UberGuy

This probably seems like a silly question, but are you positive you didn't get them? I have never once received a message saying I got my merits for that TF, but I have always actually gotten them.

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Uberguy: my alleged point was that "one year into the five-year lifespan of the game" may not be all that relevant to the discussion. It's not that far from talking about "the days before 50's had content" to talking about "the days of the Smoke Grenade bug".

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I guess I don't see why that point is particularly relevant in and of itself.

Poster A: "Why play at 50"
Poster Me: "Well once upon a time, there wasn't much reason, but here's how that's changed, so now there are reasons"

I don't see how the when is relevant when my point was the what. It's not as if I was claiming the things you can do with a 50 are new. I was simply enumerating them.

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So please tell me how the hell the new system is better than the old one.

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The new system is better than the one that's live right now.

I don't know why you think anyone else is comparing it to the system that came out with the PvPOs.

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So if you think this fix will increase the drop rates, you are wrong. Again, if a red name posted something saying they are increasing the drop rates I would love to see that post.

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I'm sorry, you're mistaken.

You're mixing the idea of the chance that a defeat produces a drop with the mechanics of drop suppression.

The changes reduce the number of conditions which sustain drop suppression. That means that you will experience less drop suppression. Less drop suppression means that more of the defeats you execute will be eligible for a drop.

They don't have to change the drop probability to change the effective drop rate.

Yes, it will be less than it was before they made any change. However, it will be more than it is currently on live.

That's some serious "No, this is Sparta!" style madness.

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Uberguy: While these things you say are true... City of Villains was four YEARS ago. Used to be there were no respecs either. . . free, bought,earned, nuttin'. Been a long time since that was true, too.

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I'm not sure where you're going in pointing that out.

I'm saying there used to be nothing much to do with 50s, and that's no longer true.

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Disagree with Draeth - invisible armors are precisely why I want this system in the first place. It would be nice to see a renaissance of sets with notoriously ugly armors. Cold Domination comes first to mind.

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Am I the single person in the game who likes ice armors?

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No, but the sentiment of wanting to always be able to see the costumes we are able to make with this game's really nice costume creator is a pretty common sentiment.

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I have no idea what's going on but each time I zone something goes haywire with the default movement binds.

Upon zoning, I'll either start auto-jumping, auto-running in circles, running backwards, flying in circles, etc. The only way to fix it is to either do a hard shutdown (Ctrl+Alt+Delete) of CoH, or to mash the buttons on the keyboard till something interrupts the auto feature.

I use an unprogrammed G15 keyboard, but this has happened on other keyboards. Also, the keyboard is not wireless.

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I get this when I alt tab. I haven't noticed anything special regarding it lately.

In my experience, what's happened is the game thinks you still have movement keys pressed. If this is what's up and you press and release the keys corresponding to your movements, you should stop the corresponding movement.

Of course, even if this is what's going on, I have no idea why it would have started up on you. I don't think I've ever seen it happen with multiple keys, such as would be needed to jump in circles.

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I assumed the point was, "since they'd WIN if they ever attacked Ottumwa, Iowa, instead of a city full of super-beings," and since game lore doesn't say "Paragon City is the last human-held city," the poster assumes the Rikti must not have attacked other cities.

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I assume that other things go on in other cities. The regular national military might be responsible for things in other cities, or Vanguard, or some combination. Some cities might not get as many ships incoming in raids. A few "Signature" characters from Paragon might actually zip off and help defend other sites if they knew the mass of registered heroes in Paragon were staving off the worst of the attacks there. (Yeah, I know most of them are standing around as trainers. Lets not forget that Statesman is both a TF contact and a hostage in "A Hero's Hero".)

Really though, I think anyone looking at this too hard has to remember that you can only make so many assumptions about long-term event continuity. It's not safe to view the invasions as a long-term war that's been running for like 1.5 years. Like most MMOs, CoH's setting is essentially static.

Each invasion restart should be viewed as similar to running a TF multiple times. If you actually consider most TF's stories, it makes almost no sense that you would run them twice in two days and have the story be the same each time. You just have to forget you did it last time or just ignore the story. From the game world's viewpoint, being invaded again this month is more like history reset where we're being invaded for the first time, and the ones before just never happened.

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"Nothing to do at 50" is a mindset. Not everyone shares that mindset, and I'd wager that the majority of CoX's playerbase is of the opinion that there's plenty to do at 50.

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Interestingly, I think this may not have been true much before issues 6-9. The exception would have been people who were well-invested in the social scene, which essentially gave them something to do with the game aside from playing it for combat and reward acquisition.

Once upon time, TFs didn't auto-exemplar team members, and you could not run them if you passed their level range. Newspaper and PvP missions naturally didn't appear until CoV was released, and it was a couple of issues after that when heroes gained police scanner missions.

Before these things there were only two common sources of "repeatable" content - running level 50 contact content with other people (the Praetorian arcs were a common favorite) or visiting the place that had repeatable contacts that had been in the game since Issue 2: the Shadow Shard. Of course, the Shard is considered out of the way, often viewed as difficult to traverse (it used to not have the extra gates and wormholes it does now) and its foes are some of the more challenging around. That combination didn't make those repeatable contacts wildly popular.

It would be a huge omission to fail to mention that level capped characters gained something new to strive for in I9 with Inventions.

So I think that, once upon a time, there was far less reason to play a 50. Multiple things have changed that make it more reasonable now, and possibly actively attractive. I know that I rarely played my 50s before issue 9, and now I play my 50s more than my lower-level alts.

There are badges for the TFs completions.

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Well, we weren't truly sure. We had a crap ton of damage on that team and did everything we possibly could to minimize the power of the repairmen, since we figured it was still bugged. Whether the bug was fixed or we were proactive enough to counter the issue is unknown.

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The bug meant that damage was irrelevant. They healed the towers the instant they spawned. There was no way to stop them.

Edit: I realized you might have meant the damage you dealt the towers, not the repair dudes. Not sure. People were finishing it with teams based on +Dam and -DR, so enough raw DPS probably would do it too. If you had run it before, though, I think you would have probably noticed the difference.

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City of Data does not list the damage of DS's Chill of the Night or Tenebrous Tentacles as unenhanceable. They definitely were enhanceable at one time for I used to put Damage enhancers in the DS.

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There is a difference in being able to put damage enhancers in him and having them do anything.

Slotting him for damage does nothing to Chill of the Night. Go test it if you don't believe me.

Edit: you did while I was verifying it.

This is now rather dramatically changed on test.

Defeating someone who recently defeated you now no longer is blocked from receiving a reward by the rep timer. I haven't tested (and probably won't) but it sounds like you actually get rep for it now, too.

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While Dark Servant does not take damage, it is not permanent until killed. Which means it actually does need to be up faster than it recharges normally at times.

I really wonder if the developers just hate Dark Miasma on general principle.

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You didn't think it was an oversight that a pet whose attacks are flagged to be unenhanceable for damage was taking a set that would nearly ED cap damage boost to no effect?

Five slotting this set only offered around 75% recharge, including the 6.25% global bonus. Meanwhile, you were otherwise wasting those slots with respect to all the other things that you could be slotting a Dark Servant for, such as toHit debuff, heal or either of two mezzes (both if you could use Hamidon Enhancers).

Slotting this set into a Dark Servant would be a tremendous waste, and likely very confusing to users not familiar with the minutiae of how the pet works. It's much better this way.

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Still nothing about an STF fix on the Tower repairmen on the final mission.

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That's because it's already fixed, isn't it?

People did an all-Scrapper STF this last weekend and reported no problems with that.

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I would also like to add to this NPC allies do not use some powers at all. For example, I have a /Regen boss as an ally in an arc I am working on that I have never seen use Integration. I tried customizing the powers to remove several from the set as a test, and still no luck. I've noticed this with a couple of other sets as well.

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There are some really obnoxious problems (IMO) with the behavioral differences in ally and foe AI. Try making a custom foe and fighting it, then edit to switch it to an ally and compare its behavior. In my experience, an ally attacks more slowly, often spending a significant time standing around doing nothing even when in range of a foe. In general, it will also use less of its full array powers, sometimes not using certain powers ever (as noted above).

Note that this doesn't appear to affect "friendly" mobs - those who are on your side, but not allies in the sense that they will follow you around. It only affects NPCs who follow you and fight with you.

This is not confined to the AE. This also happens in standard missions with combat allies. It's just in the AE that its deeply apparent, since its relatively easy to observe the same NPC in the same general conditions but on alternate sides.

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The softcap is the number that drops an enemy's chance to hit to 5%. Mobs have a base 50% chance to hit, so the softcap is 45%. Players have a base 75% chance to hit, so the softcap, when a player is attacking you, is 70%. And thanks to diminishing returns, good luck getting your defense that high in a PVP zone.

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In PvP, players have a 50% base chance to hit other players.

Happy B-Day, iltat.

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Fraud prevention. They only allow 3 purchases per 24 hour period

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I'm pretty sure it's one transaction per 24 hour period and has been that way for a long time, if not since the policy was first instituted.

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Unless it's changed very recently, this is incorrect. I made three purchases using one credit card and one master account all in the same day several weeks after the magic booster came out. I wanted to make four, but it stopped me at three, and I was able to make the fourth the next day.

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It was the blue tower. The reason is was lame was because we took the blue tower out first. then took the red tower out. both still down. we started on the yellow tower and the blue tower was revied. mind you that was the first tower we took out and we were working on number 3 when it was revived. Ive seen them revived as soon as the tower was taken down because of a straggling repair man but that tower had been down a while. I even hung around to make sure no repair men showed up when we took it out. I did the same thing for the 2nd (red) one. very very lame indeed

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That's actually normal. Note I don't disagree that it's lame.

If a repair man is left somewhere, he'll go repair other (dead) towers. It doesn't happen a lot, but I've seen it happen on normal STFs, usually when something happens to the main LR aggro holder and he starts rampaging on the rest of the party. If a spawn of repairmen gets through in the chaos, it seems some of them can go looking for other things to fix.

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Speaking of flipping. How funny is it watching the flippers flip each others stuff into the stratosphere where only they can afford it.

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This... doesn't make any sense.

Flippers make money based on the delta in what they bought and sold at. If the flippers are flipping things from one another, that's a losing proposition, because it implies that the same flipper is buying stuff again, at a later time and at a higher price. If they're only selling to other flippers, money is leaking out of that system. It has to be coming in from somewhere else.

No, they still drop in the arena. However, they now follow the same suppression rules that govern Rep in zones, even though you gain no rep in the arena.

The rep timer was reduced to 5 minutes from 10.

Very nice. No nukes/shivs is somewhat unexpected (by me).

Out of curiosity, what'd you do to keep LR busy till enough towers were down?