lionheart_fr

Actually BaBs posted later on these forums that Jack Emmert said it was licensed to CoH in perpetuity.

There are no characters that can't be soloed well. My highest level character is a Guardian (main tank) that only duos with my wife. My second highest soloer is also a Guardian.

My brother's highest level character (at the cap) is a Minstrel (healer) who was done mostly solo. My wife, who was not an MMO (or video gamer of any sort) before CoH and LOTRO has solo characters in LOTRO of every class.

When teaming, as in CoH, I've never found a need to have the triforce style at all. Just about any combo works well in LOTRO. This may not be as true in raids, but I'm not a raider so I wouldn't know for sure.

It's only a grind if you make it one or have to have the "best of the best" build/stats, what-have-you. Personally, I'm not a grinder, so my Legendaries grow as they grow; I don't put any special effort into them.

Then relatively few would have played it and the development time would have not seen any ROI.

I love the storyline aspect (even wrote one myself); however, I liked it better coupled with the ability to level (albeit more slowly with the types of missions I played) to get past areas of dev content I didn't care for.

Especially villain side. I got so tired of the snakes missions that when I made new alts I immediately took them to the AE to level past them.

If one didn't play farms in the AE, it was a great alternate leveling path. I like games that provide multiple leveling paths so that not every character had to play exactly the same linear route.

That's one of the things I like in LOTRO. There are four different starting areas and at various levels two or more regions you can do so that alts can take different paths. It keeps the game fresh. Completionists (those who have to play every single piece of content on a single character) don't care for it so much, but those of us who like to try different class/race combinations love it.

In STO, the leveling is so fast now that it's possible to hit Vice Admiral via duty officer missions and still have all the storyline content left to play. It's not so bad since the missions scale to your level, but it means you outlevel some cool ships along the way. I have two characters that I am leveling strictly via the Foundry (which will take roughly forever) to have alternate paths and use some of the early level ships longer. It allows me to basically craft individual experiences for each character. Fun stuff.

I'm cherry-picking this on purpose, so bear with me.

My first RPG experience (like many) was with pen-and-paper RPGs. It was entirely face-to-face voice chat. A male voice for a female character and vice versa never really bothered me. It's what the person did with that character in reflecting their personality that made it RP, not the voice itself. So unless the person making the comment has never played anything but a text-based online RPG, I've never really understood that position on voice chat.

To me, *specifically when playing with close family/friends*, voice chat greatly *enhances* immersion. Especially in a superhero game. It allows conversions, situation-appropriate one-liners, etc., to be far more spontaneous and flowing. It allows for more personality with voice inflection and so forth.

I am not a fast typist and by this point in my life (45) probably never will be. It's disappointing at times to have a comment half typed only to find that we're already on the move or the topic has shifted so that the comment no longer fits.

But also note my disclaimer: With close family/friends. I generally do not voice chat with people I don't know.

I've designed quite a few of my own characters for Freedom Force. All it takes is a graphics editor like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or even free ones like Gimp or Paint.net.

Freedom Force has an excellent modding community. There are literally hundreds of custom meshes, skins, maps, and FX available. There are a plethora of skinning tutorials. I'd never done anything like that before I started playing FF some years ago. My main character in CoH is based off the avatar I made for Freedom Force.

If you have no talent for skinning (or desire to learn), there are a number of skinners in the FF community who are willing to make characters for you per your descriptions. I've made a few for others myself (though I am not one of the true artists of the skinners).

It's true that there is no in-game method of mix 'n' match to make your own character, but it is possible to make just about any character design you can imagine with some graphics tools and practice. FF is highly moddable.

That said, to the OP: Yes, I would buy a standalone version of CoH.

There are "American-style" football teams and leagues all over the world. If I recall, there are over 300 such teams in Germany alone (at least there used to be).

Yes, I am a football nerd and sometimes recreate these teams in Madden NFL (for the PC; another anachronism, but it does allow for custom graphics ).

I wondered about that. We're long-time players and CoH was installed under 'City of Heroes' in the 'Program Files (x86)' directory on all three PCs before the NCSoft launcher was required. It's been working fine since we moved over to using the NCSoft launcher -- until this patch.

Now that's an interesting twist.

Please let us know what you find out. My wife, daughter, and I are all running into the same issue. My wife and I are on Vista; my daughter is running Windows 7.

c:\City of Heroes

Not I. Only CoH is affected. LOTRO and STO are running fine for us.

This is only since the last patch. It most likely isn't antivirus related either since our machines are each running a different antivirus program.

I've been using the same PC since CoH switched over to using the NCSoft installer with nary a problem. Until now, of course.

Hyperstrike - I tried installing to a different location and got an error that the installer did not have permission to write to that directory. So I guess I'm left with uninstalling one more time and reinstalling to the default directory.

Hopefully the revamp will be subtle; too many stark folds and seams can detract from the Silver Age look some of us still prefer.

While I would love to have two color patterns for tights (that is, the pattern itself plus colorable outlines around it), I realize that gets into tech, not just art. However, something similar might be achieved by making the edges of the current patterns semi-transparent to give the illusion of lines or highlighting, similar to how the Thorns pattern is handled.

More patterns overall (not armor, but just tights overlays) would be nice too. Most likely you have to be careful there so as not to make it too easy to duplicate copyrighted characters, but looking at other sources, games, and such there are still some very cool pattern varieties that could be added.

This right here. I'm running the HD 5770 on a Windows 7 64-bit PC and after Tuesday's patch, I'm experiencing missing body parts and textures both in the character creator and the game world. I'll look at updating drivers as well.

I'm 44 and was disappointed that the X-Men movie didn't use their real costumes. I'm not a fan of the darker, grungier looks. I don't want every character to look like a high-tech soldier, street thug, or normal civilian. Give me old school superheroes any day.

Thanks for letting us create all types of characters -- including the good ol' colorful spandex costumes. If I were to have one request from a costume standpoint, it would be that more such options be included as well (in addition to the rest). It would be great if we could have multi-color patterns, but I realize that is a current tech limitation.

No, you're not the only one. My motto has always been: Variety is good.

In a game that has always encouraged playing alts with all the customization available, making the progression too linear and removing variety is not a good thing.

For me, participation in Radio/Newspaper missions varies by character. I liked the mix of contacts and Radio missions because it added flexibility; it kept the game fresh because not all of my characters had to follow the exact same path.

And you're making assumptions not backed up by facts.

We received two new costume sets and one new powerset with i21. Free. We have been told that we will continue to receive free sets in addition to the store sets. If this is true, then not everything is being "monetized" for subscribers.

The free allotment of points over and above our subscription fee will allow us to pick and choose from a wider variety powersets, costumes, and such *over time* than ever before. Putting them in the store instead of tying their release to a full Issue brings them to us faster than ever before, so if you want to spend money on them you can, but if you choose to use just your free points, you can save them up and get them over time as you would have if you relied strictly on Issues and expansions.

It's entirely possible that the "free" costumes and sets paired with what we can pick up with our monthly stipend will exceed what we received on average under the old system. We won't know until enough time has passed to allow for analysis.