Jimmy

The main intent of this change was to make exploration more rewarding - specifically exploration in the course of your normal gameplay rather than just a standalone dedicated activity (for those players, the badges are the main draw, so it didn't need much more of an incentive). Boosting the amount of XP from exploration badges wasn't really an option, as it would need to be a massive amount to have any real impact. Patrol XP was a thematically-relevant middle ground that ticked all the boxes. It's now very rewarding to collect exploration badges as you travel the game world during your levelling journey. Significantly more rewarding than it used to be. There are of course some corner cases where the benefit is "lost", but the amount of XP you gained beforehand was so tiny that we feel the trade-off is overall very worth it for the average player.

@Luminara is correct. I am, however, always in favour of a fashion war.

Post in the bug forum if you haven't already. It's unlikely this is related to the Adamanstor change, but it was a huge patch so there's always a chance something went awry. These are fine. They require a meaningful amount of effort. Scrapyard is not, because he can be respawned every 1-2 minutes with minimal effort if enough players are participating. Even if you don't consider it an "exploit" (I'd say it's borderline), it's definitely an abuse of the system.

We're making some changes to this in the next patch to reduce the number of tips dropping in missions. One thing I will say is that the issue is being amplified by the Valentines event being active, which dramatically increases the amount of tips floating around. In any other month you'd be seeing a lot less.

We might look at that pricing in the future (and could even swap the free jet pack out again, if a better one becomes available). I mainly wanted to swap this out because the Sky Raiders Jet Pack is huge and 20 years old - it's also the one you used to get with certain game time card purchases back on live.

New Player Experience (NPE) Improvements - RC3 With everything finally becoming official, we're at the beginning of a new era for the game, and it is time we become better stewards of the core game itself. The first step is to start making some improvements to the new player experience (or NPE, as the cool kids refer to it) to remove some of the small "pain points" experienced by new players (you may have noticed a large influx of them recently!). Character Creation Guidance We cleaned up some of the language and graphics during character creation and tutorial selection to guide new players toward creating their characters in the easier starting areas: Updated text to nudge new players to start in Primal Earth, not Praetoria. Updated text to nudge players towards Breakout or Outbreak, not Galaxy City. RESISTANCE and LOYALIST are now colored blue and gold in the text descriptions (in the same way HERO and VILLAIN are colored blue / red). "City of Heroes: Freedom" and "City of Heroes: Going Rogue" graphics replaced with "Primal Earth" and "Praetorian Earth" graphics. Kheldians now show stats during AT selection (instead of a series of ?s). EAT descriptions updated to state that they are not recommended for new players, cannot access the tutorial, and are locked to (start as) specific alignments. Origin selection guidance text updated to clarify that it's primarily a narrative choice with minimal gameplay significance. Several AT descriptions updated to correct poor grammar and remove needless gendering. Several AT stats updated to better reflect their abilities (also, Kheldians now have stats instead of ?s). Replaced all the ugly dashes (-) with pretty bullets (•). Access to Travel New characters will automatically start with Athletic Run (players can swap this out at S.T.A.R.T, formerly P2W, for another version). Passport (and Long Range Teleporter) is now unlocked by acquiring any 10 exploration badges, instead of one exploration accolade. This doesn't affect characters who already own Long Range Teleporter, and the Pocket D unlock method is still present. Note: For technical reasons, this only counts exploration badges collected after the patch. New characters are given 30 minutes of the LKT-1700 Rocket Pack when training to level 2. The description informs players how to get more. Swapped from Sky Raiders Jet Pack to LKT-1700 Rocket Pack. Origin Attacks Damage is now more consistent during the early levels. It is now scale 1.00 at levels 1 through 10. This damage declines linearly, starting at level 11, and ending at 0.30 at level 17 (previously the damage began dropping off from level 2). Endurance cost removed. Recharge reduced from 4s to 3s. Range increased from 45 feet to 80 feet to match most ranged attacks. Now added to the tray upon character creation. Power icon colors updated to Inherent color scheme. Note: The existing icons still exist with their old file names if you were using them for macro images. User Interface Improvements All three main power trays are expanded by default, and pre-set to tray 1, 2, and 3 rather than all being tray 1. Additional trays added with the + button now default to tray 4, 5, 6, etc. The inspiration tray is in its expanded state by default. To avoid confusion with Sprint, Prestige Power Slide is now no longer added to the tray upon character creation. Fixed a bug which sometimes caused power trays to be completely emptied if a new character zoned or logged off before moving powers in or adding extra powers to the tray. Power trays now default to showing the first associated key binding instead of slot numbers. Options Improvements Power recharge timers now default to on (Center). When centered, the recharge timer slightly increases in size as it approaches 0, and has an extra animation when the power is recharged. Timer text scaling no longer changes based on time remaining and is just a flat size increase for single-digit numbers. The power tray timer defaults to shown for powers with an estimated recharge of longer than 5 seconds. This can be changed in the options menu, or a custom value may be set using the /recharge_timer_threshold command. Icons of recharging powers no longer shrink when the recharge timer is enabled, to make them easier to see behind the number. Veterans used to the old behavior can override this with /tray_always_shrink 1. New settings added to control power tray animations and add more customization options (format options, color coding, opacity) for the recharge timer. Added an alternate color palette for the recharge timer. Adjusted timer to always round up when in whole-number mode, so that it is a proper countdown. Fixed recharge timer color setting not saving correctly. The game's volume levels have been adjusted to make for a more comfortable experience. The volume sliders now range from 0% - 150%. The 150% setting is equivalent to the former 100% setting. The slider range scales along a curve so that more of the slider results in usable volume levels. The "Show Pet Window Option" setting has been removed and is always enabled. This just provides players with the ability to open the Pets window (by clicking "Pets" at the top of the Team window), it doesn't open the window by default. Added an option to control power tray labels: Can be set to Key Bindings, Slot Numbers, or None. The Auto-accept level changes above or below options now default to level 50 instead of 0, preventing pop-ups from appearing when teaming. What was formerly called "Inverted" mouse is now "Normal" and vice-versa. The Villain Name and Villain Health Bar UI options now include "Always" in the list of settings to cycle through. Control Scheme The game's default key bindings and mouse options have been modernized: The default run forward binding now turns the character to face the camera direction. This mostly affects what happens when you press forward after using free look to change the camera angle. Running forward with Left Button + Right Button is now a standard run and does not activate autorun. Left-mouse-button dragging activates Quick Look mode, which is similar to free camera look with the middle mouse button but snaps back to center when the button is released. The default bindings for the top tray (Alt2) changed from Control+# to Shift+# for reduced finger strain on commonly used combinations. The pop-up server tray now has default key bindings of Control+#. Team member selection bindings moved to Shift+F1 - Shift+F8. Default key bindings for collapsing and switching power trays removed. With more trays visible all the time and the extra added trays, having 1 of them change when pressing minus or equals isn't as useful, and it was easy to accidentally press these and cause confusion. The previous bindings are available under the drop-down as the "Classic" preset, and should work just like they always have. These changes only apply to new characters, and overridden by customized bindings that were previously saved. Applying some or all of these settings on existing characters requires either resetting to the default bindings or manually applying the changes. In-Game Guidance When gaining the free Rocket Pack at level 2, you are presented with a pop-up explaining how to get more at the S.T.A.R.T. Vendor. Finding your first exploration badge now gives a pop-up explaining that you'll get LRT if you collect 10 in total. Fixed and updated the missing Invention tutorial pop-up when reaching level 10 (this pop-up will also automatically unlock the Invention tutorial contact relevant to your faction). Rewrote the "You got a Tip!" Pop-up to be more up-to-date and informative. Miscellaneous Pay 2 Win (and Transact 4 Victory) have rebranded as S.T.A.R.T. Fixed several missed P2W strings. Exploration badges now award a tour guide tip. The very first exploration badge you pick up does not award a tip (to avoid getting two pop-ups from one badge). Exploration badges now grant Patrol XP instead of regular XP. The amount of Patrol XP gained is dramatically higher than the previous amount of regular XP previously gained. The amount scales with level, starting with 1.5 bars at level 1, down to 0.25 bars at level 50.

Oops, thank you. The positions are correct in-game, I just copy/pasted the wrong numbers for the patch notes.

Try this: https://discord.gg/nBYGyNmN

It should be every badge in a zone that has tips (as long as you don't already have all the badges in that zone), apart from your very first badge (to avoid a double pop-up). The reality is that a very large portion of exploration badges aren't discoverable without being told where they are by another player or resorting to VidiotMaps / the Wiki. That's why we added Tour Guide tips to begin with, so there's a diegetic way to discover them. Making them easier to use and access just means players are less likely to want to use those non-diegetic methods (and it's totally fine if you still want to do that, but the convenience gap between in-game discovery and the wiki should be a bit smaller than it is right now). The aim is to make the badges more discoverable full stop. The method of discovery isn't the important part 🙂

It does not help to mischaracterize what developers and moderators say. You'll just discourage future communication. Asking for feedback to remain focused on the topic at hand (in a focused feedback thread) is not the same as saying we don't like your feedback.

This isn't the case at all. The feature was reworked precisely because of the feedback. It's obviously impossible for us to action all the feedback when such a wide range of opinions are shared, but we absolutely do listen. We just maybe didn't listen to the opinions you agreed with (this isn't personal, just an example - I don't know what your opinions on this are - but posters will frequently be offended when we listen to feedback they disagree with). Everything posted in the feedback threads is read and considered. We keep them heavily moderated to ensure they remain useful (even when comments get hidden due to going off-topic, we can still see them and do read them). With that said, giving us feedback about a feature we are no longer pursuing doesn't help anyone, all it does is get in the way of the feedback for the new feature - which many players are helpfully providing in this thread, as requested.

Invaluable input as always, Flea.

We actually discussed quite a few options internally, including stuff like this. Something to keep in mind is that we need to ensure every badge can be earned on every character, so "Team of 5 with only original ATs" wouldn't work (but there are similar options that could work). We're definitely open to more badges like this in the future (hence, this feedback thread).

Hey folks. Two things. 1 - This is a feedback thread for the new badges. Not a feedback thread for the now-removed Aether reward. 2 - Let's try to keep it civil. Getting grief over something being removed during beta makes us less likely to want to solicit feedback and try experimental ideas during the Open Beta phase, and more likely to keep updates in Closed Beta longer until all the issues are ironed out. We don't want to do that, because getting opinions from a larger group can be very helpful - but you also need to understand that sometimes features don't work out, and they need to be removed. That's just part of game development.

We have defined the acronym internally - but we also aren't married to our own option and wanted to see guesses from the community. You might come up with something better!