InfamousBrad

It makes a little more sense if you've run Praetorian Montague's arc (2nd Night Ward arc) first. The Animus Arcanae have only been sentient for a little while; with the except of Ward and Clarity, most of them are still, emotionally, children.

When you're playing Trilogy's arc, you're babysitting an infant spellbook, playing along with his fantasy of what it must be like to be a superhero. Being a little kid, he tells the story in the order it occurs to him, most exciting parts first, filler story second. It's kind of endearing; even more so, that he lets you decide how much of a good guy the main character is and whether or not the bad guy repents at the end.

I thought they fixed this bug, two or three patches ago in beta?

If it's the same bug we had when beta started, the work-around is to never use two AoEs in a row. There's something about the AoEs' particle effects that swamps the server or swamps the connection or something.

I don't understand how anybody can have gotten as far as the Magisterium trial, how they can have unlocked the previous 5 slots, and not instantly get the mechanics of this. Seriously, it's not that hard. Phase 1 is an ordinary kill 10 rats. Phase 2 is a routine one-at-a-time tank-and-spank, unless you're going for the badges, and even then it's only the timing that's a little tricky. Phase 3 is a tank-and-spank where it helps to have more than one tank, so that one can step in when the other gets debuffed, and a mop-up team to clean up the adds like in BAF. And phase 4 is just yet another tank-and-spank with don't-stand-in-the-goo like half the trials to date (or like the bloody Death from Below trial, for crying out loud) and a one-click power to shut down the pillars just like using the grenades in Lambda. If you even bother; on beta, every team that tried was able to spank him down even though their extra regen, for the extra badge, it just took longer.

Honestly, I don't see how anybody fails this unless the ONLY part of their screen they ever look at is the button bar. If it hurts to stand where you're standing, don't stand there, step back before the DoT kills you. Stand back and let somebody else take a turn in front if you get debuffed to fragility. This is so much easier and so much less complicated than even the Underground Trial that when I hear people saying they failed it, I go "what is this I don't even."

I wish it looked that good. Sorry I didn't grab screenshots, but I can tell that this was some new Paragon trainee's class project, and they gave it away free because it's such a failure.

For one thing, it's tilted at the wrong angle. Go back and watch more classic Disney movies, if you can't be bothered to look at historical costuming books: the hat should not go straight up, like a Dun's Cap, it's supposed to go back to nearly horizontal, so that the lace train hangs down well behind the wearer.

But the bigger problem is that it's designed to require about five different colors (hat, fur trim, lace trim, train, and hair) and only has two colors to work with. So they made the worst possible choice of two. Color one tints the hat and both trims. Color two tints the train. The hair is a blend of color one and color two. Brown hair? You have to have a brown hat. And a brown train. Green hat, or pink hat? Enjoy your greenish or pinkish hair.

There's a limit to how entitled I feel I am to complain about a free hat, but seriously, if this doesn't get at least the color choices fixed, it's entirely useless. Frankly, I feel like a better solution would be to tip it far enough back that the hair can justifiably be eliminated, tucked up into the hat (which I've seen in some historical costuming sources, albeit not often), get rid of the anachronistic fur trim around the bottom of the hat, and have color 1 be the fabric of the hat and color 2 be the trim on the hat and the lace trail. That'd be worth wearing. Or, alternatively, have all parts of the hat be addressed by color 1, and have the hair be color 2, using texture overlays to make the hat trim lighter or darker and making do with transparent color 1 on the trailing veil.

(If you combine pieces from the Gunslinger and Steampunk packs, it is entirely possible to make a convincing princess dress, as long as you're okay with the knee-length skirt. Which, for game engine reasons, we have to be.)

Since it didn't cost me anything, I got over my disappointment pretty quickly, but when I saw the name of the costume piece in the store, I was briefly excited, for the first time since Freebie Friday began.

I know enough history not to be flattered when I'm compared to what the Russians did to Berlin in 1945. We're bad, in City of Heroes, but we're not that bad.

I've had the launcher patched for hours, but I can't bring myself to log in. I'll get over it soon, probably, but right this minute I'm feeling heartsick. There's a scene in this issue, by now most of you with level 50 characters have seen it, that just makes me queasy.

Over the course of Belladonna Vetrano's level 50 arc, we find that due to the loss of the Seers (Minds of Mayhem trial) and the exposure of Tyrant's surrender to the Hamidon (TPN trial), most of the Praetorian police and some of the surviving IDF have defected to the Resistance. By the time we get there, Neutropolis has fallen, and the Resistance controls most of Imperial City. And ...

And it's everything we fought to prevent, in three of the four level 1-20 Praetorian arcs. Half the city is on fire. The Crusaders won.

And worse, when we get there, the Resistance and the cops aren't saying to us, "Holy (expletive), the city's on fire! Help us put out these fires, help us rescue the people trapped in those buildings!" They're saying, "Oh, good, the city's on fire! This is a perfect opportunity to steal stuff from Praetor Sinclair!"

Thanks for another reminder that everybody in this game, hero and villain alike, is some kind of a monster. Thanks for the reminder that, to borrow (and bowdlerize) a phrase from TV Tropes, City of Heroes is a (Bleep)sack World.

Look.

I know that Tyrant and Neuron intended to kill every super on Primal Earth. And I saw what Battle Maiden did to Blyde Square. And I saw what Admiral Durray did to Skyway City. And I feel no sympathy for Mother Mayhem, who was a monster and genuinely needed to die. But are we no better than them? Is this what we were fighting for, to burn Praetorian City to the ground in retaliation?

Look, I know that very few are going to sympathize with me. This is the direction that the whole game's story has been going, all along. And most of you are just exactly the kind of people who actually nod when somebody says, "It's different when we do it, because we're the good guys, because we have good intentions," a human tendency that has driven me insane since I was a child.

I also know that I should distrust my own instincts in this, because I know that pure aesthetics are driving part of my reaction. Part of me actually cheered the destruction of Skyway City, wished it was permanent, because Skyway City is pathologically ugly. Aside from the Seer Network, Praetorian City was everything I've ever wanted to live in: comfortable, affluent, environmentally friendly, human pedestrian scaled, and above all beautiful, the most beautiful environment this game's designers have ever made. It constantly left me wondering if, frankly, once we got rid of Mother Mayhem, if maybe leaving that world to be co-ruled by Tyrant and Hamidon was really such a bad idea. And we just set it on fire. And looted it, rather than put out the fires or rescue the victims. Yay us.

What's WRONG with leaving it to two relentlessly anti-war supers, one who will not tolerate abuse of people, the other of which will not tolerate abuse of the environment? Once we rid that world of Praetor Tillman's vampyric, invasive hive-mind, shouldn't we have asked Tyrant/Hamidon why they were afraid of us? Shouldn't we have at least tried to negotiate peace, and combined our forces against the Battalion?

Yeah, I know, it's just a game. But I loved Imperial City. Several of my characters fought to save it. Give me at least a couple of hours, maybe a day or so, to get over seeing it in flames.

On the server I play on, I only know three styles, although once in a rare while I may have heard another name for a couple of them:

Speed, aka Stealth: Multiple people with +50 or greater Stealth(PvE) and [Assemble the Team] run from objective to objective, teleporting the team to any objectives that a tanker can't solo. Any objectives that a tanker can solo, the tanker runs ahead and solos while the rest of the team does whatever they want, maybe goofs around with the first couple of spawns for lack of anything better to do.

Steamroll: Minimum-distance path through all objectives, killing anything that gets in the way, ignoring anything that isn't.

Shard, aka XP: Treat every mission as if the objectives included "Defeat all."

Of the three, I usually prefer Steamroll. Less finicky, everybody gets to participate, less dull, good rewards. (Exception: I absolutely do like to stealth most of Virgil Tarikoss's strike force. 8-person spawns of Circle of Thorns is way too much mez and way, way too much debuff to be facing for most level 15-20 teams. And by the end of Synapse, virtually everybody is stealthing from exhaustion and boredom; even teams that promised each other they were going for maximum XP stealth those last couple of missions.)

I just hope that they proliferate Spines to tankers and brutes at the same time they release Bio Armor. I really want to make either a bio/spines or a spines/bio.

Even journalists and columnists who don't (admit to) being gamers, who don't (normally) cover games, are picking up on Guild Wars II's abolition of the dedicated healer class. I'm a news junkie, and it feels like over the last couple of weeks, one by one, a steady stream of journalists have picked up on the NCsoft press releases about that, or picked up on articles by people who did.

Would it have been too much to ask that NCsoft include, in those press releases, a reminder that City of Heroes has never had a dedicated healer class? That NCsoft pioneered the idea that refilling another player's hit points stat is only one way to make a hard encounter easier, that weakening the enemy or strengthening the player's other stats, combined with easier access to health potions (or Inspirations, as City of Heroes calls them), and giving all players some way to either weaken enemies or strengthen themselves or strengthen their team mates has always allowed City of Heroes players to include whatever mix of character classes they wanted in their teams and still beat the hardest content in the game?

Of course, I'd also like those press releases to point out that as a game that did away with the holy trinity no later than October of '05, City of Heroes has had more than six years to perfect a game mechanic that newer games, like Diablo 3 or Guild Wars 2, are only just now experimenting with. Maybe that's too much to ask.

It's just ... well, grrr. I'm sick and tired of features that CoH has had all along being called "innovative" when some non-CoH game does them.

It's not just you.

Going to extra trouble to rule out heat-related issues is worth it, it helped with me. Mine was doing it continuously, even after cleaning out the case and cleaning all fans; it turned out that the thermal paste that was connecting one of my graphics sub-cards to the heat sink (I run a GTX295, which is two smaller cards shipped in SLI mode) had gone bad. I ended up having to get the graphics card replaced under warranty.

So when you say you're not seeing any temperatures above 80C (which is pretty hot), is that the CPU temperature, the case temperature, or the GPU temperature? Because the GPU temperature is probably the more likely problem, because CoH isn't all that CPU intensive, but with all these over-the-top particle effects rendered in OpenGL, it's very, very, very GPU intensive. I use CPUID HW Monitor to check temperatures, so make sure that you're reading all of the temperature probes, not just the one on the CPU chip.

And, I have to say this: even after getting the card warranty replaced, it still happens to me: if I run several consecutive 24-man raids, or an entire evening of 40-man mothership raids, my computer will hard-crash.

I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate street sweeping, because I hate killing anything that just respawns as soon as I turn around. If it's just going to respawn 10 seconds or 30 seconds later, what the heck was I even fighting for?

Yes, I know that instances respawn the next time someone loads them. But they don't do it in front of me. As far as my character is concerned, Frostfire's lair is still empty, as far as my character is concerned, Ernest Hest's volcano lair has been destroyed, and so on. You go in and play it later and you're the one who does these things? Fine. You go in and play it later, and I tag along? Fine, we're writing your fanfic, where you're using my character as a background NPC fighting alongside you; I know how it "really" turned out.

But if I street sweep my way around the same block of King's Row over and over again, and when I turn the corner the 4th time the same 3 Skulls are prying up the same sewer access lid or stealing the same purse, it just rubs my nose in the fact that I'm not saving the day, I'm just playing a game. It takes a lot of the fun out of it for me.

Only the mmorpg.com stream had audio; it also seemed to have nice, clear explanations of what was going on. Thank you! Casino Heist's gameplay looked a lot more fun, to me; Time Gladiator had cooler graphics, but the same old tank-and-spank gameplay.

Obviously I have questions.

1) You mentioned that it'll be via TuT, aka the LFG window. Obviously the maximum is 4 for Casino Heist, what is the minimum? And if we queue solo, how few people will it start it with? Will NPCs fill in for the missing players?

2) Similar question, Time Gladiator: what's the minimum and maximum number of players? And what's the minimum team size that the TuT will spawn it for?

3) Did I miss the reward table at the end of the first movie? Or do you have to play both movies, every day, to get a chance for the special enhancement?

4) If I pick the enhancement and already have, say, five of the six, will it give me the sixth one for sure? Does it rule out rewards you already have, like the Elemental Order costume pieces in the H&V superpacks, or is it a random 1 out of the 6 every time and it's up to us trade for the ones we don't have?

5) For that matter, are the Overwhelming Force enhancements tradeable? Can they be stored and/or traded on the consignment house? Can they be stored in supergroup or villaingroup enhancement bins?

6) If I put the Overwhelming Force proc into an attack that doesn't currently have knockback, does it add knockdown to the attack?

7) Let's say I put the Overwelming Force proc into an attack that does 10 points of knockback, and I fire it at an enemy that has 9 points of knockback protection. Will it knock them down? Or will it reduce the knockback of the attack, on the front end, to where it no longer does enough knockback to punch through their knockback protection?

8) Does the character have to be level 47 or higher to get the Overwhelming Force enhancement reward option? Or can I farm for these on a lower level character and store them for later?

Also, a suggestion, re the Ninja Monkeys badge in Time Gladiator: I would prefer that the Ninjas Defeated bar go all the way to 75, as well as the Monkeys Defeated bar. When you get to the Monkeys phase, I would prefer that it start not at 1, but at the number of Ninjas defeated in the previous phase. Also, both phases need a visible count-down timer in the scriptui window, please.

And a request: gods forbid that I should load more work on the animation department, but can we earn an ;eatpopcorn emote in this event? And maybe, maybe, a ;throwpopcorn emote? It could come in handy for roleplaying during other people's Drama.

I think Z_M nails it, above.

When I listened to the Paragon Market panel at the Pummit, I noticed that the only things people are willing to pay extra money for are character-related. Notice that neither Praetoria access nor First Ward access showed up in the best seller list. The best seller list consists entirely of powersets, costume parts, enhancements, and the "cards" that give a random costume part or enhancement.

Players have voted with their dollars and with their time for less low-level content, less mid-level content. The cash-paying customers want a new character subclass (or class, eventually), or a new costume set, so they can roll new character concepts ... which they then want to PL up into the end-game raids as fast as humanly possible, skipping all of the content up until then if possible. Note, after all, that upcoming releases for the market include much stronger XP boosters, and several-hour substantial self-buff temp powers: exactly what you'd need so that as soon as you get done with Death from Below, you can crank any character's difficulty up to +4x8 and PL yourself through the 20-50 range. Note also that they long ago altogether gave up on stopping the AE PL farms that are designed to get you to level 50 in 8 to 16 hours; Power Amplifiers and Double XP boosts will only reinforce that.

That's not how I play City of Heroes. Right this minute, I have a whole crop of mid 20s, playing leisurely through the mid-level content, which I mostly still enjoy, and a half dozen or so low 30s waiting for Night Ward. But people like me are apparently as much of an unprofitable niche market as the PvPers. Paragon Studios is, arguably correctly, chasing the big money: selling people a wider variety of characters to grind Incarnate Trials with.

(Although, I say with a wry grin, there's very little point in caring what your character's costume is once you get to the end game. On a 24-man raid, the particle-effect smog is so dense that nobody can see your costume.)

I've been saying a somewhat darker version of that all along. My version is even simpler: after the nuclear whale abortion that was Tabula Rasa, after becoming an industry laughing-stock, NCsoft tripled the development and maintenance budget for City of Heroes, in a Hail-Mary pass attempt to try to make up for what years of neglect had done to the game.

It was way, way too late for that to work.

Look, this part isn't speculation: if you triple your operating costs, you have to triple your revenues just to break even. The studio went from 15 developers to a hair under 50 overnight. Have revenues tripled since then? No. They've risen modestly, but they haven't tripled.

Or have they?

I keep running into people who admit to having spent insane gobs of money on the Paragon Market. New content turns out to be a money-loser for them, but new prizes for spins of the virtual slot machine (Super Packs) and new costume sets and new powersets are all selling like hotcakes. What was a $15/month game is now, for I wonder how many people, a $30 or $50 or more per month game, and if enough people compulsively buy every new powerset, every new costume pack, and buy $12 per power purple sets for the resulting alts? That could have ended up way more than tripling the revenues.

If you like getting new costume sets and new powersets and don't mind paying double or triple what you were paying before, and don't mind the fact that we're probably never again going to see an expansion the size of City of Villains or even a smaller one like Going Rogue, that's a good thing.

If the Free Fridays item is a per-character item, like a team inspiration, can I claim it on all of my characters? Or do I have to pick one to collect it with?