Venture

Just won the Steel Canyon map with a 24 TA/A Defender. Cleared Weapons Deal, Breakout and Store Robbery sides; didn't die once.

Granted, this was on Heroic. But TA/A is one of the weakest combos in the game. So I really don't see how people can be having these horrible problems.

I played a Mind/Psi Dom for a bit, it was pretty nice, and pretty easy to shread through +1 with little effort. I stopped him around 12-13.

Um, you do realise that gives you a practically irrelevant amount of experience with the AT?

Everything added to the game is content.

Content is new zones, missions and such. Costumes are not content. Bases are not content. Badges are not content. PvP is not content. They're all fluff. They're toys to be played with when you're not actually playing the game.

That doesn't mean they're not worth adding, or that I don't like them myself. It does mean that in terms of actual content, i8 is pretty light. The new Faultline is nice but even level-appropriate characters will be done with it fairly quickly. Police band missions Safeguards are the real content addition for i8 and not everyone cares for them. (I happen to like them.)

The devs really, really, really need to stop adding content to the shallow end of the game. The game doesn't need any more work below level 30 (which is about the 25% mark in terms of advancement). It needs the godawful duplicated missions in the level 30-35 CoH bracket replaced. Sit someone down RIGHT NOW, remove the duplicate entries and write ANYTHING to replace them. Doesn't have to be brilliant stuff. Those duplicates are a huge embarassment, a reminder that the game wasn't finished when it shipped, and I have no idea why they've been allowed to exist for so long.

Then we need new real content in the 35-50 ranges. I don't care how much fun it might be for the developers to rebuild Boomtown; unless it's going to be a 35+ zone, we don't need it.

The problem is this; we're talking about a group of professional programmers. In practically every other profession, there exist deadlines. I do not think it unreasonable to expect projects to be completed by a certain date.

Software development just doesn't work that way. Software isn't written according to schedules and isn't completed "on time". That's why release dates tend to be fluid and never announced far in advance.

Speaking of elitism, to the individual who replied to my comment about not being a social studies teacher with "it shows."

Allow me to clarify something: I am in favor of elitism. That said, nothing about CoX's bases is elitist. To claim otherwise is to deny facts in evidence: it is possible, as shown here in this thread, for small groups, even individuals, to have decent bases. If you can't achieve that it isn't because it's impossible. It's because you haven't made the effort. It is not unreasonable that bases require some effort to construct. Or are you prepared to argue they are, or should be, an entitlement?

I would like to believe that you simply saw an opening for a quick bit of humor and took it. If that is not the case, then show me the evidence to suggest that anything I said about socio-economic philosophy or political ideology was incorrect.

All of it was incorrect, except arguably the definitions. There is nothing fascist about bases or supergroups, any more than it is "fascist" that your house was likely not built by you personally. Your supergroup is what you make of it. If you join a supergroup and find it's run by some tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood, leave and take everyone worthwhile with you. If base design isn't reflecting the desires of the group, turn off supergroup mode until the designated architect comes around. If they throw you out, see previous answer. The only actual power SG leaders have is the ability to kick people out, the abuse of which hurts them more than anyone else. They have no ability to make members do anything the members don't want to do, no means of coercion (at least in-game). If your supergroup is fascist it's because you and your fellow members have made it fascist. Yes, democracy will take some effort. If it was easy, we wouldn't have police states.

It is important to remember that a lot of these groups are being run by kids (and yes, even most of the older teenagers are still children) and the only model of authority they are familiar with is parental. If adults are going to hang with kids in online games they will probably have some educating to do.

Otherwise, stop assuming that because a man chooses to teach in a certain subject area, he must be limited in education and perspective to that area alone.

I'd certainly expect a teacher to recognize the difference between criticism of an opinion and a personal attack.

As for the rest of the thread, aside from comments regarding actual bugs (like the kick-out bug, or the non-working raids) I don't see any compelling criticisms. A lot of people are complaining about the lack of personal space, but bases were never intended to be personal spaces. They are group content. Personal housing would be nice, but if we have a choice between that and, say, new zones I'll take the new zones, thanks. At the end of the day, housing is fluff, not content. Bases, currently, are fluff and will remain so until they become a functional part of PvP (which I, personally, couldn't care less about anyway).

Sorry to bring up the Council/Arachnos ties again but where does the Path of the Dark fit into all this. From the story arc in CoH we learn that this group is at least 1500 years old and it seems that the Council is a later form of the Path. Was the Path a faction within Arachnos controlled by the Nictus and then just split off as a unit after Mussolini fell to become the Council?

The Path of the Dark is a Nictus organization (post-retcon, anyway), not part of the Council, based at their Shadow Cyst in Ravenna. Arakahn sent Ridolfo "Requiem" Uzianno there to bond with a Nictus; he's been sending people there since to become War Wolves. Why he sends people to Italy to turn them into War Wolves when the process doesn't actually involve bonding with a Nictus, or how the Nictus could have instant transit to earth (possibly for 1500 years) without overruning the planet is just one of the little warts that crept in with the change in the storyline.

True, but I teach English not Social Studies

It shows.

I'd echo Kias's comments. My SG on Virtue has for most of the past year had no more than three accounts in it, and usually only two playing. We recently balloned to five. We have a control room with a supercomputer and decorations, two teleport chambers (four pads, eight beacons), a med center with inspiration storage, and a workshop with two empowerment stations, salvage and enhancement storage (only the basic worktable, we don't need worktables for much). We have a few decorations in the entrance room too. The supercomputer was a recent purchase and required almost all the prestige we'd accumulated in the last several months, but it's the last major purchase we'll need in the foreseeable future. The only thing I could even think of adding is another workshop, and we really don't need it. I can't even see what we'd want to expand the plot size for under the current circumstances.

We use the base for occasional socializing, transportation and storage. We'd socialize in it more often if we were all RPers but we're not. People keep bringing up SWG's houses, but the only thing my house was good for in SWG was storage. It's true that there are people out there that really enjoy decorating virtual living spaces. Almost all of them are playing The Sims. I don't think it would be a productive use of the devs' time to try to cater to a market that mostly isn't playing their game.

People keep saying that bases are too expensive, but just a few of us have managed to build pretty much all the functionality a PvE SG could ever need. At most we could use more telepads, but even the number we have is a luxury. Since we're small everyone has base edit privs; if you need to go somewhere distant the pads aren't set for, sell back a beacon and buy the one you need. (For this reason I think the current telepad/beacon system is a joke; either don't let us sell the beacons back, or make them require salvage, or just change the telepad menu to let the user chose from all the zones the SG has badged and get rid of the beacons altogether.) I could not possibly care less about the difficulties involved in making a PvP base, and I strongly suspect upwards of 90% of the user base doesn't care either.

As far as I'm concerned, it's not that bases don't work (aside from bugs; the one kicking member of non-coalition SGs out instantly being a chief offender), it's that people aren't making them work. Whether that's something the devs can fix is by no means clear.

How big a playerbase does EQ-1 have compare to EQ-2? I honestly have no clue. I would assume EQ-1 is gasping its last breath.

Last I heard, EQ1's population has been stable for a long time. Basically, once an MMO has past its prime, everyone who was going to quit will have done so.

Even UO is still up and running. It's possible the Marvel MMO will push CoX into an early grave but very unlikely and not something to be seriously worried about.

Right, let's list all the villains that have a power centre.

Clockwork: all powered by the Clockwork King's TK. Except, of course, for the ones in Cap au Diable...

Tsoo: draw their mystical powers from Hmong ancestrial spirits.

Sky Raiders: initially funded by theft from the US military, later unknowingly supported by Nemesis.

Banished Pantheon: their mortal and undead agents draw their power from the gods exiled by Tielekku.

Circle of Thorns: Oranbega could be said to be their "center of power".

Freakshow: their power comes largely from Excelsior, plus they are supported on the sly as Crey's black-bag troops.

Crey: long overdue for a revamp, IMO, as by the end of the CoH storyline the corporation is on the ropes and the Countess is (putatively at least) in jail.

Carnies: like the Clockwork, the whole group supposedly draws its power from Vanessa DeVore and her mask, which are out of the picture at the end of their story.

Malta: as those who have done Crimson's missions know, it is entirely possible that Malta's true masters have yet to be revealed....

Just off the top of my head.

As for the Council...I don't think they really have a center of power, despite their leader's name. They fund themselves, so they're not someone's puppet. They might be said to have an ideological base, but that would require they first have an ideology, which they do not. Their alliance with the Nictus is supposed to be severed as of the end of the Kheldian War arcs, but that wasn't followed up on for CoV.

Play one, from level 1 to 50 and then return here and make that suggestion... you won't.

I have a level 50 Regen. I suggest the power, and in fact the entire set, be left as is.

They're called the Malta Group because the conspirators who started it did so at a meeting on Malta.

There's another possible reason, but it would be a spoiler.

Are Malta really portrayed as evil in-game?

Yes. There's nothing grey about them. They'll shoot down a jet liner full of people to kill one man, kidnap people to chop them up and stick their brains into war machines, or blow up an office full of innocent people just to frame a super and destroy his life. They treat people like tools, and no one who does that is any kind of good, no matter what his intentions.

The first time I heard the term was a post in the old UO Newsgroup in a post that I *think* was made by our very own Venture. Actually, a quick search show it wasn't him, but a fellow named Bill Bessette. Here's a link to it.

Is someone taking my name in vain? :-)

The first use of "nerf" I heard was in the UO newsgroup, from Jeff "Dundee" Freeman. He went on to become a content designer for SWG, and (AFAIK) is now the Lead Systems Designer for an unspecified SOE product.

But what of the heroes patroling the area? Even in the comic, Pargon City is shown to have an almost ridiculous ammount of heroes being just about everywhere all the time.

How many of whom could have done a damned thing in the event of a building fire? Very few would have powers that could let them put the fire out without demolishing the building in the process -- pretty much just ice and storm heroes. We have building fires in-game and the vast majority of heroes need special gear to fight them. (The possiblity of a character with something like water powers can't be dismissed, but since such power sets aren't represented in game it is safe to conclude that if they exist at all, they are incredibly rare.) Heroes with TFoe/Recall could presumably snatch victims from the flames -- if they could see them. Heroes with the right defensive powers could possibly walk into the fire unscathed, but that's not much help to the victims if they're not reached quickly.

Finally, the report doesn't say how many people survived the fire.

So that leaves us with.. a person that is killed by a burning building, but has not time to save him/herself, the firedepartment does not have time to react, and herose does not have time either. That means that building had to have gone up like a pile of century old dry paper.

Not necessarily. The fire department simply may not have gotten to the scene in time. Additionally, the robbery was taking place in a convenience store. If that store had soda fountains, with compressed gas cannisters, they may have been set off in the initial blast. The same for natural gas lines used for heating or cooking.

To me, it sounds like that entire building was a firetrap just waiting to happen, and was most likely in violation of a multitude of fire safety violations.

There's not nearly enough information to justify that conclusion.

She uses Psionic Wail when she's low on health.

She does? Either I whacked her so fast she never had the chance, or I just never noticed -- I was using my Robotics/Traps MM and they do have good Psi resists.

Either way, it would be very Superman-like (and maybe Batman-like on a good day) if there was a Redeem Frostfire mission.

He's been a villain for 27 years; it is, contrary to Ms. Francine Primm, far too late to think about redeeming this guy.

Didn't I fight an EB a bit ago for the Knives in the Mako Campaign, or was he on another team?

If it's the mission I'm thinking of, it was Longbow agent Ace McKnight, who hired the Knives of Artemis for protection...which is more than a little questionable for a Longbow agent.

WTH?!?!?!? NEED... MORE.... INDIGO.... INFO!!!!

She is a former Knife of Artemis, though she was never inducted into the inner circles and thus doesn't know about the death cult at the group's core until you inform her of it. Her contact info says she's a master of stealth and intrigue; her hero info in CoV says she can read minds and see into the future. Her powersets in CoV appear to be Broadsword/SR; her psychic powers are probably gamed as SR and perhaps Leadership powers. I didn't see her using any overt Psychic Blast or Mind Control powers or such. Crimson trusts her as if she were his own daughter...but as we see in the Melvin Langley arc, not quite completely.

Her contact info says she was the first to discover Arachnos but that can't be right since Arachnos was known back in the 30s. It is probably an artifact from the earliest version of the group when it was still called SPIDER (and her info used to say "SPIDER").

That's about it.

Imagine if they had mobs with web grenades too.

They do; the LTs and Bosses use them.

2) This case should have been brought as a reckless homicide. However even there, there was insufficient evidence that the defendant knew that his actions were likely to cause the harm inflicted. This is necessary when the government alleges reckless conduct. The defendant was a teenager and there is no evidence that he knew the extent of his powers.

Even a teeenager should know better than to play with fire.

In a world where a signficant number of kids spontaneously manifest superpowers upon puberty, I'd expect that kids have been bombarded with the message that superpowers are very dangerous and shouldn't be used without training. I'd also expect that by now the courts (and juries) in Paragon City have had enough of juvenille supers blasting things indiscriminantly and have taken to making examples out of them.

Finally, he was already up against it for freezing the shopkeeper and robber, which probably killed them before the fire in any case.

I am guessing paragon city is EXTREMELY sensitive to things like this after the Siren's Call incident! He is lucky he didn't get tossed in the Zig for life.

Frostfire's arrest was in 1979; the Sirens' Call incident was last year.

And I'm not so sure Spider-man couldn't be considered a murderer by some courts, as it was his web that snagged Gwen Stacy in such a way as to snap her neck. If not murder, negligent homicide.

Um, no, due to the small detail that she was plummeting to her death at the time. Her death was the result of the Green Goblin's actions.

Frostfire's situation is less clear. He was witnessing an armed robbery, and it is legal to use deadly force to prevent imminent and inescapable loss of life or limb (AFAIK), but it is not clear that the robbery qualifies. The likelihood was that if he did nothing and the shopkeeper surrendered his property, the robber would have simply fled the scene. Arguing that he was trying to save the shopkeeper when he burned down the building is somewhat specious when he froze the shopkeeper in the first place.

Missions may be supported by Paragon's governing bodies, but surely, laying waste to a bunch of Outcasts who are doing nothing more than standing on a street in peaceful assembly is against our real life laws.

There's no right to hang out on street corners, certainly not wearing gang colors. Feel free to have your character walk up to street spawns and tell them to break it up or get charged with loitering, so they can fire first. :-)

Perhaps Frostfire was the victim of the Malta, helping to cause the fire, and everything else that went wrong. Not to mention that "our friends" have connections.....

Doesn't seem likely since he wasn't operating as a cosutmed vigilante yet.

They're not specific with what they slapped him with, but I'm guessing it was under 10 years.

The entry says 20 years, 10 suspended, parole in 3.

Let's say that you're hiking and you stumble across someone who's dangling over a cliff. You try to help pull the guy up, but you lose your grip and he falls to his death. Should you do jail time for that?

Depends, did you push him first?

Sorry, but anything involving rubber-banding the mask back to Italy where it can be lost in time for Vanessa DeVore to find it again is just lame.

This bothered me a bit too. It HAS to be the same mask. Having two that are exactly the same doesn't make any sense. But if it's the same mask, how does it end up back in Venice 15 years later, old and discolored? Did the mask will itself back?

It is possible that Shadow Queen's mask belonged to another witch in Giovanna's coven. Even so, it would mean Paragon's heroes and MAGI would have to be pretty slow on the draw to not recognize the Carnival when they appeared after the war.

More likely they are the same mask. Laws was likely not given the full rundown on the mask's history, or the history was changed after he started writing. As I and others have noted in the past, it doesn't do Cryptic much good to crow about the umpty-ump thousands of pages of background they have when no one's bothering to consult it in advance or check new material against it for continuity.

The best way out is probably to assume the masks are different. Perhaps Azuria felt Shadow Queen's mask was too dangerous to study and had it destroyed before grokking the "17th century Italian carnival figures" references.

No, I’m not a raging political activist screaming for equal rights for women. My charges of sexist in this novel are based not on social issues, but on being a reader who felt ripped off.

Could have fooled me.

Psyche had to be in the book because she's in the Freedom Phalanx, but her powers would have pooched the plot so she had to be sidelined. Arguable Laws could have used a different plot, but he didn't.

FWIW I thought the book was mediocre at best. I just think that writers should be free to write without having to suffer the slings and arrows of political correctness.

I haven't read the book, though, so is her death "on-screen"? The faked death is a classic comic book thing.

Oh yeah, she's croaked. There was a body.

Of course, that has to be taken for what it's worth in a comics universe.