InfamousBrad

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  1. It took me a second to notice it, but the female Big Trouble in Little China armor, chest piece, is a two-tone piece with skin showing. Which the UI has never allowed. Are we getting a tech improvement, or are the gold bits on that baked-in?
  2. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Zwillinger View Post
    ATOs (Archetype Enhancements) will be purchasable from the Reward Merit Vendor, for a combination of Reward Merits and Inf, and from Astral Christy, for a combination of Astral Merits and Inf. There will be a cooldown timer on the purchase of these items. The amount of Inf and duration of the cooldown are still being discussed and will be evaluated once all of this hits beta. This is in addition to their availability in Super Packs.
    This addresses my concerns, alleviating my anger over the possibility of pay-to-win items only being offered through slot machine pulls. If you have to put a for-money slot machine into the game in order to make bank, at least you didn't make it mandatory to play it in order to max out your character. I still don't like it; my hatred for anything resembling casino gambling burns with the fire of a thousand exploding suns. But at least you made it optional.
  3. Not only have the old problems not been solved, it's got a new problem: the RSS feeds for Developer Digest and Community Digest are both broken.
  4. As a former villain, as someone who hated Longbow passionately even before the Second Rikti War, I somehow expected the chance to kill, or stand by and watch somebody else kill, the CEO of Longbow to be more satisfying. Maybe it's because I knew that a Rulu-shin cultist was planning on benefiting from it; more likely it's because I was hoping that her death would have something to do with the fact that she runs an above-the-law mercenary company that uses flamethrowers to make arrests.

    I realize that we've probably never seen Malaise without his mask, at least not that I can remember, but the realization that "Penn Jilette" from the earlier cut-scenes was Malaise seemed kind of abrupt.

    As someone who used to spend a lot of time playing with Mission Architect, I want that Arachnos office map tileset expanded to include a full set of office maps, please! (Although it's a little too dark to be plausible, if you ask me, but I'm not the art director. Given my druthers, I'd want a whole tileset that looks like the Arachnos office in Recluse's Victory.)

    I know you have the tech to branch dialog based off of souvenirs and badges. Manticore should have remembered that he and I had fought several times before, even if only from my souvenirs for completing Westin Phipps' arcs before going vigilante. And Darrin Wade should have made some kind of remark about my having worked for him before, off of my Thief of Midnight badge.
  5. InfamousBrad

    Pieces of Win

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Lazarillo View Post
    Access to the Roman set, the same way Vanguard already is. This to me would be far more desirable than capes or auras, simply because it's more potentially "theme-critical", to me at least. I'd say the same for a lot of the weapon unlocks as well.
    Absolutely 100% agree. And also the Valentine's-day Greek themed costume bits.

    Also, if you offer the Rulu-shin costume bits as a set? That set needs to include the Rularuu weapon unlocks. I have wanted to create a Rularuu cult themed villain for years now, but ...

    Well, I imagine that Lazarillo feels, like I do, that if you want to create a time-traveling Roman themed character, it doesn't make sense to costume them in something out-of-period to level 35, then have them switch "back" to their native costume at that level? I feel that same way about costuming ancient Greek demigods, heroes, monsters, or time-traveling citizens; I feel that same way about Rulu-shin cultists.
  6. Unmoderated global chat, completely free, where anybody can set up a new account any time they need one, is and always will be a disaster. Create another channel, and you won't have a good channel and a bad channel, you'll have two bad channels. Gresham's Law. Or, as the guys from Penny Arcade taught us, the G.I.F.T.

    And since this isn't a shardless game, moderators would have to moderate the Help channel on, what is it now, 15 servers? More? I lose track. So figure 80 full-time-equivalent positions just to 24x7 monitor all the Help channels and push the "silence" button on anybody who gets out of line. This game doesn't charge us enough to pay for that.
  7. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dark_Respite View Post
    FINALLY!

    After four years, a balls-to-the-walls, OMG-I-want-to-play-this-NOW trailer that the game has needed and deserved! (And I want that music!) THIS was the ad that should have been shown at SDCC...

    Wow. And now that we have weekly content/market/stuff, I can go back into retirement. The ads are now in good hands.

    Michelle
    aka
    Samuraiko/Dark_Respite
    Michelle sells herself short, but I agree with the sentiment -- this is the best City of Heroes game trailer you've made, even better than the Invasion trailer at the beginning of the 2nd Rikti War.

    I linked a second, intended-to-be-premium account to my game account, and got an error message in the browser when I tried to buy some Paragon Points for it.

    Edited to add: Problem went away when I went back to the cityofheroes.com page, re-entered Account Management from there, and tried again. *shrug* Beats me what happened.
  8. Sorry, not even minimally interested without the hat.
  9. Thank you very, very much! One more bug report, though: minimum level on pool powers is still wrong; it's not letting me take Tactics earlier than 14, should be 4.
  10. There really is no such thing as a "good DPS tanker," at least not prior to the late 20s to late 30s. If you want high survivability and good DPS, you're basically looking at a brute. That being said, my electric/electric tanker is pretty close to what you're looking at; Lightning Reflexes helps significantly with DPS, and electric melee gets reasonably good DPS with a seldom-resisted damage type.
  11. With SOs: 1 acc, 2 dmg, 2 endred in Hot Feet and 1 endred, 3 debuff in Time's Juncture. It gets even better once you cram some Hami-Os or a 5-slot set into Hot Feet.

    There was a point, on beta, where the copy tool was down and the database had been wiped, so we were all cash-poor. I ground out enough inf to slot as above, and that, plus unslotted Imps, was enough mitigation and damage to grind x1+0 Council missions until I could afford to slot the rest, almost without ever firing any other power. The combination of those three powers is just that good. Combine it with 6 slotted Farsight (3 rech, 3 def) and 6 slotted Thunderstrike in Ring of Fire and Char, and Katie bar the door, you're all but unstoppable against anything below an EB; I barely remembered I had other powers.
  12. I have a level 50 ill/kin/psi that I parked when they took away the ability to speed buff the Phantasm; it was a small thing, but it did end up making a perceptible difference, and I was ready to move on to something else anyway.

    It was a fraternity initiation of a 'toon, anyway, up to 18, but after that what you get out of any illusion build, not even counting your secondary, is almost complete invulnerability to anything but AoEs and player-targeted ambushes. The taunt magnitude on Phantom Army is amazingly useful. So, even though I didn't team with it all that much, I can see that being a big deal if you've got perma-PA: you're a perfectly good off-tank with some pretty impressive team buffs. Your buffs are only 60% as strong as they would be on a kin defender, but you're easier to keep alive.
  13. Let me say thank you for something that, honestly, I don't know if anybody but me cares: thank you for showing that non-powered heroes still matter in the City of Heroes and still make a difference.

    Thank you also, by the way, for not filling it with standard disaster-porn: looters, rioters, etc. Disaster sociologists have known, ever since William James accidentally invented the field with his surprising first-hand scientific reporting from the scene, back during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake: human beings are better people than we give ourselves credit for. Major disasters have an odd way of turning everybody into heroes.
  14. As soon as I saw the room shown in picture 3, I typed in global chat: "Devs h8 MMs." When I got to the map shown in picture 5, I stopped, swore for almost a full minute, and then typed in global chat, "Wow, [string of expletives], I wasn't kidding, the devs really DO hate masterminds."

    I ended up being pleasantly surprised. OK, yes, I did lose all four minions at least once in the room shown in picture #3, but it didn't matter -- not least of which because I had six-slotted Force Bolt. After all these years of Virgil Tarikoss's Strike Force, I got to be the one pushing somebody else's minions into the lava! It was surprisingly gratifying.

    And I don't know what you did to that last map to make minions reticent to enter the lava, but I wish you'd go back and do it to the last Virgil Tarikoss map and to the room we fight Trapdoor in for Mender Ramiel. Please!!! I have no idea what you did that made it possible for me to fight a Elite Boss speedster with AoE knockback on a flat rock the size of a dinner table in the middle of a sea of lava without losing a single minion, but it needs to be done to all of the environmental-hazard maps. And maybe to the catwalks in Keyes Island. Seriously, how did you do it?
  15. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Gunbunny View Post
    Like all 'good' Tf's it takers practice to make a perfecrt run. Especially the get out of the cave part is tricky here. I wonder if even 1 person managed to do this on the first go.
    /bind alt+r "powexec_name Reveal"

    As soon as I saw that 90 second timer, I slapped Reveal. Good thing, too; my default navigation path through an Oranbegan map would have sent me the exactly wrong direction.
  16. Well, I can tell you this about the Television arcs: they're already aging badly. I'm roughly Melissa Bianco's age, I think, or anyway roughly the same age as the person who wrote this. So when they quote early Simpsons, when they quote Babylon 5, when they quote Mystery Science Theater 3000, when they refer to the controversy over when MTV stopped playing music videos, when they quote UHF (!!!) reruns of Dragnet and Leave it to Beaver, I get it.

    Not one person in 100, born after 1961 or so, is going to get half of those jokes.

    City of Heroes skews old, I gather; I get the impression that the average CoH player is probably around age 30. But that means that to the average City of Heroes player, they're making jokes about television series, all but maybe one of which (American Idol) went off the air before that average CoH player was born. No matter what country they were born or grew up in. And that's going to be more true, every day, the longer arc stays there.

    They could rewrite Television's arc every couple of years, replace the Babylon 5 joke with a Battlestar Galactica reboot joke, replace the Simpsons joke with a How I Met Your Mother joke, and so forth. But they're not going to. So, as much as old guys like me love that arc, sooner or later it's going to have to go.
  17. Before Dr. Graves, there were three canonical "Idiot Ball" story arcs/series on the villain side: Willy "Dealer" Wheeler, Kelly Uqua, and Television.

    Television is the most defensible of them: it's a god. A young and very powerful god. You made the mistake of looking into the trap, and now you're mind controlled. This would be a loathesomely awful arc if it weren't for the non-stop supply of spot-on pop culture jokes -- those jokes are the only reason anybody tolerates this.

    Kelly Uqua is almost forgivable, for the same reason that the stuff related to Dollface in Dr. Graves is almost forgivable: she's an apparently AV-level Rikti Mentalist who takes you by surprise. Given that, unlike Television, we eventually get a chance to fight her and she dies like a punk, though, no player will ever forgive this arc for the fact that never, not once, not even at the end, not even after multiple people have yelled at you all the evidence why you needed to, does your character ever "pop a Break Free." Your character stays under her mental control until she is done with you and then you go away. No wonder people hate it.

    But there is no plausible excuse for Willy "Dealer" Wheeler's arc. None. There is no way that any player character with enough survival instinct to have made it to level 15 could take even Willy Wheeler's first mission and not realize that his mysterious employer was from either Longbow or Wyvern. I can just barely not resent the idea that my character might be helpless enough against Rikti mind control to fall for Kelly Uqua's tricks; there is just flatly no way it's acceptable to imply that my character is dumb enough to fall for Ace McKnight's.

    This could be fixed with a text edit: early on the in the arc, there needs to be italicized or orange text where your character starts to wonder if Dealer is a conspirator or a patsy, because this is obviously a setup, and then your character decides to play along in hopes of finding out and destroying whoever it is that's hiring him.

    - - - - -

    And, on an entirely different note, yes, I agree: the Origin of Power arc is a total head-scratcher that seems to completely and totally ignore the entire first 5 years' worth of the game canon. Now that the Incarnate arcs are out, after listening to Prometheus long enough, I think I almost see what you were trying to do here - but it fails. Hard. Especially the villain one.

    - - - - -

    I like the idea behind the several contacts' worth of Portal Corp arcs. I just think they had no business being written until or unless the studio could afford to make the various alternate timelines look different from Primal Earth.

    - - - - -

    Oddly, I can't think of a single hero story arc that deserves to die a horrible choking death on writing or storytelling grounds; some of the best writing in the game is on that side, like the two original Sky Raiders arcs, or the later Freakshow arcs, or the Malta arcs. On the other hand, there isn't a single arc in the entire game that was written prior to issue 6 that doesn't deserve to die a horrible death for lousy game mechanics: endless commuter quests, street hunting missions for mobs 10 levels below you, pointless repetition of identical instance maps, and the canonical City of Heroes crime against gaming, constantly having to travel the length of four zones to get from one instance to the next in the middle of a story arc.

    - - - - -

    No, wait, I take that back: the Kheldian arcs are crap. To be fair, the Arachnos Soldier arcs are even worse.
  18. There are markers for them on the map, they're contact icons. (General directions: at the cop shop in Skyway City, on the boardwalk east of the south ferry in Cap au Diable.)

    The hero-side arc makes good use of, and writes nice in-character dialog for, a villain group that really needed a story arc like this, to show off their motivation and what it's like to be them. I approve. (Some will claim continuity error: I can only assume, however, that all this really means is that since this arc caps at 20 and Darrin Wade's arc is level 20-29, Darrin Wade's arc post-dates this one.)

    Have we established what the minimum level is?

    Players should probably be warned that both arcs end in an elite boss -- although it's a fairly weenie elite boss.

    Useful observation: if you run both arcs with a rogue or vigilante incarnate, you can take the astral merit reward for both of them.

    The last map on both arcs is no more a clue to which zone is going to be remade than the maps in the Apex and Tin Mage task forces are. This is not a game where the story alters the gameworld, not all that often anyway.

    My final thought was: what is Penn Jilette doing in these arcs, and why is he hanging out at the Monkey Fight Club in Sharkhead?
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by rsclark View Post
    Manti's hired minions are also pretty trusting to pose as kidnappers and assume I'm not a murdering vigilante.
    They also have a remarkably good collection of Arachnos weapons and armor, and do a remarkably good job of imitating Arachnos combat techniques.

    If I'd been writing it, they would have been archers who were wearing Arachnos uniforms. But I suppose that would have given the ending of that mission away too early.
  20. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Hyperstrike View Post
    So where does everyone fit in the Five Man Band concept?
    I'd forgotten that trope, but are you even seriously asking? Twinshot is the Hero, Grym is the Lancer, Proton is the Smart Guy, Dillo is the Big Guy, and Flambeaux is The Chick.

    We were discussing something similar over the weekend on Virtue United, and I opined that all of them but Twinshot are continuations of something Melissa Bianco did with Fusionette in the Faultline and RWZ arcs: "Don't be THAT GUY."

    Fusionette is a parody of that annoying blaster we've all teamed with: the one who runs off away from the team, grabs tons of aggro, and then either leads it back to the team or dies there and waits to be rezzed. You find her annoying to team with? Good. Don't be That Guy!

    In these arcs, Flambeaux especially, and to a lesser extent Grym and Dillo and Proton, are yet more forms of "Don't be THAT GUY:"

    Flambeaux is one of the most common and most annoying forms of "bad RPer." We've all teamed with them, especially on Virtue -- the person for whom RPing consists of two things: reciting their backstory ad nauseum while the rest of us are trying to play the game, and telling us over and over again how sexy their character is. You find this annoying? Good. Don't be That Guy!

    Grym is someone who basically imported his character straight over from World of Warcraft, a thinly disguised Worgen warrior (minus the very nice hat and the Cockney accent), or any other werewolf character from any other fantasy MMO; nothing he says makes any sense in the context of CoH or fits even minimally into the backstory, but he insists that it's all very important and all be taken seriously. You find this annoying? Good. Don't be That Guy!

    Proton is, as others have said, Mary Sue incarnate. He's claims that he's super-smart, he claims that the ladies all love him, and he claims that he's an important family member of two of the most important canon characters, but we've never heard of him before. You find this annoying? Good. Don't be That Guy!

    Dillo is the high-class version of the annoying RPer. He's someone who's fit his character into the game's backstory, and invented an entire alien dialect for his species. That he never quits using, even when discussing game mechanics. Which means that nobody on the team can ever tell what he's actually saying. You find this annoying? Good. Don't be That Guy!

    This can probably be expanded; the main characters of the villain tutorial are probably somebody's idea of the five stupidest, most annoying concepts that RPers bring to super-villainy. I'm just a little too tired, this morning, to do the analysis myself.
  21. Quote:
    Originally Posted by LegionAlpha View Post
    Men of the CoH community, if you and your lady vested years of play time into the game and you break up leaving the characters they both make, do you delete all or does one just claim their characters and rename them?


    Ruling?
    My advice, all of which assumes that you own the account, that it's in your name, paid for by a credit card with your name on it, from a bank account that the divorce decree (or other legal action) has clarified is yours and yours alone:

    1) Do nothing immediately. Right after a breakup, your emotions are running high, your brainpower running low. Give the anger some time to ebb.

    2) Sort the characters: if you have more than 12 slots on the server, move hers to the end of the list. If you have left-over server move tokens, move her characters to another server. She may come back. Probably not, but she may.

    3) Once you actually need the character slots, and no sooner than a couple of weeks from now, delete her characters, lowest level to highest.

    If my assumption is wrong, and it's a joint account whose ownership hasn't been settled? Delete nothing; don't even log into any characters but yours; strongly consider opening a new account on a card that is unambiguously yours in case some court rules that the credit card, and thus the account, is actually hers, not yours.

    Don't let GG give you any guff about "inflexible male honor;" you're the one who has to sleep at night after making your choices. My advice, as a fellow man, is that the honorable thing to do with what was jointly-held property is to be a good steward of it until it is once and for all, unambiguously and permanently, no longer jointly held property. After that it's yours to do with as you please. Until then, it's just not.
  22. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Feycat View Post
    I think it's the same old forum logout bug we've been dealing with for years, but like cranked up to 11. SUPER annoying.
    That's my experience. I was having this problem before, but now I have it every single time I check the forums, even if it's only an hour or two later, and sometimes even just a couple of minutes after the last time I logged in.

    And, yes, it's super-annoying.
  23. During beta, I wrote up a four page list of criticisms of these three arcs. A lot of my suggestions got used, but you've put your finger right on the biggest things that didn't: the whole concept of "I'm in a competition with a bunch of really unpleasant people" sucks, and all the way through from beginning to end it assumes that you are human, and that you're rude, dismissive, and prone to over-estimating yourself. At the risk of channeling Venture, there is an Idiot Ball in this arc, and you spend a lot of time holding it.

    Heroes definitely got the better end of the deal on the tutorial missions. Twinshot's arcs do a better job of teaching the material, they work better as the tutorial they're supposed to be. Twinshot's arcs actually tie into the issue 19-22 storyline; Dr. Graves' arc is just kind of random. And even on her worst day, Flambeaux is less annoying than even the least annoying of the characters in Dr. Graves' arc.

    These arcs didn't need to be fixed, they needed to be yanked out and replaced with something completely unrelated, done over, and done right, from scratch. Unfortunately, as I pretty much expected, by the time any players saw them and were able to give feedback, it was way too late for that.

    My advice? Skip it altogether; just grind the Death from Below trial. It's more fun, and will level you past Dr. Graves before you can blink.
  24. InfamousBrad

    Quick question.

    It's in the Known Issues list -- not handed out yet, will be soon.
  25. "First World problems."

    Given that I didn't intend to spend any money above my subscription, I'm disappointed with myself that I caved and bought a $5 costume pack. The 1600 points I had banked went to buy a 2nd enhancements bag. $20 for a bag still feels offensive to me, but it is nice to not have to run back to the vendors as often when leveling a lowbie character.

    (I was startled to see that it awarded me another reward token, even though I spent only $5 on points. Shouldn't I have had to spend $15 on points to get that token?)