Scarlet Shocker

Happy Birthday!

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Thats additional story arcs though, not a zone remake.

I never knew that about the fog been turned off must have missed that one.

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It was a bug.

As to the original suggestion: NO!

The starting point for villains is not problematic and you can be out of Mercy within a couple of hours if you work it right, and besides, being a "Destined One" means that Villains should actually have to struggle a little bit. You want to be spoon fed, go play something where you start at lvl 50.

Nothing wrong with Mercy at all. As others have suggested, Boomtown, Eden and DA need a bit of love but Mercy doesn't

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City of Guides list, forum threads, word of mouth... City Of Guides doesn't have star ratings, only comments, which, IMO is wrong. When there would be more comments, features like "most useful positive and negative reviews" from Amazon would be very helpful.

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Whilst I'm sure it's a worthy forum for the game, the bottom line is I'm not prepared to go search a different web site for good missions. Frankly I wouldn't search an official CoX NC/Paragon forum. I want it at my fingertips in the MA search function. Anything else is way below par and won't do it for me. Unless they can come up with something it's rendering the whole issue worthless.

Me and my short attention span huh?

I'm done with wading through the dross to find the odd good arc on the MA.

I've mad a couple of arcs and published one but having done it once there's little gratification in making another arc. But so many arcs are just cowpats on the face of the green fields of City of.

Half of them don't offer a decent description or raison d'etre for poorly described, thought out and implemented "custom" groups or characters and given that almost every arc has been awarded 5 stars it's a generic fail for the marking system. The search system's unusable and thus there's no impetus for anyone to produce a good arc other than the fact they can say "I done it now."

I am thinking there are two problems here:

a) too much content

b) a completely useless search system

c) a completely useless search system (yes that's only 2 reasons but the 2nd reason's so good it's worth repeating)

d) a lack of creativity.

Of my complaints, I'm fully aware that d) is likely to be most controversial and I have a response: Do NOT publish an arc you built to try stuff out if it's not worth publishing. There's a raft of stuff out there that has been created just to test concepts and try stuff out. But then somebody publishes it and it becomes part of the meaningless dirge that is MA today.

But it gets worse:
Person A publishes their concept, then tells their mate who then (for no clear reason other than it's their mate) rates the arc 5 Stars. This means it gets thrown into the massive collection of gunk and it becomes impossible to discriminate the good from the bad.

I'm aware that I might be taking an "holier than thou" approach, but come on people if you're going to go to the effort of writing an arc, creating custom characters and then publishing it, make sure it's worthwhle.

That, of course, is a dream too far. In a democracy such as the MA where the rules are few and far between, there's no quality regulator and so we are doomed to a succession of dogpiles and precious few ways to sift the wheat from chaff.

Devs: Sort the search out pronto otherwise you've created the biggest White Elephant MMO in history

Player: Try and disciminate. Ask yourself "Would I really enjoy playing this arc?" and "is it worth publishing?" If you can honestly answer yes, then go for it, but don't expect fulsome praise unless you've created something unique and exciting.

Oh and for the record? Yeah I published an ok arc, but whilst conceptually it's not bad it's flawed in both execution suffered translation from the test server so has clunks. I've never claimed otherwise but until the Search system gets better I won't be using it much.

Linky here

Looks like NC lands the first punch. Worlds.com didn't oppose so one wonders what kind of politicking's happening behind scenes

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from the City of Heroes herself

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So the game is female . . . . . interesting . . . . . .

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Crud, this means that my relationship with this game just got a whole lot more difficult to explain to my partner...

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How do you think my wife feels about this. She's now playing with a another female

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oooh... how much are you charging for the rest of us to watch?

Your premise is fundamentally flawed on a number of counts... and the first one is that Galaxy is underpopulated by heroes.

In any large populated area if the superhero population outstrips the criminal activities they cease - which in this game would mean "The End!"

I also don't believe that villains need any more "starting points" than they have already, especially now that the MA is up and running. There's plenty to do. Villains already get more opportunities to savour the delights of Paragon via Newspaper missions than Heroes do the Isles.

I'm also quite opposed to the "going rogue" concept and the MA is already a step in the wrong direction for me I feel.

And yes, your suggestion does break game law in so far that your initial encounter as a villain is that Arachnos and Kalinda seem to think you've got what it takes to be one of the Chosen Ones. If you get stomped on by Longbow from day 1 that's no way to prove anything to anyone. (Not often I agree with the Phantoms but I do on this.)

Also it's impossible to have Heroes & Villains in a zone without it being either a) non-combat (a la Pocket D) b)Co-op (RWZ & Cim) or c) PVP. Turn Galaxy into a PVP zone would ruin the game for so many people it wouldn't even be funny and the other two options are just not feasible.

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Um...shouldn't this be in Suggestions?

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No. It's a guide!

Cool thanks

Still worth getting then

no. You need to slot both builds separately

It's almost like having 2 separate toons of the same AT.

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"so, I was going to Dr. Strange's house, and what did I find? Another Starbucks!"


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Clearly, something must have gone Wong

(Nice touch)

Ok so I've got a few recipes for "Recharge Intensive Pets."

In light of the pet recharge changes how does this affect pets? I am unclear about how these sets work - do they make the pets recharge quicker or did they make the powers recharge faster (or both)?

If it's the latter or some combo thereof, are these types of IOs now well and truly redundant?

What benefits can I expect from slotting these now?

Cheers

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I didn't know people could have fetishes for fish. Extraordinary.

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you've never met anyone with a koi pond then I guess

Man I wanna see the movie now tho!

Patti does Paragon or was it Captain Anonymous and the @#%$ache of Doom?

I don't actually like this idea but I can see why it's necessary as things stand.

I think the biggest problem is that like "standard" arcs, the contact is the glue that holds it together - although they may not grant you every mission.

Often you'll get sent by the arc contact to another contact for info and/or a mission - I guess the classic case is Synapse TF, and the lack of a "talkie" mission is highlighting a serious flaw in the MA system. That there's no travelling and or discussion with other people is problematic - add those and this suggestion wouldn't be needed (but you'd also need to be able to add a couple of "talkie" missions to an arc without having it count against your missions.)

It's not the amount of missions being posted it's the clunky search system. Fix that and your concerns will go away.

/unsigned

I tried to get a team together today and just about everyone I tried who was level compatible was in some kind of MA mission - either testing, developing or playing.

There's no obvious way of checking this - and the most obvious indicatior, the Map Marker's no help.

Some way of checking if the person's in the MA would be a good thing although not sure what form that could take - maybe some kind of "MA" indicator in the status table between Map and Search Comment?

Either way, in the Find and the Global/Friend box that'd be a real boon.

So how to the Warwolves fit in?

Hope it's been great

Even as a native English speaker I'm also prine to typagrpaffical errirs and the missspilling of werdz.

Thankfully as the net spreads wider and becomes even more international, there are perfectly acceptable "regional English" spellings - let's face it, Webster and his racist anti-Englishness caused him to rewrite the "American dictionary" so give American English some kind of identity and the Americans some kind of quasi-self-identity. The upshot is that we have a number of perfectly acceptable spellings in English for the same item: ax vs axe, colour vs color, etc are examples that spring to mind.

To me the spelling is less important than the context - if I get what you mean I'm less bothered about the quality of your language (a caveat is that it must be legible of course.)

Yes we try and keep typos and spelling errors to a minimum and I will happily cast an eye over a document in the search for the glaringly obvious (but only on request.) Proof reading is an art and it can be time consuming so I'd advise you if you are serious about writing good English then try the following:

Get a good dictionary (and a good thesaurus too)

Spell check everything - but remember that it won't find the difference between "their" and "there"

Read Lynn Truss' "Eats Shoots and Leaves" - it's a book for grammar-Nazis but is an invaluable aide.

Learn the correct use of the possessive catastrophe. [sic]

Write your copy in a word processing document initially. You can always Copy & Paste later. (If you don't already have one, you can get Open Office totally free.

If in doubt ask.

Finally (and perhaps most importantly) don't stress. Even the most practiced writer will make errors - and there are myriad ways for them to fall through the net. Given that we cannot afford a proof reader or secretary don't worry about it. It's not as though we're getting paid for it. Focus on the story and sense.

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Its very possible the MA authors you despise have tried their best bless em, they could be 9 years old for all you know.

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If these arcs display the level of imagination that children have then the parents ought to be ashamed. Time was that children showed (and were encouraged to use) imagination.

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Blame 30 years of Blatcherism mate

I suspect your despair will be short lived

Many people will throw together and publish a dogpile just to see how it works. They will then try their own arc and a few other equally poorly thought out arcs and quickly lose interest - especially when badges get awarded so they have "done what they needed to do."

They'll then go back to their normal game.

The creative types who actually have something to offer will persevere and hone their craft and the percentage of "good" arcs to the dogpile norm will increase until there's a pretty good quality to a "significant proportion" of the published MA arcs.

Of course this could just be wishful thinking and I might be wossnaming in the wind

I suspect that more people will comment under test conditions because that's what they are there for, and are thus slightly more diligent

but once under live conditions most people will just give it a rating and not bother with actually providing constructive feedback

kthxbai

Can I have your stuff?

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I wonder who would be best for the role of annoying little git that repeats what was just said, tells you what people are about the say, and generally makes watching pointless as you already know what is going to happen.

It would have to be a NPC otherwise they would get punched to another planet.

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You mean Fusionette!