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What @Greycat and @huang3721 said. Also, regarding Prometheus lashing out because he had a bone to pick with Zeus - there's some pretty important context around that exchange, in that Prometheus is falsely conflating Statesman with the actual Zeus. That's the entire reason the Freedom Phalanx even go in the first place, being 'random mortals' to Prometheus who he won't be predisposed to hate. They're there solely to work around the Not-So-Jolly Blue Giant because they know he won't hear Statesman out. There's also the even more relevant context earlier in the same comic where Statesman himself says he isn't Zeus and isn't a deity. Incarnates are certainly god-like, but they aren't literal gods. Not even the main 'My face gets put on the game's box art' ones. Which I'm glad about, honestly. If Statesman had been equivalent to actual, full-on 'block my texts from Hera, I'm turning into a swan' Zeus, that would have made Darrin Wade's arc even more obnoxious than it already is.

Statesman isn't a deity, though, and never was. He was Incarnate, yes, and possessed the powers of Zeus, but he was never referred to as god. Beyond that, assuming Zeus was also an incarnate is a hefty pull, given that's never stated anywhere lore-wise. The only Zeus-linked entities that exist currently in canon are Incarnates of Zeus (Statesman and Imperious), Zeus-class Titans (not relevant), and the Avatars of Zeus made by Pandora's Box (though the less said about the story fustercluck that is SSA 2, the better). Also

Welcome back! Glad to have you around again, BaBs.

... huh. Well, Drew Goddard has a solid enough track record as a writer/director IMO, and with the advent of AI siphoning off actual human creativity in media and the AI-techbros fawning over the machine consuming the artist, there's definitely some 'real life writes the plot' potential here. Whether or not a film that actually says something vs a nostalgia cash-in will get made remains to be seen. I just hope they don't make the mistake the Star Wars sequels did and tie too much back to the original cast. A Matrix story that moves past the original cast or just has them as the backdrop for the story would work so much better than either rehashing what we've already seen yet again or twisting what ought to be their narrative legacy.

As someone who grew up watching the original X-Men TAS (and playing the side-scroller X-Men beat 'em up arcade game and Marvel vs Capcom)... This is fantastic. This is exactly what I wanted and more. It's not just continuing where the original left off plot-wise, but honoring the spirit and style of it as well - with a fresh coat of paint and awesome fight choreography. This is what happens when a franchise is worked on by folks who aren't ashamed of 'what it used to be' but rather know how much better it could have been sans budget limitations, juggling TV ratings, and the tech of the time. The modernizations in the dialogue and character choices work excellently, and so far all of the returning and new voice cast have been great. Fully on-board with seeing where this goes given the storylines they seem to be adapting. More stuff like this, please and thank you.

I support this idea, but only if the hostage NPC audio clue is someone imitating the 'Wooo-Wooo-Wooo' glowie sound effect

They have a surprising amount of returning voice actors for this series. Wolverine, Rogue, Beast, Storm, and Mister Sinister are all played by the original actors from TAS, albeit with different levels of 'affected by 30 years of time.' The original voices for Jean Grey, Jubilee, Gambit, Cable, and Morph are all also in the show, but as new characters. Time will tell if adjusting the casting for some characters and not others was the right call, but still - respect to them being willing to bring back as many as they could. Definitely planning on giving it a watch. Maybe if it does well enough, they'll do a continuation of the Spider-Man TAS too (at least, that's what the inner child-nerd in me hopes for).

We should, yeah. It doesn't require a mass inundation of reports every time someone spots another player wandering around as C$PT!AN 4MER!C4 or Kal-El of Kyrpton or whoever, but sending one off, urging folks to cut it out, and moving on with the rest of the day is the right call. With the new agreement with NCSoft, Homecoming has all the more reason not to let these things slide (not that they tolerated it before now), and not urging the same mindset within the community sets a poor precedent. Plus, frankly it's just lazy. If these folks would make characters inspired by yet distinct from a famous IP, the devs can't do anything about that - heck, they actively encourage it, precisely because there's no infringement being done. Players are free to be as Kryptonian-like or Iron Man-adjacent as they want, the just can't try to pass themselves off as literally Superman or Tony Stark. It's uninspired at best and dangerous for the future of the game at worst, and that deserves more investment from the community.

Let me see if I've got this straight. Your objective is to implement the ability to deliberately target other players with PvP, in non-PvP zones, and allow attacking players the opportunity to possibly lock their targets out of accessing certain characters entirely? Then if the locked out character doesn't have a ransom paid the character gets deleted? And you want the playerbase and the devs to support this suggestion?

While I'm not opposed to this idea, there's already an established tradition of placing Memorial NPCs to honor players that have passed on. IMO having their characters actually in-game as an eternal part of CoH feels like the better option. Like @Clave Dark 5 said, they're still there, getting ready for their own adventures.

I'd say luckily. The whole 'Normal Hero -> Incarnate -> Dimensionless -> Primordials' progression chain the devs revealed in the AMAs was going to be a massive headache at the very best. Totally understand it as a 'promoting continual subscription grinding mechanic' to give players The Next Thing To Do for their max level characters but given how many arguments the HC forum gets right now about power creep/progression just with IOs and AE (and the added Hardmode content)... I'd really loathe to see a version of CoH that has multiple tiers of endgame OP nonsense further beyond what we've already got.

Can't really find much to argue with in that video. I tried Champions Online for a bit after sunset, as many other CoH alumni did. It was interesting enough at the time but the overly cartoony cel-shaded graphics and the extremely stylized settings never really hooked me. Champions always seemed like a Saturday morning cartoon writ large and I just found myself missing CoH's more realistic take in style and presentation. It was akin to going from the original Teen Titans cartoon to Teen Titans Go (and seeing how one was cancelled while the other continues to astonishingly live on and on, is more than an apt comparison...). Champions always felt like a missed opportunity to actually grow from CoH. Its costume creator and powerset concepts did things we, as players, would have paid through the nose to have while the game was live (and in some cases, are only getting now due to concentrated dev efforts). Except Cryptic never really seemed to capitalize on any of that and now they just slap more and more stuff into the Zen Market and lootboxes. Neverwinter was a number of steps up for a long while and filled that MMO void, but they also sent it tumbling down that same lootbox hill years ago.

@Oubliette_Red is correct - the mini-mode activates its own unique set of scales that ignore/supersede the scale sliders in the costume creator. It's effectively using another model with the same costume pieces/color selections as the currently activated costume, which is part of why you can't edit or change costumes with it on. It'd break things or at the very least be extremely wonky. That said, it would be nice to have a variant without the Baby New Year sliders. Just a really tiny character, or one to be like, Nemesis Automaton height but with your own costumes. Those would be fun alternate versions.

She is still around - if the player takes the 'stab both deities' route it states Tielekku 'vanishes back to the spirit world.' Also they use the God-Killer Sword to do that bit, not the Dagger of Jocas. I'm not even sure deities can be killed in CoH, but speculating on that gets into the mix of how Tielekku, Ermeeth, and Hequat work VS how the Banished Pantheon works VS how the Well of the Furies/Pandora's Box stuff works, and that's just a headache. Mostly due to the Well of the Furies/Pandora's Box stuff and the fact that a bunch of the lore for the original gods and the Banished Pantheon never actually comes up in-game.

Still not quite sure what RP scenes folks in here are doing where the continual sounds of vomiting are considered a benefit but hey, Pocket D takes all kinds. Except, apparently, anyone afflicted with repeated puking. As per the devs, they can get right out.

Nope, he's still gone. Granted, with Pocket D being Pocket D, those sounds you heard could have been... well, any number of things. Especially if you play on Everlasting.

The first one - the Prismatic costumes and effects deactivate when the player dies and have to be turned back on after being rezzed. It does break the immersion a bit, but everything detoggles when the player dies so it's just following the same rules for active powers.

Honestly it seems like what would happen if an AI were asked to generate a 'CoH Forum Argument.' Most of the replies in this thread are the most token forum kvetching I've ever seen or just trolling, which is basically the same thing at that point. Not a knock against trolling, mind. That's as much an age-old pastime on CoH forums as arguing about stuff is. Frankly, a farcical back and forth about Puking Guy is a lot better than the nonsense that gets tossed around in Powerset threads (or the massive dumpster fires that were the AE threads). >.>

I realize the Middle Ages were different times but we've evolved beyond the need for 'John the Pukesmith' to be the town's entertainment in the last couple hundred years, my vampiric friend. 😛 If your CoX is flavored like vomit... I seriously don't know what to tell you. See a doctor. See an exorcist. See... actually, @dtjunkie's Omega Mop might be able to help. He is in the market for a new nemesis after all.

Got beaten to the punch by @lemming, but yeah. Puking Guy's presence made it really unpleasant to RP on the villain side of Pocket D so he got removed from the zone.

I'm not so sure about it being stuck in time. The Atlas Park revamp, destruction of Galaxy City, phasing out of the original FBSA contacts for the new starting zone experience, Dark Astoria's incarnate revamp, and the Signature Story Arcs... CoH was evolving the overall timeline pretty strongly in the final pre-sundown Issues. If the phasing tech had been expanded further, I could easily see a 'If you've done X arc, certain zone details will change' thing like how some Praetorian NPCs were added to Brickstown if you'd done the story arcs following the Praetorian War. Granted, it probably would have taken a number of more issues before the Live devs even considered revamping the Rikti War Zone, though it would make for fantastic framework with the Rikti teaming up with Primal Earth's heroes to fight the Battalion (which, if I'm not mistaken, was in the cards from the Dev Lore AMAs - not that Homecoming is beholden to any of that). Probably, though it'd require some dev participation. The Mothership is a spawnable entity AFAIK though I think the invasion version might have just been a skybox.

As other folks in this thread have replied, those billboards are - in-universe - a direct response to the Rikti War of 2002 and have been in the game since it launched nearly 20 years ago. They're also very much in-line with Red Scare propaganda from after WWII and perhaps even moreso align with the general uber-patriotic response America had post-9/11 (because keep in-mind, CoH was released only 3 years after that happened). They are really tame compared to some real-world propaganda, certainly, but I do absolutely get how they'd make folks uncomfortable - and also, even sidestepping both those things, they're just really dated given the progression of the game's overall storyline. The Rikti War itself happened over 20 years ago and the Vanguard arcs focused on resolving the lingering faction conflicts were 15 years ago when Issue 10 went live. If Homecoming were to do a follow-up, where the Rikti Traditionalists finally managed to achieve peace and the Restructurists are defeated (but not in a way that denies them responsibility for Rikti Invasion events, because removing a zone event won't ever happen) I could easily see replacing them with something else. Vanguard recruiting posters maybe, or something involving the fallout of the Praetorian War which is, itself, nearly 10 years gone by now. Hell, HC could have a 'Design a billboard' contest like the Live devs did. Have the players make offerings to update some of the old billboards. I still laugh whenever I fly past the 'It's a Clanket!' one.

Fitness was made inherent because just about every player took it as a power pool as it was, and making it inherent meant players could boost those core aspects (HP/End Recovery) without compromising 'an actual power pick.' Going back to it being another 'waste of a power pool' on top of doubling up on the same powers would not solve any of those issues, just reintroduce one that was already solved and exacerbate poor build-planning. Running out of slots is just part of making a character. They aren't going to have space for literally everything you want to put in and managing that is part of playing the game. I always toss at least one or two chance for +end procs on my characters, which is a deliberate choice to spend them there to solve the 'no blue bar' instances. As that can already be solved with the right investment, lack of further recovery in power pools isn't an issue. In times when it becomes more direct, like when fighting Carnies or Malta, that's a game mechanic and what teaming up with other players for buffs or having some blue inspirations is for. Also as far as thematics go, if you absolutely want to use a pool to represent that there's already Physical Perfection in the Body Mastery ancillary pool. Proliferating that ancillary options to other ATs would be good (as would more Epic proliferation and Epics in-general), but making Fitness again but with the old, clunky implementations isn't the way to go.

Undefined Mode is the green blobby model from the original character creator. This one. It's also got a Silver variant that's the version from the modern costume creator.

There is no Gadgetry set - there is a Traps secondary, which seems to be what you're referencing. As for them being 'complete sets' both Devices and Traps are complete sets already. They're meant to occupy the same theme, concept-wise, but are deliberately focused on different mechanics and powers because of the archetypes they're made to work with. Traps has the force field generator, the acid mortar, and the triage beacon because it's designed to be a debuff/buff set for team support. Devices, on the other hand, is designed more for solo support via shorting up the Blaster's weaknesses and offering some team utility. They're different powersets for a reason. As far as some of it seeming technological and some of it seeming magical, that's up to the individual player's perception of the FX. Even then, the glorious thing is you can ignore the description blurbs of powers and explain them however you want that makes sense for your character. However, if it's just a matter of 'I don't want this character to have the forcefield drone at all' your options are either don't pick that power while playing Traps (which is a really bad decision, mechanically) or just play a different powerset that you like better.