Grouchybeast

Trademarks do solve a real problem, though. When you go to the store, you want to know that the pint bag of Cannula's Oh-So-PositiveTM that you buy really is freshly harvested human blood, and not from a company that ripped off that distinctive silver-and-black graveyard Cannula branding to sell you frozen horse blood flavoured with artificial essence of people, right?

Scourge?

Surely a Stalker is just someone who enjoys picking flowers?

You can do a lot with recolours, I find. For example, I have Clocktail, a Praetorian bartender clockwork, who uses her cocktail mixing (Water Blast) and drink cooling (Cold Domination) abilities. I also have Buffalo Lill, a mutant cow who controls plants (Nature Affinity) and drowns her enemies in milk (Water Blast).

Dooped, jerked hacked, and gone to the Americans!!!

This. Posi 1 is great. That amazing moment when you see people charging towards the City Hall steps and you know it's all about to go down in flames. I love it.

Supply has fallen, but so has demand, so there's been no real pressure on prices either way. Converter roulette constantly moves supply from less-desirable to more-desirable IOs, so the market stays liquid. The devs have tweaked the inf:drops ratio a couple of times, which has kept inflation in check. It all adds up to keep the market pretty level.

If I'm crafting for a particular niche, I do everything in stacks of ten. Bid for a stack of 10 of the recipes and all the salvage, then when I log in and find it's all filled, I craft all ten, put them on the market, and assuming the niche still looks viable, bid for more stacks of ten. It keeps things simple.

Maybe someone wanted to spread a little Christmas cheer to players who take the time to list Common salvage on the AH.

Every character that you log in gets a pop-up saying that Old Father Time needs your help, and where to find him.

My bad. I thought I had a vague memory of having a lowbie character open a present as they were passing through in a high level zone and getting clobbered by uber-purple snowbeasts. ETA: Apparently not my bad. Open presents with caution!

I think the spawn level is set by the zone they're in, not by the character opening the presents, isn't it? It's arc and TF ambushes that spawn at the character level.

No, I'm pretty sure @Luminara's just saying that she feeds the bodies of anyone she kills to the cats and the bear. Don't worry, the cats are fine.

In order to stop people min-maxing, this is also applied to support sets. Pinball Wizard + Empathy becomes the most hated and feared combo in the game.

You're right, End management really shouldn't be difficult now. SOs are such a massive buff to low-level characters, even though it was framed as a pure quality of life improvement. Now, low-level characters with SOs can end up with bigger bonuses than high-level characters exemped down to their level, because it throws out the whole balance of the scaling rules. I even thought about using SOs, which I've never done, since I only started playing the game after the Invention system came out. But like you, I don't usually bother slotting anything at low levels, except a few uniques. So I guess it wasn't a big enough buff to overcome my inertia. :)

For the past couple of days I randomly keep thinking about a control set that consists of variations on the character just walking up behind NPCs and whacking them on the back of the head with a heavy object, and laughing to myself. It would be the most fun control set ever. You could call it Cranial Control.

If I'm alting, I feel like it's down to me to tell the team leader clearly when I'm back. They shouldn't need to do extra work for my convenience. I always send a tell with "Hi, this is [previous character] back for the TF". If I didn't do that I wouldn't be surprised to miss out a slot. Sometimes I've come back with the new character, and they're given the slot to someone else in the meantime anyway. Again, fair enough, they're the ones juggling tells and putting the team together, so I don't feel I have any real standing to complain.

I would love to see more Goldside content. At the very least, stretching the zone level ranges to make levelling a character goldside smoother would be great.

This is what I do, too. I like to slot my builds as I level, so I usually slot attuned IOs anyway. The only time I'm crafting drops is when I'm selling them, so I just use a crafting table in the RWZ, with the AH window open to buy salvage. (I rebuilt my old base from live, including the salvage storage racks, so I now have a row of racks full of salvage neatly sorted by level that I literally never even open and are now just nostalgic decoration. (My precious Alchemical Silver!) I should probably do something about those.)

TO/DO/SO bonuses are affected only by the difference between their own level and the character level, unless a character is exemping. An even-level SO always gives a bonus of 33.33%. Since SOs are now available at any level, low level characters have had a huge boost in their powers, assuming they can be bothered to keep up with refreshing their SO. A +3 SO gives approximately the same bonus as a level 40 Common IO.

One of the fundamental (and best, imo) things about CoH is that costume choices are kept separate from powers. We don't have a game where everyone feels they have to min-max into the same ugly armour because it has the best stats. Roughly ten seconds after this was implemented, people would start complaining that they don't like being forced to use the fire sword to get the highest bonus damage, or the singing sword to get -res.

I remember that a few times on live there were routing issues that affected the NA servers but not the EU, or vice versa. (Your .sig makes me chuckle every single time I see it.)

Welcome home!

I don't think I've seen anything Tom Hanks is in. ETA: The IMDB tells me I'm lying, because I have in fact seen Apollo 13.

That would be a whole lot of extra work for the devs, though. Not just in deciding how available they want all the different IOs to be and then setting the prices accordingly, but having to keep rebalancing those prices against the flow of inf into the game to keep that availability on track. At the moment, the market does all the work of balancing supply and demand for them and all they have to do is tweak the top-level drop rate numbers. It's pretty brilliant, design-wise.