Sparkly Soldier

The CoV site says this...

Maybe they could base the badges on how many times a character's triggered the "thank you" animation from NPC (like, if they can add a hidden variable to the player's stats that just goes up by one every time that happens). I still help people being attacked just to help, and wouldn't want a more substantial reward, but a series of badges praising the hero for still caring about the people would be nice.

To answer that via an earlier quote...

I hope they don't do too much with the Nuclear 90 story, though: I saw it as a great character hook and made my own Nuclear 90 mutant, and at least a few other people have mentioned doing the same (meaning there's probably way more than 90 out there, but as long as nobody's counting... ).

But maybe something similar to the Nuclear 90 or the "Bang Babies" in Static Shock could be the premise of an issue. Let's say that, just recently, hundreds of young adults all around the world have started developing dangerous superpowers, similar to the Nuclear 90 situation. An investigation traces the phenomenon back to something that secretly happened almost 20 years ago, like an experiment by Portal Corp that seemed to have no measurable effect, so nobody paid it much attention.

Now, however, the mutants born from that event are revealed as the key to something much bigger, and the hunt is on as both the villains, ranging from Crey Corporation to Arachnos, and the heroes are trying to find them all to capture, recruit or kill them. Some of them become heroes, some of them use their powers as villains, and others just want to live normal lives, and the premise leaves the actual roster big and vague enough to let players work the conflict into their backstory and take any role they want in it.

In other words, rather than trying to take on the story of "mutants" as a whole, which could easily fall into the "X-Men did it" trap, the story could focus on just one particular group of mutants, the event that sparked their births and how both the good and bad guys react to such an event.

I think part of the problem might be that Marvel's so thoroughly dominated the mutant concept for so long that it's hard to come up with mutant-themed story ideas that they haven't already explored. And if CoH even accidentally writes a major storyline that happens to resemble a plotline Marvel used at some point over the decades, it'll just whip Marvel's lawyers into a whole new frenzy.

This isn't really relevant, but I just have to say... come on! My very first character in CoH is a young Japanese psychic with a magical-girl obsession, and then I discover Penelope Yin in Faultline. Then as my character gained more control over her powers, I added costumes that involve her powers crackling with an electric pink-white aura - and now I discover that's exactly how Penny's look evolved too!

Great artwork though, even if it'll have people saying Yuki's a total Penelope Yin ripoff.

My blaster sprints and leaps all over the place in a fight, which is a lot of the fun of playing her... so much so that, when I started a mastermind, it took about 20 levels to finally accept that she needs to just stand there, debuff the enemies and let the minions take care of things.

This is probably seriously impractical (or maybe the game even has something like this already, and I just haven't seen it yet), but given how the other threads on PvP cited griefing and bullying as barriers, I wonder if missions where both a team of heroes and a team of villains accept to fight against each other would go better. Kind of like the Arena, except it'd be one group versus another on a specific story arc, like a "Battle for Terra Volta" where the villains are trying to storm the complex and the heroes are defending it, or the opposite, where heroes go to the Rogue Isles to arrest someone and the villains are on the defensive, or a neutral ground where they're both racing through a level to secure an artifact or invention.

That sort of structured PvP could be more fun than just roaming around a PvP zone hunting each other down, and the fact that both sides have to seek each other out to start the mission could help ease the negativity (or at least, word would quickly spread about who not to play with). On the other hand, it's hard enough to find people for missions on blueside/redside alone, without having to recruit both...

Eh, I never took Twinshot's use of "kiddo" as anything more than a playfully affectionate nickname for the rookie on the team, born out of her having been in the military and being used to talking to rookie soldiers that way. It seemed to say more about her personality than anything about my character.

I think a lot of it comes down to, as Silver Gale said, which enhancements sound right for the character. My namesake character received her powers from a psionic mutant heroine and, since she hasn't learned to control them and she's a huge fan of the magical-girl genre (which itself can twist magic and science into pretzel knots), her unconscious expectations make them look like magic powers.

Her origin could be mutant (they're mutant powers, even if she's not a mutant herself), science (she was an ordinary girl until they were given to her) or magic (that's what it actually looks like she's doing most of the time). Science would be the simplest, most literal answer, but power boosts by xenon exposure in a lab just make no narrative sense for her. Mutation and Magic share DO's and the concept behind mutation SO's sort of works, but CoH has a pretty strict lore concept when it comes to being a mutant (part of which is that you were born with your abilities) and she doesn't really fit that bill.

In the end I went with magic because she looks magic, acts magic, and talking to genies, hanging out at Pandora's Box and dramatically flashing talismans and shouting mythological names felt much more in line with her character than anything else. The origin affects the flavor of the character's progress through the game, which stores and enhancements they use, how NPC's describe them and so on, so it's really just a question of which one feels right for that character's adventures.

As for a robot with a Science origin: "You received your powers either through purposeful scientific inquiry or some accident gone awry. You have since learned to harness your new-found abilities, becoming a powerful force in the world." A robot that gained sentience through some unique circumstances and is now trying to use its new-found freedom to change the world could definitely fit that description.

A few of them wouldn't make sense anywhere else, though. Miriam's Scroll of Tielleku arc hinges pretty strongly on old Dark Astoria and thwarting a BP plan to free Mot; without the personal timeline effect that having both zones open would allow, her story just doesn't make much sense anymore.

But yeah, some of the others needed to be moved to more appropriate zones long ago. There's at least one non-magic, 20'ish-level mission that sends you there to a fully staffed, ordinary office building to rescue hostages and recover some files. I just boggled for a moment, fighting the urge to shout "who's crazy enough to still be commuting there?!" before rushing off into the fog to go save them.

And to think I raced an Astoria-themed character through the Miriam Bloechel arc on the night before i22, thinking it'd be gone that morning. Still, I'm glad I got it done that night instead of after the change: "go to Dark Astoria and stop the Banished Pantheon from breaking the seal" just has a better ring to it than "go to the echo of what Dark Astoria used to be and stop the Banished Pantheon of the past from breaking the seal that's going to break anyway, except even earlier, so, you know, time paradox."

Having just gotten another arc that referred the player to Echo Astoria, what worries me is that it's not going to make any sense for new players. There's no in-game explanation of what the term means, so anyone who hasn't already found Ouroboros, which is easy to miss if they skipped Faultline and haven't been taken there by another player, is going to get stumped when they see "Echo: Dark Astoria" as the destination. And when they ask around, find out about Ouroboros and i22 and how they have to go to the echo version now, it's going to snap the narrative immersion for them like a rubber band.

The most immersive solution, as someone else said, would be to have old Dark Astoria at Talos Island for most of the game, and then it gets sealed off at level 50 and new Dark Astoria kicks in as the events there unfold during the player's personal timeline. The only problem there is that, since high-level players might still want to go back to old Dark Astoria, the developers would probably need to create an echo entrance for them that opens up at level 50. It'd be a lot of work, but it'd be great if the messy in-game referrals to Echo: Dark Astoria right now are just a stop-gap while something along those lines is worked out.

That's how I've been playing as an energy/energy blaster at +1/+1/no AV's difficulty using DO's and SO's. I'm at level 33 now, just recently made the jump to using mostly SO's, and have focused on solo story arcs with two task forces and a few teams (not for my own missions) along the way.

First Ward posed some difficulty with the D.U.S.T. troops doing a ridiculous amount of damage per hit, but otherwise regular enemies are consistently manageable so long as hit and run tactics are employed and the lieutenants/bosses taken down first. I was surprised to find that the Rascals in Croatoa were such a problem; they're no threat individually, but they appear in large groups, seem harder to hit than most enemies and can very quickly wear down a blaster's health. I died twice during the course of the Croatoa arcs, both times due to large Rascal ambushes rather than bosses or lieutenants.

The real challenge, though, seems to be with the Elite Bosses; Nocturne, for instance, must have killed me half a dozen times before I finally wore her down, Arbiter Sands took a few tries as well and both Diabolique and Sorceress Serene in FW were major headaches. The only Elite Boss who came across as a pushover was Dr. Vahzilok, probably because his attack range seemed to be lower than mine.

Mezzing isn't much a problem at this point due to defiance, AoE knockback attacks are proving invaluable for keeping charging mobs at bay, and Aim/Build Up are essential for taking down groups of enemies that include lieutenants. Her progress is certainly slower than most AT's, since a lot of time's spent darting around to lose aggro and setting up another round of attacks, but survivability is still high.

I started the game with a blaster and, despite having a scrapper and a few other AT's on the roster now, she's still by far the most fun to play. The less rewards/damage/xp per second argument, though it might be mathematically true, is only relevant if your goal is to race the character to their max build as quickly as possible. If you have fun playing a blaster, then taking a little longer to get there just means having that much more fun along the way.

Edit: I guess it could also be relevant for team leaders who decline blasters because their calculations show that another AT could contribute more DPS, but a team that micromanages its members to that degree doesn't sound like much fun anyway.

You get impatient with having to walk around buildings instead of jumping over them.

I hadn't played many MMO's before CoH got me hooked, but the ones I did play all ended up leaving me cold because the character flexibility is usually nil. They seemed to amount to "you are a lowly foot soldier in this great big conflict being fought by the real heroes, and your task is to climb to the top of the mountain for a better view of the plot." Whether it's a world of elves and orcs on a warpath, or the old representative democracy that fights battles in space, the player character just never felt like a character to me so much as a passive, insert-name-here window into the setting. Licensed games seem even more prone to leaving that sort of impression, since the player characters and the adventures they're having have to stay hidden out of view of the canon universe.

CoH is the one MMO I've seen that makes the character literally anything you want, and (on the Heroic side at least) has NPC's respecting your character as their own person right from the start. Out of all the thousands of power combinations, none of them require any specific background. In a more typical MMO setting, if you want to have energy-projecting powers then you're most likely going to be a mage using a very detailed school of magic that's outlined by the game's setting, and the tone of your character is leashed to that context. In this one, you can describe yourself using any kind of powers you like. Even keeping with magic as an origin, you can be a serious student of the occult, a whimsical nature spirit, an alien sorcerer from a lost planet, a genius hacker who discovered how to program spells on his laptop or anything else you like. It's all fair game, and CoH's wide-open setting has enough narrative room to make everything fit.

What's more, if the build's shaped around the character, the gameplay differences actually make it feel like a game centered around that character. I didn't really appreciate this until my mastermind came upon some of the same mid-level arc finales that my blaster character had already finished. The battles naturally went very differently for each of them, but the outcomes also felt exactly like how each one's personality would have handled the situation. The freedom to create just about any background you can imagine for a character, and the versatility that makes the game still feel like an authentic story, is something I hadn't seen in any MMO before, and that won me over almost instantly.

A good balance between having the players as "the hero" and needing some sort of mascot character to frame the story around might be that, whoever it is, they serve more of a Commissioner Gordon/Oracle/Aleph role, coordinating the player's heroics against enemies that character really can't win against directly. That way there's still a well-defined CoH icon, but their presence wouldn't take away from the player. Looking over the Freedom Phalanx lineup, Numina might work.

Congrats! ^_^