UltraAlt

It has an aura at this point at least. Not sure if they added it in an update or if you just didn't notice it.

Ran this with a level 20 with other players at level 20 or below, so the street version not the Oroborus version. Set at 0/0. First mission, zombie insta-spawn mob shows up, the group is tight like a good mission team, zombies blows up, and kill the entire team. Continues to happen in other missions, whoever is the target of the zombie insta-spawn mob get killed unless they are flying or running around all over the map trying to avoid them instead of fighting them. Immobilizes and holds don't stop them. Best for the team leader to move away from the group and sacrifice themselves to save the rest of the team. There are enemy types that unless you get a hold on them immediately and keep them held, they will kill you instantly if you are in melee range. Add the Viral Cocktail to this, and death upon death to whittle down mobs. This really needs to be better scaled for a team that isn't filled with level 50s powered down to the mission level cap. OR possibly this is truly the hard mode that some players are looking for, but will never play because they won't play it with a level 20. Maybe in the future, I'll play it on a team with level-locked 29's to see if it makes more sense at that level.

It all comes down to when is a players want to have a certain character name greater than the player that already has the name wants to have the character name. I would also remind all of you that want a character name that is already taken, just because a name is "freed up" does mean that you will be the one that gets it when that happens. The more "wanted" or "likely to be picked" that name is, the quicker it will be snatched up. The same way people are accused of "squatting" on names, there will be people waiting to pounce if it is announced that a name purge is going to happen at a set time/date. I'm not sure that there is much of a difference between the two.

What I said could very well have happened because it could happen for those exact reasons. Without evidence to prove that did not happen the way that I explained it, there is no evidence to prove that it did not. My examples are based on the system working correctly. Because you believe the system isn't working correctly, you disbelieve an explanation that explains why this could occur with the system working correctly.

So this screenshot is incomplete. I can't see how many bids there are and it looks like the number for sale is cut off. But I can tell you what could happen in these cases. 1,600,000 - someone put on the market for over 5,111 and the purchasing player either guessed at the price or raise it from some point until they purchased one. 5,111 - someone put in a X# of bids at 5,111 and someone put a new one on the market below that and no one else had a higher bid. (lower the price you place an item the less it cost you to put it on the market) 4,000,000 - someone really wanted it and kept upping their bid until they got one. 1,200,000 - someone put a new on the market below 1,200,000 above 1,111,111 or below 1,111,111 but the guy that was bidding 1,111,111 had all their bids filled 1,111,111 - someone put in a X# of bids at 1,111,111 and someone put a new one on the market below that and no one else had a higher bid. So you see, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what the DEVs did. I could very well be how the market works when players are involved.

I don't spend most of my time in the market instead of playing the game. When I log into a character, I check the market. It might take 5-10 minutes dependent on what I have sold/purchased, etc. I watch LFG while doing this and join a team if one pops up that I want to/have time to join. Once done with my marketing I may decide to run missions until a team shows up, start a team, or alt/server-jump. I check the character before I log out again, and this doesn't take more than a couple of minutes. So, if I join a mission before I'm done marketing, I spend the time waiting at a door to do my marketing. Of course, as per above, I check the market before logging the character out. But sure, people can take a lot of time doing anything. If you want to spend all you time digging through everything on the market every day then I guess that is possible. I make decent profit on the market and I don't spend a lot of time doing it.

I think it is a really good list, but when I look at it to break it down and think about it. 2 and 4 seemed to be the same thing except a person instead of the object. Both would be relying upon a source for being magical versus innately being magical. But then I started breaking down 1 and 4. Did the character in 1 learn magic from a mentor? Does that make it 4 because they have a mentor? If 1 has a book of spells, does that make them 2 even if they wrote the book themselves? My evaluation of your list would be 1) Studied Magic - know it 2) Possess a magical item - own it 3) Magical by Birth - am it 4) Magical by association - granted it Elric pretty much has all that covered. Studied magics, check. Has Stormbringer, check. Born a Melnibonéan, check. Summons and deals with spirits, elements, dragons, etc., check. Stormbringer Magical by birth/creation as far as we know. Not sure if Elric count as 2 or 4, but I would tend to count him as 2 because Stormbringer possesses him to kill his friends. Dr Strange Not born with it. Otherwise he has the others covered. Too tired to go on, but great concept(s) to think about. Thanks lot for posting, Andreah. Should be good stuff floating around my head when I go into the Dream Lands.

I decided to do a little user interface changing mainly due to masterminds and needing to add another tray because of them. I didn't have my pet window open on this screen shot, but it is placed between the main active trays and Tray 4. One of the secrets of my alt-jumping ways is to keep everything set-up in the same format for all characters, so I save the revised interface loaded it up onto all my characters and moved slotting around on all my characters to fit the new paradigm. --- Tray 1 - Main tray powers 1-4 main attack powers 1 fastest recharge -> 4 slowest recharge; Tank 1 taunt 5-6 AoE, cones, snipes; mastermind 5 Follow Me, 6 attack my target; tank 5 /macro follow; or ? 7 Heal 8 Tray flip to tray 2 9 Fast travel 0 Slow travel Tray 2 - Secondary/Support tray powers 1-4 support/alternate powers 1 fastest recharge -> 4 slowest recharge 5-6 AoE, cones, snipes; mastermind 5 Follow, 6 attack target; tank 5 /macro follow; or ? 7 Heal 8 Tray flip to tray 1 9 Fast travel 0 Slow travel Tray 3 quick access click powers 1-* powers that I apply to teammates * if not, tank use /macro follow as a divider *-7 other powers I want quick access to that have long recharge times or are used sparingly 8-9 spare flight powers that I don't need to access immediately 0 Rest Tray 4 1-* pet summons and other powers clicked seldomly - maybe /macro team Gratz and * /macro AH as a divider *-0 Vanity pets, Buff pets, other power pets (warwolf whistle, Snowbeast, etc) Fortune telling/mutation/ Tray 5 Powers that are constantly on once activated - leadership, armors, defenses,etc. Tray 7 quick access storage misc very rarely used powers or macros Tray 8 1-* Base Macros * Fast Travel *-0 Powers that I am contemplating moving out of my active slots completely, but might need to use for some reason until then Tray 9 1-* Costume changes *-0 various macros

That's your opinion. People post that they disagree with you. Just because you post a lot doesn't mean you are correct.

I think it's pretty standard in any game that only 10% of the players ever go to the forums for anything except to get questions answered. There is probably a much higher percentage of City of Heroes players that come to the forums, but think it is a pretty accurate guess that it is well less than 25% of the players. Saying that, players don't have as much reason to come to the forums to ask questions as the City of Heroes /help channel kicks so much booty. So yeah, if the DEVs announce it in the GMOTD some players will catch it that don't come to the forums, but, honestly, I pretty much blow off the GMOTD myself and jump into the action. And I don't know who you are to say that "Look at your character roster, they're all generic'd already." You have no idea what my character are unless you are a DEV and you are digging into my account. All my characters have bios. They are all character-conception based. So if you think that taking my names is so important to you then why are you telling me that they are generic? It is insulting to say that.

The above was quoting me in your post and it is the answer to your question.

I play it as an RPG myself. I like role-playing my characters. But I am RPG-lite. I'm not 100% RPG all the time, especially when I'm with my old gaming buddies from RL. This post was going much better before the forums ate 30 minutes of my work. Page 66 of the book that came in the original box set talks about influence. I had typed all that in, but I'll just go with the definition part. "Influence represents the respect you have earned from Paragon City, its citizens, and your fellow heros, and you can use it to improve your ability to combat the forces of evil." Most of the respect from other heroes comes from this quote "You may also trade Influence with another heroes." The Market of Might So my Empathy Defender that was unslotted and weak (back before Wentworths), went to the University to learn a craft(ing) and went to Wentworth to see who wanted to purchase his goods (they were goods because they were made with Influence and not Infamy!). Pretty soon thanks to that (and a Charles Atlas training course), he was fully slotted and had some influence to throw around to other players to show how influen(ce)tial he was. Don't Cross the Streams Then this happened which totally ruined with Influence was and turned it into outright currency. This was another major strike against RPG'ing in THE CITY. (I think some know how I get about Farming, so I'm not going to go there) What is this? You want it all, but you can't have it. It's in your face, but you can't grab it! The villains had Infamy and not Influence. They didn't earn Influence for doing good. They earned Infamy for breaking the legs of Long Bow Agents and for dirty deeds done dirt cheap. The villain Black Market was tiny compared to the Wentworths. Of course, it was. There was far fewer villains. The villains were locked off from the good produced by good/Influence because of their evil ways. And besides, they were villains! Why should the benefit from the good/Influence work of Heroes?!! Villains whined and conned the DEVs into taking down the dividing wall, breaking another bit of the canon. The Wentworths and the Black Market merged. Influence and Infamy became the same thing. The currency of doing good was intermingled with the currency of evil. A little too real world for me. I'm here to escaped the muddled gray and play with the stark dividing lines. It seriously hurt me that the DEVs thought that the currency for doing good was the same currency gained for evil acts. Not very comic book at all. Or maybe just simply the de-mythicized retconned stuff produced by people that don't even like superhero comics anyway. Isn't there a way to RPG being Good any more? Well Influence ain't it. It's the badges. I might not need an stinking badges, but I'm going to get some along the way and my characters are probably going to sport one that helps show my RPG vision of them

I didn't get a Captcha page, but that screen popped up for me. I was going to clear my browser's cookies and restart the browser to see if came up. Thanks for taking the time to screen capture it and post!

It would free up far less names, but it would be a much more fair way to go about it to target unused accounts versus characters rarely played. Anyone that really wants to keep names is simply going to log in rotation to beat whatever mechanic is added. Imposing this kind of mechanic simply punishes those that don't know about it.

The way it worked before the market (and it still does this but not so much as it did before the market came out) was that whoever did the most damage on a target got the most currency. Defenders and controllers were dirt poor. You would be luck to slot up generic enhancements in the mid teens. I had a couple of characters that were controllers and defenders (especially empathy defenders) that were stuck and dirt poor until the market came out. So what this meant was that the guys that did more damage and got more damage could buy better enhancements to do even more damage than the defenders that couldn't by anything. It was a vicious circle with the mantra "I'm a -insert damage dealing archetype name-, and I am so cool. Defenders and Controllers are worthless!" Teams loved to have Defenders and Controllers on a team, but they could care less how badly they were scraping by. Influence was the monetary currency from the get go. It is supposed to express the public's view of your character, but that pretty much gets thrown out the window with power-leveling and farming. The Market simply gave players a way to generate revenue with the salvage that they were getting that they couldn't use or didn't have room to store in their base. So Influence was currency from the get go. The Market only make it becomes strait up currency. We don't need multiple types of currency andy more than there need to be multiple types merits and what not. Keep it simple and remove the clutter; don't add more clutter to the system.

What makes an effective-market work? GOOD PVP. The best PVP in CoH is the Market. It always has been since it's release. It is great the way it is. Totally balanced. What changes might you like to see made (less so on UI changes as we discussed that recently)? Only things I would add would make what others would call ebil marketing easier. Don't make it easier. Make people work for the market. (My right pointer finger can crack concrete blocks by doing a double click again all due to posting on the posting on the market! Maybe I do know kung fu! ... but wait! We will also throw in this 6 piece set of ginsu steak knives absolutely free!) How might you make it more accessible (if you feel it's not already)? Easiest way is to have a marketing tutorial similar to the University tutorial which I'm assume most players blow past and don't even know it exists. For this reason I would make the Marketing and University tutorials stay on the players contact list until the missions are completed or the player OPs to intentionally remove them from their contact list. Homecoming Market changes that already exist I understand with the changes Homecoming has already done with the Market due to the size of the player base. It took while to figure out what was going on, but I'm acceptable to it and it makes sense over all. The only major setbacks are that low end players can't sell salvage to make a profit. 98% of their salvage doesn't see for much of anything. But there are so many players that 2xp through stuff and powerlevel/farm to 50 that it doesn't really make any difference for many players The secrets of Ninja Marketing are not to be discussed. There is no such thing as Ninja Marketing. Move along, citizen! There is nothing to see here!

The longer the better. I hope NCSoft just doesn't care what is going on with City of Heroes and leaves us alone.

It's part of the maze system. If you go into the woods the same situation is going on. The tops of trees are actually roofs as the same way the area between trees ... say in Perez Park .. are actually walls. It would take a lot of work to change the entirety of the map so it wasn't built on the roof and wall system that is currently in the game.

I made my Taxibot on Torchbearer. I've seen a couple there. Ran one badge tour in Atlas so far. I hope to see more Taxibots out there. If there is more Taxibot activity on another server, I'll make one elsewhere.

I'm against name enforcement rules. I would make sure that they wouldn't affect me anyway, but it seems that some just want someone else's name. I "lost" some of my names the same as other people did. Rename and move along, citizen; nothing to see here.

Since the discussion is apparently about "hard mode" and why "hard mode" development is better than developing new zones and missions, then I guess my input is not really wanted here. I guess that's a con. (I'm taking the "versus" to mean "instead of" in this situation). The Pro would be end-gamers might like it until they get bored with it and burn out. 1) a) Diversification of development I know it seems like diluting development at various areas across the board will take longer for anything to really stand out, but what one player wants, another player could care less about. b) DEVs doing what they are interested in as they will be more likely to feel good about putting more time into doing it. c) DEVs suiting up as Giant Monsters and AVs and attacking Paragon City (doesn't anyone else remember how epic that was back-in-the-day?) d) More community events like Tanker Tuesdays, etc. aka simulate the community through community involvement (as we have here for example with a weekly discussion topic) 2) Letting Devs work on what they feel good about working on is reasonable. 3) It's always easier to pick the low-hanging fruit. I would go with that to begin with.

I always wondered what happened to Peri Winkle. No one ever uses him because there are much better crayons. Or maybe the Circle of Thorns finally did something to him.

Nice beard!

Ouroboros is out-of-sync with the normal time stream/line. The Base teleports can't help you travel through time.

Welcome home to you as well, Ejlertson!