Hertz

Needs more alliteration.

Here's some suggestions for color customization, now that we're out of closed beta:

A "random" button. Instead of choosing a single specific color, it assigns a random color to that field each time the power fires. You could therefore choose your two colors as green-random, or random-white.

A "spectrum" button. Instead of choosing a single specific color, the player's power cycles through the rainbow of colors while it is animating.

A "cycle" button. While animating, the power remains the same color, but changes in luminosity, going from light to dark and back.

All palettes available in the costume editor. I so want to be able to use those nice earth tones, the cool colors, the pastels, and the darks on my COSTUME!

Tool tips for the color blind. Put pop-up names over the colors so the color-blind users can see what they're choosing.

They could implement a sliding-scale tax on Auction House sales. Depending on the sale price, the tax goes up or down. If you want to sell an item for a billion, that's your prerogative — bidding high just guarantees you first place in line — but 75% of that goes into taxes and the seller only sees 25%. That'd bleed off a large amount of Influence quickly.

They could make Common Salvage available for sale at a certain fixed price point. Yes, that would kill the exorbitantly high prices at the Auction House. So what? The problem isn't that there's too much Influence, the problem is that items are unavailable to the casual player; fix the problem, not the symptom. The in-game vendors for SOs and Common IO recipes hasn't hurt the Auction House; there's still a brisk trade on both those items.

They could make an in-game item email system available. You could mail yourself Enhancements, Recipes, or cash ... for a price.

Translation: Doom, bring back bridging and power-leveling?

What are you saying here?

I've had two accounts since July of (mumble mumble). They're both close to their 60-month badges by now, which is one reason I'm glad I started so early.

Originally, I justified the second account because there were no global handles; you couldn't track down people on other servers. If you wanted to play with your friends you basically had to make all your toons on the SAME server.

There should be an "I complained about a badge" badge.

If you've got time, Lifeguard, I'd love to hear what you think of the villain arc "Quid Pro Quo," #82369, level 1-10.

I will hit 60 months in September. When's the cutoff?

I think in Risk, holding Australia ought to be worth 1 beer per turn.

I'm disappointed that I didn't make Marcian's list.

Heroes also get access to the Ice Cream and Pony power pool.

1 Pony. Auto. +2000% Endurance Recovery.
2 Ice Cream. Toggle. Makes you better than villains. While this toggle is on, you will never lose to a villain in PVP.
3 Happy. Click power. Click this power to add a new zone, new Task Force, or new store to Hero-side. Deduct one zone from villain-side.
4 Kittens. Pet. You get a kitten. This kitten is 200 yards long and weighs 800 tons, and gives you +10000% damage, 95% damage resistance, and it purrs.

Villains get a rock.

My emergency backup maneuver for virus removal is a DVD that I have handy. A friend made it for me. Essentially, it enables you to boot Windows from the DVD, and it is crammed full of every antivirus program he could think of. Since it's a DVD, viruses can't corrupt it, and it's always pristine if you ever get into trouble like this.

Perhaps after you get your machine scoured, you might consider something like that.

I just want the set to make Scrappers cry. I'm tired of hearing all the complaints that Dual Pistols should be a melee set.

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How fast do you have to be STANDING to create fire? Pretty Effing apparently.

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Stand fast, men!

The other way the game engine could be expanded is to rewrite the code for Critters, so they use the same wireframes (and costume pieces, and animations) as Players. Add to that some nice scripting, that allows those Critters to interact, and you open up more cutscene possibilities: bring Dr. Smith to the lab, and he is confronted by Dr. Evil Guy, who shoots him. That kind of thing.

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If you live in Boston and are an avid fan, and you could go watch a world series game between, say the Yankees and the Red Sox, but access was limited and you would have to pay more, would you go watch the Royals play the Indians in Kansas City instead?

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Dude, if the World Series is on, it wouldn't be between the Yankees and the Red Sox ... they're in the same division, in the same league. And if the World Series were on, there wouldn't be a game in Kansas City.

Nice analogy, though. Your business acumen is equal to your knowledge of baseball.

If they're going to fiddle with the power pools at all, I would prefer to see them contain more options — bigger pools, rather than more small ones.

Some options:

Tier 1. Hurdle combined with Swift; Health.
Tier 2. Stamina.
Tier 3. Recharge rate auto power.

or...

Tier 1. Hurdle, add a small auto +Damage; Swift, add a small auto +Recharge.
Tier 2. Health, add a small auto +Resist.
Tier 3. Stamina, add a small auto mez resistance (not mez immunity).

or...

Tier 1. Hurdle; Swift.
Tier 2. Health; Stamina.
Tier 3. Auto +Recharge; auto +Damage.

Personally I don't care about Stamina one way or another. I almost never take it. I would love for people to stop whining about their Endurance and learn how to slot — but of course, the fact that slotting for Endurance isn't sexy, and learning to conserve isn't easy, shows there may be some endurance-balance issues still to fix.

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Rather than see Stamina made inherent, I really think some of the END required by certain powers needs to be looked at; especially damage AoEs. These have an absolutely ridiculous END cost; especially for newer players who may innocently pick them up at the levels they're first offered at.

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Precisely my argument. I almost never take Stamina, because I two-box my characters, and Endurance is rarely a problem when I can switch back and forth from one character to another. (Granted, two-boxing means I'm not as efficient as two separate players running the same characters, which is why I don't burn through Endurance as quickly. It's also why I always team with friends and avoid pick-up groups, because I know I'm not as fast as two separate players, nor can I contribute as much.)

The problem is that the game design isn't particularly efficient in its use of Endurance. Ball Lightning costs about as much as 3 Charged Bolts ... which means if you use it against anything fewer than 3 targets, you're wasting Endurance. Newbies don't always know that, and it takes them some time to figure it out. Armor has the same inefficiencies. Unyielding costs the same amount of Endurance whether you're standing, flying to the mission, or being attacked by 15 enemies.

I would prefer to see a more sensible Endurance model. Make armor toggles run at a bare minimum until they're being used. If you've got an armor that protects against Fire/Cold, and you're not taking very much Fire/Cold damage, then your rate of consumption should be low. Against Fire/Cold enemies (say, Circle of Thorns at certain levels) then it should go up. Throw a Ball Lightning against 1 guy, and it drains 1 target's worth of Endurance.

My show just closed last weekend. I'll probably have a bit more time to play now.

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But I just can't see how to get CoX players who are new to PvP to team without forcing it.

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It's very simple. Children on the playground team together every day, and they solve this problem. The child who kicks and bites isn't allowed to come back and play again.

What PVP needs, in the opinion of this non-PVPer, are similar social tools that can be found in PVE: the ability to form a team of your friends and play against an objective of your choosing, at a difficulty level you select, along with the ability to remove and exclude and ostracize the people with whom you would prefer not to associate. That's how playgrounds work; PVP should be no different.

I would love to see social tools for the PVP zones that allow me to make a list: these are my friends, I will PVP with any of them at any time. These other people are idiots, and I never want to see them again for any reason. Allow me to enter PVP on my own terms, with my friends, and I'm more likely to do it.

It's not about winning or losing. It's not about the mechanics. It's not about the Archetypes or the rewards. If you want to grow the circle of PVPers, you have to understand that the fundamental things about which you argue don't interest me. I'm a social butterfly; what interests me are human interactions, and being with my friends, win or lose.

Now you could say, "Just use the Arena, stupid!" I can and do. But the obstacle to that is my limited circle of friends: I can only do that when one of them is around. Open yourself up to playing against every and all player out there, and you're guaranteed to eventually encounter some idiot who's out to make your day miserable, and one such idiot can put you off trying again for weeks. I can lose 20 times in a row and not care, if at the end my opponent says, "Great game! Look, I have some suggestions on things you can do differently. Why don't I go get some other character and we can have a fairer fight?" Lose once to some mental defective who shouts insults and emote-taunts, and I'm not interested in playing with that guy ever again.

Ostracism is a powerful tool. If there are players who routinely make the list of Idiots, players with whom few people want to compete, then those bad apples can no longer spoil the lot. At the moment, the average non-PVPer's only recourse is to ostracize himself which results in reduced PVP population.

And that's why you're not going to get a dialogue going with the developers about this. The developers aren't PVPers — if you insult them, call them names, name demands, throw tantrums, and basically act like that idiot in the PVP zone that everybody hates, they're going to ostracize you. Jeez, children on the playground figure this part out.

I find it very interesting that her fireball changes from red to blue.

I have revised a number of the problematic story points. I think this version plays considerably less with the Idiot Ball.

New arc# is 87975.

File a bug report, possibly.

If you don't want to leave one of your slots occupied by this mission for debugging purposes, you might log in on Test and mount the arc there; you don't need those Test server slots that badly.

Otherwise, just give a clear explanation how you replicated that error.