Lightfoot

We don't even know if wave 1 (the 5+ years vets) has started yet. Why are we complaining about wave 2 not starting yet.

The only phase of Going Rogue beta that has been confirmed to have begun is the Friends & Family portion, which, as I recall, was slated to begin at about the same time Issue 17 went into Open Beta.

No matter how many of these threads get made, they are not going to speed up your beta invite, nor should they. Each phase of beta will begin when they are ready, and not before, and we should be thankful for it.

I wanted to pull this out because no one had responded to it yet.

There is a detriment. Enhancements are are the only reliable influence sink in the game. The more influence available to those who know how to play the market mini game, the more expensive those recipes, enhancements and salvage will become.

If you are a player who has trouble generating gobs of influence and cannot afford most of the items you want on the market, this suggestion will only make the problem worse (those who know how to work the market will thank you for the extra monies, though),

This position has been proven false time and again by the playerbase at large. Even small or inconsequential nerfs ("the Brawl nerf," where Brawl's activation time was increased by .06 sec, to match it's animation time, and a change so small that most computers would not be able to tell the difference) have been met with much weeping wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Another case in point would be the Dominator buff. Permadom was nerfed, while damage was increased across the board resulting in Doms whose damage output matched, or in some cases exceeded, their performance while in Domination mode. There were violent threats of ragequits all over the place, and there are still people complaining about the buff to this day (including the uninformed people like yourselves who only listen to the malcontents rather than finding out firsthand).

Since it will take a minimum of two months to assess and correct any overbuff, plenty of folks will have time to get used to the now overperforming set, which will result in just as much whining and lots more rage than if they gradually buff sets and powers over time.

Actually, the ambushes in hostage rescue radio missions have been bugged for a loooooooooooong time.

The bug (apparently now fixed) used to make the ambush happen when you accepted a hostage rescue mission. If you took one, and then just stood there long enough, an ambush would eventually come your way (unless their path took them by some police drones or into another hero).

I'm glad they finally fixed it.

What Jekyll and Hyde? The Dominator changes of a year ago completely eliminated the Jekyll / Hyde duality of Dominators. Domination is Mag increase / Mez protection / Endurance refill only now. The damage buff was completely removed and baked into their powers so that they were always doing Domination level damage (unless you were a double dom permadom).

If you are going to use something as evidence of the lack of Dev attention, the Dominator changes weaken your case, not strengthen it.

And you are absolutely correct, the Devs are extremely wary of "overbuffing." They have said so in plain english. The reason they buff in small increments is because it is much easier and much less painful to gently ramp up the power than it is to realize they went too far and rein it back in. This is wisdom, you might do well to learn from it.

The Lore of Praetoria has been rewritten to accomodate Going Rogue.

Many things are still the same, but many things have also been changed. Tyrant and his Praetors are still evil (or at least gray), much of Praetorian Earth is still in ruins (but it isn't Tyrant's fault that the world is that way), and the Praetor Tilman bio is thought by many to be the Praetorian propaganda corps in action.

The city of Nova Praetoria is a bright spot in an otherwise devastated Earth. After Truman dropped a nuke on North Korea, the Hamidon achieved its full power and the Devouring Earth struck all over the globe. Cole, who had been retired from his Statesman identity, returned to action to deal with this threat. After he defeated Hamidon, the world was grateful and offered him the job of protecting the planet.

Nova Praetoria became Cole's seat of power, and it is a paradise surrounded by devastation.

Hit the SPAM button and just say "HELL, NO!!!!!"

Seriously, these guys aren't located anywhere in the united states. You are giving your account and credit card information to someone against whom you have no legal recourse should they use either inappropriately (in addition to the fact that making use of one of these services is a permanently bannable offense as detailed in the EULA you agree to every time you log into the game). It is also a relatively safe bet that just visiting their websites means your computer will come away with a little bit of extra code in the forms of viruses and malware.

It is already ridiculously easy to generate piles of influence and infamy in this game, you don't need to use these people, so don't.

In the early parts of CoV Beta, Fury was generated by being hit. Ice being a defense set, rather than a resist set, combined with the slows from the auras and ice melee, meant that Ice / Ice Brutes generated almost no Fury. Fury also degenerated a lot faster then, so the Fury that Ice did build was almost impossible to maintain.

Late in CoV Beta, months after Ice had been removed, they changed the Fury mechanic so that it built when the Brute was attacked (not hit) and when the Brute attacked.

Ice should be acceptable for Brutes under the current conditions, it is just a matter of Castle and crew having the time to tweak the numbers the next time they do a round of Proliferation.

The OP was referring specifically to being buyable in game, using influence or infamy, from a vendor in game like the jet pack vendor in the Shadow Shard and Grandville.

The OP was not requesting the ability to buy temp powers with real money. We can already do this, by the way. There is a "Jet Pack Mini Booster" which provides 30 days of real time use for $5. Given how absurdly easy it is to get a free jet pack in game, I would be surprised if the real money option gets used much.

I wouldn't mind a buyable / craftable version of any of the Mayhem / Safeguard temp powers. Kind of low on my priority list, but, SCR aside, it might not take too much muscle to add them in, so I could see someone working on it in their off time.

Nope. Those things are given to us by the city for our help in keeping Paragon's financial institutions safe. I don't need to handwave the Jump Pack's technological look away because it is technological. I can choose not to use that gift, and put it in the closet with my sixteen Emmy's, but if I do use it, no RP needed other than "I stopped a robbery at the King's Row bank."

That being said, I certainly wouldn't object to a more "magical" temp power, such as a flying carpet. The best use of Dev time to develop such would probably be for "Magic Booster II: Arabian Nights" or somesuch. Make it a temp power a la Ninja Run, and we're good to go.

The quote, from the Devs, no less, went something along the lines of "We'll get right to work on Shield Offense as soon as we are done with Dual Archery Defense."

The general gist of the above being: Unless it locks you into Shield Defense as your only partnered powerset, the whole idea is patently stupid. You can carry a shield, throw it at people, hit people with it, but you can't block with the darned thing? The shield's primary function is to protect you. Being able to take Shield Offense without the game forcing you to take Shield Defense ranks right up there with Assault Rifle Melee (you know, that rifle set where you can't actually fire the rifle).

Shield Charge and your shield bash animation for Brawl will have to suffice, because the alternative is too stupid to program.

The Devs are aware.

The fix was up in the training room on Friday, the next live build should fix it on Live.

Yes, I just found it this weekend, decided I liked it, and dropped it on one of my male characters.

Then there would be content that you are locked out of if you chose the "wrong server." You have a character that would be violently opposed to the Council? Too bad, only 1/10th of the Council arcs are on your server.

In addition, if each server had unique content, it would greatly increase development time of new content. The four new story arcs we just received would have to become 60 new story arcs. If we are shooting for one content update a year, this might be reasonable.

There are multiple servers so that the game runs more smoothly. If you have an older machine, then you should gravitate towards the less populated servers and learn how to use your global channels and team search tools. If you have a high end machine and can handle Freedom and Virtue, good for you.

As awesome as this MIGHT be, you have no idea how crazy protective the comic book companies are over their properties. Marvel sued NCSoft just because you COULD make characters who looked similar to their property. The suit was eventually settled, and not in Marvel's favor, but it isn't a fight NCSoft wants to go through again, so when a character that is too close to another company's property is reported, the GMs come down on it hard and fast.

And with Marvel and DC both developing their own MMOs, this idea is even more of a pipe dream.

This presupposes that your idea of unique content per server could be realized, which it shouldn't be. Why not just merge the server lists? Many US players would love to have four more servers to play with, and I'm sure a bunch of EU players would like to play on Freedom.

Since City of Heroes isn't unique in having dedicated international servers, there may be some sort of economic or legal reason that the servers are separate.

Or they could introduce new Zones patterned after cities of the world? Sounds a lot less convoluted to me.

It still happens. I got on a random PUG Manticore Task Force two weeks ago on Triumph (which is usually fighting for the lowest population on the server list). Seven players who, I believe from the all business nature of the team chatter, had never met before, and who I haven't seen since.

The same character did a PUG Sister Psyche two months before, about the same time, but the team didn't gel as well, so we had to spread the Task Force over two nights (of the six who started that Task Force, one dropped in the second mission with no explanation and four came back to finish the second night).

Granted, these happened during primetime (starting around 7:30 Eastern) so if you are trying to PUG Task Forces outside prime time, your experience may vary.

And then there are the weirdos like me.

I made a dozen server transfers during that time, and wound up with exactly the same number of characters on each server that I had before.

All but two of those transfers were to force a rename on characters who costumes and concepts I loved, but I couldn't stand the names any more. I should have done one more, I still have a name that doesn't roll off the tongue very well, but I hadn't played the character much before the free transfer offer ended. Now that I have played him more, the name is starting to bother me.

This may be difficult to believe given the response you have received, but City of Heroes has one of the friendliest and most supportive communities of any MMO on the market (if not THE friendliest and most supportive). You are getting a lot of snark in response to your post, and I feel I should explain why so that it doesn't drive you away.

This suggestion is made often by new players who come from other MMOs and returning players who have been away for a while (probably playing other MMOs, which tends to color their perception of their previous City of Heroes experience), who don't understand how City of Heroes has evolved.

City of Heroes is a heavily instanced game. More than 90% of the game happens in private instances. When you see people just hanging around, it is usually because they are socializing or recruiting for teams and supergroups. The folks who are actually doing missions will only be seen for the minute or two it takes to cross the zone to get to their next mission door, and then they are off the streets again.

A few years ago, the best way to earn xp was to street sweep. Therefore, you saw tons of heroes out on the streets clearing mobs in circuits around the zones. The Devs noticed that lots of people were completely ignoring the missions that they spent much time creating. To encourage people to experience more of the game than just the streets, they took some actions; they introduced half debt if you died during an instanced mission, they increased the xp awards for instanced missions, they increased (greatly) the xp rewards for completing a story arc, they started awarding Reward Merits for completing story arcs, and they have greatly increased the quality of the writing in the stories from the first batch of arcs. All of this has taken many heroes off the streets and into the instanced missions.

This means that the "Lvl 18 Healer LFT" that used to work in broadcast isn't so effective any more. If you want on a team, you need to take some initiative and learn how to use your global channels (which probably didn't exist or were just introduced before you left) and the team search functions. You can't be afraid to form your own teams, and with supersidekicking, you don't need to play "level Tetris" to make sure you have enough mentors for any lower level recruits. In fact, you don't have to worry about exemping down either, as you now earn experience while exemped. Teaming is easier than it has ever been, provided you put forth a little bit of effort (join a Global Channel if you don't want to lead, or learn how to use Team Search if you aren't afraid of the star).

The reason you got a lot of snark was because you stepped in, looked around for a few minutes, and assumed that something was drastically wrong, and then provided a terrible solution for a problem that doesn't really exist. If you had posted something like this instead:

"Hey, I've been away from the game for a few years, and it seems like it is a lot harder to get on a team now. Does anyone else feel this way, or is it just me? Does anyone have any advice on how to get on teams more consistently? BTW, I'm on Justice server."

You would have been deluged with helpful advice on how to use the search function in game, as well as the names of the Global Channels for Justice Server. You went about it in a negative way, therefore you got negative responses.

Here's hoping that now you know why the response was so negative that you decide to stick around.

Welcome to the game and the forums.

Dechs already answered your question, so I'll just add some general advice.

You mentioned about asking how to level faster, and you did receive a correct answer. Joining teams is the fastest way to level without risking the use of an exploit. As a new player, you are doing yourself a disservice by trying to level quickly. Unlike most MMOs, City of Heroes was designed to be enjoyed at all levels. There is much less focus on the end game (in fact, your exclusively end game options are fairly slim).

For example, you flew right over Doctor Creed, who is a great early contact if you want to really feel like a villain. By doing the newspaper and mayhem mission in Port Oakes, you will be introduced to the Radio, who is also a good contact for feeling like a villain.

The developers have put a lot of time into crafting storylines for you to enjoy at all levels. Some of these are quite good, and there are more of them than you should be able to do at one pass through the game.

Let's say you make a new character (go ahead, it's alright, having alt characters is encouraged ), and you take the Burke path again. If you do all of Burke's mission, all of Creed's missions (Burke will introduce you to him as long as you are not 6th level or above), three newspaper missions in Port Oakes, the Mayhem mission in Port Oakes, and then the arc for your first Port Oakes Contact, you will outlevel the other two level 5-9 Port Oakes Contacts. If you then do the Radio or Veluta Lunata story arcs, you should outlevel the 10-14 Contacts in Cap au Diable. All of this story that you miss on one pass is meant to be picked up and done by another character.

tl;dr version:

Don't rush to the end. What you find there is not worth missing all the stories you zipped by on the way up. Enjoy the ride.

Well, you did say that it would take more xp at level 1 (and presumably each level thereafter) than it would if it were a new character.

My question is thus: Why add 40+ levels of new story arcs, that only people who have level 45+ characters can access.

You want more content, in addition to "character growth." Isn't this the long way to go about it. Why not just add more story arcs to the ones already in game?

Your system isn't any better. The "precedence" in comic books doesn't support your case as much as you'd like. When the Bat was broken by Bane, and Azrael took over, it wasn't a reborn Azrael or Batman, it was Azrael with Epic Pools and a new costume.

Superman did not level up from 1-45 again when he became "Superman Blue." He spent 8 issues, published weekly, learning his new powers (2 months if your math is bad, far less XP than you are proposing), and 6 months as Superman Blue and Superman Red before reverting back to his original powers and resuming his career.

Storm, after having her powers taken, had to learn to live as a normal, but when she regained her powers, they weren't different powers, but the same powers. (I'll give Marvel some credit in this department, when they make a change, they stick to it for a while, although Spider-Man's time in Hell thanks to Mephisto's trick has gone on a bit longer than it should have. I expected him to notice and rebel against the inconsistencies long before now. Eventually he will have to accept May's death at the hands of that sniper and he and Mary Jane's marriage will need to survive without May's support).


I thought part of your original idea was that you would be retiring the character ("going out of commission somehow").

There is nothing preventing you from playing your 50's and utilizing new IOs and systems (like the Incarnate system) with the system as it stands now. If we implement your idea for a full respec, those "retired" characters won't have the chance to grow into the new systems until they have gone through at least 60 levels worth of grind (thanks to your XP penalty) before getting back to their previous level. Your idea inhibits character growth more than it encourages it.

Ugh! I despise the Champions Online combat system. Even with the blocking mechanism, I find it to be far less interactive than our own (set auto attack, wait for meter to fill, fire charged attack, block as bad guy telegraphs move, repeat). The tactical options on CoH are much more diverse than Champions Online.

I'd like to see more released, myself, but without seeing what Jay's typical workday consists of, I'm not ready to pass any judgment. Remember, Jay and his department aren't only responsible for the character creator, they are also responsible for the costumes of the enemy groups.

They have more costume nodes, which gives the illusion of more costume options. When I played the game, even with all those nodes and the options they have that we don't, I found it much more difficult to make a character that I thought looked good. Some of the best costumes I've seen in Champions are ripped off straight from the comics. Some of the best costumes I've seen in City of Heroes are true originals.

I will grant that it has been six months since I canceled my Champions Online sub, so they may have added hundreds of new costume options since then and made combat more interesting, but I doubt it.

There are some costume pieces that are obtained through in game actions (Witch Hat, Roman Armor, Capes, Auras, etc.). There are others that are obtained via micro-transactions (Booster Packs, i.e.; the Cyborg costume set is part of the Cyborg Booster Pack). Others are obtained by maintaining an active subscription (Trenchcoats at 3 months, Wings at 15 months, and so on). The great majority of costume options are still available with just the base game, and which your trial account should have access to.

Since all costume options need to "work" with all animations, full robes are not available at this time due to animation issues with sets like Martial Arts and some Brawl animations. Full robes are heavily requested, and our Devs are responsive, so I'm pretty sure that the main character designer (JLove) works on the problem when he has spare time.

There are temp powers that will put an object in your hand when using that power, but there is no way to have your Fire Blasts emanate from a staff instead of your hands. At least, not at this time (It would require new animations be made for the Fire Blast powerset. As it stands, we have been told that the system will let us have alternate animations or alternate colors, but there isn't room in the code for both. Fire Blast allows alternate colors, Martial Arts allows alternate animations).

Welcome to the game. I'll look forward to giving you another welcome when you sub.

I'm going to add some perspective to this.

CoH has a much higher retention than most MMOs. At its highest point, we had approx 210K subs. We are currently sitting at (best guess) 110 to 140K subs. WoW has a much higher rate of churn than we do with people subbing and lapsing and resubbing. Does that mean that Blizzard should pack it in?

Have you ever looked at WoW patch notes. A heck of a lot of nerfing goes on there, too. MMO designers must strike a risk / reward balance and hold to it or risk losing people to boredom (if the game is too easy) or frustration (if the game is too hard).

WoW came out a year after CoH, which means that WoW's engine is almost as "out of date" as our own. I guess Blizzard should pack it in and develop WoW2 (by your logic, anyway).

Our niche is pretty secure. The only competition we have in our niche can't hold a candle to CoH. If Going Rogue continues to hold the interest of current subscribers and draws in some new players, I think we will hold up fine against DCUO (especially if the gameplay is as similar to Champions as it looks). In fact, if gameplay is that bad, DCUO may be a an adrenaline shot to CoH, as new people come to the MMO scene because of the DC brand, but they dislike the gameplay, they might look in CoH's direction.

Server mergers are often considered the death knell of a game. Either that, or it shows that the creators had unreasonable expectations (Age of Conan comes to mind, their entire plan hinged on their game being the prophecied "WoW killer." As such, they had three or four times as many servers as they needed. When their subscriptions played out, it turned out that they were "just another healthy MMO" with nowhere near WoW numbers. As such, they needed to close more than half of their servers).

If you aren't WoW, 100K subs is considered healthy. 11 servers for 100K+ (CoH) subscribers is reasonable. 87 servers for 250K (Conan), not so much so. As it is, after merging servers, Conan still has three times the servers (around 30) for less than three times the population.

And for your talk of "lackluster issues," "declining subs" and "out of date engine," I notice that you are still here and that you haven't dropped CoH for Champions Online. They have a "more up to date" (or, as is the case with all software, maybe "less out of date" is more appropriate) engine and the same content style as WoW (which means it must be good). This tells me that, despite your complaints, CoH is still the best superhero MMO on the market. I suspect you will still be here complaining after DCUO comes out. I would be surprised if you prove me wrong.

What makes you think the Devs are using Maya 2010? If the Devs are using a third party animation program, rather than hardcoding all the animations by hand into the game, then the animation program they are using is at least 8 years old. As such, it most certainly does not have the features of the latest version of Maya. Until you know what programs are used to animate this game and have learned to use them yourself, you have no idea how hard or easy it is to program the animations of this game.

Hail of Bullets is a PBAoE click attack. It has no effect on your movement animation at all. In fact, since it affects enemies, you are technically rooted while you are using the power, and cannot move at all. What you are looking at as "movement" is simply the animation of the power.

Ninja Run goes the other direction. It has a specific animation and stance. However, when you activate a power, that stance is "put away" to be replaced by the normal combat stance and power animation. When the power animation is complete, the character drops back into the Ninja Run stance if the power is still toggled on.

Both of these things are right.

Vehicles aren't being programmed, in part, because they would be a nightmare to do. MMOs are incredibly complex, and every new thing you program has to be able to interact with every other thing in game. If I recall correctly, the problem we had about a year back with characters "dancing" while activating the Pocket D Teleporter was due to a line of code in the chat interface. As a game gets older, and more code is added to it, the number of odd interactions also increases (as we are seeing now with Ultra Mode and the fact that programs running in the background on your home computer, such as Google Desktop, can have a significant impact on game performance now where they did not before).

Which leads us to the your second thing. Given the technical hurdles, and the limitations that would be necessary to get vehicles right, it simply isn't worth the cost in time and money to wade through that nightmare. The return on their investment would be negligible, at best. Therefore, they do, in fact, have far more important things to work on. I suspect that they will have more important things than vehicles to work on right up to the time the servers shut down.

It seems there is only one answer you will accept for "proper transportation for a normal human," and that is: vehicles.

The Devs have gone on record saying that vehicles will never happen.

a) There are too many technical hurdles that need to be overcome for the development to be cost efficient. The technical hurdles have already been enumerated by us and ignored by you in your infinite knowledge of the game's code, despite the fact that many of these technical hurdles have been spelled out for us by the Developers who must work with the code you seem to know so intimately.

b) in order to make them not look ridiculous, they would need to be restricted to outdoor maps and game world only, not available in indoor instanced missions. This makes them severely restricted in comparison to every other travel power in the game, making them a non-optimal choice. Since only the diehard roleplayer will spend a power choice on a vehicle with the restrictions necessary, the development cost would produce little bang for the buck.

c) You know (and the Devs know) as well as I do that a single motorcycle or car skin is not going to be sufficient. Once it is known that vehicles are in development, we, even if we would not want to give up the power slot for a gimped travel power, would be frothing at the mouth for a "vehicle creator." We don't want "Mad Cow on a generic looking cycle." We want the "Mad Cow Cycle," complete with horns on the handlebars and a Guernsey pattern on the gas tank.

How many examples do you want? Klingons. Predators. Really, any sci-fi race with a tradition of hand to hand combat would probably also use thrown weapons.

Did you totally miss where someone you quoted made mention of differing body sizes? Not just models (male, female, huge), but actual heights. Our heroes can be between four feet and eight feet tall. The same motorcycle model that fits a six foot tall character is not going to fit an eight foot or a four foot tall character.

How is coloring our powers or selecting our weapon skins remotely like having sprint / superspeed put your character on a motorcycle or in a car?

If the pose is persistent (Ninja Run, Hover / Fly), then one of two things needs to happen when we activate a power. The pose needs to go away, to be replaced by the power's animation, and resume when the animation is finished; or every power needs to be animated for that pose. Ninja Run does the first, Hover / Fly does the second.

This means that when you activate a power on a motorcycle, either the motorcycle disappears and you assume the power's normal activation stance, or that every power needs to have a motorcycle animation. The first looks stupid and will break your immersion, the second is a hell of a lot of work.

So, what powers auto-adjust to the size of the model? I can't think of any. This would require the creation of new tech to solve your problem.

A vehicle is an example of tech. If your character wouldn't use any of the devices that we have put forth because it would be too much tech in his natural, then how can you rationalize using a motorcycle.

The game doesn't need vehicles, and I'm glad the Devs aren't wasting time and money trying to put them in.

As a Gravity / Thermal Controller, I don't think you can buy any of those weapon skins (maybe you can, but you won't be able to use them, as you don't have any weapons that can be customized).

Unlike virtually every other MMO, anytime you unlock a new costume option, all it does is give you the ability to further enhance your appearance. None of the unlockable costume pieces change your abilities in any way.

How we slot our powers has no effect on how we look, and how we look has no bearing on our effectiveness. Slotting an IO from the Obliteration set won't change how we look, and unlocking the Roman costume pieces by completing the Imperious Task Force won't change how the character plays.

Just because someone has one of those nifty, sometime hard to get costume pieces, they are not automatically 1337. You can't tell how skilled a player is, nor how powerful their character is, by looking at what they wear. All the Roman armor says is that the character is at least level 35, and that the character took part in a successful Imperious Task Force. They could have followed along and spammed Brawl for all you know (not that I suggest this tactic, many Task Force leaders will not hesitate to kick someone who is playing so poorly as to be a liability).