Silver Gale

We don't have a thermostat. Just a tiny apartment with gas heating.

Apex, Tin Mage and CoP are grindy now? They each take less than two hours and there's very little incentive to repeat them. They give nothing that you can't get elsewhere in about the same time. Sure, people run them a lot because they're new, and short, and quite fun, but I dunno how that makes them grind.

The Trials, yeah, they're pretty grindy, but by all accounts we'll be getting more Trials before we get more slots, so that's actually going to get less grindy by the end of this year.

...hot!

Um. Wait...

I'm not seeing the logic here. If the game is balanced around SOs, then wouldn't it make a lot of sense to keep it balanced around SOs while adding IOs to the store? Nothing really changes - SOs are still the baseline and IOs are still optional, there's just more people who can get IOs now.

My husband and I have vastly different ideas of what is a "comfortable" temperature. What he considers about right I consider too cold, what I consider about right he considers too hot.

We are not going to agree on a "open the window" estimate of the weather - either I'll say it's too cold or he'll say it's too warm. However, if we look at an objective measurement like temperature, and see yesterday was 18 Celcius while today is 16 C, we will both agree that today is colder than yesterday (even if I would consider today "too cold" and he "chilly but bearable").

Really? What happened? Did you have a massive life-changing epiphany where you realised that you will almost certainly outlive CoH and one day, all of those badges will be gone as if they had never existed?

You kids today with your Inventions and your markets. Back then, we just had TOs, DOs at 12, SOs at 22, and that was it. If we wanted anything but Power 10 enhancements we had to run a bunch of missions for our contact and hope we wouldn't outlevel them by the time they started offering us stuff. We couldn't afford to slot up with all SOs until well into the 30s, unless a kindly 50 helped us out, but we were happy all the same. They were simpler times.

See, I was kind of with you on this. But then I got to thinking.

Remember when levels 41-50 were released for CoH, and later for CoV? And how each of them was a whole new zone, and two tiers of contacts in that zone, each with storyarcs (very long and AV-filled storyarcs for CoH, somewhat shorter for CoV), and CoV also had the epic story tied to choosing a Patron and receiving that power pool?

And now we have four slots which are, time-wise, a much large investment than 41-50... and the only way to advance them (let's be honest, shards -> threads is not any sort of Incarnate advancement mechanism) is two Trials. Awesome Trials, to be sure, but... there's only two. And you have to play them a whole lot.

I mean, if the whole 41-50 game was just two things that you had to repeat a whole bunch of times and could only do on a team, I don't think many people would ever bother reaching 50. And even if the two things were *masterpieces* technology-wise, it wouldn't be a very good design.

I think the Devs messed up the balance of Quality vs. Quantity a little. The Quality is great (technology-wise, at least, the issues with the writing are well-documented), but the Quantity is somewhat lacking. Look at the RWZ: a whole zone with a four-part storyarc (can be done solo or in a group, over many days at one's leisure), repeatable missions (easy but slow source of shinies), a Task Force (suitably epic, following on the storyarc but not required) and a Raid (best source of shinies, easy to put together, feeling chaotic and action-packed). That, I think, would be a good model for Incarnate content.

Technically all of that was the past three and a half years. Before that I was dating a guy who was kind of a passive-aggressive jerk and didn't like CoH much. But I don't want to dwell on stuff like that, so.

I would also like to add that the most common justification for "server merges plz" posts are "I can't find a team". While the forum posters are usually good about rattling off that series of methods or something similar, the fact remains that these are all workarounds for the lack of a good team finding tool. EDIT: Perhaps if we had better auto-teaming tools, people would be less likely to come to the forums to ask for server mergers because "they can't find a team". Wouldn't that be something worthwhile?

I mean, certainly in a game that lacks an Auction House or equivalent, it's quite *viable* for the playerbase to decide on one central location where all players would go to spam up Trade chat with "WTS this, WTB that" until someone is interested, I don't think anyone would respond to the idea of an Auction House with "that's not really needed, we already have [Trade Hub], just go there and spam WTB until you get what you want".

No OP who suggested server merges has ever done this "simple search", so I don't see why I should need to.

People who post a lot on a game forum do so because they are highly invested in the game and want to make their opinion known. Whether that opinion is based in fact or wishful thinking is another matter entirely, which you can't divine from postcount alone, only though actually reading what they have to say and comparing it to known facts.

A rule of thumb that has never failed me on the Internet is not to expect a lot of sensibility from any poster ever, regardless of any stats. Also, not to take any one poster as representative of any community, ever.

You haven't really done much there except replace all of his unique costume pieces (the chest logo and arm bits) with stuff from the character creator. The updated headpiece is nice though.

The members of the team "liked MMOs, but we weren't hardcore MMO players," says Miller. "I wanted to make a MMO that was accessible to me and my friends, where we could have a bunch of stuff to do while we were leveling up that was akin to the things that we were seeing in other games."

Miller agrees. "We have over seven years of content development in this title, right? That is something that brand new competition cannot say, and I dare them to match... The game is built around breadth and having things to do with alts that you haven't done with your main character."

Yep, absolutely nothing here that might lure people into playing. Now, if only they'd mentioned something about upcoming Power Proliferations, or the status of Power Pool Customisation, or the Coming Storm plotline, or [insert thing that you would most like to know about]... *that* would really bring in the new players! I'm just thinking about the health of the game, here.

Suppose they added one Incarnate arc in I21. You can run it solo or with friends, and get a component at the end. Then you're done on that character, and all you have left is the Trials again. Would that be okay?

Assuming it isn't. Imagine there are two Incarnate arcs. You run both of them, then you're done and it's back to Trials. Heck, imagine they pull a RWZ, and have *four* arcs, with an overall epic story that comes to a climax in the final mission of the final arc... and then you're done, and you can only replay the story again on another character. Would that be good solo/small team Incarnate content?

Assuming it isn't. Assuming you never want to see a Trial again and still get progress on your Incarnate powers - spending about the same playtime as the Trial players, accounting for time to gather Leagues and learn tactics. How many arcs would that take? Probably more than twenty. All with excellent writing and interesting mission mechanics and a standardized reward payout so anyone who runs through all of the arcs is guaranteed to be at the same level at the end, Incarnate-wise. Yeah, that's certainly not asking much.

Okay, so assuming you agree that at least *some* solo/small team content will need to be repeatable. For people who like teaming, it's a nice bit of variety to put in between Trials... but soloers now have *no* choice other than to grind the repeatable content until their eyes bleed. How many repeatable solo arcs would you need until you didn't feel like you were just doing the same thing over and over? Seven? Ten?

Always keep in mind that the solo path will have to be *noticeably* less effective than Trials, to make up for the higher cost of entry on Trials. So some people will feel they are "forced" into Trials by the higher rewards, anyway.

A completely solo path to Incarnate power that doesn't feel like a grind at any point would be nice, but unfeasible. What we will get is, in all likelyhood, more grind.

I'd probably buy character-based costumes before I'd buy account-based, since I have one character who could really use about 10 more slots and all the others are okay with 5 or even out of ideas by the second costume.

You can take screenshots and compare them in an image editing program side-by-side.

Also, if you want to have a costume with the same face, scales, and colors as another one, you can save the older one and load it into a costume slot.

I'm guessing they think the amount of money they'd lose on dealing with frauds from your IP region is greater than the amount they'd gain from legitimate customers who want to buy stuff. It sucks when criminals ruin things for everyone else.