TwilightPhoenix

Duoing the ITF on my BS/SR Scrapper and my friend's Emp/Dark Defender, around I13 or I14. Not the most impressive thing since people have soloed it and all, but I'm still proud of it. Could have maybe been faster, but we poked around a few of the maps to see what was getting ignored, such as computers that disabled the turrets on the third map. We also charged up Lag Hill rather than pulling the bosses!

...on the forums. In-game, doesn't appear that way...


Edit: Aaaand it's gone.

To be honest, I don't think this will work. CoH will, sadly, die a sudden and undignified death.

...but, nonetheless, there's still that small chance. And, as such, I sent an email so maybe, just maybe, something positive would happen.

Forgotten Sorrow from Aion, English version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-jaOwPSef8


Don't cry for me, how easy love has gone.
Try to see, how deep my despair is
Come the winds of fate and time, take all my tearful memories.

Call out to thee, singing your name in sweet harmony
but only echoes fade away.
Crying breeze to thee every moment with chiming wind
where has the silent tears.

Don't sigh for me, your fate rings false to me,
try to see the shards of history.
Darkness fills my heart and I'm.. laughing loud on all that's passed us by.

Call out to thee, singing your name in sweet harmony
the wind blows endlessly.

Roaming around whirly world, rough breath in dark, cruel blades and tears in sorrowful days.
Burning away hollow hopes, don't pray for God where the angels have gone, so I seek,
weep myself all gently, 'till I'm blind.

*piano playing*

Roaming around whirly world, rough breath in dark, cruel blades and tears in sorrowful days.
Burning away hollow hopes, don't pray for God where the angels have gone, so I seek,
weep myself all gently, 'till I'm blind.

Please come to me, come dusk, the past will flee,
try to see the new dawn what brings hope faintly

This topic has taken me from semi-knee jerk annoyed, to defensive, to exasperated, to "meh, whatever", to amused that it still is going on.

And before anyone asks, my SG-mates talked me into it. People I've played with for years are far, far more convincing than anything posted here or anything said by marketing. That and tossing coins. Coin tosses are great for breaking uncertainty by showing what you really want.

And yes, it really was that hard, before anyone follows up with that question.

Edit: In hindsight, I blame this topic for it. Had I not made it, I would have thrown CoX to the deep recesses of my mind again without giving it a second thought until about November.

Yes as while it's not the most helpful thing to say, it's at least not being a jerk.

@Fista: While I was admittedly whiney at first, I don't see how trying to clarify my position was "continued whining and complaining" and basically being told that I was just a spoiled brat who wanted the whole game for free was "being politely explained to that this game is Freemium". Heck, someone in another topic linked to this one and said something akin to "And here's the latest example of a free player nerd raging that they can't have everything free."

Honestly, there's a lot of big names on these forums who I thought were pretty darn cool back in the day, but a lot of them seemed to have been turned into serious jerks after this game went free.

Edit: Not saying everyone was being a jerk, but some clearly were. [/edit]


@In general: So yeah, while I don't have a way to pitch this to any rednames (support ticket will likely get an automated response to the effect of "We received your feedback, but aren't going to read it and will tell you to use the forums instead"), but what about doing something like the old Reactivation Weekends to give either everyone or premium and VIP players free VIP access for a weekend? There's plenty of precedent for them and it'd be a good way to show "Hey, here's all this cool stuff! Have fun with it for a weekend and if you like it all you have to do is sub!" Non-subs would get to try stuff they may not have gotten to try before to see if they want to do it, VIPs would have more people to run their VIP-only content with for a weekend. Toss in 2XP too on top of it and you'd have a classic winner.

Heck, if they want to get really clever, they can take a page from Aion's book before it went F2P and give away freebies to VIPs over the weekend and a day or two after and make the latter freebies the really nice ones. So, everyone would get the weekend freebies, but they'd only get the nice ones after the event if they were subbed. Trust me on that, it works. You wouldn't believe how many people resubbed to Aion just to get an exclusive pet.

Oh, and yeah, it'll also address complaints, such as my own, about not being able to try out the game in it's full glory before deciding to resub or not. Yeah, it's not 24/7 free access, but that's not we, or at least I, want. Yeah, I'd have to wait for the Reactivation Weekend, but I was doing that just about every time I was unsubbed for a good while back then, so that wouldn't be anything new, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one waiting like that.

Reactivation + 2XP were awesome in the past with the worst complaints I saw being some people unable to make them. I can't see why they wouldn't be awesome still.

Now that it serves me correctly, I remember that a lot of my resubs in the past coincided with reactivation weekend events. Whether you never unsubbed or not, you have to admit those were always awesome. If you were subbed, all your friends would show back up and could show them, first hand without any restrictions, just how awesome things were now than they used to be. If you weren't subbed, you can log in and play as if you had never left and see, quite clearly, whether the game was something to invest time and money into again. Combine this with the 20-day trials someone else mentioned and the invite backs giving 15 days free, pre-Freedom felt rather welcoming to returning players, as if the game was saying "Hey, welcome back! We're so glad to see you again, we hope you stay!"

Which, now that I think about it, is probably a big reason why Freedom feels so unwelcoming to a returning player unless they're high tiered on the rewards. There's none of the excitement of reactivation weekends, there's none of the freedom of being able to see all that is new, there's none of the "Hey, we want you back, so here, have this!" attitude that was so present pre-Freedom (2XP with reactivations, the trials, the half a month free, etc). Instead, it just feels like "Oh, it's you again. Here's some of your junk, try to have fun with it. If not, I'll sell you the rest of it."

Yeah, I hear the "but you had to sub to get anything" argument thrown around a lot. Yeah... no. Sure, unsubbed players didn't get to play the game every day, but they did get please come back trials, extra time for resubbing, and reactivation weekends, all with unhindered play. You can't call that negligible or trivial at all. In all honesty, I think I'd rather have a reactivation weekend than "premium access" all the time. Yeah, I can't log in whenever I feel like it with the former, but dang if those two days didn't feel totally awesome regardless of whether I was subbed or not at the time.

For trivia on the other reasons I would ever resub, the big chunk of the remainder was friends telling me, in detail, all that had happened and begging me to come back. But, that won't happen anymore since all the friends I have contact with outside the game don't play anymore since they wanted to play City of Heroes, not City of Gods (their reason, not mine). The other bit was having to unsub for small amounts of time, like a week, and my first sub after playing the Mac Open Beta.


Edit:

Okay, that verify didn't take long. The performance difference between the Mac client and Windows client is, quite honestly, disgusting. Unlike with the Mac client, the Windows one said "Hey, you can use ultra mode with your hardware!" to which I was like "Ummm... no. I know better." But, even still, I'm having a massive FPS boost with no jitter at higher graphics settings. And that's with me finding a formerly laggy spot and dropping a bunch of formerly laggy powers all over my camera.

I want to go find and punch Transgaming for not doing a better job with the Mac Client (along with every other developer who takes the lazy way out and just uses cider and wine wrappers).

Which is still why it's a wall-banger since Doms can have just as many pets as a Controller and aren't locked. Or at the time at least, Controllers can have one more than Doms now with them getting their own Dark Miasma set.

Also, Defender and Corruptor sets are full of psuedo- and regular pets. Just look at Traps.

But I'm glad they didn't lock Doms, they had become one of my favorite classes before I quit earlier. Two of my unlocked slots would have been wasted had they been locked, which would have seriously sucked.

Edit: And how many times does this game have to verify the piggs? The NCSoft launcher did it, then redownloaded them, then did it again, and now CoX itself is doing it.

Yes, I had them unlocked before Freedom. Not sure if I can make new ones since I'm out of slots and I'm not willing to delete anything.

If I recall, the reason for gating Controllers and MMs given was because of "performance", as if they would be too rough on the servers or slow everyone's computer to a crawl to allow totally free players to use them. That always felt a bit like a wall-banger because Defenders, Dominators, and Corruptors are all still available and would cause similar performance issues and they're not too hard to permanently unlock. And there was no trouble with any of them pre-Freedom either way (though I suppose if all the NPCs in gang war had capes, Thug MMs would have a portable lag hill from the ITF).

Unlocking IOs in-game would be fine, unless it required doing something absurd like killing 1,000 heavies in RV every week.

Also, I can log into my Peacebringer. No idea if you drop from VIP though.

Topic got busy while I slept. I forgot how much traffic these forums got.


So yeah, just a couple of quick things. First, if the entire payment model being able to function is hinging on a sole 160 point item... then there is something horribly, horribly wrong with the entire model. I don't buy that at all since I seriously doubt any company who is not totally retarded would not put all of their hopes and dreams of profit on a single feature of the game. (NCSoft may not be the best when it comes to marketing and PR, but I don't classify them as retarded either) There's several dozen things you get for free as a VIP besides IOs and there's tons of shiny stuff besides those to buy for Premiums. For example, I wanted staves forever. I just now noticed they existed and if I chose to stay as a Premium, it'd be something I'd buy at some point (along with the character slot for the new alt). In other words, even if they made IOs completely free (which, while I'd be happy, am not advocating), this game's revenue isn't even going to consider crashing and burning anytime soon.

Second, at whoever suggested just buy the points to get to Tier 7 up front, can I borrow $270 from you?

Third, I now recall a very good visual example of what CoX feels like on returning now. Basically, watch this video and in the second half of it, pretend the "player" is a returning premium. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_Z5N...ure=plpp_video It's SFW and funny, so even if you disagree you should at least get a laugh.

@Toast: Apologies, I missed that bit when the rest of your post kept saying stuff like "you wouldn't have a welcome experience" and "you are getting an experience many of us paid years for". That sort of made it come across as the post was targeting me specifically in a rather aggressive manner and made the (not you specifically) disclaimer in the middle of it easy to miss.

Anyway, mind, while there are those who may have spent "thousands" on the game, what they've spent in the past is their business and really has no bearing on the current state of affairs other than the free perks should they unsubscribe. I mean honestly, I find that mindset extremely aggravating because reality doesn't work that way the majority of the time. Say if you've been a long time shopper at a store who required membership to shop there and they suddenly allowed everyone to shop there one day, they're not going to give you a gold-plated shopping cart to use. You're going to get the same one as the new customers. Now you might get treated a bit better by the cashiers as they recognize you, but that'd be about it.

But yeah, however much anyone has spent on CoX before it went free to play is seriously irrelevant. If anything, it can easily be argued you got the massive perks of having 6+ years of exclusive access, possibly including stuff such as events that may never be repeated (like the Rularuu invasion) and able to provide feedback to help shape the direction of the game before Freedom launched. Free players don't have that and never will. And it's really besides the point regardless.

Let me ask you, as a (I assume) long time subscriber, how does being a bit more inviting to Premium players, former subscribers who may or may not have invested just as much or more time and money into the game as you have, harm you in any way shape or form? How much would it ruin your experience if they were offered a short, say five day, one-time VIP trial for free? Or if the characters they made were as usuable as always but had to obtain the necessary unlocks for any other characters of theirs to use those systems (say, can edit any MA arcs they had published while subbed but cannot publish new ones or republish it if they take it down)? I'm not saying "Hey, they should have MA access period!" or "Hey, everyone should have the VIP experience for free!" but rather dangle some incentives to make premium players stick around and want to either spend money in the store or resub. It frustrates people such as myself who've made multiple attempts to come back far less and it could generate more profit for the company. Like I said upthread, free samples can generate a heck of a lot of sales.

Also mind, money is only part of the issue . I'm also looking at time investment and opportunity cost, among other things. Will City of Heroes Freedom provide an acceptable amount of entertainment for the amount of time required to play it and for the cost of the other stuff I could be doing instead? In the past, this was true. Is it true now? I don't know, the sour experience I've had every time I've logged since Freedom launched has me rather unsure, but I've liked the game enough in the past I'm willing to try to get past that and see. But I don't want to spend any amount of money until I'm sure I'm making a sound investment. That might sound silly, but I'm tight with my wallet and I refuse to spend cash to try something without proper research. You may or may not be totally fine tossing $15 or $5 just to check something out to see if you like it or not. Me, not so much, especially with how much a game that transitions to a whole new payment model can change. I can tell CoX is quite a bit different since I last seriously played it and I need to know if I like the difference, but to do that I have to get over the demotivational issues (and, more importantly, the performance issues, if my Windows client ends up hating me too, I'm giving up regardless).


@Arcannavile: I'd pay for the same, similar enough, or better experience that I had from before. Vague, I know. If it helps, I do have things on my in-game store wishlist, I just forget what.

@Tenzhi and Biowraith: Understand when I originally made the topic, the issue of IOs and other such was particularly jabbing at me since I wasn't logged in long enough to really re-experience my performance issues (and was too annoyed at the other stuff) and didn't get to experience those in their full glory until I logged back in later to go try to do a Mayhem mission. IOs are an important point, sure, but one that can be overcame if enough other factors work out. It's also worth noting that I'm kind of annoyed at several people making posts as if I'm just saying "GIMMIE" and am also annoyed at myself for making this topic to begin with.

Edit: And the stupid NCLauncher seems to be ignoring that I installed all the assets from the disc and just needs to patch everything. I hate that stupid thing, but that's another, unrelated issue. At least it's not trying to force me to use PMB.

Yes, that would be deciding that the game is worth returning to and worth spending $5 every two months for points for the IO license or for a VIP sub every month in the current situation.

Not being able to try out my unlocked characters as I used to play them considerably deters me from being able to make a proper decision to do so, especially with the default option being "go elsewhere" if I end up lacking sufficient information. Things they could do to improve that are mentioned here, but that doesn't solve anything right now and I doubt any staff are reading this topic anyway.

My definition of F2P is that I can log in and play for free without having to make any purchases and that the game indicates in some fashion that it is F2P (being named Freedom and having accounts that are called Free Accounts are pretty good indicators to me). Again, Freemium is just a variant of that. How much I like any given restrictions or variant of the F2P model is irrelevant.

Is that refer a friend button for inviting new players to make new accounts or to get returning vets back? I can't find anything on inviting former players back, but maybe I'm not looking in the right places.

And I do know IOs aren't necessary to play the game (don't know about Incarnate Trials, but I imagine Apex and Tin Mage would be extremely rough on SOs, though granted we only had Alpha slot when I played those), it's just, again, not fun getting kicked down in power so much on my higher level alts. I honestly had forgotten how horribly squishy Super Reflexes is when you're stuck with only 33% defense. And how endurance heavy it is too, even without all the power pool toggles to add more defense.

Wasn't aware of ATOs' existence. HOs, yes, but I never looked at those since the ones I wanted cost as much as a quarter of my IO builds. Or more.

Oh, the Protector channels, I'm on Protector Vigilance, Protector Watch, Protector TFs, STF Masters, Jello Shooters, and one other one I can't remember. During my five paper missions and Mayhem, I saw two stray helloes and one person spamming for a trial. Maybe it's just Tuesday? Though my global friends list being dark the whole time is a bit disheartening (but that's not the game's fault).

Also... why do I keep popping out walls of text?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting everything to be free. Not even close, they have to make money somehow after all. What I do miss is the awesome generosity they had back in the day. Been away from the game for awhile? Have a friend invite you and get some free time as a welcome back gift. Not sure about the game? Here, have a trial for a few days that lets you experience the whole game for it's short duration (said trial got nerfed like crazy, which was annoying, but I was a subscriber by then so it didn't directly affect me, just made introducing the game to friends a PITA). AFAIK, that kind of thing is gone. There's no VIP trials, no extra welcome back time, none of that. It feels like if they're already getting your money, they love you. If they're not, they don't care about you even if you've been a paying customer in the past. Or if you prefer, gone from "Hey, we made your game more awesome, please come back and join us!" to "Hey, we made your game more awesome, but if you don't give us money we're going to make it suck for you." Or if you prefer, they've switched from the carrot to the stick. It doesn't really encourage me to sink $15 or even $5 just to see if I still like the game when there's so many sticks smacking me when I log in.

Lots of ways they could easily alleviate that. The invite-back thing they used to have, letting existing characters from previous subscribers keep what they have if no longer eligible, just can't get more (maybe disabling Incarnate powers, no real opinion since I'm only losing a couple of alpha slots so I really don't know what I'm missing), allow accounts that have existed/been unsubbed for so long be allowed to activate a (maybe one-time) "free VIP trial" that lets them check out VIP benefits for a few days, stuff like that. I work retail, that kind of stuff works. You'd be surprised how much extra someone will spend for a single carrot and how much more likely they are to just dump their cart and walk out of the store when there's too many sticks. For example, a brand of flavored water wasn't selling at all. We gave free samples and now we have trouble keeping stocked, months later.

But yeah, I'm not expecting to get everything free, despite how awesome it is with Aion (though the only thing I haven't spent anything in their cash shop is because they haven't put anything for sale that interests me).

Anyway, I did read some of that diary topic and his experience is... a lot different than mine. But that's probably because he's Tier 9 and has almost no restrictions. I'm Tier 4 with 9 tokens, so I'm a long way off from having permanent access to Controllers, Masterminds, and IOs, along with other things. But I do have AH access. What I'm supposed to do with it when I'm not eligible for salvage or recipe drops, I don't know. At least my influence isn't capped so my wealthier toons aren't stuck having more inf than they can carry. And also, I have EAT access too. No clue why since I didn't buy it and I haven't VIP subbed, but my Peacebringer is perfectly log-inable.

For the higher level characters with IO builds, I know, making SO builds was one of the first things I grudgingly did a year or so ago when I first tried Freedom. And spending a hour+ per toon making a new build and buying SOs isn't the best "Welcome back!" experience. And then having them perform as only a pale shadow of their former glory is not fun. At all. If you want to see what I mean and you have a spare build on an IOed alt, just log em in, make a second build, unslot your incarnate powers, and just feel how horribly weak it'll seem in comparison. It's not fun. That and I think I screwed something up on my Scrapper and Defender when doing the SO build because they perform like crap with them. And I'm out of respecs to fix it and my Scrapper already used up the trial respecs tweaking his too often since he was my first alt for me to experiment with IOs on. And I can't craft the respec recipe. Yay?

But anyway, I took a more serious shot in-game. Maybe it's just Tuesday, but my server, Protector, was weirdly silent. Either nobody was on or they all went to new global channels. Sure, it's not the biggest server, but the global channels were usually chatty during evenings. So, having no idea which contacts in the contact finder gave old, sucky missions and which ones gave the new content, I went and ran a Mayhem mission since those always amused me. Yeah, paper missions were blah, but I fully expected that going in and I'm not really judging the game on those. And they at least amused me by putting four of the missions back and forth across the street rather than opposite corners of the map. Blowing up everything was still amusing, though PPD Ghosts are still broken (-45% stackable tohit debuff on a minion-level mob at level 30... seriously?).

And I also realized I need to just suck it up and ditch the crappy Mac client and just install CoX on my Windows partition if I'm going to play again. The jittering frame-rate is a serious PITA (40 FPS! Now 7! Now 40! Now 7!) and, as always, adjusting my settings didn't help. Also, the memory leak is still there. Anyone know which files contain all the settings, or at least the ones I've set to default, such as key binds, window settings, and all that? I know where my costumes are stored, but not the other stuff.

Oh, and Tymer, Freemium is still F2P. It's just one of several variants of it.

Edit: Are options.txt and wdw.txt the settings files I'm looking for? Poking around trying to see if I can find it in the mean time. Not sure if there are others.

Edit 2, the TL;DR Version!: After ten pages of discussion, arguments between various individuals, accusations, assumptions, and myself going from posting an annoyed, semi-knee jerk reaction to reorganizing my thoughts, I came to a simple conclusion. I want to try the game in it's full glory, or close enough to it, to see if it's something I want to return to and I'd be perfectly happy with something like the Reactivation Weekends of old to do that. No need to make everything free or whatever other conclusions some people seem to jump to. /endedit /tl;dr


I stopped playing around the time of I19 or I20, before the whole Freedom thing was announced due to various reasons and fell totally out of the loop for awhile. Came back, found the game was F2P and also there was an I21. And since then I've tried picking this game back up. I remember the good times I had and get interested in returning, finally coax myself to log in, and then quickly get demotivated. Okay, instantly. This has happened several times.

I subbed for just shy of two years back in the day, but this seems to amount to getting my IOs, Controllers, and Masterminds all locked and rendered useless without forking over cash, which just leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I log into my two mains, who both had heavily IOed builds that are now unplayable to the point they might as well have all empty slots. Sure, I made some SO builds the first time I tried coming back, but spending the first couple of hours making new builds and buying SOs just to achieve partial performance was not an encouraging experience, and trying to play those weird, funky SO builds still doesn't help. I get my ***-kicked by something I could have handled with both hands tied behind my back before while at the same time thinking "For a nominal fee, you can avert this!" The mid-level characters I unlocked are more fine since I still used SOs, but it's still feels meh knowing I can't play my mains. And I can't just go roll a new alt without deleting someone because, hey, I used up most of my slots unlocking now-unplayable characters and the last few on characters I could play, so no "brand new fresh experience" for me without forking over money.

It just kind of leaves a whole, sour taste in my mouth. I liked this game, I want to play this game again, but I feel like it's saying "Welcome back, now dump out your wallet on the table" which is totally unlike it was back in the day, despite having to pay the sub fee "Hey, welcome back! Here, have an extra 15 days for free and enjoy the full game unhindered!" The whole premium thing isn't the point of my argument, though with the other MMO I play, Aion, sitting over there and letting me play the full game without dropping a dime, it's kind of become a bigger factor in annoying me.

But yeah, don't do the whole "You used to have to sub first" argument. I'm aware of it and I can probably type about 15 pages of counter-argument and I'd rather not. So moving on...

So, I poke around and there's still other issues that annoy me that keep cropping up. Little things, but it adds up. My interface is all jacked up on my alts and has to be fixed, and seems to do that every time I log in (granted, it's usually been an Issue or so between log-ins, I don't even know which Issue we're on now), performance on the Mac is still kind of screwed up no matter what my graphics are set to (seriously, there's no reason why Aion on medium-graphics should have triple the frame rate of CoX on minimum just because I'm booted on Windows in the former and OSX on the latter... and yes I'm using a supported version of OSX), there's lots of cool sounding things that require up-front payment but no way to tell beforehand if I'd like them (Staff Melee? Sounds awesome. No way to try it? Meh, not spending), no way to just buy a permanent or at least extended IO license (if I recall correctly, getting to Tier 7 would cost me around $260 or take just under two years if I sub the whole time, which I'd be for more likely to eventually do if I could have my IOs full-time now whether buying a license or putting it in a more sane spot on the rewards table), sending feedback via a support ticket on a couple of occasions simply got me an automated "Thanks for feedback, but use the forums to talk about the game" response that made me feel like they were saying "We don't give a f#$! about what you think", especially since at the time Premiums could only use the technical support forum, no way to disable incarnate powers in the arena (there was a casual PvP night on my server, don't know if they still did it, but it was fun. Even with IOs back, I imagine I'd be useless now since I don't have incarnate powers), and some other things I'm not thinking of.

I don't know, it just seems baffling that this game and Aion is being ran by NCSoft. Sure, the latter has it's own problems, and I could go on and on about them, but at least I've been able to do things like see and chat with CMs in-game and come and go as I please without worry of all my stuff timing out while not feeling like I'm being told to dump out my wallet to see if I want to play again while being told my opinion doesn't matter.

I imagine this comes off as a bit whiney and ranty. It's kind of how I feel since I'm rather annoyed and nobody I knew was on in-game for me to complain to. CoX is a game I'd really love to play again, but it seems to just want to throughly demotivate me on doing that the moment I log on. I want to know if the good times I had in the past are still there to be had, but with most of my friends gone, my old super group looking like it's barely hanging on, everyone in the channels seeming to only be interested in doing incarnate content, and no way to at least try the game in it's former glory for a little bit, how am I supposed to find out?

So meh, maybe someone will give me some good reasons that'll let me be able to get past the wall of demotivation and give things a legitimate shot. Or maybe I'll just get a bunch of TL:DRs, "You used to have to pay up front to play anyway, so I don't see the problem" posts I heard a million times back when I tried to return earlier, or whatever "You're wrong and you're an idiot" trolling that could crop up.


Edit: Again, not trying to say "give me all this stuff free" or anything of that nature. I'm just trying to decide if this game is worth investing time and money in again, as a Premium or a VIP, but feel it's doing everything in it's power to dissuade me by ruining the experience because I haven't paid anything yet.

Also, I know the game is supposed to be balanced around SOs. Saying my characters screwed up in terms of IOs as being unplayable may have been a bit strong (though the IOed builds themselves really are unplayable). I was highly annoyed when I typed that. However, it's still undeniable that having to spend a hour or so per character making a downgraded build for SOs and then take the time to reslot them only to be at a fraction of their effectiveness is very, very much unfun and not a good "Welcome back!" experience.

Some of the community announcements will not let me use the link to jump to the discussion topic because I'm apparently not allowed to view them. Yet navigating there manually lets me view that topic just fine. This happens logged in (I'm Premium) or not logged in.

The I21 Media Blitz announcement topic is an example. The link to the discussion topic, specifically this one (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/newth...stthread&f=569) will say "Nope, you're not allowed" but manually navigating to the topic (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=275600) works just fine.

This is the only forum I can post in, so I can't drop a bug report in the bug report forum. Heck, unless I start a new topic, then I can only post in this topic too. It's kind of silly like that, they really need to either open up a couple of other forums to Premium players or make a forum for Premium players. Otherwise I can see a bunch of off-topic threads being started here because, other than speaking in-game or filing a support ticket, we have nowhere else to go to give feedback. But, either way, I did /bug it and already got the standard "We received your bug report and some issues may be fixed sooner or later depending on how serious they are" response.

I know about the 30-day license, but I'd love to be able to purchase longer lasting ones too. Or just outright buy an early, permanent license. Sure, in the long run that'd be a wasted purchase, but the precedent is already there. I can buy early unlock of Masterminds and Controllers, among other gated content, so why can't I buy an early unlock of IOs?

Yeah... I need to buy over $200 worth of points or be subscribed for 18 more months for a permanent IO license. That's not very encouraging at all.

I'm at the end of Tier 4 and have one token towards Tier 5, so I have AH access (and actually found I had some inf waiting for me to pick up still). But if I don't get recipe or salvage drops for not having IOs unlocked, that's fine, I can understand that. Although I could still sell it, I have more than enough inf to supply a couple of servers worth of toons with SOs, so that's not too much of a bother. Though that makes me wonder about the logic of letting me get Reward Merits then. Surely they don't intend for me to spend them on Large Inspirations, assuming those even work since I'm not at Tier 8?

The power in question is a reward for completing Mayhem missions, the one from Independence Port listed here. As far as I know there's no mention that these should be restricted and non-functional for me, so either their failure to work is a bug or the lack of mention is a "bug".

And yeah, I knew radios weren't the best thing to do going in, but I really felt like just blowing stuff up. Although partly due to the lag I was getting (so bad I was rubberbanding in zig-zag patterns when trying to run straight), Mangle ended up doing most of the damage, but it was funny watching him flip out and destroy everything and everyone in a two-block radius whenever we came upon a trash can. I still have some global unlocks left, but if I choose to stay I want to see how much life my server has before using them after the expected tide of free-players comes rushing in. I might transfer and I'll need the unlock slots over there.

Speaking of which, I saw in another topic someone was missing two global unlocks and I think I might be as well. If I remember, before Freedom, everyone had two free unlocks. I then received two more unlocks for twelve month vet and two more for Going Rogue. Shouldn't I have six?

My account got reactivated today and I decided to try out CoH again to see if it would be worthwhile to return. So far, my first impressions on returning have been rather... poor. Insane rubber-banding lag that laughs at my /sync attempts, my 50s finding themselves functionally useless since both of their builds are filled with IOs, and everything being so in my face about "Give us money!" among other things isn't making things look good. To add to this, I'm finding that I'm the victim of either a bug or a "feature" that seemed to be completely unmentioned.

I was lucky enough that one of the characters I unlocked was a lowbie and only had two IOs rather than being filled with generics like I thought he was, so I did have a playable character without shelling out cash on a sub, IO license, or more unlocks. I played this toon through five paper missions and then a Mayhem mission, which granted the Movement Increase passive power, and found gameplay to be business as normal. When I was done, I decided to go back to the AH to throw my junk at as had been habit in the past. I quickly noticed two things. First, Movement Increase was doing absolutely nothing. Looking at my character's real number attributes, the power wasn't even listed as an effect under the stuff affecting my movement speeds. And second, my inventories were all just as empty as I had started, except for Inspirations which had continued to drop.

So, am I missing something here and Premium players are barred from bank/mayhem mission powers and from salvage recipe drops? Or is this a bug designed to discourage me more from trying to come back to this game despite the bad first impressions I'm having? If this is intended... well, they need to make it clear and I question the logic behind letting me get reward tokens but not recipe or salvage drops (or not let me use anything the merits buy). I'm at Tier 4 rewards, but none of them I can see mention excluding me from salvage and recipe drops or bank powers.