Guinefort

One other piece of advice. If you're taking the NPC helpers along because you need the support DO NOT go to -1. It doesn't actually lower the enemies' level, but it does reduce your helpers' level. All it does is render them more likely to die, even on the opening mobs of Talons.

If the 20-29 level band is full of good stuff, the 30-49 level band is rather lacking. In addition to First Ward/Night Ward, blueside there is:
-The second half of the Croatoa arc (the one you've started).
-At 35, the Rikti War Zone arcs become available. They're well worth doing. There's a chain of four contacts, though you can only run the two from Levantera at level 35, the next contact won't be available until 40. That means that if you want to run the whole plotline at once, you have to wait until level 45 (you can't outlevel them).
-Cimerora opens up at 35, too. There is minimum story arc content there (just three story arcs, one of which consists almost entirely of talking to people to get lore information); it's attraction is mainly the task force based there. You have to have Midnighter Club access (or a crystal in your supergroup base) to get there.
-Other than Night Ward, that's it for newer content. (Except for the Origin of Power arc, which is only worth doing if you want the badge; it's four FedEx missions, each in a different zone, plus one CoT fight. Even the lore it introduces isn't particularly interesting). There are the original story arcs, none of which are particularly outstanding, and there are the tip missions. The new 30+ arcs coming in the next issue will be a welcome addition.

I periodically start Praetorian alts when I feel like a change in the storyline. I've always been more story-focused than badge-focused, so I'll just do one set of arcs per character per zone.

Praetoria is very story-heavy, and often times running one set of arcs will illuminate an aspect of what's going on in another arc. It's also nice to have a decent knowledge of the existing lore in Primal Earth, so you can recognize the parallel characters. In any case, read all the text; most of it is very well done. And play around with dialog trees, too. For example, with Praetor White's "pick flowers for Cleopatra" mission, try choosing the "really, they're from me" choices as long as you can.

Side-switching can be fun; you can either play the other side's arcs straight, or you can work undercover. You can only work undercover for the side you chose at the end of the tutorial though, so if you originally chose resistance, you can work undercover in the loyalists, but you can't inform the loyalists what the resistance is up to. The "working undercover" option is mostly a series of phone calls to your faction leader at key moments that imply a slightly different outcome for the mission, but they rarely change gameplay in any way.

You can play loyalist/responsibility and resistance/warden arcs no matter what your current alignment is. You can only do loyalist/power and resistance/crusader arcs if you have chosen the appropriate side in your most recent morality mission.

Praetorian enemies tend to be tougher, and spawn placements are different too. Even if you recognize the maps (say, offices are the same maps with a spiffy mid-century modern makeover), the spawns won't be in the same places. Spawns in tunnels maps can be rather close to each other, especially right at the bottom of the entrance stairs. Pulling can be a lifesaver.

The Underground zones are notably trickier than the aboveground zones. In the Underground zones, everything will attack you and it can be harder to avoid aggroing spawns. The ceilings are too low for most travel powers, and although you can move out of the aggro range in some areas, others (like the narrow passages at the tops of stairs) will force you to go right next to them. It's always possible to outrun them, though, so I just put sprint on, check the map in safe locations and run to my location. I never take enough damage to kill me, though a couple of times, I've had to rest as soon as I enter the mission.

A few things are more convenient: enemies will only drop DOs of a type you can use, there's just one store that buys and sells all enhancements, and enemies can drop any type of salvage. Auction houses are only in Nova Praetoria (Resistance have one in the base underground, too), and crafting tables are only available in that zone, too. The auction house will suppress all your powers and drop your toggles; the resistance version does neither.

That's all I think of offhand.

I enjoy Croatoa, though I always feel like the resolution is really abrupt. I saved it? Didn't feel like it.

For me, I still feel like Faultline hasn't been surpassed. Yeah, Fusionette is annoying, though she's not so bad if you solo. But it's got a lot of really great things going for it:
-it's one of the first blueside story arcs where you really feel like you're stopping a significant threat. It's not huge in scale, but you feel like it's really important that you succeed (the only other ones I think of are the Vahz arcs that nobody seems to run anymore).

-Contacts that you actually care about. Think about it, how many blueside arcs are there where the contact is more than just a conduit of information? The newest ones do that (Laura Lockhart, Graham Easton, and Twinshot, especially), and redside is full of them, but they're rare blueside. But I found myself really caring about Jim Temblor, Penelope Yin and Doc Delilah.

-Captain Castillo's inept wooing of Doc Delilah. The clue when you search his desk, especially.

I even love the anticlimax of the final mission. I remember laughing out loud when I ran it for the first time and realized what was going on in it.

The 20-29 range arguably has more good content in it than anywhere else in the game. Your main choices are:
First Ward- the continuation of the Praetorian storylines; won't take you all the way to 29

Or, you can choose to become either a hero or a villain in Primal Earth.
Heroside: The original mission arcs in Talos Island and Independence arcs are pretty good stories, though the mission design leaves a lot to be desired. You may have to run a series of scanner missions and a safeguard to get an introduction, though.

There are several newer storyarcs, too. Keith Nance and Ray Cooling will introduce themselves to you immediately; they're both in Talos.

The "find contact" button will take you to the two new storyarc contacts in Steel Canyon.

Finally, you'll get an intro from Montague Castanella in Steel Canyon. His arc is no longer necessary to gain access to the Midnighters, but isn't bad. If you do gain access to the Midnighters, you get an intro from Mercedes Shelton, who has a series of 3 20-29 arcs.

There are also three "story zones" in the level, which offer a series of story arcs that relate to each other. Faultline is a 15-24 level, but at level 20 you may still be able to run the first two contacts in the sequence. It's probably my single favorite arc in the game and well worth running.

Striga Island is 20-30; I'm not a fan of the story, but there are some nice temp powers to be gained from it.

Croatoa opens up at 25 and has a pretty good set of arcs as well.

Villainside: One option is to run a series of newspaper missions and a mayhem mission and get introduced to a contact in Sharkhead and run the arcs that lead from them. All of them set up a chain of contacts in the zone, though their stories don't always relate to each other.

There are also several newer arcs added in. Darren Wade, Vincent Ross and Dean MacArthur will introduce themselves to you. And the Find Contact button will get you to two contacts in Cap au Diable.

At level 25, content starts to be available in Nerva Archipelago; run newspaper missions/Mayhem mission to be introduced to one.

On both sides, you can unlock a new costume slot at 20- talk to Serge in Steel Canyon or the Facemaker in Cap au Diable to get a mission to do that. You can also run a mission to earn a cape.

And that's just the soloable stuff; I haven't mentioned the Task/Strike Forces.

It's also worth noting that some of the lack of content redside is a product of responding to lessons learned in blueside content.

Yes, blueside has more zones, but when you really look at it, it's not as many more as it seems. Where blueside has two zones at the same level range (Steel/Skyway; Talos/IP; FF/Bricks), the original content is exactly the same. Different contacts offer exactly the same missions (and you'll only be introduced to one of them on any given character). You do get something else to look at and a different feel for a given zone, but having two 10-19 zones doesn't actually mean twice the content.

When they realized that people weren't interested in hazard zones, they largely left them out of redside; thus the absence of a villain equivalent to the gorgeous but usually empty Perez Park, or the incredibly dull and almost always empty Boomtown.

People complained about always having to travel between zones, so they largely eliminated that redside, as well.

Yeah, redside needs more content. It doesn't have an equivalent to the Shadow Shard (though blueside doesn't have an equivalent to the patron arcs). And the "let villains run essentially heroic content for the greater good" policy of making new zones open to both factions isn't a great solution. But it's also worth noting that it isn't as unbalanced as it looks.

(I'd also argue that the overall quality of the story arcs redside is better than the equivalents blueside. I'd far rather run Vernon von Grun's arc than Unai Kemen's; or the Radio than, say, Bonefire. The best arcs blueside are better than the best arcs redside, but I'd argue that the overall average is higher redside.).

Edit: Just saw Agent White's post, and seeing that I repeated some of his points. I want to add my agreement that more 35-50 content would be welcome. Other than the (excellent) RWZ arcs and the rewritten Maria Jenkins/Tina MacIntyre arcs, there's nothing beyond legacy content until you hit level cap (oh yeah, one or two arcs in Cimerora). And the blueside material is an especially tiresome slog.

Not quite sure how this fits in, but there are posters advertising both movies in front of all the movie theaters. So the existence of the movies is presumably in-canon, the events themselves or the characters' participation in them is not.

A cheesy dream-sequence, perhaps? The character goes to the movies, then dreams about themselves and people they saw in Pocket D playing out the events? I suppose that's more a sitcom trope than a comics one, though. (And is it just me, or would the gladiator movie be really boring to actually watch?)

I would guess it's because without his mission, nobody would have any idea who he was. Wade is a pretty minor figure in the game, after all. So the arc that he gives (and his brief appearance in Mercedes Shelton's redside arc) are about the only ways to learn who he is and what his goals are.

There are so many ways that the continuity is messed up at this point (the current favorite example is that you can get a taskforce from adult Penelope Yin at the same time you're doing the Faultline arcs, where she's still a kid). I don't particularly see a problem with keeping Wade in game. (I honestly don't see why Statesman and Sister Psyche needed to be wiped out of all the older content, too, but that's another issue).

Problem solved. A restart of the computer eliminated the problem completely. Thanks again for the advice, everyone.

Thanks for the advice.

I've tried logging in a couple more times; looks like the problem is still there. I tried playing on a lowbie, and there were short periods when it worked normally, but then went back to causing a problem. I should note that buttons highlight or otherwise register that they've been clicked the first time- they just don't have any meaningful effect.

I have no third-party mouse drivers or software. I'm not aware of changing anything between Saturday and Monday to cause the problem.

When I tried playing this evening, I found that my mouse clicks weren't registering correctly. Starting from the login screen, it seemed like I had to click on any given button twice for the game to read it as clicked. Power buttons usually needed to be clicked twice, and sometimes dragged instead of clicking. Worst of all were the boxes. I tried scrolling in the chatbox, and instead of the scroll button moving, the entire box moved. But I can't drag it back into place, because the game doesn't really recognize the mouse button as being held down (though there's enough change in appearance that it seems to be registering something). The game worked fine when I last played-two days ago.

And I checked my mouse-it works fine everywhere else.

Any thoughts about what might be going on or if it's fixable? The game is close to unplayable right now.

Most of my favorites have already been mentioned, but I would add the Mercedes Sheldon missions heroside, three arcs available from 20-24 (why are the best arcs heroside all available in the 20s?). You have to do Montague Castanella first to unlock it, since you need access to the Midnighter club. Well-written, some unusual missions (especially the last one in the Magic man arc), and with difficulty that scales well if you solo them (very doable by almost any character without bosses, a real challenge if you turn them on).