Silver Gale

Shipping your own characters between themselves seems sort of... weird.

You'd do better to ship your characters with other people's characters. Plenty of good RP potential there.

This is a move by the mods that is guaranteed to annoy anyone who had any sort of stake in the reputation mechanism. So, good job not showing favouritism, I guess.

To celebrate this booster, here are some ninja facts:

1. Ninjas are mammals.
2. Ninjas fight ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

Paragon Studios' motto is "we'd rather give you entirely new zones than revamp the old zones". This is an approach that's focused on pleasing existing customers at the expense of incoming new customers, and it shows with GR.

Something that a lot of older MMOs have been doing is "revamping the new user experience". LotRO has done work on the early level zones to streamline the quest lines and make it more obvious where a character needs to go at which level. WoW is gearing up to wipe the entire world clean and start again. Even Fallen Earth, in the first month after launching, has made changes to the early level zones to account for player feedback.

Most players agree that the 1-20 game in CoH is somewhat stale and lacking. Since the game launched, there's been some updates to the first three zones (Atlas, Galaxy and King's Row) as well as a small makeover for the Hollows. However, the contact progression is still in the same state it was at the game's launch - a whole bunch of interchangable non-characters who send you on endless street-sweeping missions and to doors in distant zones (before you've gotten a travel power, and there is nothing to indicate that there is a way of getting a jetpack to make travel faster).

Paragon Studios' answer? Make an entirely new early game that requires an additional purchase, and leave the existing early game exactly as it is.

New subscribers are not going to compare the best of your content to the competition. They are not going to buy the game, and then buy the expansion, in order to see the better starting experience. They are going to start playing the game to see if they like it, and they are going to wind up in the Steel Canyon and Skyway content, and in the Mercy Island/Port Oakes mess redside. And they are going to compare *that* to other games.

(Granted, those areas still compare favorably to the Champions early game, but that's no reason to get complacent.)

I love what I'm hearing of Going Rogue so far. I'm looking forward to playing my Praetorian characters in the all-new early game together with all my long-time-playing SGmates. But I realize that while making new early game is fun for me, remaking the *existing* early game is important for the health of the game. I'm willing to accept not getting as many all-new zones if that's what it takes.

Massively interviews City of Heroes' newest architect

I wasn't aware the new Dr. Aeon was the "Joe the Longbow Eagle" guy! I need to work my way through his arcs one of these days.

Good and Evil are terms each person defines for themselves, based on their culture, their own personality, and how much thought they're willing to put into it. Of course if a person tells you "I believe that general statement X", you can always say "but what about extremely specific situation Y where general statement X could be applied in various dramatically different ways". As I said: you can do that, but you really shouldn't, because the sort of person who always asks questions like that is considered to be very tiresome and doesn't get invited to parties.

It's much easier, to avoid tiresome people like that, never to say "I believe that general statement X". Instead, you should create a world in which general statement X is always true without exception, and write a book or movie or game that takes place in that world and shows general statement X to be true, and then turn it into a bestseller. This way, when the tiresome person reads your book and comes up with their extremely specific hypothetical example that calls your belief into question, you are miles away enjoying a nice glass of sherry and counting the profits you made off the royalty fees.

"Consistent mission level" is a rule that can be broken, you just have to think carefully about how you're breaking it and why. There's a great arc out there which makes use of level scaling to show that your character is gradually weakening. Also, you could make an arc where the first mission is a "prologue" or a later mission is a "flashback" to when you were a newbie hero, which contains a vital clue to the mystery you're trying to solve.

My main hero is a Storm/Elec Defender. When CoV first came out, I decided to make her an Evil Twin. The problem was that at the time, none of the CoV ATs had access to anything like Electric Blast, much less Storm. I ended up going with a Dark/Cold Corruptor (Cold Domination being kinda-sorta like Storm if you squint and turn your head).

I had to really think the concept through to justify the powersets, but eventually everything fell into place. By the time Storm Summoning and Electric Blast were proliferated to the villain side, I couldn't imagine Gale's Evil Twin as anything else than Dark/Cold. (I did roll an Ice/Storm Alternate Universe Evil Twin Completely Unrelated Person on a different server.)

*wanders sleepily through the room and moves a crucial piece of machinery a little bit to the right in the search for coffee*

Okay, so people who are in the Closed Beta for an upcoming expansion are traditionally under a NDA, and it's generally considered poor form to even inform someone that you are in the Closed Beta. This is supposedly to keep people from being jealous or badgering the beta tester for info.

But whenever I see a character ingame with the 60 months Veteran badge, or the Loyalty Program badge, I will immediately know that the player has been offered a chance to be in the GR closed beta. How are veterans and loyal customers supposed to keep jealousy and nosy questions away?