Lord Mayhem

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It's not even good flamebait.

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Oh I don't know - when I read the OP I had a sudden urge to set fire to my monitor.

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I got both of my books from Amazon.co.uk for around £3.99.

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Yeah I think mine cost me around that - they're not that pricy and I get the impression they wouldn't have sold that well (CoH/V players are probably the only market for them) so I doubt we'll be seeing them get reprinted/re-issued either.

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Personally, when doing ITF myself on a scrapper, /DA is the best by far imo (heck, even tanked Romulus on last mish with my DM/DA), have tried it on /DA, /SR and /WP, still to try it with my /Inv.

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DA certainly has the best all-round resists of any scrapper set (until they get Electric anyway, and that lacks a superb heal like DA, plus doesn't have as good negative resists for the Nictus as DA), but I'm surprised you didn't find /WP just as good if not better considering how good RTTC is in a crowd (and how low aggro it is). Invul will probably be the best though - Invincibility thrives in big spawns and most ITF damage is S/L (albeit with a fair bit of negative energy and some fire too).

I think the OPs point about Regen is that it's a powerset that really doesn't scale that well as spawns get bigger - a Regen's ability to mitigate damage stays the same, even though incoming damage increases drastically in bigger spawns (compared to resists & defence that apply to every incoming attack regardless of how many, or /WP's regen that scales up as spawns get bigger) - hence Regens being so weak to alpha strikes and spike damage when MoG isn't up.

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I have been looking for these books and I only found 2 of them (i though they were 3) in Amazon.com.
Any other place where I can buy them, or any chance of re-editing them.

PS: sorry for my bad english, too much time without use it.

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There's only two - Web of Arachnos and Freedom Phalanx - the third novel about the Rikti War was cancelled and it looks unlikely it will ever appear now.

No clue where else you could buy them though - I always tend to get my books from Amazon.

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Fantastic original ideas. Great attention to detail.

Someone should be expecting a call from NCSoft Soon(tm)...

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Heh thanks - both for the praise and for bringing this post back to the top. Topics slip down this forum category so quickly and I'm not crass enough to outrageously bump my own ideas.

By the way, have you read my airport zone idea? <nudge nudge, hint hint>

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Got my suggestion (for GM's) right here:
http://uk.boards.cityofheroes.com/sh...Number=1182615
It includes a way to make them both easier and at the same time more challenging.

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Yeah but that didn't make an awful lot of sense compared to current game mechanics and would require a lot of programming to put new systems in place.

I'd rather add challenge by having more random events, which could easily be done with the systems the game already has in place.

You could have ambushes that come to aid the GM/AV, perhaps made up wholly of EBs, so that off-tanking becomes useful to have. Instead of purple triangles you could have trade-offs between different up-triangle/down-triangle states so GMs resist different damage types or status effects in the different states - and make these states more visual, such as the GM changing appearance (as those little purple triangles can be so hard to see).

You could also have AVs/GMs being granted weaknesses/strengths or special abilities by the environment around them, e.g. maybe Jurassik moving/healing/attacking faster on land, but moving/healing/attacking slower in water. Or have Adamastor able to heal himself by absorbing the life force of any BP shaman nearby and have ambushes of those rush towards him periodically, so you'd have to kill them before they got near him to prevent him healing.

Put them all together and you might get something like this:

Babbage spawns at one end of Boomtown and ponderously moves towards the other side of it, where he is going to attack a team of surveyors trying to assess the damage to some of the buildings near the Steel Canyon gate. Heroes have to stop him. As well as the badge for defeating him, there is also a badge for stopping him before he harms any surveyor teams with their Longbow bodyguards.

Phase 1: Babbage would begin a fight:
- resistant to psi/fire/lethal (can’t do much against his armoured shell)
- protected against holds/stuns/fears/confuses (ditto)
- resistant to repel/kb/-spd/-rchg (weighs so much he is hard to affect)
- with good accuracy/ToHit (full power, unconcerned for his safety)
- with good regen
But also:
- weak to energy (overloads circuits), cold (freezes joints) & smash (dents armour plates)
- attacks slowly for lower damage (ponderously heavy)
- slow moving (because of his bulk)
- resistant to Taunting (he tries to keep moving towards his objective)
- weak to being Phased (just because… & a way to slow his progress if you needed to regroup)

As soon as he gets damaged Babbage would start moving towards the nearest junk pile in the direction of his objective (these could be destroyable objects, placed all over Boomtown) to scavenge pieces of armour from it and thus rapidly increase his own health. You could stop this by destroying the junk pile before he reaches it (it could be EB level with decent resists, but still easier to harm than Babbage himself).

Phase 2: at half health, Babbage’s resists/protections flip and visually his outer armour falls away to reveal the workings inside, then he becomes:
- weak to psi/fire/lethal (you can now attack his psychic control net and circuits/wires)
- weak to holds/stuns/fears/confuses (can get at his inner workings more easily)
- weak to repel/kb/-spd/-rchg (doesn’t weigh as much now)
- with poor accuracy/ToHit (targeting optics damaged when armour fell away)
- with poor regen (the damage you do to his internals is harder for him to self-repair)
But also:
- resistant to energy (his unshielded capacitors absorb it)
- resistant to cold (chilling his components directly makes him more efficient)
- resistant to smash (doesn’t do much to his wiring, compared with lethal)
- attacks faster for higher damage (less bulky now, but is frenzied as he feels threatened)
- moves faster (because he weighs less now)
- can be Taunted normally and stops trying to reach his objective

That way he becomes easier to control but harder-hitting as the fight goes on. Also during this phase Babbage can no longer use junk piles to restore his health, but ambushes of Psychic Clockwork rush out to repair him instead and have to be stopped before they reach him. Each Psychic Clockwork that reaches Babbage merges with him to form part of his restored armour (and thus increases his health, which if it increases past 50% would put him back in his phase 1 state).

Most of the phase states can be done via the purple triangles system we have now and the visual change at 50% health would be just like Jade Spider’s appearance change in the CoH-side Silos TF - I think only the AI changes would need major programming work. Oh and make Babbage much bigger - at least 3 times the height

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Make all AVs and possibly GMs... immune to Taunt.

Pure chaos! It would be so awesome!

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You really hate Blasters, don't you? GMs would just be a death sentence for them if you do this.

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Another idea: Let AVs be able to nuke and/or use God Modes whenever they feel like it instead of when they're at 5% HP and the next six attacks will finish them off anyway.

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Side-lining whether the AI could handle preferences without a major code re-write, I can tell you've not fought Honoree on the LGTF - it takes quite a lot more than half a dozen attacks to finish him off when he goes Unstoppable - in fact if your team doesn't have enough damage/debuffs he'll just out-regen whatever damage you manage to do while he's in it. I've seen LRSFs get ugly when Statesman and/or Positron go Unstoppable too.

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Nerf Granite Armour! If you have one of these in your team, said AV is surely... dead. If you don't have a Granite Armour in your team, it's a little trickier, but more fun.

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Granites (tankers & brutes) do make AVs a lot easier, but then they do pay rather large penalties in non-AV situations for that power - I think calling a nerf down on them would be somewhat unfair when most people probably play Stone Armour purely for that capability. Besides, my EM/Elec can make himself just as unkillable for 3mins against any AV with Power Surge, and adding 1min of Demonic to that and potentially opening the fight with a Luck overdose he can usually hold aggro for 5mins with impunity, which is often plenty of time to down most AVs. If you pick on Granite you pretty much have to pick on most tier9 godmodes.

I'm sure it would be a very painful experience for a regen scrapper who couldn't control their aggro, just based on how badly my Fire/Fire Brute got mauled with his low resists (despite having fast-recharge heal) and high aggro area attacks, but then his team didn't have a dedicated Tanker (I was sharing duties with another non-stone brute, with a PB using dwarf for the tougher stuff, iirc - though I did manage to tank Rom ok with the help of some Lucks - didn't have much choice as he just wouldn't leave me alone once I started wailing on him - a common problem I've had as a Fire/Fire). On the flipside my Em/Elec was fine - probably because he didn't take as much aggro (mainly single target, no DoTs), had slightly higher S/L resists (but a less reliable heal in Aid Self), and most importantly his team had a Granite Tanker.

If you have a Tanker who is good at holding multiple-mob aggro (i.e. not /WP), stick close to him and/or don't aggro more than you can handle, don't try to beat the tank into a spawn (or, god forbid, try to solo a spawn like some scrappers try), and then I think a regen might do ok. But I have seen a few over-eager scrappers on my ITF teams, with various secondaries, who just leapt from one defeat to another because they just couldn't adapt from their usual gung-ho scrapperlock playstyle to a more stalker-like cautious approach.

Bosses/EBs might suck for a regen if/when you get their attention though (and some spawns in ITF are all EBs/bosses) - regen may not be able to out-heal that immense damage if you hang about, but if your primary kills fast or has some mitigation you might be ok (just be aware that Roman bosses are highly control-resistant - you can't reliably bounce them with AirSup/Focus or fear them with ToF or stun them if you're MA). Or only target what the Tanker targets and kill that.

You just have to bear in mind that those Romans hit very hard (harder than Warriors, or Rikti with swords, even) and treat them accordingly, with large amounts of respect.

And you just reminded me that my scrapper is one of my few L50s I haven't done the ITF with yet - but he's Claw/WP so I'm unlikely to steal more aggro than I can handle and big spawns are where he's most survivable.

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I've noticed Americans based in Florida are too friendly.

"Would you like a refill sir? "

"No thank you, I'm quite alright."

"Are you sure? "

"No no, it's fine."

"Are you sure? "

"Really!"

"I'll leave this here with you then. "

"I don't want to be a bother!"

"I insist! "

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Hehe when I worked for a US firm we used to call that being aggressively polite. Just smile and agree with whatever they say - it's much easier - just don't try to rock the foundations of their happy happy world or it gets ugly fast

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How about a slot machine in St Martial which takes recipe/salvage/enhancements as currency with a chance to win a higher ranked recipe/salvage/enhancement and a tiny chance to win something mega rare?
I have tons of useless junk which sells for a just few beans and I'd love to do something slightly more interesting with it.

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And what do Heroes get? A bingo hall in Atlas Park?

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All i've got to do is work out which one i want to concentrate on now

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Well that's the trick, isn't it? CoH/V promotes altaholism more than any MMO I've ever played. It's the first MMO since EQ I've ever been able to, or wanted to, get more than one character to the level cap (although I did have tons of mid/high level alts in WoW that would soon have joined my dwarf hunter at 70 if I hadn't got bored of the game so fast).

I'm fairly disciplined when it comes to focusing though - I usually have a character I duo regularly with a friend, and another I use for soloing/PuG'ing when he's not online - that focuses my attention nicely. But recently that has gone rather awry and I find myself levelling my 45 Mind/Psi dom and my 26 Ice/Storm Corr in duos, while my 45 EM/EA Stalker should be getting all my solo/PuG time but is having to share it with all the lowbie alts that the very evil I12 allowed me to create (extra slots) and then persuaded me to create (powerset proliferation)

I'm sure you'll enjoy the Bot/Dark - I only really got bored of mine at higher levels because it was all just too easy. Levelling should be pretty fast though.

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We have no assault rifles in the house

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They're in the survivalist bunker you built in case the Commies invaded or nuked the US?

One of my US guildmates in EverQuest (one of the many who couldn't believe I didn't own a gun for home defence), who lived somewhere in the Midwest iirc, once told me he used to shoot his rifle at cans in the field behind his home, which was right next to a busy public highway, and the Police never even came out to check where the gunshots were coming from. I guess if the Police are that slack you need to protect yourself

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But Gms dont DO anything. They are just there, waiting for someone to gather a load of players who then start to blast it until the tree falls down... a total non event.
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They should have goals theyre trying to accomplish. (destroy certain buildings? cause chaos in the city? etc ) etc and there should be a marker of some sort to determine if we're preventing them from achieving they're goal or if they're winning.

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The Arachnos Flyer in Grandville and Ghost of Scrapyard in Sharkhead don't just stand around waiting to be killed and are part of the kind of event you're suggesting. The Flyer has a patrol path and lands 4 times to drop its force field and (if attacked) disembark troops. GoS rises from his grave in Potter's Field's cemetary, makes his way to the Hellforge reprocessing plant, and is slowly joined by more and more Scrapyarder followers from around the zone until he has a bit of a strike rally going on. He makes a speech, and then he leads them on a strike march through the streets of Sharkhead town, more Scrapyarders joining them all the time, as he heads towards the pier where Mako originally killed him. And then... well, nowadays his path takes him into the auto-death field around the BM and he just suicides there

It would be nice if the Devs could retroactively change all other GMs to fit this pattern so at least there was some movement to them and scripted events they carried out (though with most GMs being in hazard zones there might not be much they can smash up that would matter - though Lusca could attack ships/bridges or pick up civilians off the quayside).

But first they need to make GMs worth defeating. First I'd increase GM xp/inf rewards, then I'd make them always drop a rare/orange recipe, and in addition a guaranteed rare/orange salvage piece too - nothing major, but at least a worthwhile reward. Lastly I'd add an Accolade badge called "Monster Hunter" earned by getting all of the GM defeat badges on your side of the game (CoH or CoV, though I'd include U'kon Gr'ai from RWZ as a requirement for both) - yes, allegedly this would make it easier for villains as they have less GMs their side, but the Arachnos Flyer being tougher than a lot of GMs and having to force-spawn Caleb & Deathsurge evens it up a little.

The new Accolade would also grant a desireable power - perhaps a passive that added 10-20% end recovery, or a click that completely refilled your end bar with a 30-60min rchg, or maybe just a click power on a 60min rchg that replicated the level-up inspiration buff (i.e. applies 1 of every large insp to you - yes, including the awaken, so it would work as a self-rez).

At least if you invite GG peasant/pheasant shooting she'll be able to bring her own gun - probably an assault rifle of some kind - you know, just for home defence

I tend to mix frankenslotting set IOs with plain IOs in the low levels - basically whatever is cheapest and gives me roughly the bonuses I want (usually rchg and endrdx first, then acc and dmg, for attacks). Accuracy isn't such a desperate need as it used to be at low levels, not now that we have the early ToHit bonus that tails off as you level towards L20. I used to only use Acc TOs/DOs at low level - nowadays I don't bother slotting anything at all until L12 because TO and L10 IO bonuses are so tiny that you barely notice them - plus at L12 I get a free L15 Acc IO by doing the Invention tutorial then.

Then at mid-level I frankenslot set IOs for whatever gives me the best boosts for the least inf, without bothering about set bonuses. It isn't until the L40s (often L47, because L50 recipes are usually plentiful thanks to farmers, and the oversupply can drop the recipe prices) that I start to slot my finalised build that I designed in Mids with an eye towards set bonuses. So I do think it's valuable to make up those "dream builds" in Mids (albeit I restrain myself from using purples unless they're from the really cheap mez sets) because it gives you something to aim for - plus I can start shopping for those IOs as soon as my characters hit L40ish, giving me time to buy them at best prices over time and store them up in my base so they're ready as soon as I hit 47. Plus if I have a vague idea of my final slotting and powers as I level up then I'm less likely to make mistakes that need respecs to fix them, and I don't overslot some powers leaving other more important powers slot-starved.

I don't usually struggle for Luck Charms either - my Ice/Storm Corr had looted at least half a dozen by L15, enough for all of his attacks to have at least one Acc IO. The four common arcane salvage I don't sell on any of my characters atm and save for my own use are Luck Charms at low level and Alch Silver, Rune and Masterwork weapons at mid level, because those tend to be the ones that sell for higher prices than most rares (i.e. above 10k, sometimes well above - I think they used to be a favoured target of price-flippers, and consequently the higher price stuck - they're certainly not priced that way because of shortage in supply) - but I did notice Luck Charms were down to 8k last week, so things have changed somewhat (I check periodically to see if it's still worth hoarding them).

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Not for me it isn't. I never take debt into consideration for anything I do, and never have. In fact I find the trip back from hospital worth avoiding more than debt.

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I agree with this - being defeated annoys me more than any "punishment" I receive for that defeat.

I'd leave a team suffering far too many deaths not because of the debt, but because of the constant gameplay disruptions the defeats/wipes cause and because they're obviously not very good players and/or don't really care what happens to them or their teammates.

That said, I do think it was a mistake for the devs to reduce debt penalties - it is truly inconsequential now, but there is still the annoying disparity of outdoor debt being higher than mission debt, and also debt badges being more of a hassle to get (for those that care - personally I see debt badges as more a mark of shame than a reward, if you get them too early ). I'd love to know why they thought it was worth taking the time to reduce debt.

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is exactly the arrogant im-better-than-you attitutue that also puts people off going into PvP zones.

It seems some PvPers don't want other people in PvP zones, they want to keep it as thier exclusive little leet-club.

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And yet they do want other people in PvP zones - the calls of "more to Siren's Call" or whatever every evening show that.

Sure, what some PvPers probably want more than anything is more fodder lower down the food chain so they have more targets of opportunity - but the point still stands that most PvPers would like to see more players in PvP zones, not less...

... even if the attitudes of some of them are less than conducive to making that happen.

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I have 3 lvl 50 mms the easiest to lvl was my thugs dark but was mainly in duo with a bots/dark. My necro/poison took the longest but the 1 i enjoy the most and still use even in RV is my bots/traps.

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While I don't have high level experience with most of the MM secondaries (except /Dark), I've played several of them on other ATs to early/mid levels, and tbh I'm convinced that /Dark is the easy mode where MMs are concerned. You have good control/debuffs for spawns, but also great debuffs for EBs - while your pets do the damage you can just run about playing controller/defender, locking down threats to you and your bots - then at 38 you get a pet from /Dark that even helps you to do that better.

Sure, /FF and /Traps makes you and the pets safer, but pets are expendable anyway and I'd rather have secondaries that keep me busier in combat - /Storm controls almost as well as /Dark (if a bit more chaotically, so perhaps more suited to ranged pets) but the debuffs don't make you quite as safe and require more skill to use - /TA has good debuffs that help you to kill fast, but again they won't keep you as safe as /Dark does - /Poison arguably makes EBs easier, but doesn't really have many tools for big spawns. /Dark pretty much has all the tools you need for fast, safe killing in almost every situation - it does a lot of what the other sets do well, plus a few unique things, all in one set - team it with pets that do great area damage, which basically means Bots or Thugs, and you can't go wrong.

But really if you want consistently good solo performance throughout the level range, survivability, ease of play, fast levelling, but still be useful to teams, then like most of us have said nothing in the game compares to a brute - and yeah, I'd personally include heroside in that blanket statement too.

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Thought it would be too good to be true

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It would arguably make MoLRSF too easy as well if you could have regular vengeance off dead MM pets (because obviously for an MoLRSF attempt you can't get it off a dead player) - though I guess at least it would make MMs more wanted for the LRSF in general

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No and No, my commitment to CoH defenitly extend beyond my 'main' and personally I have a problem with the 'self asssured' attitude of a lot of Americans. Which in itself could be seen as 'racist' but I generally find it difficult to show respect to those who don't recpricate and in my experience generally Americans tend to have very little respect for non americans or those not 'americanised'. Perhaps this is my own twisted, small minded, petty view of things but whatever my answer remains the same.

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I used to play US servers exclusively for my MMOs - usually because EU servers weren't available - and can attest that Americans run the gamut of faultlessly polite/friendly individuals through to the immature/petty scum that infest every online community, regardless of nationality. Their populations were no more weighted towards one extreme than the other when compared to EU ones (and I got to experience both sides of the Atlantic in the same game in EQ, EQ2 and Auto Assault beta), not to the extent that say games polarise people (e.g. WoW having a higher percentage of immature players than EQ2, for example).

The only tendency I noticed on US servers more than on EU/UK ones is that they were less aware/caring of international matters (I blame their media - though admittedly they have a much larger country to keep track of news-wise compared to most of us) and were more likely to wear their religion/politics on their sleeve and expect everyone to respect/understand or agree with it.

So yeah, a bit more jingoistic and god-fearing than us lot in general, but otherwise the only thing that really hacked me off was every time I ran into a US player who said to me "European? I bet you wished you'd been born here" (and that happened to me a lot in EQ) - they were always rather surprised when I said "no, not really" - and usually even more surprised when they learned I didn't have/need a gun for "home defence"

But generalisations aside, best to just take each individual as you find them without cultural bias - stereotypes rarely fit absolutely.

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To me it seems a lack of knowing how to play and the feeling of knowing how to lose...

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I think this touches on a very important point. I've known people get very upset when dying in PvP in an MMO. Even ignoring the tendency of immature players to gloat and rub it in when they do win but cuss, moan and cry cheat when they lose, I think a lot of mainly PvE players - RPers most of all - get so attached to their characters that they just don't want to see those characters being defeated and potentially mocked/humbled by others.

Personally it doesn't bother me - anyone who plays FPS games such as Planetside or any of the Battlefield series gets used to "dying" over a dozen times an hour and potentially a lot more, often to completely random occurrences way outside of their control (such as being orbitally bombarded at the moment you respawn from a defeat). On BF2142 it's fairly common for even the highest scorers in a match/round to have been "killed" over 20 times in the 40-ish mins it took to play, depending on the situation - especially in a Camp Gibraltar "meatgrinder" stalemate, for those familiar with the game. As a newbie you're glad when you manage to kill at least one other player before dying

But I have experienced players getting very angsty over their character being defeated (sometimes by me ) and it happens a lot more frequently in MMO PvP than FPS PvP from my admittedly skewed personal experience.

Defeat is probably easier to chalk up to the fortunes of war in an FPS, whereas in an MMO it might seem more personal because of your greater attachment to your character because you can customise them more, make more decisions while building them, and have more/greater chances to get in-character (if not necessarily more immersed) than with your FPS tag/handle. Also there tend to be less players around in PvP and less "chaos" so it seems more personal, not to mention the better chat systems in MMOs making it easier for the killer to gloat/mock, leaving the victim more socially exposed.

Also it's easier to feel griefed in MMO PvP than FPS PvP, because in FPS games the entire gameplay revolves around killing your opponents - in MMOs a lot of players get killed in PvP when they were least prepared for it because they were trying to do something else (usually PvE or crafting/harvesting orientated) so it feels like griefing/ganking to them. I've experienced that myself, being repeatedly ganked by higher levels in a newbie zone while trying to PvE in my first experience of free-for-all PvP in EverQuest. While CoH/V isn't anywhere near that bad, some PvE players still feel an entitlement to get nukes, shivans, badges or whatever in PvP zones (wrongly or rightly), so that likely induces a similar feeling of being "ganked" to them.

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And imo cimer is awfull. A TF length arc just to gain entry which u must repeat on every toon. Then you get there for zero content and the lag tf. I would much rather the pvp zones had a revamp than more half baked and badly programmed zones.

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I was very disappointed that Cimerora didn't have the usual 4 contacts with arcs as per the established Striga/Croatoa/Hollows/Faultline/RWZ pattern (hoping that will be rectified in I13).

Despite that I personally I think the ITF is the best TF in the game, despite the lag on the 3rd mission, and I really enjoy the Midnighter access arc CoV-side. Ironically enough I enjoyed that access arc's boss-heavy missions most on my stalker, who is not so much a "pure pvp solo build" since I respecced him mainly for PvE instead. And that, together with the I12 changes, has made him much more fun for me in PvE, to the point where I'd rather play a stalker than a scrapper now.

So I respectfully disagree with most of your points, just as you would doubtless disagree with my wish that the Devs continue to focus on PvE instead of patching up an ailing PvP playstyle that is never going to be as popular as PvE here, no matter what the few "hardcore" PvPers say.

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PVP in MMO's sucks, even EVE and the up comming WAR have nothing on a good FPS like CS or UT, they might have some fun sstem, but for pure PvP that scales from 1 vs 1 to 32 vs 32, FPS will always rule.

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I think the above comment is a gross generalisation, but I agree with it in spirit. All of my favourite PvP games, from the original Unreal through my sole MMOFPS Planetside and now to the Battlefield games, have been twitch games where there is a playing skill progression for the player, rather/more than a statistical progression for the character.

Maybe that's a subjective opinion, but I primarily buy/play MMOs for PvE not PvP, and simultaneously I'll buy/play an FPS (or occasionally an RTS) mainly for the PvP and not for their tacked-on PvE, because generally that is the main playstyle they are designed for these days. I'd rather play a game that was mostly honed and patched/updated for the playstyle that I picked it for.

CoH/V will never have more than casual PvP because it is mainly a PvE game at core and has to maintain focus on that - the Devs would be daft to alienate their core subscriber base by majorly shifting attention now. For PvE I'd rather have our wide range of varied powers/powersets that are impossible to balance within an archetype, let alone with other archetypes (for both PvE and PvP) - but when I PvP I want less classes and the same progression/abilities available to all.

My current PvP/FPS game is Battlefield 2142 and that has 4 kits ("classes" really - Assault is medic/grunt, Recon is sniper/stealther, Support is ammo/firepower and Engineer is repair/traps/anti-vehicle), each with weapons/gadgets/passives you unlock as you progress in PvP, but you can switch between the 4 kits at will with each respawn (on the same character), develop them how you choose, and none of the unlocks are what I'd call essential (just nice perks). Imho a proper PvP game needs to be structured either like that, or be totally skill-based and not class-based, because it has proved impossible for MMO dev teams to properly balance more than a small handful of base classes (and taking into account all the pri/sec powerset choices as well as archetypes, we effectively have hundreds or even thousands of different classes here).

I would question why a serious PvPer would bother with CoH/V as their main PvP game, unless they were also very interested in the PvE and the superhero theme as well. If you're a serious PvPer and want to PvP in MMOs then surely Guild Wars or other MMOs with PvP reward/competition systems in place (even WoW) would be preferable to here.

Me, I'll stick with FPS games to indulge my "killer" side, while getting my "explorer"/"achiever"/"socialiser" fixes in CoH/V.

Yeah my friend pointed these out to me last night - they look rather interesting.

I'd guess this counts as the purple set for all 4 travel power set types (I'd be willing to guess that every enhancement category without a purple set atm will get one in I13) - although the name definitely makes it sound like part of a new Winter event (and with us getting a new Halloween event this year I'd say a new Xmas event is quite likely too).

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Like the effect on the advetisment that makes it look like a real billboard poster, aka it comes in squares.

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I just wanted to highlight this point before it gets drowned in the Vin Diesel squee/blech-fest The poster effect impressed me as well when I saw my first in-game ad last night in Nerva (on a billboard in Crimson Cove). It shows that either the advertisers or the Devs are making an effort to ensure the ads look convincing from an in-game immersion standpoint, which soothes one of my main worries from when in-game ads were first announced.

Also a friend had to point the ad out to me - that's how unobtrusive it was for me personally. Admittedly that could have been because the Babylon AD posters are nice and subdued colour-wise. I'm still concerned as to how an advert with brighter colours might contrast with the usual Rogue Isles colour palette (though I guess with red/white longbow uniforms everywhere that's a moot point): In Planetside the bases were subdued blues/greys, so the bright orange/white Fanta adverts on the walls looked daft and rather tacky compared to the film posters there (although they made no sense either from an immersion perspective as Planetside is set about 2 centuries in the future on alien worlds - a problem at least CoH/V doesn't have).

At least when I looked at the ad in CoH/V I didn't get a spike of lag - in Planetside the tracking software SOE used to track when you looked at adverts was more intrusive than the adverts themselves (and there was no option to opt out).

So I'll keep adverts on for now, at least until I run up against an advert that is glaringly obtrusive. GR, where would you like the feedback for obtrusive adverts to go? On the forums? Or an email/PM to you? I'm assuming a petition would waste your customer support people's time, and it wouldn't fall under /bug either.