Mr_Energon

So here I am on yet another business trip, playing City of Heroes during the evening to pass the time away and work on my plan to finally get one of each archetype to 50. I've been playing practically since launch, yet I still have to get a dominator, brute, stalker, and the epic archetypes to 50. Hmm, if I do the epics, I guess that means 7 more characters to get to 50.

My son called and I filled him in on my plan. "I'll help you dad". Sniff - attaboy.

My wife and son got me the game for my birthday the summer after it came out. A life-long comic fan, I had been coveting it, but was kind of reluctant to dive into a MMO for the first time. I'm sure she's regretting it now, but it's been a fun run.

The first account quickly turned into two so that my son could play. During business trips, we would sometimes play together, talking on the phone while we ran missions together and weekend mornings were often dedicated to City-time. He's a high school sophomore now, with lots of demands on his time, but we still get to play together when our free time aligns.

In a couple of years he'll be off to college. With City shutting down, I don't think we'll ever have that shared gaming experience again. Console controllers are a bear on my carpal tunnel, so I've left that area to him and his friends. On the plus side, I'll probably knock out a few more of the honey-do projects.

Still hoping that City gets saved. If not, I'll remember it for a long time, it's been that intertwined with my life.

Did they turn on another event? In my old age, I fuzzily remember comments that only one event can be run at a time. Is Double-XP coded as an event?

And keep on marketing too! We don't want WW/BM to dry up!

Adding my voice to say "Awesome video" and to thank you and everyone involved for your efforts.

Added mine as well. This is pretty cool.

The loss of Veteran rewards and purchased items would be a bitter pill to swallow. Even so, I'd probably still play if it was the only option to keeping the game alive.

With these two as free, that will free up some points for me to buy a Thrown Weapons primary for blasters (hint hint)

I went with Aquarianne for my magical blaster.

The overriding question I have is why is coop the only way to share resources between sides? Why can't we revamp a zone and give a hero-view or villain view using either the phase technology or separate map server instances.

From a cost/benefit point of view, you would be able to take all of the art assets developed for the revamp and make them available to all of the player base. Yes, you would need additional server runtime resources, but you would need that for a new (not repurposed ala Dark Astoria) coop zone.

If not this approach, then the art assets should be reused as instance maps for missions and build a set of missions for the opposing side that would make use of the instanced zone maps.

Isn't it true that any alternate animations have to have the same playtime as the originals for the set to work as designed? Doesn't that put a damper on sharing between Street Justice and Martial Arts without some rework?

A few thoughts of my own.

From my point of view, the different ATs and powers are the real replayable content of the game and new powersets or AT has a bigger impact on my desire to play the game than a new zone or set of missions (not that I mind those). Add in the meta-game of build management, inventions, and the like, a new powerset or AT leads to much more in-game time for me than a set of missions.

So to make a wild assumption that everyone is like me, launching a new AT would be a no-brainer, but others may have a different opinion on that.

Price wise, I would probably easily shell out $20 USD for a new fully realized AT like assault/shield with 4-5 choices for both primary and secondary and the knowledge that the AT would be considered with others for powerset proliferation.

I believe the current price of masterminds and controllers can't really be considered when pricing a new AT as based on earlier dev comments, that price point is based more on server impact instead of development time.

The different suggestions for a new EAT similar to Khelds or SoA have been interesting, but I personally prefer a more open concept AT than one limited to a branching power tree and a concept that might not appeal to a majority of players.

If they offered new versions of each elemental blaster primary but with different origination points and weapon customization (staff (tech/magic), pistol/wand, and optic), I would buy it on day one. Wouldn't matter if the powers are essentially the same as existing sets, the new origination points open up all sorts of character concepts. The original set of alternate animations for blasters were a major letdown.

I read Jack McDevitt for my lighter sci-fi needs, Simmons for the deeper reads.

In my 24 pack I got the full costume set and one catalyst. Can't remember the full ATIO distribution, but it was pretty scattered across all ATs so I'll probably need to do some marketeering if I want to go for a full set.

Well, after three days of trying the NCsoft Launcher is now downloading. At the current download speed, I might be able to play after 10-11 hours.

I had checked this morning and was still getting the Retrying Connection... in the download status but now it appears to be past that issue.

I did nothing to this system to explain the change (unless running the Game Adviser had a side effect).

I'm having the same issue. The ncsoft launcher starts fine, determines that an update is required but when I launch the update, its just "Retrying connection".

I've checked my firewall settings to make sure the ncsoft updater executables aren't being blocked. I've even tried it with two different networks: hotel and mobile broadband: same symptom either way.

I'm on the road right now, so I may be freedomless until I get home.

How about some cosmic travel powers ... my Incarnate needs his own boom tube (or dimensional aperture device to avoid legal issues)

Yep, I have the same problem. Always seems to happen when the dang Resurrect dialog is prompting me during a run of the weekly task force. :-)

Hopefully the booster set will contain new feathered wings - not that I dislike the existing wings, but the set should be self-sufficient and Paragon should not expect that purchasers of the booster already have the vet or Valkyrie wings.

While I'd like to see more power customization animation options as much as the next guy, I'd also like to see a bit more power animation variety in the enemy groups. If different groups had different ways to say, hurl a boulder, it would be a nice touch.