PumBumbler

I can't remember if this still holds true, but we always wait for everyone to come into the mish before completing the TF as a matter of form.

I *think* currently you will still get the merit rewards if you are online and on the team and the TF completes. Not sure about the rest (badges, mish completion bonus).

If you are offline or on a different toon when the TF completes you will get no rewards. Only xp if you were level pacted but that's it.

If you DC'd you might still be considered online if the server didn't disconnect you. Once I DC'd for about 20 minutes but my toon didn't get kicked offline. Too bad I was leading a TF at the time and no one was sure what happened to me.

Not sure about that sister psyche person, they should have gotten a merit reward but I'd have to check to see if you get rewards outside the mission on TF completion by running a quick KHTF or something.

Most hoarders won't release things onto the market, the behaviour you are describing is closer to a marketeer (buy low, sell high). Hoarders don't hoard when it's low and wait to sell...they just hoard.

Otherwise during the big influence spike (MM exploit) you'd have seen hoarders dumping their stocks furiously to fill the market demands. It is not very logical but who said anyone had to be reasonable on the interwebs?

Edit: before there was a market in this game, Hamis still existed. There were/are still people with bases full of HamiOs even though they didn't inflate in value. They were rare and considered valuable. That was pretty much enough incentive for some people to hoard them.

If you were to defeat 1,750 mobs, the odds are good that you'll get *some* drop that will be close to (if not more than) the value of the rare salvage you were looking for. Rich players tend to stay rich.

Not necessarily true. The Rikti ships aren't of interplanetary origin but that doesn't mean that they can't hide out in space. You would presume that the ships have some kind of space going capability because there's no need to build them so large for interdimensional travel.

The LGTF needs 8 people to start it. Finishable by 6 would be nice but technically 8 players should be the minimum.

FWIW, the Cavern of Transcendence trial needs 8 players to simultaneously click glowies but it is generally a much faster trial, although I remember the first time I did it years ago we finished with 30 seconds to spare (a 90 minute time limit). >.>

Welcome to the internet.

You said it right there. Unless Conserve Power is perma, you will see a benefit from Speed Boost. No one said you're doing it wrong, but to deny that you will see _any_ benefit from having +recharge is false.

Even moving from mob to mob with +run speed will up your mobs defeated per minute, presuming you can control your toon's movement in tighter spots.

If all you're doing is spamming your attack chain then you should consider doing a couple of more things to help the team. Besides, even things like Eye of the Magus and other accolades are not available instantly no matter how much recharge you have natively. Veteran Teleport, Mission Teleport are other powers with extremely long recharge timers that benefit from +recharge powers such as Speed Boost.

Speed boost != Stamina. For someone to bring up flaws of logic and use such a poor analogy boggles the mind.

People arguing against the merits of +recharge and +end for the teammates are really just complaining that they don't like the +run speed aspect of it.

People who are complaining about the short duration of the boost are complaining about the tediousness of having to buff 'all the time'.

Bottom line is that some people don't like SB, but a large portion of the people like it and find utility in all of its aspects as well. If you don't like it you don't have to take it, and asking someone not to buff you with it is your right as well. Just remember that most people will raise an eyebrow because of it.

You know who I blame for this.

Whoooooosh!

If you look at Castle's post, it pretty much shows that the process is kinda messed. Castle as a person and as a programmer is doing his job, but in many ways there doesn't seem to be any process flow to ensure that the problems we see aren't minimized (which is the part that vexes me).

As a bug, it seems pretty simple for him to fix, but there doesn't seem to be a final design doc in which he needs to compare it with. This is probably related to the issues that people are complaining about regarding incomplete patch notes. The devs aren't reporting complete patch issues because there doesn't seem to be a central repository for it, and issues like this are the result.

Additionally it also appears that the issue is considered fixed when the developer (Castle in this case) checks in the changes. There doesn't appear to be any further follow up on the bug, how it got there in the first place, or any further (mandated) testing.

You can bag on Castle for that as a representative of the company, but to blame him for the structural/managerial failings of the system is a bit of a stretch.

Penny Yin can be saved by using the veteran teleport power right to the door, then everyone jumping the CWK. Letting her die doesn't save any time since she is actually kinda tough.

Infernia has to die because she talks way to much. Glacia just gets caught in the crossfire. Otherwise you'd have to lead both of them out (one of which who refuses to move until her diatribe is finished), rescue 6 hostages on a huge map filled with drones and then defeat an AV. Sorry. But only 1 mission needs to be failed. Probably saves about 10-15 minutes.

The zone hamidon encounter doesn't work that way though. Once the Hamidon nucleus is down the mitos go boom.

Even the original hamidon encounter worked that way. I remember we had a yellow dawn (full bloom) and we killed him just as the bloom wiped most of the raid. It was quite epic.

You should be neg repped for being a Healing Arrow denier. After all, it worked when Manti shot Statesman. Um then again, it was kinda the long way around to healing.

Thank you.

I'm not disagreeing with you, my post was a reply to someone asking if it was impossible to finish without a holder. It is not impossible, but it also not fun.

Myriad, the green mitos have super high damage resistances if they are not held. Holding them drops their resistances so they can be defeated much faster.

Basically Castle's patch to fix the i17 LGTF issue is not really a fix, since overcoming the mito hold barrier with an 8 person team is simply not worth the effort as opposed to spamming huge damage and temp powers instead.

And people are upset because we again have tweaks being made to the game without any patch notes or testing process. Some people take hours to get to the 'weakened hamidon' mission and then hit a brick wall. On test, that's acceptable. On live, that's really unfair.

The LGTF is only one of two cross faction TF/SFs in the game, so basically for high end content it pretty much limits cross faction playing to ITFs and ship raids now.

No, given enough damage you can overcome the greens without holding them, although I am not certain of this since this patch. We were able to finish the LGTF in i17 before this patch by nuking/shivs/HVAS etc. to defeat the Hamidon and then the remaining greens (blues and yellows down already).

Just remember that the first green is always the hardest to defeat since the other greens are healing it. It is at this point where you need the most buffs/damage/pets to be working.

As you defeat more greens it becomes a little easier, unless your buffs and pets wear out before you can overcome all the greens.

They become your cellphone provider.

Generally a fix should be to put it back to where it was before it was broken. "Matching the original design" isn't a good idea since I would suspect that the original spec got tweaked after a whole bunch of QA.

Again, I would like stress that fixes like this could have been caught by a simple heads up on test, so that players could go over things and see if they work before it hits live.

Something like: "Hey I patched the Green Mitos so they aren't perma unholdable anymore but they don't work like before i17 went live. Anyone care to check the game balance on it?"

Was there any grumbling from other people within Paragon Studios about the balance of the LGTF? Normally a task force has the most challenging mission last but they way this is working now makes the Hamidon encounter the most difficult and the Honoree a wimp in comparison.

Not in the LGTF. It's always been that the team has to defeat the mitos as well as hami. We powered through it before this patch but it wasn't very pretty nor fun, and it was a regular 20 min LGtf team so we were lucky to have a lot of zone hami leaders on our team.

With the current patch this TF will be harder than the LRSF.

CoX definitely has the ability to survive for a long time past 2010. The question that everyone is asking is, does it have the ability to thrive?

The answer to that question is probably not likely- in its current form. This is my take on it. It's not scientific and it has no numbers other than my gut feeling. It is anti-Arcana, if you will.

The market conditions that existed 6 years ago are very different from today, so many of the steps being taken are ones out of necessity, and some are fairly obvious.

The MMO market tends to be a zero sum game. By this I mean there are very few players who play many MMOs at once, or who are hardcore into multiple MMOs at any given time. I don't think it is common to see many MMO players who will subscribe long term to more than 2 MMOs. Many players have only chosen 1 MMO to play. This is in contrast to non-MMOs where games are played and then put down for the next latest game.

This means that in order to get MMO players to play this game, you will be required to get them to reduce or stop playing their other MMO game (conquest sales). The problem with conquest sales is entrenchment...players are invested in their toons and of course their friendship base, so it takes a lot to get them to switch, so usually it's the screw ups of the other company that causes enough rage quitting to get groups of players to come over.

The question is how to market to the other MMO players over a sustained period to 'pick them off' if they fall out of love with the other games. Of course, the biggest screw up is if the other MMO closes its doors.

MMOs that fall off the leading edge tend not to 'bounce back'. The two big killers to MMOs are boredom and ragequitting. Big changes to the game lend themselves to people being surprised and angered by seemingly unnecessary changes. This is probably the area where I've found this game to have its biggest failing. This area is all about change management. From ED to troller nerfs to PvP changes, there should have been someone who was dedicated to (and trained in) making sure the player base was groomed to accept those changes so the least impact was made upon them. Change management is really an area that the devs and community representatives did not understand and fumbled their way through. Things are better now but not necessarily by design. Once someone is gone for n months, it is rare that they will come back. Recovery of players is therefore then a slow recovery.

Keeping players from being bored is the other issue, but that can be rectified two ways. Content and PvP. Those two are well trodden paths so I won't even bother adding my two cents.

One of the issues people cite is the economy. In many ways it does show up in the numbers but just remember that every MMO in this market labours under the same conditions. Companies can still thrive in a recession. The smarter ones will do better than the others.

Marketing is a big factor in the whole d000m scenario, but if people are hesitant to return, and the market is saturated, standard selling just won't be effective in this case. Unless there is some internet phenomena (underground marketing) that will get the attention of millions of people, it will still be a slow climb back.

The simplest fact of the matter is that no matter how much the internet has changed things, gaming sales are still dominated by retailers. This means that placement within retail shops is paramount to getting noticed and generating numbers.

Expansion packs aren't bad, but everyone is always excited when a new game comes out...ergo CoH 2. Therefore it is fairly evident that in order to make this franchise successful it will be necessary to start over again, as it were. The trick is to keep everyone who is here entertained enough to stay on to guarantee they switch over to the new game and then have a chance to draw in everyone else who had previously quit or net new players.