Lothic

Actually it would be more accurate to call this person "Guy who took the Champions Online Acrobatics travel power and made a functionally identical copy of it". For what it's worth I think the CoX version of this power looks a bit more polished animation-wise, but otherwise it was pretty much a complete rip-off.

Now don't get me wrong about this - I'm actually glad CoX ripped off that power because it was one of the few things that Champions Online did that was vaguely cool. For everything else that CO has "copied" about CoX I think it was only fair that this game manage to steal something for themselves.

I love this new booster pack and everything about it.

As far as Ninja Run goes I liked this power quite a bit some months ago when Cryptic first called it "Acrobatics" and made it one of their travel powers for Champions Online. It doesn't really bother me that this power's function and animation details are almost identical to the ones first invented by our "competition" in the least. For what it's worth I think CoX's version of this power has slightly nicer animations (espeically the way the arms move for instance).

If this game can continue "borrowing" the few features that other game is doing well then I have no doubt CoX will continue to be the overall better game.

Obviously something being "more trouble than it was worth" is a subjective point of view, especially where we players are concerned.

For example I could understand why the Devs maybe didn't want to put in the mission architect, power customization and side crossovers (in Going Rogue) because to some people those things might seem like more trouble than they were worth as well. I could see why the Devs might not have wanted to waste the time to put those things in either. In any event the time and effort to get this Walk power working was still clearly trivial compared to those other arguably "optional" features I just mentioned.

Let's just say one player's opinions on what goes into this game (including yours and mine) don't really count for much. *shrugs*

Is there actually a QoL feature that has ever been added to the game that 100% of the people use 100% of the time?

Obviously not everyone's going use this new Walk power either when it's brand new or not. But it has been suggested in the forums for years now and I'm sure there will be some people who appreciate that it's finally been implemented.

P.S. I use fly pose binds on my characters pretty much every time I play. If at least one person (myself) uses them then I'm sure there will be at least one person who likes other things like the new Walk as well.

I'm glad we finally have a Walk feature as well, but I wouldn't call it a "surprise" to see it. People have been suggesting it on the forums for years now.

Obviously it was never a critical enough feature for it to be a priority so I'm not upset or confused as to why it took a while to finally happen. But it is a relatively interesting coincidence that we got this in CoX just a couple of months after that "other" superhero MMO launched with a Walk option back on September 1st. I'm sure that had absolutely nothing to do with this game finally getting around to it.

Whatever the reason that motivated it it's good to have it here now...

The "weird tradition" as you called it was just a clever way for the Devs to give themselves more time to finish the 40-50 level content on each side. It was always the plan for these factions to be capped at 50.

It's certainly possible that the same will happen in Going Rogue, but depending on how level 50 heroes and villains entering Praetoria are handled chances are that "tradition" will not be mainatained. My guess is that Going Rogue will be able to account for levels 1-50 of all factions at launch in some form or fashion. I'm sure more will be added in subsequent Issues after GR goes live.

Pretty much everyone I still know in this game are already 60+ month vets just like me so I don't expect to get too many "What's GR closed beta like" questions from people in general.

I really don't think this "bug the people with the badges for info" idea is going to be a serious concern. I'll just not answer peoples' questions the same way I've always done with all the other closed betas I've been in. *shrugs*

Replace a power from a powerset that's been there for years just because it "might" be a fun idea. Are you kidding?

I have no incredible love for Havoc Punch and I actually do like the idea of the whip power you suggested. But I would never, ever suggest that a power ever be completely REPLACED by another power. Can you imagine how many people would likely scream bloody murder over that? When the Devs tried that for the power pools a few Issues ago it lasted about a week in beta before they wisely backed off that idea.

Now if there was a way to add a whip power to that powerset as an ALTERNATIVE to Havoc Punch then that'd be cool. Basically the word "replace" is a very loaded one as far as powersets go and you should probably be more careful in how you phrased what you meant. I realize you probably just meant something like an "animation replacement" for that Havoc Punch but as pointed out by Shadow State it might not have been totally obvious what you meant.

Which purge?
It took the Devs several "purges" over roughly a year to finally get rid of all of the IoPs.
Just a sad bit of trivia as a footnote to a unfortunately handled situation...

If we assume the Devs would have to require this thing to have a 30 second interruptible activation period in order to keep people from exploiting it then most of the "quick turnaround" usefulness this feature might have provided would be ruined.

As anecdotal evidence I can usually relog a new character into the game in around a minute, and that includes the current 30 second log off timeout that already exists. Sure there are times when I need to quick swap a character for a team but I estimate that I only need to do that maybe once every several hours of playtime, if even that often. This whole thing is basically a QoL solution in search of a problem as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not saying this is character swap thing is technically a "bad" idea, but I would argue that it would end up saving the typical user so very few seconds per play session that I really can't see the Devs wasting much effort for this at this point. Basically I could probably think of many QoL improvements I'd rather have before this one. *shrugs*

It's a cool RP oriented idea... that'll never happen for obvious game balance reasons. *shrugs*

My main badger Fire/Rad had Medicine Woman (the 50 million HP version) about 3 years ago before I ever started any heal farming for Empath (the one billion HP version) I finally finished a year ago. So technically I earned the "new and improved" version of Empath at least five times over with one character -without- farming.

Oh well, if I had only procrastinated I could have had an easy Empath too.
For what it's worth Empath should have been this low to begin with.

I'm not going to quit playing this game over the I16 badge nerfs.
But I will admit that like most things I believe the Devs overreacted in this situation.

There were several top epic badges that were set too high years ago.
Those several top epic badges should have been lowered years ago.
It's good that those badges are finally getting addressed after years of making the case for them here in the forums.
Better late than never I guess.

But I16 is going to neuter several dozen other badges that are very arguably -not- broken. I've had these badges on my badging characters for years so it doesn't directly affect me, but it does sadden me to think this game is heading a bit too far into carebear triviality as far as this activity is concerned. Hopefully Going Rogue will give us some serious end-game content to replace the challenge of badging that's apparently been deemed "too hard" for us to enjoy.

This is correct but it's a bit of a simplification. I've been using /settitle binds for my costume changes for years now so I've gotten knowledgeable (against my will I suppose) about what generally happens when new badges are added. Currently badges range in /settitle values all the way up to the 1200s now.

The epic badges (i.e. Immortal, Leader, Empath, etc.) are indeed near the end of the list so they are always shifted upward. But new badges have lately been shoved into the list at around the 600-700 mark so that means that even when we only get a few new badges there are literally hundreds of preexisting badges that get bumped up. Case in point the I16 badge changes will shift many of these badges upward by 13 'spots' in the list. This probably covers not only the I16 badges but the new Halloween 2009 badges as well. No wonder it's a PITA for the badge tracking websites to maintain current lists for these things.

I'll never quite understand why reassigning /settitle numbers to badges like this is considered a "good" way to do things as far as our Devs are concerned. It just seems like a scheme that'd be prone to buginess and it sure as heck wastes our time refiguring it out after every badge update. Oh well.

While I completely agree the that having to relog each time I want to change characters is vaguely annoying I completely understand and agree with the security concerns that feature exists to address.

I don't play in an environment where the chance somebody could gain access to my characters against my wishes is very likely. But from a pure computer security point of view I'd rather live with a very minor annoyance like this (I can typically relog characters in less than a minute) than to hear about people constantly crying in the forums about how their various "little brothers" nuked their characters every other day.

It's a reasonable account security feature which has been in place in this game for years. At this point the chances anything will change with this here is effectively nil. Frankly the fact that a game like Guild Wars apparently (according to you) weakened their security in this area is not a -good- thing as far as I'm concerned. *shrugs*

Yeah never underestimate people's desire to try to get away with something silly like this.
But there are two things working in the favor of nicknames that would probably make them safe and doable:

1) They'd have to be able to pass the name filter just like regular names.
2) The Devs could make it so that a player only ever sees their own characters' nicknames, not anyone else's.

With these two safeguards in place no one could ever use a nickname to grief or be "naughty" to other players.

No need to actually apologize. But I will point out that if anyone ever tried to compile a list of the "top most often suggested things for this game" the idea of vehicle based travel powers would easily make it into the top 10 of that list.

I'm not against the idea in general, but I think for this particular game it would very hard to accomplish due to age of the graphics engine and the overall animation concerns. I don't think it'd be impossible, just very improbable at this point. Of course the Natural Origin Booster Pack is still on the horizon so who knows...