UberGuy

What we're doing

I'm planning what I think is the last of my dedicated attempts to get the Really Hard Way badge in the Magisterium incarnate trial. I'm shooting for starting to form this Thursday at 8 PM Eastern Time. That's 7 PM Central, 6 PM Mountain and 5 PM Pacific.

When we're doing it

If you're a west coast player and can't get there at 5, bear in mind we haven't yet started one of these sooner than 30 minutes after we started forming. We also usually try three times, though (so far) we've only succeeded once per set of three.

Hopefully, scheduling this for Thursday this week will allow for some time to get the word out.

How we're doing it

See my previous thread for details on what we need most. Having 1/3-1/2 of the league be +3 Corruptors is the easiest way to pull this off. Even if you can't bring that, most everyone needs to be +3. If you can bring anything that debuffs DR, that's also a big help.

Naturally, if your badge collector meets none of those requirements, that's OK. That's why we've been running it over and over - to give people a chance to rotate in their badge collectors, no matter what they are.

I know a lot of folks have achieved this badge now on the previous four trials. Even if you already got this badge on one of the prior attempts, please come help others get it. In particular, if you have it and can now bring something else that better matches what we need to pull it off, please consider bringing that.

If you really want this badge and this date/time won't work for you, please reply here or send me some kind of PM or /tell ASAP, and I can see about rescheduling, running more, or whatever. I want to wrap these up soon if possible - people have been awesome helping out, and I don't want to exhaust their good will!

Thanks in advance to all who can come, and everyone else wish us luck.

One oddball side effect, hitting pause seems to cause some functional items to disappear. At least it did on the beta client. I made a nice long demo of one of my characters walking through the base, which gives plenty of time to tool around with the free camera.

I wouldn't be surprised if one could hand-edit a demo file to make it run for longer than its original recording time.

I'm likely with you guys.

I didn't do MMOs before CoH came out. It was the first one that attracted me.

The scene has changed a lot since I started playing, and I think MMOs as a category of games have improved a fair amount. Many of the things that I disliked about them have been addressed in newer titles. Sadly, my avoidance of MMOs was a combination of active distaste for what I considered negative aspects and a lack of interest in their actual content. While the negative aspects have been addressed in some new MMOs, the interest still isn't there for me. CoH was a huge outlier for me.

I'm something of a one-hobby, one-vice kinda guy. I want to sink time into one activity and really invest in it. I'm not sure I'm up for the investment of time in an MMO that I spent here, even if I found one I liked. I'm not sure I'd be lucky enough to pick one that lasted this long. As much as I hate to see CoH go (barring miracles), it's had a pretty damn good run.

One addition to the many environmental sounds Atlantea listed is generators. If you stand near what looks like a street-level generator box for the power company, or on a building roof, it hums.

Listen to the city when standing in Talos. (I often noticed this while loitering in Wentworths.) In addition to the sounds of cars and whatnot, you will hear birds chirping, though only when it's light out. It sounds like a summer day.

By the way, the thing with the mailbox and Singularity or Group Fly is true of all those kinds of objects with attacks. If you set off certain AoEs in the presence of those items, such as Fire Ball or Foot Stomp, you'll knock the appropriate contents out of the item. Leaves out of trees, letters out of mailboxes, sheets of paper out of cardboard boxes, soda cans and wadded paper out of trash hoppers and trash cans, etc.

In the University buildings, on the library side, there are loose books on the tops of the bookshelves that you can move.

Justice is noticeably quieter, but not dead. This evening we ran iTrials for about three hours. Yesterday we had full teams running Magisterium for the Really Hard Way badge. (We've gotten it once a night on four separate nights now.) We still run Hamidon on Monday and Wednesday, and RWZ raids after.

There seems to be a fairly sharp divide of players into two broad camps of people.

On one side are those who, as already mentioned, don't see the point in playing more - future accomplishments are going to be gone soon, so why bother playing?

On the other side are players who view accomplishments with their characters as something they will cherish even if the game ceases to be available. They are often seeking to do more things they had not previously done (usually because they thought they had more time). I'm one of those people. If I have to, I'll be cramming in badges and whatnot on Nov 30. (Well, I hope I'm done with badges way before then, but if I had to, I would.)

There's a bit more involved. Some folks also are keeping playing because they have friends playing (sometimes for the reasons directly above), and some just really love playing CoH, and are filling as much time with it as they can while it's still here. For these folks, goals per-se aren't the point, but rather the experience itself.

Those who seem most prone to leave seem more loosely attached to the combination of the game world, their characters, or friends who aren't leaving yet. If you feel your characters can be ported to another game, or don't really get attached to characters at all, if your friends all left, or you mostly just played in PuGs on active servers, you probably are more prone to leave.

Me, I'm attached to my characters and want to round out their accomplishments, I want to play the game until I can't any more, and I have friends who are staying for the kinds of reasons given above. Justice seems to have a nice core of players like me who plan to stick it out till the end. While player counts may continue to decline, I bet I know the names of Justice community of players who will be logged in on Nov 30. I'm sure other servers have their equivalents.

I haven't seen high-end CO play, and for a variety of reasons, likely never will. But it sounds like its high end offers something that might be comparable to Scrappers, Brutes, or even some things we can't have here, like Ranged/Armored characters. But I don't think that would quite match the high end here on a team, even if you could get lots of mobs together, because the buffs and debuffs are weaker.

I solo a melee characters a lot in CoH, so I certainly can appreciate the notion of a game that lets you build such characters, but I also do things like speed TFs and iTrials, and in those contexts, a lot of the crazy things we pull off in CoH are strongly influenced by buffs and debuffs. Something like the Really Hard Way badge from the Magisterium iTrial is impossible without overwhelming debuffs. (Naturally, I realize it is only set up that way because we have such strong debuff options.) I will miss that big picture of collective overpowered play, assuming of course no one recreates something like it. If they do, I will be very likely to check it out.

(Controls in CoH are a lot of fun too, at least in PvE. They're kinda crazy, though, and clearly a bit hard to balance even in PvE. Another place I have a hard time seeing other people follow.)

I had forgotten that it was a bug, but that's a far more specific accident that worked out in their favor. Almost the entire powers system structure was filled with implications the devs didn't really grasp until players took them and went berserk with them. The strength of buffs, the wide variety of buffs available, the ways survival buffs like defense and DR stacked, and the high base HP regenerative powers of player characters all combined to create a system that made us very powerful, and at the same time, that the original devs lliterally didn't understand.

When I started playing CoH, my SG was fighting +10 critters in Talos within a couple of weeks after pre-release. The devs had to put in the "purple patch" and caps on XP gain just to try and limit how powerful we were and how fast that power let us progress. The initial purple patch was much more draconian than what we have today. With the original purple patch, fighting a +1 was more like fighting a +2 is now. Doing so with TOs was completely pointless. They had to give it more spread because of the limitations of the side kick system of the day.

As innovative and awesome as the SK system was, everyone had to have their own mentor, and the levels of all the mentors didn't have to match. Being an SK made you -1 to your mentor. There was, originally, no ability to change mission difficulty setting, so everyone usually wanted to do the missions of the highest level character on the team, so all the level spread was shifted down. You needed players with TOs and DOs to be able to be at least a little useful against +1 or +2 critters, because it was terribly common for an SK to have a mentor who was at least -1 to the current mission holder. So the purple patch was made less intense so we could actually fight more than +0s.

So we have characters who had the raw power to take on +10s with buffs, now restricted to usefully fighting +3 or so foes. But that meant that, with buffs, we were amazingly good at fighting +0 foes - the baseline difficulty the game presented to us. So we usually settled on something higher that didn't get into the worst of the diminishing returns. That was usually perceived to be +2, AKA "Invincible" and later "Relentless" for CoV. (If you had strong AoEs, you were often better on the settings that were, in rough terms, equivalent to (+0/x2) and (+1/x2) today. If you were strong at single-target damage and could take the harder hits, (+2/x1) was usually the best XP/time.)

This has been the root of so many things about the game. The perceptions of baseline (average) speeds at which people leveled, the drive to create mission difficulty settings ... but the biggest thing it led to was the ability to take on huge spawns - one of the most comic-book-like things I think this game delivers outside things like travel powers.

Its one reason I am not sure any game will ever be able to replace CoH for me, because, at its core, I love CoH's gameplay because its balance was broken. Well, "broken" in the sense that it was nothing like what the devs originally aimed for. Despite that they put a bounding box around us with the "purple patch", that brokenness has been a core aspect of the game since release. It's in the game's DNA, as it were, and bleeds into everything the devs have given us since then (good and bad).

And for the most part, I've enjoyed that about it immensely.

I don't know if anyone would be insane enough to implement a system like this on purpose. I'm not sure any more carefully balanced system will ever deliver the raw sense of power this game does. And I certainly don't think it's likely that anyone will accidentally hit the same sweet spots ever again.

Energy Transfer.

While I sort of miss old-school Regen nostalgically, I think I actually prefer it the way it is now.