Grouchybeast

If damage dealt was a factor, then door-sitters would get no drops which is clearly not the case (see @Ukase above). Do keep keeping track, though, just in case you've found an extremely weird edge case. It has happened in the past!

Presumably if the player was sufficiently dedicated to RPing a Cole loyalist, then they wouldn't play the Incarnate trials, much like someone RPing a hero isn't going to switch sides and play through a lot of villain arcs even though they have so many delicious, delicious badges locked behind them. I'm okay with letting RP choices block off content sometimes.

I like this one, because it sounds like it could lead to the opportunity to punch Manticore in his smug, annoying face.

It's just that the RNG hates you. Luckily, there's a guaranteed way to fix it. Start keeping a spreadsheet for drops for your tanks and blasters. The RNG is extremely cunning, and can sense when it's being watched. You'll find that the little pest will start to average out just to spite you. (Seriously, no, there's no difference in drop rates for ATs. Recipes that drop are randomly assigned to a team member.)

When you rip out that market backend, can you get someone to place a tombstone for it in Dark Astoria, so I can go and dance on its grave?

When people try to train he loudly compliments the good taste of all the squishies who sneaked Redside to pick up Scorpion Shield.

You know what, I agree. It's way too easy to make inf on the HC markets. Cheap converters have trivialized the whole thing, it's too accessible, and IOs are way too cheap. There's no reason why a LotG+rech should be buyable for 5 million. I'm with @Yomo Kimyata on this. Let's put the merit to converter ratio back to 10:1, and make converters account bound. People should have to work for their inf on the market just like they do in AE or playing other content.

I was Grouchybeast on the live servers, too, but OTOH I've been Grouchybeast on the internet for longer than CoH has been around.

The devs have already provided an easier version of level 3 and 4 hard mode: level 1 and 2 hard mode. You can choose to play them right now. Just as the people who enjoy playing level 3 and 4 hard mode can enjoy playing them right now. There's nothing wrong with all content not being to the taste of all players. If some people are picky about teams, that's their prerogative, there's literally nothing stopping you loading up your MM and forming a 4 star team. As to you other point: nothing about farming has been removed. The rewards have been adjusted a couple of times, but AE farming is still there. AE PLing is still there. Fire farming is still there. AFK farming is even still there! All farming playstyles are still fully supported by the game.

Before Incarnate powers trivialised some of the old high-level content, I used to see people with specific team composition requests for MO runs. I think that's a fair comparison for the new hard mode TFs. The standard difficulty versions are still there. There are even, in fact, the less-demanding one- and two-star hard mode settings. I don't think it's unreasonable to set aside a tiny corner of the game for people who might like to have to think harder about team composition and tactics, especially when all that mission content is available to everyone else anyway, they just need to turn down the difficulty. And that, frankly, has always been the case.

The various AMAs are on the wiki, although I'm afraid I don't know exactly where the higher level incarnate details are.

You're right, Page 4 gave us a new optional hardmode for the ITF. It also gave us a new Incarnate story arc and repeatable missions, two new powersets, a ton of costume creator content including sheathable weapons, new base items, new emotes, local chat customization and dice rolling, two new RP locations, PVP instant 50s, advanced customization for AE enemies, new AE content (maps, powersets and mobs), and a whole bunch of miscellaneous adjustments and fixes. So I'd say that they're directing their changes at a player who enjoys solo and team content, or who likes to make costumes and customize their characters, or who does RP, or enjoys trying new powersets, or who PVPs, or who writes AE missions.

You can just not play the exit arc if you don't want to. First Ward and Night Ward can be accessed by Praetorian characters so you can keep levelling there. Unfortunately you're still going to run out of content at some point, but if you really want to commit to getting to 50 as a Praetorian you can use AE in PD.

Since I would guess that most people who PL to 50 in AE are doing it with a 2x XP booster to save time, this actually fits the lore perfectly. They get faster experience in the carefully tuned training environment, but they indeed don't get any influence for it. Unless, of course, their mentor puts in a word for them with the powers that be around the City or the Isles (i.e. drops a boatload of inf on them so they can outfit with IOs). Your mentor, of course, is gaining influence as they become widely known for the time they devote to training mentees.

I think I must have been playing a different live server version of City of Heroes. In the one I played, the Gladiator's Armour PVP IO was changing hands off-market for over the inf cap, and some of the individual purple IOs were touching a billion inf. A single build could be multiples of the inf cap. Describing Prisms, something that's only been in the game for 10 days and is already dropping steeply in price, as 'gatekeeping the lesser players to the cheap seats' is absolutely ridiculous.

We're going to have to let the price of the Prisms settle for a while before there's any chance of a change in how they drop. The patch went live less than two weeks ago, and there are two more tiers of costumes to come. Until the system has been running for a while and the price has stabilised, no one knows if there's even a problem that needs to be fixed.

This. Awarding bonus XP AND the Notice/Aether Particle would be double-dipping the WST bonus. If you really want the level 50 rewards, level the character up before running the WST, I guess.

I love blasters. My main is a blaster. All my favourite characters are blasters. (Except for a few defenders and corrs. I do like those, too because they also have blasts.) One of the reasons that I was so upset by the sunset was that the I24 Blaster changes looked amazing, and then suddenly I was never going to get to play them. And still I can't deny that the HC changes to blaster powers were more than fair. Blasters are still pretty damn awesome.

That can already be provided by Dev Choice missions in AE. You're asking for a bunch of extra work by the devs just to get a different mission door.

That's what Dev's Choice AE arcs are, essentially. My understanding is that AE and normal missions don't use the same back-end format at all. I might be wrong about that, but assuming it's true then there'd still be a large amount of work needed to move an AE arc out into the game world. The only concrete difference as a result of all that effort would be that the mission stated from a different contact, so I'm not sure it's a productive use of dev time.

I thought that the whole of the Incarnate system was locked behind the subscription? I got a second account after free accounts were introduced, and it was incredibly restricted. It didn't even have access to the AH or IO sets unless you paid for them.

That seems a little unfair on the farmers. The biggest objections I saw to the AE vet experience removal was from people who write and play non-farm missions, who didn't want to lose their ability to make post-50 progress in AE outside of dev choice arcs. Since playing story arcs in AE is its actual intended purpose, it was changed to leave vet XP in AE.

The Incarnate system was an attempt to bolt a super-grindy end game onto a game where the traditional 'end game' was to roll another alt. Multiple currencies are a feature of systems like that, because it stops people being able to use stored resources to rush the next tier of end-game content. So Alpha was the first part of the new end game, and had a new currency, and for a while Alpha was all we had. When the next tier was introduced, that had its own XP only earned through certain content, and its own currency and components again, and all the Shards and Alpha components that players had built up were useless for it. Everyone had to start the new tier at zero. If the live servers had stayed up, there presumably would have been multiple new tiers added, each with new currencies locked behind new trials to keep the hamsters busy on their wheels and paying their subs. IMO, it was never a good fit for CoX, either mechanically or conceptually.

After the shutdown news, I couldn't bear to log in to the game again, except for once when I used the Titan export tool to take copies of all my characters just in case a miracle happened. I never stopped missing the City. Every year or so I'd watch SamuraiKo's One Last Day video and think about the game, and have a little cry. I don't remember how I found out that the City was back in 2019, but it did feel like a kind of miracle.

I think every new TF or iTrial I ever played in the game started off with it being way too hard, and ended up being speed-run solo by an Emp Defender using only the Fighting Pool attacks. (Not long after I came back to the game in 2019 I joined an ITF which turned out to be full of other people who had just come back to the game. It took nearly three hours (but we did finish it). Not long after that, I joined a LGTF where all of us were new back to the game and no-one could remember what the heck we had to do with the Hamidon, so we had to take a short wiki break to figure it out.)