Grouchybeast

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Nah, not really that weird. I find I try not to get my costume dirty when in the sewers. I mean who the hell wants to walk through sewerage.

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I will always "complain" if it's a sewer mission and about the cost of the dry cleaner...or WHY they couldn't get a nice office for once...just once.

And indeed, avoiding the water in the sewer.

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I'm not a RPer at all, but on the blue cave missions I actually feel physically cold when running through the water. It makes me shiver, in a way that water elsewhere in the game doesn't. BUT. It only happens when playing one character. So, I don't know. Subconscious RPing, maybe :-)

All of the high-level villain arcs I've played. The lower levels are okay, some perfectly fun things, and then you get to Grandville and suddenly contacts with utterly awesome arcs are just throwing themselves at you from all directions. I don't know who wrote all those stories, but they really need to get them back to write some more. I'm honestly quite excited that I'm just getting another character up to that level, so I can run the arcs again, and also see if I've missed any other great ones in the same range.

Blueside, Faultline is a lot of fun. And also the Carnie arc in Founders, where the contact starts acting oddly.

Ellie Mintaal, no doubt. Fire/ice blaster, and a reinvention of the sorceress of the same name I had in Diablo II. My first 50 was Grouchybeast, because I wanted to get to know the game with another character before I made Ellie, and I'm pretty fond of her, too, but Ellie's definitely my favourite. Okay, so she has very few powers which don't focus on blowing things up with FIRE, but, really, that's all I ask for in a game.

I'm looking forwards to Going Rogue, so I can take her redside and run her through some of the high-levels arcs over there.

On the one hand, voice-overs can be really good and immersive. There's been the occasional game where I've felt the voice acting added a lot to it.

On the other, bad voice-overs are really painful. And the repetitive dialogue for random citizens becomes much harder to ignore if it's spoken than if it just pops up in the NPC dialogue box. And the continuous on-going nature of MMO development has to make it a lot more expensive and inconvenient than producing dialogue for a stand-alone game.

On balance, unless the voice-acting is extremely awesome, I'd probably rather the money and development time went elsewhere.

AFAIK, there's no way to buy a new name. You're best best is probably to contact support and explain the problem, and hope they'll be sympathetic and change the global for you.

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Isn't it illegal to purchase a code etc off ebay ?

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I bought an unopened Collector's edition still in its shrink wrap, and good luck to NCSoft if they want to try to ban people who've bought a copy of the game from reselling it unused.

I got the box set which included the prestige power slide super, super cheap on E-bay -- I think it was about £3.50, including the postage and with a month of play included (and another 15 days of paid play on a second code valid to set up another account). So it might be worth setting up a search on e-bay for a copy.

I would seriously never be able to choose which of these to have running around with a character. They're all adorable.

Maing costume pieces from recipes is character specific.

There's no direct way to transfer any items between characters, no. If you want to swap them between characters on the same server, you can always ask someone to help you, provided you know someone you trust not to scarper with the item in question while you log with the new character :-)

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It's logical - our way of spelling and talking is the most recent form of English, so it's the correct one - it's like you don't talk like Shakespeare anymore, because you evolved from it to a more modern style - and that's just what we've done with English

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Unless you're using time travel to get your language from the future, I don't think it's actually possible for modern American English to be more recent than modern British English. As you say, neither langage is the same now as when they start to diverge.

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With all the stupid invention badges and now the MA badges etc noone that didn't get on the badge badnwagon from the start years ago has absolutely NO reason to grind badges.

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That's a slightly odd argument. It like saying that because there are people out there with thousands of stamps, no one new will ever taking up stamp collecting. It doesn't have to be about having more than other people, does it? It can just be about having more than you had last week, or completing a set, or suceeding in a challenge.

I'm collecting Ouroboros flashback badges right now, and planning to make a start on the Invention badges on the same toon with the recipes I pick up running through arcs. So, the answer to why start now is, because it still fun for me to do, even if I'll never have the mostest.

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The MA is for people who want to create their own stories or experience other players' stories.

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Well then, with all due respect, be done with the hypocrisy and just remove all rewards from it and make it the tool it's supposed to be.

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To be fair, I think the devs have been pretty clear about what they want from the MA from the start:

1. For it to be a tool for users to create interesting stories for other people to enjoy, and not a tool for farming.
2. For people to be able to level their toons through the MA at equivalent speed and with equivalent reward to non-MA content, thereby providing long-term players with far more fresh content than the devs ever could.

Those are two goals which do naturally conflict with one another to some extent, as by providing rewards and flexibility they also provide the motivation and tools for abusive play. The fact that it's so hard to make the system flexible and reduce abuse is presumably why other MMOs don't have MA systems of their own. But, even though they may have made mistakes with their implementation, I do admire the CoX devs for coming up with such ambitious goals and for trying to get the system into a shape which supports them. I'd rather have devs who try for really innovative content, even if it's hard to do right, then devs who are happy to just keep cranking out stuff from pattern books.

Thank you very much for all your hard (and awesome) work.

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.... you're right. Maybe I misremembered what Posi said. But I'm pretty sure he said something that indicated global tels were a better practical solution than mails.

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IIRC, the problem was that at first, missions were published in the name of the logged-in toon, not the player's global name. In beta, the request was made to publish under the global name. But globals have no associated e-mail account, and thus feedback had to switch to tells. It seems like, barring development of global e-mail, it isn't possible to have both publishing under globals and feedback via mail. As you say, hopefully it will be one of the improvements to the MA in I15.

I'm not sure, though, why an imbalance in total inf is a reason not to merge the markets. If people haven't spent their huge blueside bank balances in the last two years, why would they suddenly start spending them if the markets merged?

Market merging would also tend to even out the amount of inf red and blueside by making it much easier to transfer inf between sides.

I have to say, I don't really understand why the markets can't just be merged as they are. Prices aren't generally all that different on redside and blueside markets, and where there is a difference, redside is usually higher, especially at the top end of expensive sets. If anyone benefits from a market merge, it would be villains, as I assume that prices would tend to settle out more towards the blueside range.

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I observe, though, the adjustment doesn't have to be directly proportional. The mass of middle-of-the-road missions with roughly average reward/time ratios need not face any adjustments at all. Rewards would be what you normally expect - sure, some of those missions will offer a slightly higher reward rate than others, but no more so than cherry-picking canon content.

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Hmm...I don't think I quite understand how your scheme works in practise. Where in the process does the assessment and the adjustment take place?

Say a new arc goes up on the MA. It's never been played before, and it hasn't been tested by the writer so there's no data at all on rewards or average play time. How are the xp/inf/tickets awarded to the first team of players to run through the arc?

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Very much. Not to repeat myself, but there's an easier solution, completely automated. Track rewards/time from MA missions. Adjust rewards for each mission based on that ratio.

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Tracking would seem to be pointless, though, as at that point aren't you're simply issuing fixed amounts of xp etc per unit time spent in the mission? And that could simply be done by giving all the drops, etc, on mission exit in an amount determined by the devs (as merits are, now). No measure to measure or calibrate arcs one by one.

If you want to somehow adjust for difficulty of the mission ands the challenge faced by the players...well, then you're back into making subjective judgements about mission difficulty which will be hard to code and open to exploits.

I like Defenders too, and I don't generally like melee in games (I have bad reflexes and tend to panic and press the wrong keys when flustered), but I'm loving playing my Brute at the moment. Admittedly, I only rolled him because I wanted to get access to VEATs, and so I picked SS/WP because general opinion seemed to be that was easy to level solo. But there's something very satisfying about running up to mobs and punching the heck out of them :-)

Corruptors are fun, too. Sort of like Defenders with the primaries and secondaries switched round so they're damage primary and buff/debuff secondary, so if you like Defenders, they might be fun for you. Quick plug - Sing Star is running a regualr Fire/Kin Corr team on Defiant at 6pm BST on Sundays and Mondays. Join us for awesome firey goodness!

Speaking of which...I guess for pure fun, for me, I really like a nice fire blaster. Any toon with a self rez which does great aoe damage has to be a winner. Plus, FIRE! LOTS OF FIRE!

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I agree with all of the above-quoted, but I think the best way for the Devs to control the rate at which we level is to put a cap on it - make the cap high enough that only farmers and powerlevellers will ever hit it, but cap it nonetheless.

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I was thinking about that a couple of days ago, and it seemed like it could be quite a tricky thing to do.

In normal play, xp gain is rather peaky. There's a lot of running to and fro from missions, and then a lot of fighting mobs. Then there's a lump of xp dropped at the end of a mission which can be quite large, with maybe a boss fight and an end of arc bonus close together.

With that in mind, how do you set the period of time over which gain is measured? Too short, and it will catch the peaks. Too long, and you allow people to farm their characters for a while then switch alts.

And as you say, you will have to set the cap so high that it will only affect powerlevellers and farmers. You don't want to catch, say, someone who has taken a slightly lower-level character along on a high-difficulty task force, and so is getting a big burst of xp over and hour or two and will then go back to normal rates. There needs to be a good safety margin between 'normal play' and farming xp gain. That will mean that the cap will probably have to be so high that people will very soon work out how to farm just under that cap, and still be levelling far more quickly than the devs would like.

And those were just the problems that I could see, as a non-developer, on first glance. It seems like it ought to be a nice, easy solution, and I'm definitely not saying it would be impossible, but I bet it would be hard to put in place and maybe not work all that well in the end, anyway.

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It's the fight of 100k+ players with many, many, many manhours of looking for exploits/freestuffz vs 50 devs + a few thousand manhours of testing by devs/beta-testers.

Sheer complexity of the system means that there will be a sweet spot somewhere which grants an unforeseen advantage that is considered an exploit, and sheer numbers of players means that someone will find it.

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And this is why it's impossible, as well as wasteful and annoying to the players, to deal with MA powerlevelling by hitting exploits one after another. The only way to do it is by estblishing a policy that abuse isn't tolerated, and then put in place punishments for it (locking slots, taking away gains from exploits).

Could it have been better handled? Maybe. There was a warning when the MA came out that abusing it would lead to sanctions. People chose to ignore that, presumably in the belief that the devs would let them get away with it. Apparently they were wrong. Clearly a lot of people didn't believe sanctions would be real, and maybe if the devs had been clearer about that from the start, it may have helped.

A little more clarity about what the devs consider abuse would be nice now, too, as at the moment some people are scared to touch the MA at all. But I can also see that it's really hard to be too specific about things like that, as it opens another avenue for exploits.

Sing -- I'm away on holiday this Sunday and Monday, so I won't be able to make it to the team. I'll see you all next Sunday. Don't get too many levels without me!

I think this is a nice solution. The devs could spend the next five years playing whack-a-mole as powerlevellers moved from exploit to exploit in the MA, and all it would do is detract effort from other things and annoy people as the MA was constantly fiddled with and arcs became invalid. A policy statement against power levelling and a meta-level mechanism for dealing with abuse (locking MA slots) was really the only way to go.

It reminds me of the way that 'Battlefield 1942' dealt with stat padding. The onus was on the players to play the game fairly and not to abuse the system. Players who stat padded were reported and dealt with firmly.

Love the idea of as zombie mall, espcially with insp and temp power stands, etc. Even if it wasn't a zone all year, it would make a great Halloween zone, like the ski lodge for the winter event.

There should also be plenty of panicked civilians running around the mall during invasions, untargettable to begin which but which can be transformed by zombie attacks into more zombies.

I've only been playing for ~9 months, and I'm still loving it! No plans to go anywhere else.