Jasra

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To be honest... I've attempted playing Red Side on multiple servers, and multiple builds and I just HATE playing in Mercy... and Port Oakes is ok. I hate the feel of the first few levels. Newspaper, newspaper, newspaper, bank. Repeat. I try to get into it, but I think I'm choosing the wrong builds.

I play primarily blasters on Blue side, even tried out a defender and a controller, only to find out I play them blaster style too. Scrapper lasted about 6 levels before getting... well... scrapped. Maybe I'm playing the wrong kind of AT on Red Side... any suggestions to try and win me over?

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Roll a Dom, and play it like a Blaster.

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Empowerment stations were limited to common salvage, so they would still be fairly cheap (With a few exceptions). However empowerment buffs are on my radar to be looked at.

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I suggestion I'll throw at you, though I doubt it could be ready for i13 launch..

Change empowerment stations to create unique inspirations with the current buffs. SGs could premake these and store them in the higher density inspiration collectors. This allows people to have Empowerments quickly available without having to go to the market, while making the low storage limit less inconvenient (at least for empowerment purposes)

Also, a workaround re: holiday storage. Since characters can carry unlimited event salvage, it would be (relatively) easy for a few SG members to hold onto most of the event salvage, and just "top off" one or two racks whenever they get low.

Using the 5 minute/merit normalization, there is almost exactly 24 hours of TF content for heroes under lvl 35, meaning they can earn merits at the maximum rate every moment they play, no matter how much they play. For villains lvl 34 or less, there are only 7 hours of SF available before they start to suffer from diminishing returns. Low and mid-level heroes can potentially out-earn villains in merits 3:1.

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How will this affect people who have macs and already have accounts? (I dont have a Mac, I'm just wondering)

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Your game account will work no matter which client you are using.

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Could you clarify - if someone isn't interested in the goodies, will the Mac client be available for free to those who already have active accounts?

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From the Ten Ton Hammer interview:

"Like writing a novel, mission arcs in CoX constantly evolve and spawn even more arcs."

What??? Since when? Please name one mission arc that's ever changed, ever. The above quote from the Ten Ton Hammer page is quite simply an untrue statement. The mission arcs in CoH/V have never evolved.

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Peregrine_Falcon,

I consider that the article is written Bruce Harlick's perspective and from the flow of mission writing that goes from Issue 12 to Issue 13 - which is what Bruce has been involved with.

While the statement may not be characteristic of the entirety of CoH/CoV development, it's accurate from the perspective of a mission developer who recently joined the team: Bruce.

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I searched that entire page repeatedly. That particular quote stands alone underneath that picture and appears nowhere else in the article.

From the perspective of a player or non-player interested in possibly becoming a player that statement simply is not true. The story arcs in CoH/V do not and have never in any way shape or form evolved. Ever. People are still complaining about the Positron Task Force what... 3 years after it came into existence? Why is that? Because it has never changed, it has never evolved beyond what it initially was. The story arcs and missions in this game do not evolve, claiming that they do is simply not true.

I'm sorry if I'm taking the language you're using seriously. I guess that I must have failed my Mental Telepathy skill roll.

Using the exact language of that statement as written and without any further context (because there is no further context to place it in) it is an untrue statement.

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1. First two sentences of the final paragraph give some context, even though that's not where the quote you dislike is.

2. Did NCNC even write the captions? The style on several of them seems much more like fansite reporter rather than PR dude or the actual interviewee.

3. Please note that many people did *not* interpret that comment the same way you did, so you might want to consider the possiblity that you misunderstood (thought that doesn't rule out the possibility that it was phrased unclearly).

4. The final missions of the Dr Vahzilok arc and Synapse TF have custom maps that they did not have at launch. I also haven't seen anyone run the Calvin Scott tf in a while, of go to Malaise to train when they level up. While not radical, there have been changes to existing content.

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Actually, I'm kind of disappointed at the simplicity of the system. I was expecting a multi-tiered badge structure, and 3-4 badges for the Accolades. And while I realize that we haven't seen the complete list, I was hoping for considerably more job categories; I was especially hoping to see some more quirky or esoteric "jobs" gained from logging out in places like the sewers, the Golden Giza and El Super Mexicano.

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Which was my initial guess as well, but since missions will only get full benefits once bumped to "dev pick" (to counter balance farming in the first place), I don't see how they'd ever be farming missions.

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Depends on how reduced rewards are, and how clever people are. If you can set up a mission that allows you to defeat mobs three times faster than average, then even with half xp you'll level 50% faster. But it's all just a wait and see game at this point.

Edited for an aggregious typing mistake. Which is preserved where I'm quoted below. Oh well.

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I'm sure I'm supposed to understand the implications here, but... I think I'm just too dense to get whatever you're trying to say (beyond that making SG-only missions is bad, for some reason).

I will say that SG-specific missions would be a HUGE blessing, especially if said SG had any sort of theme/RP element to it... I truly don't see any downside to an SG-only arc. 'Splain?

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Pretty sure the implication is that SG-only Mission=SG-only farm.

FWIW, I teamed with three people over the course of this week who were on trial accounts, and had been convinced to purchase because of how much fun they had during the raids.

I think the current schedule *may* be a little too frequent, though they definately shouldn't renege on the one's they've already announced. After that, once per issue is probably enough - that gives any chars created with new/proliferated powers sets to get the bagdes, without making the event too commonplace.

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Lighthouse said :
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As a point of clarification not included in the press release specific for City of Heroes and City of Villains, this new voice chat technology will be used through the PlayNC Launcher and not directly through City of Heroes.

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This means (As I read it), you can chat at the part where you login to your account. Once you select your toon, chat is ended.

I'm ok with that. I would never have a need for it, but I won't cry DOOM at that point.

(This is the DOOM part)
If they DID change their mind, and added it in-game, that would be my clue to cancel the family's accounts. I've played way too many games that have VOIP, and listening to some little 13-yr old belt out a tirade of racial-epithets when they get killed does not appeal to me, unless I can ban their account right there. By the way, in the games I [u]USED[u] to play with VOIP, we ran our OWN servers, and turned it off. Here, NCsoft runs the servers, so they would have to monitor/record every conversation, and ban accordingly. This would drop their user base significantly, just based on some of the crap I've seen typed. I can only imagine what they said out loud, and would rather not hear it.

Lighthouse, I'm gonna hold you to your word here.

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Before you hold him at his word, make sure you've got his word right. I take his comments about the NC Launcher/CoH client to simply mean that the chat runs in the background while you play via NC Launcher, not that starting a game kills voice chat. It could be you're right and I'm wrong, but you should definately clarify what's promised before deciding whether or not people keep their word.

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And what was that about stopping the Circle of Thorns from trashing Orenbega?

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The Midnighters stopped the Circle from *raising* Oranbega, bringing it to the surface; not *razing* Oranbega, destroying it.

And yes, that sure sounded like Alec Baldwin to me, too.

Thanks for the article links, Atomaster; some interesting info.

I don't like using voice chat personally. I usually have my volume down so I can keep a weather ear out for my wife or kids, and even when it's up I usually have trouble making out what most people are saying in voice chats.

However, I can see a couple interesting things from this. The less interesting aspect is the possibility of "voice fonts" becoming part of character creation. You could choose from a catalog of base voices, then have a couple sliders tweek it.

More interesting, however, are the possibilities inherent in text-to-speech and speech-to-text. This could make the in-game communication system into something of a black box; you choose how you input to it (voice or text) and how you receive output from it (voice or text). Add a few (ok, maybe more than "a few") years development and you start getting into the possibility of real-time language translation as well medium conversion. A lot of conjecture, but a lot of possibilities as well.

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Um...yay?

Seriously...these Midnight Squad arcs sound most tasty.

<nomnomnomnomnom...>

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"The image I have in my head is of a stodgy old Midnighter rolling a big crate out in front of the Freedom Phalanx. The lettering on the crate reads, “The Arc of the Covenant”. With a smile, the Midnighter asks the group of heroes, “You gentlemen think you could put this dusty old thing to use?”

This is a really bad idea, bringing anything into the game that has any form of religious connotation is a bad idea...

I hope the story is influenced by the arc and not the arc itself. "sigh" we'll see I suppose.

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You realize this is a joking reference to "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and not something that's actually going to be in-game, right?

One of the Natural contact starter missions in AP is similar, where you recover a crate with the same number stenciled on the side as the Ark had in "Radiers".

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I want to set up something horrible, stop the war between the Rularuu and the Knives of Artemis; because I think that mission would be pure hell for just about every archtype.

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I would love to get in on that mission!!!

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Agreed, I think half the funs going to be trying to come up with the biggest PITA mission for your team .

I'm thinking of a joint Malta/Carnie one for starters .

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Sappers, Sorcerors and Succubi, oh my!

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The announcement doesn't mention specific times this is going on (ex: it's 10:30am CT on 4/21, I've been ingame for an hour, and there hasn't been a single raid yet). Is this a "prime time" only event?

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No, it happens randomly throughout the day. They tend to come in bursts, then have a lull period for a couple hours.

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<QR>

This is really impressive. But I have one question -

Where's your QA guy?

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90% sure QA is handled out of Austin.

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The only thing I'm not sure of is what legal ramifications would be involved with that. The out of game costume editor got nixed because of the possibility that you could create copyrighted characters (i.e., by Marvel) and store them on your local hard drive. Even though no one would see those costumes but you, it was apparently enough of a concern that NCSoft nixed it.

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Actually, the offline character creator decisions pre-dated the Marvel IP issues by a long margin. IIRC, the main issues were that they hadn't planned from the get-go to make a stand-alone char tool, and therefore would have had to divert dev resources away from the actual game into making the tool; and that the char tool would still need access to the actual textures and other graphic resources (as opposed to the info in demo-record, which is basically just a batch of array indices *referring* to textures), so it would end up being a relatively bloated piece of software.

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Is there any chance we might finally get costume load/save options? When people obviously spend a LOT of time crafting their character's appearance, it would be nice to have an option to save that exact appearance and load it up when creating a new character (or modifying one in icon).

I realize you could end up with some people duplicating each other, but it would make life much simpler when deleting and re-creating yourself as another archetype or another power set combination.


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As far as i'm awear there are no current plans to have that oprion. All that is being added is the ability to select the various costume sets in the game such as the Enforcer set, the Vanguard set, the Stealth set etc. Although i am all for your idea, i'm unsure how much extra room it will take up on the servers, if it takes about 1MB to save a costume then your talking in the GBs to do just one server's worth of costume saves.

Still i think it is a brilliant idea, I have a few costumes that i like to just put on all my alts that's effective and i can just do a few tweats here and there without starting from scratch.

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I doubt a set of costume data is more than 1k, certainly no more than 3-4k. It also wouldn't need to take up server space at all, it would just store the configuration data on your local drive, the way it does when you save binds to a file.

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Edit: That doesn't change the fact that you will still see folks who want ice armor even knowing that it messes with Fury. I've already seen someone suggest that the slow elements could be removed from ice which is an option of course.

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In some people's defense, the more rational requests I've heard for Ice Melee/Armor for brutes have been pvp-influenced. Since Fury generation is already an issue there, the additional slows wouldn't be a detriment.

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Just don't ask me what 'Vorpal' means"

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Ah the wonders of Wiki.

Vorpal

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Oh, we know what it means, we just don't want to have to explain "Decapitating Sword" within the context of "My Little Pony"

All this is great, just want to toss out my short list of things to make the Creator darn-near perfect:

1. A "Swap Color" button to switch the current primary and secondary color

2. Ability to save and load costumes. This would be extra-special good if you could actually import/export via a text-file, so SGs could distribute SG costumes to their members via website.

3. *Something* needs to be done with Chest Emblems. Sub-menus, multiple categories, something.

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Between now and June a good answer?

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Well, it's probably an accurate answer. But "Between now and April 20th" would be a *good* answer.

Are the new hotkey bars going to be 10 slot (1-0) like they are curently, or 12 slot(1-=)?

Will we have keyboard access to more than 3 of the bars (preferably thru custom modifier key settings)?

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Not to mention this from the I12 Game Update screen:
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There is a familiar threat in an ancient land and the Midnighters need the help of both Heroes and Villains to stop it.

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Could be Nemesis...

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Or Snaptooth

Ok, everything in the teaser sounds great, can't wait, yada yada yada...

But after reading this thread, here's what really jumps out at me:

Billy Idol playing in your head?!? Madonna?!?

Wilson Pickett you philistines!