Returning Player Diary

nice write-up

to hijack the thread a bit again - my dream with a revamped KR would be to make it not co-op but duplicated. What 94% of the players wanted with CoV was to play villains in Paragon City. KR would be a great zone to make a hero and a villain version, not as co-op but so villains could be in the city.

not much time to play, so a few random observations:


The remote auction house is ridiculously useful, but I miss seeing everyone piled into the physical wentworths/black market space. In a game largely bereft of busy public spaces, this is a genuine loss. No complaints about the convenience or utility of the feature, but regrets about further erosion of populated public spaces.


Logged in my fire tank to mess with his costume this AM (hooray, barbarian costume pack!), pulled up my global tab and had a nice chat with Cyvert & some other folk I didn't recognize in TheMarket channel. Gated forum access looks even siller compared to the full run I have of global channels.


I see they're having a 50% off sale on server slots this week- definitely going to pick up five or ten of those. The severely limited 'premium player' slots don't do much to limit my gameplay, but they play hell with my inveterate costume tinkering. I have a bunch of characters that NEED revision in light of new costume options added while I was on hiatus, but they aren't necessarily ones I play enough to warrent using one of my severely limited slots on right now.
Time to buy a little breathing room...

I can honestly say I've only been seriously annoyed at the market a few times- annoyance is, on some level, part and parcel of a crowded public sphere.

And I'm not being that nostalgic- the current system is a gargantuan improvement in nearly every way.

I just like gathering spots in the game world- i like to see people's costumes, read their bios & generally feel like I'm in a City of Heroes rather than a City of Instances.

I mean, I got mad when they added the auto-logout feature way back when. Not because it spoiled my XP farming in bricks, but because I really liked seeing a ton of heroes at the train station. =P

Have you visited the rooftop garden in Atlas Park? I try to swing in there when I can and always see a few people.

I'm not sure what keeps disorienting me more- what has changed, or what hasn't.

I see the devs still have no idea what to do with bases.

very little time again last night, just logged in my stalker Mope to check his traps & take advantage of the sale on character slots.

Amusing to scroll through the many ragequit posts about staff fighting (which I have no interest in) and hear how terrible, awful, no-good and slap-in-the-face this week's market offerings are when it's running a half off sale on the one game item I desperately wanted.

Dropped $15 on points, picked up a 5 pack of slots & used the leftover points on the Steampunk costume bundle.

For those keeping store, that makes $30 I've spent this month on playing the game for free. =P

Which strikes me as the reason FTP with a market is the best model for MMOs going forward. Anyone who wants to can check out the game, wherein you tempt them with premium goodies. And VIP is an attractive option without being required to have fun.

IMHO they've done a really good job with the whole Freedom thing, my quibbles with the storefront aside.

So the other night I noticed there were some new IOs, 'Attuned Enhancements'. Checked the stalker set, bonuses were great & I liked the idea of not having to mess with them ever again so I thought I'd pick up a set for Mope.

Crafted the 'going rate' seemed to be around 20m for the good ones, so I put in bids on the whole set at 7m for the expensive ones and a little over half the 'last 5' for the rest. Checked in last night and lo, all but two bids had filled.

Nice to see bargain hunting still works.

I really need to DL that build planner so I can take advantage of inherent stamina on my stable of level 25-40 character who still have their legacy builds. Tried to respec my cold controller on the fly the other night and made a hash of of, reminding me why I didn't bother messing with anything when stamina was first made inherent.

It looks like I'll have a few hours to myself this evening, hoping to get to the next bit of Twinshot's arc.

Yeah. I'm still doing respecs on my characters to work in the Inherent Fitness. And it is a lot of work, so I only do it when I happen to hit the right mood. Compromises need to be made to reallocate slots to the new powers that I'm picking up, which is tending towards Tough and Weave on most characters so far. Then I spend several hours going back and forth in my various Bases to see if I have or have enough of the Set pieces I want to use.

I figured they'd be best off just starting from scratch, and leaving in the old base system as a legacy feature for the people still crazy enough to want to use it. But hey.

I still find it funny that the F2P game is actually a lot like the Pre-I8ish game I first played- no Inventions, no Alignment, none of these fancy new costume pieces or zones! Though all the quality of life improvements are probably great. It's kind of interesting that the game translates well to F2P by putting all the 'advanced' stuff behind the paywall, since there's basically a perfectly solid if simple game underneath all that.

well, last nights session was frittered away on costume fiddling & marketeering rather than gameplay. Well, I did do one MA farming run with my fire tank just to see if my favorite ambush map still worked, but that was it.

This reminds me why I stuck with my subscription for so long even as my free time to play dipped toward zero- I liked having it there do pop in on when I had a free moment, or needed to space out for a couple of minutes.

I may not have had time to run a mission, let alone level a character, but once you've figured out the basics marketeering is the work of moments, and messing around with the character creator lasts as long as you want it to- especially after they added the 'save costume' option.

Ran into my old pal Talen Lee in the market channel, along with several other familiar names. And let me just say that the ability to pull up an AH window while sitting at the Mission Architect ticket counter is like having a printing press for money.

Truncated playtime again yesterday, was under the weather & turned in early.

Burned one of my global slots unlocking my Praetorian.

I pre-ordered GR to get early AT access and because before they (finally) gave up on segregated markets the alignment system looked like a potential goldmine...or at least a good way to cheese off the anti-merger kooks who loved waxing high and mighty about how their heroes would NEVER stoop to trading with *gasp* villains.

Anyway, I didn't buy it for Praetoria. Aside from making a character to check out the new zone tech & run a couple of low level arcs it sat mostly ignored until last night. But while I'm checking out new stuff I figured 'why not'?

The zones are pretty. Not sure I like the whole overground/underground thing- it's a little confusing getting around. Missions seem much more populated & harder than the core game, maybe not the best introduction for players for whom GR was their first introduction to the game world.

The capstone mission of the arc was leading a bunch of ghouls on an 'eat all' mission vs the Praetorian po-po- I guess I was on the Resistance path. That was fun, as I was playing a mind/elec dominator and the herd of ghouls provided a welcome damage boost. Down side, it was a kill all with one of those giant, multi-level rooms at the end- happily, my long experience with these sorts of things resulted in a 'straggler free' mission.

I don't really like the 'feel' of Praetoria though. It's all very thematic and attractive in an objective sense, but there was something missing.

Anticipating a bit of spare time tonight, hopefully enough to get LIZARDROID to 14 and pick up the Twinshot storyline again.

I've really been enjoying reading your posts about your experiences Nethergoat. I hope you continue! Not only is fascinating to read as someone whose played the game for many years, I am sure someone new to the game who reads this over will find it interesting and oft times informative.

wait, forgot I could just pull up an AH window after exiting.
It's like Christmas in July!

uh, I just listed a level 10 damage DO for 1 and it insta-sold for 99,999?

Peoples are krazy!