Positron

We couldn't have done it without you guys and gals. The players are the true secret to our continued success!

Hey guys,

Baryonyx has written up a great post addressing several of your concerns, but we only finished finalizing the wording moments ago. We understand how important this is to you so we wanted to make the post as clear as we could in the areas we are talking about. It's now in the hands of Zwill and the OCR department for translating before we post it (and it's not small), unfortunately it won't get up today.

Suffice it to say there are changes coming to give you guys a better reward experience in the next major patch.

We hope to continue to add to the game things you can purchase with Astral and Empyrean merits as well.

There is plenty of time before the Trial starts to set up strategies/communicate/talk about the weather, before you actually begin.

Since the UI shows both Siege and Nightstar's health bars (and you can click either health bar to immediately target them), coordinating the "10 seconds" shouldn't be a monumental task. Difficult? Possibly, but by no means impossible.

I'll clarify here for a little perspective.

A league is up to 6 TEAMS of 8 character each team, total of 48 characters.

Most (but not all) team-wide buffs/powers remain team-wide, i.e. they only affect the characters who are on your team within the league.

In Incarnate Trials, Temp Powers are disabled as well (we may let a sub-set of temp powers work, but we're still testing).

The current set of Incarnate Trials max out at 24 characters in the League. 48 character Leagues are still possible for things like Hami and Mothership raid coordination.

During the beta and internally, I've seen Leagues "missing vital roles" do just fine in completing the trials. I'm not saying that having those roles fills won't make it easier. Just like anything else in CoH, difficulty can be mitigated significantly with specific team/league make-up. This is no different than how the rest of the game works.

Time:Reward and Risk:Reward are both things that are examined when dealing with an MMO. It's not all Risk:Reward, since there are a wide variety of character types, some of which mitigate risk far better than others.

I can't comment about the specific powers in this thread, but I can comment on the names we picked.

One of my driving goals was to not repeat a "first letter" so players would be able to abbreviate Incarnate Slots without duplication (like we deal with with Skyway City, Steel Canyon and Siren's Call).

There has been some scarily accurate, as well as wildly inaccurate, predictions in this post.

Nice to see we hit a couple things the players are dreaming about. Sad we can't bring them everything they want.

DR is a tool that gives a lot more flexibility to designers when they are creating powerful effects. Without it, PVP would just come down to who can buff the fastest to get off their killing blow.

I understand a hatred towards DR, as it really does monkeywrench a lot of builds, but it does give the Powers team a lot more flexibility in what they are allowed to create.

I got my wife the Keurig coffee maker she wanted. Worked wonders so far. Once she runs out of K-cups I might need to exit the map though.

Hey guys,

We generally do a "state of the game" address around the anniversary mark for the game (April 28th), and I like to call the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas the "dead time" of communication because everyone is trying to cram 5 weeks of work into 3.

Yes, we have all been incredibly busy working on I20 and beyond. Those in the I20 Pre-Beta have seen more of us in their private area of the forums than the rest of the forums have, and that's been noted by you guys (as evidenced by this thread). In 2011 we'll try to do a better job in posting outside of the "private" areas as we want to remain visible and communicative.

That said, the studio is off next week (well, there will still be board moderation), so there won't be much posting ANYWHERE from the devs for a week or so.

Have a great holiday!

Goodbye Floyd, I know we're all going to miss you.

Now, to figure out how these dang powers spreadsheets work.

I'd love to have one of these on my desk!

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to pop in here while Melissa is out on vacation (early!) and wish you all a happy whatever-holiday-you-celebrate. (See what I did there?)

This year has been an amazing one for City of Heroes, with the release of Going Rogue and the addition of the alignment system and the new zones in Praetoria, to the issue 19 focus on the Incarnate System making your level 50's more powerful. I have to say I am happy that the Incarnate system seems to be having the exact effect we'd hoped for in the game, and I can only say it's going to get better when we release the Incarnate Trials in Issue 20!

Speaking of I20, the team is hard at work on this issue (and beyond!), we want to continue to bring you the BEST super-powered MMO around, and we'll continue to deliver content as long as you guys are willing to play through it. We've got some big plans for the next couple years of the game, so don't think we're going anywhere!

I think CoH has the BEST community in all of MMO-dom. You guys have given us such great feedback that we are able to deliver the kind of game that you like to play, and give us enough insight into your playstyles that we believe that we can even continue to surprise you with new systems like Going Rogue and Incarnates.

So once again, Happy Holidays, and I will see you all again in 2011!

Oh and apparently there is a picture of me that Ocho took today that will be posted later... I love the holidays, and they wanted a pic of me in my Santa hat. (Those of you who follow my Twitter got a sneak peak already).

During the Betas where we tested the Alpha Slot one piece of feedback that we received was that the Alpha Slot abilities do not work when you exemplar down, and the abilities themselves compensate for some Enhancements you may have on your character. These two things do not play well together, exemplaring down means using the Enhancements you have slotted, but it may not be generating the desired effect since you no longer have your Alpha ability running.

Our solution to this dilemma was to add in an unlockable third build, granted when characters unlock the Alpha slot. This gives the players the flexibility they have asked for in slotting their charactesr for exemplaring, as well as slotting them for Incarnate abilities and still including whatever they were using their second slot for (soloing, grouping, PvP, etc.) Unfortunately, this feature of the system slipped through the cracks and a patch note was never generated for it. It’s in there and works right now, you just might not have been fully aware. Using the third build is not an exploit or a bug, it’s working as intended by us.

Since you now have the potential for three builds, we’ll be granting a 3rd freespec with this issue on Wednesday December 15th.

Sorry for missing that patch note,

Matt Miller

Thanks to everyone who showed up. Some excellent bugs/issues were discussed and found.