GrinningSpade

As I am an avid collector of collectible temporary powers I am all in favour for this one. From the trusty rock to the nullifier mk 1 zap gun, gonna collect em all!

/signed

Well, I checked and guess what. Slot Machine is NOT on the ouroboros list. So are undoubtly other contacts you will miss due to this system. No idea why the developers thought that would be a good idea though.

Which brings me back to my original point. Reduce the difficulty in obtaining these contacts, weapon customization options etc to at least acceptable levels.

Ok you got a point there. If you do an event that disupts the normal gameflow, people will be annoyed.

However the other side of the coin is of course. Don't do events that disrupt the normal gameflow and other people will be bored and annoyed. Either way you lose.

So the best thing imo is to create an event that makes most people happy and as less people annoyed as possible. Tricky but thats why we pay them the big bucks.

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And yes it could affect hunts (including TF/SF ones) - but what the heck do you expect in a world where metahumans, criminal robots and alien invasions are common??? The way invasions clean up at present is a bit too simple, clean and easy.

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That'd be fine in an actual world, but in a game where a team of friends might be running prearranged TFs on the only night they can all make it before next month, having everything come to a grinding halt because of a server-wide event wouldn't be popular.

Keeping the players coming back's essential for a subscription game like CoH, and I'm sure imposing a sudden change in play options for the next 24+ hours wouldn't go down well with a lot of people.

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That wouldnt be a problem if such an event was announced in advance. Just like the Halloween thing. I bet you and your friends first enjoy the halloween event before going into a TF.

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2. No not avoiding badges based on awarding, but awarding un-locks. As in a contact like the slot machine, or the tomy-gun assault rifle. Any other character on the account would get the unlock as well, but not the badge.
Of cause in this example the gun should be awarded both sides, but the contact really only have meaning on one side. Though if the heroes had an identical badge with a contagt any hero side character should get the hero side contact un-locked.

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Not a bad idea actually. It would make the tommygun for villains for example feasable instead of impossible. (You try to hunt an elusive mob where you can only see if it is the right one when you READ its inscription!!!!! And lets not forget there is only 1 of them available on any city zone in the whole game). Heroes have it way easier here.

Though what to do with accolades like the atlas medaillon? I don't mind a bit of work for a nice benefit. Perhaps we could limit this to unlocable weapons and contacts maybe?

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Quite crazily I'd have thought that the devs wanted people to get the accolades through playing, not through afk farming.

Needing the 4th damage badge for any faction-specific accolade is pretty ridiculous. I could understand it if there was an accolade available to each side that used the 4th-6th dmg/healing/debt/inf/etc badges, but it's the hero-villain disparity that really marks this as an oddity.

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And that is exactly the thing I wanted to point out. The 4th damage badge is one among many that is NOT obtainable with a playstyle that could be considered normal or even slightly abnormal. This one for example should not be neccesary for an accolade.

I fully agree. Although you outlevel contacts constantly of course. But these contacts require dedicated work to obtain them. Of course there is Ourobouros but I am not sure they are all in the Ouro list.

The excisting invasions are nice. The only problem is that the events lasted to long. 1 day would be ok 1 week to much. Especially since very time the event period started people would be enthousiastic to bring their new toons up to date.

And yes, it would be nice if there would be consequenses when the Rikti are not opposed.

Ok I decided to make a list of some badges that need rethinking.

First category Unlockable contacts on CoV:
Some are easy. They consist of history badges exploration or badges that are easily obtained and come almost automatically at the appropriate levels. However here are the exceptions.

Veluta Lunata requires Pirate badge. This means you have to trap 10 ghosts in a special way. You also get the flintlock dual pistols. Well worth the time to do this one in my book. Not for the contact but for the flintlocks

Henri Dumont requires you to kill 200 scrapyarders. Well they are abundant in sharkville. Only problem is that you can outlevel him before you get the amount needed.

Kristof Jaeger requires you to kill 1000 longbow. Now this is doable as you encounter longbow at every corner. But doing that before you outlevel the contact is more tricky nowadays.

Crimson Revenant. Requires you to take down Ghost of the Scrapyard. Hard to do these days when not many people are online and interested in hunting GM's.

Slot Machine. Kill 200 marcone bosses. Bleh, hours and hours of running around using a macro to get the marcone capo is alot of work to unlock a contact even one as nice as the slot machine. When you do newspapers instead you would easily gain a few levels in the meanwhile. Guess what most people choose?

Arbiter Leery. Requires you to do a respec first. Ok this one is doable.

Number 204. Kill huge amounts of Toxic Tarantulas. Fly around for a few hours in Grandville and try not to outlevel contact before you get it. I am sure this is a nice contact. Never managed to do him though.

Viridian. Well for this one you need to kill left and right. Crey, rikti, freak tanks, lost bosses and lets not forget 200 Crey protectors. Hope you like farming missions for this one.

And that concludes the list for hard to get contacts. Anybody here around who can claim he done them all? I want these to be more accesable.

It's more something to discuss then to suggest. It is of course a suggestion as well. Sometimes things are not that clear cut.

When Issue 12 came online and everybody was leveling up veats. Now that was an amazing time. Full teams the whole day for a week or so. Amazing and best fun I had. It also showed the powers of the veat when working together.

You know the drill. Arrest/Capture/beat to a puddle a number of special mobs and get your badge! Some are easy while others are rather difficult to find in enough numbers to make it possible during leveling up time. Most require dedicated time, tactics and boredom to hunt down though.

All is good and well though, because in the end you get your shiny badge. Is the badge worth the effort? Some say yes same say no. That's a choice for every one to make and is the difference between a foolhardy stubborn badgehunter and somebody else.

However, there are badges that do more then just look shiny. They give acces to nifty acccolades, neat weapon options and best of all new contacts.

And here is my problem. I like to have acces to different contacts now and then. For example the Slot Machine. Problem is that to unlock that contact, the game requires me to spend hours and hours doing nothing else then hunting down grey mobs. It goes faster in a team but not many teams are willing to spend hours without any xp. And those are the easy gangsters, there is also a badge that unlocks a weapon that has count em 1-3 mobs on the server at any given time.

My point is that this way, people won't experience everything this game has to offer. Because they can't stomach such a tedious grind. I would love to see some prerequisites for opening contacts, gaining special weapons skins and even acces to accolades (how many of those fake illusionist do we have to kill?) to be re-evaluated.

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Oh, btw...what if Hollows would be that coop zone?

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While it's the logical choice, it's also had more revamps than Britney Spears, and would need a massive change of design for it to be a logical co-op zone.

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Besides, Hollows got its own Storyarc, its own TF/SF as well. Compare that to places like Perez, Boomtown, Dark Astoria, Crey's Folly and even Eden. Each and every one of those zones lack contacts, storyarcs and except for Eden a TF. Those are the zones that could use a refurbishing.

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So what's some dimwit crying about his anchors getting killed got to do with a supposed US server exodus?

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I think the implication was that the US server was more likely to nurture and care for the n00b and not recall friend the fool onto the nearest GM.

Personally I don't care if the n00b go to the US. The US can have them. We will take the newbies.

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The problem is not that n00b's go to the US server. The problem is more a thing like n00bs come play our game, encounter rude persons, reconsider and go play WoW. Then the rude people, having less and less people to be rude against, go to the US server so they can scare of people over there.

That said. Griefers and rudeness can and will cause people to dissapear before they got hooked well and proper.

my guess is some fixes to the cyborg pack.

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Are you suggesting that more brass mechanical spiders would not be a good thing?!

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It'd be very Nemesis

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The problem is that the whole spider theme has been stolen by Lord R. So unless Nemesis wants to blame Arachnos for things. Hmm on second thought, this is a Nemesis thing.

Yep, thats what happened to me. Playing on highest. Encountered Rikti instead of Lost and got slaughtered. Rikti hit hard and got good armour against my attacks.

I find this a shame though. I know of the rikti/lost connection but when i encounter rikti instead of Lost then I want my toon (and the contact) screeching in terror for they have come back etc. The midnight squad missions are a good example of how this connection should be played out. This isn't satisfying. Roleplay wise and gaming wise for I will have to leave the map and talk to the fateweaver.

Yes that would be nice but....

I also like to be able to put my weapon away for real. So I am thinking about a delay in passive stance of say 1 or 2 minutes before you turn the weapon away. Plus you got to think about what to do with powersets that uses weapon and weaponless attacks like stone melee.

Sloppy. One could say false advertising. Or at least misleading advertising. Good thing this is not a paid for bonus pack.

Hmmm, well it was a little bit before 30. But close enough I guess. Oh well in that case bye bye nice and squishy Lost. Hello Rikti who have great resistance against my main attack powers and hello fateweaver so I can lower my rep to yawning for them.

lately whenever I am doing a CoV mission (for example the arc of Lt. Demitrovitch on Nerva) I get send into the sewers to take out some Lost. But instead of encountering Lost I encounter Rikti more Rikti even more Rikti one or two Lost and more Rikti. Only the targets of the missions are in fact Lost.

Now this is annoying. I like beating up Lost, I dont have any problems with beating up Rikti of course (even if they are much tougher then the Lost) but only when i get Vangaurd Merits. I am not a charity!

So I am wondering, is this meant to be or do they have their databases a bit mixed up? I hope the latter because I miss the Lost as a nice fun villain group.

I doubt this will become a popular set. At least I defenitely won't order it. Even if the power is cute.

I think Praf got spot on what is indeed a novel idea.

The bat form could even have a few attack options but notother powers are available while in bat form.

Like:
Suck Blood. Bite attack minor damage, self heal
Flap in face. Confuses enemy making him protect his face etc.
Hypnotic gaze. No damage causes sleep of single target.

Fun to have but nothing that would be unbalancing. It would also open up a whole lot of other transforming powers.

You can of course ignore the missions in mercy islands. It's easy to hunt around a bit, hit level 5 and then move on to Port Oakes.

So basicly you have 3 options. Kalinda, Burke or Hunt. Not bad for a game element that you will pass in one hour at most.

Looking forward to see your name appear in the future then Rockjaw.

Best of luck.