Silver Gale

Yeah, do look into how Sidekicking works in this game, and let your friends know, otherwise all three of you are going to be "PL'd 50 n00bs" that everyone considers part of the problem.

Well, it... wasn't as stupid as I was expecting from the loading screens. The trap by Wade made sense in context. The whole "Manticore has to shoot Psyche to stop everyone from being killed-!" felt a bit like a retread of the comics, but I guess not everyone has read those.

After the brief "actual emotional reaction" of SSA5, my interest has fallen back to "not painful to read" levels.

In order to get a bit more mileage out of the Super Packs I started using up my various Paragon Rewards consumable freebies a while ago. I'm left with only a few Enhancement Unslotters now. That wasn't too bad, double/team insps are cool and the occasional Windfall or XP Booster is nice to have.

So here's what I'm going to do:

1) Only buy the 5 packs/1 Reward Token, or one with my VIP points if there is nothing else I want.

2) Not buy any more until I've used up all the consumables in the previous batch.

3) Stop buying them immediately once I have the full EleOrder set.

BID ON ALL THE THINGS!

I've been going around all my characters putting up bids in the 50-100mil range on appropriate ATIOs. The logic is that there will be an initial spike of supply as people buy the Super Packs and end up with extraneous IOs.

So far demand seems to be rising fast on the Corruptor set. My bids were left in the dust and I had to increase them. I used the Inf from my MM since apparently nobody wants the MM IOs and I got them all around 30mil ish.

After getting 6 characters outfitted with new shinies I'm down 2 billion Inf, so that means I took a measely 200mil out of circulation.

Running Trials is definitely mentally exhausting for me.

But you know what? Swimming is physically exhausting, and I still enjoy it.

A good Trial run, where the leader communicates clearly and everyone's on the ball, where I really feel like part fo a greater whole - it can feel like getting a new best time on 50m crawl. I feel exhausted but also accomplished, and happy. The Merits and Threads and reward table are almost an afterthought.

I've always thought I'm not going to start complaining on these forums about the writing in this game because if I start, I may never stop. And seasonal missions are naturally going to be the worst since they're written on a tight schedule and are only going to be visible for a short time anyway.

With that in mind, let me complain on these forums about the writing in these seasonal missions.

SPOILERS (seriously)








1) I'm an Archmage. Seriously, that's what the badge says: "Your research into the arcane, coupled with your experience in fighting magical foes, has unlocked heretofore unknown magics within you, earning you the title of Archmage." Surely I would have a better handle on how to use a magical ritual rather than "mutter some spells I heard somewhere once and hope for the best"? Minor gripe, can't write for everyone, most heroes are not magic scholars, I know.

2) Why does my character's life have to be linked to that of Red Widow? My character is a hero. She doesn't need much additional reason to go save the life of someone she's just brought back from the dead.

3) I haven't worked with Miss Duncan a day and already I'm entering a warehouse, beating up security and trying to steal an artifact that the owner, as far as I know, has not aquired illegally. I should probably quit before I wind up wearing white and red spandex taking a flamethower to homeless people on foreign soil.

Okay, so it is Crey, who are fairly throughly corrupt, but my sole justification is "I need that thing to mess with someone's mind and the Countess won't give it to me". There is pretty much no way I can look at this and see myself as a hero.

4) On a villain character, I decide to try out Arbiter Hawk's version, and suddenly all becomes clear. It is *exactly* the same story except with "Longbow psychology profilers predict Recluse might become a little less obsessed" replaced with "Arachnos Fortunatas forsee a GLORIOUS FUTURE where Arachnos rules all".

So what I *suspect* happened is that the writers wrote the villain arc first - with the "you have to stop her getting killed or you'll die too" motivation, and the "someone has an artifact I want so I'll break into their place and rob them" and then did the equivalent of search-and-replace to make the hero arc. Heroes are always running around doing anything a contact tells them with the vague promise of 'world better somehow' at the end of it, anyway.

Is this an attempt at making us emphathise with villain players who complain about their content being merely copy-paste of hero content? Or is this an attempt at evening out the quality of red and blueside by lowering the latter instead of raising the former?

In summary, Jessica Duncan's arc is the lowest point in my enjoyment of CoH writing at least since AE was introduced. Even the writing in the Trials has never been bad enough that I wanted to complain on the forums about it.

I wonder how difficult it would be to make a Shadow Shard-sized zone that's just a huge expanse of flat terrain in all directions, with a starry sky. 'cause that'd be a great April Fool's joke. "MOON ZONE! (mobs, missions, terrain features, or any thing of any interest whatsoever not included)".

Archetype-specific IOs. Which price category wil they be in? Posiblast? Purples? PvP IOs? Will they all have similar prices or will some sets be more valuable?

What is the opinion of the market experts?

The promptness of awarding each VIP reward to my account seems inversely proportional to its desirability.

Server Transfer Token
Desirability: Low to none.
Awarded: First of each month, sharp, no delays!

Paragon Points
Desirability: High.
Awarded: Couple days after the first, usually before billing date. Usually.

Paragon Reward Token
Desirability: Very high.
Awarded: Completely randomly, somewhere at the tail end of the month.