[Winter Event Badges]

On 11/29/2019 at 12:33 PM, Voltor said:

Toy Collector: collect 200 presents, note: clicking a present only counts for you and not teammates.  You will also receive Winter Horde Gladiator badge.  Protip: do NOT camp a spawn point for a present, it will not respawn. defeating any winter horde will help it respawn faster, but they will eventually despawn on their own. Protip 2: you do need a team clicking presents and defeating the snowmen to spawn Winter Lord, but once that is done you are better off soloing this badge as teammates clicking presents does not count towards your badge.  Also this is the only way to get the Winter Horde gladiator badge so if you are a badge hunter looking for them all, you have to get this one.

 

Protip 1 is half-true. A camped present spawn will never respawn. In testing this entire protip, I opened a present and cleared the spawns, then moved to the next closest present still in visual range and did the same. In a little over half an hour of testing various things at present spawn 1, I immediately retreated to the area near present spawn 2, never leaving it for even a full minute. That present at present spawn 2 never respawned the entire time. It might after a certain amount of time, but it is obviously quite long before a forced respawn with somebody right near the spawn point will happen. However, the rest of this protip is untrue. Cleaning the spawns up does not make the present respawn any faster. I sat there with my phone opened to time.gov and the ones that I cleaned up actually took a bit longer for the present to respawn, on average, than the ones where I left the snowies there. There was some variabkility to it, which leads me to believe that the server does a periodic check to see if there's a present there, and then spawns a new one if there isn't, no matter if there are snowies present or not. The longest times were all with cleared snowie spawns, though. This belief that they respawn faster refused to die while the game was live, and it apparently sticks on stubbornly since its resurrection. No matter what, no present took longer than approximately 5 minutes (+/- 10 seconds) to respawn. A good route being necessary to avoid the no-respawn problem of the first part of this protip, you should have very little problem with present respawns if your route is about 10 presents long in circuit, given the general spacing of the presents. Since the snowies tend to be level appropriate to the neighborhood in which the present is opened, and are probably among the most highly-visible critters in the game, I would say that the choice is yours whether you clean them up or not. That is, of course, if you're opening them solo. Don't leave spawns of 5 or more that might include bosses loitering around in a city zone like Atlas Park, just out of common courtesy.

 

Protip 2 was the only way to get a Winter Lord to spawn for a few years, but was changed later on. I believe that a large team opening presents will still spawn a Winter Lord occasionally, but there is a definite "safeguard" function now, where a Winter Lord will spawn no matter what when a certain number of presents are opened within the zone. That number is pretty high, though, definitely over 50, since I opened my last 50 for Toy Collector without spawning a Winter Lord in the zone, and there wasn't one up anywhere that I could see.

[Devs Stance on PvP and Balance of the Game?]

When this game first came out, the Original Devs stated (I believe it was Jack Emmert) that this game would never have PvP.

 

That's Jack fully two years before the game released. PvP was at the very least on the whiteboard of things to do way back then. Even if he had said that there wouldn't be PvP around launch, he would have been eating those words in about two weeks, when they announced City of Villains at E3.

 

The ToHit Debuff had always been there in Fly, as far as I recall, but was added to Super Speed and Super Jump with the release of Issue 4, with Arena PvP, mind you, then switched to suppression a week later. I'm not kidding, it was that fast. I'm sure there was a PvE use of jousting, but I would say that the timing puts the onus of the change mostly on PvP balance.

 

I can't be for sure on this part, but Arena was scrapped at the same time that having full power customization was scrapped. For example, fire sword circle, with blaster powers, combined with controller powers. If you watch some of those videos, they even used those powers together. Originally City of Heroes was supposed to let you combine any powers you wanted. That obviously was changed at some point, as was the idea to bring PvP in to the game. I am fairly certain that the Devs decided against PvP and stated it would not be a part of the game after it went live. I would have to do some digging to find it, if the post even still exists at all.

 

I was not a Beta player, but was there from the moment that it went live, and I remember nothing of the sort. Yes, they changed their minds about power selection, implementing ATs and power sets, but that was a year later, and with no mention of PvP, either confirming or denying any plans for it. Again, they would have been really shortsighted to say something like that anywhere near launch, when they were giving a demonstration of PvP at E3, about two weeks later.

[Devs Stance on PvP and Balance of the Game?]

When this game first came out, the Original Devs stated (I believe it was Jack Emmert) that this game would never have PvP.

 

That's Jack fully two years before the game released. PvP was at the very least on the whiteboard of things to do way back then. Even if he had said that there wouldn't be PvP around launch, he would have been eating those words in about two weeks, when they announced City of Villains at E3.

 

The ToHit Debuff had always been there in Fly, as far as I recall, but was added to Super Speed and Super Jump with the release of Issue 4, with Arena PvP, mind you, then switched to suppression a week later. I'm not kidding, it was that fast. I'm sure there was a PvE use of jousting, but I would say that the timing puts the onus of the change mostly on PvP balance.

[Loyalist <-> Resistance ... switching alignments EVERY TIME for Praetorians]

This is a great guide. Of course a true completionist will have to do both versions of this, not only to see all of the Informant options, but also to see both potential outcomes of each moral choice for themselves.

 

Now, the tutorial is mandatory for a run like this, but it's completely optional for anyone else, even if they are a badge hunter, since there are no unique badges in the tutorial that can't be picked up later. I would go along with your caution about getting Moral High Ground before leaving Praetoria, but you'll have more than enough chances to make 5 moral choices before you leave, even if you skip the tutorial. That's averaging less than 2 quest lines per city zone.

 

I did something very much like this on my second Praetorian many years ago, just to fit the concept of someone who was so disgusted with the state of affairs there, that he happily betrayed everyone that he could before leaving the place behind.