Leandro

Happy 10th birthday, Sister Flame!

There's only one, Notice of the Well. You get it by doing the task force of the week. This week's is Tin Mage II. Next week's is Manticore (heroes) or Renault (villains).

This happens every now and then with many TF missions. The workaround is for the leader to log off so the star is passed to someone else, then complete the mission again. It'll properly complete that time, and the new leader will be able to get the next one.

I haven't liked the game's direction for a while now. It's become obsessed with delivering new systems and not new story content. The "Coming Storm" has been coming for a very long time; the Honoree was captured in Issue 10 and we only see Vanguard has him in custody in Issue 19. That's quite the snail pace. The Rularuu, the 5th's "temporal war", there are lots of threads that are dangling and begging to be picked. But now it's all about Praetoria, and I'm getting quite tired of it.

And now, content is being split within issues. Rather than get 4 trials at release, for some variety, we're getting two trials now, two in a couple of months. I don't like that. If it were 4 trials now, 4 trials in a couple of months, well, okay, that's understandable. But when it comes to content, this issue is delivering 2 TFs (and one of them is really forgettable and needs work) and 2 trials. I can be done with all the content in this issue in 3 hours.

I was happier with the game back when it was 15 guys doing it, than now that NCsoft did its reinvestment. Issue 10 is still my favorite issue content-wise: zone revamp, four story arcs, a task force, a raid, and a world event. Since then, we got weapon and power customization, flashback, purple IOs, PVP revamp, architect, dopplegangers, ultra mode, side switching, incarnates, and raids; but no issue has been as content-heavy (GR excluded; it's not content that my existing characters can do). Even the new arcs are about the Praetorian invasion. What, did all the Primal villains go to sleep?

I blame Architect quite a bit for this. It's like Paragon decided that "regular" story arcs were pointless to do since people could make very similar things in the AE. But the AE won't tell me canon stories that reveal more of the universe I've been playing.

For me, the last several issues have felt as if I was watching a TV series for 4 years, a good TV series at that, and then suddenly it was replaced by something different, and the creators said "we'll continue the old series someday, but don't worry, you can still create lots of fanfic based on it".

The one mission that I like the most in the past 3 issues is the tip mission where Frosfire and Ms. Thystle ask for my help. Why? Because I know Frostfire from years ago, I handed him his butt way back in the first week I was playing. And now he's redeemed himself and got a girlfriend. I'm more emotionally invested in that than in the one-dimensional evil Fascist Praetors from another dimension.

Let's see. My empath has 208.8% global recharge between Hasten and bonuses; if I were to pick the Spiritual Core Paragon and three-slot it with level 50 Recharge IOs, it would take 113.6 seconds to recharge. So 90 seconds up, 23.6 seconds down.

If I were to really go crazy and six-slot RA with recharge IOs, it would recharge in 108.9 seconds; so 90 seconds up, 18.9 seconds down.

If I hit Geas of the Kind Ones for an extra 100% recharge, it recharges in 100 seconds. I don't think it's possible to get much closer than that.

I personally have it two-slotted and use the Musculature boost, so it recharges in 127.5 seconds; I don't feel it's necessary to make it recharge any faster.

Last year I did a lot of marketeering and averaged 200-400 million per night, until a Double XP Weekend happened; during that weekend I got over 2 billion each day. After that, I kind didn't know what to do with the influence and I stopped; I gave away most of it, and right now I only have about 5 billion on my characters. I might get involved with it again once i20 goes live, but once you know the market "tricks", it does become a bit boring.

A much better way to ban spammers would be to blacklist the MAC address of the network adapter used to connect to the internet, since that is stored in the hardware itself; you would be banning a specific computer. Unfortunately, it's likely that tech-saavy scammers would just install a driver to spoof the MAC address and change them every time they're banned.

IP addresses are worthless for blacklisting, especially in these days of wifi everywhere. I can take my laptop outside and connect to five different open networks, with five different IPs.

I'm very happy that I'll be able to play with the European people again. I remember playing with a bunch of them during i10 beta and it was a blast.

I am not a PVPer, so my main character is an illusion/empathy controller that was not built for PVP at all, but has a very great PVE build. Several times I was asked by global friends to join them in a PVP zone or another because "we're getting stomped on, come help us", and I made a huge difference, and had fun, even though I had little PVP experience. I joined PVP zones or arena maybe once or twice a month, but I had fun with it.

Since the i13 changes, I've never been asked to join PVP again, and when I ask people about it, they tell me to roll a character specifically for PVP. I don't want to do that; I want to play my character.

Since I am not a PVPer, I don't know what changes resulted in this outcome. But I know that it used to be a lot more "inclusive" of builds, and nowadays it isn't. That "inclusiveness" is what I think made pre-i13 PVP a much better experience, even if it was flawed from a "balance" point of view.

I have this problem, also with a Radeon HD 5770, Intel Core2Quad Q9550, Windows 7 64-bit. It's part of the reason why I haven't logged onto COH other than for the weekly TF in a month.

I recommend people switch to http://imgur.com or http://min.us -- ImageShack and TinyPic will IP-block a lot of countries.