EvilDeathBee

I can't tell from your post whether you are advocating changes to fire/kins or opposing them. On the one hand, you're complaining about powersets becing changed too often, and on the other, you're complaining that fire/kin has been pretty much alone?

(Aside from the changes Catwhoorg listed, of course.)

If the two of you aren't planning to play at the same time then there is no problem. Just change the log-in name at the welcome screen to switch between accounts.

"Dual-boxing" generally refers to playing two different characters simultaneously. Two computers are advisable for that although it can be done with one, provided it is powerful enough.

If it's just a matter of wanting more slots on one server, maybe it would be better to simply buy more slots than purchase a whole new account, although you may already be maxed out. You can have 36 slots per server, I believe.

One Power Pool that I've always wanted was a blue-bar equivalent to the Medicine Pool:

Endurance Manipulation
Lay on Hands: Gives +15 endurance to a teammate. (Ally only and interruptible)
Strengthen Will: Gives a teammate resistance to endurance drain and to-hit debuffs (Ally only and interruptible)
Focus Concentration: +15 endurance to self (interruptible)
Interference: Debuffs an enemy's recovery for 30 seconds

The first and third powers would be more or less equivalent to Aid Other and Aid Self, and the second would be similar to Stimulant. There isn't any way to make an exact equivalent to Resuscitate, so I've had to improvise. I've wanted to see a better way to keep mobs drained of endurance, so I added one.

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As to "posting in the right forum," why isn't "What is your drink?" or "what happened to Malta? posts not in the question forums? The answer is obvious, traffic. If you want more eyes on your thread, you go to where the eyes are. The descritption of what each Forum covers is flexible enough to allow a poster to decide where they want to present their ideas. This coupled with the fact that one cannot double post, leaves the clear choice to write in the more populated forum.


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Then you should have posted in Forum Games.

Along with what people have mentioned, some content in the game is unlockable and extremely easy to outlevel thanks to patrol XP.

Doc Buzzsaw, who requires the "Bling" badge, is a perfect example. You need to get the badge before level 29 to do those missions, and may need to slow your levelling down so that you can get enough infamy to qualify.

There are similar issues with the Transcendence Trial, Ernesto Hess, and Katie Hannon. You need to complete a specific contact's missions to unlock the TF, but can easily outlevel the contact and miss the chance to get them.

Ouroboros makes it possible to go back and take another shot at them, but this gives people another way to do it.

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The Rikti Comm Officer farms were the MEOW farms. The name caught on because the majority of those farms used a cat girl contact and you had to save a bunch of cat girls as one of the mission objectives. The original mission created may have been called MEOW also but this is unconfirmed.

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The Comm Officers I knew about, but the rest of it is news to me too.

I'd probably go with Storm Summoning.

For something to pair it with maybe Psychic Blast as a Defender or Fire Control as a Controller?

The only problem with the set is that it is a notable endurance hog at lower levels, which necessitates a bit of down-time, but once it gets going you can go pretty much as fast as you want.

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Oh and my favourite poster was Pilcrow and that awesome avatar of his. It was of Dick Van [censored] dancing with the penguins from Mary Poppins but his head was replaced with Jesus. He had that avatar for like 2-3 years before it was mysteriously deemed inappropriate and they forced him to take it down.

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I also miss Pilcrow. And that avatar made me chuckle every time I saw it.

I second trying a Controller of some kind or an FF defender.

Also, don't overlook Ice Blasters. You can play pretty aggressively if you want to, but you have scads of controllerish powers that let you stroll through most missions fairly unconcernedly.

Thanks for the info, Manti!

And glad to see you stopping by now and again.

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We've all seen the broadcasts: lvl XX healer lft. I used to think people were referring strictly to empaths, but apparently storm summoners can pass themselves as "healers" as well, with their amazing healing set consisting of a whopping 1 single target heal. Maybe it's just me, but this is just more than a tad bit misleading. If this is the case, then any blaster who happens to pick up the ally heal from the Medicine power pool can pass themselves off as "healers" as well.

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Oh dear. I leave the game for a few months and this - this is what I return to?

*sob* It's like I never left.

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Smoothing the XP Curve
One thing that we constantly examine is the rate of advancement in the game. In a future version, we intend to smooth out the leveling curve by changing how much experience is given out for defeating opponents. The intent is to smooth out the “bumps” where players typically get stuck leveling up their characters. Keep an eye on coming patch notes for specifics.

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Awesome.

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Real Numbers
As a general quality of life improvement we will be adding new functionality in a coming version of the game to display the “real” numbers behind your characters and their powers. This includes a user configurable display of important characteristics such as movement rate, regeneration rate, resistances and many more! Additionally, you will be able to see how those statistics are affected in real time by buffs and/or debuffs affecting your character.

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And more awesome.

I'm not sure how much I'll approve of the City Vault, but I'm curious to see how it turns out. I wasn't sure if I would like Inventions either, but they turned out more than okay.

Sounds like a banner year is on the way. Much thanks.

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Doesn't that apply for almost any religious combatant of sex and violence in the media?

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Pretty much. The Tao Te Ching might be safe, but I wouldn't vouch for many other holy books if we really started to clamp down on anything with sex and/or violence.

It's only more noticeable with Christians in this part of the world because the Bible gets quoted so frequently and is clearly an influence on a larger number of people. Since it is undoubtedly a bad influence on at least a small number of them (Jim Jones, for example), you can find all the ammunition you need to attack it fairly easily.

True, you can also find a lot of evidence to defend the Bible (it promotes good behaviour more often than bad), but the habit of would-be censors is to bolster a poor case by dismissing everything but their own "facts" as irrelevant.

The reason people who advocate banning books seem so scary is that it is usually obvious that the case against what they are attacking is very weak, but if they succeed in making their charges stick, anyone can pursue an equally weak case against a different book and succeed there, too.

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Don't just blame conservatives. Both parties are equally to blame for stupidity, as shown in Hillary Clinton's Family Entertainment Protection Act.

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Not quite true. Conservatives come across as stupider for promoting censorship because they have more to lose from it.

Look at it this way: if you own no property, you can advocate burning the entire country to the ground and starting over without sounding insane. The more property you own, the less sense it makes to do that. You're bound to lose more than you gain back.

Similarly, anyone who really and truly doesn't give a rat's tail about free speech, cultural heritage, or anything else can advocate censorship to their heart's content. Conservatism almost by definition involves preserving our heritage and free speech is necessary to do that. Works of art are about all we have with which to remember the past and communicate with others, so our ability to make art needs to be as unrestricted as possible. More to the point, free speech is part of our heritage and I'm never sure what conservatives in this part of the world think they're conserving if it isn't that.

The reason Christians come off worse than anyone else is because they are the guiding force behind many of the attacks on popular culture that leave the Bible's sanctity open to debate. Christians regularly argue against "sex and violence" in works of art knowing full well that the Bible has a good measure of both. This means that Christians' most important holy book is more at risk from a consistently applied system of censorship than any other book. An atheist who advocates any kind of censorship that could impact a book like the Bible may be unwise and imprudent, but a Christian who does so is downright foolish.

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I think a lot of these whackos are under the impression that these games cause that empathy to be destroyed.

The more we "kill" in game, the less we think of other humans as humans, and instead consider them targets that will respawn, so it's ok to go on that killing spree.

See how their brains work? Completely lacking any rational basis and they should all be sterilized, yes, but it is what it is.


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What I've always found funniest about people promoting the "violence on TV causes violence in real life" argument is that it hinges on the idea that reality and virtual reality are interchangeable in people's minds. But the only people of whom this really seems to be true are the ones promoting the argument.

The same is true for the "Celebrities should be good role models" argument. Not many people other than the ones arguing that seem to see celebrities as role models at all.

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Yeah. The reply? Horrendous.

Vitriolic words are to be used only when you finish your attack. Until then, let the other side go for the finishing blow when you're not even fazed yet.


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It was a perfect counter arguement, how can you think otherwise.

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I agree with the sentiment behind the reply, but it's not an effective rebuttal. People who might support censoring video games are unlikely to see it and even less likely to agree with it. If you want to bring down a politician, you have to attack him where he thinks he's safe, and that means directly attacking the voters the politician is trying to appeal to.

The real flaw in the movement to censor video games is that the distinction between games and other art forms is artificial. Any laws having to do with art apply equally to Tomb Raider: the Game and Tomb Raider: the Movie. They make games out of movies and books and make movies and books out of games. Games are only a better target politically because there is a sharper distinction between a game-player and a non-game-player than there is between a movie-goer and a non-movie-goer.

This creates a problem: if someone creates a questionable game from a work in another medium, the same laws that apply to the game will apply to its source material. Draw up a case for banning Left Behind and its sources, then stick a fork in the censors. They're done.

Just a general note on the thread here:

I've noticed a few people arguing about whether the tendency to promote censorship is more prominent in "left-wing" or "right-wing" platforms. I would argue that using "left" and "right" in any political argument invalidates everything you say. For the most part they are both smears and both mean "poopyhead". At best they are a lazy shorthand for a large number of political positions that are not linked to each other except that we are in the habit of thinking that they are. What I mean is that it is a big mistake to treat people as being on opposite sides of the political fence when they tend to agree on how government power ought to be used. A close look at most political systems will show that "left" and "right" convey no useful information whatsoever.

It also bugs me when I see "liberal" and "conservative" treated as polar opposites. This is only true when a country has traditionally been somewhat restrictive in behaviour and virtually any change has to involve loosening things up. If a country has a tradition of liberal values (i.e. allowing people to live with minimal interference from governments or other organizations) then it is both liberal and conservative to attempt to keep it that way.

Sorry for ranting, but it's extremely common for someone with an axe to grind (like Jack Thompson) to try to legitimize his arguments by delegitimizing all of his opponents'. His job is made easier people try to make common political terms into insults for the purpose of political campaigning. What I mean is that if a word like "liberal" is used as a shorthand for an entire segment of the writing population, then that segment can be casually dismissed from consideration once you begin to feel you will know what their opinions are before reading them. This is perfect for someone promoting an opinion based on questionable logic.

The only real defense against this is to reserve political terms for ideas rather than apply them to people. I have progessive opinions and conservative opinions, but I like to think my attitudes depend on whether change is a good idea. In my opinion, it is liberal to oppose censorship (or to put it another way, censorship is anti-liberal), but I don't see that as a good argument either way. Simply put, if censoring video games is a good idea, we should do it. Unfortunately, I don't think its supporters have ever proven their case, and in fact tend to hurt their own cause by using very fuzzy logic. Until that changes I'll have to prefer keeping things as they are.

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I cringe everytime I see his name in a discussion. Maybe I am not very sensitive to people's feelings but Lighthouse seems to be politically correct to the extreme. Someone could use the word "butthead" in a post and he will close it down. Have we become such a community that we cannot tolerate even minor rants and dissenting responses?


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I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Maybe I've simply missed the threads you're thinking of, but I don't recall seeing any threads locked or deleted for trivial reasons. What Lighthouse has been doing differently, I think, has been quoting the actual parts of the ToS that people are breaking in the threads he locks. This can seem more heavy-handed to people who are well aware of what rules are being broken than silently locking them (which will simply remove the thread from the front page).

Perhaps Cuppajo or Cricket had a better handle on which flame wars were likely to die of their own accord and ignored them instead of making an appearance, but I don't think they were any more permissive.

Lighthouse has also offered links to examples of posts that have covered the same topics as the locked threads but did so in a more constructive manner. For example, he linked to several posts about the Controller nerfs that he felt were constructive feedback. Again, I think this is a good thing, but it can come across as unnecessarily parental.

To be perfectly honest, if you ever start to think the forums are going downhill, keep in mind that it is ultimately the forum posters that are to blame. Us, in other words. Rather than complaining about Lighthouse (who wouldn't have even been hired if there weren't enough work to keep him busy), we should make a point of thinking a bit more before we speak.

Personally, I've had posts deleted and I doubt any of them was an innocent bystander. There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything, even complain.

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Apparently, I forgot to write up a patch note on this...mea culpa.

The -Perception portion of Smoke Grenade for Devices is now auto-hit in PVE. The To Hit Debuff and PvP segments of the power still require a 'To Hit' check.

EDIT: There was also a slight change to Cloaking Device which should help with the SG breaking Stealth a bit. Experiment with it some and let me know what you think.

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We all appreciate this, Castle.

Is there some way that the enhancement screen could indicate whether a to-hit check is required in PvE or in PvP only?

There are now several powers in the game that do this and can be slotted by players for accuracy whether or not they need it. It's confusing.

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Now we just need the COH staff to record a live version of this song, to be used in the special Winter Event Zone....

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I was thinking of having it as an extra-special ambush for Icon missions during Christmas season.

For when everyone runs in there to change into their Santa hats.

On the Eleventh day of Christmas, the gaming gods gave to me,

Eleven Mushrooms Mezzing!
Ten Sappers Sapping!
Nine Tsoo Sorcerers!
Eight Madness Mages,
Seven Fiends Fighting,
Six Morts a-rezzing,
Fiiiiive Super Arachnoids!
Four Master Illusionists,
Three Nerva Spectral Lords,
Two Air Thorn Casters
And a Sapper in a Devouring Earth Treeeeee!

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A very minor improvement for Gadgets...I mean, Devices! (Yeah, it was a dumb mistake -- typing in haste and all of that.)



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I'm also curious about what this could mean.

If "Minor Improvement" = "Small Tweak" then by rights Web Grenade should be changed to do Extreme damage.

Actually, I'm guessing what it means is that Castle put several changes to Devices on the table and so far only got one of them though, and that one being one of the smaller ones.

Accuracy buff to Smoke Grenade perhaps? Or longer range? Making it auto-hit probably wouldn't be "minor".

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Edit: If the problem is teleporting Malta turrets around low-level zones, the better answer is to just have them despawn after a period of time, or have them despawn when their owner dies - or both, to be consistent with the player version of the power. There's no good reason for them to hang around after the engineer dies, and never was. They're a nuisance item for players who are in the right level range to deal with them, and a needless hazard for low-level characters coming across ambush remnants.

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Totally agree here. Also true of DE eminators.

Let them last for 30 or 60 seconds after the caster dies and despawn.

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It's not exploitative. It makes perfect sense. This solution is, respectfully, a kludgey hammer of expediency. Ugh. "Legacy issue"? For who?

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When Castle said "Legacy issue" I think he was referring to calling Devices "Gadgets".

I think the change probably increased in importance when more people started taking TP Foe. It is more popular than it used to be.

Frankly I don't see the problem with making Auto Turret similar to a Controller pet - more or less permanent until you respawn it. If it's stationary, it can't stay useful for very long because you're moving through the map and you'll either have to move it (as we were able to do) or resummon it.

To be honest, I don't have much of a problem with the change itself since you can't TP most of the other objects like Auto Turret around either (Ice and Burn Patches, Caltrops, Tar Patch, etc.) You can, however, get a lot more use out of those powers, partly but not entirely due to their recharge rates.

The only negative about the change is that it indicates the oft-mentioned "looking at Blaster secondaries" clearly hasn't taken place, since if it had, the fixes that Auto Turret actually needs would be going in as we speak.

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Although, I was wandering around in the university this morning, and it took a *long* time for me to remember just exactly what a "snare" enhancement was.


Lots of things are called lots of things in different places. Even experienced players will sometimes refer to the actual set they are playing as the Trick Archery set, or the Energy Armor set. I still occasionally hear about this set called "Storm Control."

For that matter, and I understand the precident, it still drives me a little nuts when someone asks me about Super Reflexes' "shields."

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Then there's that "Healer" AT that some players really rave about....