Silver Gale

At level 20 on Hero side, you should be hanging out in Talos Island and Independence Port. Once you've hit level 30 you'll be moving onto Brickstown and Founders' Falls.

You should have been introduced to your first Primal Earth contact in Talos. An agent who claims you've already been doing evil in Primal Earth. Run his arc and the one afterwards, they're pretty fun.

Make sure you find the "Detective" contact (in the Contacts window, Detective tab) and talk to them to receive the Police Scanner (it looks like a radio, in your Contacts window at the very top of Active tab.)

Use your Police Scanner while outdoors in Talos to get a choice of three missions. The Scanner missions are not particularly interesting (very Mad Libs style: (villain group) has stolen the (item)! (villain group) has kidnapped (a citizen)! (boss name) of (villain group) is on the loose!), but after running five of them you can run a Safeguard mission where you stop a bank robbery. After that the Detective will introduce you to a contact. This is the main way of gaining new contacts whenever you can't find anything to do.

Also check out the Task Forces: Positron in Steel Canyon, Synapse in Skyway City, Sister Psyche in Independence Port, and Citadel in Talos Island each offer one. You can run them at any level (you will be temporarily scaled down in level if you're higher than the maximum level, but you'll still earn XP normally), but you need a team to start them. Either watch out for "TF starting" messages in Broadcast, or start your own! They are fairly old content (aside from Positron, who got a revamp recently) but they come with a cool fight against a big tough guy at the end.

Don't worry too much about rushing to the end. There *will* be an endgame system in the next Issue, but a lot of people are skipping on it in favor of levelling alts through the existing content. Play at your own pace, read through the stories, try to learn as much as you can about the various archetypes and powersets.

I'm not entirely sure how that's applicable. I'm not proposing a hard price cap on the market or an increase in drops.

This isn't exactly polished enough to be a suggestion yet, so I'm putting it in this forum instead of Suggestions. I'd just like some comments.

CoH does not have enough reliable Inf sinks. There are some NPC vendors, but the number of things a single character needs from them is quite small compared to the time spent playing. Even if you slot with SOs that you replenish every 5 levels, eventually you reach level 50 and don't need to spend any more Inf ever, but there are plenty of reasons to keep playing. Slotting with IOs is quickest if you buy from the market, where only 10% of Inf is sunk, and there is no way to produce recipes and salvage without also producing Inf.

You can get all the IOs you want bypassing the market entirely if you gather Reward/Alignment Merits. You can turn 50 Reward Merits into 1 Alignment Merit at the cost of 20 million Inf once a day. If you're level 50, you're quite likely to make more than 20 million in the course of gathering 50 Reward Merits, so this doesn't really sink as much Inf either.

If there was a way to trade Inf directly for Reward Merits, that would provide a consistent Inf sink, and indirectly a de facto price cap on any recipe in the game.

Supposing a Reward Merit costs 2 million Inf, and you are limited to getting 50 of them per day (a counter increments from 1 to 50 every time you buy one, and resets to 0 20 hours after your first purchase).

You can get one Alignment Merit a day by sinking a total of 120 million Inf, and not making any more in the process.

The "value" of a purple recipe becomes no greater than 1.2 billion. PvP recipes become no more expensive than 4.2 billion. It doesn't devalue them to the point where there is no point in trading them.

Additionally, this solves the problem of "many alts holding less merits than one roll" problem - if you have 15 Merits left over on an alt you're not planning to play for a while, you can send over 10 million Inf from your main, buy an additional 5 Merits and make a random roll.

The only potential problem I can see is Salvage prices jumping up, since there's still no way to generate Salvage without also generating Inf.

Thoughts?

Great, the two that I don't have are not part of the sale... (Mutant and Party) ah well.

Things that bug me: "Souvenirs" were pretty clearly supposed to be actual items that your character picked up during an arc. The name of the souvenir is the name of the item. The description starts with "This item reminds you of a story, a story you like to call.... Title Of The Arc."

Most souvenirs for new storyarcs follow this convention, but the ones introduced for the Hollows/Striga/Croatoa storyarcs are just the title of the arc and a description. What, did I stuff "Flux the Outcast" into my Vault of Heroic Deeds between "An etched Clockwork piece" and "The PsychoChronoMetron"? Does he just sit there all day and tell me about the time we had an adventure together whenever I ask? How am I holding a "Piercing the Veil" next to my "Freakalympics gold medal"? THIS MAKES NO SENSE ARGH.

Don't forget the new Hazard Zone badges and accolades.

Find a common IO in high demand, but for which the salvage is relatively cheap and plentiful. Buy stacks of salvage, craft from memorized, sell in batches of 10 for just over cost. Free money and crafting progress for just minutes of time investment a day.

How to find the "just over cost" price point? Pull up a calculator, (salvage cost + crafting cost)*1.1111 and round up to the nearest thousand or so. You may need to spend a few days observing the price fluctuations of common IOs and salvage, but once you've identified your target IO, it doesn't need any more thought.

I've only met one of my CoH friends so far, but it went pretty well. We're married now.

I'm currently working on titles and achievements in Guild Wars in order to get cool stuff in Guild Wars 2. It would be cool if I also got some badges in CoH for it. Cross-game promotion yay!

You have stuff. I do not have stuff (or at least not as much stuff as you). I deserve stuff. Therefore you are wrong because you have stuff and I don't. You will continue to be wrong unless you give me the stuff I deserve.

I think a big cause of inflation is that there is no way to generate salvage and recipes without also generating inf. A way of generating recipes or salvage while *sinking* inf (something as simple as "200 inf gets you random piece of salvage, Arcane or Tech, any tier, any rarity") would go a ways towards alleviating that.

Someone told me that they heard from an NCSoft employee that you're guaranteed to get a Closed Beta invite if you send in a picture of yourself wearing a bra. It's just what I heard.

Absolutely not. If it were a Psi power, it would be called "Psi Healing" or "Psi Support". You can make up stuff that's not in the game, but don't expect me to acknowledge it. #contraryjusttobecontrary