Greycat

"Population" is... meh. WOW was an aberration with the "millions of players." COH had what would otherwise have been considered a healthy population for quite a while. Pays the bills, allowed development. As far as why we didn't have the HUGE influx of gold sellers? What would we have bought it for? There isn't/wasn't a constant gear grind, you don't have to pay to level when you go see a trainer (that is, frankly, one of the most ANNOYING mechanics I've run into in other games. "Oh, you know punch hard II? Punch hard III will cost 1.3m gold to learn. Oh, you want to learn ANOTHER power too?..." ) We didn't even start with a market - or anything but TO/DO/SOs, Titan-Os and Hamis. Inventions came in, they dropped, salvage dropped, there wasn't really a *grind* to avoid. And content wise, they're not really needed. Sure, even the rare stuff (purples, PVP IOs) got pricy, but they were "nice to haves," not "you must have this to progress." Frankly, there was (and is) no real market for their "services."

Absolutely this. Base raids were a mess - I know my SG wanted to try a raid early on, arranged it with another SG, and for one reason or another it would just cancel or not start or whatnot. We could never get it started, and everyone pretty much lost interest in trying after. Arena ... worked, sometimes, but people would try to join the default (versus player) "scheduled" events and those would never start. (Sort of like joining "first available" TFs in the LFG queue... has that ever worked?)

You ... can use PVE builds for PVP already? That was generally the thing when PVP came out to begin with. "Builds" tend to be more for the arena-focused (and maybe RV) crowd... note, I use "crowd" loosely here. Hell, a lot of the current perma-everything-capped-everything PVE builds would give a lot of historic "good" PVP builds a hard time. You just have to be aware of how the way power effects change in PVP - at least in zones - affect your play.

Ummmm.... Isn't #2 already a thing? I distinctly remember messing with that on live. After all, you're already awarded "gladiators" for accomplishing things (typically defeats of a certain type of enemy, though at least one is an explore badge.)

Only one I really see as not really doable would be the client side ban/generic. And if it were possible to make them completely invisible to you ("you don't exist in my world" level,) the way I'm reading part of that? It'd be like self-selecting for griefing. Someone doesn't like you for whatever reason, you do this to them, they *realize it,* suddenly you're getting mobs trained on you, anything outside of a mission (and what happens if someone else invites them *to* a mission you're on?) you try to fight, they wipe out... yeah, just a whole pile of problems with that.

Honestly, as another 100+ altaholic, I wouldn't care about any of that list. That's all stuff that should (to me) show up in something like CIT (https://cit.cohtitan.com if not familiar.) When I'm choosing characters, I don't generally care about their VL or how much INF they have - not on that loading screen, at least. If I were revamping the character select screen, I'd be more interested in doing two things - adding search options and adding sorting options. Currently, we have a freeform text box to search, which defaults to name, but we can pick AT or power (and sort with text there.) We can see name, level, side, AT, primary power set and days offline. (We can search by, but not see, secondary power set, which... ok...) I'd: - Have CIT linking, because yes, sometimes you do want extra info. Should have the option to be shareable or private (with overrides for each character.) - Provide categories - just color codes, perhaps, that you can flag each character with and/or rename, and then sort by. For instance, my "complete T4'd 50s" I flag with red, my "TF leaders" are flagged with yellow, "Hami raiders" with green" (or whatever.) You can select and have it sort by category first, or just show a specific category (including "uncategorized.") - Sort by level. I don't *think* sorting by vet level is possible, since that depends on powers slotted/running and they're probably not "running" when you're not on that character, or that might be more database activity than desired. I don't know. If VL isn't a big deal, yeah, that should be shown as well. - Create/rename "pages" of characters, visible (similar to a spreadsheet) as "tabs" on the bottom. By default, there's one for "all characters." - Sort by alignment. - Sort by days offline. - Search/sort by SG. - SHOW the secondary powerset. I know I've had other things in other suggestions for this that arent' coming to mind right now.

i13 pretty solidly broke PVP and, as I recall, the interest of PVPers with a serious rework of everything (and not in good ways.) Yes, a lot got dialed back a bit at a time, but the damage was done. Personally, I'd throw IOs in as something else breaking it, as well. Or, rather, breaking its approachability. By which I mean - well, let me give you a real-game-world example from a few months ago. Went into Bloody Bay. I had a ... late-teens-ish, maybe early-20s-ish Brute. As much as she had a "build," it was a PVE build. Far from anything special. Ran into 1-2 others who were messing around fighting. Eventually there were four of us, either going one on one, two on two, free for all, didn't matter. We were just fighting, winning, losing, "Ha, thought I had you there" and "Nice move" ing... until someone brought in a PVP build that nobody could touch. I suppose they "won," but it made it pointless for anyone else to try. (Granted, we did for the hell of it, but it was immediately apparent that they were not going to be beaten even solo vs the rest of us.) To me, that's what both IO builds and i13 did to PVP. Early on? I loved hopping into a zone and PVPing. Didn't always win - I'd be surprised if I was at 50% - but I could take a lot of things in and at least do something without a specialized "build." I had an energy/energy brute that got known for slotting stuns (and getting cussed out as a stalker, which I found funny... almost as funny as someone trying for a good several minutes straight to TP Foe her, something energy had protection against.) Yes, some ATs - or not even ATs, but powerset combos - were worse, or *much* worse, than others, but the solution to that was simple... *team with someone.* (Another example, my Corrupter, another Corr and a Dom held Siren's Call for a good half hour until we were simply overwhelmed by numbers... like a team and a half finally hitting us all at once. We just stayed tight, concentrated and prioritized targets - and it didn't hurt they were coming in 1-2 at a time for a while.) (One other thing I'll call "broken," at least for the two lower zones, is the +5 levels worth of powers when exemping. It's already bad enough in BB that you have the level 15-25 range and the differences in power and slotting that brings up without allowing up to level 30 powers... and Siren's opens up primary powerset T9s with that now, and almost a complete secondary, giving powers up to 35. Made it less fun. Part of why I skipped Warburg so much was it just being T9-offs.) Last, despite PVP being planned from the beginning, the way the game's set up just doesn't really lend itself to balance... at all. Maybe the way it was in alpha (freeform, picking powers with origin determining how many/how much it could be boosted/etc) would have worked, but - well, in many other games, you have "the tank," "the DPS," "the healer," maybe "the pet class." They *tend* to be fairly similar to others of their class, so you can have an easier time balancing it. COH? A Fire/Kin is not an Ill/Storm is not an Earth/FF is not an Ice/Rad is not a Mind/Emp is not... and that's before getting into builds. And then you have *every other* AT with all of *their* combinations to consider. PVP "balance" or "making things fair" kind of has to boil down to "bring a team..." - and even then, well, team composition can either even things out or break things even worse (see... almost anything Repeat Offenders did.) ... boiling it down to the original question? I'd say what's broken most is "approachability."

In fairness, you *can* also just open them in Notepad or an equivalent text editor... but it will look better (and be editable more easily) in Mids.

I'm going with "You only notice you whiff because you're paying attention *because* you just hit aim.* Personally, I think the only reason a hit should be able to ignore the clamp is if the target is immobilized (slightly better chance, since they can still wiggle around) or held (almost 100%.) Or it's something like one of the Steel Canyon fires, which is just silly to miss when you're spraying the entire area with the extinguisher. What are you doing, facing *away* from the building?

Honestly, a more ... equivalent flag would be "Invasion off." They interrupt people trying to get to missions, do hunts, etc. Being able to turn them off while you try to get to a GM or zone event, or collect exploration badges? That would be handy. You could do it without zombies spawning everywhere or getting blasted by a dropship, regardless of how anyone else in the zone felt. People have complained about having to wait out invasions or go do things elsewhere while they were going on in the past, as well, just like they complain about PVPers in PVP zones. Yet somehow this never gets asked for... (Obviously not a serious suggestion.)

... Someone's waiting by the helicopters? Doesn't that require someone else to actually be in the zone? Also, there are insta-kill drones.

So. The proposal is to take a focused feedback thread and make it harder to give feedback or get clarification in a timely manner by artificially strangling peoples' ability to post. No thanks.

... wouldn't that be most of them? Also, no. As silly as asking to have a "rikti off" switch for mosthership raids. It's the point of the zone. If you don't want to face the exceptionally miniscule risk of PVP, don't go in there.

Honestly, before we get more *room* in the editor, just having the editor *fixed* would be nice. I hate typing, just to have it complet Meanwhile, you start tryingly stop working and not want to budge no matter what you do. to type somewhere else and all of a sudden it drops whatever you were typing in before in. It's annoying.

Just reinforcing this. GM and Hazard Zone are not synonymous. And GMs, on top of everything else brought up, are - frankly - boring. "Everyone pound on a bag of HP for a minute or two!" Meh. (There's also the argument that neither red nor gold side have "hazard zones," so this would be blatantly unfair for anyone playing those sides. Yeah, even the two people playing gold. >.> )

... at which point I wander up with my AOE KB and knock everything into a nicer pile...

... you know, I want this just to throw an easter egg in the game. Find a zone. Put a new statue in each corner. Each doing a "heroic" or "magical" pose... that also happens to resemble "YMCA."

Meh. don't really think it needs one, personally. (Nor would I want to be flattened by one running a sub-level-10 character around trying to do missions. )

Odd, never did that. And I was most definitely an altaholic.

... I still joust without any real issue, even (especially) on melee. Makes the Protean fight in Adair's arc insanely easy, for instance.

Didn't happen on live. Unlikely to happen.

As far as Kheldians, the lore's already there. Warshades (Nictus) - are obviously *already* working with the Council and have an entire plan or set of plans we work to disrupt through the Kheld arcs blueside. Peacebringers - we *already* have arcs with "Rogue Peacebringers" (again, in the Kheld arcs) that work with the Nictus, or at least against Sunstorm's treaty with Shadowstar. The issue's basically just a lot of writing. Redside... eh. For three of the four VEATs, it's "I didn't buy the propaganda." For Banes, there's a bit of lore conflict between the "they get jacked into a psychic network" and the "One good spider" blueside alignment mission where we explicitly save a Bane and bring them back to Paragon, but that's on the original devs - it at least gives a foundation for them (any, really) to be blueside. Though I'd hope, for them, they had some mechanism - either ambushes or a slightly higher taunt vs. other Arachnos or something - to deal with the fact you *left Arachnos.* It's one of the things that annoyed me with them redside - other than "I have a few meh arcs and a special costume," you were treated like any other player, no extra hostility (or support) from other Arachnos members.

So, let's go over all the issues this would face and/or cause: 1. People already complain about "all the good names being taken." I don't agree with this, mind you. But for this to work, you'd be changing names *up to ten times per character.* Which: - a. either means you want to *reserve* up to ten names per character, which would likely result in tarring and feathering, or - b. cause support problems when you go from the Blastinator in costume slot 3 to Huggins in costume slot 6... but the next day, when you go to costume slot 3, someone else has already taken "Blastinator." People would try to argue that's "their" name for that costume slot. 2. Not sure you can actually change names while logged into the game. It's a function on the character select screen. While you can change *globals* while (and only while) in game, I'm not sure how the database is set up or if it would allow you to change a character name. GMs can generic people on the spot (I've seen it happen,) but I don't know what doing it multiple times on a character, repeatedly, would do. 3. Oh, the fun of *invites.* "ITF LF 3 more." "OK, I (Blastinator) am on the way!" *Changes costume.* *Team leader tries inviting. Gives up, because you changed slots to SuperSpud, and gives the slot to someone else.* I mean, those problems popped into mind in a few seconds of seeing this. Best you can do is put it in your bio - "Hey, blue/white costume, please refer to me as Unit 07. If I'm in the green suit, Henry. Yellow tights, Urinalota Trouble."

I've got a ton of alts as well. North of 100. Given two accounts, probably at 200 or so on Everlasting. It takes maybe two minutes in Atlas (little longer in Mercy) to get LRT unlocked - also giving five merits. Holding up a team to get *one* explore badge in another zone? They're freaking everywhere. You should generally be able to get one with almost no diversion from wherever you're going to. Some you can't help but stumble over. When it's slow? Get all of them in the zones, a few zones at a time, 5 merits a pop. Adds up nicely. And since you'll already have LRT options for those zones, you can get to them quickly. You see it (for some reason) as a hinderance for new characters. I see it as a bonus for getting starting cash for them (5 merits for all the explore badges in a starting zone - convert to converters - sell. Easy money.)

I don't recall seeing mine go into melee unless they're following *me* there. Eh. I'm not honestly sure how I feel about this. Part of the worry to me is the "untouchable like Voltaic Sentinel," as while VS is untouchable and can attack, it also is never *targeted* by the enemies. Yes, the Essences are targetable, but that also means they're absorbing damage I don't have to (and if they do run off somewhere, they get killed instead of drawing yet more attention directly to me right away.) Besides, I don't know how the devs would feel about another "untouchable but does damage" pet - even one on a timer that expires. We already have that in PA (with a timer,) and PA's one of the primary reasons the longstanding (since live...) request to have Illusion on Doms hasn't happened. Granted, we do have untouchable buffing pets in (some) Lore branches, but they're on an extremely long timer. The "Animation starts but no summon" thing... needs fixing, or if it fails you should be able to reuse it right away, frankly. If you check invasion events (especially zombies,) the corpse timer is *very* short and getting Essences from those is nearly impossible. This was to deal with issues with having too *many* bodies laying around on live, but it did hit Warshades pretty hard... nothing else really relies on this sort of mechanic. (I half wonder if whatever would fix that would also be able to be applied to "if a rez isn't accepted, don't put it on cooldown - make it available right away.") Yeah, I think "ehhh...." sums up best how I feel about this. Granted, I *like* having - I tend to say "2 1/2" pets out, since the third expires fairly quickly (and I don't really have a "recharge" build on my 'shades - though I can get 4 out in an MSR,) and having them soaking damage and mezzes for me. I'd have to see what sort of tradeoffs a dev would apply to it - I think there'd be more than just a summon limit. (Also, lore nitpick - no, you're not extracting part of their soul, or you'd have even more things this shouldn't work on... most robots for instance, or most Carnies, since Devore laps those up via the masks. "Essence" is used through several descriptions of warshade powers. It's basically just whatever energy is giving life/motivation to the target. It doesn't invalidate the theme of what you're aiming at - Nictus try to drain energy to keep themselves alive, after all, and that'd have an effect - it's just one of those things people like me get picky about. :) )