GastlyGibus

@Zeraphia We're just going to have to agree to disagree then. I'm not even an avid PvP player, but I genuinely like the concept in this game and I wish more people did it. The way I see it, the rewards are meant to draw players in and encourage them to engage. I'm not in favor of removing those rewards by putting them in a new zone or taking away the risk of entering PvP to acquire them. And as others have stated, PvP in this game is already at an all-tome low. Even during peak hours on Excelsior, I rarely see more than a half-dozen players in Recluse's Victory, to say nothing of the barren wastelands that are Siren's Call or Bloody Bay. I've been able to take my scrawny Defender into those zones to get the badges with virtually no resistance at all. If it really is an issue, you can always transfer to another shard to get the badges, or even bring some buddies with you for backup.

No there isn't. You entered the PvP zone. Being attacked is part of the risk you take going in there. Sure, they might be mean-spirited in attacking you after being asked to stop, but they have every right to ignore your requests and keep attacking you. It's like going into a bar and asking the patrons to stop drinking because you're a teetotaler. The only benefits are badges and temporary powers, neither of which are necessary nor required for the game. With the advent of Incarnate powers, the old strategies of using nukes and shivans have become obsolete. There is no content that requires the use of these powers; they are a very apt demonstration of high-risk-high-reward scenarios.

Why is the zone functioning as intended suddenly "griefing" just because it's less active than before? You're in a PvP zone. Doesn't matter if there's a thousand players in it or just one. You're another player, you've entered the zone on your own volition, you're given several warnings on the fact that you can and most likely will be targeted by enemy players in the zone. How is utilizing game mechanics griefing? It's intended to be that way because the rewards are insanely good. The Warburg nukes and Shivan shards are ridiculously powerful, thus the method of obtaining them is significantly more difficult than normal. I'm going to say no to the suggestion of PvP flagging. The few players who do still engage in PvP would get screwed over even more if the rare player who entered the zone was able to just say "nah man." The badges are the incentive for entering the battle zone; taking those away or being able to bypass the PvP aspect would kill whatever interest in PvP this game had left.

I've recently been converted from my normal support playstyle into the Tanker life, so I might be biased when I recommend Tanker. For me, honestly, Tankers are great because they are really good on both teams and solo, and I sometimes like to have my alone time, just rushing into missions without a care in the world and clobbering my enemies into submission. Having an AT that works effectively for both teams and solo is a huge boon for me. And even though you pointed out that there are more Tankers, in my experience I don't run into them as often as Corruptors. It always feels nice when I'm the designated Tank for a team, just being a meatshield and letting your allies clean house. Tankers just make you feel invulnerable, and that's a lot of fun for me.

I really hate to be the stick in the mud here. Truly, I do. And don't get me wrong, I appreciate everything you guys do to keep this game alive and give us (sometimes ungrateful) players cool events and things to do. It's a noble effort and I greatly commend your efforts. However, with that being said, this "Monster Mash" was just not fun. I logged out about twenty minutes in because the lag made the game literally unplayable. In those twenty minutes where I was there, I was able to fire off maybe five whole attacks. I even lowered my graphics settings to the absolute bare minimum. That helped a lot with framerate, but the lag was insurmountable. Having 200 players all crammed together in one spot, all firing off their entire powersets, along with massive spawns of monsters and baddies, just killed the connection. And as I told my league last night, "I didn't wait here to an hour just so I could stand here and lag to death." If at all possible, things like this need to be spread out. If each of the leagues were each put in their own little corner of the map, it might help. But with how bad it was with lagging and connectivity, I just couldn't be bothered to stick around. I hope something can be done in the future to prevent this, but as it stands now, I won't be participating in future Monster Mashes with lag issues like this.

Vanguard. Not even a question in my mind. Vanguard is the only enemy group I've encountered so far that forces me to lower the difficulty to -1/x1. Even just three same-level minions can stack so much -res that suddenly that minion is now dealing 300+ damage with one attack. Not to mention the absolutely sadistic programmer who decided that Vanguard Wizards should be able to cut your max endurance in half for a solid 5 minutes. No other enemy group in the game has caused me more grief or frustration than Vanguard.

GeForce Experience is the program I use for game recording, but good luck trying to get modern recording software to work with a game made over a decade ago. When I've tried to use GeForce for City of Heroes, I've found it only works when it feels like it.

If there's a Rikti Invasion event going on, then it tends to happen incredibly frequently. However, if there's no event going on, a Rikti invasion is only triggered by a team completing the Lady Grey Task Force.Upon completion, a random zone, hero or villain, is chosen for an invasion. Zombie invasions are event exclusive, and as far as I'm aware, have no trigger during normal play. Also, welcome back! Hope everything is as fun as you remember it. 😄

Can also confirm that, neither before nor after the Great Server Crash of 2020 (tm), have I been experiencing any kind of connectivity or lag issues. I'm no IT expert, so unfortunately I can't offer any advice. All I can say is while you and others are reporting an increase in connectivity issues, other players like myself have not had any issues whatsoever. It seems more likely that this is an issue on your end.

This. I constantly see "healer LFT" in the LFG channel, and it takes all of my willpower to not give the snarky response of "what's a healer?" back to them. Seriously. "Healer" doesn't mean anything in this game. Are you a Defender? A Corruptor? Controller? Are you running Empathy? Kinetics? Pain Domination? Radiation Emission? I mean really. This isn't World of Warcraft. We don't have "healers" in this game. We have support. That's one of my all-time favorite things about this game; the diversity of the support role. Advertising yourself as a "healer" tells me virtually nothing about your character or powerset. On another note, I know this will get me flack, and I know people can play what they want, but two big things that irritate me are petless Masterminds and "pure" Defenders. Petless Masterminds, okay, I can understand if you want to challenge yourself, but you're literally just a really weak Corruptor. You have all of three attacks that suck up all of your endurance and do such negligible damage you might as well not even be there, and your secondary is the weakest of the archetypes because of MM modifiers. Same goes for the "pure" Defender builds, usually Empathy, running nothing but their primary and not dealing any damage at all. I understand the game is not that challenging, and I understand there's not a whole lot of content that requires everybody to be playing at peak performance, but you're just slowing things down and being carried by the rest of the team with those two. You may all insult and belittle me now. 😛

Nerf Coyote, they're too good at posting and making the rest of us look bad. :v

Nerf friendliness! This community is too nice and sickeningly optimistic. We need more tryhard jerks!

Nerf Blasters. I kill things too fast and I never get the satisfaction of watching my Beam Rifle's Disintegrate power spread! >:v

Luminara nailed it. Even with two big corporations who have the best of intentions and a desire to cooperate, these kinds of legal proceedings can take years. It's not such a simple matter to just say "hey, can we have the IP please?" and NCSoft going "sure, here you go."

The Imperious Task Force honestly has a lot of good lines. During the "Retake the City" mission: Raserei Ubermenschen Rocket: Do you really think this is going to work? Raserei Ubermenschen Fire: I always think it's going to work. That is what makes me such a loyal subject!

Not a compliment on gameplay, but I was in a costume contest a while ago, and a non-judge player came up to me and gave me 5 million, saying my costume and bio deserved something even if I didn't win. That brightened my day for sure. Another time I was playing my SR/Kat Tanker, and since the majority of missions were kill-all, I decided to run past spread-out mobs, throw an attack to taunt, and then run to the next group so they'd all come after me. One player remarked "what is that? A drive-by tanking?" He later said I was doing a good job. That was my favorite Manti TF that I've been on. 😄

As others have said, they are incredibly useful on teams. You go down in a fight, your team most likely helps clean up the mobs, then when the fight is over you pop a wakie so a team member doesn't have to use up their rez on you. Resurrection powers are useful during big fights, like arch-villains, where you need to be up right now and ready to keep fighting. Wakies are good for standard mobs where you can wait a few seconds for the coast to be clear.

It's a security feature in a world where villains try to take over the world every day. "Oh, Captain Awesome Pants, thank goodness you're here! The council broke into the offices of Super Guns Incorporated and are trying to steal the plans for the Universe Gun! You have to stop them!" [Captain Awesome Pants arrives at the office.] Council: "Seriously, we've been searching for five hours! Who the hell designed this place?? How do I even get out of here? .... and now the heroes are here!? Curse you, office architects!" That's why every time you go to stop an office theft or kidnapping or whatever, you're always there in the nick of time. The villains are just as confused as you and spent the entire time just trying to figure out where the hell they were going. 😛

There was a not insignificant influx of jerk hackers. Something had to be done before we were gone to the americans. 😉

Peacebringers and Warshades. No matter how hard I try or what kind of concept I go for, I can never stick with them for long. They both feel like AT's that are trying to do everything but aren't capable of doing anything as well as other AT's. I know some will disagree and say I'm wrong, but that's just my personal experience. I never know what to do with them and they always just feel so underwhelming to me.

A lot of things have changed from live, so feel free to ask questions. One thing that hasn't changed is how helpful the community here is. 😄

Like others have said, if it's blue, it's patrol EXP and gives you a boost to EXP gained until it runs out. You get like one bar of patrol EXP for every few hours you're logged out, to a maximum of ten bars (an entire level.) If it's grey (although for me it looks dark red, so I dunno what's up with that) then it's debt. Hover your mouse over the EXP bar for a few seconds, it'll tell you how much of all three EXP types you have.

Here's the ones I took. Not a comprehensive portfolio, but just the ones that caught my eye as a non-judge. And of course the vanity shot of myself 😛

I actually took some pictures myself, but they were mainly of costumes that caught my eye and not really of the event as a whole. If you'd like me to post 'em here though, I can!

The only complaint I think anybody had was the running time. Perhaps for next time you could have each judge on your panel critique costumes by themselves, and then compare/combine your scores together. Have the judges line up and players go down the line to be looked at by each judge in line, so that way it feels a little less like everybody is just standing around waiting for their turn. Other than that, it was a ton of fun, and I'm glad you guys put in the time and effort to make it possible. Definitely looking forward to any possible future contests. 😄