Grouchybeast

This seems somewhat overpowered and unbalancing, as it effectively doubles the number of powers available to some sets, thereby making them significantly stronger.

It creates a balancing nightmare. Corruptors would get another helping of damage on top of their damage primary. Sets with a majority of heal and buff powers would get a huge boost in power versus sets which are heavy on debuff. Of course, one way to balance this would be to give debuff powers a buffing effect when used on allies, thereby making the whole idea even more unbalanced versus the other ATs.

The other way to balance it would be to reduce the effectiveness of both the positive and negative versions of each power. That might not be popular.

Heh. That's a good one. My favourite version of it is still the one about the end of Torchwood S2, though.


I'm one of those people with an active sub but playing very little. I've logged in a handful of times since October. Partly it's because my duo partner is playing other games now, partly it's because of the still-extant problem with TFs being fixed at difficulty 0, and partly it was having a lot of other things to do in the run-up to Christmas. I'm going to give it another month or so to see if I get my enthusiasm back, and then if I'm still not playing, cancel.

I pay monthly, but I guess a lot of people use the longer-term options, which could put a lag into subs falling off after people stop logging in. How you'd even begin quantifying that without number from NCSoft, I have no idea. I'd assume that lump-sum subs are counted at the moment the money is taken, not spread out over the lifetime of the sub, though.

Very interesting. Do you have the value for 2 capes, as well?

On-line RP is really a less than optimal way to learn how to write fiction, or practice writing it. It has all kinds of odd stylistic tics that mean the experience generally doesn't carry over well into ordinary prose, and can give people horrible writing habits.

Yeah, seriously. And if they're looking to get rid of a few employees to cut costs, identifying people they can fire for contravening the code of conduct will save them the cost of redundancy/severance packages. Take the rearrangement as a warning, and hope you don't get singled out.

So, let me see if I understand this...

Players who get to 50, then immediately re-roll an alt and start again will never use their 'certain amount of playtime'. So they'll never get a chance to enjoy the perks resulting from auto-retiring a character unless they force themselves to play their 50s.

Players who enjoy playing their 50s *will* burn through their 'certain amount of playtime', and then will be forced to lose the characters they still enjoy playing, to get empty slots they don't want.

Not only is it this a fundamentally bad idea, but it's a maximally bad implementation of a fundamentally bad idea, which manages to be bad both for players who like playing their 50s AND players who like rolling lots of alts.


I do like the idea of being able to 'retire' a 50, though, rather than just having to delete them. Someone a while back proposed a system where a deleted 50 could pass things on to a successor, which IIRC was rather nifty.

I think it would be rather lonely running arcs all on my own over on Defiant :-)

If I helps, when my last two characters reached 35 I blew all their merits on rolls. I kept what I needed (and got a surprising amount of useful stuff) and sold the rest. I'll probably keep doing it in future, despite the length of time it takes for some stuff to sell.

I didn't know that there was a Bowie track with the same name, but it makes perfect sense.

Rather sadly, I'm only young at heart :-)

I tried PVP, after I was attacked while farming Mu Guardians in RV. I played for a couple of hours, then the next weekend I went back and played for a couple more hours until I got the kills for the badge. I got killed a bunch of times, obviously, but all that costs is a 30 second trip to the hospital, so it isn't like there's actually any penalty attached to it in CoH. However, I've never gone back since. Ultimately, I just found it much less enjoyable compared to the PVE content.

I play CoH because I like mowing down massed ranks of PVE enemies, preferably using fireballs. Also, the steady trickle of drops provides intermittent rewards that satisfy my inner magpie. What I really want to do is play Diablo II, but my other half got bored of that, so I had to find something new if I wanted him to play co-op with me. PVP is simply not what I enjoy in a computer game.

Or they're like me -- I know it's silly, but I'd honestly never thought of getting out of the zone faster by just getting killed. But then, I never remember my self-destruct power, either, or my mission TP. I'll try to remember next time. Who knows, maybe someone will even get a PVP drop off me on my way out :-)

I will still always leave zones when PVPers show up, though, and without saying anything on broadcast. It would seem rude to even ask people to leave me alone to do my PVE badge farming/temp power collecting when I'm in their PVP zone. And considering how vanishingly few people there are in PVP zones, I sometimes feel like I'm getting people's hopes up just by being in there.

If I had a US account, I would happily make new characters to join in. (If for no reason other than that Teenage Wildlife is a title on the tracklist of AJ McLean's upcoming solo album.) Alas, as an EU player, all I can do is say thanks in advance for all the level 35 recipes I will be happily bidding for. Try and drop some Scirocco's Dervishs and Obliterations, please :-)

It could also increase the removal of inf from the game, as increasing the number of times an enhancement is traded on the market increases the number of time the 10% fee is levied on it. I guess the trade-off would come in whether the increased number of trades per item is offset by lower prices due to increased supply and reduced demand.

Panzerwaffen meant global chat channels, not global friends, I think. They're accessible to anyone on the server who wants to join, and if you're looking for opportunities for PuG teams they're probably places you should be, anyway.

Princecharmingium? Standanddeliverium?

You really see no qualitative difference at all between 'every single MMO launched since CoV' and 'a superhero MMO developed by Cryptic'? No reason why NCSoft might be particularly concerned by the only other superhero MMO to enter the market, and therefor put in place a customer retention programme? Do you really think that it's just an odd coicidence that it happened to exactly span the CO launch?

It's just not very good marketing to call it a 'Please, please, please don't drop your CoX sub while you try out CO, look, you can have cool shiny stuff if you don't!' programme. 'Loyalty' sounds much better :-)

I think you're looking at that backwards. The loyalty programme wasn't designed as a clever way to stream access to the GR beta. Beta access was chosen as a reward for the loyalty programme because a lot of people love getting closed beta access.

The point of the loyalty programme was to encourage people to maintain their subscriptions over the period when CO was launched. That included 60 month vets, and six months vets and, in fact, people who only bought a sub the week before. They're all important, because NCSoft want *all* of them to keep forking over their subs in the future.


(Also, don't be too sniffy about players with 'only' six months of experience beta-testing. People with different expectations and different levels of expertise find different bugs, and it's important to have a heterogeneous group of testers, or more bugs will be missed.)

Not only do mobs take falling damage, reducing their xp value, but the health lost by Paragon Protectors when firing off Moment of Glory is also deducted from their xp value.

If the crafter is sucking up all the recipes, all the consumer has to do is bid exactly one more inf than the crafter to get the next recipe that comes along. In fact, since it's presumably worthwhile to the crafter and they aren't making big bucks on a one inf margin, buy two recipes and craft one to sell.

Unless there's only one recipe a week showing up at all, of course, but in that case it's still going to take the same time whether a crafter is working the niche or not. And one inf will still outbid them.

Boomtown?


I always like suggestions like this. It's nice to feel that you're making an impact in a game, and it's more difficult to achieve that in an MMO. I also like the PPD idea, so that the zone doesn't always get taken over outside peak playing hours.

The one thing I'd want to add to this is that it shouldn't require full teams, and especially not multiple teams, to recover a zone. A single hero should be able to make some kind of an impact and get whatever reward there is (there'd be badges, right? right?), even if it took them a lot longer than a team.