TerraDraconis

Errr. Actually they are from our planet. Just not from our dimension. Now the race that changed them to the Rikti are aliens but we haven't ever seen them.

Well laid off is technically fired. It just a no fault kind of firing. Having been there and done that it is no fun. I note from his blog that he and 8 others all were let go at the same time. And reading his blog post there it sure looks like it was the laid off type.

The title warned me. Very nice.

Yes you can. Saw that answer in one of the dev answers. You have a server full up with 12 characters. Drop from VIP to Premium and choose not to unlock any of those 12 but instead unlock 2 new slots on that server. You are not forced to unlock a locked character.

Went and looked it up. quoting Positron on this topic.

This means that if you have 12 characters on a server. Drop to Premium, ignore those 12 and unlock new slots on that server that when you revert to premium you will have your original 12 unlocked again and the new characters locked. Just like I said in my post.

Oh and presumably Mr. Body has at at least 1 Vet year since Oct 2005 and probably more thus my knowing he will have more than 2 slots to play with when he drops to Premium.

you get 1 slot per vet year. 2 slots for just being Premium, and some other slots for various expansions he may have bought. So it wasn't an unreasonable assumption to say he had more that 2 slots to work with.

Wrong.

Lets say that you have 12 characters on oh Virtue. You have purchased no slots on virtue so the server is full. You drop free to play. Our original poster had a forum date from 2004 so they probably have 7 extra slots for that and 2 for I12 for a minimum of 11 slots available to unlock.

So now as a Premium player they want to play on Virtue. The first time they login they will see that all of their characters are greyed out and that they have 11 unlock tokens. They can use those tokens as they want on the existing 12 characters leaving 1 locked or they could unlock say 6 of them and open up 5 empty slots for new characters on virtue.

When they came back to VIP they would be confronted with options if they had left 6 characters locked and created 5 more. Because as a VIP character they never unlocked any more slots on Virtue. So the server would require them to pick 12 of the existing 17 characters to unlock.

So in summary you can use your unlock tokens to unlock either an existing character or an empty slot. The new system simply treats a VIP as having 12 slots always unlocked on each server.

Yes this. I have done a few ITrials and I'm pretty certain that I spent at least 2 times as long standing around and waiting for the trials to start as I did actually running trials. And as noted there is nothing you can do while waiting except sit there bored.

Actually it's not.

Endgame in every single other game out there consists of either endless farming or grinding 1 or 2 raids over and over and over until the next 5 - 10 levels get released then you rush up to the new farms and raids and repeat.

As far as I can tell that is all that any game has for endgame.

What are you expecting an endgame to be that is different?

I rather hope not. I would love so see solo access opening up soonish. Personally I'm not a fan of doing trials and have been suffering through them because I'm impatient and would like the new incarnate stuff. But I'm not a huge fan of playing them.

I'm not certain if the solo material would happen in I21 simply because of the conversion to Freedom. I would hope that if we don't see anything by then then I22 would have solo Incarnate material. Personally I would be thrilled if I21 had solo Incarnate stuff that could earn threads/and both types of merits. But we will see.

BINGO!

What a lot of people complaining about the trials and lack of other content are not thinking about is the big pictures. IE what is going on in the overall game development.

Hmm, lets see, we have a new system that has no extra material to play. Well then it needs fleshed out. So that means that a number of incarnate trials are planned and added to give multiple things to do with well being an incarnate. [Note the devs have stated that they have plans for solo incarnate stuff but that it will take time.]

At the same time this is happening and Incarnates go live the devs are working in the background on converting to the hybrid F2P model for issue 21. They have indicated that there will be a bunch of low level changes to accommodate an influx of new players. So the mission developers have been focused on fixing missions and adding material for that. Not on adding new general missions/arc from I19 - I20.

What does that leave the devs releasing a lot of during that time? Hmm, lets see, oh I know Incarnate Trials. ::sheesh:: It is amazing how people can react to things with only a tiny narrow focus and complain about it with no idea of the bigger picture.

So yes I would expect that with I21 and on we will see more non trial stuff appearing. Because they won't be diverted with building COH:Freedom in the background. That wasn't a small simple 5 minute project and I don't know why people imagine that it is that easy to do. You can't just declare a game F2P and go, there are massive amounts of work to convert systems to a hybrid model.

Given the shear amount of things changing in I21 figuring that the Closed Beta might run long isn't really going out on a limb. Really it's the first chance the devs will have to show off how they made the change to Freedom and based on some past closed beta's they may chose to go back to the drawing board. Usually there are 2 or 3 systems in a closed beta that the devs are not certain of and indications are that they often have an alternate idea on how something could work that can be implemented.

So yes while closed beta started last week and based on betas that ran smoothly the minimum time we could see it out would be late august. If they run into a need to make changes it could easily streatch into September and wind up released in late September/early October.

If we are playing the guessing game then I'll guess early September. But that is a wild guess based on experience. A solid safe bet is to say it should be out by October. ::Shrug::

I've been having solid problems with mapservering since I6. I could work around it by putting my computer in my routers DMZ. This was clearly a problem on my end with my router.

The netgear router I had finally died about 3 months ago and I had to buy a new one. Guess what? I haven't had a mapserver problem with COX since then. Not one.

Since there isn't an increase in complaints about mapserver error since I18 you may want to consider that your modem or router may be failing and need to be replaced. Mapserver errors seem to be a distinct symptom of that kind user hardware failure.

From comments they appear to be aiming for October, but given that it isn't out of beta it could be longer before it gets released.

That of course makes perfect sense which is why so many people apparently can't see it. ::sigh::

I mean it isn't like the examples posted at the start of this thread don't include an example bundle. IE the bundled magic set costumes for 400. If they are doing that then it sort of makes sense that they will offer the entire magic bundle for oh 700 - 800PP.

You could in the beta but that appears to have gone away before it went live. You can change Astral and or Emperion merits into shards. I think it was astral.

No from what I can see you can do one of the following.

A) Spend Paragon Points to unlock an AT such as Mastermind.
B) Wait until you have reached the appropriate Paragon Rewards Tier. Tier 5 for Masterminds and get it for free.

So if you are bouncing in and out regularly between Premium and VIP you might go ahead and spend $5 - $10 to have constant access to the AT. But if you are subscribed and expect to stay subscribed you can just wait for it to automatically be unlocked and then if you are poor and have to drop back to Premium you will just have it.

Ehh, From various things the devs have posted the new Vet Reward system is more complex and more free form than the old one. IE I have tonnes of stuff from the existing vet rewards that I probably will never use.

So the new system works something like this.

Each month you are subscribed as a VIP you earn 1 Paragon Reward Token.

These tokens have a counter so if you have earned 6 and spent 6 the system still knows you have earned 6.

At various levels of total tokens earned you gain automatic benefits. For example the Tier 5 reward at around 3 years [probably 33 tokens] is unlocking the Master Mind class permanently on your account without the need to spend any Paragon Points or reward tokens to do so.

So we know that we earn tokens that can be cashed in for various rewards. We don't know what the individual rewards are yet.

We know that there is a second stage of the Paragon Rewards system where having earned a certain number of tokens you gain automatic benefits. These are called tiers. At a guess Tier 1 = 3 tokens, tier 2 = 6 tokens, etc. Probably matches closely to the major steps in the current Vet rewards program.

Eh, you can purchase purple recipes by doing the Incarnate trials, Or earning Hero/Villain merits. I'm not certain why Paragon points would be worse than either of those.

This hasn't happened yet in the 4 hybrid games I can think of right off the top of my head. DDO, LOTRO, CO, & STO. ::shug::

Basically we have games that have gone this route and there is no trace of this predicted DOOM in any of them. Why would COH:Freedom be any different and some how it fall into this horrible fate?

I'm afraid it was only in my power to grant a new trial today. Sorry about that.

Ok I grant your wish for a brand new trial. Login to the game and go play it now.

Read the first post in this thread by Ghost Falcon. 400 Paragon Points = US$5.00 not US$20.00.

The entire costume component of the magic booster is 400 PP. presumably the other bits of it also cost around 400 PP for a total of 800 PP or possibly there is a discount for the entire set and as a set the booster costs say 700PP if you buy it that way rather than piece by piece.

It is 400 per account not per master account.