Scarlet Shocker

I picked up on a thread from my twitter feed that I found curious. I'm pretty familiar with Gartner from an IT perspective from my working life, so this struck a chord with me.

The article in question can be found here, and it's a relatively simple diargram but could be very interesting. It's the old "Up and to the right" thing is (still) a big buzz and place to be for corporations and there are a number of criteria to apply but take a look and then see where you scale CoH

A long while ago, Base salvage got ditched because "players were confused by the difference between Base Salvage and Invention Salvage."

So suddenly we have:

I love Praetoria. My big problem is the whole Well of the Furies thing that is such an unmitigatedly bad story it makes me wonder if I'll bother with the content and just do more runs from 1-50.

Also I doubt that there's any point in offering the Devs an alternative - they've had plenty already and came up with "Cole Smash Multiverse" as their best effort. I don't think we'll see many redeeming features forthcoming. It's not the gameplay I have a probelm with it's the madness of the well as a story.

One big problem they have overlooked I believe is the duality of this game. Time was you could only be a hero. Then you could be a villain and experience some great new content and once CoV arrived you could fight the other side in PVP.

Now Heroes and Villains are forced to team so much that the division has just been completely blurred and there's just a grey mess. Then you go to Praetoria and start a new toon and you think "Yeah I got a side that I can work with" but once you hit lvl 20 you get kicked out into the same old grey goo that exists for Primal characters.

We should have an option to stay in Praetoria and continue to serve our faction I believe, and if you remain a loyalist, then oppose the Primals coming to invade. Resistance could act as a fifth column in Praetoria helping the primals to overthrow Cole from within.

With the Well of the Dogpile story, I'd like to see something along the lines of Malta, realising there's more at stake than their crusade against meta-humans, discovering a bit about the incarnates and working with non-incarnate superhumans to take them down. They have some interesting technology and could maybe give a technological solution that provides functionally similar powers, thus reducing Dev work

Thanks. I'm either blind or it was hiding in plain sight!

I've been experiencing real issues with the forum over the last couple of days. Pages aren't loading, timing out, and just hanging.

This happens in Windows and Fedora using a Firefox 4 and Chrome. Chrome is an improvement on Firefox but still imperfect.

It doesn't seem to be me because speedtests are good (I'm on a 20 meg fibre) and other sites load fine, so it does seem to be me to be down to here but I'm puzzled.

Anyone else having troubles?

What: A Character Auction hosted by the EERC on Defiant Server
When: Saturday 9th April 6pm BST/7pm CET (5pm UTC)
Where: Defiant Pocket D
Who: EERC and YOU!
Why: To have a party, to win prizes and large amounts of Inf, and to provide funds for the EERC to hold future exciting events across the EU community.

How does it work? Read on and think about putting yourself up for auction!

The people who have volunteered to be auctioned off will be known as the auctionees.. The auctionees have agreed to play FOUR hours* with the highest person bidding on them doing anything the bidder wishes within reason and allowable by the Terms of Service (PLing and farming are very discouraged and the auctionee has the right to decline to partake in those events). By agreeing to be an auctionee, you will receive 25% of the winning bid. The following people have agreed to be auctioned off during the Defiant character auction(in no particular order):

Scarlet Shocker
Mrs ?
Super Ready
Mr ?
Mereman
Beastyle*
Avatea*
You! (add your name to this thread and let's see how much you raise!)

We have several other prizes: Spot prizes, Inf etc and an Mo TF of your choice on Union organised by vernichterhelge and a Martial Arts Booster code very generously donated by TsumijuZero.

(*Red Names are only available for 2 hours play and teams must work within their available schedule for obvious reasons)

Everyone else who attends will be bidders. Bidders will bid upon those being auctioned for a chance to win them (or the experience being auctioned). As a bidder, you agree that you have the amount of influence/infamy available to you, and are willing to play the game with the person that you are bidding on. You must be present to win!

Inevitably we need some rules but they are pretty simple:

When bidding, must be a minium of one million inf higher than the previous highest bid, and in increments of whole millions. (so No bids of 2,000,001 )
Only one active bid at a time, which will be made in the Request/Auction channel. Please keep that channel free for bids, and use broadcast for general chatter, wolf whistles etc.
They must have their team ready. They must be prepared to fit in with the times available to the player/CC who has been won.
Payment must be made prior to any play
No griefing - especially if they win a CC or official Paragon Studios employee. In other words no whining about the state of the game or how rubbish such and such a power set is. Have a fun conversation but appreciate the CC rep isn't their sounding board.
Play to the best of your ability - if you try an "Master of" run and one of the team continually buggers it up then the Auctionee is entitled to call it a day.
If things go wrong due to unforseen circumstance (major power outage, server failure, etc) then the Team and Auctionee can renegotiate a replay.
In the event of any dispute the final decision of the EERC will be final.
All other rules for Paragon/CoH must be observed
Have a bunch of fun!!!!!

There are very few circumstances where a specific AT is a must have on any of the content in this game. That's one of the joys of its flexibility.

Just on a whim, I picked up a cheap box from Amazon the other day and that was one of the main things to strike me.

The basic costume creator, that you get wtih the GVE edition is manageable - just about - but it seems really limited compared to a veteran with plenty of boosters. I feel a bit conflicted because there is a lot of content in the standard creator.

My biggest problem with the costume creator as it stands is the sheer volume of poorly sorted options. It's damned confusing and hard to work with. If they could be categorised better and sorted into manageable bits then even better.

We also need better skin options and hat/hair combos - both bugbears of mine that I've posted before. I also happily support decals for the back and shoulders etc, and I'd say increase the choice.

I'd love something to be done, even if it's a case of sorting but even then that's not so simple I suspect, but I'd suggest surely f the character creator gets a makeover that'd be the perfect time to update the character models. Things like fingers and facial expressions (and dare I say flexyhair) are desperately needed. That more than anything else is holding the game back in comparison to other MMOs I'd say.

If an experienced MMO player were to encounter the game for the first time, I seriously wonder what their reaction would be looking at the models and costume creator.

Origins themselves mean little enough in this game but the game itself doesn't suffer for that but yeah we're all gonna be mad well zombies soon enough so it's kind of academic

I started with Blasters and now I'm a big fan of Controllers.

I love Trick Arrow but came to that relatively late but Storm is also excellent.

So last night we're on this STF.

We've got a nicely balanced team, a tank, I'm on my best troller Magma Mage (earth/thermal) we've a kin defender, a fire/rad troller and a couple of fire blasters and a an Arch/Dev blaster and we're on +1 so everything's cool.

I monkey as Ghost Widow comes into range thanks to Secondary Mutation but I've got SB on so I'm tearing around with Rocky my pet trying to keep up but I lose him and she goes down quick enough. The other 3 don't stand much of a chance.

We steamroller most stuff despite having a couple of novices on the side, but with our debuffs and dps not much gets to stand up to us.

Until we get to Lord Recluse.

Our tank is SS/Willpower so has no taunt and to compound matters hasn't ever done the TF, nor have they got their Incarnate slot, nor are they used to teaming having soloed to 50 (that's noteworthy in itself if you ask me) and is rusty.

So despite all our buffs, the tank squishes before even getting close to Recluse and anyone else (ie me mostly because I'm trying to support the tank from closish range) doesn't stand a chance once I'm in his aggro bubble. Neither me or the kin can get heals off quickly enough to mitigate his damage and the tank falls down.

We try several variations on a theme and get nowhere, and it's late at night (close to midnight) and a few people are muttering about "gotta work in the morning" and "we'll never do this" when suddenly one of the fire blasters pipes up in a classic Michael Caine moment with: "'Ang on lads, I've got an idea."

At this time we'd not even managed to take a single pylon down, so we're ready to try anything. So blaster (played by Protector X) says "I'll handle LR, you take the pylons.

I admit I was skeptical. I've played with this guy a lot and he's quite squishy but his damage output is good, but hey, it's that or nothing by this stage. So we go for it.

We take out the flyer (again) and then on his F7 we pile on the pylon. It goes down quick as you like. So does the next. And the 3rd. And LR is nowhere to be seen.

Occasionally I catch a glimpse of Mr Multi-Arms and some red and yellow flames streaking by but I'm mostly focused on taking the buff generators down and a lot of crowd control - the flyer comes back and a few Arachnos come to the party but without an AV to worry about they are soon toast. But we have to pause in our endeavours and win two more units of reward merit yay! when we take the flyer down again.

We take the fourth for good measure. We've come this far let's not blow it now it works and we see Protector doing a dance from above with Lord Recluse, spamming fireworks in his general direction. We buff up and get our AOE stuff out... I've got 3 that I lay down and the /Devs mines make a welcome addition and then the blaster leads Recluse into the middle of it where we hit him with everything. He lasts probably less than 2 minutes, out of the 2hours 22mins of the whole TF (of which the bulk was easily from the Recluse cut scene onwards.)

Epic stuff and a great effort from Protector X for thinking out of the box and pulling it off and literally, a blast!