Noxilicious

Unfortunately for you there is hardly a concrete value for "fewest dead people". In the case of an open civil war between Praetoria's enforcers the Resistance members, the casualties would sky-rocket on both sides.

You either get in and cover your hands in blood or you watch on the sidelines, waiting for a stray bullet to reach you.

For what it's worth I'm in Germany and I'm playing on the US servers just fine. As long as you can pay your subscription fees, you can still play the game.

The forums weren't down per sé. All EU accounts were still able to post just fine, but the US accounts couldn't log in anymore.

That said, like some of the other people here, I started to panic when I read the wrong password message and feared I got hacked. Now I know that computers are powered by witchcraft and unforeseen stuff like that happens, but I'm still pretty annoyed at Paragon Studio that it took them this long to make a newspost on their website about it, letting some of us remain in a hacker-panic.

Uh, I'm not the one who asked for suggestions, I'm just someone who made a suggestion. He said he didn't have any idea so far for a costume so I threw something together.

So using the character creator I tried to come up with a design for Drake. Granted, I suck as a chracter designer, but I figured I might as well give it a shot.



Considering his backstory as an underground fighter who lost his family, I imagine he'd neither have the means for a really fancy outfit nor the motivation for colourful spandex.

I went with a tanktop because it allows you to see that the arms aren't part of a costume, but directly attached to his body as well as his chiseled physique he has as a successful underground fighter. The worker boots I think do a nice job of evoking the image of a boxer's boots, so that's a hint towards his past.

Not exactly a stellar job, but hey.

He sounds like a Jax to me.

Okay, with the Mortal Kombat reference out of the way, I consulted my trusty thesaurus, and for revenge, I found Counterblow. I personally find that neatly encapsulates both the revenge theme against the Family as well as his backstory as a cage-match fighter.

Another one I came up is Payback Pugilist and while I like that for the alliteration, I'm not sure how much the term Pugilist fits a guy like your character.

I tend to form PuGs more than I join them, and as a team leader I always look for people set to Looking For Any and Looking For Team.

The problem is just that there's about five, maybe ten people set to that in the entire range of 1-50 when there's fifty readily available in my level range set to Not Looking, and it's not even because they aren't looking but just because some of them forgot or don't even know about search tags.

Not Looking can mean Not Looking. It can also mean Currently Looking, it can mean Might Join If I Get A Tell, or Don't Even Ask Me Shut Up. Not Looking is the default setting and most people don't care to change it, so in the end it stopped being Not Looking a long time ago.

As a result, maybe one or two members of my teams tend to be picked from the Looking For Any/Team crowd, but the rest tend to be picked from the Not Looking list.

Oooooh! So that's what Tip mission are!

Never let it be said the devs never listen to their players. How often did people request to see story arcs you get from street-sweeping? I swear there was a thread for it every couple of months.

Holland also has nude cyclists!

Whatever happened to that, uh, promotional video for Holland, anyway?

I'm with Techbot here.

To me, personally, hunts tend to be one of the least fun parts of the game. In the case of the Numina TF, it feels like it's 60% hunt missions. Not fun for me.

And while that is just taste, hunts, especially zone specific hunts, always have the danger of being interrupted by zombies or Rikti. It happened to my first Numina, and we weren't even playing on a Rikti Weekend or Halloween.

Most of all, though, the Numina hunt is just... boring. Hunting down enemies in the 1-35 range is hardly exciting when you're already 40. It gives you absolutely nothing.

Now, as far as I can tell, the purpose of the Hunt of Doom is a sort of review of what your hero did. Hey, look at all the places your hero has been! Look at how far you've come! Don't you see how much you progressed to get here?

So yes, I am all for cutting the Hunt of Doom, but if you want to preserve its spirit, for the lack of a better term, you should find another way of underlining this review of your hero's progress. Maybe it's a mission where all those villains banded together to take their revenge on you, so you have huge mobs of level 5 Hellions at first, but as you progress, you meet higher level baddies in smaller mobs until at the end you fight standard-size level 40 mobs.

That way you can still see how much stronger you got since the days of Hellion-busting, but now they come for you instead of having a level 40 player hunt down level 1 mobs for some contrived reason.

Noooo, Germany!

My heart is so broken.

Still, Spain proved to be better. Grats to you, Spain.

The Jade Spider appears during the Mender Silos Task Force as an AV and in the Mender Silos Strike Force as an ally.

The Jade Spider is pretty cheaty. At first it's just another psionic AV, but when you "beat" it it comes back with full health, one level higher, and with a psionic damage aura that's so huge even Blasters at the edge of their attack range get hurt. You're gonna need plenty of oranges and purples to take that one on without team-wiping repeatedly.

And my axe

Is there any reason the last mission only has an EB? That seems rather unusual for a mid-level TF.

I'll be talking about these questions as a team leader red-side.

Usually I don't set rules so much as guidelines. The first guideline is "everybody fights". What this means in clearer terms is that if a Brute separates from the team to fight another mob I'm cool with it, assuming it's not somehow putting the rest of the team in jeopardy a lot. If a Stalker separates from the team to "scout ahead", I consider it leeching off of the team's XP, and I'd send him a tell asking him to join the team and contribute to the combat. If he doesn't, I'd kick him (this has yet to happen). If a Corruptor decides to completely neglect his Primary in favour of his Secondary, I may not agree with his playstyle, but I still consider using your Secondary as contributing to combat and he gets to stay and I won't say a thing.

There's an exception to that guideline, though, in that if we get a mission where we need to hunt glowies or hostages in an outdoor instances, one team member can scout ahead so we spend less time on a wild goose chase.

And that's basically it for most cases. If you fight, I generally don't have any orders to give. You click your powers and I am happy.

As for the other cases, well, the most common case where I actually do set a rule for the team to follow are Mayhem missions. I feel many players are more used with Safeguard missions where rushing towards the bank is a good strategy, and they want to do the same in Mayhem missions. I make it explicitly clear, though, that you need to stay with the team and fight your way to the bank with the team, though. This is mostly because rushing to the bank will trigger a lot of Longbow ambushes which may not be too huge a problem for higher levels, but especially in the lower levels that can be devastating. Basically, you rush ahead, you spawn ambushes, and you are therefore a liability to the team.

Oh, also, I wouldn't call this exactly a rule, but when I'm forming a Strike Force, I make it explicitly clear that we will not speedrun or stealth any missions, but fight our way through. I don't do that so much though because I want to have a rule to enforce, but because a Strike Force team needs to last for a while, so I consider it important everyone knows what kind of flavour of Strike Force we are talking about.

But yeah, that's the gist of it. I like keeping rules and guidelines as scarce as possible, but sometimes they just tend to be needed. More than that, though, it's important for team leaders to be communicative. That's not to say they need to set those rules or guidelines, but being told what to expect next is always nice. Silence is golden, but it's also makes for horribly weak armor and it's heavy so it slows the team down.

Communication is key to a good team.

Isn't that a pretty common bug, actually? Sometimes people get truckloads of vet rewards. A buddy of mine got six years worth of vet rewards after playing only two years.

So yes, it's a bug, one that the devs don't seem too inclined to fix at this point, so consider yourself lucky.

While we're on that subject, in Paragon City, the Kronos Titan locates you instead.

Personally, I find this game doesn't have a lot of varying things to do, but what it lets you do is awesome. In practice this means many may get burned out quick, but many also eventually return and have fun again.

I get the impression that's kinda where you fit in. There's nothing wrong with that, either. You play while you have fun, you stop when things get boring, and you play again when the CoH bug bites.

As for making things more social, in my experience (being that I purely play on the Virtue server), this game has a lot of followers but not many leaders. Coupled with the fact that the game is heavily instance-based, if you simply wait for a team to recruit you, you may either get lucky and get a team quick or you might wait forever and end up thinking the game is dead.

But once you start throwing together teams yourself, you'll find there are tons of people willing to team up with you.

I generally make use of a three-point assault. First I make use of global channels dedicated to finding and forming teams. About every server has a dedicated teaming global channel. On Virtue I use Virtue LFG Alpha, but what the ones for other servers are called, I do not know. You'd have to check the appropriate server forum for that.

Then I hit a level-appropriate zone and broadcast that I'm forming a team at level X and that you can feel free to send me a tell if you wanna join. This usually doesn't net you as many people as global channels as people don't see broadcasts in mission instances and there's little reason not to do mission instances.

Lastly, I use the team find feature. In case you don't know how to find it, you need to click on Team on your chatbox, then Find. Anyway, what I do there is, I first set it to look for people who turned the Looking For Anything and Looking For Team flags on and hit search. Then I send tells to people five levels above me (the new Super Sidekick feature lets people keep powers up to five levels above what they're exemplared to) and ten levels below me asking if they wanna join my level X team. Then I set to looking for people with the Not Looking flag and look again for people five levels above or ten below mine and send tells.

Why do I look for people who are set to Not Looking? It's the default setting and most people either don't know about looking flags or don't care to set them. Many of them are actually happy to join your team.

Reading about my three-point Global Channel-Broadcast-Tells method probably takes as long as forming a team of four to eight people in the game.

As for social aspects outside of beating up villains, there's also global channels dedicated to chitchat, often dedicated to a server. Virtue's chitchat channel is Virtue United, for example.

Well, I can see that reasoning. It'd be a mechanic I'd never use myself, though, so as long as it doesn't affect me negatively, I'd just be ambivalent towards it.

Well, I'm glad that BABs is only in charge of animation, then, because needless player punishments was the reason I quit Final Fantasy XI before I really started. Having a game take away stuff from me is a sure-fire way to make me needlessly angry at it.