Grouchybeast

I had somehow never noticed that existed. You have changed my costume creation experience forever, thank you!

Welcome to the game! CoH is an old game, and some of the older content is pretty pedestrian by modern standards, so it can be hard to pick out a path with the better stories. But luckily, there's a fantastic guide written by @Gulbasaurcalled The Good Missions Guide: A Heroic Levelling Journey through Story Arcs, which will be a big help in sifting out some of the more, um, historic content.

I'm not sure I found the right thing, but the links I did find seemed to be talking about loot boxes, i.e. items bought with real world currency. I was wondering if you had any examples of what we're talking about in CoH, gambling with pure fake internal currency that was still required to have a gaming license. Otherwise it does seems like worrying you might need to comply with real estate regulations to play Monopoly.

All the instances of that seemed to involve game currencies that had mechanisms to cash in and out to real money, though, making them analogous to casino chips. Given the very large number of video games that have had gambling game elements for decades now, it seems like if it was something worth worrying about in CoH then there would be one single instance you could point to of a game being required to have a gaming license for their fake in-game gambling. I was being slightly silly with the Neopets Scorchy Slots example (although it's true) but really is ubiquitous. Stardew Valley has gambling.

So what is the legal difference between an inf 'slot machine' and using enhancement converters? Would Winter Packs also count as illegal gambling?

Honestly, I think they'd be more fun if they paid out in random buffs, like Mystic Fortune and Secondary Mutation do. Then they'd be a pure inf sink, and the 'prizes' could be anything. Small but common buffs, large but rare buffs, very occasionally turn into a Wailer...

If you buy insps in a SG base, does the money go into an inf pool for the SG? If you pay for a costume update in a base, does the inf go into a pool for the SG? If you buy a recipe from an invention table in a SG base, does the inf go into a pool for the SG? If you sell drops to a vendor in a SG base, do those drops go into a pool for the SG?

The slot machines should definitely be a net loss on average, just like real slot machines. A 25% house take, maybe? Then they're doing their bit as a small inf sink.

I've always been disappointed that the slot machines in the Golden Giza didn't work. I think it would be a fun little addition, if it didn't take too much dev effort. You could have regular slot machines that take inf and pay out inf (with the house taking a cut as an inf sink). Then you could have a VIP supers area where you pay inf and get one of the Mystic Fortune or Secondary Mutation buff. (Gambling regulations don't apply to pretend gambling with pretend currency that can't be converted to real currency. Willie Lovett got sent to prison for running an illegal gambling operation involving real dollars, not because he spent too much time playing Scorchy Slots on Neopets, a pretend gambling game that's existed on a COPPA compliant site for over twenty years.)

My first ever character was a Rad defender, and I quickly learned that when you suddenly notice that your debuff toggles are still running, but none of the nearby enemies are glowing, you're about to have a bad day.

Trying not to be spoilery...have you done the replays of her arc in Ouro? Laura Lockhart's arc was everything that I'd always wanted from Ouro, which always felt like it had so much potential as a concept, and I really hope that the HC will eventually follow up on that and do the same kind of thing with other arcs.

TP to a random Shadow Shard location! More people should have a chance to experience the beauty of the Shards.

Imagine what a great inf sink it would be if you could rent a zone for the evening for a party. Like, add disco lighting everywhere, have all the mobs dancing, get some VIP signature heroes and villains come to mingle.

I think the issue with a lot of the 'we should have a magic powerset!' suggestions is that they rarely say what a magic powerset actually looks like. Maybe you could lay out at least a rough outline for what you're imagining? What AT it's for, what the T1-T8 powers would look like and the approximate effects they'd have (damage type, mez type, buff/debuff etc). Then people could get a better idea of the suggestion. 'Magic' is pretty vague, or at the very least is open to a lot of different interpretations!

Oh, cool! I didn't remember that one.

One of the 'problems' with CoH is that there are so many storylines you're unlikely to see all of them on any one character. You can, if you pause XP a lot or explore stories you've outlevelled in Ourobouros, but CoH pretty much assumes that you're going to have a lot of alts. There are a lot of routes through the content. If you want to follow the story of the Lost, I'd recommend making sure that you play these arcs and make sure you take the time to read the text and especially the clues (an annoying amount of story info during arcs is hidden away in the clues, so make sure to keep checking the tab): I Lost My Daddy! (15-20) - Penelope Yin in Faultline, introduced by Jim Temblor Lost and Found (10-50) - Montague Castanella in Steel Canyon The Strange Case of Benjamin A Decker (35-50) - Levantera in the Rikti War Zone At That point you've covered the important info, but you might as well follow the rest of the RWZ arc through to the end. It's once of my favourite storylines in COH, I think it really feels epic and like you're a save-the-world kind of hero.

And I don't think it really makes much material difference to the idea of playing in 'hard mode'. Even in pre-IO days on live the TOs stopped dropping after 20.

That's what I was thinking. But it would need a lot! Assuming only upgrading every 5 levels, you'd dlot a level 20 Damage TO at 20, and at level 22 upgrade it to 25 (that's 5 level 20s) Then at level 27, you could upgrade it to level 30 with 5 level 25s. So...level 50 would need 5x level 45, and each of those would need 5x level 40, and each of those would need 5x level 35, and each of those would need 5x level 30, and each of those would need 5x level 25, and each of those would need 5x level 20. Maths is not my strong suit, but I think that's 15,625 level 20 TOs? Per slot Even if you can get level 30s and start there, it's still 625 per slot. Plus you'd need to figure out all the later slots and buy and pre-level accordingly. I would definitely just use a level 10 Common IO can call it a day!

Maybe level 10 Common IOs would be a good enough approximation? They give 11.7% for schedule A, which is certainly more than a TO, but considerably less than an SO. ETA: Am I misremembering, or do TO/DO/SOs now not go level+, level++, level+++ as they combine, but actually increase in base level? If they do, then theoretically you could buy a LOT of TOs at level 30 and then recombine, strip and stash then, and keep doing that all the way up to 50. It would be incredibly time-consuming and tedious, but theoretically possible?

I'm sure Dr Vahzilok will be able to get him looking great! With the helmet on you'll hardly be able to tell there's anything wrong.

They used to do that and it was great, but now a lot of the time (all of the time?) the dialogue all fires when then map loads and it's useless. It's been like that for a long time, although I don't know if the bug existed at the end of lLve. I only remember it being on HC, but I could easily be wrong as Live was a long time ago now!

A+ suggestion, this would be great.

For future reference, there's also a setting in the options that toggles on PVP values for powers, which is another good place to look for the cause if the values suddenly look wrong.

This game absolutely rains inf for any player willing to go to the minimal effort required to hold out any one of the many different available buckets to catch it. This seems like an extremely convoluted and time-consuming design for a completely unnecessary new bucket.

That would be great, actually, because it's bugged me for as long as I've played. The worst is when you've painstakingly escorted someone all the way across the Croatoa hillside map through endless Redcap ambushes, and then they thank you, turn round, and sprint back up the hill to a cave door. Hey! Get back here!