Monorail/Ferry merges in i19, will it include the Black Helicopter?

There is also a submarine between Sharks and IP

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.

Before the Vanguard moved in, and before DJ Zero Musical Taste (he's been playing the same damn song for years) set up Pocket D, i used to run through KR to get to the IP tailor.
i tell ya, the newbie whippersnappers today have it too easy. Still, i remember when all the lakes in Paragon froze over and you could skate on them. The funniest for me was playing Hydra hockey in Perez Park with KB and repel powers while skating the ponds.

Atlas Park --> RWZ is your best bet as mentioned above. Or, if you have the Pocket D VIP TPer, use that and go to Trina in the Tiki Lounge.

But if you're intent on using Steel, you'll be able to go from Atlas Park to Steel Canyon North. Then it's a much shorter trek to Icon with a wide street to easily avoid mobs.

Zones are meant to be empty by design. Evidence: Mission completion recipes, Arc completion Merits, 50% debt inside Missions. That is why setting your LFT flags and using /sea are your friends.

Then what's the point with them? Why all the crime in the street? I miss the early days when you see dozens of players moving and fighting through zones. With all the ways you can take shortcuts nowadays from one zone to another I simply miss the enjoyment of sitting back and watch players flitting about to and fro.

Staring at motionless characters at Wentworths isn't the same as traveling down a street and watch other players taking out the "street trash".

They're become window dressing. They give a sense of immersion on their own, with no other players needed.

I have a certain nostalgia for it too, but I recognize that there are real problems with it in this game.

This game gives its greatest rewards for defeating foes. It's combat-centric, and always has been, and I believe that's because at its core from day one, what our devs originally released was a cool, mid-scale team PvE combat simulator with a bad-*** costume editor. That set the pace and the expectations for everything that followed.

Not long after release people figured out how to build and slot enhancers such they could take on multiple over-level foes. Back then, the only place you could get lots of over-level foes was outdoors. "Street sweeping" was a direct outgrowth of this.

This was a serious challenge for the devs in the days before difficulty settings. They were creating instanced content that large swaths of the player base were not playing because the best reward was not in those instances. So they started doing things to attract people back into the instances. Larger mission end rewards, 1/2 debt in missions, and even the original reputation "sliders" (Heroic, Unyielding, etc.) were enticements to get players back in missions. That tradition has continued all the way through I16's difficulty settings (which helped move people back out of the AE after that became the most recent "street sweeping").

So they keep using carrots to funnel reward-interested players into mission instances. Combine that with travel powers and you've got a game world full of players traveling at 50+ MPH to get from mission door to mission door. They're going to blow past all that stuff, and that's what happens a ton of the time for an awful lot of players. I have only very rarely met players who were interested in moseying through zones. Even though I've met people who had characters with no travel power for concept reasons, they still tried to get from mission to mission as fast as they could given that restriction, at least in the days after street sweeping was no longer vogue.

Remember, the devs (I think Statesman told us) that they originally envisioned us fighting our way from mission to mission. How they could possibly have envisioned that while giving us travel powers like Fly, SJ and SS, I don't know, and nothing about how they placed missions relative to one another or laid out mobs in zones really seems to line up with that expectation. That said it's probably not the most extreme prediction error our original devs had for how people would play the game they built.

Ultimately, addressing this at this point would probably require a serious rejiggering of both the mission and reward systems, which doesn't seem that worthwhile to me for the benefit of bringing back that nostalgic outdoor teaming activity.

It's not like I want them to get rid of the zones completely, because they do provide a sense of depth, even if they have no players in them at all. It would be a deeper sense of death if there were players out and about in it, but the game is currently set up to make people want to be in missions. I think it makes complete sense for the devs to give players the ability to get into those missions more quickly as a QoL improvement.

Actually, I didn't even look. I figured you were around long enough to remember at least some of that stuff. The long-winded background was only intended to paint the big picture (and maybe be interesting info to newer readers), not specifically to educate you personally.

Probably true, and I didn't really think of that. I will say that other than being poorly advertised in game, I think global channels are a much more effective way to get people together.

Maybe. I'm not sure there's much mileage in dropping the mission complete bonus. It's only about a +2 boss's worth of XP. (Edit: I can't remember, does your level setting for mission difficulty still affect this?) If you play on low settings and don't kill everything, it's probably going to be a decent percentage of your mission XP. If you play on high settings and tend to defeat everything, it's a drop in the bucket anyway.

I really can't see them doubling debt in missions. They could halve it outdoors, but that seems kind of meaningless, given that there are so many other reasons to run missions.

I'm actually guessing that will not be part of the merger. While you will be able to move between zones in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles freely, I suspect that there will still be limited "portals" for Vigilantes and Rogues moving between the two.

You still have to lock Heroes from being able to go to the Rogue Isles, and warn Vigilantes and Rogues of the side effects of passing through the portal. You couldn't do that from a single all-inclusive menu.

Then again, maybe that's a technical issue the devs have resolved.

I'm actually hoping that if the zones that have two trams/ferries get to keep them, a second tram will be added at the north end of IP.