UltraAlt

Not true. That's your opinion. The levels scale so if you run at a lower level, the enemies are scaled down to that level as well - so you don't need the powers you think you are missing in most cases.

Because I'm not a sociopath or a psychopath.

I know that you all have seen it. There are far more people that will join a team rather than trying to recruit one. There are far more team leaders that will only lead a team if they know the people on the team (on their friends list). I've always wondered why people are so hesitant run/recruit/lead PUGs (Pickup groups). What is the fear of the Star?

what? You've never been on a team where someone that is below level 50 was running the team and a level 50 comes on the team and insists that they are given the star because they want to have access to more of your powers? I see this kind of behavior all the time. It's obnoxious.

I know that you all have seen it. There are far more people that will join a team than will run one. There are far more team leaders that will only lead a team if they know the people on the team. I've always wondered why people are so hesitant to try try to use the LFG to recruit. What's the worse that can happen? 1) No one joins No big loss. Try again later on or at another time. 2) A player joins and then quits Oh, well. Their loss. Or you didn't make it clear enough what your team was going to be about doing. 3) You recruit a jerk. Put them on ignore and/or kick them from the team if you really have to. 4) You are trying to get a Event, Taskforce, etc going and not enough people join It happens. I usually don't give it more than 10 minutes. Many don't even want to sit around doing nothing for that long, and I really don't blame them. When people recruit, they generally have the same kind of format. [what will the team be doing]. [What level of characters am I looking for]. send tell for invite. LF#M (looking for # more - where # = the number of players you are looking for) Some people abbreviate things. I think that's a bit snarky, but to each their own. By writing it out you will attract more players. example of initial messages :: Citadel TF. level 25+. send tell for invite. Hollows mission team. Level 10 - open to all. Send tell for invite Example of follow up messages when team size is 8 and currently have 5 on team :: Citadel TF. level 25+. send tell for invite. LF3M Hollows mission team. Level 10 - open to all. Send tell for invite. LF3M taskforces, events, etc. close so you can't recruit, but normal mission/streets-sweeping teams can keep recruiting until full and recruit again when you team empties out. When running a normal mission/street-sweeping team, I wouldn't send a recruit message more than once every 5 minutes or so. I know there are plenty of players that solo or are busy marketing, slotting, leveling, making bases, etc., but I do think that the game and community is stronger when we have more people actively recruiting so that new players have skilled players to game with .... and I'm not talking about recruiting for farms and power-leveling a new player (I personally think this is detrimental to the game, the community, and the new player's gaming experience and longevity in the City). I'm talking about recruiting for teams that are going to run taskforce and missions with the goal of leveling up, creating a challenge, creating a learning group, and, of course, have fun. So sometimes you also need to make it clear when running a taskforce, event, etc if it is going to be a Speed/stealth or for XP. If you state it up front, no one should complain. They know what they are getting into and should respect that the leader is recruiting for that - and that that leader has taken the time to do the recruiting for that team. I think is pretty much being a jerk to get recruited to at TF and then asking for the star because you are the 50. Want the star? Do the recruiting yourself. Don't steal the star from the person that had the motivation to recruit and did (what apparently is) the hard work of recruiting the team. This kind of behavior - team stealing - will stop some that had tried to recruit from trying to recruit in the future. I'm not going to say that I always recruit when I'm on. I don't. But I do try to fill my teams when I do run teams. Everyone enjoys the game in their own way. That is a good thing. I love this game and want to share that enjoyment with the other players in the CITY.

Are you trying to slot the Taunt-IO for the taunt aspect? You seem to be simply wanting to slot it for the proc. Even if you had a taunt, your taunt wouldn't override even a scraper Challenge or a stalker's Provocation. It would be in a tier below those three and I think even those two might be able to be overridden by the taunt of damage in some cases. I don't think taunting fits with the Sentinel archetype. I don't think that Sentinels should have the advantage of being able to slot a taunt proc any more than a melee archetype should be able to slot a ranged AoE proc. My two cents on it.

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You made your points. I made mine. Thanks for the discussion.

Great. You have proven my point. from WIKI "City of Heroes (CoH) was a massively multiplayer online role-playing game which was developed by Cryptic Studios and published by NCSOFT." City of Heroes IS an MMO. So if you want a superhero game that isn't an MMO, then you should find another game to play. Not sure what that means. It simulates Superheroes fighting crime, hanging out with other superheroes in their bases and in other environments, all kinds of other things, and has a EXTREMELY in depth character customization (Biography area still is too small, but apparently that can't be fixed without linking to external resources). There are additional components, but you do not have to get involved with those if you don't want to. Super heroes do go find contacts, and, in many cases, in comic books they aren't at just one location, they have to go running around and looking for them in order to get information out of them about what is going on in their "CITY". City of Heroes has enhancements, power selection, temp powers, and enhancements instead of armor and weapons. The same gaming principles apply. I think you need to do more research on game theory. And, again, it is obvious that you don't want to play City of Heroes but some other game. I hope that City of Heroes is never changes into what you are looking for. I love City of Heroes and don't want to see it drastically changed at a core level. For your sake, I hope someone else makes a superhero game that fits your standards or that you gather your own development team and design it yourself. The end-game is not the game. It is the part that was added after the game was completed to extend the life of the game for those that don't alt. I believe the more superhero related experience is in the game itself - below level 50.

Yes. Heroes and Villains should be separate. That's one of the core points of ANY superhero genre game. There are Heroes and Villains. We don't need this to be gray morality world. That is not CITY OF HEROES. No. It is easy enough to go to Nul the Gull and change alignment if that is what you want to do. Vigilantes and Rogues can already use teleporters to go to either side. Again. This is CITY OF HEROES and not Gray Morality World. I know some players play it like it is Gray Morality World, but I'm here to play CIty of Heroes where there are heroes and villains ... an those other guys that are in that dystopian utopian thing that was tacked on at the end of the game before the sunset. Uh, yeah. I think that's a standard for all MMO's. I remember when more people thought it was more fun to race between missions and checking out the cool environment during travel. If you don't want to go to contacts, you can run radio or newspaper missions through all your levels. I have the feeling like you don't really want to play an MMO. That's my point of view. You can play how you like, but I'm not for breaking City of Heroes for what other kind of game that you want to be playing because it isn't City of Heroes. Maybe one of the other City of Heroes sites would be better suited for you. They may have done all of these things that you want already. I prefer Homecoming the way that it is. The DEVs here seem to be pretty even-handed and have made great decisions from my point of view. Of course, others are all looking from a different perspective.

Doesn't that help older characters keep their dentures in place?

The OP was complaining about teammates. I was giving suggestions for avoiding bad teammate situations. Like Lu Da says in The Water Margin, "Out of the 36 ways to get out of a bad situation, the best one is to leave" My issue is that I'm leading a taskforce - even a short one like Yin - and some (insert necessary expletives here) level 50 (insert necessary expletives here) decides that they are going to stealth/speed the TF for everyone else and doesn't (insert necessary expletives here) care what the rest of the team thinks or wants. They are the (insert necessary expletives here) and not me for wanting to get xp out of a taskforce when I'm the one that is leading it and did the recruiting. [This also goes for that 50 that doesn't want to recruit for a taskforce, but wants to be the one to lead the team because - to them - they are obviously the most experienced - are the biggest (insert necessary expletives here) - and don't respect that someone else took the time and initiative to recruit the team they are running with.] On the other hand, watching someone Leroy Jenkins over and over again is just (insert necessary expletives here) annoying. Zone into a mission, run into the mob, die, go to the hospital, get back the the mission, run past the team into the next mob (or two) and die, go to the hospital and repeat. When you get into this kind of situation, It is very annoying because this behaviour can obviously endanger the entire team. And yes, I do run into this kind of behavior. Sometimes mix in the team rezzing the character so that they can immediately race into the next mob and die. So yeah, what the other people are doing isn't always about being efficient. Sometimes I just can't tell why they are doing what they are doing because like the example above, it is obvious that the rest of the team isn't falling in battle, why is this other player so obviously oblivious to the rest of the the team? This even goes to entire teams ignoring information that can make the whole team work better and gel as a team. But there is always that old say, "Out of the 36 ways to get out of a bad situation, the best one is to leave" That being said, I really don't think I should be the one that has to leave when I'm the one that recruited the team/taskforce in the first place. I owe it to the players in the team/taskforce that aren't that (insert necessary expletives here) player(s). I only kick people in the very extreme situations. I think I have kicked one. I was on a taskforce. The beginning of a mission they came in and parked and said they had to do something or other. Team finishes the mission and goes to the next mission. Can't start the next mission because that player is still afk in the mission. Took a minute or two to figure out that they were the player that was door sitting on the prior mission. Announced it and gave them 2 minutes to get out of the mission so that we could continue, before booting them. On the other hand, I'll make up an excuse to bail out if I'm not happy with what is going on with a team. I try not to do it on a taskforce (don't think I've done so yet), but I will bail if the situation requires it.

I started in Episode 2 so I saw the game evolve over time (eventually to the point that I stopped subscribing and playing altogether (partially because of what F2P had done to the game on many levels) about a year before sunset for multiple (additional) reasons - Homecoming has removed many of the reasons that I stopped playing) I had full character lists on all the servers before the sunset. Each server had its own character/favor. Kind of like it is now. one server wants to be the RP server. one wants to be the PVP server. one (or two) is where the Europeans tend to hang out. One is where the Oceanic/Asian/Pacific players sent to hang out. There is always one most populous server - that was Freedom. It is Excelsior now. The flavors/character were distinct but they really started diverging when the AE came out. Players did farm and power-level before the AE release, but the release of AE was a farming boom on steroids. And that (and the change to F2P/microtransaction [even for subscribers] model) funneled players directly to the most populous server - Freedom. The F2P revisioning was even called Freedom. New players went directly to the AE in Atlas when they logged in. And started yelling over broadcast for farms. They would level up to 50 and have no idea how to level up or get to another zone. Since many of them didn't have much influence at that point, they either tried to play without enhancements or took advantage of one of the spam goldfarmer emails that was being broadcast every 15-30 seconds. All this was intensified on the most populous server - Freedom. So pretty much the players rushed, didn't learn to develop the use of their powers through experience and were left overpowered and overconfident about what the game was about without actually playing it. I'm not saying that you are anyone is guilty, but there are many times that more experienced players are going to use different tactics to avoid teaming with that kind of player. It has nothing to do with a player being new. It has everything to do with a player not watching how others are gaming round them and treating teammates like NPCs instead of watching what is going on and figuring out how to gel with the group. It happens to some extent on all the servers, it is just more obviously the case on the most populous server - back then, and now. People should play how they like to play. If they like playing some way or another, there will be others that want to game with them and some that don't. There are people that like being crass and those that don't. There are people that like to ding, and those that gratz other people's dining because dinging is an important part of the (any) game (MMOs) .... well ... addictiveness and comradery ... both which add to play longevity. Players that rush and don't really care about their characters are a totally different kind of players from ones that take time to craft characters or bases (both of which lead to different play styles) ... and marketers that get hooked on the marketing. Players that play overtime obviously have a different understanding of the game and teaming (to each their own for sure!) Yep. People should play how they like to play and City of Heroes has a huge amount of content to explore ... if you don't go directly to the end-game and think that is all that there is. Was just pointing out what I see to be an obvious situation that occurs with the most populous City of Heroes server ... which may very well be the situation on the most populous server related to any MMO.

either you are targeting the same thing as everyone else or the other characters that you are running with have power-levels much higher than the foes you are facing. I actually do what I can to avoid running with players that have veteran levels just because of this reason ... well .. and others ... You see, some people just level past all the low levels to get to 50 and then think that that they know how to play the game since they have a 50. They just want to plow through everything and show off how super they are and could care less about what the rest of the team thinks of their behavior (other than adoring them because they are so mighty, powerful, etc.) I too am annoyed when someone rushes around to speed/stealth something that I wanted to get xp from. I don't like chasing players that act like a ping-pong ball or a tank the rush through a mob and into the next one and could give bat-droppings about the rest of the team. That can go for someone that runs ahead of the team and agros mobs and dies after leading the enemies back toward the group. Luckily, I PuG at good bit and generally get to be on teams when people actually figure out how to work with each other and move at a pace where the team is able to fight foes without falling. ... and that happens a lot more on servers other than Excelsior. Excelsior is like the new Freedom server. And I mean that with all the bad connotations that obviously go with that. Even before AE and City of Heroes when F2P back-in-the-day, it was already a different kind of server population. AE made it ... well the AE babie paradise. F2P just doubled down on it. Back then, the behavior level was like of DCUO global chat out in Metropolis or inside of the Watchtower gets at some points. If people like to play like that, that's great. I hope they are enjoying themselves. If you want a team to talk to each other talk to them. Gratz people. Woot out and thanks when the gratz you. A lot of that used to happen in the game. And, as always, if the team really is that bad, make an excuse and bail out of it. There are better teams out there ... especially in the lower levels from my experience. Teaming isn't the problem. It's your teammates.

Make an Alt and play the game instead of the end-game.

I think the DEVs should put 3-4x the thought into Hero content as they do Villain content. I say this due to the relation size of the active server population. Relation to Praetorian content is weird as Praetorian content turns into co-op content so perhaps putting some focus there would increase content that would benefit all Heroes, Villains, and Praetorians. The kind of alternate leveling path that I would add to the villain side would be one where contacts bring the new player into a non-Arachnos organization that has the player do missions to help the organization. the leaders have the middle level guys (npcs) push the player around ... at the start ... As the player levels, they get to gain influence in the gang/organization and then start pushing lower levels (npcs - possibly having underlings now using the primary and secondary colors of the PCs SG) around with the boss/leader of the gang/org (AV) pushing them around still. The number of minions, lts, bosses, and individual NPCs (named allies) that persuaded to join the PC sub-gang is tracked as leveling progress. As the player levels, they convince more of the gang/org to side with them (in which case the start wearing the primary and secondary colors of the PCs SG). Reaching 50 (or maybe even 45) the player confronts the boss/leader of the gang/org (AV). There is a big gang fight between the player (with their allies and minions) versus the leader/boss (AV) and any allies and minions that the player has not brought to their side. If the player starts being defeated possibly his minions would break for it and run. Same goes for the AV, their followers might not just run but change sides and start helping the PC defeat the AV in order to get on the PC's good ...er... I mean evil side. After defeating the AV, the player would now have missions as the gang leader; fighting off rivals, using the acquired gang in bank missions, fighting other criminal gangs, and general terrorizing THE CITY missions. I'm not sure how that would work in team play, but I think that would be an interesting leveling path for villains.

Sonic is a team support power. It functions on -Res. There will be people taunting or controlling most of the crowd. High DPS is not the only answer in a fight. Why would you want to be "far for all the cones"? You have to be close to the guy in the front to get the most of the crowd behind them. ... or you haven't put enough thought into find good ways to use combinations and tactics that you haven't used successfully before. Cookie-cutter builds are just that. Might as well make a cookie-cutter post list in the forums and people can rate the builds with the like options. Easy enough. No cookie-cutter min-maxing for me. I enjoy the flavor of different characters. Being the same as others is boring and self limiting.

Can we get a change to Null the Gull so that after completing a selection it goes back to the main option screen instead of kicking you completely? A little annoying when setting up a new character and you have to keep clicking back in in order to set a character up.

Yeah, had drops with even minions. Was trying to hunt down Bosses because it seemed like it was intended for them to have a higher drop rate. With the amount of testing I did so far, it the tips seem to drop more the higher they con to the character ... but random isn't always random.

Checked out base power for flight and leaping. Little weird needing to use the pop-up tray for the double leap, but it is pretty cool. Can tell the change in speed for sure. I always liked how we gradually increased in power, but can see how it is ease of use/travel. I agree that the travel pools should be more powerful/faster than the P2W versions ... though I'll probably still stick with some P2W travel powers on some character (form changes for sure). I use the flight pack from parking for the Day Job in Firebase Zulu on several of my characters. (Related to this I would like to see the Raptor pack as a backpack option where the wings come out when in flight/hover mode) Afterburner gets you a substantial way across a zone enough to make it worthwhile I think.

Steel Canyon two bosses - both dropped tips - just looked for bosses to fight Fought 5 clockwork minions at a badge marker and a tip dropped

Just went looking for bosses. found and fought like 7-8 bosses in Kings Row. Two Travel tip drops. Found like 4-5 grey/green bosses to a level 15. First boss downed gave a tip. Paladin event started/stumbled into event area, so that that gave me several conduits which were bosses. first conduit downed gave a tip.

No bosses in Atlas. I guess I should have guessed. Onward to King's Row! -edit- made a new character and ran around the lake. Took out three minions and tip dropped.

Didn't even know that could happen until last night, Doc? Am I correct in thinking that the Bank Heist doesn't work in this manner and that all have to enter for it to start, or have my teams just been entering closely enough to together or the selection of all the rolls need to be made before that one will start?

You are talking about testing by solo players I'm assuming as nothing you have posted seems to indicate group size, sidekicking/mentoring, group structure/mix, or player skills at teaming. Teams are generally going to be a mix of the categories you listed even in beta. Group tactics, the "gel" state of a group, and the experience and skill level of players goes a long way.