Reiska

Something else here Arcanaville didn't point out as best I can see: making these foes AVs that scale down would give them the PToD, which would make these arcs substantially more difficult for a soloist of any AT that relies on mez. Being "native" EBs means that they don't get the purple triangles.

Dark Astoria's mobs have a base tohit of 64% rather than 50%, similar to the mobs seen in incarnate trials. So your softcap isn't softcapped in DA, most likely, unless you're running around with >59% S/L def.

I couldn't agree more. It's especially irritating when you have online friends in the southern hemisphere and are trying to coordinate RP times with them because the time differential is always changing on you. :|

Nope. Spring forward, 10 AM EST is 11 AM EDT. :P That was my initial thought too, though. Maybe the server clock's just set wrong?

If you get in touch with support and verify the situation with them, they can probably make sure the account is deleted or banned or somesuch as would make you more comfortable.

Premium accounts do not normally have access to the invention system unless they were beyond a certain veteran threshold.

Now we just need forums MARTy.

I have no love for farming in this game, but I can't justify saying that self-rezzing mobs giving XP for the second defeat is an exploit with a straight face.

For one, this behavior occurs elsewhere in the game - Freakshow mobs can randomly self-rez, and they give XP the second time, in dev-created content.

For two, let us break the argument down. A self-rezzing mob is, generally, equally as difficult to kill the second time around as it was the first time around. To argue that it shouldn't give XP for the second kill, which takes exactly the same effort as the first, skews the reward model regardless of whether you're measuring time/reward (because they take twice as long to kill) or risk/reward (because they have twice the opportunity to hurt you).

But, if the basis of your argument is that they shouldn't give XP for the second kill because the challenge of a self-rezzing mob is not commensurate with the XP they give, one can only logically conclude that the mob shouldn't be worth XP at all, because the second kill is exactly as difficult as the first. So if the second kill is "too easy" to be worth XP, isn't the first kill also?

What "usual 3 months"? 3 months is actually significantly faster than the average number of days between issues over the entire life of CoH.

In fact, the average amount of time between issue releases over CoH's history thus far has been 126 days; the smallest gap between issue releases historically is the gap between issues 5 and 6 (57 days), and the longest to date was the gap between issues 16 and 17 (225 days).

It doesn't have anything to do with the playerbase shrinking at a much further accelerated rate than we have known it to steadily decrease; NCsoft would just shut the game down if that were the case, like they have with other MMOs showing that pattern. NCsoft doesn't historically throw resources at 'dying games' in a last ditch effort to save them - they just shut them down. Especially not over a year's worth of resources (which is how long the devs have been working on Freedom behind the scenes)

So it's a reasonable guess that CoH is not, in fact, dying, and that its subscriber base is still reasonably close to that 100,000 figure on either side. (Granted, of course, a sizable portion of that is people with multiple accounts I'm sure...)

I'm going to wager a guess that (s)he doesn't like the kind of player attitudes and/or drama the typical PvPer brings to the game. Mind you, CoX PvPers are, in my experience, a cut well above the "typical PvPer" of other MMOs on average, but I've run into my fair share of jerks even in CoX.

69 players is an excessively small number proportional to the size of CoX's active playerbase (which, even by conservative estimates, is around 100,000 accounts).

Even with the in-game LFG system, many established people on CoH find blind invites offensive as a matter of course.

Too bad that blind invites are the only thing trial (free) players can do. I don't see them having a lot of luck getting teams as the system is currently presented, and CoHF is unique among games that use the proposed model in locking out /tell to free players. They can use /hc, of course, but on most servers, people will at best tell you it's not the proper use of the channel and point you to a server global (which trials and free players can't use) and at worst flame you.

It also didn't seem to bring anyone to the game on those trials.

Agreed. (Only quoted you to emphasize the below response.)

You have correctly described all the ways in which the restrictions on trial accounts prevented trial account users from disrupting the game experience of paid users. However, you're missing the point that the restrictions on trial accounts also very likely minimized the success of the trial accounts' intended purpose, namely, bringing in new players to CoH. Point of fact: the introduction of the trial accounts made no visible change in the trend of CoH's subscription numbers (slowly but steadily downward since the launch of CoV).

I love CoH, have been playing it for 5 years, but I have to say that I wouldn't join it based on what trial accounts offer.

Perhaps this is because they can't talk.

I wouldn't.

Frankly, the only things I'd even remotely expect to be carried over to a theoretical CoH2 from CoH1 characters are non-gameplay factors. It'd be nice, for example, if existing CoH1 subscribers would be able to reserve a limited number of character names in CoH2 which they presently hold on CoH1. It would also be nice if there were some way to import CoH1 costume data into CoH2 (probably from our saved .costume files), and maybe if there was recognition of old badging, or old story arc souvenirs, or that sort of thing.

But I would certainly expect, and not be offended by, having to start from level 1 again. The trick is, depending on a new game's implementation, that could even easily be done without making our established characters feel less powerful - it's all a matter of scale. Nothing at all says a hypothetical CoH2's level 1 characters would have to be equivalent to CoH1's level 1 characters in power selection or strength.

I still wonder, though, if they might not be working on a client revamp of some kind. I'm pretty sure EQ did that at one point - releasing a new client with better visuals than the original launch client was remotely capable of, and which interfaced with the existing servers. I'm not sure if compatibility with the launch client was retained, though.

What I've always been told is that the kiosks were disabled because RMT spammers were using them as a source of character names to send spam to.