Miuramir

Again, the realization wasn't that I couldn't beat him solo, but that it was going to be enough of a hassle that it would be less hassle to do it with friends. In my case, I have enough friends that have more 50s than me that it's practical to do it that way, but not an option for everyone.

(More specifically, part of the problem is that char does normally expect to be able to get some breathing room with other powers, particularly KB; and he seemed to be either immune or highly resistant to everything I threw, particularly KB. My original plan was that the Lucks were the *backup* plan to cover me if the other stuff slipped up; I've got a variety of slows, stuns, holds, KB, and other tricks to deploy that can usually improve my odds considerably. Unfortunately, he pretty much blew through my primary setup ignoring everything but some of the damage and then my backup plan failed at a critical time before I had burned him down. Simply going back and trying until I got good rolls and he got bad ones would probably have worked eventually; loading my Insp tray with the expectation I'd exit and refill it between EBs (and therefore giving me some room to pack oranges) would probably tip things enough to make it sooner rather than later. I've got the V merits I could bring a HVAS if necessary, if it came to that... pick up an Envenomed Dagger to open with maybe, that sort of thing. Doable, but a hassle; far simpler to just bring friends if you have that option.)

My personal take is that the best option is to have an *alternate* unlock be available with a non-trivial number of Alignment Merits. The tech to have it cost merits is already developed and partially tested. The in-canon logic that by repeatedly demonstrating the values that you exemplify, you eventually start to become regarded as an avatar of those values and being able to draw on higher sources of power is reasonably sound. The mechanical time-based limitations on earning AMs allows the devs to put a hard lower bound on the speed at which people can earn them. And from a metagame standpoint, it was strongly suggested that staying true to your original alignment over a long period would have meaningful rewards to balance the obvious short-term draws of Going Rogue, and that's currently not really the case.

Concerns about the current situation and how much further it will go are exactly my primary worry.

One of the primary reasons my friends and I stay with or keep coming back to CoH, as opposed to other MMORPGs, is specifically that there is a minimum of level-gated content. The fact that due to the exemplar system and the rarity of explicitly-gated content, we don't have to worry too much about who is ahead of whom on which character on which server is one of the *primary draws* for CoH, and why we're not playing those other MMORPGs.

In particular, amongst my friends there are substantial differences in playtime both in a vet reward sort of way, and in an available hours per week sort of way. We've got people who have been around since the beginning and people with less than a year. We've got people who are currently unemployed and can play 10 hours a day if they wanted, and people with family, careers, volunteer work, and other demands so that they're lucky to see four hours a week. We've even got one person who only got their own account recently, but doesn't have access to a computer capable of playing CoH except when they visit one of the others of us on vacation; their play time per quarter might not hit what some people can do in a day. Yet CoH is AFAIK the world leader at allowing people who literally have two orders of magnitude differences in time played to enjoy productively teaming together.

If this were "real" levels to 60, the current excellent exemplar system would hopefully continue to work; a level 60, a 56, and a 45 could team up with few problems. Yet they're deliberately throwing out one of the reasons we choose CoH over the competition by locking people out of playing with their friends in what could well be an increasingly byzantine gating system. Consider how much gating we've had with only half of a slot, and we've got at least another 19 halves to go. I seriously hope this doesn't happen, but the trend they've established at the moment is "If you're not completely unlocked and slotted to the current standard, we will add a new arbitrary and extremely punitive mechanic keeping you from being relevant."

Our experience with complex gating systems in other MMORPGs is that they are ultimately highly divisive; they create frustration both in players ahead who have to repeat earlier progress, wait for friends, or forge onward with rapidly decreasing support, and in players who are behind who have to keep begging people to re-do things, or find that they log on and aren't qualified to participate in any of the things that their friends are doing. Yes, there are plenty of other MMORPGs where that's the norm; again, the reason we're here and not there is that it's not what we want.

That's not a Faustian Choice, that's a Morton's Fork; "two unpleasant seeming alternatives that ultimately lead to the same unpleasant conclusion".

The choice of whether to take the fast or slow path to Incarnate-hood would be a classical Faustian Choice if it was actually presented to you; a situation where you take the "fast, easy" dark-side route despite the knowledge that it will eventually doom you. However, what you *actually* get is a Hobson's Choice, where your choice is the slow path or nothing.

Sorry, it does happen. I had three purples and an egg running plus some inherent defense at the instant he hit me with a *single attack* that did both 400+ points physical and 700+ points energy, on a blaster with barely over 1200 hit points. Technically I think I could have survived if I was maxed at 100%, but I'd not quite fully recovered from an earlier more ordinary hit; I didn't have that many greens available (tray started mostly loaded with purples and eggs) so wasn't using them when they would have been mostly wasted. Nearly full green bar to faceplant in a single instant while purpled up, leaving me to check the combat logs to figure out what the heck happened.

This is the incident in beta that caused me to say "you know, I can beat this guy solo by expending time, resources and effort, but a lucky shot from him trumps all that; I'm just going to bring friends when this goes live".

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Mender_Ramiel
The rest of his dialog, available on the wiki, is well worth reading carefully for anyone interested in CoH lore.

One interpretation is that while Mender Silos / Lord Nemesis is a master of the Xanatos Gambit, he's far less good at Xanatos Speed Chess, and the possible interference from multiple alternate universes at seemingly random (unpredictable from within our universe) times forces him to play a much more off-the-cuff game than he's comfortable with.

Another weird interpretation is that Mender Silos / Lord Nemesis isn't actually that good a planner after all, just one of the first people to abuse time travel to give himself clues and suggestions. When he's actually forced into a situation involving complex plots at war and competing time travelers that defy predestination, he starts doing far less well. Ouroboros is primarily an attempt to get all major time travelers aligned into either a fairly predictable path, or in direct opposition to that path, to make reality easier to retroactively foresee.

Unfortunately you're illustrating one of the clear divides between the casual player and the more serious one.

You (and some others) seem to expect that this game should be like a *hobby*, which is generally a "serious amateur" version of a profession. They usually require substantial skill development, a learning curve, hardware investment, dedication of substantial blocks of time, and so on. Examples such as "woodworking" and "golf" that have been used recently would be applicable here.

Many other people expect that this game should be *entertainment*, which while it is usually fed by professions, is rarely a profession itself. While they frequently have some sort of price (up-front, continuing, or both), one doesn't usually need a whole lot of dedication or advanced skills to enjoy it; and in the rare cases where skill is helpful it's usually immediately visible up front and doesn't increase significantly or surprisingly across the experience. Related examples might be "reading a (comic) book", "watching a movie", "playing (superhero) make-believe with friends", "family boardgame night", and so on.

Personally, I'm somewhat on the fence here; while I'm certainly capable of treating a game as a hobby with a lot more attention to detail (partly because I can sometimes read forums and wikis on my lunch break, but not actually play), there are a fair number of times when I get home from a long day of unpaid overtime at work juggling system configuration files and spreadsheets the last thing I want to do is spend my extremely limited personal decompression time worrying about build details, advanced tactics, team composition, or whatever. I want to get together with some friends and have fun pretending to be superheroes together, in a rich world with an evolving storyline. Unfortunately, the *story* of I19 is heavily gated... there are no open-world invasions that scale using GM code so everyone can do their part as they are able, the "Alpha Strike" is two difficult TFs with a prerequisite arc containing multiple EBs and also requiring either multiple other TFs or a bunch of high-level farming.

In actuality, after having to go to a fair amount of effort during the beta to solo the arc on various characters, the folks I usually play with have decided it's way easier to just hit the arc with a half-dozen characters and keep moving. But that's not a practical option for everyone, or even a possible option for some.

Personally, I was expecting that the "solo only mission" code introduced in GR's Praetorian alignment choice missions was the preliminary for what would be required for one's beginning to the Incarnate path. The fact that teaming is not only allowed but suggested (and balanced for) seems off.

I was hoping that we'd get something that was actually tailored to the character; it's traditional in myth and fiction that the path to ascension is a very personal thing closely associated with one's central focus. There's at least one other MMORPG that has an epic, solo-only battle for what used to be the final barrier between you and max level, which has class-specific goal options; some can heal their way to victory, some steal, some just focusing on beating up a tough foe. While the current arc is a lot better than the "run a hard TF and pick the option added to the reward menu" plan from earlier, it falls far short of either its potential or expectations.

One of the interesting things I've been wondering whether it provides an insight into normally-obfuscated information is the year plan deal. The presumed implication is that the cost to them of giving out the bonus deal free months is less than the cost to them of getting credit. In effect, they're getting a distributed loan from the player base.

It's also possible that the "cost" here is less monetary, and more a NcSoft paperwork issue; if they have to jump through a lot more hoops to hire someone today to work on a feature that will hopefully improve revenue next year, versus allocating the player's distributed up-front "investment" that they already have in hand.

That depends somewhat on how you and/or your ISP are set up, but "probably". For instance, if the modem is providing NAT and DHCP, with the router in effect merely giving you extra ports; and your laptop is set to get its address via DHCP, it should work. On the other hand, if the modem is basically just passing data and you've been assigned a specific IP address or had a specific MAC address registered with your ISP which belongs to the router, you'll need to manually reconfigure your laptop to match the settings your ISP expects.

Part of the confusion is that there are a lot of different jobs that get done by different devices, and the common names don't always match the technical roles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_gateway
is a good start if you want some more details. In this case, one of the questions is whether your "modem" is also serving as the primary router, with your "router" mostly just serving as a network switch.

In any case... home-grade "routers" do fail more often than people expect. Most of them are poorly cooled, and not really designed for the heavier use of gamers, video streamers, torrenters, hackers, etc. My experience is that depending on brand and environment a service life of 1 to 3 years is typical. They can have all sorts of weird, difficult-to-diagnose problems as they start to fail as well, although one of the most common is failure to work well with longer network cable segments.

The above is a bit odd looking, is it correct? Running with 1024x768 resolution (a 4:3 aspect ratio) full screen on a 1920x1080 monitor (a 16:9 aspect ratio) is going to be both misshapen and fuzzy. You might want to consider using your monitor's actual resolution, and then using the Renderscale setting to reduce the 3D resolution to something your card can better handle, instead.

There's one CoH setting I'm aware of that is directly connected to it running in the background, which is MaxInactiveFPS. Try using the command:
/maxinactivefps 1
and alt-tabbing to see if it either gives you more time before the crash, or fixes the problem. This should put CoH's video system into a "lazy" 1 update per second mode when not in the foreground, which might help with whatever is the problem. IIRC this setting doesn't normally persist between logins, so you'll have to reenter it.

You might also experiment with running windowed rather than full screen. Some people have problems one way, some the other; and it might either fix your problem or provide useful information.

Have you checked your system logs to see if Windows logs any sort of error message just before the crash? In newer versions of Windows, if it gets more than X "recoverable" graphics driver errors in Y minutes (IIRC the default is X=6, Y=1), it decides that there's a serious problem and crashes the system to force a reboot; I'm not sure if there's a similar process in XP but the log is worth investigating anyway.

This is an excellent example. Maxwell's Demon flipping out and sending all of the heat randomly to one end of a macroscopic object is highly unlikely, but not impossible. In an simple infinite-universes multiverse, there will be an infinite number of them where that has happened; however, if you're picking randomly a finite number of universes to check, you might never see one, because the "density" of the universes with the property you are looking for is very low. (Your chances are probably significantly higher of finding a universe where heat flow is regulated by actual demons, and a demon-summoning mastermind was screwing with people's physics experiments...)

Of course, there are more complicated variations; what if something is infinitesimally unlikely, but the number of universes in the multiverse is actually a higher-order infinity? What if your widget can check a countably infinite subset of the available universes, but not a higher order? (More generally, if the multiverse has cardinality beth-two, but conventional means of dimensional travel can only index via a beth-one mechanism, what are your odds of finding an occurrence of a unlikely event with probability approximated by 1/beth-null? My understanding of complicated infinities breaks down somewhere in here. Intuition would seem to indicate you could find one easily, as the search mechanism is strictly more powerful than the unlikeliness mechanism.)

Does the continuum hypothesis hold in the CoH multiverse? Worse yet, is it possible for one of the differences between alternate universes in the CoH multiverse being that in some of them the continuum hypothesis is true, and in some it is false?

This is not true. In the simplest terms, infinity does not make impossible things possible, it merely makes unlikely things eventually pop up in quantity. For instance, positive integers are infinite; even positive integers are also infinite. Yet despite having an infinite number of even positive integers, you will not have any that cannot be evenly divisible by 2.

Additionally, the presence "somewhere out there" of an infinite number of improbable things doesn't help you find them if you're limited to taking small untargeted samples. If approximately one in a billion universes has some property Foo you're looking for, if there are infinite universes there are an infinite number with Foo; yet if it takes you an hour to set up to check a single universe with no way to tell if it's Foo until you look, even a determined Mender Silos would not have good odds of having found a Foo. You're better off spending your time trying to develop some sort of handwavy "resonance harmonizer" that specifically targets Foo-like universes.

An additional important issue is that it is NOT clear whether there are infinite dimensions in the CoH multiverse; it is even less clear whether the means of access allow access to all of them. There's some indication from the canon that the number of readily accessible dimension to Portal Corp-style technology is probably "only" in the thousands to tens of thousands, and many of them are comparatively uninteresting (uninhabited, dead, etc.). It isn't clear how much of this is the limitations of their technology and how much of this is a fundamental property of reality. However, the actions of a number of powerful individuals, including some with access to power or knowledge likely to exceed ours, seem to act in a manner that implies that there aren't an infinite number of (comparatively readily) accessible universes. At the very least, the combination of "quantity of universes" and "ease of search for the ones you want" leads to powerful people deciding to change this one rather than "simply" finding another one more to their liking.

(note: all distances in this post are approximate straight-line ones, estimated with the Ruler tool in Google Earth. Network distances are almost invariably *longer*, sometimes significantly so depending on backbone routing; also, the speed of light in long-haul fiber is about 1.5 slower than the vacuum speed, even before accounting for any switching, amplifier, etc. delays.)

This is certainly not entirely true, and possibly not really close. As a player in Virginia near the high-bandwidth state fiber backbone, the performance to the former East coast servers also in Virginia was dramatically better than to the former West coast servers, and significantly better than to the current unified Texas datacenter. My SG has a concentration of players in DC, VA, and NC, and mostly played on Triumph and Victory (both East) for a reason; when we'd go onto Training Room, Protector, or other West coast servers the performance would be significantly and noticeably worse.

Since the US server farm has moved to Dallas, Texas this summer, network performance has been on average worse; I run with /netgraph 1 a fair amount of the time these days, and get considerably more tall green and red spikes than I did last year.

Does anyone know where in Virginia the East-coast datacenter actually used to be? Assuming it was in the DC / Northern Virginia area, from my place that's meant a change in my case from less than 200 miles over high-quality connections, to about 950 miles, with several more hops; and that's a noticeable drop in quality. If the West-coast datacenter was in San Francisco (confirmation? I'm going based on ZM's post), the distance to there was almost 2,300 miles, and pretty much everyone I knew could tell the difference between performance at ~200 and ~2,300. German players are going to be adding something on the order of 5,000 miles... saying that's not an issue is highly suspect.

Quick calc shows that European players will likely be adding an utter minimum one-way delay on the order of 40 ms (speed of light in long-haul fiber is about 4.9 us per km (yes, that's significantly slower than in vacuum), or roughly 0.008 ms per mile). Doing some better legwork, according to AT&T the current actual transatlantic latency is 77 ms for New York - London, and 87 for Washington DC - Frankfurt; add to that the continental delay of 44 for the New York - Dallas connection. For comparison, the Washington, DC - San Fransisco link is showing a delay of 72, which matches ping times in the mid-80 range to well-connected servers there that I'm currently seeing.

City of Heroes NYCC 2010 - part 2/4

1:22 - 1:51
I apologize to War Witch for being brutally exact in the quoting, but I felt it would carry more veracity.

We are, climbing, Incarnate's, ladder;
We are, climbing, Incarnate's, ladder;
We are, climbing, Incarnate's, ladder;
Soldiers of the Well.

Every, round goes, higher, higher;
Every, round goes, higher, higher;
Every, round goes, higher, higher;
Soldiers of the Well.

Mender, do you, love my, hairpiece?
Mender, do you, love my, hairpiece?
Mender, do you, love my, hairpiece?
Soldiers of the Well.

If you, love it, why not, serve it?
If you, love it, why not, serve it?
If you, love it, why not, serve it?
Solider of the Well.


OK, that went a bit creepy; and while I'm not as happy with the third verse, one of the few things we seem to reliably know about the far future is "dramatic hair is important". Perhaps "slotting" would be a more mundane fit than "hairpiece". We don't know what sources of inspiration the devs are drawing on, and I'm certainly not sure what *mine* are, that "just popped in there"

The Alpha Slot info page lists the following ways as some examples of how you can get components: LGTF, ITF, STF, RSF, and CoP. A logical assumption might be that preparing your character / supergroup to run high-level TFs and SFs would be a better use of your time than optimizing for AE grind; the devs probably chose the examples deliberately.

My take on power, which seems to be reasonably supported by game canon, is as follows:

Each full-blown dimension has, in addition to the forces and energies that modern human scientists recognize (gravity, electromagnetism, etc.), a supply of power of a different sort. Where it ultimately comes from is a mystery; it might be the echo of the song of creation, or the kinetic energy of our 3-brane crashing through 19-dimensional space, or whatever. As far as anyone has ever been able to tell, the source ultimately doesn't matter... the energy is mutable and has what might be considered analogous to fluid-like properties at a metaphysical level, in that it tends to take the shape of its container.

This supply is immense, but not infinite. Normally, it is to gravity as gravity is to electromagnetism; weak locally, but capable of affecting things over tremendous distance and time scales (this bit is somewhat more speculative). It is unclear whether it is a truly renewable source; there are some indications that if it is, the renewal is slow (on human time scales at least).

In many dimensions, the majority of the inhabitants are not even aware of it, and it lies largely untapped.

In some, one entity becomes aware of the power and able to tap into it, and with the rush of power becomes that dimension's first and only god. Sometimes it shatters or diffuses them, and they become what might be considered a dimensional-scale genius loci, having left their mark on the "flavor" or manifestation of the energy but no longer interacting with things on a merely humanoid scale; they have become "one with everything" to the extent that they are no longer capable of associating with anything in particular. In borderline cases, you can end up with a deity that is usually a diffuse cosmic phenomena, but can with effort focus their will on areas of special importance to their psyche, such as the homeworld of their original species. In other cases, usually extremely driven and focused individuals to start, they manage to retain enough individuality in the flow of cosmic power to become an incarnate god; usually weaker in total power, as they have let some of the power flow past them to retain their individuality, but capable of operating as a more traditional sentient but with vast powers. This doesn't mean they are conventionally sane, of course, whether or not they started that way; and some grow addicted to the rush of power and seek to conquer other, fallow dimensions.

In other cases, the power is unlocked by a group, who share in the flood; in some cases, their individuality is largely lost, resulting in what is basically a single cosmic entity but with disparate personalities or aspects depending on which of the original personality shards of the composite entity is at the fore at any given time. More commonly, whether due to careful planning or in desperate self-defense under the deluge of power, each individual focuses on what makes them different and what they are good at; this tends to result in pantheons of deities with powers and abilities organized into spheres (god of war, goddess of nature, etc.). Depending on the balance of the initial group, they may be well-matched or have considerably disparate power levels.

In a few comparatively rare cases, an entire species or other large group manages to unlock the power; thus distributed, the effects are less "godlike" and more "planet of hats", where you end up with an entire race of beings with thematic hereditary powers that defy ordinary physics.

In the case of CoH "Primal" Earth, it appears that all humans have the latent ability to tap into this force, but require some special focus or ritual to "wake up" their access to power. (Speculative: It is at least possible that this is the result of all modern humans having at least some genetic heritage from the original gods and / or archmagi). There are references to early gods of considerable power, and the discovery by humans of "magic" (a far more potent force than what is referred to as such today) is probably the first systematic way of humans tapping into the force. For whatever reason, the thing that is special about Earth is that the dispersal of it tends to be cyclical; in most other cases, once a being / group gets hold of the power, they're set for eternity.

So, down to the modern day... the power had been largely untapped for quite some time, possibly due to being deliberately shut away. Esoteric martial artists, hermit mages, prophets of legend, and others may have been able to occasionally draw upon faint leaks of the power, but the unifying theme was that it took *some* sort of enormous focus, dedication, and ritual . The Well of Furies incident changed all that; with the floodgates tapped by multiple, largely unprepared individuals who lacked strong focus, most of the power rushed through or past them. The two openers, fighting to stay coherent in the rush of power, become self-stereotypes of the most iconic parts of their personalities; and those stereotypes proceed to color much of the energy unleashed; it is far easier to tap into the power if you at some level "buy in" to the ideology of Statesman or Lord Recluse.

The released energy is no only far more freely available, but is somewhat "pre-formatted" not only for humans of skill, but with a certain set of psychological memes embedded including a tendency to solve problems via adventure and force, due to the influence of the openers. Currently, one can tap into the power via several different routes: the single-minded inventiveness of the engineer with unorthodox ideas, the zen focus of a superior martial artist, the trauma of an unusual accident, primal reveling in one's mixed-species genetic heritage, and so forth. At an underlying level, the power is from the same well, but the methods used to access it shapes and colors the forms it can take; and the mentality of the user (conscious or not) is a strong determining force (with the mentality of Statesman and Lord Recluse lurking as a hidden influence, like the watermark on a seemingly blank sheet of paper).

Controlling the power takes both skill and probably some sort of metaphysical capacity; people develop at different rates, but it seems that in general most humans have approximately the same underlying maximum power draw available to them. With considerable effort some can make better use of the power than others, whether through long skill, economic application, or careful management of usefully-cumulative effects; but in general most people's ultimate potential is similar; and it doesn't really matter much what sort of focus (martial arts, guns, firebolts, super strength) they have used as their lever and theme for their power.

The new Incarnate system is going to be about those individuals who, by whatever means, break through or around the "normal" human limitations on access to power, and find ways to call upon more power than has recently been available.

tl;dr: A "natural" character's martial arts training is as much a power-access ritual as a "magical" character's spells or a "tech" character's engineering diagrams. Everyone draws on the same force of underlying power and gets access to about the same amount of it, but the ways it manifests are determined by the ways it was accessed. Incarnates will be those who can go beyond those limits.

"Quag Keep", Andre Norton, 1979; was the first D&D novel and has been mined for ideas / ripped off so many times that many of the folks today don't even realize the origins.

As for the character reactions, it would vary wildly:
* "You left me just standing there waiting for you in a train station! FOR ALMOST FOUR MONTHS! I could have been out fighting soul-sucking demons knee-deep in sewage! ... ... OK, point taken; could you at least abandon me in the university next time so that I've got something to read?"

* "I do not know which is more significant, that you exist as part of the decadent and corrupt First World and were at least indirectly responsible for the deaths of my family; or that you have given me astounding powers and encouraged me to use them to fight for what I believe in. Augh! Difficult moral choices again, it's all your fault! Can I fall back on just setting you on fire? No, I see... so the moral lesson here is that there *are* forces beyond even the fool Statesman and the weakling Recluse, that I cannot simply cleanse with fire. Be assured that I will be thinking about this while you sleep."

* "Hi-iiii! (bounces, waves frantically) I want a pony! No, a unicorn! That sparkles! A magical sparkling unicorn with fairy wings that gores people so I can watch them twist in agony on its shining golden horn and call out gurglingly for the release of death which never comes! More pain is more sparkles for me, and the more I sparkle the more fun I have! ... No unicorns? Not even a pony. So sad. (sniffle) Can... can I at least have some more sparklies? Ooohh, orbiting swirly sparklies next week? For meee?! OK! Thaaaaaaaank youuuuu! "

* "Your intervention has lifted me out of a world that, below the layers of petty criminals, bandits, and disorganized monsters, is in a desperate struggle against almost-incomprehensible evil forces. Powered by giant ancient crystals, they summon towering, hideous demons and wield magics most foul. From this, for my years of toil, hardship and fighting, you have brought me into a brave new world, a shining paragon, which... below the surface of petty crime is in a desperate struggle against evil forces with giant crystals, hideous demons, foul magic, et cetera. Gee, thanks. At least I don't have to pay for arrows here. And donuts, those are nice I guess, better than living on jerky all the time; and I have some much snappier looking outfits. Stealth is easier, the pouch of infinite trip mines very handy and some days hilarious... no ugly hat! OK, on balance, it's an improvement, but next time, could you possibly take me someplace a bit less doomed?"

This does not match my observation. True level 31 toon, SSK'd to a true level 40 toon for a SK level of 39, was getting no actual costume powers at all although the costume-count badge counter (Fashionable, etc.) was going up. Zones were mostly Brickstown with some Founder's Falls, both are 30-40 ToT zones. The true 40 was getting actual costumes. At other points the team SSK level was 37-ish, still no actual costumes.

The following night, being the team leader and not SSK'd, the same toon in the same zone (Brickstown) had no problem getting actual costumes.

Google "Throat Stab". There's a major MMO that's been out longer than CoH and is roughly ten times as popular, that has an enemy class with a power that reduces the target's HP to 5%, *and* completely resets all accumulated hate on that target. Curing also creates major hate in that MMO, so you've got a situation where your main tank is critically injured but being ignored, with the enemy probably going after whoever is the top damage dealers, frequently with far lower defenses and HP. If the tank grabs hate too quickly, they'll get taken down by one of the foe's more mundane but still dangerous attacks; if the healer cures either the tank or the unfortunate DD too heavily (especially with AoE cures, which generate far more hate per HP cured) they'll end up with too much hate and be the new priority target themselves (and they're usually quite squishy), and the DDs are dying under the onslaught. Oh, and if you are KO'd there's a 5-minute window where you're basically useless, and most of the actually difficult boss fights are timed.

Yet this isn't considered a terribly big deal; the team has to pay basic attention, use their abilities wisely rather than just banging on keys as things recharge, and in general actually be a team. Tactics used include such things as having a backup tank (or more commonly a DD that can tank for short periods), use of disposable pets as fake tanks / damage soaks that can be recast far quicker than a fallen PC can be brought back in, careful hate juggling so that the foe wastes time switching targets amongst PCs that can take a few hits but not the full attention of the foe, strategic use of limited-use, limited-time special abilities (the Tier 9 "god mode" equivalent sorts of powers only recharge every 2 hours, so you have to be very sure when you want to use them), battle space management (some DDs can run away very effectively, causing the foe to waste time or actually fail attacks), and so on.

This is just one tiny example of the sort of more interesting fight that other MMOs have. I enjoy CoH for a lot of reasons, but the very small number of interesting fights that go differently than all the other fights is one of its bigger disadvantages IMO.