Pauper

How far behind can you be and still run with the team?

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Pauper

Short, one-shot type missions should be patterned after tips:

- You can do them in the zone you're in -- no running halfway across Paragon or the Rogue Isles (even though it's easier to do now than ever before).
- They're short in terms of time investment.
- They're long enough to allow for interesting mechanics (I'm thinking of the Malta Action Hero tip specifically here).
- You get to interact with the game's signature NPCs. More interaction with the lore is always better.
- There are enough of them so that you can pick and choose if for some reason some of them don't fit your character. If your character can't stand up to Carnies, you don't have to take a Carnival of Shadows-based tip. Likewise, if a particular tip gives you two options, neither of which makes sense for your character to pursue, you can drop it and eventually receive another.

One wrinkle I'd like to see added to one-shot missions is to have them incorporate the mechanic from the Valentine's Day tips -- have an option to either start or complete the mission by reporting to one of two contacts (to avoid excessive complexity, I'd be OK with having the contacts be in specific level-appropriate zones) in order to 'resolve' the mission in different ways.

I'm not all that excited about patterning 'long' missions after Dark Astoria, because DA seems to me to be more a number of shorter arcs with a common theme. There's nothing wrong with that, but there should also be a place in the game for truly epic solo mission arcs a la the Freaklympics.

It's easier to say what not to do with these missions than what to do, but I think the devs have pretty much figured all these out already:

- No 'visit 5 different phone booths across the zone and look for ambushes' missions.
- No 'defeat X mobs on the street to find your next mission' missions. (Or, if you absolutely must include such a mission in your larger arc, then at least include the information on which neighborhoods in which zones to visit to find these mobs. "You'll find Council all over Founders' Falls," is not just a lie, but a frustrating one when the contact is on the other side of the zone from where the Council hang out.)
- If you're going to have the 'mission accept' trigger an ambush, have the ambushing mobs appear somewhere close to the contact that gives the mission.
- It's actually OK to have missions take place all over the city -- again, that's part of what makes the mission 'epic' -- but if you're going to send me to an out-of-the-way hazard zone, make that mission meaningful with respect to the zone. For instance, don't just send me to Boomtown to investigate a Council base -- there are Council bases everywhere -- send me to Boomtown to investigate a Council base that's in the midst of fighting off a pack of scavenging Clockwork!

Add in the 'series of short connected arcs' that are represented by the Graves/Twinshot arcs and the Dark Astoria arcs, and you've got something for everyone. (And for the record, the Dr. Graves arc is one of my favorites -- the first time I played the Shining Stars arcs, I saw the 'twist' coming the first time I talked with Grym in the university. Even after playing that arc, I did not see the 'twist' coming in Graves, and it was cooler for it.)

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Pauper

Another option for shards, though it's woefully inefficient: Rikti mothership raids.

A decent raid will net you 700-800 Vanguard merits, which can be used to purchase 4-5 Gra'i Matters. They're used as common components in some Alphas, or can be converted to a single shard per component.

The biggest advantage is that you can do them prior to level 50, and thus earn XP toward hitting 50 at the same time you start stocking up on stuff to convert into Incarnate components.

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Pauper

My own feeling is that returning players who want to play for free should roll new toons on a new account (linked to the old one, if you like).

That way you can focus on the cool QoL changes ("I can fly at level 4!?") instead of head-bang about all the stuff that you can't do with the old toys.

Feel free to visit the old guys if you ever decide to go VIP. It's much easier that way.

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Pauper

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer:

All chat can be indecent chat
Though recent chats are bolder
For filth (I'm glad to say) is in the mind of the beholder
When correctly viewed
Everything is lewd
I can tell you things about Penny Yin
And that sweet little Swan? Who knows where she's been?

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Pauper

I'll be attending, but have the last in a three-series arc of Living Forgotten Realms going from 7-11 on Saturday night.

If there's a pre-party or after-party, I'd be glad to visit.

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Pauper

Yep -- in fact, I did an experiment this weekend where I re-installed the Windows game client in my 5-year old MBP's Windows Vista Boot Camp partition:

- Hardly any fan spin-up.
- Zones loaded more quickly.
- Could support a higher level of graphics rendering on the same hardware.

The only explanation I've found for how Cider works is that it translates WindowsAPI calls like the ones from DirectX into instructions that can be handled by MacOS. In that sense, it's not really that different from running the PC version of the game in virtualization software like Parallels or VirtualBox, except it doesn't appear that Cider attempts to do hardware emulation in software and thus has a smaller 'footprint' when running in the MacOS. Nevertheless, it seems that, if you're a stickler for performance rather than just being happy that the game runs at all, you'll be happier Boot Camping your Mac than just running the Ciderized version of City of Heroes.

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Pauper

Snow Globe,

Check to see that you have the most current security certificate for the NCSoft login page -- some folks have been reporting that they can't even get to the page because the certificate appears to have changed as a result of the login page changes.

If you're in Firefox, while on the login page select Tools -> Page Info and go to the Security tab. This will let you view the security certificate and install it in the browser if needed.

Let us know if this helps,

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Pauper

Apparently there's a certificate issue with the login page -- looking at the certificate, you can see that the root level cert is 'signed' by NCSoft, Ltd., but the issuer is 'SGTRUST SGC CERTIFICATION AUTHORITY', which is apparently a smaller organization and not one that's likely to be 'pre-loaded' on your browser like bigger players VeriSign, RSA, and Entrust are.

To make the error go away, manually install the security certificate from the site into your browser certificate store. To figure out how to do that, use your browser's Help menu or Google it.

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Pauper

I use a 60-day game card, and I get my points on the day that the new game card goes into effect (for when I enter the game card code prior to the previous code's expiration) and roughly 30 days later (depending on whether that date falls on a business day).

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Pauper

I'd be curious to see how much more 'expensive' the revised promotion is in terms of codes.

Under the previous system, the Community Team would post ten codes at a time. They might do this three or four times during the day, resulting in a total 'cost' of about 40 codes.

Now, for at least this first RT-based promotion, I suspect they'll be handing out far more than 40 codes -- very likely hundreds and perhaps over a thousand, depending on how serious people are in both following on Twitter and doing the RT thing. It could very easily take them the rest of the day just to generate and pass out all the codes claimed in the past ten minutes.

You might argue that 'codes are infinitely replicable and therefore without cost', but I'd argue that the time spent by the Community Team has value, and spending it generating and supplying codes instead of actively monitoring social media, planning the next Coffee Talk or Dev Digest webcast, or what-have-you is a cost, and a huge one, that will go largely unnoticed by the fanbase.

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Pauper