SpittingTrashcan

I believe that the particle emitters on the Celestial Rifle are not working as intended. My evidence: when I use Ignite on a target directly in front of me, fire shoots backward out of my foot.

Reproduction steps:
1. Select Celestial Rifle as custom weapon for Assault Rifle.
2. Use Ignite.

Expected result:
Fire shoots out of rifle at target.

Actual result:
Fire shoots diagonally backwards and to the right out of right foot.

I hope for the sake of the poor tired devs that this bug will be simple to resolve.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has happened across a fellow player sporting an amazing costume and wondering how they pulled their look off. Therefore, I propose a new action in the context menu when a player character is selected: Save Costume. This would, in one click, save their current costume to a .costume file in your Costumes directory. You can then open it in the tailor at your leisure and figure out what combination of options led to that striking look.

This isn't just a handy thing for players, though - it's good business. Suppose you see a costume piece you've never seen before and want to buy. Actions -> Save Costume, and when you open it you'll know what to buy from the store.

I am aware that the demorecord function already saves costumes. However, the demorecord function is also rarely used, not very easy to find, and extracting costumes from demorecords is not easy. I think there's room in the world for both demorecord and Actions -> Save Costume.

Feedback would be appreciated.

Snipe the Portal! - A really bad idea.

(This one dates from before my time, when Praetorian Infernal's demon summoning portal would keep spawning demons forever and ever.)

From this announcement:

I've been aware of the forthcoming existence of a server exclusive to VIP players for a while now. It was my initial impression that this would be a minor perk (hey, another server to roll silly alts on), combined with a backstop against complaints from long-time subscribers that the unwashed masses have ruined the game (oh, just take yourself on over to the exclusive server and leave us alone). I have personally not planned to make much use of this feature, and I was fine with that.

However, with the announcement of the VIP headstart has come word of a number of events exclusive to the Exalted server. This may be just a headstart PR event, but it may also be the first of many such events that are intended to make Exalted access a meaningful and substantial perk. And while I'm admittedly reacting early to concerns not in evidence, I'm not sure how I would feel about that.

There are two reasons why I wouldn't want exclusive Exalted events to become a major portion of the VIP value proposition.
1. I have been rolling characters on other servers, notably Virtue, for many years now. I am more attached to those characters than I am to fresh alts, and I would prefer to play them in the new content. Moving them over would take a fair bit of time even with the monthly free server transfers.
2. I'm not sure I want to spend a lot of my time on Exalted and away from free and premium players. I can think of several people I know who either play now or have indicated interest in starting soon who would be playing as free or premium players. I don't want to have to make a choice between getting the most out of VIP status and playing with my friends.

At this point, I'm pretty sure that whether or not the developers intend to have Exalted access and Exalted-exclusive events as a significant part of the value of VIP has already long since been decided. I just wanted to say that I have reasons to hope that they have chosen not to make Exalted any more than one more server among many.

It is my understanding that IOs will be completely disabled for non-subscribers who have not taken steps to enable them. Frankly, I do find that somewhat problematic - not because the IOs themselves will be unusable, but because it is possible that a player will have to destroy IOs in order to slot functioning SOs. Asking a player to destroy prior investment in the game in order to continue playing it under the terms they are currently capable of affording does seem slightly harsh, to the degree that the previously available option - not playing at all - actually may seem more attractive under certain circumstances. That might be a problem.

I want to be clear as to my personal opinion here.

I have no problem with choices having consequences. I have no problem with different activities offering different rewards, or with the idea that there exist faster and slower ways to obtain a given reward. I certainly have no problem with the market being a PvP environment with winners and losers, and I say that as a person who frequently and willingly loses at market PvP.

I am, however, troubled by the specific examples I gave, because to me they represent the strongest examples of incongruity between what the development team has stated they want the players to do and what the system created by the development team grants tangible rewards to players for doing.

Suppose we were to assume that the developers communicate what they wish players to be doing through the reward system. This is not a completely insane idea: after all, empirical evidence shows that aggregate player activity is often strongly influenced by rewards, and surely the developers are in an excellent position to be aware of this. What, then, do the developers want us to do, based on relative reward?

1. Farm AE.
AE farming is the single best way to earn XP, Influence, and many commonly sought rewards. It is wildly better reward/risk and reward/time than doing just about anything else. AE farms ran over 2XP weekend. It's that good. Clearly it's the thing the developers most want us to do.

2. Be a hero or villain and run Tip missions.
Most Tip missions can be stealthed in a few minutes. Running five a day, every day, gets your pick of most of the more highly sought items three or four times a week, per alt. The rewards are equivalent to up to 200 reward merits - that's several long task forces, or dozens of short task forces, or scores of standard arcs representing hundreds of individual missions.

3. De-PVP.
There are no rewards that are optimally gained from fighting other players in PVP. There are, however, a number of good rewards that are optimally gained from cooperating with your assumed opponents while in a PvP setting. Many PvP zones set up a prisoner's dilemma, where the best option - collaborating - maps to not PvPing in the PvP zone. All PvP zones encourage PVPIO farming, which goes a lot faster when one person does the killing and several others volunteer to be sacrifices, and is completely ruined if someone decides not to play along and instead goes and actually fights people.

My point, to phrase it delicately, is that what the developers have stated as their intent for the players, and what the reward system communicates, are somewhat different on occasion. I don't have a proposed remedy - I am merely noting the message that I receive.

I suspect GuyPerfect did not emit that message with even half the seriousness you ascribe to it.

Edit: And I was right!

What I am seeing here is that some people do not understand that Freedom will not turn City of Heroes into a free-to-play game - precisely as intended. What it is intended to do, and what it will do, is allow people to try a significant chunk of the game at no cost indefinitely, and then allow them to unlock another significant chunk of the game in perpetuity with a single one-time purchase if they prefer to do so, or subscribe and receive even more access.

Think carefully: if a free player knows that certain privileges are locked behind a one time payment, and those privileges are important to them, and they choose not to pay for them but rather to stop playing the game, what precisely has been lost? Not a customer, because they weren't willing to pay for things they wanted.

If you don't think this business model will work, that is a prediction which will or will not be borne out by subsequent events - but if you think that the developers were trying for a different business model and happened to stumble into this one through poor implementation, then you don't understand what Freedom was designed to be.

I'm currently working on a Traps/AR Defender as a big game hunter. Ignite is actually kind of insane. AR/Traps could probably do it a bit faster with Scourge, but I didn't like the build compromises I'd have to make to get the survivability up.

As regards Praetoria: man, I sure do love Praetoria.

One thing that I've noticed as a less-mentioned side effect of GR: tip mission rewards.

On the one hand, pretty much every build I put together now includes the Numina and Miracle uniques and as many LotGs as I can fit in. Where before these would be pretty much unattainable with my preferred playstyle (ignore market, punch faces), the HVAM stores have placed these well within the realm of obtainability - and by extension, anything else that can be bought when you're earning 150 million or more inf from a week of solo play outside of AE.

On the other hand, I basically have stopped running newspapers and almost stopped running any standard content arcs. If I have time for only a few missions in a day, tip missions offer absurdly better rewards/time than any other solo option. Which is fine, except I've seen all the tip missions now and would kind of like to do something else. Ideally, rewards shouldn't shape decisions - but practically, rewards shape decisions, and I'm not sure if the devs fully thought through this particular distribution of rewards in shaping decision making. They do have a history of making that particular oversight.

1) Grab a high level character with Fly and a ranged attack, preferably AoE.
2) Fly around Atlas Park, wiping out spawns that have civilian hostages. Because the hostages cannot reach you to say thanks, they will trail after you.
3) Flashmob Ms. Liberty.

When there's a Blaster on your team, you get Fallout and Vengeance.
When there's a Kin on your team, you get moving.

My position is that anything that has a functional strategy that anyone can implement to overcome it is fair game. You did not sculpt your vaunted survivability from the protean firmament. All the building blocks were given to you by the developers, quite deliberately, to enable certain scenarios under certain circumstances. And if the developers then quite deliberately choose to circumvent those building blocks to create other scenarios under other circumstances, that is their prerogative.

In certain special circumstances, the developer design states that your survival is dictated purely by your capacity to, at the appropriate cue, press the buttons that make the little man move around, because that is how they wanted it to be. In other, much more common circumstances, it is instead influenced by the time you spend carefully choosing and purchasing imaginary goods with imaginary money earned through imaginary toil, and that is also how they wanted it to be. I find both of these things acceptable.

No.

Is this a situation where the rule against posts with just "no" in them does not apply?

I can't play anything that doesn't have some form of protection from mez - either through direct immunity, or through enough debuff and crowd control that mez never hits. When I press a button, and things do not happen, my enjoyment disappears instantly.

Other than that, it's all good. I used to be down on Stalkers, but then I discovered Elec/Nin and not taking Assassin's Strike. And I used to be down on Warshades, but now I play hop-n-bop lobster. And I used to be down on MMs, but then I found Demons/Traps. So, basically, for every AT I thought I didn't like, I found a powerset combo and playstyle I do like. Except Blasters.

The great thing about reflexive idealism is that it leaves the majority of your brain delightfully relaxed. And I'm being trolled again...

On topic, I tilt strongly toward the glamorous, or perhaps theatrical, end of villainy. My two most villainous villains are, respectively, a demonic marketing agent whose corporate mission is to make the world so terrible that people will sell their souls for the least bit of relief, and a James-Bond-antagonist mustache twirler who deliberately chose to use his family fortune to make himself the most infamous criminal in history. Both of them would readily describe themselves as evil, and both of them were created deliberately to be fun antagonists - the kind who never stop coming up with devious plans to be foiled. My greedy or merely self-motivated types tend to be Rogues, and my extremists are Vigilantes.

Considering that some 10 minutes before the announcement I suddenly lost connection to the servers, I suspect a serious problem that does not bear waiting on.

I also expect several more of these surprise whoopsies between now and September as the team installs the new backend architecture for Freedom.

Wraps gloves.
Valkyrie boots.
Reaper face detail 2 (with the off-shoulder cape scarf trick, too)
Neck Cover mask.
Chaos Leather.
Sinister boots, no pad.
Articulated Roman armor chest and shoulders.
Vanguard Big gloves.
The Incarnate Ascendant boots and gloves. Not the glowy ones though. Too expensive, too flashy.

@Twoflower got me in the game.
Everyone else kept me here.

Three thoughts.

1. If you insist on a melee AT, Kinetic Melee/Energy Armor Scrappers are coming soon, and EA is getting revamped in a fairly sexy fashion. Tossing around energy fields seems pretty sci/techy, and I'd recommend Scrapper as they get the most thoroughly revamped EA and the coolest KM mechanic.

2. If you just want not to be mezzed (an inclination I have a great deal of sympathy for), then consider a Bots/Traps or Bots/FF. Very technological, very tough, and the shield drone/big bubble grants protection to hold, stun, and immobilize. Plus, FF buffs everyone in two shots now, so you get lots of time to go pew pew with the laser gun.

3. If you're willing to venture further afield, consider what I'm considering: a Beam Rifle/Radiation corruptor. Why? Because of DUBSTEP GUNS.