Lord Mayhem

[ QUOTE ]
Having picked it up recently on both sides for a fair price i can't see the problem. Then again i don't have to have it now.
I can wait.
Certain Hami's and Purples are the only thing really in decline in i14.
So much i'm thinking of respeccing my toon's with purples. Purples are overrated.

[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah I must admit I don't consider Deci to be a major problem price either side (but then it's not a set I use very often) - certainly not compared to the huge gulf between redside and blueside on the prices of LotG +7.5s and the +recov uniques - or the huge availability problems redside on most things.

I'm more concerned about a 2 billion inf build I could afford slowly turning into a 3-4 billion inf build I won't be able to afford for a while (and by then it could be a 5-6 billion inf build if things continue as they are).

[ QUOTE ]
I have gained a ridiculous amount of infamy on my villains just because MA-->Tickets-->Black Market-->Supply-->Infamy so unbelievably easily...

Not that I am complaining, however the market has became somewhat like a quicksand pit in areas. There's relatively zero purples going around - that is in comparison to before.

EDIT: And please for the love of.. someone sell me 'Membrane Exposures'..

Fury

[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah I'm so glad I bought 3 Membranes for my widow a month ago (even though she's still L38) - though I still have to worry about getting 3 for the eventual Fort build.

My more immediate worry is the shortage of purples and their soaring prices. Of the 13 L50s in my sig only one uses purples (the Mind/Psi has the two cheap Sleep & Confuse purple sets) - so I'd been saving up to purple out my Night Widow eventually as a treat to myself.

Pre-I14 I knew I had enough inf for that, but the prices have escalated so much lately that I'm running out of inf and only have 7 of the 20 purples I need - with bids up for the rest that were realistic 3 weeks ago but not anymore - I'm a patient bidder (I like bargains), but the availability just isn't there at anything below ridiculous prices.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

That's probably because two archetypes blueside have ranged attack powersets compared to just one redside


[/ QUOTE ]
Huh? Corrs? Doms? MM's?
Hell all at's have access to ranged attacks whether they are in primaries, secondaries or patrons.

[/ QUOTE ]
I see very few MMs taking their ranged attacks and some dom combos are heavier on melee or AE, but fair enough - what's your explanation for it? It sure isn't oversupply on redside or undersupply on blueside, which leaves demand in the equation... and blasters were one of the most popular ATs on that list of the most played ATs that Back Alley Brawler posted on the US forums a while ago.

[ QUOTE ]
The MA price hike seems to be affecting heroside vastly more than villainside.

Take the Decimation ranged IO set. Three out of the set are 10mil-20mil+ (whereas I distinctly remember them being a mid-price range set when I bought them a while ago, like Crushing Impact kind of pricing) while on villainside there's 51 level 40 Decimation chance for buildup procs selling and no buyers and only one of the recipes fluctates between 8-10mil all the rest are 1mil-3mil

[/ QUOTE ]
That's probably because two archetypes blueside have ranged attack powersets compared to just one redside - more demand = higher prices.

Honestly I don't think blueside has it that bad - it's amazing how low the prices generally are compared to redside (where I mainly play) - Deci aside, most recipes & IOs in orange sets (e.g. Numina, LotG, Oblit, Posi, Mako, etc.) cost half or less what they do redside with far less availability shortages (which cause horrendous price spikes redside) - you pay less, prices seem more stable and you fill your orders much quicker.

About the only parity between both sides is that purples seem to cost similar sums, rare salvage has dropped majorly in price both sides, and common/uncommon salvage (especially in the high level band) has hiked massively in price both sides - but at least blueside isn't running out of stock in some salvage types like redside is.

As much as I hate the effect AE tickets are having, thank grud for tickets when you need a piece of common/uncommon salvage and don't fancy paying 250k inf or more for it.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I still want to know who it is in the I15anniversary banner

[/ QUOTE ]My wild guess is Reichsman.

[/ QUOTE ]

Erm.. isn't Reichsman an alternate version of Statesman from a dimension in which Nazi Germany won WW2? In other words not really to do with 5th Column...

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Reichsman

Edit: also perhaps the the person in the banner is Requiem (5th Column former leader). The glowing eyes remind me of this pic a little
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/w/images//c/c1/Requiem.jpg

[/ QUOTE ]
The eyes remind me of Lord Recluse more than Requiem - those eyes are red, not a Nictus emanation like Requiem has.

My wild guess is that in Reichsman's world when Marcus Cole (Statesman in our continuity, avatar of Zeus) and Stefan Richter (Lord Recluse in our continuity, avatar of Tartarus) went into the Well of the Furies and drank from the Fountain of Zeus and opened Pandora's Box, it was Marcus who became avatar of Tartarus (and maybe Stefan became avatar of Zeus) - i.e. the opposite of how it happened in our world.

Ergo Marcus would have become the megalomaniac who joined the pre-breakup Council/5thC/Arachnos group in Italy and in his world he may have taken it over pre-WW2 (stepping on Requiem and The Center on his way up), become a card-carrying fascist, and gone on to lead the invasion of his homeland, America (led by an incarnate the 5th Column attack on Independence Port in WW2 would certainly have had a much better chance of success).

It would be a tidy explanation for why Reichsman is a far more evil parallel-Statesman than Tyrant is.

Bye Phantoms - take care and I hope you enjoy CO/DCUO.

Oh and please close that door when you leave - too many inmates are escaping lately

All the best, poptart - stay safe. Hope to see you back at some point.

[ QUOTE ]
Yet another ironic post from someone who thinks they're important enough to make comments like that.

[/ QUOTE ]
How important do you need to be? Is there a forumite rating system I'm not aware of?

[ QUOTE ]
I'll make a note of who's storming off, and give them a special welcome when they come back

[/ QUOTE ]
That's going to need a big piece of paper

[ QUOTE ]
A touching piece of arc there. A few pictures here say more then a thousand words. I was touched by it.

[/ QUOTE ]
Me too. Farewell Doc - take care and good luck in all that you do.

[ QUOTE ]
Well, I guess if you're playing a Brute, then Fury would count as rage then.

[/ QUOTE ]
That's two posts without a smiley anywhere in them - are you unwell?

[ QUOTE ]
Hopefully, Paragon will announce something amazing, something that will make us all go "bloody hell!!"

[/ QUOTE ]
Lets hope so. MA must have taken up a lot of man-hours - probably too many tbh as it has cut down the amount of Dev-created story content we've received as updates recently. Hopefully there are departments/sections at Paragon Studios who didn't have much MA-connected work to do and have been working on other stuff.

MA is huge, but it's still one feature, and as much as I like it I don't like all of the effects it has had on playstyles, nor what it may do to future story progression in this MMO. And I'm sure there are people who hate it - what is being added for them?

[ QUOTE ]
Who knows, perhaps having low expectations instead of high hopes might mean I feel less disappointed now?

[/ QUOTE ]
I've always been an advocate of pessimism, especially in other MMOs - expect the worst and you're either proved right or pleasantly surprised But this Dev team was the first one to ever fill me with optimism about a game's future.

If others felt the same way then I can understand all of the disappointment. Paragon Studios haven't let us down in comparison with the Dev teams of other MMOs at all - but it feels like they've let us down in comparison with their own track record in past issues.

And I'm glad you're not gone yet - I hope you reconsider

Thanks, War Witch for such obviously heartfelt sentiment. Sometimes people forget that the Devs love the game as much as most of the community does - your post makes that clear. Congrats on your success - keeping an MMO thriving for 5 years is a major achievement.

[ QUOTE ]
You guys are what make the game great.

[/ QUOTE ]
Without you guys and gals we wouldn't be able to

Well Col_Blitzkrieger is due to review my L46-50 arc at some point, so perhaps you could give me feedback on my L1-15 arc - it would be much appreciated. Details as follows:

Arc Title: The Renegade Rebellion
Arc ID: 117690
Level Range: L1-15
City of Guides link: Clicky
Description: "Members of Paragon's gangs are going renegade. Large numbers of them have gathered in Skyway and started a riot, blocking the freeway. Your mysterious contact asks you to disperse the riot and investigate if the renegades have any stated aims and/or a leader."

It is story-focused, doesn't conflict with any in-game canon, shouldn't have any spelling or grammar errors, should be a nice challenge for a low level character, and you may even find some of the text humorous

You may want to do this with a brand new character - I designed the arc so that, if not much is ghosted, at the end of the five missions you should be at least L5 and probably L6-7, thus skipping all the tired old L1-5 content that many of us have played dozens of times, and leaving time to get the raptor flight pack from the first mayhem/safeguard mission before you outlevel those missions at L10+.

Enjoy!

[ QUOTE ]
I used to think like that. Until these intermittent spawn failures have shown me the error of my ways. At least 3 ghosting runs and one complete playtrough after any major objective change or it's bugged, more for fancy missions with conditional bosses and so on. 5 complete playtroughs before publishing. I'm still to test my 1st arc up to that standard, this weekend maybe. And yes, there was a major problrem I've caught on the 5th run once.

Again, this is probably because I don't know yet what exactly causes bugs and how to avoid them, but almost everyone is in the same situation right now.

[/ QUOTE ]
You can't always control or completely eliminate the bugs - a lot seem to be very intermittent.

A map I used for the 4th mission of my L1-14 arc was absolutely fine in testing, and absolutely fine on a solo run through I did after publishing it, but then a few hours later I did it in a duo and there was a massive hole in the world we couldn't get past and kept falling through - same for the next two play-throughs - so I changed the map, republished and re-tested and now just hope I won't get a comment that it's happening on that map.

Also a 6-person team that ran my L46-50 arc reported that some of the mobs were spawning at L47, while others were at L50-L52, when all three missions have "flat" spawning - but nobody else has reported that in its 37 play-throughs and I have never experienced it in testing or when playing the arc myself.

And again I could never work out why some bosses I create just won't show the transparency from Reflections Effects but others do. Turning the costume auras off one boss seemed to work, but didn't for another. The boss using huge bodytype wouldn't take an aura when the male bodytype ones would. And yet another player had an arc that had a boss with huge bodytype and eye auras, plus Reflections Effects working.

And I just can't get "betray on arrival" to work whatever other settings I try.

In many cases you have about as much control over whether a bug happens as you have over where the boss gets placed. Thorough testing is good, especially for gameplay balancing, checking for typos and the like, but you can't test for every eventuality - sometimes you just get intermittent bugs and the Dev-created content certainly isn't immune to that.

[ QUOTE ]
Perhaps you can have one of the persons outside mention that he saw the target moving into the building?

[/ QUOTE ]
That's a good idea and it's something I logged in to do earlier (adding it to at least one of the destructible truck spawns), but for some reason both of my arcs have suddenly bloated to 20-30% more space than they took up when I last republished them, and no I've made no additions to custom groups used in them so I have no idea what's causing it.

I'm hoping they'll go back to what they were before (99.87% and 86-ish %) on their own, then I can make the amendment.

I'm @Lord Mayhem, my alts are legion, my L50s are thirteen in number (ominous), my levelling is mainly in duos, my gameplay is mainly villainous, my MA arcs are story-focused, my marketeering is not ebil, my farming and PvPing and RPing are non-existent, my badgehunting is just for titles and accolade powers, my taskforcing/raiding is at weekends, my SGs both have 2 active members and aren't recruiting, my 2 SG bases are fully-featured and lovingly decorated, my forum posts are sporadic and too long, my sub is paid until September, I've been here since 2005, I'm a 32 month vet, I took a year out to play other MMOs the last time I felt the game was no longer fun for me...

... and I'm not leaving CoH/V unless the game stops being fun for me again, or I find another MMO that is more fun (TOR perhaps), or someone turns Union and Defiant off.

I'll be here as long as there are archetype/powerset combinations I still want to level to 50. I currently have 13 characters at level 50 I still enjoy playing, 13 characters on their way to level 50, and plans to make another 5 (once I can think up good names/concepts for them), so I suspect I'll be here for quite a while yet.

Farewell GR - I hope you find a great job that suits you.

Oh and if it was you that dropped anniversary titles onto most of my team in Cap last night on Union, but then dropped half a dozen Winter Lords (and a Caleb) onto my head just as we charged into a full spawn of Freedom Phalanx in Aeon City plaza, thanks muchly...




No, really! I enjoyed fighting the GMs (once I got back from the hospital ) a lot more than a temporary yellow title - the chaos was epic!

Woah, deja vu! Apparently it happens when they change something (or in the Dev's case when they fail to make enough changes ).

Farewell, Khaine - we'll keep the lights burning for a while yet, so you can find your way back if you ever feel like it.

Bye Z. I understand all your reasons and empathise with most of them. If I was burned out and no longer enjoying the gameplay I'd probably be off as well.

Tbh I've felt let down by so many Dev teams in so many MMOs that now I just accept it as par for the course - though it was nice to believe otherwise for a time here.

Take care and best of luck in all you do.

Very nicely written and I wish you the best of luck in finding a new MMO home. TTFN!

Bye FFM - can't say this is entirely unexpected, but take care and I hope you find a new game that offers what you're looking for.

Woah, mass exodus! Cya Coin and Moghedien - take care.

Bye Standoff - take care and I hope you have fun in your next game.

I completely agree with you, Leif - well said!

At a bare minimum every zone should have contacts in the Striga/Croatoa/CoV style, giving the story of that area and the enemy factions present - that brings believability and life to a game world.

As a fan of the game's background I want to see progress in the world, so I'd rather the Devs added to existing content and lore, rather than just bolting-on zones/factions/stories that have few previous connections to existing ones.

I think the real reason behind Posi's statement is that revamps are probably not as exciting to work on for the Designers/Devs as completely new zones are, as they have more restrictions and less creative freedom.

Btw out of all the zones you quoted, RWZ is easily my favourite - co-op, a fun TF, a unique raid event with a GM, 4 contacts with escalating arcs, repeatable contact, unlockable costume pieces and temps, both solo and hazard-size spawns plus in-zone EBs, and a wide level range - that zone has it all - something for everyone.