El D

Agreed. Taunting from the Presence pool got pretty narrowed in scope so as to not to tread on the 'We're the aggro management/herding ATs' niche that Brutes and Tanks are promoted to occupy (and sometimes Scrappers, maybe). Which means it became that much less effective for any other AT who'd actually benefit from taking it and for Brutes and Tanks. It kind of seems like a highlight of the conceptual misalignment of power pools, which seems to have only become more exacerbated as the game has gone on. It's good that Homecoming made many of them more broadly applicable and useful overall and I understand the idea behind not wanting them to eclipse abilities from Primary or Secondary sets, but the powers themselves still need to be good enough to be worth picking up in the first place. With the advent of IOs, set bonuses, and Incarnate powers, if some Controller wants to have a Tanker taunt... Why not? The whole 'there's no set trinity of required options, play what you like' aspect of CoH should be something that power pools enhance, rather than backtrack on via underwhelming imitation.

Totally agree on the stories. More specifically, stories that focus on exploring the setting, organizations, and the other characters - how they all interact and their motivations - to build investment in the player's own narrative, rather than the focus CoH was taking of 'You're becoming the most powerful and competent superpowered being on Primal Earth - just like literally every other Incarnate!' The SSAs were pretty guilty of this too, to the direct detriment of many signature characters. Statesman is an all too fitting example... A story that prompts the player to think about how their character relates to the guy whose face is on the game box, contextualizing what that character means within the setting and what they symbolize, would be a lot more interesting than one where the guy on the box gets jobbed and every player character in the game is catapulted to the exact same 'You succeeded where he failed - you're the best!' spot to show how much better they are. Early CoH stories with Modern CoH mechanics? Yes, more please.

I agree with the general concept behind this idea. Nixing the Well of the Furies as the 'primal source for all superpowered possibilities' is an absolute yes. It was a dumb narrative decision hampered even further by poor explanation in-game, though I get why it works in the context of the Incarnate system (the Live devs wanted a handwave for why every single character concept could be affected by it, so 'quintessence of all superpowers' it was). That said, I'd go a step further and invert the focus on those Origin Exploration missions. Keep the 'Deep Dive into Origins' aspect, but make it the player character seeing how other groups or signature characters of said Origins gain and utilize their powers, rather than any attempt to explain the player character's background or 'next step' for them. This still keeps it grounded within the lore and offers up more story angles to peruse, but keeps the character progression method deliberately nebulous. Was your Natural Origin character inspired to improve by Manticore and Wyvern? Did they push themselves further to combat Malta and the Knives of Artemis? Was it some secret training program from ELITE or Omega Watch? Or was it none of the above, some other idea you had? The arc shouldn't be there to tell a player how their character works, it should show how similar characters fit into the world as inspiration. That was the biggest writing fumble of the Incarnate system, to me. The Origin stuff always should have been specific for setting canon & lore but open-ended for player inspiration - instead it was specific for setting canon & lore, and directly determinant for players. 'It doesn't matter what backstory you wrote, this is the ultimate source of why your character has their powers and the only way you will become stronger.' By the same token, bringing back the FBSA branches as actually important entities in-game and just making origin choice matter more overall. Even if it is just for repeatable missions or similar arcs with branching dialogue options based on player origin, moments where the game gives the player an option to reference 'Yes, I am a Magic origin character in a Magic relevant arc' should definitely be more of a thing. How your character knows what they know or has access to what they do as a result is still up to player decision (or, if it's not fitting, just opting out of that angle in the first place), but it should still be there.

This is my thought on it as well - if new Incarnate options are put in, they're going to need even higher tier content to be used in. That's already kind of the route being taken with introduction of Hard Mode, which has definitely expanded the range for incarnate level content a fair amount between boosted versions of older content and outright new stuff. Theoretically it could also allow room for new Incarnate options, but the quibble there is... Hard Mode is also currently balanced around just the five existing Incarnate slots/IO builds. Adding even more on top of it could possibly make it easier than intended, require that existing Hard Mode content be tweaked again every time a new Incarnate power was added, or at the extreme end introduce even more difficult 'Hard Mode+' to keep up. Which just circles back to the beginning of the whole 'iTrials/endgame content is too easy' issue once players unlock the newest powers for the umpteenth time (not to mention the fact that there's going to be a hefty amount of folks who won't ever even play the content or complain that it was made in the first place...). I imagine that's why broadening the options was the focus with Hard Mode - adding it as an expansion of the plateau that is the existing endgame tier with a focus on badges/cosmetic rewards rather than any mechanical boosts was the only way to make new endgame content that didn't reintroduce that 'here's the next level, come back a pay more subscription money!' content spiral that Live was getting into before sunset. Which is a shame, because I bet the Homecoming team would have some pretty cool ideas on what to do with the rest of the Incarnate system. Maybe if another avenue for progression was figured out, though I'm not sure what that would be.

Fair point! Given map and object geometry and scaling of a lot of in-game items, stuff like that is kind of a given really. Add in capes, wings, and tails and any full-body emote is going to get messy/clippy. It actually already is a base NPC emote. Lie on Couch.

110% Agree There's a lot of NPC only emotes like this (such as the various 'sit and talk' emotes) that'd be really great for player use. Granted, a large number of them would also absolutely do wonky things given the collision box around player models and make the text boxes appear in weird spots (like massively high over a character's head), so it's not quite a straightforward 'just enable it' thing. Without trimming down the scale of said collision box or perhaps giving an option to negate player collision (a 'Walk' toggle, but for intangibility?), I'm not sure what else could be done to resolve that issue in implementing them.

This isn't a deviantart page, much less some single-player game where the devs don't care how or why you play it. It's an MMORPG that has had to deal with this literal same issue in the past - which is exactly why that ruling which you are agreeing to every time you log-in is in place. You don't want to abide by Homecoming's rules? Play somewhere else. QFT (...jeeze, haven't done one of those in years) It's pretty telling that OP has written up huge swathes of text in-response to everyone here, but in none of them actually showcased the costume and name of the character that got generic'd. Probably because it was a blatant violation of policy.

As other posters have said, the 'Don't make copyrighted characters' a CYA ruling for Homecoming and the safety of the server. Whether or not it's likely that any IP or copyright holders would go after the server isn't the point - it's to ensure that none of them have any standing to do so in the first place. Also, frankly, the game would be boring as Hell if players were allowed to run around as their favorite characters from comics/movies/video games. The point of CoX is to make your own characters and build a story of your own, not to do online cosplay as someone else's creations. If that's the experience you want, Fortnite has that in spades. 'Change the rules to risk shutdown and legal action so I can play as Superman/Wolverine/Batman/Spider-Man/etc.!' never held water during Live and it doesn't hold water now.

I'm not sure even Ouroboros can go back that far xD

Yeah, parking a marketing alt at an SG portal is really the only avenue for that. I can't provide a link, but I want to say the reason that AH access isn't activated in bases was explained as given the way bases work and load, the game would have to load the entire auction house into that separate instance. It would also need to do that every time someone entered the base, which would become this a massive spiral drawing more and more resources until the base would become unable to even be loaded into at all and the server shard would crash. Same reason we don't have AE access in bases, or AH/AE in instanced missions for that matter.

Issue 5 was August 2005, so you were playing... at 8 years old? Dang, here I thought I started young having been in high school at launch. Also, found a screenshot for this thread!

Mu Mastery is one of the Patron Pools - epic pools that are unlocked when a character earns a badge for running one of the Patron Arcs Redside. Just getting one of the badges will unlock all four options, though the unlock will only activate provided your alignment is Vigilante, Rogue, or Villain. You can switch back to Hero immediately after and still keep them unlocked though, and you get the badge just by being on a team with someone who completes the mission, so it can be unlocked at early levels.

Oh yeah, concept-wise it's not a huge contradiction at all. Just a specific subset of the wonderful ideological umbrella that is fascism, so it still totally counts. Apologies if it came across as a gotcha - didn't meant the comment harshly or anything, just that there were/are some hefty actual connections once upon a time (that the game did thoroughly scrub for a few years >.>) and some of which got reinstated later on. RP-wise yeah, it's totally cool to run it however you want. Whatever the label, they're still going to be jackbooted leather-fetishist goons who deserve to get pummeled either way. xD Also that SG acronym is hilarious!

Yeah. It was definitely the best path forward (or at least the path of least resistance) for welcoming the worldwide community of players and negating unnecessary/possibly expensive legal issues for the dev team. Plus they got an in-game storyline out of it (even if it was rather abrupt) so overall a pretty solid win/win/win.

While they might not use literal Nazi symbols or espouse direct Nazi philosophy (which is certainly the best/safe call and an important distinction that comicbook media made pretty regularly at the time)... the 5th Column are directly tied to Nazi Germany. Just take the first paragraph of their background - "Before they were taken over by the Council, The Fifth Column stood as the last remaining threat from World War II, a group of super powered fascists still fighting a war the rest of the world left behind fifty years ago. The Fifth Column has the nefarious distinction of actually triggering the United States' involvement in the war against Nazi Germany. Hitler first sent the covert super team to Paragon City in 1939, tasked with spying on and sabotaging US shipping and naval development." Heck, that's quite literally where the name 5th Column comes from in the group's explicit context as 'continuing to fight WWII after it ended.' They are the 5th Column of the Reich. There's also the Amerika Korps, the entire dimension of Axis America (in which Nazi Germany won WWII and took over the United States), and the friggin Reichsman. All linked directly to the 5th Column. Sure, they aren't waving around actual swastikas - so technically the game has no explicit nazis - but they're still as close as a Saturday morning cartoon version can get. Which is fine given the role they play as villainous antagonists and given the issues CoH would have faced tossing around any direct symbology. Filing the serial numbers off for legal protections and safeguarding the game's rating is perfectly understandable, as is telling everyone that asked 'No, they were never literal nazis' when admitting that there had been intentional nazis which were removed would have been its own separate can of worms to deal with. Beyond all that though, direct quote from Positron in the Lore AMAs regarding the 5th Column's total removal (along with any direct reference to Nazi Germany the game had) - 'CYA for release in Germany. Yes we didn’t NEED to go to the extremes that we did, but it made for a great story.'

I've got an Electric/Energy/Mu Scrapper that's a ton of fun to play. He's an AoE-spamming crit machine courtesy of the Critical Strikes unique in Thunder Strike. It procs on most mobs of enemies and between Ball Lightning, Chain Lightning, and Lightning Rod everything just tends to melt.

It kind of sounds like part of the issue might be aggro maintenance. Yes, Blasters are very squishy, but on teams were mob aggro is actively accounted for most mobs will be long dead before they have time to shift focus off of the tank. If you're soloing... well, that's soloing as a Blaster I'm afraid. Speaking as someone's whose main was originally a Blaster starting back at launch, that's just how the experience goes - they were deliberately designed as a 'glass cannon whose support is other archetypes.' Taking them out of that arrangement, much as later buffs (and HC's buffs) have boosted their survivability, is still going to be iffy at best. Well, at least until you get into IO sets but IOs can break most things. For an actual suggestion of what to play, I've had a lot of fun with my Psychic/Kinetics Corruptor. Psi deals a ton of damage due to not being a commonly resisted type (and despite a handful of sluggish power animations) and Kinetics has great... well, everything. Buffs/debuffs/utility. It's considered the best support set in the game for a reason. Grab Hover to keep out of melee but stay easily within Transference range as needed, slot IO sets for Ranged defense, hit mobs with -damage, -recharge, and -endurance as often as you can. They're capable of soloing well enough and you will never lack for team invites.

I wouldn't mind expanding this concept in-particular - both more broadly for high level missions and into lower-level mobs since the Circle show up just about everywhere. The CoT's entire shtick is 'implant ancient wizard souls into people's bodies' so why don't we run into a wider variety of "Possessed NPC' mobs? Possessed PPD officers, University professors/students, Midnighter agents, Longbow operatives, Legacy Chain members... Make it pull randomly from a pool of 'human' mobs, have it slap the green eyes aura on them along with a random Caster/Mage powerset, and give them a chance to appear in standard mission/open world spawns. Have them be the Quantums of the Circle of Thorns, essentially.

I'll echo what the other posters are saying - curate the chat box channels a bit to remove General and similar public channels, go with a lower pop. server, and as player on Everlasting... I'd probably have them avoid that shard entirely, honestly. Not everyone there is a frisky 'All RP Welcome' type with a naughty character bio, but there's enough. Certainly more than any other server. My SG actually has a minor game where we point them out to each other 'in the wild' (IE, outside of Pocket D), if that says anything. Regarding people sharing OnlyFans links in a server-wide public channel, that's definitely a 'report to the GMs' thing. Especially if you've got a chat log of the incident. Players are permitted NSFW roleplaying in private - with the hard-line requirements that it's consensual and everyone involved is of age - but just tossing direct links to adult content in a server-wide public channel definitely isn't 'terms of service' acceptable. Even if the OF links are just risque and not outright pornography that still seems like incredibly thin ice and not a precedent the HC team would be interested in allowing. Like, not a prude but that's just not cool. There's a place and time, and it ain't public chat channels. >.>

Fantastic pun for a feline character. Absolutely love it. ...I imagine a number of players in Pocket D would love it too, for altogether different reasons. ;>.>

It's more meant to provide a better roleplay set up. AE arcs where 'My Nemesis is attacking a Vanguard facility' or 'The Midnight Squad has word about a powerful demon they want me to look into' would work a lot better when the player can actually go to those places to run said missions, rather than starting them from either an empty AE Building or an AE full of farming teams. Granted no, that's not remotely the same thing as a full-on open world-style mission instances, but it'd be a lot more immediately implementable. Though, thinking about that, Tip missions could seemingly work for an actual open world set up. If a player designed Nemesis could be linked to Tip/Morality missions, that's a baked-in random generator of 'random things for the player's Nemesis to be doing' that can be expanded on. Player provides a costume file, slaps a name on them, maybe picks a pre-made enemy group for them to be in-charge of/working with, and the game takes it from there.

While I love the idea from a narrative RP stand-point, I'll have to echo what @biostem and @Rudra said. I have no doubt that the Homecoming team could make a more interesting Nemesis system than what Champions Online has (I was not at all impressed with it either while I played), however at that point it'd probably be both easier and more prudent to have spent that time expanding AE with new options, mobs, and mission types rather than attempt to make a 'canon Player Nemesis storyline' that won't appease everyone. There's a much more modular system already in the game, so why not use that? That said, more 'integrated' versions of AE run by other groups could bridge that gap somewhat - and definitely be more interesting to use. Vanguard having their own holo-deck version, the Midnight Squad having a magical version, Fort Trident and the Crucible each having fancy Danger Room training facilities - basically new instances where the existing AE system can be utilized in thematically appropriate settings. There's a number of AE Buildings that are almost always empty or next to empty, and some of them are in spots where it made no sense for them to be to begin with (like the Rikti War Zone).

While I understand the logic, this seems a pretty 'power creep'-y - especially so in-regard to what is already the most powerful tool for enhancing characters in the game. Having to either attune the IOs yourself or buy attuned versions separately from the auction house (where they already cost the same as non-attuned IOs, which in and of itself is an objective net gain) is really the only restraint placed on that aspect of the system. Getting attuned IOs as drops would render other enhancement drops even more useless than they already are, getting attuned IOs as recipes would make the existing recipes pointless (and require that all of them be remade as new, 'craft as attuned' versions if that's even possible), and being able to stack the enhancement boosts on top of having them level bonded seems... well, actually power creep-y. On Live, these limitations were part of the MMO grind. On HC, all these things still exist as already lessened speedbumps in the system deliberately to curb mass inf. accumulation (and at least a little bit as a learning curve for players). Also the choice to attune or not to attune (or boost or not) is there as a player decision because there's supposed to be a tradeoff for using one over the other. If a player is making a character for high level PvE play (like AE farming) they probably can boost freely and don't even need to bother with attunement, if they're going for high-level PvP content then using boosts might be the best bet (while low-level PvP could use attuned), and if the character is a main that's going to badge or run exemplar content then the best choice is attuned - but the booster AE build might not be as good while exemping, the PvP builds won't function quite the same out of their level band, and the exemplar build won't have quite the same big numbers as either of the others in their respective areas. Edit - Also, to actually address the 'player confusion' aspect, that's part of what the University IO tutorial is for and also if someone doesn't know what 'attuned' does... They can ask in Help chat or the HC Discord? Or look it up on the forums/wiki? Really, if someone dives into the IO system without taking the time to learn how aspects of it work, poorly spent influence is a really minor cost to pay (especially considering how easy it is to gain).

So it does! You are indeed correct. In retrospect, the instances of my /EA Scrapper being spotted have been on teams where we zipped through from mob to mob incredibly quickly, and 'Help, my team steamrolled the enemies too quick for my stealth to reset!' doesn't have quite the same ring to it... Still think it's odd from a design standpoint - and as @ZemX said it makes for some incongruities with how ambient taunt/herding works between sets - but as is it's manageable at least. Having the taunt aura as a separate toggle overall would resolve most of those 'have to manage it' instances though, IMO. Especially if it was packaged with a 'negate stealth radius on self' effect. Admittedly a minor benefit, but taunt auras being a 'direct player control' thing rather than a 'respond and account for variances in mechanics' thing seems like a solid QoL improvement.

No, moving characters from one account to another isn't something that can be done. Or rather, it's not something that's ever been done on Homecoming or Live - I can't actually say 100% that it can't be done period because Not A Dev™. The closest thing that players are allowed to do is copy characters from the live shards to the Beta/Testing shards, but they're still locked to that specific account. The only option currently to get that Blaster on your main account is to make them fresh on said main account and level them up to the same point. On the plus side though, you can still totally keep the original farming version under a different name so it's not like the progression is lost. Use that version to test build changes, dual-box as your character's own clone, use them as bonus loot storage - there's options!