Retrogression

Another way to do this (my preferrred way, I think) is to allow us to change paragon points into an in game point currency and trade them/give them to others.

So really 3 options:

1) create Point cards, or make it so Time cards can be used as Point cards similar to Lineage II

2) make an option to Purchase as Gift in the same way now purchaseable for your own account

3) make an option to in game trade or gift Points

You could do any or all of these. Each would be better or worse for certain applications.

The problem with all of them is the opening for fraud. The indirection potentially permits the creation of fraudulent throwaway accounts to use the fake/stolen credit cards (or to use them in person) and give the resulting item to an account which, though implicated, keeps plausible deniability of wrongdoing. I am guessing that is the real hold up with this feature.

However, it's one that many games have managed to deal with, big games, small games, and every size in between - so - figure out and do it please =D

I went to my NCSoft master account and changed my password also. It took a few minutes, but did let me log in (fortunately I hadn't exhausted my 5 tries, but it was a close call, 4!)

What happened? All the passwords got erased from the forum?

Is this preventing people from login to the game too, or forum only?

I see it reported here too:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...wpost&t=264357

seems to only affect "open" ones

I was unable to buy the animal pack. I'd previously bought packs with no problems.


edit: I used Paypal in my attempt

3/4 of the 8 or so purple recipes I've had drop to me, dropped when I was assisting my friend on her prestige farming. Which basically meant I went along side her on her missions, she was level 50 and set to +1/+8. I played various of my characters, controllers, defenders, and aoe scrappers (spine/fire and spine/dark mostly)... they got about 6 purples (possibly 7, couldn't find the 7th but might have sold it), and I got 2 playing normally on my 50s (one on an ITF and one while soloing a police radio mission).

That's in the time since they were introduced. I remember when purples were new, she got three in a series of about 10 of the repeatable Cimerora missions that we were doing to get our highest level villains to 50 (from 46 mine/48 hers) to unlock the villain epic ATs.

She accidentally sold one to a vendor. She's done that twice now. Only thing that makes her swear

It took me another 6 months after that before I got my first purple recipe drop. It's very unpredictable.

Cende said "the university works" so there's also Professor, in that case.

If you do a halloween tip mission with another person, both of you get the badge choice menu at the end. So that's one way to get them done faster - if you have a 5 person team you can all trick or treat till each person has the mission, then do all 5 in a row.

different people level at different rates

my first level 50 took me 2.5 years

now after playing for 6 years and some, I have 5 of them

(before CoH, I played Everquest for 3 years or so. I never got to the level cap in that game, not once (they kept raising it before I got there) nor any other MMO before or since CoH)

I am going to disagree with all the posts here and say you should end up slotting those dark blasts for to-hit-debuff AND damage. The exception will be the tentacles, which you will want to slot for range and immobilize too, so you can't really do all the damage and to-hit-debuff (THD for short) on them that you'd want. Range is extra important for cone attacks, because the far end of the cone is the biggest width, and range makes the cone go further! So range increases the area covered by a cone by a lot, making it very worthwhile.

"frankenslotting" is the way to do this. you can get an acc/THD and an acc/dam and two THD and two DAM and have fully slotted damage, THD, and more than the equivalent of one accuracy enhancement as well. For one example, for say, Gloom You can do this starting at level 7, though I guess I would recommend waiting till the 20s before bothering, unless you just happen to get one somehow, or have tons of inf, or level super slow like me

At level 47 you can also use Hami-Os for acc/THD and damage/range on the cones. These are nice combos. damage/mez is also great for Tentacles. damage/range and damage/mez Hami-Os tend to be some of the least expensive Hami-Os, and acc/THD is pretty cheap too as Hami-Os go.

I do not have a ff/dark defender but I do have an emp/dark defender and a storm/dark defender who I play pretty much (the emp/dark is level 50 and the storm/dark is in the 30s but I have had her since my first month of CoH and she was my main for couple months back in 2004, and I still play her every so often) so I know dark blast pretty well.

The first level dark blast you have to take. Gloom is a very good choice, it does good damage and lot of debuff, recharges quickly, and has skulls on it Moonbeam is not a great choice, interruptable, doesn't really do very good damage for the extra hassle. Tentacles are vital. The other cone (Nightfall?) is also vital. You need to learn the range/angle on these so you can jump from one to the other on the same target group, takes a little practice but it works very well once you know how.

I always skip the knockback cone as it causes more trouble than it's worth, I think. On a FF/dark though, it might be useful. FF has a lot of knockback too. (so does storm, though)

Dark Pit is nice but a really low amount of stun, it needs something to stack with. I thought it would stack great with Thunderclap but I ended up respec'ing out of both Thunderclap and Dark Pit and it made my storm/dark build much better. She solos mostly dependent on her THD to keep safe - from both the dark blast and the Hurricane. Storm brings a bit of extra damage from the lightning and tornado and freezing rain, but not really all that much...

I read today somewhere on Slate that teens today say "LOL" is outdated and only used by old people who don't keep up.

What do the kids today use instead? LOL

The thing that makes something an "MMO" to me, has nothing to do with the Massive part of the translation of the initial, just like the D in MUD didn't really have anything to do with the setting being a Dungeon.

The thing that makes it an MMO to me is the persistence of the world setting. This is something MUDs gave to the early MMO games, essentially. A world that keeps running when no players are in it.

It could be a micro MMO by being a very small graphical RPG game with a persistent world, I think. It could even potentially be a FPS type game or another game type instead (RTS?)

*All these abbreviations I am using represent game genres that are not completely defined by what their letters stand for. For example, many RPGs include a first person mode, some real time strategy the player needs to exhibit, and shooting. Some RTS games and some FPS games have elements of role playing. But the genres are pretty distinct - RPG has levels and gaining new abilities as you go up in level, with the retention of earlier abilities too. FPS has aiming, twitch gameplay with little power progression tied to time played. RTS has the ability to build up resources and create a lot of units each with distinct offensive/defensive/resource building capability, and defend buildings which also provide those same traits. And MMOs are about playing in a persistent world with other people also playing in it, where everything you do is stored on the server, and the client is just a view into that persistent world.

So, very possibly micro MMOs will take off. But I don't see much evidence of them doing so...? And if I did, I'd have to talk about it so vaguely I might as well not

I rarely hide from searches. Most of the time, I'd like to be invited to a team.

Once in a while, I feel like organizing/running a team; in those cases it helps to be findable.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, when I'm feeling like being left alone, I do sometimes hide. Mostly in those cases I do an Oroboros flashback arc solo with some of the difficulty settings on, so I can get badges and have more of a challenge - and I really don't want to be invited to team during that, so I hide.

As for the Bill vs Marcian view of the world, they're both right; but I don't mind meeting morons, if they're nice ones. Some stupid people are very nice. They are restful and fun to be around, most of the time. As for the mean ones, I can usually just ignore them and if they do something horrible, /report them. So Bill's problem - it's not an issue for me. The nice, interesting, smart people who I do like meeting, are kind of more of a problem - I play relatively few hours, and so I can't count on ever seeing them again, which is kind of sad....

Dear Matt aka Television,

I have a few questions...

What kind of database does CoH use? (aka, relational, custom, open source like postgres etc, object oriented, flat files, some mix?) Is there a dev in charge of the data access layer of the code and if so, who is it? (I am particularly interested because in the early months of CoH, they did several data mining tasks that took ... exceedingly long times to run, and it made me curious to a degree that still has not much abated) When you joined the team and saw how they managed the data, what was your reaction?

What techniques do you use to make meetings shorter?

What internal bug tracking system do you use? (like Jira or bugzilla or mantis type of things)

Does any of the CoH code use multiple inheritance?

Please add to the FAQ:

If a bid has been filled, what will happen?
My guess: the item bought will go into "storage" mode.
Alternative possibility: the bid will be canceled and the inf will return to the bidder, the item returning to "storage" mode on the seller?

If an item up for sale was sold, what will happen?
My guess: the inf received for the sale will go into "storage" mode
Alternative possibility: the sale will be canceled and the item will go into storage mode

If an item up for sale was not sold, what will happen?
My guess: the item will go into storage mode along with the listing price
Alternative possibility: the item will go into storage mode but the listing price will be gone for good(you'll have to pay it again to relist)
Another alternative possibility: the item will go into a special storage mode where relisting it for the same price will be free, but you can't get the listing price refunded.


Edit: for you price limit proponents... please consult a basic economics text if you have the time. If not, please take my word for it that price limit will not help make anything cheaper. The only thing that will make things cheaper is one of the following

Either reduce the influx of INF - reducing INF rewards for farming, etc - or make it harder (probably not going to happen) OR increase the supply of items, either directly (place some for sale for whatever price they like on the market via a SQL script or the like) or indirectly (if something is deemed too expensive by devs, raise its drop rate, or make it cost less in merits, which would result in it also costing less in INF)

/targetcustomnext notmypet will target anything except your own pets. Including doors and blinkies, it's pretty useful, though overbroad if you're looking for something specific.

Really tough, because there's been so many good ones.

My top 5:

1. Super sidekick - A huge improvement, making it vastly easier to form teams

2. Striga - When the Striga zone was added to the game, the concept of thematic story arcs that stayed in a single zone was premiered; it then went on to great use in CoV, Faultline, RWZ, Midnighter club, and other places. Striga was where it all started!

3. Inventions - made slotting so much better - and now you have non expiring enhancements

4. Villain Epic ATs - one of my favorite archetypes

5. Sonic resonance reskin to current graphics - no more headaches!

Nearly got on the top 5 list:

- These are #6 and #7: Tailor and Respec. It's hard to remember that when CoH started, you had to make a new hero (or delete and remake) to get a new costume or new power or slot selections!

Honorable mentions:

- Costume additions like capes, wings, the skirts that came with Issue 4 that were pleated and varying lengths, the additions to those skirts to make leather, patternable, etc, the Justice and Sinister sets, Samurai and Tech Sleek veteran reward sets, mirror finish updates to metallic sets with Ultra mode, Ear and Tail on separate choice lists, power color and weapon customizations, and I could go on and on with great costume additions.

- Jet Packs purchasable in Grandville and Shadow Shard available from first level if you need a 'travel power'

- Train to Founders Falls

I did not really find the survey biased, though it's hardly a polished example of expert polling, it's a typical amateur's try at it

I happen to think that video games overall are becoming less violent. Early video games mostly were full of violence, after Pong at least. There was Asteroids which was all about destroying things. There was Space Invaders which mostly had to do with killing aliens that were set on killing you. There was Centipede which was about shooting bugs and mushrooms. All violence all the time. Also Nethack which was mostly about killing monsters and then eating them.

The Infocom games were early text based games and while they were only moderately violent, they did contain some offhanded violent actions.

Nowadays it's very easy to find games with minimal or no violence. Farmville is a good example. Peggle is a great game, no violence at all. Like Tetris or Pong, they're completely nonviolent games. There's more of these every day it seems! Great stuff.

A game like City of Heroes has a lot of violence, but even CoH is tending toward less violence as it goes on, at least making the attempt to add things to do other than fight. Games like Eve Online grow from a niche to a big deal; they are not very violent though they do have big battles, but you can play them completely nonviolently through resource gathering and commodities trading if you prefer.

A lot of games are just as violent as they used to be, and of course with better graphics you can have more cinematic or realistic violence if you choose, but that isn't quantity of violence, it's quality of violence! Completely different thing, right?