Thunderspark

Oh im so glad this post was made. It makes me feel a whole lot younger knowing that there are players a good 20 years older enjoying the game. Can't help it really, since through most of my youth I was brought up being told that computer games were for boys. My dad actually thought it was a fad that would die out! Oh how I've teased him about it since.

When I finally 'rebelled' I picked up a Playstation 2 and grabbed some of the old classics everyone raved about (Final Fantasy VII was the first!) I found what I'd been missing and I've been stuck here ever since. There's still a slight hint of the 'boys only' history though, especially in MMO's where everyone assumes you are unless you tell them otherwise. But I suppose everyone would assume you were a girl if Hello Kitty had their own MMO too

- You know you're too old for CoH when you see a large group of people at Wentworths and you assume they're queuing up to cash in their pension giros.

I've already created one of my character's praetorian alter-ego as a separate character. As much as I love the idea of having them made 'canon' so to speak, I think I'd rather not limit it to Praetorian Earth.

...still got my fingers crossed for the Nemesis system.

Lets see...

When I was young I used to farm my parents for extra money which I spent mostly on clothes and sweets. I've 'farmed' the vending machine at the parents club for the Cherry Coke (why is there only ONE button for cherry and FOUR for regular coke?) since it tends to sell out quickly if I don't get there first. Oh... and I've 'farmed' for compliments. Everyone needs a little pick me up sometime.

I love meeting new players. Enticing them to stick around and enjoy everything CoX has to offer comes as second nature to me I guess, but then I try to be courteous to anyone I meet not just newcomers. Of course, the rules don't apply when im ganked in PvP... im a very sore loser

Where's my scrapper powerset "wet fish"? I want to slap someone around with a haddock! And I totally agree with you on the level 51 thing... I've been farming for months on my level 50 and I still haven't found a monster tough enough to give me that last 1xp I need!

If you want an 'epic' badge, try working for the portable crafting table accolade. You need a few billion inf and a truck load of salvage for that little beauty... My attempt is still a work in progress

Perhaps some people are never quite satisfied, or perhaps they don't fully realise the work that goes into creating much of the content we enjoy. The power customisation might seem like a simple task, but anyone who has read their earlier posts about colouring powers will know the real story behind it.

A lot of the powers were precoloured, and they needed greyscale versions in order to let players customise them. This meant they needed to remake the artwork. Then they had to 'attach' powerset to the players much like they did for Dual Blades and Katana customisations. Now, im no developer, but that alone sounds like a mammoth amount of work, never mind adding in all the interface bits and pieces so players can actually make the changes.

Okay it's not 'Going Rogue', perhaps the most anticipated update in the history of the game, but it offers a much more diverse world to enjoy and in my books that can only be a good thing. Though im still slightly disappointed that they haven't announced any customisation options for mastermind pets, im quite pleased with I16 and to me it shows that the devs still care a lot for the game.

Just remember, what appears to be a 'simple update' can often be far more difficult to accomplish under the hood.

Looks like im not the only one with a dose of the flu. Get well soon Posi. You and me both

I have pink forcefields because... well, they're forcefields. Whos to say what colour they're supposed to turn out? Besides, the character who wields them has a penchant for pink fashion, so it works on there too!

I do like to associate power colours with the chararcter though, either with their personality, as in Little Jenny's case, or the source of their energy (Like sinister red storm summonings). For me it has to make some kind of logical sense to be a certain colour (or little colour at all in the case of my regen) since ultimately the power customisation is an extension of who they are.

Oh dear... I fear that Mr No Pants has just re-opened Pandora's Box...

Things for the devs to do:

1) Fix defense
2) Remove Heal decay
3) Increase the timer on Hibernate resistance
4) Make slows WORK again
5) More lenience when it comes to interrupts (Such as when hit by an enemy toggle power)
6) Remove -regen portion of travel suppresson.

Though to be honest, I don't think PvP will ever be viable in this game to anyone who doesn't have everything slotted with purples and rare IO sets. The sad fact is that most set bonuses aren't reduced in PvP effectiveness like your basic powersets are, giving these high fliers an obvious and distinct advantage. I don't think they should be made useless, far from it, but AT's which are generally considered vulnerable can be virtually untouchable with the right slotting (eg. blasters).

As for the Hibernate, this is more of a personal bugbear. I'm rather tired of seeing the same pattern emerge from fighting blasters and corruptors. They shoot, they take hits, they almost die and then.... yup. Hibernate. Instant HP/Endurance and then they beat a hasty retreat or finish off what's left of you when they break out. There is already a hibernate resistance, but it's timer is too forgiving in my opinion and needs a small extension. It's an incredibly overpowered skill since it's essentially a reset switch for combat which puts it at the top of my pet hates.

I've only played a handful of online games where the filters were rather extreme. At least in City of Heroes you can disable it for chatting, it's a shame it doesn't also work for publishing story arcs. Okay granted they don't want people writing their own triple-X fanfictions or inciting a religious war by saying bad things about the Pope or a certain prophet, but sometimes its just absurd.

Mind you, anyone who has played Phantasy Star Online/Universe will know that their chat filters (unable to be turned off, I might add) are completely insane. While it filters out the most benign of words ("Doesn't it" becomes "Doesn'* @!#" because of the 'tit' part) it doesn't filter out a certain four letter F word if you end it with 'ing'. Strange but true folks.

Nice of them to build war walls which don't actually protect Paragon from the Rikti... after all, every time there's an invasion they conveniently turn themselves off. Isn't technology marvellous?

I love the colouring of various powersets (though slightly upset they didn't give Masterminds any pet customisations) and I welcome most of the AE changes with open arms. I for one was rather sick of fighting wave after wave of endless boss monsters. Not only was the "all boss" scenario overused it was plain boring and showed a desparing lack of originality on the part of the designers.

However... I feel the need to RANT about one niggling factoid. Why oh why did they reduce the XP gain to ZERO for mobs who've had their default skills removed? Bear with me on this. I wanted to create a Ninja group. Easy enough, but I've had to use Super Reflexes INSTEAD of Ninjutsu. The reason? Simple. Hide is a DEFAULT power in the Ninjutsu set resulting in a whole map of invisible enemies all capable of instant critical hits! Removing this power means zero XP gain and my storyarc is less enjoyable to anyone who wants to play through it.

Another bearbug is the kinetics nerf. No, not for controllers but for corruptors. Face it, there are NO primary defender-esque powers redside. The closest we get to a defender on villains is a corruptor and they've just had one of their aces demoted. It's painful enough that most of the jobs are too solo-centric, did they really have to swing the bat towards one of the few decent powersets remaining to slowly remove all incentives to team up? The only time I ever see a team villainside is for the occasional SF...

Anyway ranting over. I'm happy for the most part but those annoyances are stinging like a hornet and it's hard to see the justification for them. Perhaps one day they'll add a more support oriented (defender style) AT for villains. Until then I hope my team can handle a big dip in attack power.

It would be nice to get a PvP recipe, but to be honest the only places anyone bothers to PvP (on Union server at least) is in Recluse's Victory. And even then it's usually a smattering of players, nowhere near the large volume we had before I13 came and screwed things up.

At least it's not as bad as the female running animations on Guild Wars. For some reason they decided that the women should run with their hands swaying far from their bodies. There's feminine and then there's little-girlish. It feels like im playing as Pippi Longstocking, if you discount the whole throwing fireballs thing at least

I think im hating the comments more than the rating system. It just seems like an excuse to berate people. It's bad enough people giving you "negative rep" for replying to a poster whom they don't like without having some smart-alec posting snide remarks as a comment for you to read afterwards.

If anything, this rep system has only strengthened my dislike of them.

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that someone who has their reputation hidden is wondering why someone else doesn't have a gazillion 'jellybeans' beside their name?

They call it "Power Proliferation" but really it's a redesign of the originals in most cases. The villain versions are often different to the hero counterparts in some way and vice versa. The most obvious change being that of Empathy becoming Pain Domination, losing it's Regen/Recov Auras (two of the most incredible powers an empath gets) and instead earning Soothing Aura and Anguishing Cry. Personally, I think villains got a raw deal.

Combat Jumping doesn't suffer from suppression, but then neither can you leap tall buildings using it either. It's called Combat Jumping for a reason. Super Leap gives you the ability to bound over the areas like someone just stuck a rocket to your back. Combat Jumping is more like bouncing energetically on a pogo-stick.

To be honest though, IR needs a weakness and it's lack of immob protection is the only one which makes sense. Super Jump requires you to take another power from the pool. One you might not necessarily want.

I'm having the same problems with Firefox. I just gave in and starting using Internet Exploiter. My real hate for IE is that it's quick to download any old rubbish that it's asked to, whereas I can run Noscript on Mozilla and bypass most of the annoying sites. For that reason I only have one site favourited on IE, and it's this one. I'm going to have to be paranoid about clicking those links too. I've already been hit by viruses using IE in the past, which is why I switched to Mozilla in the first place.

I've tried all kinds of things to try and get Mozilla to accept this site, but none have worked so far. I'll keep trying and maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to leave IE behind like it deserves.