Turgenev

Gaah, first sentence too... rest of the article was fair but brief, wanting the 2nd part to see where they take this.

Rednames: Can you ring up Examiner and give 'em a healthy correction?...

As an aside, the one that broke my badge crazy train for all my alts was Issue 9: Inventions. That staggeringly vast amount of work for toons that were really secondary to my goals is what made me walk away from all but my main.

Okay. Then in this case, your tools are individually Incarnatized, not you as the super-user. Each tool will need its share of work in order to proceed with the Incarnate work, according to your worldview. Hope this helps.

Kill, no. Tabled for scheduled prioritizing, yes.

My decision when the Incarnate system came out was, "Develop one toon as the vanguard, and the rest will come secondarily." Right now, my primary toon's technically T4'd up for two weeks now, but I'm still working the Notices for more T3 trees to open up (my goal is to have him T4'd in each tree for flexibility). The rest of my 15+ 50s play second fiddle to that goal. I have a few of them at T3 status, and the rest are other tiers or still working in Incarnate arcs to open them up.

It hasn't killed my desire, exactly. Alphas don't work SK'd down, for instance, so it's not like it brings anything to the table when I'm not doing WSTs. I AM having fun with my primary (I always have, but even more so now). I WILL have fun with my alts. Just not right now.

So, are you alone? No, but I'll disagree with your viewpoint, and present my own for comparison.

Kromatique.

This. The whole hunt section took my team of 8 about 7 minutes to conclude, including the ones that everyone's complaining about. We hopscotched efficiently, with current hunters dropping their targets while the next phase hunters were finding big groups to snuggle up to for their turn. This was a PUG crew too. No KS accusations on Broadcast, no nasty tells. The only "confrontation" I had was when I was parked near my favorite Raider spawn point, and someone Hovered right up to me, stared me down, then hovered away to the next group. OMG, drama. XD

Total time for last night was about 47 minutes. This REALLY isn't as bad as people are making it out, in my opinion.

Actually, we're both sorta right... so here's what happens:

1. You can login a toon that has the rename flag on it.
2. BUT, you have a window in the middle of your screen that you "have" to address - can't drag it, can't minimize it - where it prompts you for the immediate name change in the game GUI.

You CAN hide your GUI, and you can fight and chat and do other things while that window is up. However, it's very annoying to work around.

Hope this helps, mouse.

Your laziness offends me. Logging into test now to check this out. :P

I'll make you a deal. You roll up a nostly naked toon on Freedom, and I'll roll up an Amish superhero to keep your wily wimmenly ways in check for company. This has all the makings of a comic book.

EDIT: I even have the perfect name. Jumpin' Jehosephat.

See Beef's followup, but if you really need it spelled out for you (pun intended), you can try the Wiki for more detailed directions for each explore badge. For instance, here's what paragonwiki.com has for Top Dog:

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Top_Dog

Most of the other badges have similar entries. I prefer the map pack personally; it's faster and in-game, but for those non-obvious situations (like in AP, where a badge is underground and it's not obvious on the map), the Wiki gives me the direction I need.

This is the best route for now, IMO. Focus on your "best" toon, and get the rest to being alpha slotted so they don't have negatives on Apex/Tin Mage, but trickle down once your first toon is "done", then the next, then the next, etc. Trying to get all your toons done at once is gonna burn you out. Right now, my main's got 1 T4, with another 2 trees just waiting for Notices and shards. My top five alts have Tier 2s and 3s, and the rest... hell, I'm still trying to get help with Trapdoor on some of my gimpier builds...

EDIT: And OP, no. The Devs have not made any comment like that, because that was never the intent of the system as designed.

I was wondering if you'd chime in again...

You're at a conference. Does your company support a VPN tunnel? If so, VPN to your company, then route your COH traffic through them. That might work to bypass the conference restrictions.

EDIT: Check out this company. Maybe the $7 is worth it to you. http://www.publicvpn.com/

Also, have you tried talking to the conference management team? If you tell them you need certain ports available, they might be able to add your MAC to an exception class to unfetter your traffic more than the general user.

Well, one way to test this is going to the Test server and "buying" rename tokens there, and seeing what happens, right?

I don't recall any ill effects from holding off on the usage. I actually parked a rename token for a few days because I fatfingered the order and got it for the wrong toon. I WAS able to play the toon from what I recall while NCSoft sorted out the rename token assignment, but I could be making that up in my head too. If you're really concerned, try it on Test and see what the mechanics do, that'll be the definitive answer.

I knew I wasn't wrong about you people and your crazy crustacean porn. If only your toon wore more clothes, Nyx. (Yeah, I read your other post about being naked. People complained about THAT on Virtue?... did you run into an RPing Amish supergroup?...)

Side note: There IS a quiet but living RP community on Freedom too. They stay underground by necessity for general scorn, but on teams that are mostly-RP, it comes through. We got 'em too, they're just not in your face and on the city council like it is on Virtue. One group that comes to mind is Young Paragonians, but I know little about them beyond reputation (although I enjoyed a rather sedate Apex run with them a few nights ago).

So far (up to and incld. Fulmens, it's where I stopped reading and decided to chime in), the comments have been relatively fair-handed regarding my home server, so thanks for that, everyone.

My suggestion to the OP: Pepper some toons on each server to level 10 or so, and get the pulse of each server with random teaming. Ultimately, it's YOUR impression that matters, not what other people's impressions are. Some things apply: If you dig RP, go to Virtue. If you're a New Yorker mentality, go to Freedom. If you like alcohol, go to Protector. Etc. But beyond that, what matters are the people you meet, and naturally gravitate to for teaming.

Most people I know (on Freedom and elsewhere) have no objections to global friending you, or to inviting you to their group's global channels. Server globals are one thing, but ofttimes the real milk and honey of the server comes from the niche groups that liked each other so much they made it unofficial.

Here's one case study: I've encouraged a group called the "Freedom Horde", which is a public gathering of quality players, under the wings of E-Man and Luna. They organize semi-daily sorties for TF and arc work, and it's not a SG mentality; everyone has their own SG, but the commonality is the community. Some people "play" better than others, but that's not the point of it. Some people are brand new, while others have been around since pre-ED (which, funnily enough last night, elicited an "oooooh wow it was like that" from one of the new players... fack I feel old...). Some builds are min/maxed, some are barely SO'd up. But you don't play with builds - you play with people, and that's where I think Freedom's variety really sells itself. You have the maximum value of choice there.

Best of all, if you don't dig one server, you can always transfer to another one. The mechanic is extremely clean, and only costs $10 if you think you need to go that route. I wouldn't entertain that 'til you hit at least lvl 40 though; anything before that, you can rebuild with a week or two of reasonable effort.

So, OP: Shop around! Check out the various server global channels, insert into PUG teams and start TALKING to players. See who you like. If you find jerks, /ignore 'em and enjoy the blissful silence. But most of all, have fun. That's something EVERY player here has in common.

1. Yeah, that movie poster took me back a bit.

2. Did it around 10pm or so EST, which is typically primetime for activity (we were solidly in red, I remember that from my toon shuffling). How was it a "mess", exactly? My team was literally hopscotching the zones; one would work zone A, while others would plant in zones B and C in preparation, so the kills literally went like dominoes. I didn't know these guys from Adam, but I had two buddies with me who're pro material, and the rest matched up just as classy.

I was actually LOOKING on Broadcast and whatnot for stuff, but didn't see a peep, and the one time I was in TV prepping for the Raider kills, someone came to my special spot, stared at me, then shuffled off to the next group. No muss, no fuss...

So what kinda probs did you get? If you wanna PM to take it off boards, that's cool.

I don't see why. I just had a very pleasant evening with it and a PUG team on Freedom. Were there other teams out there? Sure. Was it a problem? Seriously, no. We had one or two people in each zone, and staggered the hunts so we were done with all the hunts in under seven minutes.

Closest I got to that is when the Cyclone Elementals will take over the spawn in a random radio mission. Nothing makes you tinkle in your kilts at lvl 25 faster than seeing lvl 54 Elementals floating around a warehouse, talking like Freakshow.

When I was in the headstart, I rolled up an electric/energy blaster chick named Cerulean Skie. I still have her. She's still a blapping terror.

I played her dedicatedly 'til about May 2004, when I was in the SW corner of Steel Canyon on a street hunt, and my team (all of us about lvl 25 or so) stopped dead in our tracks when we saw an Illusion controller spawn Phantom Army and go to town on a group we were gearing up to hit.

My mouth dropped. From then on, I knew the joy of chaos control. Rolled up Dr. Turgenev during that play session, and didn't look back 'til I got him to 50.

Skie's a 50 now, and she lives in my arsenal as a proud, albeit slightly underpowered, trophy. Fond memories will keep her around long after any other toon I have.

/em cutself

No one watches my freakin' demofiles.

Gimme a shout if you see me then, I'll be frequenting the various WST runs.