Mothership arrival: imminent

Well, it's posisble - if 15 devs could put together something as big as Issue 10, then with the current size of the team, they could do something similar while still having most of the staff working on GR.

But I still think it'd be very unusal for them to do that - they'd have to go back to the dev-only testing to keep it a secret, and that could lead to more bugs if it's as much content as some people are suggesting.
Or if they were going to put it on Test, then I think they'd announce more about it further in advance.

My thoughts exactly. The only thing we know is that an "imminent" Rikti invasion involving a mothership is on the way.

They've announced the F&F start for closed betas in the past. Could just be a more flamboyant way of doing so to create buzz.

Yep, my guess is that we're going to get a Rikti invasion week along with an announcement for some major piece of new content (presumably I17).

Alternatively it's just an invasion week and the reason we haven't heard anything is that the devs realized they over-hyped it getting our hopes up and are now in negotiations with the US government to enter the witness protection program.

I'm pretty sure is cost a lot more to build an Aircraft Cairier and get it to a combat area than to just send lots of troops, but we still do it.

The Mother-ship was likely built with intra-dimensional travel at least partly in mind due to the Rikti having had actual extraterrestrial encounters. They fought and won a war with the Battalion of their dimension, so they likely had space capable warships just sitting around. Having the Rikti use non-space capable warships would be like a modern military using biplanes.

Plus inter-dimensional portals seem to be rather trivial to the Rikti given they maintained "thousands upon thousands" of them (ranging in size from 9 feet to 100 yards) at 28 locations around they world for at least 3 hours before they actually used them.

As a side note, many of the Rikti craft did retreat into space during the first day of the invasion

Put me in the Clouded camp.

And yet the last few issues have been among my favorites. The MA is awesome, power spectrum has given a whole new look and feel to the powers (for those of us with enough imagination to enjoy it, anyway ), and I know at least one person who just recently came back because of all the QoL improvements and the MA.

But I still haven't seen all the content in-game yet, so perhaps it's not as big a deal for me as it is for others. But everything they've been adding lately had made character customization and personal story development far more extensive than it ever was before.

The last few issues have livened the game up for me my family/friends that play CoH. But, of course, opinions may vary.

Same.

Oh, so the Star Strider thing was the player-organized Rikti spanking? i joined in that, i just didn't realize it was called "Star Strider" (odd name for a battle against invaders from a parallel Earth) and missed all the Dev posts promoting it. It was very fun taking down all those dropships on Champion and Virtue though.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I'm honestly glad you've enjoyed the new stuff in these last several issues. I like most of it too. The Mission Architect is the main thing keeping me in this game right now, in fact. But we all have different priority systems for features that excite us, and new developer created Story Content is at the top of my own list.

To me, it feels like going to a really great steak restaurant, and I order a steak right off the menu, and they keep telling me it's cooking, really, it'll be done any minute, but until then here are my side dishes. Which are delicious! No question about it! But they aren't my steak. And now, they restaurant is saying that even though I bought a steak, they reassigned all the chefs to work on a special meal, and if I want any steak I'll have to either buy that second meal, or wait until they're done and go back to being the regular chefs. And then when I complain about this, the other patrons tell me to go to the grill they've set up in the back and cook my own damn steak.

And then when we get these kinds of fluffy non-announcements that drag out for days or weeks at a time, it feels like the waiter is trying to distract me from my chronic lack of steak by, I don't know, playing the banjo or folding my napkin into animal shapes. Where if he has to come by my table again without any steak to offer, I'd prefer he just refill my Dr. Pepper for the 50th time as quickly as possible and then get out of my face. Yeah. Err. This metaphor is stretched enough, I think I'll just let it go.

Rikti AT = RAT ?

As much as I like my hypothesis, I am in the same camp. I'll believe something when I see it.

So we are not allowed to have any discussion that we do not already know the answer to?!?!

I am all for giant robotic facepalms but without mindless banter forums would not exist.

Unfortunately the longer this takes without actual news of what's happening I'm going to have jump in the "it's just another rikti invasion" until something/someone says otherwise :/

Would really love to be wrong though...

This is exactly what I'm avoiding by just saying to myself "it's just an invasion week."

Actually I think they can toggle them without even taking down the server, can't they? They can for things like the Winter event.

Normal invasions are told in advance so we can get ready for them. All we have this time around is "Something rikti-related is happening in the next couple days." If it's not something new, they've gone bananas.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Why? Because even if it does just turn out to be an invasion event, it's resulted in a week of us sitting around talking about it, in multiple threads and multiple forums.

Understood completely. I'd like more developer content as well. But I think that GR has been the focus for some time now (so it should have *lots* of content) and that what we've seen in the last few issues are game system upgrades that are a direct growth from GR development.

Purely speculation on my part, but it seems reasonable. Besides, these are game forums; rampant speculation under the guise of "I know" or "I'm certain", etc., are what it's all about, right?

I'm sure GR will be full of great things. Enough great things to be worth its box price. But I'll be paying seperately for that. I already pay mothly subscription fees for this game with the expectation that the entire development team will contribute to the Regular Issues (even if the specific contribution from one team or another fluctuates from issue to issue). The story team withdrawing from almost entirely from the last four regular issues to make expansion content is unacceptable. And because of that, no matter how great GR turns out to be, it won't change the fact that it's been more than a year since we had any significant offering of new story content in the Regular Issues.

This is my theory as well. Although six years down the line, I think they'd kick it up a notch by integrating it into a triggerable "super-invasion" with the new transport ships.

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I suspect the odds are reasonable that it's just a normal invasion week, possibly slightly spiced up with the appearance of Rikti-fied devs. However, I'm hoping it is more, and we do have a bit of a clue. The Devs have a (comparatively) new toy, which is the tech to do the zone meta-events and countdowns that we've seen applied to the Halloween and Winter events this year.

My guess is that the most likely change is for them to introduce a similar addition to the Rikti Invasion event, probably following the model of the Halloween event as it's a little more similar. Filing the serial numbers off of Halloween to Rikti-fy it is fairly easy; we could have multiple portals that had to be taken down (along with defenders), which then spawned a GM to be finished off.

Something conceptually more like the Winter event would be even more interesting, because it'd imply someplace new (or at least revamped) to go. Kill a minimum number of Rikti in a zone to spawn a Rikti GM; defeat the GM. But at the last minute, the GM teleports, and you have a short window in which you can go through the portal yourselves to continue the battle on the other side; in the mothership, in a cave complex, or whatever.

This sort of thing could be done almost entirely with existing tech and art assets, which is important given the demands of GR. The main thing you'd want might be some new "lead Rikti" to spice things up... and hey, we've got the Rikti-fied mods hanging around now. (Which might well be, or have originated as, some sort of play on GM = Giant Monster and GM also = Game Master; I can imagine someone saying in a meeting that they needed to design a new Rikti GM, and someone running with the alternate interpretation for the heck of it.)