Mantic

I notice that all of you guys responding are long-time CoH veterans. I certainly respect your knowledge of the game, but I wonder if you really grasp my perspective on the game.

As I mentioned, though I've been playing for a few years (since March 2007, off and on), I'm only on a few days a month at best. I've missed whole months a couple of times, even when paying for the account. In that time I've started a couple of templates from the forum, but each time they wound up obsolete before I got halfway through -- I've only been able to grow toons quickly by having higher-level players get together and power-level me.

So if there is a streamlined guide of where to go and what to do from 1-50 to efficiently grow a toon up, especially solo, that would be very helpful to me. I might actually get a second character to level 50 someday.

Making Inf on the market is one of the least interesting points. Being offline for weeks at a time or longer allows lots of bids to come in, so I do pretty well on that front for the time invested. Too bad Inf can't buy XP... but at least I can buy a purple once in awhile.

As mentioned, I've tried following templates from the forum here, and not had great results. If there is a guide that actually pairs templates with tailored rapid-leveling tactics, I would consider that worth money. And I have looked -- people have not been putting that much work in for nothing.

The rest of the bullet points do suggest material that is available on the Wiki, and which may not be of any practical use. Presentation could make a difference, though.

All of which is why I'm looking for someone who has actually seen the guide to clarify it's contents.

I do check the Wiki when I need to know something specific. As you can see from my post count here, though, I am not so inclined to ask questions (I Google and search these forums often, but don't like to bother people -- especially when I'm looking for general information about the game).

The nature of the strategy guide I am asking about is supposedly different from a straightforward manual (like the Wiki, which answers straightforward questions such as where to go to get x badge).

From the bullet points of the advertisement it contains:

* Secret leveling locations from 1 to 50
* How to make more influence than you could ever spend
* Character creation guide for new and advanced players
* The hidden mechanics of the combat system
* Efficient tactics against every type of villain
* Powersets in detail
* Cutting-edge soloing strategies
* How to play a grouped character. Flawless.

They also claim it is updated regularly to keep consistent with current game rules. This is typical of all the MMO guides sold by Killer Guides.

The advertising copy for the guide makes some bold (but very general) claims. I'm just hoping that someone here who has already made the investment can provide a more realistic estimation of it's usefulness.

The "City of Heroes Vade Mecum" is a commercial strategy guide written by Mike Jatczak that is being sold on the interwebs, and I'm curious if anyone here has purchased it and can offer opinions.

This thread is not intended as an advertisement and for that reason I will not provide a direct link to the product page, but I will say that it is being sold by Killer Guides (who publish hint books for a number of MMO games).

I'm an infrequent player here and if this guide can really make what time I spend in CoH more productive it would be worth the money. But I can't find reviews anywhere, and that makes me leery of dropping $30 on a PDF file. For all I know, this guy could have just copied the CoH Wiki...

The persistent bid amount hasn't bothered me so far, perhaps because of a habit I have from using other forms on the web for years. When I select the amount window with the intent of entering a new value I habitually click+drag, selecting the existing value, and then type in the new value over it.

As I say, it's already a habit from using other web forms and search engines, so similar habits may have been why the devs didn't see this as a problem. For me, the persistence is a time-saver since I tend to make bids in bulk.

I will admit that the new UI has taken time to adjust to, but at this point I feel it solves more problems and adds more desired features than it breaks. This kind of change is rarely welcome, as we've all gotten comfortable with what we knew, but I think that new players will find the current WW UI easier to grok than the original.

[ QUOTE ]
Oh good, an official discussion.

Can someone please reassure me that this is not going to become the only way to play and update City of Heroes?

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DITTO

This is the first I'd heard of it, just skimming the forum, but I have to say:

I DESPISE STEAM and VALVE! Valve has cheated me out of money time and again, Steam has abused my machine and stolen both my money and great scads of my time. If NCSoft must deal with Valve please, please, please!!! do not ever force Steam on existing customers!

We haven't stolen from you. Far from it! We happily pay a monthly rate to play this game that is higher than most of your competitors; clearly we all want to support your continued success. But some of us have issues with Steam, and forcing it on us as a condition of continued service would be a backhanded way of rewarding our loyalty.

Apologies if this matter has already been addressed, but I'm downright neurotic after the rapings received from Valve already.

Well... it's patch day. Some MMOs do this every single month, so all in all I think NCSoft is ahead of the curve. They even let us download the biggest part of the update ahead of time (which means all the world to this dial-up user).

It's not atypical for patch day to go south on any game due to the intense traffic hitting the servers up for patch files and all the usually inactive players getting hyped up to see what's new. It may seem strange to those who were on the test server playing this content for ages already that people are still in this mode, but I suspect that the vast majority of players want nothing to do with potentially unstable beta software (not to mention all the low-bandwidth users like me to whom a 4+GB test client download is not an option).

If problems persist for more than a few days, it would be very nice of NCsoft f they'd give up-to-date customers a little free time to compensate for this bump. And I suspect that isn't out of character for this company. But I still suspect the biggest part of the problem is coming from normal patch day traffic rather than errors on the part of the CoH development team. And that it will practically correct itself in a matter of time.

Unfortunately, 52.6MB is eight to nine hours transfer on a dial-up connection, and because of the traffic, and an error with resuming in the patcher I've had to restart that file several times today... even after having almost the whole thing. But it's worth the hassle to me. I dig CoH/CoV, and I've faith in NCsoft to do right by their customers if snags and errors continue for long.

While your colour theory is not wrong, it is incomplete. Contrasting combinations work, but are not the only valid combinations. Yellow & green, which you criticized, do complement well (technically better than a contrast, which clashes), and are one of the more common pairs in commercial design (especially now that the "green" movement has adopted the same colour scheme as John Deere). A number of well-known superheroes and supervillains have also worn that combination.

The trick to these complements is that you are pairing two colours that are next to one another (analogous) on the wheel. DC's Geo Force started out with such a scheme using two shades of brown with orange and yellow hues (Marvel's Wolverine also wore a popular costume in that scheme), and later changed it to the green & yellow combo. Marvel's Magneto uses a magenta and purple combination, which has since caught on with a lot of other characters in the X-Men titles. Apocalypse went the other direction and paired purple with blue, for a cooler combo. And so on...

I forget if you pointed out the triad combinations -- pairing up colours like green & purple or yellow & blue, but that's very popular with the superheroes (the Incredible Hulk with his purple pants and all of the X-Men in their original team outfits). Probably you did, since you mentioned Superman and Spiderman.