Rodion

This only happens if you're talking to a contact that has the missions in sequential order. This is true for very few hero contacts. Basically, only those added since Faultline and Croatoa. The majority of the older hero missions are in random order within the arc, and then they throw in some random missions sometimes.

I would like to see all hero contacts changed so that they issue their missions in the same order as Ouroboros does. But since so many of those arcs are really long -- some have dozens of missions -- it's unlikely that a pickup team would hang together long enough for many members to be in sync.

To correct this the arcs would need to be split up into two or three smaller arcs, the way most villain contacts' arcs work. This would allow players with the same contact to eventually sync up again if they did the player's mission who's behind everyone else.

This is my complaint about Sonic Resonance as well. Liquefy should be awesome, but it just doesn't measure up. Dark Miasma's Tar Patch is much more useful, even though it does a whole lot less.

Actually, we do have access to more slots.

I've got a couple of dozen characters that I obviously can't play all at once. When I get useful things like Thunderstrike, etc., but I don't have market slots on my current character, I email them to myself and then put them on the market with other characters.

I don't do this to eke out that last bit of inf, I do it because it seems like such a waste to vendor decent stuff that just happens to be worth less than the other stuff I'm selling, or because my slots are filled with bids. If enough people do this it should increase the supply of solid but not flashy items.

My Fire/Dark corruptor is one of the most robust characters I have, even including tankers and brutes. Running solo at +0/x8 I once got ambushed by three waves of Longbow led by a Ballista and did not faceplant.

It really depends on the specifics. If you are copying an existing in-copyright story using all the same character names, same events, same plot, etc., then you are plagiarizing and guilty of copyright violation.

However, if you change the names of the characters, shift around events, put it in a different place, add your own plot points, then you may be in the clear if it is different enough. But that's often a difficult sell in the courts. When they made the movie Nosferatu they originally wanted to film Bram Stoker's Dracula. They tried to get his estate's approval but that didn't work out. So they changed some stuff around. Stoker's estate sued and won. Nearly every copy of the film was destroyed.

If a literary work is out of copyright (I think anything before 1920 or so is now out of copyright), then it is in the public domain and is fair game. This is why Alan Moore could use Mina Murray, Allan Quatermain, Edward Hyde and Captain Nemo in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

NCSoft doesn't want to mess around with getting sued, so if you're using any names from copyrighted works it's in their best interests to remove your arc.

The devs learned a lot about making better arcs with CoV. Before that they made these huge, aimless sprawling arcs that were mostly about wasting your time. With CoV, and with subsequent arcs written for CoH -- Faultline, Croatoa, RWZ -- they greatly improved the way arcs are structured, allowing for much better merit rewards.

The oldest content is the low-level hero stuff, so it's the least suited to merit rewards.

Now, as to why you wind up with more merit rewards villain side?

At all levels villain contacts have a number of small, self-contained arcs (often two or three per contact). The hero arcs are generally longer when they start appearing at higher levels. Villains also tend to solo more, I'd guess. That means you're able to complete more content that gives rewards. Heroes tend to run other players' missions, which means you get no merit rewards. Even if they do run their own arcs, they usually take so long that you only do one every five levels if you team with other players, so you see very few merits.

Second, hero arcs from contacts are randomly ordered. Villains teaming can start the same contact's mission and complete them lock-step and everyone gets merits. Not so for the vast majority of hero content. Two level 40 players starting Tina McIntyre's arc will not be able to complete it together. Only the newer content (Faultline, Croatoa, RWZ) works that way.

This is my major beef with the whole reward merit program. You have to explicitly pick and choose how you play the game to get reward merits. If you like to play on pickup teams but not lead the team, you'll never get any merit rewards. If you do radio/paper missions and mayhem/safeguard missions, you'll never get any merit rewards.

The only way to get merit rewards are to run TFs/SFs, run your own contact missions, run Ouroboros missions, or take down giant monsters. If you're an "average" player who pops on for an hour or two a night and like to team (don't have the time or inclination to run TFs or lengthy Ouroboros arcs, don't like to lead a pickup team), you will never get any merits.

One improvement would be to revamp the hero side arcs: they need to be split into smaller subarcs and they need to be sequential. Essentially, you should get the same stuff from the contact that you get from Ouroboros.

Really, it depends on your tolerance for pain. I have a Energy/EA brute that I mostly ran solo, but at level 47 or so I ran on the level 40 SF. This is the one where you get a bunch of ambushes from CoT. I was the last one standing and took down the AV alone (though the rest of the team certainly helped whittle him down).

I took Tough and Weave, and soft-capped S/L defense, have Fire/Cold/Energy defense in the low 40s, Neg in the 30s and Psi at 15. The positionals are at 22% or so.

It would be rather pricey reproducing this character now, since it uses three sets of Kinetic Combat.

It's roughly as survivable as my SS/Electric brute, but the AoE isn't as good. I don't have experience with Dual Blades at higher levels, so I can't speculate how it would interact with EA.

Remember, this is against even-con opponents. The accuracy and to-hit modifiers vary by level and rank.

If you plan on running against higher-level critters this may affect your decisions.

Common IO recipes originally existed at all levels in beta (not just every 5 levels). How these got into live I have no idea. They can't be moved to the auction house because there's probably no database ID associated with level 29 IOs, so the auction house and email system don't know what to "call" them.

The short answer is: find the things that people pay a lot for on the market, and sell them on the market.

The long answer is: run task forces or Ouroboros arcs for reward merits, then make the random rare recipe roll at the merit vendor (20 merits), then sell any recipes that you don't want. You'll get some losers, but you'll get some that are worth millions

Another thing you can do is run AE arcs, spend them on the Bronze random recipe roll, and sell the ones on the market that are worth something. Popular ranges are 30-34 and 35-39. You'll get a lot of junk this way, but you'll also get some that sell for many millions. You can also craft these recipes and sell them for more, but it's more fooling around and potentially risky if you list something for a high price that doesn't sell.

The final thing to realize is that anyone can get rich, and anyone can get most anything they want if they wait. Impatience will cause you to pay more for things than you should. Make reasonable bids and let them stand for at least several days before revising them. Watch the market's patterns and you'll eventually spot a bargain.

My motto is: I can get anything I want by not wanting what I can't get. That means I can get things like Positron's Blast by careful and patient bidding, but I don't even consider a build that has a LotG: +recharge because it's just not gonna happen. If you happen to get one on the random roll you can sell it for millions and get all the things you want, within reason.

Finally, you don't mention what level you are. Once your character gets to 50 you make influence much faster. Don't worry about IOs if you don't have a level 50 yet. Just play your character and have fun doing what you like (though you should try to fit in a number of TFs as mentioned above). Once you get to 50 start worrying about getting IOs. You'll probably find a lot of good recipes along the way.

I find this more entertaining than a nemesis anyway (and I suggested it in these forums way back when). We have several different versions of doppelgangers: straight doppels, ones with goofy powers, inverse color ones, black and white ones.

I don't know how the CO system works, but I'm guessing every nemesis is basically the same anyway. It would be too much development time to create more than a couple of nemesis storylines. So I'm guessing it's really no different than just being able to custom design the costume for a random AV in one of the standard arcs.

The only way a Nemesis system would be of real interest would be if player characters could actually affect the game world in some material and lasting fashion, and your Nemesis worked to counter your influence.

Say, for example, you could convert some of the areas in Crey's Folly so that instead of spawning Freakshow you could do missions and defeat enough Freaks in the zone so that, say, Longbow that were somehow loyal to you would spawn instead of Freakshow. Maybe there could be some structures to take over like in Recluse's Victory, and you could effect changes in structures and terrain. Then your Nemesis could fight against you and undo your changes.

But when you come right down to it, a computer-based Nemesis might not be very interesting. Maybe the Nemesis should be some new kind of PvP, where you compete against another player (or players) at a macro level instead of duking it out hand-to-hand, which is problematic because of the extremely powerful nature of CoH/V power sets.

A more strategic kind of PvP instead of the tactical PvP might be just the ticket. It would be like PvE, but your Nemesis would direct the actions of the PvE mobs at some higher level. After a time there'd be a denouement where you can thrash it out with your Nemesis face-to-face with the help of your minions, to help equalize the conflict between, say, a defender and a scrapper.

It's got a couple of UI problems that could be fixed relatively easily (make it conform to the standard windowed UI dialog found on Windows and the Mac), but it's definitely an improvement over the original interface. The tabs and the vertical list allow more information to be displayed for each item, which is a great improvement.

By UI standards, I mean things like preselecting text in bid and price fields when they're prepopulated, putting the cursor in those fields when an item is selected, making the TAB key move between the bid and number of items fields, up/down arrows on the number of items field, etc. This would reduce the amount of mouse clicking and erroneous bids caused by people quickly entering a number when a number is already there (often making the bid or price hundreds or thousands of times greater than intended).

Another problem is that you drop an item on the market it should be selected and opened automatically, and the list should be scrolled so that it's visible. This was a problem in the original interface as well (which didn't scroll the window when you put stuff in the market).

These are all minor changes, but they'd really increase the usability of the market interface.

I've got a WP/Energy tanker that I tried this with a year ago. It was a concept build linking WP to the Fear powers, and I was tempted by Glimpse of the Abyss since it's so cheap and has good recharge and decent HP bonuses.

However, the pool Fear powers are underpowered compared to the primary/secondary Fear powers such as Spectral Terror, Fearsome Stare, and Cloak of Fear. In particular, there's no -to hit component in Invoke Panic and Intimidate, and the base duration for Invoke Panic is only 10 seconds with a minute recharge plus a relatively high End cost.

It doesn't perform very well. I did it as an experiment and it feels like a failure (part of it may be the /Energy secondary). I have a WP/Mace tanker with Tough and Weave, and it's more mundane but a lot more fun.

I think you're exaggerating. Whenever I check the number of players on low population servers like Triumph, there are 50 or more players Blueside even in the middle of the day. At 9:30 AM CDT there were at least 21 villains and 33 heroes on Triumph, not counting any players who are hidden from team search.

I play on Triumph, Pinnacle, Champion, Virtue and Freedom, and there are a lot of things I don't like about Freedom: in particular, there's a noticeable difference in performance on Freedom. Freedom feels clunkier and less responsive, there are more dropped commands and discontiguous movement compared to other servers. The markets are more crowded, which means you're often getting spammed by three or four Demon Summoning MM pets at once.

And, actually, there are a lot of players who like to play solo, and they really don't care how many other players are on the same server. They have access to the markets across all servers, so server population doesn't really matter to them. And, if they feel like being in a crowd, they can always switch to an alt on another server.

Server population is going to be at its lowest now. Before a big release many long-term players take a break. Many of the most dedicated and knowledgeable players are in the closed beta, which means we'll be seeing a lot less of them.

In response to your question, the first server listed is always the one you last played on. The other servers appear to be listed in order of current population. Freedom and Virtue are always at the bottom, with the other servers changing places constantly, with no server having consistently more players that I've noticed. All that really needs to be done is to make that known to players in some fashion.

There's no doubt that there a fewer players now than when the game was new. But you have a server that you love playing on, one that's extremely crowded. Why do you moan and groan about the other servers?

The description says "During play, foes Level 20 or higher may drop notes or clues, or offer information." That implies it's all foes whether in missions or not.

One would assume that foes in ticket-based AE missions would be exempt from this, in the same way that you can't get salvage and recipes in such AE missions.

I wouldn't make any assumptions about how the market merger will be implemented. You should probably wait until closer to the release date and see if there any announcements of technical details of the merger before pulling stuff off the market prematurely and losing your listing fee.

I would guess one of the reasons market mergers were rejected for so long were concerns over the loss of listing fees and other such things. Perhaps someone finally had a brilliant insight to avoid the problems, or recent changes to the market allowed a merger to take place in a way that wouldn't cause the loss of influence.

You seem to be implying that the pet A.I. runs on the client, but it most likely runs on the server and not on the client.

The client accepts input and renders graphics, which takes lots of CPU cycles all by itself. There are several reasons why decisions have to take place on the server: first and foremost being the integrity of the data -- anything happening on the client can be hacked. Second is synchronization (all the decisions have to happen on the server otherwise nothing would match up among clients fighting the same battle). Third is the amount of extra data that would have to be transmitted in both directions: the server would have to send all kinds of extra data to the client if the pet A.I. were running there, and the client would have to send it back for every action taken by a pet. I don't see massive data increases when I play controllers and masterminds; ergo, pets don't run on the client. Fourth: the PvE mobs are obviously controlled from the server, and there must be an immense amount of code that is shared between pets and mobs, since they pretty much do the same thing.

Finally, and to your point, since pets are running on the server, it's even more important to keep down the amount of CPU required to run their A.I. so that the servers aren't overloaded.

If "casual players" don't understand that patience is key to using the market, they will quickly lose the influence they do have. Similarly, if they don't understand which drops should be posted on the market and which should be vendored, they will continue to be relative paupers. You need a basic understanding of the worth of things in order to become wealthy, in real life as in this game.

The ability to pool influence will allow some "casual" players will be able to fully kit out a select character, and then they will be broke. This process will in turn drive a certain amount of market inflation.

But players who worry about IOs and set bonuses are not really casual players. They are min-maxers who don't have the time and/or inclination to farm or play the market to obtain the kind of cash needed to satisfy their ambitions. They are the Salieris of the City: they can see the top of the mountain, they just can't scale its peaks.

But the truth is that in this game, any Salieri can become a Mozart if you wait long enough. You just can't do it in a short time unless you do certain things (like farming merits, play the market heavily, etc.). I count myself as a Salieri: able to get all the things I want by not wanting the things I can't get.

Truly casual players don't really know what IOs are and don't really care. They just play to have fun and don't worry about the numbers. Anyone who's crafting IOs is by (my) definition not casual.

The new temporary power Envenomed Dagger may be of use. It has significant -regen (250% for 10 seconds, I think), but it may not be enough for you to solo an AV.

When zone events (Rikti invasion, zombie apocalypse, Steel Canyon fires, etc.) are occurring the only way to know they're happening is to be logged in when the alert is displayed. If you log on after that message is sent there's no way to know unless you happen to be in the zone, or pester other players for the information.

The information terminals would be the ideal place to put this kind of information: not much, just that these events are happening. A simple time-stamped log of the same messages that are sent to the hero/villain event channel would suffice. To eliminate time zone problems, the terminals should display the current time (adjusted to your computer's local time) and the time stamp should be in your computer's local time as well.

Other information, such as character stats (number of hours played, number of times logged in, etc.), could also be displayed on other tabs of the info terminal dialog.