NewScrapper

My personal preference was that instead of investing all the time and effort it must have taken to redo 72 costumes, they would have hired some proofreaders to go through the game and make edits to all the annoying text errors. Or have their programmers work on those QoL issues that so badly need to go away. (Stop sending me to Wincott or Peebles. Stop telling me Architect Studio Manager might have a job for me. Stop sending me to the Hero Corps Rep in Kings freakin' Row when I've already outleveled that zone.)

My only dislikes are (1) they didn't keep the red/black scheme for the minions, and (2) dang, those hats got tall -- I keep looking at these guys and thinking, "Galactus?"

No serious visceral objections, though. The spikiness comes off a little ugly in the bosses, but, well...they ARE the Circle of Thorns after all, so spikiness fits.

I just created my first Praetorian and went through the Tutorial. My first feeling about Going Rogue is...irritation, frankly. SO much optional stuff to read, and I'm OCD enough to have to go through everything and try to absorb it all. (Yes, I got the Avid Reader badge.) It's also irritating from an OCD standpoint that you have to answer NPC questions, and your answers impact how other NPCs respond to you later on. I don't want to have to play through the game a bunch of times to see every possible permutation -- that's a lot more time-consuming than flipping through a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. I guess I'll just have to be careful that, when I'm going through all the different answering options, the last one I pick is the one I want NPCs to react to later on. It just seems silly and superfluous to have that kind of stuff in there. I don't know, maybe other people get a kick out of it.

Another pet peeve: When you're first given the choice to become Loyalist or Resistance, nothing plot-wise has happened at that point to really make you want to be a Resistance fighter. Sure, you've been drafted into the goon squad, but unless you've pre-decided to be a straight-up anarchist from the get-go, there really isn't anything that happens up to the decision point that would make you say, "You know, my emotions are pushing me in the direction of the Resistance!" So I'll have to imagine up a character who's already got "issues" with the status quo and see what the Resistance side of things holds.

Still, I'm only at level 2. We'll see....

Seriously??? I swear I have NEVER heard of that before. That's awesome! Thanks!

I see some players on occasion with their arcs listed in their sigs, and sometimes they have more than 3 listed. I thought you could only have 3 at a time published, unless you get slots freed up by having your arcs declared Devs Choice or Hall of Fame? Are there alternative ways to get more slots? (Because I don't see that many Devs Choice and Hall of Fame Arcs out there.)

Did Scrappers ever get Super Strength? If not, did the devs ever give a reason why not?

I like playing characters who deal justice with their fists, but on the Scrapper side that pretty much limits me to Dark Melee (and Kinetic Melee, though that's pretty different from straight up punching). I think the devs once mentioned the possibility of a Street Fighting powerset that sounded interesting, but it was probably shelved in favor of Kinetic Melee. I would really like to see Super Strength on a Scrapper.

Anyone hear anything about whether, once Freedom goes live, VIP players who have filled up their published arc slots will be able to buy more with either Paragon Points or real money or whatever?

Pet peeve of mine: I don't like it that Helper players have yellow names and HelpMe players have purple names. I'm used to seeing blue heroes and red villains, and I liked it that way -- gives a sense of solidarity rather than class distinctions, as the yellow screams "I'm all that" and the purple screams "n00b". I don't really know what good the name colors do anyway...is there a buddy system going on that I'm not seeing? Most of the help I've seen comes over the Help channel. Do Helpers really seek out HelpMes and ping them with "may I help you" like overzealous waiters trying to refill your almost-full glass with water? Do HelpMes really crowd around the Helpers and emote to their knees in gratitude at having found a wizened sage who might bequeath knowledge upon them? Let me be clear -- I don't mind the system itself, but I can really do without the garish yellow and purple name colors, and would prefer that the Helper or HelpMe title by itself be indicator enough. (If you actually get mileage out of the yellow & purple names, I'd be curious to hear about it. I haven't marked myself as either.)

I'll give that a try. Thanks!

No, I don't know much about the diagnostic tools available. What should /netgraph show me if it's good or bad?

I have a brand new PC with an ATI Radeon 6950 and an i5 processor. Was thinking I should be seeing no glitches at all when playing CoH -- maybe my expectations are unreasonable -- especially since my settings are Default plus these few changes:

1) Resolution set to 1920x1200.
2) Character detail at 200%.
3) World detail at 200%.
4) Depth of field effects turned off.

Yet one of the things that just drives me batty is that moving objects tend to "stutter" while I'm standing still just watching them go by. Cars will move, then stop, then move, then stop, and the jerkiness is totally frustrating from a lack-of-immersion standpoint. When the server (I play Virtue) gets really full, then I even see pedestrians stutter in mid-stride. And I see a lot of it with player characters, too.

I'm just wanting to know, is this anything to do with my PC, or is this a network or ISP or server lag issue? (Sometimes my powers don't fire off as quickly as I think they should, either, but this might just be my perception.)

I absolutely agree with leaving Atlas and Galaxy as separate zones. I would much rather see a new early-level zone added to CoV. Mercy Island bores me to tears, to be honest. There's nothing to do or see there. Half the island is a hovel, and the other half is a sprawling mess of a city. It's just depressing. It's really more like a hazard zone than a city zone -- very little personality.

In fact, all of the early CoV zones are like this. I think part of this is the lack of "Defeat X" missions to make the villain groups more interesting. Look at all the Luddites and Corulax in Cap Au Diable. Who are they, and what do they want? Is there even any story content behind them, or are they just there? It's been a while -- I really need to play through the lower-level content of CoV to get my bearings -- but I've honestly never gotten a character past lvl 20 on CoV because it's just so chaotic and dull. I don't feel plugged into the story. I rather feel like I've been dumped into a world full of random spawns and contacts with fixed story-arcs that offer no variety or sense of choice. Maybe there's some intention behind it to make the CoV experience feel different from the CoH experience, or maybe I'm just not as fond of playing a Villain as I am of playing a Hero -- it could very well be me who's not a good fit for the game. But here's the thing...I really want to feel like a villain on CoV-side, and honestly, all I really feel like in each and every zone is a two-bit thug. I commit a few random crimes, rob a bank, and maybe do a story-arc or two, and then I hit a new zone and the cycle repeats -- I'm back to being a common thug again. For a "Destined One" I sure don't feel like I'm being groomed at all for any kind of significant destiny.