chigiabelo

A long time ago during Live, The Diary of Jane by Breaking Benjamin was a favorite song of mine, so I named a stalker I made Diarrhea Jane.

A very long time ago during the original game I posted in the suggestion threads about an idea I had for post 50 content: the ability to form squads composed of your alts and a UI to switch between them at will while playing as well as control other squad members in a manner similar to Masterminds. My idea was for every character you level up to 50 you gain the option to add them to a squad of up to 8 characters that may include other players' squad members. The game UI would need to be modified to allow you to switch between your squad members at will, replacing all the previous character's tray assignments/macros/etc. with the next one's. Squad members not under direct control would act like AI pets but you would have some control over them via the Mastermind type UI. The whole point of this was to introduce whole new ways to play and you could literally play the same mission so many different ways depending on the order in which you switch between your squad members.

Some ideas get shot down not because they're crazy, but because some folks have an agenda, they want certain things implemented before others, and if your idea diverts developer attention away from that agenda, they'll poopoo it. The good news is that devs (both in this game and others) will know a good and implementable idea when they see one. I can think of a few ideas that, while I can't be certain I was the first to suggest them on the original forums, I (1) hadn't seen anyone else bring them up before me, (2) I got flamed for suggesting most of them when and most importantly (3) they got implemented either in CoH or Champions. Examples of things I requested that others did not think were such good ideas are the ability to hide from your friends (i.e., appear offline), a mission editor (AE), and Personal Arch Enemies (a version of which was implemented in Champions, pretty much the way I would have wanted it too). Here's something I always wanted: squads made up of your other characters and the ability to switch between them in the UI. Basically, I think with today's more powerful processors and cheaper, larger amounts of RAM, it should be possible for the client to instantly switch between characters, allowing you to play more than one. My idea was that once you got 2 characters to the level cap, you'd unlock squads, i.e., the ability to play special missions designed for much larger teams composed of one or more players bringing two or more of their Level 50+ alts and switching between them at will while playing. Characters that are not under your immediate control would automatically begin using AI to fulfill their roles, but be somewhat controllable using Mastermind-type commands. You could literally play the same mission different ways just by changing the order in which you switch between your characters.

If you are a solo player, have you considered just running your own server and changing the leveling rate to whatever suits you? The files are out there and even on an 8GB PC, you can run the server AND the game client, and change just one line in a config file so that your characters level at 1.5x/2x/3.5x ... literally, whatever speed you want. I have one at home set to 5x and it's a blast. Though I'll be honest, since Homecoming came up, I've preferred to play online. I kinda wonder why some of the entities running public servers haven't experimented with servers that have custom leveling rates, just to see if the public has a preference. If it were me, I'd offer a server with 3.5x leveling speed with some conditions: limited to a certain number of players, if you move a character to that server you can't move it back to a regular server, the gain in XP should be offset by loss of something like inf probably, and the economy would be separate from the regular servers. Oh, and it would be called Kiddie League. Then the devs could datamine it to see if it leads to people quitting the game sooner or sticking around longer.

The day is still young and some of us aren't liquored up and pissed off enough yet. Give it time ...

S'funny ... I've never seen that acronym before, but instantly knew what it meant.

This brings up (to me, at least) the thought that perhaps the whole time sink thing needs to be rethought a bit given the different circumstances we are in. In a subscription pay-2-play game, I get it, you need to keep people busy and suck up their time. Crafting, traveling from zone to zone and a whole other bunch of things accomplish some of that as does combat, badge hunting, etc. But the way things are now, is it really that necessary? Surely they could consider streamlining some of these things so we can keep doing what we really enjoy doing.

Multi-boxing is possible on PC's that fairly ordinary by today's standards, so if you have 8GB+ of RAM you should have no trouble playing 2, 3, possibly more accounts simultaneously and alt-tabbing between the accounts. If you are intent on PL'ing yourself, it might be a good idea to create farming toons (usually a brute, but with the upcoming tanker changes, possibly one of those too) on your main account and at least one other account. Leveling a brute that is destined to be a farmer is fairly easy (check out the guides on these forums) and before they even reach 50 they can already start farming lightly and sometimes even AFK. After I got my first MM to 50, i created another account and lightly PL'd a brute to his late 20's. At that point, I let the brute take over and level himself and PL another brute on a 3rd account. At some point, the first brute could handle +1/x6 afk, i.e., I would enter the farming missions with both brutes and just leave them there and come back 1/2 hour later and most everything in the mish was dead. As soon as both brutes hit 50, I alternated getting them their incarnate abilities while PL'ing a 3rd brute, this time on my main account, to 50. So now I have 3 farmers (Spines/Bio, Fire/Fire and Spines/Fire) and one of them just PL'd a defender on my second account to 50 also. All in the span of a month and I now use the farmers to afk farm influence. I'll use them to PL only to recreate my old alts from Live while I play new AT's that I haven't had the pleasure to try out yet. By year's end I hope to have recreated all my favorite alts from the old days while I've created all new concept characters from the newer powersets.

There are simply some people who have to live in a world where people are like them and do the things they do and for the same reasons they do them. It's the root motivation of all prejudice/bigotry/racism. It's not just this game; it's like that on virtually every forum I've been a participant in. Here's an example: 25 years ago I took up skiboarding. Skiboards look like small snowboards, about 3 feet long and maybe 5-6 inches wide and you wear one each foot, used with regular ski boots or hard snowboard boots. They were very popular with the inline skater crowd. I went on a snowsports forum online where skiers and snowboarders were, as usual, bashing each other. As soon as I mentioned skiboarding, I immediately started getting flamed.

Different strokes for different folks ... I like AE farming for influence and stuff, keeps my less capable alts well fed. I also enjoy PL-ing friends and will sometimes randomly offer to PL a stranger and top them off with some inf and rare recipes.

Hmmmmm, hobbies ... playing electric guitar, collecting electric guitars, collecting tube guitar amps, building tube guitar amps, guitar building/modding, electronics in general, shooting sports, skiing, kayaking, boating, RC airplanes, 3d modeling and printing, Arduino and coding in general.

Strangely enough, I've found some of the farming missions in AE to be a good source of incarnate shards. I spend a couple of hours there PL'ing another character in an S/L farm and had 28 shards at the end of the exercise.

You need to go to Icon on hero side and see the cosmetic surgeon.

Excellent guide!

I think once you've been around the block a few times, it's acceptable to find shortcuts past the early levels. Gaming AE is one of them. In my case, once I got to 50 and Incarnated my Mastermind, I created two other accounts, a brute in each one, and began using the MM in AE to PL them. The first one I would leave at the mission door and run one of the S/L Comic Con farms. I realized that depending on your difficulty settings, you could take a character from 1 to anywhere from 14 to almost 20, I think it was, in your first pass of the outdoor mission, if you had XP rewards set to double (P2W). Once the first brute, a Spines/Bio, was old enough to earn his keep, I slotted him up for defense and resistance and let him follow along the MM while the second brute, a Fire/Fire, waited at the door. The brute was excellent at keeping aggro off the MM and pets and allowed me to play at higher difficulty while all I had to do was spam a heal his way every now and then. The first brute hit 50 within 10 days of casual play but at some point before that, was already able to farm a bit while AFK, so I pretty much let him level himself in the space missions. The second brute followed shortly after and is currently leveling AFK as I type this and will hit 50 tonight. When both are incarnated, they'll be used mostly for farming influence.