Doctor Roswell

The Cape is rightfully pretty popular over on Virtue. Good people, too; I've been lucky enough to play with Crypto and Angel on occasion. They host in-game events for supergroups and generally have a decent-to-great selection of music, depending on who's picking out the tunes.

I used to take them as soon as possible, but ever since CoV introduced paper missions, I've been waiting longer and longer. Not only is there less zone-to-zone travel these days (most PuGs are probably just doing scanner/paper missions), but cross-zone travel is so much easier, what with all the teleporters and SG bases and zones that connect to multiple other zones, than it used to be. I generally don't rush into a travel power unless it's something I really want for the character (so if the character has wings, chances are he gets Fly as soon as possible). I can usually make the basic jetpacks last into the 40s even if I'm not being all that frugal with them, and by then I can buy replacements.

But most of the time there are at least one or two levels where I have to pick a new power, and nothing available jumps out and grabs me. Those are the levels where I pick up my travel powers. It's different for every character; some take the tier 1 at 6 and the tier 2 at 14, others don't even start until 35.

It just depends where the good stuff is; where it isn't, I'll take my travel power.

Let me guess... Vista?

If I'm right, try launching the program by right-clicking on the icon and selecting "Run as Administrator." What could be happening here is that Vista's wonderful, not-intrusive-or-irritating-at-all security features are allowing you to download the update, but not letting your system upload anything (such as the instruction to continue past that point) to the internet, for fear that it's some spyware program trying to steal your credit card information or something. If that works, go to properties and enable to program to run with admin privileges all the time (you may also want to set it to Compatibility Mode for XP while you're in there).

Otherwise, it's possible you've got firewall issues. Most likely your firewall auto-updated and for whatever reason, the exception for CoH was lost, so it's blocking the program from transmitting anything. It's usually pretty easy to re-enable, but it varies from program to program.

While I'm all for something that makes Cap au Diable less of an end-all, be-all in redside zones, I don't know if this is the way to do it.

For one thing, it's already tremendously easy to get from just about anywhere to just about anywhere, between Pocket D, SG bases, Oroborous, the Midnight Club, Vanguard DPOs, Consignment House/Black Market teleporters both purchased and earned through day jobs, the mission teleporter, and let's not forget all those jetpacks...

Second, all this would do, blueside anyway, would be to further congregate the players in a few specific zones while others go largely unused. A "high-level hub" for villains wouldn't be so bad, but there's already barely any reason to go to most hero zones anymore. If anything, I'd rather see amenities spread out more. Move Wentworth's from Steel Canyon to Skyway City. Take the Vanguard DPO out of Atlas Park and put one in Galaxy City. And for frak's sake, get rid of some of the AE buildings! We don't need one in every zone. Two or three in Paragon and one or two in the Isles is all we need, and as much as I like the idea of heroes and villains running AE content together, it just doesn't make any damn sense in places like the RWZ. (Ideally, it would be a zone unto itself, but that's a whole other topic.)

Spread out the population a bit and you might even end up with less lag -- ever notice that the closer you get to the Black Market in Cap, the longer it takes to get there?

Wentworth's?

On your map?

Outside the AE building.

Officially, no.

But you can always find a trustworthy third party.

And there are ways to do it through the market by having the poor alt sell something cheap and in low demand (say, a level 1 flight speed enhancement), then logging on with the rich one and bidding a few million for it. Be sure you check things out very carefully, though; make sure you're the only one selling the item, and that nothing changes (last five transactions, number of people bidding/selling, etc.) in the time it takes you to switch characters, or someone else may end up with your money.

I don't know if a message field is the right way to go, but some kind of method for seeing what the team is like before you join would be nice. If nothing else, the leader's (or even better, the whole team's) name, AT, level and zone. And maybe the team size. Possibly hidden unless you click a third button on the prompt?

Heroic Man has invited you to join a team. Do you accept?
(Yes) (No) (Info)

Heroic Man (lv15 Tanker, Steel Canyon) has invited you to join a team of 4. Do you accept?
(Yes) (No)

ParagonWiki's page on macros.

In your example, you'd want something like:
/macro dec "local abababa$$powexec_name deceive"

The "dec" part would be the letters that show up on the button in your hotbar.

Trial accounts can't send team invites.

There used to be no end to the crap I gave a friend about paying a monthly fee to play EverQuest. I couldn't understand how someone would be willing to pay so much, so often, on a constant basis, just to play a game! I mean, who does that?

Usually, the topic would come up in conversation over a game of Magic: The Gathering.

No, the parking space was a more apt analogy.

But let's not abandon the car analogy (Tyrone and Quee-Quee may decide to steal that too!); I think we can still make it work. Let's try this:

If I buy a car, meaning I pay the seller's full asking price, and own it outright, then it doesn't matter whether I'm driving it or not. So if Tyrone and Quee-Quee took it without my permission, they would be stealing from me. In video game terms, this would be like them coming over to my house and saying, "He hasn't used his Wii in months. Must not want it anymore," and taking it home with them.

If I "buy" a car meaning I've got a loan from a bank and I'm making monthly payments to them in order to keep it, then as long as I'm making those payments, it doesn't matter if I'm driving it or not; Tyrone and Quee-Quee would also be stealing from me. This kind of thing doesn't tend to happen in video game terms unless hacking is involved somehow, but theoretically, it would be like them taking a name I already had in CoH and using it themselves. Or maybe stealing my Windows Live password or something.

If I "buy" a car meaning I've got a loan from a bank and I'm making monthly payments to them in order to keep it, but then I stop making those payments, the bank is fully within their rights to take that car away from me (after a reasonable grace period). And if Tyrone and Quee-Quee then show up and want to start making a monthly payment to the bank so that they can have the car, they're not stealing anything from me, because it stopped being "my" car when I stopped making my payments. Now they're just customers paying for a product. It's not their problem if the product used to be mine, even if I did love it dearly and put a lot of time and effort into washing and detailing it and installing a new sound system and rebuilding the carburetor myself.

If nothing else (and there's probably something else; a business office or something at least), the EU servers are all physically located in Germany.

A little information on the different servers can be found here. That site, by the way, is pretty much the best resource on the internet for all things City of Heroes.

Basically, everyone's said it, though.

Freedom's got the highest population, but has a not-undeserved reputation for being filled with semi-literate morons who type like they're text messaging and are more interested in powerleveling and farming than in playing the rest of the game or helping new people. Which is not to say that everyone on the server is like that; every server has those people and no server is nothing but those people, but Freedom's easily got the most. And the high population can sometimes mean lag and/or lockouts, though that's generally only a problem for the first few days after an new issue launches and during special events like Double XP Weekends, which only happen a few times a year. It's also worth mentioning that apparently the upcoming issue 16 will include the implementation of a "queue" server, so in the future, lockouts shouldn't be an issue so much as sometimes having to wait five minutes or so to get into your server when you first log on.

Virtue is the second most populated (and the second most likely to have the same lag/lockout issues as Freedom), and generally a more... eloquent, I guess?... population, but it's the role-playing server. Some people take that as a very good thing, some as a very bad one. That doesn't mean anyone's going to force you to roleplay (there's no official roleplaying server, it's just that Virtue is where the roleplayers tend to congregate), but people will be doing it all around you, talking in ((double parentheses)) to indicate out-of-character speech, and occasionally doing weirder stuff like erotic roleplay in Pocket D. You can avoid stuff like that very, very easily if it's not your thing, but if you come to Virtue, you should know that it is there to be avoided. Also, catgirls.

Besides that, there's Infinity, which is generally accepted as the third-most-populated server and doesn't have the same stigmas attached to it that Freedom and Virtue do. But from what most people can tell, there's a pretty big gap between the second and third positions, population-wise.

And there's Justice, which is (again, unofficially) where the Australian/New Zealander players can be found in the largest numbers. For this reason, Justice tends to be a better place to find a team during "off-peak" hours in North America. If you tend to play in the early morning, you may want to give Justice a shot.

The others are probably not what you want if what you're looking for is a large population. Or, as others have suggested, you may want to try making characters on a few different servers and seeing which one "feels" right; they've all got their own personalities and communities, and if you were to, say, hook up with a supergroup (guild, if you're coming from another MMO) that works well for you and plays when you tend to be on, then server population may not be an issue.

Also, you don't necessarily have to tie yourself to one particular server,or faction, or archetype, or character; This game, much more than your average MMO, encourages players to dabble in a little bit of everything.

Oh, for the love of all that is holy, yes.

Also, it might be nice if, were one to space out and activate such a power in a "no-teleport" zone like Pocket D, it didn't mean you were out of luck until the power recharges. A simple "can't activate that power here" message would be nice, instead of a wasted activation.

QoL is "Quality of Life" -- a common term used for suggestions that have no intrinsic in-game value other than to improve the experience for the player or remove an annoyance. Examples of QoL improvements include the recent ability to rate and add notes to other players, and the Spam button on in-game e-mail.

aOnCaDl is a little more complicated; think about it for a second. Look at just the capital letters, then just the lowercase letters... Red's just circumventing the word filter (which is probably okay in this case because the word is being used in a proper and not-naughty way).

There's a post somewhere on these very forums, but it's from pre-move, so none of my links work. Instead, here they are.

I'm not sure how realistic it is, but it's not a bad idea. I hate coming back from AFK (or a long costume-editing, respeccing or mission-creating session) and seeing a tell asking me if I want to team, but not having any idea how long it's been since it was sent. If it's been twenty minutes, I'd just as soon not respond, as they've probably already figured I was AFK and responding now might just confuse or inconvenience them. But if it happened thirty seconds ago...