Quinch

Hmm. Flashbacking to the second arc does knock you back down to Lv25, despite what the crystal says - the Wiki apparently already has this bug documented. On the other hand, what about Skippy? Will I have to run his entire arc again for a chance to get the souvenir?

Bit of weirdness here - I just finished Mercedes' first arc, the Dirge of Chaos. Now, being solidly Lv29 thanks to the XP handbrake, I was ever so slightly surprised by the sudden stop after the arc was completed. The Magic Man arc... isn't. She just tells me to bugoff.

So, I drop a portal and swing by Ouroboros to see what level range the arcs are, exactly. And... they're Lv25-29. And listed and available for my Lv29 character, along with all other arcs in that range.

What. The hell?

Edit; also, is it normal not to have an arc flag as complete, souvenir and all, if you fail the last mission? Referring to Skippy's infamous 30 arc.

In my quest for the Perfect Layout, I've delved into poking with wdw_load and chat_load commands. The idea is to have an "active" layout, mostly visible but with all the chat tabs in plain sight so I can easily notice any new messages, and a review layout where all the chat tabs are expanded to cover the entire screen, and switch easily between the two with a click of a mouse. And... it works. Sort of.

The problem is, when I switch from the active layout to the review, and then back to the active, most of the chat windows have scrolled halfway up. This probably has to do with the fact that, when a chat window is {being} resized, the text is cropped from the bottom, rather than the top, but knowing that doesn't really help me enough to solve this.

Not noobish {though oddly capitalized}, but somewhat confusing.

You can save and load a costume at the tailor or the character creation screen. You can also give costume piece recipes to another character, though once they're crafted, the recipe disappears and the costume piece option is allotted to the character which crafted it.

Eh, that would only make it available to a select few. We need something constant.

Garielle, keep in mind that most of the influence now goes through the markets in form of salvage and recipe trade, and with the fact that IOs never expire, there's that much less need to spend influence on replacing them. You can play well enough with store-bought enhancements, but the financial step between generic enhancements and IOs keeps growing.

Adeon, the point is the balance between perceived needs - you don't really need that IO, but you want it. You don't really need a teleport to Striga Isle, but you want it anyway. The difference is that, with the latter, money is taken out of the system, making what money remains in it that much more valuable. And yeah, the exact exchange rate might need some tweaking until it settles on a balance between "worth the cost" and "can't buy everything".

Fulmens has done an analysis on the amount of inf bounght into the game by a non-AE farmer.

Yep, that's the first thread that popped up when I looked up "inflationary", and yeah, looks well written.

I don't see the idea of raising the market fees ending well - the primary purpose of the market seems to be the exchange of items between those who have them and those who want them, with influence simply being an intermediate facilitator and current fees being there to limit manipulations on behalf of the sellers {and an open market might work better, but that's a topic for another thread}. Cranking up the penalties for the market's use would just make it less used.

As for reducing influence gain from defeated enemies, it would cause major problems for casual players who don't want to play the market - I remember the pre-invention days where you were hard-pressed to even DO-out, let alone SO, and let me tell ya, it wasn't pretty.

Hmm. The prestige purchases might actually be a very good idea. The system seems completely unused to the best of my knowledge, but on the other hand, prestige is always in demand.

Can someone run this by me - influence to prestige rate is dropped from 500:1 to 100:1. That means one point of prestige per every hundred influence given to the exchange office. That makes the system more appealing to use, influence is removed from the system, but prestige is introduced instead.

Prestige is in turn used for supergroup building and, to minute extent, maintenance. But the thing is - bases, for the most part, don't do anything. Yes, you can outfit them with teleport pads, hospitals and empowerment stations, but when all is said and done, they are both status symbols and a simple, yet powerful "cool factor". Everybody wants their own secret lair, and even if it has little practical use, the appeal of a sandbox environment can't be overstated - hell, look at the Sims.

On the other hand, the rate of prestige gain is fixed throughout all levels. You gain the same amount for a minion whether you're at Lv1 or Lv50, which means that there is always a shortage of prestige, thus fueling the perceived need. Want more prestige? Well, there's those five hundred million influence burning a hole in your pocket, what could it hurt to pimp out your secret crib? Bam. Prestige in, influence out, and that much closer to a balancing point between "money" and "stuff".

I dunno. Anyone see any major flaws with this idea?

Since people would have more influence to throw around, it would be like monopoly money and they would be bidding much higher than they already are on the market.

Well aware of the problem, but since the influence simply changes hands, the inflation remains.

I'm not proposing increasing the merit rewards from story arcs - to do so would also make them viable farming targets. What I am proposing is a system of of merit micropayments - a minor amount of merits for minor tasks, rather than exclusively a system of larger amount for larger tasks.

City of Heroes has an inflationary economy. It's a fact of life - with each passing day, the amount of influence present in the game outweighs the amount of goods, either from influence earned by defeating enemies or selling drops to stores {also removing said goods from the system}. There are positive and negative sides to this - the positive is that, with influence more readily on hand, it's that much easier to purchase goods or services with a fixed price, such as, well, anything sold by NPCs. However, the downside is that any economic resource becomes less valuable the more available it is, the prices goods are offered for by other players steadily go up. Money becomes less and less valuable and accumulating enough to match the rising prices becomes more and more difficult. Thus there emerges a need to remove influence from the system, one that is not currently matched by the presently available sinks, i.e.

Enhancement stores
Hero Corps Field Analysts
Inspiration vendors
Influence to prestige conversion
Auction house fees
Crafting fees

Thus, I present this thread to offer your solutions for the inexorable pressure of in-game inflation.

don't use ragdoll physics for one reason or another.

I've seen {and put} enough baddies jammed in walls, doorframes and war walls not to want to experience it for myself.

Might be a coding nightmare, but it would add a level of variety. Besides, it's not like they would make less sense than the regular maps, which were created by a machine scanning the dreams of drugged M. C. Escher. Fact.

Honestly? Using the merits as a main, or even a significant method of slotting out your build is utterly impossible given the ratio of merit rewards vs cost. Most recipe merit prices are in three digits, while you'll be lucky to get even two from an average story arc, leaving task forces the main source of merits and thus pushing them into farm territory.

So... why not award merits for non-special content? Why not award merits for missions given by non-repeatable contacts? Because contacts don't have an infinite number of missions, it would be that much harder to farm them, and might even produce some minor appeal for generic "Defeat Sqrt(-1) Haberdasher" missions. The constant trickle of merits would encourage the use of contacts and put more control over the accessibility of wanted enhancements into the hands of the player.

So yeah -

/signed

Since side kicking is automatic now, what happens if you're lvl 45-47 and you team with 50's does that mean your automatically sked to 49 as well? slowing down XP between those levels? Or am I completely off in my thought process about that?

Your leveling rate will remain the same - you'll notice that a Lv1 character sidekicked to... any level, really, still gains levels at the rate of a Lv1 {Lv2, then Lv3 etc} character. Sidekicking doesn't change the experience gain or the requirements for the next level - it simply lets you fight at a higher level.

All of our own expieriences in this game only matter to us, as individual account holders. What someone else does in this game is not our place to pass judgement on, as long as they dont break the TOS/EULA. It's just not our buissness.

Okay. Fair warning. Rant ahead.

I'm a reasonable man. I'm not asking for much, not often at least. I know that different people have different tastes and sometimes, frequently in fact, they want things that I don't want, even if I really want them not to. But, you know, that's how it is, live and live, make love not war, pointy end toward the enemy and so forth. You play by yourself and you're your own master and it's nobody, and I mean nobody's business to tell you how to play.

But when you're on a team - when you're on my team, your [mass] belongs to your teammates. I don't care if two passive primaries and every single secondary except taunt make your tank steamroll when he's solo, if you're not the first in the fight or if you're the last man standing when your team is sucking dirt, then you're worthless. Your controller is going to hold that sorcerer, heal whoever's hitpoints are below two thirds, slow or immobilize the meelee enemies, throw fortitude around, bubble, speed boost and O2. If you really want, you can stand around with healing aura on autofire, but you can do it outside.

You can play any way you want to. You can farm, exploit, power level and brag how you got your fifty in six hours. Really, you can. I won't mind. But if you join my team with your Lv50 right after standing in Atlas asking "where is Orbos" and "What are enhancements?" then don't think for a minute, for a split second, that I will have any pity on you. In the gospel of Uncle Ben, with great power comes great responsibility - but if the responsibility of merely knowing your backside from a hole in the ground that much of a burden then, to me, you have no right not to be talked down to at all.

Well, of course heroes are tougher than villains. It takes a team of villains to take down a single hero, and a team of heroes to take down an arch-villain.

{jumps off the suddenly derailed thread}

Copypasta, please. Need a copypasta on aisle three!

Well, there could be a hidden hospital under the tavern as Weatherby mentioned - are there any established hero organizations that have an interest in keeping the Council contained that could be running it or at least keeping it supplied? The Longbow are preoccupied with Arachnos, I believe, maybe Hero Corps or Wyvern?

I don't see this happening anyway - the ridiculously overengineered character customization system is one of CoH's claims to fame, I honestly doubt they'd abandon it in favor of micropayments.

Villains? Who cares about villains?

And /unsigned. The longer the name, the less brandable it is.

Sure, it works for AoEs because those have variable ranges of actication, but how are you going to direct a cone when cones have a set cone length?

Simple - make it so the maximum distance the reticle extends is the length of the cone power. Even better, then you would also have a visual representation of coverage - if the reticle is behind a mob, it would be the sign that it's close enough to be caught in the effect.

You can get a cape at Lv20; talk to the City Representative in Atlas Park if you're playing a hero {also called blueside} or your initial contact, Kalinda or Burke, if you're playing a villain {AKA redside}.

There are no "crafting" skills - the game is remarkably non-loot-based. There is salvage and the invention system, but you can comfortably play with just the store-bought enhancements.

As for the Lost, you can find them in the Sewer Network, The Hollows, Kings Row {though in only a few places} and Skyway City.

Edit: And, of course, welcome to Paragon City.

Because it's remarkably easy to outlevel your contacts and the missions and story arcs they offer; the XP handbrake gives you the option of controlling your leveling speed.

/signed, if only because I want to scream "Surrender or pie!" at people.