Doc_Scorpion

I'm confused too... Especially with the "I'm still at the mish door buffing" comment. I summon and buff when I log in... Why wait until you're in a mish? You stopped having to do that in an Issue back in the low teens (IIRC) when summoned pets became permanent. Unless it's your tier 2 or 3 pet... Why are you resummoning and buffing rather than managing your other pets? And even when it's your tier 2 or 3, it's not always tactically intelligent to be summoning and buffing instead of managing your other pets. (And sometimes the better tactical choice is to summon and send them into the fight unbuffed entirely.) Effectively playing an MM is hard and there's a punishingly steep learning curve, especially with some of the more fragile pets (or less useful secondaries). By design, Nuke grade powers have lengthy recharges - regardless of the AT. (MM's aren't any different from any other AT in that respect.) And your fully upgraded tier 2 pets are awfully close to Nuke grade, and your fully upgraded tier 3 is most definitely Nuke grade. It's the price you pay for the power you command.

The old tutorial is still available by choosing it when you leave the Character Creator. (Select "Play The Tutorial" then "Breakout".)

It's the Cyrus Thompson Community Center - founded and funded by Justin Sinclair/Manticore to honor Cyrus Thompson (Breakneck). It's mentioned in, and seen in the background of, the last two pages of issue 6 of the Top Cow run of the City of Heroes comic (the finale of the Smoke and Mirrors arc, which featured Breakneck and explains why there's a memorial). Putting that building in was why the Memorial was moved in the first place - to match the comic. (Re-reading the end of that arc... darn onion ninjas.) There was a ton of speculation in the community about what the building could be used for... But if the OG Dev Team had any actual plans for the building they remained silent on the matter.

To quote Greycat: "The prefix for the "no" i would put on this is decidedly not family friendly. Or quiet." Requiring me to level to keep my name is bovine exhaust of the highest order. Probably three-quarters of my toons are currently level-locked for one reason or another. At least one I'm considering will be permanently level locked.

Sorry for the second post, but something occurred to me in writing my previous one that I think shouldn't get lost or buried under the issues I raised there... There's something we're missing in the discussion of hard mode. We keep talking about IO'ed and Incarnate toons... But it seems to me that a workable hard mode (or modes) must scale. Hard mode (or modes) must be available and workable from the steps of City Hall to the portals on Peregrine Island. (And the Redside equivalents, which I'm much less familiar with.) Why? Two reasons. First, power/XP creep starts in Atlas Park... (It's not all about IO's and Incarnates. They don't cause the problem, they just make it worse.) Second, it helps avoid the "game begins at 50" syndrome. (Down that path lies madness.)

Isn't that kinda the point? Folks are asking for harder content... and you say, "No! Don't make things harder!". Adding tactical puzzles (more mobs like Sappers) makes things more difficult but it doesn't make things harder. (If that makes sense.) Clear the tactical puzzle and it's right back to steamrolling... That is, once a puzzle is solved, it stays solved for the remainder of the encounter. Whether it's the tank getting screwed because he can't taunt the whole spawn... Or the support characters getting screwed by having their support is less valuable... Or the DPS character getting screwed because he can't kill fast enough... (preventing the balance from being tipped towards the players.) Negatively impacting the players is an inescapable part of hard mode. (At least as I interpret hard mode - increasing the risk. Making the player work for it and feel like they've earned it. Not being bored because they can simply steamroll without effort.) The lack of incentives for tactical play is a problem... But I'm not sure how much it overlaps with the "lack of a hard mode".

That's an interesting question... How many of the folks asking for "M0AR HARD3R" are folks who've spent a ton of money beating current content with their wallets? (And/or many hours in Mid's.) But yeah. The problem isn't just lack of "hard content", it's also the supply of overpowered toons (whether by natural skill or purchased power). Though it's not going to be popular, any workable solution is going to have to look carefully to sort out cause and effect and address both.

No. Eagle Eye is part of Shauna Stockwell's chain. I don't recall offhand when she was introduced, but she's definitely not Issue 0.

Siege Perilous. And it was a right mess because it required custom code (it was all but a completely different game), and often didn't get the updates until much later than the "regular rules" shards. It was frequently buggy and those bugs would persist much longer than they did on the "regular rules" shards. A full production team was required to support the main game, and Siege got the scraps. It's that "all but a completely different game" you have to keep an eye on when looking towards it as an example for Homecoming. It wasn't just harder, it was also different. Different combat rules, different resource gathering rules, different vendor rules... There was very little that wasn't different to some degree. A large part of that was due to the fact that Siege Perilous wasn't actually the "hardcore mode" as you're envisioning. It was a PvP shard based around "capture the flag" style mechanics and inter-faction/raid style warfare that was completely absent on the main servers. Most UO players treated it as if were a (pre-Trammel) "hardcore mode", but it really wasn't. Either way it was notably a ghost town at the time the main game was still adding servers to handle the load. Why was it a ghost town? Hard to say. Maybe it was a self fulfilling prophecy, nobody is going to go where nobody is after all. (MMO's are inherently social!) Maybe it was the persistent bugs and endemic server instability. Maybe it was the radically different ruleset. Maybe there aren't really that many hardest-of-the-hardest-core players... Who knows? (And could someone explain what "801" means?)

While it's true that it's impossible to recreate exactly, that doesn't mean it's impossible to recreate in spirit. Bob's approach seems more in line with the (quite doable as they have demonstrated) latter. Kinda like they're part of an ingame historical recreation society.

Copy over your Tequila install, and the HC launcher automagically copies over a ton of stuff.

Yes. The XP lock.

Quoted. For. Truth.

Planning on leveling up inside a mish is perfectly reasonable. Not running away from a fight is a rational compromise between reality and ideals. But I'd think that planning on waiting them out is definitely the best way to hew to your goals. All that being said, it's largely a self-correcting problem! 🙂 Those dings and the opportunity to plan around them get scarcer as the size of the steps between levels increase.

There's sub-50 hunt missions and mission doors set in Crey's Folly and Boomtown, as well as GM events. What happens to sub-50 toons if suddenly the surface spawn is 30-40 levels over their heads? Every toon of mine that's interested in those arcs does them at the appropriate level or goes back and does them via Ouroboros. (That is, in the latter case, the content you've never done before is already available to you.) The problem here isn't that "content you haven't done before is unavailable"... It's that you've either skipped past it or for whatever reason won't use the existing system for revisiting that content. <Not aimed at MidnightClubPatron.> The problem with "hard mode" is that eventually players beat it... And then they're back here in the forums demanding ever harder modes. It's a never-ending treadmill occupied by an ever decreasing number of ever more monomaniacal players. My take is that it's better to create more zones/missions at all levels. It's better to make more available to play styles other than "rush to 50" and/or "the game begins at 50". You'll never satisfy that portion of the player base, they'll always be back demanding more... no matter what you do.

If they're pointless, why are you crafting them? (If they're for memorization, they aren't pointless.)

Back in 2005 there were no radio missions and several "holes" in the leveling/contact chains... Street sweeping filled in those and other holes. Now radio missions fill those holes. Edited to add: Automatic sidekicking ended Mentor Tetris and made it easier for players of different levels to group together, that also help end the percieved need for street sweeping.

*nods* Thank heaven for the Hollows and Radio missions! 🙂 Yeah, the Hollows were something of a n00b trap, and devs were right to fix it. (Though they fixed it too good IMO...) But the Stockholm Syndrome the shared experience of so much of the playerbase became part of CoX's culture.

I read this earlier and pondered on it... and it just doesn't make any sense. How do you get 50 (and invest the work and time needed to get any significant number of badges), and not realize how the toon/AT/powerset will play? Heck, how do you get from 30 to 40 without realizing it? This is Homecoming. We have (literally) a thousand slots... Go build a new character. Other than getting that first accolade at low levels, it's not like this is all that hard. Grab a badge every time you go to a new zone. Heck, just with random grabbing easy/obvious exploration badges as I happened to pass by over the past year.... Almost all of my characters entered the new era with a nice assortment of teleport destinations already in their list.

If you're truly recreating the Classic experience... shouldn't it be travel powers after you've taken the precursor power (I.E. hover) and no earlier than 14? (I didn't start until Christmas 2006, in between Issues 8 and 9, so I'm not entirely familiar with the earlier eras.) Aye, the days when you'd have to beat off people with sticks if you announced you were running the Atlas Park safeguard - that jetpack was a godsend to many. (Yes, I know, no safeguards under your rules. It was just a stray memory of travel powers back in the day.) The jet pack (Atlas Park) and jump pack (King's Row) were greatly desired because they gave you early travels powers, and if you were stingy in using them let you delay taking travel powers.

<nods> Something like that.

I think the only thing that's worse if getting five pounds of free chocolate when you were promised eighty one ounces. Seriously, it's not like logging out and back in is any big deal. That's a lot of work for what's really a minor inconvience.

Yup, I was hunting in Croatoa last night, spotted a badge on my map, and jumped down and grabbed it real quick... Probably will never need it, but sure, why not? Unlocking that first Accolade is a bit of a PITA though if you aren't a flyer... Atlas Park has three badges way up high. (You can just manage Top Dog with a free jump pack.) That's my only complaint, the barrier to entry is a wee bit too high. But I can't see any way to lower it w/o handing it out for free. Which I'm ambivalent about.

That's not lack of motivation... That's a personal choice of playstyle. The game doesn't force a motivation on you, you choose to play a certain way. It's not the only way to play, but unfortunately it's the social meta on HC and thus the perception has arisen that's practically the only way to play. Dang, @Darmian replied while I was typing this up and pretty much said the rest of what I was going to. Scroll back up and re-read it.

That's a nice compromise. Those trying to reach a zone level (which strikes me as the most common use case) have quick & easy access, while the minority of more specialized testers can also be accommodated. Which is not to say that one type of tester or the other is "more important" or "better"! Only that, in my experience, there are more use cases than the current popmenu can accommodate. When I wrote the post that @AboveTheChemist linked to, I was not aware of that. Now that I am, I'm still in favor of adding it to the popmenu. Why? Because /levelup has been removed from the Beta FAQ, essentially making it "undocumented" and unavailable to those new to the beta process. As the dev's intentions seem to be to streamline and simplify the "beta cheat" process by moving from a list of opaque /commands to the popmenu... For consistency and transparency, the equivalent should be added to the popmenu.