InfamousBrad

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... these funny little paper things called “books” that also utilize the reading skill...

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Are obsolete. Kindle fo' life, yo.

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Between 7AM and 9AM Pacific Time, on July 28th, the current UBB Message Boards will be taken offline in order to transfer the data over to the vBulletin Message Boards.

This means that the UBB Message Boards will NOT be accessible during that time.

The work that needs to be done on the new boards is expected to take approximately 72 hours.


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Guys, the way I read these 3 sentences is that THESE boards will be down for 2 hours, not 3 days.

The 3 days is for further work that needs to be done on the OTHER boards after the transfer.

I'm assuming that the new boards will open after the 3 day mark. Which may mean there could be a 72 hr. "info gap" between these boards & the new ones.

Not really apocalyptic in my book.

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I could really stand to know if you were right. Not that I won't know in 24 hours time, one way or another, but knowing in advance would be a goodness.

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Manticore and Ghost Widow are switching sides in issue 17? Is that even possible?

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It might be possible, but I think it's more likely that the Praetorian version of Manticore is a villain and the Praetorian version of Ghost Widow is a hero.

[/ QUOTE ]We already know about Manticore, he's a villain named Chimera.

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I got the sense from the panel that they might be ret-conning some of the Praetorian counterparts. I guess in Chimera's case there will be no change.

[/ QUOTE ]Except that Manticore's costume and Chimera's costumes aren't identical, and I can tell the difference: that's not Chimera, that's Manticore.

That'd be pretty freaky, wouldn't it? If the only way you could do the Manticore TF was through Ouroboros (if at all), but Ghost Widow was somewhere in Brickstown with her own anti-Crey TF? If Ghost Widow wasn't in Recluse's Watchtower handing out patron powers, but Manticore was standing there handing out Arrow Mastery powers?

Listening to the panel excerpt video, then going back and watching the Going Rogue trailer again, gave me a weird moment. From the 2:23 to 3:17 mark of the video:
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"One of the things with when we had the Praetorians in the past, you know, as they currently exist in our game, on the surface they're fairly two-dimensional, they're abstracts of, they're the 'goatee versions' of a lot of our characters from City of Heroes. And when we chose Praetoria as a world we really wanted to flesh out and explore, sitting down with people who care about the story as much as we do, that wasn't doing these people justice. We really started to look at each individual character, and the history we were creating, and within this alternate world, ruled by a Tyrant, and asking ourselves, 'Now, how would this person exist and how would they be, and whose side would they be on, and and so forth?'"
"It's not just every good guy is a bad guy and every bad guy is a good guy. Some people are inherently good and some people are inherently bad and they're going to stay that way no matter what."

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Now go back to the Going Rogue trailer and look at the color cues behind the various characters. Desdemona starts out red-tinted, becomes a hero, gets blue tinted. Maelstrom talks about being trained as a hero standing in front of a blue backdrop, turns on them, gets a red backdrop. OK, we get it: blue = City of Heroes, red = City of Villains, that's familiar.

But what follows is a montage of four signature characters: Statesman on a blue background, Lord Recluse on a red background, Manticore on a red background, and Ghost Widow on a blue background.

Manticore and Ghost Widow are switching sides in issue 17? Is that even possible?

My gut instinct is that archery/arrows is going to be pretty impressive, if you know how to play it. Early levels, Ice Arrow then Glue Arrow the worst mob in the spawn, and then clean the rest of them out, because it may be a lethal damage set mostly, but Blazing Arrow hits like a truck. I figure it'll take me some juggling to decide how many debuffs I want to fire before I start piling on attacks, in the long run; my thugs/arrows mastermind always opens with poison (to reduce the alpha), glue (to make mobs waste their time trying to get out of it), acid (to increase my outgoing damage). Will I have the patience to fire all three of those, let alone ice followed by all three of those, before I start lobbing arrows? We'll see.

I've already got a costume picked out as a Rulu-shin cultist, and I'm just fine-tuning the name. I can't wait to get the Rularuu bow.

On the downside, I expect teams to be really leery of them; people want buffs, or failing that, heals. But once people get it through their head that it AoE debuffs almost as well as Radiation Emission but with no anchor powers, villains, unlike heroes, will probably come around.

My tentative build: 1 Snap Shot + Entangling Arrow, 2 Aimed Shot, 4 Glue Arrow, 6 Blazing Arrow, 8 Swift, 10 Ice Arrow, 12 Stealth, 14 Health, 16 Poison Gas Arrow, 18 Invisibility, 20 Stamina, 22 Acid Arrow, 24 Recall Friend, 26 Stunning Shot, 28 Fistful of Arrows, 30 Explosive Arrow, 32 Rain of Arrows, 35 Oil Slick Arrow, 38 EMP Arrow, 41 Scorpion Shield, 44 Focused Accuracy, 47 Summon Disruptor, 49 Aim. Or else I may go 12 Hasten, 18 Superspeed and scrape up a Celerity +Stealth proc for Superspeed.

Edited to add: Speaking of the Rularuu bow, you know what would be really cool for magic-origin trick arrows defenders, controllers, corruptors, and masterminds? If we got alternate combat animations for Trick Arrows that looked more magical, less ultra-tech. Instead of various ultra-tech warheads, have them all be plain arrows, but with different shaped and different colored glow on the shaft depending on which "spell" was being cast on the arrow. I know we won't get it for i16, but I can dream, can't I?

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Ooooooo I saw "reinvent early gameplay experience".. yes please! Then all those people that say they PL because they're "bored" with the early content can stop their whining!

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Go back and listen to the presentation again. They're not talking about revamping the early gameplay experience in the existing areas. They're talking about adding a new early-gameplay experience, for characters that start out in Praetoria.

That's still good news. I was wondering if they were going to let characters start out in Praetorian Earth, if Going Rogue also included the rumored neutral faction, or if it was going to just turn out to be one or two zones for heroes and villains to go to as part of side-switching. It made me nervous that the character bios for the two signature characters of Going Rogue were both from Primal Earth. I'm delighted to hear that I was worried for nothing.

Not as delighted as I'd be, as you would be, if they had said that they were also adding more contacts to Mercy Island and rewriting the level 5-19 original hero contacts, but delighted none the less.

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... didn't like the responsibility of grabbing new teammates, worrying about team balance or picking missions. ...

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That's what broke me of it. My experience, on both Freedom and Virtue, has been that:
<ul type="square">[*]Nobody will settle for anything less than a 6 person team. They would rather stand around for another hour, if that's what it takes, than enter a mission door with fewer than 6.[*]If you persuade, say, a 3 person team or a 4 person team to enter the first mission, every single one of them will quit if you don't have a 6-8 person team by the time they finish the first mission ... and they expect you to carry your weight on the team while you're scrolling through the /search window and corresponding with 10 or 15 potential team recruits via simultaneous tells. There are people who can multi-task that well. I'm not one of them.[*]People care a great deal about XP efficiency, reward, and risk avoidance. They also resent 5 minutes of travel time more than they resent 45 minutes of standing around while the team leader recruits. As a result, it's possible to recruit a team for AE boss farms. It's possible to recruit a team to grind /newspaper and police radio missions, if (and only if) you promise to stick to Freakshow when you can get them, and Council as your only fallback. It's usually possible to recruit a team for task or strike forces. Zone story arcs? Double (at least) your expected time to recruit. Classic CoH story arcs, mayhems, safeguards, Ouroboros, street sweeping in hazard zones, anything in a PvP zone? Forget it, never going to happen, period, no matter how long you spend trying to recruit.[*]After doing at most 3 missions with a 6-8 person team, one person (not unreasonably, since it took us an hour to recruit) has to log off. Five other people will take this as an excuse to quit the team, themselves, because "obviously" the team is breaking up. At that point, my choices are two: take another hour to recruit more people, or give up and go back to soloing.[/list]At this point, I have, in fact, given up on teaming for anything but strike forces. Until I have them all memorized, I'm letting other people recruit for them, because when it comes to strike forces, people expect the person with the star to know what parts can be stealthed, what ambushes are spawning when, what zone to go to next while the leader is traveling to click some contact, and all other aspects of strategy for the TF/SF. And I don't blame them, it really does improve the experience when a SF is lead by someone experienced. When I'm closer to being that guy, I'll recruit more teams.

But teaming for zone (let alone regular) story arcs, Ouroboros arcs, mayhem or safeguard missions? I gave up long ago. I can solo three times as many of them as I could get done with a team in the same amount of time, because of the drastic reduction in standing-around time.

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... Mastermind primaries, for example, do not show up as customizable, ...

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Now that I've seen more of the screenshots, including the one that shows what Audrey (from Plant Control) looks like when tinted? I know that BAB and the other developers are busy at SDCC this week, but can you please spare a minute to explain why mastermind minions' uniforms, for at least the original four (mercs, ninjas, zombies, bots) aren't tintable but controller minions are? I know that you have tintable color palette versions of those models available, I can see them (as allies) in Mission Architect. What's stopping you?

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It very likely has to do with the fact that the appearance of Mastermind Henchmen is the culmination of a rather very complicated combination of circumstances. You don't just change the base model for the henchman, you also have to account for the upgrades, and we're already seeing the cracks in the system with the Thugs bug where if you upgrade them while they're upgrading, the latter upgrade won't alter their costumes. It's likely coming, but I wouldn't hold my breath for anything over colour tinting like what you can do to custom NPCs in the Architect, or at most a couple of extra models sets in the same theme.

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Color tinting would be enough. Fair enough that you remind me that there are multiple models for each minion: pre-upgrade, tier-1 upgrade, and tier-2 upgrade. And the only ones I've seen in MA have been the tier-2 upgraded models, so they may not have tints prepared for all 68 models, just the 17 tier-2 upgraded models. But when they started building i16, they didn't have tintable versions for any of the controller or dark miasma pets, either.

And actually, I should lower that from 17 and 68 down to 13 and 52, respectively, because I sort of do understand why Thugs can't be: all 7 of the Thugs minion types have multiple models. Oh, and I didn't count in however many models they created for Gang War. I understand why tinting Thugs is such a big deal. But would it really be all that time consuming to give us tintable uniforms on mercs, ninjas, or robots, and put the other two primaries' minions off for later?

About a third of the maps in Mission Architect. Email attachments: inf, loot, SG invites. Motion-captured dance moves. Outdoor instances of more of the existing city zones. Villain strike forces at levels 10-15 and 30-35. Suburbs. A total rewrite of the hero contacts in Kings Row, Skyway City, and Steel Canyon, plus the contacts other than the starter contacts in Atlas Park and Galaxy City. Another villain zone in the 15-25 or 20-30 range, so that villains have an alternative to Sharkhead in the 20-25 range. Lunar, orbital, desert, jungle, underwater, and alpine environments. Any evidence whatsosever of the existence of civilian government in the US. West Libertalia. Personal rooms for all members of a supergroup, accessed by elevator in the base. A public lobby room (or rooms) for supergroup bases. Full zone revamp for Boomtown, possibly giving it to the villains as their level 20-30 alternative zone, or at the very least synchronizing the instanced outdoor "Boomtown under repair" map with the hero version of Boomtown. More mastermind primaries. One or more Halloween story arcs explaining why we suddenly have Zombie Apocalypses. Balanced incentives to level via either street sweeping or in PvP zones, as alternatives to story arcs, task forces, and AE. Cross-server Arena matches that don't depend on the test server. Automatic in-game promotion, via NPC chat or billboards or the newspaper animation's textures or something, of winners of cross-server Arena tournaments. Nemesis's steampunk-utopia city base, wherever it is in the Shard, including an instanced mission in which we invade his steampunked-out zeppelin airship. Craftable monkey-wrench melee temp power. Rikti Epic Archetypes for both sides, Traditionalist heros and Restructurist villains. Completely re-written and updated in-game Help. Non-Arachnos patrons for villains.

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... Mastermind primaries, for example, do not show up as customizable, ...

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Now that I've seen more of the screenshots, including the one that shows what Audrey (from Plant Control) looks like when tinted? I know that BAB and the other developers are busy at SDCC this week, but can you please spare a minute to explain why mastermind minions' uniforms, for at least the original four (mercs, ninjas, zombies, bots) aren't tintable but controller minions are? I know that you have tintable color palette versions of those models available, I can see them (as allies) in Mission Architect. What's stopping you?

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What servers are seeing problems?

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Nobody on Virtue can connect to the global server.

Keep in mind that I'm having to do some guesswork here; it's not like any of us have seen the code. But here's what I think is happening, and then why it's such a pain in the neck:

When they turn on an invasion event, like the zombies over Halloween or the Rikti during invasion weeks or weekends, the first invasion happens in all eligible zones at once. Then what I think is happening is that at the end of each zone's event, the server picks a random number of minutes, 180 minutes plus or minus some fairly small number, and queues a zone invasion event for this zone in that many minutes.

If a zone event happens 8 times a day, and there are 7 days in a week, then by the end of an event week the spacing between invasions has widened to the original 3-hour interval plus or minus about two hours. That is to say, it's almost entirely random, and by the last day of the event there's a zone, on your side, getting hit almost constantly, maybe a 15-20 minute delay between the end of the invasion in the zone you're in and the next beginning of an invasion.

But over a 3-day weekend like the one we just had, Friday morning to Monday morning, there are only 23 invasions (average) per zone. So the total maximum deviation from the default starting time is less than an hour, and the average is less than half an hour.

I bring this up because even as late as late Sunday night, around the midnight scheduled (but not actual) end of the event, 5 out of 7 of the villain zones were still getting hit simultaneously. And the other two would kick off within seconds of when those five ended. So if you were trying to get the badges with multiple characters, and you logged in right after a wave of invasions, you had about two and a half hours to kill to wait for the first one. If you managed to get all 3 badges and the accolade in a single invasion event (likely, but not guaranteed, especially if you hit the lowest zones where most of your team can't kill things fast enough to spawn heavies), you could just barely switch characters fast enough to catch one more invasion event ... and then come back in another 2 and a half to three hours.

Please, please let me strongly suggest you increase the maximum "delta" on the random scheduling of zone events for these things.

Personally, I love Kings Row. It's easy to get around in, it's the most realistic-looking hero zone, and most of all, it really looks like a zone that needs heroes. It's my third-favorite hero zone, after Croatoa and the RWZ. But you didn't ask favorite, you asked for worst. These are my opinions only, clearly:

Hero: Skyway City. Hate the look of it, the stupid roads to nowhere. Hate the fact that if you're not flying, you spend ridiculous amounts of time backtracking. If you don't have mez protection, you better be flying, with all the Clockwork and Lost bosses waiting to insta-mez you as you bounce or teleport by. Hate that it's stupidly huge, almost as big as Independence Port despite starting at level 10, which at least used to be pre-travel-powers. Hate stepping out of the train station, every 20th or so time, at level 10 and finding all the exits swarmed by dozens of level 14 Supa Troll lieutenants. Hate that almost all of the store entrances have permanent spawn points outside. (Used to hate it even worse, before it got the second train station.)

Villain: Sharkhead Isle. Hate the ugly look of it. Hate the fact that the default sight distance is halved because of the pollution, making it even uglier. Hate the fact that I suddenly feel like I'm back in Darwin's Landing again, because after helping defeat a demon capable of destroying all life on Earth I'm getting beaten up by ordinary human beings throwing rocks. Hate all of the buggy and/or stupidly difficult level 20-25 missions, like getting sent at level 20 to fight team-sized level 26 Council spawns. And most of all, hate that there is no alternative, that like or or not, there just plain isn't anywhere else to go to get missions from level 20-25, the only 5-level range in all of CoV where everybody has to be in the same zone. (Well, not counting Darwin's Landing, of course.)

Ironically, the single worst villain zone comes right after the absolute best villain zone, Cap au Diable, which gets right all of the stuff that Sharkhead gets wrong.

Minor bug: On female characters, regardless of build or chest scale, any "Over" chest symbols are mostly or entirely invisible, embedded deep inside the costume. They need to be moved out a bit. Problem does not occur on male characters; didn't try huge.

You do know that the server status page is broken, right? That as soon as the auto-update script runs, it goes back to the server status on June 24th?

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Removed Mending Mitochondria from Devouring Earth enemy group.

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I would have preferred they merely be stripped down to zero or near-zero XP and left in, but it doesn't affect me personally.

Any chance of giving us a rough count of how many characters have been or are about to be deleted for exploiting this? This exploit ran wild for a long, long time, the number of people abusing the heck out of it can't be very small.

Almost all of the standard spawn points on an Oranbegan jail are up on those rope bridges, too, which squeezes them out so as to guarantee that there's at least one mob of each spawn within instant-aggro range of every jail cell.

All jails spawn guards based on your standard team size. If you're on an 8-person team, and 1 person goes to the jail cell, either he better be able to stealth past, or he better be able to solo 8-person spawns, or the team is going without him until they clear a path to him. That's equally true of Oranbegan, Council, Longbow, and PPD jail cells.

But the Oranbegan ones are especially nasty, because they're the only one that has more than one spawn point in the same room as the jail cell. Longbow and Council, they're right outside, and not even always there if it's Longbow. PPD jail cells have one spawn point in the middle of the room of 8 cell doors; 50/50 chance if breaking down the door will also aggro the whole 8-person spawn. But if it's an Oranbegan jail, forget stealthing out of it: they'll be on you before you can stealth back up from destroying the door.

And it's been like this since day one, so I guess it's working? as? intended?

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So… the HUGE room in the Arachnos base set… makes you think a Dev said “Oh, so you don’t like the 5 layer cave room, huh? Try THIS out for size!”

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I love the six giant story Arachnos reactor room, it's the most super-heroic or super-villainous looking thing we get in the entire CoV game. To be fair, I didn't get my current graphics card as a breakfast cereal prize. (Navigating that room before I turned Bloom up was as annoying as the 5-layer cave room was before I turned on 4x anti-aliasing.) I just wish they'd fix that broken elevator in one of the variations on it, or at least hang an "out of order" sign on it.

You can tell that the big Arachnos lab rooms were added after issue 6, because whoever added them doesn't know the trick to making maps load smoothly; you always lag out right when you get within visual range of them. I remember when they first added these, feeling like they'd just successfully justified the Arachnos lab tileset. The spider soldier barracks room, the Arachnos flier hangar, and the giant reactor room make it worth the price of admission; other villain groups wish they had rooms this cool in their standard lair tilesets.

P.S. Arachnos office tileset, pls kthx?

"We can't stop here. This is Rikti country."

"Ah, nothin' like cold fusion."
"So, are we really gonna blow this thing?"
"Only if we see any Rikti."
"Yeah, I got yer Rikti right here ..."

Meh. In case I'm the only cranky old-timer who remembers this, Mission Architect didn't introduce power-leveling to the game. It just moved it from Peregrine Island to Atlas Park, and from Grandville to Cap au Diable.

Yes, there's a steady trickle of broadcast spam from people looking for or recruiting members for whatever the PLer FotM mission is, to grind it over and over again until they unlock all the powers on their level 50 character, so they can quit the game. How this is any worse than people doing the same thing with TV Farms in Grandville or whatever the equivalent (I never bothered to learn it) in Peregrine Island, I have no idea. Oh, wait, I do know why it's different: thanks to auto-SK, it takes them 1/4 the broadcast spam to build their teams, so that's a net positive.

I play the game 97% solo, enjoying the content, even content I've seen before, which frequently feels new when I do it with characters with radically different powers. The rest of the time, I join teams that are, unsurprisingly, still running strike forces. I wrote a couple of mission architect story arcs that filled in what felt to me like intolerable storyline gaps in the villain content, I may write more some day. I solo other people's arcs to cover the few level ranges in the game where I actively hate the canonical story arcs. Soloing through the soloable content for the temp powers, badges, and the general story line experience, and teaming for the team-only content, feels to me like the most fun way to play the game. Such is my preference.

Any time I have business reasons to be in Cap au Diable, I'm reminded that there are people who only play the game in order to unlock the powers, so they can see what they're like. I can imagine that, even if I'm not one of them. Giving them their own clubhouse to hang out in not only doesn't hurt me, it gets them out of my hair. Yeah, a week from now, half of them will probably be gone, off to some console game or their other MMO, replaced by new people with the same playstyle. I won't bother to learn any of their names, because from where I stand, jump, fly, superspeed, or (rarely) teleport, there's no reason to: their characters are all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

But as long as I don't strain my eye muscles from rolling my eyes at the broadcast chat while I'm using Aeon University's Conceptual Framework(tm) tables, or while I'm shopping on the black market, they're not hurting me. And in the meantime, the same tool they're using to race through power selection as fast as possible gives me occasionally entertaining surprises, like "Why We Fight" or "Tales of the Black Market." It's all good.

My UI setup. I use 85% UI scale so that the buff icons on the pets and the team window don't stretch half the width of the screen. The global chat tab windoid shares space with the team window, since I never use both at the same time. And the space between the target window and the compass is set aside for WinFast PVR, the TV application that came with my TV tuner card, so I can watch TV (usually the news) while I'm playing solo.

Wow. You just encapsulated all of the reasons why the ITF is my least favorite task/strike force. (Although that being said, I haven't tried the Shard ones.)

1) Wide Range: Which means that just like regular missions and just like saucer raids, you get level 35s who feel entitled to have half the team be level 50s, because they feel entitled to be sidekicked. So recruiting for one, once you get the four level 35-45s, grinds to halt as you try to recruit more 50s.

2) Unique Enemies: Yes, but stupid ones. By level 35, I've gone toe to toe with demons, monsters, and renegade gods capable of threatening all life on earth with a stray thought. Now, I face the ultimate enemy: a primitive barbarian in scraps of leather, with a chunk of metal in each hand. The idea that Cimeroran Traitors are a level 35-50 villain group annoys the heck out of me. Sure, go ahead, invoke the supposed magic that they're using, that isn't referred to anywhere in-game. Go ahead, somehow convince me that Roman legionnaires were all trained to Batman-like levels of physical prowess. Uh, no.

3) Unlockable Costumes: Mean that if you play a character with that concept, you have to explain why you wore modern clothes from level 1-34. If they unlocked on an account-wide basis, I'd think this was the greatest reward ever. Having to be unlocked on a character by character basis, it's annoying.

4) Few Mezzers: But tons of mobs with AoE heals, and every lieutenant or above is immune to mez. Combine this with ...

5) Melee Centric: Did you know that Arachnos Soldiers are weak to melee? Cimerorans tear my Bane Spider character up, even on lowest difficulty settings. The stacking -def(all) from all those spammed Broadsword attacks makes Cimeroran Traitors just about the only enemies that threaten my bots/FF mastermind, too. Let me guess: you're a tank with a resistance-based primary?

6) Enemies that are "just right"? Are you including that one spawn of 8 overlapping elite bosses? Or the long path going up the hill that tends to drop three spawns on you at a time (regular spawn, patrol from in front, patrol from somehow behind) right at the moment that the team lags out? No other TF or SF has ever produced so many consecutive team wipes for me, not even mission 3 of the Positron TF.

7) Co-Op: Is over-done. Holiday co-op missions were an interesting change of pace. The RWZ was an interesting idea that has gone on too long, and officially exhausted all of my interest in co-op content. The ITF is, in my opinion, already over the line, and all the more so because in this game, "co-op" seems to always mean "villains get to be heroes."

8) Painless Maps: Except, of course, for the one map that lags everybody out just as they're coming into the middle of a swarm of overlapping ambushes. Or that cave where every 3rd spawn is a team-wiping Nictus crystal.

9) Very Little Travel: We villains are spoiled; we take this for granted.

10) Ample Reward: And deserves it, because it's a pain-in-the-neck TF.

11) Time: About right when it goes well, but time to completion is wildly variable, since your estimate of one hour doesn't include any of the time to line up the right mix of levels, doesn't include waiting for people to come back from any possible team wipes due to massive simultaneous elite boss fights or overlapping ambushes, and doesn't include however long the team spends standing around arguing about how we want to take down Romulus this time. I've had ITFs wrap up in less than an hour. I've had two of them give up at above the 3 hour mark, counting from when recruiting started.

Even though I almost entirely play villains, these days, I'd rather run Positron again (and again) than ever run the ITF even one more time. And much rather run the LGTF, which has much more interesting enemies than either of the above and uses a much more interesting variety of combat tactics, like the cumulative Four Horsemen fight and the mini-Hamidon raid.

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Are the devs parodying propaganda, too? Yikes!

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Parodying? Have you seen the stuff put out by state-run media in dictatorships?

The one genuinely interesting thing about Arachnos is that, unlike literally every other canonical villain group, they actually have a country to run. That gives them opportunities that other villain groups don't have, which is why (for example) the Council are doing what they're doing in Striga. But it also imposes certain problems that conspiracies don't have but countries do. Some of them, like the need to deal with a potentially restive populace, Paragon Studios dealt with reasonably well in the canonical fiction. Some of the other problems, though, like the fact that what would be just a crime for a criminal conspiracy becomes casus belli when they're done by a country, not quite so well dealt with.

In my reading of the Rogue Isles' political situation, Lord Recluse has been forced by circumstances to become that rara avis, a mad social scientist.

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So what's different between an invasion and when they appear regularly? Is the game play different? Or is it just more of those same invasions?

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Every non-Hazard, non-Trial, non-PvP city zone except the Rikti War Zone (ironically), Cimerora, and (I think) Striga gets hit three hours after the server comes up. After that, each zone gets hit again every 2 to 4 hours, so no matter what zone you're in, it will have an invasion event on average once every three hours. Whenever you log in that weekend, there will probably be an invasion somewhere in a zone you can reach in no more than an hour.

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For those negative nellies, remember the first time YOU were part of a Ritki Invasion, or any of the earlier issue invasions? The adrenaline pumping? The vastness? The epic battling? Bombs dropping all around you? Fighitng side by side with your friends, SG or VG?

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Yes. I remember those things intimately. That first day was the best day of playing City of Heroes I've ever had. Three hours after the servers came up, when the Rikti hit every city zone at once, and players on every global chat channel started making speeches to rally the troops from both sides, it felt historic, like I was part of something big.

"He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."

And then, over the course of the next year, we got it hammered into our head that what we had done, including the should-be famous battle of the Steel 60 on the test server? Became just another increasingly boring part of the game: a theme park ride that leaves the station on a regular schedule, as epic as a game of checkers.