Grouchybeast

With the Minotaur costume pieces and colourable Water Blast, I'm thinking more 'Dairy Queen'. If only the hats would go on the animal heads!

Yes, it is. But if you're soloing on a low difficulty, you need to be prepared for a content gap between the end of FW and the start of NW. FW on +0x1 just doesn't deliver the kind of XP you need to make it from 20-30, and the repeatable missions in FW get, um, repetitive quite fast.

Yeah, one in a hundred is the value that I've seen given by people before. And, while it's a small sample, when I was rep farming for the badges a while back, I got four IOs from ~400 rep valid kills. (Slightly over, because it took me a few days to get the badges.)

Sorry, I failed to add the appropriate smiley. They're generally rated 12, which the perfect age for toilet humour.

As the poverty-stricken Farrelly brothers and their string of unsuccessful 18-rated films handily prove.

I feel your pain, having also slogged up from 24 to 30 in First Ward with a Praetorian character.

There are repeatable missions available in FW (contact depends on your alignment, so check the wiki). However, there are only about three or four different types of missions. Also, my character was a Mind/Psy Dom, so while she's safe, she isn't a fast leveller. I ended up dual-boxing with a scrapper on another account, putting the Mind Dom on follow with Confuse set on auto. It was still somewhat painful, but it was faster and I got XP for two characters out of it.

Keep checking for other people in the zone, too. I managed to find teams very occasionally, but FW is pretty sparsely populated on Defiant.

I remembered reading something about that in New Scientist a couple of years ago, and I found a link to a nice paper someone wrote about their investigations into the effect.

I used to get that sometimes, but I find that the occasional /unload_gfx generally wards it off.

It's placed a little bit out of the way in the sidebar on the right of the page, underneath the contact's name and picture. If the contact is referred to you by someone, or refers you to someone else, then the info will be in there. It says who the contact introduces, and at what level.

(Also, make sure that you're using the urls paragonwiki.com or wiki.cohtitan.com. Those are the same place, and are the updated wiki hosted by CoH Titan. There is another version of the wiki on wikia, which is not maintained and which in the past has been a source of malware.)

It's yet another really annoying feature of the Market. I have a second account that I bought a VIP sub for with the 6+1 month offer, to build up some points and tokens, and it lapses at the end of this month. I'd also really love to be able to pick up the VIP ATs in the sale.

Sure give people a warning that they're buying something they have VIP access to, and make them click through a couple of 'Are You SURE?' screen. Even better, also check the account's reward tree status, and stop people buying things they already have unlocked at their point on the tree.

Sadly, I suspect that the Market probably isn't capable of doing either of those, and isn't flexible enough to be changed to do them, either.

And how did you know that when you first started playing the game?

It's a known bug that they're working on. Basically, instead of being properly attuned, the enhancements are dropping 'fixed' at the level of the character claiming them from the reward table.

Even there, the CoH forums are a fluffy, loving, supportive paradise compared to some other game forums.

How is that any different to starting in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles?

You might not know this, but you now have a second build on all your characters, which you can switch to at any trainer. You can then fill that build up with SOs without doing any harm to your slotted IOs. If you decide to sub or buy an IO license, then you can switch the build back.

Since you left around I15, then you have another option which gives very good value. You can pick up Going Rogue boxed editions cheap on Amazon (make sure it's described as brand new, or factory sealed, so the code will be vaild.) Applying a Going Rogue code will give you a month of VIP, 400 Paragon Points which you can use later to buy IO licenses if you decide to let your sub lapse again, permanent access to side switching and Praetoria, plus a few other goodies as described here.

The item is free to everyone, VIP, Premium or completely free player.

But then you're taking that value, and you're applying it *per item* to the parts of the costume pack.

To go back to Arcana's breakdown of packs, according to your system, the values of the different possible packs are:

Common, Common, Common, Uncommon, Rare - 137PP
Common, Common, Common, Uncommon, Very Rare - 134PP
Common, Common, Common, Rare, Rare - 137PP
Common, Common, Uncommon, Uncommon, Rare - 115PP
Common, Common, Common, Rare, Very Rare - 134PP
Common, Common, Uncommon, Uncommon, Very Rare - 115PP
Common, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Rare - 118PP
Common, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare - 115PP

Does that seem right to you?

That's really the key issue.

Would people buy more packs, knowing they could trade the items they didn't want for items they did?

Would people buy fewer packs, because they could get all the items they want by trading items they don't want rather than by buying more packs?

Unless you can answer that across the player base, you can't say whether it's financially a good idea or not.