Reiska

There's often, in such dictatorships, a huge gap between the law as written and the law as it's actually enforced. (Take North Korea. Did you know their constitution guarantees freedom of speech? Do you think anybody in North Korea actually has freedom of speech? No.) I think, taking that into account, that the Loyalist Responsibility character is enforcing the law as it's written and not going above and beyond it like many of the NPCs are shown to, generally speaking.

They were, in fact, most recently reset on August 16th, 2010, the same day Going Rogue went live.

Thank God.

Notwithstanding that this has nothing to do with programming and would be better asked of Castle, who has anything at all to do with powers, this game is designed around PvE, in which tanks perform their role admirably.

My BS/Shield does it. I'm sure Fire/Shield would be better.

All it checks is number of slots, not the position of them.

This happens whenever the store goes down. Nothing you can do but wait for it to come back.

I think the only reason they bothered to put out a new retail box at all was so that they could get retail shelf presence. From what I understand, most video game retailers had stopped carrying CoH because the existing retail box was too dated.

In that sense, it wasn't really a lost $20, because without the Architect Edition box on Gamestop's shelves, there wouldn't have been ANY CoH retail box available for purchase in stores, I think.

Bosses only generally make like 5% of a mission, though, so... yeah.

I take that to mean that the potential exploit isn't fixable by its nature. I've no idea what it might be, but either way, if that's the case, it's probably in the game's best interest that we not try and dig this one up. :P

I read most of it, yes, so I'm aware there are a few different controversies flying here at once. There's the Shield Charge errors which Castle acknowledged (the only point I commented on), there's the question of balance of Fiery Melee versus Dark Melee (which I'm not qualified to comment on), and of course, there's the concerns about Fiery Aura being underpowered as well (which I think has merit).

It's also fair to say that the people crying about it are a minority in this thread, if an extremely vocal one. The argument goes back further, though; people made the same argument about the Blessing of the Zephyr nerf, and whatever you or anyone else thought about that one, I stick to the belief that how long something has been in a flawed state is not an argument in favor of leaving it flawed.

When something's broken, you fix it. And ultimately, there are very few of us on these forums who are objectively qualified to identify something as "broken" or "not broken". To be fair, I wouldn't consider myself qualified to make that judgment; I pretty much reserve that for the people who actually have access to the code. What we are qualified to identify is whether or not we "like" or "dislike" something.

Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the developers to make a good faith effort to ensure that player power remains within the range for which they have designed the game, or at least reasonably close, and when outliers are discovered (either way), to rein them in by correcting those outliers to more normalized values. It is entirely possible (and in the case of something like Blessing of the Zephyr or Shield Charge, likely) that there will be people who "dislike" the change, but if the expected power curve around which the core of the game is designed is being thrown out of whack, it needs to be corrected, period.

That all said, I do agree with the other posters that it's fairly disturbing that something this massive slipped under the radar, and wonder if perhaps it wouldn't be in the powers team's interest to do a once-over of all the player powersets to make sure they are in fact performing where the documents say they're supposed to, across the board, because if one error like this can get through, I would be highly surprised if there weren't more.

Streakbreaker?

Also, other people in this thread need to quit crying. If we hypothetically discovered an archaic law on the books that said murder wasn't illegal as long as it was committed between the hours of 2 and 4 AM, would you argue that we should allow murders between 2 and 4 AM to remain legal just because "that's how they've been for 235 years"?

No? I think not.

So why then do we have people crying it's unjust to nerf Shield Charge, a power that singlehandedly badly devalues every single other Scrapper secondary in high-end play, just because it's been this powerful for a year?

Nitpick: IIRC, heal powers like Dull Pain and Reconstruction are always based on max HP before any enhancements, so a 50% heal on a L50 scrapper is always 669 HP, even after buffs to the max HP.

Given what I've seen WP do, I don't think Regen would be that overpowered on Brutes. I actually suspect like others in this thread that it would be underpowered for them because they'd bite off more aggro than they could possibly handle.

A correction to make here, and I don't have the post link handy but go search Positron's posts.

You're correct in that a "Rogue" cannot buy things on Wentworth's. However, continued play of the Going Rogue side-switching system will allow someone in a formerly redside AT to make the step from "Rogue" to full-out "Hero", at which point they will be just like any other character that was blueside in the first place - shops at Wentworth's, is locked out of the Rogue Isles.

In short, the alignment spectrum is blue -> light purple -> dark purple -> red, and as I understand it from Positron's posts, in playing side-switching you skip one of the purple stages - i.e. you either go blue->light purple->red or red->dark purple->blue. You can certainly stop at purple, though, and that has its own set of advantages and disadvantages.

Hero: Shops at Wentworth's. Can't enter the Rogue Isles. Can only team with other heroes (except in RWZ/Cimerora/Pocket D). Can only initiate hero story arcs/TFs.
Vigilante: Shops at Wentworth's. Can enter the Rogue Isles. Can team with anyone. Can only initiate hero story arcs/TFs, but can join teams doing villain story arcs/SFs, presumably.
Rogue: Shops at the Black Market. Can enter Paragon City. Can team with anyone. Can only initiate villain story arcs/SFs, but can join teams doing hero story arcs/TFs, presumably.
Villain: Shops at the Black Market. Can't enter Paragon City. Can only team with other villains (except in RWZ/Cimerora/Pocket D). Can only initiate villain story arcs/SFs.

The devs haven't said anything about how vigilantes/rogues will function in PvP zones yet. I suspect, however, that they'll continue to be treated as someone of their more pure faction (i.e., in RV, a vigilante will be treated the same as a hero)

Edit/addition: It would _have_ to work this way, because if a former villain goes all the way hero (not rogue, not vigilante, but hero) but was still required to buy on the Black Market, he would effectively be unable to buy from any market, because of being locked out of the Rogue Isles.

The current D&D Online is really a fairly faithful representation of 3.5's rules, or at least as close to them as you can get (IMO) in a real-time game environment. The only setting they used is Eberron, but Eberron's definitely not a bad setting, IMO (your mileage may vary).

I actually wish they would hurry up and get a PC game out of some kind (single player or MMO, either way) based off 4E's rules, because those rules are _perfect_ for a video game and I'm shocked no one's taken it up yet.

But, for what it's worth, DDO is my second-favorite MMO to play after CoX, and I enjoy it for a lot of the same reasons I enjoy CoX - it's just less refined in those aspects than our game is.

We have this to an extent (grinding TFs for merits), although it's less evident than when you used to get recipes directly.

I'm personally of the opinion that WoW's success is at least 90% attributable to the fact that it has "Blizzard Entertainment" on the box, but I can address the other points as well...

Longevity: Well, yes, but CoX has longevity too. More than WoW, actually, I believe.
Expansion packs: No real comment; in my experience, each new expansion actually tends to upset the hardcore players because of perceived concessions to casual players.
Graphics: WoW has actually, perhaps oddly, made a point over the years of keeping its graphics relatively simplistic compared to its competition. People make fun of WoW's poor character models (and they are pretty poor) and general cartoony look (more so, ironically, than CoH), but what they miss in this fact is that WoW is capable of running on an extremely wide range of hardware - you can play WoW passably well even on cheap integrated graphics. I had a friend who used to raid decently well (low FPS, but playable) on a computer that could barely handle CoV at absolutely minimum settings.