Silver Gale

And I do wonder, how much of this "aha, I knew it, you *do* want my shinies! *you're not getting my shinies*!" in response to reasonable questions about "why didn't you bring this up before?" is projection. How much is a general assumption that players are power-hungry and if there is a Greater Power to be gotten, they will want it. And how much is the GM going "you are not ready to know" because he's still trying to decide and doesn't want to commit to one answer yet.

I am expecting the whole thing to hit depths of stupidity never thought possible, just so there's still a slim chance I'll be pelasantly surprised.

Actually, compared to what happens when they try to be grim and serious, I think I'll take trying to be cute and funny.

That poor, poor Chicago, man

Since the queue only allows VIPs to join iTrials, and all VIPs can use /tells and Global channels as much as they want, none of this changes if a player uses the random queue to put them in an iTrial instead of inviting the first 24 VIPs who show interest, and then launching an iTrial.

Actually it even *prevents* the situation where a level 50 Premium player who has access to Tells/Globals joins your iTrial League, and everyone experiences a delay because the leader can't launch the iTrial and has to kick the offender and find another person.

My interpretation was that nobody uses the queue to randomly team up because nobody *else* ever uses the queue, so it's easier to randomly team up by Broadcasting "LF any Trial" in the proper zone.

Maybe it's personal bias: I have led Trials before, because there were a lot of people "LF any Trial" in Broadcast and nobody forming one, and I knew that using the random queue was a last cause, so I went around inviting anyone who seemed interested until I had a full Trial, and then launched and led it. It wasn't difficult, but it was full of tedious busy work, since I had to individually send out invites, and sometimes people were in the wrong zones and I had to ask them to come to the RWZ, and sometimes someone would ask me to save a spot for a friend who was switching. And of course, if it took more than 15 minutes to assemble a full League, people would start quietly vanishing, I assume because of a lack of time or patience. A simple way to just say "accept the next 23 people who show interest in an iTrial" would have helped me immensely.

The queue has some problems from the point of view of someone looking to get into an iTrial team as soon as possible and not caring about who they team with: it doesn't show how many people are waiting, the "typical wait times" are skewed by pre-made teams, and there is no guarantee that someone will be giving a clear strategy to follow.

Joining a "pre-made team" has at least the illusion of clear waiting time, since you can see how many people are needed to reach the maximum, and an illusion of leadership, since the person doing all the invites can be expected to dictate strategy. (There are cases where a person will invite 24 people from Broadcast and then ask "okay, who wants to lead?", but at least in my experience, they are rare.)

You could say that "wanting a clearly defined leader" is a type of "preferring control over who they team with", but if the queue had some way for people to volounteer for League leader, what exactly would be lost compared to the method of recruiting the first 23 people who show interest and then launching a Trial?

Well, from my observations, there are plenty of people on Broadcast in the RWZ and now in Dark Astoria saying "any Trials forming?" or "50+X [AT] LF any Trial".

Likewise, when a Trial does start forming, it is my observation that many leaders tend to announce it on Broadcast and Global channels, recruiting freely both those people who are Broadcasting for invites and those who send them tells. I have asked to join many Trials in forming and have only ever been refused for lack of room. During off-peak times, when playing on my level 50s, I have even gotten /tells asking me if I am interested in a trial.

Neither of those situations appears to speak of "wanting to control who they team with" - on the contrary, it seems to value getting into the Trial as soon as possible. They are both quite frequent and I do not often see the same character name twice.

So, based on my observations, I conclude that there is a significant amount of players in the game who want to experience the Trials with a minimum of fuss and waiting, not really caring who they are teamed with. I am assuming that the intended use of the random queue on the LFG tool is to help that particular class of people get into Trials faster. Please feel free to point out any errors you see in this line of thinking.

So, if the random queue is intended to help people who don't care about team composition and want to get into the Trial faster, and the random queue is *not* actually helping people get into the Trial faster, then the LFG tool is not working right for those people and could use an improvement.

If the majority of the players who run Trials care about proper team composition more than expediency, or if the LFG queue is intended only to let pre-made Leagues run the Trials, then of course everything is working correctly.

I was dismayed when I discovered this today. Like most posters in this thread, I liked to divvy up my XP Boosters between characters and have them ready in a power tray. I mistook the "this will activate the XP booster" warning for a "this is something only one character can claim" warning, and I ended up with a XP booster on a character I was about to finish playing.

Worse, when I claimed the booster, the email vanished from my inbox (presumably so I could not claim another one while I had the one active), giving me the impression that the other five XP Boosters that email was good for had just vanished.

I don't like this change and would like to ask for it to be reverted, and not applied to any more boosters.

Won't someone please think of the people who are Premium players, never plan to subscribe, had exactly 27 tokens, and spent $15 on points for the express purpose of getting the Innner Inspiration power?

(By the way, if you want to have large inspirations as drops without subscribing, you're going to have to fill up Tier 8, meaning you have to spend that token on Inner Inspiration anyway.)

If you look at my original post, that was indeed what I was refrring to.

Wasn't saying it was a good idea to do all of those in CoH. You'd have to make up a brand new game that relied entirely on in-zone events instead of instancing, and that could scale you down to a lower level without disabling any powers you gained later.

ArenaNet are the only group of mavericks who started from the idea of "how do we remove obstacles that get in the way of teaming?". And their approach has basically been taking CoH's system and improving on it.

(SSK is good, but how about if every zone in the game auto-exemped you to its max level? Sharing mission completions and improving rewards for teams is good, but what if you didn't even have to invite other people to your team at all? Oh hey, most character builds are self-sufficient, but almost any team-up is greater than the sum of its parts.)

I'm slightly devastated by your combination of intensity identifiers there.

They released the Dark Astoria update with all the new arcs and solo/small team Incarnate rewards, LFG queue that covers all the Trials and TFs and is usable inside missions, and Dark Control. So that's quite a lot of things that *I* was looking forward to, at least.

Brian Clevinger is the writer of Atomic Robo. He came up with the idea for the character (a very human-like if not at all human-looking robot created by Nicholas Tesla) a long time ago, made the character in City of Heroes, then decided to make a comic book based on the character. He got Scott Wegener to do the art on the comic, and included screenshots of the CoH character. Scott Wegner subsequently came up with the character's look, which ended up not being much like the CoH version at all, and the Atomic Robo comics make no reference to Paragon City or anything similar to the place.

I get that you're advising people to be cautious, but don't do so based on unsupported fearmongering. This is less like doing 70 when the speed limit's 55, and more like those cartoons where four characters share a can of beer and pass out and have horrifying hallucinations to illustrate the Dangers of Alcohol To Young Minds.

There is a non-zero chance that if you use your own creation as a basis for a CoH character, and then make a commercial production based on the original version of the character, NCSoft will take you to court based on the wording of the EULA.

There is also a non-zero chance that NCSoft will insert language into the EULA making every customer agree to be an indentured servant, and send their private mercenary army to enforce the terms.

The proper response to this thread is NOT "never, ever, under any circumstance use a character idea you ever want to monetize in CoH, and if you already made character there, then you can never use them for profit."

The proper response is: "In general you should avoid making CoH characters based on ideas you want to monetize at some point - but if you do think of monetizing a character you've already rolled, it's a good idea to 1) Redesign the new version so they are markedly different from what CoH's engine can do, 2) Delete/rename the character, and remove any prominent CoH screenshots with the character from your websites/forums, 3) never, ever, under any circumstance use any references to CoH characters, places, or terms in your work."

I could spend this Inf I have now... but what if I need it later?

I think it depends on which character first checks their email. If it's a character with "only accept from Global Friends" unchecked, the email goes into the inbox as normal. If it's a character that has it checked, it vanishes into the Void, never to be seen again.

Again, what about Atomic Robo? The artist that works on the series outright stated that:

So here was a character the writer made up, that was created in City of Heroes before he went out to do anything with him, that was then translated into comic book form (the comic book retaining absolutely no elements of CoH lore) and picked up by an independent publisher.

Now, we don't know how much legal wrangling was involved, but you shouldn't say it's completely impossible.

Got it this time, thanks. (Would've just replied to the mail ingame, but didn't think of it until after I'd deleted. Duh.)

Nope. Turned it off on one character, and the test email came through, but still don't see the previous mail.

Argh, I forgot I had "Mail from global friends only" set on most of my characters. I'm ot sure what that did to the email, did it get returned, or did it just vanish into oblivion?