The_Alt_oholic

Also, I have to ask:

Are you a min/max-er if you use a mini/max build?
-or-
Are is the min/max-er the one that crunched the numbers to min/max the system?

To me a player that uses a mini/max-ed build is mini/max-ing, and the person that figured it out originally is the mini/max-er.
The vocal ones tend to be mini/max-ing. That is to say that they are trying to find a mini/max-ed build rather than taking time to crack the system themselves.

[NOTE :: I don't intentionally go out of my way to make a mini/maxed build. I go with the flow of each character, and I rarely use a respec. This allows me to have characters that are unique and play differently. It helps keep the game alive and vibrant to me. Naturally, some of the more themed builds are not as strong as a mini/max-ed character - oh ,well, I'm here to have FUN.]

Um...yeah... well, there are actually people that have come to the Americas (some of them becoming American citizens) from countries all over the planet and not just from Western and Southern-western Europe - including some of my ancestors.

...but this seems to sum my feeling up a bit better ...

In fact, the OP still has a couple of days to move some characters to other servers. If they don't have character slots filled on other servers then try another server.

I have all but one of my currently placed slots filled on all servers. Generally, I do not have a hard time finding a team on most servers.
I'm not saying that I can always get a team of 8. I'm also not saying that I'm running and recruiting for ever team that I'm on.
When I'm running a team, I rarely have a hard time filling a team - unless it is a tf and filling a tf is always a pain because I will not use globals. (There are plenty of channels already available to us).

I see no reason for a server merger.
The servers tend to have different flavor of players. I enjoy going to each one and seeing what is going on.
Some servers are little bit more "close circled" and this can make it a bit hard to find teams on those servers unless you follow the procedure to find teams that these "closed circle" of players have implemented on those servers - those are usually listed somewhere here on the forums and joining global channels that may or may not be full and/or private.
As I said, I will not use global channels in order to get a team. There are plenty of channels built into the game for use in order to get and recruit for teams. Those that intentionally do not recruit people or accept invites from people simply because they are not being communicated to via global channels or because the other characters are not members of their sg/vgs are not helping the longevity of this game by isolating themselves from the rest of the community.
I know that sounds weird when a lone wolf calls down a pack to say that they are not being part of the community. But my PuG'ing and willingness to team with those that I do not know make me part of the greater whole of the community as I'm not affiliated with any one group that I will not team with others or makes others jump through hoops in order to prove that they are willing to conform to in-crowd standards of behavior.
I'm not shocked that any of this goes on. It's natural human behavior. Both for those that intentionally want to dominate and those that find comfort in an elitist crowd. Shunning others also gives some a feeling of power.

At the same time, behavior in this game can cause others to put you on ignore for one reason or another, and this can greatly reduce your ability to find teams. Players can be put on ignore for any number of reasons. I know that I have my own reasons, and I don't think the ignore list is big enough.
(Yes, I know that this makes me sound like I'm an elitist myself. In all honesty, the people that I put on ignore are going to tend not to want to team with me any more than I would want to team with them. Farmers are the main players that I put on ignore. Farmers know that I don't want to team with them. I'm going to report every farm that I find. I would assume for that reason alone, farmers aren't going to want to team with me.)

Now with all that ranting out of the way.

As per standard when it comes to the server-merger discussion - which happens all the time - , the OP didn't list what server they were on!

Ironically, the last server-merger thread that I saw - just a couple of days ago actually - was on the Freedom forums. I found this odd as Freedom is the highest population server. Also, Freedom is a server that do not play on any longer because of the behavior of the players there in general. In fact, some other players have been actively trying to get free transfers from the DEVs so that they could move their characters off Freedom. Some of them just started over to get away from Freedom. Well, we were given free server transfers for Christmas and guess what some players did with them - they moved their characters off Freedom.
Now I'm not saying that I won't play on Freedom from time to time - I do have 14 characters over there. I'm saying that I have 10 other servers to play on that I have 12-15 characters on (each) that seem to have a community of players that I enjoy gaming with much more than those that have chosen Freedom as their home server (I have been good and haven't called Freedom "FarmDumb" for a couple of weeks now, but you will note that term "farm" in there that I'm loath to be involved with.) and that even goes for the ones that expect their server communities to abide by their self imposed teaming rules. I'd much rather be snubbed then to keep being invited or hear about farming going on.

So merging with Freedom - never.
Merging in general - I really think it is a bad idea and see no reason for it.

It all comes down to ::
If you can't find a team, start one.

1. Characters that are grayed out are already on teams.
2. Be polite, don't blind invite.
3. Send a tell with your team's mission level before invite.
4. Even better, ask the other player to send you a tell acknowledging that they want to join before sending an invite.
5. If recruiting for teams below level 15, always send an invite or add a note requesting that they type "/hc I'll join" because characters may be on trials. (NOTE :: /hc I'll join, will put a message on the [Help] channel - yes, trials can use the [Help] channel, most of the trial players just don't know that they can access it by using /hc as /help was nerfed a while back.

If you don't want to start a team and can't find one, try a different side or server.

1. There are always fewer villains, and villain players have always been less likely to team than their hero counter parts.
2. The servers are listed from top to bottom :: the top server is the one you were on last and from there down they are listed from lowest load (at 2nd from top) to highest load (at the bottom). This isn't directly related to population as the servers have different capacities, but, in general, it is, in fact, a reverse listing by population.
3. Freedom and Virtue are virtually always the two most populated servers. Virtue being the self proclaimed RP server.

Or...a different archetype.

Look around using the /search function and see what kind of archetypes aren't on teams. If you see one missing, then log in with one of those - you're more likely to be snatched up for a team that really has to have that one type of archetype to get their team going right. (in all actually, it the mix of archetypes really doesn't make much of a difference - it's just a matter of how well the players can work as a team).

I think there is still a feeling that the MA is for down-and-dirty, quick missions rather than MA story arcs. That is to say, that they are treated sort of like police missions without a mayhem mission or ambushes - or dare I say "farming".

Myself, I tend to write 5-mission arcs, because I'm trying to write a story arc. I also look to play 5-mission arcs. I've played some very good ones.
I still find it, however, a bit hard to find good mission arcs among the "farming" missions that try to disguise themselves as story arcs. Not because I can't usually tell them apart from the intro text, but that there are still so many of them allowed to remain in the AE archives in general.

I would tend to say that arcs that are going to extent across multiple arcs are best used for pick-a-path use. Of course, we are limited by arc slots, but really there is no other way to do pick-a-path as there are no logic-trees that utilize the success or failure of missions in the MA.
I, however, can see that some would find it useful - myself included - to use them as a part 2 or sequel to the first arc.

----
Secrets of the Lake - arc 174351 - An earthquake has rocked Paragon City. Help a scientist research suspicious activity in a remote lake.
Earth Defense Sentai :: Save the Earth! - arc 304514 - Join the Earth Defense Sentai and save the Earth! (Mission Arc one of a possibily continuing saga)
Game Issues - arc 304514 - Game Issues are always dragging down the in-game fun. Won't you help stop LAG once and for all?

/emote sleep

But I guess that would work better for The Sleeping Sentry

Faint Watchman, Nebulous Protector, and Shady Custodian seem better names, but I don't have problems finding good names for my characters.

I'll throw in Quiescent Guardian as a freebie.

Well, from my point of view, you seem to be a bit of a jerk.
I wouldn't say this, but you seem to think it is okay to call other people "terribly rude and a touch arrogant".

If I run into one of your characters and buff or heal them to try to help them, it will be a complete accident because I didn't realize it was one YOUR CHARACTERS.

By-and-large, players in this game like to help and to be helped.
You seem to be one of the exceptions to the rule.
It is a super-hero game with team-centric mechanics after-all. There appear to be plenty of games where this is not the case; you may be from one of them.
You have been unfortunate enough to find a game to play with a friendly and helpful community.

The way to avoid being buffed by other characters is to be in a mission. Other players don't have access to buffing your character while they are in a mission. So keeping inside of missions a much as possible will help eliminate others helping you.
Oh, sorry, I was trying to help you...and you didn't specifically say that you wanted any replies to your posts...
....my bad? ...
No. By posting in the forums - much like by running around in the City - you open yourself/your characters up to being helped by/exposed to other players and interaction with them.

We really don't have enough information to know what they were experiencing in-game.

It may have been ::

Exit training mission to Atlas.
broadcast: AE team lfm any level.
Player joins.
AE farm* begins.
First mission completes.
Team run AE farm* mission again.
New player gains the impression that the AE farm* is all there is to the game.

Apparently, this has gone on quite a bit, especially between the release of the AE and the release of i16.

The starting arc missions for the origin contact arcs on hero side and the contact arcs on villain side have different maps for every mission, so they aren't repetitive due to maps. Some players may consider they are repetitive because they are often based around the game group of foes.

The groups are also repetitive as is the terrain if they ran around in the sewers at low levels.

If you prowl around the streets fighting foes instead of running missions, you will encounter various level foes of various groups. Of course the zones are rather large and there is plenty of different terrain to battle in and explore.

*note :: AE farming is an exploit. AE farms are against the rules. AE farms still go on.
AE farms tend to lure in new players due to the fact that they are often run in starting zones. AE farms are repetitive. AE farms give new players the impression that CoH is repetitive.
AE farms are bad for the longevity of CoH as they drive away new players by exposing them to repetitive content.

I play on all the servers. Triumph - not so much recently, because of activities elsewhere and not by-and-large because of any bad experience that I had on Triumph.

I would like to point out that -- the ones that are jumping on the OP - who is apologizing for their actions - are rep PL'd posters; and those that are accepting the OP's apology have their rep turned off.

To the OP, don't be brow beaten by the in-cliche. You learned from your mistake, now move on. I don't even know what you did, but the point is that you seem to have learned a lesson from something that you did was wrong.

It seems from my play on ALL the servers that those that are in the big server in-crowds on every server are isolationists and don't interact with the server population in general as they are too busy with their in-crowd status - which obviously demands telling people that they are on the "outside" if they aren't a member of their in-crowd (posts related to high rep here apparently being an example).
I can honestly say this as I PuG 95% of the time that I'm on teams. I'm playing with different players/characters/archetypes all the time. I do have a feel of the general population of players that aren't involved with the in-crowds or big, isolationist supergroups.

I wouldn't have stepped-in to post on this thread until I noticed how the general feel of posts seemed directly related to rep levels/status of posters.

I like caltroping them (gets more than one at time) and then using ignite on them - flamethrower - ignite again etc (so they can slowly try to run away while on fire.).

But yeah, web grenade is a great with a single a target because the quick recharge time can keep them from escaping from the firey inferno of ignite.

I thought the original Ecco :: The Dolphin had cool swimming in it, but I guess that was all swimming.

Some how I think if Gary Anderson can pull off underwater SuperMarionation in Stingray ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E06cNv55jTs ) then I think it can be done well in a video game if someone even takes a little bit of time and effort.
I agree it may not be worth the returns to do in in CoH, especially if my underwater Controller can't summon his fishy friends.

Guess I'll have to stick with my aquatic tanker, scrapper Lake Creatures, and scrapper or peacebringer Deep Ones.
*sigh*
Of course, none of them will apparently get to do too much swimming underwater in CoH.

And I guess the Deep Ones will have to be content with working to summon Lusca - not so fishy, but definitely aquatic!

Cool.
Looks like I forgot to post my currently posted arcs like everyone else appears to have done.

----------
Secrets of the Lake - arc 174351
Earth Defense Sentai - arc 304514
Game Issues (renamed slightly I think but name #!) - arc 352371

Can get the the Self Destruct power button changed to a big RED button while we are at it?
I always make my own macro called "RED" to trigger it anyway I guess - maybe a macro called "Walk" would work temporarily.

/macro Walk "powexec_name walk"

At least I don't think "Walk" as a macro name would cause a conflict.

Look at the bottom of the page while you are editing the Arc. If you are over 100% then it won't be publishable.
There's a bar down there. It is easy for me to "over write my page count" on AE missions - still ...since they have increased the "size" of AE missions at least twice!

To be fair then ::
"Announcing that a "Dev" rikti raid was happening" is the same as posting it on sals channel.
However, This was posted before the note about sals channel - "then if they had announced that a "Dev" rikti raid was happening everyone would run madly to X server. X spot..which would lead to im guessing lots of lag with so many rikti, devs and players in one spot."

So I'm a bit confused.
Either it is "letting a large number of players know about the event that will effect in-game lag" or it isn't.
If announcing it to the whole server would have increased the lag so much is it really just a "small minority" that are being left out by the rest of the community that utilize that global channel?
The fact is that they are being left out by the rest of the community because they aren't using that global channel.

I'll bow out on any conversation directly linked to how people utilize global channels on the EU servers in general as I play on the NA servers. I was never my intent to directly address that issue.

However, my post was generally related to my experience on the NA servers - the busiest server of the whole lot of them in fact (which I haven't played on very often since AE was released) - and the use of player-created global channels (which I no longer use at all as I see them being fragmentary to the over-all community) as standard method of announcing DEV-run special events on the servers in general.
I did not mean to make a stab at how cliche-ish or the majority percentage of players on Union that sals channel boast to have as members.

On that grounds, regardless of where the player-created global announcement is happening - it is not providing information about the event to all players.
From your statement, you agree with that fact even by saying that a "small minority" was left out.

The /hc channel reaches all players on both sides of the server.
The Event Channel should have had a message about this special event.
It certainly could have appeared on the Admin channel.

The DEVs could have set up a ticket system to allow accounts in to instances of the event in the same manner as the people that bought the Wedding pack. That's not to say that everyone that bought the Wedding pack was event to experience the Wedding event - because I'm pretty sure they didn't.
I just think that's more fair than announcing it outside of the game and then just allowing players to distribute the information to people in their group instead of the community as a whole getting the information in game where they are actively playing the game.
Not all players even come to the forums. So I guess they really don't even know what they missed out on, but I do come to the forums and I knew that something was going on.

I guess I just have to take this sort of event like Hero Con.
The people that are in-the-know or have-money are going to be able to participate in this sort of "special" event. I'm just not one of those kinds of special people.
So I should just ignore this whole situation in general as what it appears to be. Some kind of L337 thing that people can proudly gloat about that shouldn't make any difference to me because it isn't fair.
I pay my subscription like everyone else. I should have a right to the same game play experience when it is content provided by the DEVs.
When it comes down to it. That's my whole point. But maybe with this extra explanation, it will make more sense.
On the other hand, I'm probably wasting my time writing this. I, however, have the feeling that all the other people that think the same thing may not post to this thread and may not come to the forums to post at all - so what I'm typing is speaking for them as well.

The problem I have with broadcast messages are that they are only broadcasting to that zone.

By channels, I assume that you are referring to global channels. Tells are technically on the tell channel. I don't deal with the global channels as I play on every server. I can't actively have a global for every server, and I'm not going to change my global channel every time I jump servers (which sometimes is multiple times in the same day). Global channels also fill up or are private channels to begin with (if they are open Global Channels and they are full they might as well be Private Channels that are going to invite anyone else).
I honestly think only playing with people that are part of a global channel that you are part of is damaging to the longevity of the game. I think the same thing about only playing with members of your sg/vg and/or associate coalition.

I am a bit confused about ::
Could you possibly go into detail about that?

I can guess at what you are implying, but it seems that you think hat there is frustration in general with inviting people and the interplay with tells that are involved in general, and I don't think that is what you actually mean.

If I try to read between the lines, it appears that you think that using broadcast and globals is the way to go (as I discussed above), and that using tells to prompt replies for invites is confusing to people.
If that is the case, I really don't understand the difference in complication between seeing a message on your screen from a tell, broadcast, or global and sending a tell as a response to information from any of those sources.

You know, quite a lot of players have left playing on Freedom because they like the player community on other servers better.
I have a full server of characters over there that I rarely play because of the player behavior that I often run into over there.

So "no". We do not want to merge with Freedom. We are happy where we are not playing on Freedom when we don't want to. Thank you.

If I had characters on other servers that I wanted to move to Freedom I could have done so with the free server moves we were given. Other players had the same option, and it sure seems like some of them used them to leave Freedom.

If you like Freedom, please stay there, but don't try to force the rest of us to game with you if don't actively want to game on Freedom.

No.
So many people apparently don't know how to use the flags that its pretty useless to worry about if they have any flag up other than the red (not looking for anything) flag.
Most people don't even read search comments before sending a blind invite for that matter.

I go through and look for players that are in the general level/archetype that I'm looking to team with and sort based on level. Next I check for search comments, the characters current location, and their status of being in a mission or not. (if your search comment says "I don't want to team", "only solo", or have flags up for taskforces or trials I'm probably not going to send you a tell to invite you to join my team.)
Then I start sending the same kind of invites that you are sending that end with a request for the person to send me a tell for an invite - in the class of trying to invite someone below level 15, I always add - (if you are on a trial, type /hc I'll join), which puts up a message on the help channel since trials can't send a tell.
I rarely get anyone ending a reply that is anything that I would remotely consider negative - but I'm careful about trying not to send a team invite message to the same character more than once an evening.
When someone says that they can't team, I send a reply and thank them for replying if they can't/don't want to join.

I don't get overly concerned either way, unless I'm trying to recruit for a tf and I'm banging my head into a wall trying to find enough so that I can start the thing. But then I'm more frustrated about being required to have a certain number of players than I am about people being busy doing something.
---
From the other side, I really don't like to accept blind invites, but I do sometimes after checking the characters level to see if it is relatively appropriate to my characters level. I try to make it clear in my search comments that I don't accept blind invites, so if the player isn't taking time to read my search comments I'm not sure how much they will be willing to take any input from me at all when I'm on a team - which leads me to suspect that is probably a team that I don't want to be involved with.

I don't mind getting tells when I'm in a mission in regards to teaming.
I understand that someone might not know that I'm already on a team when they send a tell to me.
I try to set my flag for green "looking for mission teams" when I'm looking for a team, and I try to set it to gray "not looking for team" when I'm in a neutral mood toward teaming - but this does not mean that I won't team. It just means that I'm not actively looking for a team. I rarely put the red (not looking for anything) flag up because if I'm on-line, I'm generally looking to team up - even if I'm not actively recruiting for a team of my own.

I'm against this mechanic.
Not only is it cumbersome, it's just plain ugly.
I'm sorry for those that have a hard time finding what they consider to be a good name.

Once again, I'm for adding a mechanic into the costume creator that will generate a list of names based on the specifics chosen in the costume creator that would check available names before listing possible choices.

I still don't have problems finding names.
Rigidity in mindset really part of the issue.

The mechanic you are suggesting allows for an unlimited number of copyrighted_charactername_variation@player combinations.

I really don't want to see @playername anywhere in the game, then again I don't want to see IRulz or IPwnzU over anyone's head either. IRulz@PwnzingU being a worse case scenario in my book. This kind of naming convention has no place in a superhero game as far as I am concerned. The name is intentionally created to harass/belittle other players and for no other reason. So may say that it is funny, but we all know that this kind of naming practice is not utilized in order to be humorous. I'm not even buying that it is used as a last resort because the player had a hard time "getting the name that they wanted".

I would like to see stricter naming conventions imposed in order to remove such garbage, L337, and PvP names (PvP names are those that are generated with characters to confuse one character or another or to cause an optical illusion that may obscure the name so that it is hard to recognize a target as a live opponent in Pvp) from the game.

I have all three filled.
But then again, I rotate arcs in and out of my slots. Not that I get many plays anyway, so the ratings really don't make a difference to me.
I like writing story based arcs which takes a good amount of time - but that is a fun thing to do.
Advertising my arcs - I don't find the concept of that too be much fun.
I have about 5-7 arcs that are published/have been published/ready to publish. A couple of these 2-3 are one story arcs - they were kind of done on a joke of the whole 1 arc missions that are out there, so I pulled the one down as it was a bit disrespectful to the concept of the AE - at least as I see it was intended.

To the OP/thread ::
It seems that you have a preconceived notion about what you want to do.
I would assume that the OP would be the over-all organizer of this project.

There is a basic concept and a main character in place.
That is to say - War Witch and possibly a Praetorian version of her.

Perhaps an arc of War Witch "stories" aka individual missions by different authors combined together would be a good way to handle this.

Otherwise, the OP needs to make the call on the settings/background, etc and then ask others for ideas about fleshing things out.

To me, the War Witch in PD is obviously an alter-dimensional War Witch as she's a trainer out in Croatoan <sp?>.
I'm not up on the comic, but I there could be valuable information in regards to War Witch in the comics. I'm assuming that that information could be usable for lore in the game, but, at the same time, the text there may be copyrighted by the company producing the comic book and so direct use my be copyright infringement - direct text extraction, etc.

I'm also not up on this whole Praetorian thing, so I'm kind of out of this I guess - though it does seem to be a fun idea.

Though seeing this post does make me want to repost my DEV d'Arc mission arc.

They could have Raptor Packs or jump packs from successfully completing safeguard/mayhem missions which last for 2 hours of use time
- OR -
they could have bought a Raptor Pack in the Shadow Shard or Grandville (which you can do at level 1) - they sell for 10 k inf, (these also last for 2 hours of use time)
- OR -
they could have parked their character in the Shadow Shard or Grandville to earn time on a Traveler's Pack - which is a Raptor Pack that can only charge up to a max of 30 minutes of use time for just parking in either of those two zones.