." feature in more modern incarnations of Windows to install things, or boot into admin if absolutely necessary, but spend most of your time as a normal user. If you can't mess up your system, neither can a virus, neither can a trojan.

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Please use this thread to discuss the below announcement:


Issue 10: Invasion, the tenth upcoming free expansion since the launch of City of Heroes® in April 2004, will introduce a host of new content and challenges. The Rikti invasion force returns with a vengeance, bent on destroying Earth!

Click here to read more about this coming Issue.

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Oh no. Ohhhh no.

Giant, zone-spanning world events? Lots of Rikti spawning and moving around?

You guys need to fix your network code so it runs at reasonable data rates or I won't be able to play the game anymore. When the ghost of Scrapyard passes by his posse of miners absolutely chokes my connection into LCTMS.

If there are going to be Rikti showing up all over the world and running around... I can't play the game at all without expecting to arbitrarily disconnect because there's a troop of Rikti at the edge of visual range.

Please, take some time in testing to see if the net code can be streamlined a little bit. I really want to see this event, but on dialup it looks right now like I won't be able to and actually play the game or survive.

--GF

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That seriously knocks down the chaff, and the added workload to the Dev/Support teams, while allowing players the opportunity to actually ADD something to the game they've worked hard on and supported.

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And all we need is a fair voting system and we're in the clear! How hard can that-

Oh. Wait.

--GF

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Inventions has been touted as something that shelved level 50's can partake in. Level 50's that have completed all their story arcs already. Please, how can both of those occur? Level 50's can not experience IO's if they are locked out of acheiving specific rewards because they happened to hit the level cap before I9.

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It's like I said, we are looking into other options that keeps the mechanic of the four pool system. Our intention is to not make people feel "gimped" for previously completing all their story arcs.

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This is just a layman's stab at things:

Inventions make anything that can be rewarded.
Recipes are a reward.
Therefore, inventions can make recipes.

So! All we need now is source material for a recipe. Which I will give the decidedly back-of-napkin name "Inspiron B".

When you get a reward from a Trial or Task Force, you can choose "Inspiron B". "Inspiron B" can be combined with invention salvage to create any recipe from pool B. Which tier it's from depends on what invention salvage gets used. Recipes which need "Inspiron B" as an ingredient should probably be standard workbench recipes, though on a different set of worktables from the common university ones.

"Inspiron B": giving you what you need, when you need it!

--GF

talk with your doctor before starting a regimen of Inspiron B side effects are generally malevolent and may include convulsive laughter megalomania swelling of the corpus callosum and spontaneous human combustion women who are nursing pregnant or who have been pregnant should not take Inspiron B or handle broken tablets due to risk of a specific temporal anomaly keep out of reach of children and just about anyone really do not taunt happy fun Inspiron B

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This Confirms that Statesman's AWARE of the problems. Just like we know most of the Devs ARE aware of the problems with the AT's, PVP, certain overpowered Mobs, and maybe even l00t/Farm issues that are still over the Horizon.

What this DOESN'T confirm is whether they're actually going to do anything about it.
There is 2 kinds of ways that Cryptic addresses anything:
#1) SOON™ ...and...
#2) We tried but decided we don't have the Resources.

...and lately we're seeing a LOT more from camp 2 than we are from camp 1.
Infact the overwhleming theme lately seems to be more Pirates of the Carribean than City of X, IE:
"Let's see how much we can accomplish with only a Skeleton Crew"

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Adding more people to a late software project makes it later.

--GF

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Good ideas but personally I'd like to see the Devs develop more "social" functions for the base.

Being able to sit down at the board room table would be a start! In fact anything that allows you to interact with the base would be good.

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Do you mean /em sitboardroom, or something static where you click on the chair?

Because if it's the former, I8 will make you happy.

--GF

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The single most requested item in CoH is to make the costume creator standalone...

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I find this shocking. I thought the single most requested item would be new content followed by, specifically, post-50 content.

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You'd be surprised how many people haven't hit 50.

You probably wouldn't be surprised at how many people have rolled alts and had to come up with costumes for them.

--GF

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Yay, let's continue to crap on Statesman! We're at 10 pages now, keep it going!

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Oh noes, honest critcisim of developer misunderstanding of the playerbase's attitude?

As for number of pages, its only two for me. In your My Home you can increase the posts per page from the standard 10. I have it at 50 and it makes reading the forums much easier.

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Well, the thing is, going by the forums, it wasn't exactly a misunderstanding. Or did I just hallucinate all those people saying they shouldn't have to give up influence for prestige, or complaining about being prestige batteries for insensitive SGs?

And it never went any deeper than that.

Never mind that you can spend 80% of your time in SG mode and still get your enhancers.

It's true that supergroups need large amounts of prestige to do anything meaningful, and that bases for are their flexibility are rigid in rather bizarre ways (tell me again why I have to clear a raid path to something with no hit points that can't be targeted?). But the most vocal complaint was "I don't want to give up my influence!"

--GF

I'll try to get good shots of the rest of my posse in O.C.E.L.O.T. (the Outcast Catgirl Evil Legions Of Terror) but here's Friends Forever.

And a costume I made just to use the shoulder kitten, Recursive Cat.

--GF

Something you might want to add to this -

"Adam, these missions are boring! Fight three guys, rest, fight three guys, rest, what's the point?!

Well, there are two ways you can make it harder. First, check your minimap for a contact icon that says 'Fortunata' or 'Field Analyst'. You can make every mission you run harder there.

Second, team up with people! Unlike the instances you may be used to in other games, these instances automatically scale to your team size. If you bring along a team of eight, every group of three minions is going to have (on average) two bosses, five lieutenants, and about 7 other minions in it. Now _that_'s exciting."

--GF

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At five minutes before the half hour (XX:25 and XX:55) hit the Argo Highway section of Talos Island. There will be lots of masks to destroy as night arrives. I've been told NOT to arrest shamans, as their presence helps spawn more masks. I don't know if this is true or not.

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Er, this is way after the fact, but:

When you take out a mask spawn, take out the whole thing. The stragglers will hang around forever, longer than a spawn that's never been bothered.

--GF

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Also: side mission waypoints don't clear off your map after they've finished (i.e. the time bonus is awarded.)

This makes a five-side-quest mission map unbearably cluttered after a while. Figuring out which one is the fifth mission waypoint ain't fun.

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I employ the Oblivion Maneuver in such cases.

Enter, see if the minimap's filled in, if it is, leave.

--GF

I agree that "Dr. Aeon?" shouldn't be described as a younger Professor Echo. Or maybe Prof. Echo should be bald instead of looking dark-haired and spry.

Anyway, here's a sort of timeline. Consider the set X1, X2, X3, X4, etc. to be an increasing set of integers, and Y1, Y2, Y3, Y4, etc. to be the same.

Present day - Y4: Fr. Henri seals Bat'Zul inside Mt. Diable.

Present day - Y3: Dr. Egon is "executed" and gets reborn as Dr. Aeon, working for Arachnos.

Present day - Y2: Dr. Aeon, under pressure from Lord Recluse, breaks Bat'Zul's containment field and taps his heart to power the Rogue Isles.

Present day - Y1: Dr. Aeon invents a "time deflector", which can be used to reroute a time traveler.

Present day: Echo Down the Aeons happens. Professor Echo makes his last stand. Virgil Tarikoss prevents an attempt to unleash Bat'Zul with some mercenary assistance.

Present day + X1: Dr. Aeon's power tap opens up a channel for Bat'Zul to break free of his ancient imprisonment. Giant flaming rocks fall and nearly everyone dies, including you.

Present day + X2: Dr. Aeon finishes work on a single-point time machine, and returns to the present day, trying to figure out how the crisis might have been averted. In the process he meets a future version of himself and receives a time deflector and a picture of you.

Present day + X3: Dr. Aeon gives himself a youth treatment to become Professor Echo, and incorporates the time deflector into his existing machine, so he can diffract himself around various periods near the present day.

Present day + X4: Professor Echo travels back to attempt to reveal the truth of what he'd done in the past without tipping off Lord Recluse that he's a time traveler. In the process he fights against you to toughen you up, and tells you to meet with Tarikoss. On the final jaunt he passes the information to himself, and circle complete, dies.

If and when you complete Tarikoss's task force you'll have done what Echo wanted you to do. Circle complete.

--GF

Well, in I7 the Brokers are apparently also going to offer Mayhem Missions.

It seems like a natural expansion of their role to tell you about unlockable contacts, if they don't have any more normal ones for you.

--GF

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Example 1
Example 2
Example 3

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Dev Quote 1: Positron has said that, whatever badge-related niceties go into the game from this point onward, Isolator will _never_ be a requirement for _any_ of them, aside from the little green text under your name that says "Isolator".

And if you think a little line of green text is an equal or greater game benefit than an entire subsystem that takes months to code and balance, you're off your rocker.

--GF

That said, when April 1 rolls around some year, I wouldn't mind getting caught in a Gamester smoke bomb and waking up in that parking lot on the east side of Paragon, with a friendly police officer standing over me saying "The multiverse is in danger? Statesman got kidnapped? Whoa there, newbie. Let's start you off with something simple." (Coyote realizes what's really going on, of course.)

Don't you hate it when stuff gets all existential?

--GF

Construction still in progress, but here's my SVG's base on Protector.

Entrance
Still Entrance
Entrance "rock garden"
Medbay (arcane)
Still more medbay
Arcane library (in medbay)
Tech/casual library
Forge
Workbench
Generator
Satellite office
Computer room
And last but not least, the most important function of any base.

--GF

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You haven't put anything in perspective. You made an odd statement that didn't affect the discussion at all. I'm not even sure what your point is supposed to be.

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The slot machine, like all contacts, is optional. Given the general quality of writing, it's probably no more and no less entertaining than any other contact.

So if you think it's too tiresome to grind out the Marcones for the badge, then, uh, you don't have to tire yourself out getting it. You miss nothing.

--GF