Mister Rik

So yesterday I came up with a "character concept" idea to create an all-female "team" of characters based on the solar system, with the "Planet Symbols" chest emblems on their costumes.

So I created:

"Mother Sun" (Radiation Emission/Fire Blast Defender)
"Girl Mercury" (Kinetic Melee/Super Reflexes Scrapper)
"Venus Lass" (Gravity Control/Earth Assault Dominator)
"Erdmadchen" (German for "Earth Girl") (Plant Control/Storm Summoning Controller)

Then I got to "Ms. Mars" (Broadsword/Shield Brute) and discovered the Mars planet symbol is not available to female characters. That led to also discovering that the Venus symbol is not available to male characters.

Now, I understand that the planetary symbol for Mars, a circle with an arrow pointing up and to the right (♂), is also used as the symbol for "man"; likewise the Venus symbol, a circle with a cross pointing down (♀), is also used as the symbol for "woman". But in my opinion, if they're going to be listed under the category of "Planet Symbols" then all of them need to be available, regardless of character sex. Their planetary meaning is their primary meaning. The gender representation is secondary.

So c'mon devs/costume people, make all the symbols available to everybody! Pretty please?

Hmm. This just got more puzzling. I took my main, the same character who just quit her SG, and had her create her own SG. I went into "Edit Room" mode, and clicked the "Room Details" tab, and there were all the Wall Mounted Weapon Displays and Signature Character Items that she supposedly "lost" when she left her previous SG. Weird.

I haven't read the entire thread, so maybe somebody has already said this, but I'll post anyway.

I'm sure most here are at least aware of the fact that WoW has lost about a million subscribers in last year or so. As of tomorrow, I'm one of them (officially cancelled my sub last week; it runs out on the 26th). While the reasons for all those cancelled subs are varied, one common reason given is the simple fact that, once an expansion is released, Blizzard concentrates all their subsequent development resources into end-game, group-required content. And the result of that is that those of us who, for whatever reason, don't enjoy raiding find ourselves with absolutely nothing worthwhile to do at max-level. Running the same circuit of daily quests on multiple level-capped toons (I have six) is a sure path to burnout, especially when running this "solo content" doesn't provide any significant rewards beyond "more gold".

A common sentiment I've seen expressed regarding MMOs is probably stated most simply as, "The playerbase has changed a lot since EverQuest". Basically, the playerbase has gotten older and more casual. I'm 45, and have been gaming for more than 30 years (the hours and quarters I spent playing Asteroids...). The people who were playing EQ in high school and college are still playing videogames, but their needs are different now. Speaking for myself, I want "more depth, less twitch" in my games. I have neither the reflexes nor the eyesight I had in my teens and twenties, and I'm more likely to play a videogame to relax, rather than to try to impress anybody or challenge myself.

Regarding the "why play MMOs if you don't want to group" argument, I look at games like I look at books. I read a lot, and I've noticed one big thing about my reading choices: I tend to prefer long, ongoing series over one-shot standalone novels. I love the persistent universe in a series, the chance to really get to "know" the characters over the long term, and the feeling that the overall story doesn't end. Single-player games are like one-shot standalone novels. MMOs are like ongoing series.

Linking reading with gaming, I'll mention the Pulitzer-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. One of the characters owns a company called "Levy Pants" (they make ... pants). The character inherited the company from his father, and one of his complaints about the company is the fact that his father insisted on "sticking with what made us successful", and ignoring the son's suggestions for changes. In the case of Levy Pants, that meant continuing to manufacture the same style of pants that were popular in the 1920s and ignoring changes in fashion, and by the time the character inherited the company from his father, in the 1950s, he was stuck with a product line that was 30 years out-of-date (the book is set in the early 1960s). By the same token, what customers want from games changes over time, and the games need to change to match what's "in fashion", not just keep hammering away at the same formula that worked several years ago.

And then there's the superhero genre itself. It is, more than anything, a "solo" genre, historically. The main reason DC Comics has had to do such major reboots and retcons over the last couple decades is that when their major characters were originally created, those characters didn't even exist together in the same universe - they were all "solo" artists, or "solo + sidekick" at most. All manner of historical timeline-twisting and hoop-jumping and "alternate Earth" explaining had to be done to plausibly get all those characters to where they existed in the same universe and could plausibly interact with each other. And to be completely honest, while the majority of "super groups" are explained as "a way to deal with bigger threats we can't handle individually", the real reason for these "team" books is simply to provide a place for B- and C-list characters who can't support their own "solo" titles, so that the publishers don't lose the trademarks on those characters. That's also why, in the big, epic crossover storylines, the central hero character who ties everything together is almost always some B- or C-lister (Deadman in DC's Blackest Night/Brightest Day crossover event, for example).

Wanted to add that the Paragon Market opened just fine a couple days ago, without crashing my client. There haven't been any patches to the game or any changes to my Mac between then and now, so I really think something funny happened with the Market.

Edit: Wait, was there a patch on Thursday?

Earlier this evening, my game client crashed with an "Assertion Failure" when I tried to open the Paragon Market. The PM window frame came up, but before its content could load, the client crashed.

Now, I log into the game, and as soon as I load my main character (the one I was playing when I opened the Paragon Market prior to the crash) the Paragon Market window frame is still there, and promptly crashes the client again with the same "Assertion Failure" faster than I can click the "X" widget to close the Market window.

I can log in a different character just fine. But my main is stuck with that PM window open, since she had it open when the client crashed. So until I can fix this (or until the Paragon Market stops crashing my client), my main is unplayable.

Is there anything I can do, like delete or edit a preference/settings file somewhere that will tell the client to load this character without opening the Paragon Market window? Anything else that might fix this?

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac8,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: IM81.00C1.B00
SMC Version (system): 1.29f1

System Software Overview:

System Version: Mac OS X 10.7.3 (11D50b)
Kernel Version: Darwin 11.3.0
Boot Mode: Normal
Secure Virtual Memory: Enabled
64-bit Kernel and Extensions: Yes
Time since boot: 11 days 2:26

Okay, Impish Kat posted while I was still typing, and seems to have solved some of my confusion. I logged in the character who just created her own SG, and I found both the Wall Mounted Weapon Racks and the Signature Character Items at the end of the "Room Details" list. I'll assume they're in the same place on my other characters.

Thanks

I checked a few more things:

• I went ahead and created a brand-new character just to test this stuff, to make sure the Base Items are actually showing up in the mailboxes of newly-created characters (just to make sure that the Base Items weren't only going to characters that existed when I spent the tokens). Yup, there they are, amidst all the Tailor Tokens, Respec Tokens, Experienced Temp Powers and Mission Teleporters: Wall Mounted Weapon Racks and Signature Character Items. So all of my characters to date have received these items, and if they're not in a character's mailbox, I can assume that character claimed the items.

• I logged in a villain character who has been in a VG for a few months now, but who I haven't played in a few weeks. I entered her group's base, and the "Add Personal Item" button was active. I clicked it, and it brought up the interface so that I could place the Wall Mounted Weapon Racks. Then I went to her mail and claimed the Signature Character Items. I clicked the "Add Personal Item" button again, and the interface again showed me the Wall Mounted Weapon Racks, but not the Signature Character Items. Why are the Signature Character Items not appearing? Can those be placed only in certain kinds of rooms?

• I logged in a hero character who just joined a SG a few days ago, and entered the base. "Add Personal Item" button is disabled. So either she has "lost" her Base Items, or her group permissions don't allow her to add personal items.

• One of my characters, who has not previously joined a SG, created a SG of her own. As Leader, she has full permissions to modify the base. Her "Add Personal Item" button is still disabled, even though she has claimed the Base Items from her mail.

I'm finding this whole thing very confusing and inconsistent. I'm on Tier 5 of Paragon Rewards, and have spent two tokens on that tier so far. Of the three remaining slots in Tier 5, two of them give base items ("Arachnos Flyer and Longbow Chaser" and "Posters of the CoH Comic Covers"). I'm reluctant to spend a token on those if they're just going to disappear/be unavailable.

Yeah, I'm not worried about the stuff I actually placed in the SG base. It's the stuff that never got placed that I'm curious about. I'm not even that concerned about losing it, honestly. I'm mainly just curious about the devs' reasoning for making it disappear. Since these items were earned personally, not by the SG, then story-/lore-wise it would seem that these are items my character collected while adventuring on her own, and they belong to her. My character chose to "donate" some of it to her SG, and to keep the rest for herself. Like, to decorate her mansion next door to Manticore So when I leave the SG, what? Do the others in the SG come by my house and take my stuff?

I've only joined SGs on three of my many characters, and the other day I decided to leave one of those SGs and form my own "personal" SG. Upon quitting the SG, I got the warning that I was going to lose all of the personal base decoration items that I hadn't placed. That's fine, no biggie. I've only earned 10 tokens so far, and the only base items included in my spending choices to this point have been the Wall-mounted Weapon Displays and the Signature Character Items. Though I never placed any of the Signature Character Items, so I don't even know what those are.

But then it occurred to me, what about my 40 or so alts that have never joined a SG? Do they simply fail to have the base items in the first place, since they were not in SGs when I spent the veteran tokens? I just had one of my newer characters create a supergroup, and I noticed that the "Place Personal Item" button was grayed out when I entered the base, but I'm not sure if that was because the entrance portal room (the only room so far) just doesn't allow placing personal items, or if that character just doesn't have the items to place.

I do wonder about the reasoning behind losing items that I never placed, though. I can understand not being able to pick up the stuff I placed and "take it with me" when I leave a SG - they're part of the base once I've placed them, and I've sort of "gifted" them to the group. But I kind of imagined the stuff I didn't place just sitting in personal storage somewhere until I was ready to actually use them.

Now that I think about it, there was something similar in Founders' Falls, too - every contact wanting me to go talk to the same person. I've only gotten one character as far as FF, though, and now I can't remember the details.

I used the term "orientation missions" in the title because I don't know what else to call them (maybe there's already a term for them, but I haven't heard it). I'm talking about the missions where you get sent to talk to the Bloody Bay contact, or to learn about Hero Corps, etc. (and the Redside equivalents). These are purely "metagame" missions that exist solely to inform the player, not the character about where these NPCs are and what they do.

Suggestion: Give account-wide credit for completing these missions. Maybe via an account-wide badge or something, the same way you get the Knowledgeable badge for learning how to use the Paragon Market on your first character and then no longer have to complete that step on subsequent characters.

The thing is, once I've done these missions a couple times, I know where to find these NPCs. Having to repeatedly leave Steel Canyon or Skyway City, interrupting whatever arc I'm working on, to travel back to Kings' Row, click on an NPC, and then travel back to Steel Canyon/Skyway City just gets annoying after 20+ characters.

The biggest annoyance, though, is the fact that every contact in the zone will offer these missions when a character reaches a certain level, and none of them will offer anything else until I hike myself over to Kings' Row/the Bloody Bay contact. I can't just accept the mission from one contact and then go get a "real" mission from another contact. I must complete the orientation mission. This is analogous to going to my job every day and having to watch the same training videos they showed me when I was hired, before I can start my actual work each day.

Adding to my personal annoyance is the fact that I'm not interested in PvP at all, so being "forced" to learn where to go for PvP on every character is wasting my time.

Aha, I think I may have solved my recent +1 mob mystery, after running into it again:

Malta. Would I be correct in guessing this enemy group starts at level 41? The Hero Morality Mission I mentioned earlier that was giving me trouble was full of level 41 Malta Gunslingers (lieutenants), and I got another Tip mission last night that had Malta mobs in it, and once again they were all level 41. The other Tip missions I ran that did not include Malta mobs were fine.

Fortunately, I'm only a couple bubbles away from 41 myself, so this shouldn't be an issue much longer.

I should have also noted that I still can't run Ultra settings, but that's more hardware limitations than anything else.

Let me start by saying that I'm really enjoying CoX. I started playing last September, right about the time Freedom went live for VIPs (and I am indeed VIP). I've been a WoW player for three years, but since I'm not a raider or serious PvPer, I've grown horribly bored with that game and came here looking for a replacement. I can happily say that CoX has been outstanding. I especially like the "The journey is more important than the destination" aspect of the game. As I mentioned above, I'm really not all that focused on max-level, "end game" content; I'm more story-driven and have been quite happy taking my time leveling while exploring as many mission arcs as I can (not to mention the fact that I'm a longtime comic book fan, and my favorite superheroes have always been the "solo" types, rather than the "team types"). I only got my first character to level 40 a couple days ago, and that's taken me since September. Granted, I already have a ton of alts, and that has slowed down my main's advancement, but that's okay with me. I'm having a blast.

Having said that, I do feel there is room for improvement, and have a couple suggestions. And just because I feel like it, I will present my suggestions using sarcasm, with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek

First off, I asked myself, "What one thing does this game need to make it even better than it already is? To really put it 'over the top'?" I gave this some thought, along with the fact that my main is a Blaster, and I came up with the answer: More knockback!

You see, when I think about what I enjoy most in video games, I realize that what I most look forward to is spending a large portion of my time lying on the ground and standing back up. The best part of lying on the ground is the complete inability to defend myself. Nothing says "epic adventure" or "heroic" like dying 15 seconds after entering a mission because the first group of three enemies I encountered immediately unloaded on me with knockback attacks, sending me flying all the way back to the door where I now can't even see myself due to the camera being embedded in the back of my head, and since I'm unable to either defend myself or pop an inspiration, I'm promptly stomped into paste. The excitement I feel while flying the full length of the zone from the hospital back to the mission entrance to try again is quite a rush!

The second improvement I have in mind involves adding more settings that don't work as advertised. The practical joke where I visit a Field Analyst and tell him, "I want to fight enemies -1 to my level*", and then the following missions primarily contain 95% enemies that are +1 to my level is pure comedy genius. Just yesterday, after double-checking my settings with a Field Analyst, my level 40 fire/fire blaster entered a mission where she discovered that every enemy (100%!) in the mission was level 41. Even better, all but maybe six of them were lieutenants. Engaging one of these enemies and only being able to get off two attacks (which missed) before being chain-knocked back-knocked down-held-immobilized-stunned and then dying without inflicting any damage on them had me howling with laughter!

All right, I got that out of my system. I'll try to be serious and constructive now.

The knockback issue just seems to be out of hand, from what I've seen in the game so far. I realize this is more of a problem for blasters, since we really have next to no defense against it, even at high levels, but even scrappers and brutes have trouble with it at lower levels. It's the primary reason I lost interest in playing any of my Praetorian characters after I got one of them to level 20 and she skipped town to take up heroing in Paragon City. Those crazy, drug-addled gang members (can't remember what they're called at the moment... "Destroyers"?) seemed to have nothing but knockback attacks. It was just frustrating and tiresome constantly falling down and standing up, falling down and standing up, over and over. I thoroughly enjoyed the Praetorian storyline; I just couldn't take the frustration of getting knocked down non-stop. The only thing I've found I can do for my blaster is plugging a Karma: Knockback Protection IO into her Combat Jumping pool power, though I haven't been able to do that yet. And if she didn't have Combat Jumping, she wouldn't even have a place to slot that IO.

The issue with the Field Analysts/Fateweavers and the difficulty settings has bugged me since I started playing. I discovered I had to choose "-1 to my level" simply to get enemies my own level. If I kept the default "+0" setting, I found that almost every mission was full of +1 enemies. This was mainly an issue when I was still brand-new to the game and figuring out how things worked — all my characters were low-level, and with only two attack powers, fighting +1 enemies, especially lieutenants, was too much. The "+1 when I chose -1" thing seems more recent, like it started a couple patches ago (I play on a Mac, so this may not be affecting Windows players), so it may simply be a bug.

I was trying to figure out why +1 lieutenants were giving me so much more trouble than +0 elite bosses. My conclusion was "preparation". Elite bosses usually spawn where I can see them before entering aggro range, so I can position myself, pop the requisite inspirations, and use my chargeup powers (and on my blasters, open up with a sniper attack for big damage). Lieutenants, on the other hand, frequently spawn, say, just around the corner at the top of some stairs, so I never even see them until I come around that corner and run smack into them, leaving me no chance to prepare before engaging. And if they're +1 to me, they have a much better chance of hitting me than I have of hitting them. So I'm affected by every knockback/hold/immobilize they attack with, while my own attacks frequently miss them and my blaster's one lonely immobilize power fails to immobilize them. What I'm getting at is that it's not "fun" getting repeatedly roflstomped by higher-level enemies purely because I can't do anything.

* Yes, I know, easy setting. Like I said, I'm more interested in going through the story, at least at this point. I'll increase the difficulty later.

At least it's not as bad as a certain other big MMO's forums. I've had cases there where I've logged in and typed up a longish post (and this can take me a while, since I like to make sure my language is clear to avoid misunderstandings), and then when I hit "Submit" I discover my session "timed out" while I was typing. Which means my entire post vanishes into thin air when the forum auto-refreshes my login. I had to learn to "select all and copy" my post before clicking the "Submit" button, so that if that happened I could simply paste my post back in instead of having to start all over.

As shown in this image:

http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/cla...unk_belt01.jpg

The female belt "Classic Steampunk 01" disappears underwater.

I've noticed this with some female boots as well, though I can't recall off the top of my head which ones. But I've seen it when doing the low-level quest in Atlas Park where you have to enter the Hellions' cave after defeating 4 Hellions lieutenants. On some of my characters their legs get cut off at the knees (or at the top edge of the "boot" zone) when they're swimming across that lake toward the cave entrance. But only with certain boots.

I just wanted to encourage anybody who hasn't upgraded to Mac OS X "Lion" yet to do so if you can. I upgraded my 2008 iMac a couple weeks ago, and the difference between Snow Leopard and Lion is like night and day. The game runs as smooth as butter now, and I've even been able to increase many of my graphics settings.

Is there a simple way to save the graphics settings on a character-by-character basis? Or more specifically, can I "permanently" change the settings for one character without affecting the defaults I've set for other characters?

Here's the problem: The "Dark Armor" power set is just ... too much. I can't even see this character when she has all her DA powers toggled on (and she's only level 27, so there are more powers to come). She's just this black cloud running around. Aside from the visibility problem, that swirling mess of smoke (or whatever it's supposed to be) is a real drag on my FPS.

The only solutions I've found are to either choose "Enabled" on the "Suppress FX When Close" option, or drag the "Max Particle Count" slider all the way down to the minimum. The problem with this solution is that I have to manually go in and change these settings when I log this character in, and then manually change them back when I play a different character.

So can I set these things for this specific character only, so that I don't have to open up the Graphics Settings window every time?

Wanted to post an update on this: I think I found the problem.

I mentioned that I was running CoH from an external drive. I was doing this for two main reasons:

1) The external Firewire drive itself is much faster than my iMac's internal drive

2) I wanted to avoid situations where the game was trying to read from the internal drive at the same time my e-mail client was downloading mail (for example), or during my hourly Time Machine backups (TM backs up my internal drive to yet another external drive)/ The backup process doesn't involve the particular external drive CoH is on.

Anyway, I was poking around my Mac last night doing something entirely unrelated, when I discovered a copy of the CoH app sitting there in my Applications folder on the internal drive. And I noticed the "Last Modified" date on it was Jan. 12, the same day I performed the problematic update I discussed in my original post.

That prompted me to look at the copy of CoH on the external drive — the copy I thought I'd been running all this time (and the only copy I thought I had) — and I saw it hadn't been updated since last October.

So apparently, when I moved the CoH app over to the external drive, along with the NCLauncher app (back in October, apparently), I neglected to delete the original copy from the Applications folder on the internal drive. And ever since then, the NCLauncher has been downloading the intervening patches and applying them to the copy on the internal drive instead of the one on the external drive. And since the copy on the internal drive is apparently the one I've been running all this time, it makes sense that I wasn't seeing the performance improvement I thought I'd get by moving it to the external drive.

Now, why there was such a large, additional performance nosedive after the most recent patch is still a mystery. But in any case, I copied the newer CoH app from the internal drive over to the external drive, made sure I then eradicated it from the internal drive, and finally configured NCLauncher to point to the fresh copy on the external drive.

I've played for several hours since then, and performance has, happily, been nearly flawless.