Doc_Scorpion

No offense meant, but do you even play the game? Because that's solidly my experience on all my support toons. (Seriously, "I haven't seen that so it can't possibly exist" is a poor foundation for an argument.) And that's at high notoriety levels not the mythical "+0" strawman you keep invoking.

No, there's only one possible theme music...

My mind went from -tor to -inator, and now I want to build a bumbling super villain based on Dr Doofenschmirtz... The other night I was playing the final mish of the Faultline arcs and my wife asked me what my hero was doing. I couldn't remember "PsychoChronoMetron" (let alone how to pronounce it), so I just called it the "eff up the world inator". She got it immediately.

This. And it's pretty much the same distribution as I saw on Live - lots of fliers, a very few jumpers, almost no speeders, and porters are rare as hen's teeth. I suspect that's because many pools open various useful powers, and because they never have to be recharged. I tried a toon with nothing but P2W temps and heading regularly back to a P2W vendor to charge up again got pretty old after a few days. Most of my toons are fliers, but a few are jumpers for concept reasons... and only a couple of the jumpers have jetpacks for those rare times when I just don't feel like jumping (or Faultline or Orenbega maps). I've never built a porter, so I can't comment there, but I don't see anything particularly broken with the other travel pools.

Based on the other reports, I tried to load this character and crashed to the desktop after the zone loading screen. Sent in a crash report.

The economy is not robust - as it depends on an endless supply of cheap salvage supplied by The Goverment and a steady (read: also essentially endless) supply of Converters to keep the roulette wheels spinning. It's heavily slanted towards the crafter and the marketeer.

Strawman that fails to address the point. Nobody is necessarily asking to be Dr. Doom, nor asking to conform to every possible imagined plot. They're asking not to be forced in the role of lackey. The only option you offer if for them to be forced to choose which kind of lackey they're going to be - which misses the point entirely. Irrelevant. The key takeaway is the the blueside storyline doesn't force you into a narrow and subservient role. The writing allows for any number of possibilities even if it doesn't allow for all possibilities. The problem here isn't some "bizarre leap in expectations", it's that there's a fundamental difference between blueside and redside story lines.

o.0 The player is the person to say that - only they're not given the choice. They're forced into the role. There's only one kind of villain in the Rogue Isles - and that's a lackey. 0.o The question isn't where you play, it's what you say and how you act.

Given how easy it is to farm and get double XP from the P2W vendor... No. Not to mention "lack" of inf and XP is not what's stopping people from playing Redside - it's the general dreariness of the zones. This was a problem on Live too. I don't see an Inf and XP bonus every three or five missions changing this.

o.0 This is... nonsense. Those are not the only choices Not having recipe storage leads people to store them on alts, in email, or on the market - none of which are visibly increasing prices. Nor is crafting them and storing the resulting enhancements noticeably pushing prices up. Not to mention that increased prices also brings increased pressure to bring them out of storage and sell them or craft them and sell them.

On average, I encounter a problematic character about every other week or so. They *are* out there.

+1 for the Railgun reference...

Selected an AE arc filled with custom critters, game locked up hard after selecting "standard rewards".

The (in)famous "Find the mission door in Faultline!" mini-game. Yes, I know it's not the type of mini-game you're talking about, but I have toon running the Faultline arcs for the first time since Live... so it's on my mind.

Two doors, one of which is deep inside a maze. And there's lvl 35 Council almost invariably lurking about on the street and at the entrance to the maze.

Yeah, my f/f Brute is seeing runners when using Burn... Not as bad as previously on Live, but they're still there. Probably about as bad as the first round of fixes on the Test Center.

Ah... memories and Stockholm Syndrome of The Hollows back in the day...

UO had mounts (the common one were useable by anyone), and they were useful and MUCH faster than walking or running on your own. But where UO really shined for travel powers was the Recall and Gate spells - both of which let you teleport directly from pretty much any arbitrary point to any pre-marked point. Many players maintained a library of rune books in their house filled with desireable pre-marked points. (You didn't even need to have your own library, every shard had at least one player maintained public library.) Most players had a runebook in their backpack with their most used pre-marked points. (Their home, the entrance to their favorite dungeon(s), favorite vendor houses, near a bank...) All it took was 10 points (out of 600 available) in your Magic skill and you were set. They could also be used for griefing (inducing a player to teleport into a PvP zone or a dangerous area), so eventually the dev's set it up so that the runes were colored by the type of destination.

Frankly, I came to this game (originally) after playing UO and YPP!... and then I happened to see the original trailer, and when the guy flew I knew this was the game for me. Superheroes were certainly part of the draw but mostly I wanted to fly. (I wouldn't end up getting into anime until after the Snap.)

Seen as I was approaching some Warriors in KR... "Attack the hero! And remember, move like water not like stupid!"

My one character who is inspired by any media is actually anime inspired...

Came up with a name/concept, don't really care for it, someone else may find it useful if it isn't already taken: Teenrager - turns out teen hormones and a super soldier serums aren't really a good mix.

Miss Mechanism was born when I saw one of those "feel good" news items you always see floating about the net... About a girl, born with a withered arm, who'd built an robot arm for a school science fair project and hoped to go into robotics research. For some reason, the phrase "first she built an arm, next she built an army" popped into my head. Originally a Praetorian, she's been re-created a pure hero on Homecoming. One day I'll figure out what kind of character (and a name) fits her sister and she'll join Amanda in game. The powers concept is based (very loosely) on an anime... Her bio is a mash up/modification of two characters from a different anime. (I've posted her elsewhere, but never mentioned the latter before. A plate of virtual cookies to the person who can identify the anime _and characters_ her bio comes from.)

The basic problem with balancing the Scrapper<->Brute<->Tanker spectrum is... that you can't really. And Brutes can be cast as the entire cause of the problem. Why? Because of design decisions made a very long time ago. The original spectrum, much easier to balance, was Scrapper <-> Tanker blueside. When Brutes were introduced, they were isolated redside and their "neither fish nor fowl" design made sense. (Redside was to some degree better balanced around solo play.) Going Rogue/Issue 18 irrevocably broke that balance by allowing all three onto the same playing field, a condition which they had never been designed for. Every discussion about Brutes (and Scrappers and Tankers) needs to take this into account. Trying to "balance" the three archetypes and give them unique niches is trying to unscrew the inscrutable. A fool's errand. (And we just spent months over in the Beta forums going around in this circle.) Another issue with unique niches is that the whole concept is (at best) obsolescent if not all but obsolete. Unique niches originated in the era of tactical gameplay... When "No AT was required, but every AT could play a role". Power creep has all but destroyed that concept. (To the point where people openly laugh if you try to create what would have been considered a "balanced" team back in the OG days.) Adding to the problem is the fact that player distribution on Homecoming is sharply skewed... We don't really have a bathtub curve anymore. A higher proportion of the playerbase are experienced veterans resulting in a distribution that looks like a yeast growth curve. This is especially bad at the upper levels where people have enough slots to be fully IO'ed out (and even Blasters can be reinforced to the point that they're practically tanks).

You're absolutely correct, the login screen tells you the server load - but that's only loosely related to the server population. A hundred people standing around Ms. Liberty is a lower load on the server than the same hundred people being scattered in twenty instances. That's why you have to refer to a different place to get the required information.