Samuel_Tow

That's simply not true. The "You should definitely bring friends!" briefing quips aren't at all a sign of how soloable a mission is intended to be, but instead warn about bosses in your mission. It's a relic from one of Jack Emmert's record-breaking worst decisions of all time - to make bosses impossible to solo. The I4 boss buff made them significantly harder (they scaled two levels above what they conned as, as I hear), such that you would NEED a team to take a boss down like the manual said. When players complained that they hated fighting through a whole mission only to find they couldn't solo the boss, Jack responded by adding warnings to missions that had them.

Ever since Jack's idea failed spectacularly and the I4 boss buff was repealed completely and in whole, these briefing quips have been pointless and meaningless. For instance, if you go through the Path of the Dark story arc, your contact will tell you to get help in every single mission, and not a single mission in the entire arc features anything that can't be found in any other mission in the game. The only thing I might concede not being entirely intended to be soloed is elite bosses, and even then only some of them. I suppose multiple boss ambushes like what you see in the Crown of Glory arc could be considered not soloable, but these scale down to lieutenants if you set your difficulty to do that, so that probably doesn't count. AVs count, obviously, but they're off by default.

Almost every solo mission is very much soloable, and the ones that aren't really only hurt specific ATs or powerset combos.

Heh, I guess this is where we disagree. Personally, I HATE surprises Sure, a novel experience every now and then is a good change of pace, but by and large, things I didn't expect to happen bother me. I play City of Heroes largely for comfort, and I take comfort in familiarity. It's very possible, I think, to have challenge even when you know exactly what to expect, largely because of how I define it. Even if I know what's coming, when an encounter requires me to use all of my character's tools and abilities, that's still a fun kind of challenge. In a way, it's actually even more fun, since I don't have to die and get frustrated until I figure out what I'm supposed to do.

I guess it's a matter of personal preference as to whether you want to be surprised by your game, or whether you want to sit down and have a predictable, controllable experience. It's the difference between sitting down at a carnival ride vs. going out hiking. One is a controlled environment that's specifically tailored to both thrill people and keep them safe at the same time. You can relax in it, knowing that whatever happens, you'll always be safe. That's more my thing. The other is more of an adventure, never really knowing what you'll come across. I have a colleague goes hiking a lot and keeps talking about bear encounters That's... Quite a bit less my thing.

I actually think this is a bigger problem than just Swan, but rather with costume design in general. As far as I'm concerned, ALL good designs need contrast. Granted, some more so than others, but a costume like Swan's that's essentially white with more white is just... Dull to look at. It's just one specific case, but I see in-game characters running around in all black and brown, with brown hair and brown skin until I go: "OK, and?" I actually have a character design which suffers from this in the face of Ezikiel, whose look I need to redesign when I start playing him again.

Look at the character most often praised here - Ghost Widow. She has some of the starkest, most vivid contrast to her look. She is is beautiful, interesting and memorable while at the same time not being loud or over-colourful. Not only is her outfit contrasted well by her skin and hair, but she's also contrasting black against black, which despite what most people may think, is not an "evil" colour but rather a "neutral" colour that works great as a base for everything. Contrasting non-monochrome colours against each other is hard to get right, but contrasting pretty much any colour against black almost always works.

Wearing sunglasses helps in ogling people quite a bit, if you have a wide enough range of vision. You get to stare at people yet they don't get creeped out. Everybody wins. Besides, it helps avoid uncomfortable eye contact with strangers on the bus. Since they don't know where you're looking, they simply never make eye contact, as opposed to unshielded eyes where you can eye someone up so long as he's looking away.

Funny thing, that.

Have you tried using the Jester boots under those pants? If you colour them right, they can look like those curved Arabian shoes you see in, say, Disney's Aladdin. Other than that, though, the redesign is aces, I'd say. Definitely an upgrade to her look, and it looks like she finally remembered to put on her pants

Um... Everywhere? The way the "muscle" slider works, it's next to impossibl to make a muscular woman who does NOT have a giant butt and huge thighs. That's because it's less a "muscle" slider and more an "assets" slider, as it makes women's breasts and butts bigger, but neglects to make their arms bigger or their chests (as in the rib cage) much more solid. I've had to jam the hips slider all the way to the left an the waist slider all the way to the right just to keep a stout woman's butt from looking like a semi-trailer.

Neither, because they both look absurd. The model would make me laugh my *** off if she ever tried to walk on anything but smooth, level ground in those heels, or - oh the hilarity - walk on unpaved dirt, like that of a park. The cosplayer I'd laugh my *** off because Miss Liberty's rainbow costume is just absurd and I can't keep a straight face looking at it, unless I supplant the emotion with rolling my eyes. Golden age and silver age super heroes DO NOT look capable or powerful in the slightest sense. At best, they look like gymnasts. At worst, they look like Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

Again - just making a female character in a turtleneck top does not automatically equal class and good design, especially when said female character is still fighting crime in a miniskirt, pantihose and high heels. Personally, I find it much more sexist to keep drawing up women in "girly" clothes as the only possible attire like we can't see them as anything more than Super Office Ladies.

You know who WOULD look more capable to me than BOTH of those options, though? The seven-foot-tall woman in blue jeans, steel-toed boots and a tiny workout top with arms like pipes and abs like a washboard. That I could understand and would actually perceive as being strong. So where is THAT in the game, outside of my own making?

These two posts back-to-back are a very neat encapsulation of what I find to be a very real problem in overall artistic design - subconscious sexualisation and and an inability to look past it.

Let me pose to you the following question: Is it impossible for a person to be BOTH someone you want to lay AND someone you can trust with your life in a battle? Is it impossible for a person to be jubilant, flamboyant and flirty while at the same time being strong, confident and responsible? Can a character not be allowed to have a complex personality comprised of divergent and sometimes contradictory aspects? Can a character not be allowed to possess vices as well as virtues?

Linkara describes his feminist-driven dislike of fanservice as "She's drawn like this solely to titillate. There's no other reason for it." when speaking of Vicky Vale in her underpants in the ******* Batman comic. And to a large extent, I agree with him. Objectifying a woman (or a man, really, but let's skip that for now) by ignoring and dismissing her personality, powers and competencies and essentially reducing her to a peace of meat, that is truly deplorable, I agree.

However, consider the reverse - is it right to DENY a woman's sexuality and sensuality and consider every display of either to be a disgrace? Is one extreme honestly better than the other? I've see people react to revealing costumes with an almost Victorian level of abject disgust and outrage, as though there is absolutely no context in which such costumes actually make sense for the character. I simply disagree with this. I'm of the opinion that practically any design and aesthetic is feasible and viable, given the right character and provided it's actually put together well.

I would be hugely against judging a costume solely based on the size of the jugs or the amount of skin it includes. I would, instead, highly suggest judging a costume more on its artistic execution and relevance to the character it is given to. There is no room for discussion as to whether revealing costumes can look pretty and constitute art, nor is there any as to whether they can be appropriate to specific characters. They can and they can. It's a question of whether this particular revealing costume is appropriate for this particular character, and whether it's actually done with taste and talent.

Of course, in the case of the posted wan costume, I don't actually like it much at all. The VERY low details kill it dead (please up your details when making costume screenshots, guys), I don't like skirts for no reason and I honestly don't like the sever mismatch between pieces. It makes the whole design chaotic. Just the whole aesthetic makes me wonder what it's supposed to represent. There's a skirt, so I expect it to be clothes, but it has no top, so I expect it to be Tights, but it's using Witch, which is metalling with Excess, which is Leather, but it has fabric sleeves and I am confused. I don't mind the direction taken, but the execution leaves something to be desired. It just feels unbalanced and peacemeal.

*note*I'm speaking of the Swan redesign the quotes are discussing, not the later one which shows up in the thread.

I agree with the TechBot. Given the design aesthetic for the existing Rularuu weapons, as well as the Soldiers of Rularuu, I'd expect these wings to be a combination of angular metal and obsidian warped together with rounded organic parts. The Organic Armour wings are a good starting point, but they'd need to be armoured similar to what the Valkyrie Armoured wings have going, but with more angular, layered armour. The Sauron aesthetic, as it were.

...

Come to think of it, we don't really have much in the way of angular Fantasy armour, do we? Suddenly, the Ascension armour makes more sense.

What, because guys are all jerks? Heh, I've found that a lot of people who are hardasses here on the forums are much, much nicer in-game. I don't know if that's because we come to the forums to argue but log into the game to play or what, but a lot of times it's just how things go.

When it comes to making female characters "like they were made by a girl," I think I fail at this. HARD. I say "think" mostly because there's never really been a good definition of how "a girl" makes characters. Usually, when this comes up, swarms of women come in and confess they make intentionally revealing costumes because that's just what they like to play as. Bad Influence once commented on using the "Strappy Shoes" costume piece as evidence for G.I.R.L., I suppose because they kind of match some men's shoe fetish, but it's still kind of hard to tell.

I suppose one easy way to tell a sleezy *** is when you spot a player playing a character who looks like (and is named, as I've seen) "Dirty HO." Things like a string bikini with an Eden top is pretty strong evidence that - as I know first hand - someone was trying to make a naked lady and this was as naked as he could make her. That I can attribute to a lech, but everything else? I don't know. "Revealing" doesn't carry a negative connotation with me, but considering I ignored Golden Girl for calling me a "pervert," I may be biassed.

I suppose if I had to draw a line when it comes to female costumes, at the border when tasteful costumes with skin turn into tasteless sleeze. So long as it has artistic merit, I suppose you could say (and that in itself is pretty loaded when people start arguing about "the beauty of the human body), it's still a good costume that happens to be revealing. That's as opposed to a revealing one that just happens to also be a costume by necessity of game limitations.

Long story short (too late), I'm not sure how much this looks like it was made by a woman, but a character can be sexy and revealing and still be tasteful and classy.

Ha! I love that argument for much the same reason you do, I suspect It's even more funny to me since English isn't actually my first language, but I still get to show up Americans and Brits at their own game. Eloquence and good spelling - to me at least - are a sign that people care about they present themselves. Putting in a few extra seconds to start a sentence with a capital letter, end a question with a question mark, type out "thanks" instead of "tnx" and suchforth just strikes me as someone who respects himself or herself. And in turn, this is a person I can respect.

This something I find to be a BIG failing of the game's theme, and is something sort of inherent in MMOs in general - everyone always stands around doing nothing. I get that technical limitations mean we can't expect our contacts to move around, OK, I get that. But can't we put them in more appropriate places just the same? Take, for instance, Efficiency Expert Pyther - why is he standing on a terrace with a Bane Spider welding ten feet from him? How is it efficient to conduct your business outdoors and away from all forms of communication? Wouldn't it make sense for him to be inside an office? Or how about Peter Thermai? He even talks about "his office," so why is he never in said office? Harvey Maylor runs a newspaper, so where is his Jay Jonah Jameson's office?

Or how about the fat afro white boy in Independence Port. He's supposed to be a weapons dealer and manufacturer, so why isn't he in a machine shop, or a lab? He's standing in front of a warehouse, supposedly housing weapons, so why couldn't he be INSIDE it? Or how about Dr. Steven "Science" Sheridan? What the blue balls is he doing next to a hazard zone checkpoint, back up against a fence next to the hospital? He's not a medical doctor. Wouldn't he have a lab set up where he works IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE? And why is Crimson standing under a giant statue's crotch? How did he get out to that little island outcrop without getting that ridiculously obvious red suit of his wet? Shouldn't we be meeting on a park bench or in a crowded restaurant or somewhere a little less conspicuous? That damn red suit alone on that little island within line of sight of the ferry is like a lighthouse in the night.

I would honestly love to see most contacts move either indoors in their own places of business or dwelling, or otherwise moved to places that make sense.

That's not saying much. They looked very bad before, now they look less bad... But they still look bad. Battle Maiden is not just something you can make in the costume creator, it's something you can get AS A FULL SET. Remember those "sets" that they gave us at some point that give you a ready-made character? Some are kind of creative in how the developers put them together, but a lot are simply "everything that came with the Booster Pack" deals. These look repugnant, for the simple reason that full sets are usually hideously overdone, largely with the expectation that you'll mix-and-match them.

A full set of anything looks goofy. It always has. I feel pity for the people who go around with, say, a full set of Enforcer gear every time I see them. The complete lack of artistic sense inherent in picking a complete design from a dropdown list is truly tragic. But OK, for players, I can kind of see it. Not all of us aspire to be artists. Some just want to pick something cool and punch faces. But for a professional art team like what's employed at Paragon Studios, this isn't just disappointing, it's shameful. You CANNOT CANNOT CANNOT just pick an entire set, stick it on a character and call it a day. That's boring, it's ugly and it's hideously uncreative. You don't need an art team to do this. Anyone old enough to play this game can pick from a dropdown list.

If characters are remade to David's standard of coolness, they need to be remade with in an interesting, unique fashion. Even if they don't involve brand new pieces, they should at least be designs that I haven't seen a zillion times before. "Full set" anything is not the right call. Full set Valkyrie least of all, with how god damn prolific that set is. It actually makes me hulk out when I see full set Valkyrie these days. I want SOMETHING original from the people getting paid to be artists and apparently aspiring to greatness. I want them to think outside the box and give us cool character designs, not just pick from a dropdown.

Battle Maiden is horrible in that way. I can remake her with about five mouse clicks, 10 if I forget where to look. Black Swan is boring to an extreme. She's essentially black Bridal with wings. Eh. Bobcat is just so, so, SO plain. I know it's supposed to be a catsuit, but it just looks like her texture hasn't loaded yet. Ugh!

... Sorry, sorry. It's just... Full-set anything characters take me out of my skin...

I'm not a DC fan in the slightest, which is probably going to show bigtime when I say the following: All the costumes linked, I absolutely love. All the old costumes of said characters I absolutely hate, and have hated pretty much since I saw them. It is for this reason I've tried to resist speaking about the Hamidon... Because I hate the thing. I find that any enemy I can describe as "a giant single-cell organism" is beyond ridiculous by a fair bit. I find the whole fight to be positively absurd, unbelievably goofy and nothing at all like interesting. I'm essentially fighting one of those cartoony jelly cakes with bits of fruit suspended inside it, a lot like what I'd have grabbed for points in Bubble Dragon. Seriously, a giant amoeba strikes me as something I'd expect to see on Baseball Ninja Batman, rather than something I'm supposed to take seriously. Because I can't. It's like asking me to take Red Faction's Rainbow Pony *** Cannon seriously. I just can't.

But...

In the spirit of being productive and constructive, let's see what I can come up with. If we want the Hamidon to be taken more seriously, then it needs to feel dangerous, it needs to feel gooey and disgusting, and it needs to feel alive. To this effect, I have a few things to suggest:

1. Make the nucleus and organelles actually 3D and scrap the shoddy sprites. Sprites work sort of OK for things you're not supposed to look at closely and for things that are small. Organelles are both important to look at and quite big. The nucleus in particular is enormous and elliptical. It looks REALLY bad. Make these 3D, make them semi-transparent, give them some internal structure barely seen through the surface and I'll be able to take them much more seriously.

2. Use a colour filter on the surface texture, both looking in and looking out. Do you remember those old Arachnos base vats of red liquid? Remember how looking through them made the world display in redscale negative? Do that to the Hamidon. Make its cell wall refract wall and bleed colour. Make things inside look all green-scale or maybe bleed the green and partially the blue from them, or apply some kind of inversion filter or SOMETHING. The Hamidon right now looks like a cloud. It should look like goo, instead.

3. Give its cytoplasm a sense of weight and thickness. Don't just throw in floating bodies or large debris. FILL the thing with little thickets of stuff, and not just foreign bodies. How much more creepy would it be if instead of being filled with empty space, the Hamidon were filled with small floating critters. Think "sewer cockroaches" in terms of what I mean. Better yet, think river diving. The water is brown, it's full of sand and silt and plant material, there are fish and other critters everywhere, you can't see **** past the length of your arm... THAT is like what the Hamidon cytoplasm should feel like. KILL visibility in there - 20 feet at most. Fill the cytoplasm with clouds of small debris and tiny critters, give players in there a sort of "turbulence" around them as they move to simulate them swimming in syrup. Make the thing look thick.

4. Give the cell wall thickness. The Hamidon should feel like a pike of goo. Right now it looks like someone beat a Forcefield Defender's Dispersion Bubble with a hammer. Make the cell wall appear to be more than one micron thick, make it look like a wall, give it internal structure. Ideally, make it at least a couple feet tick, so that anyone passing through it would have a strong sense of having passed through "something" before coming into the inside goo. In fact, why is the Hamidon's cell wall so permissive? Why not make it in large sections and have players attack it for a while before it softens up before they can even get in? Sure, amoebas aren't exactly rigid, but plant cells have a secondary cell wall which does add significant rigidity, and with the Hamidon chewing biology like bubble gum, I'd expect the thing to be better defended.

5. Make the goo act like goo. Right now, we walk into the Hamidon and we can both breathe fine and move fine, even if it's with a slight debuff, if I remember correctly. The things giant cell organelles are supposed to float in its cytoplasm, but we have to jump to hit them? Why? The thing is, cytoplasm is pretty thick stuff, which means we'd have much greater floating in it than we would even in water, and people can usually float in water. I like the suggestion to have everyone permafly with swimming animations for movement and aerial animations for attacks and other powers. It might mess up ground-only powers, I admit, but still, it would be cool. It really will feel like swimming in syrup. Also, hand out temp powers that allow players to breath inside the goo. If you have to break the cell wall to get in or out, then leaving the make a run for the rebreather vendor becomes a legitimate raid complication.

That's all I can think of.

Yeah, I'm sure the Steampunk "skirt" has its uses, but being a skirt ain't one of them. The thing has a split right up to the crotch and it makes it look like the woman in question is running around in her undies with just a few pieces of cloth tucked into her belt. I know long skirts are somehow not feasible in our existing engine, but a long skirt this ain't. As you said, it just looks trashing, and that's not a look I feel is appropriate for Azuria.

Or Serafina, for that matter. Why does she have to look like a ******, ESPECIALLY standing on a street corner like she is. Should we remake HER?

Valkyrie using the Valkyrie design isn't a bad idea, but there's something... Odd about the body shape on this one. I can't quite put my finger on it, though. I think - if I had to guess - that it's because she's somewhat unbalanced and to-heavy. The Valkyrie shoulders cause a lot of that, but her physique is also to blame. With as heavy and bulky as her shoulders are, that narrow waist just looks disproportionate. I know it's seen as sexy (by some) and I know Valkyrie has never been very heavy-set... Bizarre as that may be for woman born and raised on "WARRIOR EARTH!!!" *ahem* But skinnier as she may be, I still feel she needs a bit more bulk, especially at the waist, to look appropriate to be carrying this much weight.

I also think what bugs me is the gloves. I HAAATE the Valkyrie gloves. For one, they don't look like they're fully armoured, as they come with a mandatory fabric texture for the actual glove. For another, the door knob hand the armour plate design has going is just... Hugh! I'm someone who's very sensitive to the shape of hands, and this is just goofy. Finally, I honestly don't think the chest plate is necessary. The Valkyrie chest plate has never been very good, but it has the added detriment of putting even more bulk and weight on the torso, and with the legs as light as they are, it's just... Odd.

Personally, I feel that if we take out the chest piece entirely, swap to better gloves (I'm partial to non-glowing Resistance) and bulk her up just slightly, we'll have a pretty spot on design.

By the way, whoever make this costume has my eternal gratitude for not using a FULL set of Valkyrie armour with wings everywhere and for not using that HIDEOUS Valkyrie skirt. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Tough call... If I had to go for hoverboard designs, I would pick:

*Something like the Hobgoblin/Green Goblin glider, sort of a mini-aircraft you can stand on. Make it long, wide and overall big.

*A floating platform. Kind of like before, but instead of a directed aerodynamic design, make it a perfectly symmetrical spherical platform, possibly with machinery underneath. Like I'm standing on top of a flying saucer.

*A simple metal disk. Just a flat, metal disk with no machinery or angular forms on it. But don't make it one micron thick. either make it have width, or otherwise make it taper kind of like two cymbals squashed together.

*A cloud. Son Goku had his Kintoun, and I'd like to see something like that. Just a small cloud - say the size of Storm Cloud from Storm Summoning - that we stand on to glide.

*Some kind of flapping bird. There are many options here - an ordinary bird (or even Null the Gull), a pterodactyl, a wyvern, some kind of mutated bat, basically anything which can flap its wings - and why not with the same animation that we do - so that we can fly on a living animal.

*Shard of crystal. Just a giant shard of floating crystal that we stand on and glide around on. It could be ice, jade or even rock, as alternatives.

*A... Surf board?

Heh, so have I, actually That's when I first realised I have a very "womany" personality when I try to be nice with people. I forget what I was doing in Atlas Park on a character in shorts and a small jacket, but I got chatted up by this guy whose intent I didn't catch until he asked me if I had a boyfriend. Well... No, I don't, really... But I guess accept someone's approach, laugh at a joke he tells and don't IMMEDIATELY cut him off and you're already dating him unwittingly.

I was lucky enough that the guy wasn't a creep, just... A kid, probably, to be honest. So I told him I'm a guy and he went off to chat up some other G.I.R.L. I felt so rejected...

Anyway, I CAN see the problem with "putting your merchandise on display" and having some ******* read too much into it. Like I said - some people will interpret you being nice to them as an invitation for a relationship. Honest, I can see the problem plain as day. I just don't think that A) most of these guys are stalkers worth banning and B) a female-only server will solve that. Especially with City of Heroes: Freedom, when everyone can make multiple accounts and lie about his gender on half of them.

I thought that might have happened, but the image in the quote post must also have changed, as well. The only way I can think for this to happen is if the owner deleted the original pic from the hosting service and his hard drive and made a new one with the same name, then updated it with the same name so the quoted old link scooped up the new pic. I've done that in the past... Once, I believe, but only when I noticed a bug with the pic immediately after posting it. After the fact, when it's been quoted seemed like something no-one would do, which is why I assumed the pic hadn't changed.

I apologise for the assumption and the mistake. I'll go edit that out of my post.

*edit*
Oh, irony. I just edited a quoted post so now the quote doesn't correspond to the post any more. Oops!

This is a point I can heartily agree with. I recall arguing with Zombra back when he was playing, as he liked to set his difficulty such that every fight was a boss fight. Literally a boss fight - a fight with a boss. He openly admitted to wanting every fight to be a life or death struggle that was very, very difficult. In turn, that made teaming with him really difficult, in more ways than one.

Personally, when it comes to pure difficulty, I prefer a game which is easy for the most part, with occasional spikes in difficulty and only isolated hard sections in the form of end-of-level boss fights. A single difficult encounter once in a long while is an exception. It's a fun change of pace, it's interesting to tackle and, for the most part, it's a challenge. But difficult encounters all the damn time just turn me off completely.

The thing is, a lot of what I want out of most (combat-centric) games is to end up feeling strong, confident and capable. You know, all the things that I'm not in real life What this means is that I do kind of want most of the game to pander to that sense of ego, to let me win and be relatively easy. Because when most of the game is easy, then the isolated hard fights come off as a fun challenge. I feel confident and ready to tackle them. By contrast, when most of the game is hard and frustrating, the occasional spikes of increased difficulty just feel like adding insult to injury.

I actually have, I think, a good way to describe this.

Challenge: Oh? A tough fight! This should be fun!
Frustration: An even tougher fight? I am so screwed...

The reason I said it was a tangent is because I wasn't answering to you. I merely used your quote as a stepping stone because you spoke about fair games. Nothing more.

If the Hidden Leaf Ninja is a brand new player, then there's a good chance said Brute is in Praetoria. All brand new players are forced to make a Praetorian before they can make anything else.

---

My main advice here would be to try a little bit of everything and look for the activities that entertain you the most. Don't worry about numbers and perfect builds or anything like that for at least the first 20-30 levels, just play the game as it comes. And if something seems too difficult, don't be tempted to give up too quickly. Just keep on trying and eventually you'll figure it out.

If you're playing a Brute, then you'll be avoiding many of the most annoying problems the game has to offer, but that still doesn't make it easy mode. Keep an eye on what you feel like you need more of - more damage, more protection, more speed, etc. - and see about working on that at level-up. Also, yes, Fury is important and you should try to keep the Fury bar up, but if it starts stressing you out, don't worry about taking a break and letting it drop. The Fury mechanic is set such that you can build up to about half bar very easily, and your bar will decay very slowly at first, so Fory isn't that hard to get going from a cold start. It's certainly not worth turning your game into work if constant rushing isn't your thing.

Finally, if chatting with people is your thing, I'd suggest investing in the Global Chat system. I don't know what global channels Freedom has, but you can probably ask around on the Freedom forum, and possibly look into using channels. It's not complex at all, and it will give you access to very busy public channels. If you meet people you like and want to hang out with, ask to put them on your Global Friends list. This is ideal because then you can see that player whenever he's online regardless of which character or server he's on, and you can chat with him across characters, factions and servers. That's a GREAT way to keep in touch with people and socialise even if you're not directly teaming with them.

If you're looking for a Super Group, though, I'd be cautious. There are a few charlatans out there who recruit you so you can make prestige for their group but don't give anything back and essentially use you. Don't join a group just because it's high on whatever list or just because someone's broadcasting for it. Look for people you like first, THEN look into joining whatever SG they may be part of, if possible.

And above all else, have fun