Nethergoat

Dakan also did RPG supplement work back in the day.
And of course Zeb Cook, the head of the old CoV project, was an oldschool AD&D author.

Lotta RPG genes in the CoH pool.
Maybe they should go back to that well to find someone to keep lore 'in check' so to speak....

It's a great resource to have- a big team mission that doesn't take a huge time commitment and that you can basically run any time you want- at least on a high population server.

I've rolled up several defenders & controllers over the past couple of weeks, which I'd never have done in the 'old days'. But thanks to DFB/DIB I can get them enough levels to where they aren't absolutely painful to solo which is most of what I do. And with the LFG channel finding teams is just much simpler than it was in the old days.

I actually ended up running two over the last few days- it's what everybody was doing, for whatever reason, so I tagged a long.

The second team I was on made a mockery of the whole thing- it was the team that *should* have had the slider turned up. I was expecting the worst as it was not one, not two, but THREE tanks, one brute, a couple of scrappers plus one blaster and my kin/dark defender.

But there must have been some heavily IO's builds in the mix because stuff was just evaporating. I barely got to use Fulcrum Shift at all- by the time I got to a spawn it was usually down to a few lieutenants & bosses with just a bit of health left. The shield tank in particular had some attack (I'm assuming Shield Charge) that just vaporised minions.

I got another level out of it, so not much to complain about. It was fast enough that I didn't mind feeling like a PL tag-along, and there was one really cool character on the team, Thunder Girl, who had a terrific golden age style costume. There was some entertaining semi-RP running banter even though this was on Freedom...all in all not a bad night's play.


Oh, and of course....ALTS!

I got a costume idea messing around online- something based on the old monochrome computer monitors of my youth, in particular the green text on black look provided by my old Epson CP/M machine.

Messed around with a couple of looks before finally finding one I liked. Tried out a couple of names, different powersets, until it finally occured to me that no set but Beam Rifle would do. Which I didn't own, so of course I had to immediately blow 800 points that I'd been storing up for the new round of Super Packs.

Ah well, easy come easy go!
Also, my son could easily have spent them on some kind of absolute garbage while he was busily burning up all my reward tokens, so CARPE DIEM!

So was born Cathode Ray, beam rifle/radiation (of course) corrupter.

I'm super happy with his costume and after running a couple of DFBs and doing some missions in Steel I'm almost in love with Beam Rifle (it's just so SMOOTH! and looks so GOOD! and OMG is disintegrate FUN!)

I'll try and remember to get a screenie tonight- he turned out really well. This might be one of those rare costumes I nail on the first try and never have to fiddle with.

On the marketeering front, turning crummy purples into great ones is both comically profitable and highly addictive. I've abandoned all of my other schemes and put everyone on the purple chase- it's too much of a good thing to last very long, and in fact I'm already seeing prices creep, creep, creep upward.

I've been able to pick up 2-3 a day and sell them pretty quickly at my price point, barring losing a few tens of millions to irritating bid creepers. Really, when you're blowing 300m on a crafted IO who cares if you get it for 280m? If you're that worried about money just craft the darn thing yourself!

But this is the ultimate illustration of my longstanding belief that marketeers naturally gravitate to the easiest profit for the least work. I had various profitable schemes going on other characters- the Goat was doing booming sales on Steadfast -KB IO's for example, selling 15-20 a day for between 10-20m.

Which is a tidy profit and a nice gig, but that's 15-20 recipes to buy, a bunch of salvage to collect, a fairly volatile market (when I got in I was getting 30m per IO and got stuck with a whole bunch of overpriced junk I had to re-list, probably thanks to some other marketeer moving in and undercutting me).

So let's say I'm selling 10 of those a day for 10m. 100m, minus costs- figure about 1m each for materials, and however much for marketing fees.
80-90m in profits?

I'm consistently getting at least 130m in profit on each of the purples I'm moving.

So why buy, craft & sell 10 Steadfasts when I can buy, craft, convert & sell one purple for at least 40m more in profit?

It did- Jack Emmert.


As little respect as I have for him as a game dev, he was a very talented author of pen & paper RPG supplements including one of my all time favorites, Children o' the Atom for one of my all time favorite fantasy worlds, Deadlands: Hell on Earth.

I think that experience served him well "worldbuilding" the CoH backstory, although it gave him some backwards notions of what's fun. There are a lot of things that work terrifically well in a pen and paper setting that are DEATH in an MMO, and I don't think he's figured out what they are to this day.

not even close.


the thing about marketeering is that it leaves obvious fingerprints that other marketeers spot. When you see someone running a sweet gig, you want in on some of that action. So pretty much any "good" niche with a high enough volume is going to be home to scads of marketeers who're all jostling for position with each other (and everyone else bidding and selling as well).


Go take a look at Clockwork Winders- unless something has changed in the past week or so, there should be like 1700 listed an 0 bidding. That's all due to me, or rather it's all due to the people who started messing around with them once I bought up the supply for a few days just because I got tired of there being none available when my crafter needed them.

When I started a typical number of listings would be 40, or 60 with no bids.

wait, what's happening?
We're going after Freedom?

I have some billions for the INFcincerator, in that case....although I don't think I have any Freedom 88's, so I'll need an invite or something.


/edit
oh wait, still on virtue- whew!

okay, no invite needed- I'll stoke the INFcincerator after work.

This is entirely possible and should be a priority, mainly because it's the sort of thing you could assign to a minimum-ish wage intern or temp with a degree in literature.

Minor investment, big payoff.

Of course, the devs may have data showing most of the playerbase are sub-literate thumb typists who think '4' is a word, in which case we ought not hold our breath... =P

I'm with you on this 100%.
There are MANY redundant & repeated words in descriptive mission text, not to mention heavy reliance on meaningless placeholders like 'alright'.
And I know where they come from, because I have the same problem on my blog if I just bang out a post without re-reading it- there's a tendency when you're just trying to get something down for your brain to get stuck on a word. I do it here on the forums too- the other day I did a post on the Manticore TF, re-read it and discovered I'd used the word "tedious" some ridiculous number of times- accurate, sure, but just lazy writing. I left one in and found different ways to phrase the others so that things read more smoothly.

If I can do it for a blog or forum post, surely they can do it for commercial game content.



Hah!

The problem here is CoH is a game, and it doesn't matter if your story has the historical scope and human insight of Shakespeare if the gameplay doesn't in some way reflect (and hopefully amplify) the text.

I can't count how many times I played those arcs you're so fond of back in the day....and I literally don't remember a single plot detail of ANY of them. All I remember is how tedi...er, BORING endless generic kill alls and street hunts were.

Contrast to stuff like the Freakalympics, which I've only played a couple of times but which I remember quite vividly (and not just because it's newer). In a game the story must be reflected somehow in the construction of the missions. To misquote Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the message".

You can write a Pulitzer prize winning story, but if I have to log in to CoH to experience it I expect gameplay to match. If I don't get it I'm going to say "Gawd this sucks!" and go do something else.

Well, as long as it's the right people.


Played the red side last night, really liked it. Fun, amusing, immersive, and occasionally challenging.

Two hooves up.

Proof that patience is a virtue, I threw up my hands at Rikti Alloy prices and put in a bid for 2.1m that was filled in the am.

Not that it really matters when you're crafting stuff that's going to turn you a 100m+ profit, but it was the principle of the thing! =P

well, I'm not defending the general failure to spell check and apply the rules of punctuation to in-game text. =P

Just saying hiring a story editor in the traditional sense is probably outside the financial purview of Paragon Studios...

people who are good at that job don't come cheap, which is why books cost money.

video games are always going to prioritize gameplay over text content.

some people insist on pretending imaginary problems are real.

Glad it was helpful!

I'm still getting surprised by stuff (although the sheer volume and quantity of my astonishment has leveled off), so I guess I'll keep on doing it.


So, the Kal TF was terrific.
Super fun and getting it started was easy peasy- put the boy to bed, logged in to a tell from Aurora, sent a ping to Organica, tossed a comment out on the LFG channel while she switched characters and before I knew it we had six slots filled. Organica has a friend who was up for it, so I passed her the star. One more LFG signal flare and we were full and ready to roll.

General comments:

Travel time is basically eliminated on this TF- nearly all the missions sent us to the ferry, which caused a short-circuit in the Old School part of my gaming brain. Every single time I was jumping away from the ferry, looking around confusedly for the next mission door only to find it was right back at the ferry.

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I don't mind some travel when it's thematically appropriate. I'm not a fan of the pointless zone-hopping of the older blue TFs but this was tilted a *tiny bit* too far in the other direction. The ferry was one of the stars of the show. It gave me a little of the same feeling I get running stuff in the MA- never having to physically go anywhere for these missions in far flung corners of the game world was a bit immersion breaking.


Still....much preferable to getting sent to Crey's Folley to canoodle with 40 freaks.

We had a strong team and basically steamrolled 99% of everything that got in our way. One exception were the Midnighters, who prefaced some crazy attacks with BIG RED LETTERS flashing across my screen- I guess I was supposed to run away or something? Alas, brute lock is strong and some huge thing happened and we had some fatalities.

Happily, between our empath and various vet rez powers there wasn't much down time & after that initial wave of disaster we made short work of things.


Another tough nut was Infernal, who wasn't much trouble except when he was one-shotting someone. Again, not a huge problem with our various rez's.

Which made me consider the gameplay 'value' of death...debt isn't anything these days so the only remaining down side to dying is inconvenience- and if you don't have to hit the hospital and run back, there isn't even that.

Anyway.

Our only really tough fight was in the final mission at Positron's place. We ended up getting *way* too many robots mad at us at some point and they were doing some kind of damage I had no answer for. A team wipe was averted with a timely Assemble the Team from our empath. We all woke up, took the fight to Posi and made short work of things.

This was pretty much everything I liked in a TF- short, diverse, cool maps, fun enemies, very rewarding (I picked up a level + three nuggets) and fun teammates.

But my favorite thing about it was all the NPCs in various cutscenes having to address our team leader with a straight face.

eg:

Odysseus: A most admirable display of martial cunning, AE Baby. I salute you.

and the absolute best, given his travails with the entire system:

Positron: AE Baby! Return Numina to me and I will let you go.


Which admittedly tickled me more than it would most others, but still very entertaining.

So, a grand success all 'round, except for the failure of my GUI toggle bind.