Greycat

Null existed on live. That's not a SCORE or Homecoming change. There are also advantages, such as XP, merits and temp powers, plus badges for those interested, to not using him. The alignment system is not "thrown out the window" because of Null. And until the team says otherwise, assume enterbasefrompasscode will go away, as they've said before. I'm not sure how you think this affects anything but long range teleport, though. /enterbasefrompasscode doesn't act as a travel power to anything but a base. It doesn't recall a friend or a foe to me. It doesn't teleport anyone nearby me anywhere. And it's a longer process to *get* anywhere (two zone loads, which on some systems can be quite a time investment) versus teh single one for long range teleport. You're far overstating the impact of the command on the teleport pool.

You'vve just /jrangered the person who first /jrangered. I'm not sure if I should feel proud of that or not. 😉 That said, I'm not sure people jumping to "nobody will invite khelds" (which... again, never experienced it on live, so...) are paying attention to which cysts I'm describing in the initial post. Cysts are already "objects," essentially, and don't spawn any more than metal crates do. Which makes sense, they're not a character and don't do anything. While I wouldn't mind them popping up again, I'm looking at reactivating a very specific set of cysts in one specific story arc - with reason. Which I would say isn't uncalled for - after all, we have specific unique enemies in other arcs, and the cysts are already *there.*

It is a PVP zone. You are warned about that on entering. It's like jumping into water after yelling "I don't want to get wet!" and complaining that you're wet afterward. Obviously Water needs to be nerfed like it's the child of two Regens, then...

AT as a whole? No. The closest I've come is back when I was *trying* to like my bots/FF mastermind and - as I keep putting it - it nearely bored me away from the entire AT. Tried a thugs/poison and loved it. So, for me it's just some powersets or powerset combos. But, eh. Nothing wrong with things just not "clicking."

See, there's something else here, too, though. It sounds - and this may just be from *years* of live arguments that went "PVPers PVPing in a PVP zone aren't fair!" and "Stalkers are unfair because I can't see them." Just PVPers *wanting to PVP* are described by many who "just want to get what's in the zone" as ... well, your category there of "the assholes." It's been that way since live. I mean, honestly - if someone came on the forum and said "Let me turn off the ability for people to aggro, fight and kill the Council war walker in boomtown because I want to RP that I'm building and controlling it and people keep interrupting it. They're mean, they're jerks!" what do you think the reaction would be? And yet that's pretty much what's been thrown at PVPers wanting to be able to fight and kill - and yes, that includes stalking and one-hit (if possible) defeating - other players in the *extremely limited* number of zones - none of which have anything required to compete the game, none of which even have people forced to go to them for anything - set aside to PVP in. If the game were set up like Aion (where the main quest about you getting your memory back of who you really were *forced* you to go into the main PVP zones and go to specific points where, yes, people would ambush you frequently,) then I'd have some degree of sympathy and agree there had to be some sort of flag, some sort of "fairness" or alternative. But, it doesn't. PVP zones need help, yes. And even if they were perfect, they wouldn't encourage more people to PVP en masse - that's just not what this community does, even without the whole "powers work sometimes very differently in PVP" issues. The OP's suggestions and reasoning, though...

What, are you a 90s Geocities page? *wonders who'll get that joke*

Both of those simply sound like "Random thing is being random" to me. 🙂

Um. Just generally "no." Honestly, I had criticisms - and I've made suggestions for Siren's, in particular - but most of this sounds like "Make PVPers play the way I want them to." Especially the "flag off and on" stuff, "PVPers don't play fair!" (come on, you even *said* it, so don't say it's a mischaracterization,) and... well, just everything. Leave the zone caps alone. I find it funny that you mention PVEers being "preferred targets" (while mentioning the zones being empty,) then turn around and do something that would make non-PVP-focused builds *even easier* (lvl 15 or 20 versus an *incarnated out* level 50? Really?) Oh, and - "PvPers don't want to do zone content as intended." It's a PVP ZONE. PVP IS THE CONTENT. The rest of it is just stuff to fight *around.* To create focal points to bring players into conflict. By PVPing, they are *literally doing the thing the zones are meant for.* Just a whole stack of no here. Stacks upon stacks of no.

I'll point out that in my case, that was a response to "why it was changed" in the first place, for the most part. With current teams, even at lower level, the cap tends to be... continually refilled with new mobs, given how quickly stuff is killed. Most noted at upper levels. (Which, in the "ramp up with level range" argument, is where the 30 would be hit.) I'd say the first paragraph here is an overly simplified view of things. It's not that the XP "isn't worth it," it's that we have merit rewards (and WSTs that double them) that are worth it even more, on top of people having the same content for years now. Heck, even I'm guilty of this - why do I run the first SSA solo once a week instead of getting a team together? Because I can knock it out for 20 merits in 10 minutes or less, even on a just-at-level, lower damage character. Merits-for-time (or shards/threads) are *more* valuable. Especially at 50. Yes, people want to "feel super." Very few are up to a multi-hour TF if they can shorten it by stealthing and the like. This can be "fixed" by spreading objective NPCs through the map - but do you *really* like "rescue the hostage" and "find the bosses" missions? (How often do you hear "ok, find the chiefs/guards/whatever" versus "we'll fight our way through and find them on the way?) The second paragraph is... eh. I'm not going to call it a strawman. It's partially true - but at the same time, as much proof against the need as for. No, I don't mean "we don't need to make farming easier," I don't mind farming (even if I find it boring. I saw and ran the "low cost fire farmer" build and... yep, still not my thing.) I mean it already shows tanks controlling (and defeating, meaning that "cap" is continually getting refilled) mob sizes over 17 NPCs. Couple that with current player survivability and damage and... well, there's not really a reason to do it. Yes, I know the argument is "But my team, I need to do this to keep aggro on me and protect them," but ... the team isn't made of cardboard and is perfectly capable of protecting themselves - or they're in a situation (say, an ambush coming from behind) where the tank's aggro cap is simply irrelevant because they'll hit the team before they even see the tank. The *rest* of the team's survivability has gone up as well, after all.

Jack's Jack Emmert, one of the original developers. Statesman? His character. He's one of the ones who left and... carried? Recreated? Cryptic, who made Champions ONline and STO. You'll see a topic about his latest move... two topics down from this as I'm posting. (Going to DCUO.) There's history. I'll just leave it at that.

I think the "Costume UI" change I'd like most is a "Propagate power change to all costumes" button. Just so you don't *have* to go to each costume to, say, set a travel power to minimal FX.

Heh. I'm worse with WW1 aircraft in Rise of Flight. Little too hamfisted to keep them from spinning or stalling out. FUn to try though.

It's not origin. Just doing a quick runthrough, I checked two Natural origin characters. One had Croquette in Talos, Rogers in Steel. The other had Basins in Talos and Martins in Steel. Which makes sense - you wouldn't want to burn out someone with the *same* contacts and arcs in the *same* zones just because someone really likes a specific origin. Honestly, it could be as oddly based as your name color in chat (which as I recall was determined based on character name in some fashion.)

That *still* doesn't strike me as problematic. Plus, don't forget, I was taking the *largest* files I could find, including power customization (which is actually larger, and I doubt looks anything like what we see when it's actually in the database, even *before* considering compressing anything.) I mean, looking at the file, I see" PowerCustomization { PowerName Incarnate.Hybrid.Support_Genome_4 Power 3207861323776 Color1 97, 97, 49, 255 Color2 76, 255, 253, 255 } ... for over 3600 lines. Plus space - which with all that takes room, yeah. I really doubt the database has all that spelled out for every character (we're exporting it, after all, so *we* can read it.) The same would go with costume files - a lot of things getting exported into a file we can read that I rather doubt the game cares about or stores in the same way. Then again, you don't have to look hard to run into COH code horror stories. I fully acknowledge I could be way off and *these* are stored in an Excel 97 spreadsheet 🙂 Even so. Storage isn't exactly dear these days. Not at the sizes either of us are talking about. And yes, I know, "it'll affect performance if it's larger." True. But did we notice when we went up to 10 costumes per character? Was there a performance hit when we went from 8 characters per server to 12, to 36? Or the 1000 we have now? People do use them. Or when we added power customization? I'm just not sold on the idea it would have any real size or performance impact to worry about. Technical difficulties in adding to the UI? Sure. I'd almost expect that. But that's about it.

See, here's the thing. That change was made so, basically, *the rest of the team had something to do.* I remember the whole "sit around, wait for the tank to herd the map back, figure out whose turn it is to nuke, go to the next map." It was *boring.* It was not good for the health of the game, frankly. If that hadn't changed, I don't think I'd have had any reason to stick around for all this time. There'd be no reason for it to be a MMO - your choice would be solo, or sit and be bored if a tank's around. And, honestly, the argument that the tank can't *control* the aggro past 17 is... false. Look, if you're playing +4x8, you're not playing "the normal game." Yes, the setting's in the game, yes, IOs and incarnates can make it trivial to survive that. But as a baseline, if you're dealing with x8, the game's assumption is that... you have 7 people with you. Even if we're not looking at multiple tanks, the rest of the team - unless they're doorsitting in AE - *can* take care of themselves. The stuff you're not controlling? is *being* controlled by the controller - maybe they're confused, maybe they're held, maybe they're flopping around on the ground from an ice slick or earthquake. Or they're getting killed by the blaster, most of whom have multiple AOEs to use. Or they're dealing with MM pets, or fighting the other melee ATs (who also have taunts and gather aggro via their own powersets.) And since you bring up judgement? You aggro a x8 group. You hit judgement. How many are left? A few LTs and bosses that are well within your aggro cap. Another group goes by? Attack. Taunt. As the group you're fighting dies, other enemies come in. Besides, it sounds like the definition of "control" of aggro here is ... limited. Most tanks have taunt, an aura that taunts, and some other form of AOE, at least. Ice? Icicles grabs their attention, the... cold aura I'm forgetting the name of keeps them from doing much even if you *don't* have their attention, and then you have whatever's in your secondary. And while you're doing that - unless you're PLing some doorsitters - your team's killing things off. Yes, you suggest a gradual increase in the cap as you level - but, to be honest, you're effectively *already* doing that as a tank (or brute) as you get more of your primary and secondary abilities. They let you juggle and control aggro without you having to do much. And yes, shortly after 50, again, you're judgementing and reducing the size of the crowds you're aggroing pretty quickly and effectively even *ignoring* your teammates' contributions anyay. So, in short, even as someone who plays tanks, has played tanks, and will play tanks... I'm just not sold on the need for an increase in the aggro cap, and my experience with it pre-reduction doesn't really incline me favorably towards it either.

DCS freed some money from my wallet with recent sales. Finally got that F-5. Now to actually be able to *get* a good flight sim setup (no real room for it in my current situation. Just couldn't let the sale pass.)

Nice of you to bring it up. As far as people expressing their opinions, well. Public (ish) board, and with a game with a link to COH (Cryptic being the developer) that will get people talking, so... just kind of expect it to show up here.

A few thoughts, there. First, "Holy" doesn't necessarily mean "Good." It just means it's dedicated to a deity or religion. A priest of Frank the God of Room Clearing Flatulence would have "holy" powers... just not necessarily good-aligned ones. 🙂 Second, we had this same argument with power proliferation, especially when it came to some mastermind sets and stalkers in general. "How can a hero use zombies, they're evil!" was fairly popular (and incorrect.) (Of course, given we'd always had heroes blasting fire at people, using Burn, attacking them with swords - and really, you can't expect to wield supreme executive power because some watery tart threw a sword at you... wait, wrong argument.) As far as the OP, worked on or not, I'd have to think wind control would just be... broken. 😉

I... honestly kind of doubt that. The files (plain text and editable) that we can see, per costume, aren't that large, and if they're stuck in a database I'd be fairly sure they're more compressed than what's exported for us to see. Going through costume files, old and new, the largest I see is 10 kb. Most are 7-8. Power customization files are larger - I'm seeing from 4 - 64kb. So even if we're assuming the largest there, uncompressed, at 74 kb (not Mb, not Gb) that's 740 kb currently for ten slots. 1480 if we doubled it to twenty - just over 1 Mb, uncompressed as plain text. And that's assuming every slot and all the powers are customized to that extent. How many people customize powers on all characters on every costume? Most, I'd wager, are using the default (so, no real "power customization" entry needed, just look to the default" or are using a minimal FX for a few, or have one customization they use across them all (which, most likely, referenced separately, because why copy that over repeatedly?) Yes, the database would get bigger. No, I don't honestly believe it would be any size to cause any real concerns.

People are going to do this regardless. Complain about powersets, tell people "everyone takes X" even if everyone doesn't, etc. Short of getting rid of people, you're not going to stop this. Granted, getting rid of "people" is tempting at times - let the meerkats rule the world now, they can't do worse - but not really feasable. (Amusingly and off topic, my spell checker wants to change that to marketeers... )

I'll either correct it, or test it (if possible) and (if then necessary) correct it. If I don't know, I either leave it or - if I'm "mostly" sure it works differently, will chime in, but make it clear that "I thought it did this, actually...can we doublecheck?"

Oh, now you've doomed yourself 😄 There are horror stories from those who have tried to untangle the spaghetti mountain of COH code. From the sounds of it, changing things to get more slots would probably... I don't know... make all Controller powers suddenly taunt every enemy on the map and drop team damage into the negatives or something. When they added the server slot (for things like the Lambda trial temp powers, etc?) In beta it completely broke Dominators and Kheldian forms. That said, yes, I'd love more slots. And more flexibility with existing slots, like not having to take two slots for a helmet/hat on and off option, for instance.

<snip for brevity> Yes. Many things changed. Among the things that changed: - More content, as mentioned. - Sidekicking changes. (Say it with me. "You are getting too far from your mentor. Your mentor is too far away! You are back in range of your mentor. You are getting too far from your mentor. Your mentor is too far away!" ... I can't help it, I'm superjumping just at the edge of mentor range!) - No debt under L10. - Half debt in missions. - Debt cap changes. - Patrol XP Among other things. I mean, we KNOW it sped up well before shutdown on live. We've had the "Disable XP" option for a *long* time specifically because of it. And yeah. When my first 50 was an elec/elec blaster back in i3? I *really* got to hate debt in the 30s specifically because of that content gap in the 35-40 range. I think I ran out early in level 38.

At least on a limited basis. Right now they're a joke. I just finished the final Kheldian arc early this morning (or was it last night... I don't know, I couldn't see my watch, it was dark.) In it, you're told Arakhn and Requiem - with their plan on taking over the Council from the Center in ruins - are desperate, and bringing something dangerous. What are those dangerous things? Cysts. These crystalline structures, which can maintain a Nictus without a host, which allow almost instantaneous travel across interstellar distance, are a threat, and are being positioned to begin a Nictus takeover. They're built up to be a major threat - appropriate for the final act in an epic storyline you've played from 1-50. And when you finally get there and face these? Place attack on auto. Sit and wait. Nothing is summoned, nothing happens unless you're too close (and even then, you - as a Kheldian - have energy/negative energy resists. You get knocked back a bit.) This is a major threat? My rent is more threatening than this. Yes, along the way you fight (in different missions) Nosferatu, Requiem and Arakhn, but the Cysts, for such a big buildup of what they are in lore are as threatening as pottery. At least the ones in the ITF have Nictus around them, even if they don't spawn anything themselves. They at least *look* like they did their job. Let the Cysts spawn Unbound Nictus again. (This also would have the side effect of giving a Warshade something to feed its Mire and Eclipse from.) At the very least, in that arc. Otherwise, they're pretty much nothing but a letdown.

Red Caps actually do have high level versions. They need to due to the holiday stuff with Snaptooth. You will occasionally see a level 50 Red Cap group in Croatoa - at least I did on live. Not sure if that spawning got fixed. Some groups are "segmented" - either through the entire 1-50 run (COT, Council) or with gaps (Tsoo disappear by 30, then show up in Incarnate variants, as do Banished Pantheon.) And there are quite a few more without high end, level 50 critters. The *rest* of the Croatoa critters (Cabal, ghosts, Fir Bolg and Tuatha don't - the holiday GMs are levelless, and the ghosts they summon are a different group.) Red Hands don't show up. Trolls, Destroyers (goldside Troll analogs, think that's the name,) ghouls/experiments, spetznatz (though they barely appear,) I don't *believe* the neoshivans do (and the shivans are ... one mission? so they can get added to the "with a gap" group,) - and a lot of groups are sort of "barely" there at 50, used for one mission or one arc (you don't *really* see high end Shivans, to my recollection - I half recall the mission from Ouro exemping you, as it is, but might be wrong.) It would still be a lot of work, yes.